Edward V

Edward V became king of England at the age of twelve after Edward IV’s death in April 1483, but he was never crowned. His uncle Richard, Duke of Gloucester, assumed the protectorate, arrested the Woodville relatives accompanying the boy and placed Edward in the Tower of London. Parliament later declared Edward IV’s children illegitimate, and Gloucester became Richard III. Edward and his younger brother disappeared, creating the enduring mystery of the Princes in the Tower.

Edward appears in Philippa Gregory’s The White Queen and The White Princess and in Sharon Kay Penman’s The Sunne in Splendour. Historical novels often reconstruct his months in the Tower from the viewpoint of his mother, uncle or attendants because almost nothing survives from the boy himself. The identity of whoever ordered the princes’ deaths, if they were murdered, remains one of the central disputed questions of Yorkist fiction.

In Robyn Young’s Sons of the Blood, News of his father’s arrest for treason sends him back to England just as Edward IV dies and the twelve-year-old Edward V is expected to inherit. In Alison Weir’s Elizabeth of York, a biography of the first Tudor queen, who was the only living descendent of Yorkist King Edward IV, and mother of the infamous Henry VIII, sheds new light on the life of this enigmatic woman and mother of the Tudor dynasty. Other novels featuring Edward V include Alison Weir’s Lancaster and York.