The Princes in the Tower: An Unsolved Disappearance on Mosher Mag

Two boys walk into the Tower of London.

Not prisoners. Not traitors. Not enemies.

They were heirs.

They were boys.

Children.

Edward V, twelve.

Richard, Duke of York, nine.

Heirs to the throne of England.

Sons of the dead king Edward IV. Nephews of Richard III.

Pieces on a chessboard where the rules were rewritten in murder.

They walked into the Tower of London in the summer of 1483.

They never walked out.

They simply vanished.

No bodies. No witnesses. No trial.

What happened in that stone keep is one of England’s oldest unsolved crimes.

A cocktail of dynastic greed, political erasure, and whispered betrayal, where innocence didn’t matter and blood was just a question of timing.

This is no fairytale.

This is a murder story dressed in royal robes and we still don’t know the killer.

April 1483. Edward IV is dead.

A sudden, suspicious death.

A healthy, gluttonous man, felled overnight.

Some whisper poison. Some blame gout. Some don’t care, they’re too busy planning who gets what.

His heir, Edward V, is twelve. Too young to rule.

So his uncle, Richard, Duke of Gloucester, steps in as Lord Protector.

A temporary position. A seat warmer.

What should’ve been a short regency becomes a swift and brutal usurpation.

Because in less than three months, the boy-king is declared illegitimate, the crown is seized, and Richard names himself king.

Then came the knife in paperwork form.

Richard didn’t kill the boys outright not yet.

First, he had to unmake them legally.

A preacher, Dr. Ralph Shaa, gave a sermon claiming Edward IV’s marriage to Elizabeth Woodville was invalid. That their sons were illegitimate.

It was all theatre. A royal defamation.

Days later, Parliament passed Titulus Regius, declaring the princes bastards and Richard the true heir.

And just like that, their crown was gone, stolen not with a blade but with ink and seal.

Richard became King Richard III. The boys became shadows.

The boys were taken, for their “safety,” they said, to the Tower of London.

A royal residence, technically. But let’s not pretend.

The Tower was a fortress and a prison.

A torture chamber. An execution ground.

It’s where Anne Boleyn lost her head. Where traitors were broken. Where whispers got louder than screams. It was where secrets went to die.

And in the summer of 1483, two princes were swallowed whole by its silence.

Putting the boys in the Tower was a statement.

A velvet-wrapped coffin.

They were seen in the gardens. Playing. Reading. Waving. For a while.

But by late summer, the sightings stop.

Their windows grow dark.

No more servants report in.

No more food ordered.

No more air in the lungs of history.

They just… stop existing.

The boys were no longer seen in public.

They vanished into the walls.

Thomas More, writing decades later, described them being smothered in their sleep with pillows by two men hired by Richard.

But More was writing under Henry VIII. He had his own enemies to flatter.

Still, the imagery sticks:

Two pale-faced boys in nightclothes. A creak of a door. A soft struggle.

And then nothing.

No bodies. No graves. No justice.

Just a tower that seemed to breathe guilt.

There are three prime suspects.

All of them were men who saw the boys as obstacles, not relatives.

1. Richard III: The Architect of the Disappearing

The obvious suspect. He had motive, means, and authority.

The Tower was under his control. The boys stood in the way of his crown.

Richard had already declared the boys bastards via a sermon and an act of Parliament — Titulus Regius. That wasn’t a warning shot. That was political acid, dissolving their claim with a stroke of ink.

Some say he smothered them in the dark, pillows over royal faces, hired hands paid to "clean up" succession. It’s almost too simple. Too neat.

And most damning?

He never produced them again. Not alive. Not dead.

He didn’t need to.

He erased them from history and crowned himself on their bones.

But Richard’s defenders argue there’s no proof.

That he was too smart to kill them, that it made him look guilty.

That they may have died of natural causes, or been moved.

But if so, why the silence?

Why not parade them as harmless bastards once his throne was secured?

Unless they were already under the floorboards.

But Richard’s reign was haunted from day one.

He was never loved. Never trusted.

The people muttered. The nobles shifted nervously.

No one forgets a missing prince, let alone two.

And Richard never addressed it. Never explained.

He wore the crown like it weighed a thousand pounds of guilt.

He ruled for two years. Then Henry Tudor marched in.

Richard died at Bosworth, his skull smashed open, his body stripped naked, dumped in a grave under what would one day become a car park.

The princes? Still gone.

2. Henry VII: The Cleansing Flame

When Henry Tudor defeated Richard at the Battle of Bosworth in 1485, he became King. But the princes’ bloodline still out-ranked his.

What if they were still alive, hidden away, and he feared their return?

He certainly acted like it: He destroyed Titulus Regius, the document that declared the boys illegitimate, making them “royal” again, posthumously.

It was genius.

Now he could say, “I didn’t steal the crown from Richard — I’m restoring it to the rightful bloodline.”

Except… the rightful bloodline was missing.

Convenient, no?

So maybe he killed them, not to become king, but to stay king.

Some say Henry found them alive, hidden away, in sanctuary or fostered out, and had them quietly killed.

Others say he never found them, but made sure no one else could claim to be them.

He executed pretenders. Imposters. Anyone who breathed the name “Plantagenet” too loudly. He even married Elizabeth of York, the boys’ sister, to blend the bloodlines and make himself the future.

The Tudors built their dynasty over a burial ground with no graves.

3. The Duke of Buckingham: The Wildcard with Bloodlust

Henry Stafford, Duke of Buckingham, started as Richard III’s loyal enforcer.

A third wheel. Ambitious, powerful, and perhaps the most sinister because he had no direct claim, only chaotic hunger.

He switched sides suddenly. Raised a rebellion against Richard. And was executed for it.

Was it guilt?

Or was it because he knew too much?

Some say he acted without Richard’s permission, seeing the boys as leverage gone stale.

He had Tower access. He had ruthlessness.

But he didn’t have subtlety.

Others argue Richard used him as the blade, then had him executed to bury the secret.

Either way, silence.

Fast forward to 1674, workmen demolishing a staircase in the Tower found a wooden box buried beneath the White Tower, containing two small skeletons.

The bones are reburied in Westminster Abbey.

Royal treatment, for kids no one could prove were royal.

No DNA test. No confirmation. The Crown forbade it.

Just a myth, politely entombed.

In 2012, archaeologists found Richard III’s body in a Leicester car park.

DNA confirms him. Science wins.

But the mystery of his nephews, his ghosts, remains untouchable.

Science could test the bones.

But to exhume them is to open wounds the monarchy still fears.

Too sacred. Too old. Too political.

The truth is in a vault.

Sealed. Sacred. Suspicious.

The Tower of London is called the most haunted place in Britain.

Tourists speak of childlike sobbing near the Bloody Tower.

Cold spots. Shadows.

A pair of boys are seen at twilight, standing hand in hand, then disappearing through walls.

And maybe it’s just folklore.

Or maybe the Tower never forgets.

Even if you don’t believe in ghosts, here’s what’s real:

These were children who trusted the people around them.

Who were caged not by their enemies, but by their own blood.

Whose only crime was being born royal.

Their story is a curse.

And every crown worn since is built atop it.

You can’t walk through London without stepping on someone’s unmarked grave. You can’t say “crown” without tasting iron.

The Tower still stands.

A museum now. A tourist stop.

But it’s a mausoleum too.

A place where power once whispered,

And two children screamed,

And no one listened.

History didn’t bury the princes. It hid them.

And the Tower? It still knows the truth.

For the freaks, by the freaks.

Thanks for reading. Stay strange.

✦ moshermag.com