Let's start a Ricardian tour of the
Tower of
London with a wonderful piece of Tower of London bunkum, courtesy of
Shakespeare's play, King Richard The Third.
In it, the young Edward V asks Buckingham: "Did Julius Caesar
build that place, my lord?"
Buckingham replies: "He did, my gracious lord, begin that place;
which, since, succeeding ages have re-edified."
Edward then goes on to asks if Caesar's building of the Tower is upon
record, or tradition. Buckingham replies: "Upon record, my gracious
lord."
No, it isn't, my gracious Lord.
Because Julius Caesar did not build the Tower. William the Conqueror
built a fortified camp on the site in 1066, on old Roman ruins. And it was
William who began the Tower of London.
He started building the famous White Tower in 1078, and it was
completed by his son Rufus about 20 years later.
Henry III (1216-1272) built a royal palace in the Tower grounds, and
massively expanded the Tower's defences. In 1241, he gave the White Tower
the first of the many coats of whitewash that led to its name.
From 1275 to 1285, Edward I (1272-1307), England's great castle
builder, did a huge amount of work. By the time he finished, most of the
walled and moated Tower complex as we know it today was in place, though
demolition and building and rebuilding continued on and off through the
16th century.
The first visit to the Tower that we know of by Richard was in June,
1465, when he was created a Knight of the Bath, at age 12.
We have some detail of the ceremonies, but where they took place, we
are not 100% sure. Put your money, though, on the royal chambers and the
Chapel of St. John, in the White Tower.
Surviving records note a dozen of Richard's official visits to the
Tower, and he must have been there often as well, as a guest at Edward
IV's palace. Edward used the Tower constantly, but he did only a little
building, putting up some outer walls at the southwestern Bulwark
entryway; they are long gone.
Richard followed the tradition of staying in the royal apartments in
the Tower, with Queen Anne Nevill, on the eve of his coronation, and going
next day in procession to Westminster to be crowned.
During his short reign, Richard commissioned repair work at the
Tower. We know he engaged one Thomas Daniel to conscript masons,
bricklayers and carpenters. Lord Hastings's head was supposedly chopped
off on a length of timber that was on site for repair work. That execution
was reportedly close to the Chapel of St. Peter ad Vincula.
Richard also built up an arsenal of artillery in the Tower, early in
1484. Records list the hiring of men to assemble "cannons and
necessaries for the king's ordnance." Some cannon were made at the
Tower, others imported.
But let's go back and start with Henry VI.
Edward IV had Henry held prisoner in the royal residence, which then
was attached to the Wakefield Tower.
The vaulted upper chamber in the Wakefield Tower contained, in a
recess in its thick walls, a miniature chapel known as the Oratory. It was
here in May 1471 that, according to tradition, Henry VI died. Today, a
stone tablet in the floor marks the supposed spot.
[Starting with the Lancastrian writer Dr. John Warkworth comes the
charge that Richard was the one who wielded the knife, or perhaps a sword,
that dispatched Henry. Various writers, documents and interpreters give
the date as May the 21st, 22nd, 23rd, or 24th of 1471. There is evidence
that on the 23rd and 24th, at least, Richard was at Sandwich, 70 miles
from the Tower.]
Let us move over now to the famous White Tower. The tower is 90 feet
from ground to battlements, and the walls are 15 feet thick at the bottom,
11 feet thick at the top. It looks square, but all four sides are actually
of different lengths.
It began life as a typical Norman castle, with a single entrance up
one level on the south face, approached by stairs that were easy to
defend.
In Richard's time, entry through that door took you into the
Constable's Hall. Behind that was the Constable's chamber, and, in the
opposite corner to the door, a spiral staircase.
Up that spiral, and on the then-top floor, was the king's council
chamber. Richard attended or held a number of meetings here, and it was
from the council chamber that William, Lord Hastings, was reportedly
dragged downstairs to his death.
When the White Tower was built, there were only two full upper
floors. Today there are three. In Richard's time the third floor was just
a surrounding gallery. We do not know for certain when today's top floor
was inserted. There is a record of a new floor being built in 1603 to
1605, and that is presumably it.
We'll come back to the White Tower later, but let's take a diversion to
talk about George, Duke of Clarence.
At the north, behind the White Tower and at the "back" of
the Tower complex, we find the Bowyer Tower. As the name implies, it
housed at some early stage the residence and workshops and stores for the
royal bowyer or bowmaker.
And it's here, supposedly, that Clarence was locked up by Edward IV,
until he was fatally upended into a barrel of Malmsey wine in February
1478.
Now, this barrel-of-Malmsey story has long been accepted as the next
best thing to gospel. But it's passed down only by tradition; there is
nothing on record. And we have to ask here: Why on earth the Bowyer Tower?
Wealthy state prisoners of the day were not locked up in rat-infested
dungeons -- or in armourers' workshops. They lived in some comfort, with
staff and servants. Henry VI, for example, was kept royally, in the royal
apartments, a home of considerable luxury.
So why, for George, the Bowyer Tower, isolated from the royal
residences on the south side of the White Tower? Why in a tower that was
not noted as a prison, and was part of a range of towers normally
associated with armour and weapons work, and later ordinance and
munitions?
Let us look for an answer. You can still see today, by the southwest
corner of the White Tower, the last traces of something called the
Coldharbour Gate. It was in Richard's time the entry to the main Inmost
Ward area, south of the White Tower.
We know from records that in the 1330s, Edward III had his own royal
apartments in this Coldharbour Gate. And that in 1341, these were taken
over by the queen and their son, the future Black Prince. Edward had
apparently moved his quarters to the south side of the Inmost Ward, to the
Lanthorn Tower.
So we know the Coldharbour gate was not just a simple gate. It offered
quarters of some luxury; and conveniently next to the royal centre of the
residence and White Tower. We also know that the upper floor of this
Coldharbour Gate tower did become a prison at some stage, and was called "The
Nun's Bower."
So here's a new pet theory: George, Duke of Clarence, was not held in
the Bowyer Tower at all, but in the Nun's Bower.
And some later historical misquote of "Bower", perhaps,
began the belief that George met his end in a barrel in the Bowyer Tower.
Credit where credit is due, and it was a suggestion from Yeoman
Warder Brian Harrison, an unofficial archivist of the Tower, that
developed this theory.
Let's go, at last, to the famous Bloody Tower, popularly described as
the place where the Little Princes, Edward V and Richard Duke of York,
were brutally murdered at the behest of Richard III.
The Bloody Tower, rectangular and rather squat, was originally built
by Henry III in the 1220s, right on the River Thames. Before new walls and
towers were built to the south in 1275-1285, the Bloody Tower was the main
water entrance to the Tower. You can still see the iron ring to which
boats were secured.
The Bloody Tower gateway was guarded by the substantial Wakefield
Tower. They are attached but, as far as we know, there was no direct
passage between them in Richard's time.
If you go into any old bookshop today, you'll probably find a copy of
a famed Victorian novel, The Tower of London, by William Harrison
Ainsworth. He finished it in 1843, in a campaign to save the decaying
Tower, and to have it opened to the public. A great read, its story is set
in 1553, only 70 years post-Richard.
Ainsworth's book is riddled with novelist's licence, and some
historical errors. But Ainsworth does include much accurate information on
the architecture and history of the Tower.
And Ainsworth carefully calls the Bloody Tower "the supposed
scene of the murder" (my italics) of the princes and adds: "
Tradition assigns it to this building." Later on, he says: " . .
. The tradition is more than doubtful".
It certainly is.
For a start, this tower during the Ricardian era was known as the
Garden Tower, and it was still being called the Garden Tower some 50 full
years after the Princes disappeared. The name was not given as the Bloody
Tower until at least 1597.
In 1604, in a speech of welcome to James I, the chaplain of the
Tower, William Hubbocke, referred to it as the tower that "our elders
termed the Bloody Tower, for the bloodshed, as they say, of those infant
princes of Edward IV."
But the Tower's official guidebook of 1975 suggested that the change
of name had nothing to do with the princes. Rather, the book says, the
name stems from the suicide there, in 1585, of Henry Percy, 8th Earl of
Northumberland; and that was 100 years after the Princes disappeared.
Ainsworth is certainly more cautious than most authors before and
since, who simply state as a bald fact that the princes were murdered in
the Bloody Tower.
One such writer in more modern times was Major-General Sir George
Younghusband, keeper of the Jewel House at the Tower. He wrote in 1926: "The
chamber in which this murder was committed has been roughly reconstructed,
and may be seen on the upper floor."
That is, on the third floor of the Bloody Tower building: gatehouse
on the first level, portcullis mechanism and a chamber on the second
level, and the "murder scene" above that on the third.
In 1950, the resident governor of the Tower, Colonel E. H.
Carkeet-James, wrote a new history. He, too, refers to the two storeys
above the gate passage, and the Princes' murder on the upper of those two
storeys; i.e. on the third level.
And this is what the Yeomen Warder tour guides will tell you today.
Problem is: In 1483, when the Little Princes were supposedly there, the
Bloody Tower was only a two-storey building: guardpost at ground
level, and then only one level above the archway. There was no third floor
and there was no upper chamber.
Early Tower records are pretty rare and full of gaps, but we know
with certainty when the entire Garden Tower building was increased in
height, and the third floor inserted: in 1605 and 1606, to accommodate the
imprisoned Sir Walter Ralegh and party.
That is, not until 120-plus years after the Princes disappeared.
In the chamber that did exist in the Princes' time, we can imagine
today's bare stone walls covered in heavy plaster, whitewashed, and
perhaps painted decoratively. Some wall hangings, too. The floor (as we
now know) tiled in green and yellow, with patterns on the tiles that
included flowers and fleurs de lis. A fire in the fireplace, fresh bread
baking in the small oven. Quite fit for a royal prison. . . .
Well, maybe. This chamber was indeed used as a prison in later years.
But we have no evidence that this chamber, next to the portcullis
mechanism in the Garden Tower, was used as a place of confinement in the
princes' time.
And the Bloody Tower gateway -- the key entrance to the outer ward
and indirectly to the inmost ward -- must have been an area of very heavy
traffic, hardly suited for a royal prison.
It's the same argument as for George: Surely it's more likely the
princes were held, in some luxury, in or closer to the royal apartments.
And there are indeed some clues that indeed point in other directions
for the princes' final accommodation:
The Great Chronicle of London, written in the early 1500s,
notes that the boys had been seen shooting and playing in the Garden of
the Tower.
The Bloody Tower, as we have seen, was initially called the Garden
Tower after the nearby Constable's Garden. It's easy to conclude the Great
Chronicle meant that garden.
But the Great Chronicle also says the boys were "within the
king's lodging". At that time the king's lodging was in the Lanthorn
Tower. And in that area was "The Privy Garden".
A more likely garden, and a more likely area, I suggest, in which to
house royal state prisoners.
Younghusband's book tells a different story: That after the Princes
were slain in the Bloody Tower, they were "dragged down the narrow
spiral stone stairs, which still may be seen, and which lead to a large
vaulted dungeon beneath the Wakefield Tower."
And later in his book Younghusband repeats that the Little Princes
were buried in the basement of the same Wakefield Tower.
Carkeet-James, too, gives the same popular version: The bodies were
taken down the stairs from the Bloody Tower and buried in the basement of
the Wakefield Tower.
More bunkum! And, from Tower officials, quite inexplicable.
The stairs from the Bloody Tower do not go down to the east to the
basement of the Wakefield Tower, or, indeed, to any large vaulted dungeon.
Instead, they descend to the small guardroom of the Bloody Tower, cut into
the west wall of the Wakefield Tower.
And there is no evidence of any entrance, through which bodies could
have been carried, from that guardroom to the basement of the Wakefield.
In addition, it hardly seems likely that two bodies could have been
buried under the stairs in the duty-guardroom without the next shift of
guards noticing fresh digging and asking awkward questions.
[This staircase, by the way, has long been filled in, and the stair
used by Bloody Tower visitors today comes out to the west, onto "Ralegh's
Walk".]
In a list of buildings and their names that was prepared in 1641, by
Yeoman Warder William Franklyns, this entry appears:
"The Wakefeld Tower, or Bluddy Tower, against the Watergate, a
prison lodging".
It looks from that as if Franklyns viewed the Wakefield Tower as
the Bloody Tower; and what we now call the Bloody Tower as the Water Gate.
So there's a good question: Were The Princes, at the end, imprisoned
not in what we call the Bloody Tower today, but actually in the Wakefield
Tower where Henry VI was murdered?
The basement of the Wakefield Tower could indeed be described as a large
vaulted dungeon, and is served by stairs from above in the Wakefield
Tower. So perhaps this is where the Princes' bodies were first buried, as
Younghusband says.
If so, not for very long, I suggest. This basement still floods when
there's a good high tide in the Thames a few feet away.
Thomas More says this is how the princes were buried:
"After the wretches perceived them . . . to be thoroughly dead,
they laid their bodies naked out upon the bed and fetched Sir James to see
them. Who, upon the sight of them, caused those murderers to bury them at
the stair foot, meetly deep in the ground under a great heap of stones."
But More does not specify in which tower or towers they were held
prisoner, or murdered, or buried, or reburied by his anonymous priest. Nor
does any other near-contemporary writer.
Dominic Mancini says: "But after Hastings was removed, all the
attendants who had waited upon the king (Edward V) were debarred access to
him. He and his brother were withdrawn into the inner apartments of
the Tower proper . . . "
Those are my italics, and to me it all suggests that immediately
before their fateful disappearance, the Princes were held somewhere in the
Inmost Ward of the Tower. They may perhaps have been in the Bloody Tower
briefly, but, wherever they were, they were moved into the Inmost Ward
before their deaths.
On the south face of the White Tower today are wooden stairs up to
the southern entrance door. There were wooden stairs there in William and
Rufus's time, too. But not in Richard's era.
Then, there was a stone forebuilding, which contained stone stairs that
went up to the White Tower door. And it was under these stairs, in 1674,
that the bones of two smallish bodies were found.
These, of course, are the bones now buried in Westminster Abbey under
the names of the Little Princes.
The identification in 1674 was highly dubious. And the so-called "expert"
re-examination of these bones in 1933 leaves a lot to be desired.
The 1933 investigators used the best medical knowledge then available
to conclude that, if these were indeed the princes, they must have died
during Richard's reign.
To quote one of the investigators: " . . . We can say with
confidence that by no possibility could either, or both, have been still
alive on the 22nd August 1485, the date of Henry VII's accession."
Now, however, we have much better forensic knowledge of bone
development, and instead can say that if these were the bones of the
princes, they could very well have been alive when -- and for some
time after -- Henry VII took the throne.
You may find it hard to ignore the coincidence of More's story that
the princes were buried under a staircase, and the discovery in 1674 of
these bones, under a staircase. On the other hand, More was the only one
to speak of burial under a staircase. And there is one old report that the
bodies were sunk in the Thames.
Now, we also have a strange report, dated in 1647 (i.e., before 1674),
of the discovery of the bones of two children at the Tower, in a sealed-up
room off a passage to an area described as "The King's Lodgings".
That unauthenticated account was accompanied by a map, showing the
sealed room. But, as Helen Maurer noted in two excellent articles in The
Ricardian some years ago, this map fits with nothing we know today
about the Tower.
The stairs drawn on the map are labelled as "stairs leading out
of Coldharbour to the King's Lodgings". But the map does not fit
Coldharbour Gate. Nor does it seem to match the outline of the old
forebuilding that contained the stairs under which the bones were found in
1674.
The forebuilding actually gave access to two sets of stairs: One to
the main entry door to the White Tower. And a tiny, private staircase that
went to the Chapel of St. John. This small stair is cut into the 11th
century wall.
Some confusing early reports suggest the bones were found under these
latter stairs, but it would truly have been impossible to bury anything
under them, so the bones are invariably presumed to have been under the
main stairway.
Where were these "stairs leading out of Coldharbour to the
King's Lodgings"? We do know that in the late 1500s, the whole Inmost
Ward area was all referred to generically as "Coldharbour". But
if anywhere there used to fit that map of the sealed room, we have today
no idea what, or where, it was.
Whose bones these were in the little sealed room, and what became of
them, we know not. And there have been other discoveries of bones and
reports of bones over the centuries in the Tower, and, again, we have no
idea of whose they were either.
One possible clue, though horribly slim, is a part of the discovery of
the bones under that White Tower staircase in 1674.
One account, of unknown reliability, says pieces of velvet were found
with these bones. And even in that era, velvet was not owned by your
average Londoner. Velvet meant money; and that implies the bones were of
two people of status.
If these were the bones of the princes, the discovery under the
staircase suggests they might well have been imprisoned in the White Tower
itself. And that's entirely possible. It, too, was called on to serve as a
state prison.
Alison Weir, in her 1992 book The Princes in the Tower, says:
"Contemporary sources indicate that the Princes were imprisoned in
the White Tower."
Again, that's bunkum: No contemporary sources indicate any such
thing. They are all silent on which tower.
Bloody Tower, Wakefield Tower, White Tower, Lanthorn Tower, somewhere
in the Inmost Ward?
We have no definitive answers. But don't bet on the traditional
Bloody Tower. Or on the stories of those Yeomen Warders. . . .
[Donald MacLachlanis a Ricardian in Vancouver BC. This article is based on his presentation to the Richard III Society of the U.S., in Seattle, in September 1995.]