White Tower (Tower of London)

• 1. Introduction

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  The White Tower stands at the heart of the Tower of London, a massive stone keep that has watched over the Thames for nearly a thousand years. William the Conqueror began constructing it in the early 1080s, and it has never quite stopped evolving since. It has held kings captive, stored gunpowder enough to level a neighbourhood, and kept the bones of two children hidden beneath a staircase for nearly two centuries. What made a single building the strongest point of England's most feared castle, a royal palace, a military warehouse, a dungeon, and a museum? The answers reach back to the Norman conquest, through plague and civil war, and forward to a bomb that killed a visitor in 1974.

• 2. Building the Keep

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  Gundulf, Bishop of Rochester, oversaw the White Tower's construction under orders from William the Conqueror, a fact preserved in a document called the Textus Roffensis. The precise date construction began remains uncertain; tradition holds 1078, while dendrochronological evidence places the start somewhere between 1075 and 1079. What is not in dispute is how long the work stretched on. Archaeological analysis of the standing building suggests a pause between 1080 and roughly 1090-1093, though no one recorded why.

  In 1995, historian Geoffrey Parnell found evidence on an interior wall that complicated the standard story. Rather than a simple pause, he concluded that construction had actually been finished at two-thirds the present size, with a pitched roof rather than a flat one. It was only after a hurricane in 1090 that William Rufus, William the Conqueror's son, enlarged the tower to its current dimensions.

  The finished structure was imposing by any measure. Excluding its projecting corner towers, the keep measures 36 by 32 metres at the base and rises 27 metres at the southern battlements, where the ground is lower. Military historian Allen Brown called it "the donjon par excellence." It has also been described as "the most complete eleventh-century palace in Europe." At the western corners stand square towers; to the north-east a round tower houses a spiral staircase; and at the south-east corner a larger semi-circular projection accommodates the apse of the chapel inside.

• 3. Palace and Prison

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  Ranulf Flambard, Bishop of Durham, was probably the first prisoner held in the White Tower, around 1100. His confinement came at the moment the tower was considered complete, underscoring that the building served contradictory purposes from the very beginning. It was simultaneously the king's most comfortable lodging in the castle and the strongest place to keep someone the king needed contained.

  Henry III made the building more explicitly royal in character. In March 1240 the Keeper of the Works at the Tower of London received a written order to have the Great Tower whitened both inside and out. Later that year the king wrote again, instructing that the lead guttering be extended so that the newly whitened wall would not be damaged by trickling rain. Henry may have been following a European fashion for painting prestigious buildings white, though he left no written explanation. He also added stained glass, statues, and paintings to the chapel inside.

  Richard II was imprisoned at the Tower of London and abdicated there in 1399; tradition holds the abdication took place in the White Tower itself. By then the building's domestic role was already fading. The chapel in the White Tower was being used to store records by the 1320s. An exception came in 1360, when records were briefly removed to accommodate the captive French king, John II.

• 4. Princes, Bones, and Notorious Cells

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  On the 17th of June 1674, workers demolishing the forebuilding on the south side of the White Tower found bones belonging to two children beneath a staircase. They were assumed to be the remains of the Princes in the Tower. The remains were re-interred in Westminster Abbey.

  The story behind those bones is one of the darkest in the castle's history. After Edward IV died, his twelve-year-old son was declared king as Edward V but was never crowned. Richard, Duke of Gloucester, was named Lord Protector while the boy was too young to rule. Edward V was confined to the Tower along with his younger brother, Richard of Shrewsbury. Then in July 1483, the Duke of Gloucester was proclaimed King Richard III. The princes were last seen in public in June 1483, and the most likely explanation for their disappearance is that they were murdered later that summer.

  The forebuilding they were found beneath had a long history of its own. It was probably added during Henry II's reign between 1154 and 1189 to provide extra defences for the entrance. It appeared in a manuscript drawing made around 1500, depicting another famous prisoner: Charles, Duke of Orleans. A plan from 1597 also recorded it. By the time it was demolished in 1674, it had stood for roughly five centuries.

  Elsewhere in the White Tower lay a place called Whalesbourne, described by Robert Hutchinson as a Tudor dungeon where sunlight never penetrated, possibly part of the Coldharbour gate at the south-eastern corner. Hutchinson recorded that rats supposedly tore flesh from the arms and legs of prisoners during sleep.

• 5. Gunpowder and Military Store

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  By the reign of Elizabeth I between 1558 and 1603, most of the gunpowder at the Tower of London was stored inside the White Tower. The Office of Ordnance and Office of Armoury had made the castle the country's most important military store, and the White Tower sat at the centre of that operation. Two armouries were created in the building during the 1560s, and the structural consequences were significant: posts were added to support the floors under the weight of the stored material, and in 1636 a hole was knocked through the north wall to ease the movement of provisions.

  Charles I ordered the Tower to be prepared for conflict in 1640. Platforms for cannons were built and twenty-one cannon were installed on top of the White Tower, along with three additional mortars. Despite these preparations, the Parliamentarians captured the Tower without the cannon being fired. In January 1642 Charles I had attempted to arrest five Members of Parliament; when that failed he fled London. Parliament then removed Sir John Byron as Lieutenant of the Tower, and the Trained Bands, switching sides, blockaded the building alongside the London citizenry. With the king's permission, Byron relinquished control. Parliament replaced him with Sir John Conyers. By the time the English Civil War began in November 1642, the Tower was already in Parliament's hands.

  By 1657 the entire building apart from the chapel was being used to store gunpowder. Proposals to move that gunpowder to a safer location were raised in 1620-1718, and again in 1832, and all failed. It was not until after the Great Fire of London in 1666 that a protective wall was built around the White Tower to guard against exactly the kind of catastrophe the fire had threatened.

• 6. St John's Chapel

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  St John's Chapel occupies the south-east corner of the White Tower across two floors, its apse the semi-circular projection visible on the building's exterior. This arrangement is almost unparalleled in castle architecture. The only other keep in England with a similar projection is Colchester Castle in Essex, the largest keep in England.

  The chapel was not part of the original design. The apsidal projection was constructed after the basement walls were already in place. Despite the centuries of changes to the rest of the building, the chapel's interior retains something close to its Norman character. Its current bare, unadorned appearance is similar to what visitors would have encountered in the original period. Henry III broke that austerity during the 13th century, ordering a gold-painted cross and stained glass windows depicting the Virgin Mary and the Holy Trinity. Those decorations are long gone.

  Geoffrey Parnell, Keeper of the Tower History at the Royal Armouries, noted that a recess in the north wall of the crypt below the chapel, given its windowless form and restricted access, appears to have been designed as a strong-room for safekeeping royal treasures and important documents. The crypt was accessible only from an eastern chamber, itself connected to the entrance floor, which suggests a deliberate sequence of access points.

• 7. Bombs, Restoration, and Legacy

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  On the 26th of January 1885 a bomb inside the White Tower damaged some of the displays. That attack foreshadowed a far more deadly event nearly ninety years later. In 1974, a bomb exploded in the Mortar Room in the White Tower, killing one person and injuring 35. No group claimed responsibility, though police investigated suspicions that the IRA was behind it.

  Between 2008 and 2011 a conservation programme costing two million pounds was undertaken at the White Tower. Repairs were carried out and the exterior was cleaned, removing pollution that had been causing structural damage. The White Tower holds Grade I listed building status, recognising it as an internationally important structure. The Tower of London as a whole was added to the UNESCO list of World Heritage Sites in 1988.

  The New Horse Armoury, constructed against the south of the White Tower in 1825, was one of the first purpose-built museums in England. Its Gothic revival design was widely criticised at the time. By the end of the 19th century, effigies of England's kings and the displays of Queen Elizabeth's Armoury were distributed throughout the White Tower itself. Today the Royal Armouries still maintain displays there, and from the north-east corner of the old Horse Armoury a wooden staircase decorated with two carvings titled "Gin" and "Beer" once ascended to Queen Elizabeth's Armoury. Those two figures, representing the most important alcoholic beverages of their time, are believed to have originally stood in the great hall at the Palace of Placentia in Greenwich.