London: Royalty and Rebellions, London Walks, Beheadings, and all that Cultural Loot

King George III stole the show. 

British royals also stole a few countries, an entire Greek temple, Padre’s Irish ancestral homelands, and India’s massive Koh-i-Noor diamond, inset on one of the crowns displayed with the Crown Jewels.

So plenty of thievery here on the Sceptered Isle, but King George’s heist was a masterpiece of musical theater. I’ll never forget how the mad King pouted his way onstage, commanding us to sing along as he snapped,  “NO don’t change the subject…’cuz you’re my favorite subject….forever, and ever and ever….”

Well maybe not forever. 

In addition to our cheap third row (oh wow!) seats to Hamilton, we ran from a clown brandishing a snarling chain saw, grimaced over bloody beheading stories, learned where the phrase ‘stinking rich’ comes from (it ain’t pretty), and had an altogether glorious week in jolly old England, hanging out with the royals.

We hauled out our 1989 wedding photo album before we left on this 30^th Anniversary Re-Do Trip, and our London touring felt a bit like opening that album. Never could have imagined all the drama, births, deaths, and joys the folks who stood with us in 1989 would go through since then. And just imagine how much ROYAL family drama there’s been since 1066 – whoa!  

But at least when our little family disagrees, we don’t behead each other. Beheading was the death of choice for royals, turns out – reserved for fashionable, powerful upper crust folks. And I do mean fashionable. As she shed her cloak to face her executioner, Mary Queen of Scots revealed her blood-red statement-gown, the proper frock for the occasion I must say. The axe guy hacked her head off anyway, despite the lovely dress. 

Actually, he missed the first time, slicing Mary’s face, and took two more swings before her dripping head fell to the floor. When the executioner bent over to pick it up, Mary’s wig came away in his hand and the head tumbled off to a corner somewhere. 

And then there was the Countess of Salisbury, who refused to lay her head on the block and leaped up, running away, screaming in hysterics. Blood spewed everywhere as she ran, witnesses reported. The executioner finally took her down with a couple body blows, before separating her ancient head from the rest of her (she was 68). And whoa, what they did to Oliver Cromwell (he sort of deserved it, though). So Ewwww.

And Happy Halloween, by the way. 

Lots more dead bodies coming up, because this IS London history, after all. There’s also a marching band and some bling in the mix, but the shocking stuff? Perfect for today, so if you dare, read on!

LONDON WALKS

To help us understand all the Royal intrigues, we showed up at various Tube Stops to join three historical London Walks tours. The company’s promo materials brag they have “The best guides in London – If this were a golf tournament every name on the Leader Board would be a London Walks guide,” and “Our guides are accomplished, urbane, well educated, sophisticated people. What you want in a guide. Many of them are renowned in their fields.” 

And guess what? All that hype is TRUE. And even better? The two-hour tours only cost £10 (a measly £8 with Old Geezer status). And even if you can’t get to London anytime soon, I recommend reading their White Leaflet tour descriptions online – they’re works of art all on their own. 

Westminster Abbey

Our guide Tom, a witty lawyer who’s received an award from the Queen (renowned in his field, no doubt), is the one who filled us in on the ‘stinking rich’ insider scoop. Ever wonder why churches burn incense during services? An ancient tradition, that goes back to….dead bodies. Turns out that rich folks liked to be buried in the best spots. Of course they did! Always after the best real estate, even as corpses.

So where was that? In the front by the altar, and guess what started to absolutely reek after a few days? So just burn some incense during services to mask the smell of all those stinking rich dead people.

The rich powerful people had their share of petty feuds and infighting, just like any normal family, although their disputes came with armadas and assassination plots. In Westminster’s Henry VII Chapel, a family feud continues to play out to this day, long after two warring cousins took their last breaths. 

Queen Elizabeth’s body lies just a few feet from her cousin’s, Mary Queen of Scots. Yep, THAT Mary: the one Elizabeth ordered beheaded, after she discovered one too many assassination plots on Bloody Mary’s part. 

Elizabeth’s tomb was a quiet place until Bloody Mary’s son, James I, claimed the throne. He ordered Mary’s body exhumed and reinterred in Westminster, close to Elizabeth.  The marble edifice – which towers over Mary’s effigy and is, of course, much taller than Elizabeth’s – comes with a thesis-length Latin inscription James wrote, explaining that his mother fought heroically against the ‘crafty devices of her mortal enemies’ but was the best queen and mother ever, basically. 

That’ll show ‘em, James. I wonder if all that score-settling made him feel any better? I’d ask him, but he’s resting down there in the vault right next to the warring cousins, and the only signs of life around here are the shuffling tourists, gaping at the lavish displays of gold and marble. 

My verdict, after dutifully shambling my way around both girls’ tombs? No amount of marble and gilt can pretty death up much. All the over-the-top tomb embellishments scream ‘I’m trying too hard,” much like over-posed instagram photos do, and besides, there are lots of other cool dead people monuments nearby, competing for attention. 

Like the one that reads, “Here lies what was mortal of Stephen Hawking, 1942-2018” above an etching of an equation Professor Hawking used to teach his students about black holes. At the moment his ashes were lowered into their Westminster resting spot, his voice was beamed from earth thousands of light-years away, toward the nearest known black hole in the universe. According to Washington Post reporter Lindsey Bever, his family said this was a “symbolic gesture” that finally let him travel into space. He now lies between Charles Darwin and Isaac Newton, and near the remains of several other distinguished scientists.

Everywhere we walked in Westminster Abbey we stepped on another dead person, except in one place where no one is allowed to step: The grave of the Unknown Warrior, front and center as one enters the cathedral. It’s lined with red poppies to keep feet off the sacred space. Poppies memorialize soldiers lost in WWI to this day, because of the famous WWI poem, In Flanders Fields. 

A poignant tribute to the dead the world’s wars leave behind, In Flanders Fields has special resonance with me since it’s lived in head since 1964, thanks to my 5^th grade teacher Mrs. Price, who made us memorize famous poetry. So I can still recite it to anyone who asks, on demand, lucky me. I can also recite The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere, which might come in handy when I – well, I don’t know when it would come in handy, but Mrs. Price must have had her reasons.

I thank Mrs. Price to this day for In Flanders Fields, even though when I was 10 I’m sure I really didn’t get it, even though I knew it was sad. After 50+ years of living, though, oh we get it, and Westminster Abbey is the perfect place to think about these famous lines of poetry once again:

We are the Dead. Short days ago

We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,

    Loved and were loved, and now we lie,

        In Flanders fields.

So when the next English monarch sits on Westminster Abbey’s coronation chair (while subtly reinforcing Scotland’s subservience to the British throne by planting their kiester on top of the symbolic but silly-looking scone stone, see side note), I’m going to be thinking about the granite-black, poppy-lined Unknown Warrior tomb embedded in the floor nearby. Even royal persons end up in the same place we do  (Lizzie and Bloody Mary, I’m talking to you).  Ok, maybe not in Westminster Abbey, but finished nevertheless. So what do you say, shall we emphasize the ‘loved and were loved’ part of life, while we’re still ‘feeling dawn and seeing sunsets glow?’ What a grand idea!

ROYAL LONDON

Last time I visited London I missed Buckingham Palace’s Changing of the Guard ceremony, so this time I was ready. We went with Jan, another witty London Walks guide, who was also the master Jedi of Changing-of-the-Guard guides. She directed her flock of scurrying-to-keep-up tourists from spot to spot, positioning us JUST SO, for several smashing views of the whole thing from beginning to end. 

Bad idea to just show up and stand by the fence, Jan taught us. She knows that if we did that, we’d be staring at the back of heads or dodging brollies if it’s a drizzly day. And we wouldn’t get good photos. Definitely not. 

So first, we stood on the curb near St. James Palace – front row! –  as the band queued up and marched straight for us, huge glossy black horses clip-clopping within arm’s reach. And when the regal procession turned to march up the Mall to Buckingham Palace, we marched right along with them.

I confess I danced and skipped along, because it did feel a bit like being a 16-year old cheerleader again, marching with the school band at halftime. I always enjoyed that part of high school, the marching with the band. Never gets old, those band tunes, even when I’m actually old. And I wasn’t the only one dancing down the street toward Buckingham Palace; it was a happy tourist party. Very fun. 

Jan then positioned us on an elevated area where we could look over the tourist hordes to watch the Changing part, over the brollies. Later she made sure we were in the right spot, with no crowds, to greet the horses, pat their noses, and compliment their riders, like the stern policewoman who broke into a wide smile when I told her, ‘Your horse is such a beautiful horse!’ (and I don’t even like horses. But he was gorgeous).

All along the way, Jan kept up a running commentary of fascinating history nuggets, like why old London doorways are wide, wide enough to fit a tractor through. Back in the day, it wasn’t a tractor – it was rich folks, because they never walked anywhere, never.  No, they were carried, and the wide doors made way for their travelling carriages and human carriers. 

And Jan’s the one who told us about Oliver Cromwell, who was already dead but had to be disinterred and put on trial. His corpse couldn’t give much of a defense, though, and when it was found guilty of regicide, he was hanged, beheaded, and his head was set on a spike outside Parliament, where it stayed for years. Ok so the anger thing lasted awhile, which is understandable, considering the murder and mayhem Cromwell’s holy crusades visited upon the British Isles.

TOWER OF LONDON

Our third witty London Walks guide, Judy, gave us more memorable gruesomeness, and I loved her Thames River prisoners-in-transit story. Turns out that a pointing axe served as medieval London’s tabloid of the day, because that’s how commoners watching along the route knew if the accused, being ferried back to the Tower after trial at Westminster, was guilty or not guilty. If the axe was pointing at you, off with your head, soon.

Judy started out by telling us that the Tower gets a bad reputation for blood, gore, beheadings. Really, it’s not such a bad place, rather a nice place, she insisted. And she was correct that there are some nice things about it, like the fact that Beefeaters, the ceremonial guardians of the Tower of London, live full-time here and conduct popular tourist tours. And the gob-smacking Crown Jewels twinkle away in their vaults, there’s that. And there are ravens wandering around. I love ravens, even though they do ruin the ‘nice place’ vibe a bit – you’ve got to keep your eye on ravens. But turns out you had to be very important, to be executed at the Tower of London, so not very many executions here.

Lovely Lady Jane Grey was very important, unfortunately for her since she was only 16. At that young age, she should have been gossiping with girlfriends about cute boys, but no. She was crowned Queen due to a tangled power-grab by the adults in her life. After only nine days, she was deposed in favor of her cousin Mary and sentenced to the scaffold.

A devout Protestant, she prayed during her final minutes, and then insisted on securing her own blindfold. Once blindfolded, though, she groped for the block and couldn’t find it, crying out, “What shall I do? Where is it? Where is it?” Finally, an onlooker guided her so she could lay her head down on the wood. Her short life ended there, but she lives on as one of history’s most popular tragic heroines.

And as far as I could learn, the Nine-Day Queen didn’t even get to wear the crown jewels. Now that’s just wrong, because those jewels are some serious bling. We lined up with the rest of the rabble to glide by the loot. Once you reach the good stuff you ride on a conveyor belt, circling the cases as many times as you like.

I loved that we saw Queen Elizabeth speak to Parliament a few days later, wearing the George IV State Diadem crown – we saw that! On a pillow next to her sat the crown she was supposed to be wearing for this occasion, the Imperial State Crown (looking a bit like a lost pet) and we saw that in the vaults as well. She wasn’t wearing it in Parliament, we assume, because it’s very heavy and she’s so tiny – and, how to say this nicely? She’s very old (hope I make it to 93, in as good of shape. Charles may be waiting awhile. Just sayin’). 

There was more, so much more, but since this is Halloween I’ll end today’s post with what was supposed to be the most horrifying tour in all of London: The London Bridge Experience. 

This was billed as a tour through London’s gruesome history, through the underground vaults of London Bridge. We thought we would be visiting real burial vaults, like the catacombs of Rome, but no – this is a straight-on Haunted House, and this is where the crazed chain-saw wielding clown chased us in the dark. 

The scariest part of the zombies, demons, and monsters maze was the ‘squeeze’ part, where you had to squeeze yourself between huge black inflatable walls closing in on you, in the dark. Ok, that was just a tad scary. The zombies? Clowns with knives? Walking Dead? Not so much. Kind of funny, actually, and we laughed as we tried not to fall down in the dark. I’m sure the place is standing room only tonight. So not scary, not so much.

However…..

In the first part of the Experience, live actors play out scenes illustrating gruesome London historical events, and Derrick killed it in his scene (ha ha). He played the Keeper of the Heads, and showed us how he prepared and cared for the bodies of the pike people whose heads were destined for the tops of the spikes. How he’d par-boil and tar the heads, disembowel the bodies…you get the idea. And based on what I read about the real Keeper of the Heads, that’s pretty much how it happened. 

Real history – way scarier than bloody zombies in a maze.

So Happy Halloween, everyone. It’s going to take me awhile, but I will finish posts for the rest of our trip soon – and we’ll finally make it to Ireland in the next post. I’m taking my time, since it was one of our most amazing trips ever – I’m having a blast just writing about it. 

So thanks, as always, for following along!