Tower: An Epic History of the Tower of London (74 page)

A medieval French manuscript shows Richard II in the Tower kneeling in homage to his cousin Henry Bolingbroke who has just deposed him and forced his abdication. Richard died mysteriously the following year.

Wounded and taken prisoner at Agincourt in 1415, Charles, Duke of Orleans, was kept in the Tower where he took up poetry. He remained in captivity for a quarter of a century before he was ransomed and returned to France. This illustration to a volume of his verses shows him writing in the White Tower.

Fear and trembling: a romanticised 19th century depiction of the Princes in the Tower awaiting their killers by French artist, Paul Delaroche.

Anne Boleyn awaits her fate, 1536. ‘One hour she is determined to die, and the next much contrary to that’ reported the Tower’s Lieutenant, Sir William Kingston.

Botched job: Margaret, Countess of Salisbury, beheaded on May 27, 1541 at Henry VIII’s command on account of her Yorkist blood, is chased by her executioner brandishing an axe.

Delivering pain: the Rack and other instruments of torture used at the Tower.

The followers of Sir Thomas Wyatt attack the Byward Tower in a bid to seize the fortress in 1554. This Kentish rebellion aimed at preventing the unpopular marriage of Mary I to Philip II of Spain. Wyatt’s father and grandfather were both, like him, imprisoned in the Tower. Unlike him, they survived.

Mr W.H.? : Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton – friend, patron and possibly the dedicatee of Shakespeare’s sonnets – pictured in the Tower with his cat, Trixie. Imprisoned for his leading role in the Earl of Essex’s 1601 rebellion against Elizabeth I, Southampton, unlike Essex, was spared and released on the Queen’s death in 1603.

‘What shall I do? Where is it?’: the bewildered words of the blindfolded Lady Jane Grey as she gropes for her execution block, 1554, romantically, if inaccurately, depicted by Paul Delaroche. (The internal nocturnal scene in fact took place in the Tower’s courtyard in broad daylight.)

The caged bird sings: frontispiece of Sir Walter Ralegh’s
History of the World
(1614), written in the Bloody Tower during his long imprisonment. Further volumes were planned, but abandoned.

River of blood: the gateway beneath the Bloody Tower showing Traitor’s Gate and the river beyond. This 19th century engraving of the most notorious of the Tower’s score of towers shows the vaulting inserted under Edward III in 1360–61 by Henry Yevele.

Gunpowder guys: a contemporary Dutch print of the Gunpowder plotters in 1605 shows Guy Fawkes (third from right) and, on his right, the plot’s leader Robert Catesby.