Ghosts of the Tower of London (9 page)

Mint Street, Outer Ward

The Bloody Tower

Bloody Tower Arch

The Inner Ward is the area surrounding the White Tower, and is bordered by the inner wall. For many centuries, when Royalty resided in the White Tower and the Royal Apartments, the inner ward was for the exclusive use of Royalty and the nobles of the court. Also within the protection of the inner wall were stored the nation’s armoury, the State Papers, and the Regalia and Jewels. During these centuries there was only one entrance to the inner ward, a heavily guarded archway beneath a gatehouse known originally as the Garden Tower (it overlooked the gardens of the Lieutenant’s Lodgings) but later as the Bloody Tower. Situated only yards from Traitors’ Gate, it served admirably as a prison for princes and knights, bishops and judges.

Here, in Queen Mary’s reign, languished Thomas Cranmer, Archbishop of Canterbury, Bishop Latimer of Winchester and Nicholas Ridley, Bishop of London. Opposing the Pope’s supremacy, they were condemned as heretics and later burnt to death at Oxford.

Here, in the same reign, John Dudley, Duke of Northumberland, was confined for attempting to make his daughter-in-law, Lady Jane Grey, Queen of England. He perished beneath the axe on Tower Hill, the vast crowd cheering as he died.

The Bloody Tower

Judge Jeffries, the Hanging Judge of the Monmouth Rebellion in 1685, eventually caught by the mob, was placed in the Bloody Tower for his own protection – where he drank himself to death with copious draughts of brandy.

The Bloody Tower also heard the whispering of evil conspirators, when Sir Thomas Overbury survived fearful poisoning for over four months. He had sought to persuade his friend Robert Carr not to marry the vicious Countess of Essex, but he under-estimated her influence and malice. Finally her poisonous concoctions took effect, and in the Bloody Tower he died a horrifying death.

But if the stones could speak, surely they would lament the deaths of the two little princes in 1483. Confined, it is said, in the upper chamber of the Bloody Tower, the two small boys, twelve-year-old King Edward V and his nine-year-old brother Richard Duke of York, were taken from their mother’s care into the custody of their uncle, Richard Duke of Gloucester. Placed in the Bloody Tower, they were never seen again. The country could not continue without a ruler, and so the Duke of Gloucester became King Richard III.

Tradition states that one boy was smothered, the other stabbed to death. Skeletons discovered in 1674 beneath an external stairway of the White Tower were assumed to be theirs.

And so their two small ghosts, hand in hand, clad in white nightgowns, have been seen around the Bloody Tower, a sight for pity and compassion rather than terror.

Sir Walter Raleigh

Be they innocent children or worldly adults, the Bloody Tower spared none, and surely no one proved more brave than Sir Walter Raleigh. An adventurer, a scientist, the favourite of Queen Elizabeth, he could do little wrong. But the next monarch, James I, had no time for men of Raleigh’s sophisticated calibre. Accused of treasonable plotting, Raleigh was soon the occupant of the Bloody Tower, a confinement which lasted thirteen years. He would stroll on Raleigh’s Walk, the battlemented wall adjoining his prison; dressed always in the height of fashion, he was popular with the people, with rich merchants, ambassadors and learned men. But as the years dragged by, the cold of the stones and the dampness of the river mists sapped his vitality, and rheumatism racked his ageing joints. King James, anxious to conclude a peace pact with Philip of Spain, acceded to Philip’s vengeful demand for Raleigh’s death, Raleigh who had plundered so much gold from Spanish galleons and colonies.

Eventually, on 24th October 1618, after years of deprivation, Raleigh was awakened by a yeoman warder and told his fate. Peter, his valet, attempted to help him to prepare, to comb his hair. Raleigh, undaunted to the end, retorted: ‘Let them comb it that shall have it!’ Taken to Old Palace Yard at Westminster, he met death bravely as the axe descended.

His phantom, then, surely has greater claim than any other to return to the scene of his long imprisonment. Over the years it has been reportedly seen flitting noiselessly through the forbidding rooms of the Bloody Tower; seen too on moonlit nights by those whose duties take them past Raleigh’s Walk, his ghostly figure floating along the battlements.

In Raleigh’s time the Walk extended to the Lieutenant’s Lodgings. Now part of those battlements are incorporated in houses built a century or so later, houses occupied by yeoman warders and their families. And since 1976 one wife in particular will always have cause to remember that her bathroom is positioned where Raleigh promenaded. Deciding to have a bath, she leant over to turn on the taps. Next minute a hand brushed gently over the small of her back! Instinctively she straightened up, turning to chide her husband – then caught her breath as she remembered that he was Watchman for the night and had left the house hours ago! However, yeoman warders’ wives are not given to swoons or the vapours; ‘Oh, stop it, Raleigh!’ she exclaimed and, undaunted, continued with her ablutions!

Incidents such as this are not restricted to nighttime, nor do they occur only to officials or residents of the fortress. In August 1970 a young visitor to the Bloody Tower saw a long-haired woman wearing an ankle-length black velvet dress, standing by an open window. She wore a white cap, and around her neck hung a large, gold medallion. As the visitor stared, the figure faded away.

Intrigued, the visitor returned some weeks later – only to see the apparition again, in the same place! No longer shocked by the unexpected, she was able to describe in detail the apparel of the ghost.

‘Princes in the Bloody Tower’ (an artist’s impression from an Edwardian postcard)

The mediaeval records are understandably incomplete, but for all we know, one of the many women who suffered imprisonment may well have been locked up behind the Bloody Tower’s ancient, creaking doors.

Two R. A.F. Regiment sentries on guard in October 1978 will not easily forget their tour of duty. On a still, moonless night, just after midnight, with never an autumn leaf stirring, they patrolled beneath the Bloody Tower arch. For no apparent reason they paused, feeling eerie apprehension, the hairs at the back of their necks bristling – and then their short capes billowed upward, almost covering their faces, as an icy breeze suddenly blew through the archway – a rush of cold air which died away as rapidly and as inexplicably as it had arrived.

Later that night their sergeant traversed the grim forbidding archway en route to the Waterloo Block. To his right the floodlights illuminated the ancient thirteenth-century wall built to stand high and impenetrable, guarding the approaches to the White Tower. Now it was crumbling, pierced by gaping holes once arrow slits and loops.

The sergeant paused, his attention attracted by a shadow he could see through a hole in the nearest end of the wall adjoining the Wakefield Tower. He stared–then his eyes widened with disbelief as the shadow moved … vanished … only to reappear at the next hole! Hardly pausing, the shape slipped past each gaping aperture, gliding silently along behind the crumbling wall. Yet when the sergeant reached the far end, nothing was to be seen on the wide expanse of grass stretching behind the White Tower!

Tower Green