Tower: An Epic History of the Tower of London

by Jones, Nigel

  Not all kings, however, were as scrupulous as Henry VII. James I, an unpleasant sadist, became, for all the wrong reasons, of all British monarchs the most enthusiastic patron of the Tower menagerie. James cared not a fig for the creatures’ welfare. On the contrary, his chief delight was to watch them tearing each other to bleeding bits. James frequently visited the Tower to slake his bloodlust – even remodelling the Lion Tower in 1603–05 to enhance the spectacle. A double row of cages, complete with trapdoors worked by pulleys, housed the animals, with a courtyard paved in Purbeck stone for them to fight in. The yard had a cistern ‘for the Lyons to drink and wasche themselves in’. James even had a thirty-metre wooden viewing platform over the cages constructed for him to watch the fun more closely.

  Occasionally, the cruel king was disappointed. In 1604, the year after his accession, James took delivery of a new African lion and ordered two English mastiffs to bait his new king of beasts. To supply them, he turned to the joint Masters of Bears, Bulls and Mastiff Dogs: Edward Alleyn, the famed actor, and his father-in-law Philip Henslowe, another theatrical luminary, who had purchased the post from the previous incumbent as a business sideline. Alleyn owned the Rose Theatre on the south bank of the Thames – neighbour and rival to Shakespeare’s Globe. A popular actor– manager in the Admiral’s Men theatrical troupe, Alleyn trod the boards at the Rose playing the leads in Christopher Marlowe’s great tragedies. But he had a second career as owner of the nearby Hope Theatre, where downmarket bear- and bull-baiting shows were staged. These cruel contests, in which specially bred mastiffs and bulldogs were set upon the tethered (and usually toothless) bigger beasts attracted huge crowds and helped Alleyn amass the fortune which he eventually used to found Dulwich College.

  On 13 March 1604, James, his Danish queen Anne, and a retinue of bloodthirsty courtiers attended the Lion Tower to watch his new lion take on a trio of Alleyn’s fiercest mastiffs:

  [The first dog] straightaway flew to the face of the lion. But the lion shook him off, and grasping him fast by the neck, drawing the dog upstairs and downstairs. The King, now perceiving the lion greatly exceed the dog in strength, but nothing in noble heart and courage, caused another dog to be put into the den, who likewise took the lion by the face, and he began to deal with him as with the former; but whilst he held them both under his paws they bit him by the belly, whereat the lion roared so extremely that the earth shook withal; and the next lion ramped and roared as if he would have made rescue …

  After the third mastiff had been put into the den to battle the lion, the heir to the throne, young Prince Henry, asked for the last dog’s life to be spared, and adopted the mastiff as a pet, ‘saying that he who has fought with the King of beasts shall never fight with any inferior creature’.

  A year later, James was back for more blood sport. This time he watched two live cocks being devoured by a lion and lioness. After this, his blood lust whetted but by no means sated, the king ordered a live lamb to be lowered into the lions’ den on a rope. Once more, however, he was cruelly disappointed, for in fulfilment of the biblical prophecy, the lion lay down with the lamb. Or rather, ‘the lamb rose up and went towards the lions, who very gently looked upon him and smelled upon him without sign of any further hurt. Then the lamb was softly drawn up again in as good plight as he was set down.’ James had to be content with watching another trio of Alleyn’s mastiffs being put to the tooth and claw by the lions.

  By James’s reign, a tradition had grown up linking the fate of the Tower’s big cats with the life of the monarch. Lions were sometimes named after the sovereign reigning at their birth, and there was a superstition that if the lion died, its namesake monarch would soon follow. (Since it was a capital offence to foretell the death of the monarch, each demise of a ‘royal’ lion was probably hushed up, and a younger and healthier animal renamed in its place.) This particular superstition had a long shelf life: as late as 1758, in the reign of George II, the gossipy Lord Chesterfield reported that many of ‘the common people’ believed that the monarch would die from an attack of gout he was then suffering, since ‘one of the oldest lions at the Tower – much about the king’s age – died a fortnight ago!’.

  In 1599, a Swiss visitor, the chemist Thomas Platter, mentions seeing lions named Edward (after the boy king Edward VI) and Elizabeth after the current monarch, who were both, he assures us, ‘more than 100 years old’. In July 1597, a Czech nobleman, the Bohemian Baron Zdenek Waldstein, visited the Tower and records in his diary seeing ‘two great lions and three lionesses, a leopard, a tiger and a huge porcupine’. The same porcupine, a rare beast indeed in Elizabethan England, may have been seen by Shakespeare, since a porcupine is mentioned in Hamlet.

  By 1622 the Tower menagerie included eleven lions, two leopards, three eagles, two pumas, a tiger and a jackal. The animals owed a debt of gratitude to that stern ruler Oliver Cromwell who, in line with his regime’s ban on theatrical performances, put a stop to bear- and bull-baiting. The royal menagerie itself flourished under Cromwell’s republic, just as it had under the monarchy. In his book Londonopolis( 1657) James Howell reports that there were six lions at the Tower, while a Polish visitor, Sebastian Gawrecki, records seeing lions, tigers, lynxes and ‘an Indian cat from Virginia’ (a cougar?).

  In January 1666 another diarist who had only opened his famous journal just ten days previously, made his first of many visits to the Tower menagerie. Samuel Pepys enjoyed viewing an old lion called Crowly, ‘who has now grown a very great lion and very tame’, so much that, currying favour with his boss at the Navy Office, Lord Sandwich, he returned on 3 May 1662 with Lady Sandwich and her nieces and nephews:

  I took them and all my Ladys to the Tower and showed them the lions and all that was to be shown; and so took them to my house, and there made much of them, and so saw them back to my Lady’s.

  Pepys was not the only famous Restoration diarist to be associated with the Tower menagerie. His friend John Evelyn also frequently visited – and was much less impressed than his rival, particularly deploring the ‘barbarous’ baiting of the beasts (reinstated at the Restoration), and unfavourably comparing the cramped cages with the spacious animal enclosures he had seen elsewhere in Europe.

  In 1671 the young Surveyor General of the King’s Works, the architect and polymath Christopher Wren, took time off from designing the new St Paul’s Cathedral to oversee a programme of modernisation at the Tower. This included a new house next to the Lion Tower as a home for the current keeper, Robert Gill. The Gills, an Essex family, had occupied the hereditary post for more than a century since the appointment of Thomas Gill in 1573. The last of the line, Robert’s son William Gill, succeeded his father in 1675.

  But familiarity with the big beasts did not ensure safety. In 1686 the mistress of William Gill, a Norfolk girl named Mary Jenkinson, showing off to some friends in the lions’ den, ventured to stroke one of the creatures’ paws:

  Suddenly he catched her by the middle of the arm with his claws and mouth, and most miserably tore her Flesh from the Bone, before he could be unloosed, notwithstanding that they thrust several lighted torches at him.

  Sadly, despite the best attention of ‘chirurgeons’ who amputated Mary’s mangled arm, she died.

  In 1681 a mysterious malady in the Lion Tower wiped out three lions at a stroke, and the menagerie’s population continued to dwindle. To boost the depleted numbers, King James II had several creatures transferred from his private collection in St James’s Park to the Tower in 1687. But even though gone, the dead lions were not quite forgotten. Two were stuffed and kept on permanent display. By this date the Tower also housed a collection of ‘curiosities’ to entertain the public visiting the menagerie. Alongside the stuffed lions, visitors could view a ‘unicorn’s horn’ and even a cloak allegedly lined with a unicorn’s fur. In 1699, Ned Ward, writing in The London Spy, reported that the stuffed lions were showing their age. After visiting the live lions, ‘where the yard smelt as frowzily as a dove-house or a
dog-kennel’, he encountered the late King Charles II’s stuffed lion who ‘had no more fierceness in his looks than he had when he was living, than the effigy of his good master [Charles] at Westminster has the presence of the original’. And as for the lion’s mate, it ‘made such a drooping figure with … false entrails, that it brought into my mind the old proverb … that a living dog is better than a dead lion’.

  By 1704, in the reign of Queen Anne, John Stow’s Survey listed the Tower menagerie as containing six lions; two leopards (or tigers – Stow is uncertain of the species); three eagles, including a bald eagle; two Swedish owls, one called Hopkins; two mountain cats, ‘walking continually backwards and forwards … [and] very cruel’; and a jackal. Stow says that the jackal stank so badly that the creature’s ‘rank smell … hath much injured the Health of the man that attends them, and so stuffed up his Head that it affects his speech’.

  At the end of the seventeenth century, zoos had become very fashionable, with rival menageries springing up across the country. The Tower authorities became increasingly concerned to protect their profitable monopoly. In 1697 they issued a stern public notice:

  That no person whatsoever (except … the Keeper of His Majesty’s Lions) do for the future carry abroad, or expose to publick view, for their own private gain, any lions, lionesses, leopards or any other beasts which are feroe naturae, as they will answer to the contrary at their peril.

  Thanks to the menagerie, by the eighteenth century despite competing rivals, the Tower was beginning to acquire the position it maintains today as the nation’s leading tourist magnet. As the eighteenth century wore on and the Enlightenment dawned, the Tower’s primary functions were changing. It had begun life as a castle with armoury and arsenal attached; then took on the functions of the kingdom’s major royal palace; morphed into the prison, torture chamber and execution site for the state’s enemies (real or perceived); now, as times gentled, the fortress’s value as a place of entertainment became pre-eminent. Still central among the draws that packed in the punters was the menagerie. In 1741 a charming illustrated children’s guide to the zoo listed and pictured the creatures to be seen there, including a lion and lioness called Marco and Phillis with their offspring Nero, a leopard called Will, a panther named Jenny, two tigers, a racoon, a porcupine, an ape, vultures, eagles and an unknown bird of prey called a ‘Warwoven’.

  The menagerie’s growing pre-eminence as a tourist trap – entrance still sixpence, rising to a shilling by the eighteenth century’s end – is reflected by the many references to it in English literature. As we have seen, Shakespeare, Pepys and Evelyn visited, as did those great pioneer journalists and pamphleteers Richard Steele and Joseph Addison. Jacobean dramatist John Webster, in his masterpiece The White Devil, refers to another menagerie superstition: that if the Tower lions were listless and depressed on Candlemas Day (2 February) and the day was ‘fair and bright’, then ‘Winter will have another flight’. Webster has his character Flamenico say, ‘… the lions in the Tower on Candelemas Day, mourn if the sun shine for fear of the pitiful remainder of winter to come’. Tobias Smollett’s novel Humphrey Clinker features maidservant Winifred Jenkins visiting the Tower and its ‘monstracious’ lion with teeth nine inches long; while William Makepiece Thackeray’s hero Henry Esmond, in the eponymous novel, visits ‘The Tower of London, with the armour and great lions and bears in the moat’.

  After Matthew Paris’s extraordinary depiction of the Tower’s first elephant, probably the most familiar pictorial image of the menagerie is the engraving of a ‘tyger’ in William Blake’s Songs of Experience (1794). Blake’s depiction is remarkably anatomically accurate for such a fantastical artist, and accompanies the famous poem of the same name. Blake had indeed drawn his ‘tyger’ from life at the Tower after crossing the Thames from his home in Lambeth to visit the menagerie. Blake was famously unorthodox in his religious views, but a much more mainstream Christian also visited the menagerie for inspiration thirty years before. John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, came there on New Year’s Eve 1764. Wesley wished this mission to settle for himself the tricky theological question of whether animals had souls. His method for investigating this was to observe how the lions reacted when music was played by a flautist. The response of the big cats to the flute’s toots left Wesley no wiser: ‘He began playing near four or five lions; only one of these rose up, came to the front of his den, and seemed to be all attention. Meantime, a tiger leaped over the lion’s back, turned and ran under his belly, leaped over him again, and so to and fro incessantly.’

  Scientists, as well as writers, artists and theologians, used the menagerie, though one who was inconvenienced by the Tower’s resident creatures was the first Astronomer Royal, John Flamsteed. Invited by Charles II to set up an observatory in the White Tower’s north-east turret in 1675, Flamsteed, who mapped and identified 3,000 stars, complained that the ubiquitous Tower ravens were depositing their droppings on the lenses of his precious telescopes. Soon afterwards, he decamped to the more salubrious surroundings of the new observatory at Greenwich.

  The eminent Scottish surgeon and anatomist, John Hunter – ironically, satirised by William Blake in his sole (and unpublished) novel An Island in the Moon as the sawbones ‘Jack Tearguts’ – reached a mutually profitable deal with the menagerie’s head keeper John Ellys, who offered the carcasses of his dead animals to Hunter for dissection. Since it was almost impossible for anatomists to acquire human cadavers legally (a situation murderously exploited by the Edinburgh body snatchers Burke and Hare in the next century), Hunter used the Tower’s animals for his dissections and for his famous skeleton collection at his homes in London’s Leicester Square and Earls Court. As a result scores of elephants, rhinos, lions, tigers, giraffes and other species all found their posthumous way from the Tower to Hunter’s dissecting table in the 1750s – and made their contribution to his pioneering discoveries in the fields of dentistry, respiration, digestion and blood circulation. Hunter’s work did much towards dispelling popular superstitions about animals. For example, a popular myth held that ostriches were able to digest iron. In 1751 an ostrich presented to George III by the Bey of Tunis choked to death in the Tower after being fed a large nail. Yet such superstitions died as hard as the unfortunate bird: forty years later, another Tower ostrich died after ingesting no fewer than eighty nails administered by its own keepers.

  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 decad
es. 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.