When I stood again in the open court, I longed to be told nothing so much as where the old Archbishop was confined, when he gave Strafford that parting benediction. It had been arranged by Usher, their common friend, that they should thus take leave of one another. The noble Strafford came forth walking to the scaffold on Tower-hill, but craved permission to do his last observance to his friend. For a moment he feared the old primate had forgotten him, but just then he appeared at the dismal window of his own prison. “My Lord—your prayers and your blessing”—said Strafford, kneeling down: and the benediction was given accordingly; after which the primate swooned in a fit of sorrow, while the stout Earl rising, said, “God protect your innocence,” and then stepped onward with a military bearing, and passed to his execution, as if it were to a triumph. Somewhere here, all this went on! I could almost fancy it before my eye. Then, too, I thought of Raleigh. And here, hard by, was the undoubted spot, within the walls, where stood the scaffold on which suffered the Queens Anne Boleyn and Katharine Howard; and Lady Jane Gray, more lovely and more innocent than either. But it was not the thing to be looking at such a spot in broad daylight. How much I should have been pleased with the privilege of lodging, just one night in the White Tower, not to sleep, but to stand at my window and look out upon the Court, and upon Tower-hill, by pale moonlight, and so—to think, and think, and think!
By dint of perseverance, I gained admission to the Beauchamp Tower, occupied at present by some officers as a mess-room. The apartments are covered with carvings and inscriptions, the work of many illustrious prisoners, in past times, and with some that merely tell of human sorrow, mysteriously, and without the name of any one that is known, to satisfy the curiosity they excite. A rich carving, in which figures the well-known bear and ragged staff, reveals the prison thoughts of Dudley, Earl of Warwick, father-in-law to the Lady Jane. There is another inscription, very naturally ascribed to poor Lord Guilford Dudley—the simple letters IANE. His sweet Jane was soon to breathe her farewells to him from her own lonely cell, and, after seeing his bleeding corpse brought in from the scaffold, to follow him to the block. The initials R. D. betray the work of another Dudley, who lived to be the favorite of Elizabeth, and the dismal husband of Amy Robsart. Here figure also memorials of Henry’s victims, and of the Marian Confessors, and not a few of those who suffered under the last of the Tudors. Underneath these rooms is the “rats’ dungeon,” where many have suffered the extreme of human agony; and directly overhead is “the doleful prison” of Anne Boleyn. Remorseless, indeed, must have been the heart of her husband, if in truth she sent him the letter, said to have been endited there, and if, after reading it, he could still abandon to the block the head that had so often reclined in his bosom.
I was resolved not to leave these awful precincts until I had also visited the Church of St. Peter ad Vincula, the burial-place of so many of those whom I had thus endeavored to recall to mind. After some patience and perseverance I was admitted, and stood upon what a clever writer has justly called one of the saddest spots on earth. So many graves, of so many destroyed worthies, are here gathered together, that one necessarily thinks, as he stands by them, of the day of judgment. What a resurrection there will be in this place at that day—a resurrection of the just and the unjust! The Church is sadly disfigured, and should be reverently restored, but its pointed arches and mural monuments, with kneeling figures, and one rich altar-tomb, with effigies, still elevate the interior above an ordinary effect. Near this tomb repose the bodies of the weak Kilmarnock and the sturdy Balmerino; and upon my saying something about them to the sexton, he told me that, in digging lately, he had come to the relics of their coffins. He then lifted a cushion in one of the seats, and showed me the coffin-plates, which he had taken from the earth. Sure enough, there they were, quite legible, inscribed with their names and titles, and the sad date, 1746. I remembered how I had read in a contemporary number of “The Gentleman’s Magazine,” and in Horace Walpole’s gossip, the contrary impressions made upon these Jacobites by the scene in which they were to suffer. Kilmarnock acted pitiably, for his conscience was alive to his sin and folly; but Balmerino was troubled with very little of a conscience whatever, and what he had was such as to persuade him that he was dying in a good cause. The old hero cried “God save King James,” to the last; and, striding up to his coffin, put on his glasses, and read this very inscription, and said it was all right. Now, I was reading it fresh from the earth, after a hundred years had gone by. It greatly moved me. Then, I thought of Laud hobbling into this chapel, lame and feeble, leaning on his servant, but standing up amid the people, while the preacher railed at him; said preacher wearing his gown over a buff jerkin, as the holder, at the same time, of a parochial benefice in Essex, and the captaincy of a troop of horse in the rebel army! But where did memories begin or end, when I tried to collect them in such a place? Here lies, beneath the altar, the daring Duke of Monmouth, hacked and hewed to death by his awkward headsman; and, not less barbarously murdered, here lies that venerable lady, the last of the Plantagenets. Cromwell lies there, for helping Henry Bluebeard; and there, too, More and Fisher, for resisting him; Anne Boleyn and Lord Rochford lie there, for being innocent; and Katherine Howard and lady Rochford, for being guilty. Two Dukes are buried between the two Queens; and there Lord Guilford Dudley once more reposes with his lovely Lady Jane. Here lies brother slain by brother, the slayer sharing, in his turn, the fate of the slain; and these, with Monmouth, mercilessly condemned by his uncle, and the two Queens murdered by their own husband, seem to accomplish the melancholy record with associations of crime the most complicate, and of accountability the most dreadful that can well be imagined. Oh, God! what reckonings yet to be settled by Thee alone, are laid up against that day, even in the little compass of these walls.
I made a parting circuit to survey the Bloody Tower and its sharp-toothed portcullis—the only one in England that still rises and falls in a gate-way, and refuses not its office; the Bowyer’s Tower, in which poor Clarence was drowned in Malmsey; the Brick Tower, said to have been the prison of Lady Jane Grey; and the Salt Tower, which, with its adjoining wall, I found nearly demolished, and in process of restoration. Finally, I went round upon the water-side and surveyed the Traitor’s Gate, so called. Here, then, are the jaws of this devouring monster, sated at last, apparently; but who knows? Under that arch have passed, one after another, those great historic characters, whose names we have already reviewed. They abandoned hope when they entered here; and almost always with good reason. One alone on whom, in youthful sorrow, and by a sister’s cruel injunction, these massive gates yawned and closed, became, in turn, their mistress; and—alas! for human nature—made them often gape for others. Think of Elizabeth Tudor passing under this arch, the captive of the Bloody Mary! Who then could have foreseen the days of Hooker, and of Burleigh, and of Shakspeare? Think of old Laud in his barge, day after day, returning through this arch from his trial, to his prison, exhausted and panting like a hart pierced by the archers, from the cruel shafts of Prynne and his confederates, but accompanied, perhaps, by his noble defender, Sir Matthew Hale. Oh! could he but have seen the Anglican Church of the nineteenth century, how thin would have seemed the clouds which were gathering around her at that awful period, and which he feared, no doubt, were to overwhelm her forever. Such were some of the thoughts, partly sad, but largely grateful, with which I found myself chained to the place; and even when it was time to go, still disposed to linger about the spot, and bend musingly above the Traitors’ Gate of the Tower.
CHAPTER XII.
Two Nights in the House of Commons.
As soon as I could devote an evening to the purpose, I made my first visit to the House of Commons, going at a very early hour in the afternoon, and sitting through the whole till after midnight. This House, since removed to the new Palace, then held its sessions in what was formerly the House of Lords, said to be the scene of all the historic events which have illustrated that body for ages, down to the reign of William Fourth. It was fitted up for the Commons after the fire of 1834, which destroyed St. Stephen’s Chapel. It was, first of all, the hall of Edward Confessor’s Palace; was subsequently the scene of a fierce passage in the life of Cœur-de-Lion; and also of that romantic incident which Shakspeare makes the first scene in his Richard Second. There Bacon presided, and was impeached, and fell. Lord Chatham’s expiring effort was made there; and there he thundered those noble remonstrances against the American war, in which our own history is so intimately concerned. Its fitting-up, however, for the temporary use of the Commons, gave it a very modern appearance, and it was as plain as can well be imagined. Before I returned to America, its interior had been pulled to pieces, and the materials sold under the hammer. I saw it, therefore, in the Omega of its legislative uses, centuries having expired since its Alpha. Mr. Lawrence, our worthy Ambassador, had kindly supplied me with a ticket, which admitted the bearer to the diplomatic benches. These are on the floor of the House, and are only separated from those of the members by a nominal division; so that, in fact, I found myself surrounded by them. At first the House was thin, and it grew thinner towards seven o’clock; but at about nine o’clock it began to fill again, the members returning from their dinners, most of them in full dress. The earlier hours were consumed in dull and unimportant matters, and business seemed to drag on like the daylight, till the place began to be as stupid as it was dark and gloomy; when suddenly the Speaker touched a bell, and a flood of soft light was showered from the ceiling, not a lamp or burner being visible. This mode of illumination was quite new to me, although I have heard of similar effects produced in the same way in America. It seemed to quicken and cheer up everything, till the Speaker left his place suddenly, (for refreshments, it was said,) and then all stood still, the members yawning and lounging about, and talking in a very undignified manner. When the Speaker returned, business seemed to have begun. A message was received from the House of Lords, with the usual formalities; but, I observed that as the messenger backed out, making his three bows, he stumbled, and excited a laugh, at which he also laughed, and then retired, winking and exchanging grimaces with sundry acquaintances, as much as to say—who cares. He was dressed in wig and gown, and was probably one of the clerks of the Lords; and he was attended in the Commons by the Sergeant-at-Arms, who was dressed in court-costume, and during the ceremony carried the Mace on his shoulder. The sight of “that bauble” revived the recollection of scenes in the House of Commons of a very different character.
The great business of the evening was a debate on the Malt-tax, which brought out all the strength of the House, and enabled the opposition to talk “Protection,” with a show of very great sympathy for the distresses of “the British farmer.” Mr. Disraeli made a great speech, in his way; but it is a very poor way, his whole manner being declamatory and sophomorical in the extreme. I had met him several times as I sauntered through Pall Mall, and looked in vain for any traces in his face and manner of the clever author of Coningsby and its successors. A jaunty and rather flashy young man, with black ringlets, twisted about a face quite devoid of elevated expression—such was the impression he gave me in the open air, and in the House of Commons I saw nothing at variance with it. He is certainly a man of parts, but that such as he should have forced his way to the Leadership of the House of Commons, only proves the extreme mediocrity of this generation. That he is a Jew is a great bar to his advancement, although he is a Jewish Christian. He affects, however, to be very proud of his Oriental origin, and perhaps he may be so; but one feels that he cannot be confided in, and that he is a mere adventurer. He seemed to me to ape Sir Robert Peel, in his way of thrusting his arm behind the skirts of the coat, and exposing the whole waistcoat in a flaring manner. I have heard as good talking at a debating club as he treated us to that night in the House of Commons. Still he made some good hits at Ministers, and was often interrupted by cries of hear, hear, hear, which are rather muttered than vociferated around the benches. He has since been Chancellor of the Exchequer, himself adopting the very policy which he then abused in terms the most noisy and passionate.
Ministers were, of course, not slow in replying, and I had a chance of beholding some of the expiring grimaces of Lord John Russell, whose feeble government was just ready to fall to pieces of itself. I knew the man as soon as I saw him in the House. There he sat, under a hat that seemed to extinguish his features, trying to laugh and look good-natured. At last he rose, and I observed that the familiar caricatures of Punch were in fact good likenesses. He is his own caricature. A diminutive utterer of “great, swelling words;” paltry, and yet pompous; and altogether as insignificant a person as I ever saw dressed in brief authority. He had only a few plain things to say, and yet he contrived to utter them, as if he were saying—“I am Sir Oracle.” Cries of divide had circulated pretty freely during the whole debate, and now I saw a division. A personage who had been very polite to me during the evening, volunteered to put me where I might see the whole process. Just before the division, members came running in from the clubs, and the “whipper-in” returned to his seat, having discharged his duty in securing the attendance of votes for the Government. Members had been pairing off the whole time, apparently to attend a ball or the Opera, as the pairs were nearly always in full dress. Their negotiations seemed to be made near the bar of the House, and the Speaker was constantly silencing the buzz of members and spectators, by the cry of “order—order,” or “order at the bar,” which Mr. Shaw Lefevre knows how to speak most potently. At length for the division, the galleries were cleared at the sound of certain bells, which the Speaker appeared to pull; but my kind Mentor clapped me into a sort of lobby, like a closet, in the door of which was a pane of glass, through which I saw the entire performance at my ease, and quite by myself. Less fortunate visitors were entirely ejected, and then the members themselves went into the lobby, and so passed in again, their names being pricked by the tellers as they passed, and the whole operation taking but a few minutes. The Ministry had a handsome majority. Before the House rose that evening, there was another division; and it so happened that I heard most of the men of mark. Sir Charles Wood, Chancellor of the Exchequer, Hume and Bright, the amusing Colonel Sibthorp, and the Milesian Reynolds, all talked, and some of them several times. Mr. Keogh excited the significant cry of oh, oh, with laughter, and made some sport by rejoining, “the gentlemen may cry oh, but still it is true.” An allusion to the Scottish Universities brought Sir Robert Inglis to his feet, and he said a few pertinent words, in a manner worthy of himself as the best specimen in the House of a true English gentleman of the old school. Mr. Sidney Herbert spoke in a handsome manner, and Mr. Gladstone also made a very spicy little speech, which seemed to annoy his opponents not a little. The House sat till two o’clock, but I finally gave it up, and left before the end. As I came out into Old Palace Yard, and saw the towers of the Abbey in the still solemnity of the night, it seemed more strikingly majestic than before. I thought what mighty interests of Empires had been settled here, and how often Chatham, Fox, Pitt and Canning, had emerged at midnight from such scenes as I had just left, looking on the same towers, beneath which they now moulder in the dust. The sombre mass of the Abbey seemed a commentary on the hot debates from which I was retiring; a speaking monitor of the transient interests of the present, and of the eternal issues of futurity, as well as of the unchangeableness of the past.
As I walked slowly to my lodgings, I passed Whitehall. Scarce any one was in the street, and all was silence. I stopped, and gazed on the white walls of the Banqueting-room, and said to myself, ‘how strange! here I am alone on this most memorable spot, in the deep and solemn night. Can it be that here, where all is now so quiet, there stood two hundred years ago a crowd of human beings, every one of whom was experiencing, at the moment, emotions the most singularly mixed and tumultuous that ever agitated the human soul? Can it be that from this same white wall issued the figure of King Charles, and that there—just there—he knelt at the block, and in a moment was a headless corpse? Even so! Here rose that groan of a mighty multitude, sighing as one man, and there the ghastly headsman stood, holding up the royal head by its anointed locks, and crying—this is the head of a traitor!’ I almost turned about to see whether Cromwell’s troopers were not charging down upon me, so strong was the impression of the spot; but just then, the sight of a solitary policeman, patrolling beneath a gas-lamp, recalled me to myself, and I fared thoughtfully, by the statue at Charing-Cross, towards my temporary home.