Hatton, writing in 1708, describes Tower Hill as a place where there are “many good new buildings mostly inhabited by gentry and merchants.”
TOWER OF LONDON
By W. J. Loftie
Pictorial Agency.
BLOCK, AXE, AND SCAVENGER’S DAUGHTER
Romance has been more busy with this one building than with all the other edifices of England put together. A volume might be filled with the stories founded in the imaginations of Harrison Ainsworth and his predecessors and imitators. The benefactors, about whose doings he has so much to tell, were first appointed here by Edward VI., to the number of fifteen from the Yeomen of the Guard. The interesting drawings made by George Cruikshank of chambers in towers now long since restored away or otherwise destroyed have been mixed up with fictitious pictures of Lady Jane kneeling at a prie-Dieu on a straw-strewn scaffold, while a hangman brandishes an axe; or of the burning of a sorcerer in the confined space of Tower Green, with flames which would have been sufficient to consume the buildings of the whole fortress. Many as were the inhabitants from time to time, many as were the prisoners, great or small, no “executions,” that is, no putting to death by process of law, ever took place within the precincts, except those of four ladies of the court of Henry VIII. and one other under Queen Mary, while political considerations and fear of a popular movement in favour of the culprit led to the death in the same semi-private place of one of Queen Elizabeth’s some time favourites, Essex. To believe the tale-writers, the Tower and its courtyards were ordinary places of public punishment. It is often remarked as a matter of surprise that no blocks, no axes have remained like jewels and inscriptions in various stone towers. But if we ask why there should be any, we get no answer. The block long shown is probably an ordinary chopping block for faggots and of no great antiquity. The axe is of Roman make, and is known to have been brought here in 1687. Some curious correspondence is in existence as to the preparation of a block by the Sheriff of Middlesex for the decapitation of Lord Lovat. The culprit was so old, obese, and infirm that it was proposed to arrange for the provision of block at which he could kneel without lying down, and some measurements were, it is believed, furnished to the Sheriff with this object. I well remember as a child being permitted, in the old Tower Armoury, to lay my head on Queen Anne Boleyn’s block, as it was called. But Queen Anne, we know, had no block, and was kneeling up when the French executioner, sent by Lord Wentworth, then Governor of Calais, cut off her head by the sweep of a sword. Almost as unfortunate as Ainsworth’s anachronisms are those of innumerable historical writers who confound the Constable with the Lieutenant and both with the Tower Major.
Things are very different now, from the visitors’ point of view, to what they were years ago or less. In those days the so-called “Horse Armoury” was the principal object of attraction. This was built as a long wooden shed on the south side of the White Tower, and was filled with fictitious figures on which some of the ancient armour was shown as that of successive English kings from the Conqueror to James II. We emerged from this gallery by a staircase which led us up into the crypt of the Norman chapel through a window in the apse. It was impossible for any one who had not previously undergone architectural training to recognise the crypt in “Queen Elizabeth’s Armoury,” as this chamber was called. A priest’s cubicle in the side wall was pointed out as “Sir Walter Raleigh’s dungeon,” but the Queen’s robe, covered with mock jewelry, was an object of far greater interest. At every point make-believe was the rule, and when we at last visited a great hall, the roof, side-walls, and pillars of which bristled with swords, bayonets, flint locks, and other similar adornments, our powers of recognising that we were traversing the rooms of the White Tower, which, before the reign of Henry III., formed the principal residence of Rufus, Beauclerc, and other descendants of the Conqueror, were completely obscured. We could perhaps see that we had been made parties to a fiction which dwarfed the most flagrant of Ainsworth or even Victor Hugo, but better counsels prevailed when Hepworth Dixon pointed out, in his two volumes entitled Her Majesty’s Tower, the great educational value of a visit to these ancient precincts and the difficulty, under existing arrangements, of obtaining any clear ideas. By degrees everything has been changed. The visitor can pause at every step and can obtain without difficulty the fullest information. In one particular, a serious mistake was committed. The inscribed stones in the Beauchamp Tower were removed and grouped in a single chamber, and it was not perceived till too late that thus they lost more than half their historical value and all that kind of value which may be termed sentimental. There are inscriptions in all the inhabited buildings, and it is satisfactory to know that the mistake has not been repeated, while the example, coupled with the modern aspect of the Beauchamp Tower, forms a useful lesson for would-be architectural restorers.
The Tower of London formed the principal feature of a system of fortification by which William the Norman proposed at once to defend London from without and to prevent the Londoners from rebellion against his authority. The other castles are generally supposed to be those of Wallingford and of Berkhampstead. Here, as a feature of Alfred’s rebuilt Roman Wall, there was a bastion of extra size, and there are supposed references to a building which may have stood on the site afterwards covered by the Norman Keep, or possibly a little lower on the line of the Roman Wall, where the Wakefield Tower, much altered, now serves for the preservation and exhibition of the crown jewels.
The Norman Keep has been known at least since the time of Henry III. as the White Tower. It was commenced in or near 1078, the architect being Gundulf, Bishop of Rochester, who seems to have laboured here, at Rochester Cathedral and Castle, at West Malling, and probably in other places until well on in the reign of Henry I. When, in 1108, he died, his works here and elsewhere were still uncompleted. He probably left the Keep, to which there was no entrance except by a system of scaffolding and ladders connected with the Cold Harbour Tower and the Wakefield Tower by strong walls enclosing a narrow triangular court. The precinct surrounding this fortress gradually grew partly within, partly without, the City boundaries, until it extended over the Outer Ward, as far as the Bell Tower to the west, the Devereux on the north, and the Martin on the east. It included the parish church, afterwards known as St. Peter’s, and the Lanthorn Tower on the south-east, part of an extension of the royal apartments. Adjoining the palace there was a little later, say, in the reign of Henry III., an open space or “garden” south of the White Tower. What had formed the Outer Ward of the Norman Castle now became the Inner Ward of still more extensive precincts under Richard and John. Bishop Longchamp took in a further tract to eastward. King John in 1210 and later years strengthened himself against the Barons of Magna Charta by increasing the outer fortifications, and work went on constantly during the long reign of Henry III. and did not add to his popularity with London citizens. Under Edward I. we first hear of the Barbican, afterwards, down to 1834, known as the Lion Tower. There are two interesting views of this building in Ainsworth’s book: one evidently a careful woodcut of Cruikshank’s drawing on the spot before the destruction of the building; the other an etching with imaginary figures. Outside the defences at this corner was the so-called Conning or Con Tower, a building of timber, opening into a narrow passage. It led out at right angles to the north. The wooden gate, on this site, still faces this way, and it is probable that not only the Tower gates but the City gates at Newgate and Bishopsgate were similarly planned, a point too often forgotten.
As early as 1347 gunpowder was made in the Tower for the French wars of Edward III.—“pulvis pro ingeniis suis,” as we read. The Salt Tower must have received its name from the storage of saltpetre. In 1381 Richard II. was lodged here for safety from Wat Tyler’s mob; and here they seized the Archbishop Sudbury and murdered him. It was here in 1399 that Richard II. surrendered the crown to Henry IV. Jack Cade’s mob attacked the Tower unsuccessfully. It was attacked again ten years later with a similar result, and after this period the history of the fortress as a fortress may be said to terminate.