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

  No sooner was the wax hard on his seal, however, than John was trying to persuade his old enemy the Pope to annul the charter. Civil war broke out again, and in 1216 the exasperated barons, terminally tired of their treacherous king, invited the Dauphin of France, Prince Louis, to take John’s place on the throne. The leader of the barons who took this radical step, Robert Fitzwalter, had a very personal score to settle with ‘Bad King John’.

  In 1214, John – a notorious lecher, currently married to his second wife, the teenage Isabella of Angouleme – had taken a fancy to Robert’s eldest daughter, Maud Fitzwalter, known for her beauty as ‘Maud the Fair’. Robert, governor of London’s second greatest fortress, Baynard’s Castle, rejected John’s request to make Maud his mistress. Enraged, the king had Maud abducted to the Tower. Here, John imprisoned her in a cage at the top of the circular turret at the north-east corner of the White Tower: the highest point in the fortress. John responded to Robert Fitzwalter’s indignant protests with more violence, sending troops to sack Baynard’s Castle, and forcing Robert to flee to France with his wife and two remaining children.

  Maud remained in her high cage, a cold and lonely prisoner, yet resolute against all John’s assaults on her virtue. Neither exposure nor hunger, nor solitary confinement, could break the ‘Fair Maid’s’ resistance. At last, an exasperated John had an egg impregnated with poison. When the egg was presented to Maud the famished girl ate it – and painfully died. Though sources for this story are scanty, it is entirely in keeping with John’s malevolent character. Besides, the king had a record when it came to murdering his helpless captives. Apart from killing his nephew Arthur, John kept his niece, Eleanor of Brittany, another ‘Fair Maid’, imprisoned at Corfe Castle in Dorset until she died. He deliberately starved twenty-two French knights to death in the same fortress. The black legend of ‘Bad King John’, though questioned by some modern revisionists, accords with the awful facts.

  Summoned by the rebel barons to replace their despised king, Prince Louis landed in Kent with a French army in May 1216. The gates of London were opened and he was proclaimed king in old St Paul’s Cathedral. As Louis took up residence in the Tower with his small court, John retreated into the East Anglian Fens, where nemesis caught up with him.

  The fight was going out of John, who was sick with dysentery. In October 1216, half of his baggage train was lost in the Wash estuary near Wisbech. Along with his crown and coronation regalia, jewels, dozens of gold goblets, silver plate and costly fabrics were swallowed up before the king’s horrified eyes in the treacherous tides and quicksands of the Wash. The news was the final straw for John. In a feast of forgetting, the sick king gorged himself on pears and peaches washed down with cider – the very worst diet for a dysentery patient. The next day, afflicted with agonising abdominal cramps, he struggled on by litter through atrocious weather, reaching Newark Castle where, on the night of 18/19 October, he died. Few mourned.

  John’s death was, however, a body blow to Prince Louis’ hopes of power. For John had a legitimate English-born son and heir – nine-year-old Henry of Winchester – who was crowned king in Gloucester a week after his father’s death. A strong and capable baron, Earl William Marshal, became regent and set about organising the boy king’s forces. London remained loyal to Louis, who doggedly fought on. However, Marshal defeated him at Lincoln and the following year the Dauphin’s last hope was destroyed when a French fleet bringing reinforcements was sunk off Sandwich in Kent by an English squadron under Hubert de Burgh. Louis sailed home, and young Henry III became undisputed king of England.

  CHAPTER TWO

  THE MENAGERIE AND THE MINT

  KING HENRY III is little remembered today and less regarded. But he was not only, after George III, England’s second-longest reigning king, he was also the monarch who, after the Conqueror himself, did most to create the Tower of London. Henry grew up under the control of capable men. His first mentor was the great soldier William Marshal. After Marshal’s death in 1219, power rested with the next justiciar, Hubert de Burgh. Both men governed wisely during Henry’s minority, introducing a sorely needed stability after John’s disastrous reign.

  Accustomed from his youth to deferring to strong men, Henry never developed his own personality, although he had the obstinacy of the weak, and the arrogance of his Plantagenet genes. He lacked that essential prerequisite of a successful medieval king: the ability to lead an army to victory. Instead, like his later namesake Henry VI, Henry III developed compensating religious and aesthetic interests more suitable to a sensitive cleric than a secular ruler. So, although Henry’s reign was a disaster for his kingdom, for the Tower it was a blessing.

  Henry adored beautiful things. He loved art and architecture, and spared no expense in richly endowing churches and chantries and filling his palaces with furnishings. He failed to establish a modus vivendi with his English barons, preferring to lavish land, titles and cash on foreign favourites, particularly French ones. Naturally, this caused resentment among the English nobility, already grumbling at the king’s spendthrift ways. But if the exchequer suffered from Henry’s extravagance, the Tower was its beneficiary.

  In the 1220s, when Henry was still in his teens, work began on a massive reconstruction and expansion programme at the Tower. The young king had decided to make the fortress a principal royal residence, and the work of transforming it from austere castle to opulent palace went on virtually continuously throughout his fifty-six-year reign. South of the White Tower, Henry also built luxurious private quarters for himself and his French queen, Eleanor, with a great hall between them. Their rooms were connected by a long covered walkway. Yet again, the boundaries of the Tower were hugely expanded. The original Roman city wall, which had formed the Tower’s eastward defences, was demolished and replaced by a tall new curtain wall. On the southern, river side of the Tower, the existing curtain wall was strengthened and extended. It was now washed by the Thames and bolstered by new towers: the Salt Tower on the south-east corner; the Lanthorn Tower (so called because it carried a lamp to guide river traffic on the Thames); and the largest tower in the fortress outside the White Tower, the octagonal Wakefield Tower.

  Originally called the Blundeville Tower, the Wakefield then acquired the name Record Tower because of its function as the repository of state papers. It got its present name from William of Wakefield, a fourteenth-century royal clerk who acted as archivist of the papers stored there. The Wakefield Tower was conceived and built as part of the royal palace and, along with the neighbouring rectangular Bloody Tower, it is the only surviving part of that structure. The king’s private quarters were on the first floor of the Wakefield. Later notorious as the site of the murder of Henry VI, the tiny oratory where Henry was struck down while saying his prayers was originally built by his equally pious predecessor Henry III for his own devotions. The lower floor was the guardroom of the soldiers who protected their king. Just east of the Wakefield was a private watergate from the river for the use of Henry and his guests; while to the west, the vaulted tunnel that visitors walk through under the Bloody Tower today was originally the main watergate entrance to the Tower complex, before the erection of St Thomas’s Tower above Traitor’s Gate by Henry III’s son Edward I.

  To the west and north of the Tower, a new curtain wall was raised with a land-gate causeway entrance in the middle of the western section. The encircling wall was crowned with a range of new towers: the Devereux, the Flint, the Bowyer, the Brick, the Martin, the Constable and the Broad Arrow. Beyond the curtain wall, Henry completed Longchamp’s work by turning his ditch into a wide moat, skilfully filled with river water by a Flemish expert ditch-digger, one Master John. By the end of Henry’s reign, the Tower of London was an impregnable island, surrounded on its western, northern and eastern sides by its moat and bounded on its southern side by the formidable barrier of the Thames. Henry gave the White Tower a new coat of paint, and behind its sheer new curtain walls it loomed over London more formidably than e
ver like a great chalk cliff, glimmering and vast.

  For all the care and attention lavished on the military fortifications without, and the splendid regal apartments within, the Tower project closest to the devout Henry’s heart was the stronghold’s new chapel, St Peter ad Vincula (St Peter in Chains – adopted as the Tower’s patron saint). This small structure in the north-west corner of the Tower’s new Inner Ward – destined to hold the mortal remains of the Tower’s most distinguished victims – was originally a parish church lying outside the Tower’s walls. The king presented St Peter’s with a peal of bells and issued minute and detailed orders for the redecoration of the chapel he had enclosed, reflecting his camp interest in the liturgical elements of religion, including instructions for the figures of saints to be ‘newly coloured, all with the best colours … also two fair cherubim with cheerful and pleasant countenances to be placed on either side of the great crucifix’. Henry devoted equal care to the existing chapel in the White Tower, the Romanesque St John’s, painting its high rounded ceiling a rich shade of red and adding to its simple Norman outlines rood-screens, stained-glass windows and the figures of saints. He endowed it as a chantry, with money for priests and monks to pray perpetually for the souls of the departed. All told, by the end of his reign, Henry’s improvements to the Tower had cost the English exchequer a whopping £9,000 (at least £7 million in today’s values).

  By 1236, although not yet complete, Henry’s Tower palace was already a magnificent enough structure to be the setting for the celebration of his marriage at twenty-nine to the raven-haired young beauty Eleanor of Provence, who was just fourteen. The king marked the occasion with a second coronation. Inaugurating a tradition that all monarchs would spend the night before their coronation in the fortress, Henry and Eleanor set out for Westminster Abbey from the Tower amidst the cheers of a capital en fête for the occasion: ‘London … so full of noble gentry and country folk … that she could scarcely contain them within her capacious bosom,’ wrote a chronicler. ‘The streets were delivered from dirt, mud, sticks and everything offensive.’ In the Tower itself, Henry lovingly decorated his bride’s private chamber with a delicate colour scheme of roses on a white background.

  Apart from its two chapels, and his wife’s apartments, the luxury-loving Henry splashed out on a new and somewhat eccentric use for his pet palace: the founding of a royal menagerie. Henry’s animal collection began in February 1235 when his sister Isabella married the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II, ‘Stupor Mundi’ (‘the Wonder of the World’). Frederick was a great patron of the arts and sciences, and generous too. He gave Henry the nearest equivalent in his own zoo to the three lions that adorned the English royal coat of arms: a trio of leopards. Henry decided against sending the leopards to the zoo his great-great-grandfather Henry I had founded at Woodstock in Oxfordshire. Instead he showcased them in his gleaming new Tower of London. Sadly, however, neither William de Botton, the courtier appointed as the leopards’ keeper, nor anyone else in England had any experience of tending such exotic beasts, and the animals soon perished. The last reference to a leopard in the royal accounts comes in 1240.

  In March that year, however, another big cat arrived at the Tower: a real, royal lion. The royal archives record that one William (probably the same William de Botton who had looked after the leopards), ‘the keeper of the King’s Lion, [is] to have 14 shillings that he expended in buying chains and other things for the use of the Lion’. In 1251, Henry decided to move all the animals in Henry I’s Woodstock menagerie to the Tower. We do not know precisely what species were involved, but references over the years to the zoo at Woodstock mention lions, leopards, lynxes and a camel – so Henry now had a respectable animal collection to show visitors to his proud new palace. Those who came to gawp at them were the Tower’s first true tourists. For centuries, the menagerie remained the monarch’s private property; and the privileged few allowed in were his favoured friends or the families of Tower employees.

  In 1252, the creatures at the Tower were joined by another exotic animal. A polar bear – sent to Henry by King Haakon IV of Norway – arrived, along with a Norwegian keeper. The first ever seen in England, the polar bear attracted enormous public curiosity. When the twopence-a-day allowance provided by the sheriffs of London for its upkeep proved insufficient to meet the beast’s appetite, the bear was allowed to fish for free food in the river running past its Tower enclosure. With his usual attention to detail, Henry spelled it out:

  Greetings. We command you that for the keeper of our white bear, lately arrived from Norway … ye cause to be had one muzzle and one iron chain to hold that bear without [outside] the water, [and] one long, strong cord, to hold the same bear fishing or washing himself in the river Thames.

  The King at Windsor

  Three years later, in 1255, when Londoners had got used to the strange sight of the bear swiping salmon out of the Thames, an even more wondrous beast lumbered into view. Befitting its size and status, the entry of this new addition to the Tower menagerie was slow and stately, attracting enormous crowds en route like the progress of a superstar. Which it was. The first elephant to appear in these islands plodded up the Pilgrim’s Way from Canterbury to London led by its keeper, Henricus de Flor. Yet another gift to Henry from a fellow European monarch, Louis IX of France, the elephant made a spectacular entrance to the Tower via a large riverboat. Such was the jumbo’s celebrity, that the aged contemporary chronicler, the monk Matthew Paris, was lured from his abbey in St Albans to the Tower to see the new arrival, drawing the elephant in a memorable picture as well as in words: ‘The beast is about ten years old, possessing a rough hide rather than fur, has small eyes at the top of his head and eats and drinks with a trunk.’

  The sheriffs of London, already too cash strapped to feed the king’s polar bear, must have groaned when they saw this enormous arrival. But Henry now commanded Londoners to stump up £22 for the construction of a huge wooden elephant house. He laid down the exact measurements: twenty feet by forty (twelve metres by six). Sadly, despite these spacious surroundings, within two years the elephant died. A huge pit was dug near St Peter’s chapel for the gigantic carcass, but the following year, the elephant’s remains were disinterred and its bones carted to Westminster Abbey, recently rebuilt and beautified in Gothic glory by Henry. Here the bones were carved into boxes to house the skin, hair, teeth and other relics, allegedly of saints, that were popular icons in medieval Europe. Given the number of reputed saints’ bones throughout Christendom, and the high prices such relics fetched, it may well be that the crafty Westminster clerics passed off the elephant’s bones themselves as the remains of holy saints. The elephant house did not go to waste either: at least until 1278 it was used to hold some of the Tower’s human captives, including scores of the Jews arrested by Henry’s son Edward I that year.

  It was Edward I who moved the menagerie to its permanent home, a large barbican gateway he built at the west entrance around the appropriately named Lion Tower. Unless let out of their cages to fight or caper in the courtyard, the animals were kept in two rows of cramped cells let into the Lion Tower’s walls. From the 1270s on, all those entering or leaving the Tower – including prisoners on their way to execution – made their exits and entrances to the accompaniment of roars, squawks, screeches and growls from the beasts and birds in the monarch’s menagerie. Edward I not only kept it supplied with new animals – he brought a lion and a lynx back from a visit to his domains in Gascony in 1288 – he also appointed an official ‘Keeper of the King’s Lions and Leopards’ with accommodation in the Tower. Keepers, members of the royal household, usually held the job for life, though one unfortunate, William Bounde, keeper in Henry IV’s reign in 1408, was sacked for complaining that his wages were in arrears. Even when paid on time, those wages were modest: set at sixpence a day, they remained unchanged for more than a century.

  Edward’s disastrous son and successor, Edward II, was fond of the animals after visiting them as a chil
d. From the limited meat available in medieval London, in 1314 he ordered that the Tower’s lion be supplied with a quarter of a sheep per day. In 1392 the zoo’s exotica was extended when Richard II was given a camel, while his much-loved wife, Anne of Bohemia, was presented with a pelican, a symbol of piety. In 1436, however, during the reign of Henry V, disaster struck the menagerie when its major attraction – the lions – all died. Whether the big cats perished through neglect, malnutrition or some devastating animal disease, their keeper, one William Kerby, got the blame – and the boot. His successor, Robert Manfeld, presided over a lionless menagerie until 1445, when the pious but inept Henry VI married the feisty French princess, Margaret of Anjou. Margaret’s father, the animal-crazy René of Anjou, although impoverished, spent what money he had on maintaining not one but two menageries at his castle of Saumur and his capital, Angers. Seeking to make the homesick teenager feel more at home, an English courtier presented Margaret with the ultimate wedding gift when she married Henry at Hampshire’s Titchfield Abbey: a lion.

  The treatment of animals in the Middle Ages left much to be desired by today’s standards. Even the relatively privileged creatures in the Tower suffered the appalling cruelties routinely inflicted by medieval man in the name of ‘sport’. To his credit, King Henry VII vociferously objected after watching two mastiff dogs baiting a lion in the Tower. According to John Caius’s treatise The English Dogge, Henry ordered the hounds to be hanged after witnessing the savagery, ‘being deeply displeased, and conceiving great disdain, that an ill-favoured rascal cur should with such villainy assault the Lion, the king of all beasts’.