At the accession of James I Raleigh returned to the Tower, as a concession to Spain, against whose power and influence he had done so much. He was tried, convicted on perjured testimony and sent back to remain fourteen years a prisoner. The cowardly king feared to put the sentence into effect, and so first in the Bloody tower and then in the Garden house he received his friends, studied geography and chemistry, seeking a method to sweeten sea water, distilling his wonderful elixir, and awaiting further evidences of the king's petty nature. The story that in a little dark cell in the White tower his History of the World was written has no foundation. That work was written in the Garden house. On his return from his unsuccessful and unhappy voyage, he lived in the Brick tower for a little while, was then removed to the Wardrobe tower, and then brought back to the Brick
tower and tempted to commit suicide. Meanwhile the Spanish court continued to clamour for his blood, and James, crazed by the hope of the Spanish marriage for his son, at length signed the death warrant of, perhaps, the greatest man in England.
The king's cousin, Lady Arabella Stuart, because of her birth spent most of her life as a prisoner of state, though she was not brought to the Tower until after her unsuccessful attempt to escape to France in 1611. From that time until her death in 1615, she was a resident of the old prison.
It is said that James would sometimes come to see prisoners tortured in the gloomy crypt under the White tower, the place where Guy Fawkes suffered after the discovery of the Gunpowder plot in 1606, before his execution.
Executions for treason grow fewer as the years go on. Charles I saw his unpopular minister, Thomas Wentworth, Earl of Strafford, go first to prison and then to Tower Hill in 1641, and the more unpopular Laud, Archbishop of Canterbury, spent many weary months here in 1645, before the procession to the scaffold. Cromwell kept George Monk, afterward Duke of Albemarle, in confinement 1643-46, but during the reign of Charles II there is less of interest, though Algernon Sydney suffered the extreme penalty for alleged complicity in the Rye House Plot in 1683, and George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, had three separate terms here.
During the short but turbulent reign of James II, the bastard son of Charles II, James, Duke of Monmouth, spent three days in the Tower, begging for mercy, after his disastrous defeat at Sedgmoor. The "Seven Bishops" were confined here awaiting their trial for daring to resist the king's will, and the infamous Chief Justice Jeffreys, captured while attempting to escape, died in April, 1689, while awaiting trial.
After the destruction of Jacobite hopes at Culloden, three Scottish lords, Kilmarnock, Balmerino and Fraser of Lovat awaited trial for their devotion to the old line. The first two were executed in 1746, and the last in 1747, the last man legally beheaded in England.
A few scattered individuals occupy the pile during the next seventy-five years. John Wilkes, the great demagogue, was here in 1763, and Lord George Gordon in 1780. In 1820 seven persons charged with conspiracy were here, but the days of the Tower as a great prison were past.
For many years no persons have been confined within its walls, but every year thousands go to see the Crown Jewels, the arms and armour, the instruments of torture and the relics of the kings. They study the inscriptions upon the walls of the Beauchamp tower, carved by the fingers of men who knew not what the morrow would bring forth, and stand upon the ground where England's worst and England's noblest have stood.