Princes in the Tower becoming king, Henry married the princes' eldest sister, Elizabeth of York, to reinforce his claim to the throne. Not wanting the legitimacy of his wife or her claim as heiress of Edward IV called into question, prior to the marriage he had repealed the "Titulus Regius" which had previously declared the princes (and Elizabeth) illegitimate. Markham suggests the princes were executed under Henry's orders between 16 June and 16 July 1486, claiming that it was only after this date that orders went out to circulate the story that Richard had killed the princes, and that the princes' mother, Elizabeth Woodville,
Princes in the Tower calculation than personal guilt". Henry was also never accused of the murder by any contemporary, not even by his enemies, which he likely would have been had contemporaries thought there was any possibility of his guilt. Jeremy Potter, at the time he wrote Chairman of the Richard III Society, noted, 'With Henry, as with Richard, there is no real evidence and one must suspect that if he had killed the princes himself he would quickly have produced the corpses and some ingeniously appropriate story implicating Richard.' Further, Raphael Holinshed reported in 1577 that Richard "purged and declared is innocence" regarding