Based on the outside view that we were afforded during our bus tour on the first day, I was surprised by just how much there was to engage with inside the Tower of London’s walls. I think my recent time in Rome gave me the false expectation that we would be looking at stone ruins and a few plaques. How pleasantly surprised I was! The crown jewels exhibit, which we began our visit with, was genuinely jaw dropping. I’m not sure what my expectations were, but the level of opulence that I encountered would have exceeded even the highest, I imagine. I thoroughly enjoyed that portion of the morning, but I was also interested in seeing the areas where historical prisoners had been kept, and looking at the markings and signatures they had left on the walls. I liked reading about John Gerard, an English Jesuit Priest, who was one of the few that actually managed to escape the Tower of London by climbing over the moat via a rope that was tossed across, along with John Arden.
Gerard interested me because not only did he manage to pull off an escape, but he did so after being tortured there, which is relatively rare in its own right. Hung by his hands with heavy weights attached to his feet, he apparently suffered significant damage to his hands and was still recovering during his escape, according to his own writings. By his account, he was nearly unable to finish the escape across the rope because of his body’s weakness in the wake of the torture. Without the aid of his friend who had tossed the rope into the tower, he claims that he would have surely fallen into the moat. After reading about Gerard’s escape, I was able to walk up on the battlements and see the point where they would have stretched the rope across. I’m not sure I would have been able to make the escape myself.
Overall, I thought that the Tower of London was super metal.
[now playing: Executioner’s Tax (Swing of the Axe) – Power Trip]
Theatre in London U of A 