Tower: An Epic History of the Tower of London (71 page)

APPENDIX

THE TOWER’S GHOSTS

I thought long and hard about whether to include any material about the Tower’s unauthorised spectral visitors in a factual work of history. However, on hearing from a staff member that the Tower’s ghosts were the chief subject of enquiry by visiting tourists – and following the example of Alison Weir, who includes a substantial section on the posthumous appearances of Anne Boleyn at the conclusion of her superb study
The Lady in the Tower
– I decided that a few words on the subject would not go amiss.

I myself try to maintain an open mind on the existence or otherwise of supernatural phenomena, though I am increasingly inclined to believe that there is ‘something’ out there of which we have as yet imperfect and disputed knowledge and awareness. Of one thing, however, I am certain: that particular places that have been the scene of tragic, momentous and violent events carry a numinous ‘charge’ – and that no place in England, possibly nowhere else on earth, carries such a concentrated spirit of place as the Tower. In that sense, it is indeed a haunted and sacred spot. And I am convinced of one more thing: however sceptically we read these accounts, the people I refer to here were sure that they saw what they saw.

The first reported sighting of a ghost at the Tower came during the building of the outer curtain wall. Thomas Becket, the ill-fated martyr archbishop murdered in his own cathedral at Canterbury, who had once supervised earlier works at the fortress, allegedly appeared to the labourers building the wall.

Another saint and martyr – certainly the most pious monarch in English history – was Henry VI, who in 1471 was murdered as he knelt in prayer in his tiny private offertory in the Wakefield Tower – at the behest of Edward IV, and quite probably by the hand of the future Richard III.
Henry is supposed to haunt the scene of the crime each year on the anniversary of the assassination: 21/22 May.

The most famous victims of violence at the Tower, the ‘little princes’ King Edward V and his brother Richard, Duke of York, who arrived at the Tower exactly twelve years after Henry departed it so violently, made frequent posthumous appearances in and around the Bloody Tower, both clad in white nightshirts and weeping softly. It is recorded that they shot arrows at targets in the Tower’s garden, so they may well haunt the place – though they may equally well have been murdered in the White Tower where their skeletons were found in 1674.

Another longer-term resident of the Bloody Tower, Sir Walter Ralegh, has been reported to have been seen sitting at the desk in the study there which is furnished as it was in the time when he wrote his
History of the World
. Sir Walter’s spirit has also been seen pacing the ramparts along Ralegh’s Walk where he took his exercise adjacent to the tower. He is said to bear a strong resemblance to his portrait, which hangs in the Bloody Tower.

Several of the women executed within the Tower’s precincts are said to revisit the scenes of their sufferings. The sightings of Anne Boleyn are so ubiquitous as to make even the most hardened sceptic wonder. They range from a spectral ‘grey’ or ‘white’ lady to an unseen presence in a room in the Queen’s House which lowers the temperature and makes animals and children scared. Anne is said to be seen on occasion without her head, or else with a black hole in place of her face.

Perhaps the most extraordinary sighting of Henry VIII’s second wife came in 1864, and led to the court martial of a soldier of the Tower’s garrison. When an infantryman of the Sixtieth Rifles saw a white figure glide from the Queen’s House, he challenged the headless apparition with a fixed bayonet, only to sense it gliding through him. After fainting in understandable terror, he was court-martialled for dereliction of duty, but was acquitted after other soldiers supported his story, and said they too had seen the ghost.

Other sightings of drifting white or blueish lights have been seen in locations such as the White Tower, St Peter’s Chapel and the Martin Tower, the scene of an extraordinary haunting in October 1817, recounted by Edmund Lenthal Swifte. He had been appointed keeper of the Crown jewels in 1814 when they were still kept in the vault from where Thomas Blood had stolen them. Many years later, in September 1860, Swifte
recounted his scary experience in the journal ‘
Notes & Queries
’. He said he had been sitting at supper one evening with his wife, sister-in-law, son and daughter when ‘a cylindrical figure, like a glass tube’ appeared in the room, hovering in the air. ‘Its contents appeared to be a dense fluid, white and a pale azure, like to the gathering of a summer cloud and incessantly rolling and mingling within the cylinder.’ Passing behind Swifte’s wife, it paused over her right shoulder, at which she crouched down and cried, ‘Oh Christ, it has seized me!’ Utterly horrified, Swifte seized a chair and struck at the apparition – at which it disappeared.

The oddest haunting at the Tower was not a human spectre but that of an animal, and it occurred in January 1816, a few months before Swifte saw the cylinder. A sentry patrolling the paved yard outside the Jewel House saw a bear cross the yard and descend a flight of steps. The sentry was so scared that he fell in a faint, and regained his consciousness only to blurt out his story before dying.

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

TOWER HISTORIES CONSULTED

The earliest general study of the Tower and its history is
The History and Antiquities of the Tower of London: With Memoirs of Royal and Distinguished Persons
by John Bayley (1830, available from Kessenger Publishing). The end of the Victorian era saw two substantial two-volume histories published very close to each other. The first was
Her Majesty’s Tower
by Hepworth Dixon (1900), swiftly followed by Lord Ronald Sutherland Gower’s
The Tower of London
(1902). An excellent semi-official guidebook from the same period,
The Tower of London: An Illustrated Guide
by Charles Morley and William Stead junior (1900), is full of nuggets of interesting information. Major-General Sir George Younghusband, a member of the Tower’s garrison, wrote a solid work,
The Tower of London from Within
(1918); while journalist Walter George Bell penned a more concise
The Tower of London
(1921, also available from Kessenger). There were few further histories published until R. J. Minney’s wide-ranging and informative overview,
The Tower of London
(1970). The eccentric historian A. L. Rowse took his own sometimes outlandish take on the Tower in
The Tower of London in the History of the Nation
(1973). By contrast, the distinguished popular historian Derek Wilson’s
The Tower 1078–1978
(1978) – published to mark the Tower’s millennium – is serious and sensible, and the most recent general history of the fortress. The same year John Charlton of Her Majesty’s Stationery Office edited
The Tower of London: Its Buildings and Institutions
(HMSO 1978), incorporating invaluable information on the Tower’s architecture gleaned from twenteeth-century excavations and investigation.

Populist modern books focusing on particular aspects of the Tower include:
The Tower of London: Cauldron of Britain’s Past
by Plantagenet Somerset Fry (1990);
Tales from the Tower of London
(2004) by Daniel Diehl and Mark P. Donnolly;
Shot in the Tower
by Leonard Sellars (1997), on the executions there of German spies in the two world wars; and Daniel Hahn’s
The Tower Menagerie
(2003), a bright and breezy history. Even breezier are the short books of
G. ‘Bud’ Abbott, a retired Yeoman Warder with an encyclopaedic knowledge of his former workplace, deployed in his very readable
Tortures of the Tower of London
;
Great Escapes from the Tower of London
;
Ghosts of the Tower of London
; and
The Beefeaters of the Tower of London
(all published in the 1980s).

The Tower of London: The Official Illustrated History
(2000) by the Tower’s sometime official historians Edward Impey and Geoffrey Parnell is of course authoritative and packed with facts. In addition, the official guidebooks on the Tower published and regularly updated by Her Majesty’s Stationery Office are invaluable; see also HMSO’s
The Royal Mint: An Outline History
(1977).

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

GENERAL WORKS CONSULTED

Chapter One: Beginnings

For William the Conqueror, his sons and successors, the conquest, Gundulf and the origins of the Tower I have relied on Robert Bartlett’s
England under the Norman and Angevin Kings
(2000); and David C. Douglas’s
William the Conqueror: The Norman Impact upon England
(1964). David Howarth’s
1066: The Year of the Conquest
(1981); Frank McLynn’s
1066: The Year of Three Battles
(1999); and Peter Rex’s
1066: A New History of the Norman Conquest
(2009) were all also useful.

For Stephen, Matilda and Geoffrey de Mandeville see J. H. Round,
Geoffrey de Mandeville: A Study of the Anarchy
(1892); Jim Bradbury,
Stephen and Matilda: The Civil War of 1139–53
(2000); R. H. C. Davis,
King Stephen
(1977); Marjorie Chibnell,
The Empress Matilda
(1991); and Nesta Pain,
Empress Matilda, England’s Uncrowned Queen
(1978).

For Richard I, King John and William Longchamp, see John Gillingham,
Richard I
(1999); W. L. Warren,
King John
(1991); Ralph V. Turner,
King John, England’s Evil King
? (2009); and Frank McLynn,
Lionheart and Lackland
(2006).

The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
and J. Stow’s
Survey of London
(both online) have also been useful.

Chapter Two: The Menagerie and the Mint

For Henry III, Hubert de Burgh and Simon de Montfort see David Carpenter’s
The Minority of Henry III
(1990) and
The Reign of Henry III
(1996); and Margaret Wade Labarge’s
Simon de Montfort
(1962).

For the Tower’s menagerie see E. T. Bennet’s
The Tower Menagerie
(1829); and Daniel Hahn’s more contemporary
The Tower Menagerie
(2003).
For the impressions of a foreign visitor to the Elizabethan menagerie see
The Diary of Baron Waldstein
(trans. 1981). For Samuel Pepys’s account of his visit see his
Diary
.

For the Royal Mint see J. Craig,
The Mint
(1953); C. E. Challis (ed.),
A New History of the Royal Mint
(1992); and for Isaac Newton’s duel with Thomas Chaloner see
Newton and the Counterfeiter
by Thomas Levenson (2009).

Chapter Three: The Captives and the Kings

For Edward I, see Marc Morris’s superb biography,
A Great and Terrible King: Edward I and the Forging of Britain
(2008). For William Wallace see Graeme Morton,
William Wallace
(2004) and Chris Brown,
William Wallace
(2005).

For Edward III see Ian Mortimer’s
The Perfect King
(2006) – a near-perfect biography. For King Jean II of France see J. Devaisse,
Jean le Bon
(1985). For King James I of Scotland see Michael Brown’s
James I
(1994).

Chapter Four: Plague and Peasants

For the Black Death, see Philip Ziegler,
The Black Death
(1969); William Naphy and Andrew Spicer,
The Black Death and the History of Plagues 1345–1730
(2000); John Kelly,
The Great Mortality
(2005); and Benedict Gummer,
The Scourging Angel: The Black Death in the British Isles
(2009).

For the Peasants’ Revolt (and other popular risings) see the racy, learned and informative
The English Rebel
(2009) by David Horspool.
Summer of Blood: The Peasants’ Revolt of 1381
by Dan Jones (2009) supersedes all previous accounts. For the remainder of the reign of Richard II see Nigel Saul’s definitive biography,
Richard II
(1999). For an earlier view, see
Richard II
by Anthony Steel (1941).

For the mysterious death of Richard II (and other monarchs) see Dr Clifford Brewer’s fascinating
The Death of Kings: A Medical History of the Kings and Queens of England
(2000) and Michael Evans’s
The Death of Kings: Royal Deaths in Medieval England
(2003).

Chapter Five: Uneasy Heads

For Henry IV see Ian Mortimer’s
The Fears of Henry IV
(2008); and for his son Henry V see
Agincourt: The King, the Campaign, the Battle
by Juliet Barker (2005).

The best and fullest biography of the tragic
Henry VI
is by Bertram Wolffe (1981); and for his feisty queen see Jock Haswell’s
The Ardent Queen: Margaret of Anjou and the Lancastrian Heritage
(1976); or for a French perspective, Philippe Erlanger’s
Margaret of Anjou, Queen of England
(1970). The fate of their dynasty is ably told by R. L. Storey in
The End of the House of Lancaster
(1966, 1986).

A detailed and excellent account of the collapse of royal authority under Henry VI and the early years of the Wars of the Roses is Alison Weir’s
Lancaster and York
(1995). The wars themselves have generated a large and impressive recent literature. The following, all titled
The Wars of the Roses
, are warmly recommended: J. R. Lander (1965), Charles Ross (1976) and John Gillingham (1981) all set the wars in their political context; while Robin Neillands (1992), Anthony Goodman (2005) and Trevor Royle (2009) focus on the military aspects of the conflict. Desmond Seward (1995) concentrates colourfully and rivetingly on the leading personalities, bringing them to breathing life.