IT is not a tower at all, as we reckon towers, you must know, but a walled town upon the banks of the Thames, in the very heart of London. Hundreds of years ago, when what is now this great city was only moor and marsh, the Romans built here—a castle, perhaps. Only a bit of crumbling wall, of mouldering pavement, remain to tell the story. When the Normans came in to possess the land, William the Conqueror erected upon this spot a square fortress, with towers rising from its four corners. Every succeeding monarch added a castle, a tower, a moat, to strengthen its strength and extend its limits, until, in time, it covered twelve acres of land, as it does to this day. Here the kings and queens of England lived in comfortless state, until the time of Queen Elizabeth, having need to be hedged about with something more than royalty to insure safety. Times have changed; swords have been beaten into ploughshares; and where the moat once encircled the tower wall, flowers blossom now. The dungeons that for centuries held prisoners of state do not confine any one to-day; and the strongholds that guarded the person of England's sovereign keep in safety now the jewels and the crown. There are round towers, and square towers, and, for anything I know, three-cornered towers, each with its own history of horrors. There are windows from which people were thrown, bridges over which they were dragged, and dark holes in which they were incarcerated.
"A dozen umbrellas were tipped up; the rain fell fast upon a dozen upturned, expectant faces." [Page 57.]
To appreciate all this, you should see it—as we did one chilly May morning. We huddled about the stove in the waiting-room upon the site of the old royal menagerie, our companions a round man, with a limp gingham cravat and shabby coat, a little old woman in a poke bonnet, and half a dozen or more schoolboys from the country. A tall Yankee of inquiring mind joined us as we sallied from the door, led by a guide gorgeous in ruff and buckles, cotton velvet and gilt lace, and with all these glories surmounted by a black hat, that swelled out at the top in a wonderful manner. Down the narrow street within the gates, over the slippery cobble-stones, under considerable mental excitement, and our alpaca umbrella, we followed our guide to an archway, before which he paused, and struck an attitude. The long Yankee darted forward. "Stand back, my friends, stand back," said the guide. "You will please form a circle." Immediately a dozen umbrellas surrounded him. He pointed to a narrow window over our heads; a dozen umbrellas were tipped up; the rain fell fast upon a dozen upturned, expectant faces. "In that room, Sir ——" (I could not catch the name) "spent the night before his execution, in solemn meditation and prayer." There was a circular groan of sympathy and approval from a dozen lips, the re-cant of a dozen dripping umbrellas, and we pattered on to the next point of interest, following our leader through pools of blood, figuratively speaking,—literally, through pools of water,—our eyes distended, our cheeks pale with horror. Ah, what treasures of credulity we must have been to the guides in those days! Time brought unbelief and hardness of heart.
We mounted stairs narrow and dark; we descended stairs dark and narrow; we entered chambers gloomy and grim. The half I could not tell—of the rooms filled with war trophies—scalps in the belt of the nation—from the Spanish Armada down to the Sepoy rebellion; the long hall, with its double row of lumbering old warriors encased in steel, as though they had stepped into a steel tower and walked off, tower and all, some fine morning; the armory, with its stacked arms for thirty thousand men. "We may have occasion to use them," said the guide, facetiously, making some reference to the speech of Mr. Sumner, just then acting the part of a stick to stir up the British lion. The Yankee chuckled complacently, and we, too, refused to quake. There was a room filled with instruments of torture, diabolical inventions, recalling the days of the Inquisition. The Yankee expressed a desire to "see how some o' them things worked." Opening from this was an unlighted apartment, with walls of stone, a dungeon indeed, in which we were made to believe that Sir Walter Raleigh spent twelve years of his life. No shadow of doubt would have fallen upon our unquestioning minds, had we been told that he amused himself during this time by standing upon his head. "Walk in, walk in," said the smiling guide, as we peered into its darkness. We obeyed. "Now," said he, "that you may appreciate his situation, I will step out and close the door." The little old woman screamed; the Yankee made one stride to the opening; the guide laughed. It was only a professional joke; there was no door. We saw the bare prison-room, with its rough fireplace, the slits between the stones of the wall to admit light and air, and the initials of Lady Jane Grey, with a host more of forgotten names, upon the walls. Just outside, within the quadrangle, where the grass grew green beneath the summer rain, she was beheaded,—poor little innocent,—who had no desire to be a queen! In another tower close by, guarded by iron bars, were the royal jewels and the crown, for which all this blood was shed—pretty baubles of gold and precious stones, but hardly worth so many lives.
You remember the story of the princes smothered in the Tower by command of their cruel uncle? There was the narrow passage in the wall where the murderers came at night; the worn step by which they entered the great, bare room where the little victims slept; the winding stairs down which the bodies were thrown. Beneath the great stone at the foot they were secretly buried. Then the stairway was walled up, lest the stones should cry out; and no one knew the story of the burial until long, long afterwards—only a few years since—when the walled-up stairway was discovered, the stones at the foot displaced, and a heap of dust, of little crumbling bones, revealed it. A rosy-faced, motherly woman, the wife of a soldier quartered in the barracks here, answered the rap of the guide upon the nail-studded door opening from one of the courts, and told us the old story. "The bed of the princes stood just there," she said, pointing to one corner, where, by a curious coincidence, a little bed was standing now. She answered the question in our eyes with, "My boys sleep there." "But do you not fear that the murderers will come back some night by this same winding way, and smother them?" How she laughed! And, indeed, what had ghosts to do with such a cheery body!
Down through the "Traitors' Gate," with its spiked portcullis, we could see the steps leading to the water. Through this gate prisoners were brought from trial at Westminster. It is said that the Princess Elizabeth was dragged up here when she refused to come of her own will, knowing too well that they who entered here left hope behind. A little later, with music and the waving of banners, and amid the shouts of the people, she rode out of the great gates into the city, the Queen of England.
THE HOUSES OF PARLIAMENT.
Though they have stood barely thirty years, already the soft gray limestone begins to crumble away,—the elements, with a sense of the fitness of things, striving to act the part of time, and bring them into a likeness of the adjoining abbey. There is an exquisite beauty in the thousand gilded points and pinnacles that pierce the fog, or shine softly through the mist that veils the city. Ethereal, shadowy, unreal they are, like the spires of a celestial city, or the far away towers and turrets we see sometimes at sunset in the western sky.
Here, you know, are the chambers of the Houses of Lords and Commons, with the attendant lobbies, libraries, committee-rooms, &c., and a withdrawing-room for the use of the queen when she is graciously pleased to open Parliament in person. The speaker of the House of Commons, as well as some other officials, reside here—a novel idea to us, who could hardly imagine the speaker of our House of Representatives taking up his abode in the Capitol! Parliament was not in session, and we walked through the various rooms at will, even to the robing-room of the noble lords, where the peg upon which Lord Stanley hangs his hat was pointed out; and very like other pegs it was. At one end of the chamber of the House of Lords is the throne. It is a simple affair enough—a gilded arm-chair on a little platform reached by two or three steps, and with crimson hangings. Extending down on either side are the crimson-cushioned seats without desks. In the centre is a large square ottoman,—the woolsack,—which might, with equal appropriateness, be called almost anything else. Above, a narrow gallery offers a lounging-place to the sons and friends of the peers; and at one end, above the throne, is a high loft, a kind of uplifted amen corner, for strangers, with a space where women may sit and look down through a screen of lattice-work upon the proceedings below. It seems a remnant of Eastern customs, strangely out of place in this Western world, and akin to the shrouding of ourselves in veils, like our Oriental sisters. Or can it be that the noble lords are more keenly sensitive to the distracting influence of bright eyes than other men?