Greetings to my loyal Gold and Silver Level Templar knights. This weekend, I went to the Tower of London for the first time in ten years. I’m a Londoner myself and it’s surprising how you can walk past a thousand years of history and take it for granted. So I ventured in and this is what I found…
In the year 1066, the Normans invaded Saxon England. After taking London, they built a fearsome stone fortress at its easternmost point along the River Thames at the very end of the Roman wall. It wasn’t external enemies they worried about - but the mob in the city. And plenty of monarchs in the centuries that followed had cause to make a dash for the Tower of London when the streets descended into riots.
The Tower of London was a fortress, a royal residence, a terrifying prison, a place of execution, a money-making mint and even a zoo. Its most notorious period in history was under the Tudors when England went through a period of religious turmoil.
It started with Henry VIII renouncing the Roman Catholic church then his daughter Mary as queen trying to bring Catholicism back followed by another daughter, Elizabeth I, reverting to Protestantism. You really didn’t know which way to turn! And the walls of the towers, within which prisoners were kept, tell a sad tale.
A certain John Ballard carved a very intricate piece of graffiti (pictured below) on the wall in Latin: “Honour all men, love the brotherhood, fear God the king”. He was a Jesuit Catholic priest working undercover during the reign of the Protestant queen Elizabeth the First. Ballard assumed a false identity as swashbuckling Captain Fortescue and organised the so-called “Babington Plot” to kill the queen.
The plotters were infiltrated by Elizabeth’s secret police and at some point, the imprisoned Ballard realised he was going to be condemned to a very horrible death. Hanging, drawing and quartering was about the worst form of execution imaginable. Little wonder that he later scrawled, in a feebler hand (from being tortured?), “hope in God departed” a week before his death.
In the same cell languished a man called Hew Draper, an innkeeper from Bristol, accused of sorcery. Rather unwisely, as you can see below, he decided to carve magic symbols of some size on the walls. Rather incriminating you might think!
To see what I else I discovered - check out the video below. It includes the last resting place of Henry VIII’s two beheaded queens: Anne Boleyn and Katherine Howard!