You’d never know, from the bright sunshine of this
midwinter day and the trees, not to mention the peeps at contemporary
metropolitan London in the background, that the structure in this photo I took
from a tour bus several weeks ago once inspired terror. But that’s what the Tower of London used to do--and, truth be told, maybe you get a hint of the dread it inspired from the sight of its parapets.
This is
where they lodged enemies of the state, and in the time of King Henry VIII it
had more than its share of residents (Thomas More, Anne Boleyn, Thomas
Cromwell), once in the favor of the mad monarch, then finding themselves,
terrifyingly, on the outside. One of my posts that had the most hits
described how a Jesuit, in perhaps the worst period for Catholics in England,
under Queen Elizabeth I, managed to escape from this nearly impregnable prison.
The continuing fascination that people have with
this once-savage place (not used to house a prisoner since Hitler deputy Rudolf
Hess, astoundingly, landed in the country early in WWII) can best be seen by
the fact that a movie called Tower of London, about Richard III
(before the revisionists and modern archaeologists got hold of him), was made
about it, then remade. Naturally, these were horror movies. (Just what you'd expect, with Boris Karloff and Vincent Price in the casts.)
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