Traitors' Gate: the name came later

The wide arch on Water Lane was built in the 1270s as a water gate beneath St Thomas's Tower, Edward I's new riverside lodgings, so that the king and his court could step from a barge straight into the fortress. The Thames then lapped right up to it. Only later, as the Tower became the state prison, did the gate acquire its sinister name, in use by the seventeenth century. The most repeated story, that the future Elizabeth I was landed here as a prisoner in 1554 and sat down on the wet steps refusing to enter, comes from a Protestant chronicle written after she was queen; Historic Royal Palaces notes that she is known to have entered over a drawbridge. The gate is real, the river is real, the name is a piece of hindsight.

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Stand at the railing on Water Lane and look at the size of the opening. The Byward gate you came through is built for people and carts. This arch is built for boats.

In the 1270s Edward I finished the work his father had started, throwing a second, outer wall around the whole fortress and reclaiming a strip of foreshore from the Thames to do it. On the new river wall he built himself a residence, St Thomas’s Tower, and under it a water gate, so that the king and his household could travel by barge, the fastest and most comfortable way to move around medieval London, and step ashore inside their own defences. The Thames came right up to the wall then; the wharf outside was built later and pushed the river back, which is why the gate now opens onto a still pool instead of the tide.

For two centuries it was simply the Watergate. It became famous for something else.

How a gate gets a name

By the sixteenth century the Tower was the kingdom’s principal state prison, and the river was still the way to reach it. Prisoners of rank were brought from Westminster or Greenwich by barge, and a landing at the water gate, inside the outer wall and out of public view, was the discreet way to receive them. Thomas More, Anne Boleyn, Thomas Cromwell, Catherine Howard: the roll of the Tudor condemned all arrived by water, and the gate under St Thomas’s Tower became, in the popular mind, the door through which the doomed passed. By the early seventeenth century the name Traitors’ Gate was in use, and it stuck.

Which of those prisoners actually landed here, rather than at the Court Gate further along or the wharf steps, is harder to say than the guidebooks suggest. The records are patchy and barges could land in several places. The name records a reputation more than a register.

The princess on the steps

The most famous story of all concerns Elizabeth, the twenty-year-old daughter of Anne Boleyn, sent to the Tower by her half-sister Mary I on 17 March 1554 on suspicion of involvement in a Protestant rebellion. In the telling that everyone knows, she was brought by barge in the rain to Traitors’ Gate, refused to land through a gate used by traitors, sat down on the wet steps and declared that she was as true a subject as any alive, until a gentleman usher gently persuaded her in.

It is a wonderful scene. It comes from John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments, the great Protestant martyrology first published in 1563, five years into Elizabeth’s own reign, by an author with every reason to present her as a brave and wronged Protestant heroine. Historic Royal Palaces, which owns the evidence, puts it plainly: legend has it she entered through Traitors’ Gate, but it is known she walked in over a drawbridge, where some of the more sympathetic guards knelt before her.

She was held in her mother’s old apartments for two months and released on 19 May, the anniversary of Anne’s execution, into house arrest. In January 1559 she came back to the Tower as queen, to lodge here before her coronation, as her mother had done. Whichever gate she used that time, she went in gladly.