#Richard never acknowledged or refuted any of the rumors against him and never displayed his nephews' bodies (dead or alive) to the public

[wonder-worker]

"Mancini, an Italian visitor to England, was concerned for (Edward V and Richard of Shrewsbury's) fate as early as mid July. Well before he left England in that month, the princes, he later wrote, 'were withdrawn into the inner apartments of the Tower and were seen more and more rarely behind the bars and windows, till at length they ceased to appear at all'. Rumours of the princes' deaths were already circulating by the year's end. George Cely reported that he had heard that Edward V might be dead not long after 13 June, and certainly before his uncle claimed the throne. The Crowland chronicler, writing in about 1486, recalled how the rumour arose in September 1483 that 'the princes, by some unknown manner of destruction, had met their fate'. Some early reports went further, stating quite categorically that the princes were no longer alive. Robert Ricart, recorder of Bristol, entered in his Kalendar under the year ending 15 September 1483 that 'in this year the two sons of King Edward were put to silence in the Tower of London'. Shortly after 1485 the anonymous compiler of a genealogy of English kings concluded his work by accusing Richard, with his accomplice Buckingham, of murdering the princes. A London citizen, in some historical notes written before the end of 1488, noted that 'they were put to death in the Tower of London' in the mayoral year ending November 1483. John Rous, writing in 1489, reported that Richard killed the princes within three months of welcoming Edward V at Stony Stratford on 30 April; Richard, he wrote, 'received his lord king Edward V blandly with embraces and kisses, and within three months or a little more he killed him with his brother'. Rumours to similar effect reached France. In a speech to the estates general in 1484 the chancellor of France, Guillaume de Rochefort, reminded his audience how Edward IV s sons had been murdered and the crown seized by the murderer."

-Nigel Saul, "The Three Richards: Richard I, Richard II and Richard III"

*Just to add, Casper Weinrich of Danzig's chronicle at the end of 1483 also states that, "Richard, the King's brother, has put himself in power and crowned in England and he had his brother's children killed" and then in 1485 "King Richard of England, who had had his brother Edward’s children killed, was killed about St. Lawrence Day"