Who trusted God was love indeed
And love Creation's final law -
Tho' nature, red in tooth and claw
With ravine, shriek'd against his creed.

Tennyson, “In Memoriam”

III
A Victorian Institution

 

From my perspective across the Atlantic Ocean, the history of England had long seemed a relatively harmonious whole. Countries such as Russia, inspired by a mystique of revolution, have brutally cut themselves off from their past. Others, such as Germany, have destroyed and discredited their heritage through wars and persecutions. Still others, such as the United States, moved by a belief in their primal innocence, are forever trying to cast off the past and begin anew. The relative wealth of monuments can make the story of England, even Britain, seem continuous to foreigners, but the British themselves know better.

In the sixteenth century, Henry VIII broke with the Pope and proclaimed himself the head of the Church of England. Cloisters were plundered and sometimes demolished, while their libraries were destroyed. The result, in the words of Peter Ackroyd, is that, “There has always been an organic need to connect the present with the past, and the forced disassociation from a thousand years of Catholic history provoked a profound unease.” This explains the unique fascination with ruins, especially those of abbeys and castles, that runs through English literature (2002, pp. 241-254). It also helps to account for the presence of the ravens in the Tower.

 

Victorian Medievalism

The Victorians may have viewed history, especially their own, as the gradual triumph of civilization over barbarism, but they also thought of that process with ambivalence. They constantly feared that civilization might lead to “decadence,” that is slackness, lethargy, sentimentality, and weakness of will. They saw a primal vitality in the supposedly primitive impulses, which was still needed to retain the country’s greatness. This was reflected in an antiquarian fascination with the pieties and cruelties of the middle ages, later with such cultural preoccupations as African art and jazz. The ravens that never leave the Tower represent the primeval energies, which must be subdued but never destroyed.

The Victorians loved medieval pageantry, even as they ceaselessly castigated the cruelties and the narrow-mindedness of the medieval era. The French Revolution has initially been widely welcomed by wide sectors of British and European society at the end of the eighteenth century. When it degenerated into a reign of terror, which ended in the dictatorship of Napoleon, the disillusionment increased the nostalgia for the feudal order. Medievalism was also a reaction against empirical science, which seemed to threaten the spiritual foundations of culture, just as surely as the French Revolution had threatened the aristocrats.

Most of the nostalgia for the Middle Ages centered on externals, on heraldic crests, ancient bloodlines, elaborate rituals, costumes and all of the colorful pageantry of the era. These were the favorite subjects of the pre-Raphaelite painters such as Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones, who wished to return painting to a primordial innocence that they believed had been lost at the time of Raphael.

The medieval revival was led by Sir Walter Scott, who was widely considered the greatest living author of his time. He aspired to the life of a Scottish laird, building himself a neo-Gothic castle at Abbotsford in the 1920s and spending the vast royalties he received from his books to increase his lands. Following his example (Girouard 1981, pp. 29-54), many people of means built castles in the early nineteenth century. The revival also extended to the values of medieval times. For the nobility (and everyone that dreamed of being nobility), these included loyalty to one’s Lord and a sense of noblesse oblige toward commoners. For the church, they included simple faith and piety. But the nostalgia was, above all, for chivalry, with its elaborate codes of honor and of courtesy towards women.

The celebration of the Middle Ages in nineteenth century Britain was rarely uncritical. Even Scott, who led the medieval revival, could sometimes appear a little embarrassed by it. He wrote extensively of the superstitions and brutalities of the period, especially of the witch trials. Other popular writers on the Middle Ages such as Harrison Ainsworth (ca. 1880) would describe the tortures of the period in excruciating, even lurid detail. But the great paradox is that the chronicles of savagery did not inhibit but, if anything, served to feed the nostalgia. They blended with the pageantry, to give an impression of barbaric splendor. They also enabled modern people to indulge freely in nostalgia without surrendering their sense of superiority.

But the chronicles of medieval barbarities could easily lead to revulsion, and, when it did, nostalgia would take other forms. There was also nostalgia for the pre-medieval world of Celts and Saxons. For those who thought much of the modern world utterly prosaic, yet also found the dogmas of the church too limiting, there was a flourishing of occult groups, such as the Masons, and neo-pagan groups, such as the Order of the Golden Dawn. When agnostics or neo-pagans dwelt on, and sometimes exaggerated, the cruelties of the Inquisition, Christian polemicists might respond with grisly descriptions of human sacrifice allegedly performed at Stonehenge or other pagan religious sites (Hutton 1999). In both instances, however, focus on barbaric practices probably only increased the fascination with the past.

In the latter nineteenth through mid-twentieth centuries, it had become common for folklorists to interpret modern customs as survivals of ancient rituals, often with little or no evidence. Thus a sword dance that was started in the 1700s became an ancient rite of fertility, a reawakening of the earth. The hobby horse dance in Cornwell, actually from the end of the same century, was a pagan celebration of the marriage of heaven and earth (Hutton 1999b, p. 30). Almost any reference to vegetation could, by obscure analogies with “primitive” practices, be made into some sort of archaic rite. The legend of the Tower Ravens was not dreamed up by learned folklorists, but it was, at least indirectly, certainly influenced by them. In the intellectual climate of the times, it seemed natural to regard the presence of ravens in the Tower as the remnant of very old traditions.

 

Modern Nostalgia

Late Victorian poetry often expressed a patronizing nostalgia for pristine wilderness, untouched by human activity. The institution of the Tower Ravens, by contrast, expresses more nostalgia for more organic relations with animals, which many identify with pre-industrial times. This is the idea that human relations with animals were once regulated by symbolism, which was a product of tradition and yet constantly nourished by intimate contact on a daily basis. Such relations with animals were, according to this vision, found among rural people before the advent of industrial farming, and they might be tragic or, at times, even brutal, for example when a peasant might slaughter and eat a pig that he had raised. Nevertheless, they respected the autonomy, as well as the mystery, of other creatures. Such bonds with animals disappeared with urbanization, as animal husbandry was mechanized. The few animals that continued to be kept by people were, as pets, deprived of autonomy and made to live by human agendas.

The nostalgia for more organic relations with animals in pre-industrial society filled the works of late Victorian writers such as Thomas Hardy, whose descriptions of village life veered between lyricism and brutality. It has been articulated in more contemporary, and perhaps more sophisticated, terms by such thinkers as John Berger (2006) and Keith Thomas (1983). It expresses longing without overt idealization or sentimentality. The raven at the chopping block was at least a reminder of a larger perspective, in which even kings fade into insignificance.
For various observers, the Tower Ravens have embodied, among other things, the Crown, Britain, the followers of raven-god Bran, the Tower of London itself, the cruelties of an earlier age, or the spirits of those unjustly killed. The ravens are constantly surrounded by motifs relating to death, especially by beheading, and resurrection. Their meaning, or at least the way it is expressed, varies from one era to the next, but they are generally thought of as emissaries from a world of spirits.

There are plenty of stories of ghosts that haunt the Tower of London. The site of the Tower, according to one legend, was the grave of the Trojan leader Brutus, who had founded London (Westwood 1985, p. 132). Its central fortification, known as the “White Tower,” was built by William of Normandy shortly after his conquest of Britain in 1066. Many subsequent English monarchs, most notably Edward I and Henry VIII, added additional towers. The Tower has housed many famous prisoners such as Sir Thomas More, Lady Jane Grey and Sir Walter Raleigh. It was the location of a great menagerie in medieval through Victorian times, and the Crown Jewels are still displayed there.

 

The Ill-Erected Tower

For all its physical grandeur and historical importance, the Tower has always been regarded with ambivalence. Since it was built following the last successful invasion, the Tower of London memorializes the defeat and initial subjugation of Britain. A. W. Rowse has remarked, with reference to the initial building of the Tower, “…the English did not wholly relish the memory, for they liked to think that the Tower went back to the Romans and was founded by Julius Caesar” (1972, pp. 9-10) In “Richard II,” Shakespeare called the edifice “Julius Caesar's ill-erected Tower” (v.i.).

The Tower contains no monument memorializing William of Normandy. It is associated, even in its official publications, far more with persecution than with defense of country. A popular guidebook that was sold at the Tower during the last quarter of the nineteenth century stated that, “Amidst the terrific conflict which sprung from the Norman’s ruthless endeavor to quench that spirit of liberty in the bosom of the Saxon which has ever proved indomitable, the Great or White Tower arose. The patriotic citizens of London so spurned the iron rule of him who sought to crush them, that the policy of the Conqueror would lead him to provide some stronghold adapted at once to shelter himself and to awe rebellions” (Harman ca. 1877, p. iii-iv). Much like the United States in the latter twentieth century, Britain based much of its identity on rebellions against imperialism, while simultaneously maintaining a vast overseas empire.

As a military fortification, the Tower of London has only been used in civil wars, and since at least the late eighteenth century it has been most notorious as a place of suffering, particularly tortures, dungeons, and beheadings (Hammond 1999, pp. 145-173). Dixon wrote in the introduction to his popular history of the Tower, published in 1869 and dedicated to Queen Victoria, “Seen from the hill outside, the Tower appears to be white with age and wrinkled by remorse. The home of our stoutest kings, the grave of our noblest knights, the scene of our gayest revels, the field of our darkest crimes, that edifice speaks at once to the eye and to the soul” (Dixon 1884, p. 13).

But what comes across vividly is not “remorse” but nostalgia. Here is Dixon describes the Tower in medieval times:

Should you have come to this spot alone, in the early day, when the Tower is noisy with martial doings, you may haply catch, in the hum which rises from the ditch and issues from the wall below you ─ broken by roll of drum, by blast of bugle, by tramp of soldiers ─ some echoes, as it were, of a far-off time; some hints of a May-day revel; of a state execution; of a royal entry. You may catch some sound which recalls the thrum of a queen’s virginal, the cry of a victim on the rack, the laughter of a bridal feast. For all these sights and sounds ─ the dance of love and the dance of death ─ are part of that gay and tragic memory which clings around the Tower (p. 16).

The violent monarchs and courtiers of old may have laid the foundations of the modern state, yet they seemed to have little resemblance to the citizens and rulers of the modern era. They were closer to the famous description by Kipling of the colonized peoples in his poem “The White Man’s Burden” as “half devil and half child” (Kipling 1990). The Victorians described the rulers of olden days in rather the same terms as those used for the strange and savage peoples then under British rule, as prone to spontaneous, violence, cruelty, superstition, and merriment. The English, or British, past was sensual and exotic, like some Oriental kingdom. A bit like astronomers who look at distant galaxies with a telescope and see the beginnings of the universe, Victorians would see their past in remote kingdoms (Boia 1998).

In the middle to late nineteenth centuries, the Tower of London was marketed to visitors as a house of horrors, not entirely different from those found at amusement parks, often with a great deal of showmanship. Yeoman Warders, dressed in their full medieval splendor, would invite tourists, including children, to place their neck on the chopping block or try on thumbscrews. Ladies might lie down on the rack, while gentleman could experience a moment of being locked alone in a dungeon (Hammond 1999, pp. 158-161).

We have several visual depictions of such tours, and they are very consistent in style. The generally take place in semi-darkness, with the room illuminated by a single dramatic beam of light. The warders, with grave expressions, are directing attention to implements of torture and execution. Well dressed visitors are looking on with in terror and awe. Children are featured prominently.

One excellent example is a picture entitled “A visit to the Tower,” painted by George Bernard O’Neil in 1862. The Yeoman Warder who is leading the tour appears to be not simply wise and dignified but a godlike figure. He solemnly points to the neck a boy kneeling on the chopping block. Another boy raises a closed umbrella like a sword above the block, while several other children gaze on in terror. Yet another boy looks up pleadingly at the Yeoman Warder. One little girl, hardly able to endure the sight, huddles in a corner and is comforted by her mother. [1]

Figure 1 "A Visit to the Tower" by Bernard O'Neil ca. 1862, courtesy Christopher Wood Gallery.

The scene closely resembles traditional paintings of martyrdom. In addition to giving the kids (and grown-ups) a “good scare,” it must have been intended to frighten them into good behavior. But many features including the dim light, the elaborate dress, the highly theatrical poses, and, above all, the mock execution are remarkably suggestive of initiation into a secret society, in which a subject dies and is “reborn.” The Tower itself seems to become a temple, with the chopping block as an altar and the Yeoman Warder as a priest. One might say that the Warder is “initiating” the visitors, particularly the boy with his neck on the chopping block, into the terrifying secrets of history. [2] 

Today, the Warders have become far more restrained, yet depictions of the executioner’s ax and mask can still be seen on countless posters and souvenirs. On electronic tables in a corner, visitors press buttons to learn of the tortures once practiced in the Tower walls. In dramatizing these terrors, particularly the executions, the ravens were originally used to deflect such emotions as fear and anger from the nation and its monarch. In a scene such as that depicted by O’Neil, it is easy to imagine the calls of the ravens echoing ominously, as the Warder intones solemnly about how they will eat the bodies of the dead.

 

Nature, Red in Tooth and Claw

Almost all early depictions and descriptions of the Tower Ravens, placed at them plaque commemorating executions (Sax 2007b). The ravens without which the Tower, according to legend, cannot survive represent the primeval violence of nature.[3] For people in the Victorian Era, bucolic views of nature seemed to be discredited by reports of explorers in distant colonies, who told of cannibalism, plagues, hurricanes, starvation, and wars of extermination. Nor could they claim to be entirely above such terror, among other things because Europeans had participated in the slave trade.

The late romantic aesthetic of the sublime called for the ecstatic acceptance of nature in all its terrible magnificence (Eagleton 2005, pp. 1-67). For all their love of cozy domesticity, the Victorians were fascinated by the elemental forces of nature. In the words of Daniel Worster, “On every hand in painting, poetry, and music, a superabundance of terror was presented: roaring lions leaping on to the backs of paralyzed stallions, dreadful torrents plunging over cliffs, thundering volcanoes erupting into lurid skies” (1995, p. 126).

In the organic realm, the violence of nature is most effectively dramatized by predation, which is an essential part of the process by which organic material is endlessly recycled. The feeding of animals, especially the big cats, was sensationalized as a bloody spectacle in zoos of Victorian times, as it had been in their predecessors from the time of Roman circuses. As Harriet Ritvo has observed, “The bloodier the spectacle, the more reassuring it much have been to the audience to know that humankind had conquered the animal kingdom” (Ritvo 1989, p. 224). No descriptions of the feeding of the Tower Ravens have come down to us, but analogies with popular spectacles of the time suggests that it was probably also sensationalized. Even if this was not the case, the spectacle of the birds tearing apart carcasses, especially with blood in them, would have challenged more fastidious sensibilities. Since carrion appears much the same no matter what animal it comes from, it would have been easy to imagine that this could once have been from executed prisoners.

Public displays of animals, particularly exotic ones, during the Victorian era placed great emphasis on violence. Ritvo has shown how zoological parks of Victorian England were pervaded by the symbolism of power, by dramatizing both their savagery and their captivity (1996, pp. 43-50). The ravens on the Tower Green had a symbolism that was in ways very different from that of the early Victorian menageries. The keeping of the ravens, which were allowed a limited autonomy, reflected the ideology of progress, but it revealed an introspective side to the Victorians. The political significance suggested by the ravens was a good deal more complex than that of captive tigers, since they did not primarily dramatize the British subjugation of distant kingdoms. Rather, it was a sort of self-conquest, the victory of progress over the cruelties of a remote age.

The graphic depiction of violence at the Tower of London might have seemed like a sort of national confession, but it certainly did not move people to challenge the use of force in the British Empire. To the contrary, it made visitors think of violence as a characteristic of the past, perpetrated largely by Monarchs and their rivals for the throne, necessary for the foundations of bourgeois civilization to be established. It was reassuring for the Victorians, in something like the way people of more recent times find horror movies or haunted houses in an amusement park reassuring. When they laid their necks on the chopping block, it was in full confidence that no real axe could never fall.

After all, centuries of “progress’ lay between the Victorians and those colorful “savages.” Barbarities, as long as they had been placed in the remote past, seemed to confirm a complacent view of current society by showing how far people had come. At the same time, they seemed to confer glamour on the descendants of both the victims and perpetrators.

The grisly accounts of tortures and executions at the Tower of London were generally accompanied by passages congratulating the British on the degree of civilization that they had achieved. A typical example is the introductory section from a widely disseminated pamphlet entitled Sketch of the Towerr of London as a Fortress, a Prison, and a Palace:

As we descend Tower Hill, the hoary walls of the ancient pile rise before us amidst the surrounding mass of modern buildings, grim witness of a bygone age. They remain amongst us symbols of the rugged times when, amidst the struggles resulting from ill-defined rights and uncontrolled passions, were laid the mighty foundations of our country’s present prosperity and peace. Dark shadows of the past enshroud the gloomy fabric; but they serve to throw into stronger relief the justice and the liberty, the intelligence and refinement, which illuminate our day (Harman ca. 1877, p. i).

One popular book published in the last year of the nineteenth century was devoted to generally romanticized accounts of prisoners in the Tower of London, yet it concluded with a peon of praise to Queen Victorian and the British Empire. “Yet it is good to remember,” the author reminded her readers, “…that, now as always, peace has come to us after storm and strife, and the Tower ever reminds us of the old truth that we stand today as reapers in a golden harvest field ploughed for us in times gone by with heavy labor, sown in tears and pain, if not in the very life-blood, of those who worked through the heat, and bore all the burden of the day” (Brooke-Hunt 1899, p. 344). From the Victorian point of view, the conquest of nature, the conquest of exotic lands, and the self-conquest by the English people throughout their history were simply parts of a single process – the gradual civilization of the world.    

The displays of tortures and beheadings at the Tower were a sort of exorcism of the violent behavior, which placed acts of brutality in remote times and exotic settings, far from the everyday life of normal citizens. The grisly exhibitions obscured the fact that violence continued undiminished, though securely out of the sight of most citizens, on the fringes of the society. Virtually every year of the nineteenth century brought multiple new rebellions or expeditions of conquest in some corners of the vast British Empire (Hudson 2005, pp. 134-139). There was something absurd or at least paradoxical about the English being so preoccupied with their guilt for a handful of rulers and aristocrats executed centuries ago, while almost routinely slaughtering vastly outgunned Asians and Africans. In one extreme but not totally untypical incident of 1832, the leaders of an incipient revolt against the Empire in Bangalore had been tied to cannon barrels and blown up, with the express purpose of striking terror in the population (James 1996, pp. 224-225).

The Yeoman Warders who were in charge of running the Tower, we must remember, were former military men, most of whom had probably served in the British Empire, for whom violence was not simply an abstraction or a cultural memory. George Younghusband, who was later to become Keeper of the Regalia at the Tower of London and who would be among the first to write of its ravens, had previously served in the Indian army. He stated in his memoir, “…the moment there is a sign of revolt, mutiny, or treachery, of which the symptoms not unusually are a swollen head, and a tendency to incivility, it is wise to hit the Oriental straight between the eyes, and to keep on hitting him thus, till he appreciates exactly what he is, and who is who” (James 1996, p. 233). The Yeoman Warders at the Tower were using the techniques of spreading terror that they had learned as soldiers, for the purpose of entertaining tourists.

The ravens could represent the savagery of the past, in part because they themselves seemed anachronistic. Their wild cousins had been exorcised from London by the middle of the nineteenth century. There was a profound ambiguity in the symbolism of the ravens, which seemed to represent at once both executioners and victims. They had, according to the mythology surrounding them, conspired with the persecutors, in that they took their places around the executioners block and ate the victims, in a sort of sacramental meal. At the same time, the ravens, in devouring the bodies of the slain, seemed to become those who were beheaded. 

The ravens are the inexorable force of nature, the source of state terror and, ultimately, civil society. The trimming of their wings represents a “civilizing” force, the control imposed by rule of law on the disorderly impulses, from which we must continually draw energy. This symbolism may be universal, but it resonated particularly in Victorian times, when the increasingly dominant middle class was achieving levels of comfort and security that had few if any historical precedents. The British were intensely proud of the level of civilization that they had achieved, yet often aware of how precarious it was. [3]

Historian David Cannadine has observed that the vast majority of traditions that seem quintessentially English date from the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Among those traditions are: royal ceremonial; Sherlock Holmes mysteries; Gilbert and Sullivan operettas; bacon and eggs for breakfast; and the National Trust. The precarious global dominance Britain had attained in trade and manufacturing by then seemed to bring surprisingly little satisfaction. It had failed to eradicate poverty or even to bring security to the middle classes. Disillusioned with the Industrial Revolution, many of the English sought a national identity in antiquarian studies, elaborate ceremonies, or idealized images of their past (2003, p. 225). We may now add the Tower Ravens to the extensive list of the traditions established in late Victorian times.

In the chapters that follow, I will trace in detail not only the history of the Tower Ravens from their introduction in the late nineteenth century, but also of the hopes, fears, and dreams, which have guided their display up to the present day. The history of the Tower Ravens is a record of changing relationships between humanity, especially in Britain, with the natural world. During the Industrial Revolution, the relationship was adversarial, and so the ravens were often demonized. In the Britain of the late twentieth century, as people assumed a more bucolic perspective, the ravens became national pets. But today, as Britain and the world enter the Post-Industrial Era, the institution of the Tower Ravens may be on the threshold of the greatest transformation of all.

 

 

 

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