The Princes in the Tower

The Tower of London has witnessed more blood, betrayal, and broken ambition than perhaps any other building in England. Within its ancient walls, queens have been beheaded, conspirators racked, and prisoners left to rot in forgotten cells. Yet among all the Tower’s ghosts—and there are many, from Anne Boleyn’s headless specter to the shimmering figure of Sir Walter Raleigh—none provoke such instinctive grief as the two small boys in white nightgowns who have been seen walking hand in hand through the Bloody Tower for over five centuries. They are Edward V, who was twelve years old when he vanished, and his younger brother Richard, Duke of York, who was nine. Their story represents one of England’s most enduring mysteries and one of its most heartbreaking hauntings.

The Sons of York

To understand why two children became ghosts, one must first understand the brutal politics of fifteenth-century England. Edward IV, the boys’ father, had seized the throne during the Wars of the Roses, the savage dynastic struggle between the rival houses of York and Lancaster that tore England apart for decades. Edward was a formidable warrior and a capable king, but he was also reckless in his personal life. His secret marriage to Elizabeth Woodville, a commoner and a widow, infuriated the powerful Earl of Warwick and created deep factional divisions at court. The Woodville family, elevated to prominence through the queen’s marriage, accumulated enemies with breathtaking speed.

When Edward IV died unexpectedly on April 9, 1483, at the age of forty, he left behind two young sons and a kingdom balanced on a knife’s edge. His eldest boy, also named Edward, was twelve years old and residing at Ludlow Castle in the Welsh Marches, where he maintained the traditional household of the Prince of Wales. The younger son, Richard, Duke of York, was with his mother, Queen Elizabeth, in London. The boys’ uncle, Richard, Duke of Gloucester, was in the north of England.

What followed was a masterclass in political manipulation. The young Edward V was proclaimed king, and arrangements were made for his coronation. His uncle Richard was named Lord Protector, responsible for governing the realm until Edward came of age. But Richard moved swiftly to consolidate his own power. He intercepted the young king’s party as it traveled from Ludlow to London, arrested several members of the Woodville family, and took personal custody of his nephew. Queen Elizabeth, sensing danger, fled with her younger son Richard into sanctuary at Westminster Abbey.

The boy king was lodged in the Tower of London, which at that time served not only as a prison but as a royal residence and the traditional location where monarchs stayed before their coronations. There was nothing unusual about this arrangement, and initially, the young Edward appears to have been treated with appropriate deference. He was given comfortable apartments and allowed to exercise on the Tower grounds. Preparations for his coronation continued, at least outwardly.

But behind the scenes, the Lord Protector was dismantling the boy’s claim to the throne with ruthless efficiency. He persuaded the queen to release her younger son from sanctuary, arguing that the little Duke of York should be with his brother to provide companionship. Elizabeth, surrounded by armed men and with no realistic alternative, reluctantly agreed. Young Richard was escorted to the Tower to join his brother. It was the last time their mother would see either of them alive.

The Usurpation

With both princes securely within the Tower’s walls, their uncle made his decisive move. A clergyman named Robert Stillington, Bishop of Bath and Wells, came forward with the claim that Edward IV’s marriage to Elizabeth Woodville had been invalid because the king had previously been betrothed to Lady Eleanor Butler. If this was true—and the evidence was questionable at best—then Edward’s children were illegitimate and could not inherit the throne. Parliament was persuaded to accept this argument and passed the Act known as Titulus Regius, formally declaring the princes bastards and their uncle the rightful king.

Richard, Duke of Gloucester, was crowned King Richard III on July 6, 1483. The coronation was elaborate and well-attended, with many of England’s nobility apparently willing to accept the new dispensation. But the fate of the deposed boy king and his brother remained a source of unease. While they lived, they represented a threat to Richard’s claim, a rallying point for anyone who wished to challenge the new regime.

In the weeks following the coronation, the princes were seen less and less frequently. They had been moved from the comfortable royal apartments to more confined quarters in the Garden Tower, which would later become known as the Bloody Tower. Visitors reported seeing them at play in the Tower grounds, shooting arrows and engaging in the ordinary activities of boyhood. But these sightings grew increasingly rare. By late summer of 1483, the princes had vanished entirely.

No reliable contemporary account records what happened to them. They simply ceased to exist in the historical record, as completely as if the earth had swallowed them. Their mother, still in sanctuary, could learn nothing of their fate. Rumors of their murder began circulating almost immediately, growing in intensity as weeks turned to months without any sign of the boys. The political consequences were enormous—even some of Richard III’s supporters were troubled by the disappearance, and it became a potent weapon for his enemies.

The Murder

The most widely accepted account of the princes’ fate comes from Sir Thomas More, who wrote his History of King Richard III approximately three decades after the events. According to More, Richard III ordered the boys killed and entrusted the deed to Sir James Tyrrell, a loyal retainer. Tyrrell allegedly recruited two men, Miles Forest and John Dighton, to perform the actual murder. The killers are said to have smothered the boys with their pillows as they slept, then buried their bodies at the foot of a staircase within the Tower.

More’s account, while compelling, was written long after the fact and drew upon sources that cannot be independently verified. Other suspects have been proposed over the centuries. Henry Stafford, Duke of Buckingham, who had helped Richard seize power before dramatically turning against him, had both the means and a possible motive. Henry VII, who defeated Richard III at the Battle of Bosworth Field in 1485 and founded the Tudor dynasty, had the strongest political motivation of all—with the princes dead, his own rather tenuous claim to the throne was greatly strengthened.

The truth may never be known with certainty. What is known is that two children, guilty of nothing more than being born to a king, were placed in the custody of adults who valued power above innocence. Whether they died by their uncle’s command, by Buckingham’s treachery, or by some other hand, the result was the same. Two boys who should have grown to manhood, who should have known the joys and sorrows of full human lives, were instead extinguished before they had truly begun to live. It is this fundamental injustice that gives the haunting of the Tower its particular quality of anguish.

The Discovery of the Bones

Nearly two centuries after the princes vanished, the Tower yielded evidence that seemed to confirm the darkest version of events. In 1674, workmen carrying out renovations beneath a staircase leading to the Chapel of St. John discovered a wooden chest containing the bones of two children. The skeletons were consistent in size with children of approximately the ages the princes would have been at the time of their disappearance. The discovery electrified the nation and seemed to provide final confirmation that the boys had indeed been murdered and buried within the Tower.

King Charles II ordered the remains interred in Westminster Abbey, where they were placed in a marble urn designed by Sir Christopher Wren. The inscription on the urn identifies the bones as those of Edward V and his brother Richard, and they rest in the Abbey’s Henry VII Lady Chapel to this day.

In 1933, the urn was opened and the bones examined by a medical team. The examination concluded that the remains were consistent with two children aged approximately ten and twelve, further supporting the identification. However, the analysis was limited by the forensic techniques available at the time. Crucially, it could not determine the sex of the children with certainty, nor could it establish a cause of death. Animal bones were also found mixed with the human remains, complicating the picture.

Modern scientists have repeatedly requested permission to conduct DNA analysis on the bones, which could potentially confirm whether they are indeed the sons of Edward IV by comparing their genetic material with known Plantagenet remains. As of the present day, these requests have been refused by the authorities at Westminster Abbey. The identity of the children beneath the staircase, like so much about this case, remains officially unconfirmed.

The Ghosts

The spectral manifestations associated with the princes represent one of the oldest and most consistently reported hauntings in England. Sightings have been documented from the late fifteenth century onward, spanning more than five hundred years of recorded accounts. The apparitions follow remarkably consistent patterns regardless of the era in which they are witnessed, suggesting either a genuine supernatural phenomenon or an extraordinarily persistent piece of cultural memory.

The princes are most commonly described as two small boys dressed in white nightgowns of the kind that would have been worn in the late medieval period. They appear hand in hand, walking slowly through the corridors and chambers of the Bloody Tower. Their expressions are described as sad and frightened, their movements tentative and uncertain, as though they are searching for a way out of a place they know to be dangerous. There is something desperately vulnerable about them—the way they cling to each other, the way they seem to shrink from the shadows around them, suggests children who know that they are in mortal peril but have no one to protect them.

The apparitions are most frequently reported in the Bloody Tower itself, which was the princes’ last known place of residence. The tower’s ground floor chamber, where the boys are believed to have been held, is the epicenter of the activity. Guards stationed in or near this area have reported seeing the two figures emerge from the walls, walk silently across the room, and then fade away. The temperature drops noticeably during these manifestations, and witnesses consistently describe an overwhelming sense of sadness that accompanies the sighting—a grief so intense that hardened soldiers have been moved to tears.

The staircase where the bones were discovered is another focal point for sightings. The boys have been seen ascending and descending these stairs, sometimes pausing as if confused or uncertain of their direction. One particularly haunting detail appears across multiple accounts: the elder boy is sometimes seen placing a protective arm around his younger brother’s shoulders, a gesture of sibling care that speaks to the bond between them and makes their fate all the more heartbreaking.

Yeoman Warder Accounts

The Yeoman Warders, popularly known as Beefeaters, who guard the Tower and live within its walls, occupy a unique position as witnesses to its supernatural activity. These are not credulous tourists or ghost-hunting enthusiasts but career military personnel who have earned their positions through long and distinguished service. Their testimony regarding the princes’ ghosts carries particular weight precisely because they tend to be skeptical, pragmatic individuals who are reluctant to discuss such matters publicly.

Nevertheless, numerous Yeoman Warders have reported encounters with the princes over the years. One account from the mid-twentieth century describes a Warder making his rounds late at night who entered the Bloody Tower to find two children standing in the corner of the ground floor chamber. Assuming they were visitors who had somehow been locked in after closing, he moved toward them to offer assistance. As he approached, the children turned to look at him with expressions of such abject terror that he stopped in his tracks. Then they simply faded from view, leaving the room empty and bitterly cold.

Another Warder, serving during the 1980s, reported hearing the sound of children crying within the Bloody Tower on multiple occasions, always during the small hours of the morning. The crying was soft and muffled, as if the children were trying to suppress their tears, and it seemed to come from within the very walls of the building. Despite thorough searches, no source for the sound was ever found. The Warder, who had served in multiple conflict zones during his military career, reportedly described the experience as the most disturbing thing he had ever encountered.

A particularly compelling account involves a Warder who was conducting an after-hours check of the Bloody Tower in the early 2000s. He reported seeing the shadows of two small figures cast against a wall by a light source that did not exist. The shadows moved independently—walking, pausing, turning—as though cast by real children illuminated by a candle or torch. But the room was lit only by modern electric lighting, and there were no children present. The Warder watched the shadow play for several minutes before it gradually faded, leaving him alone in the silent tower.

The Tower’s Other Ghosts

The princes are far from the only ghosts reported in the Tower of London. The fortress has served as a place of imprisonment and execution for nearly a thousand years, and the list of those who suffered and died within its walls reads like a roll call of English history. Anne Boleyn, the second wife of Henry VIII, who was beheaded on Tower Green in 1536, is frequently seen walking near the Chapel Royal of St. Peter ad Vincula, where her headless body was buried. Lady Jane Grey, the so-called Nine Days’ Queen, who was executed at the age of sixteen in 1554, has been reported as a white figure near the battlements. Sir Walter Raleigh, imprisoned in the Tower for thirteen years, has been seen pacing the wall walk where he took his daily exercise.

The ghost of the Countess of Salisbury, Margaret Pole, presents one of the Tower’s most disturbing apparitions. The elderly countess was executed in 1541 after a botched beheading in which the inexperienced executioner chased her around the scaffold, striking repeatedly with his axe. Her ghost is said to reenact this horrific scene, screaming and fleeing from an invisible pursuer before collapsing.

There are also reports of phantom bears and other animals, remnants of the Royal Menagerie that was housed at the Tower from the thirteenth century until 1835. A spectral bear was reportedly seen by a guard in 1816, who attempted to bayonet it and collapsed in shock when his weapon passed through the apparition. The guard reportedly died of fright within days.

Yet despite this crowded field of specters, it is the two small boys in their white nightgowns who affect visitors most deeply. Perhaps it is because they were children, innocent of the political machinations that destroyed them. Perhaps it is because their story speaks to something universal—the vulnerability of the young in a world controlled by ruthless adults. Or perhaps it is because their fate remains officially unresolved, their murders never prosecuted, their remains never definitively identified. They are, in every sense, unfinished business.

The Emotional Resonance

Visitors to the Tower of London who know nothing of its ghostly reputation frequently report experiencing powerful emotional responses in certain locations, and the Bloody Tower is chief among them. People describe feeling sudden, overwhelming sadness upon entering the chamber where the princes were held, a grief that seems to come from outside themselves and has no connection to their own circumstances. Some visitors have been reduced to tears without understanding why. Others describe a sensation of oppressive dread, as though the very air in the room is heavy with suffering.

Children seem particularly sensitive to whatever presence lingers in the Bloody Tower. Parents have reported their children becoming suddenly distressed upon entering the building, crying without cause or clinging to their parents with unusual intensity. Some children have asked about “the sad boys” before being told anything about the history of the location. Whether these reactions represent genuine psychic sensitivity or simply a child’s response to the gloomy atmosphere of a medieval prison tower is impossible to determine, but the consistency of such reports is notable.

The emotional quality of the haunting distinguishes the princes from many of the Tower’s other ghosts. Anne Boleyn’s specter, for instance, is often described as dignified and composed, walking with the bearing of a queen even in death. The Countess of Salisbury’s ghost is terrifying in its violence. But the princes’ apparitions inspire neither dignity nor terror—only pity. They are children who needed protection and received none, who called for help and were answered with silence. Their ghostly presence is not threatening but pleading, as if even after five centuries, they still hope that someone will come to save them.

Historical Investigations

The question of what happened to the princes has occupied historians for over five hundred years and shows no sign of resolution. Each generation brings new theories, new suspects, and new interpretations of the scanty evidence. The debate has become one of English history’s great intellectual puzzles, attracting amateur and professional historians alike.

The traditional view, established by Tudor historians and reinforced by Shakespeare’s famous portrayal of Richard III as a scheming villain, holds that Richard ordered the murders to secure his hold on the throne. This interpretation has the advantage of simplicity—Richard had the clearest motive, the most direct opportunity, and the most to gain from the boys’ deaths. The fact that he never produced the princes alive, even when rumors of their murder were damaging his political position, suggests that he could not do so because they were already dead.

Revisionists have challenged this view, arguing that Richard III has been the victim of Tudor propaganda. They point out that Henry VII, who overthrew Richard and established the Tudor dynasty, had every reason to blacken his predecessor’s reputation and to ensure that the princes’ fate remained a mystery. If Henry himself was responsible for the boys’ deaths—and he certainly had the opportunity, as the Tower was under his control after Bosworth—then blaming Richard would have been both politically convenient and personally exculpatory.

The Buckingham theory proposes that Henry Stafford, Duke of Buckingham, ordered the murders on his own initiative, either to curry favor with Richard or to advance his own claim to the throne. Buckingham had access to the Tower, he turned against Richard shortly after the princes’ disappearance, and his rebellion in the autumn of 1483 may have been motivated by guilt or by the failure of a political gamble.

More exotic theories have also been proposed. Some historians have suggested that one or both princes survived and were smuggled abroad, living out their lives in obscurity. The pretenders Lambert Simnel and Perkin Warbeck, who both claimed to be the younger prince during Henry VII’s reign, may have been inspired by genuine uncertainty about the boys’ fate. Others have proposed that the princes died of natural causes—disease was rampant in medieval England, and children were particularly vulnerable.

The Weight of Centuries

What makes the haunting of the princes so compelling is not merely its antiquity but its moral clarity. In a place where the line between justice and murder was often indistinguishable, where state executions were carried out with legal ceremony and religious ritual, the killing of two children stands apart as an act of pure evil. There was no trial, no accusation, no pretense of legality. Two boys were locked in a room and smothered in their sleep because they were inconvenient to a powerful man’s ambitions.

The Tower of London has absorbed centuries of suffering, and its stones are saturated with the emotional residue of countless tragedies. Prisoners have scratched their last messages into its walls. Blood has stained its floors. The sounds of weeping, praying, and screaming have echoed through its chambers for a thousand years. But the princes’ haunting cuts through all of this accumulated horror with a simplicity that nothing else in the Tower can match. Two children, holding hands, walking through the darkness, looking for a way home.

Five hundred years have passed since Edward and Richard vanished into the Tower’s depths. Dynasties have risen and fallen. The Wars of the Roses have faded from living memory into distant history. The Tower itself has been transformed from a functioning fortress into a tourist attraction visited by millions each year. But the boys remain, unchanged by the passage of time, forever young, forever frightened, forever holding hands in the darkness. They are a reminder that some wrongs can never be set right, that some innocence, once destroyed, can never be restored, and that the dead do not always accept the silence that is imposed upon them.

Those who see the princes report that the experience stays with them for the rest of their lives. Not because the apparitions are terrifying—they are not. Not because they are spectacular—they are the opposite, quiet and almost unbearably gentle. They linger in the memory because they represent something that every human being instinctively recognizes and recoils from: the betrayal of trust, the murder of innocence, and the knowledge that in this case, as in so many others throughout history, the guilty were never punished and the innocent were never avenged.

The princes walk the Bloody Tower still, two small figures in white, hand in hand against the dark. They have been walking for five hundred years, and there is no reason to believe they will ever stop.

Sources

• Wikipedia search: “The Princes in the Tower”
• Historic England — Listed Buildings — Register of historic sites