The words ‘Tower of London’ summon up inescapably dark images. These ancient eighteen acres carved from London’s heart, capped by the four turrets of William the Conqueror’s White Tower and surrounded by a double curtain wall designed both to keep besieging armies out and VIP prisoners in, have witnessed more human suffering and misery than perhaps any other spot on earth.

Torture chamber, execution site, murder scene, and the place where high- born inmates either awaited their own bloody end or dragged out years and decades of hopeless incarceration at the whim of some heartless monarch – the Tower has been all this and more. It is doubtless this dark side which draws in the two to three million tourists who fork out twenty pounds a head each year to traipse through its grim gateway, making the Tower easily Britain’s most visited tourist location.

In addition to its role as London’s Lubyanka, of course, and as the expert Yeoman Warders who show the visitors around explain, the Tower has also been variously a royal palace, a menagerie, a mint, an armoury, an arsenal, an observatory, a military garrison, the national record office and a treasure chest housing the Crown Jewels. But an aspect of the Tower’s multifarious functions that the tourists rarely know or hear about is the Tower’s prominent place in English literature – and indeed that of Scotland and France too, playing host as it did to two members of the royal families of both nations, captured by the English and held for ransom there.

The first foreign royal prisoner was the young Prince James of Scotland, who actually acceded to his throne as King James I (not to be confused with King James I of England and VI of Scotland) while held in the Tower in 1406. As a boy of twelve, James was sent to France by his father, King Robert III, to escape Scotland’s turbulent – and often murderous – politicalinstability.

Sailing south, the prince’s ship was ambushed by pirates off the Yorkshire coast and young James fell into their clutches. The pirates were forced to disgorge their prize to England’s King Henry IV. He lodged the boy quite comfortably in the Tower, allotting the Constable – the Tower’s Governor – nearly seven shillings a day for the Prince’s keep and more than three shillings for his servants. The White Tower’s grand apartments were put at the prince’s disposal. No matter how cosily housed, however, James was still a prisoner, and as time wore on, with no sign of his release, he began to fret.

Well-versed in music and poetry, James put his feelings of isolation and homesickness into poetry. It is known as The King’s Quair, a book which still holds an important place in medieval verse:

The bird, the beast, the fish eke in the sea, They live in freedom each one in his kind;

And I a man, and lacketh liberty; What shall I say, what reason may I find, That fortune should do so? Thus in my mind My case I would argue, but all for nought: There was no one to give my woes a thought.

Then would I say, if God had me destined To live my life in thraldom thus and pine, What was the cause that he me more condemned Than other folk to live in such ruin? I suffer alone among the figures nine, One woeful wretch who to no soul may speed, And yet of every living person help hath need.

On hearing of his son’s capture, King Robert died – it is said of grief – but his new status as king did not affect the royal prisoner. The new Regent of Scotland, the Duke of Albany, was in no hurry to raise the huge forty thousand-pound ransom demanded by Henry for James’s release. Only when Henry V succeeded his father did James’s plight ease. He was taken from the Tower to Windsor Castle, and even accompanied Henry on campaign in France in 1420.

James’s cup ran over when he fell in love with and wed Henry’s cousin, Joan Beaufort, with whom he had many children. His captivity finally ended after eighteen long years when he returned to Scotland in 1424. In 1437, however, he was assassinated – a victim of the same dynastic squabbles he had fled Scotland to escape. His poetry remains as a memorial to a talented but unlucky monarch.

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A second long-stay royal resident at the Tower with literary leanings was Charles, Duke of Orleans. He was the nephew of King Charles VI of France and one of the defeated French commanders at the battle of Agincourt in 1415. Severely wounded and left for dead under a pile of bodies, twenty- four year-old Charles and his younger brother Jean were saved and brought to England with hundreds of other noble French captives by the victorious Henry V.

Fearing that the two princes would be viable rivals to his own claim to the French throne, Henry set their ransoms impossibly high and secretly ordered that they never be freed. Charles was left to languish in the Tower, where, like his fellow captive James I, he turned to verse to express his anguish.

At first Charles wrote short roundels in French on such conventional subjects as the changing of the seasons and courtly love. But as the months turned into years, with no sign of his freedom, he began to write in English as the memory of his native tongue faded. One of his early verses, ‘Envoi’, poignantly expresses his situation:

Paix est tresor qu’on ne peut trop louer: Je hais guerre, point ne la doit priser; Detourbe m’a longstops, soit tort ou droit, De voire France que mon Coeur amer doit.

(Peace is a treasure one cannot too much praise: I hate war, which none ought to prize; Right or wrong, it grieved me long, To see France, to which my sad heart is bound.)

Had he known just how long his enforced exile would last, poor Charles might have given up the ghost altogether. His confinement – alleviated by spells hunting and hawking from other English castles – lasted for a full quarter of a century, only ending in 1440 after King Henry’s death. At that point, the new English administration, wishing to appease France, released him and his brother after collecting the bulk of his vast ransom, which was worth fifty thousand pounds even then – more than two million pounds today.

Charles’s wife, Blanche, had died during his long ordeal, so he married Mary of Cleves, the daughter of the Duke of Burgundy. He paid off the rest of his ransom with her dowry and fathered a son, who became King Louis XII of France. Looking back on his time in the Tower, Charles reflected sadly that he had experienced ‘such weariness, danger and displeasure that I many times wished I had been slain at the battle where they took me’.

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The Tudor century (1485-1603) saw the Tower hit its high tide as a political prison, with Catholic priests and Protestant Bishops succeeding each other in the cells as the waves of Reformation and counter-Reformation ebbed and flowed. The first notable literary work to emerge from these troubled times, however, was a Machiavellian political tract, The Tree of Commonwealth. It was written by Edmund Dudley, the chief tax collector to the first Tudor monarch, Henry VII.

Dudley was notorious for his extortions. He was imprisoned by Henry VIII on succeeding his grasping father as a sop to public opinion. In a bid to save his neck, Dudley dedicated his work to Henry. The book advised the young king to be strong and authoritarian – to temper justice with mercy. Dudley might have saved his ink. His tract never reached the young king, who ordered his execution anyway. (Edmund, incidentally, was the first of three generations of his family to die at the Tower. His son John, Duke of Northumberland and grandson Guildford, were both executed by Henry’s daughter, Mary I, for their plot to put Guildford’s wife, Lady Jane Grey, on the throne.)

Later literary works produced at the Tower during Henry VIII’s bloody reign were of a devotional religious nature. Henry’s Lord Chancellor, Sir Thomas More, was imprisoned under Spartan conditions in the damp Bell Tower for refusing to take the oath recognising Henry as head of the Church. He turned his thoughts to spiritual consolation with his Dialogue of Comfort against Tribulation, a meditation on the ‘four last things’ – death, judgement, heaven and hell, and a treatise on the Passion of Christ before he too went to the block.

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More, the ‘Man for All Seasons’, was of a more unworldly nature than the prisoner whose lengthy confinements in the Tower almost rivalled the long travails of King James and Charles of Orleans: that quintessential Elizabethan Renaissance man, Sir Walter Raleigh.

Soldier, sailor, courtier, explorer, poet, Raleigh rose swiftly to become the brief favourite of the capricious Elizabeth I, before blotting his copy-book by making one of her ladies, Bess Throckmorton, pregnant and secretly marrying her. A furious queen threw them both in the Tower where their baby son died of the plague, and where Raleigh, completely unabashed, instantly embarked on a literary campaign addressed to Elizabeth to win his freedom.

His initial effort, penned from the Brick Tower where he was held apart from his wife and child, was a self-pitying sonnet – a verse form recently imported from Italy – on his imprisonment:

My body in the walls captived Feels not the wounds of spiteful envy, But my thrilled mind, of liberty deprived, Fast fettered in her ancient memory, Does naught behold but sorrow’s dying face.

Such prison erst was so delightful As it desired no other dwelling place; But time’s effects and destinies despiteful Have changed both my keeper and my fare. Love’s fire, and beauty’s light I then had store; But now close kept, as captives wonted are, That food, that heat, that light I find no more. Despair bolts up my doors, and I alone Speak to dead walls, but those hear not my moan.

When the queen remained unmoved, Raleigh started a longer literary labour, in a dozen ‘books’, using the couple’s pet names for each other: ‘Water’ and ‘Cynthia’. Here he moved from grovelling flattery …:

Such force her angel-like appearance had To master distance, time or cruelty Such art to grieve, and after to make glad, Such fear in love, such love in majesty.

… to genuine lyricism:

But as the fields, clothed with leaves and flowers, The banks of roses, smelling precious sweet, Have but their beauty’s date, and timely hours, And then defaced by winter’s cold and sleet.

So far as neither fruit nor form of flower Stays for a witness what such branches bear, But as time gave, time did again devour And changed our rising joy to falling care;

So of affection, which our youth presented When she that from the sun reaves power and light, Did but decline her beams as discontented, Converting sweetest days to saddest night.

It was not flattery but greed that got Raleigh out of the Tower. The queen needed him to sort out the spoils from a captured Spanish galleon. He was restored to fortune, but never regained her favour. He was in even less good odour with the monarch who succeeded her in 1603, James I of Scotland, who, probably with some justice, suspected Raleigh of plotting against his pro-Spanish policy and returned him to the Tower.

This time, lodged in the notorious Bloody Tower, Raleigh tried a different literary tack addressed to a different royal target to write his way out of the Tower. Despairing of impressing James, Raleigh beamed all his considerable charm on the heir to the throne, the pro-Protestant Prince Henry, who said of his father’s persecution of Raleigh: ‘Only my father would keep such a bird caged.’ When he finally ‘sang’ the caged bird produced a remarkable work dedicated to the young prince, whom he had been tutoring in the Bloody Tower: nothing less than a huge History of the World.

Prince Henry died of typhoid in 1612, before the first volume of Raleigh’s huge history could be published. Disheartenened, he saw no point in continuing. Nonetheless the History had a significant impact on his own time, and for several generations. Outselling Shakespeare, and praised by characters as diverse as Oliver Cromwell, the philosopher John Locke and the historians Lords Macaulay and Acton, Raleigh’s theme is the working out of God’s judgement and mercy through history. Thus unjust kings get their comeuppance while the good and worthy (by implication Raleigh himself) at last get their just deserts. Unsurprisingly, King James found it ‘too saucy in censoring princes’ and had its publication briefly suspended.

A convincing refutation of suspicions of atheism that had been cast against him, the History’s thousand plus pages (which only reached 168 AD) was by no means Raleigh’s only literary work in the Tower. Poems, philosophy, essays and memoirs poured from his furiously energetic quill. He even embarked on a new career as a herbalist, using plants from the Tower’s garden to conduct chemistry experiments and boil up elixirs for the delectation of society ladies. (Raleigh’s ‘Great Cordial’ – a physic derived from quinine – was poured down the throat of the dying Prince Henry but failed to save him.) Eventually, Raleigh too died by the axe – a victim of a vicious king unworthy to tie the great Elizabethan’s shoestrings.

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If Raleigh was a republican before his time, a Cavalier poet who also suffered in the Tower after the Civil War was there because of his loyalty to the Crown. William Davenant was a godson of Shakespeare himself and liked to hint that he was the Bard’s real son. As such, he fancied that he had inherited literary gifts. He turned out a wide array of works ranging from love lyrics to England’s first opera libretto, The Siege of Rhodes. Made Poet Laureate on the death of his and Raleigh’s friend, Ben Jonson, Davenant fought bravely for the king in the Civil War, fled to France when the war was lost and was made Governor-General of Maryland as a reward by the exiled Charles II.

While sailing along the Channel to take up his post with a cargo of white slaves culled from French jails, Davenant was stopped by a Parliamentary warship. He was arrested and held at Cowes Castle in the Isle of Wight. Here he began a long verse drama, Gondibert, completing and publishing it when he was transferred to the Tower in 1651 to await Parliament’s pleasure. The poem included verses in praise of a woman whom the gossipy antiquary John Aubrey called ‘a handsome black wench’. She is reputed to have infected Davenant with syphilis, which resulted in the loss of his nose when he ingested mercury to combat the disease. He spent a year in the Tower before the intercession of fellow poet John Milton, one of Cromwell’s secretaries, got him freed. It is pleasant to record that Davenant repaid the favour after the Restoration when he protected Milton from the Royalists’ revenge.

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In the troubled times of civil war it was not only Royalists who suffered in the Tower. The leaders of the militant republican wing of the Parliamentary Army, known as the Levellers for their advanced egalitarian ideas, were jailed there too. ‘Free born John’ Lilburne, the most prominent Leveller, was sent there so often that it almost became his permanent home. But he never let the experience prevent him from continuing to propagate his ideas. Inside the Tower words flew from his pen like sparks from a smithy.

It was said to have been ‘impossible to separate him from his ink’. After he and his fellow Levellers wrote and published an especially provocative pamphlet from the Tower, An Agreement of the Free People of England, an exasperated parliament banished them to the Netherlands. Lilburne returned covertly in 1653, only to be arrested and sent to the Tower yet again. A late conversion to quietist Quakerism finally silenced his noisy spirit.

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Two Restoration figures who saw both sides of the Tower’s walls were General George Monck, a Royalist turned Cromwellian turned Royalist again, who was instrumental in putting Charles II back on the throne in 1660, and the diarist Samuel Pepys. In his first Royalist incarnation Monck spent most of the Civil War immured in the Tower after being captured by the Roundheads. Steadfastly refusing to obtain his freedom by turning his coat, he put his time there to good use in writing one of the seventeenth century’s key military manuals, Observations on Military and Political Affairs, which emphasised the importance to a successful campaign of good intelligence and supply lines over crude fighting. Monck was also modern-minded in wanting to preserve his own soldiers’ lives: ‘A good general should not be so prodigal of his Soldiers’ blood as though men were made only to fill ditches and to be the woeful executioners of his rashness.’ Monck also found his time in the Tower fruitful in another sense by becoming involved with his Cockney laundry lady, ‘Nan’ Clarges. After Monck had engineered the return of the king and been rewarded with a Dukedom he married Clarges. She became known as the crude and foul-mouthed Duchess of Albemarle.

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In his Diary, Pepys describes his frequent visits to the Tower. As he was climbing the greasy pole of a civil service career at the Admiralty he took the wife and children of his patron, Lord Sandwich, to see the lions in the Tower’s menagerie. During another excursion there he made a pass at an actress he came across. He once inspected the coins

turned out at the Tower’s Royal Mint; and he was tasked by Charles II to supervise a dig inside the Tower for silver bullion allegedly buried by its former Cromwellian Governor. (The lengthy treasure hunt was to prove fruitless.) Finally, Pepys saw rather too much of the Tower when he was himself imprisoned there on suspicion of treason and spying for France in the paranoid aftermath of the ‘Popish Plot’ of the late 1670s. Though released after a few weeks and entirely exonerated, it was an experience he never wished to repeat. His visits to the fortress ceased.

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The menagerie was located at the Tower from the reign of Henry III in the thirteenth century until the Duke of Wellington became Constable and expelled its remaining inmates to the new London Zoo in Regent’s Park in the 1840s. It directly inspired one of the best- loved poems/songs in the English language: William Blake’s The Tyger. (Tyger, tyger burning bright/In the forests of the night/What immortal hand or eye/Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?) Blake, who lived in Lambeth, crossed the Thames to view the big cats at the Tower, drawing and engraving them from life to illustrate his immortal poem.

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It was those condemned to an imminent end, however, who produced the Tower’s most poignant work over the centuries. These included the Catholic poet-priest Robert Southwell, author of The Burning Babe, who endured at least ten torture sessions in the Tower after he was arrested on the run by Elizabeth I’s Papist-pursuing posses. Southwell was reduced to such a verminous state that he petitioned to be executed immediately rather than endure further degradation. Even in this extremity, however, he continued to produce poetry:

O life! What lets thee from a quick decease? O death! What draws thee from a present prey? My feast is done, my soul would be at ease, My grace is said: O death! Come take away

Thus still I die, yet still do I revive, My living death by dying life is fed; Grace more than nature keeps my heart alive, Whose idle hopes and vain desires are dead.

Southwell was granted his death wish when he was executed in 1595. *******

The most famous single piece of literature produced at the Tower was written on the very eve of his execution in September 1586 by Chideock Tichborne. It was dedicated to his wife, Agnes. Tichborne was a young Catholic gentleman from Hampshire who had been drawn into the Babington Plot to assassinate Elizabeth I and put Mary, Queen of Scots, on the throne in her place. The Plot, penetrated by Elizabeth’s efficient secret service, led to Mary’s execution – and that of the young blades who had hoped to serve her. As he awaited the agonising end proscribed for traitors – to be half-hanged, castrated and eviscerated while still alive – Tichborne penned his own ‘Elegy’:

My prime of youth is but a frost of cares, My feast of joy is but a dish of pain, My crop of corn is but a field of tares And all my good is but vain hope of gain; The day is past and yet I saw no sun, And now I live, and now my life is done.

My tale is heard and yet it was not told, My fruit is fall’n and yet my leaves are green My youth is spent and yet I am not old I saw the world and yet I was not seen; My thread is cut and yet it is not spun, And now I live, and now my life is done.

I sought my death and found it in my womb, I looked for life and saw it was a shade,

I trod the earth and knew it was my tomb, And now I die and now I was but made; My glass is full and now my glass is run; And now I live, and now my life is done.

Tower: An Epic History of the Tower of London by Nigel Jones is published by Hutchinson (£20)