Gone Medieval - Tower of London: Most Infamous Prisoners

Episode Date: January 4, 2024

From William Wallace and King Henry VI, to Anne Boleyn and Sir Walter Raleigh, London's iconic Tower of London has held some of history's most notorious figures over its 1000 year history. Host of Gone Medieval podcast Matt Lewis joins Dan to uncover the secrets embedded within the tower's formidable walls. They dive into the deep history of this mighty fortress built by William the Conqueror and tell the stories of the executions, the escapes and the animals that have called the tower home, including a 13th century polar bear who would swim and catch fish in the Thames.You can find out more about the Tower of London and its notorious prisoners in the History Hit Miscellany book available in bookshops and online.Produced by Mariana Des Forges, edited by Dougal Patmore and remixed by Joseph KnightEnjoy unlimited access to award-winning original documentaries that are released weekly and AD-FREE podcasts. Get a subscription for £1 per month for 3 months with code MEDIEVAL - sign up here.You can take part in our listener survey here. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

From long-loss Viking ships and kings buried in unexpected places to tales of murder, power, faith, and the lives of ordinary people across medieval Europe and beyond. Join me, Matt Lewis, Dr. Eleanor Jarniger, and some of the world's leading historians as we bring history's most fascinating stories to life, only on history hit. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries

with a brand new release every week exploring everything from the ancient world, to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Welcome to this episode of Gone Medieval. I'm Matt Lewis. I was recently allowed out of the GM dungeon up to the throne room of Dan Snow's history hit. Blinking in the bright light, I got to talk about some of the high-profile prisoners who've seen the inside of the Tower of London for the wrong reasons. In almost a millennium of its history, the tower has served several purposes from a palace to a zoo, from an armoury to a mint, but it's now perhaps best known as a prison.

This is my chat with Dan about some of that long and often terrifying history. Hi everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's history here. In the 1070s, just a few years after the conquest of England and during the ongoing struggles to make that conquest an enduring occupation, William the Conqueror started building a massive castle on the edge of what, what was probably his most important city of this new kingdom, London. It was downriver to the east of London. Ships could come and go uninterrupted by having to pass through the arches of bridges. Reinforcements could be brought across the channel from Normandy.

If necessary, those ships could also evacuate members of the royal family from the troublesome city altogether. It was a massive statement of Norman control. even the rock itself was transported from Normandy to build this huge tower, inside which William, his family, key officers of state, would be able to shelter from the wrath of Londoners. The tower was so pronounced that even to this day, a thousand years later, it's still simply known as the Tower. The Tower of London is one of the most powerful fortresses in Europe because of its central place in the nation's capital as an important royal centre of. power. It has been enlarged over the centuries. It is still in use today. It's where the crown jewels are housed in their impenetrable basement, deep underground. And safeguarding royal treasure is just one of

its many uses and purposes over nearly a thousand years of its existence. On the podcast day, I've been inspired by people's response to the book we got out, the history hit Miscellany. There's a big section in there about the prisoners who found themselves locked up in the Tower of London. It's one of the things that people have commented to me. They found interest in the book. So I thought I would do a session with Matt Lewis. He's part of the History Hit family. He's presented many shows on the History Hit TV channel.

He has his own podcast, Gone Medieval, smash hit podcast, a part of the History Hit Network. And we decided that we would do a little deep dive because I've never done an episode specifically on the Tower of London before. So thank you to those of you who got in touch. It spurred me to do a special episode about what is probably Britain's most important Castle. We're talking particularly about some other celebrity prisoners that have been in there of the years, from Ranulf Flambard, the Bishop of Durham, we think the first prisoner, to the Cray brothers, the Cray twins who were in prison there briefly in the 1950s. What a history. Enjoy.

Matt, good to you have on the part, man. It's great to be here, Dan. Thank you very much for having me. So I am looking out my window right now, and I can just see the little old white tower at the heart of the Tower of London. But actually, it goes, that's a thousand years old, often said it's from the first stone. buildings in Britain that sort of survives the present. But that is, the tower was built on a, on a Roman fort. Yeah. 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 Normans 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 fragile 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 that he wants to be safe and school. 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 its 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? You know, 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, is this, 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, it's 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 sort of rebuilding London and re-establishing it as an important political focal point. And I guess, you know, 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 Conqueror 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 little Henry...

I often wonder, how long did he sand and look at his brother and think, what do I do? 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 couple of seconds? 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 at the same as now. The white tower in the middle would have... Would it even have 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. And the Mcellany book has lots of great details about the development of castles and layouts of castles and what each bit of it does and is for.

The keep was originally called a dungeon, which is where we get the word dungeon from in English today, because it was a place where you keep all of your value. 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. He had lots of the curtain walls,

lots of the towers. And essentially what we see now is kind of the 13th century tower. It's obviously undergone continuous development from then. But I think we would probably pretty much recognize it from the 13th century onwards. You couldn't ask for more of a statement than conquering a kingdom and then building a stronghold at the heart of it in stone that you brought from your home country. I mean, that's astonishing. 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 DeMontfort, 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 Demontfort. 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 II 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 II 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 why 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. 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 opened 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 dragged 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 her 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 imagined that some peasant rabble would be able to break in because those Henry III 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 are the royal mince in there? is an arsenal as an important storehouse for weapons? 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, which you say 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. 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 chamed 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, 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 important prisoners, aren't there, through this period? And so 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, again, the Micellany book has a great list of famous prisoners who are held at the Tower of London amongst the lists of many, many things that are in there. And 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 at the Tower of London is a man named Ranul Flembert, 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 Ranul 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 Flomber 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 escapes? 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 all his, I think 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 comfortable 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. So it's actually 700 years ago this year. that Roger Morton rescates 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 chair 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. We 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 100 years war in France in 1453. at the Battle of Cassillon. 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 where a... 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 VIII 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 Stewart era.

And Henry the 8th 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 like to prosecute some noble women,

but there isn't the mechanism to do it. You know, Magna Carter talks about how nobleman 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 a queen, but Henry VIII will breach that rule. And we're told he sends for this experienced sword, from an 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. 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 Anne Boleyn'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 the 8th 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 Ambulin'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, you know, just a hundred years earlier maybe. And so we do see it develop

more into a prison, it's still a mint, it's still an arsenal, all 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. Actually, you mentioned Henry the seventh's wife dying. They did seek sanctuary. Was it 1497 when the Cornishmen all marched

up to London, they fought a battle in Deppford quite near the tower. The tune of Royal Family was sheltering in the tower, weren't they? They were absolutely. So we've got little tiny Henry the 8th, the future Henry the 8th, who's just been created Duke of York. He's sheltering there with his mom and his sisters. And there's this bunch of Cornish rebels. It's basically a tax revolt what's happening here. So Henry the 7th has levied really high taxation for a war that he wants to pursue with Scotland, which is part of the Perkin Warbeck business. All of the Cornish folk are kind of saying, why do we have to pay bucket loads of money for a war miles and miles away? That's nothing to do with us. And ultimately they rise in revolt. They march on London. They get as far as Deppford Bridge.

There's a huge battle with Henry's forces. But he sends his wife and his children into the tower, because that's the safest place for them to be. And there must have been genuine fear that, like the Peasants Revolt, these people were going to get to London, take control of the capital for a while. I mean, in the previous 100 years or so, we've had the 1381 Peasance Revolt. We've had 1450 Jack Cage Revolt gets into London and holds the city for days. Henry must have been genuinely frightened about what might have happened at this moment. And he turns to the tower as a place to put his most valuable things in the donjon again.

He puts his wife and his daughters and his youngest son in the White Tower to keep and protected during this moment of real uncertainty and risk. So over 400 years after William the Conqueror built her, it's still doing the same job, keeping the persons of the royal family safe. That's extraordinary. Well, let's whiz forward. 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 attempt to kill James I, the first of England, and 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 is 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 first. 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 I'm 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... 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. And incidentally, Holbeach House now is currently on the Heritage at Risk Register. It's all boarded up and it desperately needs some love. So if anyone at Dudley Council is listening, help us sort that out. Give it some love, folks. Give it some love. The whole beach house still has bullet holes in the doorway from that shootout. They still exist to this day.

And that building is in danger of falling down. Another famous Jacobian, or Elizabethan Jacobian, Walter Raleigh. Queen Elizabeth chucked him in the tower briefly. But he was famously put in the tower for annoying James I, 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 executes 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 secondary plot, so 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 to be able to smoke. 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 acts and he says, you know, this is a fine medicine for all ailments. It'll cure almost anything that's wrong with you. Popes his head down on the block and he's waiting for a little while and reportedly he then, looks at the execution 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 entombed 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, 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, 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 it 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 will 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 cray 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 register 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 absolutely 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're moving. 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 Jules still still kept there, right? So 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 Jules 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. Thank you very much, Matt, for coming on. Hosts of the Gone Medieval podcast, thank you very much. Thank you very much.

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