Well, so far so good. I have managed to download all of my trip pictures on to my computer and delete the blurry ones (not too many, happily). Our first adventure, after arriving in London and checking into our hotel, was to visit the Tower of London. As you may gather from this picture, it was not a cheerful place. If you were hauled off to the tower, especially if you were accused of treason, the outcome was not likely to be good. We had a wonderful guide through the tower who told us lots of fascinating stories about the people who were executed there.
It seems that treason was the most popular crime. Essentially, a king or queen could accuse anyone of treason if they happened to disagree with them on any subject. When a person was executed at the tower (by beheading) he or she was marched out to the grassy hill outside the tower walls where a crowd of townspeople would be waiting to watch the spectacle. The condemned would make a final speech, then offer his executioner a bag full of money to buy a swift, hopefully painless beheading. Sadly the executioner wasn't always as skilled as one might hope and our guide regaled us with tales of botched executions. It reminded me of the Harry Potter character "Nearly Headless Nick". On the up side, the Crown Jewels are stored in the tower and they are quite amazing. The crowns, scepters, etc were quite amazing but I was also itrigued by the huge (3-4 feet across) gold platters and matching chalices. So many of these gold pieces seemed to have been aquired in the 1600s. This made me wonder what was going on at that time historically. I finally got an answer from one of the guards. It seems that during that era the Spanish were bringing back lots of gold from the new world and the British pirate Sir Francis Drake was stealing it from them. Isn't history interesting?
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