Tower: An Epic History of the Tower of London (6 page)

In those distant days, scientists and artists often worked closely together. Hunter, himself a gifted draughtsman, employed painters to immortalise his animals, including the great equine artist George Stubbs, whom Hunter commissioned to paint an anatomically accurate portrait of a newly arrived Great Indian Rhinoceros at the Tower. India had become a fruitful source of animals for the menagerie after the subcontinent was taken over by the East India Company, which sent many specimens home to the Tower, including elephants and tigers. Sir Edwin Landseer, probably Stubbs’s only peer as an animal artist, and a child prodigy, frequently visited the Tower in his youth in the 1820s to sketch the creatures there – particularly the lions, who provided the original inspiration for the four magnificent beasts he eventually sculpted at the foot of Nelson’s Column in Trafalgar Square.

Another artist who made the Tower his happy hunting ground, drawing both the menagerie and the Royal Mint, was the caricaturist Thomas Rowlandson. One of his best-known cartoons depicts visitors mingling with apes in the menagerie’s ‘monkey room’, which opened in the 1780s. But after a boy was mauled by an overenthusiastic ape, this early experiment in cross-species communication was abandoned, and the monkeys went back behind bars. The popularity of the menagerie as a leisure attraction fluctuated with its changing animal population. The Napoleonic Wars, when Britain was at times cut off from its far-flung imperial possessions, and the menagerie starved of new blood, was a particularly lean time, coinciding with the long and lacklustre reign as head keeper of the appropriately named Joseph Bullock, who took over in 1801 and held the job for the next two decades. Among the resident creatures when Bullock
arrived was a lioness called Miss Fanny Howe, named in honour of Admiral Howe’s naval victory over France on ‘the Glorious First of June’ in 1794 – the lioness having been born in the Tower on the same day.

Besides Miss Fanny, the collection in Bullock’s custody catalogued in 1809 also included a black leopardess called Miss Peggy, some tigers, a Barbary panther called Traveller, a hyena, a Mexican wolf, a silver fox, a racoon, a jackal and an eagle. By 1815, when Waterloo brought a final end to Napoleonic strife, the menagerie totalled a few (rather mangy) lions, a panther, a hyena, a tigress, a jackal and a bear. The bear, a famously fierce grizzly from America named Old Martin, presented to King George III by the Hudson’s Bay Company, was a favourite with the public, and was treated with respect and care despite his ferocity. Gone were the days two centuries before when a menagerie bear which had killed a child negligently left in its yard in 1609 under James I was ‘punished’ by being set to fight a lion. Yet again the bloodthirsty James was disappointed when the lion refused to be roused to combat. The king ordered that the chained bear be baited to death by mastiffs instead. The dead child’s mother was given a portion of the ticket takings from the bloody spectacle – watched by the entire royal family – as compensation for her loss. By 1822, despite Old Martin’s popularity, Bullock’s menagerie was down to just two animals – Martin himself and an elephant – and an aviary of birds. It seemed that extinction was nigh.

But at what seemed to be its last gasp, a saviour rode to the rescue in the shape of Alfred Cops, who succeeded the ineffectual Bullock on the latter’s death in 1822. Cops was the first (and last) professional zoologist to hold the past of Chief Keeper at the Tower, and he was a man of energy, imagination and compassion for his charges. Already experienced at managing other commercial menageries, Cops set about his new duties with vigour. Not only did he channel resources into new animal acquisitions; he also toured the world himself in search of them. In addition, he applied his rationalist scientific outlook to improving the conditions of the creatures in his care, changing their diet to more nutritious fare, and building a spacious new forty-foot animal house with an aviary attached. As a result of Cops’s active approach, six years after his appointment in 1828 the menagerie had improved out of all recognition, boasting a staggering 300 specimens from sixty different species – several born at the Tower, a sure sign of contented creatures.

These included, as well as a wide variety of big cats, wolves, bears,
baboons, elephants, kangaroos (a newcomer from the relatively recently discovered continent of Australasia) antelopes, a zebra, and a flock of birds including eagles, vultures, macaws, owls and a pelican. Reptiles, too, were well represented, with alligators, an anaconda, a boa and a rattlesnake. Given the limited space at the Tower, species were crammed uncomfortably close together, living cheek by beak, so to speak – occasionally with fatal results. A hyena snapped off the head of an over-inquisitive secretary bird which incautiously stretched into the malodorous beast’s den for a peek. And, in the year that this inventory was drawn up – 1830 – a lion was accidentally let into a cage containing a Bengal tiger and tigress described by a zoo guide as being of ‘moody’ temperament. A furious three-way catfight ensued, which the keepers were only able to stop after half an hour with the aid of burning torches. The outnumbered and severely mauled lion died later from its wounds.

It is, however, a measure of how much popular taste in entertainment had progressed from the licensed sadism of James I’s time to the relative humanity of the Hanoverians, that an event which the Jacobean public would have paid good money to watch now excited a storm of bad publicity. The menagerie’s management was widely blamed for their carelessness in inadvertently letting their star big cats fight to the death. Nonetheless, the publicity helped to pull back punters who had drifted away during Bullock’s tenure. Business boomed at the Tower’s ticket office, encouraged by the wide variety of creatures Cops had secured for a menagerie that had regained its place in public affection.

And yet, paradoxically, Cops’s success sealed the Tower menagerie’s doom. Although Cops was himself keenly aware of the importance of keeping his animals happy, the sheer number of creatures he had squeezed into the Tower’s cramped confines offended a public awakening to a new fellow feeling for our furred and feathered friends. (The RSPCA had recently been founded, and an Animal Protection Act giving rudimentary rights to farm and domestic animals had actually reached the statute-book.) In addition, there was mounting pressure from an influential and growing scientific establishment that such zoos should not be for the ignorant gawping of the vulgar multitude, but should have as their primary purpose the scientific study of animal species.

The
coup de grâce
was administered to the menagerie after the appointment in 1826 of the Duke of Wellington as the Tower’s constable. The Iron Duke, hero of Waterloo, the man who had beaten Napoleon, and
subsequently become prime minister too, was not a man to be trifled with – even by a strong character like Cops. And the duke was determined to close – or at least move – the menagerie and write
finis
to its colourful 600-year-old history. To Wellington’s rigidly tidy military mind, the Tower was first and foremost a soldiers’ garrison: a vital strongpoint in London’s heart that might well be needed again as a fortress should riots and disorder ever threaten to get out of hand. Wellington did not like having to put up with the throngs of rubbernecking tourists who traipsed through the gates every day, getting in the way of his sentries, and gazing open mouthed at his parades. But if he had to endure the vulgar horde, he was damned if he was going to tolerate a herd of noisy, smelly animals and birds on his doorstep – howling, screeching and gibbering.

The opening of the London Zoological Society’s new Zoological Gardens in Regent’s Park in 1828 gave the duke his opportunity for an alternative location; and the near fatal mauling of a keeper, Joseph Croney, by a leopard in 1830 presented a perfect ‘health and safety’ excuse for the closure of Cops’s beloved collection. Having secured permission from the new king, William IV, and the cooperation of the Zoological Society, Wellington briskly ordered that half the menagerie’s inmates – the 150 creatures belonging to the king in the royal collection, including that stubborn survivor Old Martin – be transferred to Regent’s Park. In December 1831 the move was made. Cops – as tenacious in his way as the duke – kept the Tower menagerie open to show off the remaining creatures that he had personally acquired as his own property, but he was fighting a losing battle against the victor of Waterloo.

Although he halved the entry fee from a shilling to sixpence to compensate visitors for the disappearence of half the animals, Cops knew that he was beaten after two more unfortunate accidents gave the duke his opening to thrust a final bayonet into the menagerie’s heart. One Sunday in April 1834 a Canadian timber wolf escaped from its den and loped across the drawbridge towards the Byward Tower, the Tower’s main western gateway. A quick-thinking yeoman warder saw the beast approaching and quickly closed the wicket gate, whereupon the wolf seized a terrier belonging to a member of the Tower’s garrison, a Sergeant Cropper. The dog, howling in pain and terror, struggled free from the wolf’s jaws and fled up the tower’s steps and into its master’s apartment, hotly pursued by the wolf. Cropper’s wife was alone in the apartment with her two young children as dog and wolf bounded in, but the wolf was only
interested in finishing his interrupted encounter with the terrier, giving Mrs Cropper a precious few seconds to gather up her offspring and escape, shutting the wolf in as she fled. The beast was recaptured after a heroic struggle by Cops’s assistants, but a further incident the following year – in which a monkey bit one of his guardsmen who was taking an illicit short cut through its enclosure – proved the last straw for the duke. A wolf almost devouring a child was one thing, but a monkey taking a chunk out of a guardsman’s leg was quite another. He peremptorily told Cops that it was the king’s wishes that the Tower menagerie be closed.

On 28 August 1835 the public were admitted to the menagerie for the final time. Between then and October, the last of Cops’s creatures were sold to the Zoological Societies of London and Dublin and to fellow collectors, and the empty cages which had housed them were broken up for scrap. Cops clung on grimly to his keeper’s house at the Tower (possession of which he had been granted for life, irrespective of the fact that there were no more animals for him to keep). And he still drew his salary of eleven shillings a day, augmenting the allowance by giving animal collectors the benefit of his expert advice and experience. He witnessed the wedding of his eldest daughter Mary to Benjamin Franklin Brown, an American collector who had bought several of his charges, and outlived Old Martin, who survived until 1838 – the year Queen Victoria ascended the throne. Cops lived to see the sad sight of the now redundant Lion Tower demolished in 1852. It must have given him a certain quiet satisfaction, though, to have outlasted his old adversary the Iron Duke, who died the same year. Cops himself passed away soon afterwards, on 21 March 1853. The Tower authorities lost no time in evicting his younger daughter Sarah and her husband from the Keeper’s House. The Tower menagerie was history.

In 1248, at almost exactly the same time that the first animals arrived at King Henry III’s menagerie, another institution appeared at the Tower that was destined to be almost equally durable: the Royal Mint. Prior to then there had been several regional mints. But from this time on the minting of money became centralised as a royal monopoly: an arcane rite, akin to a craft guild, with its own jealously guarded jargon and customs. Those entrusted with striking the kingdom’s coinage in the Tower were a law unto themselves, and although they worshipped at St Peter ad Vincula (and helped to pay for its upkeep), the masters of the mint kept themselves very much to themselves.

Their secrecy and exclusiveness, dictated on security grounds, was helped by the physical location of the mint. It was originally housed in a series of makeshift sheds, but by 1300 a 400-foot-long building was constructed in the narrow canyon between the inner and outer west curtain walls of the Tower. Enclosed on all sides in an area of the Tower which became known as Mint Street, and guarded by a porter appointed by the king ‘to keep the gate for all incomings and outgoings and to summon all men required when there was work to do’, the ‘moneyers’ went about their valuable task. Minting money was hot, hard, laborious, noisy and dangerous work. The interior of the mint’s workshops were a hellish inferno full of the clash and splash of metal, both hard and molten. A sweaty, smoky, smelly world where hammers clanged deafeningly and glittering, jagged splinters of precious metal and molten droplets flew through the filthy air, causing painful injuries. Few mint workers escaped their service without losing a finger or an eye to their risky craft.

Metal – gold, silver and bronze – was first smelted in crucibles and when liquid, was poured on to stone slabs to cool. It was then beaten out on an anvil with heavy hammers until it became a thin plate. The plates were chopped into smaller sheets called ‘blanks’ or ‘flans’, and the blanks were stuck between ‘dies’ – rounded heavy metal stamps bearing the image of coins. The lower die was called a ‘standard’, a ‘staple’ or a ‘pile’, and the upper die was known as a ‘trussel’ or a ‘puncheon’. A spike or ‘tang’ on the lower die – or pile – engraved with the obverse side of the coin, was then driven into a solid block of wood, and the blank placed on the engraved coin on the pile’s surface. The engraved end of the trussel was then struck sharply with a hammer, thus simultaneously imprinting the impression of the obverse and reverse dies. As well as carrying the images of the reigning monarch and coat of arms, the newly minted coins also usually bore the name or initials of the moneyer – the official responsible for their minting – as an individual hallmark guaranteeing the integrity and quality of the coin, and a primitive precaution against counterfeiters and ‘coin clippers’, the bane of the mint from medieval to modern times.

Since they bore the image of the anointed monarch – the only picture of their sovereign that the average citizen would see – coins of the realm were accorded a reverence above and beyond their mere monetary worth. Any tampering or forgery was regarded as treason, and punishments for such offences were savage, including mutilation or death. Nonetheless, the greed for gold was so strong that there would always be those
avaricious or desperate enough to risk the penalties. The two most common methods of adulterating the coinage were counterfeiting – manufacturing dud coins from base metals such as tin – and ‘coin clipping’ – trimming the edges of coins and smelting the shaven splinters into gold or silver bullion.