Off with her Head!

Now that we have strayed into the territory of the gruesome, yet fascinating, I can now regale you with the tale of my trip to the TOWER OF LONDON:

And some pretty darn gruesome stuff went on. There were, of course, the murders of the princes in the Tower - apparently they found the bodies of two children when they were renovating a couple of years ago. And the last person to be executed in the Tower was during the Second World War, when a German spy who badly mishandled a parachute jump into the English countryside. And there was also the zoo, where all the animals that had been gifted to the monarch were kept. Not particularly gruesome you might say, but when I say that the public were allowed to get up close and personal with the animals, I think you'll see where I'm heading. One lady lost an arm to a tiger and a small boy was badly savaged in the monkey room. There were casualties on both sides - an ostrich died after someone, under the misaprehension that ostriches ate iron, fed it a nail.

Also, there are several hundred bodies buried underneath the chapel. The phrase 'buried' is a little tenuous - they simply lifted the flagstones in the chapel and squashed the body underneath. Usually in the dead of night. This meant that the chapel floor had a slightly undulating appearance. The only three women who were executed on the Tower grounds are buried there - Anne Boleyn, Catherine Howard and Lady Jane Grey (incidently, all three dispatched by the Tudor dynasty).



The chapel is on the left, underneath the tree.



Actually, only seven people in total were exectuted within the Tower grounds - the rest were held in the Tower, but their heads parted company with their shoulders on the hill outside where the excited public would gather and watch, probably while eating a picnic lunch. The best execution story is definately that of the short but stormy relationship between the Duke of Monmouth and his executioner Jack Ketch, but I'll let you find that one out on your own. Needless to say, drinking and executing don't go hand in hand.





But not all of the Tower's history is bloody. Apart from zoo, the Tower for many years housed the Royal Mint (in the houses in the photo above), until the Industrial Revolution made this impractical.  Now, of course, the Royal Jewels are kept here, under the watchful eyes of the Queen's Guard:

The White Tower, the oldest building right in the centre, houses an awesome museum of arms and armour throughout British history - the jousting armour of Henry VIII is, unfortunately, irrefutable evidence that he didn't look anything like Jonathan Rhys Meyers.

The White Tower

 And now, the Beefeaters actually live in the houses that make up the outer wall - talk about making history come alive!

So, if you are in, near or around London, the Tower is a MUST SEE. A bit pricey, but there is so much to see - I was there for almost five hours and I didn't see everything. My advice: do the tour. They are taken by the Beefeaters who, obviously, know everything there is to know about the Tower (it is literally their home).