The Tower of London - mighty fortress and royal palace.
Infamous prison and place of execution.
William the Conqueror built it as his English stronghold 900 years ago.
Ever since, some of the biggest and most notorious names in England's history...
...from Anne Boleyn to Guy Fawkes,
have been jailed, tortured and put to death here.
Their stories are the stuff of myth and legend but the truth is even more extraordinary.
I'm Dr Suzannah Lipscomb, Tudor historian and author.
And I'm Joe Crowley, journalist and investigator.
Together, we want to reveal the secret history of the Tower.
Hunting down evidence.
It's like a sweet shop for a historian.
- Making some shocking discoveries. - That is quite incredible.
And coming to some very surprising conclusions.
Everyone's very sure that this was a complete stitch-up.
This must have been an inside job.
- Think you know the Tower of London? - Time to think again.
In this episode - Traitors.
We're investigating the hidden stories of three men who dared challenge the English state
and were sent to the Tower to die.
Up first there's the outlaw priest who attempted a midnight prison break.
It's a fascinating story and he's written down every detail.
Then, England's first terrorist, Guy Fawkes.
A victim of savage torture.
(Whimpers)
It would be exquisitely painful but there is nothing would kill you in the short term.
And finally, the last man executed at the Tower,
a German spy, in 1941.
(Gunshot)
It's a piece of trivia for most people. He was my grandfather.
He ended up being executed far from his family,
unable to say his last goodbyes.
All three were men on a mission. All three were enemies of the state.
It's the 4th of October, 1597,
in the reign of Queen Elizabeth I.
At the Tower of London, Father John Gerard is spending his final night in prison.
His crime is to be a Catholic priest in a Protestant country, an often fatal offence.
More than 100 priests have already been slaughtered in Queen Elizabeth's reign.
But John Gerard is not about to join that list.
Instead, tonight, he will carry out a stunning escape from the Tower,
England's most formidable prison.
Now, we want to find out how this priest managed it.
Here we have the Tower. It's supposed to be super-secure
and yet we've got a Catholic priest breaking out.
It's extraordinary. It's some sort of English Alcatraz, but he manages to do it.
Look at this. This is the Tower in 1597.
And he is kept here, in the Salt Tower.
So, it's behind the moat, the outer wall, and the tower he's in is part of the inner wall.
And he manages to break out.
- I'd like you to piece together his escape. - OK.
I'll try and find out a bit more about him and delve into his background.
In the time of Father Gerard,
less than 2% of the country were practising Catholics,
yet this minority terrified England's Protestant rulers.
Catholics were seen as an enemy within,
more loyal to the Pope and Catholic Europe than to their queen, Elizabeth I.
Catholic worship was outlawed and priests like John Gerard were ruthlessly hunted down.
Elizabeth's government had agents known as pursuivants
who scoured the land looking for Catholic priests.
The Catholics responded to the threat in both a logical and ingenious way -
with priest holes.
These were life-saving hiding spaces, used when the pursuivants came knocking.
This house, Harvington Hall, has more of these hides than anywhere in England.
I've enlisted priest hole expert, Alice Hogg,
to reveal one secret spot the pursuivants never found.
Use your imagination a little. We've got a walled library with books everywhere.
This end here, we've got a cupboard.
We open the doors, we've got more books, more panelling.
But if you come up this way... this is where the hiding place is finally located.
- Right behind this beam here. - Goodness me.
Gosh, you can't have fat priests, can you? Look at that.
This was a deadly game of hide-and-seek.
And Gerard needed real endurance to play it.
One, he was in one for four hours. Another time, for four whole days.
With no food other than a jar of quince jelly and some biscuits
that his hostess had been able to give him before he went in.
- Four days? No water? - No water at all.
And on the last time, it was a nine-day search.
Life as a priest in hiding was tough.
But Gerard was prepared.
He trained for his covert mission in Rome before returning home at the age of 24.
Ever since, he'd flitted between the homes of rich Catholics,
hiding away when the pursuivants came calling.
So, if these hides were so sophisticated, so secret,
- how was Gerard actually found? - It was an act of betrayal.
The family had a servant who wasn't a Catholic and betrayed him to the authorities.
So, all these hides were completely in vain and he ended up in the Tower, anyway.
Not in vain for other priests. They saved so many lives.
But for Gerard, it was an act of betrayal and he was off to the Tower.
Gerard was accused of being sent by the Pope
on a political mission to pervert the Queen's loyal subjects.
This was treason and the sentence was death.
Yet the authorities seemed reluctant to charge Gerard.
Instead, he was locked up, interrogated
and finally left to rot in the Tower.
In Protestant England, Catholic schools were banned.
Would-be priests had to travel to colleges in Europe before secretly returning home.
One of those colleges still exists today.
Its HQ is no longer in France, but in Lancashire, northern England.
Well, this is Stonyhurst ahead of me. Isn't it magnificent?
I've heard there are some relics here from when Catholic priests were outlaws in their own land
and I'm hoping there's gonna be some good information on secret priests
and, in particular, on Gerard,
because I really want to know what made this guy so special
that he could escape the Tower of London.
Gerard was one of dozens of foreign-trained priests operating in England.
Here at Stonyhurst, curator Jan Graffius holds evidence of just how dangerous their job was.
This is a very special relic contained in this box.
- And, inside, is a human shoulder blade. - Really?
This is a shoulder of one of four young men who were all trained on the Continent as priests
and all landed on the north-east coast, near Durham.
They were immediately picked up and they were executed weeks later.
And this is the penalty of sticking out.
To stay alive, a priest needed the skills of a secret agent and some very clever kit...
...like a portable altar and a chalice for mass that could be dismantled and hidden.
John Gerard survived 18 years under these sorts of circumstances.
He was very, very good and, luckily, when he returned back to Europe,
his Jesuit superiors said, "You have to write this down
because we want to use your story as training for other priests."
And so he wrote his story down and that's how we know so much about him.
Gerard's memoirs became the handbook for secret priests.
And Stonyhurst has a very early copy.
Do we get a sense from this, because this is his hand,
what life was like in the Tower at that time?
Very clear. He sends his guard out to buy pome aria magna - big oranges -
which he, the guard, seems to like eating.
So, he's buying for himself luxuries and he hands some back to the guard
as a way of forming a friendship, a bond.
A sense of relationship's being built up here.
Right, cut to the chase. How does John Gerard escape?
- There must be an account in here. - Very clear.
It's a fascinating story and he's written every detail.
So, we can follow it from here.
John Gerard, what a star.
If only all historical figures would write down their key thoughts and actions
in an autobiography immediately, it would be incredibly useful
because I now know exactly how he escaped the Tower
and, let me tell you, it doesn't disappoint.
Time to send Suzie a message.
By 1597, Father Gerard had been locked up for three years
and knew death was more likely than escape.
(Caws)
No-one had broken out of the Tower for 30 years.
So how did this priest manage it?
On the subject of Father John Gerard, Joe sent me a rather enigmatic note
that says, "Here are some things worthy of your consideration. Joe."
There's clearly more to this than meets the eye.
The 16th century saw the dawn of the British spy service.
So Catholic priests in Protestant England had to get handy with secret messages.
To crack this one, I'm heading to meet an expert in Elizabethan espionage,
Robert Hutchinson.
I suspect, very strongly, that there is, in fact,
some secret writing written on this piece of paper.
And what we'll do is try the test.
The heat affects the secret writing which has a chemical reaction on the paper,
which means, when you heat it, what's been written should show up.
That's a "T".
There's a "B".
- "About"? Is that "About"? - About, yes, it is. It is.
"About the...
OJ."
"OJ."
- Orange juice! - Orange juice.
OK, hence the orange crosses.
Yes. Now, we know that Gerard was very fond of oranges.
But it wasn't just an issue of trying to boost his vitamin C intake.
Orange juice was used as a secret ink. This is his means
of communicating with his supporters outside the Tower
and his fellow prisoners within the Tower.
Another Catholic rebel, John Arden, was held opposite Gerard's cell
in the Cradle Tower, closer to the outside world.
Gerard used orange juice letters to make contact...
...and his corruptible jailer to set up a visit.
He bribes his jailer...
...to allow him to cross the courtyard to get to the Cradle Tower.
Everyone has their price, especially in the 16th century.
And that's where Gerard realised, with the stink of the Thames in his nostrils,
just how close he was to chances of freedom.
Secret letters helped Gerard get into the Cradle Tower
where he saw that escape was possible.
He used the same method, with allies outside the Tower, to plot a prison break.
But what was his cunning plan?
Father Gerard made his great escape
four weeks after visiting Arden's cell for the first time.
I've returned to the scene to make sense of what Gerard pulled off that night.
I've read Gerard's account and now, being here, it all starts to make sense.
That's Salt Tower, where he was imprisoned in his cell.
Across this courtyard is Cradle Tower, where Arden was locked up in his cell.
On the night, we know Gerard persuaded his warder
to bring him down from the tower, through the gardens, to Arden's cell.
He persuaded him using golden reason, i.e., bribery.
That tower gave them the best possible chance to escape.
Gerard was brought up and locked behind this door with Arden.
Meanwhile, two Catholic friends of Gerard
were rowing their way up the Thames,
docking their boat just on the wharf there
and waiting to hear from their friend
because, inside here, Arden and Gerard climbed up to the battlement
and there they had a stout thread attached to an iron ball.
What they were gonna do is throw this across to their friends on the wharf.
And this was a really, really tense moment because, as Gerard writes,
any splash, if they missed and it went in the moat,
then, immediately, the game would be up.
Gerard's Catholic friends waiting on the wharf hear this iron ball fall.
They then attach a proper, sturdy, thick rope and Gerard hauls it up onto the battlements.
The other end is attached to a stake on the quayside
and Gerard can make his way down the rope.
Whether he's weak from torture, I don't know, but he really struggles.
He gets stuck halfway.
GERARD: At length I got to the middle and there I was stationary
for my strength and spirits, which before were flagging,
began entirely to fail me.
He sums up all his belief, really, in God, to see him through.
He's dangling there and eventually he makes it and gets his feet up on the wall here,
his friends pull him over and he's exhausted.
They revive him, they give him a drink, then they steal away
to the boat waiting on the Thames.
Just imagine how this moment would have felt for John Gerard as he boarded,
away from the Tower, from torture, from probable death and on to freedom.
John Gerard was never recaptured
and we know from his book, from his own words, he went to live in Europe.
He lived for another 40 years, well into his seventies.
It's an incredible story, full of self-belief, passion and a very daring escape from that place.
It's the 31 st of January, 1606.
A staunch Catholic is dragged from the Tower to his public execution.
But this is not another undercover priest.
This is Guy Fawkes...
...perhaps the most notorious traitor in English history.
Three months earlier he'd come within hours of blowing up Parliament
and, inside it, King James I and his entire government.
All in the name of religion.
Today, four centuries on, Guy Fawkes remains infamous in Britain,
his crime commemorated every year
with fireworks, bonfires and the burning of effigies of Guy Fawkes himself.
- This is the case of Guy Fawkes. - Uh-huh.
Pretty familiar story - in Britain, at least.
Basically, he's a terrorist. That's how we know him.
Exactly. The question is, how did they deal with terrorists in 1605?
The other thing that intrigues me is this. This is an engraving from the period.
It shows Guy Fawkes but it also shows a number of other plotters with him.
We've forgotten all about them. We just remember Guy Fawkes.
- I don't know why, so I'm gonna look into them. - Yeah.
Perhaps you could look into torture at the Tower.
OK.
On the 4th of November, Guy Fawkes stood beneath Parliament,
minding 36 barrels of gunpowder.
He was just hours from blowing up hundreds of people, including the King.
A terrorist attack on an unprecedented scale.
But an anonymous tip-off averted disaster...
...and Fawkes was arrested and sent to the Tower of London.
So, what happened to him there?
I've come to Britain's National Archives to find out.
Here, archivist James Travers has unearthed Guy Fawkes's
very first statement to interrogators.
He talks quite a long time without giving them any really juicy information.
And he was signing with this very well-formed, false signature of John Johnson.
John Johnson? Where's that come from?
I think it was the first thing to come into his head. It sounds like "Mr Smith", doesn't it?
What were your parents'?
The interrogators are getting nowhere.
Then the prime target of the gunpowder plot gets involved.
King James the first, himself.
He has actually set out, in his own hand,
what the questions to Fawkes should be.
He's intrigued by Fawkes, as well as terrified by him.
He wants to know a lot more about his background.
- Where was he born? - Where was he born?
It gets more and more involved as you go down.
Guy Fawkes was a real mystery man.
So, what was King James prepared to do to solve that mystery?
"If he will not, by other ways, confess,
the gentler tortures are to be first used unto him."
"And so, by degrees, until the ultimate is reached."
By "the ultimate", he meant the rack.
Incredible. This is an official green light to torture
using the Tower's most fearsome device - the rack.
Three days later, Fawkes is a broken man.
On the 9th of November, we get a very different signature
in his own name and very, very faint.
- You think that's a result from the torture? - Absolutely.
His handwriting goes to pot and he can't make an impression.
Yeah.
This barely-legible signature followed an eye-opening confession.
Guy Fawkes, a 35-year-old soldier from York,
was only a junior member of a huge terrorist conspiracy.
He'd been recruited for his skill with explosives.
So, who really was behind this plot?
Guy Fawkes has been famous for centuries.
He's a celebrity of history and the person most associated with the Gunpowder Plot.
But he was far from being the only one.
In fact, the leader of the plotters was one Robert Catesby,
a nobleman hell-bent on returning England to the Catholic faith.
It had been Catesby's plan to blow up the King and government with gunpowder.
When the plot was discovered, Catesby didn't give up.
Now he tried to inspire a Catholic rebellion but it only attracted the attention of the law.
Two days after Guy Fawkes's arrest, Catesby and 13 followers
pulled up here, at Holbeche House,
tailed by the local sheriff.
- Hello. You must be Richard. - I am, yes. Nice to meet you.
Curator Richard Knox has studied what happened next
to England's most wanted fugitives.
We've got the final few men, the die-hards, here making their last stand. What happened?
They're surrounded.
We've got the sheriff's men all the way round here,
bristling with armaments.
The plotters themselves have a limited amount of powder.
(Gunshots)
Several people are shot as they're moving about, trying to find better cover.
And in the most dramatic moment,
we have Catesby, Percy and Winter.
They don't want to die the traitors' death.
In a true Butch Cassidy And The Sundance Kid moment, they burst out from the doorway,
they want to die, go out in a blaze of glory, if they can.
Mostly, they just want to die quickly.
Catesby and Percy are granted that,
allegedly, by the same bullet.
- The two of them, by one shot?
Apparently so. They must have been very close together.
Though Catesby was the leader,
I think the manner of his death explains why he is not as infamous as Guy Fawkes.
Firstly, he died out of the public eye, some 200 kilometres from London.
And, secondly, that brave death in a stand-off
appears more fitting for a hero than a hated traitor.
Back in London, the Tower was filling up.
The survivors from the Holbeche shoot-out joined Fawkes
and they implicated even more plotters.
Yet there's no evidence that any of this bumper crop of detainees were tortured.
But why not? Surely that was what the Tower was there for?
I'm heading to see Dr Alison Rowlands, an expert in 17th century law.
It's not a part of recognised, criminal legal procedure in England.
According to ordinary law in England, suspects aren't tortured.
But there are cases where high treason was involved, or believed to be involved,
and torture was actually formally authorised by the monarch
or representatives of the monarch.
So, it's never really just done on a whim, it's quite bureaucratic.
- It has a process. It's signed off? - It's not just a free-for-all as we might think.
There has to be a definite sense that the state, the monarchy, is under threat.
Even in 1605, torture existed outside standard legal procedure
and was severely restricted.
The Tower of London was not quite the torture chamber of legend.
In the 100 year period between 1540 and 1640,
we've got about 80 cases where we have written proof that torture was authorised.
It doesn't sound very much. On average, that's less than one a year.
It's four in every five years. Not what I thought it would be.
No, I think it's testament to the fact it is a relatively rare occurrence.
Fawkes was tortured because the government were in a state of fear
about a terrorist cell at large.
Now, with those terrorists captured or killed, torture simply wasn't needed.
But that didn't mean these traitors would get away scot-free.
In January, 1606, Fawkes and seven key plotters
were condemned to death at Westminster Hall.
They were to be publicly hanged, drawn and quartered
with Guy Fawkes to be killed last.
He would have to witness his friends die horrifically
before facing the very same fate.
But what exactly did he see on the scaffold?
- Ah, hello. Are you Stuart? - Yes. Pleased to meet you.
Suzannah. How do you do?
Who better to ask than Home Office pathologist, Dr Stuart Hamilton?
A man whose job it is to make sense of death.
First part, the hanging is, essentially, a type of strangulation.
It's not like the judicial hanging where you drop somebody and break their neck.
You put the rope round their neck, suspend them,
and that compresses all the blood vessels that you can see here, supplying your brain.
Quite often people start to have fits.
They also, a little bit later, develop very abnormal postures.
Your limbs either contract up or stretch right out.
All of this would be quite a spectacle to see, really.
That's just the beginning because then we have the drawing. What happens there?
The drawing is, essentially, what we call disembowelling.
A cut across the abdomen, which would expose the intestines.
This must have been extraordinarily painful. Surely this must have killed you?
No, it wouldn't. You don't have major blood vessels in
the front of your abdomen which could bleed heavily and kill you.
So, how long can you live like this, then?
Without treatment, maybe 24, 48 hours.
You can live for 24 to 48 hours with your stomach, with your guts coming out?
Yep.
But with the crowd baying for blood, a traitor would not live that long
as his body was finally hacked into quarters.
It was a brutal method of death,
believed to have been invented by Henry III in 1241, to kill a hated outlaw
and later becoming the standard punishment for high treason.
Back in 1606, Guy Fawkes had to witness this torment before it was his turn.
A report from the time reveals what happened next.
(Actor reads report) "Last of all came the the great devil of all - Guy Fawkes.
He was scarce able to go up the ladder.
Yet, with much ado, by the help of the hangman,
went high enough to break his neck by the fall.
This eyewitness account implies that Fawkes cheated his full punishment,
dying before he was disembowelled.
Reports suggest that he managed to get himself up quite high before the hanging,
which meant he had a drop.
And that's much more like the traditional judicial hanging
that we would have seen in the 19th century, whereby the rope comes down
and the weight of your body actually snaps your neck.
And that leads you to die, ideally, almost instantly.
It appears Guy Fawkes was a rebel to the end, escaping the full horror of his punishment.
Ever since, his name has been fixed in the public mind as the great traitor.
And it's easy to see why.
Fawkes was the one caught red-handed with 36 barrels of gunpowder.
Fawkes was the one tortured at the Tower.
And Fawkes was the last one to be given a traitor's send-off on the scaffold.
(Explosions)
It's the 15th of August, 1941,
nearly two years into the Second World War.
London is reeling from months of sustained German bombing
which has killed 40,000 people and destroyed a million homes.
At the bomb-damaged Tower of London, one man is about to make history.
In a few seconds, Josef Jakobs will become the last man ever
to be executed at the Tower of London, ending centuries of bloody history.
But why was the ancient Tower used
for this final, modern execution?
This case is a little bit different.
This is Josef Jakobs. He is the last person ever to be executed at the Tower.
He's a German spy and he's put to death in 1941.
In 1941? Goodness! I thought they'd stopped executing people at the Tower centuries before.
Exactly. I want you to look into Josef himself.
What makes him so special? Was he some sort of Nazi super spy?
Exactly. I'm gonna look into the Tower
and really whether this was a one-off or the last of many.
When you look at these ancient buildings, they don't scream 20th century history.
But, actually, the Josef Jakobs story is bringing me here,
right within living memory and what I really want to know is,
were executions happening all the way up until 1941?
And just how, exactly, did Josef meet his end?
And who better to answer all those questions
than those guardians of the Tower, the Yeoman Warders,
popularly known as Beefeaters?
- Morning, John. How are you? - Great to see you. How are you? Yes.
I know the last execution happens here in 1941.
Are there executions quietly taking place
every week or every year here, up to that point?
Certainly not. The Tower of London, in the late 1800s and early 1900s,
became a tourist attraction.
The Crown Jewels, the royal regalia are stored here.
People wanted to come and see them.
The last public executions were in 1747
but we did have executions in the First World War and again in the Second World War.
Carl Lody was the one, I suppose, who is probably the most famous.
In 1914, German spy, Carl Lody,
became the first man executed at the Tower for 167 years.
Ten more enemy spies went on to be executed here in the First World War
as the Bloody Tower turned back the clock.
We had over 1,000 soldiers here so it was quite easy for the government
to put us back into being a holding centre for German prisoners,
which is what happened in both the First and Second World Wars.
So how many people were executed here during the Second World War?
- We only have one. - Right.
And that was Josef Jakobs.
This final execution was a complete one-off
so just what had Jakobs done to deserve his unique place in history?
Six months before his execution, the 42-year-old Josef Jakobs
was setting out on his first spying mission.
He would be dropped, by parachute,
into a field some 120 kilometres north of the Tower of London.
I've come here on a perilously cold day in winter to this farm in Cambridgeshire,
because the case files tell me this is where Jakobs landed.
I'm hoping to find out what he was doing here and why he was captured.
I've recruited espionage historian Nigel West to help.
He's taking me to the very spot where Jakobs landed in January, 1941.
Jakobs made a successful departure from the aircraft
although he had never practised a parachute drop before.
Everything went well until he hit the ground
and then, because of his lack of training, he fractured two bones in his leg very badly.
He simply couldn't move. He was paralysed on the ground.
He remained there for some hours
until, eventually, he saw two farm workers walking some distance away
and, to attract their attention, he fired two or three shots.
(Gunshots)
He posed no threat to them, whatever. He was in a miserable condition.
He was wearing slightly strange clothes.
He was wearing a pin-striped suit underneath a Luftwaffe flying suit.
So, pretty much, from the moment that he landed,
everything had gone totally wrong and not according to plan?
He was absolutely desperate
and the act of firing those shots to attract attention
was, in effect, a complete surrender.
The unfortunate Jakobs was picked up by Ml5 and quizzed about his assignment.
But it was hardly James Bond-star action.
His mission was, first of all,
to send daily radio reports of weather conditions in England
and that was for Luftwaffe operations.
If you're going to send aircraft and air crew over to targets
and you're uncertain of the conditions there,
then you're putting lives and equipment at risk unnecessarily.
Jakobs was a failed weatherman in big trouble.
On British soil he had to obey British laws.
By spying for the Nazis, Jakobs was committing treachery...
...and the punishment was death.
In May, 1941, Jakobs was charged.
But was killing this hapless secret agent the only option?
I'm heading to meet former British spy, Harry Ferguson, to find out.
The usual procedure when a spy was picked up during the war was to try and turn him,
to get him to agree to work for British Intelligence
and send false reports back to the Germans.
He'd say, "I've arrived safely, I'm gathering intelligence.
Please send more spies."
When they arrive, you capture them, you turn them
and gradually undermine their operation.
But Jakobs was terribly unlucky because news leaked out
that these farm workers had found a German parachutist in a field
and that news may well have somehow filtered back to Germany.
Loose talk helped cost Jakobs his life.
He could not be used as a double-agent
so was brought to court martial and sentenced to death.
He would become one of 16 spies Britain executed in the Second World War...
...but the only one who wasn't hanged in prison.
The reason he was shot rather than hanged, as the other 15 German spies were,
is simply that he was a military officer and therefore came under military jurisdiction
and when found guilty under the Treachery Act, the sentence was shooting rather than hanging.
Jakobs's weather forecasting unit was part of the German army...
...and this entitled him to a military death.
As he was held at Brixton Prison in south London,
the nearest convenient barracks with a firing range
was at the Tower of London.
On the 15th of August, 1941,
Jakobs was taken to the Tower of London's indoor range to face a firing squad.
I want to know how this unique execution operated.
So I've come to meet former soldier, Joe Milo.
He's a Second World War historian and has studied Jakobs's case closely.
There would've been eight assigned to the firing squad.
We do know from the records
that they carried out a rehearsal of the execution before carrying out the real thing.
When they were marched out, what would they have seen?
This man sitting down, would he have been tied?
He would have been tied to the chair, probably blindfolded or hooded.
He would have had a white target pinned to his chest so, in their mind,
they're focusing on a white piece of cloth rather than a human being.
That's on the chest? They're not aiming for the head?
Not the head. They're aiming for the heart.
To understand what they were going through, let's see if I can...
- Take it as if you were gonna fire. - Yeah. OK.
- They'd be standing? - They'd all be standing.
They'd receive their weapon preloaded because five of them would have a live round
and three of them would have had blank ammunition.
The purpose of that is to keep a level of uncertainty about whether or not
you're carrying out the execution up to the point at which you shoot.
That's a kind of human level for the guys on this side of the range?
- That's right. - Not knowing if they're about to kill somebody.
It helps then overcome the psychological barrier of shooting someone.
(Gunshot)
- That would be that. - Over in a moment.
- Do we know it killed Josef outright? - He certainly would have been dead instantly.
Today the firing range is long-gone.
But at the Tower of London, one grisly reminder of this final execution remains.
This is the actual chair Josef Jakobs was sat in when he was executed.
Just look at it. You can see where the bullets passed through it.
Part of the frame of the chair has just been blown away.
If you were to sit there, the damage is slightly to the left of centre
which is where the human heart is, so very clear what they're aiming at.
Quite a gruesome artefact, in many ways.
When Josef Jakobs was killed, he left a wife and young family back home in Germany.
Today, that family have not forgotten him
and his Canadian granddaughter, Giselle Jakobs,
makes regular visits to his grave in London.
- Oh, hello! Are you Giselle? - Suzi, hi! Nice to meet you here!
All right, let's go.
Here, in the cemetery's Book of Burials, the entry for Josef Jakobs jumps out.
Here we go. Look at that. Wow.
Look at how old they all are. Seventies.
Late sixties. And there he is, 43 years old.
OK, 1734-G.
Josef is buried here, in an unmarked grave,
close to this simple wooden cross.
My sister and I came here in '93 and we received an envelope
and it contained the letter that he wrote to his family
the night before he was executed at the Tower of London.
When I first read it, I just bawled. I just cried.
What does it say?
He gives his love to his wife.
And he signs off at the end of the third page, then he starts a fourth page
because I guess it wasn't enough, what he had written, so...
There's just a lot of love and I get a sense that he was at peace when he went to his death.
Obviously, he would have liked to see his family again
but it wasn't to be, so...
It's really odd because it's a big piece of trivia.
"Who's the last person executed in the Tower of London?"
You type Josef's name into Google and that's the question that comes up.
It's a piece of trivia for most people and, for me, it's not.
He was my grandfather. He ended up being executed far from his family,
unable to say his last goodbyes.
As a historian, one always tries to be objective, impartial.
But this has really turned things on its head for me because...
it really brings home that he was a family man
and, essentially, what happened is he left his family one day and never came back.
The execution of Josef Jakobs
ended 900 years of bloody history at the Tower of London.
Throughout that time, the Tower has been used to imprison,
torture and execute those who threaten the state,
whether with religious ideas,
gunpowder or even weather forecasts.
And with the Tower having being brought out of retirement before,
who's to say that, in the future, it may not swing into action once again?
Ripped & Corrected By mstoll May 2017
Ripped & Corrected By mstoll Released on www.Addic7ed.com