Tour of the Tower
London, the capital of England and one of the most famous cities in the world, is home to many historical sites and tourist attractions, few of which can rival the nine-hundred-year-old Tower of London, either for its historical significance or its morbid tales of death, torture and royal execution. Tonight, the crowds waiting at the entrance are even larger than normal, for it is October 31, and a special late-night tour is being given in honor of the holiday. A large assortment of tourists from around the globe eagerly awaits the arrival of the traditionally clad yeoman warder who will lead them on a ghostly tour of the infamous Tower.
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Welcome, ladies and gentlemen, to this special Halloween tour of the Tower of London. I am a yeoman warder, a guard of the Tower, as well as a humble storyteller and something of a poet. I also have the pleasure of being your host for this evening, and, as such, I invite you to step back in time with me as we wander through the pages of Britain's history.
To begin with, the Tower of London, despite what many people think, is not a single structure. It is, in fact, eighteen acres of towers, courtyards, battlements, houses and other buildings, which are collectively referred to as the Tower of London. The Tower is roughly square in shape with two lines of defensive walls enclosing the great White Tower. Placed at intervals along the inner wall are thirteen smaller towers, and along the outer wall are six towers on the river face and two bastions at the northeast and northwest corners.
The Tower can trace its origins back to William the Conqueror, who defeated the Saxons in the eleventh century. William discovered the remains of ancient Roman walls here along the Thames River—relics of a fortress built by the Roman Emperor Claudius a thousand years earlier—and decided it was a strategic area to build a fortress. In 1078, William started building a vast stone structure within the shelter of those ancient Roman walls. That edifice, which would serve as both a fortress and a royal palace, became known as the White Tower. That original tower, or keep, has changed very little in more than nine hundred years and forms the nucleus of the Tower of London.
By the end of the sixteenth century, the Tower no longer served as a royal residence; it was being used solely as a gaol for prisoners of state and as quarters for various government offices. Today, the Tower of London is a popular tourist attraction that houses many national treasures including the crown jewels. The White Tower serves as a museum in which we display old weapons, suits of armor and many instruments of torture. But on this tour, ladies and gentlemen, we will not concern ourselves with crowns, jewels or swords. Tonight, we will visit the more macabre sites of the Tower and learn its horrific secrets.
Near the main entrance where we are standing is the site of the Bulwark Gate where prisoners were handed over to the Sheriff of London for incarceration. Prisoners of the Tower were often taken to Tower Hill just outside these walls where a permanent scaffold once stood. There, the unfortunate souls were hanged, beheaded or in some other way executed, after which their bodies were often brought back into the Tower for burial.
During World War II, a sentry posted here claimed to have seen several men in old-fashioned uniforms bearing a stretcher between them that held a decapitated body, the head of which had been carefully tucked between one of its arms and its torso. Before the sentry could sound the alarm, however, the ghostly cortege vanished before his eyes. When he later recounted his experience, the guard accurately described the uniforms worn by the sheriff's men whose duty it had been to return the prisoners' corpses to the Tower for burial.
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The first point of interest on our tour is the Bell Tower, so named because of the belfry above it. Here in the Bell Tower, Sir Thomas More, one of the most respected men in England, was imprisoned in 1534 by King Henry VIII for refusing to acknowledge either Henry's divorce from his first wife, Catherine of Aragon, or his claim to be the supreme head of the Church in England. More was executed in July 1535, and his body was buried in St. Peter's Chapel. Here, too, young Princess Elizabeth was held prisoner by her sister, Queen Mary Tudor, for fear that Elizabeth would plot to usurp her throne.
I'd like to call your attention to the battlements across the courtyard to your right. In 1592, Sir Walter Raleigh, a favorite of Queen Elizabeth I, incurred her royal wrath. The gentleman was thus sentenced to a brief stay here in the Tower. Then in 1603, Elizabeth died, and James I became king. James feared Raleigh was plotting against him, so he had Sir Walter imprisoned here again, this time on charges of treason. So great was Raleigh's popularity, though, that James did not risk executing him.
In 1616, the former favorite was released, and he sailed off to the New World in search of gold. Sadly, Raleigh disobeyed royal orders and plundered Spanish possessions, so in 1618, in response to Spanish demands for vengeance, James had him beheaded for his old treason charges. Those battlements across the way adjoined Sir Walter's apartments, and during his imprisonment, he often strolled along them. On moonlit evenings his ghost is said to be seen still strolling along what has come to be known as Raleigh's Walk.
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We are now entering Saint Thomas's Tower, named after Thomas Becket, one-time chancellor and good friend to King Henry II. Their long-standing friendship came to an abrupt end when Henry, hoping to quell his problems with the Catholic Church, appointed Becket Archbishop of Canterbury. However, once in that exalted position, Thomas chose to place his allegiance to God and the Church above that to his friend, the king.
Outraged, Henry was said to cry, "Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?" Upon hearing this, four of the king's knights stabbed the archbishop to death in his own cathedral. Although it's true that Becket was not murdered here in the Tower, his ghost is said to be very active within these walls. Legend has it that King Henry III, grandson of Becket's old friend, ordered a new tower be built on this site. Twice, as the structure neared completion, it was destroyed: once by a storm and the second time for no apparent reason at all. A priest later claimed to have seen the ghost of Thomas Becket battering down the tower's stonework with his mighty cross.
Let us now move on to the Wakefield Tower.
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It was here in the Wakefield Tower, on the night of May 21, 1471, that thirty-nine-year-old Henry VI, a devout but decidedly weak monarch, was stabbed to death while praying in his private chapel. Henry, who had become king at the tender age of nine months, was of the House of Lancaster and was imprisoned in the Tower during the War of the Roses by King Edward IV of the House of York. Edward, who gained the throne when he was nineteen, was believed to have ordered the assassination of his predecessor ten years later. Since his death more than five hundred years ago, King Henry's ghost has been seen several times in this chapel. The poor man's hands are said to be still folded in his final prayer.
If you will follow me, ladies and gentlemen, we will now visit one of the most popular sites in the Tower.
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Welcome to the infamous Bloody Tower. Twelve years after the murder of Henry VI in his Wakefield Tower chapel, the man who allegedly ordered his death, King Edward IV, died at the age of forty-one, leaving his twelve-year-old son, Edward V, to inherit the throne.
Unfortunately, the new king and his younger brother, Richard, Duke of York, were placed under the guardianship of their uncle Richard, Duke of Gloucester, who also had his eye on the throne. The elder Richard had his nephews declared illegitimate and sent them to the Tower. He was then crowned King Richard III. I'm sure all of you are familiar with that notorious monarch, who was thus immortalized in the play by William Shakespeare,
"A bloody tyrant and a homicide; one raised in blood, and one in blood established; one that hath ever been God's enemy."
What happened to the two princes after that is one of the great mysteries in English history. Neither boy was ever seen again. Although no definitive proof was ever uncovered to link Richard to their disappearance, legend has it that the hunchbacked king had Sir James Tyrrell murder the two lads here in this tower. Hence the name: the Bloody Tower. Sir James's agents were said to have found the two boys asleep in their beds. One was smothered with a pillow, and the other was stabbed to death. As Shakespeare later wrote,
"The tyrannous and bloody deed is done, the most arch act of piteous massacre that ever yet this land was guilty of ... Look back with me unto the Tower. Pity, you ancient stones, these tender babes whom envy hath immured within your walls! Rough cradle for such little pretty ones."
Allegedly, the murderers then carried the boys' bodies down the narrow stairway and buried them under a pile of rubble in the Tower basement. Some accounts claim that their corpses were later dug up by Sir Robert Brackenbury and reburied in a hidden spot close to the White Tower.
It is interesting to note that in 1674 the skeletons of two boys were unearthed near the White Tower, and in the belief that the grave of the princes had at last been found, the reigning king ordered the bones be moved to Westminster Abbey where they rest to this day. And, as you might well suppose, the two princely ghosts have been spotted, clad in their nightshirts, standing hand in hand near this tower and elsewhere on the grounds.
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We'll pass through the Bell Tower again on our way to the Beauchamp Tower. The battlements that connect these two towers are supposedly haunted by a spirit dressed as a young cavalier and believed to be the Duke of Monmouth. King Charles II, who had no lawful heir, acknowledged his illegitimate son, James Crofts, and appointed him Duke of Monmouth. Charles's brother, James, was next in line for the throne; but James, a Catholic, was not very popular with the Protestants in England, who plotted to have Monmouth declared legitimate and named Charles's legal heir.
However, as much as Charles loved his son, he refused to change the line of succession, and his brother became King James II in 1685. Monmouth made a futile attempt to claim the throne, and James sent him to the Tower, where the duke was beheaded for treason.
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We now enter the Beauchamp Tower, the principal prison for persons of high rank, although many of the other towers also contain dungeons and cells in which noted personages were confined. It is said the Beauchamp Tower is haunted by the spirit of Guildford Dudley.
When Henry VIII died, his son Edward, the product of Henry's third marriage to Jane Seymour, became king. Unfortunately, Edward was a sickly boy who had contracted tuberculosis, and his reign was destined to be short. As the young king lay dying, John Dudley, Duke of Northumberland, arranged a marriage between his own son, Guildford, and Lady Jane Grey, grandniece of Henry VIII. The duke then convinced Edward to name Lady Jane his successor. Despite Dudley's machinations, upon the young king's death, the people recognized Henry's older daughter, Mary, as the rightful heir to the throne. Queen Jane and her husband, Guildford, were both imprisoned in the Tower and later beheaded. Young Guildford's ghost is sometimes seen weeping in Beauchamp Tower just as he did in life while awaiting his execution.
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If you look to your left, between the Chapel and the Tower Green below, you will see a small paved area where a chopping block was once erected for the beheading of those whose public execution on Tower Hill might have incited the people to riot. The names of the six persons who died on that spot are inscribed on the board there. They include three queens of England (Anne Boleyn, Catherine Howard and Lady Jane Grey) as well as Queen Elizabeth's supposed suitor, Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex.
The site was also witness to one of the most bizarre and cruelest executions ever conducted in the Tower of London. When the Tudors gained control of the English throne, the last female Plantagenet—the previous ruling family—was Lady Margaret Pole, the Countess of Salisbury. Although the countess was seventy years old and posed no threat to his rule, Henry VIII nevertheless ordered that she be beheaded for treason. Proud to the end, the countess refused to bow her head over the chopping block. Instead, she fled from the executioner, who chased her around Tower Green, swinging his mighty axe at the running prisoner. Eventually, he hacked the unfortunate woman to death in his pursuit. This grisly event is reenacted by the ghost of Margaret Pole each May 27, the anniversary of her death.
From here, you have an excellent view of the famous Tower ravens. There have always been ravens at the Tower of London, and they can usually be seen strutting about the Green. Let me warn you, these birds are not very friendly, and it is unwise to touch them or to attempt to feed them. If you look closely, you can see that their wings have been clipped to prevent them from flying away. This is a result of a curious superstition, dating from the time of Charles II, which prophesizes that when there are no longer ravens in the Tower, both the White Tower and the British Commonwealth will fall.
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We are about to enter the Chapel of Saint Peter ad Vincula, which, when translated, means "St. Peter in Chains." Under the flagstones of this little chapel, the oldest royal chapel in England, most of those who died on Tower Hill and six of the seven executed on Tower Green were laid to rest. This is where Sir Thomas More is buried. Also interred here is Anne Boleyn, of whom Shakespeare wrote,
"Beauty and honour in her are so mingled that they have caught the king: and who knows yet but from this lady may proceed a gem to lighten all this isle?"
Henry VIII's second wife fell from his royal favor when, rather than bear him a male heir, she presented him with a second daughter, Elizabeth. Not only was Henry disappointed with the offspring of his marriage, but also his eye had already fallen on Jane Seymour, and he wished to rid himself of his wife to pave the way for his marriage to Jane. Anne was charged with and later found guilty of adultery and treason. At her request, a swordsman was brought from France to perform the execution, and the twenty-nine-year-old queen was beheaded on Tower Green in 1536.
Her ghost has since been spotted both with and without its head in many parts of the Tower, including this chapel, where it has been seen leading a procession of ghostly lords and ladies who pace the floor and then vanish.
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The next stop on our Halloween tour is the Martin Tower. It was here one night in 1815, at the stroke of midnight, that a sentry spotted, at the entrance to this tower, a huge bear that reared up at him. The frightened guard tried to kill the bear with his bayonet, but the weapon passed through the animal and became lodged in the oak door. Upon his encounter with the supernatural, the sentry fainted and was unable to tell his story until he regained his senses. The following day, however, the young man died—some say of fright. The appearance of a ghostly bear is not as farfetched as it would seem. King Henry I was the first of many English monarchs down through the centuries to have kept a menagerie at the Tower of London. The zoo, which had housed lions, tigers, zebras, monkeys, elephants and bears, was not eliminated until the year 1835 when a lion is said to have mauled a soldier.
One of the most unusual apparitions to appear in the Tower was seen only once, and to this day no one has been able to explain it. It occurred in 1817, when the keeper of the crown jewels, one Edmund Lenthal Swifte, was dining with his family here in the Martin Tower, where the jewels were kept at that time. Swifte's wife looked up from her dinner to see what appeared to be a glass vial, roughly three inches in diameter, filled with swirling white and blue liquids. The vial hovered above the table and then moved behind the woman. Swifte, who feared for his wife's safety, flung a chair at the tube, which instantly disappeared and has never been seen again.
Another ghost said to haunt the battlements around the Martin Tower is that of Henry Percy, the Earl of Northumberland. In 1605, Percy was sentenced to the Tower for his part in the Gunpowder Plot, the infamous conspiracy to blow up Parliament and, along with it, King James I. Percy was held prisoner here for sixteen years, but eventually, he was able to buy his freedom. Although Percy left the Tower very much alive and with his head still firmly attached to his shoulders, his ghost is nevertheless said to stroll along those battlements where in life the earl took his customary walks.
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We now enter the Salt Tower. When we visited the Beauchamp Tower, I told you about Lady Jane Grey and her husband, Guildford Dudley. Lady Jane was the queen of England for only nine days when she was imprisoned here in the Salt Tower. Before her death, Jane was forced to watch from her prison window the execution of her husband out on Tower Hill. Later that same day, February 12, 1554, the fifteen-year-old queen faced the axe herself on Tower Green. As recently as 1957, on the anniversary of her death, Lady Jane's ghost has reportedly been seen on the roof of this tower.
As we head back to the main entrance, we will walk along this wall and back through the Wakefield Tower. In the 1960s, a sentry patrolling the walls between the Wakefield Tower, which is straight ahead, and the Lanthorn Tower, in back of us, came upon an intruder. The sentry later claimed a man wearing a cloak appeared from the shadows. The sentry bravely attempted to challenge the cloaked man—that is until he noticed that the mysterious stranger did not have a head!
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And that concludes our Halloween tour of Her Majesty's Tower of London. I hope you found it both entertaining and educational. Many of you will someday look back on this evening's entertainment and ask yourself, "Is the Tower of London really haunted?" Well, let me ask you this: is life nothing "but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more"? Or perhaps "unnatural deeds do breed unnatural troubles." Do you believe that "when we have shuffled off this mortal coil," we simply "die; to sleep; no more; and by a sleep to say we end the heartache and the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to"? Or are some of us "doom'd for a certain term to walk the night"? If there indeed are more things on heaven and earth than are dreamt of in Horatio's philosophy, then surely nowhere would we be more likely to find restless spirits than in these stone walls of the Tower of London.
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After bidding farewell, the yeoman warder bowed, and before the eyes of the astonished tourists, vanished like the phantoms that were said to haunt the Tower. It was only after his startling disappearance that some of the visitors surmised the true identity of their host: the self-proclaimed "humble storyteller and something of a poet" was none other than the Bard of Stratford-on-Avon himself, a man considered by many to be the greatest writer in the history of the English language. Their host on the tour of the Tower of London that wondrous Halloween night had been none other than the immortal William Shakespeare.
This story was based on actual reported hauntings at the Tower of London.
Salem is so intrigued by the Tower of London that he once put a tower room on our saltbox.
