Sent TO THE TOWER

In the center of modern London lies a terrifying fortress complete with portcullises, machicolations, and a long and bloody history. It was built by the Normans, who more or less invented castles in the 10th century, then used them to impose a tyrannical regime on large chunks of Europe. It was England's turn in 1066. By then, the Normans had invented a portable, flatpack castle, and they brought five of these over the English Channel to the big hackfest at Hastings, together with radical techno-gear such as stirrups. The Saxons lost, and a plague of rapacious Norman barons spread across England, terrorizing the population and obsessively throwing up castles at the slightest hint of resistance. This tactic was so effective that England never really got rid of them.

The Tower of London was the king's castle, so it was the biggest. It needed to be, because London was full of disgruntled Saxons, and they had to be kept in order. Well, that was the theory. The Tower was repeatedly besieged, and usually it surrendered. You could hardly say it was a stunning military success.

In fact, for most of its history the main problem with this monstrous edifice was what to do with it. Royal personages and top civil servants sometimes lived there, but it was drafty and occasionally smelly-what with the sewage in the moat and the gory heads on stakes-so living in the Tower gradually went out of fashion. Bits of the tower were used for various inventive purposes, such as minting coins or keeping elephants, but mostly it served as a prison.

Since it was officially a Royal Residence, you couldn't chuck just any scrotty Herbert in there. The Tower got the celebrities-mostly members of the nobility and the higher orders of the church who were implicated in plots to seize the throne or were just in the monarch's way. Often they were brought to the Tower by boat and rowed straight in through Traitors' Gate. Few prisoners who entered through the Gate ever left the Tower, unless it was on their last journey to the scaffold. Their stories would fill an issue of Muse the size of a telephone book, so here is a selection of some of the juicier ones.

The Sinful Bishop

Ranulf Flambard, Bishop of Durham, was a thoroughly nasty piece of work who ran a vast extortion racket for the Normans. When Henry I came to the throne, Ranulf was clapped in the Tower and became its first prisoner. Someone smuggled him a rope in a barrel of wine. He distributed the wine to his guards, who ended up predictably paralytic. He then managed to squeeze through a window and lower himself far enough to drop into the moat. He escaped to Normandy, where he persuaded the French Normans to try invading England (again!), then accepted a pardon, returned to England, and spent the rest of his life scandalizing polite society.

A Bad Egg from a Bad Egg

In 1214, England was ruled by King John, a brilliant baddie. He's the Sheriff of Nottingham's boss in all the old Robin Hood movies. Anyway, King John took a fancy to a lady called Maud FitzWalter. She wasn't interested, and she wouldn't marry him, so he locked her in the White Tower (see foldout map). She still wouldn't budge, so he sent her a basket of eggs as a peace offering. The eggs were poisoned, and she died. Told you he was a baddie.

The Welsh Rope Trick

Gruffudd ap Llywelyn. No, you're not expected to pronounce that. Your cat might, if it's trying to get rid of a hairball. Gruffudd was Welsh. Wales is the knobbly bit that sticks out to the left of England. It used to be an independent country, and it has its own language, which is unpronounceable. For centuries, rulers of bits of Wales fought each other, and in their spare time, they fought the king of England. When his father lost a battle to the English King John in 1211, Gruffudd was handed over as a hostage and spent the next four years in prison. When he was released, he raised an army and fought his father. His father won and imprisoned him again. Then a few years later, his brother imprisoned him, and finally, in 1244, he was handed over as a hostage (again!) to Henry III of England and ended up in the Tower.

His lodgings, in the White Tower, were very comfortable, but by now he was really fed up with the prison thing. One night, he ripped up his bedsheets, knotted them together, and tried climbing down from the roof. You'd think the guards would be wise to this one by now, especially after the Flambard episode, but he nearly got away with it. Alas, the rope broke, he fell 90 feet, and, according to a contemporary source, "his head and neck were crushed between his shoulders." In due course, Wales was ruled by his sons, Owain Goch, Dafydd ap Gruffudd (honestly), and-wait for it-Llywelyn ap Gruffudd. If you're not sufficiently confused by now, I could bring in Gwenwynwyn ab Owain Cyfeiliog. But I won't.

Who Owns the Bones?

This is the big murder mystery. It was the 1400s, and two big families-the House of York (badge: white rose) and the House of Lancaster (badge: red rose) both claimed that their candidate was the rightful and legitimate king. They were prepared to fight battles, murder rivals, and generally behave in a disreputable manner to get one of their lot on the throne. During the Wars of the Roses, King Edward IV, who was a Yorkist, tried to mend matters by marrying a Lancastrian. It might have worked if he hadn't inconveniently died, leaving the throne to his 12-year-old son, Edward V. That effectively put Edward V's mom in charge, and she was Lancastrian. The Yorkists didn't like that idea. So young Edward's Yorkist uncle Richard was hastily named Lord Protector. This meant he would rule the country until Edward was old enough to fit a proper suit of armor, and stopped glazing over when presented with a Customs Return or Enclosure Act.

It all turned nasty, of course. Uncle Richard declared that Edward and his kid brother, Richard (they were very imaginative with names), were illegitimate. He proclaimed himself King Richard III and sent the two young princes to the Tower "for their own protection." For a few months, passersby occasionally caught a glimpse of them, but then they disappeared and were never seen again.

Did he murder them? Were they smuggled out of England? No one knows. One of the murderers supposedly confessed, but he was being tortured at the time. Centuries later, two plausible skeletons were found in a trunk buried beneath a staircase in the White Tower, but forensic scientists haven't come up with a positive ID on the bones. Anyway, there was so much politics going on, getting at the truth is like chasing a ghost through fog. Read a few books on the subject. They all disagree with each other. see if you can make any sense of it.

The Perils of Strong Liquor

This is another one from the Wars of the Roses. The Duke of Clarence fought for whichever side looked like winning, then happily swapped sides when it went the wrong way. He was also notorious for "maintenance"-that's interfering with the proper process of justice by giving either party the means to "maintain" a lawsuit. He wasn't popular. Eventually, he was arrested for "compassing the death of the King by necromancy"-i.e., high treason by witchcraft. He was locked in the Bowyer Tower (see map) and sentenced to death, but someone must have really hated him. Before they could hack his head off in the customary manner, he was held upside down in a butt (cask) of Malmsey wine and drowned. The public were outraged at the waste of good Malmsey.

The Guy with the Fuse

By the early 1600s there had been 60 years of religious persecution, with successive monarchs alternately embracing the Protestant and Catholic faiths, forcing their beliefs on the entire country, and burning as a heretic anyone who protested too loudly. When Queen Elizabeth I died in 1603, the Catholics were hopeful, because they reckoned the new king, James, would be a Catholic and stop the current round of repression. But he didn't. He went Protestant.

Months later, a group of Catholic fanatics met in a tavern, determined to do something drastic. They ended up renting a cellar right under the Houses of Parliament (good security, eh?) and filling it with barrels of gunpowder, hidden under piles of firewood. The idea was that when the king attended the grand opening of Parliament on November 5, 1605-Boom! Supposedly, one of the plotters gave the game away by writing an anonymous letter to his cousin, who was a member of Parliament, warning him to stay away from the grand opening. Blowing up most politicians was O.K., but Lord Monteagle was family.

A last-minute search discovered Guy Fawkes lurking in the cellar, ready to light the fuse. He was taken to the Tower and stretched on the rack to make him reveal the names of the other plotters. He spent a total of 50 days incarcerated in "Little Ease" (a tiny cell, in which a prisoner can neither sit, kneel, nor stand up straight) before he was hanged, drawn, and quartered with his fellows. The bloodthirsty English still celebrate November 5 with fireworks and the burning of an effigy of the unfortunate gentleman.

A Class Act

International celebrity, explorer, author, adventurer, courtier, poet: Walter Ralegh (Raleigh) had it all. He's the one who supposedly threw his hugely expensive cloak on the ground so that Queen Elizabeth could step over a puddle. But that sort of elegant sycophancy wouldn't wash with Elizabeth's successor, James. He was a vulgarian who liked to put mastiffs into the lions' cage and watch them get mangled. And his closest cronies were Ralegh's enemies.

Anyway, in 1603 Ralegh was implicated in a plot to depose James and let the Spaniards into England, and was sentenced to death. "Thou art a monster! Thou hast an English face but a Spanish heart," the prosecutor yelled. But it was such a blatant frame-up that the king "graciously reprieved him," keeping him in the Tower as another exhibit. Undaunted, Ralegh spent his time holding dangerous philosophical discussions, conducting scientific experiments, writing poetry, working on his History of the World, selling his famous cure-all cordial, and becoming a tourist attraction.

In 1616, James relented and let Ralegh out to lead an expedition to find the fabled city of El Dorado. It was a disaster. As Ralegh lay sick, the expedition hotheads got into a fight with a gaggle of Spaniards, which was expressly forbidden. When the expedition returned in 1618, the 1603 death sentence was finally carried out. Ralegh had been condemned for being pals with the Spaniards, but now he got the chop for fighting them. The ultimate cool guy, he ran his thumb over the blade of the headsman's ax. His last words were: "'Tis a sharp medicine, but a sure cure for all ills."

Blood by Name, Bloody by Nature

Thomas Blood was a handsome Irish adventurer with a talent for disguises, devious plans, and abject failure. He had sided with the antiroyalist Oliver Cromwell during the Civil War when Charles I was beheaded and the Crown Jewels were sold off, since there was no longer any head to put them on. But the revolutionaries were incompetent and squabbly, and within a year of Cromwell's death they had to invite a special guest king to do the ruling because they couldn't agree on anything. He needed a new set of Crown Jewels. To pay for them, he started grabbing land and cash from people who had supported Cromwell. Thomas Blood's Irish estates were swiped, his snooty wife left him, and he ended up penniless and swearing revenge.

The luscious new Crown Jewels were kept in a big cage in the Martin Tower, guarded by a nice old codger called Talbot Edwards, who lived there happily enough with his wife and adult daughter until they were suddenly befriended by a "country preacher" and his "wife," who brought along a young "friend" to woo the daughter. One day they all came to visit with two more "friends," who had requested a private viewing of the jewels.

You can guess who the preacher really was. The moment the cage was unlocked, the gang pounced on Mr. Edwards, gagged him, hit him over the head, and finally stabbed him for good measure (amazingly, he survived). They squashed the crown flat to make it smaller, stuffed the orb into someone's padded breeches, and started filing the scepter in half to make it easier to hide. At this point, the Edwardses' son returned on leave from the navy (no, I'm NOT making this up). The gang managed to sneak past him and scarper, but the guard was called out, and they were soon rounded up.

Now it gets totally surreal. Blood refused to discuss his crimes with anyone except the king. Unbelievably, Charles II granted him a private audience and followed it with a full royal pardon and a pension of £500 a year. Was Blood blackmailing the king? Did the king want him as a spy? Did he just enjoy all the Colonel Blood adventure tales? Only the king knew, and he never told anyone.

When Blood finally died nobody could believe that he wasn't faking, so nine days after his funeral they had to dig him up again to make sure.

The Double-dress Dodge

In 1714, England ran out of kings and had to import one from Germany. The Scots didn't like it and rebelled. As usual, the rebellion failed dismally. Among the ringleaders condemned to death was one Lord Maxwell, who ended up in the Tower. The night before the scheduled execution, Lady Maxwell turned up with three of her lady friends, begging for a last visit with her husband. One of the women was secretly wearing two gowns and two identical cloaks. Lady Maxwell carried a bottle of cognac (yes, it's the drunken-guard trick again) and a bag of cosmetics. They all turned on the tears and hysterics, and it ended up with so many weeping and wailing women coming and going with messages and last-minute petitions that the guards failed to notice that one of the outgoing women had a beard. Meanwhile, Lady Maxwell was keeping up an animated conversation with the wall in the condemned man's cell. She eventually bid the wall a tearful farewell and left. The guards didn't discover Maxwell's nonpresence until the following morning, when they came to take him to the block.

These shenanigans and more like them went on for 700 years, to the great entertainment of everyone not a participant. But in the early 19th century, the authorities chucked out all the prisoners and turned the Tower into a full-time tourist attraction. This is not nearly as amusing, but it does help to pay for all the beef that the beefeaters (the Tower guards) eat. Today, the only reminders of the prisoners are elaborate carvings on the walls of former cells, miscellaneous instruments of torture, and the ravens on the lawn-descendants of the birds that used to loiter around the scaffold on Tower Hill, pecking out the eyes and giblets of hanged criminals.

The ravens are looked after by the Queen's Ravenmaster, who feeds them and clips their wings, which fortunately stops them going and looking for more interesting (i.e., disgusting) morsels. Why does the Crown bother? Well, an old tale says that if the ravens leave, the Tower will fall, and with it the kingdom. It's probably just a legend, but there's no point in courting catastrophe.

Paul Baker is a strange fellow who does all sorts of exciting things with Tudor musical instruments and computers. He lives in the English Midlands, close to Dudley Castle. When this article is published, he may be forced to move to London, to an apartment overlooking the Thames.

Copyright Carus Publishing Company Oct 2005
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