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

  The second floor of the White Tower was reserved for the use of the constable – the Tower’s commander appointed by the monarch – for important guests, and eventually for state prisoners of high status. The rooms consisted of a great hall complete with fireplace – used for state banquets – with a minstrels’ gallery running around it; and the constable’s chamber, a space which served as bedroom, meeting room and living quarters for the Tower’s top official. Each floor had latrines with chutes into underground cesspits emptied by the ‘night soil men’.

  South of the White Tower, a gaggle of smaller buildings sprang up to serve Gundulf’s great structure. These, the first of many additions and extensions added to the original keep across the centuries, were temporary structures not designed to last. There were stables, blacksmiths’ forges, stores for building materials, chicken coops and pigsties. Before he died, Gundulf oversaw the building of a high curtain wall guarding the Tower on its southern, river side, and the first of many smaller towers girding the great central keep. It is not known exactly when the oldest surviving tower outside the White Tower, the Wardrobe Tower, was built; and the date of the construction of the royal palace south of the White Tower is equally uncertain. It is likely, however, that by the time of Gundulf’s death, aged eighty-four, in 1108, a start had been made.

  Gundulf had long outlived his original patron. Having finally subdued the English, William the Conqueror was faced with rebellion in his native Normandy by his own oldest son, Robert Curthose. It was on a punitive expedition against the rebellious town of Mantes, in 1087, that the Conqueror, his youthful stockiness run to fat, met his end. Having torched the conquered town with his customary savagery, William was riding through the blazing streets when his horse stepped on a burning ember. The beast bucked violently, throwing William’s great gut against the hard iron saddle pommel, and causing devastating internal injuries to his swollen stomach. William took ten days to die in agony. Feared more than loved, when he expired, his remaining followers stripped his bloated corpse and then scarpered. The Conqueror’s final indignity came at his funeral, when monks attempted to stuff his carcase into a small sarcophagus. The cadaver split, filling the church with such a noxious stench that mourners fled. It was an inglorious end for the victor of Hastings and the founder of the Tower.

  William’s second son, Rufus, succeeded him as King William II of England. Rufus was a tyrant who quarrelled violently with the Church, offended his nobles with his extravagance and apparent homosexuality, and oppressed his long-suffering Saxon subjects with punitive taxation. But Rufus, like his father, was an enthusiastic builder. His most lasting legacy was the great Westminster Hall, and he supervised the completion of Gundulf’s work at the Tower before his violent and mysterious death by an arrow fired in the New Forest in August 1100.

  Henry Beauclerc – so called because, alone among the Conqueror’s children, he could read and write – William I’s third and youngest son, succeeded Rufus as Henry I. Ruthless, ambitious and astute (he was in the fatal hunting party and may have engineered his brother’s death), Henry lost no time in riding to London and claiming the throne. Henry consolidated Norman rule during his long and stable reign – partly by marrying a Saxon wife, Edith, heiress to King Harold’s House of Wessex. But although he fathered more bastard children (over twenty, by half a dozen mistresses) than any other English king, like that other later fertile monarch, Charles II, Henry left no legitimate male heir. His only sons by Edith, William and Richard, died when their vessel, the White Ship, failed to clear rocks outside Barfleur on a drunken homecoming voyage from Normandy in November 1120.

  Henry named his daughter Matilda, widow of the Holy Roman Emperor Henry V, as his heiress. But a female ruler – even an empress – was an unwelcome novelty to the Norman nobility. When Henry died in 1135, the majority of England’s barons invited Stephen of Blois, grandson of William the Conqueror by his daughter Adela, to take the throne. Matilda, endowed with her combative family’s ferocious genes, refused to accept Stephen’s claim to the crown. Aided by her half-brother Robert of Gloucester, she invaded England to assert her right by force of arms.

  Stephen’s seizure of the throne and Matilda’s outraged opposition condemned England to two decades of sporadic civil war known as ‘the Great Anarchy’. Stephen, though a brave and stubborn warrior, lacked the ruthlessness essential in a medieval ruler. He was too weak to eliminate Matilda, yet the prospect of a woman ruler was terrifying enough to his barons to keep him on his increasingly shaky throne. The result was a bloody stalemate in which the over-mighty barons – constantly changing sides – lorded it over their long-suffering serfs as the rival rulers fought like cat and dog.

  The more unscrupulous barons, like modern mobsters, imposed a protection tax known as a ‘tenserie’ on their unlucky tenants. But the extortion provided no protection at all. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle laments, ‘When the wretched people had no more to give, they plundered and burned all the villages. Then was corn dear, and flesh and cheese and butter, for there was none in the land. The wretched people perished with hunger; some who had been great men were driven to beggary. Never did a country endure more misery, and men said openly that Christ and His saints slept.’

  One of these robber barons was Geoffrey de Mandeville, holder of the office of Constable of the Tower of London, whom his biographer, the Victorian historian J. H. Round, calls, ‘the most perfect and typical presentment of the feudal and anarchic spirit that stamps the reign of Stephen’. The office was then a hereditary post, and the first constable, appointed by the Conqueror, had been Geoffrey’s grandfather, another Geoffrey de Mandeville – rewarded for his courage at Hastings. The first Geoffrey was succeeded by his son William, and in his turn Geoffrey the younger had taken the post. He had done fealty to Stephen when the new king arrived to secure the capital and the Tower after Henry I’s death. A grateful Stephen created Geoffrey 1st Earl of Essex – the first of three holders of that title to enjoy close, but ultimately fatal, connections with the Tower – and rewarded him with land.

  Stephen was the first monarch to reside in the Tower, keeping the Whitsuntide festival there in 1140 in the newly built royal palace south of the White Tower. The king hoped that his generosity to Geoffrey would ensure the constable’s loyalty as the civil war dragged on. But the unscrupulous Geoffrey took advantage of the chaos to advance his own interests. Given custody of the daughter of King Louis VI of France, Princess Constance, who was betrothed to Stephen’s eldest son and heir, Eustace, Geoffrey kept the young girl under virtual house arrest – the first of the Tower’s many royal captives – defying Stephen’s demands for her release until he had seen who would win the civil war.

  In 1141, Stephen was defeated and captured by Matilda’s forces at Lincoln and taken in chains to Bristol. Geoffrey deftly changed sides and pledged the Tower’s allegiance to Matilda. He demanded in exchange that he should receive yet more land, acquiring in addition the powerful post of sheriff of the counties adjoining London. Matilda also gave him permission to strengthen the Tower’s defences. De Mandeville’s defensive work came just in time. When Stephen was freed, civil war flared up again and the London Mob – strong supporters of Stephen – chased Matilda from the capital and besieged the Tower. Not only did Geoffrey see them off, he staged a sortie as far as Fulham and abducted the Bishop of London – the king’s leading supporter in the capital – as a hostage.

  Geoffrey extorted a high price from Stephen for the renewal of his dubious loyalty. He forced the king to grant him yet more land around London, making him the wealthiest magnate in the kingdom. Stephen’s patience with the treacherous constable finally ran out in 1142 when he discovered that Geoffrey had secretly renewed contact with Matilda, intending to turn his coat yet again. The king summoned Geoffrey to St Albans in Hertfordshire, arrested him, and forced him to disgorge all his land and castles – including the Tower – before he was freed.

  Enraged and embittered, Geoffrey left the court �
�like a vicious and riderless horse, kicking and biting’ to embark on the final phase of his turbulent career. Imitating Hereward the Wake, the legendary guerrilla leader who had resisted the Norman conquest, he took to the East Anglian Fens around Ely, expelling the monks from Rumsey Abbey in order to use it as his headquarters. Here, the ex-constable lived an outlaw’s life for many months, preying on the surrounding countryside. But in 1144, Geoffrey’s luck ran out when he was mortally wounded in a skirmish with Stephen’s forces at Mildenhall in Suffolk.

  Word of Geoffrey’s expulsion of the Rumsey monks had reached the Pope himself, who excommunicated him for sacrilege. He was denied a Christian burial, and his body lay in the open ‘for the ravens to devour’. His remains were rescued by the Order of the Knights Templar. Grateful to Geoffrey for past services, the Templars clothed his corpse in their robes and brought his body to London’s Temple Church off the Strand on the north bank of the Thames – a mile from the Tower where he had held sway for thirteen years. They enclosed the corpse in a lead coffin, but, in obedience to the papal ban, left it unburied between two trees in the churchyard. Here it remained for twenty years before someone took mercy on the old rogue and finally laid Geoffrey to rest before the church’s west door. His effigy, clad in Templars’ robes, can be seen in the church to this day.

  In 1153, after nearly two decades of bloody but inconclusive strife, Stephen and Matilda reached a compromise in the Treaty of Winchester. Depressed by the death that year of his heir Eustace, Stephen disinherited his second son and accepted Matilda’s son, Henry – who had already entered the fray on his mother’s behalf – as his heir. In return, Stephen would be unmolested for the rest of his reign. Henry did not have long to wait: the following October, 1154, Stephen died at Dover and Henry, England’s first Plantagenet king, was proclaimed Henry II.

  The year before his death, Stephen had named Richard de Lucy as constable of the Tower in succession to Geoffrey de Mandeville. Henry confirmed the appointment and made de Lucy his Chief Justiciar – the foremost legal officer in the kingdom. Restoring the rule of law and financial stability to England after the bloody chaos of Stephen’s reign was Henry’s most urgent task, and one he carried out with the driving, restless energy that characterised the Plantagenets. One of the first jobs was to put the neglected Tower into a state fit for its dual role as fortress and palace. These works, early in 1156, were supervised by Henry’s most efficient subordinate – his chancellor, friend and future turbulent Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Becket. Henry appointed the humbly born Becket to succeed de Lucy as constable of the Tower in 1161. Further works – including giving the chapel in the White Tower a lead roof – were carried out in the 1170s.

  In the first written description of the Tower after the improvements, Becket’s biographer William Fitzstephen describes the royal palace within the Tower as ‘great and strong with encircling walls rising from a deep foundation and built with mortar tempered with the blood of beasts’. The mortar had not literally been mixed with animal blood, and the Tower’s use as a zoo still lay some years ahead. This description refers to Roman bricks and tiles which had been pounded into reddish powder to make the mortar. With its contrasting white and red facades, the Tower had become England’s keystone.

  Brutal and quarrelsome though Henry was – as his notorious ill-judged outburst which led to Becket’s murder, and his feuds with his own wife and sons, demonstrate – he was an able and effective ruler. His marriage to the redoubtable Eleanor of Aquitaine added a vast new swathe of French territory to his domains. By the end of Henry’s reign in 1189 his Angevin empire stretched from Ireland to Spain. But things fell apart again after his death, when his glamorous second son and successor, the tall, golden-haired Richard I, called Coeur de Lion, abandoned England for the Third Crusade, while Henry’s youngest and favourite son, John, proved himself arguably England’s worst king. Once again, as under Stephen, local lords flexed their muscles in the absence of any commanding monarch to curb them.

  One such magnate was William Longchamp, Bishop of Ely, Richard’s chancellor, justiciar and constable of the Tower, who the king had left in virtual charge of the kingdom during his prolonged absence in the Holy Land (Richard spent just ten months of his ten-year reign in England). The French-born Longchamp, as unlike his royal master physically as it was possible to be – he was small, swarthy and crippled – was efficient, but also arrogant and vain.

  Longchamp spared no expense in turning the Tower into a stronghold capable of withstanding a prolonged siege. He almost doubled the fortress’s size by extending the south curtain wall westwards along the river, and built a new tower, the Bell Tower, at its south-west corner. Beyond this new outer, western ward, Longchamp dug a fresh defensive ditch to the west and north of the castle to make a moat, although this last refinement proved too much for Longchamp’s engineers, and for the time being the ditch remained dry. The little cleric also spent £100 equipping the Tower with the latest state-of-the-art military technology: mangonels, giant siege engines that could hurl huge rocks further and faster than existing catapults.

  Longchamp’s extensions had, however, enraged neighbouring Londoners whose houses he had destroyed and whose land he had grabbed. The chronicler William of Newburgh said of the hated prelate, ‘The laity found him more than king, the clergy more than Pope, and both an intolerable tyrant.’ There was, therefore, much local support when in 1191 followers of Prince John, attempting to snatch the kingdom from his brother Richard during the king’s absence on crusade, laid siege to the Tower. The siege lasted only three days, for Longchamp’s moral resolve proved to be rather weaker than his physical defences. He exchanged his clerical garb for the disguise of a woman’s dress, limped through the besiegers’ lines, and fled to Dover Castle, leaving the Tower in John’s hands.

  While Richard lived, the quarrelsome, treacherous and avaricious John could never feel secure in his illicitly gained kingdom. In 1192 word arrived that Richard had been arrested in Vienna on his way back from the Holy Land and handed over to the Holy Roman Emperor, Henry VI, to be held in Durnstein Castle on the Danube until a vast ransom of £100,000 was paid by the people of England. Raising this enormous sum crippled the English economy, and left a lasting legacy of resentment among the poor on whom fell the chief burden of paying it.

  A Londoner named William Fitzosbert, known as Longbeard, headed popular demands for the financial load to be more equitably spread. A charismatic demagogue, Fitzosbert had a fine line in eschatological, pseudo-religious imagery in his appeals for social revolt. He told one excited meeting, ‘I am the saviour of the poor. Do ye, O poor, who have experienced the hardness of rich men’s hands, drink from my wells the waters of salvation. And ye may do this joyfully; for the time of your visitation is at hand. I will divide the waters … and separate the humble from the haughty and treacherous. I will separate the elect from the reprobate, as light from darkness.’ Tradesmen, apprentices and many of the poorer sort flocked to hear Longbeard deliver this intoxicating message, and he attracted a following of thousands to his public orations, thwarting attempts by the Mayor of London to arrest this dangerous rabble-rouser. An ex-Crusader himself, Fitzosbert took his case to King Richard who, released from captivity, was campaigning in Normandy.

  After Fitzosbert returned to a London on the verge of civil insurrection, the authorities cracked down hard. The new justiciar and Archbishop of Canterbury, Hubert Walter, sent an armed posse to arrest him. Fitzosbert made the mistake of putting one of Walter’s posse to the sword. Panicking, he and his friends sought sanctuary in the spire of St Mary’s Church in Bow. Refusing to respect this, the archbishop had a fire lit beneath them and smoked the fugitives out. Half choked, Fitzosbert staggered into the street and was stabbed in the stomach by the son of the man he had murdered. Battered, bleeding, but still alive, he was tied to a horse’s tail, and painfully dragged to the Tower, where he was thrown into a dungeon to await his inevitable condemnation. On 6 April 1196 he w
as again dragged through the streets, this time to Smithfield, a traditional site of butchery, where he was agonisingly stretched between horses, before being hanged along with nine of his followers.

  The support that Fitzosbert had attracted among poor Londoners was evident at his execution when the crowd, instead of jeering, watched his suffering in respectful silence, before converging on the scaffold and bearing away the gallows as a sacred relic. The very earth on which the gibbet had stood was carried away in handfuls until a great pit marked the site, while the chains in which Fitzosbert had been hanged were reputed to work miracles. Only after Walter had placed armed guards at the site did popular adulation for the ‘martyred’ Longbeard die away. But the rebel had inaugurated a tradition of social dissent that would involve the Tower more violently before another two centuries had passed.

  In 1199 King Richard I died a lingering death from gangrene after an arrow struck his shoulder while he was besieging the French castle of Chalus. John inherited the kingdom he had coveted for so long. John proved himself a crueller, more grasping, and more untrustworthy king than he had been as a mere prince. After fourteen years of his tyranny, John’s barons rebelled in May 1215, entered London, and besieged the Tower. Although the fortress’s lieutenant, William of Huntingdon, proved a tougher nut than William Longchamp had been and stubbornly held out, his royal master did not. Within weeks the unpopular king had famously been forced to a humiliating capitulation at Runnymede on the Thames. John put his seal to Magna Carta – the great charter drawn up by the rebel barons which, for the first time in English history, set legal limits to an absolute monarch’s arbitrary powers. Only one of the charter’s sixty-three clauses specified granting rights and liberties to ‘all freemen of the realm and their heirs for ever’; and a second forbade the selling, delay or denial of justice. Most of the other clauses safeguarded the rights and privileges of the barons. It was hardly a great milestone on the road to democracy. But it was a start.