Henry VI died in the Tower in 1471, almost certainly murdered

Henry VI, the deposed Lancastrian king of England, died a prisoner in the Tower of London on the night of 21 May 1471, aged 49, and was almost certainly killed on the orders of Edward IV. Weeks earlier his only son, Edward of Lancaster, had died at the Battle of Tewkesbury aged 17; with the heir gone, keeping the father alive only kept the Lancastrian cause breathing.

What did Edward IV claim?

That Henry died of grief. The official Yorkist account, the Historie of the Arrivall of Edward IV, said he died of “pure displeasure and melancholy” at the news of his son’s death and his queen’s capture. He died, pointedly, on the night Margaret of Anjou was brought to the Tower. Few believed it. The Milanese ambassador reported home:

“…he has caused King Henry to be secretly assassinated in the Tower, where he was a prisoner… He has, in short, chosen to crush the seed.”

Does the 1910 exhumation prove he was murdered?

Not on its own. When his remains were examined at St George’s Chapel, Windsor, in 1910, W. H. St John Hope described hair “apparently matted with blood” — but Hope was an architectural historian, not qualified to identify blood, and the anatomy professor present did not mention it. The professor did record that the skull bones were “much broken”, yet the body had already been dug up once, in 1484, when it was moved from Chertsey Abbey to Windsor, so the damage need not date from 1471.

Nor is there evidence for Shakespeare’s villain. Richard, Duke of Gloucester — later the Richard III killed at Bosworth, and the king who ordered that 1484 reburial — was at the Tower that night, but so were many others.

Henry VII later planned to move the body to Westminster for a shrine; the plan came to nothing. The death is still marked every 21 May in the Wakefield Tower, where tradition places it: a plaque placed in 1923 reads “By tradition, Henry VI died here”, and Eton College, which Henry founded, lays lilies, joined since 1947 by roses from King’s College, Cambridge.