Tower: An Epic History of the Tower of London

by Jones, Nigel

  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 inf
erno 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.

  Across the centuries, as the nation’s economy grew, so exponentially did the mint. Gradually its workshops crept around the north-west corner of the Tower. Excavations have revealed the presence of a fifteenth-century assay furnace and pots near Legge’s Mount, the Tower’s north-west bastion. By the sixteenth century, the entire area between the inner and outer curtain walls of the whole Tower was taken up either by the Royal Mint or by the Royal Ordnance Factory and their related activities. Mint Street was now a thriving industrial village within the Tower, as a map of 1701 reveals. It shows separate gold and silver melting houses; milling and assaying houses, and the homes and offices of the mint’s officials. The presence of stables suggests that the mills used to drive the mint’s machinery were powered by horses rather than by water.

  But the physical labour of turning out coins remained exhausting, at least until the belated introduction of machinery in 1662 in the reign of Charles II. The inflation at the end of Henry VIII’s reign imposed particular strains on the mint, as it struggled to turn out enough coins to meet the increased demand for a rapidly debasing currency. In 1546, one William Foxley, entrusted with making the mint’s melting pots, is recorded as having fallen asleep on the job, and then slept through continuously for fourteen days and fifteen nights, waking ‘as if he had slept but one’.

  The financial situation had stabilised somewhat by the reign of Henry’s daughter Mary. In 1554, as part of her deeply unpopular marriage settlement with King Philip II of Spain, twenty cartloads of Spanish silver in ninety-seven chests, mined in Spain’s Latin American colonies, were delivered to the mint. The following year the mint sealed a deal to turn old Spanish silver coins, ryals, into English coinage worth £17,600. At the same time the mint won its first ever foreign contract to mint new Spanish coinage. The coming of the English Civil War in 1642 provided an unwelcome hitch to progress when the then Master of the Mint – a convinced Royalist – absconded to join King Charles I’s court at Oxford, taking the mint’s dies with him. His flight enabled the cash-strapped Royalists to continue turning out coins without interruption, while those left behind at the Tower mint were forced to come up with hasty substitutes for the stolen dies.

  After Parliament’s triumph, the Tower mint continued to turn out coins, though obviously without King Charles I’s head, which had been lopped for real in 1649. The new ruler, Lord Protector Oliver Cromwell, was happy to have his likeness stamped on coins and commemorative medals instead, but proved as tight-fisted as any king when it came to paying up. The Master of the Mint under Cromwell’s Commonwealth, Thomas Simon, found himself £1,700 out of pocket for the coins he had designed. After repeatedly applying to be reimbursed, but only receiving £700, he finally wrote to Cromwell in exasperation, ‘I beg you to consider that I and my servants have wrought five years without recompense and that the interest I have to pay for gold and silver eats up my profit.’

  Unsurprisingly, Simon was only too delighted to offer his services to Charles II when the monarchy was restored in 1660. But if he was hoping that the poverty-stricken king would match his keen interest in the mint with actual money he was again to be sorely disappointed. While in Dutch exile the king had met an Antwerp goldsmith named Roettier who had loaned the ever cash-strapped monarch money in hope of future preferment. The investment paid off after the Restoration when Charles gave the old goldsmith’s three sons jobs at the mint. Charles encouraged the Roettier brothers to compete with Simon in designing the new monarchy’s coinage, and chose an elegant one submitted by John Roettier. Nettled, and clearly put on his mettle, Simon dipped into his pocket once again and paid for a coin called the Petition Crown, which he submitted to the king along with an abject note:

  Thomas Simon most humbly prays Your Majesty to compare this, his trial piece, with the Dutch, and if more truly drawn and embossed, more gracefully ordered and more accurately engraven, to relieve [pay] him.

  Two years later, and still unpaid, poor Simon became one of thousands of victims of the Great London Plague of 1665.

  The ubiquitous Samuel Pepys accompanied King Charles to the mint to inspect new coins struck with his own likeness: ‘So we by coach to them and there went up and down all the magazines [workshops] with them; but methought it was but poor discourse and frothy that the King’s companions … had with him. We saw none of the money; but Mr Slingsby did show the King, and I did see, the stamps of the new money … which are very neat and like the King.’ The new coinage was the work of an engraver named Blondeau, a Frenchman brought to the mint by Cromwell. Like Simon, Blondeau impartially went to work for the new royal regime and compared Cromwell’s warty likeness with the effigies he had made of the new king – doubtless to the latter’s advantage.

  Pepys was so impressed with the coins and the new-fangled machinery that had struck them – ‘So pretty that I did take a note of every part of it’ – that he soon returned to the mint to commission Blondeau to engrave a seal for the Admiralty. ‘… and did see some of the finest pieces of work, in embossed work, that ever I did see in my life, for fineness and smallness of the images thereon. Here also did see bars of gold melting, which was a fine sight.’ Although Pepys often expressed his pettish disapproval of the King’s frivolity, diarist and monarch shared an eye for a pretty woman, and both were captivated by the loveliness of Frances Stewart, a court beauty, one of the few who stoutly refused to become another of Charles’s many mistresses. Instead, the king propagated Frances’s charms to his subjects by making her the model of Britannia on the country’s coins, an image that endured until decimalisation in the 1970s.

  The late seventeenth century was a time of transformation for the mint. Not only was machinery – used at other mints elsewhere in Europe since the mid-sixteenth century – finally introduced to replace hand-held hammers, but the greatest scientific mind eve
r produced by Britain was also brought in to oversee the mint’s operations. In 1696 Sir Isaac Newton was appointed Warden of the Mint. The appointment came at a time of crisis both for the mint and for Newton. The prickly Lucasian professor of mathematics at Cambridge University was over fifty – elderly by seventeenth-century standards – and his masterpice, Principia Mathematica, in which he had set out his theory of gravitation and his three laws of motion, was already a decade behind him. His work on the calculus was also largely complete. Never a social animal, the lonely old bachelor was essentially marking time at Cambridge while searching for a new role to occupy a mind still at its peak.

  Meanwhile, the nation’s treasurer, William Lowndes, was faced with a severe shortage of silver coins – the result of a two-pronged assault on the currency. The first attack was mounted by coin clippers who shaved the old unmilled coins minted before the introduction of machinery. The second prong of the economic assault came from bullion dealers who melted down silver coins into ingots, shipped them abroad where they fetched higher prices than in England, and sold them to buy gold. In September 1695 Lowndes asked the curmudgeonly genius Newton to suggest a solution to the silver shortage.