Carved in stone: the Beauchamp Tower graffiti

The Beauchamp Tower on the west wall was the Tudor prison for well-born captives, and its first-floor room holds the densest collection of prisoner carvings in the Tower. The finest is a heraldic panel cut in 1553–54 by John Dudley, eldest of five brothers imprisoned after their family's attempt to put Lady Jane Grey on the throne: a bear and ragged staff for the family, framed by flowers standing for each brother's name. Nearby the name IANE is carved twice, for Jane herself, who was held elsewhere in the Tower and beheaded on Tower Green in February 1554 at seventeen; her husband Guildford Dudley died on Tower Hill the same morning. Across the fortress in the Salt Tower, a Bristol innkeeper called Hew Draper, accused of sorcery, carved a full astrological sphere dated 30 May 1561: a defiant thing for a man held on a charge of magic.

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The Tower kept its prisoners, on the whole, in comfort. A gentleman or a priest held on suspicion of treason was not thrown in a dungeon; he was lodged in a room in one of the wall towers, with a fire if he could pay for it, food sent in, and a great deal of time. Some of them spent that time on the walls, with a knife or a nail, and what they cut is still there.

The Beauchamp Tower, on the west side of the inner ward next to the green, has the best of it. Built by Edward I around 1280 as a gate tower, it became the standard prison for high-status captives in the sixteenth century, and its first-floor room is a register of Tudor politics carved by the losers.

The Dudleys

In July 1553 the dying Edward VI was persuaded by John Dudley, Duke of Northumberland, to name Lady Jane Grey, Northumberland’s daughter-in-law, as his heir over his Catholic half-sister Mary. Jane was queen for nine days. Mary raised the country, Northumberland’s support melted, and the whole Dudley family arrived at the Tower as prisoners: the duke, who was executed within weeks, and his five sons, John, Ambrose, Robert, Guildford and Henry, who were lodged here.

The eldest, John, Earl of Warwick, carved the panel that dominates the room. At its centre is the family badge, a bear chained to a ragged staff, with a lion. Around it runs a border of plants, and the plants are a puzzle for the initiated: oak leaves and acorns for Robert (robur, Latin for oak), roses for Ambrose, gillyflowers for Guildford, honeysuckle for Henry. A verse beneath explains the device to anyone who cannot read the flowers. It is heraldry as a family photograph, cut by a man who did not know whether any of them would leave.

John died soon after his release in 1554. Robert survived to become Elizabeth I’s favourite, the Earl of Leicester. Guildford, who had married Jane Grey the year before, did not. On the morning of 12 February 1554 he was taken out to Tower Hill and beheaded; Jane, seventeen years old and lodged elsewhere in the Tower, watched his body come back on a cart before she was led to the scaffold inside the walls. Somebody in the Beauchamp Tower, probably before that morning, carved her name into the wall, twice, in plain capitals: IANE.

The innkeeper’s horoscope

The strangest carving in the Tower is not here but across the fortress in the Salt Tower, at the far end of the wall walk. Low on the wall beside a window a circle has been cut into the stone: a zodiac wheel with the signs around its rim, a table of the days and hours beside it, and an inscription: HEW DRAPER OF BRISTOW MADE THIS SPEER THE 30 DAYE OF MAYE 1561.

Hew Draper kept an inn in Bristol. In 1560 he was accused of sorcery, specifically of having used magic against Sir William St Loe, a courtier, and his wife Elizabeth, better known to history as Bess of Hardwick. He denied it, said he had once dabbled in such things but had burned his books, and was sent to the Tower anyway. There, awaiting whatever came next, he carved a working astrological diagram into his cell wall, dated it, and signed it with his name and home town. For a man imprisoned on a charge of practising magic, it was either an act of faith or an act of defiance, and possibly both.

What happened to him is not recorded. The sphere is.

Reading the walls

The room in the Beauchamp Tower is small and dark and the carvings are worn, so pick a quiet moment and let your eyes adjust. Look for dates, for the Latin mottoes Catholic priests cut in the 1580s and 1590s, for a crucifix, for the names of men who were later hanged at Tyburn. These are not memorials put up afterwards. They are the prisoners themselves, present tense, in the hour they were made.