Princes in the Tower act stated that Edward IV and Elizabeth Woodville's marriage was invalid because of Edward's pre-contract of marriage with Lady Eleanor Butler. Gloucester was crowned King Richard III of England on 3 July. The declaration of the boys' illegitimacy has been described by Rosemary Horrox as an ex post facto justification for Richard's accession. Dominic Mancini, an Italian friar who visited England in the 1480s and who was in London in the spring and summer of 1483, recorded that after Richard III seized the throne, Edward and his younger brother Richard were taken into the "inner apartments of the Tower" and
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