Episode Transcript
[00:00:21] Speaker A: The Tudor History and Travel show is a podcast that brings Tudor History to life by exploring Tudor places and artefacts in the flesh.
You will be travelling through time with Sarah Morris, the Tudor Travel Guide, uncovering the stories behind some of the most amazing Tudor locations and objects in the uk.
Because when you visit a Tudor building, it is only time and not space which separates you from the past.
And now, over to your host, Sarah Morris.
[00:00:54] Speaker B: Hello, my time travelling friends.
When this podcast was first recorded, it originally lived behind a paywall as part of the Tudor Travel Guide membership.
At the time, full episodes were available exclusively to subscribers, with shorter versions released more widely.
That is no longer the case.
I've since made the decision to open up that archive and begin releasing these previously member only episodes to everyone, freely and with great pleasure, so that the wider Tudor community can enjoy them.
As you listen, though, you may hear references to dates, events or up and coming moments that have now passed.
But at the heart of the episode, the stories, the research and the passion for Tudor History remain just as relevant today.
Going forward. Alongside my usual monthly podcast, at the beginning of each month, I'll also be releasing one of these archive episodes roughly once a month until we've shared them all.
And if this episode whets your appetite for more Tudor History, you'll find a vast and ever growing library of articles over at the Tudor Travel Guide blog just waiting for you to explore them.
Or if you'd like to go a step further and actually walk in the footsteps of the Tudors, you can find details of my immersive historical tours over@simplytudortours www.simplytudortours.com.
but for now, buckle up, sit back and enjoy this episode from the vaults.
[00:02:43] Speaker C: I met with assistant Buildings curator Alfred Hawkins and we went exploring some of the nooks and crannies, the darker nooks and crannies, I should add, of the Tower of London. Because I wanted to find out about this building as a place of imprisonment. Perhaps it is most well known for that and some of the high profile prisoners like Amberlynn and Lady Jane Grey.
And yes, I did want to find out about where they had been housed and the kind of conditions that they would have experienced during their imprisonment.
But I was also curious about those prisoners who were much lower status.
Where were they housed?
What kind of cells and what kind of provisions could they have expected?
What kind of treatment would be meted out to them, including that of torture? And did we know where those cells and the torture chamber actually is within the tower?
I wanted to know answers to all of these questions.
And so towards the end of the day, just as dusk was falling over the Tower, rather fittingly, I met up with Alfred and we went on our journey in time.
So buckle up, let's go time traveling, my friends.
Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the Tower of London and our expert guide, Alfred Hawkins.
[00:04:22] Speaker D: So welcome to the Tower and it's hello to our expert guide today, Alfred Hawkins. Hello, Alfred.
[00:04:28] Speaker A: Hello. Thank you for coming.
[00:04:29] Speaker D: Oh, well, thank you for inviting us down to the Tower. It's very exciting to be here because I know we're going to be getting to all sorts of different nooks and crannies.
[00:04:37] Speaker A: Yes. We're going to be giving you visuals, VIP tour of loads of off limits areas. So should be quite fun.
[00:04:42] Speaker D: So before we start, perhaps you could introduce yourself and tell us all what your role here is at Historic Royal palace is.
[00:04:49] Speaker A: So I'm Alfred Hawkins and I am assistant curator of historic buildings for the Tower of London and the Banqueting House Whitehall.
My role is mostly to advise on the historic fabric stories and archaeology of both the amazing sites. I get to look after.
[00:05:05] Speaker D: Fantastic. You do. And so you spend most of your time here at the tower?
[00:05:08] Speaker A: Yeah, 90, 95 my time at the Tower and then some time at the Banqueting House whenever they need me.
[00:05:14] Speaker D: Okay, fantastic. So today we have a theme for our storytelling and that's all about what it was like to be a prisoner here at the Tower. And of course we had low status prisoners and we had the highest status prisoners and I think we're going to be trying to explore what it was like and what kind of privileges each of those different types of prisoners had. Is that right?
[00:05:34] Speaker A: Yes. So I've got a variety of different cells and torturous locations to show you.
So hopefully, hopefully we have to see, see what it was like for different people of different status.
And obviously sometimes it's the high status people who have fewer privileges than anybody else. So it should be, should be a fun time.
[00:05:54] Speaker D: There'll be a lot to talk about and of course people will be able to hear that there are people in the Tower. Life is going on around us. So if you hear background noise, dear listeners, then you are right in the hub of a thriving little community in the Tower. So where are we going first, Alfred?
[00:06:12] Speaker A: First we are going into the King's house, which was formerly the Queen's house until very recently, of course, which was built in 1540. And that backs onto the Bell Tower, which is a 12th century mural Tower where supposedly Thomas More was held. So we'll start at the higher status and then work our way down, I think.
[00:06:32] Speaker D: Okay, well, sounds like a good idea to me. So why don't we go. Lead the way.
So we're heading into a door, aren't we?
You know, the public don't get to go into, which is very exciting. So this is the Lieutenant of the Tower.
[00:06:50] Speaker A: This is the house of the Constable of the Tower, who is the Queen's representative on site and a trustee of historic royal palaces.
So yeah, this is his private residence. This is where he lives, but also where he will bring various guests. So it's not ever on the public route.
[00:07:12] Speaker D: And was this always the Constable's house, even when it was built back in 1540?
[00:07:18] Speaker A: So yes, the 1540 house was built on top of what we think were the previous constable's lodgings or lieutenant's lodgings. The Constable has often been a figurehead, but more of a aloof one. So the Lieutenant of the Tower, which has evolved into what we now have as the governor of the Tower, did most of the kind of day to day work. So that they would be. Would be based in this building.
And we have evidence, I think it's from the 14th century when we get the kind of first lieutenant or constable's lodgings here that are documentable. But it's probable that there were previous buildings here for the same reason, because it's a high status part of the Tower and it's got access to everything else.
So at the moment we are in a 1540s corridor. And then through this door, which is
[00:08:09] Speaker D: a rather exquisite door, isn't is one
[00:08:12] Speaker A: of my favorite ones.
[00:08:13] Speaker D: It's a huge oak door.
[00:08:16] Speaker A: We have the ground floor of a mural tower.
[00:08:22] Speaker D: Oh wow.
[00:08:24] Speaker A: Which has lovely vaulted ceiling and all of the kind of.
[00:08:29] Speaker D: It does, doesn't it? So tell us about this space. I can see immediately that there is a picture on the wall of Sir Thomas More at the Tower of London. So is we think that he was held.
[00:08:40] Speaker A: Yes.
So I'll rewind the clock a little bit just to give some context, although this is obviously Tudor Travel guide.
So this building was built in around 1190 and at that point was one of the external mural towers of the fortress. So all of the land to the south of us, which is called Water Lane, was the Thames. So the Thames would be lapping up against this building.
And it's an interesting building because it kind of shows us the duality of medieval craftsmanship. So on the outside it is a defensive turret and there are defensive elements in here. Although heavily altered by the Victorians, but internally the masonry is incredibly fine and kind of shows us the high status lodgings that this may have once been. So it's serving multiple purposes before we even come to the Tudor period and Thomas More.
But yes. So this is where we think Thomas More would have been held.
We don't have any direct references or documents that say Thomas More was held in this place. We don't have a big book that says where everybody was held all the time.
[00:09:54] Speaker D: That's a shame, isn't it?
[00:09:55] Speaker A: It is. It makes our life very difficult, unfortunately.
But what we do have is John Fisher, who was Bishop of Rochester, who was imprisoned in around the same time, was held upstairs. And he was a prolific writer, so he documents his time quite well. And so we know he was upstairs in the bell tower. And as Moore was also a religious prisoner of fairly high status, it would make sense for them to be in the same place. There's also a myth that they communicated by poking their heads out the windows and shouting to each other. But I'm not sure, not sure how far we can stretch that one.
[00:10:35] Speaker D: Well, hopefully we're going to have a show notes page to go along with this podcast and we'll have some images so people can see what we're talking about. But perhaps you could just describe some of the architectural features and why this would be considered a high status cell.
[00:10:49] Speaker A: So the thing that obviously jumps out when you immediately walk in here is the vaulted ceiling and you've got quite finely worked corbels at the base of those vaults.
But again, that's in the Tudor period. It's kind of debatable how far this kind of masonry would be visible.
So when we walk into parish churches, into castles, we get what we have here, which is a kind of load of bare Reigate stone and various other bits of Kentish wagon, things like that, which are very interesting in their own right, but would have probably been covered with some sort of render or painted or some form of decoration or paneling later on.
So what we have here is the foundation of a very high status medieval building. But what we don't have is the kind of decorative interior that would go over the top of that.
[00:11:44] Speaker C: Right.
[00:11:46] Speaker A: It's clearly high status, but we don't have those kind of elements.
[00:11:49] Speaker D: Yes. It's been stripped right back, isn't it? It's naked.
[00:11:53] Speaker A: Yes. No. And it's kind of. It's a Victorian thing where it's.
Everything in the medieval period was all bare stone. So let's tear everything off and uncover the bare stone, which is deeply, deeply annoying for us now because who knows what kind of mural paintings or decorative features were stripped.
[00:12:14] Speaker D: And there's loads of like, nooks and crannies, alcoves, I don't know what you would call them. Is that just because we're in essentially a round tower? I mean, why, why have they been. What was their purpose?
[00:12:25] Speaker A: Well, so they are all of these kind of embrasures are connected to arrow loops, which, although none of these are medieval arrow loops, they probably would have been in the medieval period. So these nooks are probably related to the use of this building as a defensive space, rather than it being used as lodgings.
But then again, as we move into the Tudor period and this, this becoming the inner wall of the tower rather than the outer wall, that feature probably would have lessened and more decorative aspects would have taken their place. So you can see there are quite a few kind of post holes in the wall and unfortunately they don't all marry up. And there have clearly been bits where some of them have been filled in, but it's likely that those represent some kind of partitioning or even creation of a mezzanine level in this room. So there's definitely stuff going on here that we don't see. And whether or not these nooks and crannies, which I quite like, is a
[00:13:23] Speaker D: descriptive term, it's really technical term, Alf. It is.
[00:13:28] Speaker A: That's the joy of arbitration. There's a word for absolutely everything and whenever you need it, you can't remember it.
Maud didn't have the most privileged time at the Tower, so we know his books were confiscated from him and various other things.
So although, and I think there is a letter of him complaining that it's damp and cold. And I mean, it is damp and cold in here. It's a medieval tower and you kind of get a sense of that on this slightly cold October day.
[00:13:58] Speaker D: Yes.
[00:14:00] Speaker A: But you have to think about it in the context of compare this to kind of what looks dorb timber frame building in some village somewhere. It's still far and away higher status than that.
[00:14:13] Speaker D: So what kind of privileges?
I know, as you just said famously, things were taken away from him.
But as a relatively high status prisoner, what could he have expected? On a daily basis, it would largely
[00:14:31] Speaker A: be within the gift of the lieutenant of the Tower. So we know more was dined in the gall or lieutenant's house, which is probably the King's house. Sorry.
So I don't know, we can say every day would have been the same. And depending on how much money you have, you could bring your servants in, you could bring your books in, you could bring paper and whatever to fill your time.
But in between being questioned and spending your time in your apartment or apartments as it may be, we can't really say this is the day to day itinerary.
[00:15:08] Speaker D: And do we know when high status prisoners were interrogated, which they were, would the councillors come to their room to do that? And it would be a sort of a verbal interrogation.
[00:15:21] Speaker A: Well, so torture is always whenever you come to the Towers, who was tortured, where and when. And obviously torture did happen, but that's not the go to. You don't try and break somebody by immediately throwing them off the edge of a cliff. So if a high status prisoner like Waugh would probably be verbally interrogated by the Lieutenant of the Tower and they would be shown the instruments of torture and various other things and say, this is what we will do to you if you don't comply with us. And then if you don't comply, they do those things to you.
So I mean that can range from. And you have to go up in steps because there always has to be something more you can do because if you start with the worst thing you could possibly do to something and they endure that, then you're never going to get anything out of them.
So I mean, it's various things like being hung from manacles and things like that, which don't sound particularly enjoyable, but in comparison to having your nails ripped out and being stretched on the rack seem comparatively better.
[00:16:20] Speaker D: And I think we're gonna come, aren't we, to talk. We're going to actually go into a part of the Tower where maybe some of those things happen. So maybe we could return some of those delightful things.
[00:16:29] Speaker A: Exactly. But yeah, I mean, he would have been, he would have been.
Or high status prisoners would definitely be interrogated either by the Lieutenant of the Tower or even by the Privy Council, if the whole Privy Council is here, as is the case with Guy Fawkes later on. For more, off the top of my head, I don't think we actually have any interrogation records for him. There's the records of the King's solicitor trying to take books away where he reaffirms his statement that the King is not higher than God, in effect, which seals his fate. But it's the annoying thing about the Tower is we can't say this is what this prisoner did on Tuesday and had this for lunch and so on and so forth. You kind of have to draw in between the lines of what we do know.
[00:17:12] Speaker D: Yeah. Still real privileged to be in this room, though. It's an incredible thing to think to be standing in the room where St. Thomas More.
It was St. Thomas in the end, wasn't it? He did get a St. Thomas, Thomas
[00:17:24] Speaker A: more and John Fisher are both venerated as saints of the Catholic Church.
[00:17:27] Speaker D: Quite incredible. And before we leave here because we have a lot of other places to explore, of course, the bell tower is famously captured in Thomas Wyatt's poem, isn't it?
[00:17:38] Speaker A: Yes. Is that he stuck his head out and was able to see the execution site of Anne Boleyn.
[00:17:43] Speaker D: And what do you think? Can you do that?
[00:17:46] Speaker A: Not. You can't really see the execution site where we think the execution site actually was.
So whether or not there's some artistic license.
[00:17:56] Speaker D: Poetic license. Yes.
[00:17:57] Speaker A: Which would make sense for a poet.
[00:18:00] Speaker D: Okay. All right. So we don't know.
[00:18:03] Speaker A: We don't know.
It's entirely possible.
[00:18:05] Speaker D: Maybe some poetic license in there. Okay. So where would we need to go next to explore the next stage of our story?
[00:18:12] Speaker A: So the next. Next we are leaving the king's house and going into number two Tower Green, which is an 18th century house. So we don't have any low status cells which are accessible at the moment from the Tudor period. But what we do have is a 19th century low status cell which would be. Is a comparative kind of space.
So we'll go in there and you can kind of. You can get a feel for the distinct lack of space.
[00:18:39] Speaker D: Really. Oh, my goodness. I'm a bit nervous. But go and lead the way. Let's go and let's go and huddle in the cell.
[00:18:46] Speaker A: Yes. I'm not sure all four of us are actually going to fit in there. We will try our best.
It is. There are lots of hidden gems in this building.
[00:18:57] Speaker D: I bet there are.
[00:19:00] Speaker A: Well, I mean, there are lots of hidden gems across the town, to be fair to them.
[00:19:04] Speaker D: What think do you. Do you think is the biggest unanswered question at the tower that everybody would just love to know the answer to?
[00:19:10] Speaker A: I don't know. It depends who you are.
I think it's where people are held. I think if we could magic up some sort of tome that says this person was held here between these days, that would answer that would be immeasurably useful to my inquiries.
[00:19:27] Speaker D: How would it help you?
[00:19:29] Speaker A: Well, we get a lot of curators department is open to inquiries. So we get lots of people writing in saying, do you know where this happened or when this happened and we try our best to answer, but often it's. We have no idea, we just don't know. So this is number two tower green. So this was built between 1700 and 1710 as the doctor's house.
[00:19:55] Speaker D: Right.
[00:19:55] Speaker A: For the Tower. So the famous line in the Yoke Water tour is if you're ill, you go to the Doctor's house and then if the Doctor can't help you, you go next door to the Chaplain's house. So in the basement of this building there is a very low status cell, so.
[00:20:14] Speaker D: Oh, my goodness.
[00:20:14] Speaker A: Yeah, you'll have to.
[00:20:15] Speaker D: So it's very much a Regency building, isn't it?
[00:20:18] Speaker A: Yes, yeah, it does. It has all of the buildings.
Well, all of the 18th century buildings at the Tower have kind of elements of both Regency and earlier because they're all built in the shells of earlier buildings.
[00:20:36] Speaker D: Down some steps, sort of down, down into the.
[00:20:39] Speaker A: So I'm taking you into a dark cupboard, but don't panic.
[00:20:43] Speaker D: Where are we going?
[00:20:45] Speaker A: So if you see, okay, we have this wonderful door. So it could just be a tour of tower doors, really, which has obviously methods, looking at this fantastic panel
[00:21:01] Speaker D: so you can peek in and you can see your prisoner inside.
And this is.
[00:21:05] Speaker A: But if you go in. Yeah, I'll just lock you in, like.
[00:21:10] Speaker D: Yeah, no, do, do lock me in.
[00:21:13] Speaker A: It's not the most enjoyable space to be, if. Honest.
[00:21:16] Speaker D: No, it's pretty bleak, isn't it? So I don't know, it's what, six, couple of meters wide? Yeah, maybe two, three meters wide. It's square two, three meters meters wide.
[00:21:28] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:21:28] Speaker D: With a small window. Very. You can imagine being very damp in
[00:21:32] Speaker A: here when you have Moore's complaints of damp and cold.
[00:21:36] Speaker D: Yeah, it's nothing compared to this. No, I can see that now.
[00:21:40] Speaker A: It is one window in a not very substantial kind of.
[00:21:44] Speaker D: So this, this would be typical of your lowest status prisoner. So tell us about, you know, the life of what kind of low status prisoner would end up. Do we have any examples?
I'm thinking, for example, Anne Askew, would she be considered a low depth status prisoner?
[00:22:01] Speaker A: Yes, I imagine so. I mean, Anne is brought here under charges of heresy and is famously one of two women who are tortured at the Tower. But she would definitely be considered low status prisoner and you would imagine that she would be in here. Women are interesting prisoners out of tower because often they are held within the bell tower or the King's house in general in comparison to male prisoners who are kind of thrown in these kind of cupboards and just forgotten About.
So the best kind of example of low status prisoners would be a lot of Jews who were brought to the tower during various pogroms and unsavoury elements of our past. But it could be anyone and everyone, really. It depends on. Depends who you want to lock up.
[00:22:51] Speaker D: And you use that sort of phrase, thrown away, kind of just chucked in and I guess, I mean, you can
[00:22:58] Speaker A: get a sense of that in here.
[00:22:59] Speaker D: You could imagine, couldn't you? Just being somebody shuts the door and you're drafted to it. I mean, were they provided with food?
What do we know about who provided for them?
[00:23:09] Speaker A: Well, it would.
There would be some sort of stipend, I imagine, within the lieutenant's accounts to provide for the prisoners.
If you had money, you could bring things in and you could bribe the young man who was looking after you or the jailer or whoever it was.
If you were looking for answers from somebody, you would keep them alive, but it wouldn't be kind of three or four course meals.
[00:23:32] Speaker D: I noticed when we were in the bell tower, it looked like there was a guard robe.
There's no such thing here.
[00:23:38] Speaker A: No.
I imagine you would be provided, if you were lucky, with some sort of pot. Pot or bucket or container.
Again, it's one of the difficult things is the. We are so heavily reliant on whether people were able to write, whether people did write, whether those records actually survived. So with John Fisher, we've got a fabulous record of his time here. And there are various other people who write about being in the Tower, but low status prisoners there is next to nothing.
[00:24:08] Speaker D: Do we even know what the general outcome was for a low status prisoner? Did they tend to die here?
Were they executed?
Was anybody released?
[00:24:22] Speaker A: It would depend largely on what you were accused of. So, I mean, Wyatt Junior's rebellion, obviously lots of his followers were imprisoned at the Tower and most of them were executed on Tower Hill.
The whole point of the Tower is this kind of representation of monarchical strength.
You don't just imprison people and forget about them, really.
You use them to make a point. And the point is the crown is right, usually.
[00:24:51] Speaker D: Yeah.
[00:24:52] Speaker A: And the best way of doing that is executing them in the middle of your capital city.
[00:24:56] Speaker D: Which tower held very publicly, of course, was the case back in the day.
[00:25:01] Speaker A: So there are, there are executions within the tower, obviously, although most of them happened actually in the 20th century.
Most prisoners, if they were found guilty and sentenced to death, would be executed on Tower Hill. I mean, there would certainly be people who would be acquitted to believe, but they don't write about it. So we don't know.
[00:25:19] Speaker D: Well, we've been standing in here, I don't know, five or 10 minutes.
[00:25:22] Speaker A: It's quite chilly, isn't it?
[00:25:23] Speaker D: I've got just what I was going to say. I'm getting quite cold compared to the bell tower. I was quite comfortable. I'm just in a T shirt today because it's a lovely, actually lovely autumn day, isn't it? But it's chilly in here.
[00:25:33] Speaker A: Yeah. So, I mean. I mean, the tower is interesting from an environmental point of view, because you have these massive, thick stone walls and they're fantastic for keeping heat in, but they're also fantastic at keeping heat out. So once it's warm, you're fine. You'll stay warm for ages if it's cold. It is very cold.
So, yes, I can't imagine this being a particularly nice place to be, if I'm honest.
[00:25:56] Speaker D: No, no. So I think we might move on.
Where do we need to go? I'm not unhappy to be getting out of this cell, I have to tell you that.
[00:26:06] Speaker A: Are we going? I think we're going to the chapel.
[00:26:08] Speaker D: The chapel? Oh, yes, yes, of course. Where a few people in the dark. Do you want me to turn the lights off?
[00:26:15] Speaker A: Oh, yes, please. Good.
[00:26:16] Speaker D: Here we go.
Oh, it's nice to be out into the fresh air and sunshine, which is a relief. And we're right outside the chapel, so of course everybody will, particularly people who love Tudor History, will associate this with many places of burial of very significant characters. Why did you want to bring me here in particular?
[00:26:40] Speaker A: Well, I think. I mean, that is the.
In a nutshell, that is the reason. So The Chapel of St Peter Adventula, one of two royal peculiars and Chapels Royal within the Tower. It's built during. Between 1590 and 1520 and is essentially the parish church for the Tower for the next 500 years. And it is still that today, which is one of the reasons why I love it so much.
It has always been the thing that it is, whereas everything else at the Tower kind of gets repurposed into whatever it needs to be. But the reason we're here, when we're talking about prisoners, is obviously most imprisonment, most periods of imprisonment come to an end, be that through one gate or in a box. So this is where a lot of the people who were executed, either on Tower Hill or within the Tower ended up. And so I thought it'd be a good place to just have a chat about that.
[00:27:32] Speaker D: Do you know how many people are buried here?
[00:27:35] Speaker A: Oh, well, we have the. So we do have a document for the register of burials at the chapel and they date from 1550 to 1821 off the top of my head. And I mean there are thousands of people really buried in the chapel and it's not a complete document by any stretch of the imagination.
So the area we are now standing on, which is outside the chapel, was actually part of the burial ground.
So the burial ground covers most of Tower Green and then stretches right along the parade ground.
[00:28:07] Speaker D: Oh, so it's much bigger than I thought I knew there were because obviously when Anne Boleyn was executed, there is an account of seeing the burials of the Francis Weston, etc. So I knew there was some area. I had no idea it was so big.
[00:28:20] Speaker A: No, it was absolutely vast. So again, it's the perception of the tower in that period. It is an institutional powerhouse with loads of different kind of governmental organizations based at the Tower. So there are hundreds if not thousands of people working here and living here and if they die, this is usually where they would end up.
So when you think about the Chapel of St Peter Avincula, it's very easy to fall into the idea of thinking it is just one of these buildings in the complex of the tower. But it's better to think of it as a village parish church where you go, then you walk through a very large burial ground in order to get there.
And the burial ground in this instance happens to be all the way along the parade ground.
So it is mostly a parish church for the community of the Tower. But there are certainly hundreds of people who are executed on Tower Hill who are also buried here.
[00:29:13] Speaker D: Right. So there are just some people who lived and worked, worked here, are buried in the graveyard, but they're also prisoners who are executed. And I guess that the slightly lower status would have been buried in the graveyard outside. And then of course we have some of the highest status folk who are actually buried in the chapel.
[00:29:31] Speaker A: Yeah. So I mean, burials within churches are fairly easily regimented by status because the closer you are to the sanctuary, the better you are effectively and the closer you are to God, the less time you'll spend in purgatory.
So yeah, you're certainly imagine that low status people who are executed would either be buried here or within one of the local parish churches, such as All Hallows. But when you start getting to high status people like Anne Boleyn, George Boleyn, Lady Jane Grey, those kind of big names, you would expect them to be within the chancellor of the chapel.
Annoyingly, the entire chapel was well, annoyingly off. Interestingly, in my view, the entire inside of the chapel was excavated in 1876 as part of works to renovate the chapel. And during that process, they identified the bones of Anne Boleyn through looking at the bones of her vertebrae, which were particularly small and bore witness to the Queen's little neck.
So that's the story that forms the foundation of where Anne is on the memorial pavement and is obviously a focal point point for thousands of people to come and kind of connect with Ann's story.
However, because that analysis lacked any kind of scientific basis, largely because none of those scientific methods existed at that point, we cannot say that is where Ann is. Because if we were looking at that today, not that I would ever advise intruding into a completely stable Christian place of worship.
You would look for pathological marks in the bones, such as quite catastrophic damage that you would receive when a sword goes through your neck. And you'd also date them through the stratigraphy, which is evidenced through the layers of soil and probably carbon dating and that kind of thing. So it's. It's a lovely myth, and it may well be true because those bones were found in the holiest part of the chapel. But we just can't say for 100% this is.
[00:31:37] Speaker D: Yeah, right. I remember writing a little bit about that, and all the, you know, some of the bones, coffins had collapsed on each other, and whether they. The right bones went back into the right pots, we just don't know any of that, do we?
[00:31:48] Speaker A: Exactly. And I mean, that's. That's the reason why the chapel was excavated was because the floor was entirely unstable. And that kind of comes back to the fact that this chapel has been here for 500 years and for largely 400 of those years was unique, used as a place of burial. So you bury people on top of each other, on top of each other, on top of each other, and eventually it does get to the point where they just start collapsing in on each other.
So most of those remains were disinterred and placed within ossuaries in the crypt, which is not accessible to the public and is a part of the consecrated active place of worship that the chapel is.
But, yeah, the few individuals who were identified as significant members of the royal family were reinterred in the chancel, and that's where the memorial pavement comes from.
[00:32:39] Speaker D: Right, okay. So they are actually in the ground. Because actually, I was going to ask you about the crypt. Is Sir Thomas More buried in the crypt there?
[00:32:46] Speaker A: Well, so again, it's the kind of it's the difficult thing of where did the Victorians put everything? Thomas More wasn't identified during that process.
He was definitely buried within the chapel, but because he wasn't identified and then. Well, and again, the problems with identification that I've already mentioned, he's probably in one or multiple of the ossaries, as with everybody else. So it's.
[00:33:12] Speaker D: It's all got mixed up, maybe.
[00:33:14] Speaker A: It certainly all got mixed up, but it's not.
I'm painting a worse picture than it is. Ossaries are a fairly normal thing in most churches and it's just where you put remains once you run out of space and they are still in a respectful area and looked after by our resident chaplain. But, no, that, I would say is probably the question I get most frequently is, where is this person buried? And the answer always is, I would love to be able to tell you that it's this place, but I can't. So there you go. Yeah, it's difficult, but the myths have certain elements to them and it's a good focal point for people to. To engage with the story of Anne and various other people who are so important to our perception of Tudor History.
[00:34:02] Speaker D: Absolutely. But it's beautiful because, as you said, this building was built during the reign of Henry viii, so it's a bona fide Tudor bit of actually of the Tower, which is great.
[00:34:12] Speaker A: It is, and it has interesting architectural bits inside it. Actually, if any of your listeners go inside, on the north eastern wall, there's a hagioscope, which is a hole in the wall, or a squint and a piscina, which are kind of elements of Catholic, which you usually see in Catholic chapels. And so you can see that it's built by Henry as Defender of the Faith, as his Catholic chapel for his fortress in the Tower of London, and then very quickly becomes obviously a Protestant chapel, following the split with Rome. So it's a fantastic survival, particularly at that transitional point in English history.
And it's a fantastic survival because it is fairly plain. So when you go to Hampton Court and to the Chapel Royal there, it's kind of opulently decorated in just this marvellous place.
But when you come to the Tower, it's fairly.
It's not laid back, it's still got an absolutely amazing ceiling and various other. And the masonry arches in particular are quite nice.
But it's definitely a step back and that kind of shows its use as a parish chapel, parish church for the Tower, alongside being a royal peculiar, rather than any of these other royal peculiars which are solely for the use of the work.
[00:35:24] Speaker D: Yes, Jeremy, you could get more different between here and the chapel. Royal Hampton Court, that's for sure.
Now, we were talking about the highest status burials, and the name Anne Boleyn came up, of course, perhaps one of the most famous Tudor prisoners and of course, the most high status. So could we just go over to where the royal apartments would have been and talk a little bit about Anne Boleyn stay here as prisoner?
[00:35:50] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:35:51] Speaker D: Okay. So.
[00:35:52] Speaker A: So we are currently just to the north west of the. Of the White Tower. So we'll walk along the parade ground and then down to the south lawn, which is where the royal apartments would have been located.
And what's probably saddest and most interesting about Anne's imprisonment at the Tower is that she obviously stayed here before her coronation. And those apartments were largely either rebuilt or done up in 1532 specifically for her to stay in in 1533 before she was crowned. So it's the kind of. It's. And the. One of the most.
The best examples of that is the onion domes on the top of the White Tower, which were installed on the orders of Henry during that kind of scheme of work.
[00:36:45] Speaker D: So they were constructed around 1533 when they were renovating the royal apartments. Right.
[00:36:52] Speaker A: So it's one of those interesting things because we associate Henry VIII as this kind of monstrous tyrant who went around cutting people's heads off, which obviously he was.
But in his earlier years, he's the dashing prince of Europe and quite often displays his affections through architecture.
And so Anne arriving here before her coronation, I mean, it would have been absolutely overwhelming that your new king has effectively rebuilt parts of a palace for you.
[00:37:26] Speaker D: Absolutely.
[00:37:38] Speaker A: Sam.
A few short four years later, those same apartments were where Anne was confined on charges of treason and adultery and all these other horrible things. So it's the saddest part of her story at the Tower is that kind of duality.
[00:38:49] Speaker D: I think it must have been bittersweet, mustn't it, to be incarcerated in those rooms where there just would have been so many happy memories of you at the pinnacle really, of your relationship and your influence and your power.
What a change. And I was always quite surprised, obviously, when Amberlynn was arrived at the Tower, she collapsed on the floor and sort of said, am I going to be taken to a dungeon? Which surprised me because I would have thought she would have known that she would have been housed in a high status prison. But I guess that just must have been part of the whole shock yeah. The sheer shock.
[00:39:21] Speaker A: Well, I mean, the town, the tower is notorious at that point for being a place of imprisonment. And you wouldn't usually associate being a prisoner with also staying in royal apartments.
[00:39:33] Speaker D: Yeah.
[00:39:34] Speaker A: So it's understandable that you might collapse. I mean, I feel like if I was trapped here, I might collapse.
I don't, I don't think any of us can really know how Anne would be feeling at that point, because it is, it is such a, such a wild change between absolute joy and the saddest moment of your entire life.
There's, there's such a boundary between our experience and that experience that you can really grasp.
[00:40:02] Speaker D: I don't think you can. You can try, but I think it's, it's just impossible. But you brought me onto the South Lawn. We just got the looming White Tower, which is just such a magnificent building, but we would have once been inside an inner courtyard of what was the royal apartments and the whole royal complex. Right. Do you want to just tell us about what we would have seen if we had been standing here in the Tudor period?
[00:40:26] Speaker A: So if you were standing here in the Tudor period, you would have, firstly, that ruinous wall, the Cold Harbor Wall, would have gone all the way along between the White Tower, between the Cold Harbor Gate, which was an additional tower coming out the west of the White Tower. And then there's. There'd be a whole row of probably brick buildings which we think would be used as kitchens. A medieval great hall which largely, we think, similar to the one that's at Winchester.
And then this whole kind of row of the Kings and queens apartments, which included halls and dining rooms and antechambers and all this kind of different things. And there are various accounts for them being knobbed, which is wood framing with bricks in between. So they are.
[00:41:08] Speaker D: Right.
[00:41:08] Speaker A: High status buildings. And the interiors would have been pretty opulently decorated in the same way that Hampton Court is decorated for each of Henry's successive wives.
So it would be a whole world away from what we have now, which is this kind of nicely mown lawn.
[00:41:28] Speaker D: Before I get on to what on earth happened here and why we don't have it, can you just answer. Answer a really nerdy question that's always bothered me if, if the hall was down there, that the ground is extremely uneven now and drops away, was this the norm? Was this the original height or was the height a lot lower?
[00:41:46] Speaker A: Well, it depends where you're standing, so it's probably over on that section, slightly lower. But the, the problem with the floor levels within the inner ward is an architect called John Taylor.
So during the Victorian remedievalization of the fortress, the Lanthorn Tower had already burnt down and has subsequently been rebuilt. But all of the buildings within the kind of innermost ward were derelict or in serious states of disrepair even by the end of the 16th century.
And they get continually altered for use as either guard rooms or storage rooms and this, that and the other. And the Board of Ordnance, if they could fit a cannon somewhere, they would put a cannon somewhere. So even, even the Great hall becomes a storage place for the Board of Ordnance after its final use as a royal residence. And so when you get to the Victorian period, these buildings that, if they haven't already been demolished, are subsequently demolished. So the wall basically from the Wakefield Tower all the way through the Lanthorn Tower as a Victorian rebuild, and the wall going up to the Salt Tower was all built by John Taylor, much to the displeasure of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings, which had been recently formed.
And so they were built very slightly to the south of where the original southern wall of the inner ward would have been.
[00:43:11] Speaker D: I see.
[00:43:12] Speaker A: And then subsequent work in the 70s to build what is now the Raven Shop basically meant that the floor levels here make absolutely no sense.
[00:43:23] Speaker D: I'm so glad you've cleared this up, because I've been tearing my hair out since I first started thinking about the royal apartments here, going, what's going on? What's the real level?
[00:43:31] Speaker A: No, so, I mean, the. You've got something I'm very interested in now. The stratigraphy of the tower makes very little sense.
So you've got the Roman wall, which is roughly where these kind of tram lines come down. And then. Then on top of the Roman wall, you obviously have the Norman fortress, and then the medieval expansion fortress, then the Tudor buildings. And so you would expect it to be this very nice, very kind of clean, oh, this is Roman, this is whatever. But it's not, because whenever different buildings were either built or demolished, all of that stone and all of the. All of the materials are of such a high quality because they are in a royal palace, they just get dug out and really reused elsewhere. So they dig out all the foundations, completely ruin the stratigraphy of what they've built, and then move on, and then someone else builds on top of it. And it just makes for incredibly difficult archaeological excavations that usually results in us having far more questions than answers. So you have a question and you think, okay, we'll do a trial trench to find the answer for that. And then you do the trial trench and there's about 100 other questions and not the answer to your original question.
[00:44:35] Speaker D: Right.
[00:44:36] Speaker A: So it's complicated. Complicated place. But no, you're right to be annoyed by the floor levels annoy me.
[00:44:43] Speaker D: I now know I'm in good company. I feel much, much happier. And the other thing that would have been here was the jewel house, right?
[00:44:49] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:44:50] Speaker D: To the side of the tower.
[00:44:51] Speaker A: Yes. So the jewel house would have come out of the south face of the White Tower.
And I believe that was built by the King's carpenter, or the Master of Kings works at that point. Who. James Needham, who one of my colleagues who's now curator at the Mary Rose Museum, Hannah Matthews, has done a huge amount of work on.
So it's.
Yeah. So you would have the jewel house coming out of here and then all of these different apartments, like the Queen's lodgings and various gardens out in. So it's a total world away from what we have now, which is one of the really annoying things is this is all the result of the Victorians, is the White Tower would also have had the annex on the eastern face, which was used as the Wardrobe Tower, and that was torn off by Taylor as well.
So what we're left with is this very isolated monolith of the White Tower, which has certain amazing attributes and I don't think I'll ever get bored of looking at it, but it is a world away from the kind of organic expansion that we would have seen over the thousand years from 1078 to now.
And certainly in the Tudor period, when you have just storehouses popping up every year for different reasons, all of that's gone. And the record of it is only really within the account books.
So it's difficult to piece together that period of history. And if anybody wants the best view that we have of the Tudor Tower of London, the source to look at is the Hayward and gascoigne map from 1597.
So obviously it's quite a few years after Anne's time, but it's largely the same place.
[00:46:40] Speaker D: I will put that because I'll put that in the show notes associated with this page, folks, if you're listening in, so you'll be able to have a look at that.
So we've got a little bit. Bit drawn into the buildings, as is our passion, but we were talking about the life of the various prisoners. So, I mean, Anne's imprisonment is reasonably well recorded, with the exception with the loss of some of records in the. In a fire wasn't it later on, I think at the Cotton Library or something like that.
But what would we expect or what did she experience when she was a prisoner here?
[00:47:15] Speaker A: Obviously, aside from the heartbreak and sadness, and probably would have had one of the, one of the better experiences as a prisoner. Obviously she is in the Royal apartments and has probably a suite of rooms and has a number of maids looking after her. I think one of whom you'll know better is the Lieutenant's wife.
[00:47:34] Speaker D: Yes, that's right, Lady Kingston.
[00:47:38] Speaker A: So she's. Yeah, she's. I mean, she is living, living in a manner akin to what she's used to, I mean, obviously with other restrictions of not being able to leave where you are and being a prisoner. But no, it would have been comparatively better, but obviously profoundly unenjoyable for all of the obvious reasons. So it's a difficult one. And as I say, I don't think we can really get too close to that experience.
[00:48:07] Speaker D: Looking at that map that you talked about of from the 16th century of the Tower, there were gardens, were there not, on the far side?
[00:48:14] Speaker A: Yes. So you've got the Queen's garden on the far side of the Tower, which. And the gardens are actually quite interesting. So the first accounts we have are from Henry III actually planting pear trees to the north of town, building gardens in and around the Tower. And so it's again, it's just a world away from what we have now because you have this kind of high status luxury apartments with gardens that you can wander around and then as the Board of Ordnance and various institutions gain power, as the Tower declines as a royal residence, I mean, 15, 32, 33, when the royal apartments are remade for Anne, is the last flourish of the Tower as a royal palace. After that, I mean, Charles, I think, has his breakfast before his coronation in the King's house and a few, few others process from the Tower. But it's never, it's never again used as a kind of royal residence. It's always just a storehouse because it is so conveniently located.
But no, it's a, it's a shame. But also what we're left with is equally significant in its own right, so.
[00:49:19] Speaker D: And I often wondered whether Anne was allowed to exercise in the garden. I don't think, if I recall there's any actual evidence that she was or
[00:49:26] Speaker A: wasn't essentially, I think it would, it would make sense for someone of her status and I mean, obviously given the context of the time and worrying about the manners of women, it would make
[00:49:39] Speaker D: sense because we do now, I think that if I recall rightly, the Princess Elizabeth, when she was imprisoned here, I think saw or had some kind of interaction with Robert Dudley at that time. Maybe that's another myth, I'm not sure. But I was wondering if she was allowed out, whether her mother had been allowed to take exercise. And that would be a very different, different kind of notion of what might be available to a high status prisoner.
[00:50:03] Speaker A: It would largely depend, I think, on who was your jailer that day, how much money you had and your privileges. I think Anne, as a Queen of England, and I mean she's always a Queen of England, regardless of what happens, would probably be allowed to do so.
And Elizabeth is a bit of vague one because she's, I mean, she's impressed and on incredibly loose charges. So she was almost certainly held within the Royal apartments rather than the Queen's house, as is the myth.
But I think it.
[00:50:36] Speaker D: Well, I'm glad you answered that because I was going to ask you that very question because I, I don't recall ever reading.
So it's more subjection that we think that that would have made sense.
[00:50:47] Speaker A: So it's the work of a number of my colleagues who are no longer working here.
But it makes far more sense for Elizabeth as pretty much the second Princess of the blood, the second highest status prisoner, to be here, to be held within the Queen's apartments, which are still in a way the royal apartments of the Tower, than in the Lieutenant's lodgings. Because again, at that point, when later in the 16th century, the tower has expanded into more of an institutional powerhouse than it is even when Anne is here. So all those other different buildings would be used for things.
It makes more sense to me as well. And I think the myth of the Queen Elizabeth's walk between the Beauchamp Tower and the King's House is more of a Victorian invention.
[00:51:40] Speaker D: Okay. And another one of those pesky Victorian legends.
[00:51:45] Speaker A: Our big kind of mantra at the Tower is we never let the truth get in the way of a good story.
And it's kind of tongue in cheek, but I think there's a lot to be said for that because a lot of the stuff we don't know. I can't tell you exactly where Thomas Cromwell was held or even where George Blim was held or anything else, because there aren't records of it. There are a few bits of graffiti here and there, and we kind of draw the lines in between with kind of good sense and research.
But the reason the Tower is so important to our kind of national memory and our perception of our own history is largely because of those myths that stem from the Victorian period.
And so that, I think, has equal importance as the truth. Because if somebody, if somebody comes here because they believe that Anne Boleyn was pulled through through Traitors Gate and they engage with the history here and go away and maybe buy a book or look at one of our fantastic HRP blocks, that to me is just as good as if someone comes here and goes, oh no, Anne wasn't brought through Traitors Gate, she was brought through the sally port.
It's not necessarily what you know when you get here, it's how you engage with it.
[00:52:55] Speaker D: I can see that. I can see that. And I must remember that because I like myth busting.
But I get your point, Alfred. I do get your point.
So before we move on and go to our next space, since we're talking about female prisoners, the other one that I wanted to touch on is Lady Jane Grey. What do we know about where she was held here?
[00:53:14] Speaker A: So Lady Jane Grey was probably held in what is now 4 and 5 Tower Green. So they are quite obviously so directly ahead of us.
[00:53:22] Speaker D: We're actually standing looking at the marwe across the way there.
[00:53:25] Speaker A: So she would have been able to see us, albeit through Coldharbour Gate. But yeah, so she would have been held in what is now 4 and 5 Tower Green, which are obviously not Tudor buildings. However, they are built on top of what were the Lieutenant's stables.
So there's the myth of, I can't remember if there's actually any evidence for this, of Dudley's corpse being brought past her on the carts. I mean, Lady Jane Grey, she certainly, for me, she ties with Anne for probably most harrowing experience as the kind of very young teenager who has the crown forced upon her head and is subsequently executed for is a high status place. But again, that makes sense when you think about the perception of Lady Jane Grey as not actually being an interloper, essentially. Exactly. So you wouldn't, you wouldn't hold her in the royal apartments because then you would be giving her more authority than possibly she would be due within the context of that.
But that's largely what we know about her. And again, I keep coming back to the buildings because that's what I'm most comfortable talking about. But the loss of all of those buildings means we can't take those stories because who knows what kind of evidence there would have been in them.
[00:54:48] Speaker D: Incredible.
[00:54:49] Speaker A: Incredible.
[00:54:49] Speaker D: One of the things I just wanted to say before we do move on is I think historic royal palaces, some Years ago, did a great kind of video representation of the royal apartments here, which is absolutely fantastic, and I absolutely love it. So I recommend. If you're listening to this, I'll put a link in the description associated with this video, and you can take a look at that. And you can literally see the apartments rising up from the ground as they would have been for Anne Boleyn.
[00:55:17] Speaker A: Yes. And if. And if you do visit us, a lot of those pictures are used in the interpretation around the fortress as well. So you can kind of get different perspectives on the lost royal apartments from different locations.
[00:55:30] Speaker D: Brilliant. Okay, so another question that bugs me is when Anne was led to her execution, which is obviously on the north side of the. Of the White Tower here, she would have had to go through somehow the courtyard and through Cole Harbour Gate. But did she go through the great hall, or was there some sort of flight of stairs from her privy chambers? Now, do you know?
[00:55:54] Speaker A: The. The short answer is no. But there would be probably quite a few different ways you could get from the royal apartments to. To the north of the White Tower. So the kind of. If you wanted to make a show of it, the best way would be through the Cold Harbour Gate, which is the enclosure, would be the gate for the enclosure that we're in. But there are also ways of getting out through the Queen's gardens and things like that. So it's.
I think your perception of which way she walked would largely hinge on how much care was taken over her execution.
So the fact that she's executed with a sword rather than an axe, the fact that she's executed within the walls of the tower, which.
It sounds incredibly strange. It is a kindness because being executed is quite horrible. But being executed in front of a baying crowd who are screaming and jeering for your blood sounds significantly worse.
So there are ways she could go which would be quiet her at ways that she could go which would be more of a procession. And I think it would depend on what you personally think about the context.
[00:57:01] Speaker D: Okay, Right. So we don't know is the bottom line, as is so often the case, unfortunately. But.
[00:57:08] Speaker A: So you've come to the tower for a couple of hours of me saying, I don't know,
[00:57:14] Speaker D: I think that's our highest status. Prisoners covered. Where do we need to head to next, Alfred?
[00:57:19] Speaker A: So I think we are heading inside the White Tower to look at torture.
[00:57:26] Speaker D: Okay. I must admit, make me the collie waffles. But at the same time, it's a shock now.
[00:57:31] Speaker A: So it's. It's a shock it's much more jolly.
[00:57:33] Speaker D: Okay, I can breathe.
[01:00:03] Speaker A: So we are now in the White Tower on the first floor, which you can probably hear my.
[01:00:10] Speaker D: So this originally, for those people who are not aware, what was the White Tower originally?
[01:00:16] Speaker A: Oh, so the White Tower is William the Conqueror's keep. It is the kind of the focal point of the original fortress. So when William the Conqueror wins the Battle of Hastings in 1066, he builds a ring work fortification in this part of London, which is kind of just a timber fort to protect the eastern side of London. And then there's Baynard's Castle fortifying the western side.
[01:00:41] Speaker D: Ah, I didn't know.
[01:00:43] Speaker A: You can defend. You can defend the city of London from both sides with both of those forts. Which is, is why the Tower isn't like Lewis Castle, for instance, which is on a hill in the middle of the city.
You don't need to do that here because the means of defense are different. You've got the Roman walls going all the way around and then a castle at either end rather than one castle in the middle.
[01:01:07] Speaker D: I see.
That's fun. And then of course, you've got the Thames protecting the south. Yeah, the south side of things. So this was his basically the first part of the Tower to be constructed. And his like royal palace. Is this where he would have.
[01:01:20] Speaker A: Well, William the Conqueror was dead by the time it was finished. So it was. It was built in two phases.
[01:01:25] Speaker D: Would have been tricky then.
[01:01:26] Speaker A: Yes. From 1078 to around 1100.
And it was. It was obviously built with royal lodgings in mind because we have the Chapel of St. John the Evangelist upstairs, which is beautiful.
[01:01:39] Speaker D: Oh, it's the best.
[01:01:40] Speaker A: It is, yeah. It's the best place here by far.
But whether or not it's used regularly for that, we don't really know because the royal apartments quite swiftly move onto the south lawn, which is more readily accessible by the Thames.
And when you think about medieval and even Tudor kings just constantly being on progress and all this kind of stuff, these kind of large dusty spaces quite quickly fall out of fashion.
So how far you can say it is palace is debatable. What it spends most of its life being is really a storehouse.
[01:02:19] Speaker D: Right.
[01:02:20] Speaker A: For gunpowder and various other things.
[01:02:22] Speaker D: And I love the fact we're walking through the armory and we've got. I feel like I've got Henry VIII looming down upon me because his armor is open to my left hand side.
Quite something, isn't it, when you see. I just love the fact we have armor because it just can give us that Idea of the size and the scale of the person, it is a
[01:02:40] Speaker A: very visceral kind of. I mean, it's one of the most important displays of power that you can have.
So this is William the Conqueror's keep, and it quite swiftly changes from being a royal palace and fortress to being a place of storage and crucially for us, a place of torture.
So that is where we are going now.
[01:03:08] Speaker D: So I'm imagining poor prisoners being dragged down here, just thinking, oh, my God.
[01:03:13] Speaker A: Oh, yes. No, I mean, it's not. It's not really something I would want to do.
[01:03:18] Speaker D: So we've come right the way down into the basement of the. Of the great Tower here. Can you tell us about this room and what we know about it?
[01:03:28] Speaker A: So this is the western room of the basement of the White Tower. So my colleague Charles Farris has done a lot of work on where torture will be located and Sandy Dixon Smith before him.
And a lot of records point to this kind of long room in the White Tower. And the structure of the White Tower is that you have two sections split by a spine wall in the eastern side. The southern part of it is an absidial projection, which is where The Chapel of St. John is located, and that goes all the way down into the foundations, which is where we just were.
But on this side there is no projection. So it is. It is the longest room in the building.
So if you're looking for a long room, this makes sense.
[01:04:16] Speaker D: This makes sense.
[01:04:17] Speaker A: And also there's.
There are documents which refer to there being a well, and there is obviously a well over in the corner.
[01:04:24] Speaker D: I see. So there are documents that talk about torture happening in the long room. Is that how we know the connection between the two?
[01:04:35] Speaker A: Just that I've been given at least.
[01:04:37] Speaker D: My goodness. Right here is the well.
[01:04:39] Speaker A: So you can imagine if you're in any of the other parts of the tower, that some of those places, although cramped, would be quite comfortable.
I mean, the King's house in particular and the royal apartments, but when you get down here, it is.
It's more what you would think of in terms of dark dungeons and dingy
[01:05:02] Speaker D: places, because it's all beautifully lit today.
It's very hard to imagine it.
[01:05:07] Speaker A: No, it's all wonderfully lit with all these beautiful brick arts, arches. That would not have been here.
[01:05:14] Speaker D: So would it have just been a square room? How would it. How would the. The actual.
[01:05:18] Speaker A: You're going to hate me for this answer.
[01:05:20] Speaker D: You don't know.
[01:05:20] Speaker A: We don't know.
[01:05:22] Speaker D: I'm getting the gist.
[01:05:23] Speaker A: So These, these brick vaults were added as part of storing gunpowder in the basement and unfortunately they are integral to the structure of the building.
So there will be evidence of what it looked like behind them, but we don't know. I mean, it's likely to be much like any other kind of internal medieval intruder space, probably lime washed, something like that.
It's not the kind of place where I would expect there to be extensive wall paintings, although saying that at Knole House they've just released this wonderful 3D scan of the, the basement, which includes wall paintings in their basement.
So it could look like various different things. But I think the, in essence this is not a residential space. This is the most secure part of the tower. If somebody wants to keep you here, you're not going to do a John Gerrard and Sally out with a rope or a Roger Mortimer. This is the, this is where you really have crossed the line.
[01:06:30] Speaker D: Yeah. So what would you have expected to see in here, dare I ask?
[01:06:36] Speaker A: Well, I mean it depends.
I think it depends on the cruelty of the particular lieutenant who was operating the tower. But there are everything from kind of iron maidens to the rack to manacles that you could be hung from and various different, slightly, slightly more visceral methods of torture which obviously you can achieve with blunt objects and sharp objects and various other things. So I don't think we have any records which document in particular this is the layout of the basement of the White Tower. But what we have are records from people like John Fisher who was hung from manacles, where people talk about the experiences they had.
And obviously there are balances to that because again, the tower is this kind of mythological space and it's kind of harsh thing to say, but you could over dramaticize being tortured. You could have had been hung from a manacle and then say that you had your nail beds ripped out or something cut.
[01:07:43] Speaker D: What did John Fisher say though?
[01:07:44] Speaker A: His experience?
[01:07:46] Speaker D: I can't remember the Count.
[01:07:47] Speaker A: I can't remember off the top of
[01:07:47] Speaker D: my head, no, I can't remember that count. But now I want to go and read it.
[01:07:52] Speaker A: The other really annoying thing about the White Tower is, well, about the tower in general is there is a thousand years of history here and there are so many different stories that it's utterly impossible for anyone to know everything, even about one period.
And I mean, between there are a number of curators and assistant curators, historical palaces. And at the Tower it's Charles Faris, Alden Gregory and myself.
And even between us we're a drop in the ocean it's annoying that we don't have all the answers, but we.
We know enough to kind of share the story about it.
[01:08:32] Speaker D: And it also gives you lots to keep working on as well.
[01:08:34] Speaker A: This is true. This is true. And as more records are cataloged and released by the tna, then more answers can come to life.
[01:08:43] Speaker D: Yeah. Fantastic. But it's.
[01:08:45] Speaker A: The shop is certainly kind of undoes the.
The spooky nature.
[01:08:49] Speaker D: It totally undoes the spooky nature. All I can see is wonderful bling everywhere near my.
[01:08:54] Speaker A: It is wonderful bling.
If you visit the tower, please do buy our bling.
[01:09:00] Speaker D: We've got lovely Queen Bee. I love your fan. The Queen Queen Bee Farm.
[01:09:03] Speaker A: It's not the spookiest bling in the world.
[01:09:05] Speaker D: No. When I spoke to my mum and said I was coming here today, she said, oh, there'll be ghosts everywhere. Standing around you, going.
[01:09:11] Speaker A: Ghosts at the tower are interesting, though. And if we're talking about prisoners, ghosts kind of go hand in hand with them. And there are just these absolutely wonderful stories. I mean, it kind of the highlight is obviously the Victorian ghost stories and kind of Harrison's the Tower of London is romantic. Romanticized version of Amberlynn's imprisonment and various other things. It's just remarkable. There's a story about the ghost of a polar bear, and if you see the polar bear, you die.
[01:09:41] Speaker D: Oh, really?
[01:09:41] Speaker A: The polar bear, obviously, is. Because when I say obviously, obviously, there's a polar bear in the Tower of London, it relates to there being a polar bear during the reign of Henry III as part of the royal menagerie. And then later on, that becomes. If you see the ghost of the polar bear, you will die.
And obviously, Anne Boleyn ghost gets around. I think she must get. I mean, there's a direct link between her and Heva. So she may well just get on the train.
[01:10:05] Speaker D: It's split between two.
[01:10:07] Speaker A: But there are.
I think, it depends.
[01:10:11] Speaker D: What's the Amberlyn ghost story here? You must tell?
[01:10:14] Speaker A: Well, there are hundreds of Amberlynn ghost stories.
[01:10:16] Speaker D: Are there indeed?
[01:10:18] Speaker A: It's more just kind of a flick of. A flick of hair in a window or a feeling of coldness. I mean, I personally don't believe in ghosts, but it depends what you think about it.
[01:10:32] Speaker D: Good ghost story, as you say.
Why let pikes get in the way of a good story?
[01:10:37] Speaker A: This is true. It's a treat. I'm being undone by my own ghosts.
[01:10:40] Speaker D: Touche.
[01:10:42] Speaker A: But no, it's.
And that's what I was saying earlier is the myths are so important, but also the kind of the ghost stories and everything else that goes along with it, some of them are utterly, utterly absurd, but they're part of this place's history.
[01:10:55] Speaker D: Yeah, absolutely.
Okay. Well, the shop, unfortunately, is shut, so I can't do any shopping in here right now. So where do we need to go next?
[01:11:04] Speaker A: So I think next we are going into the Beecham Tower to look at some graffiti.
[01:11:11] Speaker D: I think that's our final destination, isn't it?
[01:11:13] Speaker A: I think so.
[01:11:14] Speaker D: So let's go and explore, because the Beecham Tower. Tell us about that while we're on the wall.
[01:11:19] Speaker A: So the Beecham Tower is actually incredibly interesting. It's the first brick defensive structure built in England in the medieval period, after the Romans.
So it's built by Edward I as part of the expansion of the White Tower, expansion of the Tower of London into the fortress we know today. So this is the 13th century, and the outer ward was expanded with the outer ballium as we know it now.
And then following that, in around 1281, the area of the Beacham Tower was rebuilt into the Beauchamp Tower that we know today.
And the reason it was rebuilt is because that was the gatehouse for Henry III, Tower of London, which collapsed in 1240.
Yeah. So there would have been a bridge going across Henry's moat into where the Beecham Tower is now.
[01:12:20] Speaker D: I see. Oh, okay.
[01:12:22] Speaker A: And then that collapsed twice and subsequently was rebuilt by Edward the First into building we know now.
And it was also one of the first buildings to be renovated by Anthony Salvin in the Victorian period because of the amazing graffiti that is in there.
And it was lobbied as wise, this space being used as a storage room or as lodgings. It should be open to the public.
And that eventually resulted in its restoration is a strong word by Anthony Salvin and brings us roughly to where we are now.
So we've just come out of the northern entrance of the White Tower and turned left.
[01:13:11] Speaker D: And the scaffold site was actually around here somewhere, wasn't it?
[01:13:15] Speaker A: Yeah, exactly. So, again, the scaffold side, which we have a memorial on, is a Victorian adventure. It's only from that point where that's talked about as the execution site.
And I mean, it makes sense to have a memorial there, because if anybody's been watching our channels, you will see that we've recently installed a new constable, which is filmed and available on the HRB website.
So the parade ground is exactly what it says on the tip.
It's a parade ground. And so we needed to have parades up and sticking a big glass sculpture in the middle of it wouldn't be particularly convenient for that.
[01:13:56] Speaker D: Yes, very practical.
Gosh. So everybody's just about departed. There's a few soldiers around, a couple of the yeoman warders of the tower and a raven.
Beautiful raven. But we've basically got the place to ourselves now.
[01:14:12] Speaker A: Yes. It's going to get significantly spookier as we go on.
[01:14:16] Speaker D: How likely.
[01:14:18] Speaker A: But no. So the soldiers can take. Continue their duties to guard both the King's House, as the house of the representative of the monarch, and the Jewel House, which is where the Crown Jewels are obviously kept.
And the yeomen live here. So it's not too odd to see them wandering around, do they?
[01:14:35] Speaker D: Because I'm looking at the soldiers now. We've got the typical sort of bare skin with the big black hats and red coats. Are they here the whole time?
[01:14:45] Speaker A: There are soldiers here all the time.
They don't necessarily stand guard all night, but they are. There are always some of them awake in the guard room.
[01:14:55] Speaker D: I love it.
[01:14:56] Speaker A: And they are here all the time and they are actually soldiers. So we get.
We have a small contingent of military personnel here all the time to defend the Crown Jewels, which are the real crown Jewels. Which is another question that you get
[01:15:11] Speaker D: quite a lot because I had so many people posting on Instagram during the recent funeral. So many people saying, are they fake? Are they fake?
[01:15:20] Speaker A: No, no. They actually were removed from the tower and used for their purpose, which is wonderful. I love it. It's hardly surprising when you think about it. So as we're walking up the Beecham Tower, you'll notice what I said about these kind of bricks.
[01:15:35] Speaker D: Yeah.
[01:15:36] Speaker A: So these are known as Beecham bricks. Bricks which are the 13th century bricks that we use to build this fortification. And as I say, it's the earliest example we have of medieval brick being used in this kind of structure.
[01:17:27] Speaker D: Right, Alfred, we've come into the Beecham Tower, We've come up a gorgeous spiral stone staircase. We're on the first floor, I think now.
And I know we're in here because of, you mentioned the fabulous graffiti that's on the wall. So please tell us about this space and who would be imprisoned here.
[01:17:48] Speaker A: So this is, as you say, the first floor of the Beecher Tower. And it's is. It's incredibly important as a 13th century defensive tower built by Edward I, but it's most well known as a high status 16th and 17th century prison.
So as you can see, there are lots of glass panes on the wall which protect various bits of graffiti and I mean, you can see from just looking around us that I can hardly say everything. Every single person who was held in this place, but I mean, the kind of names such as the Earl of Arundel and various supporters of Lady Jane Grey and we think some of the Dudleys, various other people, is one of the best places certainly to engage with kind of prisoners at the tower and kind of see their lasting legacy.
[01:18:39] Speaker D: So before we go into, just maybe talk specifically about the graffiti, I'm comparing this space to the first space we went into in the bell tower. This is bigger. We've got these beautiful windows. I don't know whether they're original or they've been added in. So they're Victorian windows, but I guess there would have been a window space there. So you have quite good light. And there's also a fireplace, I notice, So a chance to be warm in here. Warm and dry.
[01:19:03] Speaker A: Yes, well, there is. There is a fireplace in the moor chamber, which is next to the guard rope that you spotted. So there would be opportunities for keeping these space, both of these spaces warm. They are of a kind, I think.
[01:19:19] Speaker D: So they are comparable in status.
[01:19:21] Speaker A: Yes. And I mean, I think you get a better sense of high status in here because the walls are largely plastered and painted. The floor is quite a nice timber floor.
It's not the kind of bare masonry that you can see in the Moore chamber, which is what I was talking about in terms of embrasures being partitioned off and it being turned into a suite of apartments rather than just one big kind of open space.
So it is certainly a better representative of that kind of high status prisoner function that we have at the tower. But they are comparable spaces.
[01:20:00] Speaker D: So the graffiti.
Do we know how this tradition started?
And you know, the question as a visitor that's always fascinated me is some of them are so exquisite, you almost feel like you need to be a master carpenter or mason. Did they get people in to do them for them? Anyway, tell me, tell me about the graffiti, Alfred.
[01:20:24] Speaker A: So again, the answer is going to annoy you.
We don't really know, as you say, some of the them are so elaborate and so fine. I mean, particularly Arundel's signature, which you can. I mean, the lights are obviously switched off at the moment, but you can see through the glass.
[01:20:43] Speaker D: I'm just going over. So this is over the fireplace. Oh, I see. And it's not just his signature, is it? There's a whole.
[01:20:51] Speaker A: There's a whole series of text which is translated next to it.
[01:20:55] Speaker D: So I shall read that.
[01:20:57] Speaker A: So the more suffering for Christ in this world, the more. More glory with Christ in the next. Arundel, June 22, 1587.
[01:21:04] Speaker D: Fantastic.
[01:21:05] Speaker A: But you can just see from the sweeping lines and the definition within some of the letters, this is not the first time you've carved something. I mean, not that I've ever been a teenager carving my name into cliffs or something like that. It is.
For anyone who's ever tried to do it, it is a spectacularly hard thing to do.
[01:21:28] Speaker D: Yeah, well, yeah.
[01:21:30] Speaker A: So getting all of these different kind of flicks, to me, I'm more of the belief that these very high status people, because they could afford to bring in servants and we know that they would have brought in their servants and brought in food and brought in books and this, that the other could have employed someone to come in and do this as a kind of, of legacy of their connection to the Tower.
So a few of my colleagues are more of the idea that if you were here for a long period of time. So Walter Raleigh, for instance, is held within the Bloody Tower, which is around the corner for 15 years, and is an example of someone with huge amount of privileges, you could teach yourself to do these things and given that much time, if you did it quite slowly, you might be able to. To achieve something like this.
So there are, there are kind of different views on what you could achieve. But then when you come to something like John Dudley's entire coat of arms,
[01:22:31] Speaker D: it's incredible, isn't it?
That has to be professional.
[01:22:36] Speaker A: It is one. It's one of the most exquisite ones that we have. And I mean, I just categorically refused to believe that John Dudley did this.
[01:22:45] Speaker D: I'm with you completely.
[01:22:47] Speaker A: I mean, even the raised lettering that you can see.
[01:22:50] Speaker D: Yeah.
[01:22:51] Speaker A: At the base of it, it is flawless. It is the work of a crafts craftsman, it's not the work of an amateur.
[01:23:00] Speaker D: And you've got like little Tudor roses and I mean, it's so fine, isn't it? It's. Yeah, I, I agree with you. That has to be somebody who knows what they're doing.
[01:23:09] Speaker A: It is, yes. So there are competing views, certainly on graffiti at large.
And it's the nature of graffiti that we don't ever really know who did it. There are some which are really interestingly signed. There's one in the Queen's house, sorry, King's house, which is carved by a servant and it's actually signed as carved by the servant of. I can't remember who they were the servant of who carved it.
But with things like this, it Is it is just very difficult.
[01:23:41] Speaker D: So dolphins, obviously, just became just a thing that people did.
It became a tradition almost.
[01:23:50] Speaker A: Yeah. I mean, obviously, someone was the first to do it.
[01:23:53] Speaker D: Yeah.
[01:23:54] Speaker A: But.
And it's something that we struggle with now is when you lock people in these kinds of spaces, the temptation is there. Just, I'll just cut my name on the wall. And obviously, now that is a crime. And please don't come to the tower and do that. But if you lock somebody in this room with nothing to do and their servants for a couple of years, it's not really that surprising that something will appear.
So.
[01:24:24] Speaker D: And I suppose if you've talked about bribing your guards and stuff, I suppose if you passed enough money to somebody, you could afford to do that. You could afford to just say.
[01:24:33] Speaker A: The other thing I find weird is I'm not entirely sure why you would give prisoners chisels and hammers.
[01:24:38] Speaker D: Yeah.
[01:24:39] Speaker A: In a stone building.
So there's definitely more going on with graffiti than we know about, but it's incredibly poorly documented. The graffiti is the document itself.
[01:24:52] Speaker D: Yes.
[01:24:53] Speaker A: So there's a lot more research to be done in it. And there are loads of people who are doing absolutely fantastic research.
[01:24:59] Speaker D: Is there? I was just going to ask you about that. You know, who's tackling these questions and
[01:25:05] Speaker A: what are they trying to find out at the tower? Alden Gregory, my boss, is hopefully looking at the graffiti at the tower, because what we don't have is kind of an inventory of all of the graffiti in the whole town. We have different buildings and trying to look at it kind of more holistically and to answer some of those questions, like who actually did these things? And is there a way of saying this is particularly fine and was probably done by a mason, and this is particularly crude and was probably done by somebody themselves.
So there is. I mean, as with all things in our field, people are always working away in archives, looking, looking for things. So hopefully we'll know more at some point in the future. But they are. They are just beautiful things in of themselves.
[01:25:55] Speaker D: Is this where we've got the Amberlynn falcon in this room as well?
[01:25:59] Speaker A: Yes, actually, that is here.
[01:26:04] Speaker D: There she is.
[01:26:05] Speaker A: So it is unknown.
So it's thought to be Amberlynn's falcon, but I was actually reading up on this one, one earlier. It's actually interesting because it shows the falcon without the kind of trappings of royalty.
[01:26:19] Speaker D: Yeah.
[01:26:20] Speaker A: So it is.
It's her in her kind of stripped, fallen state, fallen era, which is interesting. Obviously, we don't know who did it. It's very unlikely to have been Anne. But again, I mean, the difference between the crudeness of this piece of graffiti versus the one that is directly.
I love it.
[01:26:42] Speaker D: It's completely different that you could imagine somebody having just a little go, really.
The ones that are close and where
[01:26:50] Speaker A: you've got the writing above it, where you've kind of ruled out lines and then put letters in those lines, whereas the raised lettering on other ones.
I mean, there's such a wild difference between individual pieces that there is. There's certainly something going on.
[01:27:09] Speaker D: Well, I look forward to hearing more about the research and what comes out of that, because I think that they are fascinating. I know many, many people are very interested. Okay.
[01:27:18] Speaker A: And then we also have Jane on the other side.
[01:27:21] Speaker D: We can't forget that.
[01:27:22] Speaker A: There's the.
[01:27:23] Speaker D: Oh, Jane. You can see. Yeah. Is that her family?
[01:27:28] Speaker A: Yeah, that's the Grey crest.
[01:27:30] Speaker D: What's the latest thinking on who maybe did that?
[01:27:33] Speaker A: Well, I mean, it's as in.
[01:27:34] Speaker D: Which prisoner might have been in here?
[01:27:36] Speaker A: Any of the supporters of Jane? I mean, there's.
There's the idea that Dudley is held in here, and so there is a fanciful idea that he may have done this.
But these people are usually imprisoned with members of their household and their servants and various other people. So could be any number of unnamed people.
[01:28:01] Speaker D: Would the servants literally stay in the room with them?
[01:28:04] Speaker A: I think it depends who you are. I mean, there's certainly in areas like in the King's house, where the servants certainly stayed with the person they were imprisoned with. But then there are other people.
Again, Walter Reilly's, one of Walter Riley's best friends, is imprisoned for a year and then becomes his kind of go to between the outside world and the Tower.
So it's different for everybody.
[01:28:31] Speaker D: Very different.
Fascinating.
[01:28:33] Speaker A: But it is. I mean, it is. Graffiti is one of the really, really good things that you can kind of just see and get a real connection with.
[01:28:42] Speaker D: It is a very tangible connection to the past, isn't it? Just imagining somebody taking the time to just chisel it away.
[01:28:49] Speaker A: As you say, the big question is, who did it?
[01:28:51] Speaker D: Yeah.
[01:28:52] Speaker A: And I mean, this. This one's a fantastic example of that as well, actually, is the.
This piece, which dates from about 1585. I mean, this is a very large chunk of the coin that has been taken off. And so there's an argument to be made that, oh, maybe, maybe he did a few and they didn't quite work and carved those out and did another
[01:29:11] Speaker D: one and just went deeper.
[01:29:12] Speaker A: But it's just so so well done.
[01:29:16] Speaker D: Yes. Do we know what the earliest one is in the room?
[01:29:19] Speaker A: Oh, I don't know. I think most of these are 16th and 17th century.
I mean, there will. There will be ones that are undated that probably predate those because, I mean, this building has been here since 1281.
[01:29:37] Speaker D: It kind of feels to me just. Just feels like it's more of a Tudor tradition that it started and it really kind of. It may have started early, but it really took hold in the Tudor period.
[01:29:47] Speaker A: No, definitely. I mean, it becomes.
It clearly becomes the done thing by prisoners. And I think there is.
There is that idea, if you are kind of considering your immortality every day, that leaving a legacy in these places gives you a connection to the other people who are imprisoned here and various other things.
[01:30:08] Speaker D: It's a very human thing to do, isn't it?
[01:30:09] Speaker A: Yeah, I think so.
Leaving your mark. Yeah, exactly. I was here.
[01:30:14] Speaker D: I lived. I was here.
[01:30:17] Speaker A: With a Z.
[01:30:18] Speaker D: Quite point. Yeah, exactly. Quite pointed right, isn't it?
[01:30:21] Speaker A: Yeah.
[01:30:21] Speaker D: Wow.
[01:30:22] Speaker A: It's a wonderful space.
If we're talking about privileges, should we go and talk about Walter Riley?
[01:31:07] Speaker D: Yes, let's go do Walt. Where do we need to go for Walt?
[01:31:10] Speaker A: So we'll go the Bloody Tower quickly, which is just around the corner.
So we've just come out of the Beauchamp Tower and then if we take a right, we'll go down towards Bloody Tower, which is where Sir Walter Riley was famously imprisoned between 1603 and 1670.
So obviously we are tailing off towards the end of the Tudor period here, but I think Walter Reilly is probably one of the best people to talk about in terms of the difference between certain prisoners and their status and the privileges that they would have.
[01:31:56] Speaker D: Can you remind us why he was imprisoned?
[01:32:01] Speaker A: He was imprisoned because he was thought to be as part of the conspiracy to overthrow James I following the death of Elizabeth.
[01:32:09] Speaker D: I see.
[01:32:11] Speaker A: So, I mean, it's debatable how far that actually went. I think he was just had a meeting with Lord Cobham or something like
[01:32:18] Speaker D: that, but it's obviously didn't go down well with the new Stuart King.
So we're right outside the Bloody Tower now?
[01:32:25] Speaker A: Yes, we're standing outside the Bloody Tower in what we have represented as Walter Reilly's garden.
So while Walter Reilly was imprisoned here, he had a number of different privileges. He had a garden where he was allowed to grow his own herbs for brewing tonics, most of which were just horribly poisonous.
And he was also allowed to write. He wrote his history of the world in the Bloody Tower, but Also interestingly, and connected to the Chapel of St. Peter and Vincula, which we can just see over the way.
Walter's son Carew was baptized in 1605.
So having been in prison since 1603, it's only a matter of maths to say that Walter was able to receive conjugal visits from Elizabeth, his wife.
So it kind of shows that you can.
Walter, all of the documents describe him as being incredibly depressed and morose, which you would be if you were imprisoned. But he has probably the best documented privileges of having his own garden, having his wife come to stay able to write letters, all of this kind, all of these different activities, which would not be just categorically not be given to people of a lower status.
[01:33:43] Speaker D: It's almost, you can imagine it, quite a nice little space.
[01:33:46] Speaker A: Yes, exactly. So, I mean, this is, this is why we've represented it in the way that we have. We did this a few years ago. There was a lemon tree that all of the lemons have been stolen from, unfortunately.
But all of the different herbs that we've planted in this garden are all ones that are documented as Walter using in his different tonics.
[01:34:08] Speaker D: And he was released eventually.
[01:34:09] Speaker A: Yes. So he was released in 1617 and then had, I think it's another go at finding El Dorado in Venezuela or something, and manages. It's either him or his lieutenant who attacks a Spanish town.
And one of his orders were not to attack the Spanish.
But I think quite sadly his son dies during that expedition and he subsequently rearrested and executed.
So it is. Walter is, is another. Well, they're all sad stories, aren't they, to be fair? Because I mean, it's just been people just being imprisoned and executed.
[01:34:52] Speaker D: It almost feels like if he was a prisoner with so many privileges that you wonder how seriously he was taken in terms of the charges obviously of treason that were laid against him.
[01:35:01] Speaker A: Well, I mean, the fact that he was imprisoned here for 15 years suggest that no one would have probably thought that he actually did that. I mean, the argument goes again to George Boleyn. I don't think anyone reasonably thought that Anne was having an affair with her brother because he loitered in her room. I mean, I have eight sisters and I sometimes loiter around when I talk to them. So it's.
[01:35:25] Speaker D: Yeah, it's a convenience. It's a convenient scenario.
[01:35:28] Speaker A: It's a convenient way of getting rid of somebody. Yeah.
[01:35:31] Speaker D: So, like, think that finishes our story. We've been talking about low status prisoners, kind of medium status prisoners, but also nobles and Queens and how they were held there. So it's absolutely been fascinating to explore all these nooks and crannies of the tower with you. Thank you so much, Alfred. Just before we go, how can people find out more about visiting the tower and what events are going on that people might want to look out for?
[01:35:59] Speaker A: So we are no longer ticketed, kind of time ticketed, so you can just turn up and buy a ticket to come in. You can also visit our website, which is www.hrp.org.
and we are also doing Tower Christmas this year, which is 12 days of Christmas.
So there will be 12 different installations around the fortress. And I know what all of them are, but I'm going to leave it as a mystery for your listeners to come and have a look.
[01:36:28] Speaker D: Excellent. That sounds wonderful. Christmas at the Tower. I have not done that before, so I might have to sort that out.
Thanks very much.
[01:36:36] Speaker A: No, thank you for coming. I mean, it's amazing.
My favourite bit of my job is being able to share stories with people who are interested and engage people with the history of this remarkable space. So thank you. Thank you for coming. Coming and I hope some of your listeners come and visit us and discover some of these stories for yourselves.
[01:36:54] Speaker D: Well, remarkable is exactly the right word and I know that, I mean, the tower is one of the most, if not the most popular destination, isn't it?
[01:37:03] Speaker A: I think it's the second most popular paid tourist attraction. We used to be the first, I think. Oh well, I mean, maybe your visitors can help us get that first spot,
[01:37:13] Speaker D: claim that spot back. There is so much to see and hopefully we'll when people can come here. Having listened to this podcast and looked at the show notes, they'll have some things that they can be particularly looking out for. So thanks again.
[01:37:24] Speaker A: No, thank you. Been a pleasure.
[01:37:27] Speaker C: Oh, that was chilling, but so, so interesting. And I hoped as a patron you enjoyed the full episode.
Now, of course, the Tudor History and Travel show will return as ever next month and we have a bumper episode well too actually, because just the day after I made my recording at the Tower of London, I headed to Hampton Court palace and I went on a mammoth tour of the royal apartments. Those that are on the public route and those which are usually hidden from view. I wanted to know everything about them. And so I will be bringing you two episodes because there was a lot to uncover in December that you will be able to enjoy in the run up to Christmas or even during those Christmas festivities when you've just simply had enough of the socializing and you want a little bit of you time.
Well, thank you to you all of my patrons for supporting the show. Of course, as ever, you do have my untying gratitude and it's wonderful to be able to share these adventures in time with you.
Until next time, Thank you for tuning in to today's episode of the Tudor History and Travel Show.
If you've loved the show, please take a moment to subscribe, like and rate this podcast so that we can spread the Tudor love.
Until next time my friends. All that remains for me to say is happy time traveling.
[01:39:32] Speaker A: Sam.
