Still Towering over London

 

beefeaters' lonely vigil

By Carole Barclay

The Tower of London has dominated the London scene for almost a thousand years. It began in 1066 when William the Conqueror ordered its construction to make his mark on the capital of his new kingdom. Since then the Tower has served as a fortress, palace, prison and even a royal zoo for those who sat on the throne of England.
    This is where the two young “Princes in the Tower”, who stood in the way of their uncle Richard III, were held before they conveniently “disappeared” in 1483. Ann Boleyn, one of Henry VIII’s unfortunate wives, spent her last days awaiting execution in the Tower. Many others, including Walter Raleigh and Guy Fawkes, passed through ‘Traitors Gate’ down the ages.
    During the Second World War Germany’s Deputy Fuhrer, Rudolf Hess, became the last state prisoner of the Tower when he was held here after he parachuted into Scotland to try and negotiate an armistice in May 1941 while the last man to be executed behind its grim walls was a German spy shot by firing squad in August 1941.
    Though this massive fortress may seems impregnable to the modern visitor the only time it ever fell was when sympathetic guards opened the gates to Wat Tyler’s rebel army during the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381. A rebel detachment led by John Starling seized the architects of the hated poll tax who were cowering behind its walls. The Lord High Treasurer Robert Hales along with the Chancellor of England Archbishop Simon Sudbury and John Legge, the king’s tax collector for Kent, were dragged out and beheaded on nearby Tower Hill.
    Though there is modest display dedicated to the Peasants Revolt in one of the bastions along the eastern ramparts walkway little or nothing is said about the turbulent times of the English Civil War.
    London was the staunchly Puritan capital of the Parliamentary forces during the Civil War which began in 1642 and ended in 1649 with the trial and execution of Charles Stuart and the abolition of the monarchy. The Republic of England, or Commonwealth as it was commonly styled in English, was proclaimed soon after.
    In 1653 Oliver Cromwell, the great commander of the New Model Army, became head of state, the Lord Protector. He established the Tower’s first permanent garrison and ordered the original crown jewels to be melted down to meet the needs of the new republic – a fact coyly mentioned in the current Crown Jewels exhibition.
    Cromwell never lived in the Tower but the fortress did provide a roof for some of his less than welcome “guests”. Most were Royalist prisoners. Others had once fought by his side.
    One was John Lilburne, a parliamentary army officer who had become a leader of the radical “Leveller” movement that campaigned for justice and equality during the conflict. “Freeborn John” denounced MPs who lived in comfort while the common soldiers fought and died in poverty. He ended up in the Tower for denouncing his former commander, the Earl of Manchester, as a traitor and a Royalist sympathiser and campaigning against the “grandee” army leaders who led the new republican government that the Levellers claimed were no better than the Cavaliers they had just ousted,
    Lilburne was accused of working with the Royalists to bring down the Commonwealth. Though a London jury acquitted him of treason charges his continuing opposition activities led to his exile soon after. Lilburn was sent back to the Tower when he returned to London without permission. He was finally freed in 1656. By that time he had abandoned his radical beliefs to become a pacifist and a Quaker and he died the following year.
    Lilburne told the Puritan preacher Hugh Peters, one of Cromwell’s inner circle, that he would rather have had seven years under the late king's rule than one under the present regime.
     Whether Lilburne had actually became a turn-coat, however, is still debatable.
But there’s no doubt about Edward Sexby, a prominent Leveller “agitator” who was arrested for plotting to kill Cromwell and distributing a pamphlet that incited the murder of the Protector.
    Sexby was an ambitious man. When the Levellers turned against the grandees he joined Cromwell’s camp and was rapidly promoted. He was elevated to the rank of Colonel and worked in France for the fledgling republic’s intelligence service. But he made many enemies along the way and by 1654 his military career had come to a halt. An increasingly bitter man, he returned to his radical past and the now underground Leveller movement.
In 1655 he fled to the Netherlands after being implicated in a new Leveller conspiracy. There he joined Royalist exiles plotting to assassinate Cromwell.
    Sexby helped produce, and may have actually written, an appalling pamphlet called Killing No Murder that called for Cromwell’s death. But he was speedily arrested after secretly returning to England in 1657. He died in the Tower the following year. The Commonwealth’s semi-official bulletin, the Mercurius Politicus, said he was ‘stark mad’.
    There’s plenty to see and this is the best time to do it. Before the coronavirus crisis the Tower of London was one of London’s most visited tourist attractions and one of the leading visitor attractions in the United Kingdom.
    Over 15,000 visitors, many from overseas, passed through its gates every day. In these troubled days London’s tourist industry has all but collapsed while the Covid-19 restrictions strictly ration the numbers allowed into the fortress at any given time. It’s around 800 on a good day. But when it rains visitors are almost outnumbered by the Beefeaters and the soldiers of the garrison. The long queues to see the Crown Jewels have vanished and you can really explore the nooks and crannies of this fascinating relic of London’s past.

The Tower of London is currently open from Wednesday to Sunday from 10:00 to 18.00. Tickets cost £25.00 (half-price for children) and visitors must book entry-slots with their tickets.

When Adam delved and Eve did span

by New Worker

John Ball preaching to the rebels

correspondent

In 1381 peasants marched on London to end the hated poll tax. They demanded equal rights and an end to serfdom, and chanted: “When Adam delved and Eve did span [spin], Who then was the gentleman?” Their leaders were Wat Tyler, who may have been a former soldier, Jack Straw and John Ball, a radical priest from Colchester.

The uprising began in May, when angry villagers drove the tax collector out of Brentwood in Essex. The resistance spread like wild-fire throughout southern England. Tax records were burnt and prisoners freed from local jails by angry peasants who readily answered the call to take up arms by an underground movement called the ‘Great Society’.

These peasant armies, led by Wat Tyler in Kent and John Ball in Essex, were welcomed by Londoners enraged at the nobility’s moves to put the entire burden of the seemingly endless war in France on the backs of workers and tradesmen. Militant apprentices opened the gates of London on 13th June to join the rebels determined to punish the architects of the monstrous tax. John of Gaunt, the Duke of Lancaster, was top of the list but he was on the Scottish borders, so they made do with burning his Savoy Palace to the ground. The Lord High Treasurer Robert Hales and the Chancellor, Simon Sudbury, who was also the Archbishop of Canterbury, fled to the Tower of London. But the royal fortress fell without a fight to the peasants, who dragged them out and beheaded them on Tower Hill.

The frightened young king, Richard II, met most of the peasants’ demands, including the abolition of serfdom. But at a later meeting with the rebels at Smithfield, Tyler was provoked into an argument and then stabbed to death by William Walworth, the Mayor of London. Richard told the peasants, who held him in superstitious awe, that he would honour his pledges. But when they dispersed, the gentry rallied to take their revenge. The king repudiated all his promises and the rebel ring-leaders were hunted down and killed. Jack Straw was beheaded and John Ball was hanged, drawn and quartered at St Albans in the presence of the king soon after.

Perhaps this was an inevitable outcome. For as the Marxist historian AL Morton noted: “The peasants could combine for long enough to terrorise the ruling class but had no means of exercising a permanent control over the policy of government. A peasant State was impossible because the peasants were bound sooner or later to disperse to their villages leaving the landlords in control of the apparatus.”

The later emergence of capitalist production led to the rise of the bourgeoisie and the end of formal serfdom in England. Memories of the first great popular uprising in England were later subsumed by a new and violent struggle for power that began in the 17th century. The Peasants’ Revolt was consigned to the history books and, until recently, barely remembered on the streets of London.

These days re-enactors and guides hover around the Tower of London during the tourist season to tell the tale of the uprising that briefly brought the feudal class to its knees. There’s a plaque that marks the spot in the memorial gardens on Tower Hill where Sudbury and Hales got what was coming to them. A statue of William Walworth along with the dagger that he used to kill Wat Tyler are displayed in the Fishmongers’ Hall, near London Bridge.

There’s little else to see in honour of the peasants who marched to London against the hated poll tax. Nothing remains of John of Gaunt’s palace, although religious services continue at the Savoy chapel that was part of a London hospital built over its ruins in Tudor days. The gilded statue that stands above the entrance of the Savoy Hotel that now stands on the Strand is not the hated John but his ancestor Count Peter, who made Savoy Palace his London residence in 1263. Just outside the hotel a plaque records the torching of the Savoy “by rebels under the leadership of Wat Tyler” and the building of the “modern palace” in 1889.

In more recent times a green plaque was put up in Islington to mark the burning down of Robert Hales’ Highbury Manor house by the peasant army. It was unveiled by Tony Benn, the veteran Labour politician, in 2010. The site that later became known as ‘Jack Straw’s Castle’ is now part of north London’s urban sprawl. Local legend says that the rebel leader addressed his men from the top of a wagon on his way to London and later hid in the ruins of Hales’ mansion following the collapse of the revolt. It certainly was the name of the tavern that goes back to the early 1700s. The pub was rebuilt in the 1960s and finally closed in 2002, when it was converted to a number of luxury flats. But the rebel connection continues with the plaque on the wall of the Highbury Barn Tavern.

Pride of place goes to the triptych on the northern wall of St Bartholomew's Hospital, Smithfield that was unveiled by the left-wing playwright Ken Loach in July 2015. The slate panels that fill a blocked window bay of St Bart’s was commissioned by a local resident, Matthew Bell, and carved by Emily Hoffnung. The memorial marks the place where the peasant delegates led by Wat Tyler and John Ball negotiated the end of serfdom with the king as well as the spot where Tyler was later killed. A brass plate on the left records the words of a later Englishman, Thomas Paine, who went to America to join the fight for freedom in the 1700s and famously said: “If the Barons merited a monument to be erected at Runnymede, Tyler merited one in Smithfield.”

Fishmongers Hall is only open to the public on special occasions that are listed on its website. The Savoy Chapel is currently closed due to the COVID-9 emergency. It normally opens from Monday to Thursday from 9:00–16:00 and on Sunday from 9:00–13:00. The Highbury Barn Tavern, which is also closed for the duration of the pandemic, is a 15-minute walk away from Arsenal station. The Savoy Hotel is on the Strand near Temple tube station. St Bart’s Hospital is in Smithfield and the nearest tube is Barbican station.