It was during the reign of Henry III. that the newly-built tower over the Traitor’s Gate twice fell. The first time this happened was on the night of St George’s Day (23rd April) in 1240, and on the same anniversary in the following year the structure again sank into the moat. According to the historian Mathew Paris, the spirit of St Thomas à Becket was the cause of both these mishaps, the Saint returning from the home of the Blessed to the rescue of his beloved and persecuted London citizens, who had looked on the ever-increasing fortifications and massive walls of the royal stronghold, with much the same distrust and irritation as the fortress of the Bastille caused the Parisians.
Four years later, the son of the great Welsh chieftain and patriot, Llewellyn, was killed whilst attempting to escape from the White Tower in a similar manner as that by which Bishop Flambard had succeeded in ending his captivity. Mathew Paris relates that the unlucky Welsh prince was discovered at the foot of the White Tower with “his head thrust in between his shoulders.” The rope by which he had hoped to escape had broken, and he had been dashed to death in the fall.
During his long and agitated reign Henry III. was frequently obliged to take shelter within the Tower from his rebellious subjects. When Simon de Montfort and the Barons rose against his rule and encamped themselves near Richmond, Henry took refuge in the Tower with his eldest son Edward’s wife, Eleanor of Provence. Edward had been fighting Llewellyn in Wales, and hearing of the dangerous situation of his wife and father, hurried back to London, throwing himself into Windsor Castle. Eleanor of Provence made an attempt to join her husband at Windsor, but the London citizens were strongly on the side of the rebels, and when the Princess’s barge reached London Bridge on its way down the river it was stopped by a rabble who pelted it with stones, mud, and rotten eggs, and heaped the foulest abuse upon its royal occupant, who was forced to take shelter once more in the Tower. Edward is believed never to have forgiven the Londoners for this treatment of his wife, and his harshness to the city during his reign was probably due to this incident.
Two years afterwards the mutinous Barons seized the Tower, which they occupied until the Battle of Evesham, in 1264, enabled Henry to return to his favourite stronghold. Once again the King was driven into war by Gilbert de Clare, Earl of Gloucester, who summoned Otho, the Papal Legate, then within the Tower, to surrender it into his hands, declaring that the Tower “was not a post to be trusted in the hands of a foreigner, much less of an ecclesiastic.” The Legate defied the Earl to do his worst, and refused to surrender either the fortress or himself into Gloucester’s keeping. This priest appears to have been not only brave, but somewhat rash, for although the city was at that time in the power of de Clare, he left the Tower when a siege was imminent, and preached a sermon at St Paul’s, inveighing against the Earl. A siege ensued, during which, according to Matthew of Westminster, a number of Jews, then within the Tower, defended one of its wards with great courage, and the King’s army arriving opportunely, the fortress was saved from falling into the hands of the Earl.
CHAPTER III
THE EDWARDS
At the close of Henry’s troubled reign we find the Tower in the keeping of the Archbishop of York, a post he held while the young King, Edward the First, was absent upon an expedition in Palestine. Although this monarch was not often at the Tower, he added to its buildings, and strengthened its fortifications, which, after the two sieges they had lately undergone, no doubt stood much in need of repair, and it was during his reign that the fortress became the recognised place of incarceration for State prisoners, and the principal prison in the realm. The dungeons beneath the White Tower were crowded with hundreds of unfortunate Jews in 1278,—a strange way, it seems, of repaying these people for the courage and loyalty some of their brethren had so recently displayed in the reign of the King’s father, in defending the same fortress against the King’s enemies. These Jews—there were some six hundred of them—were imprisoned in the Tower on the charge of clipping and defacing the coin of the realm.
The prisons were often filled after Edward’s campaigns, many captives being brought from Wales and from Scotland. Amongst the latter, after the defeat of the Scottish army at Dunbar in 1296, was King Baliol, with the Earls of Athol, Sutherland, Menteith, Ross, and others, Baliol’s son, Prince Edward, with other Scottish chiefs and knights, being added to the former batch of State prisoners in the following year.
It was in 1305 that one of the greatest heroes of that or any other period was brought a prisoner to London, and one would give much to know with any certainty whether William Wallace was imprisoned or not in the Tower, and where he spent the last days of his glorious life. But it is a matter of uncertainty whether he ever entered the walls of that fortress. He appears, when brought to London, to have been lodged in a citizen’s house in Fenchurch Street, whence he was taken to his trial at Westminster Hall; there he was impeached, and, as Holinshed has it, “condemned and thereupon hanged at Smithfield.” Had Wallace been imprisoned in the Tower, Holinshed would probably have recorded the fact. The manner of the hero’s death will ever remain a stain upon England and upon the memory of his judges. He was treated worse than a common felon; dragged in chains to the gallows, and killed with every detail of barbarous cruelty. Three other distinguished Scottish prisoners were imprisoned in the Tower in 1306, after the battle of St John’s Town, before their execution. These were the Earl of Athol, Sir Simon Fraser, and Sir Christopher Seton. Their heads were placed on the turrets of the White Tower.
Not only did the dungeons of the Tower hold the King’s enemies in this reign, but also many of his clergy and judges. Of the former was the Abbot of Westminster, with a following of eight of his monks, who were imprisoned upon the charge of having robbed the King’s Treasury to the amount of one hundred thousand pounds—a prodigious sum in those days. Among the judges imprisoned in the Tower at this time (1289) were Ralph de Hengham, Chief Justice of the King’s Bench, and the Master of the Rolls, Robert Lithbuy, with others, charged “with criminal partiality in the discharge of their offices”; they were only released after paying heavy fines.