Lady Jane Grey: the nine-day queen and a cold morning of execution
The most famous image of Jane Grey’s death is wrong in almost every physical detail. Paul Delaroche places her in a dark stone chamber. A shaft of light strikes a white satin dress.…
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2034 articlesTraitors' Gate: the water entrance to the Tower with no easy return
At high tide in the late thirteenth century, the Thames came much closer to the stone arch. A royal barge could leave the river, pass beneath a pointed opening and enter a protected basin…
The Tower Menagerie: royal lions and the dark side of courtly entertainment
A fourteenth- or seventeenth-century visitor approaches the Tower’s western gate without yet seeing a cage. First comes a short, heavy roar, claws striking timber, a chain, a human shout.…
The Tower ravens: how a modern legend became an ancient prophecy
A black bird walks across the grass as if it owns the fortress. It does not hop anxiously like a pigeon. It takes several deliberate steps, lowers a formidable bill and studies the visitor…
The execution of Charles I outside Banqueting House
Whitehall is rarely quiet. Buses pass between government buildings, security barriers redraw the pavement, and visitors move toward Parliament Square. Above the entrance to Banqueting House…
The Gunpowder Plot: Westminster's cellars and the night of Guy Fawkes
Do not picture the Gothic towers of the present Houses of Parliament. Picture a cramped early-seventeenth-century palace: old walls, timber galleries, lodgings, stores, stables and…
Catherine Howard's ghost at Hampton Court
The corridor never entirely swallows sound. A footstep begins beside a door, passes over the carpet, strikes the wooden panelling and reaches the listener a fraction later than the body…
Execution Dock at Wapping: the last journey of London's pirates
First comes the silver oar. It is carried before the procession as the sign of Admiralty authority. Behind it are the cart, the condemned, officials, a minister, guards and a crowd that…
John Dee at Mortlake: court scholar, angels and a vanished library
Mortlake, Friday 16 November 1582. Five in the evening. The Thames is darkening outside John Dee's windows, while an impossible audience assembles in his study. One man watches the surface…
John Dee's black mirror at the British Museum
The circle before us is slightly smaller than a dinner plate. It weighs less than a kilogram, yet its surface contains three continents and five centuries of…
Simon Forman: Elizabethan astrologer and his secret casebooks
September 1611. A boat leaves the south bank of the Thames. Aboard is a man who has spent almost twenty years persuading Londoners that the minute in which a question is asked can reveal a…
The Templars of Temple Church: history, myth and hidden secrets
Leave Fleet Street and pass beneath a gateway. The buses recede. Stone chambers form a corridor, then a court opens and a round building appears as though it has been transported from…
