Haunted London (29 page)

At Tower Green the guide recited the list of execution victims, including Anne Boleyn, when Joan suddenly whispered to her mother, ‘They didn’t chop her head off with an axe. They did it with a sword.’ Later she described in detail the 1536 scene when a compassionate executioner removed his shoes, crept behind the queen and killed her with his sword. In fact that is exactly what happened, although very few people know it, and the entry in
Chambers’s Encyclopaedia
states that ‘Anne submitted her slim neck to the headman’s axe’. The
Encyclopaedia Britannica
however has it correct and the entry refers to Anne’s head ‘being struck off with a sword by the executioner of Calais, being brought to England for the purpose’. The nine-year-old girl had no interest in history and her father maintained that she had not read about Henry VIII’s wives, nor had she seen any of the television programmes and in fact she knew nothing about the period.

The Tower Chapel of St Peter ad Vincula (Peter in Chains) dates from the time of Henry VIII, the earlier church having been destroyed by fire in 1512. It was largely rebuilt in 1305-6 and restored by Henry VIII. References to the church occur as early as 1210.

It has been said that no spot in England has sadder memories and perhaps no place has a more spectacular ghostly procession than this church. Here lie buried Queen Catherine Howard; Sir Thomas More; Thomas Cromwell, Earl of Essex; Margaret, Countess of Salisbury; Jane, Countess Rochford; Thomas, Lord Seymour of Sudeley; Edward Seymour, Duke of Somerset; John Dudley, Duke of Northumberland; Lady Jane Grey and her husband; Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex; James, Duke of Monmouth; Simon, Lord Fraser of Lovat; Sir Thomas Overbury (who was poisoned); Sir John Eliot; Arthur, Earl of Essex (who was found with his throat cut); and many more, including Queen Anne Boleyn, who, it would seem, returns to this melancholy chapel.

Anne’s fall was rapid. On May Day, 1536, she accompanied Henry VIII as Queen of England to a tilting match at Greenwich. Next day she was arrested on a charge of high treason and seventeen days afterwards she was beheaded and her body thrown into a common chest of elm that had been fashioned to hold arrows. There is a tradition that her body was secretly removed to Salle Church in Norfolk where she was buried beneath a black marble slab without any inscription, and where her ghost is also said to walk, but when the black slab was lifted some years ago, no bones were found beneath it and it seems certain that in fact her remains rest in the crypt of the Chapel of St Peter.

An officer of the guard was making his rounds one evening accompanied by a sentry, when he noticed a light burning in the chapel. He pointed it out to the sentry and asked what it meant. The sentry replied that he did not know what it meant but he had often seen it there, and stranger things too. The officer procured a ladder, placed it against the chapel wall, climbed the ladder and looked into the still lighted-up window. He never forgot what he saw.

Walking slowly down the aisle moved a stately procession of knights and ladies in ancient costume and in front walked an elegant female whose face and dress resembled reputed portraits of Queen Anne Boleyn. After repeatedly pacing the chapel the entire procession vanished and with it the light that had first attracted the attention of the officer.

A rather different phantom procession at the Tower was witnessed by a sentry on duty near the Spur Tower during the First World War. It consisted of a party of men carrying a rough stretcher on which lay the body of a beheaded man, the decapitated head underneath his arm. It seems unlikely that the sentry would have known that the normal procedure, following an execution on Tower Hill, was for the headless body to be brought back to the Tower for burial, in procession, with the head placed under one arm.

Other ghosts at the Tower that have been identified include the apparition of Thomas Wentworth, Earl of Strafford, who appeared to William Laud, Archbishop of Canterbury, when he was a prisoner in the Tower from 1641 to 1645. Laud knew Strafford well and maintained that his old friend had comforted him by saying that he had nothing to fear. The ghost was ill-informed, however, for the Archbishop was beheaded in 1645.

Another man who saw the ghost of a friend at the Tower was an army general named Middleton. He and his friend, Lord Bocconi, had made a pact that whoever died first would endeavour to return and warn the other in the event of danger. Middleton was taken prisoner at the Battle of Worcester and lodged in the Tower where one day his old friend appeared to him with an assurance that Middleton would be safely out of the Tower within three days and in fact Middleton did escape within the prescribed period.

After giving a lecture at the Society for Psychical Research a few years ago, Mrs Jerrard Tickell told me of the experience of an officer at the Tower; an experience which she would have dismissed as an hallucination or tall story had she not previously known the man concerned. In 1954, at a quarter to midnight, he saw what appeared to be a puff of smoke emerge from the mouth of one of the old cannons outside the White Tower. At a distance of about twenty-five yards he watched the puff of smoke hover for a moment, form into a cube and move along some railings towards him. As it did so it began to change shape again. The officer called a nearby sentry and they both watched the ‘smoke’ dangle on the side of some steps leading to the top of the wall. The alarm bell was sounded but by the time the guard turned out, there was nothing to be seen. The guns include an ancient one for stone shot; brass guns from the days of Henry VII and Henry VIII; French, Spanish and Chinese guns; guns from the wreck of the
Royal George
; and several mortars, including one used at the siege of Namur by William III. It is not clear from which gun the smoke issued.

The ‘long-haired’ lady in a black velvet dress and wearing a white cap and a large gold medallion that was reported by a visitor in August 1970, may well have been Lady Jane Grey. ‘She’ was seen standing by an open window in the Bloody Tower and when the visitor walked towards ‘her’, the figure vanished.

The ravens at the Tower have long had a sinister reputation, probably derived from their dark plumage, deep croak, and the ancient Romans’ use of the bird in augury. When ravens fly and cry over a house containing a sick person, it has long been regarded as an omen of death; and if a sick man hears a raven croak, he is thought to be dying. With the age-old association of the bird with death and misfortune, the ravens at the Tower have long been regarded with superstitious awe and special arrangements are still made to feed and preserve them since it is believed that should the ravens ever leave, Britain will face disaster. As recently as the Second World War some Londoners were disquieted by the rumour that no Tower raven had been heard to croak for five whole days and it was feared that the ravens had deserted the Tower, with dire results for Britain.

Another tradition at the Tower is that the enormous shadow of an axe is sometimes seen spreading its form from Tower Green and appearing on the wall of the White Tower.

Archer, Fred
Aubrey, John
Bardens, Dennis
Barton, Nicholas
Bates, L. M.
Braddock, Joseph
Cunningham, George H.
Day, J. Wentworth

Dent, Alan
Grant, Douglas
Hallam, Jack
Harper, Charles G.
Harries, John
Harrison, Michael
Hole, Christina
Hopkins, R. Thurston

Hughes, M. V.
Kent, William

Lang, Andrew
Liechtenstein, Princess Marie
Ludlam, Harry

Macqueen Pope, W. J.

Mander, Raymond & Mitchenson, Joe
Maple, Eric
Montizambert, E.
The Ghost Hunter’s Road Book 1968
London Beneath the Pavement 1961
Haunted England 1940
Adventures with Phantoms 1946
Ghosts Over England 1953
Cavalcade of Ghosts 1956
The City Saints 1932
An Encyclopaedia of London Revised 1970
London for Everyman Revised 1969
Cock Lane and Common-Sense 1894
Holland House 1875
The Mummy of Birchen Bower, etc. 1966
The Restless Ghosts of Ladye Place, etc. 1967
Theatre Royal, Drury Lane 1945
Haymarket: Theatre of Perfection 1948
The Theatres of London 1961
The Realm of Ghosts 1964
Unnoticed London 1922

Murray, Margaret
O’Donnell, Elliott

Pearson, Margaret
Pendrill, Charles
Platts, Beryl
Price, Harry

Richmond, Sir Arthur
Sergeant, Philip W.
Squiers, Granville
Stirling, A. M. W.
Stow, John
Sutherland, Lord Ronald
Timbs, John
Underwood, Peter

Wheatley, Henry B.
Wilson, Colin & Pitman, Pat
My First Hundred Years 1963
Haunted Churches 1939
Haunted Britain 1949
Phantoms of the Night 1956
Haunted Waters 1957
Bright Tapestry 1956
The Adelphi 1934
History of Greenwich 1972
Search for Truth 1942
Poltergeist Over England 1945
Twenty-six Years, 1879-1905 1961
Historic British Ghosts (n.d.)
Secret Hiding Places 1934
Ghosts Vivisected 1957
The Survey of London Everyman’s Library Ed, 1956
The Tower of London 1901
Curiosities of London 1867
A Gazetteer of British Ghosts 1971
Into the Occult 1972
Horror Man – the Life of Boris Karloff 1972
The Story of London (Mediaeval Towns) 1904
Encyclopaedia of Murder 1961