The Tower, the Zoo, and the Tortoise
by Julia Stuart

List Price: $24.95
Pages: 320
Format: Hardcover
ISBN: 9780385533287
Publisher: Doubleday

Julia Stuart is an award-winning British journalist and the author of one previous novel, The Matchmaker of Périgord. She currently lives in Bahrain with her husband.

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A Timeline and History of the Tower of London

1066-87 Construction of the Tower of London begins sometime during the reign of William the Conqueror.

1204 King John ships three boatloads of wild animals back to England during his retreat from the Norman territories --- the possible start of the Royal Menagerie.

1210 Earliest surviving record of payments to animal keepers at the Tower.

1240 Henry III orders that the central keep be whitewashed inside and out, according to the latest fashion. Though the whitewash is long gone, the name the White Tower remains to this day.

1251 Henry III receives a “white bear” and its keeper from Norway.

1255 An African elephant arrives from Louis IX of France.

1381 Wat Tyler leads what becomes known as the Peasants’ Revolt. A mob marches to London in protest against a poll tax, several hundred of whom storm the Tower. A number ask the King’s mother to kiss them, and the Archbishop of Canterbury is killed.

1539 The first record of official torture taking place at the Tower.

1553 The Tower Mint becomes the sole place where English coinage can be struck.

1554 Princess Elizabeth (the future Elizabeth I) is imprisoned for two months while she is questioned about her knowledge of plots against her half-sister, Mary I.

1592 Sir Walter Raleigh is imprisoned for marrying one of Elizabeth’s ladies-in-waiting without the Queen’s permission.

1603-16 Raleigh is imprisoned again, for treason.

1618 Raleigh’s third and final stint in the Tower, this time for deliberately inciting war between Spain and England. He is executed in Westminster in the same year.

1640 The last official record of torture at the Tower.

1671 Colonel Blood and his gang attempt to make off with the Crown Jewels.

1780-1 Henry Laurens, a powerful merchant from South Carolina is the first and last US citizen to be imprisoned at the Tower. He is held on suspicion of high treason for his part in the American struggle for independence from Great Britain.

1811 Martin, the first grizzly bear seen in England, is presented to George III by the Hudson Bay Company.

1828 A secretary bird puts its head into the hyena den and is deprived of it in one bite.

1829 Over 160 animals are catalogued in the menagerie, including a pig-faced baboon, 100 rattlesnakes, and two llamas.

1830 The Times announces that 150 of the menagerie’s animals are to be presented to the newly formed Zoological Society of London.

1835 The menagerie is closed.

1941 Deputy Führer Rudolph Hess is interrogated for four days at the Tower after crash-landing in Scotland. Josef Jakobs, a sergeant of the German Meteorological Service is executed as a spy in the rifle range. It is the last execution inside the Tower.

2006 The Ravens who usually roam freely by day are locked up in the Upper Brick Tower during the avian flu outbreak.

2010 More than 2 million people will visit the Tower of London.

Tower of London facts

1. Employees of the Tower Mint were said to be recognizable by their missing finger ends.

2. There are around 150 Tower residents.

3. The current display of suits of armour includes one made for someone under 3-feet tall. It is thought to have been made for either Richard, Duke of York, one of the Princes in the Tower, or Sir Jeffrey Hudson, the dwarf who entertained Henrietta Maria, Charles I’s queen.

4. The Crown Jewels were secretly taken from the Tower just before the beginning of the Second World War, and hidden at Westwood Quarry in Wiltshire.

5. The gruesome weapons in the Spanish Armoury were supposed to have been from wrecked ships of the Spanish Armada when it attempted to invade England in 1588. However, they are not Spanish, and most predate the Armada by at least 50 years.

6. The instrument of torture known as the Scavenger’s Daughter was designed by a former Lieutenant of the Tower.

7. Henry III established a vineyard to the north of the Tower.

8. Sir William de la Pole, the Tower’s longest serving prisoner, was incarcerated for 37 years for allegedly plotting to seize the throne.

9. Johan Wheler was imprisoned in 1554 for saying that King Edward VI was still alive.

10. The Bloody Tower, where the two little Princes are said to have been murdered was originally called the Garden Tower.

11. The river entrance is known as Traitors’ Gate because of the number of prisoners accused of treason that are supposed to have passed through it.

12. Only one raven survived World War II. Several are thought to have died of shock during the bombings.

Tower of London menagerie facts

1. In the 19th century zebras were ridden around the exercise yard among the visitors.

2. The first guidebook to the menagerie was published in 1741.

3. In the 18th century the Dey of Tunis sent a pair of ostriches to the Tower, said to be its most exotic beasts at the time. But one died after swallowing a nail. Another ostrich died after eating 80 nails, presumably given by visitors as the birds were thought to be able to digest iron.

4. During the reign of Edward I (1272-1307) the official position of Master of the King’s Bears and Apes was created.

5. During the 14th century the role was transformed into Keeper of the Lions and Leopards. By the following century, the Keeper of the King’s Menagerie was pretty much an honorary title, bestowed by letters patent on people who had done the monarch a service.

6. James I designed a bottle with a nipple to feed some orphaned lion cubs.

7. In 1686 a lion mauled Mary Jenkinson, a Norfolk maid. Her arm was subsequently amputated, but she died several hours later.

8. The identity of the ‘Shah Goest’ an animal kept at the Tower, and depicted on a mid-18th-century engraving sporting long black ears, has never been established. It may be a caracal.

9. The Tower eventually managed to breed its own lions, rather than have to rely on gifts, and in 1670 the youngest royal lion was given to the ruler of Denmark.

10. One 18th-century historian noted that the smell from the animals was so rank that it had affected the health of the keeper to such an extent that his speech was impaired.

11. The last few animals belonging to Alfred Cops, the attraction’s last keeper, which were exhibited in the menagerie, were given to an American gentleman and exported to America. He is thought to have been Benjamin Franklin Brown, a showman who had stayed in the Lion House at the Tower, and who subsequently married Cops’s eldest daughter.

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