Horace Walpole and others have maintained that it is not so.  The substance of the story is as follows:  Richard, some time after he had set out on his progress, sent a special messenger and confidant, by name John Green, to Sir Robert Brackenbury, the constable of the Tower, commanding him to put the two princes to death.  Brackenbury refused to obey the order, and Green returned to his master at Warwick.  The King was bitterly disappointed.  “Whom shall a man trust,” he said, “when those who I thought would most surely serve me, at my command will do nothing for me?” The words were spoken to a private attendant or page, who told him, in reply, that there was one man lying on a pallet in the outer chamber who would hardly scruple to undertake anything whatever to please him.  This was Sir James Tyrell, who is described by More as an ambitious, aspiring man, jealous of the ascendency of Sir Richard Ratcliffe and Sir William Catesby.  Richard at once acted upon the hint, and calling Tyrell before him communicated his mind to him and gave him a commission for the execution of his murderous purpose.  Tyrell went to London with a warrant authorizing Brackenbury to deliver up to him for one night all the keys of the Tower.  Armed with this document he took possession of the place, and proceeded to the work of death by the instrumentality of Miles Forest, one of the four jailers in whose custody the princes were, and John Dighton, his own groom.  When the young princes were asleep, these men entered their chamber, and, taking up the pillows, pressed them hard down upon their mouths till they died by suffocation.  Then, having caused Sir James to see the bodies, they buried them at the foot of a staircase.  But “it was rumored,” says More, “that the King disapproved of their being buried in so vile a corner; whereupon they say that a priest of Sir Robert Brackenbury’s took up the bodies again, and secretly interred them in such place as, by the occasion of his death, could never come to light.”  Sir James, having fulfilled his mission, returned to the King, from whom he received great thanks, and who, Sir Thomas informs us, “as some say, there made him a knight.”

It has been maintained that this story will not bear criticism.  What could have induced Richard to time his cruel policy so ill and to arrange it so badly?  The order for the destruction of the children could have been much more easily, safely, and secretly executed when he was in London than when he was at Gloucester or Warwick.  Fewer messages would have sufficed, and neither warrants nor letters would have been necessary.  Was it a sudden idea which occurred to him upon his progress?  If so, he might surely have waited for a better opportunity.  If not, he might at least have taken care to sift Brackenbury before leaving London, so as to be sure of the two he intended to employ.  Is it likely that Richard would have given orders for the commission of a crime, without having good reason to rely upon his intended agent’s boldness and depravity?