A Norman castle turned museum
The Tower of London is a fortress on the Thames founded by William the Conqueror in 1066, with its stone keep, the White Tower, raised in 1078 from pale Caen stone. Now run as a museum by Historic Royal Palaces, it holds the Crown Jewels, St John's Chapel, built around 1080, and centuries of royal and criminal history.
William the Conqueror raises the White Tower over London
The Tower of London is a fortress on the Thames, now run as a museum by the charity Historic Royal Palaces. At its center stands the White Tower, the stone keep that gave the whole castle its name. William the Conqueror founded the Tower at the end of 1066, right after he took England by force. He built it to hold down a city he had just conquered, and Londoners resented it from the start. The White Tower itself went up in 1078, made partly from pale Caen stone shipped over from Normandy. Historians call it one of the most complete eleventh-century palaces left in Europe.
The Tower grew outward from that one keep over the next two centuries. Kings Richard I, Henry III and Edward I added rings of walls and towers, finishing the layout seen today by 1285. It became far more than a fort. Kings stored their treasure and their official records here. It also housed the Royal Mint, which struck England's coins for centuries, and the Royal Menagerie, England's first zoo, where King Henry III once kept a white bear and an elephant on the grounds.
Queens and a nobleman die on Tower Green
From the late 1400s onward, the Tower became a place where the powerful fell. William Hastings, 1st Baron Hastings was beheaded on Tower Green in 1483 after backing the wrong side in a succession fight. Henry VIII sent two of his wives here to die: Anne Boleyn in 1536, killed with a French sword, and Catherine Howard in 1542. Both are buried nearby in the Chapel of St Peter ad Vincula. In 1554, Lady Jane Grey, only about sixteen years old, was executed here after a failed attempt to keep her on the throne for nine days. Despite this grim record, only seven people were ever executed inside the Tower's walls before the twentieth century. Most public executions happened outside, on Tower Hill.
A prisoner writes history while a thief targets the crown
Sir Walter Raleigh spent thirteen years locked in the Bloody Tower, from 1603 to 1616, and wrote his History of the World there. Guy Fawkes was brought here after the Gunpowder Plot of 1605. Guy Fawkes's surviving confession shows his handwriting falling apart line by line, a sign of the torture used to get it.
By the 1660s, the Tower held something new worth stealing: the Crown Jewels. Oliver Cromwell had destroyed the old medieval regalia in 1649, melting the gold down into coins stamped "Commonwealth of England." Charles II ordered a fresh set made for his coronation in 1661. Ten years later, in May 1671, a conman named Colonel Thomas Blood talked his way into the Jewel House. Blood flattered the keeper, Talbot Edwards, into showing him the regalia alone, then tried to flatten the crown with a mallet and smuggle it out under his coat. Guards caught him at the door. Charles II pardoned him anyway and gave him land in Ireland, a decision nobody has ever fully explained.
A gentler legend from this period involves the Tower's ravens, kept on the grounds to this day. The story told to visitors says Charles II was warned by his astronomer, John Flamsteed, that if the ravens ever left, the Tower and the kingdom would fall. It says he moved the Royal Observatory to Greenwich rather than risk losing the birds. Historians doubt it happened that way. The earliest known picture of a Tower raven dates only to 1883, and some trace the legend instead to the Blitz, when the birds became a symbol of the city holding on. Whichever version is right, the Tower has kept ravens on its lawns for generations, their wings clipped so they stay close to the ground where the executions once took place.
A spy is shot and gangsters are briefly held
The Tower returned to use as a prison during the Second World War. In May 1941, Rudolf Hess, Adolf Hitler's deputy, was held here briefly after flying alone to Scotland in a failed bid to broker peace. That August, a German spy named Josef Jakobs became the last person ever executed at the Tower, shot by firing squad for espionage. The Tower's final prisoners arrived in 1952, when the Kray twins, the London gangsters, were briefly detained there for failing to report for national service.
Beefeaters guard jewels a king still wears
The Tower is now one of Britain's most visited museums, run by the charity Historic Royal Palaces and still guarded by the Yeomen Warders, known as Beefeaters. The current Crown Jewels, including the Imperial State Crown and the enormous Cullinan I diamond, sit on display in the Jewel House, which Queen Elizabeth II opened in its present form in 1994. King Charles III wore the regalia at his own coronation in 2023, proof the collection still does its original job. Visitors can walk Tower Green, where Hastings, Boleyn, Howard and Grey died, and look up at the White Tower that has stood watch over the Thames for nearly a thousand years.
The Tower of London stands open to visitors today, its walls, green and Jewel House all on view.
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