Тауэр. История и судьба.
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The Tower. The History and Density.

This short history charts the different stages of its construction and explains its role as fortress, palace and prison.

It is with William the Conqueror (1066-87) that the history of the Tower of London begins. Immediately after his coronation (Christmas 1066), William I the Conqueror began to erect fortifications on the site to keep the unruly Londoners in fear. In the early 1080s, William the Conqueror began to build a massive stone tower at the centre of his London fortress. Nothing like it had ever been seen before.

Through the centuries that followed, successive monarchs added to the fortifications.

Nothing quite like it had ever been seen in England before. The building was immense, at 36m x 32.5m (118 x 106ft) across, and on the south side where the ground is lowest, 27.5m (90ft) tall. The Tower dominated the skyline for miles around.

The Tower was protected by Roman walls on two sides, ditches to the north and west up to 7.5m (25ft) wide and 3.4m (lift) deep and an earthwork topped by a wooden palisade.

Although many later kings and queens stayed at the Tower, it was never intended as the main royal residence. Palaces like Westminster had more opulent rooms. Equally the Tower was not the first line of defence against invading armies, though it could rise to this challenge.

The Tower's primary fianction was as a fortress-stronghold, a role that remained unchanged right up until the late 19th century.

As a powerbase in peacetime and refuge in times of crisis, the Tower's fortifications were updated and expanded by medieval kings.

A series of separate building campaigns ensured that by about 1350, the Tower was transformed into the formidable fortress we see today.

These building works started in the reign of Richard the Lionheart (1189-99), who, on gaining the throne, left England almost immediately on crusade.

He left the Tower in the hands of his Chancellor, William Longchamp, Bishop of Ely who doubled the fortress in size with new defences.

They came just in time. In the King's absence his brother John seized the opportunity to challenge the Chancellor's authority and mount an attack. He besieged the Tower and its new defences held out, until lack of supplies forced Longchamp to surrender.

On his return in 1194 Richard regained control, John begged for forgiveness, and was

 later named as Richard's successor.

As king, John (1199-1216) often stayed at the Tower and was probably the first king to keep lions and other exotic animals there.

At the age of only 9, John's son Henry III (1216-72) inherited a kingdom in crisis. However, within months the French were defeated at the Battle of Lincoln, and attention turned to securing the kingdom, with reinforcing the royal castles at the top of the agenda.

The boy king's regents began a major extension of the royal accommodation at the Tower, including the building of two new towers on the waterfront: the Wakefield as the king's lodgings and the Lanthom, probably intended as the queen's.

When rebellious barons caused Henry to seek refuge at the Tower in 1238, the nervous King soon noticed the weakness of the castle's defences.

In 1238 he embarked on the building of a massive curtain wall on the north, east and western sides, reinforced by nine new towers and surrounded by a moat flooded by the Flemish engineer John Le Fossur (the ditch-digger).

King Edward I (1272-1307) was a more confident and aggressive leader who managed his country's rebels, but he was determined to complete the defensive works his father had begun at the Tower.

Between 1275 and 1285 he spent over £21,000 on transforming the Tower into England's largest and strongest concentric castle (with one ring of defences inside another).

He filled in the moat and created another curtain wall enclosing the existing wall built by his father, and also created a new moat. In spite of all this work and building comfortable royal lodgings, he seldom stayed at the Tower.

Other uses for the Tower

However, Edward's reign saw the Tower put to uses other than military or residential. It was already in regular use as a prison (the first prisoner being Ranulf Flambard in 1100); and Edward used the castle as a secure place for storing official papers and valuables.

A major branch of the Royal Mint was established, an institution that was to play a significant part in the castle's history until the 19th century.

Edward I's less warrior-like son, Edward II (1307-27), lacking in either military skill or statesmanship, soon put the efficiency of the Tower's new defences to the test.

The discontent of the barons reached a level comparable with his grandfather Henry Ill's reign, and Edward was often forced to seek refuge there. He took up residence in the area around the present Lanthom Tower.

The former royal lodgings in the Wakefield Tower and St Thomas's then began to be used by courtiers and by the Wardrobe (a department which stored valuables and dealt with royal supplies).

Unlike his father, Edward III (1327-77) was a successful warrior and the captured kings of France and Scotland were held at the Tower.

He carried out minor building works at the fortress and extended the wharf, before Richard II (1377-99) shepherded in another period of intense domestic strife.

The reign of Henry IV (1399-1413) and that of his successor Henry V (1413-22) were quiet ones for the Tower, with very little building work or domestic unrest, but instability soon returned with Henry VI (1422-61 and 1470-1) and the Wars of the Roses.

During this struggle between the royal houses of Lancaster and York, the Tower was of key importance, and for the victorious it became a place of celebration.

Henry VI held tournaments at the Tower; it saw splendid coronation celebrations for Edward IV (1461-70 and 1471-83) and victory parties for Henry VII (1485-1509), who entertained his supporters in grand style.

However, for the defeated the Tower was a place of murder and execution; victims included Henry VI himself in 1471 and the young Edward V and his brother in 1483.

Henry VIII (1509-47) continued the work begun on the royal residential buildings by his father Henry VII, but on a grander scale.

He commissioned a large range of timber-framed lodgings, primarily for the comfort and enjoyment of his second wife, Anne Boleyn, ready for her coronation in 1533.

But they were rarely used and from this point on, the Tower ceased to be an established royal residence.

Henry VIII's decision to break with Rome swelled the Tower's population of religious and political prisoners from the 1530s onwards, while the country had to adjust itself to their monarch's new role as the Supreme Head of the new, Protestant, Church of England.

Prisoners included Sir Thomas More, Bishop Fisher of Rochester and two of Henry's wives. All four were executed.

Before his premature death, Edward VI (1547-53) continued the political executions begun by his father.

Mary I (1553-8) returned the country to Catholicism and her short reign saw many rivals and key Protestant figures imprisoned at the Tower.

Lady Jane Grey was executed at the Tower on the Queen's orders and Princess Elizabeth, the Queen's half-sister was imprisoned there.

Elizabeth I (1558-1603) continued the trend cramming the Tower to bursting point with celebrity prisoners but, like her successor James I (1603-25), she made few improvements to the Tower's defences.

Charles I's reign (1625-49) ushered in a long and bloody civil war (1642-9) between the King and Parliament. Once again the Tower was one of the King's most important assets.

After the execution of Charles I in 1649, Parliament organised a great sale of the King's possessions. Orders were issued to take the Crown Jewels and 'cause the same to be totally broken, and that they melt down all the gold and silver, and sell the jewels to the best advantage of the Commonwealth'.

Oliver Cromwell, who became Lord Protector in 1653, installed the Tower's first permanent garrison, which succeeding monarchs used to quell trouble in the city.

With the restoration of the monarchy in 1660, Charles II planned ambitious defences for the Tower but they were never built.

The Tower's use as a state prison declined and instead it became the headquarters of the Office of Ordnance (which provided military supplies and equipment).

Most of the castle was taken over with munitions stores and offices. The new Crown Jewels went on display - and in 1671 narrowly escaped being stolen.

A programme of maintenance rather than new building work characterised most of the 18th century; the existing fortifications were intermittently repaired.

However, a new gateway and drawbridge were created at the east end of the outer southern curtain wall in 1774, giving access from the Outer Ward to the wharf

Efforts were made to prevent the moat silting up, with little success.

Under the invigorating leadership of the Duke of Wellington, Constable of the Tower from 1826 to 1852, the moat, increasingly smelly and sluggish, was drained and converted into a dry ditch by 1845.

The last time the Tower exerted its traditional role of asserting the power of the state over the people of London was in response to rallies and disturbances in London in the 1840s supporting Chartist demands for electoral reform.

More defences were constructed, including a huge brick and stone bastion that finally succumbed to a Second World War bomb, but the Chartist attack never materialised.

It was also at the beginning of the 19th century that many of the Tower's historic institutions departed. The Royal Mint was the first to move out of the castle in 1812, followed by the Menagerie in the 1830s, which formed the nucleus of today's London Zoo.

The Office of Ordnance was next to leave in 1855 and finally, the Record Office relocated in 1858.

An increasing interest in the history and archaeology of the Tower led to a process of 're-medievalisation' in an attempt to remove the unsightly offices, storerooms, taverns, and barracks and restore the fortress to its original medieval appearance.

The way the Tower looks today is largely thanks to a 19th-century fascination with England's turbulent and sometimes gruesome history.

In the 1850s, the architect Anthony Salvin, a leading figure in the Gothic Revival, was commissioned to restore the fortress to a more appropriately 'medieval' style, making it more pleasing to the Victorian eye - and imagination.

Salvin first transformed the Beauchamp Tower to make it suitable for the public display of prisoners' graffiti, refacing the exterior walls and replacing windows, doorways and battlements.

Further commissions included restoring the Salt Tower (completed 1858) and making alterafions to the Chapel of St John in the White Tower in 1864. Salvin restored the Wakefield Tower, so that it could house the Crown Jewels, which remained there until 1967, and built the bridge between it and St Thomas's Tower. This he also restored so that the Jewel House Keeper could live there.

In the drive to complete the perfect 'medieval' castle, his successor, John Taylor, controversially destroyed important original buildings to create uninterrupted

views of the White Tower and to build a new southern inner curtain wall on the site of the old medieval palace.

Tower became a tourist attraction. Visitor figures increased dramatically in the 19th century. Now it was not just privileged sightseers (who were paying for a guided tour as early as the 1590s), but ordinary people who enjoyed a day out at the Tower.

In 1838 three of the old animal cages from the Menagerie were used to make a ticket office at the eastern entrance where visitors could buy refreshments and a guidebook.

By the end of Queen Victoria's reign in 1901, over half a million people were visiting the Tower each year.

Two World Wars saw the Tower back in use as a prison and a place of execution.

Between 1914 and 1916 several spies were held and subsequently executed there, including Franz Buschmann.

The last execution at the Tower of the German Josef Jacobs took place in 1941, the same year that Hitler's Deputy Fiihrer, Rudolf Hess, was held there briefly, one of the last state prisoners at the Tower.

During the Second World War bomb damage was considerable, and a number of buildings were destroyed, including the mid-19th-century North Bastion, which was hit directly in October 1940.

The moat was used for allotments and vegetable growing. The Crown Jewels were removed to a place of safety.

Today the Tower of London is one of the world's major tourist attractions and a World Heritage Site, attracting over two million visitors a year from all over the world.