The Tower of London: History’s Most Notorious
Prison
In the annals of world history, there are
a handful of prisons whose very names are
guaranteed to send a shiver down your spine.
Alcatraz is one, Devil’s Island another.
But even these can’t hold a candle to the
most notorious prison of them all.
We’re talking, of course, about the Tower
of London.
A vast medieval castle in the heart of the
British capital, the Tower of London is infamous
for the criminals who were held there.
It was within these impenetrable walls that
kings and queens met grisly fates, that Guy
Fawkes was sent to his doom, that high-ranking
Nazi Rudolf Hess was interred at the height
of WWII.
Yet while the Tower is most famous as a prison,
its full history goes beyond merely holding
criminals.
Over the centuries, the Tower has functioned
as everything from a fortress of domination,
to a place to mint coins, to a dumping ground
for one king’s endless collection of exotic
animals.
A living relic of the past deep in the heart
of the UK capital, this is the story of the
legendary Tower of London.
A Symbol of Conquest
On October 14, 1066, a single arrow changed
the course of British history.
At the Battle of Hastings, King Harold of
England was felled by an arrow gruesomely
penetrating his eyeball, leaving no-one to
oppose William the Conqueror’s rampaging
Norman Army.
Come Christmas that year, the Anglo-Saxon
period had ended, and William was on the throne.
It was the dawning of a new age for Britain,
the establishment of a glorious new dynasty.
There was just one problem for the newly-crowned
William I.
His new subjects didn’t think his dynasty
was all that glorious.
In fact, there was a palpable sense that the
people of London would sooner boot him up
ye olde backside than bow down before him.
For William, this was a challenge.
Now he had England, he needed to hold onto
it, ideally by a show of force that would
stop any rebellion in its tracks.
But even a guy nicknamed “the Conqueror”
couldn’t just go around hitting every irate
merchant with his broadsword.
No.
William needed something more potent.
A symbol that would project his power across
the capital, making resistance unthinkable.
It was from this need that the Tower of London
was born.
Construction on the Tower first began in 1075,
replacing a wooden fortress William’s men
had built to pacify the city.
Known as the White Tower, the central part
was designed to be visible across London,
a castle so big that no-one would be able
to forget who their new masters were.
But if you’re expecting to hear that William’s
men immediately began locking people up in
the Tower, you need to know that it wasn’t
designed to be a prison.
Far from being London’s Alcatraz, the Tower
was more like a kind of medieval Death Star,
a place from where the evil emperor - William
I - could oppress England’s citizens without
having to worry about being killed by the
Rebel Alliance of irate Londoners.
And, yes, it was also a prison.
But we’ll come back to that in a bit.
Over the next few centuries, the London Death
Star grew ever larger.
It was in the 12th century that the outer
‘curtain’ walls were added, turning the
Tower into something we might recognize today.
But it wasn’t until the 13th Century came
rumbling into view - by which time Willaim
was long dead - that the Tower really took
its legendary shape.
It’s also at this point that “Tower”
became a misnomer.
Really, the singular Tower of London is actually
a whole host of towers, all of which began
to spring into existence around the year 1200.
First, there was the Bell Tower, from where
warning bells could be rung in the event of
invasion.
Second came the Wardrobe Tower, where all
the king’s clothes were held.
Finally, in 1220, the Lantern Tower took its
place, which lit the way for ships navigating
the Thames.
The completed tower was a monster.
A place where anything - or anyone - would
be safe.
At least, that was the plan.
As it turned out, the Tower wasn’t maybe
as invincible as people thought.
Whoever Takes the Tower..
In its centuries of existence, the Tower of
London has had three major roles.
The first was that of a prison, which we’ll
be discussing in detail in the next section.
The second was something we alluded to in
the introduction, a place where a number of
kings locked away their exotic pets.
The third was apparently as the place everyone
went when they felt like having a revolution.
The starting gun on these endless attempts
to breach the Tower was fired way back in
1189.
That was the year of the First Crusade, when
Richard the Lionheart went skipping off to
start a royal rumble in the Holy Land.
Barely had he got on the ship to Europe than
his brother John was leading a vast army against
the Tower, hoping to take it and have himself
crowned king.
He succeeded, but it was a short-lived victory.
When Richard returned in 1194 he in turn overran
the Tower, dragging the snivelling John out
at swordpoint.
While we’d love to tell you he then chopped
John up and paraded his limbs around the city,
the reality is that Richard forgave his brother
then obligingly died and made him king just
five years later.
Still, letting John live did at least lead
to an amusing interlude in the Tower’s history.
It was King John who, in 1204, decided to
turn it into a home for his lions, leopards,
and bears.
More on that in a few minutes.
While Richard and John’s feud ended with
an act of forgiveness, most rebellions centered
on the Tower came to much more grisly conclusions.
Perhaps the most gruesome was during the Peasants’
Revolt of 1381.
That year, Richard II - a very different dude
from Richard Lionheart - decided to levy a
tax on his subjects that would leave them
both politically powerless and financially
destitute.
Classic king of England move, am I right Americans?
Anyway, the peasants were all like “nah,
we’re not gonna pay that,” and when Richard
II was all like “uh, yeah you are,” the
peasants grabbed their pitchforks and marched
on London.
Under their leader Wat Tyler, the peasants
forced the king to negotiate.
The moment he left the Tower of London to
do so, the rebels rushed inside and trashed
the place.
We mean trashed.
They ransacked the royal rooms, jumped up
and down on the king’s bed, even dragged
the king’s mother into a bedroom, demanding
kisses from her.
But the gruesome bit came when they found
the Archbishop of Canterbury cowering in the
chapel.
Rather than demand kisses from him, they dragged
the poor guy outside and cut off his head.
Because the guy wielding the axe was probably
drunk, it took 8 blows to do the job.
Eww.
While the Peasants’ Revolt was put down
in less than a month, the next major rebellion
to involve the Tower would last much, much
longer.
We’re assuming you’ve heard of a little
show called Game of Thrones.
What you might not have heard is that George
R.R. Martin’s bloodthirstiness was based
on real history, specifically the 1455-1485
Wars of the Roses.
And you better believe the Tower had a role
to play in Game of English Thrones.
Principally, that of a prison for poor Henry
VI.
A weak and useless king whose weakness and
uselessness was what started the wars, Henry
was thrown in the Tower by Edward IV in 1465.
While his predecessor, Henry III, had been
saved by retreating into the Tower during
the Second Barons’ War two hundred years
earlier, Henry VI would have no such luck.
In 1471, he was found dead in his cell, almost
certainly murdered by Edward IV’s men.
At the time, it was probably the most shocking
incident to take place in the history of the
Tower.
But Edward wouldn’t have much time to revel
in his cruelty.
In a little over a decade, it would be his
own children who became the Tower’s most
famous prisoners of all.
A Gilded Cage
Back in the year 1100, before the Wars of
the Roses, before the Peasants’ Revolt,
before even the Tower had been completed,
a man named Ranulf Flambard made history.
The Bishop of Durham, he’d been a close
advisor to William the Conqueror’s son,
William Rufus, a guy who was super unpopular
with just about everyone.
When Henry I took the throne in 1100, he decided
to make a clean break with the old regime
by arresting Rufus’s closest advisors.
Which is how Ranulf Flambard became the first
person to ever be imprisoned in the Tower
of London.
It hadn’t been a major success.
Exactly one year later, Flambard had again
made history by becoming the first person
to escape from the Tower, kinda suggesting
that maybe the Tower wasn’t all that as
a prison.
But still, Flambard’s arrest marked the
point at which the Tower started doubling
as a medieval supermax.
By the time Henry VI breathed his last in
a cell, dozens if not hundreds had been held
between its walls.
But of all those hundreds of people, none
would stick in the public imagination like
the Two Princes.
After our old friend Edward IV killed Henry,
he spent a good decade riding high, convinced
he had this whole War of the Roses in the
bag.
The only problem was that he’d had his two
sons relatively late in life, and neither
was yet old enough to rule if Edward suddenly
kicked the bucket.
Which is exactly what happened on April 9,
1483.
The king dropped dead, leaving his son Edward
V behind as a mere 12 year old monarch.
Even in the 15th century, letting a 12 year
old call the shots was clearly wacko.
So Edward IV’s brother, Richard III, was
made Lord Protector, ruling in Edward V’s
name until he reached maturity.
And, yes, we know there are already way too
many guys called Edward running around in
this video.
Blame multiple centuries of unimaginative
royals.
Anyway, Richard III was meant to protect young
Edward V and his brother.
Instead, Richard pivoted from Lord Protector
to “possible Disney villain”.
Not long after Edward IV’s death, Richard
had the two princes placed in the Tower of
London for their protection.
In reality, it was more for Richard’s protection,
or the protection of his claim to the throne.
That July, 1483, Richard had himself crowned
king of England.
Not long after, the boys vanished from the
Tower, never to be seen alive again.
It wasn’t until nearly 200 years had passed
that their bones were found buried in the
grounds.
Although the murder of the princes has never
definitively been solved, the popular explanation
- or at least the one Shakespeare gave us
in his play Richard III - is that Richard
had the boys killed, just as the boys’ father
had had useless Henry VI killed.
But, hey, 15th Century history may have been
brutal, but at least it had a sense of karma.
Not two years later, Richard III was in turn
killed, in this case in battle by Henry VII.
With Richard’s death, the Wars of the Roses
came to a bloody end.
But the use of the Tower of London as a prison
didn’t.
See, when Henry VII finally died, his crown
passed to his son, also called Henry.
And Henry VIII was going to spend his reign
imprisoning people in the Tower like it was
going out of fashion.
Bigamy and Brutality
If you like your historical figures big, they
don’t come much bigger than Henry VIII.
A titanic figure both in historical terms
and in terms of his waistline, Henry VIII
was basically the 16th century’s attempt
to create the most ridiculous monarch it could.
He broke Britain from the Catholic Church,
established the Church of England, spearheaded
the Reformation, and, famously, did all this
while collecting more wives than I own pairs
of pants.
Wanna guess where a whole lot of those wives
ended up?
The first wife to get chucked in the Tower
was Anne Boleyn.
Henry had split Britain off from the Catholic
Church specifically so he could divorce his
first wife and marry Anne, which sounds kinda
romantic until you hear what happened next.
Three years after the pair married, in 1536,
Henry and his right hand man, Thomas Cromwell,
engineered Anne’s downfall so Henry could
marry his latest squeeze.
They accused her of treason, of adultery,
and of having sex with her own brother.
Then they carted Anne, her brother, and four
of her closest male friends off to the Tower
of London.
That May, Anne was first forced to watch as
her brother and friends were beheaded, before
being dragged out onto the Tower’s scaffold
and decapitated herself.
But English history still had its wicked sense
of karma.
Not four years later, Thomas Cromwell was
also arrested for treason and dragged off
to the Tower and executed.
Supposedly, he spent his last night on Earth
in the same apartment Anne had stayed in before
her execution.
We wonder if he spared a thought for the woman
whose death he’d helped engineer?
But the decapitation party at the Tower didn’t
end there.
Two years after Cromwell’s death, Henry
was by now on wife number five.
Catherine Howard was Anne Boleyn’s cousin,
although its likely she barely remembered
her.
Catherine was a mere sixteen when she married
the nearly 50 year old Henry in 1540, four
years after Anne’s death.
If you’re thinking that age gap doesn’t
sound like a basis for a successful marriage,
you’re even more right than you thought.
Barely was a year out before Catherine was
discovered having an affair with a younger,
hotter, and altogether less rotund guy.
So it was a quick arrest, a short trip to
the Tower, and then another thunk of the axe,
and goodbye wife number five.
It’s said that, before she was decapitated,
Catherine asked for the block she would have
her head chopped off on brought to her cell
so she could practice kneeling before it.
When the executioner finally cut off her head,
he made her kneel in the exact same place
Catherine’s cousin, Anne Boleyn, had knelt
to be beheaded all those years before.
Henry VIII himself died six years later, in
1547.
By that time, he’d remarried yet another
woman called Catherine.
She happily avoided the fate of her predecessor.
Yet the Tower’s use as a prison outlasted
Henry’s death.
Not long after Henry died, Lady Jane Grey
- the Nine Days Queen - was chucked into a
cell by her aunt, Queen Mary, who wanted the
throne to herself.
Since Mary’s nickname is “Bloody Mary”,
you can probably guess how that went for Lady
Jane.
Yep, another thunk of the axe, followed by
the thud of a head rolling into a basket.
Another famous inmate of the Tower of London
was Guy Fawkes, the guy who tried to blow
up Parliament.
Guy Fawkes was one of the few prisoners to
ever escape the Tower’s fate for them.
Not in the sense that he scaled the wall and
ran away, but in the sense that, as he was
being led to the scaffold for execution, he
managed to leap over the side and break his
neck, dying instantly.
Even in death, we like to imagine he was grinning
from ear to ear.
But there was one other set of prisoners at
the Tower who wouldn’t be remembered by
history.
Who wouldn’t even be regarded as prisoners
by their jailers.
It’s time for us to finally meet the animals
of the Tower of London.
The Greatest Zoo in History
OK, so we ned to wind the clock back now.
Back across the centuries, back across Henry
VIII’s six wives, back across all those
damn guys called Edward, all the way back
to the reign of King John.
Remember John?
He was the brother of Richard Lionheart, the
one who stormed the Tower while his brother
was out crusading, only to be dragged out
the Tower at swordpoint when Richard returned.
Well, when Richard died in 1199, John became
king, a job he sucked at.
Seriously, if John was trying to get hired
at Walmart today, he’d leave King off his
resume because he was so bad at it.
In the early part of his reign, John lost
a whole lot of the Norman lands England had
been united with since William had done all
his Conquering.
The only consolation was that John actually
got a consolation prize.
Like, for real.
In 1204, just after he’d lost Normandy,
John received three crates.
Inside them was a collection of exotic beasts
from across the world, including lions and
bears.
So what did John do with all these unwanted
zoo animals?
The same thing Henry VIII did with his unwanted
wives!
He locked them up in the Tower of London.
The Tower of London menagerie would outlast
John’s crummy reign not just by six years
or six decades, but by six centuries.
From this inauspicious start, it grew to be
one of the largest collections of unusual
animals in the whole of Europe.
John’s successor, Henry III, was particularly
adept at adding to the menagerie.
In 1252, he convinced the King of Norway to
gift him a polar bear for the Tower.
Just three years later, in 1255, he added
the first elephant on British soil since the
days of the Romans.
For those able to see the menagerie - and
we keep using that term because “zoo”
didn’t come into fashion until the 19th
century - it must’ve been as awe-inspiring
as it would be for us to see a live T-Rex
being ridden by shirtless Jeff Goldblum.
But the actual numbers allowed to witness
the animals could be counted on the palm of
one hand.
Menageries in Europe weren’t for the public,
or for science, or for private entertainment.
They were for showing off.
Oh, the king of France has a bear, does he?
Well we’ve got a polar bear!
But maybe that was for the best.
Much as we hate to ruin this lighthearted
segment, the truth is that animals in the
Tower of London suffered atrociously.
Take the lions, for example.
While the three lions are a symbol of England
- somewhat confusingly, as that’s three
more lions than we’ve ever had living in
the wild - the lions at the Tower were chained
up and kept in a tiny, cramped space known
as the Lion Tower.
When James I assumed the throne, he even instituted
regular fights between the lions and dogs
for his own amusement.
Still, the lions had it better than London’s
stray cats.
Legend has it that commoners were sometimes
allowed in to see the beasts if they brought
a cat for the lions to eat.
By the eighteenth century, the menagerie played
host to rhinos, baboons, ocelts, wolves, tigers
hyenas, and others too numerous to mention.
But while tales persist right into the nineteenth
century of people doing crazy stuff like trying
to get the elephants drunk on wine, the Tower
of London’s petting zoo couldn’t last
forever.
Starting in 1831, the animals were slowly
removed and placed in the slightly-saner environment
of the newly-opened London Zoo.
By the end of that decade, there were no animals
left in the Tower.
A tradition stretching back to the 13th century
had finally come to an end.
The story of the Tower itself, though, still
had one final act.
Life During Wartime
By the time the 20th Century dawned, the Tower
of London had lost almost all of its historic
functions.
The royal family no longer lived there.
The animals were gone.
The Royal mint had been moved.
There wasn’t even a tower left for the king’s
wardrobe, for goodness sakes.
But it still retained one traditional function.
The Tower was still totally a place where
ne'er do wells could be locked up and executed.
However, the nature of those locked up had
now changed.
Gone were the days of John Balliol, the Scottish
king who’d been allowed to keep both his
wife and dozens of hunting dogs in his cell
with him.
Now the Tower of London was reserved for traitors
to the Crown.
During WWI, this meant spies for the Central
powers.
Between 1914 and 1918, it was common for those
convicted of espionage to be dragged there,
lined up against a wall, and shot.
It was a practice that continued all the way
into WWII.
Well, part way, at least.
On 15 August, 1941, with the Tower still damaged
by bombing sustained in the Blitz, a 43-year
old meterologist from Luxembourg was taken
out into the courtyard and placed before a
firing squad.
Convicted of spying for the Nazis, Josef Jakobs
had no way of knowing he was about to make
history.
As the guard asked if he had any last words,
Jakobs looked each member of the firing squad
right in the eye and told them “shoot straight”.
Seconds later there was the crack of rifles,
several puffs of smoke, and then Josef Jakobs
was dead, the last person to ever be executed
in the Tower of London.
Not long after, the Tower finally ceased to
function as a prison.
From the moment old Ranulf Flambard had stepped
into his cell way, way back in 1100 AD, the
Tower had been a place for the miscreants
of society.
The same summer that Josef Jakobs was executed,
it had played host to perhaps its biggest
miscreant of all.
High-ranking Nazi Rudolf Hess had been briefly
held there after landing his plane in Scotland
on a secret peace mission.
He would go on to be convicted in the Nuremberg
trials.
But with the close of WWII, and the beginning
of a long era of peace in Europe, London finally
lost the need for such a symbolic prison.
The last people to be held in the Tower of
London were the Kray twins, a pair of gangsters
perhaps as famous for their celebrity connections
as for their crimes.
In 1952 they were briefly held for dodging
National Service.
When they walked out, the days of history’s
most infamous prison came to an end.
Today, the Tower of London is a mere tourist
site, another place for visitors to tick off
alongside Buckingham Palace and the London
Eye.
But even defanged and robbed of its purposes,
the Tower still carries the traces of its
tortured past.
Many still talk of the ghosts that haunt the
Tower.
While its seems unlikely that the souls of
dead queens and princes are literally wandering
around, the stories of their gruesome fates
still linger, haunting our collective memory.
It may have lost its palpable sense of menace,
but the Tower of London is still a place where
murders, assassinations, cruelty and madness
once bloomed.
It seems likely that we’ll still be talking
about it after another thousand years.
