Tower: An Epic History of the Tower of London (69 page)

Lovat’s chutzpah is evident in the report of his trial by Robert Walpole’s gossipy son Horace. Lovat told the lords that he would have broken out of the Tower if he were a younger man. Told that much younger men had been successfully held there he replied, ‘Yes – but they were inexperienced. They had not broke out of as many gaols as I have.’ (Lovat had indeed escaped from prison while in French exile.) On his way to his trial a woman thrust her head into Lovat’s coach and taunted him with the words, ‘You ugly old dog, don’t you think you will have that frightful head cut off?’ Lovat (whose admittedly unhandsome features were brilliantly etched by William Hogarth as he awaited trial) responded unabashed, ‘You ugly old bitch, I believe I shall.’

He was right. Lovat was sentenced to be beheaded on Tower Hill. On 9 April 1747, a year after Culloden, the old man was taken by coach the short distance from the Tower and had to be helped up the steps of the scaffold. He did not die alone. A vast crowd had assembled to see his departure, and one of the crowded stands erected to give spectators a better view collapsed under their weight. Twenty people died. When told
of the disaster, Lovat replied with characteristic callousness, ‘The more who go, the better the sport.’ Urged to hurry as he laboriously prepared to die, the old man grumbled, ‘God save us! Why should there be such a bustle about taking off an old grey head, that needs cannot go up three steps without three bodies to support it?’ Lovat was the last person to be beheaded on the hill where so many had died before him.

Lovat’s three prime characteristics – murderous psychopathology, aristocratic eccentricity and physical ugliness – came together in a trio of famous Tower prisoners of the eighteenth century. The first, Laurence Shirley, 4th Earl Ferrers, was a sadistic rake whose violence and drunken womanising (he had a mistress, Mrs Clifford, and a parallel family of four children) did not delight his pretty young wife, who separated from him in 1758 after enduring six years of abuse. His excesses put his extensive Midlands estates in danger, and trustees were appointed to manage them. Ferrers resented any curb on his activities, and in January 1760 after summoning one of the trustees – an elderly steward named John Johnson – to an interview, he shot the old man dead.

Ferrers was detained in the Middle Tower while he was tried for murder before his fellow peers in the House of Lords. He entered a plea of insanity, but conducted his own defence so ably that he was found guilty and sentenced to be hanged. He was visited in the Tower by his aged aunt, Selina Hastings, Countess of Huntingdon, a patron of the early Methodist movement. But her earnest evangelising had no effect on the earl, whose only wish was for his mistress to come on a conjugal visit. The countess vetoed this as she would not let Ferrers ‘die in adultery’.

The murderous earl was determined to make a fine exit. He spent his last night hearing one of his four warders read
Hamlet
and then, having paid all his bills as though the Tower were merely a tavern where he had been staying, he left on his final journey. Dressed in his wedding finery – a silver-edged coat, silk breeches, and white stockings with silver knee buckles – he departed for the gallows at Tyburn. The earl headed a parade more fit for a fair than an execution. Ferrers rode to his death in a fine carriage drawn by six horses, followed by his own hearse. Behind came his family and retainers attended by liveried servants and foot soldiers. Proceeding at a funereal pace through thronged streets, the macabre procession took almost three hours to reach the place of execution. Refused a final drink, Ferrers had to be content with puffing a pipe of tobacco. Lavish to the last, he gave
the hangman a five-guinea tip. As a peer, Ferrers enjoyed the dubious privilege of being hanged with a silken cord rather than a rough hempen rope. He was the last lord to be hanged in Britain.

Three years after Ferrers went to his doom with such panache, a very different man became the hero of the London crowd – and such a danger to the established order that he was sent to the Tower. The radical MP John Wilkes, though spectacularly ugly, with cross eyes, snaggle teeth and a massive jaw, was a successful ladies’ man who boasted that he could talk away his looks within minutes. A reprobate who cavorted with prostitutes dressed as nuns in the caves of the notorious Hellfire Club, Wilkes was nonetheless, as his slogan proclaimed, ‘a Friend to Liberty’. He challenged the authority of king and aristocracy with a boldness not seen since the Levellers. When a typically outspoken assault on the royal government of King George III appeared in Wilkes’s newspaper
The North Briton
, he and fifty of his followers were arrested. With typical defiance, Wilkes contested the legality of the warrant committing him to the Tower, cheekily suggesting that it should be re-addressed to his next-door neighbour: the Lord Chancellor and King George’s favourite, Lord Bute. Rejecting this idea, the arresting officers dragged Wilkes away. But he was out of the Tower within a week to continue his rumbustious career – which culminated in him being elected Lord Mayor of London.

The third Tower prisoner to embody the half-crazed spirit of Lord Lovat was another Scots aristocrat, Lord George Gordon. Although the religious conflicts that had convulsed the realm for two centuries had diminished, anti-Catholicism was still a powerful force in the late eighteenth century, and Gordon, the president of the Protestant Association, led the charge against attempts to repeal discriminatory laws against Catholics. In June 1780, after Gordon presented a huge petition to Parliament objecting to any relaxation of anti-Papist laws, mob fury spilled into London’s streets, giving the city its most horrific taste of mass violence since the Peasants’ Revolt exactly four centuries before. Newgate and other jails were burned down by the rampaging crowds, releasing hundreds of criminals into the teeming streets; the Bank of England and the Royal Exchange were attacked; the house of the Lord Chief Justice, Lord Mansfield, was torched, and scores of rioters drowned in alcohol when the vats in a distillery they were looting burst. The rioters were only narrowly prevented from freeing the lions in the Tower menagerie to
roam the streets and join the mayhem when the fortress’s drawbridge was raised against them.

Thoroughly alarmed, the authorities called out the army – including the Tower’s garrison – to restore order. Between 300 and 850 rioters were shot or executed, and Gordon was unceremoniously carted off to the Tower. Horace Walpole commented approvingly, ‘The monster that conjured up this tempest is now manacled in the Tower.’ Although charged with treason and kept a close prisoner without access to writing materials, there was no evidence that Gordon had directly incited the riots that bore his name. When the conditions of his confinement were relaxed, one of his visitors was the founder of Methodism, John Wesley, who recorded:

I spent an hour with him at his apartment in the Tower. Our conversation turned upon Popery and religion. He seemed to be well acquainted with the Bible and had abundance of other books, enough to furnish a study.

Gordon was acquitted and freed after eight months in the Tower. He eventually abandoned the Protestant faith and converted to Judaism.

A distinguished American who came as a captive to the Tower at the same time as Gordon was held there was South Carolina’s Henry Laurens, president of the Continental Congress that drew up the Declaration of Independence. Laurens was intercepted at sea by the Royal Navy en route to Holland to rally support for the United States in Europe’s first fellow republic. On arrival at the fortress he was greeted by the Yeoman Warders with a rousing chorus of ‘Yankee Doodle’. Laurens was detained in the Tower for a year, complaining constantly that his quarters were cramped and that he was inconvenienced by being continually guarded by soldiers with fixed bayonets. He strongly objected, too, to the Tower’s practice of charging for its board and lodging, and refused outright to pay. He was sustained, however, by the support of many British sympathisers with America’s cause who brought him food and other creature comforts in such quantities that he was able to distribute them to his guards. Ironically one of his visitors was his son who, despite the war, was being educated in England. In 1782 Laurens was exchanged for Lord Cornwallis, the British general whose surrender at Yorktown effectively ended the War of Independence. After his return to the US, Laurens was nicknamed ‘Tower’ Laurens.

* * *

The Gordon Riots were seen by many as a fearful precursor to the French Revolution, which broke out a decade later. Subsequently, Britain’s two decades of continuous warfare with revolutionary and Napoleonic France left the country exhausted, impoverished and rife with the radical doctrines that had inspired the great upheaval across the Channel – many spread by discharged soldiers. One such was Arthur Thistlewood, the gaunt-faced leader of the Cato Street Conspiracy. Thistlewood was an inveterate plotter involved in one revolutionary enterprise after another. One such plan, hatched in 1816, was to seize the Tower and the Bank of England – the idea being that securing the financial and military centres of the capital would lead to a collapse of the established order and an English revolution. But the government’s system of spies and agents provocateurs was as efficient as it had been in Walsingham and Thurloe’s day, and Thistlewood found himself inside the Tower as he had planned – but as a prisoner.

In 1820, Thistlewood conceived a more deadly plan. He gathered a group of well-armed fellow fanatics with the aim of murdering the entire British cabinet as they sat at dinner. Thistlewood’s right-hand man, Edwards, was, however, a government spy, and the plotters were surprised as they gathered above a stable in London’s Cato Street to carry out their plan. Thistlewood fatally stabbed a Bow Street Runner (a prototype policeman) before he was subdued and taken to the Tower with seven of his co-conspirators. Thistlewood was honoured by being lodged in the Bloody Tower itself, while his fellow plotters were distributed among the Byward, Middle, Salt and St Thomas’s Towers. In keeping with holding them in the same cells where Catholic conspirators had gone before, the Tory authorities dealt with the would-be revolutionaries in a ferociously Elizabethan manner: Thistlewood and his four closest confederates were hanged at Tyburn; the other two were transported for life. They met their deaths with courage, Thistlewood proclaiming:

Albion is still in the chains of slavery. I quit it without regret. My only sorrow is that the soil should be a theatre for slaves, for cowards, for despots.

England still awaits the revolution that the Cato Street conspirators died to bring about.

The Duke of Wellington embodied the conservative values of tradition and stability that the conspirators had been assailing. In 1826, six years
after the Cato Street conspirators had gone to their deaths, the Iron Duke, the man who had humbled the great Napoleon at Waterloo, and subsequently became Tory prime minister, was made constable of the Tower. His appointment marked the end of the Tower’s position as the state’s main political prison – though it would reprise the role in the two world wars – and its transformation into England’s leading tourist attraction.

The duke, still furiously energetic and ruthlessly efficient, did not regard his role as merely symbolic. His first act was to transform the Yeoman Warders from patronised pensioners into proper servants of the state. Recruited from army NCOs, the ‘Beefeaters’ would in future be paid regular salaries and infused with an
esprit de corps
appropriate to the proud guardians of the kingdom’s most prestigious fortress. As we have seen, the duke also presided over the closure of the outdated Tower menagerie and its transfer to the more spacious Regent’s Park zoo. Finally, and most significantly, Wellington ordered that the paying public could be admitted to the Tower as tourists.

At first, tourists were only allowed into the keep of the White Tower, but as the reign of Queen Victoria opened in 1837, it became clear that to satisfy public curiosity other parts of the ancient complex would have to be shown as well. Public pressure for increased access became even more intense in 1840 with the publication of
The Tower of London
, a romantic novel by the popular author William Harrison Ainsworth. Although Ainsworth’s fiction – focusing on the story of Lady Jane Grey – romanticised the Tower, and invented wholly imaginary features into the fortress such as a network of underground tunnels, it served to draw the attention of Londoners to a monument which over-familiarity had perhaps caused them to take for granted.

The process of gradually increasing public access, however, was disastrously disrupted on the night of 30 October 1841 when fire – probably caused by an overheating stove – broke out in the Bowyer Tower in the northern inner wall. The alarm was sounded and soon the nine appliances of the Tower’s private firefighting service were on the scene. However, a shortage of water meant that only one engine could be used and the flames began to spread. To prevent a curious public from getting in, the Tower’s gates were closed – which had the unintended consequence of delaying the arrival of the London Fire Brigade who had been summoned to assist.

By now, the conflagration had spread to the Grand Storehouse between the Bowyer and White Towers. The storehouse was used to house the
armoury, the nation’s premier collection of ancient and modern weaponry. The firefighters and the Tower’s garrison only had time to remove some of the most valuable items when the building’s roof collapsed at 11.20 p.m. Their focus now shifted to saving the Crown jewels housed in the Martin Tower. In the confusion the keys could not be found, and the cases housing the regalia had to be smashed and prised open with crowbars. Most of the smaller items had been safely passed through the tower’s bars when the baptismal font became stuck. The Keeper of the Jewel House’s clothes were smouldering by the time that the silver font was successfully prised free.

The Tower recovered from the fire with remarkable speed. The Bowyer Tower was rebuilt, and on the site of the storehouse, a new barrack block – named the Waterloo Barracks in Wellington’s honour – was opened by the duke himself in 1845, seven years before his death – still in office as constable – in 1852. The duke had also commissioned the barracks’ designer, the Gothic architect Anthony Salvin, to reverse centuries of decay, and restore the Tower to the approximate appearance it still bears today. Among other works, Salvin bult a new Lanthorn Tower, replacing the old one which had been burned in another blaze in 1788 – but demolished the Flint Tower in the northern wall, which was so derelict that it was about to collapse. The duke also ordered the draining of the noisome and filthy moat – which he rightly considered a health hazard – revealing piles of oyster shells, along with human bones and Tudor bottles.