The Tower of London
In the early years of his reign, a massive stone tower was constructed by William the Conqueror at the center of his fortress in the city of London. And since this was the royal power base for ruling England, each successive monarch put into it and made it more impressive.William, Duke of Normandy invaded and defeated the English under King Harold at the Battle of Hastings. Realising he should next secure England’s strongest city – London – he didn’t strike directly but first laid waste to the nearby countryside. An advance guard went to London to create a fort and plan his triumphal entry into the city.After his coronation in Westminster Abbey on Christmas Day 1066, the new king withdrew to Barking in Essex, while several strongholds were made ready in the City to safeguard against the intense population. Old evidence makes us believe that one of William’s strongholds was in the south-east part of the Londinium Roman town walls, on the internet site where the Tower of London was built. These early defences were changed with a stone tower (the White Tower) defining the real power and prowess of the brand new Norman monarch.Henry the work was continued by VIII 1509-47 started on the royal residential structures by his predecessors, but on a grander scale. He commissioned a sizable variety of timber-framed accommodations, mostly for the comfort and enjoyment of his second wife, Anne Boleyn, ready for her coronation in 1533, nevertheless they were rarely used and from this point on, the Tower ceased to be a recognised royal residence.Henry VIII’s determination to break with Rome swelled the Tower’s citizenry of religious and political prisoners from the 1530s onwards, while the country had to modify itself to their monarch’s new role as the Supreme Head of the new, Protestant, Church of England. Criminals incorporated Sir Thomas More, Bishop Fisher of Rochester and two of Henry’s wives. All four were executed.Henry’s girl, Mary, (1553-8) delivered the country to Catholicism and her brief reign saw many opponents and critical Protestant results caught at the Tower.As the centuries went by, the tower fell into disrepair. Action was taken under the invigorating control of the Duke of Wellington, Constable of the Tower from 1826 to 1852, to restore the tower. The place was cleared up and the moat, increasingly potent and gradual, was cleared and became a ditch by 1845. Work began on an enormous new barracks, made to accommodate a lot of men – on your website of the Grand Storehouse ruined with a fireplace in 1841 – initiated. On 14 June 1845 the Duke laid the foundation stone on the barracks called after his greatest glory – Waterloo.The Tower’s defensive role lessened as time went by, and the last time the Tower exerted its conventional role of asserting the strength of the state over the people of London was in a reaction to rallies and disturbances in London in the 1840s supporting Chartist requirements for electoral reform. More defences were made, including a huge brick and stone bastion that ultimately succumbed to another World War bomb, but the Chartist assault never materialised.It was also at the beginning of this century that several of the Tower’s old organizations left. The Royal Mint was the first to move out of the fortress in 1812, followed by the Menagerie in the 1830s, which formed the nucleus of today’s London Zoo. The Office of Ordnance was next to keep in 1855 and eventually, the Record Office relocated in 1858.The approach the Tower seems today is largely as a result of a 19th-century desire for England’s strong and occasionally ugly history. In the 1850s, the designer Anthony Salvin, a leading figure in the Gothic Revival, was commissioned to restore the fort to a more appropriately ‘old’ design, which makes it more pleasing to the Victorian attention – and imagination. Salvin first developed the Beauchamp Tower to produce it suitable for the public show of prisoners’ graffiti, refacing the outer walls and replacing windows, doorways and battlements.Further and later commissions also included rebuilding the old Salt Tower (the work was completed 1858) and making many alterations to the Chapel of St John in the old White Tower in 1864. Salvin was charged with repairing the Wakefield Tower, in order that it was able to home the Crown Jewels; these remained in the Wakefield Tower until 1967; additionally he designed the bridge between your Wakefield Tower and St Thomas’s Tower. So the Jewel House Keeper may stay there this he also renewed. In the push to complete the great ‘medieval’ adventure, his heir, John Taylor, controversially destroyed significant original structures to generate consistent views of the White Tower and to build a southern interior curtain wall on the site of the old medieval palace.So today’s tower is quite much a Victorian version of the Tower, but it still holds a lot of attention – as hsown nyc the fact it draws over a million visitors every year.
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