The Princes in the Tower

The Princes in the Tower is an oil painting on canvas by John Everett Millais, dated 1878 and shown at that year's Royal Academy exhibition at Burlington House; it belongs to Royal Holloway, University of London, at Egham in Surrey.

The subject is Edward V and his younger brother Richard, Duke of York, the sons of Edward IV, who disappeared in the Tower of London in 1483. Their uncle Richard, appointed their guardian after their father's death, had them declared illegitimate and took the crown as Richard III, and the Victorians believed he had them murdered. Millais drew heavily on Shakespeare's Richard III, and the story was a popular subject throughout the nineteenth century; Paul Delaroche had painted it in 1830 as The Children of Edward.

Millais shows the boys alone at the foot of a dark staircase in the anxious moments before their deaths. Dressed in black, the elder holds his cap and stares ahead while his brother presses close and grips his shoulder and hand. Royal Holloway's commentary notes that a shadow at the top of the stairs signals the approach of the murderer. Like much of Millais's later work, the picture centres on children, and its popularity has been linked to a growing Victorian concern with protecting them.

The identity of the models is disputed. An 1890 catalogue of the Royal Holloway collection names them as the sons of a professional model, Miss White, later Mrs Davis, who had sat for Millais's The White Cockade of 1862, and his son John recalled that Millais cast the boys as the princes as soon as he saw them. Other sources say the taller prince was Winifred Dallas-Yorke, later Duchess of Portland, and the other her younger brother Charley, after Millais saw them act the scene in a tableau vivant. Thomas Holloway bought the painting in 1881 for the college he founded, which also owns its companion, Princess Elizabeth in Prison at St James's. The canvas measures 147.2 by 91.4 cm.