Ghosts of the Tower of London (10 page)

Tower Green

A central garden, sheltered by plane trees, is known as Tower Green. It is bounded on the east by the White Tower and the Chapel Royal of St Peter ad Vincula forms its northernmost side. To the west squats the Beauchamp Tower, while its southern border is the Queen’s House, originally the Lieutenant’s Lodgings – since 1530 the residence of the officer in charge of the Tower of London.

In such a pleasant oasis it is easy to imagine the royal levees, the parties and merrymaking which must have taken place here during the centuries when the Tower of London was a Royal Residence. Yet one small enclosure on Tower Green constantly reminds us that this is where the private scaffold stood, the five-foot high wooden platform, draped in black, strewn with straw. There, witnessed by the Royal Court and dignitaries of the City of London, perished those whose only crime was to incur a king’s wounded pride or be thought a dangerous rival.

Before 1536 executions, even of women, were not infrequent; infidelity too, was hardly a rarity. Yet the punishment of death for alleged unfaithfulness – and that in the person of a Queen of England – was unimaginable. That such an event
did
happen has never ceased to horrify and appal subsequent generations.

Queen Anne Boleyn

Anne Boleyn, second wife of Henry VIII, had been queen two brief years when she was accused of infidelity and treason and sentenced to be ‘either burnt or beheaded on the green within the Tower as his Majesty in his pleasure should think fit’. Confined in the Lieutenant’s Lodgings for four days, she was led out to the private execution site. Strangely enough she was to be beheaded by the sword – a rare weapon of execution in English history, but infinitely preferable to the axe. The latter was a cumbersome and ill-balanced weapon, its primitive design often necessitating more than one stroke.

Anne mounted the steps and knelt upright, there being no block when the sword was employed. The French headsman, black clad, stepped forward. Her attention being distracted by his assistant, Anne mercifully failed to see the flashing blade as, with one stroke, her head was severed. In accordance with custom, the executioner held her head high – and the gathered assembly gasped in horror as the eyes and lips continued to move! Her pitiful remains were ensconced in an old arrow chest and buried beneath the altar in the Chapel Royal of St Peter ad Vincula on Tower Green.

It is hardly surprising, therefore, that through the centuries apparitions purporting to be those of the doomed queen have been seen, even by those most prosaic and level-headed human beings, soldiers of the British Army.

In 1864 a sentry of the King’s Royal Rifle Corps on duty at the Queen’s House saw, through the swirling river mist, a white figure. He challenged and, receiving no reply, attacked – only to drive his bayonet through the spectre! Being found in a state of collapse, he was court-martialled but two witnesses at the window of the Bloody Tower corroborated his story and he was acquitted. The phantom figure was seen by other sentries in later years, gaining the sentry post an evil reputation.

Council Chamber in the Queen’s House

Still in the last century, a yeoman warder swore under oath to seeing a bluish form hovering, a shape which then seemed to move towards the Queen’s House, whilst in 1933 a guardsman reported seeing a headless woman floating towards him near the Bloody Tower.

Within the Queen’s House, long a prison for royal and important personalities as well as being the Lieutenant’s residence, many an eerie experience has been reported. Across the ancient timbered floors walks the ‘Grey Lady’. Only a woman will ever discover her secret – for she has never been seen by a man. In the 1970s the figure of a man in mediaeval dress was seen drifting along an upper corridor, whilst in the same decade firm footsteps were frequently heard ascending a rear stairway. So convincing were these sounds that eventually two residents investigated. On hearing the measured tread, one resident went instantly to the foot of the stairs, his companion going to the top. Slowly they moved along the stairs – to meet no one but the other!

Late in 1978 an American guest in the house heard religious chanting. It was midnight, and the faint music and voices continued for some minutes. Assuming it to be from a radio or similar equipment, she mentioned it casually the next day – only to be told that no music had been played as late as that. The same slow religious chant had been heard on a previous occasion by a resident passing by the house.

The Gunpowder Plot conspirators

A room adjoining that in which Anne Boleyn passed her last few days has a particularly unearthly atmosphere, being noticeably colder than other rooms in the house. A peculiar perfumed smell lingers in the air, and such is the brooding menace of the room that no unaccompanied girl or young child is ever permitted to sleep in it, for in the past those who were have woken to feel that they were being slowly suffocated!

Across Tower Green is the Chapel Royal of St Peter ad Vincula, and an instance some years ago of lights burning therein led the Officer of the Guard to investigate. Peering in through the window, he stared unbelieving at the spectacle confronting him. Along the aisle, between the tombs, moved a procession of spectral figures, knights and their ladies. They were led by a female who, he averred, resembled Anne Boleyn, and they moved towards the altar beneath which her pitiful remains had been buried centuries before. Even as he stared the vision faded and the chapel darkened, leaving the officer alone in the deepening shadows of Tower Green.

Of the women who perished so violently on the private scaffold, surely none suffered more terribly – nor more undeservedly – than Margaret Pole, Countess of Salisbury. Over seventy years of age, innocent of all crime, the countess was slain as an act of vengeance by King Henry VIII. The countess’ son, Cardinal Pole, from the safe haven of France, reviled Henry’s religious beliefs. Retribution – and the axe – descended on his mother. On the scaffold the countess proclaimed her innocence. She refused to kneel over the block and she challenged the axeman to ‘remove her head as best he could’. Pursuing her around the block, the axeman is said to have literally hacked her to death in a welter of blood.

Chapel Royal, St Peter ad Vincula

Over the centuries it seems as if her proud Plantagenet spirit still shrieks defiance to the sombre skies. On the anniversaries of her brutal execution, her ghost is reported to run round the scaffold site pursued by the spectral axeman, the bloodstained axe brandished aloft.

One night in 1975 personnel in the Waterloo Block overlooking the Green were roused in the early hours by the sound of piercing screams. This was confirmed by men on duty in the Byward Tower, and a few nights later the guardsman patrolling the rear of the Waterloo Block also reported that just before dawn he too heard high-pitched screaming from the direction of the Green. Nothing was found.

Could it really have been the death cries of the hideously mutilated countess?

The Beauchamp Tower