The place which attracts more queues of the curious than any other City sight must surely be the West End of Waterloo Barracks, built in 1845 within the Tower, where the Crown Jewels are now placed permanently on show in a special vault. In the ground floor room above it one can see the Great Sword of State made in 1678 and used at each Opening of Parliament, the robes of the monarch worn at coronations since 1821, and the insignia of the Orders of Knighthood.
The Crown Jewels in that vault are not all that old because during the Commonwealth the ancient symbols of monarchy were done away with. The oldest crown on view is St Edward's Crown, weighing five pounds, honouring Edward the Confessor and made of gold for the coronation of Charles II in 1661. It is still used at every coronation ceremony, being replaced by the Imperial State Crown made for Queen Victoria in 1838 and set with over three thousand jewels. The Imperial Indian Crown boasts over 1,000 diamonds. It was worn by George V in 1911 at the great Delhi Durbar. When his Queen was crowned in the same year she wore the crown set with the famous Koh-i-Noor diamond. This wonderful collection includes orbs, scepters, maces, bracelets, swords, anointing spoon and ampula.
What does an elephant wear in wartime? Only in the New Armories of the Tower of London can this question be answered. The suit of elephant's armor there displayed was probably brought back from the Battle of Plassey, won by Clive of India in 1757. But that is just a novelty in a wide-ranging collection of armor, weapons and firearms covering the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and supplemented by armor from the Royal Collections.
The New Armories back on to the wall between Broad Arrow Tower and Salt Tower, all thirteenth-century work. In the Salt Tower one's heart goes out to those prisoners, long since out of their misery, whose pathetic carvings in the stone include a diagram for casting horoscopes cut out by someone in 1561 that evidently had a lot of time on his hands. It is thought that the tower derived its name from the gunpowder and saltpeter once stored here.
North of the Armories is the Regimental Museum of the Royal Fusiliers (City of London Regiment) which was formed in the Tower in 1685 and amalgamated with others in 1968. Those Fusiliers would have guarded the gate when a password, or `by-word', was a very necessary preliminary to entry by the privileged. Today tourists enter under the Byward (byword) Tower in their thousands daily.
In medieval times those who challenged the power of the throne and who conspired against the state were taken into the Tower, and imprisonment, via the Traitors' Gate, in a barge or boat floating in from the Thames under the sixty-feet-wide arch. Now the river has been pushed away, but it lapped at the Gate beneath the turreted St Thomas's Tower when they were both built around 1242 for King Henry III who also, it is thought, set in hand the Bloody Tower opposite, which was completed under Edward I. Here were incarcerated Thomas Cranmer, Archbishop of Canterbury, burned in 1556, Sir Walter Raleigh, who wrote his unfinished History of the World here in 1614, and the 'infamous Jeffreys', judge of the 'Bloody Assize' who on 18 April 1689 died in delirium on this spot.
In the White Tower is the oldest church in London, the Chapel of St John, superb in the powerful simplicity of its Norman architecture. When monarchs dwelt in the Tower this was their private chapel.
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