I Never Knew That About London – Tower of London

I Never Knew That About London – Tower of London

The Tower of London stands sentinel just outside the City of London, in the borough of Tower Hamlets. It was begun by William the Conqueror in 1078 to replace a temporary wooden structure put up not long after the Battle of Hastings in 1066. The first building to be erected was the central keep, which had walls 15 ft (4.6 m) thick and reached a height of 90 ft (27 m), the tallest building in London at the time and the oldest and most complete Norman castle of its type in England. It was renamed the White Tower after being whitewashed in 1240. The White Tower is the oldest complete building in London. St John’s Chapel, one of the first parts of the Tower to be completed, is the oldest unchanged church in London.

By the time Edward I completed the building work at the end of the 13th century the outer wall enclosed an area of 18 acres (7.3 ha). The White Tower

was the first building in England to have latrines, with two garderobes, complete with seats and chutes, on each of the top three floors.

The Tower’s first prisoner was Ranulf Flambard, Bishop of Durham, who was sent there in 1101 for selling benefices.

In 12 3 5 the Holy Roman Emperor gave Henry III three leopards, in honour of the leopards on the Plantagenet coat of arms, and these were the start of the Royal Menagerie at the Tower. In 1252 the King of Norway gave a polar bear, and in 1255 an elephant arrived, a gift from Henry’s cousin King Louis IX of France.

In 1300 the Royal Mint moved to the Tower from Westminster, and in 1303 the Crown Jewels were brought to the Tower after a series of mysterious thefts from their stash at Westminster Abbey.

In 1381, during the Peasants’ Revolt, a mob broke into the Tower and dragged Archbishop Sudbury out on to Tower Hill and beheaded him. This seemed to start a trend and, five years later, the first official execution took place on Tower Hill, that of Sir SIMON DE BURLEY, Richard II’s tutor.

In 1399 Richard II was imprisoned in the Tower and forced to abdicate in favour of his cousin Henry Bolingbroke. On the eve of his coronation as Henry IV, Bolingbroke initiated the Ceremony of the Bath, choosing 46 of his followers to be spiritually cleansed in the baths adjoining St John’s Chapel. As the men washed, Henry made a sign of the Cross on each man’s back and knighted him. They then spent a night of prayer in the chapel, at the end of which they offered up a taper to God and a penny to the

King. The spiritual home of the Order of the Bath is now Henry VII’s Chapel in Westminster Abbey.

On 21 May 1461, HENRY VI was murdered while praying in the Wakefield Tower, and on the anniversary of his death staff from Eton and King’s College, Cambridge, both founded by Henry, come and place flowers on the spot.

In 1478 Edward IV’s brother the Duke of CLEARANCE was arrested for treason and locked up in the Bowyer Tower, where he mysteriously drowned in a butt of malmsey wine, malmsey being a kind of sweet wine from Madeira.

When Edward IV died in 1483, his brother Richard of Gloucester quickly took charge of Edward’s sons, 12-year-old King Edward V and his brother Richard. He declared the boys illegitimate and had them sent to the Tower, ostensibly for their own safety. Richard of Gloucester was crowned Richard III and the two princes were forgotten. In the autumn of 1483 there were rumours that they had been found suffocated in the Garden Tower where they were living, and their bodies hurriedly buried. The Garden Tower was known ever after as the Bloody Tower. In 1674, during the reign of Charles II, two small skeletons were found under the stair to St John’s Chapel and were reburied in Westminster Abbey.

Although it had always held prisoners, the Tower really got its reputation for cruelty during the Reformation, when Henry VIII sent so many there to be tortured or beheaded for refusing to sign the Oath of Supremacy. Sir Thomas More and Bishop Fisher were both executed on Tower Hill in 1535, for refusing to sign, and Thomas Cromwell in 1540, for making Henry marry ‘the Mare of Flanders’, Anne of Cleves.

While high-profile executions took place in public on Tower Hill, a scaffold was erected inside the walls on Tower Green for unpopular beheadings that might incite a riot, particularly those of women. Among the unfortunates who lost their heads on Tower Green were Anne Boleyn in 1536, three years to the day after her coronation, Catherine Howard in 1542 and Lady Jane Grey in 1554. Those executed on, Tower Green are buried in the Chapel Royal of St Peter ad Vincula, the oldest royal chapel in England.

The LAST MONARCH TO OCCUPY THE TOWER was JAMES I. THE LAST MAN TO BE EXECUTED ON TOWER HILL was the Jacobite peer, the 11th lord LOVAT in 1747.

In 1804 the Royal Menagerie was opened for the public to come and see, and this is where William Blake saw his ‘Tyger! Tyger! burning bright…’ In 1835 one of the lions in the menagerie attacked a member of the garrison and the animals were moved to the new zoo in Regent’s Park. Only the ravens remain, their wings clipped to prevent them flying away – lest, as legend has it, the kingdom should fall.

The last ever prisoner at the Tower of London was Hitler’s deputy, RUDOLPH Hess, who was detained there for four days in 1941, having been captured after parachuting into Scotland supposedly to see the Duke of Hamilton.

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