Ghosts of the Tower of London (12 page)

From the very roof to the dungeons, the White Tower has witnessed violence and death. Kings and princes, lords and ladies, even common soldiers looked their last on the world there. During the Civil War a Royalist soldier was hotly chased up the spiral stairs by a Roundhead. Having lost his sword, desperately the Royalist dropped to his knee and, tripping his pursuer, seized him and hurled him through the window, the Roundhead crashing to his death on the Broadwalk below.

Centuries earlier, in 1215, the country had groaned beneath the harsh rule of King John. But, tradition has it, he had more to concern him than the suffering of the masses. Despite being married, he was determined to possess Maud FitzWalter, ‘Fair Maud’, daughter of Baron FitzWalter of Baynards Castle. She repulsed his every advance and so, not to be denied, he had her abducted and locked up in the round turret of the White Tower. Her father protested so vehemently that the king exiled him and his family to France and then, all obstacles removed, continued his assault of Fair Maud’s virtue! Though caged and helpless, Maud defied him – whereupon he caused a poisoned egg to be sent to her in her food. She ate it – and died there in the bitter cold loneliness of the high turret.

Much later her father managed to return home, to find the country on the verge of revolution. Mustering the other barons to the cause, he led them against the King, ultimately forcing him to endorse the Magna Carta. And so it could be said that the document which gave the English their freedom originated from a poisoned egg in the round turret of the White Tower. Perhaps Maud’s life was not sacrificed entirely in vain.

High on the battlements in 1234 Gruffydd Prince of Wales sought to escape by lowering himself from the roof by means of a rope. But the rope broke and Grufydd plunged to instant death, being found the next morning ‘his head and neck crushed between his shoulder blades’. His son, Llewelyn, also a prisoner, later escaped and continued to fight the English. Captured in 1282, he was executed and his head was mounted on a spike and exhibited in London while bells rang and crowds cheered. It was adorned with an ivy wreath, thus fulfilling the ancient prophecy that a Welsh prince would one day be crowned in London! The head was then attached to a turret of the White Tower, near the spot from whence his father had previously fallen to such a hideous death. Truly a warning to all, that escape didn’t always mean freedom.

Even the top floor, domicile of the Royal Family, was not spared its share of horror. In the adjoining Council Chamber one day in June 1485 Richard, Duke of Gloucester (later King Richard III) presided at a Council Meeting. Requiring to dispose of Lord Hastings, he accused him of treason and witchcraft. ‘By St Paul!’ he exclaimed, ‘I will not dine till I have seen thy head off!’

The wretched Hastings was hustled down the spiral stair and out on the Tower Green. A log of timber served as the block; without trial or comfort of clergy his head was struck off – then shown to Richard ere he sat down to his midday meal.

Most violence, however, occurred in the dungeons. Here, underground, in the reign of Edward I, six hundred Jews, men and their families, were crowded together in appalling conditions. Public opinion strongly against them, they were accused of coin clipping, scraping metal from the rims of coins, a profitable crime. They were imprisoned for some months, and no fewer than two hundred and sixty-seven were eventually hanged.

Chivalry may have played a part on the mediaeval battlefield; it certainly had no place in the torture chamber of the White Tower. If a prisoner could be forced to divulge secrets which might incriminate a rival, it mattered not whether that prisoner was man or woman. In 1545 Anne Askew was accused of heresy by those who hoped that her confession would implicate Henry VIII’s Queen Katherine Parr. Anne, a highly intelligent woman, was a zealous Protestant, a dangerous belief to hold in those bigoted days. She had been a friend of the queen, who held the same religious opinions – and so powerful enemies struck.

Arrested, imprisoned, questioned at length by Bonner, Bishop of London, she parried his accusations with shrewd responses. But it availed her little; she was sent to the White Tower and there, in the flickering lantern-light of the torture chamber she was racked unmercifully for over an hour. She confessed nothing. At last, her limbs stretched beyond endurance, almost senseless with agony, she was carried back to her cell. A short time later she was taken on a cart to Smithfield. There, before a vast crowd of callous, jeering onlookers, she was burned to death at the stake. But someone, somehow, felt pity for the poor tortured woman, for a bag of gunpowder inserted among the fiercely burning logs brought her merciful release from the searing flames.

Gunpowder provided relief for Anne Askew; it spelt only doom to Guy Fawkes and his companions in 1605. Caught attempting to blow up the Houses of Parliament, Fawkes was yet another whose tongue – and joints - were loosened as the rack pulleys creaked and the ropes stretched remorselessly. After half an hour’s excruciating torment he was a broken man, naming names, admitting everything. The other plotters were rounded up and the ringleaders were put to that most terrible of deaths, being hanged, drawn and quartered.

If the supernatural atmosphere of the White Tower was a stage, then we would certainly not want for a cast of players. Those already mentioned are but a few who would claim star parts, and even if their apparitions failed to materialize, surely the intensity of their sufferings could well echo down the centuries, just as their screams must have reverberated along the passages and stairways of their grim prison.

Instances have been reported by sentries patrolling at night, instances of hearing screams and stifled cries of pain through the heavy doors at the base of the White Tower. And not so many years ago, soldiers reported seeing the huge shadow of an axe spreading across Tower Green, to stand menacingly erect, silhouetted against the walls of the White Tower.

A body of men with even stronger nerves than the sentries - if such were possible - are the Department of the Environment Custody Guards, one of whose many tasks is to check security within the White Tower during the night hours. In the brooding silence of the vast shadowy rooms it is not easy to dismiss a creaking noise as just an old floorboard, that cold breath of air as just a draught - especially when all windows are tightly secured! And as for a faint smell of incense, once experienced – in 1975 – by a security warden – rubbish! Though remembering that high prelates did attend the interrogation of heretics under torture, why should there not be the ghost of the aroma of incense?

Of
course
there couldn’t be eyes watching malevolently through the slits in that knight’s helmet – but what would
you
see if you turned round really quickly?

Oh, no, the White Tower at night is no place for the faint of heart – in any century.

The Martin Tower

The Martin Tower

At the north-east corner of the inner wall stands the Martin Tower, a tower of many ghostly legends. At the turn of the century it was reported that a figure in white walked the upper room, to the great alarm of the yeoman warders - and even in these times there are some workmen who are reluctant to work inside it, such is its eerie atmosphere. George Boleyn, Anne Boleyn’s brother, was imprisoned in the Martin Tower, later being hanged, drawn and quartered on the vengeful instructions of King Henry VIII.

Yet one man whose spirit is reputed to linger around this tower is one who was acquitted and released! The intrigue of the Gunpowder Plot in 1605 involved many names. A few are well known, such as Guy Fawkes, Ambrose Rookwood, Father Gerard; many are less known, Winter, Wright, Kay. One such latter was Thomas Percy, an active conspirator in the Plot, a man related to Henry Percy, ninth Earl of Northumberland. Upon the discovery of the plot, charges were laid against the earl, alleging his complicity. And so this elderly and learned gentleman was confined in the Martin Tower for no less than sixteen years. That his confinement was not particularly arduous is evidenced by the fact that his family lived with him for some of that time, and that he formed a scientific and literary circle within the Tower of London, other erudite prisoners, among them Sir Walter Raleigh, visiting the Martin Tower to debate the finer points of the times with the ‘Wizard Earl’ as he was known.

The Earl was subsequently released in 1620 after paying a £30,000 fine, truly a fortune in those days. Whilst confined he took his exercise on ‘Northumberland’s Walk’, the battlements each side of the Martin Tower. Although he suffered neither torture nor sudden death, his ghost was seen, late in the last century, by sentries who, terrified, would only mount guard in pairs. Not only that, but the innocent passer-by has on occasion felt unseen hands push him – or her! - down the steps by the Martin Tower.

Not all happenings end so mildly. Indeed one poor unfortunate snapped beneath the strain of such an experience – and paid with his life. He was a sentry who, in January 1815, was on patrol before the arched doorway of the Martin Tower (then the Jewel House). Midnight was striking when, to his sudden horror, he saw the figure of a huge bear emerge from beneath the door. Desperately he lunged with his bayonet, only to have the weapon pass through the shape and embed itself in the oaken door. His comrades, hearing the commotion, hurried to the spot – to find him stretched unconscious on the ground.

Questioned the next day by the Jewel House Keeper, Mr Edmund Lenthal Swifte, the sentry was ‘trembling and haunted by fear, a man changed beyond recognition’. Within two days he was dead-during which time his bayonet still pierced the ancient timbers of the door he had died guarding.

And such are the quirks of fate that it was Lenthal Swifte himself who was involved in one of the eeriest emanations ever to occur within the fortress. One cold night in October 1817 the Keeper of The Crown Jewels was having supper in the dining room of the Martin Tower. The three doors to the room were closed and heavy curtains shrouded the two windows. His family, consisting of his wife, their son aged seven, and his wife’s sister, sat round the oblong table, his wife facing the fireplace. Two candles illuminated the scene, though doubtless a fire burned bright as well. Mrs Swifte raised a glass of wine and water to her lips, then suddenly exclaimed, ‘Good God! What is that?’ Swifte looked up – to see what appeared to be a glass cylinder about three inches in diameter floating above the table; within it bluish-white fluids swirled and writhed. It hovered then, moving slowly along, passed behind his wife. Immediately she cowered, covering her shoulder with both hands. ‘Oh Christ!’ she shrieked. ‘It has seized me!’ That she felt
something
was evident, for no mirror faced her, only the fireplace, yet her sister and son saw nothing of the appearance. Mr Swifte, filled with horror, sprang to his feet and hurled his chair at the hovering apparition - to see the tube cross the upper end of the table and disappear in the recess of the opposite window.

Later Mr Swifte, an intelligent and highly responsible official, set down a detailed report of the occurrence. Never once when recounting it during later years did he change a single detail – or deny the terror which imprinted itself on his memory that dark night in the Martin Tower.

Not all visitations in that locality are, however, hostile. South of the Martin Tower and connected to it by Northumberland’s Walk lies the Constable Tower. Once, long ago, the residence of the Constable of the Tower of London, it is now the home of a yeoman warder and his wife.

Over the years since 1973 a ‘presence’ has manifested itself. This spirit has nudged the wife’s arm so determinedly that the pen spluttered sideways across the paper! The occupants of the Constable Tower are immediately aware of its arrival, because it is heralded by a strong ‘horseman’ smell, a compounded odour of leather, of sweating horseflesh, - that of a rider who, having just dismounted after a long hard gallop, strides into his home.