Let us Talk of Many Things; of Books and Queens and Pirates, of Mystery and Kings...: Wednesday Wanderings - Sent to The Tower (not looking for the Tudors) with Nicky Galliers

visiting around and about,
wandering here and there...

The Tower of London ... A Personal Visit

by Nicky Galliers

I went to the Tower today, took a whole day holiday just for me. I'm just totally hooked. I have been before, but I was seven and my dumb school party, when offered the Bloody Tower or the gift shop, chose the gift shop! I remember fuming ineffectively and asking if I could go to the Bloody Tower on my own instead.

It was empty. There is usually a queuing system for the Crown jewels that makes the average passport control look like a blip but it was deserted. The only queue was for the ice-cream van. I knew it would be like this without the foreign tourists, and that's why I went, and before the schools break up.

The warders want to talk. I had a Yeoman Warder to myself for ten minutes plus talking about all sorts, starting with where Gruffydd ap Llywelyn fell to his death and the Warder told me that we'd have had maybe 20 seconds in 2019 to talk at the same time of year. He told me to make the most of it, talk to them as they want to talk. I then found a lady in the White Tower who I spent a good 30 mins talking to and she showed me places behind those red cordons, discussing the architecture...

Where is everyonbe?

It is actually quite hard to find the Plantagenets at The Tower of London. The curators of the historic site seem to want to pander to the popular belief that Henry VIII was the Only King of England, or, at least, the only interesting one. There are brief mentions of Henry III and Edward I who made changes to the Tower and its towers, but few others get any kind of mention.

But they are there, if you look hard enough, and if you let your imagination slip away through the windows, up the steps, and into the hidden darknesses.

It does seem quite bizarre that so much weight is placed on the one king whose involvement in the Tower came half way through its life so far. Built in the 1070s, Henry VIII only arrived in the 1500s and the Tudor’s tenure was short-lived by the standards of the fortress. All gone by 1603, one hundred and eighteen years. Whereas the Plantagenet line, and its direct ancestral line, the Normans, owned it for over four hundred.

The White Tower

From a comment from one of the wardens in the White Tower, I gleaned that the Yeoman Warders themselves like to celebrate the earlier occupants of the Tower, and look on the Tudors with a little more disdain than the visitors. They certainly know who they were. A question put to one, Yeoman Warder Phillips outside the Bloody Tower, brought an answer immediately with no need to explain further.

‘Around 1240 a Welsh prince fell from one of the towers, but I don’t know which one,’ I said.

‘Gruffydd ap Llywelyn. He fell from there,’ said Yeoman Warder Phillips, and pointed to the south-west corner of the White Tower in front of us.

Where Gruffydd fell

Once over my astonishment and glee that he knew who Gruffydd ap Llywelyn was, we had a lovely chat about the man, and the legends that have grown up around him. This one, over-looked, foreign prince, step-grandson of King John, is remembered by the Warders. I wonder how many visitors ask about him – not many, I suspect. Yeoman Warder Phillips told me of the legend that the bank beneath that corner of the White Tower is carpeted with daffodils in the spring, watered by the blood of this Welsh prince. It is, of course, tosh, but it shows just how entrenched the ghosts are that Gruffydd has his own myth perpetuated to those who will listen by the Warders.

Another place that the Plantagenets have left their mark is, unexpectedly, the Crown Jewels. The jewel house is quite gloomy; the walls are dark and the lighting is all on the jewels and the feeling is not of somewhere sumptuous but more, well, London Dungeon. The row upon row of metal barriers outside and the moving walkway inside give testament to the crowds usually attracted to these gems. The day I went, the queue for the ice-cream van was longer.

The Crown Jewels Queue

The crowns are mostly modern, with just a few that date as far back as Mary of Modena in 1685. But it was here that I found one of my favourite Plantagenets – Edward, the Black Prince. The Imperial State crown which dates to 1937 contains the Black Prince’s ruby. There is nothing else on the display to explain what this stone is, so, I trotted off to find a warden to help.

The legend is that the ruby, a large, misshapen, polished stone – not cut – was gifted to Edward, the Black Prince (known then as ‘of Woodstock or Prince of Aquitaine) in Spain for services rendered on the battlefield. It passed into the hands of Henry V which makes sense as Henry rather admired Edward, and he reputedly wore it attached to the crown on his helm during the battle of Agincourt. It has a hole drilled through it to help mount it. However, so the story goes, he lost it during the battle, and tasked some poor soldier to go and find it, or not bother coming back.

And this is where the mystery really starts. The stone mounted in the front of the Imperial State crown isn’t a ruby. It’s a spinel, a pretty but far more common stone and not the same value as the equivalent ruby would be. The warden told me he had to explain this to the Queen’s jeweller when he was asked to give a guided tour to him.

Was there ever a ruby? Was it only ever a spinel, or was it switched at some point, taken from another setting to be gifted to Henry V in place of his lost stone? Who knows, and who ever will?

And so my search took me to the White Tower itself. Part way up the wooden stairway is an open door. It was knocked through into a stairwell so there was a way out of the donjon to the buildings facing it that once stood in the innermost ward, such as the Great Hall where Anne Boleyn was tried. There had been a forebuilding attached to the front, a feature of Norman castles offering another layer of defence – a door into the forebuilding and then another door into the donjon protected by a portcullis cutting the donjon off completely from the forebuilding. That is now long gone though it appears on the 1597 diagram of the Tower, and likely prevented communication between the Tower and the Great Hall. It was under this stairwell that the bodies of the two princes were found, those boys believed to be Edward V and his brother Richard, supposedly killed by Richard III. Ana, the wonderful warden I struck up a long conversation with, believes that Richard had nothing to gain by killing them, but she also held that, whoever they were, these children were Someone because they were disposed of in the heart of the royal palace and that, therefore, Someone knew. Until and unless the Queen allows their bones to be exhumed and their DNA compared with that of Richard III, we’ll never know who they are. If they aren’t the princes, who ARE they?

And it was in the White Tower that I found the most compelling evidence of my Plantagenets, of that family that ruled these lands for four hundred years, that produced heroes and villains in equal measure, men – and women – who were anything but ordinary.

There is a mask of Edward III in a case in the entrance level of the Tower, just beyond the partition wall on the north east side. It is a facsimile created in wood between 1685 and 1688. It seems to be a fair representation, based on his funeral mask and the face on his tomb which was taken from life. I knew of the existence of the mask, but not its location so coming face to face with my favourite king was a pleasant surprise. And he was quite handsome with prominent cheekbones in a slim face.

Beside this case, in the archway in the partitioning wall, is something that is not on general view, and even if that part of the room were, most people would walk past without thinking. This archway is lower than the others and was the actual doorway through from one side to the other, the other arches would have been blocked with decorated panels. This one would have contained a door, and that door would have been secured by a long pole pulled out from the wall next to it and across and probably secured in a recess the other side. The pole would have sat in a long, tube-like recess, about ten centimetres wide, and at least two meters long, lined with four planks made from single lengths of wood. The effort required to replace these, buried so deep in the wall, far outweighs any gain. Therefore, these pieces of wood, as insignificant as they appear, date to the 1070s and are some of the oldest remaining wood in the building. And no one knows it’s there. Except Ana, my guide, and now me. And now you.

On this level are the other places where I knew I could find traces of my Plantagenets, and they are the most obvious and yet the least considered places and, when I say it, you’ll think yuck...

A loo

The White Tower has excellent facilities. There are toilets everywhere. At least three per level. Whoever you are, whatever you do in life, you use the loo. It isn’t romantic, but if people leave a psychic trace of themselves in the places they frequented when alive, the loos are a prime candidate for hauntings. Edward III, Edward the Black Prince, Richard III, Empress Matilda, Henry VIII, William the Conqueror, they all used these garderobes. When it comes down to it, we’re all the same.

Take your choice which one to use

I went to the Tower of London in search of the Plantagenets, and found a lot more. I found Edward III, and old friend, his face staring back at mine. I found the mystery of the Black Prince’s ruby. I found new friends, Yeoman Warder Phillips who, out of the 37 Yeoman Warders stationed at the Tower, was the one who happened upon my Tweets and reached out through Twitter, though he never knew my name. And Ana, the amazing guide who showed me places I otherwise wouldn’t have seen. And I met with a few strangers, the vivid depiction of a man painted on the wall of a room where Sir Walter Raleigh had spent so much time, only uncovered in 2018. Who was he? Maybe we’ll never know, but maybe we’ll find more under the plaster in years to come. I found a community, a group of people who are as much as part of the history and the story of the Tower as poor Anne Boleyn.

The Tower has always been home to a large community, larger than many villages and towns – several thousand people at its height.

As I decided it was time to leave – for this visit, I will be back – I decided to have a quick look at the Royal Mint display. And as I wandered along the medieval coins, I smugly counted to myself ‘Got that one; got that one; got that one….’

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