The Tower
The
lost palace
When Anne Boleyn arrived at the Tower as a prisoner in 1536, her first question was: 'Shall I go to some dungeon?' The constable of the Tower replied, 'No, madam, you shall go to your chambers whereat your Grace lay before your Coronation.' Thus the highest and lowest points of Anne's life occurred at the same place – the lost royal palace inside the Tower of London.
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The White Tower was built in the 11th century as a fortified palace for William the Conqueror and his son William Rufus. Archaeologists believe that all of the important state rooms of a palace can still be identified inside it: the king's hall, chamber and chapel. The last of these, the Chapel of St John the Evangelist, is a beautiful Norman building that remains in use as a chapel today. Documents from the Middle Ages describe its decoration, with stained-glass windows, painted woodwork and statuary.
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The medieval royal palaces of England have survived very badly. With the two notable exceptions of the great halls of Winchester Castle and the Palace of Westminster, very few of the domestic buildings on royal sites are now anything more than ruined fragments. The Tower is particularly fortunate in possessing examples of the more private apartments of the monarch, in the Wakefield Tower and St Thomas's Tower, as well as a fine 14th-century water-gate – the Cradle Tower – through which the king could enter the Tower from a boat.
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From at least the 1160s, the royal court preferred to use a low-rise palace that stood beside the White Tower on the river bank. This was substantially rebuilt in the 1220s and 1230s by the architecture-loving Henry III (1216-72), with a new great hall, kitchens and chambers for the king and queen. These 13th-century buildings were the core of the palace throughout its history. Almost all of them have since been demolished, but one of Henry III's own chambers survives inside the Wakefield Tower: a beautiful, octagonal, vaulted room with its own en-suite chapel and window-seats from which the king could look out over the Thames.
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The infamous 'Traitors' Gate' was originally built for Edward I (1272-1307) as an extension to the royal palace. Despite its later ominous reputation, it was originally a spectacular riverside 'show apartment' with elaborate traceried windows of stained glass, floor tiles and large fireplaces, with painted statues on the roof. Edward I's queen, Eleanor of Castile, is said to have introduced exotic Spanish fashions to the Tower (and so to England as a whole), such as silk wall-hangings and carpets on the floor. An unimpressed Englishman described the results of these innovations as 'like some sort of heathen temple'.
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The wall-painting in the Byward Tower (not open to the public) was sadly damaged in the 16th century, but gives an indication of the richness of royal interiors in the late Middle Ages. Art historians agree that it was painted some time around 1390, during the reign of Richard II (1377-99).
The room's location some distance from the royal palace means that it cannot have been part of the royal apartments. It may have been occupied by an official in the Royal Mint, which perhaps explains the painting of an archangel weighing souls at the Last Judgement. Documents at the Tower refer to painters using expensive materials such as gold and silver leaf, as well as green and blue pigments, like those surviving in the Byward Tower.
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The Tower was not generally where the royal court preferred to stay, not when the Palace of Westminster and Windsor Castle were both close at hand. From the late 14th century, however, it became customary for each new monarch to stay at the Tower before their coronation and then ride through the City to Westminster.
This stay at the Tower would also be marked by a long and elaborate ritual for the creation of new Knights of the Bath. As the name would suggest, part of the ritual involved the candidates for knighthood bathing, in a room of the White Tower. A representative of the king would visit them and, standing beside the bath, would instruct them on the duties of a knight while pouring water over their heads.
Much of this ritual lapsed in the 17th century. However, so important was the notion of a king processing from the royal fortress to his coronation that, in 1660 (when the Tower's days as a royal residence were long gone), Charles II rose at dawn to ride from Whitehall to the Tower, then immediately turned round and rode back in procession.
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The palace in the Tower received much-needed repairs and redecoration before Anne Boleyn's coronation, by which time many of the buildings were 300 years old. This work were supervised by Thomas Cromwell, Henry VIII's secretary (and later a victim of the Tower himself), and included all parts of the complex, from the curtain walls protecting the castle to the weather vanes on top of the White Tower. (The White Tower's most famous features – the onion-shaped domes on the turrets – date to these repairs.)
An entirely new chamber was built for the queen – 59 feet (18 metres) long and 29ft 8.8m) wide, with a bay window on one side, and a line of windows on the other facing into the Tower gardens. The great hall, in which by tradition each coronation would be celebrated with the initiation of new Knights of the Bath, was repaired and redecorated, and another new chamber was created inside it for the queen. Before the coronation, Henry VIII brought Anne to the Tower to see how the work on the new buildings was progressing.
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The Tower contained palace gardens from the 13th century: Edward I was known to have taken 'the greatest delight' in them, and in 1483, it was there that the 'princes in the Tower' were last seen. In Tudor times, the gardens contained low brick walls and 'bridges' topped with ornamental vanes, perhaps carrying heraldic statues, as shown in contemporary pictures of royal gardens. The palace itself had a long gallery from which the king and queen could look down into the gardens from their southern end.
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Over the course of the 16th century, the palace fell into disrepair through neglect, and by the end of Elizabeth I's reign (1558-1603), the great hall was a roofless ruin 'almost falling to pieces with age'. In 1603, for James I's coronation, a temporary structure of wood and canvas was set up inside the great hall, almost like a marquee.
Several of the buildings were demolished in the 17th century, but others were converted for the use of the Office of Ordnance, as offices, stores and houses. The great hall became a store-house, but was demolished after a fire in 1774. One of the most tragic losses was the 'Record Office', built as one of the royal chambers in the 13th century: this was demolished in the face of vocal opposition as recently as 1885.
