Despite its reputation for incarceration, torture and execution, the Tower of London was never primarily designed as a prison, and wasn’t even built by the English.
After his conquest of England in 1066 William, the Duke of Normandy sought to subjugate the population of London with a series of impressive military stockades along the city walls, and one of these was the ‘White Tower’ which rose 90ft above the city. Built from cream stone shipped in from Caen, the imposing structure was a ‘visible token of foreign rule’[i].
This complex, which would come to be known as the Tower of London, served variously as a fort, royal palace, mint, jewel vault and even a menagerie. Although it held prisoners from 1100, because it was a royal castle these were mainly high-status, wealthy individuals for short spells. As it had no dedicated prison cells until 1687, its noble detainees occupied apartments and were often allowed to live ‘in relative comfort, deprived only of their liberty’[ii],with tapestries, furnishings and other domestic comforts available for purchase from the Lieutenant of the Tower. Indeed Scottish king John Balliol, brought in his own retinue of servants, while Sir Walter Raleigh was allowed to live with his wife and son in a series of well-decorated rooms.
By 1802 the Tower was still the only prison in the country for ‘State delinquents of rank’. A guide to the state of the nation’s prisons at the time reports that warders ran separate houses, ‘well-furnished, in any of which, as the Governor is pleased to order, the State Delinquents may be confined; and the custom has been to assign them two of the best rooms on the first floor; with iron bars affixed to their windows by the Board of Works’[iii].
Despite a comfortable stay for some lucky residents, during the Tudor period the Tower forged its fearsome reputation as ‘the foremost state prison in the country’, housing those thought to pose a serious threat to national security[iv].
In 1536 Anne Boleyn, the first of Henry VIII’s wives to be executed was held there in the luxurious apartments she previously occupied at her coronation. The teenage Princess Elizabeth was imprisoned for a short while in 1554 by Queen Mary I and the same in that same year, Mary’s rival for the throne Lady Jane Grey was executed there. Although she was privileged to be beheaded within the tower walls, rather than in public like her husband Lord Guildford.
While prisoners of rank could often expect to serve their sentence in comfort, and quite possibly the luxury of a private beheading by skilful swordsman, those convicted of the heinous crime of treachery could be expected to suffer. Guy Fawkes was taken to the tower to be interrogated in 1605, when his plot to bomb the Houses of Parliament was discovered, and after confessing suffered the grisly traitor’s death of being hung, drawn and quartered.
However the popular image of the Tower as a place of torture and death is largely a construct of the 19th century growth of the site as a tourist attraction. Torture was only ever used during the 16th and 17th centuries and, even then, it had to be sanctioned by the privy council each time: in the hundred years from 1640, only 48 cases of torture were recorded.
Executions at the tower continued right up until the end of the Second World War. Eleven people were tried and shot there for espionage during the First World War and German spy Josef Jakobs, was the last person to be killed at the Tower in 1941. Nazi deputy Rudolf Hess was its last state prisoner, held for just four days in the same year.
Among the last prisoners to be held at the tower were the Kray twins in 1952, after assaulting a prisoner while AWOL from military service. Throughout this time, and in fact since the Elizabethan period, the Tower continued as a tourist attraction, and since 1990 it has been cared for by the charity, Historic Royal Palaces.
[i] Ackroyd P, London The Biography (Vintage 2001)
[ii] ‘The Tower Of London Prison’ (Historic Royal Palaces, 2020) <https://www.hrp.org.uk/tower-of-london/history-and-stories/tower-of-london-prison/#gs.aoycei> accessed 20 July 2020
[iii] Neild J, State Of The Prisons In England, Scotland, And Wales … Together With Some Useful Documents, Observations, And Remarks, Adapted To Explain And Improve The Conditions Of Prisoners In General .. (Nichols 1812)
[iv] ‘The Tower Of London Prison’ (Historic Royal Palaces, 2020) <https://www.hrp.org.uk/tower-of-london/history-and-stories/tower-of-london-prison/#gs.aoycei> accessed 20 July 2020
Written By John Rosser