Copyright dailystar
With over 1,000 years of history it has been a fortress, a Royal palace and home to the Crown Jewels. But the Tower of London has also been a forbidding prison, with everything from Nazi spies to gangsters among the 8,000 people locked up behind its walls. Now a new series of the hit Channel 5 show Inside The Tower will examine what happened to the head of one its captives, Sir Walter Raleigh. Here we look at his story – and other tales of the building’s intriguing inmates… During the War of the Roses, the Duke of Clarence was thrown in the Tower by his elder brother, Edward IV. After a trial conducted by the king himself, the Duke was sentenced to death. This was carried out on February 18, 1478, in the Bowyer Tower, when he was reputedly drowned head-first inside a barrel of his favourite Malmsey wine. Edward V and his younger brother became known as the Princes in the Tower after disappearing there in 1483, probably murdered on the orders of their uncle Richard III. By then Henry VI had also died in prison at the Tower in 1471 after being deposed by Edward IV. He’s thought to have been murdered with a dagger while praying. Chief suspect – yep, the future Richard III. Henry VIII’s second wife and queen, Anne Boleyn, was imprisoned at the Tower, then beheaded and buried there in 1536. Her daughter, the future Elizabeth I, would later briefly spend time behind bars there too. Lady Jane Grey became known as the ‘Nine Day Queen’ after a brief spell on the throne in 1553. The 17-year-old was overthrown by Mary I, shut up in the Tower and beheaded along with her husband. Explorer Sir Walter Raleigh was locked up for 13 years in the early 17 th century for plotting against James I. He was placed in the Bloody Tower, though hengot his own library and garden. Raleigh was eventually freed, but soon beheaded for illegally attacking Spanish forces in 1618. It’s said his wife carried his embalmed head around in a velvet bag for the rest of her life. Anne Askew was condemned as a heretic under Henry VIII and was put on the rack at the Tower before being burnt at the stake in London’s Smithfield in 1546. Guy Fawkes was also tortured at the Tower for his part in the Gunpowder Plot of 1605, until he confessed and gave up the names of his co-conspirators – before being executed. Samuel Pepys is famous for his diaries, but he was also an MP and was briefly imprisoned in the Tower when suspected of spying for France in 1679. Sir Robert Walpole, who’d become Britain’s first prime minister, also spent six months in the Tower in 1712 on trumped up charges of corruption, before being released and rehabilitated to politics. During World War One, 11 German spies were executed by firing squad at the Tower. The first was Hans Carl Lody, who posed as an American to spy on the Royal Navy, but was quickly rumbled. World War Two saw just one spy, Josef Jakobs, shot at the Tower. He’d been caught parachuting into Britain carrying forged papers – and some sausage. His last words were: “Shoot straight, Tommies”. British army officer Norman Baillie-Stewart was secretly thrown in the Tower in 1933, suspected of spying for the Germans. Oddly, novelist Barbara Cartland exposed his presence there. Baillie-Stewart was later court-martialled and imprisoned until 1937. He would later move to Germany and broadcast for Adolf Hitler’s regime. At the end of World War Two he was jailed again for aiding the enemy. Nazi Rudolf Hess was Hitler’s deputy in World War Two, but in May 1941 he made a solo flight to Scotland on a madcap mission negotiate peace between Britain and Germany. He crash-landed, was immediately captured and was sent to the Tower, where he was interrogated for four days. Hess was then locked up in a Surrey mansion for the rest of the conflict. Before they became murderous East End gangsters, twins Ronnie and Reggie Kray ended up in the Tower. In 1952 the pair were called up to do their National Service with the Royal Fusiliers, but went AWOL after Ronnie punched a corporal. They were soon captured and became some of the Tower’s last prisoners while awaiting court-martial. The notorious duo were eventually dishonourably discharged. The first Tower escapee was Ranulf Flambard, Bishop of Durham who, in 1101, managed to climb down the White Tower and flee using a rope smuggled to him in a gallon of wine. In 1597, banged-up priest John Gerard escaped via a rope cunningly strung across the Tower moat by pals, despite his hands still being manacled. And jailed Jacobite William Maxwell managed to simply walk out dressed as a woman in 1716, the day before he was due to be executed. Inside the Tower of London starts on Thursday at 8pm on Channel 5.
