Tower: An Epic History of the Tower of London (9 page)

The rest of Henry’s long reign was consumed in conflict with his barons, outraged by his arrogance and reckless extravagance. This led to outright civil war even more ruinous than his father’s Barons’ War had been. Finally losing patience with Henry’s rule by petulance out of feebleness,
the barons forced him in 1258 to submit to a new Magna Carta – the Provisions of Oxford – which for the first time committed the king to hold regular parliaments and consult his barons in appointing important royal officals. Meanwhile, the rebels made one of their own men, Hugh le Bigod, constable of the Tower. But the barons, led by the king’s own brother-in-law, Simon de Montfort, Earl of Leicester, overreached themselves and arrogantly alienated their more moderate supporters, who moved back to the king’s side. In February 1461, Henry suddenly struck. Having secretly obtained permission from the Pope to disregard the oaths he had sworn at Oxford, he occupied the Tower.

Henry dismissed Bigod, appointing a loyalist, John Mansel, as constable in his place. Supported by foreign mercenaries, Henry strengthened his hold on London, using the reinforced Tower as his powerbase and his bolthole. For the next few years, the king played cat and mouse with the barons. He would emerge from his fortress, gallop around the country in futile efforts to assert his authority, then retreat into the Tower again. But Henry discovered that the Tower’s strength could become a trap. So long as he remained within its walls he was safe. Tying himself down there, however, severely limited his freedom of manoevre, and as opinion once more swung against him, he found himself effectively besieged by the hostile population of his capital.

The weakness of Henry’s position was vividly brought home to him in the summer of 1263 when he was shut in the Tower with only his queen, Eleanor of Provence, and its garrison for company. The main royal army under the king’s son and heir, Prince Edward, was campaigning in the west against the rebel barons. The baronial leader, Simon de Montfort, had secured Dover and was marching towards London. Henry was willing to make peace. Not so his queen, revolted by any thought of compromise with rebels. She sailed by barge from the Tower up the Thames, aiming to join her son Edward at Windsor.

Eleanor got no further than London Bridge, where a mob of baronial supporters pelted her barge with sticks, stones, rotten eggs and rubbish, forcing her to beat a retreat (after throwing some of the missiles back) with as much dignity as she could muster. Further humiliation awaited her. At the Tower, her terrified husband, fearing that the mob would burst in with her, ungallantly refused to open the fortress gates to readmit her. The queen was finally rescued by the Mayor of London who chivalrously gave her sanctuary in the residence of the Bishop of London at St Paul’s.

Three days after this setback, with the Tower unprovisioned for a siege, Henry submitted to a truce and Simon de Montfort’s supporter Hugh le Despenser was made constable. Civil war soon broke out again, and Henry was defeated by Simon at Lewes in May 1264. Henry and Edward were made prisoner, and de Montfort became the dictatorial ruler of England. Simon’s power lasted barely a year. In 1265, Edward escaped, rallied the royal forces, and in August trapped Simon, le Despenser and their closest supporters at Evesham. The struggle, fought in a summer thunderstorm, was so one-sided that a chronicler called it ‘the murder of Evesham, for battle it was none’. Simon was butchered on the battlefield (his corpse was quartered, and his disembodied head mockingly mutilated, with his nose cut off and his genitals nailed to his face in their place) and his surviving supporters slaughtered in Evesham Abbey.

After Simon’s death, leadership of the rebel lords devolved on Gilbert de Clare, Earl of Gloucester, known as ‘Gilbert the Red’ from the colour of his hair and for his fiery personality. In April 1267, taking advantage of the absence of Henry, who was ineffectually grappling with another rebel baron in the Isle of Ely, and of Edward, who was campaigning in the north, Gilbert made a sudden dash from the Welsh Marches for London. The city and the Tower were held by one of the king’s favoured foreigners, Cardinal Ottobuono, Italian papal legate in England. The pious king had used him to pronounce penalties – including excommunication – on the clergy who had supported the barons. This had not endeared him to either prelates or the people.

Rebellious Londoners ‘without drede of God or of theyr kynge’ flocked to Gilbert’s banner. Gilbert laid siege to the Tower, using catapults in a vain attempt to break down its massive walls. The mainstay of the garrison were London Jews, who had taken refuge there for fear of a repetition of pogroms carried out by Simon’s followers in Leicester, Canterbury and London in 1264, when hundreds had been slaughtered. The Jews, excused the papal ban on usury, had become moneylenders clustered in Cheapside around the road still today called Old Jewry, close to the Tower. Jews were always targets in times of trouble, as killing them freed their Christian debtors from their debts. Meanwhile, the warlike Edward, with an army of 30,000 at his back, stormed south, picked up his father at Cambridge, added reinforcements at Windsor, and by early May was besieging the besiegers.

Henry succeeded in springing Cardinal Ottobueno from the Tower using mercenaries from France who sailed up the Thames to rescue the embattled cleric. But Gilbert’s men were well dug in, and the siege continued. The stalemate finally ended after six weeks with another truce, under which Henry agreed to moderate the harsh penalties against those barons who had supported Simon. The Tower was relieved, Gilbert and his supporters were pardoned, and Henry ended his long reign in 1272 in unaccustomed peace and tranquillity.

The new king, Edward I, made a refreshing change from his feeble and unpopular father. Tall, lean, bold, cunning, ruthless when required, an experienced soldier and able administrator, ‘Edward Longshanks’ was an ideal medieval monarch in the tough mould of William the Conqueror and the first two Henrys. He spent the early years of his reign reducing Wales to obedient submission; and the latter part – with less success – attempting to do the same to Scotland. One quality that Edward I had inherited from his father was Henry III’s love of building. Instead of ecclesiastical architecture, however, Edward’s tastes were military, and he became the greatest castle builder of his age. He finally squeezed the Welsh into submission by constructing an encircling ‘iron ring’ of mighty fortresses – Flint, Rhuddlan, Conway, Caernarvon, Beaumaris, Harlech – around the coast of north Wales.

Naturally, the great castle builder added to his father’s works at the Tower. By the time Edward’s reign ended in 1307 the fortress had essentially assumed the outlines it retains today. Although the interior buildings of the Tower have changed over the centuries, the outline shape that the eighteen-acre site with its twenty towers now shows to the changing world outside its walls is that which Edward bequeathed to his nation.

With the physical damage of Gilbert the Red’s nearly successful recent assault still rawly evident, Edward’s first priority was to repair the destruction caused by Gilbert’s siege engines to the Tower’s fabric. In doing so he had to ensure that the Tower was invulnerable to any future attack. He did this by putting as much space between his Tower and the threatening city – with its population now some 80,000 – growing around it by filling in his father’s modest moat, and digging a much wider one – more than 100 feet across – of his own. Edward then put up a second outer curtain wall around the whole Tower complex. He next strengthened the western, landward side of the fortress by sealing up the causeway entrance
halfway along the western wall and building a new tower – the Beauchamp – where the gateway had been. A single gate, however strong, was vulnerable to a determined assault by battering ram, so the king constructed a triple series of gatehouse towers at the Tower’s south-west corner; these remain the entry point through which thousands of tourists still troop daily to enter the Tower.

As we have seen, where today’s book- and souvenir shop and café stand, Edward erected the massive barbican entrance gateway, the Lion Tower. Getting past the menagerie’s lions and bears would have presented an additional barrier to any besieger. Beyond the great semicircular Lion Tower was a drawbridge, and then a pair of gatehouses with double portcullis, the Middle Tower. Across a bridge traversing the wide new moat was a second drawbridge; and then yet another inner pair of barbican gatehouses with double portcullis, the Byward Tower, giving access to the outer ward courtyard of the Tower itself. Any assailant attempting to rush the Tower would now face a right-angled approach and a series of well-guarded gates, portcullises and bridges protecting the great fortress, probably now the most formidable in all Europe.

Henry III’s watergate under the Bloody (then called the Garden) Tower was sealed up and replaced by a portcullis, giving access to the inner ward between the White Tower and the royal palace. Edward adopted the same defensive approach with the Tower’s river entrance. In the middle of the southern curtain wall he put up another double tower, St Thomas’s Tower, over a wide watergate that became the usual entry point for arriving state prisoners – often hauled straight from the corridors of power in Westminster and Whitehall and rowed downriver by barges to their doom. Because of this sad procession of the mighty fallen, the gateway, its steps covered with green algae from the slapping waters of the Thames, as slippery as the path to power, acquired the sinister name by which it is known to history: Traitor’s Gate.

Unlike his father, whose desultory building work at the Tower had remained unfinished at his death, Edward completed his works within ten years: 1275–85. They cost him £21,000, twice what even his free-spending father had lavished. The finished Tower now had the same concentric form of Edward’s great Welsh castles. He borrowed this idea from the huge Crusader castles he had seen in the Holy Land. Edward had been away on crusade when his father died in 1272. It says much for his authority that, although he did not return until 1274, no attempt was made in his
absence to challenge him, nor – uniquely for any king since the conquest – would any English rebel, rival or baron dare mount such a challenge during his thirty-five-year reign. Edward could be cruel when crossed.

If Edward I had few English foes, he had enemies aplenty in Wales and Scotland. In Henry III’s chaotic reign, Llywelyn ap Gruffydd, son of the portly Prince Gruffydd who had died attempting to escape the Tower, had brought much of the principality under his sway, proclaiming himself Prince of Wales in 1258. Llywelyn failed to pay homage to Edward or attend his coronation. The new king’s revenge for this insult was slow but sure: starvation. In 1277, Edward seized the Isle of Angelsey, bread basket of Wales, bottling Llywelyn up in Snowdonia’s mountains. In 1282, Llywelyn was killed in a skirmish in mid-Wales. His head was hacked off and, adorned with a mocking crown of ivy, sent to decorate the tallest turret on the White Tower. The following year, after his barbaric execution by hanging, drawing and quartering in Shrewsbury, his brother Dafydd, the last hope of the House of Gwynedd for a semi-independent Wales, had his head sent to join his brother’s on the very same roof from where their father had made his ill-fated bid for freedom. It was a very visible warning of the dangers of defying England’s ferocious new ruler.

For all his tender devotion to his wife Philippa, Edward I was a vicious and relentless enemy. He was both a ‘great’ and a ‘terrible’ king, as his biographer Marc Morris ambiguously titles his life, and as both de Montfort’s barons and the Welsh had discovered to their cost. Now it was the turn of England’s Jews to suffer his wrath. As we have seen, the Jews were tempting targets for envious popular persecution. In London, the royal protection they enjoyed was exercised by the constable of the Tower, and the fortress gates were often flung open to shelter Jews from rampaging mobs. Tension was especially high during coronations when spending was lavish and debts to Jewish moneylenders soared. There were riots in 1189, during Richard I’s enthronement; in 1220 during Henry III’s second coronation; and again in 1236, when only the Tower’s thick walls stood between London’s Jews and their would-be murderers.

But the Jews’ sole guarantee of survival – the Crown’s protection – depended on the king’s fickle favour. And Edward I no longer needed Jewish economic support because he had discovered a new source of loans: Italian bankers from Lombardy. In 1278, as a safety valve to deflect popular discontent during an economic recession, he withdrew some of the Jewish
community’s special privileges. Two years later, petty persecution turned to a real pogrom in a way horribly prefiguring the turning of the screw against Jews in Nazi Germany. Six hundred members of London’s Jewish community were rounded up and herded into the Tower’s cells. There were so many that the cells overflowed, and the overspill were crammed into the insalubrious surroundings of the recently vacated elephant house in the menagerie. Half of the arrested Jews were eventually hanged, on a charge of debasing the currency by ‘clipping’ coins.

The surviving Jews were held as hostages and huge ransoms were demanded from their families to obtain their release. When a judge, Henry de Bray, had the courage to protest against this illegal mass detention, he too was arrested and sent to join what Edward contemptuously called his Jewish ‘friends’ in the Tower. A distressed de Bray broke away from his guards and, though bound with cords, threw himself into the Thames in a suicide bid, but he was fished out and made to complete his journey to the Tower. Here he tried to beat his brains out against his cell wall, and eventually succeeded in taking his life. De Bray was the Tower’s first recorded suicide; he would not be its last. In 1290 Edward took the drastic step of giving Britain’s entire Jewish population the stark choice between converting to Christianity or being expelled from the realm altogether. Most stood by their faith and opted to leave. They would not be readmitted until the rule of that unlikely liberal, Oliver Cromwell, three and a half centuries later.