Parliament declared Edward IV's sons illegitimate, they vanished in the Tower, and two child skeletons found in 1674 have never been DNA-tested

Edward IV died on 9 April 1483. His son Edward V was 12 and his younger son Richard, duke of York, was 9. Their uncle Richard, duke of Gloucester, lodged them in the Tower ahead of the coronation. The coronation was postponed. Gloucester was petitioned to take the throne on 25 June and crowned Richard III on 6 July. The boys were last seen in summer 1483. In January 1484 Parliament passed Titulus Regius. It said Edward IV had been precontracted to marry Lady Eleanor Butler, who was alive when he married Elizabeth Woodville, so his children were illegitimate and barred from the throne. After Henry VII took the crown, his first Parliament repealed the act in 1485 and ordered every copy destroyed unread. The original was never removed from the Parliament Rolls and is still stitched into them at The National Archives (C65/114). On 17 July 1674 workmen at the Tower found a wooden box under a staircase holding two child skeletons. On Charles II's orders they were placed in an urn in Westminster Abbey in 1678. Examiners in 1933 said they were two children of about the right ages. No DNA test has been done.