During the late reigns there is little that calls for record in the history of the Tower: happy is the land that has no history. But for the fire in 1841, which destroyed the ugly old Armoury of William III.’s time, and the dastardly attempt made in 1885 to blow up the White Tower, no events of much interest have happened. The old fortress, however, has undergone much structural alterations and needed restoration, in which, although great mistakes have been made, as must inevitably be the case when such a group of old buildings as those in the Tower are touched, the result, on the whole, has benefited the appearance of the fortress, and above all, aided the preservation for future ages of the noblest and most historical group of buildings that exists in our land. May they endure: may they be venerated by future generations of our race as they deserve to be.
The following narratives concern the two events just named.
On the night of Saturday, the 30th of October 1841, the great Armoury, or storehouse, to the east of St Peter’s Chapel, was completely gutted. The fire broke out in the Bowyer Tower, which abutted on the Armoury; an overheated flue in a stove is supposed to have been the cause. The Armoury had been commenced in the reign of James II. and completed in the reign of William and Mary, to whom, when it was finished, a banquet had been given in the great hall of the building. This hall, which occupied the whole length of the first floor, was afterwards used as a storehouse for small arms, 150,000 stands of which were destroyed by the fire; besides these, were numbers of cannon and trophies taken in the field. The loss caused by the conflagration was estimated at £200,000. The Regalia was saved from the Martin Tower by one of the superintendents of the Metropolitan police, named Pierce, an incident of bravery which Cruikshank perpetuated in one of his finest etchings. Accompanied by the Keeper of the Jewels and his wife, Pierce, with some other officials, broke the bars of the cage behind which the Royal jewels were kept, with crowbars, and then at great personal risk he managed to squeeze himself through the narrow opening thus made, handing out the crown, orb, and sceptre to those outside. The silver font was too large to pass through the opening, and it was necessary to break away another bar of the grating. Repeated cries from the outside now warned the party to leave the Jewel Room, as the fire was rapidly gaining upon the tower, but Pierce remained until he had secured the whole of the Regalia. The heat inside was so intense that some of the cloth upon which the Crown jewels rested was charred. “Some public reward to Mr Pierce,” writes Chamber, in his “Book of Days,” “who had so gallantly imperilled himself to save the Regalia of the United Kingdom, would have been a fitting tribute to his bravery. But no such recompense was ever bestowed.”
A contemporary account of the disaster in George Cruikshank’s Omnibus, edited by Laman Blanchard, gives the following description of the destruction of the Armoury:—“There stood the keeper himself, his wife at his side, partaking the peril; and the warders whom he had summoned to the rescue. We must, however, pourtray the stifling heat and smoke; the clamour of the soldiers outside the closed portal, which the fires of the Armoury were striving to reach; nor the roar of the still excluded flames, the clang of the pumps, the hissing of the water-pipes, the gathering feet and voices of the multitude. They are beyond the pencil. The pressure from without increased. Again the clamours rose high, and the furnace heat rose higher. But the keeper abided his time—the crowbars were raised in a dozen hands awaiting his word. It was given! The first blow since the days of King Charles descended on the iron fence; and Queen Victoria’s crown safely deposited in its case, and sheltered therein from smoke and flame, and the common gaze, was removed to the Governor’s house. Orbs, diadems, and sceptres—dishes, flagons, and chalices—the services of court and of church, of altar and of banquet, were sent forth in the care of many a sturdy warder, gallant John Lund being the leader. The huge baptismal font, soon to be called into use for the Prince of Wales, was last removed. The Jewel Room was as bare as if Blood the First had left nought behind him for Blood the Second. How must the spectators have gazed on the bright procession, as from window, and roof, and turret, the Armoury blazed out upon it!... Next in sublimity to the spectacle of the blazing pile, was the scene afterwards presented, when, as the fire lessened, and the smoke cleared off, the whole space of the enormous armoury was opened to the straining eye—a sight of awe and wonder. Above was the sky of a November morn, and below, covering the immense sweep of the floor, heaps of fused metal, of dimensions scarce to be credited, with bayonet points bristling up everywhere, close-set and countless, like long blades of grass.”
The buildings destroyed in the fire were the Armoury, a hideous William III. building, the upper part of the Bowyer or Chevener Tower, which was also hideous and modern. The only relic of much interest destroyed in the Armoury was the wheel of Nelson’s ship Victory; the arms destroyed were modern, and were all soon replaced.
The present Gothic barracks were built upon the site of the Armoury, and were opened in some state in 1845 by the great Duke of Wellington, who was then Constable of the Tower. These barracks, which were completed in 1849, were named after the Duke; they are loopholed for musketry, and will hold 1000 men. North-east of the White Tower is a modern castellated building which is used by the officers of the garrison; further to the south-east are the Ordnance Office and Storehouses. The area of the Tower within the walls is twelve acres and a few poles, and the circuit outside the moat is one thousand and fifty yards.
Three explosions took place in London on Saturday, the 24th of January 1885, during what the Irish Fenians called the “Dynamite War.” Two of these occurred in the Houses of Parliament, the third in the White Tower.
The mine, or rather, infernal machine, was laid in the Armoury, and was placed between the stands of arms in the Banqueting Room, both that chamber and the Council Room being injured by the explosion.
Saturday being one of the days upon which the Tower is free to visitors, the old building was full of people, the Banqueting Room being well filled with women and children when the explosion took place, at two o’clock—the same time as that at which the explosion at the House of Parliament occurred. The cries of the people in the room were most distressing, and immediately the charge exploded, the Banqueting Room was ablaze, the flames communicating themselves to the floor above. Since the fire in the Tower in 1841, a fire brigade had been stationed in the building, and numerous fire extinguishers, such as small manuals and hydrants, were kept in readiness, and although two of the London fire brigades were telephoned for, the military, with the aid of hoses and hydrants, had already checked the spreading of the flames. The actual amount of damage done, happily, fell far short of what might have been expected, considering the force of the explosion, and the great age of the building attacked. The windows and casements were nearly all blown out, the flagstaff at the top of the White Tower was blown away, the floor was burnt, and the face of the clock was damaged; and this was the extent of the hurt caused by the dastardly attempt to wreck the White Tower. The report of the explosion is described as being like the firing of a heavy piece of artillery, being followed by a flame of fire that rose up through the open well that communicates between the second and third floors in the centre of the two halls. This flame was immediately succeeded by a shivering of all the glass in the windows, the crashing of the woodwork, and the falling of hundreds of rifles from the armoury racks, while a dense cloud of dust darkened the interior of the building, and made it impossible for the visitors or officials to discover where the explosion had occurred. A wild panic ensued, and as the dust gradually cleared away, the people rushed in a wild helter-skelter down the staircase, and poured out of the Tower. Meanwhile, the warders and police arrived to the succour of the injured, whom they had to draw out from beneath the wreckage. Directly after the explosion the bugles sounded the assembly, and the Grenadiers, who formed the garrison, turned out. Lord Chelmsford, the Lieutenant of the Tower, and General Milman, its Major, caused flying sentries to be posted at every avenue and point of egress admitting to the Tower. Orders were given to close the gates, and no one was to be allowed to leave the fortress under any pretext. The perpetrator of the outrage was a scoundrel, who, two years before, had been concerned in the outrage of a similar nature on the Underground Railway, when bombs had been placed at Charing Cross and Praed Street stations. He was sentenced to fourteen years’ penal servitude with hard labour, and was released in the month of March 1899. That the White Tower escaped, and the people in it, with so little injury, was a miracle, for the charge of dynamite was a strong one.
Crime, like history, repeats itself. Amongst the manuscripts kept at Hatfield House is the following declaration:—
“1593–4 Feb. 6. John Danyell, Irishman, came to me, Richard Young, the 6th day of February 1593, and gave me to understand of a plot that is pretended for the firing of the Tower—viz. that there is a vault wherein brimstone doth lie, and there is gunpowder under it. And he says that there is a trap door that doth stand much open, and is purposed that two men like labourers shall come in as though they were workmen in the Tower, and shall cast certain balls into the vault where the brimstone lieth, and in a short time it will take fire and consume all.”
From this it will be seen that the intention of one criminal in the reign of Queen Elizabeth was carried out by another nearly three hundred years later, in the reign of Queen Victoria.