Flodden Field, and was now seventy-four years of age, was, with the Earl of Surrey, imprisoned in the Tower. Surrey, tried by jury in January 1547, on the 19th of the month was led out of the Tower gate to execution on Tower Hill. Thus was sent to death England’s first writer of blank verse and one of her most excellent poets. “Surrey’s instinct for prosody was phenomenal,” says Mr. Edmund Gosse, and “he at once transplanted blank verse from a soil in which it could never flourish [it had recently been invented in Italy], to one in which it would take root and spread in full luxuriance.” Yet the sweet singer who lit the torch that was handed on to Shakespeare was brought to the block with the tyrant and the malefactor. Norfolk would have shared a like fate, had not the King himself died a few hours before the time appointed for the Duke’s removal to Tower Hill. He was set free when Mary came to reign, and died in his own home in 1554 at the good old age of eighty-one.
Young Edward VI. was brought up to the Tower with great ceremony, and began his reign when but a boy of ten. In the Tower he was made a knight, and rejoicings in anticipation of his coronation made the old walls ring again to gladness. The State procession from the Tower to the Abbey was conceived and carried through in a spirit of regal magnificence, and from Eastcheap to Westminster the streets were bedecked in a manner expressive of the joy of the people that Henry’s reign of terror had ended. The boy King had not long been on the throne, when, under the guidance of Protector Somerset, in whose hands was all the power of an actual ruler, bloodshed began afresh. Thomas, Lord Seymour, brother of Somerset and uncle of the King, was immured in the Tower, and, accused of ambitious practices, beheaded on Tower Hill on March 20, 1549. This act brought down the rage of the populace upon Somerset, who was already unpopular by reason of his seizure of Church property. By his ill-gotten gains he had built the magnificent Somerset House, and in order to clear the ground for it he had demolished a church and scattered the human remains found there—an act of desecration that the citizens regarded as a crime. The Earl of Warwick headed the opposition, seized the Tower, and the Protector was lodged in the Beauchamp Tower. Later, however, he was pardoned, and the young King records in his diary that “My Lorde Somerset was delivered of his bondes and came to Court.” But the feud soon came to a head again, and in 1551 Somerset was shut up in the Tower once more, and his wife with him, on a charge of high treason. He was taken, by water, to his trial at Westminster Hall, where he was “acquitted of high treason,” but condemned “of treason feloniouse and adjudged to be hanged.” The King, who appears to have written a full account of events in his diary, notes that “he departed without the axe of the Tower. The people knowing not the matter shrieked half-a-dozen times so loude that from the halle dore it was heard at Charing Crosse plainely, and rumours went that he was quitte of all.” But, far from being “quitte of all” he was conveyed back to the Tower, and while some maintained that he was to be set at liberty, others with equal heat asserted that he was to die speedily. The dispute was set at rest by his execution on Tower Hill, “at eight of ye clok in the morning.” The boy Edward seems to have had some of the callousness of his father in his nature, for he signed the death warrants of both his uncles with calmness, and in his commentary on their executions he betrays no emotion whatever, taking it all as very commonplace happening. “The Duke of Somerset had his head cut off upon Touer Hill” is the entry in the royal manuscript book. At the time of the Protector’s committal to the Tower there came with him, as prisoners, his supporters the Earl of Arundel, Lords Grey and Paget; also Sir Thomas Arundel, Sir Ralph Vane, Sir Miles Partridge and Sir Michael Stanhope—these latter being executed. Edward’s short reign of six years had seen as many noble lives sacrificed as any six years of his father’s reign had seen, and with the Queen who succeeded him the tale of bloodshed was not less full of sudden tragedy.
Mary Tudor was preceded by the nine-days’ “Queen,” Lady Jane Grey, who had been named his successor by the dying Edward, at the instigation of the Duke of Northumberland. Lady Jane had been wedded to Northumberland’s fourth son, Lord Guildford Dudley; she was only sixteen years old; she began and ended her “reign” in the Tower, to which she was conveyed by her father-in-law, who was keeping Edward’s death secret until his plans were complete. But Mary had been proclaimed without the Tower if Lady Jane had been proclaimed within. The weaker was pitted against the stronger, and Northumberland, whom we hear of at Cambridge trying to go over to the side of the stronger by shouting “God save Queen Mary!” in the public highway, was arrested in spite of his proper sentiments and was brought prisoner to London and lodged within the Tower, where only a few weeks before he had been in command. He suffered on August 22. In the September sunshine Lady Jane was allowed to walk in the garden attached to the Lieutenant’s house, “and on the hill,” and to look out upon the river and the roofs of the city from the walk behind the battlements which connects the Beauchamp and Bell Towers. In the Beauchamp her husband was held in bondage, and there he carved the word “Jane” on the wall, where it is to be seen to this day. In October Mary was crowned, and in November a sad procession wended its way up Tower Hill, through Tower Street and Eastcheap, to the Guildhall. At the head walked the Chief Warder, carrying the axe; following, came Archbishop Cranmer, Lord Guildford Dudley, and Lady Jane Grey. At their trial they pleaded guilty to high treason, were sentenced, and returned to the Tower, the Warder’s axe showing, by the direction in which the blade pointed, what their doom was to be. To her father Lady Jane wrote, from her prison-house: “My deare father, if I may, without offence, rejoyce in my own mishaps, herein I may account myselfe blessed that washing my hands with the innocence of my fact, my guiltless bloud may cry before the Lord, Mercy to the innocent!... I have opened unto you the state wherein I presently stand, my death at hand, although to you perhaps it may seem wofull yet to me there is nothing that can bee more welcome than from this vale of misery to aspire, and that having thrown off all joy and pleasure, with Christ my Saviour, in whose steadfast faith (if it may be lawfull for the daughter so to write to her father) the Lord that hath hitherto strengthened you, soe continue to keepe you, that at the last we may meete in heaven with the Father, Sonne, and Holy Ghost.—I am, your most obedient daughter till death, Jane Dudley.” It is possible that Queen Mary might have spared the life of this sweet and gentle maid, happier in her books and her devotions than in the intrigues of State, but a rising of the men of Kent, under Wyatt, who demanded the “custody of the Tower and the Queen within it,” brought matters to a crisis. Wyatt appeared on the Southwark bank of the Thames and was fired upon from Tower walls. This is the last time in its annals that the fortress was attacked, and that it was called upon to repel an enemy. Wyatt, captured at Temple Bar after a night march from Kingston, where he had crossed the river, was soon in the Tower, and with him was led many a noble prisoner. All hope that Lady Jane would be spared had now gone. Her father was seized and brought to the Tower on February 10; her husband was seen by her on his way to death on Tower Hill on the morning of the 12th, and she looked out again upon his headless body, as it was brought back on a litter, very soon afterwards, and taken to the chapel. A contemporary chronicle describes the preparations made for her own death on that day: “There was a Scaffolde made upon the grene over against the White Tower for the saide Lady Jane to die upon.” She was led forth from her prison to the Green by Sir John Bridges, then Lieutenant, and mounted the scaffold with firm step. The hangman offered to help her to take off her gown. “She desyred him to let her alone, turning towards her two gentlewomen who helped her off therewith ... giving to her a fayre handkerchief to knytte about her eyes.... Then she sayd, ‘I pray you despatch me quickly.’ She tied the kercher about her eyes, then feeling for the block, saide, ‘What shal I do, where is it?’ One of the standers by guyding her thereunto, she layde her head downe upon the block, and stretched forth her body, and said, ‘Lord, into Thy hands I commend my spirit,’ and so she ended.” Fuller has said of this noble girl, “She had the birth of a Princess, the life of a saint, yet the death of a malefactor, for her parent’s offences, and she was longer a captive than a Queen in the Tower.” Her father and Wyatt, before many days had passed, were both beheaded on Tower Hill; many luckless ones who had taken part in the Kentish rising were put to death with every form of cruelty; and, shortly after these terrible days of bloodshed in London, Mary was married to Philip of Spain at Winchester.
Princess Elizabeth had, meanwhile, been brought to the Tower in custody, and was landed, on Palm Sunday, at Traitor’s Gate. She was closely guarded but was allowed to walk on the open passage-way, where Lady Jane Grey had paced up and down before her, which is now known as “Queen Elizabeth’s Walk.” Towards the middle of May, being set free of the Tower, she is said to have taken a meal in the London Tavern—at the corner of Mark Lane and Fenchurch Street—on her way to Woodstock. The pewter meat-dish and cover which she used are still preserved. The city churches rang joyous peals when it was known she was out of Tower walls, and to those churches that gave her welcome she presented silken bell-ropes when Queen of England.
Queen Mary’s days were darkened again by busy work for the headsman, and by religious persecution. Thomas, second son of Lord Stafford, defeated in an attempt to capture Scarborough Castle, was brought to the block on Tower Hill, and a large band of prisoners was put in Tower dungeons. To make room for these, many of the captives already there were released. Mary died on November 17, 1558, and then began to dawn those “spacious times of great Elizabeth” when England moved to greater glory than she had ever known before.
Queen Elizabeth, on her accession, came again to the Tower, spending the time until the coronation within its walls, but she had too many memories of captivity there to retain much love for the prison which had now become her palace. Seated in a golden chariot, the new Queen, ablaze with jewels, passed on her way to Westminster through a city decked out in all manner of magnificence, and through a crowd shouting themselves hoarse with delight at her coming. The Tower appears in the records of Elizabeth’s reign almost wholly as a State prison. An attempt was made to smooth out religious difficulties by committing a number of Church dignitaries to its keeping, among them the Archbishop of York, and Feckenham, Abbot of Westminster. Then came Lady Catherine Grey, Lady Jane’s sister, who had offended the Queen by marrying Lord Hertford in secret. Her husband, also, was soon afterwards a prisoner. He lay for over nine years in his cell, but was released at the end of that time, while Lady Hertford died in the Tower. The Countess of Lennox was imprisoned three times within the walls, “not for any treason, but for love matters.” Thomas Howard, son of the first Duke of Norfolk, was shut up here “for falling in love with the Countess,” and died in captivity. It is interesting to find that Cupid could forge Tower shackles as well as make a wedding ring, and that to enter his service without the Queen’s permission was almost a capital offence.
In 1562 a suspected conspiracy to set the Queen of Scots—ill-fated Mary—on the English throne was the cause of Arthur and Edmund de la Pole, great-grandchildren of the murdered Duke of Clarence, being put into the Beauchamp Tower, where, when we reach that portion of the buildings on our rounds, we shall see their inscriptions on the walls. The brothers were fated never to leave their place of confinement alive. After fourteen years of respite, Tower Hill again claimed a victim, the Duke of Norfolk suffering there in June 1579. In the following year Roman Catholic prisoners were brought, one might say in droves, to Tower cells. Many of them were subjected to torture either by the rack, the “Scavenger’s Daughter,” the thumbscrew, or the boot. In 1581 Father Campion, a Jesuit, was hurried to death, and in 1583 we hear of one captive committing suicide in order to escape the awful fate of dismemberment that many of his fellow-prisoners had suffered. It seems as if the sanity of life, the sweet wholesomeness we associate with the Merrie England of Shakespeare’s time, had not pierced the solid crust of Tower tradition. To lay down a comedy of the great dramatist and take up contemporary records of the Tower is as if one had stepped out of the warm sunshine and fragrant air of mid-June into a dark, damp vault whose atmosphere stings with the chill of a November night.
Tower dungeons were becoming too crowded. Many a poor obscure captive was sent over to France, perhaps to a harder lot, and the vacant places were filled by political offenders. Northumberland killed himself in the Tower; Arundel, made prisoner with him, died—from self-imposed privations, it is said—some months after. Sir John Perrot, Lord Deputy of Ireland, was charged with using some hasty words against the Queen, and that was considered sufficiently dire an offence for Lord Chancellor Hatton to have him brought to the Tower. But Elizabeth refused to sign the warrant for his execution. He died, in his captivity, after six months, of a broken heart. Of the imprisonment of Raleigh, and of Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex, something will be said when we come to examine those portions of the Tower with which their names are associated. With the death of Elizabeth the curtain falls on the last of the Tudors—a race of sovereigns who had used their faithful Tower well, as palace, fortress, prison, and secret place in which their enemies were put out of existence. Of many of the greater names of Elizabeth’s reign, Tower annals bear no record, but soldier, statesman, or ecclesiastic, having crossed the Queen’s humour, found it but a step from Court favour to Traitor’s Gate.
“In the grey hours of morning, March 24, 1603, watch and ward was kept in London streets; and in all the neighbour counties men who had much at stake in time of crisis wove uncertain plans to meet the thousand chances that day might bring.... When day broke two horsemen were far on the northern road, each spurring to forestall the other at Holyrood with homage impatiently expected by the first ruler of the British Isles. At a more leisurely pace the Elizabethan statesmen were riding in from Richmond, where their mistress lay dead, to Whitehall Gate, where at ten in the morning they proclaimed King James I.... The Lords of the Council showed themselves agreed that there should be no revolution. The decision was silently endorsed by a grateful nation. In city and manor-house men laid aside their arms and breathed again.” In Mr. G. M. Trevelyan’s admirable England under the Stuarts, from which these words are taken, a delightful description is given of the state of England at the coming of the King of Scotland to the English throne, and the chapters might well be read in connection with any study of Tower history. For, to understand the happenings within the Tower, it is profitable to have some detailed knowledge of the state of society outside its walls.
King James, after his progress “during a month of spring weather” from Edinburgh, came to the Tower and held his first Court there. The usual procession to the Abbey was abandoned owing to plague that lurked in city streets, and rejoicings within Tower walls were less lusty than usual, but the King rode in state from Tower Hill to Westminster two years later to open his first Parliament. It is interesting to read in Mr. Sidney Lee’s Life of Shakespeare that Shakespeare himself, with eight players of the King’s company of actors, walked “from the Tower of London to Westminster in the procession which accompanied the King in his formal entry into London.” There is no other positive record of the great dramatist and poet having visited the Tower. We can but conjecture that a building so indissolubly bound up with the nation’s history would offer no mute appeal to such a mind as his, and that he must have come, at times, to look upon the place where, down to his own day, so many tragic deeds had been done.
Early in James’s reign many eminent prisoners were brought to the Tower in connection with a plot, as the timid King thought, to place the Crown on the head of Lady Arabella Stuart, his first cousin on the mother’s side. In May 1611 Lady Arabella had married young William Seymour. This event brought both bride and bridegroom into royal disfavour. The husband was shut up in the Tower, and the wife kept in captivity at Lambeth Palace. But this did not daunt them. Lady Arabella, on being taken north on the way to Durham, pleaded illness when scarcely out of sight of London. In disguise she escaped to Blackwall and took ship at Leigh-on-Sea, there to await her husband, who had succeeded in getting out of the Tower by dressing as a labourer and following out a cart laden with wood. From the wharf, Seymour sailed to Leigh, but found that the French vessel in which his wife had sought shelter had gone down the river some hours before. He managed to cross to Ostend, but Lady Arabella was caught in mid-channel and conveyed back to Tower walls, which she never left again. In her latter years she became insane, and, dying in 1615, was buried at midnight beside Mary Queen of Scots in the Abbey. Seymour allowed unmerited punishment to fall on his young wife, remained abroad until the storm was over, married again, and lived long enough to see the Restoration. The conspiracy of 1603 had been the cause of the execution of George Brook, brother of Lord Cobham, and two priests went to death with him. Lord Cobham himself, and Lord Grey de Wilton, were brought to the steps of the scaffold not many days after, for participation in the same plot. Before the headsman had done his work a reprieve arrived, and they were sent back to their place of captivity.
In 1604 the Guy Fawkes conspiracy necessitated a fresh batch of captives being lodged in the Tower, and during our visit to the dungeons beneath the White Tower we shall learn something of their fate, and of the fate, also, of another prisoner of this period, Sir Thomas Overbury, poisoned in the Bloody Tower. Felton, the rogue responsible for the assassination of Buckingham, had bought the knife with which he did the deed on Tower Hill at a booth there. He was brought to the Tower on his arrest and confined until the day of his hanging at Tyburn. They were not always, however, political offences that filled the Tower cells at this period; a private quarrel was the cause of Lords Arundel and Spencer being given quarters in the prison, and Lord Audley was beheaded on Tower Hill in 1631 for committing crimes which were so revolting as to encourage the belief that he was insane.
With Charles I.—who did not visit the Tower, as far as is known, during his life—the number of noble prisoners by no means grows less. In November 1640 the Earl of Strafford was put in the Tower and condemned to death after trial in Westminster Hall. The King was anxious to save him; the Tower was to be seized and Strafford set at liberty; the royal plans failed; Charles forsook his favourite even after having sworn that not a hair of his head should be injured. The prisoner could anticipate but one end. “Sweet Harte,” he wrote to his wife, “it is long since I writt to you, for I am here in such trouble as gives me little or noe respett.” Archbishop Laud had also been put in the prison-fortress, and as Strafford passed down the sloping pathway that leads from Tower Green to Traitor’s Gate, on his way to execution, Laud, from the window above the arch of Bloody Tower, gave his friend his blessing. The Earl was led out to Tower Hill and suffered death there on May 12, 1641. It is said that 200,000 people witnessed the event, and that it was celebrated by the lighting of bonfires at night. The Archbishop had been arrested at Lambeth Palace and brought to the Tower by the river. He remained for four years in his room in the Bloody Tower, and in his diary describes the visit paid to him by Prynne, “who seeing me safe in bed, falls first to my pockets to rifle them” in the search for papers, which he found in plenty. “He bound up my papers, left two sentinels at my door, and went his way.” On March 10, 1643, Laud was brought to a trial in Westminster Hall which lasted twenty days. Because he had—so the charge was worded—“attempted to subvert religion and the fundamental laws of the realm,” he was condemned, and on Tower Hill, on January 10, 1645, when seventy-two years of age, beheaded. He was buried, as we shall see in a later chapter, in the church of Allhallows Barking, near by. Readers of John Inglesant will remember the vivid description given in that book of these days in the reign of the first Charles, and in the moving picture of the life of the time Laud played no inconsiderable part. “Laud,” says Bishop Collins in his exhaustive Laud Commemoration volume, “deserves to be commemorated as among other things, a true forerunner of social leaders of our own day. To him, at any rate, a man is a man, and no man can be more; the great, the rich, the educated, had no hope of favour from him; rather he reserved his mercy for the poor, the ignorant, and the lowly.... We thank God for his noble care for the poor, and his large and generous aims for the English race; for his splendid example of diligent service in Church and State; for his work as the great promoter of learning of his age.” From such an authority these words are valuable and do much to set the balance right after the splenetic outbursts of Carlyle and many a lesser writer.
August, 1642, had seen the outbreak of the Civil War; Charles was at Nottingham; the Tower was in the keeping of Parliament, and its captives were those who adhered to the King. We find a Lord Mayor of London amongst them for publishing the King’s proclamation with regard to the militia, and gallant Cavaliers in plenty filled the cells. Sir John Hotham and his son, charged with attempting to give Hull over to the Royalists while it was being held for Parliament, were brought to the Tower in 1643, and to Tower Hill in the following year. Sir Alexander Carew, Governor of Plymouth, was beheaded shortly afterwards on a similar indictment. When the King had himself suffered death at the block, in Whitehall, the Tower contained many of his supporters, and amongst those who shared their royal master’s fate were the Earl of Holland, the Duke of Hamilton, and Arthur, Lord Capel. A fine old knight of Wales, Sir John Owen, taken at the same time, and condemned to death, was, by Ireton’s intercession, pardoned, and he returned in peace to Wales. Worcester fight sent a batch of prisoners to the fortress, and in the same year (1651), a preacher at St. Lawrence Jewry, named Christopher Love, found to be in correspondence with the second Charles, was beheaded on Tower Hill. A picture of the scene on the Hill at the time of his death, engraved by a Dutchman, is one of the first drawings, after those of Strafford and Laud, of an execution on that famous spot. Lucy Barlow, mother of the Duke of Monmouth, who had been imprisoned in the Tower with her young son, was released by Cromwell after a long detention. Cromwell was, during the last years of the Protectorate, in constant fear of assassination. Miles Syndercombe, at one time in his confidence, made an attempt on his life in 1657. Having been sentenced to death, Syndercombe took fate in his own hands, terminated his life in the solitude of his cell, and the body was dragged at a horse’s tail from Tower Hill to Tyburn. Dr. John Hewitt, concerned in a rising in Kent in favour of the Restoration, was beheaded on Tower Hill with another plotter, Sir Henry Slingsley. The frequent escapes from Tower walls during the Commonwealth period would lead to the belief that the place was not guarded with the customary rigour when Cromwell was in power, but when he died the Tower became an important centre of attention. Colonel Fitz, then Lieutenant, had, so it is said, arranged to admit three hundred men of the Parliamentary army. This little negotiation was not carried to its desired conclusion, and a fresh garrison was placed in the fortress on discovery of the plot. But unrest was evident within the walls; the lack of agreement of those in charge was followed by the seizure of the Tower by General Monk in the name of Charles II. He released numbers of Cromwellian prisoners and placed a strong garrison there under Major Nicholson. During the months that passed before the return of Charles, the Tower held many important prisoners. In 1660 Colonel John Lambert was made captive for opposing Monk’s scheme for the Restoration. Pepys, who comes upon the scene to illumine the time with his detailed accounts of happenings grave and gay, gives, “as related by Rugge,” an account of Lambert’s escape. At eight of the clock at night, it appears, he slid down, by a rope tied fast to his window, and was awaited by men ready to take him off by the river. “She who made the bed being privy to his escape, that night, to blind the warder when he came to lock the chamber door, went to bed, and possessed Colonel Lambert’s place and put on his night-cap.” This interesting female was duly discovered in the morning, after having deluded the jailer by replying in a manly voice to his “good-night” the evening before, and was herself made captive for her temerity. Lambert, who had succeeded in getting to Warwickshire, was recaptured and subsequently banished.
When Charles II. came to the throne the early years of his rule were occupied in punishing, with merciless severity, all who had in any way been aiders or abettors of those responsible for his father’s tragic death. In the Restoration year the Marquis of Argyll, afterwards executed in Edinburgh, was a Tower prisoner. Poor Sir Harry Vane, not in any way convicted of complicity with the regicides, was brought to Tower Hill in 1662, and there suffered execution without a shadow of justice to cover the crime. Pepys rose “at four o’clock in the morning” of the day when Vane was to suffer. “About eleven o’clock we all went out to Tower Hill, and there, over against the scaffold, made on purpose this day, saw Sir Harry Vane brought. A very great press of people.” The people of London at that time went out to see men brought to the block, just as their successors patronise a Lord Mayor’s show. Pepys had taken a window in Trinity Square, but was unable to see the actual fall of the axe because “the scaffold was so crowded that we could not see it done.” Charles II. was the last of the kings to sleep in the Tower the night before coronation, and he, in keeping with tradition, made a number of Knights of the Bath who would, after the ceremonies in St. John’s Chapel, ride with him in the procession to Westminster on the following day. Of course Pepys had secured a window “in Corne-hill, and there we had a good room to ourselves, with wine and good cake, and saw the show very well.... Glorious was the show with gold and silver, that we were not able to look at it, our eyes at last being so much overcome,” but the volatile diarist has sufficiently recovered the power of vision to observe that “both the King and Duke of York took notice of us as they saw us at the window.” This proved to be one of the “most glorious cavalcades” that ever left the Tower.
The Great Fire of 1666 put the Tower in great danger. Had it reached the walls and set alight the stores of gunpowder lying within, we should have had very little of the work of the Conqueror and Henry III. left to us. The King himself had ordered the demolition of surrounding buildings, and by such means was the progress of the fire checked; Pepys, of course, was running about, and we hear of him “on one of the high places of the Tower” where he was able to look towards London Bridge and did see “an infinite great fire.” George Villiers, second Duke of Buckingham, began his series of five imprisonments in the Tower in 1658, during the Protectorate, and continued them well into Charles’s reign. But though constantly in trouble his offences were as constantly forgiven by the King, and he was never a captive very long. Of Colonel Blood’s escapade in 1671 something will be said in the third chapter, but the irrepressible Pepys was hunting for treasure—not Crown jewels—in 1662 when he was led to believe a sum of £7000 was “hid in the Tower.” He and assistants set to work to dig for this hidden gold, but “it raining and the work being done in the open garden” the search was abandoned. The treasure is yet undiscovered. The amazing
Pepys was himself a captive in the Tower from May 1679 to February 1680, and seems to have lived fairly well there if the account of his expenses be any criterion. William Penn was also a captive about this time, and wrote No Cross, no Crown during his imprisonment. That singular invention of Titus Oates, called the Popish Plot, sent about forty men to the block, among them William, Lord Stafford, who was executed on Tower Hill on December 29, 1680. Three years later, the Rye House Plot brought Lord William Russell and Algernon Sidney to the Tower and execution, while Essex, who had also been lodged in the dungeons, and had, like Russell and Sidney, not actually been concerned in the assassination scheme planned at Rye House, was found in his prison with his throat cut.
James II. omitted the procession from Tower to Westminster, and it has never since been observed as a necessary prelude to a king’s coronation. There is no likelihood of the custom ever being revived now that the Tower has fallen from its high estate as a royal residence. The young son of Lucy Walters, who had lived in the Tower, as we have seen, as a boy, now returned as the defeated Duke of Monmouth, beloved of the people for his handsome face, but unstable in character. He was beheaded in 1685, on Tower Hill, having been led there with difficulty through the dense crowd of citizens gathered to see him die, and to cheer him on the sad way up to the top of the hill and the scaffold. A contemporary engraving shows the excited populace packed closely together in solid ranks. Jack Ketch, the headsman, was almost torn limb from limb by the infuriated mob when he had made four ineffectual strokes on the neck of the victim and had severed the head with the fifth. The Seven Bishops came to the Martin Tower in 1688, and Judge Jeffreys, of infamous record, died in the Bloody Tower—what was the fate that lodged him in a place so appropriately named?—in 1689. King James had fled the country, and without bloodshed the great Revolution of 1688 was brought about.
Sir William Fenwick, who had been found guilty of high treason, was the only victim brought to Tower Hill during the time of William and Mary, but there were many prisoners of State in the Tower, partisans, for the most part, of the Stuarts. Charles, Lord Mohun, was made a prisoner within the walls in this reign, not for “adhering to their Majesties’ enemies” but for having killed a celebrated comedian, in a quarrel about a famous actress. In 1695 Sir Christopher Wren examined the Beauchamp and Bloody Towers, “to report what it would cost to repaire and putt them in a condition” to hold more prisoners. The Tower capacities, it is evident, were being tested to the utmost limit.
Queen Anne had some French prisoners of war immured in the Tower soon after her accession, and, in 1712, Sir Robert Walpole was nominally a captive there. I say nominally, because his apartment during his confinement from February to July was crowded by fashionable visitors whose carriages blocked the gateway at the foot of Tower Hill. We are indeed in modern times when captivity in the old fortress-prison was treated as a society function; Walpole’s rooms were, after his release, occupied—I used this milder term, as he could not, in the strict sense, be called a captive—by the Earl of Lansdowne, author of that unpresentable comedy, The Old Gallant.
With the House of Hanover the Tower records take a graver turn. Under George I. the rebellion of 1715 brought young Derwentwater, taken prisoner at Preston, to the Tower. Lord Kenmure was captured at the same time, with other Jacobite Lords, and was brought, with Derwentwater, to Tower Hill, and there, together, they were executed. Kenmure was put to death first, and all marks of his tragic end having been removed from the scaffold, Derwentwater was brought out of the house on Tower Hill (where Catherine House now stands), to suffer on the same block. The crowd in Trinity Square had been disappointed of a third victim, for Lord Nithsdale, as we shall see later, managed to escape from the Tower on the evening before. In 1722 the Jacobites plotted to seize the Tower; their plan failed; they were made prisoners there instead, and lay in the dungeons for several months. We have passed through the period of The Black Dwarf and come to the days of Waverley and the romantic “Forty-five.” In 1744 three men of a Highland regiment, which had mutinied on being ordered to Flanders after being promised that foreign service should not be required, were shot on Tower Green; others were sent to the plantations. This roused great resentment in Scotland, and prepared the way for the coming of Prince Charles Edward, who landed on the Island of Eriskay in July 1745. This young hero of incomparable song and story was, to quote Andrew Lang, “the last of a princely lineage whose annals are a world’s wonder for pity, and crime, and sorrow,” and Prince Charlie “has excelled them all in his share of the confessed yet mysterious charm of his House.” After Culloden a sad harvest was reaped on Tower Hill, and we shall hear more of the last of the Jacobites, who perished at the block for their loyalty, when we visit the scene of their sufferings.
A few political prisoners in George III.’s reign; the committal of Arthur O’Connor, one of the “United Irishmen,” in 1798; the imprisonment of Sir Francis Burdett in 1810; and the placing there of the Cato Street conspirators in 1820, brings our list of captives to a close.
In Queen Victoria’s time, on October 30, 1841, a fire occurred within the Inner Ward of the Tower, which threatened at one time during its fury to make sad havoc of surrounding buildings. The storehouse of arms which stood where the barracks are now placed, to the east of St. Peter’s Church, was gutted, and the smoke and flames were blown over towards the White Tower. Fortunately, the store alone was destroyed, and it was reported to have been ugly enough to deserve its fate. The Tower’s last trial came upon it, unawares, in January 24, 1885, when the “Fenians” laid an infernal machine in the Banqueting Room of the White Tower. The explosion that followed did considerable damage to the exhibits in the building, and many visitors were injured, but the White Tower itself, secure in its rock-like strength, was in no way the worse for what might, in more modern buildings, have rent the walls asunder.
The Gascoyne plan of 1597, reproduced at the end of this book, will show a straggling line of buildings running partly up the slope of Tower Hill and terminating in what was known as the Bulwark Gate. It was there that prisoners, with the exception, of course, of those who came by water to Traitor’s Gate, were, in Tudor times, delivered to the custodians of the Tower; and it was there, also, that all who were to be executed on Tower Hill were given by the Tower authorities into the charge of the City officials. Grass grew on the hill and its river slope in those days, and, leaving the Tower Gateway behind, one would, as it were, step into an open meadow, the declivity towards the Moat on one side and the cottages of Petty Wales on the other. The aspect of this main entrance to the Tower has been so altered that it is a little difficult nowadays to reconstruct it in imagination. The Moat made a semicircular bend where the present wooden stockade stands, and it had to be crossed at least twice—some accounts say three times—before the Byward Tower could be reached. The first drawbridge was protected by the Lion Gate; the Lion Tower stood near by to command that gate, and was surrounded by the waters of the Moat. All trace of these outer barbicans and waterways has disappeared; the Towers have been pulled down, the ditch filled up, to make the modern approach to the Wharf.
On the right, within the present wooden gateway, the unattractive erection known as the “ticket-office” occupies the site of the royal menagerie, which existed here from the days of our Norman kings to the year 1834, when it was removed to Regent’s Park, and from which the present Zoo has developed. In the time of Henry III. (1252) the Sheriffs of London were “ordered to pay fourpence a day for the maintenance of a white bear, and to provide a muzzle and chain to hold him while fishing in the Thames.” In Henry’s reign the first elephant seen in England since the time of the Romans came to the Tower menagerie, and lions and leopards followed. James I. and his friends came here frequently “to see lions and bears baited by dogs,” and in 1708 Strype, the historian, mentions “eagles, owls, and two cats of the mountain,” as occupants of the cages. In 1829, and during the last five years of its existence here, the collection consisted of lions, tigers, leopards, a jaguar, puma, ocelot, caracal, chetah, striped hyæna, hyæna dog, wolves, civet cats, grey ichneumon, paradoxurus, brown coati, racoon, and a pit of bears. The “Master of the King’s bears and apes” was an official of some importance, and received the princely salary of three halfpence a day; but this was in Plantagenet times.
Middle Tower.—The first “Tower” that the visitor of to-day passes under is called, by reason of its position at one time in the centre of the old ditch, the Middle Tower. Its great circular bastions commanded the outer drawbridge, and its gateway was defended by a double portcullis. The sharp turn in the approach—formerly a bridge, now a paved roadway—to this Tower would make it impossible to “rush” this gateway with any success. When Elizabeth returned as Queen to the Tower, which she had left, five years before, as prisoner, it was in front of this Middle Tower that she alighted from her horse and fell on her knees “to return thanks to God,” as Bishop Burnet writes, “who had delivered her from a danger so imminent, and from an escape as miraculous as that of David.”
The Moat and Byward Tower.—The bridge and causeway connecting the Middle and Byward Towers has altered little in appearance, and looks, to-day, very much as it does in Gascoyne’s plan. But the broad Moat has been drained; the water was pumped out in 1843, and the bed filled up with gravel and soil to form a drill ground. It was across that portion of the Moat lying to the north, under Tower Hill, that two attempts at escape were made in the last years of Charles I.’s reign. Monk, the future Duke of Albermarle, had been taken captive at the siege of Nantwich by Fairfax, and was a prisoner in the Tower for three years. With him were brought two fellow-prisoners, Lord Macguire and Colonel MacMahon.
They managed to escape from their cell by sawing through the door, at night, and lowered themselves from the Tower walls to the ditch by means of a rope which they had found, according to directions conveyed to them from without, inside a loaf of bread. They succeeded in swimming the Moat, but were unlucky enough to surprise a sentry, stationed near the Middle Tower, who had heard the splash they made when leaving the rope and jumping into the water. On their coming to the opposite bank they were re-taken, cast back into the prison, and shortly afterwards hanged at Tyburn. The Lieutenant of the Tower was heavily fined for “allowing the escape,” poor man! A few years afterwards, Lord Capel, made captive at the surrender of Colchester Castle, broke prison by having had tools and a rope secretly conveyed to him with instructions as to which part of the Moat he should find most shallow. With deliberation he performed all that was necessary to get himself outside the walls, but he found the depth of the ditch exceed his expectations. Attempting to wade across, he was nearly dragged under water by the weight of mud that clogged his feet, and was, at one point in his perilous progress through the water, about to call loudly for help lest he should be unable to continue the exertion necessary and so be drowned. However, cheered by friends waiting under cover of bushes on the Tower Hill bank, he came at last to firm ground. He was carried to rooms in the Temple, and from thence conveyed, some days later, to Lambeth. But the boatman who had carried the fugitive and his friends from the Temple Stairs, guessing who his passenger was, raised an alarm. Capel was discovered, put again in the Tower, and beheaded in March, 1649, beside Westminster Hall. The grim-looking Byward Tower is said to have been so named from the fact that the by-word, or password, had to be given at its gateway before admittance could be gained even to the outer ward of the fortress. On that side of it nearest the river, a postern gateway leads to a small drawbridge across the ditch. This gave access to the royal landing-place on the wharf, immediately opposite, and in this way privileged persons were able to enter the Tower without attention to those formalities necessary to gain entry to the buildings in the ordinary way. In the Byward Tower, to the right, under the archway, is the Warders’ Parlour, a finely-vaulted room, and outside its doorway we meet one or two of those Yeomen Warders, whose picturesque uniform, so closely associated with the Tower, was designed by Holbein the painter, and dates from Tudor days. These Yeomen Warders are sworn in as special constables, whose duties lie within the jurisdiction of the Tower, and they take rank with sergeant-majors in the army. When State trials were held in Westminster Hall the Yeoman Gaoler escorted the prisoner to and from the Tower, carrying the processional axe, still preserved in the King’s House here. The edge of the axe was turned towards the captive after his trial, during the sad return to the prison-house, if he had—as was nearly always the case—been condemned to die. This Yeoman still carries the historic axe in State processions, but it is now merely an emblem of a vanished power to destroy. Allied to the Warders are a body of men known as the Yeomen of the Guard, or Beefeaters, who attend on the King’s person at all his State functions, whether it be in procession or at levée. The Yeomen were first seen beyond Tower walls in the coronation procession of Henry VII. The eastern front of the Byward Tower has a quaint, old-world appearance, and has altered little since Elizabethan days.
Bell Tower.—This old Tower, at the angle of the Ballium Wall, contained at one time, within the turret still to be seen above its roof, the Tower bell, which in former days was used as an alarm signal. In the regulations of 1607 we find that “when the Tower bell doth ring at nights for the shutting in of the gates, all the prisoners, with their servants, are to withdraw themselves into their chambers, and not to goe forth that night.” The walls, built by Henry III., are of immense strength, the masonry being solid for fully ten feet above the ground. The Tower contains an upper and a lower dungeon, the former lit by comparatively modern windows, the latter still possessing narrow openings or arrow-slits. In the upper cell, the walls of which are eight feet thick, four notable prisoners were confined—Bishop Fisher and Anne Boleyn in Henry VIII.’s time, Princess Elizabeth in Mary’s reign, and Lady Arabella Stuart in the days of James I. Fisher was eighty years old when brought to linger here “in cold, in rags, and in misery.” The aged Bishop had refused to comply with the Act of Succession and acknowledge Henry supreme head of the Church of England. From this prison he wrote to Cromwell, “My dyett, also, God knoweth how slender it is at any tymes, and now in myn age my stomak may nott awaye but with a few kynd of meats, which if I want, I decay forthwith, and fall into crafs and diseases of my bodye, and kan not keep myself in health.” But no alleviation of his sufferings did he obtain, and early in the morning, when winter and spring had passed away, and slender rays of June sunshine had found entrance to his dismal dwelling-place, the Lieutenant of the Tower came to him to announce that a message from the King had arrived, and that Fisher was to suffer death that day. The Bishop took this as happy tidings, granting release from intolerable conditions of life. At nine o’clock he was carried to Little Tower Hill (towards the present Royal Mint buildings), praying as he went. On the scaffold he exclaimed, “Accedite ad eum et illuminamini, et facies vestræ non confundentur,” with hands uplifted, and, having spoken some few words to the crowd around, was repeating the words of the Thirty-first Psalm, “In thee, O Lord, have I put my trust,” when the axe fell. Into the lower dungeon Sir Thomas More was taken in the same month as Fisher (April 1534). More had been friend and companion to King Henry, and had held the office of Lord Chancellor after Wolsey. But past friendship and high services were forgotten when, with Fisher, he refused to accept the Oath in the Act of Succession, and he was committed to the Tower. For fifteen months he lay confined in this “close, filthy prison, shut up among mice and rats,” and was so weakened as to be “scarce able to stand,” when taken to the scaffold, on Tower Hill, on July 6, 1535. In Mr. Prothero’s Psalms in Human Life his last moments are thus described:—“The scaffold was unsteady, and, as he put his foot on the ladder, he said to the Lieutenant, ‘I pray thee see me safe up, and for my coming down let me shift for myself.’ After kneeling down on the scaffold and repeating the Psalm ‘Have mercy upon me, O God’ (Ps. li), which had always been his favourite prayer, he placed his head on the low log that served as a block, and received the fatal stroke.” His head was placed on London Bridge, but soon afterwards it was claimed by his devoted daughter and was buried with her at Canterbury when she died, in 1544. The bodies of Fisher and More are buried side by side, in St. Peter’s, on Tower Green, but Fisher’s remains had rested for some years in Allhallows Barking, on Tower Hill, before removal to the Tower chapel. At the entrance to the upper chamber of the Bell Tower from the passage on the wall, known as Queen Elizabeth’s Walk, there is the following inscription on the stone:—