Tower: An Epic History of the Tower of London (3 page)

Geoffrey extorted a high price from Stephen for the renewal of his dubious loyalty. He forced the king to grant him yet more land around London, making him the wealthiest magnate in the kingdom. Stephen’s patience with the treacherous constable finally ran out in 1142 when he
discovered that Geoffrey had secretly renewed contact with Matilda, intending to turn his coat yet again. The king summoned Geoffrey to St Albans in Hertfordshire, arrested him, and forced him to disgorge all his land and castles – including the Tower – before he was freed.

Enraged and embittered, Geoffrey left the court ‘like a vicious and riderless horse, kicking and biting’ to embark on the final phase of his turbulent career. Imitating Hereward the Wake, the legendary guerrilla leader who had resisted the Norman conquest, he took to the East Anglian Fens around Ely, expelling the monks from Rumsey Abbey in order to use it as his headquarters. Here, the ex-constable lived an outlaw’s life for many months, preying on the surrounding countryside. But in 1144, Geoffrey’s luck ran out when he was mortally wounded in a skirmish with Stephen’s forces at Mildenhall in Suffolk.

Word of Geoffrey’s expulsion of the Rumsey monks had reached the Pope himself, who excommunicated him for sacrilege. He was denied a Christian burial, and his body lay in the open ‘for the ravens to devour’. His remains were rescued by the Order of the Knights Templar. Grateful to Geoffrey for past services, the Templars clothed his corpse in their robes and brought his body to London’s Temple Church off the Strand on the north bank of the Thames – a mile from the Tower where he had held sway for thirteen years. They enclosed the corpse in a lead coffin, but, in obedience to the papal ban, left it unburied between two trees in the churchyard. Here it remained for twenty years before someone took mercy on the old rogue and finally laid Geoffrey to rest before the church’s west door. His effigy, clad in Templars’ robes, can be seen in the church to this day.

In 1153, after nearly two decades of bloody but inconclusive strife, Stephen and Matilda reached a compromise in the Treaty of Winchester. Depressed by the death that year of his heir Eustace, Stephen disinherited his second son and accepted Matilda’s son, Henry – who had already entered the fray on his mother’s behalf – as his heir. In return, Stephen would be unmolested for the rest of his reign. Henry did not have long to wait: the following October, 1154, Stephen died at Dover and Henry, England’s first Plantagenet king, was proclaimed Henry II.

The year before his death, Stephen had named Richard de Lucy as constable of the Tower in succession to Geoffrey de Mandeville. Henry confirmed the appointment and made de Lucy his Chief Justiciar – the foremost legal officer in the kingdom. Restoring the rule of law and
financial stability to England after the bloody chaos of Stephen’s reign was Henry’s most urgent task, and one he carried out with the driving, restless energy that characterised the Plantagenets. One of the first jobs was to put the neglected Tower into a state fit for its dual role as fortress and palace. These works, early in 1156, were supervised by Henry’s most efficient subordinate – his chancellor, friend and future turbulent Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Becket. Henry appointed the humbly born Becket to succeed de Lucy as constable of the Tower in 1161. Further works – including giving the chapel in the White Tower a lead roof – were carried out in the 1170s.

In the first written description of the Tower after the improvements, Becket’s biographer William Fitzstephen describes the royal palace within the Tower as ‘great and strong with encircling walls rising from a deep foundation and built with mortar tempered with the blood of beasts’. The mortar had not literally been mixed with animal blood, and the Tower’s use as a zoo still lay some years ahead. This description refers to Roman bricks and tiles which had been pounded into reddish powder to make the mortar. With its contrasting white and red facades, the Tower had become England’s keystone.

Brutal and quarrelsome though Henry was – as his notorious ill-judged outburst which led to Becket’s murder, and his feuds with his own wife and sons, demonstrate – he was an able and effective ruler. His marriage to the redoubtable Eleanor of Aquitaine added a vast new swathe of French territory to his domains. By the end of Henry’s reign in 1189 his Angevin empire stretched from Ireland to Spain. But things fell apart again after his death, when his glamorous second son and successor, the tall, golden-haired Richard I, called
Coeur de Lion
, abandoned England for the Third Crusade, while Henry’s youngest and favourite son, John, proved himself arguably England’s worst king. Once again, as under Stephen, local lords flexed their muscles in the absence of any commanding monarch to curb them.

One such magnate was William Longchamp, Bishop of Ely, Richard’s chancellor, justiciar and constable of the Tower, who the king had left in virtual charge of the kingdom during his prolonged absence in the Holy Land (Richard spent just ten months of his ten-year reign in England). The French-born Longchamp, as unlike his royal master physically as it was possible to be – he was small, swarthy and crippled – was efficient, but also arrogant and vain.

Longchamp spared no expense in turning the Tower into a stronghold capable of withstanding a prolonged siege. He almost doubled the fortress’s size by extending the south curtain wall westwards along the river, and built a new tower, the Bell Tower, at its south-west corner. Beyond this new outer, western ward, Longchamp dug a fresh defensive ditch to the west and north of the castle to make a moat, although this last refinement proved too much for Longchamp’s engineers, and for the time being the ditch remained dry. The little cleric also spent £100 equipping the Tower with the latest state-of-the-art military technology: mangonels, giant siege engines that could hurl huge rocks further and faster than existing catapults.

Longchamp’s extensions had, however, enraged neighbouring Londoners whose houses he had destroyed and whose land he had grabbed. The chronicler William of Newburgh said of the hated prelate, ‘The laity found him more than king, the clergy more than Pope, and both an intolerable tyrant.’ There was, therefore, much local support when in 1191 followers of Prince John, attempting to snatch the kingdom from his brother Richard during the king’s absence on crusade, laid siege to the Tower. The siege lasted only three days, for Longchamp’s moral resolve proved to be rather weaker than his physical defences. He exchanged his clerical garb for the disguise of a woman’s dress, limped through the besiegers’ lines, and fled to Dover Castle, leaving the Tower in John’s hands.

While Richard lived, the quarrelsome, treacherous and avaricious John could never feel secure in his illicitly gained kingdom. In 1192 word arrived that Richard had been arrested in Vienna on his way back from the Holy Land and handed over to the Holy Roman Emperor, Henry VI, to be held in Durnstein Castle on the Danube until a vast ransom of £100,000 was paid by the people of England. Raising this enormous sum crippled the English economy, and left a lasting legacy of resentment among the poor on whom fell the chief burden of paying it.

A Londoner named William Fitzosbert, known as Longbeard, headed popular demands for the financial load to be more equitably spread. A charismatic demagogue, Fitzosbert had a fine line in eschatological, pseudo-religious imagery in his appeals for social revolt. He told one excited meeting, ‘I am the saviour of the poor. Do ye, O poor, who have experienced the hardness of rich men’s hands, drink from my wells
the waters of salvation. And ye may do this joyfully; for the time of your visitation is at hand. I will divide the waters … and separate the humble from the haughty and treacherous. I will separate the elect from the reprobate, as light from darkness.’ Tradesmen, apprentices and many of the poorer sort flocked to hear Longbeard deliver this intoxicating message, and he attracted a following of thousands to his public orations, thwarting attempts by the Mayor of London to arrest this dangerous rabble-rouser. An ex-Crusader himself, Fitzosbert took his case to King Richard who, released from captivity, was campaigning in Normandy.

After Fitzosbert returned to a London on the verge of civil insurrection, the authorities cracked down hard. The new justiciar and Archbishop of Canterbury, Hubert Walter, sent an armed posse to arrest him. Fitzosbert made the mistake of putting one of Walter’s posse to the sword. Panicking, he and his friends sought sanctuary in the spire of St Mary’s Church in Bow. Refusing to respect this, the archbishop had a fire lit beneath them and smoked the fugitives out. Half choked, Fitzosbert staggered into the street and was stabbed in the stomach by the son of the man he had murdered. Battered, bleeding, but still alive, he was tied to a horse’s tail, and painfully dragged to the Tower, where he was thrown into a dungeon to await his inevitable condemnation. On 6 April 1196 he was again dragged through the streets, this time to Smithfield, a traditional site of butchery, where he was agonisingly stretched between horses, before being hanged along with nine of his followers.

The support that Fitzosbert had attracted among poor Londoners was evident at his execution when the crowd, instead of jeering, watched his suffering in respectful silence, before converging on the scaffold and bearing away the gallows as a sacred relic. The very earth on which the gibbet had stood was carried away in handfuls until a great pit marked the site, while the chains in which Fitzosbert had been hanged were reputed to work miracles. Only after Walter had placed armed guards at the site did popular adulation for the ‘martyred’ Longbeard die away. But the rebel had inaugurated a tradition of social dissent that would involve the Tower more violently before another two centuries had passed.

In 1199 King Richard I died a lingering death from gangrene after an arrow struck his shoulder while he was besieging the French castle of Chalus. John inherited the kingdom he had coveted for so long. John proved himself a crueller, more grasping, and more untrustworthy king
than he had been as a mere prince. After fourteen years of his tyranny, John’s barons rebelled in May 1215, entered London, and besieged the Tower. Although the fortress’s lieutenant, William of Huntingdon, proved a tougher nut than William Longchamp had been and stubbornly held out, his royal master did not. Within weeks the unpopular king had famously been forced to a humiliating capitulation at Runnymede on the Thames. John put his seal to Magna Carta – the great charter drawn up by the rebel barons which, for the first time in English history, set legal limits to an absolute monarch’s arbitrary powers. Only one of the charter’s sixty-three clauses specified granting rights and liberties to ‘all freemen of the realm and their heirs for ever’; and a second forbade the selling, delay or denial of justice. Most of the other clauses safeguarded the rights and privileges of the barons. It was hardly a great milestone on the road to democracy. But it was a start.

No sooner was the wax hard on his seal, however, than John was trying to persuade his old enemy the Pope to annul the charter. Civil war broke out again, and in 1216 the exasperated barons, terminally tired of their treacherous king, invited the Dauphin of France, Prince Louis, to take John’s place on the throne. The leader of the barons who took this radical step, Robert Fitzwalter, had a very personal score to settle with ‘Bad King John’.

In 1214, John – a notorious lecher, currently married to his second wife, the teenage Isabella of Angouleme – had taken a fancy to Robert’s eldest daughter, Maud Fitzwalter, known for her beauty as ‘Maud the Fair’. Robert, governor of London’s second greatest fortress, Baynard’s Castle, rejected John’s request to make Maud his mistress. Enraged, the king had Maud abducted to the Tower. Here, John imprisoned her in a cage at the top of the circular turret at the north-east corner of the White Tower: the highest point in the fortress. John responded to Robert Fitzwalter’s indignant protests with more violence, sending troops to sack Baynard’s Castle, and forcing Robert to flee to France with his wife and two remaining children.

Maud remained in her high cage, a cold and lonely prisoner, yet resolute against all John’s assaults on her virtue. Neither exposure nor hunger, nor solitary confinement, could break the ‘Fair Maid’s’ resistance. At last, an exasperated John had an egg impregnated with poison. When the egg was presented to Maud the famished girl ate it – and painfully died. Though
sources for this story are scanty, it is entirely in keeping with John’s malevolent character. Besides, the king had a record when it came to murdering his helpless captives. Apart from killing his nephew Arthur, John kept his niece, Eleanor of Brittany, another ‘Fair Maid’, imprisoned at Corfe Castle in Dorset until she died. He deliberately starved twenty-two French knights to death in the same fortress. The black legend of ‘Bad King John’, though questioned by some modern revisionists, accords with the awful facts.

Summoned by the rebel barons to replace their despised king, Prince Louis landed in Kent with a French army in May 1216. The gates of London were opened and he was proclaimed king in old St Paul’s Cathedral. As Louis took up residence in the Tower with his small court, John retreated into the East Anglian Fens, where nemesis caught up with him.

The fight was going out of John, who was sick with dysentery. In October 1216, half of his baggage train was lost in the Wash estuary near Wisbech. Along with his crown and coronation regalia, jewels, dozens of gold goblets, silver plate and costly fabrics were swallowed up before the king’s horrified eyes in the treacherous tides and quicksands of the Wash. The news was the final straw for John. In a feast of forgetting, the sick king gorged himself on pears and peaches washed down with cider – the very worst diet for a dysentery patient. The next day, afflicted with agonising abdominal cramps, he struggled on by litter through atrocious weather, reaching Newark Castle where, on the night of 18/19 October, he died. Few mourned.

John’s death was, however, a body blow to Prince Louis’ hopes of power. For John had a legitimate English-born son and heir – nine-year-old Henry of Winchester – who was crowned king in Gloucester a week after his father’s death. A strong and capable baron, Earl William Marshal, became regent and set about organising the boy king’s forces. London remained loyal to Louis, who doggedly fought on. However, Marshal defeated him at Lincoln and the following year the Dauphin’s last hope was destroyed when a French fleet bringing reinforcements was sunk off Sandwich in Kent by an English squadron under Hubert de Burgh. Louis sailed home, and young Henry III became undisputed king of England.