Walk through Trinity Gardens from Tower Hill tube, towards the ticket offices for the Tower, and you will pass through the memorial to the merchant marine of WW1 and WW2, the civilian sailors who have ‘no grave but the sea’. (I wrote about this back in the dark ages.)
Just by this is another memorial, not much more than a three metre square cobbled pavement, fringed with bronze plaques, which marks the spot of the scaffold – the platform for executions – where the majority of the prisoners of the Tower who were executed met their fates.
Some of the condemned were given the dignity and privacy of an execution within the walls of the Tower itself – this includes the three queens, Anne Boleyn, Katherine Howard and Lady Jane Grey – but it is believed that 125+ found themselves facing the crowds on Tower Hill.
And crowds there were. Thousands turned up to see the Duke of Monmouth (illegitimate son of Charles II, who led a rebellion against his uncle James II in 1685) and Simon Fraser, Lord Lovat (octogenarian supporter of Bonnie Prince Charlie’s 1745 uprising) keep their appointments with the headsman. (“Headsman”: it’s weird how talk of executions makes you write like some Victorian history book.)
The first to die on this spot were Archbishop of Canterbury Simon Sudbury and Robert Hales, Lord High Treasurer under Richard II, who were both in the Tower of London when it was overrun by the rebels during the 1381 Peasants’ Revolt. As advisers to the king they were blamed for the ills against which the peasants were revolting (the Poll Tax and labour/serfdom laws primarily) and were dragged from the Tower to be summarily executed.
They are some of the 27 names listed on the bronze plaques of the memorial, the majority of whom were despatched by the Tudor monarchs for treason (real or confected), religious conflict, or simply for being of a lineage that could claim a place in the succession. (Both Henry VII and Henry VIII terminated with extreme prejudice anyone with Plantagenet blood.)
Among those mentioned on these plaques are John Fisher and Sir Thomas More. Fisher was Bishop of Rochester, Chancellor of Cambridge University and had been tutor to the young Henry VIII, but his refusal to accept his former pupil as head of the church after the king split with Rome (and the pope then making the imprisoned Fisher a cardinal) doomed him. And it was for similar reasons that More, formerly Henry’s Lord Chancellor and regarded as one of the most brilliant men in Europe, was condemned. Both were made saints in 1935 (400 years after their deaths) by Pope Pius XI.
Wolf Hall fans will see that this is also where Thomas Cromwell met his end, and others on the same plaque include Thomas Wyatt, the leader of the eponymous rebellion against Mary I (which precipitated Lady Jane Grey’s execution), and Thomas Howard, involved in a plot to overthrow Mary’s successor Elizabeth.
The final plaque includes another Archbishop of Canterbury, William Laud, whose new prayer book and church reforms – basically enforcing “high church” rituals and hierarchy throughout the Church – enraged the more puritan and presbyterianism elements of English and Scottish protestantism. Parliament had him imprisoned and then executed during the First English Civil War.
Most of those executed at Tower Hill were a) nobles and b) beheaded (the axe being a swift death, it was the merciful commutation of the standard method of execution for treason which was to be hung, drawn and quartered); this was not a punishment site for common criminals. But there were some exceptions. The first plaque mentions Richard Wyche who was burned at the stake in 1440 for ‘lollardism’ and there were five unnamed persons who were hung, drawn and quartered in 1532 for ‘coining’ – either clipping or counterfeiting coins, a crime regarded as High Treason.
The previously mentioned Lord Lovat was the last person to be beheaded on the site in April 1747, but there were three hangings in July 1780, including the only two women known to have been executed here – Charlotte Gardiner and Mary Roberts, who, were sentenced to death by hanging for participating in the Gordon Riots.
The bronze plaques and the small posts and railings of the memorial seem to date from 1956, so from around the time that the work was being done on Edward Maufe’s WW2 Merchant Marine monument, but the cobbled pavement and the central plaque is Victorian. Royal Collections Trust have a photo from 1899 showing the memorial, and it is marked on the 1895 OS map – though not on the 1873 one, giving us a 20 year window for the original installation – which means it predates everything around the gardens with the exception of the Trinity House building.
Curiously this Victorian plaque references two Jacobite lords, Balmerino and Kilmarnock, executed in 1746 for their part in Bonnie Prince Charlie’s uprising, rather than any of the more famous characters who perished here. Perhaps the instigator of the memorial was a Scot, or an opponent of the Hanoverian line.
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