Read Tower: An Epic History of the Tower of London Online
Authors: Nigel Jones
Tower: An Epic History of the Tower of London
CONTENTS
Chapter Two: The Menagerie and the Mint
Chapter Three: The Captives and the Kings
Chapter Four: Plague and Peasants
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 Eleven: Fallen Favourites
Chapter Twelve: Papists, Plots and Poisons
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
Select Bibliography: Tower Histories Consulted
Select Bibliography: General Works Consulted
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. Behind 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.