Tower: An Epic History of the Tower of London

by Jones, Nigel

  Furious, Edward put the luckless inhabitants of the border town of Berwick-upon-Tweed, where Balliol had been chosen king, to the sword. Edward’s army smashed the Scots at Dunbar in April 1296, seized Edinburgh, captured Balliol, and compelled him to abdicate. He, along with the Scottish Crown jewels and the Stone of Scone – the rock on which all Scottish kings were crowned – were borne in triumph to London, and Balliol and his son Edward were clapped in the Tower, together with a clutch of Scottish nobles taken prisoner with them.

  As a king, Balliol was lodged in some comfort. He and his companions were held for the first six months of their confinement in rooms off the great hall of the White Tower. The records of his captivity tell us that his personal household in the Tower included a chaplain, an assistant chaplain, a tailor, a pantry attendant, a butler, a barber and two chamberlains. Balliol was also allowed the use of two horses stabled in the Tower – with attendant grooms – for exercise riding in the ‘Tower liberties’ (the quarter of London immediately adjacent to the Tower). He was given a substantial daily allowance of seventeen shillings to maintain this staff. As time went on, Balliol’s value as a political prisoner decreased, and he suffered the indignity of being moved to the cramped confines of the Salt Tower – for a time called the Balliol Tower in his memory – and had his allowance slashed. Finally, after two years, his pleas to the Pope to secure his release bore fruit, and until his death in 1314 Balliol was a dependant of the pontiff in France.

  The Scottish thistle remained a painful thorn in Edward’s side. The ever-dormant fires of Scots nationalism next roared into flaming revolt under the inspired leadership of William Wallace, a charismatic giant with military skills matching his towering physique. Wallace beat an English army at Stirling Bridge in 1297, but was decisively defeated by Edward at Falkirk the following year, and turned guerrilla chieftain. In 1305 Wallace was betrayed by a close companion, Sir John Menteith, in return for a hefty English bribe. The giant knight was captured after a furious struggle in which he broke the back of one assailant and literally brained a second. Wallace was brought to London in chains. Unlike Balliol, the lowborn Wallace was not treated with the honours due a king, but as a common rebel and traitor.

  Wallace was held at the Tower – since Henry I’s reign the official state prison for traitors – before his trial at Westminster Hall. The court did not take long to condemn the warrior rebel, after a show trial in which the great patriot faced his judges standing on a high platform wearing a mocking laurel crown. The savage sentence was spelled out in its full horror, leaving nothing to the imagination:

  You shall be carried from Westminster to the Tower, and from the Tower to Aldgate, and so through the city to the Elms at Smithfield, and for your robberies, homicides and felonies … you shall be there hanged and drawn, and as an outlaw beheaded, and afterwards for your burning churches and relics your heart, liver, lungs and entrails from which your wicked thoughts came shall be burned, and finally, because your sedition, depredations, fire and homicides were not only against the King but against the people of England and Scotland, your head shall be placed on London Bridge in sight both of land and water travellers, and your quarters hung on gibbets at Newcastle, Berwick, Stirling and Perth to the terror of all who pass by.

  The same day, Monday 23 August 1305, this fiendish sentence – the standard punishment for treason since the eleventh century – was carried out, and Wallace endured the law’s full rigours. First, he was bound to a hurdle fixed to a horse’s tail, with his head dangling humiliatingly near the ground. Exposed to the jeers, taunts and filth flung by the braying crowds lining the streets, he made a slow journey to the scaffold, past the stations of the cross decreed in the sentence: Westminster, the Tower, Aldgate and finally Smithfield, where a high scaffold had been erected, the better for the crowds to enjoy this martyrdom. Wallace was first hanged from a gallows, slowly strangling. As the victim involuntarily urinated, defecated and ejaculated, the obscene jeering of the mob reached fever pitch. The executioner, a skilled torturer, slashed through the rope just before death supervened, reviving the insensible victim with a bucket of water. Wallace’s genitals were then sliced off and flung into a fire to be burned before his dying eyes. Next, a deep incision was cut in the abdominal wall of the agonised but still living man, and his intestines were slowly drawn out and consigned to the flames. Only when the executioner pushed his bloody hands into the chest cavity and ripped out Wallace’s still-beating heart and lungs did merciful death finally ensue.

  Even then, though, the butchery was not complete. The corpse was cut into four quarters, each with a limb attached, to be exhibited in the regions where Wallace had dared to rebel. Finally, the patriot’s head was hacked off, boiled in salt, and plunged in a preserving pail of pitch, before being spiked on London Bridge. The prolonged martyrdom of William Wallace was finally over, but the legend of ‘Braveheart’ was born. In the days and weeks following the butchery, more Scottish rebels were brought from the Tower to share Wallace’s fate, including the Earl of Atholl, the first nobleman to die for treason since the time of William the Conqueror. But the terror was all in vain. Seven months after Wallace’s death a new Scottish champion, Robert the Bruce, was crowned king at Scone. Bruce would avenge Wallace in spectacular style at Bannockburn, and the two Edwards – Longshanks and his woeful son – would never succeed in subduing Scotland.

  The story of the disastrous reign of Edward II – who succeeded his father in 1307 when the old warrior died of bowel cancer, in Cumbria – en route to yet another campaign to bring Scotland to heel, is told in Chapter Thirteen in the context of his nemesis Roger Mortimer’s dramatic escape from the Tower. Edward of Caernarvon’s awful reign – as so often in the Middle Ages – was sandwiched between those of two mighty and iron-fisted monarchs who brought their realm much needed stability and prosperity: his father, Edward I, and his son, Edward III.

  Edward III was no stranger to the Tower himself, having spent large parts of his boyhood there, as a semi-prisoner of his mother Queen Isabella and her lover Mortimer. One of his first acts as king in his own right was to make good the neglect and damage that both fortress and palace had suffered during his father’s chaotic reign. In particular he strengthened and heightened the southern curtain wall running along the river, and built a new tower, the Cradle, in its south-east corner to give a private river entrance for the king apart from the often crowded Traitors’ Gate under St Thomas’s Tower. The Cradle Tower was so called from a lift – the ‘cradle’ – used to hoist the royal barge from the river.

  Edward used the Tower palace as a residence and held his council meetings there. He equipped his rooms with the latest mod cons, including a four-poster bed and hot tubs in which he bathed weekly – an unheard-of luxury to his less hygienically inclined courtiers. Appropriately for a king in awe of Arthurian legend, Edward exalted the spirit of chivalry and founded the Order of the Garter as an exemplar of knightly values. He spared no expense when it came to equipping his court with the very best in costly clothes, tapesteries, regalia and all the trappings of a great king. He augmented the royal menagerie at the Tower with leopards, lions and a bear – and took the creatures on tour to York in 1334, as a status symbol to impress his unsophisticated northern subjects.

  At the opening of his reign the Tower’s defences left much to be desired. Arriving unannounced one night in December 1340 after a dangerous sea crossing from Flanders, the king was appalled to gain entry to the fortress without being challenged by the sleepy sentries, a dereliction of duty for which the serving but absent constable, Sir Nicholas de la Beche, was sacked and jailed. Edward ordered the sheriffs of London to fork out £40 ‘to be spent about the Tower of London which is in great need of repair’. As well as his work on the southern wall, and the building of the Cradle Tower, the king reconstructed his own residence, the Garden – later Bloody – Tower, adding a vaulted gateway and a heavy portcullis weighing two tons which needed thirty men to raise and lower it,
whose mechanism can be seen to this day.

  To oversee this work, Edward appointed a permanent master mason, Henry Yevele, who was paid twelve pence a day for his labours, along with a chief warder, John O’London, whose responsibility was the security of all the drawbridges, gates and portcullises in the fortress. Yevele was the pre-eminent English builder of his generation whose work can still be seen in Westminster Abbey and Westminster Hall, whose superb hammer-beam roof is his monument. In Canterbury Cathedral, Yevele sculpted the magnificent tomb of Edward III’s eldest son, Edward the Black Prince. Yevele is also thought to have carved the funeral effigy of Edward III himself, with its lifelike drooping eyelid – a characteristic of the dynasty – and flowing beard. He was a pioneer of the new Perpendicular style of architecture, with its soaring fanned vaulting and flattened arches, and his employment demonstrates Edward’s determination to make his kingdom a centre of culture and civilisation equal to any in the world.

  It was to the Tower that the young Edward had brought his new French bride, Philippa of Hainault, in 1328. Unlikely though it seems, the Tower proved an ideal honeymoon spot for the teenagers, and Philippa was soon pregnant. Her coronation was brought forward, and on 17 February 1330 she rode in state through cheering crowds from the Tower to Westminster Abbey to prepare for the sacred ceremony next day, wearing a green velvet tunic, a cape of cloth of gold, and a fur wrap to guard her against the chilly winter weather. Soon afterwards, she gave birth in the Tower to her first daughter, Blanche. Although the child soon died – infant mortality in medieval England was high, even in royal circles – the fecund couple went on to produce thirteen more children. Blanche was the second royal birth recorded at the Tower, the first in 1321 being Edward’s own sister, known as ‘Joan of the Tower’, the last child of the ill-matched Edward II and Isabella of France. Queen Isabella’s own life in the Tower until the arrival there of Roger Mortimer, the man who became her lover and consort, had been a lonely one during the frequent absences of her homosexual husband. We know that she whiled away her time by reading the romances among the 140 volumes in the Tower’s growing library until Mortimer’s advent converted her dreams of love and chivalrous knights into reality.

  Robert the Bruce’s death in 1329 left his son David II as king of Scotland at the tender age of five. He was married to Edward III’s younger sister, seven-year-old ‘Joan of the Tower’ the following year. A child king is an invitation for ambitious adults to plot, and soon Scotland’s nobles were squabbling over the spoils of power. Edward III encouraged the regal ambitions of Edward Balliol, son of John Balliol, the Scots king who his grandfather Edward I had imprisoned in the Tower. Supported by the ‘disinherited’ barons who had lost their lands to Bruce, and stiffened by a company of English archers trained at the Tower, Edward Balliol invaded Scotland by sea in the summer of 1332. He defeated the army of David II at Dupplin Moor, and was crowned king at Scone. Once more, as in Edward I’s time, Scotland was divided between a Bruce faction and a Balliol faction. With England under another King Edward backing Balliol, patriotic Scots were bound to side with the Bruce.

  In 1346, after King David II had grown to manhood and returned to Scotland to claim his kngdom, the Scots invaded northern England. Their aim was to recover the lands that a grateful Edward Balliol had granted Edward III after the English had helped him defeat David’s faction. Two months before the invasion, English longbowmen had shattered the French at Crécy, at the beginning of the conflict that would become the Hundred Years’ War, and now that famous victory was repeated over the Scots at Neville’s Cross outside Durham. Throughout the wars with Scotland and France the English super-weapon – the devastating longbows which won so many battles – were made and stockpiled in the Tower’s armoury. One storekeeper’s record noted that before Crécy there were 7,000 bows and a staggering 9 million arrows kept there.

  King David – and with him more than fifty Scottish knights and nobles captured at Neville’s Cross – was escorted south as prisoners by the triumphant English army. Londoners turned out in force to witness this humbling of Robert the Bruce’s son. On 2 January 1347 members of the city’s guilds lined the streets, and the constable of the Tower, Sir John Darcy, welcomed King David II – who, though a captive, was mounted on a magnificent black charger – into the fortress at the Lion Tower with all the honours due to a reigning, albeit defeated, monarch.

  Edward III himself was not on hand to witness this triumph. After Crécy, he had besieged the port of Calais – sending to Darcy at the Tower for a supply of giant crossbows from the armoury, to help him reduce the town. The Tower armoury was also where England’s first experimental gunpowder munitions were being made. In the year 1346–7 no less than two tons of gunpowder was refined there. Blockaded by land and sea, Calais was starved into submission after a siege lasting almost a year. Famously, the commander of Calais, Jean de Vienne, and half a dozen other leading citizens – or burghers – of Calais emerged exhausted and emaciated, with nooses around their necks to await the pleasure of the king who had promised to hang them all. Only the tearful pleas of his queen, Philippa, moderated Edward’s wrath and both the burghers and their town were spared. Calais would remain a treasured English possession for the next two centuries.

  De Vienne and the other Calais burghers joined their Auld Alliance allies King David and the Scottish lords as prisoners in the Tower. They endured captivity while the frustratingly long process of raising a large ransom for their release went on. Impoverished Scotland was equally slow to ransom their king after concluding peace with England at the Treaty of Berwick in 1357. Although they agreed to pay 100,000 marks for David’s freedom, and the king was immediately released, the sum was never raised in full. One of the Scots lords imprisoned in the Tower with David paid the supreme penalty for crossing Edward. The king had Graham Murdoch, Earl of Menteith, hanged, since the earl had previously paid homage to him and had gone back on his solemn oath. Just as it had not paid to thwart Edward I, so his grandson exacted a harsh price from those who double-crossed him.

  No sooner had David been freed, than another reigning king came to the Tower as a prisoner. This was Jean II – known as ‘Jean the Good’ – the king of France. Jean, along with his third son Philippe, was captured after his defeat at the battle of Poitiers in September 1356 by Edward III’s warlike eldest son, Edward the Black Prince. Jean’s detention was far from onerous. Feasted in the Black Prince’s red silken tent on the battlefield at Poitiers, with the chivalrous prince waiting on him personally, Jean’s initial ‘prison’ in London was the magnificent Thameside palace of the Savoy, home of Edward III’s luxury-loving younger son, John of Gaunt, a couple of miles upriver from the Tower.

  In stark colour contrast to King David’s coal-black courser, King Jean was riding a milk-white steed when he entered the city, whose fountains were said to have run with wine in delighted anticipation of the vast ransom which the French would pay for their king: 300,000 crowns, more than the French kingdom’s annual GNP. In the palatial surroundings of the Savoy, the French guests were frequently visited by King Edward and Queen Philippa who made Jean ‘Gret feest and chere’. Later he was transferred to Windsor Castle where he was allowed to hawk and hunt; and later still was held at a succession of other castles before arriving at the Tower in 1359.

  Records for his first day of captivity in the Tower show that Jean’s household were allowed seventy-four loaves, twenty-one gallons of wine, three sheep, one calf, a capon and twelve chickens; together with peppers, ginger, salt, herbs and mustard. The king’s amusements during his enforced leisure were necessarily more limited than he had been used to, though he visited the menagerie with young Philippe and generously tipped the keeper. Finally, under the 1360 Treaty of Bretigny, the two royals were released. When King Edward and the Black Prince brought the news to the Tower, Jean showed his gratitude by throwing them a grand banquet in his lodgings. He then returned to France to raise his own ransom. As security, another of Jean’s sons,
Louis of Anjou, agreed to enter English captivity as a hostage in his father’s and brother’s place until the ransom was paid. But when, after six months, an impatient Louis escaped from English custody in Calais with the ransom still unpaid, the unfortunate Jean – clearly a man of his word – came back voluntarily as a prisoner to England where he was greeted like a returning hero. He died, still an honoured and unransomed captive, in the familiar surroundings of the Savoy palace in 1364.

  The Hundred Years’ War, to which the Treaty of Bretigny had brought a temporary truce, resumed in 1369. Edward himself, following the death of the Black Prince and the demise from the Black Death of his beloved Queen Philippa, fell into senility and the clutches of a rapacious mistress, Alice Perrers. The old king died the following year of a stroke. It was a sad end to a fifty-year reign which had seen the consolidation of the English nation. The new king was the Black Prince’s ten-year-old son, Richard II.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  PLAGUE AND PEASANTS

  IN THE SUMMER of 1348 a ship docked at the Channel port of Melcombe Regis in Dorset. In the fleas infesting the fur of the black rats on board were the deadliest plague bacillae that have ever visited mankind. The Black Death emptied towns, wiped out villages, and struck at rich and poor alike, killing the wife and three of the daughters of King Edward III, along with swathes of his poorer subjects. Spreading swiftly inland from that fatal bridgehead in Dorset, the plague reached London by the autumn of the same year. Although the capital, by today’s standards, was still tiny – it was possible to walk right across London from the Tower to the city’s western wall at Farringdon in half an hour – it was a crowded labyrinth of cheek-by-jowl dwellings; a warren of filthy, mud- and shit-strewn streets, which were an ideal breeding ground for the pestilence.