The polar bear who lived at the Tower... along with a grumpy lion and a baboon who threw cannon balls: Britain's first (and most bizarre) zoo



Every night of the year, just before 10pm, a man wearing a crimson coat and black Tudor bonnet walks to the Bloody Tower within the Tower of London carrying a candle lantern and a bunch of large keys.



After collecting his military escort he marches to the Middle and Byward Towers and locks the great oak doors. Suddenly, as the group passes the Bloody Tower, a sentry emerges from the darkness brandishing his bayonet. 'Halt! Who comes there?' the sentry demands.



'The Keys,' the Beefeater replies. 'Whose Keys?' the soldier asks. 'Queen Elizabeth's Keys,' continues the Beefeater. 'Pass Queen Elizabeth's Keys and all is well,' concedes the sentry.



Tower of terror: Attacks by animals who lived in the Tower of London zoo were not uncommon

The Beefeater sets off again with his escort and, after receiving the salute from the waiting Guard, waves his bonnet in the air and cries out: 'God preserve Queen Elizabeth!'



This extraordinary ritual, performed by the Chief Yeoman Warder, is believed to be the oldest surviving continuous military ceremony in the world.

Performed for at least 700 years, the Ceremony of the Keys has echoed around the walls which housed the notorious prisoners the Tower has hosted through the centuries - from Walter Raleigh (who grew tobacco in the Tower gardens) to the Kray brothers (who spent a night there after failing to report for national service).



Yet less well known is the fact that for 600 years the ceremony also marked the beginning of the nightwatch over a very different type of prisoner.



Because while we may be familiar with stories of the Beefeaters and their ravens, how many of us know that the Tower was once home to an entire menagerie of exotic animals - complete with lions, a leopard, monkeys and even a polar bear?



A polar bear? At the Tower? It's a bizarre notion, I grant you. Indeed, I found the whole concept of a Tower menagerie so intriguing that I made it the basis of my latest novel - a novel which, much to my delight, was one of seven books picked for President Obama and his family to read on their recent summer holiday, and which is a surprise bestseller in America.



So how did the Tower menagerie come about - and what became of it? The first arrivals, it is thought, were three boatloads of wild beasts shipped to England from Normandy during the reign of King John (1199-1216).



One can only guess what these wild creatures might have been - but we do know that exotic animals had always been considered an appropriate gift from one ruler to another, and that over the ensuing decades four-legged sweeteners started arriving in London.



In 1235 the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II sent Henry III three leopards to mark his wedding to Eleanor of Provence, the emperor's sister. A lion was next to arrive, followed in 1252 by a polar bear (or 'white bear', as it is called in records) together with its keeper - both gifts from Haakon IV of Norway.

The Royal Menagerie: An illustratation of how the zoo within the Tower looked in 1816

The dilemma, of course, was where to house such valuable - if dangerous - royal creatures. Where better than in the country's most secure royal lodgings: the fortress by the Thames, whose mighty walls would prove the perfect enclosure.



With the animals normally locked away out of public view, one can only imagine the amazement of 13th-century Londoners whenever the muzzled and shackled polar bear would be led from the Tower and tethered to the Thames riverbank, from where it would fish for food and wash itself.



Yet if the bear was a sensation, even greater things were to come. In 1255, Louis IX of France gave Henry an African elephant, which arrived at the Tower by boat, the first of its kind in the country.



The contemporary chronicler Matthew Paris left his abbey at St Albans and travelled to London to see the spectacle. 'The beast is about ten years old, possessing a rough hide rather than fur, has small eyes at the top of its head, and eats and drinks with a trunk,' he wrote.



To accommodate the new arrival, the Sheriffs of London were asked to build and pay for a 40ft long wooden elephant house, which later found use as one of the Tower's many prison cells.



To care for the growing number of beasts at the Tower, Edward I created the official position of Master of the King's Bears and Apes - a role later renamed Keeper of the Lions and Leopards.



By the 16th century, when the collection was opened up to the public, the menagerie included several lionesses, a lion, a tiger, a lynx, a wolf, a porcupine and an eagle - with a special viewing platform later installed 'for the kinges Matie (friends) to stande on to see the Lyons lett out'.



James I, whose gifts had included a flying squirrel from Virginia, a tiger, a lioness, five camels and an elephant, was particularly devoted to his lions and even designed a bottle with a nipple with which some orphaned cubs could be fed.



The note he sent with it to the keeper read: 'I pray God your lordship an understand my description of a new engine to give a beast suck.'



The menagerie continued to expand and in 1672 Christopher Wren began supervision of a new Lion House for the keeper.



It was in the south-east corner of the Tower, and had two storeys, as well as attics and a cellar. But there was a rather troubling downside to life as keeper of the king's beasts.



Stow's Survey Of London, published in 1720, remarked that: 'The creatures have a rank smell, which hath so affected the air of the place (tho' there is a garden adjoining) that it hath much injured the health of the man that attends them, so stuffed up his head, that it affects his speech.'



Fortress: A wolf and monkey were able to do what many a man couldn't by escaping the famous walls

But still the animals came. Two ostriches were presented by the Dey of Tunis in the 18th century, again the first of their kind to be seen in Britain. In those days, it was widely believed that these giant feathered newcomers could digest iron - a theory undermined when one of the Tower's ostriches died after ingesting no fewer than 80 nails, presumably fed to it by the captivated public.



Indeed, the welfare of the Tower animals through the ages would have horrified modern naturalists. James I's Indian elephant (actually housed in St James's, rather than the Tower) was given wine daily from April to September, as it was believed it couldn't drink water at that time of year.



Small wonder, then, that by 1821 the collection had dwindled to four lions, a panther, a leopard, a tiger and a grizzly bear called Martin. All that was to dramatically change the following year when a new keeper, Alfred Cops, was appointed.



Cops was devoted to his creatures - and for the first time in the menagerie's history, he went out and actively purchased animals for it. This was much to the delight of the public, who flocked to the Tower to see what new and exotic beast he had acquired, Cops managed to build up a menagerie that contained more than 60 species and more than 280 animals.



Visitors could peer in wonder at a zebra, an alligator, a bearded griffin, a pig-faced baboon, an ocelot, kangaroos and a Bornean bear.



But the menagerie's rise in fortunes was also to prove its undoing. It soon became apparent that the Tower was no longer the right place to house the beasts. In 1830, within weeks of the death of George IV, a decision was made to give the entire collection to the Zoological Society of London, which would make space for them in Regent's Park, where the society had established its zoo.



The royal animals were transferred at the end of 1831 and the beginning of 1832, with a number going to two other zoos, leaving only Cops's privately owned creatures at the Tower.



The move was long overdue - not only for the sake of the animals' welfare, but for the public's safety, too. For much to the delight of the newspapers, who revelled in tales of the fearsome beasts of the Tower menagerie, attacks by the animals were far from uncommon.



In 1686 a lion mauled Mary Jenkinson, a Norfolk maid living with the lion keeper. It was decided to amputate her arm in order to save her life, but she died a few hours later.



In the 18th century a baboon being shipped to the Tower hurled a 9lb cannon shot at a boy-sailor and killed him. A report in 1830 told how a leopard had attacked a man employed to remove bones and waste from the menagerie's exercise yard.



Two under-keepers heard his horrified screams and came to his rescue. And then there was a seemingly ungrateful serpent, which wrapped itself around Alfred Cops's neck while he was feeding a bird to a boa constrictor in a bid to entertain tourists.



Indeed, it may well have been two final unfortunate incidents - in which a wolf escaped from the Tower, followed shortly by a monkey biting a soldier's leg - which finally led to the closure of the Tower menagerie.



By 1835, the last of Alfred Cops' collection had been rehomed, and 600 years of exotic animals at the Tower came to an end. Not, of course, that it stopped foreign powers sending the British monarchy the furry, the feathered and the long-nosed.



Gifts of live animals to the present Queen have included jaguars and sloths from Brazil in 1968, and an elephant from the Cameroon to mark her Silver Wedding Anniversary.



Now, this whole forgotten chapter is to be celebrated with a special exhibition at the Tower, called Royal Beasts, which opens in April.



Watching over the visitors will be one of its most unusual tenants - the polar bear, a sculpture of which will sit outside the Bloody Tower, where there was once direct access to the Thames.



Might not this be a fitting occasion to bring back some of the Queen's animals to their predecessor's royal lodgings?



'We talked about it with London Zoo, who do have a handling section, but the kinds of animals that you have in menageries aren't the type that can be handled,' says collections curator Dr Sally Dixon-Smith.



'They do have snakes, but with the number of people coming, it would be quite difficult.'

And there's no forgetting keeper Alfred Cops, almost being squeezed to a size zero in an instant.



Balthazar Jones And The Tower Of London Zoo, by Julia Stuart (HarperPress, £7.99). For more details on the Royal Beasts exhibition, and to book tickets, visit www.hrp.org.uk



