Tower: An Epic History of the Tower of London Read online

  CONTENTS

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Also by Nigel Jones

  Title Page

  Acknowledgements

  Part One

  Chapter One: Beginnings

  Chapter Two: The Menagerie and the Mint

  Chapter Three: The Captives and the Kings

  Chapter Four: Plague and Peasants

  Chapter Five: Uneasy Heads

  Chapter Six: Roses are Blood Red

  Chapter Seven: The Princes, the Protector and the Pretenders

  Chapter Eight: The King’s Great Matter

  Chapter Nine: The Henrician Terror

  Chapter Ten: Tudor Children

  Chapter Eleven: Fallen Favourites

  Chapter Twelve: Papists, Plots and Poisons

  Part Two

  Chapter Thirteen: Great Escapes

  Chapter Fourteen: Restoration Romps

  Chapter Fifteen: Civil Wars and Uncivil Peace

  Chapter Sixteen: Iron Dukes and Lunatic Lords

  Chapter Seventeen: The Tower at War

  Epilogue

  Appendix: The Tower’s Ghosts

  Select Bibliography: Tower Histories Consulted

  Select Bibliography: General Works Consulted

  Picture Section

  Index

  Copyright

  About the Book

  Castle, royal palace, prison, torture chamber, execution site, zoo, mint, treasure house, armoury, record office, observatory and the most visited tourist attraction in the country: the Tower of London has been all these things and more. No building in Britain has been more intimately involved in our island's story than this mighty, brooding stronghold in the very heart of the capital, a place which has stood at the epicentre of dramatic, bloody and frequently cruel events for almost a thousand years.

  Now historian Nigel Jones sets this dramatic story firmly in the context of national – and international – events. In a gripping account drawn from primary sources he pictures the Tower in its many changing moods and its many diverse functions. Here, for the first time, is a thematic portrayal of the Tower of London not just as an ancient structure but as a living symbol of the nation.

  Incorporating a dazzling panoply of political and social detail, Tower puts one of Britain's most important buildings firmly at the heart of our national story.

  About the Author

  Nigel Jones is a former deputy editor of History Today and BBC History magazines who is now a full-time historian and biographer. He has written books on subjects as diverse as Rupert Brooke, Patrick Hamilton and Nazi Germany, appeared on historical documentaries on BBC TV and radio and written and reviewed for most national newspapers. He conducted the author interviews for the Daily Mail Book Club; and reads for serialisation for the Daily Mail. His reviews appear frequently in the Sunday Telegraph, Literary Review and History Today. Nigel is founder-director of www.historicaltrips.com

  He lives near Brighton in East Sussex with his partner and three children.

  Also by Nigel Jones

  The War Walk: A Journey Along the Western Front (Robert Hale, 1984)

  Hitler’s Heralds: The Story of the Freikorps 1918–23 (John Murray, 1987)

  Through a Glass Darkly: The Life of Patrick Hamilton (Macdonalds/Scribners, 1991)

  Rupert Brooke: Life, Death and Myth (Richard Cohen Books/Metro, 1999)

  Mosley (Haus, 2004)

  Countdown to Valkyrie: The July Plot to Kill Hitler (Frontline, 2008)

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  My first appreciations must go to the Constable of the Tower, General Sir Richard Dannatt, and his deputy, Colonel Dick Harrold, and their staff, for making me welcome in their historic domain. The Tower today is a unique village in the heart of London; a close community in which all who work there take an intense and justified pride. Writing its story has been a privilege.

  My thanks, too, go to those friends and colleagues who have taken a sympathetic interest in the project and helped it along in various ways: Jad Adams, Barbara Antounyan, David Boyle, Merrie Cave, George Clode, Neil Faulkner, Richard Foreman, John Greenwood, Gerard Greaves, Chris Hale, Mike Ivey, Roger Moorhouse, Dave Musgrove, Paul Lay, Michael Leventhal, Michael Prodger, Jason Webster. Thanks to Helena Bell for finding me a rare 1921 history of the Tower by her ancestor, Walter Bell.

  A special thank-you to my former English teacher, Roger Sawyer, the biographer of Roger Casement, for telling me more about Casement’s time in the Tower. And thanks, too, to Mark Bicknell for lending me his collection of books about the Overbury case.

  Finally, my eternal gratitude to those closest to the project who have lived and sweated it out along with me: my agent and friend Charlie Viney, who has been such a tower of strength, humour and optimism tempered by realism; my patient publisher Caroline Gascoigne, her assistant editor Paulette Hearn and my beloved partner Lally Freeborn and our children.

  Thanks to you all.

  PART ONE

  CHAPTER ONE

  BEGINNINGS

  THEY HAD BEEN fighting all day, and sheer exhaustion was sapping their strength. The light of the autumn afternoon was fading fast. The grass covering the long slope of Senlac Hill was sodden and greasy with mud and blood, littered with the mangled corpses of the slain, ‘soiled with their own gore’. Seven hours of savage combat, as the famed Norman cavalry charged repeatedly uphill, meeting the unbreached dam of the Saxon shield-wall, had taken a grim toll on both armies. They had started the day with roughly equal numbers – seven to eight thousand men each – but a quarter were already dead, and another quarter would follow them to Valhalla before the day was done.

  The Normans, after the rough cross-Channel voyage in their open longships, were near despair as their assaults dashed against the rampart of the shield-wall. The English Saxons, dog-tired from their week’s forced march from Yorkshire after smashing the last Viking invasion of England at Stamford Bridge, could hardly stand from fatigue. The wall of their inter-locked shields was looking ragged, the gaps torn by the falling dead too wide to be plugged. Only the fierce spirit of their warrior king, Harold, sternly ordering them to close ranks, kept them in their places.

  Duke William of Normandy seized the situation at a glance. He had less than two hours left to win a decisive victory and with it the throne of England. If he failed to break the Saxon line by dark, his cause would be lost. Harold would remain king, and William would be lucky to escape ignominiously back across the Channel. Only a massive final effort might yet secure the kingdom. William had already tried a few tricks that day. He had swerved his knights away just as they reached the English front line after a headlong charge. It was a risky manoeuvre – a feigned downhill retreat could easily become a rout. But it had worked. Believing that their enemies were fleeing, some Saxons had broken ranks and chased their enemies down the slippery slope. Once in the open, however, the Norman horsemen had turned on the isolated foot soldiers and cut them down.

  Now, William again threw in his cavalry. He flung them at either end of the English line. Simultaneously, William ordered his archers to unleash a storm of arrows at the heart of the Saxon defences: the elite housecarls who guarded Harold with their terrifying five-foot axes. William ordered his bowmen to shoot so that their arrows arched over the shield-wall and fell from the sky, a hard rain on a soft target – the exhausted English rear ranks. A lucky arrow found a spectacular mark: King Harold’s eye. Although the faithful housecarls closed ranks for a brave last stand around their stricken king, Saxon morale finally cracked.

  Pursued by Norman horsemen, the surviving conscript soldiers of the fyrd fled first. Behin
d them on the torn ground lay the hacked bodies of England’s last Saxon king and his brothers Gyrth and Leofwine. Harold’s body was so slashed and battered that only his mistress, Edith Swan-neck, could recognise it by intimate ‘certain indications’ when she searched the battlefield. Here, on the evening of 14 October 1066, it was Anglo-Saxon England that lay dead along with its king, its bleeding body trampled into the earth. To the victor went the spoils.

  Hastings was not the first battle that Duke William had fought – nor would it be the last. Born in 1027/8 as the illegitimate son of Duke Robert ‘the Devil’ of Normandy by Herleva, a humble tanner’s daughter, William learned early that life is an unceasing struggle. Aged eight when his father died in 1035, he was surrounded by plots and assassinations as ambitious nobles vied for the throne. At twenty-three, William won his first victory near Caen against his rebel cousin, Guy of Burgundy. A successful soldier, and a lucky one, William fought off repeated French incursions and steadily expanded his duchy.

  His triumphs whetted William’s ambitious appetite. He persuaded England’s ageing king, the childless Edward the Confessor, to accept his tenuous claim to the English throne. (William’s wife Matilda was descended from Alfred the Great, so he was Edward’s second cousin, once removed.) Despite having allegedly pledged William his support after being shipwrecked on the Normandy coast, Harold Godwinson, England’s leading Saxon nobleman, accepted the crown offered him by the Anglo-Saxon council, the Witan, on Edward’s death in January 1066. Incensed, William prepared to back his ambitions by force. He assembled a fleet and an army of Normans, Bretons and French mercenaries, secured the blessing of the Pope, and sailed for the Sussex coast.

  Moving slowly, and savagely stamping out sparks of resistance as he went, William took until mid-December to reach Southwark on the south bank of the Thames. He found the wooden London Bridge – the only river crossing – barred against him. Cautiously, he marched west, burning and looting, until at Wallingford he met a submissive Archbishop of Canterbury, Stigand, sent by the Witan to offer him the crown. On Christmas Day 1066, William I was crowned by Stigand in Edward the Confessor’s newly built Westminster Abbey.

  Outside the abbey, the coronation ceremony was disrupted by angry Londoners loudly opposing their new, foreign-born king. Alarmed, Norman soldiers rushed from the abbey with drawn swords. It was a reminder that their conquest was far from complete. They were a tiny, beleaguered army amidst a hostile, barely cowed populace which bitterly resented these strangers with their weird tongue and alien ways. The Normans had killed the English king and decimated his host, but to enjoy the fruits of victory they realised they must be equally ruthless in repressing Harold’s discontented former subjects. And they had a tried and tested method at their disposal: the castle.

  Fortified hilltops had been commonplace in England for centuries; as the ramparts and ditches of Dorset’s Maiden Castle, dug by the ancient British, attest. The Romans had their fortresses too, as the stones of Hadrian’s Wall bear witness. But it was the Normans who patented the ‘motte-and-bailey’ castle. The idea was simple. Where there was no convenient natural hill, as with a sandcastle, the Normans threw up an artificial mound – the motte – crowned by a wooden tower. They then dug a defensive ditch – the bailey – around its base, using the excavated earth to make an additional encircling rampart, surmounted by a wooden fence. By 1066 the Normans were past masters at the speedy construction of these flat-pack fortresses – they could build one within a week – and their first acts upon landing had been to put up two, at Pevensey and Hastings.

  Eventually, the Normans would build some eighty-four motte-and-bailey castles across their newly conquered kingdom. The early ones were sited near their Sussex beachhead – Lewes, Bramber and Arundel – guarding strategic river valleys in case they needed to retreat to the coast in a hurry. The temporary wooden castles were soon replaced by solid stone, once the Normans felt confident that they were in England for good. The functions of the castle were twofold: as the imposing home and headquarters of the local magnate; and as a refuge for his loyal soldiers, servants and tenants in times of trouble. They were the nodal points of the feudal mesh of occupation that the Normans threw over the conquered kingdom.

  William rewarded the knights who had followed and fought alongside him with large parcels of conquered English land – together with the overlordship of the peasants who tilled the soil. Great castles were erected at Dover, Exeter, York, Nottingham, Durham, Lincoln, Huntingdon, Cambridge and Colchester. Norman names – de Warenne, de Lacey, Beauchamp – replaced Saxon ones in the nobility and clergy as a military occupation morphed into a new social structure.

  William lavished special care on one castle in particular. His new capital, London, was vulnerable to attack on its eastern, seaward side. It clearly needed the protection that only a great castle could provide. England’s earlier military masters, the Romans, had pointed the way. In the fourth century AD, to defend the port-city they called Londinium Augusta, they had thrown up a stout city wall. It ran north–south from today’s Bishopsgate down to the Thames before swinging west along the northern bank of the river. Only the foundations of the wall remained by William’s time, but it was in the angle of its south-eastern corner, on the site of a former Roman fort named Arx Palatina – erroneously thought by the Normans (and by Shakespeare) to have been put up by Julius Caesar – that William decided to build his super-castle.

  The rowdy scenes at his coronation had made it very clear that Norman rule could only be imposed by brute force. As a contemporary French chronicler, William of Poitiers, recorded, ‘Certain strongholds were made in the town against the fickleness of the vast and fierce populace.’ A fortress to house London’s garrison and intimidate its inhabitants – who totalled around 10,000 in 1066 – had to be constructed without delay. Within days of the Christmas coronation, conscripted gangs of Saxon labourers were hacking into the frozen soil. The remains of the Roman city wall served as a temporary barrier on the new fortress’s eastern and southern sides. A wide and deep ditch, surmounted by a palisaded rampart, went up on the western and northern sides of the site. A wooden tower was erected within three days in the middle of this rough rectangle. After a decade, however, largely spent in stamping out rebellions in the west and north of his new kingdom, William decided to remake his temporary timber structure in permanent stone.

  William had the very man in mind to realise his vision. He envisaged the building of a mighty edifice that would be at once fortress and palace – the last word in state-of-the-art military architecture, as well as an impressive royal residence. A towering, solid structure that would literally set Norman superiority in stone, inducing a Saxon cultural cringe and snuffing out any notion of further resistance to his rule. The master architect that William hand-picked to oversee the project was a talented cleric named Gundulf.

  Born in 1024 near Caen, Gundulf, like many medieval bright lads, entered the all-powerful Church. Legend says his decision was prompted by his miraculously surviving a storm during a perilous pilgrimage to Jerusalem in the 1050s. He became a protégé of Lanfranc, the Italian-born prior of the great Benedictine Bec Abbey. Gundulf demonstrated a particular talent for architecture, designing churches and castles. He was an emotional man, given to outbursts of weeping, which won him the disrespectful nickname ‘the Wailing Monk’. Nevertheless, when William sacked the Saxon Stigand and chose Lanfranc to succeed him as the first Norman Archbishop of Canterbury in 1070, the new archbishop brought his temperamental clerk with him to Canterbury, where Gundulf supervised extensions to the cathedral.

  The castle-building cleric caught the Conqueror’s eye, and Gundulf was soon summoned to London. William suggested that Gundulf should crown his architectural career by building in London the greatest castle in all Christendom. Gundulf was reluctant. Ageing and increasingly pious, he told the king that in his time left on earth he wanted to construct an ecclesiastical, rather than a secular, edifice – if possible a cathedra
l. No problem, William replied. At Rochester, near Canterbury, there already was a cathedral, in ruins since being pillaged in a Viking raid. He offered Gundulf the vacant bishopric and money for the cathedral’s restoration – so long as he built the great London castle first. So – doubtless with more tears and fears – Gundulf accepted his commission. In 1077 he became Bishop of Rochester, and the following year – 1078 – work on London’s new Tower commenced.

  * * *

  Gundulf set about his task with vigour. He was fifty-four, old by medieval standards, yet would not only complete both the White Tower and Rochester Cathedral (along with a fine new castle there), but also see out both the Conqueror, and William’s son and successor, William Rufus. The White Tower gained its name from the blocks of pale marble-like Caen stone imported from Normandy with which it was constructed – with infill of local coarse Kentish ragstone – and from the coats of gleaming whitewash with which it was eventually plastered. The Tower was a huge structure, the biggest non-ecclesiastical building in England, rising some ninety feet above ground, with four pepperpot turrets, one at each corner. All the turrets were rectangular, with the exception of the north-east one, which was rounded to contain a spiral staircase.

  When complete, the White Tower measured 107 feet (33 metres) from east to west, and 118 feet (36.3 metres) from north to south. The massive walls were fifteen-foot thick at their base, tapering to eleven at the top, built on foundations of chalk and flint. An undercroft, or basement, formed the lowest floor of the White Tower, where a well was sunk to supply the inhabitants with water. The cellar vaults were used at first for storing food and drink, as well as arms and armour. A more sinister function was their later use as the Tower’s principal torture chambers, the agonised screams of victims muffled by the surrounding earth and stone. The main, middle floor was entered, then as now, on the south side by an exterior wooden staircase, which could be quickly removed in case of siege. This floor was originally the living quarters of the Tower’s garrison, and was divided into three vast rooms: a refectory with a great stone fireplace where the soldiers ate and made merry when off duty; a smaller dormitory with another fireplace where they slept; and, in the south-east corner, the beautifully simple Romanesque Chapel of St John, with its twelve huge pillars.