3. I escaped the Tower of London with my head! (and it was even attached to my neck)

Welcome back to the world of Cori, where everything is about me (I know that’s what you’re looking for, you internet lurkers). Today is day four in London, and what an eventful day it has been! Today’s agenda was to visit the Tower of London, and later tonight we will be going to see London Tide at the Lyttelton Theatre. I got up early to get coffee with my roommates and took a walk around Russell Square to start off this day slowly. After that, our day began with a rather snappy ride on the tube, all the way to the Tower of London.

The original wall of Londinium (which is what it was called when the Romans colonized the City of London) as well as the Tower of London, from a distance!

Right off the bat I got some nice pictures: some of the tower, some of the flowers in the surrounding area, and one of a certain Roman emperor named Trajan, who I thought was from Civilization 6, but is apparently a real guy! Crazy, right?

The man, the myth, the legend (Civ VI Trajan)

And a random statue on the side of the road

Once we got inside, we saw the Crown Jewels, which we were sadly not allowed to take pictures of. You’ll just have to take my word for it that they were pretty rad, as far as imperial jewels won from the colonization of the entire world go. After that, the group was set free. We went first to the imprisonment at the tower exhibits. The first, and my favorite, was Beauchamp Tower.

In Beauchamp, there were brief placards on quite a few people who were imprisoned there. One of them that I took interest in was Alice Tankerville, whom I had never heard of before.

Upon looking into Alice’s story more extensively, I found that she worked in piracy alongside a man named John Wolfe and was imprisoned because she was caught robbing two wealthy Italian merchants on the Thames. She was locked away in Coldharbour Tower, which was very secure from the rest of the complex. The placard above mentions that she is the only woman to ever escape the tower, but not how. It turns out that she wooed two guards, who helped her to rappel down the side of the wall near Traitor’s Gate under the cover of darkness, into a boat. It was not successful, though, as they were caught by a group of night watchmen and then hanged in chains over the Thames. The full article that I read on this is here–I thought that her story was pretty neat.

Traitor’s Gate, but with a wicked angled view instead of the symmetrical one I wanted because there are never not people standing in front of it 😦

My favorite part of the trip to the tower were the various engravings in a room at the Beauchamp Tower. I thought it rather poetic, that there were so many images of peoples’ final efforts of human connection, through leaving a carving of something that mattered to them, whether it be their own composition or a symbol of their family. There were carvings from many famous people of the time, such as Robert Dudley, who was the Earl of Leicester and Philip Howard, who was the Earl of Arundel. One that I found particularly interesting was the engraving shown below.