Some forty years after the publication of John Ford's Chronicle History of Perkin Warbeck, Charles II ordered the remains of the royal lodgings, annexed to the Tower, to be torn down and removed. When the workmen razed the external staircase that formed part of the link between the Royal Apartments and the Chapel of St. John, they uncovered “Under the bottom stair, at a depth of ten feet, … a wooden chest. In it were the skeletons of two children, the taller one lying on its back, the smaller one on top of it, face downwards.” The King's Principle Surgeon, John Knight, wrote in the same year that the bones “upon the presumptions that they were the bones of this king [the eldest son of Edward IV] and his brother Rich: D. of York, were by the command of K. Charles the 2nd put into a marble Vrn and deposited amongst the R; Family in H: 7th Chappel in Westminster at my importunity” (Williamson, Mystery 183).

The material connection between the discovery of the bones and Ford's play (printed in 1634) is frail at best, except that the king's handling of the situation seeks to close the door on one of the great genealogical cruxes in English royal history, which also happens to be the dramatic centre of Ford's play: the fate of Richard Duke of York, King Edward's second son.