The Tower Menagerie: royal lions and the dark side of courtly entertainment

Place card

Place: the former Royal Menagerie at the Tower, especially the lost Lion Tower at the western entrance, together with the present Royal Beasts interpretation and Kendra Haste’s wire sculptures.

Address: Tower of London, London EC3N 4AB.

Nearest stations: Tower Hill; also Tower Gateway.

Period: a royal animal collection developed from the early thirteenth century; a secure landmark is the gift of three “leopards” to Henry III in 1235. The main royal collection left for Regent’s Park in the winter of 1831–32, while the last keeper’s private display closed in 1835.

Themes: diplomatic gifts, heraldry, monarchy, early zoology, global trade, colonial acquisition, keepers’ labour, public spectacle, danger, cruelty and the emergence of animal-welfare language.

Access: the Lion Tower site is marked near the western entrance; Royal Beasts is included in standard admission while the relevant route is open. Check hours, temporary closures and filming conditions with Historic Royal Palaces. Commercial filming requires advance permission; tripods, monopods, indoor selfie sticks and gimbals may not be used without agreement.

The setting

Do not begin with a lion. Begin with a sound.

A fourteenth- or seventeenth-century visitor approaches the Tower’s western gate without yet seeing a cage. First comes a short, heavy roar, claws striking timber, a chain, a human shout. Then the smell arrives: damp straw, meat, dung, smoke and river air. Before the guest reaches the fortress, the Crown has announced that it can bring a living creature from beyond ordinary experience into London and keep it beside the royal gate.

Kendra Haste’s transparent lions occupy that threshold today. Their bodies are made from galvanised wire, so walls, visitors and sky pass through their ribs. They look like ghosts. It is an almost perfect memorial to a collection whose living occupants and buildings have almost entirely gone. Yet “ghost” is dangerously convenient here. It turns actual animals into beautiful Gothic atmosphere and allows us to forget how they reached the fortress.

Three beasts described as “leopards” came to Henry III from Emperor Frederick II in 1235. A white bear, probably a polar bear, arrived from the Norwegian king in the early 1250s. It was led to the Thames on a tether and allowed to catch fish. In 1255 London saw an elephant, a diplomatic gift from Louis IX of France. Officials ordered a house forty feet long and twenty feet wide to be built urgently. People gathered to see the wonder. Within a few years the elephant was dead.

For six centuries the menagerie sold one persistent illusion: if the monarch possessed a rare animal, the monarch possessed the distance, nature and networks that had delivered it. Behind that illusion were ships, collars, cages, cold, unsuitable food, boredom, injury and human expertise often appropriated alongside the animals. The menagerie was not an eccentric appendix to the Tower. It expressed the same proposition as the walls and Crown Jewels: power can capture, classify and display.

The story

The word menagerie does not mean a modern zoo with a coherent scientific, educational or conservation mission. It describes a collection of living rare animals assembled chiefly for the owner’s status, curiosity and entertainment. At the Tower its purposes changed. A private royal resource became a theatre of diplomacy, a paid attraction, a place of observation and finally an embarrassing survivor beside a new model of the scientific zoological garden.

Some accounts begin with King John in 1204. Early kings certainly kept beasts, but the records are fragmentary and a single “foundation date” gives false precision. It is safer to say that a royal tradition existed in the early thirteenth century and that Henry III’s collection left unmistakable administrative traces. In 1235 Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II gave him three animals described as leopards. Historic Royal Palaces cautiously identifies them as probably lions: medieval names for large cats do not align cleanly with modern biological taxonomy, while three lions were already central to English royal heraldry.

That distinction matters in a script. We cannot simply translate the medieval noun and imagine the modern species. A clerk might describe an animal through heraldry, a bestiary or another person’s report. Even someone standing before the cage did not possess our system of species. The menagerie displayed the unknown while forcing it to fit the language of rule. A lion became more than an individual creature; it was a living extension of the shield.

Henry III made rare animals a conspicuous part of the royal Tower. In the early 1250s King Haakon IV of Norway sent a “white bear”. A polar bear is a convincing identification, but the record is not a genetic certificate. The financial evidence is more specific than the romance: the sheriffs of London were told to pay for its upkeep and to provide a muzzle and a stout chain or cord for journeys to the river. The bear could swim in the Thames and catch fish while remaining tied to the bank.

The scene becomes picturesque only at a distance. Imagine its operation. Keepers lead a powerful predator through a working fortress. A crowd wants to come closer. The urban river is tidal and polluted. The tether must be long enough for the animal to hunt and strong enough to contain it. The bear received movement and familiar food, but not freedom. Its fishing was care, spectacle and a display that dangerous northern nature could be held at the end of a royal rope.

The most celebrated medieval arrival came in 1255. Louis IX gave Henry III an elephant after receiving the animal himself through crusading and eastern Mediterranean diplomacy. The National Archives highlights an order in the Liberate Rolls: the sheriffs of London were to build, without delay, a structure at the Tower forty feet long and twenty feet wide. This is not late tourist folklore. It is a government record of fortress architecture being adapted to a body local builders had never maintained.

The chronicler Matthew Paris drew the elephant and wrote that people flocked to see the novel sight. His manuscript survives in the British Library. The image matters not because it is an infallible zoological diagram, but because it captures an encounter between observation and inherited knowledge. A medieval author attempts to fit a new animal into line, text and proportion. A podcast can place its listener beside the elephant and beside a witness learning how to see it.

The elephant did not live long. Sources securely establish a new house and a dedicated keeper, but explanations for the death accumulate entertaining details. Popular retellings claim that it was given only wine or fed meat. HRP material associates a known practice of giving wine with a different seventeenth-century elephant at St James’s Palace; it should not be transferred to Henry III’s animal without direct evidence. Confinement, climate, the voyage, infection, stress and diet can be discussed as possible factors, not as a preserved diagnosis.

That caution does not excuse the institution. It prevents actual uncertainty from becoming a cartoon of the “stupid Middle Ages”. People could spend heavily and feel sincere wonder while failing to understand an animal’s needs and taking ownership for granted. Care and exploitation were compatible. A large house by Tower standards was not an adequate environment for an elephant; one keeper could not replace a social group, climate or range.

Under Edward I the menagerie gained a permanent home at the western entrance, later known as the Lion Tower. Its location was political theatre. Royal predators confronted a visitor before the visitor moved deeper into the fortress. Roaring joined the architecture of intimidation. The Tower did not merely store weapons and prisoners; it presented living evidence of the Crown’s distant connections.

The collection changed constantly and was rarely stable. Animals died, were born, transferred, purchased and given. By 1622 the official history lists three eagles, two pumas, a tiger and a jackal alongside lions and leopards. Categories again require care: early modern uses of tiger, leopard and related names could be broader than modern taxonomy. A precise species list may be less secure than an account for a cage or feed.

Between 1604 and 1606 James I expanded the lion facilities. An exercise yard, a viewing platform and a great cistern for drinking and washing were provided. The improvement of conditions also improved visibility. Animals gained space in the form that made them easier to watch. This is the menagerie’s constant contradiction: the architecture of care was also the architecture of display.

Lions bred and survived at the Tower more successfully than many species, but proximity remained dangerous. In 1686 Mary Jenkinson tried to touch a lion’s paw and died from her injuries. We know her name because her death became an incident. Many animals, labourers, visitors and suppliers remain unnamed. Her story nevertheless destroys the safe distance created by a modern display. A cage had not abolished the lion’s force; curiosity could become fatal within seconds.

Keeper of the Lions was a royal appointment, sometimes prestigious and held for life. The title did not guarantee zoological knowledge. Keepers learned through experience, transmitted skills, error and contact with specialists who arrived from abroad. Their labour involved meat, cleaning, repairs, breeding, disease, visitors and the risk of attack. It is as misleading to romanticise a keeper as a heroic tamer as it is to flatten him into a mindless tormentor. He was a worker inside a system that demanded the preservation of valuable property and its conversion into spectacle.

During the eighteenth century, animal routes increasingly overlapped with the commercial and military map of the British Empire. A rare beast could be taken after a hunt, purchased through local intermediaries, presented to an official, placed aboard an East Indiaman and carried through London’s docks. The word “gift” hides that chain of possession. Even when human participants exchanged a gift voluntarily, the animal had agreed neither to the voyage nor its new role.

The cheetah known as Miss Jenny illustrates how people disappear from the frame. The animal came from Bengal in 1764 in the orbit of Sir George Pigot, Governor of Madras, and was used in a staged deer hunt at Windsor. George Stubbs painted the episode. Researchers associate one Indian handler with John Morgan, a lascar who told the Old Bailey that he had come over with a “tyger” for Pigot. HRP explicitly warns that Morgan’s presence at the Tower has not been established, and that the identification of this cheetah’s later life in the menagerie must be expressed cautiously.

The uncertainty is more valuable than an elegant caption. In a European painting, the person who understood an animal’s language, conduct and commands can become an “exotic servant” without a biography. His knowledge is necessary to control the beast, while ownership of that knowledge passes to the patron and artist. A script should state the evidential limit: Morgan existed and testified to travelling with a large cat; his own presence at the Tower Menagerie is not proven.

George, an early nineteenth-century Bengal lion, retained a detailed biography because it was excellent publicity. In 1822 a British officer shot his parents in India. The three-day-old cub was put aboard the Hope with a foster goat. A four-month journey ended at Gravesend; George became so tame that visitors could come close to him. The affectionate celebrity story conceals its opening scene: colonial hunting destroyed a family, and the orphan became an attraction in the hunter’s country.

By then the Tower was part of tourist London. “Going to see the lions” could mean seeing the capital’s sights in general. Visitors paid for closeness to danger and for the right to claim that they had seen the world without leaving the city. Stories settled around the attraction: that entry could be paid with a cat or dog for feed, or that an ostrich died after swallowing nails. These claims should not be repeated as fact without a primary record. They fit the site’s reputation so perfectly that a late anecdote can masquerade as an account book.

The lions also produced the London joke of “washing the lions”. On 1 April, newcomers were sent to the Tower Ditch to watch a ceremony that did not exist. A newspaper reference from 1698 is among the earliest documented English April Fool traditions. A forged ticket from 1856 promised admission at an imaginary White Gate, although the menagerie had been gone for more than twenty years. The Tower lions continued to work in urban culture after their bodies had disappeared.

The old collection looked wretched by the early nineteenth century. In 1822 the twenty-nine-year-old Alfred Cops became the last Head Keeper. Unlike many predecessors, he brought practical experience from the Exeter Exchange menagerie. He inherited only eight animals in premises described by a contemporary as small, ill-contrived and dirty, with inhabitants that appeared sick and melancholy.

Cops was both a competent keeper and a showman. He acquired nearly three hundred animals across a decade; the 1830 guide listed fifty-eight species, and attendance rose. Popularity may have brought attention and resources, but it also meant more bodies within a restricted complex. Entertainment and better husbandry moved together without becoming the same thing.

In 1830 two Bengal tigers gained access to a lion and killed it. Heated iron rods were used in an attempt to separate the animals. The incident gave the menagerie’s critics a dreadful demonstration of how dangerous species, human error and unsuitable architecture could turn a collection into a killing enclosure.

Closure was not a single moment of moral awakening. The Duke of Wellington, Constable from 1826, wanted a military fortress rather than a crowded public exhibition. Security and crowds concerned him. At the same time, public language was changing. The Cruel Treatment of Cattle Act of 1822 was an early legislative milestone, and the SPCA was founded in 1824. These developments did not create modern protection for captive wildlife, but cruelty was becoming harder to describe as the owner’s private entertainment alone.

An institutional alternative had appeared. The Zoological Society of London was founded in 1826, and its Regent’s Park garden opened to Fellows in 1828 as a scientific institution. William IV presented the royal animals to ZSL in 1831. The first recorded deliveries on 30 December included two lions, two leopards, a bonobo, a rhesus monkey and a black lemur. Moving them through winter streets did not turn nineteenth-century captivity into modern welfare, but it ended the model of royal beasts guarding the fortress gate.

Cops showed privately owned animals for a few more years. Further incidents followed: a wolf escaped and a monkey bit a soldier. The last exhibition closed in 1835, animals were sold to zoos or travelling circuses, and the Lion Tower was later demolished. Thus the dates 1831–32 and 1835 are not rivals. The first marks the transfer of the main royal collection; the second marks the end of the remaining private show on site.

Modern London Zoo should not be cast as a flawless rescue while the Tower carries all the darkness. Nineteenth-century zoological gardens also depended on imperial transport, restricted enclosures and public display. What emerged was a new claim: systematic observation, published knowledge and, much later, conservation. The menagerie’s history is not a straight march from cruelty to virtue. It is a slow change in aims, standards and the words with which society justifies keeping wild animals.

In 2010 HRP commissioned thirteen wire sculptures from Kendra Haste. Lions stand near the former Lion Tower; a white bear appears near water; an elephant extends its head from an implied enclosure. Wire does not attempt to replace the animal. It gives absence an outline. The memorial becomes honest only when paired with a question: are we admiring the king’s capacity to gather the world at his gate, or hearing the cost of that capacity?

People to remember

Henry III turned diplomatic animals into a sustained royal collection. His orders show expenditure and interest, but also a monarch’s absolute power to determine where another creature lived.

The white bear and elephant are known not by personal names but as gifts. The records describe price, tether and building more fully than fear, illness or behaviour.

Matthew Paris left a drawing of the elephant, a rare near-contemporary attempt to observe and transmit an animal almost unknown to an English audience.

Mary Jenkinson died in 1686 after approaching a lion. Do not use her as a punchline about a foolish visitor: the institution sold proximity while demanding distance.

John Morgan and unnamed travelling handlers carried expertise alongside animals, yet often disappeared from British history once the valuable creature passed to an elite owner.

George, the Bengal lion, was an orphan of colonial hunting made into a tame celebrity. His biography binds together a family’s destruction, a ship, a foster goat’s labour and visitors’ affection.

Alfred Cops revived a failing attraction and drove the old model to its limit. His professional skill cannot be separated from the commercial expansion of the collection.

Fact, interpretation and legend

Documented fact: Frederick II gave Henry III three animals called “leopards” in 1235; HRP researchers consider them likely to have been lions.

Documented fact: the white bear went to the Thames with a muzzle and stout tether; officials ordered a forty-by-twenty-foot house for the elephant of 1255.

Reasoned interpretation: the elephant was probably African and reached Louis IX through crusading diplomacy. That is better supported than describing it unconditionally as Indian.

Unknown cause: the elephant died within a few years. Poor conditions and limited knowledge form the context, but no medical diagnosis survives.

Documented danger: Mary Jenkinson died after contact with a lion; in 1830 two tigers killed a lion and heated bars were used to separate them.

Requires qualification: John Morgan is linked to Pigot’s large cat and an Old Bailey testimony, but a visit by Morgan himself to the Tower Menagerie is not proven.

Urban legend: entry could be paid with a cat or dog for feed; an ostrich died from nails. Individual practices or incidents may have occurred, but the popular formula needs primary evidence.

Documented joke: “washing the lions” was a real London hoax; the ceremony itself never existed.

The place today

Begin on the western approach before Middle Tower and Byward Tower. The Lion Tower stood here, at the threshold rather than inside the familiar postcard dominated by the White Tower. Film the visitor stream beside the wire lions. The modern queue repeats the historic logic of a first impression, although the live roar has gone.

Continue through the Royal Beasts interpretation and sculptures. Build a route around bodies: lions at the entrance, the bear towards water, the elephant as an impossible scale within a fortress. Do not claim that every sculpture occupies the exact cage of a particular year. They are contemporary artworks interpreting a distributed six-hundred-year history.

Connect the Tower to the Thames and to the direction of Regent’s Park. The spatial arc works well in audio: animals reached east London through global maritime routes, lived at the fortress’s western gate and then moved north-west to the new Zoological Garden.

Before visiting, check hours, route closures and admission. The site has cobbles, steps, confined passages and access restrictions in some historic buildings. Personal photography is allowed in most areas, but commercial work and equipment require agreement. Do not film children or vulnerable visitors without permission, block the entrance, or stage shock content that mimics feeding living animals to the sculptures.

Research bibliography

S0090. Historic Royal Palaces, The Royal Menagerie at the Tower of London — main chronology, animals, Cops, closure and sculptures.

S0091. The National Archives, On the Record: 700 Years of the Thames — Liberate Rolls, the elephant’s route and house.

S0092. British Library, Cotton MS Nero D I — Matthew Paris’s drawing and account of the 1255 elephant.

S0093. Historic England, Tower of London, List Entry 1002061 — the menagerie as a historic function of the protected complex.

S0094. Historic Royal Palaces, Washing the Lions — Lion Tower, Mary Jenkinson and the April Fool tradition.

S0095. Zoological Society of London, The History of ZSL — foundation, scientific zoo and transfer of the royal collection.

S0096. RSPCA, Our history — the 1822 Act and the SPCA’s foundation in 1824.

S0097. Historic Royal Palaces, Tower facilities — current photography and commercial filming rules.

S0098. Historic Royal Palaces, Royal Beasts exhibition — current exhibition and admission status.

S0099. Historic Royal Palaces, Community Access Scheme Resource Guide — white bear, elephant house, empire and the limits of the John Morgan story.