Richard of Shrewsbury, Duke of York

1473–1483

Richard of Shrewsbury, Duke of York, was the younger son of Edward IV and Elizabeth Woodville. After his father’s death in 1483 he joined his brother Edward V in the Tower of London. Parliament declared both boys illegitimate, and their uncle became Richard III. The children then disappeared from the record. Whether they were murdered, when they died and who was responsible remain unresolved questions.

Richard appears in Philippa Gregory’s The White Queen and The White Princess and in Sharon Kay Penman’s The Sunne in Splendour. Fiction often gives the younger prince a vivid personality to intensify the tragedy of the Tower, but almost no direct evidence survives. The mystery has therefore become a canvas for each novelist’s judgement of Richard III, Henry VII and the Woodville family.

Paul Doherty’s The Fate of Princes is set in the reign of Henry VII. The lawyer and royal servant Francis Lovell is asked to examine the fate of Edward V and his younger brother Richard, who disappeared from the Tower during the rise of Richard III. Alison Weir’s Elizabeth of York places Richard of Shrewsbury, Duke of York within a narrative shaped by court politics and dynastic power and family, marriage and personal loyalty. Other novels featuring Richard of Shrewsbury, Duke of York include Alison Weir’s Lancaster and York and Alison Weir’s The Pretender’s Wife.

Historical context

Historical periods linked to Richard of Shrewsbury, Duke of York

Princes in the Tower 1483 CE

Series

Series featuring Richard of Shrewsbury, Duke of York (1 series)

The Plantagenet and Tudor Novels in Order

by Philippa Gregory 16 books 4.4

The Plantagenet and Tudor novels form a chronological sequence of connected but independently readable stories about women near the English throne. They move from the Lancastrian court and the Wars of the Roses through the rise of the Tudors, Henry VIII’s marriages, the mid-Tudor religious crisis and the…

All books in this series