The Salt Tower

There is a merrie England

Of a compact sphere,

That dwelleth here

Within the Tower of London.

Merrie enough if there be gain

At plain man’s torture,

Lover’s pain,

Liar’s shriek, honesty’s prayer,

And the signet of blood on floor and stair.

So pause as ye go, think as ye stand,

Of the fluttering kerchief,

The enfeebled hand.

Did ye not see them?

Say now for sure,

For a ghost made not welcome,

Appeareth the more.

 

The Salt Tower guards the south-east corner of the Inner Ward. Originally it could only be entered via the battlements, as could the Beauchamp Tower and others. The lower room therefore was a dark and noisome dungeon, half underground, though the upper cells were little better. Dating from the thirteenth century, it too confined many prisoners behind its grim walls. Most of them were Jesuit priests, caught in the religious persecutions of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. One such was Henry Walpole, a young Englishman. He had witnessed the execution of Jesuit priests, men who had been terribly tortured for their Catholic beliefs. This spectacle, at a time when this country was at war with Spain, only inspired Walpole to take over their task. Already converted, he became a Jesuit and in 1589 he joined the Spanish Army in Flanders, as a chaplain. Four years later he returned to further the Catholic cause. He was captured and sent to the Tower of London. There every effort was made to extract information from him. Despite being racked many times he remained silent. He was imprisoned in the Salt Tower and there on the cold stone walls he carved his name and those of the saints who gave him the strength and fortitude of soul to endure the torture and confinement. At last, in 1595, he was taken to York where he was tried and executed, probably by being burned alive.

One late afternoon in 1973 a yeoman warder visited the Salt Tower. He had recently been reading a book about the Jesuits, a book which discredited their principles and condemned them as traitors. He mounted the narrow winding stairs and, alone in the gathering gloom, he studied the inscriptions so laboriously carved by tortured hands. Without warning, a sudden glow illuminated the prison chamber - and he felt some ‘thing’ touch him on the back of the neck! For one moment he stood frozen with fear – then hardly knowing what he was doing he fled down the spiral stairs and out of the arched doorway. It was some considerable time later that he was able to control his racing pulses and calm down. Yeoman warders are not given to imagining things - but the book, needless to say, is no longer in his possession!

Nor is it only sensations which pervade this particular tower. On 12th January 1957, soon after midnight, two guardsmen on sentry duty saw a shapeless white form high up on the battlemented roof of the Salt Tower. As they stared unbelievingly, the apparition lingered - then slowly faded away!

Just a few yards from the Salt Tower stands the new History Gallery. Before its foundations were laid, excavations took place alongside the base of the Roman Wall there. At a depth of more than fifteen feet a grave was discovered in 1976, a grave containing the skeleton of a young man. He lay on his back, his knees slightly bent, his hands crossed before him. His head was tilted to one side - and in the skull gaped an ugly hole.

Who was he, this Iron Age youth who had lain there for nearly two thousand years, making his the earliest human remains to have been found to date within the City? How different was his life from ours? How violent his death - and why?

And will his spirit return, to drift phantomlike in the dim recesses of the History Gallery, to reproach those who dared to violate his last resting place?