The Tower of London, (Vol. 1 of 2)

by Lord Ronald Sutherland Gower

Stained Glass in the Tower

Of all the richly coloured windows placed in the chapel of St John in the White Tower by Henry III. and the brilliant glass in the church of St Peter ad Vincula, very little now remains, and the only coloured glass to be found in the Tower at the present day, as it was originally placed, is in the window of a little room used as the library for the Tower warders close to the Byward Tower—this room in one respect resembles the most famous library in the world, that of the Vatican, from the fact that no books are visible, they being all put away in cupboards—and this consists only of two royal badges in coloured glass. These royal arms appear to be of the time of James I., and although they have been much restored, that containing the three feathers of the Prince of Wales retains much of its old glaze and is a good example of emblazoned glass of the period. It may possibly have been intended for the cognisance of Prince Henry, or Charles I., when Prince of Wales.

A quantity of stained glass panels were found in the crypt of St John’s Chapel, in which some interesting and valuable fragments, mostly incomplete in themselves, of heraldic glass of the sixteenth century and of small pictorial subjects, were mixed with modern and valueless glass of subordinate design. The whole was carefully examined by Messrs John Hardman, who separated the ancient from the modern glass, and using delicate leads to repair the numerous fractures of the former, and setting the various fragments in lozenges of plain glass, filled the right windows of the chapel with the following subjects:—

The first window in the south front, entering from the west, a coat of arms, with the words “Honi soit qui mal y pense” around it on the upper portion; a sepia painting in the centre, representing the Deity and two angels appearing to a priest, with flames rising from an altar. In the lower portion is another sepia painting with the Deity depicted with outstretched arms, one hand on the sun, the other on the moon, and the earth rolling in clouds at the feet. This is generally supposed to be emblematical of the Creation, but has been suggested as representative of the Saviour as the Light of the World.

The second window has a head and bust near the top, with a peculiar cap and crown. The centre is a sepia representing the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden, and the guardian angel. At the bottom there is another sepia, depicting a village upon a hill, probably a distant view of Harrow.

The third window has at the top a figure of Charles I. in sepia; in the centre a knight in armour, skirmishing, and at the bottom what appears to be a holly-bush with the letters H. R.

The fourth window has a negro’s head with a turban in the upper portion; in the centre a sepia of Esau returning from the hunt to seek Isaac’s blessing, Rebecca and Jacob being in the background. Near the bottom is another sepia of the exterior of a church, probably Dutch.

The fifth window, and the last of the series facing south, has a coat of arms and motto like those in the first window; in the centre, a sepia of the anointing of David by Samuel, and near the bottom Jehovah in clouds, with the earth and shrubs bursting forth. This is probably emblematical of the Creation.

The south-east apsidal window has the coat of arms and royal motto as before, with two smaller coats of arms and the same motto below, a royal crown and large Tudor rose being near the bottom.

The eastern window (in the centre of the apse) has a crown with fleur-de-lys and leopards at the top, and in the centre the small portcullis of John of Gaunt and the wheat-sheaf of Chester. These are by far the best heraldic devices in the whole series of windows.

The north-east window has a very imperfect coat of arms with fleur-de-lys and leopards, as well as two other coats with the royal motto. There is also a device which might be taken to represent the letter M, but which is probably the inverted water-bottles of the Hastings family. Daggers are quartered upon the other coats of arms. At the bottom of this window is a Tudor rose and several fragments of glass much confused.

The glass has been placed in the windows with great care, the subjects being made as complete as the broken fragments permitted. Each of the eight windows is ornamented with leaded borders.

CHAPTER II

THE NORMAN AND PLANTAGENET KINGS

Henry the First was the earliest of our kings to make use of the Tower as a State prison—Randulf Flambard, Bishop of Durham, having the distinction of being its first prisoner. Henry, it appears, in order to curry popularity at the beginning of his reign, had Flambard arrested, the Bishop—hated by the people for his rapacity—being accused of illegally raising the funds needed for the building of the fortress which was destined to become his prison. He was imprisoned with the King’s sanction, but nominally by the will of the House of Commons, and thus inaugurated the long line of prisoners of State which, from the reign of Henry the First until the early years of the nineteenth century, the Tower never lacked.

Flambard had been the principal minister of Henry’s predecessor, William Rufus. The Saxon chronicler, Vitalis, recounts that the Bishop was allowed while in the Tower, to keep a sumptuous table for himself and his servants, a privilege which enabled him to escape from his prison in the following manner. He obtained a rope which had been hidden in a wine cask, and after liberally regaling his keepers, whom he succeeded in fuddling with much wine, he made fast the rope to a pillar of a chamber in the White Tower, or to the bar of a window, and let himself slide down, reaching the ground in safety. It was a wonderful feat Flambard performed, for he held his pastoral staff in his hand as he descended the side of the Tower. The rope proved too short and the Bishop had a fall of several feet, but apparently without being the worse for it. A swift horse, provided by his friends, took him to the coast, whence he succeeded in reaching Normandy. Some years after his escape he returned to his see at Durham, where he completed that splendid cathedral, also building many other churches and castles, amongst the latter being Norham Castle, whose stately ruins have been sung by Sir Walter Scott.

It is uncertain whether any of the Norman kings before Stephen made the Tower a place of residence. But in 1140 that monarch, during a gloomy period of private and public affairs, retired to the Tower with a large retinue and kept his court there during Whitsuntide.

“Early in the year,” writes Freeman in his “History of the Norman Conquest,” “after Matilda’s landing, an attempt had been made to make peace. At Pentecost the King held, or tried to hold, the usual festival in London; but this time his court was held to the east and not to the west of the city, not in the hall of Rufus, but in the fortress of his father.”

The custody of the Tower appears, soon after its completion, to have been made an hereditary office, granted by the sovereign to the family of Mandeville. In this year of 1140 the Tower was in the keeping of Geoffrey, grandson of that great Geoffrey de Mandeville, who had accompanied the Conqueror to England, and who had greatly distinguished himself at the Battle of Hastings. Stephen created the grandson Earl of Essex, but being himself taken prisoner soon afterwards at the Battle of Lincoln, the Empress Matilda gained de Mandeville over to her party, during Stephen’s captivity. By a charter, dated from Oxford in 1141, Matilda confirmed the Earl in all the possessions which he had inherited, whether in lands or fortresses, the custody of the Tower being included therein, Essex being given a free hand to strengthen and fortify it. A subsequent charter of the same year gave him the special charge of the Tower, “with all lands, liveries, and customs thereto appertaining” (Dugdale’s Baronage). According to Leland, de Mandeville constantly added to the fortifications of the Tower, but when he was defeated and taken prisoner at the Battle of St Albans he was obliged to surrender the Constableship into the hands of Stephen.

In 1153 the Tower was held for the Crown by Richard de Lucy, Chief Justiciary of England, in trust for Henry, Duke of Normandy, to whom, after Stephen’s death, it reverted.

Matilda had offended the Londoners by refusing to abolish her father’s laws, and by also refusing to restore those granted by Edward the Confessor, and, rising in arms, they drove the Empress from the city. Stephen having recovered his liberty, Matilda’s power ceased shortly afterwards. After her flight the Londoners laid siege to the Tower, but it had been so strongly fortified by de Mandeville that he was not only able to defy the besiegers’ uttermost efforts to effect its capture, but was able to make a sortie as far as Fulham, where he took the Bishop of London prisoner, “as then lodged there, being of the contrary faction” (Holinshed).

It is doubtful whether Henry the First ever lived in the Tower, or whether he added to its fortifications. Thomas à Becket is supposed to have wished to have been made Constable of the fortress as well as of Rochester Castle, which latter he is known to have held.

FitzStephen, in the reign of Henry the Second, describes the “Arx Palatina” as being then, “great and strong with encircling walls rising from a deep foundation, and built with mortar tempered with the blood of beasts.” Probably the sanguinary aspect of the mortar used in the Tower buildings was owing to the use of pulverised Roman red tiles and bricks, of which a large quantity were most likely pounded into mortar.

When Richard Cœur de Lion left England for the Holy Land he entrusted the charge of guarding the Tower to Longchamp, Bishop of Ely, who was his Chancellor. This Bishop strengthened the fortress and deepened the moat. He had good reason for his work upon the fortress, for John, taking advantage of his brother’s absence, besieged the Tower; but the Bishop, thinking discretion the better part of valour, yielded up his trust without attempting to defend it, and fled for safety to Dover Castle. John made over the Tower to the confederated nobles under the Archbishop of Rouen, who occupied it until Richard’s return from the Holy Land.

In 1215, the Barons, who were then up in arms, aided by the London citizens, besieged the Tower, but although it was poorly garrisoned, their attacks were repelled. A year later, whilst the civil war was waging between John and his barons, the Tower was handed over to the French prince Louis by the rebellious nobles, who had invited him to take John’s place as King of England, but Louis does not seem to have taken kindly to the position, and speedily returned to his own land. In 1217, Henry III. was reigning in undisputed possession of the realm, and to him belongs the credit of having done more towards making the Tower worthy of a royal abode, than any of his predecessors or successors upon the English throne. The most stately of its buildings, after the Great Keep, are due to his love of art and architecture. The Royal Chapel, the Great Hall, and the Palace chambers, which he either built or decorated, are frequently mentioned in the chronicles of Henry’s reign, and were the outcome of his taste and love of magnificence.

In 1232 the Tower was given into the custody for life to the famous Hubert de Burgh, Earl of Kent. His constableship, however, was brief, he being supplanted by Peter de Roches, Bishop of Winchester, and imprisoned in the fortress he had formerly governed.

It was during the reign of Henry III. that the newly-built tower over the Traitor’s Gate twice fell. The first time this happened was on the night of St George’s Day (23rd April) in 1240, and on the same anniversary in the following year the structure again sank into the moat. According to the historian Mathew Paris, the spirit of St Thomas à Becket was the cause of both these mishaps, the Saint returning from the home of the Blessed to the rescue of his beloved and persecuted London citizens, who had looked on the ever-increasing fortifications and massive walls of the royal stronghold, with much the same distrust and irritation as the fortress of the Bastille caused the Parisians.

Four years later, the son of the great Welsh chieftain and patriot, Llewellyn, was killed whilst attempting to escape from the White Tower in a similar manner as that by which Bishop Flambard had succeeded in ending his captivity. Mathew Paris relates that the unlucky Welsh prince was discovered at the foot of the White Tower with “his head thrust in between his shoulders.” The rope by which he had hoped to escape had broken, and he had been dashed to death in the fall.

During his long and agitated reign Henry III. was frequently obliged to take shelter within the Tower from his rebellious subjects. When Simon de Montfort and the Barons rose against his rule and encamped themselves near Richmond, Henry took refuge in the Tower with his eldest son Edward’s wife, Eleanor of Provence. Edward had been fighting Llewellyn in Wales, and hearing of the dangerous situation of his wife and father, hurried back to London, throwing himself into Windsor Castle. Eleanor of Provence made an attempt to join her husband at Windsor, but the London citizens were strongly on the side of the rebels, and when the Princess’s barge reached London Bridge on its way down the river it was stopped by a rabble who pelted it with stones, mud, and rotten eggs, and heaped the foulest abuse upon its royal occupant, who was forced to take shelter once more in the Tower. Edward is believed never to have forgiven the Londoners for this treatment of his wife, and his harshness to the city during his reign was probably due to this incident.

Two years afterwards the mutinous Barons seized the Tower, which they occupied until the Battle of Evesham, in 1264, enabled Henry to return to his favourite stronghold. Once again the King was driven into war by Gilbert de Clare, Earl of Gloucester, who summoned Otho, the Papal Legate, then within the Tower, to surrender it into his hands, declaring that the Tower “was not a post to be trusted in the hands of a foreigner, much less of an ecclesiastic.” The Legate defied the Earl to do his worst, and refused to surrender either the fortress or himself into Gloucester’s keeping. This priest appears to have been not only brave, but somewhat rash, for although the city was at that time in the power of de Clare, he left the Tower when a siege was imminent, and preached a sermon at St Paul’s, inveighing against the Earl. A siege ensued, during which, according to Matthew of Westminster, a number of Jews, then within the Tower, defended one of its wards with great courage, and the King’s army arriving opportunely, the fortress was saved from falling into the hands of the Earl.

CHAPTER III

THE EDWARDS

At the close of Henry’s troubled reign we find the Tower in the keeping of the Archbishop of York, a post he held while the young King, Edward the First, was absent upon an expedition in Palestine. Although this monarch was not often at the Tower, he added to its buildings, and strengthened its fortifications, which, after the two sieges they had lately undergone, no doubt stood much in need of repair, and it was during his reign that the fortress became the recognised place of incarceration for State prisoners, and the principal prison in the realm. The dungeons beneath the White Tower were crowded with hundreds of unfortunate Jews in 1278,—a strange way, it seems, of repaying these people for the courage and loyalty some of their brethren had so recently displayed in the reign of the King’s father, in defending the same fortress against the King’s enemies. These Jews—there were some six hundred of them—were imprisoned in the Tower on the charge of clipping and defacing the coin of the realm.

The prisons were often filled after Edward’s campaigns, many captives being brought from Wales and from Scotland. Amongst the latter, after the defeat of the Scottish army at Dunbar in 1296, was King Baliol, with the Earls of Athol, Sutherland, Menteith, Ross, and others, Baliol’s son, Prince Edward, with other Scottish chiefs and knights, being added to the former batch of State prisoners in the following year.

It was in 1305 that one of the greatest heroes of that or any other period was brought a prisoner to London, and one would give much to know with any certainty whether William Wallace was imprisoned or not in the Tower, and where he spent the last days of his glorious life. But it is a matter of uncertainty whether he ever entered the walls of that fortress. He appears, when brought to London, to have been lodged in a citizen’s house in Fenchurch Street, whence he was taken to his trial at Westminster Hall; there he was impeached, and, as Holinshed has it, “condemned and thereupon hanged at Smithfield.” Had Wallace been imprisoned in the Tower, Holinshed would probably have recorded the fact. The manner of the hero’s death will ever remain a stain upon England and upon the memory of his judges. He was treated worse than a common felon; dragged in chains to the gallows, and killed with every detail of barbarous cruelty. Three other distinguished Scottish prisoners were imprisoned in the Tower in 1306, after the battle of St John’s Town, before their execution. These were the Earl of Athol, Sir Simon Fraser, and Sir Christopher Seton. Their heads were placed on the turrets of the White Tower.

Not only did the dungeons of the Tower hold the King’s enemies in this reign, but also many of his clergy and judges. Of the former was the Abbot of Westminster, with a following of eight of his monks, who were imprisoned upon the charge of having robbed the King’s Treasury to the amount of one hundred thousand pounds—a prodigious sum in those days. Among the judges imprisoned in the Tower at this time (1289) were Ralph de Hengham, Chief Justice of the King’s Bench, and the Master of the Rolls, Robert Lithbuy, with others, charged “with criminal partiality in the discharge of their offices”; they were only released after paying heavy fines.

The succeeding monarch Edward II., frequently occupied the Tower, leaving his queen and children within the fortress for safety in 1322, whilst he invaded Wales; and it was in the Tower that his eldest daughter was born—Jane of the Tower, as she was styled on account of the place of her birth. She lived to marry David Bruce and to become Queen of Scotland in 1327. During this reign the once powerful order of the Knights Templar fell into unspeakable ruin, the Tower becoming the prison of all the knights of the order who had been arrested south of the Tweed, their Grand Master dying there. Besides these there were many prisoners of note taken in Scotland and Wales, and mention is made of a woman having been imprisoned there for the first time. The lady who gained this unpleasant celebrity appears to have richly deserved her incarceration. On the occasion of a visit made to the shrine of St Thomas at Canterbury by Queen Isabella and her retinue, the royal pilgrim, on her return journey to London, was obliged to crave the hospitality of the châtelaine of Leeds Castle in Kent. Lady Badlesmere, for such was the name of the lady of the Castle, not only refused to admit the royal party, but gave orders for it to be attacked, and several of the Queen’s servants were killed. As a result of this conduct upon the part of the strong-minded Lady Badlesmere, Leeds Castle was taken, its governor hanged, and the inhospitable lady herself was conveyed to London, and occupied a prison in the Tower.

Amongst the Welsh prisoners in the Tower towards the close of Edward’s reign were the two Lords Mortimer of Wigmore and of Chirk, the former of whom, making his escape and gaining France in safety, returned at the head of an army. Edward had thrown himself into the Tower, but fled to Wales when he heard that Mortimer and the Queen—his most implacable enemy—were in arms against him. The King was captured, and soon afterwards murdered at Berkeley Castle. Meanwhile Mortimer had seized the Tower and beheaded the Bishop of Exeter, whom Edward had left in charge, had taken the keys from the Constable, Sir John Weston, and, releasing the prisoners, gave the Tower into the keeping of the citizens of London. After Edward the Second’s murder, his son, the young King Edward the Third, was kept in a state of semi-captivity in the Tower by his mother, Queen Isabella, and her paramour Mortimer. Edward, however, soon showed the strength of his character, and, after capturing Roger Mortimer and his sons at Nottingham in 1330, carried them to the Tower, where they were promptly hanged.

The French and Scottish wars waged by the third Edward brought many State prisoners to the Tower. From France came the Counts of Eu and Tankerville, taken at the close of the siege of Caen in 1346, together with three hundred burghers of that town. From Scotland came David Bruce, with a large following of his nobles, Sutherland, Carrick, Fife, Menteith, Wigton, and Douglas, captured by Percy at the Battle of Neville’s Cross in 1346. Froissart and Rymer describe the huge escort of twenty thousand armed men which guarded the captive Scottish King, mounted on a black charger, on his arrival at the Tower on 2nd January 1347, how the streets were crowded with eager sightseers, the City companies drawn up clad in their richest liveries, and Sir John Darcy, the Constable, receiving the King at the Tower gate. Bruce remained a prisoner in the fortress until he was liberated on the payment of an immense ransom, the companions of his imprisonment being the brave defender of Calais, Jean de Vienne, with twelve of its principal citizens, after the siege and capture of that city. Eleven years later, in 1358, another sovereign was a prisoner in the Tower, John, King of France, with his son Philip, remaining there for two years after the Battle of Poitiers, until the Treaty of Bretigny set them free in 1360.

A minute survey of the Tower had been made in 1336, and in the following year orders were given by Edward for repairs therein, “on account,” the King said, “of certain news which had lately come to his ears, and which sat heavy at his heart; the gates, walls, and bulwarks shall be kept with all diligence, lest they be surprised by his enemies.” He ordained that the gates of the fortress should be closed “from the setting till the rising of the sun.” But in spite of these royal commands, it appears that the Tower was allowed at this period to fall into disrepair; for, three years after these orders had been issued by Edward, we find him, on his second return from warring in France, landing secretly one November night at the Tower, and finding the place so ill-guarded that he had the Governor and some of the other officers imprisoned, amongst them being the Lord Chancellor, who combined that office with the Bishopric of Chichester. About this time Edward’s Queen, Philippa, was brought to bed of a daughter in the Tower, but the little Princess, who was named Blanche, died in her infancy, and was buried in the Abbey Church of Westminster.

CHAPTER IV

RICHARD II.

As I have pointed out in the Introduction to this book, reliable historical details regarding the Tower are very meagre up to the date of the reign of Edward III., but with the reign of Richard II. the story of the Tower becomes of interest. Holinshed describes at some length the splendours of the new King’s coronation. How the youthful monarch, who was “as beautiful as an archangel”—as the life-size portrait of Richard in Westminster Abbey proves—clad in white robes, issued from the Tower surrounded by a vast retinue of knights and nobles. He tells us of the streets through which the royal cortege took its way to the Abbey, all adorned with tapestry, the conduits running with wine, and the pageants performed in the principal thoroughfares. Shortly after this Wat Tyler’s Rebellion broke out, and the young King with his mother sought refuge in the Tower. How the revolt ended is too well known to require telling here at length—how the mob surged angrily round the fortress, “at times,” as Froissart writes, “hooting as loud as if the devils were in them,” how Lord Mayor William Walworth advised Richard to sally forth and himself attack the rebel rout while they were asleep and drunk, and how the young sovereign decided to meet them at Mile End. How during his absence some of the rioters broke into the Tower, massacred the Archbishop of Canterbury, Simon of Sudbury, who, with Sir Robert Hales and some of the courtiers, had taken refuge in the Chapel in the White Tower, and how these were butchered; of the pillage of the royal apartments and the insults which the King’s mother, the widow of the Black Prince, was compelled to endure—all this has been told scores of times since old Froissart wrote his veracious account of these violences which read like a page from the French Revolution of 1789.

Yet, often as this tale has been told, it has never been more vividly described than by the pen of George Macaulay Trevelyan, who in this, his first work, “England in the Age of Wycliffe,” has given grounds for believing that the literary mantle of his father and of his famous great-uncle has descended upon him. In this book are the following passages relating to the peasant rebellion in 1381. Of those who had taken shelter in the Tower in those days of terror, Trevelyan writes: “There was but one ark of safety, where many whose blood was sought had already taken refuge. Gower compares the Tower of London during this terrible crisis to a ship in which all those had climbed who could not live in the raging sea. It had been the King’s headquarters for the last two days. It was from the Tower steps that he had been rowed across to the conference at Rotherhithe. His mother was with him in the famous fortress, as were Treasurer Hales and Chancellor Sudbury, for whose heads the rebels clamoured; his uncle Buckingham and his young cousin Henry, who was destined to depose him; the Earls of Kent, Suffolk, and Warwick; Leg, the author of the poll-tax commission, now trembling for his life; and, last but not least, the Mayor Walworth. But the noblest among them all was the tried and faithful servant of Edward III., the Earl of Salisbury, a soldier who had shared in the early glories of the Black Prince, a diplomatist who had dictated the terms of Bretigny to the Court of France; he seems to have held aloof in his old age from the intrigues of home politics, but in the imminent danger that now threatened his country he acted a part not unworthy of the name he bore. One man was absent from this assembly of notables, who, if he had been present, would assuredly never have left the Tower alive. John of Gaunt had good reason to be thankful that, during the month when England was in the hands of those who sought his life, he was across the Border arranging a truce with the Scots.

“By the evening of Thursday, a great mob was encamped on St Catherine’s Hill, over against the Tower, clamouring for the death of the ministers who had there taken refuge. Sudbury was the principal victim whom they demanded. The most horrible of all sounds, the roar of a mob howling for blood, ever and again penetrated into the chambers of the Tower, where prelates and nobles ‘sat still with awful eye’ (Froissart). The young King, from a high turret window, watched the conflagrations reddening the heavens. In all parts of the city and suburbs, the flames shot up from the mansions of those who had displeased the people. Far away to the west, beyond the burning Savoy, fire ascended from mansions in Westminster; away to the north blazed the Treasurer’s manor at Highbury. Close beneath him lay the rebel camp, whence ominous voices now and again rose. Returning pensive and sad from these unwonted sights and sounds, the boy held counsel with the wisest of his kingdom, shut up within the same wall.”

Then follows the account of the attempted escape from the Tower of the Archbishop during the following night, or rather in the early dawn of the next day. Sudbury had resigned the Great Seal into Richard’s keeping; but this had no effect in calming the rage of the mob. In vain did the Archbishop attempt to break from his prison; but as he appeared on the Tower stairs, he was seen by the rebels from St Catherine’s Hill, and obliged to return. Trevelyan then goes on to describe the interview between Richard and his rebellious subjects at Mile End, when the young monarch conceded their demands, and granted them a general pardon. But meanwhile a great tragedy had taken place within the fortress. “The rebels,” continues Trevelyan, “broke into the Tower. Authorities differ as to the exact moment; some place it during, and some after, the conference at Mile End. But it is, unfortunately, certain that no resistance was made by the very formidable body of well-armed soldiers, who might have defended such a stronghold for many days even against a picked army. These troops were ordered, or at least permitted, by the King to let in the mob. It appears that part of the agreement with the rebels was that the Tower and the refugees it contained were to be delivered over to their wrath. The dark passages and inmost chambers of that ancient fortress were choked with the throng of ruffians, while the soldiers stood back along the walls to let them pass, and looked on helplessly at the outrages that followed. Murderers broke into strong room and bower; even the King’s bed was torn up, lest someone should be lurking in it. The unfortunate Leg, the farmer of the poll-tax, paid with his life-blood for that unprofitable speculation. A learned friar, the friend and adviser of John of Gaunt, was torn to pieces as a substitute for his patron. Though the hunt roared through every chamber, it was in the Chapel that the noblest hart lay harboured. Archbishop Sudbury had realised that he was to be sacrificed. He had been engaged, since the King started for Mile End, in preparing the Treasurer and himself for death. He had confessed Hales, and both had taken the Sacrament. He was still performing the service of the Mass, when the mob burst into the Chapel, seized him at the altar, hurried him across the moat to Tower Hill, where a vast multitude of those who had been unable to press into the fortress greeted his appearance with a savage yell. His head was struck off on the spot where so many famous men have since perished with more seemly circumstance. The Treasurer Hales suffered with him, and their two heads, mounted over London Bridge, grinned down on the bands of peasants who were still flocking into the capital from far-distant parts.”

Richard was again forced to take refuge in the Tower in 1387, in consequence of a revolt led by his uncle, the Duke of Gloucester, and other disaffected nobles, who, out of patience with the King’s misgovernment, and detesting his ministers, who had alienated Richard from the more respectable of his subjects, succeeded in depriving him of legislative power. The government of the country was placed in the hands of a commission appointed by Gloucester, whereupon Richard flew to arms and summoned a Parliament which met at Nottingham. Gloucester and his adherents took the field with an army forty thousand strong, and in an action fought between them and the King’s army at Radcot Bridge, the latter was defeated. Richard once more took shelter with his family in the Tower, the fortress being besieged soon afterwards. A truce, however, was called by the Archbishop of Canterbury, and negotiations were arranged for a meeting between the King and his nobles, of whom, after Gloucester, the Earls of Derby and Nottingham were the principal leaders. A conference was held in the Council Chamber of the White Tower, and some kind of agreement was arrived at, Richard returning to his palace at Westminster as soon as the proceedings terminated.

The King’s most unpopular ministers were impeached, some of them being executed, one of them being his greatest friend, Sir Simon Burley, a valiant soldier who had been appointed Richard’s governor by the Black Prince. Despite the tears and entreaties of Queen Anne, Burley was beheaded on Tower Hill. His death was never forgiven by the King; he had been a loyal and devoted friend and subject both to Richard’s father and to himself, and he had served with great distinction throughout the wars of Edward the Third’s reign. His execution was terribly revenged by Richard when he was able, once more, to act for himself.

Three years later, the Tower witnessed brighter scenes. Froissart tells us in his inimitable manner of a splendid tournament held in Smithfield, and commencing with a State procession which left the Tower, and in which the King, his Queen, and the whole Court presented an imposing sight. But Richard was biding his time to avenge the death of his old friend Burley, and these brave shows and festivities were only used as a cloak for designs he had meditated carrying out from the day of Burley’s execution by his rebel subjects. The time at length arrived—in 1396. His “good Queen,” Anne of Bavaria, was dead, and Richard had taken as his second wife and Queen, Isabel of France—daughter of the mad King Charles—who was lodged in the palace at the Tower until her coronation. In the following year (1397) Richard obtained his revenge.

This was a coup d’état—I have the authority of Mr Gardiner for using the French term—by which he summarily arrested his uncle Gloucester, with the Earls of Warwick and Arundel. The shrift of these enemies of the King was a short one. The Duke of Gloucester[7] was taken to the Castle of Calais, and there he died, probably by the King’s orders; the Earl of Warwick had received an invitation to meet the King at dinner at the palace of the Lord Chancellor, Edmund de Strafford, who was also Bishop of Exeter, which was in the Strand, near Temple Bar, with gardens running down to the river. When the dinner was ended, Warwick, on rising to take leave, was arrested, hurried to a barge, rowed up to the fortress, and placed in the tower which bore his family name. After a time, he was removed from the Beauchamp Tower to the castle rock of Tintagel in Cornwall, and thence to the Isle of Man, the King sparing his life, probably because of the public indignation that would have been roused by the execution of one who had, more than any other of the great nobles of his day, distinguished himself so highly in the French wars.

Arundel was brought to trial, pleading not guilty, and offering to prove his innocence of the charges brought against him by the ordeal of battle. No mercy, however, was shown him, and he was beheaded the same day that his sentence was pronounced. His death was lamented by many who knew his worth; he was a gallant soldier, and ten years before this fate befell him had commanded an English fleet which had defeated a French one. He was one of the greatest sons of the most illustrious house in the kingdom, and his prowess on land was as renowned as his success upon the sea.

On his way from the Tower to the scaffold on Tower Hill, Arundel asked that the cords with which his hands were tied might be loosened, in order that he might bestow the money he carried about him upon the people through whom he passed on his way to death. He was accompanied to the scaffold by the Earl of Nottingham, who was his son-in-law, and by Thomas Holland, the young Earl of Kent, his nephew, who apparently came to triumph over his downfall rather than to sympathise in the tragedy, for he is reported to have said to them, “It would have been more seemly of you to have absented yourselves from this scene. The time will come when as many shall marvel at your misfortunes as you do at mine,” a prophecy soon afterwards fulfilled.

Arundel’s body was buried in the Church of the Austin Friars in Broad Street in the City, a building once filled with splendid monuments to the illustrious dead, but of which no single one now remains. Among these monuments were those of Hubert de Burgh, of Edward Plantagenet, Richard the Second’s half-brother, and many others, but none more illustrious, both by birth and renown, than Richard Fitzalan, Earl of Arundel. Whatever his relatives may have felt concerning the Earl’s death, the great body of the people lamented and mourned him bitterly, regarding him as a martyr; and so much so, that they flocked in crowds to the church of Austin Friars expecting miracles to be performed at his tomb. Richard, although outwardly rejoicing at the great Earl’s death, is said to have had his nights disturbed ever after by fearful dreams, and his mind haunted by the wraith of Fitzalan.

Side of the Scaffold on Tower Hill.

After this sanguinary act of vengeance Richard seems to have lost all self-control. Mr Gardiner writes that, “It is most probable that, without being actually insane, his mind had to some extent given way.” However that may be, it is certain that after the deaths of Gloucester and Arundel, Richard knew no peace; and in three short years he, too, lay in a bloody grave.

Richard dissolved Parliament the year after the murder of Gloucester and the execution of Arundel, appointing a Committee of twelve peers and six commoners, his personal adherents, to carry on the government of the country with himself. Like the first Charles he attempted to rule the realm without a Parliament, and by this act of autocracy destroyed himself. The Duke of Norfolk and Henry of Hereford had been banished during that memorable tournament at Coventry, which Shakespeare has immortalised in his great tragedy, and during the two succeeding years Richard ruled the land, a half-crazed despot.

In 1399 Hereford, who by his father’s death, “old John of Gaunt, time-honoured Lancaster,” had become Duke of Lancaster, returned to England from his banishment, having heard that the King had seized all his father’s lands; and, in returning to claim his own, it chanced that he obtained the realm of England from his cousin Richard.

When Lancaster landed at Ravenspur in Yorkshire, Richard had betaken himself to Ireland, whence he returned in hot haste to England: he found his situation already desperate. Events moved swiftly, and on the 2nd of September 1399, Richard was taken a prisoner to London and placed in the Tower.

“Men’s eyes

Did scowl on Richard; no man cried God save him;

No joyful tongue gave him his welcome home;

But dust was thrown upon his sacred head:

Which with such gentle sorrow he shook off,

His face still combating with tears and smiles,

The badges of his grief and patience,

That had not God, for some strange purpose steel’d

The hearts of men, they must perforce have melted,

And barbarism itself have pitied him.”

The day after the gates of the fortress closed upon him, Richard’s deposition was read in Parliament. Twenty-two years had passed since he had left the Tower for his coronation, surrounded by all the pomp of this world—himself the brightest figure in a brilliant pageant; he was now throneless, a prisoner in the power of his cousin; a broken-down and prematurely aged man, although still in the prime of life.

“On St Michael’s Day (September 29) a deputation of prelates, barons, knights, and lawyers proceeded on horseback to the Tower, where they alighted; King Richard came to them in the hall (probably the Council Chamber in the White Tower) when they were assembled. He was apparelled in his robes, the crown on his head, the sceptre in his hand. Standing there alone, he then spoke: ‘I have been King of England, Duke of Aquitaine, and Lord of Ireland about twenty-two years, which royalty, lordship, sceptre, and crown I resign here to my cousin, Henry of Lancaster, and I entreat him here in presence of you all to accept this sceptre.’ He then tendered the sceptre to the Duke, who, on receiving it, handed it to the Archbishop of Canterbury. King Richard next raised the crown from off his head, and said: ‘Henry, fair cousin, and Duke of Lancaster, I present and give to you this crown and all the rights dependent on it,’ and the Duke, accepting it, delivered it also to the Archbishop.” (From “The Story of the House of Lancaster,” by G. H. Hartwright.)

After the final tragedy in Richard’s dungeon at Pomfret Castle, his corpse rested one night in the Tower, with the still beautiful face exposed, until the following day, when it was placed in St Paul’s.

Shakespeare has dealt leniently with the character of Richard of Bordeaux. Doubtless the tragedy of his life made Shakespeare kinder to his memory than was warranted by sober history, for Richard was one of the worst of our English kings. The son of the heroic Black Prince and the grandson of Edward the Third, with the blood and traditions of Richard the Lion-Hearted, Richard inherited none of their great qualities, and was content to fritter away his life in petty acts of tyranny and oppression. England had been used to victory during the great reigns of the first and third Edwards; under Richard, the only success of the national arms was the defeat of the French fleet by Arundel, and Arundel was put to death by Richard. Proud, passionate, and tyrannical, the Black Prince’s son threw away the love, respect, and loyalty which, for the sake of his father’s memory, he had possessed to the fullest upon his ascent to the throne. And although he was only thirty-four at the time of his death, he had lived long enough to see the heartfelt affection of his people turn to dislike and contempt. But the glamour of his personal beauty, combined with the tragedy of his fall, inspired the greatest of our dramatists to perpetuate his memory in a manner which will ever touch the human heart.

“Sunt lacrymae rerum, et mentem mortalia tangunt.”

CHAPTER V

THE LANCASTRIANS

Neither of the succeeding reigns—those of Henry IV. and of Henry V.—have left many traces upon the history of the Tower, although both these sovereigns occasionally lived within its walls, but in those days the fortress had become less of a Palace and more of a State prison. There was a picturesque ceremony, however, in the Tower on the eve of Henry the Fourth’s coronation, when forty-six new knights of the Order of the Bath “watched their arms” throughout the night of the 11th of October (1399) in the Chapel of the White Tower.

With Henry of Lancaster the list of State prisoners recommences; Llewellyn, a relation of Owen Glendower’s, coming there in 1402, being followed three years later by Owen’s son Griffin, and other leaders of the Welsh, taken at the battle of Usk. Nor did Henry fail to visit his wrath upon offending priests, for in 1403 the Abbot of the Friar Preachers at Winchelsea, was interned in the Tower, with other ecclesiastics, charged with intending to incite the people to rebellion, and with having written “railing rimes, malicious meters, and tauntyng verses against the King”; their literary ability brought these unlucky priests to the gallows at Tyburn. But the most important prisoner of State whom we find in the Tower in Henry’s reign, was Prince James of Scotland, the son and heir of Robert III. The young Prince, who was only nine years of age, was being sent to France to be educated, and, encountering heavy weather, was driven ashore at Flamborough Head in Yorkshire. Notwithstanding the fact that England and Scotland were then at peace, Henry seized the prince and his attendants, contrary to all the laws of justice and hospitality, imprisoning him within the Tower, together with the Earl of Orkney, who was accompanying him as his guardian. When the news reached King Robert of Scotland in 1406, he is said to have died of a broken heart, the young prince becoming de facto king of that country, but Henry still kept him a prisoner. After remaining for two years at the Tower, he was taken to Nottingham Castle, and it was not until the accession of Henry the Sixth that he regained his liberty, having been a prisoner for eighteen years.

Henry V. became King in 1412, and in the “Chronicles of London” is an account of the goodly array which accompanied the new monarch to the Tower, “and ayens hym was a gret rydynge of men of London, and brought hym to the Tower upon the Fryday, and on the morowe he rood through Chepe with a gret rought of lordes and knyghtes, the whiche he hadde newe made in the Towre on the night before, unto Westᵐʳ.”

An infamous law had been enacted against the followers of Wyckliffe in 1401, and during the hero of Agincourt’s reign the Tower was full of these persecuted people; indeed, the one great blot upon Henry’s memory is the barbarous treatment of the Lollards by the Church. Of these reformers Sir John Oldcastle (afterwards he bore the title of Lord Cobham in right of his wife) was the most distinguished. He had been one of the foremost warriors in the French campaigns, and appears in every way to have been an honour to his class. By the provisions of the iniquitous clerical decree of 1401, the Bishops were allowed a free hand in persecuting, to the death, all those who were suspected of following Wyckliffe’s teaching; all preachers of his doctrine were liable to be arrested, as well as owners of heretical books. If the doctrines were not abjured, the Church had the power of handing the culprits over to the officers of the Crown, and these, according to the legal enactment of this religious persecution, the “first legal enactment,” as J. R. Green calls it in his history, “of religious bloodshed which defiled our Statute Book,” could burn the offender alive, “on a high place before the people.”

The first martyr to suffer for the purer faith in England was a priest of Lynn, William Sautre. Oldcastle was the head of these reformers, and although a personal friend of the young King, the Bishops allowed no ties of friendship, no valiant services for his country, to weigh in his favour, or to stand between them and their prey. They demanded the body of Oldcastle, alive or dead, and Henry reluctantly, but weakly, gave up his old friend into the power of the bloodthirsty prelates, Oldcastle being taken by force in his castle of Cowling. He was brought to the Tower but succeeded in making his escape, whereupon the Lollards, encouraged by once more having their chief at their head, rose in arms. They, however, were speedily defeated and a wholesale butchery ensued, thirty-nine of the more prominent amongst them being burnt or hanged. Oldcastle was brought a second time to the Tower and did not again escape from the clutches of the priests; they had their way, and burnt the gallant old knight, hung in chains over a slow fire, on Christmas Day 1417, at Smithfield, in front of his own house. “Oldcastle died a martyr,” as Shakespeare pithily says. His life and death inspired Tennyson to write a noble poem on this heroic warrior-martyr.

It is almost as if Henry’s early death, at the age of thirty-four, came as a judgment for allowing Oldcastle to fall into the hands of the priests; and the memory of the subduer of France will ever bear the dark shadow of Oldcastle’s cruel murder. Although it would not be fair to the English clergy to compare them with their Spanish and French brothers in the matter of cruelty, they were not far behind them in their remorseless persecution of all who dared to differ from their doctrines. Until the rule of the priest was forcibly extinguished by Elizabeth’s adoption of the Reformed faith, executions and tortures which would have disgraced savages, formed part of the English Code. But in spite of the priests, the torture chamber, and the stake, the spirit of Wyckliffe and his followers was not quenched in the country; it always existed most strongly in the country towns, and when the persecution of Queen Mary and Bishop Bonner outraged the great bulk of the nation, the fires of reform, which had only smouldered, but which had never been extinguished, burst out into flame, and the hateful reign of the persecuting priest was finally and for ever overthrown.

The campaigns in France, like those in Wales and Scotland, added to the distinguished prisoners of State placed within the durance of the Tower walls by the fortune of war. Of the French came the Dukes of Bourbon and Orleans, with the Counts of Eu, Vendome, the Marshal Boucicourt, and many other knights after the Battle of Agincourt in 1415. I have made mention elsewhere of the famous imprisonment of the Duke of Orleans in the White Tower. He was released in 1440, on the payment of a ransom of fifty thousand pounds, a sum approximately ten times that of our present money value; but many of these French captives died in the Tower, among them the Duke of Bourbon and the Marshal Boucicourt.

After the death of Henry V., and during the Protectorate which governed the country during the minority of Henry VI., the young King’s guardian, the Bishop of Winchester, taking advantage of the absence of Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, the actual Protector, reinforced the garrison of the Tower, and on the Duke’s return from France refused to admit him to the fortress, with the result that the aid of Parliament had to be invoked to arrange matters between the Duke and the Bishop. Throughout Henry’s troubled reign the Tower was full of prisoners, some of them French and Scotch taken in the wars, and amongst others Owen Tudor, the father of the future Henry VII. The Duchess of Gloucester, an aunt by marriage of the King, was also imprisoned in the fortress upon the charge of witchcraft and sorcery, a circumstance of which Shakespeare made signal use in his tragedy dealing with the unfortunate Henry’s life.

In 1450, the Tower was again the scene of civil strife. In that year Jack Cade’s insurrection took place, and with that insurrection the name of one of England’s greatest nobles was connected, William de la Pole, Duke of Suffolk. The history of his family was distinguished. His father had fallen at the siege of Harfleur; his eldest brother had died on the field of Agincourt, and two others had perished in the Battle of Jargeau. The Duke himself had willingly given himself up as a hostage for his youngest brother, who had been taken prisoner in France, where, however, he had died before his ransom could be collected. Suffolk had been a Knight of the Garter for thirty years at the time of the Cade rebellion, and throughout those three decades had served the King faithfully, both at home and abroad, as he told his accusers when he was brought before the Parliament at Westminster on a charge of high treason. But he had many enemies, and these vamped up the charge of treason against him on the ridiculous ground of his having laid up provisions and military stores at Wallingford Castle, with the intention of sending them to the French. Upon this absurd charge Suffolk was committed to the Tower, but as nothing could be proved against him he was shortly afterwards released, but sentenced to be banished the country. For some unexplained reason Suffolk was intensely disliked by the people, and all the misfortunes of the time—the English defeats in France and the unpopularity of the government of the day—were laid to his account by the populace. His end was pitiful. He had taken ship at Dover to cross to Calais, but was seized on board by the captain of another vessel named Nicholas of the Tower. On hearing the name of the ship Suffolk is said to have lost all his fortitude, for it had been prophesied to him that if he “could avoid water and escape the danger of the Tower, he would be safe, and so his heart failed him.” The old prophecy came true, for shortly after his capture his head was hacked off by several strokes of a rusty sword, and his body was cast upon the beach at Dover. Thus miserably perished William de la Pole, Duke, Marquis, and Earl of Suffolk, Duke of Dreux, Earl of Pembroke, Baron de la Pole of Wingfield, and other titles and dignities.

St. Thomas’s Tower, from the Wharf.

Jack Cade’s insurrection was the beginning of a long series of civil strifes which at last broke out into the civil war that raged from 1450 to 1471; this was the War of the Roses, so called from the badges worn by the opposing factions, the Lancastrians wearing the Red, and the Yorkists the White Rose.

At the outset of the war, London was at the mercy of a riotous mob, headed by the redoubtable Cade, who had assumed the name of Mortimer. The charge of the Tower had been confided to Lord Scales and Sir Mathew Gough. Lord Saye, who was at this time Lord High Treasurer, was a prisoner in the Tower, an Order in Council having placed him there, as a means, it was hoped, of pacifying the rioters, who, however, attacked the fortress from the Southwark side of the river, aided by Cade and his followers, but retreated at nightfall across London Bridge. Scales, with the help of the Lord Mayor, made a sortie from the Tower, barricading the bridge, whilst Gough commanded the rebels’ position across the water from the battlements of the fortress. At this juncture the Archbishop of Canterbury, who had taken shelter within the Tower, called for a general amnesty, and this being granted, the rebellion died out of its own accord, Cade being captured and killed by the Sheriff of Kent, and his followers dispersed to their homes. Meanwhile the King had sunk into a state of semi-idiocy, his mind, never a strong one, having doubtless been affected by the unceasing trouble around him; besides, he was the grandson of Charles VI. of France, so that his mental condition is easily accounted for. The Duke of Somerset, grandson of John of Gaunt, now took the foremost place in the Council, but after a short period of seclusion, Henry was again able to act as King.

CHAPTER VI

THE WARS OF THE ROSES

There is much that is tedious in the accounts of the Wars of the Roses. One battle is gained by the Lancastrians, and the next by the Yorkists, this continuing for years in a see-saw fashion. At first the war was not marked by much bloodthirstiness, but after the Battle of Towton no quarter was given on either side, the prisoners being murdered in cold blood, the most conspicuous amongst them being beheaded. This summary method of disposing of the captives accounts for the small number of State prisoners in the Tower during the twenty years of internecine warfare which almost annihilated the peerage. Here are a few of the principal battles fought throughout the length and breadth of England between 1455 and 1461. In 1458 was fought the battle of St Albans, in which Somerset was defeated and slain. In 1459 Lord Audley was slain by Salisbury, who gained the Battle of Blore Heath; in 1460 the Yorkists, led by Salisbury, Warwick, and March (afterwards Edward IV.), defeated the King at Northampton and took him prisoner; in the same year Margaret’s army routed the Yorkists at Wakefield, where the Duke of York was killed, and Salisbury was beheaded at Pontefract. In 1461 the Lancastrians were defeated at the Battle of Mortimer’s Cross by Edward, the son of the Duke of York, and the future King; and in that same year the decisive Battle of Towton was also gained by him, the Lancastrian cause receiving its death-blow. Three months later, Edward was crowned by the style of Edward the Fourth, and his brothers George and Richard were made Dukes of Clarence and Gloucester respectively, whilst poor, harmless, half-witted Henry was proclaimed a traitor.

When Henry was told that he had no right to the style of King, he replied: “My father was King; his father also was King; I myself have worn the crown forty years from my cradle; you have all sworn fealty to me as your sovereign, and your fathers have done the like to mine. How, then, can my right be disputed?” “By force,” they might have replied.

Queen Margaret, an infinitely more masculine being than the poor weak King, her husband, would not give up the struggle, and even after the Battle of Towton had destroyed the cause of her house, she raised its standard in the North. Warwick crushed her army, and after the Battle of Hexham in 1471, Margaret was forced to flee with her son. She is traditionally said to have owed her escape to a robber, on whose generosity she had thrown herself. Henry, meanwhile, was led a prisoner to the Tower, being treated, by Warwick’s orders, with every indignity. His gilt spurs were struck off when he reached the fortress, and his legs tied to the stirrups of his horse, which was led round a tree in front of the Tower which then served the purpose of a pillory. Once inside his prison the fallen monarch appears to have been treated with some kind of humanity, being allowed to see some of his friends, the use of his breviary, and the company of a favourite bird and dog. His prison was in the Wakefield Tower, and in one of the chambers—now containing the Regalia—was the oratory in which tradition has it that he was murdered by Gloucester.

Later on Queen Margaret and her daughter-in-law, Lady Anne Neville, were also imprisoned in the Tower, but the Queen never saw her husband again, for although they were in the same building they were rigorously kept apart. After an imprisonment of five years, part of which was passed at Windsor, Margaret was allowed to return to her own country, on the payment of a heavy ransom, where she died in 1482.

All through the Wars of the Roses the Tower had been the scene of some important events. When in 1460 the Earls of Warwick, Salisbury, and March arrived in London from Calais, Lord Scales was in command of the Tower. Scales was Lancastrian in his politics and sympathies, and after vainly attempting to keep the three Earls from entering the city, blockaded himself within the fortress; and it was only when the news of King Henry’s having been taken prisoner came to his knowledge that Lord Scales surrendered his trust into the hands of the Yorkists.

The new King’s coronation took place on St Peter’s Day, the 29th June 1461. Edward arrived from the Palace of Sheen at Richmond three days before the ceremony, and took up his quarters in the Tower, being received at the gates of the fortress with much pomp and state. On the eve of his coronation he gave a great feast to his adherents, knighting thirty-two of them. According to the chronicler Fabyan’s account, the new Knights of the Bath “were arrayed in blue gowns with hoods and tokens of white silk upon their shoulders,” and they rode before the King in the procession which took its course from the Tower to the Abbey at Westminster. Edward soon showed his vindictive nature by imprisoning, within the Tower, as soon as he felt himself secure upon the throne, Henry Percy, the son and heir of the Duke of Northumberland. Besides Percy, Aubrey de Vere, Earl of Oxford, with his heir, were also placed in the Tower in 1462, with some other nobles and knights who had fought upon the Lancastrian side; of these Sir Thomas Tudenham and Sir William Tyrell were beheaded on Tower Hill.

King Edward’s wife, Elizabeth Woodville, passed a few days in the Tower previous to her coronation in 1465, and both the King and Queen frequently lived in the Palace of the fortress, the Queen passing the time there when Edward was occupied in putting down an insurrection in the North.

When the whirligig of events and Warwick, the “King-maker,” brought back King Henry for a brief space of power, Elizabeth Woodville fled with her children to the Sanctuary at Westminster. The “King-maker” was defeated at the Battle of Barnet in 1471, and King Henry was brought back to the Tower once more a prisoner.

It was on Easter Sunday, in the year 1471, that Henry VI. re-entered the fortress for the last time. The fatal day of Tewkesbury was his doom, and Queen Margaret must be regarded as the cause of her luckless husband’s death. Could they have changed their rôles in life, Henry would probably have died on the throne and have left sons to succeed him. At Tewkesbury, Edward, who had left the Tower in charge of Earl Rivers, his Queen’s brother, again met Queen Margaret in arms, defeating her and taking her son prisoner. The death of this her only son, slain, it is said in cold blood, by the Duke of Gloucester, for whom she had waged unceasing war against the Yorkists, destroyed her last hopes. And on the 22nd of May 1471, the day after the triumphant Edward’s return to London, her husband lay dead in the Wakefield Tower.

The manner of his death will never be known, but the crime has always been charged to Gloucester. A great authority (S. R. Gardiner) thus writes of the death of the sixth Henry: “There can be no reasonable doubt that he was murdered, and that, too, by Edward’s directions.” Of the earliest histories relating to Henry’s death there are many and contradictory accounts. According to Polydore Vergil, Hall, Fabyan, Grafton, Holinshed, the Warkworth Chronicle, de Commines, and Sandford, King Henry was murdered by Gloucester himself. Hume alone avers that “he (the King) expired in confinement, but whether he died a natural death or a violent one is uncertain.”

Thus at length the much-tried and weary King Henry of Windsor was at rest after so many sore buffetings, defeats, perils, and misfortunes; his life’s pilgrimage was at an end.

“Good night, sweet Prince;

And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest.”

Henry’s corpse was taken, according to Holinshed, “unreverently from the Tower” to St Paul’s, where it remained one night, and was next day buried at Chertsey, “without priest or clerke, torch or taper, singing or saying.” In later times Henry’s remains were re-interred at St George’s, Windsor. On the pavement to the right of the choir in that burying-place of our English kings, a flagstone bears written upon it in large letters, “King Henry VI.”

We have now arrived at the most dramatic point in the history of the Tower. After Henry’s death a very host of bloody deeds took place within the walls of the gloomy old fortress; murder succeeds to murder; and the blood of princes seems to ooze from beneath its prison doors.

The next royal victim was the King’s brother, George, Duke of Clarence, “false, perjured Clarence.” For him, however, one feels little pity, since he well merited to be called both “false” and “perjured.” The old tale of his having been drowned in a barrel of Malmsey wine has been believed these four hundred years, and, as it cannot be disproved, it will serve as well as any other. It is the mystery which surrounds these murders committed in the dark towers of the old fortress, which adds not a little to their horror. An execution in broad daylight seems, compared with the unknown manner in which a prisoner was killed in some hole and corner of a dungeon, quite a cheerful event. One shudders at the thought of the helpless victim struggling in his death agony in the arms of his murderers.

Clarence’s death took place on the 18th of February 1478, but even the place of his imprisonment is unknown. By some he is said to have been confined in the Bowyer Tower; but in Mrs Hutchinson’s Memoir she has left on record that the Bloody Tower was the scene of his murder, and as she was the daughter of Sir Allen Apsley, the Lieutenant of the Tower in Charles the First’s reign, her authority on the matter is a good one. The only contemporary, or nearly contemporary writers, in favour of the story of the Malmsey butt are Fabyan and de Commines. The former, a London citizen, writes: “The Duke of Clarence was secretly put to death and drowned in a butt of Malmsay within the Tower.” Philip de Commines considered this to be a true version of the manner of the Duke’s death. It has been suggested that Clarence was poisoned.

Edward IV., as has been said, lived a great deal in the Tower; he also increased its fortifications, and, according to Stowe’s “Survey of London,” built “a brick wall around a piece of ground on Tower Hill west from the Lion’s Tower, now called the Bulwark.” This fortification has long ago disappeared. Edward likewise, according to the same excellent authority, renewed the moat and made considerable general repairs to the buildings. He was the last of our Kings who added materially to the Tower.

With the appointment of Richard, Duke of Gloucester, to the office of Protector, after the death of Edward the Fourth, on 9th April 1483, the Tower plays a conspicuous part in the events which the next few years produced. Edward had left two sons; the elder, now Edward V., being twelve years old, his brother, Richard, Duke of York, being a year or two younger. Gloucester had the reputation of being an excellent soldier, and had not, as was the case with his brother Clarence, been disloyal to the late King. Whether he was hump-backed or whether, as some writers aver, he was scarcely less handsome than his handsome brothers, or whether one of his shoulders was higher than the other, is not of much consequence; for whether he was crooked or not in person, Gloucester was certainly crooked in character. If any faith can be put in the lineaments and expression of the human face, that of Richard, to judge by the portraits that have come down to us, was most evil. His face can be studied in the National Portrait Gallery. The close-set cruel eyes, the heavy nose, the thin white lips, the protruding jaw, are not inviting; but the expression is even more remarkable—a mixture of cunning, boundless determination, and remorseless cruelty. Gloucester possessed, writes Mr Gardiner, “a rare power of winning popular sympathy, and was most liked in Yorkshire, where he was best known. He had, however, grown up in a cruel and unscrupulous age, and had no more hesitation in clearing his way by slaughter than Edward IV. or Margaret of Anjou.” Mr Gardiner is almost apologetic for Richard’s memory; but there is a great difference, it seems to me, between being revengeful and even merciless in war, and in murdering either with one’s own hands or by those of hired assassins, one’s brother and one’s nephews. It was by shedding their blood that Richard was enabled to mount the throne which he usurped: of that there is no room for any reasonable doubt. That Shakespeare, in giving the worst character of any in his great series of historical plays to this monarch, is responsible for the popular opinion of King Richard is also indisputable, for we English take our history from these plays, and “crook-back’d” Richard will ever remain the deepest-dyed villain that ever wore the English crown. The great Duke of Marlborough confessed that all that he knew of English history had been learnt through Shakespeare’s plays, and with all truth the majority of his countrymen might say the same. It has also been said, “The youth of England take their theology from Milton and their history from Shakespeare”; and surely they might go further and fare worse.

View in the Inner Ward

It should, however, in fairness both to Richard and to Shakespeare, be remembered that the character of the Royal villain in the play was drawn by one who wrote in the days of the Tudors, and at a time when the house of Plantagenet was not in good odour with the reigning Sovereign. Richard appears in three of the dramas—in the second and third parts of King Henry VI., and as the hero or chief villain in that which bears his name when King: the important part played by the Tower in the usurper’s reign is strongly marked by the poet placing four scenes of Richard III. within or near the fortress—twice as many as occur in any other of his historical dramas.

On the 13th of June 1483, Richard had the Archbishop of York, and Morton, the Bishop of Ely, together with Lord Stanley and Lord Hastings, arrested during a Council which he had summoned in the White Tower. Without any pretence of a trial, Hastings was led out of the Council Room by the soldiery whom Richard had concealed behind the arras, and, according to Fabyan, his head was struck off on a piece of timber which lay near St Peter’s Chapel. “I will not dine till they have brought me your head,” said Richard to Hastings, as he was being led away. The three other prisoners were placed in separate dungeons, the Archbishop and Stanley being released in the following July. Another victim was required by Richard. Lord Rivers, the late King’s brother-in-law, like Hastings, had been a check upon Richard’s designs for seizing the crown, therefore Rivers was executed, as was also Sir Richard Grey. There only now remained Gloucester’s two nephews between him and the throne. At this particular time they were living with their mother, the Queen, Elizabeth Woodville, at Westminster, and it was only by the strongest persuasion, followed by threats, that the unfortunate Queen was induced to allow their uncle to take charge of them. Gloucester, having first placed the Princes in the Tower, declared them to be bastards, and as Clarence’s children were prevented by their father’s attainder from coming into the succession, Richard openly declared himself the rightful King. He even went to the length of getting a preacher named Shaw to declare to the people that he alone was the legitimate son of the Duke of York, and that his brothers, the late King and the Duke of Clarence, were not his father’s sons. Perhaps this attack on his mother’s good name was the most odious of the many infamous acts of which Richard III. was guilty. On the 25th of June 1483 Parliament declared Gloucester the lawful heir to the throne, and on the 6th of July he was crowned as Richard III. But during that summer rumours as to the death of the sons of Edward IV. began to be spread abroad, and the King’s name was linked with the report that they had met a violent death in the Bloody Tower.

In a wardrobe account for the year 1483 there is a long list of articles of dress delivered at the Tower for Richard’s coronation. Among the dresses mentioned, we find that Richard had ordered the following elaborate costume:—“To our said Soverayne Lord the King for his apparail the vigil afore the day of his most noble coronation, for to ride from his Towre of London, unto his Palays of Westminster, a doublet made of two yerds and a quarter and a half of blue clothe of gold, wrought with netts and pyne-apples, with a stomacher of the same, lined oon ell of Holland clothe, and oon ell of busk, instede of green cloth of gold, and a longe gown for to ryde in, made of eight yerds of p’pul velvet, furred with eight tymbres and a half and 13 bakks of ermyn, and 4 tymbres, 17 coombes of ermyns powdered with 3300 of powderings made of boggy shanks, and a payre of short spurs with gilt.” To describe these queerly named habits of “apparail,” such as “tymbres,” and “bakks of ermyn,” and “boggy shanks,” would require the knowledge of an antiquarian deeply versed in the costume of the Middle Ages, but this account of Richard III.’s coronation outfit proves that he, at any rate, spared no expense in the decoration of his person, whether that was deformed or not.

His coronation was one of the most splendid on record up to that period in the annals of the English sovereignty. From the Tower to the Abbey he was followed by a cortege in which rode three dukes, nine earls, and twenty-two barons, besides a host of knights and esquires, all gorgeously arrayed. After the coronation festivities were ended, Richard went to Warwick, leaving the Tower of London in the charge of Sir Robert Brackenbury. Richard is supposed to have sent Sir Robert a message, which he received whilst attending mass in the chapel of the White Tower, asking him whether he would be willing to rid the King of the Princes. Brackenbury indignantly refused to have anything to do with such villainy, whereupon Richard relieved him of his charge of the Tower, and handed it over to James Tyrell, who hired the three murderers—Dighton, Green, and Forrest—these being admitted into the prison of the Princes in the Bloody Tower at night, when the double murder was accomplished. In describing the Bloody Tower, I have given an account of the place where this deed was done and the passage through which the murderers entered the prison.

The murderers were well rewarded—Richard Tyrell being appointed Governor of the town of Guisnes near Calais, also being given lands in Wales; Green obtained the Receivership of the Isle of Wight; Forrest’s widow (so probably Forrest died soon after the crime) received a pension. Further, in order to protect all those who were concerned in the affair, Richard issued under his royal hand and seal a general pardon for all their former offences.

The innocent blood was, however, avenged in the following reign. In 1502 Tyrell was beheaded, not on the charge of murdering the Princes, but for aiding John de la Pole to make his escape; this John de la Pole was Richard’s nephew, upon whom he had settled the succession after his own death. Tyrell, it is said, confessed to the murder of the little Princes shortly before his execution. Dighton, who was hanged at Calais shortly after Tyrell’s execution, also confessed his share in the murder, and his knowledge of the bodies of the children having first been buried by a priest near the Wakefield Tower, and subsequently in some other place unknown to him.

The Wakefield Tower, time of George III.

The earliest historian who wrote an account of this double murder was the French chronicler, Philip de Commines, a contemporary of Richard III. In his Chronicles occurs this passage relating to the King: “il fist mourir ses deux nepheux, et se fist roy appellé Richard III.” Two contemporary English authors have also written to the same effect. The first of these is a Londoner named Arnold, who, in his “Chronicles of the Customs of London,” states that in the year 1484 “the two sons of Kynge Edward were put to silence.” The second is Fabyan, from whom I have already quoted in these pages. He writes, “Kynge Edward V., and his broder the Duke of York, were put under suer Kepynge within the Tower, in such wyse that they never came abrode after,” and he adds, “common fame went that Kynge Richard hadde within the Tower put unto secrete deth the two sons of his broder Edward the IV.” Sir Thomas More, in a history which he did not write himself, for it was written by Morton, the Bishop of Ely, but which More published, also asserts as a fact that the Princes were murdered. Polydore Vergil, Hall, Stowe, and Bacon have all written to similar effect.

Horace Walpole amused himself—much in the same way as did Archbishop Whateley in later days—by writing a clever skit entitled, “Historic Doubts of the Life and Reign of King Richard III.,” in which that amusing and prolific writer of gossiping letters casts doubt on the very existence of such a being as King Richard III., which, if proven, would do away with the existence of the little Princes. But I imagine that “Horry” had as firm a belief that the Princes were destroyed by their uncle in the Tower, as the Archbishop had in the existence of Napoleon.

The tragic death of the sons of the fourth Edward has been a favourite subject both with poets and painters. Two of Paul de la Roche’s finest paintings represent the brothers in the Tower, and one of Millais’ most successful and characteristic works is a group of the two boy princes standing together on the prison stairs, and seeming to listen for their murderers’ approach. And who does not recall, when thinking of that tragedy, the matchless pathos of the lines describing the scene as spoken by Tyrell in Richard III.:

“The tyrannous and bloody act is done:

The most arch deed of piteous massacre,

That ever yet this land was guilty of.

Dighton and Forrest, whom I did suborn

To do this piece of ruthless butchery,

Albeit they were flesh’d villains, bloody dogs,

Melting with tenderness and mild compassion,

Wept like two children, in their death’s sad story.

O thus, quoth Dighton, lay the gentle babes,—

Thus, thus, quoth Forrest, girdling one another

Within their alabaster innocent arms:—

Their lips were four red roses on a stalk,

Which, in their summer beauty, kissed each other.

A book of prayers on their pillow lay;

Which once, quoth Forrest, almost changed my mind;

But, O, the devil—then the villain stopp’d;

When Dighton thus told on,—We smothered

The most replenished and sweet work of nature,

That from the prime creation, e’er she fram’d.

Hence both are gone with conscience and remorse,

That could not speak; and so I left them both,

To bear the tidings to the bloody King.”

A curious event occurred to one of the State prisoners in this reign, Sir Henry Wyatt—the father of the poet, Sir Thomas Wyatt, and grandfather of the Thomas Wyatt who lost his life for the part he played in the rebellion against Mary in favour of Jane Grey—was a Lancastrian in politics, and had been imprisoned in the fortress on more than one occasion; “once,” the Wyatt papers say, “in a cold and narrow tower, where he had neither bed to lie on, nor meat for his mouth. He had starved then, had not God, who sent a crow to feed his prophet, sent this and his country’s martyr a cat both to feed and warm him. It was his own relation unto them from whom I had it. A cat came one day down into the dungeon unto him, and, as it were, offered herself unto him. He was glad of her, laid her on his bosom to warm him, and, by making much of her, won her love. After this she would come every day unto him divers times, and when she could get one, bring him a pigeon. He complained to his keeper of his cold and short fare. The answer was, ‘he durst not better it.’ ‘But,’ said Sir Henry, ‘if I can provide any, will you promise to dress it for me?’ ‘I may well enough,’ said the keeper, ‘you are safe for that matter’; and being urged again, promised him, and kept his promise; dressed for him, from time to time, such pigeons as his acater the cat provided for him. Sir Henry Wyatt, in his prosperity, for this would ever make much of cats, as other men will of their spaniels or their hounds; and perhaps you shall not find his picture any where, but like Sir Christopher Hatton, with his dog, with a cat beside him.”

Prison beneath the Wakefield Tower.

Sir Henry had the faithful cat portrayed with a pigeon in its claws offering it through the grated bars of his prison window. There is a similar story of a cat befriending Lord Southampton when a prisoner in the Tower in the reign of Elizabeth.

CHAPTER VII

THE TUDOR KINGS—HENRY VII.

When Henry Tudor, Earl of Richmond, had become Henry VII., after the battle of Bosworth, a relative calm settled over the Tower, as it did over the country generally. Not that State and ordinary prisoners ceased to enter the Tower gates, the former to die on the adjacent Hill, the latter at Tyburn, and some to be released. But we hear no more of midnight murders within its prisons, and with the baleful figure of Richard Plantagenet, such crimes ceased to cast their shadows on the scene of his many misdeeds.

The first notable State prisoner sent to the Tower by Henry VII. was Edward Plantagenet, Earl of Warwick, son of the murdered Duke of Clarence. During the reign of Richard III., Warwick had been kept under surveillance at Sheriff Hutton Castle, in Yorkshire; but Henry had him brought to the Tower for greater security. There was some reason, from Henry’s point of view, for this care; for Warwick, being descended from Clarence, the elder brother of John of Gaunt, had a better and more rightful claim to the throne than the first of the Tudors. So long as Warwick lived, Henry felt his seat insecure; and he seized the earliest opportunity for destroying him.

In 1487, Lambert Simnel, the son of an Oxford tradesman, had been declared by the Earl of Kildare and some malcontent English residents in Ireland, to be the Earl of Warwick. A conspiracy was at once formed to overthrow Henry, and a small army, partly recruited in Germany, and partly formed by Irish troops furnished by Kildare, crossed St George’s Channel. At Stoke, near Nottingham, this force encountered the Royal troops, and was completely defeated. Simnel was taken prisoner, and although the King publicly exposed his deception by showing the Earl of Warwick to the people, the Pretender was considered too insignificant for execution, and was relegated to the position of a scullion in Henry’s kitchen.

All Hallows, Barking

Warwick could in no way be considered affected by this rising, although his mere existence gave it a raison d’etre; but two years later, when Ferdinand of Spain refused to allow his daughter, Catherine of Arragon, to marry Henry’s eldest son Arthur, on the ground that the Earl of Warwick had a prior right to the crown, the King ordered a trumped-up charge to be drawn up against the unfortunate Earl, of an attempt to escape from the Tower; and on this charge he was tried, condemned, and executed on the 28th of November 1499. With him ended the line male of the House of Plantagenet.

The records of the Tower are not entirely of the sombre colour of imprisonments and executions. In the month of November 1487, we read of the pageant that took place at the coronation of Henry’s Queen, Elizabeth, the daughter of Edward IV.; their marriage united the rival factions of the White and Red Roses. A few days before her coronation at Westminster, Elizabeth had been brought to the Tower from the palace at Greenwich by water, in barges “freshely furnyshed with baners and stremers of silk, richly besene”; one barge was “a great red dragon, spowting Flamys of Fyer into the Temmys.” She landed at the Tower Wharf, where the “Kyngs Hyghnesse welcomede her in suche maner and form as was to al th’ Æstats, and other ther being present, a very good sight, and right joyous and comfortable to beholde,” as writes a chronicler of the scene. The following day the Queen, being “rially apparelde” in cloth of gold and damask, and a mantle of ermine, “her faire yelow hair hanging downe playne byhynd her Bak, with a Calle of Pypes over it, and a Serkelet of Golde richely garnyshed with precious Stonys upon her Hede,” was borne in a litter which was “coverde with Cloth of Golde of damaske, and large Pelowes of downe covered with lik Clothe of Golde,” to the Abbey, through streets hung with tapestry and lined with “the crafts in their Lyveryes,” through lines of children, “some arrayde like Angells and others lyke Vyrgyns, to singe sweete Songes as her Grace passed by” (Leland).

The most serious danger to the stability of Henry’s monarchy was the insurrection brought about by the impostor Perkin Warbeck, a man who, by some writers, is said to have been a Florentine Jew, whilst by others he is declared to have been a Fleming. Warbeck gave out that he was Richard, Duke of York, the younger son of Edward IV., and that he had not been murdered in the Tower, but had escaped. In 1491 he landed at Cork with some followers. In Ireland he was supported by Desmond, and was also assisted from Flanders by Margaret of Burgundy. Until the year 1495, when he made a descent upon England, little was heard of him. By this time Henry, owing to his avarice and tyrannical form of government, had made himself extremely unpopular, and consequently his enemies gladly availed themselves of such an opportunity, as Warbeck’s claim presented, of injuring the King. In an evil moment for himself, Sir William Stanley, who had so powerfully aided Henry in his victory at Bosworth, and who had placed the crown, taken from Richard the Third’s dead body, upon his head, and whom Henry had made his Lord Chamberlain, declared that, “if he certainly knew” Perkin Warbeck to be the son of Edward IV., he would never draw his sword or bear arms against him. He was impeached upon a charge of uttering these words, and tried by a Council summoned by the King, who was then in residence in the Tower. He was found guilty, and executed on Tower Hill.

Meanwhile Warbeck was received in Scotland as the rightful heir to the English crown, and James III. believed his story so firmly, and favoured him to such an extent, that he ordered his relative, Catherine Gordon, Lord Huntley’s daughter, to marry the Pretender. Warbeck now styled himself Richard IV., and advanced into England with an army; but at the first reverse, he fled in panic, taking refuge in Ireland. In 1497 he made a second descent upon England; but after suffering defeat, and again taking to flight, he was finally made prisoner at the Abbey of Beaulieu in the New Forest, whence he was sent to the Tower, and hanged on the 23rd November 1499.

More festivities took place in the Tower in the year 1501, when the nuptials of Henry’s eldest son, Prince Arthur, with Catherine of Arragon were solemnised there, the execution of the Earl of Warwick having at length enabled the Spanish King to give his consent to the match. The bride and bridegroom were little more than children, Arthur being fourteen, and Catherine a year older; but the marriage—that was to be so fruitful of trouble and death in the next reign—was solemnised with the greatest splendour, there being daily banquets within the walls, and daily tournaments without. In the next year, Sir James Tyrell met with his deserts for the part he had played in the murder of the little princes in the Tower, being beheaded on Tower Hill; he should have been hanged, but pleading his privilege of knighthood, he was allowed death by the axe. In 1503 Henry’s Queen gave birth to a daughter in the Tower, but soon afterwards mother and child followed each other to the grave; and when six years had passed, Henry VII. himself was taken to that stately mausoleum which he had created in the Abbey of Westminster, and Henry VIII. reigned in his stead.

CHAPTER VIII

HENRY VIII.

After succeeding to the throne, Henry VIII. passed a few tranquil days in the Tower, but his sanguinary nature soon showed itself, and his first victims were his father’s most trusted counsellors. Having formed a new Council, Henry had Sir Henry Stafford (the Duke of Buckingham’s brother), Sir Richard Empsom, and Edmund Dudley arrested, the former on some slight charge of disaffection of which he was able to clear himself, and the two others on the charge of extortion during the late reign.

Empsom and Dudley were disliked throughout the country, having been the tools of the late King’s intense avarice, which became his consuming passion towards the close of his life; both men appear to have enforced his tyrannical policy with extreme harshness. Henry VIII. benefited by his father’s miserliness, however, for the seventh Henry left the colossal sum, for those times, of one million eight hundred thousand pounds. His son, in order to obtain popularity at the beginning of his reign, gave up his father’s ministers to gratify the popular clamour against them, and although Empsom and Dudley both deserved punishment, it was deemed necessary for form’s sake not to condemn them without a specified charge. The Council was instructed, therefore, to trump up a charge of conspiracy against the King’s person; and, upon this the two men were condemned and executed upon Tower Hill.

Henry then bethought himself of marriage, and took to wife his sister-in-law, Catherine of Arragon, he being then only nineteen years of age, and Catherine five-and-twenty. For the first few years this appears to have been a happy union; but it was one much to be regretted, as it brought Mary Tudor into the world.

Henry possessed a handsome presence and a genial bluff manner, and as long as all went well with him, and his least wish was carried into instant execution, he could be amiable and even attractive. But his character was both cruel and crafty, and, in later years, these defects became more strongly marked. With old age and infirmity, he became more akin to a wild animal than to aught human; and although he was personally popular amongst the great bulk of the people, on account of his magnificence and prodigality, no greater tyrant ever sat upon the English throne.

Froude has in vain tried to whitewash Henry’s character. The early years of his reign were indeed years of promise, but Henry must be judged, not by his promise, but by his life and deeds; and the butcher of Anne Boleyn, of More and Fisher, can only be regarded as a worthy colleague of the worst tyrants that have from their height of place been the curse and bane of their subjects.

Henry, with his love of show and splendour, gave himself and Catherine a gorgeous wedding ceremony. They had held their court at the Tower previous to their nuptials, and on the 21st of June the wedding took place. Never had the English court made so magnificent a show as at this time. The costumes of the men vied in splendour with those of the women, and many of the great nobles literally bore their fortunes upon their backs. The King blazed in a habit of crimson velvet, lined with ermine and covered with diamonds, rubies, emeralds, and other gems. And as he rode through the streets, bareheaded, on a charger arrayed in damasked cloth of gold, he was surrounded and followed by a suite of knights and nobles, all in crimson velvet or scarlet cloth, Sir Thomas Brandon, the Master of the Horse, being the most splendid figure in the procession next to the King. Brandon, the chronicler tells us, was arrayed in “tissue broudered with roses of fine gold, and having a massy balderick of gold.” He led the King’s spare horse by a silken rein, “trapped barde wise, with harneis broudered with bullion golde,” and he was followed by nine children of honour, “apparelled in blewe velvet, poudered with floure delices of gold and chains of goldsmithes woorke, every one of their horses trapped with a trapper of the King’s title.”

The Queen’s cortege was no less magnificent. Catherine was seated in a chariot drawn by two white palfreys, and was attired “in white satyn embroidered, her heire hangyng downe to her backe, and on her hedde a coronall, set with many rich orient stones.” She was followed by a crowd of ladies riding white palfreys, dressed in cloth of gold and silver, these again being followed by an army of attendants.

The coronation was soon followed by executions; Henry seems to have required blood-shedding as a kind of relaxation, and to have caused it to flow with as much delight as he participated in the pomps and splendours of his regal state. His next victim, after Empson and Dudley, was Edmund de la Pole, Earl of Suffolk. Although the only crime that could be brought against him was his consanguinity to the Blood Royal of the Plantagenets, it was quite a sufficient excuse for the King, and Suffolk was beheaded in 1513. He had been born in 1464, his father being John de la Pole, Duke of Suffolk, and his mother Elizabeth Plantagenet, daughter of Richard, Duke of York, consequently he was of the Blood Royal by his mother’s side, and, through her, nephew to Edward IV. and Richard III. Edmund de la Pole had surrendered the Dukedom of Suffolk in 1493, but was attainted in 1504, imprisoned in the Tower in 1506, and executed seven years later. “Audacious, strong and prompt in council” is the character given to Suffolk by a contemporary writer. The title of Duke of Suffolk was bestowed by Henry upon his brother-in-law, Charles Brandon, who had made such a fine figure at his marriage.

Half-a-dozen years passed, and again the Tower prisons were filled, some of the prisoners there having been concerned in a City riot. With these was a Dr Bell, charged with “inflammatory and seditious preaching.” During this riot the Lieutenant of the Tower, Sir Roger Cholmondeley (whose effigy is in St Peter’s Chapel), fired the Tower guns upon the City, but the damage done by the cannonade seems to have been very slight.

In 1521 a descendant of Edward II. was brought to the fortress; this was Edward Bohun, Duke of Buckingham, who traced his descent from the grandfather of Richard II. through Anne the eldest daughter of Thomas of Woodstock. Wolsey, now all-powerful, hated Buckingham for the arrogance of his manner towards him, the Duke never troubling to conceal his contempt for the lowly born, but ambitious Cardinal. Wolsey’s opportunity for being revenged upon the nobleman for his insolence came, when some ill-guarded expressions uttered by Buckingham were repeated to him; the Duke was immediately arrested and taken to the Tower. This was on the 16th of January 1521, and on the 13th of the following month he was tried on the charge of high treason and sentenced to death. Holinshed, in his Chronicle, describes how Buckingham was taken by water from the Tower to Westminster. A barge had been furnished for the occasion with a carpet and cushions, and when the Duke was brought back from Westminster in the same manner, but with the axe’s edge turned towards him, he refused to take the seat which he had occupied on his way to his trial, saying to Sir Thomas Lovel, “When I came to Westminster I was Lord High Constable, and Duke of Buckingham, but now, poor Edward Bohun.” It is interesting to see how closely Shakespeare has followed Holinshed’s description of this episode in Buckingham’s condemnation, in his play of Henry VIII.:

Vaux.	Prepare there, the Duke is coming: see the barge be ready; And fit it with such furniture as suits The greatness of his person.
Buckingham.	Nay, Sir Nicholas, Let it alone; my state will now but mock me. When I came hither, I was Lord High Constable And Duke of Buckingham; now, poor Edward Bohun—

In Brewer’s Introduction to the third volume of “Foreign and Domestic State Papers of the Reign of Henry VIII.,” is the following interesting account of Buckingham’s trial and execution:—

“As trials for treason were conducted in those days it was little better than a question of personal credibility, assertion against assertion; and very few reasonable men could entertain doubts as to the issue. The King had already pronounced judgment, he had examined the witnesses, encouraged and read their correspondence, and expressed his belief in the Duke’s guilt. Who was to gainsay it? Who should be bold enough to assert that the King had arrived at a false conclusion, and that such manners of procedure were fatal to justice? In a court also, constituted of men who were not lawyers by profession, who had received no training for such nice questions, who understood nothing of the salutary laws of legal evidence, what hope could there be for the accused? How could he expect that protection which not only innocence but guilt had a right to demand until the charge be fairly and fully proven? The only lawyer employed was the Attorney-General, on behalf of the Crown. But in those days Attorneys-General regarded themselves as the servants of the Crown, who had to earn their wages by establishing the guilt of the prisoner. So the Lords retired, and on their return into court the sentence of each peer was taken one by one. Then said the Duke of Norfolk to the Duke of Suffolk, ‘What say you of Sir Edward, Duke of Buckingham, touching this high treason.’ ‘I say that he is guilty,’ answered the Duke, laying his hand upon his heart. Every peer made the same response; and against each of the names entered on the panel—a little scrap of dirty parchment, still preserved in the Record Office—there is to be seen to this day, in the handwriting of the Duke of Norfolk, ‘Dicit quod est culpabilis.’

“Then was the Duke brought to the bar to hear his sentence. For a few moments he was overpowered by his situation. In the extremity of his agony, he chafed and sweat violently.[8] Recovering himself after a while, he made his obeisance to the court. After a short pause, a death-like silence! ‘Sir Edward,’ said the Duke of Norfolk, ‘you hear how you be indicted of high treason, you pleaded thereto not guilty, putting yourself to the judgment of your peers, the which have found you guilty.’ Then bursting into tears (he was an old man, and had faced death unmoved in the field of Flodden), he faltered out: ‘Your sentence is, that you be led back to prison; laid on a hurdle, and so drawn to the place of execution; there to be hanged, to be cut down alive, your members cut off and cast into the fire, your bowels burnt before your eyes, your head smitten off, your body quartered and divided at the King’s will. God have mercy on your soul. Amen.’ The Duke heard this horrible sentence with proud dignity and composure. Turning to the Duke of Norfolk, he quietly replied, ‘You have said, my lord, as a traitor should be said unto; but I was never one.’ Then addressing the court, he requested that those present would pray for him, assuring them that he forgave them his death, and expressing his determination not to sue for mercy. In compliance with the custom of the time he entered his barge at Westminster stairs, and was delivered, on landing at the Temple, to Sir Nicholas Vaux and Sir William Sandys, by whom he was conducted through the city to the Tower. This was about 4 P.M. The trial had lasted some days, having commenced on a Monday, and on the following Friday (17th of May), between eleven and twelve in the forenoon, when the hills of Surrey were cloathed in their freshest verdure, and the then unoccupied banks of the Thames, steeped to the water’s edge with the tender green and delicate blossom of the white thorn, the Duke’s favourite flower, the sombre procession threaded its way through the dark passages of the Tower, and emerged upon the Green. Amidst the sobs and tears of the spectators, the Duke, led by the Sheriffs, mounted the scaffold with a firm and composed step. Turning himself to the crowd, he requested all men to pray for him, ‘trusting,’ he said, ‘to die the King’s true man; whom through his own negligence and lack of grace he had offended.’ With this brief request, he kneeled at the block. There was a sudden glimmer for an instant in the air, then a dull thud, and the head rolled heavily from the body. The headsman wiped his axe; the attendants threw a cloak over the headless trunk, to conceal the blood which streamed in a torrent over the scaffold and dripped through the platform on the grass beneath. In rough frieze, barefooted and bareheaded, six poor Augustinian friars, shouldering a rude coffin, emerged from the shuddering and receding crowd. Gathering up the remains of the once mighty Duke of Buckingham, for the King, satisfied with his condemnation, had commuted the last extremities of the sentence, they carried the corpse to the church of the Austin Friars. The Duke in his lifetime had been kind to poor religious men, and this was the last and only office they could render him.”

Queen Anne Boleyn
(From an Engraving after a portrait of the time.)

Thus closed the life of Edward Bohun, Duke of Buckingham, Earl of Hereford, Stafford, and Northampton.

Lords Montague and Abergavenny, and Sir Edward Nevil, were also committed to the Tower with Buckingham, being charged with having concealed their knowledge of his so-called treason; but they were all three liberated after an imprisonment of some months duration.

In the fifth volume of “Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic,” in the reign of Henry VIII. is the following memorandum of repairs made in the Tower during the summer of 1532:—“Work done by carpenters and taking down old timber, etc., at St Thomas’s Tower; and for alteration in the Palace.” “There has also been taken down the old timber in the four turrets of the White Tower; and the old timber of Robyn the Devil’s Tower—that is, Julius Cæsar’s Tower; and of the tower near the King’s Wardrobe. Half of the White Tower is new embattled, coped, indented, and cressed with Caen stone to the extent of 500 feet.” The return to this memorandum estimates the total expense of the alteration at £3593, 14s. 10d.

The Tower was again the scene of festivities when, in the month of May 1533, Anne Boleyn—to whom Henry had been secretly married on January 25 of the previous year—was taken there in state. Again, as five-and-twenty years previously, the old fortress put on its gala apparel and became splendid for the new Queen’s coronation. The old chronicler Hall describes the wondrous scene of “marvellous cunning pageants,” of the fountains running wine, “Apollo and the Muses, the Graces and all the Virtues, Mary, the wife of Cleophas, and her children” welcoming the beautiful Queen, coming in all the glory of youth and loveliness from Greenwich to the Tower, where she landed at “five of the clocke, where also was such a pele of gonnes as hathe not byn harde lyke a great while before, and on her landing was met by the Kyng, who received her with loving countenance, at the Posterne by the Water syde, and kyssed her.”

The next day, through streets strewn with gravel and gay with tapestry, silks, and velvets, Anne wended her triumphal way to the old Abbey at Westminster. The order of Anne’s coronation has been given at full length by Shakespeare in the scene in the Abbey in Henry VIII.:

“At length her grace, and with modest paces

Came to the altar; where she kneel’d, and saintlike

Cast her fair eyes to heaven and pray’d devoutly.

Then rose again and bow’d her to the people:

When by the Archbishop of Canterbury

She had all the royal makings of a queen;

As holy oil, Edward Confessor’s crown,

The rod, and bird of peace, and all such emblems

Laid nobly on her: which performed, the choir

With all the choicest music of the kingdom,

Together sung ‘Te Deum.’ So she parted

And with the same full state paced back again

To York Place where the feast is held.”

(Henry VIII., Act iv. scene 1.)

Three short years passed away and a pall of darkness falls over this brilliant scene, and Anne’s regal state and “royal makings of a queen” are changed to the prison and the scaffold.

In September 1533, Anne brought a daughter into the world, the future Queen Elizabeth. In the following year Parliament passed an Act of Succession, devised by Henry, by which his former marriage with Catherine of Arragon was declared to be an unlawful one, and Anne’s daughter was made successor to the Crown, thus excluding the Princess Mary from the succession. All the King’s subjects were commanded to acknowledge this new Act, but the Chancellor, Sir Thomas More, and Fisher, Bishop of Rochester, whilst willing to obey the Act as an Act of Parliament, declined to allow that the King’s marriage with the Spanish Princess was illegal. Henry, on hearing this, burst into one of his Tudor furies, and both More and Fisher were, by his orders, sent to the Tower. At the same time Henry sent Commissioners through the length and breadth of England to suppress all the religious communities that refused to obey the Act, and also those who were not willing to conform to his new Law of Succession.

Thomas Cromwell was the principal agent in carrying out Henry’s commands against the monasteries. No fitter man for the task could have been found. Risen from a humble station, Cromwell, who had been introduced to the King’s notice by Wolsey, after his patron’s fall had become private secretary to the sovereign; and in 1534 he was appointed Henry’s Vicar-General in all matters appertaining to Ecclesiastical affairs.

One of the Orders of Friars, styled Friars Observant, had openly expressed their opinion concerning Henry’s second marriage, and for this the Order was ruthlessly suppressed, many of its members being executed. The same fate befell the Carthusians, some of whom were imprisoned in the Tower for refusing to conform to the oath of this Act of Succession. The Prior of Sion Hospital was hanged as a felon, and many other priests and friars were put to death with every brutal detail appertaining to the manner of execution for high treason.

Among all these martyrs for their faith, none were more eminent for holy living than the aged prelate, John Fisher, Bishop of Rochester. He was in his seventy-ninth year when Henry ordered him to be imprisoned in the Tower; he appears to have been a frail, emaciated old man, and, to judge from the life-like drawing of him by Holbein, had the look of a man who has but a few years before him. So beloved was he in his diocese, that when the order came to remove him from his see, the whole city of Rochester turned out to bid its revered Bishop farewell. The grounds for the charge of treason that was brought against him were that he had listened to the prophecies of a woman known by the name of the “Nun of Kent”; but Henry’s real reason for ridding himself of Fisher was the Bishop’s refusal to comply with the Act of Succession. Fisher, being a fervent servant of Rome, declared that Henry’s first marriage had the sanction of the Pope, and consequently of the Church, and therefore could not be declared illegal and invalid. Neither would he acknowledge Henry’s new title of “On earth supreme Head of the Church of England,” a title assumed by the King in 1534. This combined refusal was, in the eyes of Henry and his Council, tantamount to a penal offence, and both More and Fisher were condemned and executed for denying the King’s supremacy in the State.

Fisher was imprisoned in the Bell Tower on the 21st April (1534), and in the following November an Act of Parliament declared him to be attainted of high treason, and his Bishopric to be vacant. His household goods were seized and his library, which he had intended bequeathing to his College of St John’s, Cambridge, was confiscated. In the chapel of that same College the good Bishop had prepared his tomb, which, however, was fated never to contain his shrunken frame. The aged Bishop suffered much from the cold of the winter, 1534–35, in his prison, and there is a piteous letter from him, still existing, addressed to Cromwell, in which he describes his hardships. “Furthermore,” he writes, “I byseche you to be gode, master, unto me in my necessite; for I have neither shirt nor sute, nor yett other clothes that are necessary for me to wear, but that bee ragged, and rent so shamefully. Notwithstanding I might easily suffer that, if they would keep my body warm. But 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 coafs and diseases of my bodye, and kan not keep myself in health.” He then begs Cromwell to soften the King’s heart on his behalf; he might as well have asked Cromwell to soften the nether millstone.

John Fisher. Bishop of Rochester
(From the drawing by Holbein at Windsor.)

Bishop Burnet has written that news of Fisher’s sufferings reached the ears of Pope Clement, who, “by an officious kindness to him, or rather to spite King Henry, declared him a Cardinal, and sent him a red hat. When the King heard of this, he sent to examine him about it; but he protested that he had used no endeavour to procure it, and valued it so little that, if the hat were lying at his feet, he would not take it up. It never came nearer him than Picardy, yet did this precipitate his ruin.” Henry had sworn that before the cardinal’s hat could arrive the Bishop should have no head upon which to place it.

When asked by the Lord Chancellor, after he had been declared guilty of high treason, what he had to say in arrest of judgment, the venerable old man answered: “Truly, my lord, if that which I have said be not sufficient I have no more to say; but only to desire Almighty God to forgive them who have condemned me, for I think they know not what they have done.” The Chancellor then read out the sentence by which the Bishop was doomed, by the usual ghastly form of words, to a traitor’s death. As Fisher was passing under Traitor’s Gate, where he had been landed on his return to the Tower from his trial, he turned to his guard of halberdiers and said: “My masters, I thank you for all the great labours and pains which ye have taken with me to-day. I am not able to give you anything in recompense, because I have nothing left, and therefore I pray you accept in good part my hearty thanks.” Those who were present were struck by the “fresh and lively colour in his face, as he seemed rather to have come from some great feast or banquet rather than from his trial and condemnation, showing by all his carriage and outward behaviour nothing else but joy and satisfaction.” Three more days of prison and the good old man’s troubles ceased.

At five o’clock in the morning, on the 22nd of June, the Lieutenant of the Tower awoke Fisher from his sleep, telling him that he had come with a message from the King—namely, that he was to die that day. “Well,” answered the Bishop, “If this be your errand you bring me no great news, for I have sometime looked for this message. I most humbly thank his Majesty that it pleases him to rid me of all this worldly business, and I thank you also for your tidings. But pray, Mr Lieutenant,” he added, “when is my hour that I must go hence?” “Your hour,” said the Lieutenant, “must be nine of the clock.” “And what hour is it now?” said Fisher. “It is now about five.” “Well then, let me by your patience sleep an hour or two, for I have slept very little this night; and yet, to tell you the truth, not for any fear of death, thank God, but by reason of my great weakness and infirmity.” “The King’s further pleasure is,” said the Lieutenant, “that you should use as little speech as may be upon the scaffold, especially as to anything concerning his Majesty, whereby the people should have cause to think otherwise than well of him and his proceedings.” “For that,” remarked the Bishop, in answer to this practical confession of the injustice of his sentence, “for that you shall see me order myself so, by God’s grace, as that neither the King nor any one else shall have occasion to dislike what I say.”

He then slept on for two hours more, when he rose and was helped to dress; a hair shirt, which he wore next to his body, he removed, replacing it with a clean white one. Upon his ordering his attendant to give him his best clothing, the latter remarked upon the care and attention that he was bestowing upon his dress that day. “Dost thou not mark that this is our wedding-day,” said Fisher in answer, “and it behoves me therefore to be more nicely dressed than ordinary for the solemnity of the occasion.”

At nine o’clock the Lieutenant called for him. “I will wait upon you straight,” said the Bishop, “as fast as this body of mine will give me leave.” He then called for his furred tippet, which he placed round his neck, “Oh, my Lord,” said the Lieutenant, “what need you be so careful of your health for this little time, which you know is not much above an hour.” “I think the same,” said Fisher, “but yet, in the meantime, I will keep myself as well as I can to the very time of my execution. For I tell you truly, though I have, I thank our Lord, a very good desire and a willing mind to die at this present, and so that of His infinite goodness he will continue it, yet will I not willingly incommodate my health in the meantime one minute of an hour, but I will still continue the same as long as I can by such reasonable ways and means as God Almighty hath provided for me.” With that, taking a little book in his hand—it was a Latin New Testament—that lay by him, he made the sign of the cross upon his forehead, and then went out of the chamber with the Lieutenant, being so weak that he could scarcely go down the stairs. For this reason he was placed in a chair, and carried by two of the Lieutenant’s men to the Tower Gate, surrounded by a small number of guards. At the Gate he was to be delivered over to the Sheriffs of London and Middlesex for his execution, but when the procession arrived there it had to wait until a messenger, who had been sent to the Sheriffs, returned to say whether those officials were ready to receive him. During this waiting the Bishop rose from his chair, and stood leaning against the wall with his eyes raised to the sky. Then he opened the Testament he was carrying in his hand, and said, “O Lord, this is the last time that I shall ever open this book, let some comfortable place now chance to me, whereby I, Thy poor servant, may glorify Thee in this my last hour!” Looking into the book, the first words he espied were these! “And this is the life eternal, that they might know Thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom Thou hast sent. I have glorified Thee on the earth, I have finished the work which Thou gavest me to do. And now, O Father, glorify Thou me with thine own self.” Fisher then closed the book, saying, “Here is learning enough for me to my life’s end.” From the Gate he was carried to the scaffold on Tower Hill, praying as he went, and when several persons offered to help him to mount the steps, he turned to them and said, “Nay, masters, seeing that I am come so far, let me alone, and you shall see me shift for myself well enough.”

The sun shone brightly on the old man’s face when, standing on the scaffold, with uplifted hands, he pronounced the words “Accedite ad eum et illuminamini, et facies vestrae non confundentur.” The headsman, as was the custom, knelt and asked the Bishop’s forgiveness for the task he was about to perform. “I forgive thee with all my heart, and I trust thou shalt see me overcome this storm with courage,” answered the Bishop. Before kneeling down, he spoke a few words to the dense crowd gathered around the scaffold. He had come there, he said, to die for the Faith of Christ’s Holy Catholic Church, he begged their prayers that he might be enabled at the point of death, and at the moment of the supreme stroke, to continue steadfast without wavering in any one point of that Faith. Then he prayed for the King, and for the realm, being so cheerful that he seemed glad to die, and “although he looked death itself in the human shape,” according to one of the writers of the time, “his voice was full, strong, and clear.” When on his knees before the block, the venerable Bishop repeated certain prayers, the Te Deum, and the Thirty-first Psalm, “In te Domine speravi.” Then the axe fell, and his head rolled on the scaffold. Thus died John Fisher, a true martyr to his Church and Faith, far worthier of canonisation than many enrolled in the long list of hagiology.

Henry was not content with merely putting this aged and venerable man to death, but, if Cardinal Pole is to be believed, he ordered the headless body of the Bishop to be treated with insult. It was left naked for hours on the scaffold, until some charitable soul with a touch of humanity, cast some straw over the poor remains of one who, but a short time before, had been among the best, if not the greatest of English Churchmen (Dr Hall’s “Life of the Bishop of Rochester”). Fisher’s head was stuck upon a pike and placed on London Bridge. Dodd, in his history of the Church, recounts that after the head had been some days on the Bridge, it was taken down and thrown into the river, the reason for this being that rays of light were seen shining around it. Hall, in his “Life of the Bishop,” states that “the face was observed to become fresher and more comely day by day, and that such was the concourse of people who assembled to look at it, that almost neither cart nor horse could pass.”

Sir Thomas More
(From the drawing by Holbein at Windsor.)

The Bishop of Rochester’s judicial murder was immediately followed by that of Sir Thomas More; it would not be easy to say which execution was the greater crime: their blood lies equally on Henry’s soul.

In many respects a parallel might justly be drawn between More and Gladstone. Their fame as statesmen and scholars in both cases was European. More’s life was equally pure, learned, and brilliant as that of Gladstone. Both men were as well known on the continent of Europe as in their own country, and the friend of Erasmus in Germany, and Colet in England, in the sixteenth century, was as celebrated as the friend of Dollinger and Hallam in the nineteenth. Their very faults only brought their great qualities into higher relief. More showed a stern severity to the Reformers which must always be deplored; Gladstone, in his Irish and foreign policies, proved the frailty of even the best intentioned motives. But the very fact of these being the only shadows of weakness that obscured the brilliancy of both these noble lives, speaks trumpet-tongued to their undying renown.

Although More had been one of Henry’s greatest friends, and had been treated by him like a close companion—for Henry could appreciate More’s humour and admire his learning—at the first sign of his old favourite standing in the way of his wishes, the monarch turned upon the subject in deadly rage.

Condemned for the same reason as that for which Fisher had been executed, More met his fate with similar firmness and cheerful courage. Neither complaint nor remonstrance troubled the serene calm of his demeanour throughout the last days of his beautiful life. After his condemnation, when he had been brought back from judgment to the Tower, the porter at Traitor’s Gate asked for More’s cloak as a perquisite. Sir Thomas gave him his cap as well, regretting that they were “not better.” He was allowed one attendant in his prison, who was unable to read or write, and although Sir Thomas had no writing materials, he managed, with a coal in lieu of ink, to write a letter to his beloved daughter, Margaret Roper. That letter was full of the perfect peace that reigned in him, and of the affection he felt for her to whom he wrote; it concludes with these words,—“Written with a cole by your tender, loving father, who in hys pore prayers forgetteth none of you all, nor babes nor your nurses, nor your good husbands, nor your good husbands shrewde wyves, nor your fathers shrewde wyfe neither, nor our other frendes. And thus fare ye hartely well, for lack of paper. Thomas More, Knight.” Sir Thomas was allowed ink and paper after he had written this letter, and he passed the time of his imprisonment in writing a treatise on Our Lord’s Passion; but his writing materials were then taken away from him, and he spent the rest of his days in prayer and meditation.

One day the Lieutenant asking him why he kept his prison room so dark, More answered, “When all the wares are gone, the shop windows are to be shut up.” Early in the next year (1535) his wife was allowed to see him; she urged him to conform to the King’s wishes, but it is needless to say that he declined to do so. And when he was told that the King had been mercifully pleased to allow him, as having held the highest office in the realm, to be beheaded instead of being hanged, drawn, and quartered, Sir Thomas laughingly said, “God forbid the King shall use any more such mercy to any of my friends.”

A Daughter of Sir Thomas More, supposed to be Mʳˢ. Roper
(From the original drawing by Holbein)

There are few more touching scenes in the history of the Tower than that when, after his final trial, More’s daughter, Margaret Roper, made her way through the crowd to give her father a farewell embrace when he landed at the fortress, and to receive his last blessing. Kneeling before him, the poor creature could only say again and again, “Oh, my father! oh, my father!” Those standing around, hardened as they were to scenes of cruelty, could not help being moved at the piteous sight.

Early on the morning of the 6th July Sir Thomas Pope, an old friend of More’s, entered his prison to tell him that the hour for his execution was fixed for nine o’clock that day. As in the case of Fisher, Sir Thomas More was asked not to “use many words” on the scaffold, for the King feared the effect of a speech from his old friend upon the public. At parting Sir Thomas said to Pope, who was deeply moved, “Be not discomfited, for I trust that we shall in Heaven see each other full merrily, where we shall be sure to live together in joyful bliss eternally” (Roper’s “Life of Sir T. More”).

Punctually at nine o’clock Sir Thomas left his prison. He was dressed in an old frieze cloak; his beard had grown long, and his face and form were thin and worn; in his hand he carried a red cross. At what appears to have been a kind of public-house, near the gate of the Tower, a woman came out and offered him a glass of wine, but he refused it, saying, “Marry, my good wife, I will not drink now, my Master had vinegar and gall, and not wine given Him to drink.” Another woman asked him for some papers that she had given him to keep for her when he was Lord Chancellor: to her he said that she must have patience for an hour, “and by that time the King’s Majesty will rid me of the care I have of thy papers, and all other matters whatsoever.”

On reaching the scaffold he found it in a very shaky condition, and turning to the Lieutenant, he said, laughing, “I pray you, Mr Lieutenant, see me safe up, and for my coming down let me shift for myself.” When on the platform he turned to the people, and, like Fisher, told them he had come there to die for the Holy Church and begged their prayers; then, kneeling down, he repeated the Misere to the end. When the executioner asked his forgiveness Sir Thomas, who meanwhile had risen from his knees, embraced him, saying, “Pluck up thy spirits, man, and be not afraid to do thy office. I am sorry my neck is short, therefore strike not awry.” He then bound a cloth which he had brought with him over his eyes, and placed his head upon the block. An instant before the axe fell he turned his head towards the executioner while he moved his beard, “Pity that should be cut,” he said, “that has not committed treason.”

The head was placed on London Bridge, but Margaret Roper obtained that sacred relic, and it was buried with her when she followed her beloved father in 1544, “to where beyond these voices there is peace.” Both the bodies of Bishop Fisher and of Sir Thomas More were buried in St Peter’s Chapel in the Tower, where they rest side by side.

One of the earliest inscriptions to be found on the walls of the Beauchamp Tower is that of Thomas Fitzgerald, who was known as “Silken Thomas,” from the costliness of his attire. He was the eldest son of Gerald Fitzgerald, ninth Earl of Kildare, Lord-Deputy of Ireland. Earl Gerald had been summoned to London, leaving Thomas in Ireland as Deputy in his place during his absence. On arriving in London, the father was arrested and thrown into the Tower. When the news reached Thomas Fitzgerald he broke into open rebellion, and together with five of his uncles laid siege to Dublin Castle, and having captured Archbishop Allen, put him to death. Dublin Castle was defended by Sir J. White, and would probably have fallen into the hands of the rebels had not the Earl of Ormonde raised the siege with a powerful force. In retaliation, the Castle of Maynooth, one of the Geraldine strongholds, was taken, and the garrison incontinently hanged by Lord Leonard Grey; when the news of this disaster reached Earl Gerald in the Tower, he died, it is believed, of a broken heart, on the 12th December 1534, and was buried in St Peter’s Chapel. “Silken Thomas” surrendered with his five uncles, on the promise of a pardon, to Leonard Grey, who, oddly enough, was another of his many uncles, Lord Leonard’s sister having married Earl Gerald. These Geraldines were imprisoned in the Beauchamp Tower, where, as we have seen, a fragmentary inscription cut by “Silken Thomas” is still visible in the principal dungeon. Despite the promise of pardon, Thomas and his uncles were all hanged at Tyburn, only one member of the Fitzgeralds, a youth, escaping the King’s fury; and so great was Henry’s anger, that he ordered Grey to be condemned to death for allowing the youth in question to save himself: Henry had determined to utterly extirpate the whole Geraldine race. The unfortunate Grey was beheaded, six years after these events occurred, on Tower Hill. “The fair Geraldine,” sung by Surrey, was the sister of “Silken Thomas.”