by Jones, Nigel
He was brought to London and taken to the Tower, where, like the German spies, he was confined in the guardroom of the Casemates. Treated as a traitor and turncoat by his guards, and denied visits from his London sympathisers, Casement’s physical and mental condition dramatically deteriorated. He twice attempted suicide: once by ingesting curare, the South American paralysing poison which he had carried since the Putomayo; and once by swallowing nails he twisted from the walls of his cell. His guards were forbidden to speak to him, and he only discovered what had happened in Dublin when a Welsh guard, with sympathy for a fellow Celt, whispered the news that the Easter Rising had been bloodily suppressed.
Eventually, the Liberal prime minister, H. H. Asquith, was told of Casement’s desperate state and ordered him to be moved to an ordinary prison. His solicitor, Gavan Duffy, later a Sinn Fein leader, saw him in the Tower and was unable to believe that the tattered scarecrow was the elegant man he had known before the war. The prisoner was filthy and covered in bites from the bugs infesting his cell. He was still dressed in the sea-soaked clothes he had worn when he came ashore. His beard was matted, his eyes bloodshot and sunken, and he seemed unable to speak or concentrate. Deprived of his braces lest he attempt to hang himself, he was forced to hold his trousers up. The last of the Tower’s distinguished traitors, Casement’s deplorable condition revived the very worst of its traditions.
Tried at the Old Bailey, Casement received the inevitable sentence of a traitor in wartime: death. His sympathisers attempted to win a reprieve on the grounds of Casement’s pre-war humanitarian work. To counter the campaign, the government secretly circulated documents, the ‘Black Diaries’, revealing Casement’s obsessive homosexuality – then regarded as a moral, as well as a criminal offence. He was hanged at London’s Pentonville prison in August 1916, although his body was repatriated to Dublin in 1966. He walked to his execution, said the hangman, ‘like a prince’.
Between the wars another, albeit less distinguished, traitor who worked for the Germans was detained at the Tower – much to the curiosity of the press, and the public who continued to flock to within a few feet of the guardroom in the Tower barracks where the prisoner was held. Norman Baillie-Stewart was a disgruntled army officer of the Seaforth Highlanders, who resented authority and was attracted by the new Nazi regime which had come to power in Germany in 1933. On holiday in Germany, he seems to have fallen for a honeytrap set by the Nazi secret services, became entangled with a German girl, and agreed to become a spy.
He was quickly detected. At the time, Britain was still anxious to appease Hitler and Baillie-Stewart was an embarrassment. It was too awkward to put him on public trial, so the authorities threw him into the Tower. Held in the Wellington barracks in a guardroom with slit windows, Baillie-Stewart’s presence soon became known to the press who dubbed the anonymous prisoner ‘the Officer in the Tower’. He was eventually court-martialled, after which it was felt that the simplest thing was to expel Baillie-Stewart from the army and let him return to Germany. He became a German citizen and broadcast propaganda over Berlin Radio during the war. It was Baillie-Stewart’s posh voice, rather than the nasal tones of William Joyce, that first led a British journalist to dub him ‘Lord Haw-Haw’ – a nickname soon bestowed on Joyce. Baillie-Stewart’s German citizenship saved him from sharing Joyce’s fate dangling from a rope after the war, and he died in a Dublin bar in 1966.
Like that other London landmark St Paul’s Cathedral, the Tower survived the Blitz virtually unscathed. However, the fortress’s most enduring and best-beloved tradition – its population of ravens – came close to extinction. No one knows when the ravens first arrived at the Tower, although this biggest member of the carrion crow family may originally have been attracted by the quantities of rotting human remains left in and around the fortress after executions. All except one of the Tower’s dozen or so ravens were scorched or scared to death by the bombs. The sole survivor – a bird named Gyp – lived, maintaining the tradition that so long as ravens stay at the Tower, Britain will endure.
In the Second World War a single German agent, Josef Jacobs – who broke his ankle parachuting into a field in Cambridgeshire, and was soon captured – shared the fate of the eleven spies shot in the Tower in the First World War, thus becoming the last man to be executed in the Tower – to date. The Tower, however, played host to a rather more important parachutist than the sad figure of Jakobs. Rudolf Hess, Hitler’s deputy Führer and faithful dog-like follower, arrived unexpectedly in wartime Britain, parachuting out of a clear sky over Scotland in May 1941. Hess, always an eccentric figure, was apparently trying to regain lost favour with the Führer by undertaking a one-man peace mission to Britain so Germany would not have to fight a war on two fronts when it invaded Russia the following month. He may have been lured across in a British Intelligence ‘sting’ which suggested that he would meet members of a secret ‘peace party’ favouring a compromise deal with Nazi Germany. Arrested on his arrival, Hess never tasted freedom again, and his first place of confinement when he was brought to London from Scotland was the Tower.
The beetle-browed Nazi leader arrived at the fortress in an anonymous ambulance and was put in the Lieutenant’s Lodgings, the half-framed Tudor house where Lady Jane Grey and Guy Fawkes had been among those preceding him, and which Hess described as ‘charming’. During his time at the Tower, Hess watched admiringly as the fortress garrison drilled to pipes and drum with a precision he praised as ‘worthy of Prussians’. After four days, Hess was driven away – again by ambulance – to the first of several safe houses in London and Wales where he would spend the rest of the war. Tried at Nuremberg, he was sentenced to prison for life – and stayed in Berlin’s Spandau jail until the end of his days in 1987.
If Rudolf Hess was one of the Tower’s most infamous prisoners, the pair of young toughs who spent a week in the guardhouse of the Wellington Barracks in 1952 were almost equally notorious. Identical twins Reggie and Ronnie Kray were the East End wide boys who became London’s most notorious gangsters of the 1960s, building an empire in their native ‘manor’ based on murder and violence meted out without mercy to those who crossed them. The first of their many enemies was the Royal Fusiliers army garrison at the Tower, from which they absconded after assaulting a corporal on their first day as conscripts doing compulsory military National Service in the fortress.
Arrested at their mother’s house, the twins were brought back to the Tower where they spent a week sleeping on the bare boards of the Wellington Barracks’ punishment cell before absconding again. The boys, who had trained as boxers, were handy with their fists and soon made life too hot for even the army to hold them. After months of the same cat-and-mouse game of absconding followed by recapture, the Army gave them up as a bad job. In 1954 the Krays were freed to begin a very different career. The twins, in their brutal and violent ways, marked an appropriate full stop to the Tower’s thousand years as the world’s premier prison.
EPILOGUE
The words of an anonymous and tattered guidebook to the Tower, published at the dawn of the twentieth century, are as true today, when the old fortress is Britain’s bustling, buzzing high-tech tourist trap, as when they were written a century ago:
There is no spot in the British Isles where the memories of the past cluster more thickly than around the old grey walls, the picturesque towers and the dark and gloomy chambers of the Tower of London. The Tower is one of the most notable historic monuments in existence. For seven centuries it occupied a foremost place in all the transactions that affected the welfare of the kingdom and the personal fortunes of its rulers. As we tour the Tower there pass before us in memory’s sad review the shadowy figures of kings and queens, statesmen and warriors, prisoners, martyrs and those doomed to a cruel and bloody death. Every tower reminds us of a memorable deed, every chamber of a famous name. The great fortress is peopled once more with its victors and its victims; past times live again; history ceases to be a dull record; it becomes
a living, moving tale; men and women of other ages are mere names no longer, they are clothed with flesh and blood; we witness their triumphs, we hear their prayers and sighs, we note their bearing in hours of trial, of exaltation and despair, and we see them in the dismal torture chamber or on the terrible scaffold with the glitter of the headsman’s axe before their eyes. To know the story of the Tower of London is to be familiar with all the great actors in the drama of English history, for its ancient walls and weather-beaten stones are the links that bind generation to generation and age to age from the Norman conquest to the present day.
APPENDIX
THE TOWER’S GHOSTS
I thought long and hard about whether to include any material about the Tower’s unauthorised spectral visitors in a factual work of history. However, on hearing from a staff member that the Tower’s ghosts were the chief subject of enquiry by visiting tourists – and following the example of Alison Weir, who includes a substantial section on the posthumous appearances of Anne Boleyn at the conclusion of her superb study The Lady in the Tower – I decided that a few words on the subject would not go amiss.
I myself try to maintain an open mind on the existence or otherwise of supernatural phenomena, though I am increasingly inclined to believe that there is ‘something’ out there of which we have as yet imperfect and disputed knowledge and awareness. Of one thing, however, I am certain: that particular places that have been the scene of tragic, momentous and violent events carry a numinous ‘charge’ – and that no place in England, possibly nowhere else on earth, carries such a concentrated spirit of place as the Tower. In that sense, it is indeed a haunted and sacred spot. And I am convinced of one more thing: however sceptically we read these accounts, the people I refer to here were sure that they saw what they saw.
The first reported sighting of a ghost at the Tower came during the building of the outer curtain wall. Thomas Becket, the ill-fated martyr archbishop murdered in his own cathedral at Canterbury, who had once supervised earlier works at the fortress, allegedly appeared to the labourers building the wall.
Another saint and martyr – certainly the most pious monarch in English history – was Henry VI, who in 1471 was murdered as he knelt in prayer in his tiny private offertory in the Wakefield Tower – at the behest of Edward IV, and quite probably by the hand of the future Richard III. Henry is supposed to haunt the scene of the crime each year on the anniversary of the assassination: 21/22 May.
The most famous victims of violence at the Tower, the ‘little princes’ King Edward V and his brother Richard, Duke of York, who arrived at the Tower exactly twelve years after Henry departed it so violently, made frequent posthumous appearances in and around the Bloody Tower, both clad in white nightshirts and weeping softly. It is recorded that they shot arrows at targets in the Tower’s garden, so they may well haunt the place – though they may equally well have been murdered in the White Tower where their skeletons were found in 1674.
Another longer-term resident of the Bloody Tower, Sir Walter Ralegh, has been reported to have been seen sitting at the desk in the study there which is furnished as it was in the time when he wrote his History of the World. Sir Walter’s spirit has also been seen pacing the ramparts along Ralegh’s Walk where he took his exercise adjacent to the tower. He is said to bear a strong resemblance to his portrait, which hangs in the Bloody Tower.
Several of the women executed within the Tower’s precincts are said to revisit the scenes of their sufferings. The sightings of Anne Boleyn are so ubiquitous as to make even the most hardened sceptic wonder. They range from a spectral ‘grey’ or ‘white’ lady to an unseen presence in a room in the Queen’s House which lowers the temperature and makes animals and children scared. Anne is said to be seen on occasion without her head, or else with a black hole in place of her face.
Perhaps the most extraordinary sighting of Henry VIII’s second wife came in 1864, and led to the court martial of a soldier of the Tower’s garrison. When an infantryman of the Sixtieth Rifles saw a white figure glide from the Queen’s House, he challenged the headless apparition with a fixed bayonet, only to sense it gliding through him. After fainting in understandable terror, he was court-martialled for dereliction of duty, but was acquitted after other soldiers supported his story, and said they too had seen the ghost.
Other sightings of drifting white or blueish lights have been seen in locations such as the White Tower, St Peter’s Chapel and the Martin Tower, the scene of an extraordinary haunting in October 1817, recounted by Edmund Lenthal Swifte. He had been appointed keeper of the Crown jewels in 1814 when they were still kept in the vault from where Thomas Blood had stolen them. Many years later, in September 1860, Swifte recounted his scary experience in the journal ‘Notes & Queries’. He said he had been sitting at supper one evening with his wife, sister-in-law, son and daughter when ‘a cylindrical figure, like a glass tube’ appeared in the room, hovering in the air. ‘Its contents appeared to be a dense fluid, white and a pale azure, like to the gathering of a summer cloud and incessantly rolling and mingling within the cylinder.’ Passing behind Swifte’s wife, it paused over her right shoulder, at which she crouched down and cried, ‘Oh Christ, it has seized me!’ Utterly horrified, Swifte seized a chair and struck at the apparition – at which it disappeared.
The oddest haunting at the Tower was not a human spectre but that of an animal, and it occurred in January 1816, a few months before Swifte saw the cylinder. A sentry patrolling the paved yard outside the Jewel House saw a bear cross the yard and descend a flight of steps. The sentry was so scared that he fell in a faint, and regained his consciousness only to blurt out his story before dying.
SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
TOWER HISTORIES CONSULTED
The earliest general study of the Tower and its history is The History and Antiquities of the Tower of London: With Memoirs of Royal and Distinguished Persons by John Bayley (1830, available from Kessenger Publishing). The end of the Victorian era saw two substantial two-volume histories published very close to each other. The first was Her Majesty’s Tower by Hepworth Dixon (1900), swiftly followed by Lord Ronald Sutherland Gower’s The Tower of London (1902). An excellent semi-official guidebook from the same period, The Tower of London: An Illustrated Guide by Charles Morley and William Stead junior (1900), is full of nuggets of interesting information. Major-General Sir George Younghusband, a member of the Tower’s garrison, wrote a solid work, The Tower of London from Within (1918); while journalist Walter George Bell penned a more concise The Tower of London (1921, also available from Kessenger). There were few further histories published until R. J. Minney’s wide-ranging and informative overview, The Tower of London (1970). The eccentric historian A. L. Rowse took his own sometimes outlandish take on the Tower in The Tower of London in the History of the Nation (1973). By contrast, the distinguished popular historian Derek Wilson’s The Tower 1078–1978 (1978) – published to mark the Tower’s millennium – is serious and sensible, and the most recent general history of the fortress. The same year John Charlton of Her Majesty’s Stationery Office edited The Tower of London: Its Buildings and Institutions (HMSO 1978), incorporating invaluable information on the Tower’s architecture gleaned from twenteeth-century excavations and investigation.
Populist modern books focusing on particular aspects of the Tower include: The Tower of London: Cauldron of Britain’s Past by Plantagenet Somerset Fry (1990); Tales from the Tower of London (2004) by Daniel Diehl and Mark P. Donnolly; Shot in the Tower by Leonard Sellars (1997), on the executions there of German spies in the two world wars; and Daniel Hahn’s The Tower Menagerie (2003), a bright and breezy history. Even breezier are the short books of G. ‘Bud’ Abbott, a retired Yeoman Warder with an encyclopaedic knowledge of his former workplace, deployed in his very readable Tortures of the Tower of London; Great Escapes from the Tower of London; Ghosts of the Tower of London; and The Beefeaters of the Tower of London (all published in the 1980s).
The Tower of London: T
he Official Illustrated History (2000) by the Tower’s sometime official historians Edward Impey and Geoffrey Parnell is of course authoritative and packed with facts. In addition, the official guidebooks on the Tower published and regularly updated by Her Majesty’s Stationery Office are invaluable; see also HMSO’s The Royal Mint: An Outline History (1977).
SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
GENERAL WORKS CONSULTED
Chapter One: Beginnings
For William the Conqueror, his sons and successors, the conquest, Gundulf and the origins of the Tower I have relied on Robert Bartlett’s England under the Norman and Angevin Kings (2000); and David C. Douglas’s William the Conqueror: The Norman Impact upon England (1964). David Howarth’s 1066: The Year of the Conquest (1981); Frank McLynn’s 1066: The Year of Three Battles (1999); and Peter Rex’s 1066: A New History of the Norman Conquest (2009) were all also useful.
For Stephen, Matilda and Geoffrey de Mandeville see J. H. Round, Geoffrey de Mandeville: A Study of the Anarchy (1892); Jim Bradbury, Stephen and Matilda: The Civil War of 1139–53 (2000); R. H. C. Davis, King Stephen (1977); Marjorie Chibnell, The Empress Matilda (1991); and Nesta Pain, Empress Matilda, England’s Uncrowned Queen (1978).
