Tower of London, and Tower Hill Execution Site, City of London

Starting point of the London Royal Route and the London Martyrs’ Way, this cluster of sites at Tower Hill remembers Reformation martyrs and Saxon saints alike

Highlights

• Site of execution and graves of St Thomas More and St John Fisher

• Nearby church possibly founded by St Ethelburga

If you know where to look, the Tower of London has plenty of spiritual significance woven into its royal history. Most visitors make a beeline for the Tower, though there are two other sites of holy significance just outside the castle walls, both of them waypoints on two pilgrim routes listed on britishpilgrimage.org.

Tower Hill execution site

Several saints and martyrs of the Reformation were executed at Tower Hill, which is on the other side of the road from the Tower itself in a small park. A few steps away is a third historic site, remains of London’s oldest church building, dating from 675. Between them the tower, the hill and the church span a thousand years of English saints.

Several martyrs were killed at Tower Hill between 1535 and 1645. A small memorial space has been set aside to mark the execution site, next to the much larger war memorial in Trinity Gardens. Tower Hill is not so much a hill as a slight rise in the land, enough of a slope perhaps to give the crowds a good view of proceedings.

Two Catholic saints were put to death here in the summer of 1535 on the orders of Henry VIII: St Thomas More, Lord Chancellor, and St John Fisher, Bishop of Rochester. Five years later their chief enemy Thomas Cromwell was executed on this same spot. In 1645 Archbishop William Laud was beheaded here by Thomas Cromwell’s family descendant Oliver Cromwell, at the start of the English Civil War.

More than 125 people were killed at Tower Hill over the course of many centuries. In 1381 a mob dragged the Archbishop of Canterbury, Simon of Sudbury, out of the Tower of London and beheaded him here, enraged by the archbishop’s support for the king during the Peasants’ Revolt.

The small commemorative area consists of little more than a few plaques recording the names of Tower Hill’s most famous victims. It abuts the much larger sunken war memorial gardens.

The Tower of London

Though mainly a historical attraction, the Tower of London also contains a fully functioning church, known as the Chapel of St Peter ad Vincula. The chapel is a relatively small building on the north side of the Tower’s central gardens. This is the burial place of both St Thomas More and St John Fisher, whose bodies were placed alongside each other after St Thomas’ execution on 6 July 1545. Their heads were removed and displayed on the city walls – St John Fisher’s eventually thrown into the Thames and St Thomas More’s moved to Canterbury for burial in a family vault (page 47).

The chapel was extensively excavated in 1876–7 but neither of the saints’ bones could be identified among all the other burials. A metal plaque inside the chapel by the door lists the pair among many famous burials here, but other than that there is no memorial to them in the chapel itself. A small bust of St Thomas More is kept in the crypt, but this seems to be inaccessible to visitors. You can attend Sunday morning worship at the chapel throughout the year, at 9:15 am for Holy Communion and 11 am for Matins; entrance is through the usual West Gate and no entry fees are charged to worshippers.

A tower near the entrance to the castle complex, the Bell Tower, is where the two saints were imprisoned before their execution. They were canonized on 19 May 1935, and jointly remembered on 22 June, the date of St John Fisher’s execution. There is a monument on the lawn outside the church marking a second execution site, used when the monarch wanted to avoid a public scene at the scaffold on Tower Hill. Henry VIII used the site both times he executed a wife – Anne Boleyn in 1536 and Catherine Howard in 1541. They too were buried in the crypt of the chapel.

Most tragic of all the many victims here are the young Princes in the Tower, killed for reasons of power rather than faith. Their uncle King Richard III wanted to rule in their stead and has often been blamed for their murders. An exhibition in the Bloody Tower presents the known evidence. Edward and Richard were 13 and 10 years old when they vanished in 1483. The skeletons of two boys were discovered in 1674, buried secretly under a staircase in the castle, and moved to Westminster Abbey. An attempt to examine these bones was made in 1933, but they were too decayed to offer any insight.

Tower of London, Tower Hill, City of London EC3N 4DT

www.hrp.org.uk

www.thechapelsroyalhmtoweroflondon.org.uk

W3W: latter.trials.stem 

GPS: 51.5080N 0.0785W 

‍Tower

W3W: sizes.pencil.grape 

GPS: 51.5097N 0.0780W memorial

‍All Hallows by the Tower, Byward Street, London EC3R 5BJ

www.ahbtt.org.uk

W3W: react.jazzy.nods 

GPS: 51.5095N 0.0794W 

Tower Hill London Underground station 100m

Directions

The tower, church and execution site are within 200m of each other. The execution memorial is not immediately obvious (see photo opposite); it is on the other side of the road from the Tower of London, 20m from the prominent war memorial set up to honour sailors of the merchant navy. 

Behind the monument is a sunken garden, and the execution site is just outside that, on the corner nearest to All Hallows by the Tower church, which is 90m away on the opposite side of the road. The church is open daily apart from bank holidays. The Tower of London is also open daily, Tuesday to Saturday 9:30am–4:30pm, Sunday to Monday10am–4:30pm. Last admission is 30 minutesbefore closing. Online tickets £24.70 for adults, £ 19:30 concessions, £11.70 for children 5–15; tickets cost more purchased on site.