Tower

So today we spent our morning at the Tower of London.

Now this is tricky. The Tower is a major historical site, a huge tourist trap, a checkmark on the superficial list of must sees in London. It has guards in red coats and black hats who march five paces in each direction in front of a little wooden structure about the size of a telephone booth with absolutely nothing in it. People take pictures of their children smiling in front of these guards.

And yet. It is the Tower.

We walked through rooms where prisoners had carved their names into the stone, a man who was part of the Gunpowder Plot. Some carved symbols of faith. One carved an astronomical chart. Towers and rooms were marked to show which monarch constructed them, right back to William the Conqueror. Traitor’s gate still rests in shallow water, and the ravens prance and cackle. And the jewels. You can’t forget the jewels.

And in the end, no amount of Henry VIII collectible dolls, no amount of fellow tourists exclaiming “It’s a unicorn!” in derision and disbelief, can really destroy the power that lives in that place.

The reason that I wanted to see the Tower was Lady Jane Grey.

For those of you who haven’t heard me babble about Jane Grey, she was Queen of England for nine days between Edward VI and Mary Tudor. She was seventeen when she was crowned, deposed and beheaded. And she was imprisoned and beheaded in the Tower.

It is not strange to encounter a historical figure who enchants you, and Jane Grey has always been one of mine. I’m not remotely alone in that. If you want a dramatized version there is a movie called “Lady Jane” with Helena Bohnam Carter and Cary Elwes which I adore and my family is sick of. Or you can read her letters.

One in particular. A letter to Thomas Hardy, written in the Tower, extolling him not to break with his faith, with Protestantism, for the sake of his immortal soul. It is beautifully written. And it was written when a conversion to Catholicism would probably have saved her own life.

At the Tower is a monument, two glass circles with the names of those given the honor of an execution within the Tower grounds. It is an unremarkable space, a field off a walkway, the walls are far away and it is open to the sky. Anne Boleyn and Katherine Howard are there, and Countess Rochford who was Anne Boleyn’s sister-in-law and survived that queen only to be taken down in Katherine Howard’s fall.

And there is Jane Grey, the nine days queen.

I heard someone remark that it was too modern an object, out of place with the rest of the Tower.

Perhaps. But we are out of place, voyeurs who half understand what we are seeing. We don’t have time to really know this place, we who have a morning to spend glimpsing the behemoth that is history. I stood over Jane Grey’s name and mourned for her a little. Because I think she was brave. Because seventeen is too young. Because there was a person who walked from the Tower to this patch of ground and who, blind-folded, could not find the block.

That’s it really. I went looking for that moment and I found it, created it maybe. But I think that is what you have to do. It’s easy to forget the human beings involved in light of little paper dolls demonstrating how the rack worked.



“The soul takes flight into the world which is invisible, and there arriving she is sure of bliss and forever dwells in paradise.” – Plato, translated by Jane Grey for John Feckenham, who, bless him, wrote it down.