London calling.
London Walks connecting.
This… is London.
This is London Walks.
Streets ahead.
Story time. History time.
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And a top of the morning to you one and all. It’s October 30th, 2024.
And what are we going to serve up today?
Well, you could say if this were a French meal London Calling is going to come calling with a digestif.
We’re going to take care of a loose end.
We’re going back to October 29th, 1618 – Sir Walter Raleigh’s execution – and then we’re going to track back. Answer the why question. Why did one of the leading lights of the Elizabethan era end up on that scaffold, his head rolling about on one side of the chopping block, his body on the other side? The twain no longer conjoined.
The short answer is, Sir Walter Raleigh was an Elizabethan and the Elizabethan era was in the past. Good Queen Bess was dead. James I was on the throne. Times had moved on. It was the brave new world of the Jacobean era.
The longer answer is one of the greatest Englishmen of his time was a pawn in the international geopolitics of the day. A pawn that was sacrificed.
Sir Walter Raleigh had made a career out of playing the Dickens with Spanish shipping and Spanish overseas interest.
Like his great contemporary Sir Francis Drake, Raleigh had singed the King of Spain’s beard many a time. Spain bestrode the world like a colossus. It was the USA of the day, the world’s superpower. And it had had its fill of the doings of the Black Explorer, as Sir Walter Raleigh was known. It wanted that piece off the chessboard. Wanted Sir Walter Raleigh’s head. James I could have bought the Spanish off. A goodly consignment of wealth from the king’s coffers would have been acceptable to the Spanish king in lieu of Raleigh’s head would have done the trick. And would have been cheap at the price. But King James wasn’t inclined to make that move. Sir Walter Raleigh wasn’t in James’ best books because he, Sir Walter Raleigh, had actively and vociferously campaigned against the crown going to James I when Queen Elizabeth died.
And that was the witches’ brew that led to Sir Walter Raleigh’s appointment with the axeman there in Old Palace Yard on October 29th, 1618.
And as long as we’re at it, let’s supplement the history, the storytelling, with a bit of guiding. I said that Sir Walter Raleigh spent his last night alive in the Gatehouse Prison, the Stuarts’ maximum security lockup there in Westminster. Conveniently just yards away from the execution site.
And as is so often the case in London – this is what I love most about the place – it’s rich pickings – layers of history – at the Gatehouse Prison.
First of all, let’s X marks the spot. If you’re outside the great West front of Westminster Abbey – anybody who goes on our Abbey tour, which meets there, just outside the Abbey shop – will be right there. Ten yards from where you’re standing is the memorial to the Old Boys of Westminster School who lost their lives in the Crimean War and the Indian Mutiny. The memorial – look for it – it’s a column topped with St George slaying the dragon of tyranny and beneath him, on the four sides of the column, four English monarch: Edward the Confessor, Henry III, Queen Elizabeth I and Queen Victoria.
You’re looking at the memorial to the Old Westminsters you’re looking at the Gatehouse Prison. That’s where it stood. Exercise a little historical imagination and you can see it, see it in your mind’s eye. It was already hoary with age when Sir Walter Raleigh spent his last night there and at 4 am was brought the good news by the Dean of Westminster that he was going to have his head cut off instead of being hanged, drawn, and quartered. That, in short, in five hours he would be in two pieces instead of four. Rather more than four if you count his heart and intestines being ripped out and his private parts being severed. All of them being consigned to the fire. Executions 400 years ago, they were hell on earth.
Anyway, yes, the Gatehouse Prison was already hoary with age in 1618. It was built in 1370 by one Walter de Warfield, the cellarar of the Abbey. And over its long life – one wall of the Gatehouse Prison stood there until 1836 – over its long life the Gatehouse Prison was encrusted with history, like barnacles stuck to the hull of a ship. Just to drop a couple of names. Incredibly, Samuel Pepys the great diarist and Secretary of the Navy did a short stint behind bars at the Gatehouse Prison. Nobody trusted anybody. Nobody was above suspicion. The powers that be were momentarily persuaded that the man who surrounded Britain with wooden walls was a fifth columnist.
That’s one you probably didn’t know. Rather better known is the stint the cavalier poet Richard Lovelace did behind the bars of the Gatehouse Prison. Soldier, lover and courtier, Lovelace was locked up for going to the House of Commons – this was during the Civil War – and demanding that Charles I be restored to power. So much for free speech. But what’s of lasting importance was that Lovelace, who was once described as “one of the chief ornaments of the Court”, penned a couple of immortal lines while he was in the Gatehouse slammer. He wrote a poem called “To Althea, from Prison”. We don’t know for sure who Althea was but the leading candidate is one Lucy Sacheverell. Anyway, Althea is immortalised, Lovelace is immortalised, indeed the Gatehouse Prison is immortalised by two lines in the poem: “Stone walls do not a prison make, nor iron bars a cage.”
And this craft of ours – being London Walks guides, showing people round London – it’s all about making connections. So let’s make a connection that will help you to ‘see’ the famous Gatehouse Prison where Walter Raleigh spent his last night alive and where Richard Lovelace wrote those immortal lines.
I want you to look at the Gatehouse that’s there today.
There today, that’s a showstopper of a line, isn’t it. But yes, there’s a gatehouse there. You’re standing with your back to the great west front of the Abbey – the memorial to the Old Westminsters is right in front of you – on your left is one of the most extraordinary buildings in London. The Sanctuary building. Mid-19th century, it’s the first intentionally asymmetric facade and roofline in London. The extraordinary thing is nobody ever sees it. They don’t see it because of the competition with the Abbey and the Houses of Parliament. But my god, does it ever repay close scrutiny. Couldn’t be more dramatic. Couldn’t be more eccentric. If you look closely, you’ll see that it’s a building of eight houses that are melded together. Four houses – all of them different from one another – on either side of – wait for it – a Gatehouse! A London Walk connection – well, it’s all a London Walks connection – but a connection with a specific walk, Mrs Dalloway walks through that gatehouse on her way up to Bond Street to get the flowers for her party that night. We’ll be walking through that gatehouse, following in Mrs Dalloway’s footsteps, when I do that walk during the Thanksgiving week. Wednesday, November 27th to be precise. She comes through that gatehouse and then she hears it, Big Ben. “There the leaden circles, dissolved in the air.” It’s one of the great moments in English Literature. Cheek by jowl with another great moment in English Literature: stone walls do not a prison make.
Here endeth the London Calling digestif for October 30th, 2024.
You’ve been listening to This… is London, the London Walks podcast. Emanating from www.walks.com –
home of London Walks,
London’s signature
walking tour company.
London’s local, time-honoured, fiercely independent, family-owned, just-the-right-size
walking tour company.
And as long as we’re at it,
London’s multi-award-winning walking tour company. Indeed, London’s only award-winning walking tour company.
And here’s the secret: London Walks is essentially run as a guides’ cooperative.
That’s the key to everything.
It’s the reason we’re able to attract and keep the best guides in London. You can get schlubbers to do this for £20 a walk. But you cannot get world-class guides – let alone accomplished professionals.
It’s not rocket science:
you get what you pay for.
And just as surely,
you also get what you don’t pay for.
Back in 1968 when we got started
we quickly came to a fork in the road. We had to answer a searching question:
Do we want to make the most money? Or do we want to be the best walking tour company in the world?
You want to make the most money you go the schlubbers route. You want to be the best walking tour company in the world
you do whatever you have to do
to attract and keep
the best guides in London –
you want them guiding for you,
not for somebody else.
Bears repeating:
the way we’re structured –
a guides’ cooperative –
is the key to the whole thing.
It’s the reason for all those awards, it’s the reason people who know go with London Walks, it’s the reason we’ve got a big following,
a lively, loyal, discerning following – quality attracts quality.
It’s the reason we’re able – uniquely – to front our walks with accomplished, in many cases
distinguished professionals:
By way of example, Stewart Purvis, the former Editor
(and subsequently CEO) of Independent Television News.
And Lisa Honan, who had a distinguished career as a diplomat (Lisa was the Governor of St Helena, the island where Napoleon breathed his last and, some say, had his penis amputated –
Napoleon didn’t feel a thing – if thing’s the mot juste – he was dead.)
Stewart and Lisa –
both of them CBEs –
are just a couple of our headline acts.
Or take our Ripper Walk. It’s the creation of the world’s leading expert on Jack the Ripper, Donald Rumbelow, the author of the definitive book on the subject. Britain’s most distinguished crime historian, Donald is, in the words of The Jack the Ripper A to Z,“internationally recognised as the leading authority on Jack the Ripper.” Donald’s emeritus now but he’s still the guiding light on our Ripper Walk. He curates the walk. He trains up and mentors our Ripper Walk guides. Fields any and all questions they throw at him.
The London Walks Aristocracy of Talent – its All-Star team of guides – includes a former London Mayor. It includes the former Chief Music Critic for the Evening Standard. It includes the Chair of the Association of Professional Tour Guides. And the former chair of the Guild of Guides.
It includes barristers, doctors, geologists, museum curators, a former Museum of London archaeologist, historians,
university professors (one of them a distinguished Cambridge University paleontologist); it includes
criminal defence lawyers,
Royal Shakespeare Company and National Theatre actors,
a bevy of MVPs, Oscar winners (people who’ve won the big one, the Guide of the Year Award)…
well, you get the idea.
As that travel writer famously put it, “if this were a golf tournament,
every name on the Leader Board would be a London Walks guide.”
And as we put it: London Walks Guides make the new familiar
and the familiar new.
And on that agreeable note…
come then, let us go forward together on some great London Walks.
And that’s by way of saying, Good walking and Good Londoning
one and all. See ya next time.