The Tower in Tudor
Times: A royal prison
The first Tudor
monarch, Henry VII (1485-1509) was responsible for building the last permanent
royal residential buildings at the Tower. He extended his own lodgings around
the Lanthorn Tower adding a new private chamber, a library, a long gallery, and
also laid out a garden. These buildings were to form the nucleus of a much
larger scheme begun by his son Henry VIII (1509-47) who put up a large range of
timber-framed lodgings at the time of the coronation of his second wife, Anne
Boleyn. The building of these lodgings, used only once, marked the end of the
history of royal residence at the Tower.
The reigns of the
Tudor kings and queens were comparatively stable in terms of civil disorder.
However, from the 1530s onwards the unrest caused by the Reformation (when
Henry VIII broke with the Church in Rome) gave the Tower an expanded role as
the home for a large number of religious and political prisoners.
The first important
Tudor prisoners were Sir Thomas More and Bishop Fisher of Rochester, both of
whom were executed in 1535 for refusing to acknowledge Henry VIII as head of
the English Church. They were soon followed by a still more famous prisoner and
victim, the King’s second wife Anne Boleyn, executed along with her brother and
four others a little under a year later. July 1540 saw the execution of Thomas
Cromwell, Earl of Essex and former Chief Minister of the King - in which
capacity he had modernised the Tower’s defences and, ironically enough, sent
many others to their deaths on the same spot. Two years later, Catherine
Howard, the second of Henry VIII’s six wives to be beheaded, met her death
outside the Chapel Royal of St Peter ad Vincula which Henry had rebuilt a few
years before.
The reign of Edward
VI (1547-53) saw no end to the political executions which had begun in his
father’s reign; the young King’s protector the Duke of Somerset and his
confederates met their death at the Tower in 1552, falsely accused of treason.
During Edward’s reign the English Church became more Protestant, but the King’s
early death in 1553 left the country with a Catholic heir, Mary I (1553-8).
During her brief reign many important Protestants and political rivals were
either imprisoned or executed at the Tower. The most famous victim was Lady
Jane Grey, and the most famous prisoner the Queen’s sister Princess Elizabeth
(the future Elizabeth I). Religious controversy did not end with Mary’s death
in 1558; Queen Elizabeth I (1558-1603) spent much of her reign warding off the
threat from Catholic Europe, and important recusants (people who refused to
attend Church of England services) and others who might have opposed her rule
were locked up in the Tower. Never had it been so full of prisoners, or such
illustrious ones: bishops, archbishops, knights, barons, earls and dukes all
spent months and some of them years languishing in the towers of the Tower of London.
Little was done to
the Tower’s defences in these years. The Royal Mint was modified and extended,
new storehouses were built for royal military supplies. In the reign of James I
(1603-25) the Lieutenant’s house - built in the 1540s and today called the
Queen’s House - was extended and modified; the king’s lions were rehoused in
better dens made for them in the west gate barbican.
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