Richard III’s seizure of the English throne is presented as a rupture in the succession that transformed a temporary guardianship into a contested kingship. In Arthur’s account to Catalina, Richard’s appropriation of the crown and the disappearance of his young nephews make the Tower of London a symbol of the dynasty’s unresolved violence, while the opposition that gathered around Henry Tudor sets the conditions for the Tudor rise.

A disputed succession

Edward, Richard’s elder brother, died young, leaving a young son to inherit. Richard initially held the throne in trust, but then claimed it for himself. The change from protector to claimant is the central turn in Arthur’s account: the crown passed not through an uncontested succession but through a brother’s challenge to the inheritance of his own family.

The episode mattered beyond the immediate contest between the brothers. Catalina had learned this history in Spain, and she and Arthur recognized in it a familiar pattern of deadly rivalry over a throne. The succession was not an abstract matter of title; it placed children and rival branches of a royal family at risk.

The princes in the Tower

After taking the throne, Richard put his nephews, Edward’s sons, in the Tower of London. Arthur says that they went in and never came out again. Their fate remained unknown, and his account gives no resolution to the mystery of what happened to them.

Their disappearance became the turning point in public opinion described by Arthur. The people turned against Richard, and the political opposition summoned Henry Tudor from France. The Tower thus stands in the account both as a royal residence and as the place from which the young princes vanished from the succession.

The opposition to Richard

Arthur connects Richard’s loss of support to the organization of the great lords by his grandmother, Margaret Beaufort. She brought the nobles together, working with Edward Stafford, Duke of Buckingham, while Henry Tudor remained in France. Arthur explains that his father, Henry VII of England, owed his throne to Margaret’s efforts.

The account also places Elizabeth of York within that struggle: before the outcome was known, Henry sent word that he would marry her if he won the throne. The proposed marriage linked the prospect of victory to a dynastic union, making the succession contest a struggle not only for the crown but also over how a new royal line might be established.

Dynastic afterlife

The danger posed by competing claims did not disappear with Richard’s fall. Later in the novel, Edward Plantagenet, Duke of Warwick, is described as having a stronger claim to the throne than Henry VII of England. He was imprisoned and executed before Catalina was sent to England, so that her parents could be assured there were no pretenders to the throne they had secured for her through marriage.

That later episode echoes the history Arthur recounts: a contested crown leaves the next generation vulnerable to the same calculations of inheritance and political security. Richard’s seizure is therefore presented not as an isolated act, but as part of a continuing dynastic conflict whose costs reach beyond the rival claimant to the children, marriages, and alliances bound to the English succession.