Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
THE TOWER GREEN TEN
Being
beheaded
at Tower Hill (as opposed to being hanged, drawn and quartered) was a
privilege of the nobility; being beheaded on Tower Green, the stretch of lawn to the west of
the White Tower, was an honour conferred on just ten people. It was an arrangement that
suited both parties: the victim was spared the jeering crowds of Tower Hill, and the monarch
was spared bad publicity. Among the victims were: Lord Hastings, executed immediately after
his arrest on the orders of Richard III, who swore he wouldn't go to dinner until Hastings was
beheaded;
Anne Boleyn
(Henry VIII's second wife), accused of incest and adultery, who was
dispatched cleanly and swiftly with a French long sword rather than the traditional axe, at her
own insistence; 19-year-old
Catherine Howard
(Henry VIII's fifth wife and Anne's cousin),
convicted of adultery and beheaded along with her lady-in-waiting, who was deemed an
accomplice; 16-year-old
Lady Jane Grey
, who was Queen for just nine days; and the Earl of
Essex, one-time favourite of Elizabeth I.
blocks of honey-coloured Caen limestone are free of all ecclesiastical excrescences,
leaving the chapel's smooth curves and rounded apse perfectly unencumbered.
Tower Green
Despite appearances, the pretty little open space of
Tower Green
was the chief place of
execution within the Tower for many centuries - the names of those beheaded here are
recorded on an incongruous glass monument at the centre of the green. The bloody,
headless corpses of the executed (from Tower Green and Tower Hill) were buried in the
Tudor
Chapel of St Peter-ad-Vincula
, to the north, accessible only during the first and
last hour the Tower is open, or on the Beefeaters' tours.
On the west side of the green, the
Beauchamp Tower
houses an exhibition on the
Tower's prisoners on the ground floor. Beauchamp Tower itself accommodated only the
wealthiest prisoners and boasts a better class of gra
ti: Lord Dudley, husband of Lady
Jane Grey, even commissioned a stonemason to carve the family crest on the first floor.
In the southwest corner of the green is the sixteenth-century
Queen's House
(closed to
the public), distinguished by its swirling Tudor timber frames. These were the most
luxurious cells in the Tower, and were used to incarcerate the likes of Catherine
Howard and Anne Boleyn, who had also stayed there shortly before her coronation.
Lady Jane Grey was cooped up here in 1553, and in the following year it was from here
she watched the headless torso of her husband, Lord Dudley, being brought back from
Tower Hill, only hours before her own execution. In 1688, William Penn, the Quaker
and founder of Pennsylvania, was confined to the Queen's House, where he penned his
most popular work,
No Cross, No Crown
.
12
Jewel House
The castellated Waterloo Block or Jewel House, north of the White Tower, now
holds the
Crown Jewels
, the major reason so many people flock to the Tower. The
Jewels include the world's three largest cut diamonds, but only a few of the exhibits
could be described as beautiful - assertions of status and wealth are more important
considerations. Queues can be long, and you only get to view the rocks from
moving walkways. The vast majority of exhibits postdate the Commonwealth of
1649-60, when most of the royal riches were melted down for coinage or sold off.
Before you reach the walkway, look out for the twelfth-century
Coronation Spoon
, the
oldest piece of regalia. The first major piece along the walkway is the Sceptre with the
Cross, which contains the world's largest diamond, the 530-carat “First Star of Africa”
or
Cullinan I
, followed by
St Edward's Crown
, used in every coronation since the
Restoration. The legendary
105.6-carat
Koh-i-Nûr
(Mountain of Light) is set into the
