Dan Snow's History Hit - The Tower of London

Episode Date: August 26, 2025

Dan takes listeners through 1000 years of Britain's history at the Tower of London, from its formidable kings to its most notorious prisoners. Dan dives into the deep history of this mighty fortress built by William the Conqueror and tells the stories of the medieval sieges, the executions, the escapes and the animals that have called the tower home.This episode is part of our series 'Dan Snow's Guide to Europe'Produced by Mariana Des Forges and edited by Dougal PatmoreIf you want to explore the Tower of London and the Medieval Palace exhibition, you can find more information here: https://www.hrp.org.uk/tower-of-london/whats-on/medieval-palace/Sign up to History Hit to watch Dan's latest documentary - 'Powerhouse: The Medieval Tower of London' at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe.We'd love to hear your feedback - you can take part in our podcast survey here: https://insights.historyhit.com/history-hit-podcast-always-on. You can also email the podcast directly at [e-mail]. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hello folks, Dan Snow here. I am throwing a party to celebrate 10 years of Dan Snow's history hit. I'd love for you to be there. Join me for a very special live recording of the podcast in London, in England on the 12th of September to celebrate the 10 years. You can find out more about it and get tickets with the link in the show notes. Look forward to seeing you there. Friends, I have been lucky enough to travel the world. I have stood in the shadow of of the Colosseum before it opens the crowds. I have gazed up at the towering steel legs of the Eiffel Tower in Paris.

I've walked along those massive stone walls of the ancient capital of China in Cheyenne. I gotta tell you, the city I have the greatest fondness for, particularly at this time of year, it's summer, the sun is out, a few little wispy white clouds above me. The city I have the greatest fondness for is London. The city of my birth, the weather's warm, there's people strolling along with ice creams,

People drink cold beers in historic pub gardens that spill out onto the pavement after work. You've got the ancient city, what we call the city of London, which is the footprint, the Roman city of London. Then you've got the West End weather. Those Saxons added on to the Roman city in the early medieval period. But if you really want to capture the essence of London in one place, a place where actually you can see 2,000 years of history, you've got to come to the south-eastern corner of the old Roman city of London, and there you'll see one of the most magnificent castles and fortunes

anywhere in Europe, the Tower of London. London has simply called it the tower. This is the place where for generations English history was made. It's a place where in echoing chambers, prisoners carve their despair. It's a place where the crown jewels are now kept in their splendour. It has been a royal palace. It's been a prison. It's been a mint. It's been an armoury and it's been a zoo as well. You'll listen to Dan Snow's history here. And in this episode, I'm going to be your guide to London's greatest landmark. In the 1070s, a few years after the Battle of Hastings marked the start of the Norman conquest of England.

And during the ongoing struggles to make that conquest an enduring one, William the Conqueror started building a massive castle. On the edge of what was probably his most important city in this new kingdom, London, but also one other trickiest. It was downriver of London. It was to the east. So ships could come and go uninterrupted without having to pass through the arches of a bridge. Reinforcements can be brought across the channel from Normandy if necessary. These ships could also evacuate members of the royal family from the troublesome city if it became. necessary. It was a massive statement of Norman insecurity, but also ambition. Even much of the rock itself was transported from Normandy to build this huge tower, which William's family and key officers of a state would be able to shelter in, if necessary, if the wrath of Londoners

reached a fever pitch. The Tower of London is one of the most important fortresses in Europe. It is placed right next to, and as London grew, right inside, the richest and most important city in the kingdom. It was enlarged over the centuries, and it's still in use today. The Tower of London now is a concentric, meaning it's a fortress within a fortress. If you get across the moat and through the outer wall, you find yourself faced with a perfectly serviceable fortress within that. You fight your way through that second set of walls, and there you see it. The White Tower, the Great Norman. keep.

Around it, in that so-called inner ward, you can see Tower Green, where high-status prisoners were executed. You can see the Chapel Royal of St. Peter Advincula, where many of them are buried, people like Anne Berlin, Jane Seymour, Thomas Cromwell's, Thomas More, I should say now, St. Thomas More. There are a few places like Westminster Abbey, where you get a higher concentration of burials of Britain's most important historic figures. Yet Traitor's Gate, where it's said that condemned prisoners were lented by boat, never to leave the tower again,

you also get the remains of the medieval palace that have just been restored to show exactly how medieval kings and queens lived in some style. I love walking along the battlements along the tops of the walls, and you get to a series of towers, each of which hold their own stories and secrets. There's the bloody tower, which is linked to the princes in the tower, where two child-sized skeletons were found in the 19th century. There's Beecham Tower, where you've got prisoners graffiti in the walls. And there's a number of others, each with its own cells and stories, exhibits. There's a lot of history, as you'd expect, in the Tower of London, folks.

And there is none better place to explain it all, a medieval historian extraordinaire gone medieval podcast host Matt Lewis. Here's an interview we did a little while back, mapping out the history of the tower from its construction to the present day. So there was originally a Roman building there, and quite often when the Normans arrived, they repurposed. a lot of Roman forts, because the Romans were great at finding a good spot for something, right? They knew what made a good fort and a good location. They'd built stone foundations for a lot of those things, which still remained. You know, a lot of the walls around London are still fairly Roman. So the Norman simply repurposed what was already there and thought,

here's a great spot to build a massive castle to dominate the London skyline. And that's not just because London was an important city, right? It's because London was particularly anti-Norman. Is that fair to say? William the Conqueror had had a bit of trouble getting into London because the Wittan, so the Wittendenhamot, the Council of Nobles in Anglo-Saxon, England had actually elected a guy called, or a teenager, called Edgar the Etheling, to be the new King of England after Harold had died at Hastings. And obviously, William didn't particularly like that. So he had to find a way to kind of stamp his authority. And he also builds the White Tower in the aftermath of the big rebellions in the north, so the harrying of the north and all of that kind of thing. So he may have been feeling a little bit frank. agile and thinking I could do with somewhere where I know I'm going to be pretty safe and secure in case London turns on me.

It's such an interesting point, isn't it? Because you're saying he wants to be safe and secure. I mean, that's his house. I mean, that's what you've got to build when your neighbours absolutely hate you, right? I mean, it's a formidable structure. It's Bill's house, you know, it's the big conservatory that he builds on the back of his house with a panic room in it and all sorts of stuff. It's built away from the city of London, so the square mile that we have now.

It's slightly up the river from there. and it's built as a new royal centre of authority from which he can operate and project his control of the capital and therefore of the kingdom. He's downriver of the capital, so he can if he wishes control. It's trade, it's food. You can get out quickly.

I mean, it's a very smart place. It's a power move, isn't it? He's essentially taking control of the entrance to the city of London. And back in the day, the furthest downriver crossing would have been London Bridge. So the Tower of London is east of that. So it's towards the sea, it's beyond the crossing point.

Ships can arrive and depart from the Tower of London without having to go under a bridge or anything. Is London particularly important? I mean, how big is this castle compared to other ones in Winchester or Cotster or other places like that? I mean, are we seeing London becoming a sort of almost a capital at this point? London would be the capital at this point. So Winchester had been really the centre of authority in Anglo-Saxon England for a long time. So as Alfred and the kings of Wessex become the kings of England, really Winchester that holds the Royal Treasury. And Winchester still holds the Royal Treasury

for a couple hundred years after the Norman Conquest too. So all of the money is still held at Winchester. So it retains a little bit of its power. But Alfred really begins the process of rebuilding London and reestablishing it as an important political focal point. And I guess that access to the Thames and the sea makes it a really good spot. Again, you know, the Romans had spotted that. They knew that London was a great place to be. Alfred sort of revitalises that. And by the time William the Conquerer comes, it is seen as the seat of government, albeit that money still resides at Winchester. Of course, who can forget Henry the first little mad dash to Winchester when his brother lay choking on his own blood in the new forest? And it'll,

I often wonder, how long did he sand and look at his brother and think, what do I do now? And how long did it take him to think, what I do is get on a horse and go to the Royal Treasury and make myself king? A couple of seconds, Matt. a second? Maybe, if that. That's Henry I first with his big brother. Okay, London is most important. And how is that reflected in the tower? I mean, people will go there today. It doesn't look the same as now. The white tower in the middle would have, would it even had a curtain wall? Would that tower have just been there, sitting proud in the landscape? And of course, you could only enter from the first story. It's got that wooden structure. There's no entry at all at ground level.

You've got to climb up a wooden structure that can be destroyed, kicked away in the event of a siege. That's a pretty big feature of medieval keep. So the white tower is essentially a keep. The keep was originally called a donjon, which is where we get the word dungeon from in English today, because it was a place where you keep all of your valuable things. And that evolves into keeping prisoners who are valuable in a dungeon. And so entry from the first floor is a great thing to do. They would have a wooden ladder up there. And if you're besieged, you kick that ladder out the way, smash it up, pull it up, or whatever you do. There is no door for anyone to run into. They've got to put a ladder up to try and get to that first floor door,

which gives you a great chance to throw things at them, pour things on them, do whatever you want to do to try and stop them getting in. But the White Tower was really William's statement piece at the centre of this complex. It's called the White Tower because the White Stone comes from Cannes in Normandy. So William goes back to what he knows.

He goes and gets some stone quarried in Normandy, floated up the river, cross the channel, down the Thames, you know, boatloads of stone being delivered to create this monolith in the middle of London. But what we see of the layout of the tower today, really becomes what we would recognise during the reigns of Henry III and Edward I. So in the 13th century, Henry the 3rd is a great builder. So he had lots of the curtain walls, lots of the towers.

And essentially what we see now is kind of the 13th century tower. When you come inside these stone walls, and there are plenty of stone walls, there are three layers of stone fortification before you get to the White Tower itself. And I've just passed through two of them. And here I've come face to face with those legendary inhabitants. of the tower. One of those curious things about the Tower of London, in fact, probably things that attract more people here than the military architecture, I'm sad to say. It is the Ravens. Well, they live here full-time because there's a saying when the Ravens leave the Tower, the Tower will fall.

And so the garrison have done the sensible thing and ensure those Ravens can never leave. They're well-fed and looked after. All their needs are met. There is in fact a Raven master who's one of the yeoman wardens, one of the so-called beefeaters. His or her special job is keeping those ravens firmly here at the tower. We don't want it falling any time soon. It's a full-time position. You get to live inside the Tower of London, if you're going to believe it. In case you're interested in applying, you have to have a long time and have an unblemished record in the British Army, of course, but that might be you if you're listening to this. But by tradition, there have to be six ravens at the tower and a spare, which means there have to be seven.

So I'm passing the Ravens now and I'm heading to the medieval palace where you can find an excellent exhibition that I can definitely recommend while you're visiting here, because it's really here that you can explore a crucial part of the Tower of London story. This I'm now entering, this is the residential part of the tower. This is the palace really. It's a royal palace. It was built by Henry III and his son Edward I in the 13th century. They knew that Londoners didn't really like them. So, you know, they thought they wanted to bulk up the defences around here and they wanted to over all the people of London. And that's why it was in their reins that the tower was turned into the mighty fortress that we still see today. And to help

tell the story, let me meet your curator of the medieval Exhibition Charles Farris. Why do we see this gigantic expansion of the tower in the 13th century? Well, it's all about power and royal security, really. We know, of course, during John's reign, that he nearly loses control of the country completely, often culminating many people thinking the signing of Magna Carta, which is a real problem for kings for many years to come.

And so in Henry III's reign, his advisers to begin with, but then later him as well, decide to expand, decide to expand royal power and part of the way they do that is with big building projects including here at the Tower of London and Henry III is perhaps most famous for rebuilding Westminster Strauby but he also does extensive building works here at the tower and because London is particularly troublesome is it because the Londoners had all gone with the barons during that Magna Carta crisis and so I guess the royal family we need to put our stamp on the capital absolutely and the Crown has a very long complicated relationship with London and they're

often falling out and so the huge expansion of the Tower of London particularly under Edward I reign, is very much about controlling London and asserting royal power as it is as a statement of royal luxury as well. And so when you came up the river, you'd see this huge palace with the king's apartments jutting out into the river. It was a real statement. Here's a king that's here to stay. So you're right. I guess there's a point there that it's enemies, foreign and domestic, because all the foreign princes, potentially invaders coming up the Thames, it has a proper defensive role. but there's something about magnificence as well and really putting your stamp on the capital

on this part of the country. Absolutely, and I think they were being very bold. Henry III, when he builds the Wakefield Tower and the Associated Royal Parments earlier in the 1200s, they would have then been on the river themselves, so that would have been a great statement of royal power too. But then Edward I, when he expands the tower, pushes out into the Thames itself,

pushes out into people's gardens and things to the north and the east and the west. He's the one that brings the Royal Mint, for example, inside the Tower of London so he can really have better control of coinage. This is a king who doesn't want to give up power to anyone and the Tower is a great symbol of that effort. And so Henry III, he adds up the walls around the core of the Tower, does he?

Yeah, he expands what today we think of as the inner ward of the Tower of London, including the Lanthorn Tower and the Wakefield Tower where we're stood today. But then Edward I really adds the outer ward. He fills in his father's moat because that never actually flooded properly. He fills in the moat, expands the tower out into the river, adds his own moat as well. And he turns it into the great concentric fortress that we know today. So that outer set of walls over the first, and then that enormous moat as well.

Absolutely. And that's fed by the Thames, is it? It's filled up by the Thames. They've got sluice gates in order to keep it filled up once it's there, because that's how a moat functions best to defend the tower. And it's actually even used for feeding the tower as well, which we can see with our amazing fish trap, which we've got on display here in the medieval palace. So they were hoiking fish out of the moat. Absolutely. I don't know what it would have tasted like, but perhaps pretty horrible.

But this is a thing that might be difficult people understand as well as a cutting-edge military fortification stronghold. It's also a sense of royal power. It's where you receive diplomats and your own barons, try and over all them, try to impress them. Absolutely. And in fact, during the Second Baron's War, Henry III is actually under siege here at the Tower briefly. And it's Eleanor Provence who refuses to negotiate with the barons and leaves by boat trying to get to her son at war. Windsor and so she realizes that her husband's not going to use the fortress to its full potential and so she decides to leave but that says a lot about her personality as well as Henry's and she

knew which in a fight she knew which member of the family she needed to go to Prince Edward she was trying to get to her son yes you mentioned the siege there did this cutting edge did this vast investment in the tower did it work for the plantagenet family did they did they get their money's worth well for Edward the first you could say arguably it does because it never really comes under siege during his reign. He's too powerful. He has a great crisis in 1297, where he almost falls out disastrously with his nobles, but not completely. And that's partly because he's known as a great warrior, partly because he's actually doing a pretty good job in many ways of ruling the country and giving justice and sorting out the economy and things like that, but also because he's

got these enormous fortresses that he's built. And he's proven with his military campaigns that he knows how to use them as well. London's becoming a capital city at this point. we can say of the English kingdom. Are the kings here, so Henry 3rd, Edward in this period, are they here that much? Are they ruling from the tower? You'd probably be surprised to know that they're not actually here very often despite spending an absolute fortune making it impressive and beautiful and comfortable as well. Edward I, for example, stays here just 53 days we think across a 35-year reign and that's because he's travelling all around his extensive lands in order to control them properly

and also to bring justice and security for his people all around the place. Despite spending relatively little time here, the Plantagenets went all out decorating the Royal Courtes in the medieval palace. That's where you find the King's Hall with a huge 13th century fireplace with a monarch could dine and receive people.

It's like joint bedchambers there and, of course, the throne room and a private chapel. Whenever you see movies set in the medieval era, Everything is grey and drab and brown and muddy and quite austere, but the reality was very different. The current exhibition at the medieval palace has reconstructed how medieval royalty would actually have lived. It shows you how colourful medieval interior design was, with reds and greens and blues and patterns and frescoes on walls and mantles and bed frames. Well, and nearly everything they could decorate, they did. This is exactly what you should expect from a grand 13th century royal world.

palace and royal residence because they would have been bright, they would have been beautifully decorated, and if you're the king or queen, they would have been extremely comfortable. And so we've got this beautiful bed here, and I guess this is the one thing you forget about. There would have been soft furnishings around. There have been tables, chairs. Absolutely. And if you look through the records of the great wardrobe, which is the department responsible for acquiring things like fabrics and spices and lots of beautiful objects and materials, We find so many references to wonderful textiles brought here from all over the world in order to make objects like this amazing bed for the King and Queen.

And we've got very, very colourful walls. These frescoes, tell me how you create this effect on the walls. So these beautiful wall paintings, they were actually created using references to Henry III's orders for the decoration of the Queen's apartments here at the Tower. And they were decorated with false masonry and roses, which is this pattern that you've seen. and what we've done because obviously we don't have perfect records for all of the design is we piece together little examples from surviving 13th century wall paintings in churches and occasionally castles and palaces and then compare that to the references we find the documents and the result is what you see here and why is it inside a castle is that security they still even now the king is a little bit worried about well where the threat's coming from absolutely this is an time of unrest as well Henry the 3rd and Edward the 1st were very worried and concerned about royal power.

Obviously in King John's reign, the throne is almost lost. In Henry III's reign as well, the throne is almost lost again. And Edward I spent most of his reign really trying to regain and re-establish royal power. And that means fortifying castles. More Tower of London after this. Hello, cherished listeners, this summer I'd love for you to accompany me on a history lover's holiday vacation around Europe. On the podcast throughout August, I'm going to be showing you Europe's most iconic historical hotspots. I've got a special series, you'll be glad to know, Dan Snow's Guide to Europe.

We've talked to local experts. We're going to be exploring Notre Dame in Paris. We're going to be talking about Napoleon there as well, obviously. We're going to be walking the streets of Pompeii. We're going to be getting there, the gladiator's eye view of the Coliseum. in Rome. We're going to be unraveling the mysteries of the Minoans on the island of Crete. Let me narrate your historic summer on this podcast. Just hit follow. You'll never miss an episode. Here's Matt Lewis again. Does the castle do its job? I mean, is it seriously threatened in those

first couple of centuries of Norman and then early plantagenet rule? Not very often, no. I mean, it does an incredible job of being a very defensible tower. That's what it's designed to do, and it does that really, really well. So Henry III's reign. We do see times when he's being threatened by Simon De Montfort, for example, and he is in the tower, and he's sort of surrounded, but they never managed to get into the tower to him, and it's to the tower that he rallies people when he feels like he needs to defend himself from Simon de Montfort. So it does do an incredibly good job. It gets broken into during the Peasant's Revolt in 1381, but there's a strong suspicion there that the guards have probably let them in.

They seem to have maybe some permission from Richard the second to go and arrest key members of his government. So the chancellor and the treasurer are in the white tower hiding in St John's Chapel. And it seems like the only reason the rebels get in is because they have some permission from Richard the second to go and arrest these people. What they don't have permission to do is drag them outside

and cut their heads off, which is what I think upsets Richard afterwards because he didn't say that they could do that. Is that technically the only time the tower has ever fallen? It's been stormed. It was a group of these so-called peasants in the late 14th century? It's held up as the only time the tower is breached, but I'd question whether it was even actually really breached then, because I'd suspect the guards open the door and let them all in with permissions from Richard II to do what they were going to do.

But as you say, things got a bit out of control because they scared at the very least some of the royal women, and then they drag some of Richard's ministers out and similarly executed them, didn't they? Yeah, they find Richard II's mom sitting on her bed in a bedroom and they all demand kisses from her before they'll leave a room, which must have been a pretty terrifying experience for her, suddenly surrounded by all of these people demanding kisses from you before they'll leave your bedroom. It's pretty terrifying. And then, yeah, they go and find some of the key ministers of the government and drag them outside. And Richard had agreed for them to be arrested and to stand trial for treason, but what the peasants do is drag them outside and cut their heads off,

which isn't what Richard had said they could do. Extraordinary to think that when Edward I and his dad, Henry III, had been massively expanding those defensive structures less than a hundred years earlier, they would never have imagine that some peasant rabble would be able to break in because those Henry 3rd and the first defences are really, really significant, aren't they? I mean, they're sort of doubles walls surrounding it, use of water, remarkable. Yeah, so there's gates in from the river so that you can get into the river if you want to, but even those gates are defensible. When you go into the tower today, you'll still walk through this section where there's big tall walls

on either side of you with towers, which if someone is trying to defend that space, you're in a kill zone. You have to walk all the way through this kill zone to get anywhere in the Tower of London. So it's designed from the 13th century onwards to be almost like the perfectly defensible castle. And you wonder what Henry III and Edward I would have made of the fact that the only people who ever got in there were a bunch of rustics from the countryside who turned up and crashed London for a couple of days. And in that period, it's now a very big footprint. Is it doing other jobs? So it's still just a sort of bastion of royal ruler? Or is it a kind of governmental structure as well as just a fortified royal residence? I think because

of the size of it and the initial importance to the royal family of it. It takes on all of these other functions. There is a mint there. It's creating coin of the realm within the protections of a royal palace. There's also an arsenal in there. So they use the white tower to store weapons and things like that for when they're needed for war. And again, it means if you're besieged in there, you've got a ready supply of weaponry there waiting for you. I mean, it's also been a royal menagerie, so a zoo. So from King John's reign, he starts keeping animals there. And again, Henry III is really big on having loads and loads of animals at the tower. So he gets gifted three leopards by the Holy Roman Emperor. And the three leopards will go on to become the

badge of the royal family of England. And footballers today will still wear the three lions on their shirt, which aren't three lions, they're actually three leopards. He gets given an elephant during his reign as well by the King of France, which doesn't live for very long there. And no one's quite sure whether it couldn't cope with the climate or it couldn't cope with the diet of red wine that it was being given. Henry III also got gifted a polar bear by King Hackon of Norway, and they were amazed and astonished reports from Londoners who would see this bear being walked down to the side of the River Tens and chained up with the keeper while it went fishing in the River Thames to feed itself. No one has seen a polar bear in England before. So it becomes

a building that performs many, many, many functions over time. And part of it is military. Part of it is because of its importance to the royal family, it is a critical royal palace still for most, well, for all of the medieval period. There's some important prisoners, aren't there, through this period? And some important royal family members meet their end in the tower. It develops, I guess, quite a reputation. Is this where you put your most dangerous enemies? Yeah, so because it's such a defensible position,

because you have this perfect dungeon, dungeon, keep in the middle of it, it's ideal for holding prisoners. And so the first named prisoner that we have, have at the Tower of London is a man named Ranulf Flombert, who's kept there in 1101, and he's been a really key minister to William Rufus, so William II, the guy who we talked about getting shot in an accident in the New Forest earlier. And when his little brother Henry becomes king, he kind of imprisons Ranulf on the basis that he's kind of the face of William's unpopular government. So Ranald Flomber is kind of the first named known

prisoner that we have held at the tower about 30 years, 25 years after the tower is created. and he's also the first prisoner to escape from there. The tower doesn't get off to an auspicious start as a prison. Ronald Flombert throws a big party because apparently when you're a prisoner at the tower, you're allowed to throw parties. He buys in loads and loads of wine, gets all of his jailers drunk. And once they're all completely paralytic, he tips over one of the barrels of wine, which has a length of rope at the bottom of it, ties it to one of the bars,

and lowers himself down out the window, and manages to escape off and disappear to France. So the tower doesn't get off to a great start. as a prison. But it goes on to have some fairly significant prisoners held there, though. Actually, speaking of people getting wildly intoxicated and escaping, is that how Roger Mortimer escaped? So let's come forward now with Edward II. And his wife and Roger Mortimer, we think, were in a relationship, one of the great nobles. He was in prison, wasn't he? But he managed to get everyone drunk as well, and he managed to climb down and escape from the tower as well. It's a bit of a theme, isn't it? If you're constable of the tower, you'd think you might do

away with this idea that prisoners can throw massive wild parties and buy in loads and loads of alcohol for it. If someone's ordering in ladders and alcohol, then maybe up the security setting a bit. Yeah, I would think so. Roger Morton escapes from the tower. It's 1st of August 1323. So he's been put there because of his opposition to Edward II. He's an incredibly powerful lord out on the Welsh marches. He's been in opposition to Edward II and his favourites. He's captured and put in prison. And yet he essentially does the same thing. He gets everybody drunk, manages to convince one of his jailers to let him out of his cell, sneaks off through the kitchens. One of the sources says he climbs up the chimney, so they deliberately not used one of

the ovens in the kitchen that night so that he could climb up the chimney and escape from there and manages to throw down rope ladders to scale over the walls, eventually gets out to the river and his road off to safety and makes it again to France and joins Edward II's wife, Isabella, in France, and they ultimately launched this invasion of England that will see Edward II deposed in favour of his son, Edward III. So a very significant moment, for the tower, again, being used as a prison, unsuccessfully, eventually leads to regime change. We've got Henry the 6th, one of their descendants, was murdered in the tower in 1471, wasn't he? I mean, he was unable to escape.

Yeah, so Henry was probably one of the most unsuccessful kings, England, has ever had. Poor Henry. Well, he became king at nine months, and I frequently hear the comment, you know, babies don't need jobs. But here's a baby who gets a job at nine months old of being king of England, and then a few months later, he's technically also king of France. So at the age of nine and then 11, he's the only person in history ever to be crowned King of England in England and King of France in France.

He's the only person ever to have achieved that. And yet he will go on to be a spectacularly unsuccessful king, nothing like his father Henry V, who's victory at Agincourt and later victories in France have led to this position where Henry V becomes heir to the French throne but dies just before his rival Charles the 6th. Oh, if only he'd lived. So his baby son, yeah, his baby son becomes king of both realms. And this kind of really long

minority period creates factions at court, loads and loads of problems. And probably no one is paying too much attention to bringing up Henry, who has got to be king one day. And so he becomes an unpopular king and unsuccessful king. He's unable to rule his kingdom. He can't control factions. This leads to the wars of the roses. We ultimately, we lose the hundred years war in France in 1453 at the Battle of Castillon. And then that imports kind of civil war back to England. We get the Wars of the Roses and Henry is deposed in 1461. He's captured a few years later roaming around the north of England and plonked in the tower. He's wheeled out in 1470. He is put back on the throne. So the Earl of Warwick falls out with his cousin Edward IV and they depose Edward and

put Henry back on the throne. And they invent a word for this because nobody knows what to call it when a king comes back. So they invent the word re-adeption for when a deposed monarch comes back onto the throne. It's just a made-up word. But he's deposed again, 1471, back in the tower, and his only son and heir is killed at the Battle of Chukesbury on the 4th of May 1471. And we're told that when Edward gets back to London, Henry dies of pure melancholy. He's just so sad that he dies. Definitely. Very sad. He accidentally, unfortunately, died exactly the right time for Edward in the Tower of London. That's what the newspapers of the day said. See, the thing is, I think it's easy to laugh off the idea that Henry died of natural causes,

but here's a guy who is by this point 50 years old. He's been a badly treated prisoner for 15 years. He's had mental health issues for the past 20 years. It is possible, but also it's entirely likely that Edward VIII made sure he didn't make it out of the tower again. And that wouldn't be the last member of a royal family to meet a sticky end in the tower. Now, you, Matt Lewis, obviously in charge of Team Richard III. So you're a good guy to get on the podcast. But who from Richard's immediate family ended up dying in the tower as well, whether by his own hand or not?

Is his brother Clarence? Did he die in the tower? Clarence was executed at the tower in 1478. He is convicted of treason for betraying Edward VIII for the fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh time. I don't know. He continually betrays their other brother, Edward the fourth. And so this is one of those things that Shakespeare says Richard is behind Clarence being put to death. but Clarence has had this string of betrayals. Edward Vourth tries him in Parliament as a traitor.

He's a tainted and he is executed. We don't know precisely how. So as befits his rank, he's executed in private and there's no record of how it's done. But a story very, very quickly springs up that he was allowed to choose the method of his own execution and that he elected to be drowned in a barrel of Malmsey wine, which was one of Edward IV's favourite kind of Spanish sweet wines.

he elected to be lowered into that and slowly drowned, drinking as much wine as he possibly could before he went. Let's come to someone who definitely was murdered in the Tudors, who, as you mentioned, were the next family to take control. Anne Boleyn, the second wife of Henry VIII, was killed in the Tower, wasn't she? Yeah, I mean, she has a fairly kind of tragic relationship with the Tower. It all starts off really, really well. So on the river side of the White Tower, there used to be royal apartments there that were demolished in the Stuart era. and Henry VIII has these apartments spectacularly redecorated to prepare for Anne's coronation. So the traditional medieval rule ever since the White Tower was there was that monarchs go for

their coronation from the White Tower. They go from there to Westminster Hall and from Westminster Hall to Westminster Abbey for their coronation. So they're lodging at the Tower to prepare for Anne's coronation and he's making such a big deal of it that he has all of these royal apartments lavishly redecorated ready for Anne. They have a splendid feast there. and that all seems great. But within three years, she's back at the tower as a prisoner, accused of adultery, of treason, of having an affair with her own brother. I mean, she must have felt like these charges were just absolutely wild. I think she must have felt like Henry was going

to let her off eventually. Maybe he just wanted to annul their marriage, but that she would go away and live quietly in a nunnery somewhere or something like that. The fact is that no English noble woman has ever been executed up to this point. There simply isn't the mechanism to do it until the 15th century. They changed the law to allow them to prosecute noble women in the same way as noble men because there's been a couple of instances where they would have quite liked to prosecute some noble women, but there isn't the mechanism to do it. Magna Carter talks about how noblemen should be tried by their peers, but it doesn't

talk about how women should be tried. And so Anne must have felt fairly confident that her life wasn't really in danger because you don't execute noble women, let alone, queen. But Henry VIII will breach that rule. And we're told he sends for this experienced swordsman executioner from France to come over and do the deed. You know, that's his form of mercy to Anne, that he gives her a quick and unmessy death, unlike lots of the executions at the tower, which get a little bit messy. And I mean, my personal take on this is that Henry is perhaps thinking, I think Henry has a real belief in a religious curse on his marital status, if you like.

so Catherine of Aragon, he never properly divorced her. He married Anne while he was still married to Catherine of Aragon. And he's not been able to have a son. And I think then when Catherine of Aragon dies, Anne hasn't given him a son, he sees a chance to execute Anne. And I think the reason she has to die and not go away is so that there is a clean break there and he is free to marry someone else. And if that's what Henry did believe, then he must have felt like he was right because he gets married for a third time to Jane Seymour and almost immediately has a son. So he must have felt some vindication for what he did. But I think Anne dies to give Henry a clean slate for him to be able to marry. But that's the first time a noble woman of any rank is executed in

England. It wouldn't be the last. This is my guide to the Tower of London. Don't go anywhere. Back in a moment. Hello, cherished listeners. This summer I'd love for you to accompany me on a History, lovers, holiday, vacation around Europe. On the podcast throughout August, I'm going to be showing you Europe's most iconic historical hotspots. I've got a special series, you'll be glad to know, Dan Snow's Guide to Europe. We've talked to local experts. We're going to be exploring Notre Dame in Paris.

We're going to be talking about Napoleon there as well, obviously. We're going to be walking the streets of Pompeii. We're going to be getting their gladiator's eye view of the Coliseum in Rome. We're going to be unraveling the mysteries of the Minoans on the island of Crete. Let me narrate. summer on this podcast. Just hit follow. You'll never miss an episode. By this stage, Henry's living in other palaces. Is the tower now a prison? I guess it's still a mint. I guess it's still an arsenal. But are the royal family routinely living there?

Because when the tower enters the history books in this period, it's because Cromwell's there. It's because Amber Lynn's there. It's because the Duke of Norfolk is. briefly there. It feels like it's a kind of elite prison by this point. It is emerging into that. So the Tudor period really sees the death of the tower as a functioning royal palace. But Henry the 7th's wife, Elizabeth of York, dies there. And we're told then that Henry is so upset that he abandons the Tower of London as a royal palace. He never uses it as a functioning palace again. We know Henry VIII was incredibly close to his mom and probably never really got over the death of his mother, Elizabeth of York.

And so he has poor memories, bad connections to the tower as well. So although he uses it for lavish moments like Amblin's coronation and preparing for that kind of thing, this is the moment where it starts to be set aside as a functioning working royal palace where the royals go and stay. And also they don't need to be able to defend themselves in quite the way that they probably did just 100 years earlier maybe. And so we do see it develop more into a prison, it's still a mint, it's still an arsenal, or of those kind of things, it becomes much less of a royal palace. And by the end of the Stuart period, we don't have monarchs even travelling from there for their coronation anymore. So it's slowly, during the 16th and 17th century, it's slowly being more and more abandoned

by the royal family. Well, let's wistford. We've got some more famous prisoners. Elizabeth I actually technically never a prisoner there, right? She lived there a bit under her sister Mary's reign. She was a prisoner there. But probably one of the most famous prisoners there. Let's whizford quickly look at Guy Fawkes, failed to attend. to kill James I first of England, James the 6th of Scotland in Parliament with all his nobles. He is taken to the tower, isn't he? That's where he's imprisoned and interrogated. What was it? Put to the question. Yeah. So he's, as you say, found in the undercroft of the old palace of Westminster with all of his barrels of gunpowder, a watch and a slow match. And it's

pretty clear what he's going to do. But he tries to pass himself off as just a servant who's, you know, just sitting there babysitting some barrels, not doing anything too wrong. He's taken before James I, and quite brazenly, you know, he's giving his name at this point as John Johnson and saying he's a servant of Robert Catesby, who's rented that cellar. But when he's bought before the king, James the first and sixth, and James says, what were you planning to do? He says, I was planning to blow the Scottish king and all of his Scottish lords back to Scotland. It makes no secret of the fact that he was trying to murder the king at this point. And James has him questioned. He wants to know who else is involved in this plot. Guy Fawkes is doing a great job of not giving up any of his

co-conspirators' names at this point. And then James says, you know, given that the gentler persuasions have failed to work, we'll move on to the less gentle persuasions. And essentially, he writes a permission for Guy Fawkes to be tortured. So torture is not the general way things are done during this period. It needs specific permission from the king to be able to do it. And Forks is then tortured. There's lots of suspicion that he was probably racked. There was a rack in the White Tower in the Tower of London. And so, you know, he's tied to this machine by his four limbs, which is gradually pulling him further and further apart. And you've got to imagine over a period of time, this is stretching his muscles, snapping his sinews and his tendons and his muscles,

and eventually it'll dislocate the bones in his body. And that's why when he eventually signs his confession, we've got that kind of really shaky signature compared to his previous one because he's been tortured so much that kind of most of the muscles in his body probably don't work anymore and he's been so badly treated that he can't even write his own name. And I think Guy Fawkes is the member of the gunpowder plot that we know of because he's the one that gets captured by the government. The main ringleaders get killed in a great shootout at Holbeach House in Staffordshire because they don't want to get captured and tortured and executed so they make sure that they're killed in this blazing shootout. Another famous

Jacobian, or Elizabethan Jacobian, Walter Raleigh. Queen Elizabeth chucked him in the town briefly. but he was famously put in the tower for annoying James I'm first enormously because he was so belligerent towards Spain, kept going on sort of freelancing operations against the Spanish main, and in the end James, well, James had him in the tower and then executed him here. Yeah, so he gets that brief moment in the tower under Elizabeth I, because he marries without Elizabeth's permission and she's not very happy about this. He gets set free after that.

Once Elizabeth dies, James becomes king. Walter Raleigh gets caught up in what's known as the, main plot. And this was a scheme to put Arabella Stewart on the throne instead of James, so essentially to have a different monarch. And it's called the main plot because there was also the biplot, which was the byproduct of this plot, which was a scheme to kidnap James instead. And he spends about 10 years in prison at this point. Although as a prison then, we're told that he's kept in what is now the bloody tower, which was then called the Garden Tower. And he's allowed to live there with his family. One of his sons is conceived at the Tower of London while he's a prisoner.

He was allowed to keep a garden outside the bottom of the tower where he reportedly grew tobacco to be able to smoke. So if you think prisons are easy today, Walter Raleigh had a pretty good time in the Tower of London. And he wrote his history of the world there as well. Yeah, he wrote his kind of incomplete history of the world while he was there. And then eventually James lets him out, essentially to go and try and find El Dorado. So I think Walter Rally is probably selling James this scheme that there's a city of gold somewhere in the new world, and I can go and find it for you and make you rich. And I think James thinks, well, you know what, if you're on a ship on the other side of the world, you're probably not causing me too many problems, so off you go. But then he gets

caught up in attacking a Spanish outpost at a point where James has a treaty of peace with the Spanish that's incredibly embarrassing for James. So James has him re-arrested and put back in the tower, tried again for treason, and ultimately this time he's executed. And he apparently, you know, he reportedly tells the executioner to get on with it. He inspects the act and he says, you know, this is a fine medicine for all ailments. It'll cure almost anything that's wrong with you. Pops his head down on the block and he's waiting for a little while and reportedly he then looks at the executioner and says, you know, what are you waiting for? Strike man, strike. I love that story. Let's whiz through to the 20th century. Rudolf Hess, Hitler's sometime number two, really, in the early Nazi party,

flew to Britain on that very strange mission in 1941, hoping to somehow negotiate a sort of entente between Britain and Germany before the invasion of Soviet Union. And he's sent to the tower, isn't he? Yeah, so he's the last kind of state prisoner who's ever held at the Tower of London. I think he's only held there briefly. He's moved on to somewhere else where he's likely to be a little bit more secure. But it's striking that even in 1941, when the government are looking for somewhere secure to keep the most important prisoner that could have fallen into their hands beyond Hitler, maybe. You know, he's second in command in Germany.

We're not quite sure what he's here to do. What do we do with this incredibly significant, incredibly dangerous prisoner who we need to keep secure and we also need to protect and we need to be able to question and find out what's going on? And it's striking that in 1941, almost 900 years after it's built, their first thought is still the Tower of London. That's the place to go to keep someone like that safe and secure until we work out what we're going to do longer term. And he was then transferred pretty soon to another prison.

And then he was sent back to Germany and held in prison in Germany until 1987 extraordinarily fascinating. Yeah, he ends up at the Nuremberg trials, doesn't he? And that obviously gets punished for his part in the Nazi regime. There was actually a Nazi spy in 1941 who was executed at the Tower of London remarkably on the 15th of August in the miniature rifle range. Joseph Jacobs, hard to imagine, still in that use in the 20th century. And even harder, perhaps, to imagine the last characters to talk about the Kray twins, the famous gangsters. Now, is there some debate about whether they were held in the tower or not?

I hope it's true. It would be an extraordinary end to this millennium old story. Yeah, I mean, my understanding is they are held at the tower for a very, very brief time. So this is kind of early 1950s. The Kray twins are called up to do military service because everybody still has to do national service at this point. and the regiment that they're assigned to is based at the Tower of London. So the reports kind of go that they turn up for military service, they registered

themselves, and then they leave because they can't be bothered with all of this. They stay for a couple of hours, seems boring, and they leave. And then they're captured by the police and returned in the first instance, it seems to be told not to do that again and just to behave themselves. They begin their national service training and they clearly then decide, this is absolute rubbish, we don't want to do this. And apparently they just walk out of the tower and walk. back to their home in the East End.

And they get arrested again. They beat up the policemen. You know, they're beating up all sorts of people around the Tower of London, beating up policemen who are trying to arrest them, clearly developing their reputation that they will have later. And we're told then that because they go AWOL, they are held at the Tower of London because that's where their regiment is based. They're initially held there before they moved on to another military prison.

So it does seem like they were held in the prison for going AWOL, in the Tower of London for a few days in 1952 as the last recorded prisoners to have been held there. And incredible, it would be someone like the Cray Twins. They go on to be held in prison for going AWOL. And even when they hear that they're going to be dishonorably discharged from the army, they just start causing absolute chaos in this military prison. So they're not in the tower anymore.

But, you know, they're setting fire to their bedding, they're beating up guards, they're smashing stuff left, right and center. And they get moved into a civy prison. Once they're kicked out of the army, they're imprisoned for all of the things that they've done, all the people had beaten up while they were in the army and they carry on, you know, getting control of wings of prisons and, you know, somebody decides to move them out of their single cells

into joint occupancy cells, at which point they just beat up all their cellmates and they start smashing things all over the place, beating up prison guards. I mean, the writing was pretty clearly on the wall there for what kind of people they were going to be. From Ranulf Flambard to the Cray brothers. Fascinating, what a history.

And today, let's just bring it right to it. I mean, it's obviously a museum. The Crown Chours still kept there, right? That's a serious job they've got. They've got to look after the crown jewels. And does it still have any other role? I mean, is that it? Up to the 19th century, it was still working as things like a mint and a royal barracks.

And you see quite a lot of the building work that's been done to it since the medieval period has been to reflect its status as a military barracks quite often. But really, it's still a functioning royal palace today. It's owned by historic royal palaces. It still belongs to the crown, to the monarch. As you say, the crown jewels are kept there. They were originally kept in Westminster Abbey, but it was decided that the tower was a much more secure place to keep the crown jewels. And so it isn't really a working royal palace anymore. It is just a tourist

attraction that we're all able, blessed to be able to go and enjoy. You can go and look at almost a thousand years of history on the side of the River Thames. You can see prisoner graffiti in some of the towers from some of its famous prisoners. You can see the spots where some of the most notable people in medieval and later history were executed within the walls of the Tower of London. And so it really is a connection to a thousand years of history and perhaps to a thousand years of some of our darker history as well. So we go there to enjoy looking around this old building, but maybe we should give a little bit of thought

to the kind of things that have gone on inside those walls in the last thousand years. You're leaving the Tower of London now. The sun is low on the western horizon. It's sparkling off the waters of the River Thames, old father Thames. Just across there you've got HMS Belfast, fired one of the first salvos on D-Day, that, but that's a whole different story. But now I'm going to go and mingle with all those city workers who are just spilling out of the big offices around here. Many of them are they heading for an afterwork pint, and I will certainly be joining them.

And folks, have you been exploring the history line, you've been in your feet all day, then make sure that you finish in the best possible way in one of London's wonderful historic pubs. There are plenty around here, and there's some fun pop-up bars along the river. So you can rest those weary feet, you can raise a toast. to intrepid historical explorers and the incredible history of London and if you want more travel guides from me this August just make sure you hit follow in your Spotify app

and look out for the episodes of the special artwork we've got episodes on the Coliseum of Rome the Acropolis in Athens still to come it's all happening thank you very much for listening everybody and thank you particularly to Matt Lewis Charles Ferris and a star at Royal Palaces if you do go to the Tower of London folks

obviously I recommend that highly you've got to go and see the medieval palace exhibition. It's all recently been referred. They do a great job with all the storytelling, really immersive, and it really takes you back in time. There's nothing I like more than an exhibition that makes you feel like you're there, because whether I like to imagine

that I'm on the decks of a ship on the Spanish main, the creaking rig over my head, searching the horizon for a Spanish prize, or plotting the downfall of the French king in luxurious medieval palatial accommodation, I'm a happy man. If you want to have a look at what the medieval palace actually looks like and learn more about the Tower of London,

check out a documentary on the History Hit Streaming Service, our TV channel. It's called Powerhouse, the Medieval Tower of London. And you can find a link to sign up to watch that in the show notes. Please subscribe to our history hit, folks. It's great fun. Join the team. See you next time.