The Ghosts of the Tower of London – Tower Green

This 90-second clip comes from Historic Royal Palaces, the independent charity that looks after the Tower of London, and was posted on Halloween 2013 as part of a short “#TowerGhosts” series. A guide speaking on camera stands on Tower Green, the small lawn inside the fortress where a few prisoners of rank were beheaded in private rather than before the crowds on Tower Hill, and calls it “a who’s who of English history.”

He names three of the Tower’s best-known phantoms: Margaret Pole, Countess of Salisbury, said to be heard screaming as she runs from the executioner; Anne Boleyn, Henry VIII’s second wife, said to walk the green with her head beneath her arm; and the two boy princes who vanished from the Bloody Tower, said to be seen holding hands. The surprise comes at the end, when the speaker offers his own theory of where the stories came from.

It is unusual, and refreshing, to hear a historic site’s own staff call its ghosts a possible marketing invention. The theory fits what historians say about the Tower’s lore: most of its ghost stories were written down in the nineteenth century, when the fortress was turning into a tourist attraction, and few can be traced back to a named witness. The best-documented Tower account, Edmund Lenthal Swifte’s description of a strange glowing cylinder in the Jewel House in 1817, involves none of the figures named here.

Watch the dates, too. In the clip Margaret Pole’s execution is given as 1542 and the princes’ disappearance as 1473; the record puts her beheading in May 1541, and the boys vanished from view in 1483, after the death of their father, Edward IV. Anne Boleyn was executed on Tower Green in May 1536 and lies in the nearby chapel of St Peter ad Vincula.