CHAPTER 3
Prisoners and Rebels

The Tower was built to defend the king and for his family to live in. But it soon took on a third role. It became a place to keep prisoners. It was not an ordinary jail. You wouldn’t find common crooks like thieves or murderers there. It was the place where the king put political prisoners. These were people who the king thought threatened his power. They might disagree with what he was doing. Or he might be afraid they wanted to take the throne away from him.

Many of the prisoners were rich and powerful. They were not locked in dungeon cells. They had comfortable apartments and servants. They could walk around the gardens. One prisoner even planted his own herb garden.

The first prisoner we know of was a man named Ranulf Flambard. He lived when William the Conqueror’s son, William Rufus, was king. William Rufus was cruel and greedy. He took as much money in taxes from his people as he possibly could. Flambard was one of the main tax collectors. Most of Flambard’s time was spent squeezing money out of the king’s subjects. Everyone hated him.

One day while hunting, King William Rufus was killed by an arrow shot by one of his own men. People claimed it was just an accident.

Now William Rufus’s younger brother took the throne. His name was Henry. Henry wanted the people of England to support him. So he arrested Flambard and locked him in the Tower. This arrest helped win support for Henry.

After Flambard had been in prison for six months, he came up with a plan to escape. He had a rope smuggled to him in a barrel of oysters. He gave a party for his guards and got them very drunk. Then he used the rope to climb out the window. He had arranged for a horse to be waiting for him. He rode away to freedom. So the first important prisoner in the Tower was also the first one to escape.

Some prisoners were kings of other countries. When a king was captured, his country was supposed to ransom him. This means they paid the English government a lot of money to have their king set free.

Even while they were captives, the kings continued to live like kings. For example, in 1357 a French king, John the Good, was a prisoner in the Tower. On his first day there, he and his followers were fed with seventy-four loaves of bread, twenty-one gallons of wine, three sheep, one calf, and thirteen chickens.

Writers in the Tower

Some of the people held in the Tower used the time they were locked up to write books. Sir Walter Raleigh is the most famous of these. He wrote several long poems and his History of the World while in the Tower. Other people just wrote on the walls. In the Tower today, you can still see the names, drawings, and comments carved into the stone by prisoners.

Sir Walter Raleigh