Episode Details

Before the 20th century, only seven people were executed inside the Tower of London in about 800 years. The fortress began in 1066, when William the Conqueror starved London into submission and built a stronghold against what his biographer William of Poitiers called the restlessness of the huge and brutal populace. Around 1078 Gundulf, Bishop of Rochester, began the White Tower in Kentish ragstone and stone shipped from Caen, 90 feet high with an entrance on the first floor reached by a removable stair, and Henry III later had it whitewashed. Its prisoners were mostly high-status: Bishop Ranulf Flambard was the first in 1100 and also the first to escape, down a rope smuggled in a wine barrel after getting his guards drunk.

Torture required a Privy Council warrant, and records show 48 sanctioned cases between roughly 1540 and 1640, including Guy Fawkes in 1605, while 112 people died in public on Tower Hill. Private executions inside the walls were kept for politically risky figures such as Anne Boleyn in 1536 and Lady Jane Grey in 1554. The tower also held a royal menagerie, the Royal Mint, the Crown Jewels, and the Board of Ordnance. Its horror image came later, from religious propaganda and William Harrison Ainsworth's 1840 novel, and Victorian restorers tore down genuine later buildings to make it look properly Gothic. The last execution there was the German spy Josef Jakobs in August 1941.

• Sir Walter Raleigh's family moving in with him, and his son born in the tower in 1605
• The rack and the Scavenger's Daughter, devices that stretched or crushed prisoners
• Barbary lion skulls from the moat, radiocarbon dated to the 13th and 15th centuries
• Edward I's 1278 arrest of 600 Jewish people on coin-clipping charges and the 1290 Edict of Expulsion
• Rudolf Hess held for four days in 1941, a moat drained after cholera, and the ravens kept by royal decree