Medicine: Princely Bones

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While the others watch, Professor Wright and Mr. Tanner for five secret days carefully, gently and awfully measure each & every princely bone. They photograph them, wrap them in finest lawn. Dean Norris replaces the bones in the urn with a statement on parchment of what has been done in June 1933. The Dean reads part of the Anglican burial service. The urn is resealed and replaced in its niche in Westminster Abbey. King George gets a confidential report, which he permits Anatomist Wright and Muniment-Keeper Tanner to reveal—

Last week, before London's Society of Antiquaries. King Edward V had been 4 ft. 9 in. tall, his brother 4 ft. 6½ in. (Their father King Edward IV had been 6 ft. 3 in.) Edward had had bad teeth. A blood stain across his face bones indicated that he had been clouted severely before dying.

The lacrimal bone, smallest and most fragile of the face, of one of the boys was abnormal, suggesting, said Professor Wright, that he had ''cried his eyes out."

The structure and chemistry of the bones proved that when they were murdered Edward was very close to 12 years 9 months, Richard very close to 9 years 10 months. That meant that they had died in 1483, proved conclusively that their murderer was their York uncle Richard III, not, as some modern theorists have suggested, their sister's Tudor husband Henry VII.

Repercussion. Last week's revelations vexed English Roman Catholics. Cried Most Reverend Richard Downey, Archbishop of Liverpool: "It is difficult to see what moral justification there can be for reading a Protestant service over the remains of these Roman Catholic princes, even though it were done on the plea of legal continuity of the present Anglican Church with the pre-Reformation Church of Britain."