Tower dungeons were becoming too crowded. Many a poor obscure captive was sent over to France, perhaps to a harder lot, and the vacant places were filled by political offenders. Northumberland killed himself in the Tower; Arundel, made prisoner with him, died—from self-imposed privations, it is said—some months after. Sir John Perrot, Lord Deputy of Ireland, was charged with using some hasty words against the Queen, and that was considered sufficiently dire an offence for Lord Chancellor Hatton to have him brought to the Tower. But Elizabeth refused to sign the warrant for his execution. He died, in his captivity, after six months, of a broken heart. Of the imprisonment of Raleigh, and of Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex, something will be said when we come to examine those portions of the Tower with which their names are associated. With the death of Elizabeth the curtain falls on the last of the Tudors—a race of sovereigns who had used their faithful Tower well, as palace, fortress, prison, and secret place in which their enemies were put out of existence. Of many of the greater names of Elizabeth’s reign, Tower annals bear no record, but soldier, statesman, or ecclesiastic, having crossed the Queen’s humour, found it but a step from Court favour to Traitor’s Gate.
“In the grey hours of morning, March 24, 1603, watch and ward was kept in London streets; and in all the neighbour counties men who had much at stake in time of crisis wove uncertain plans to meet the thousand chances that day might bring.... When day broke two horsemen were far on the northern road, each spurring to forestall the other at Holyrood with homage impatiently expected by the first ruler of the British Isles. At a more leisurely pace the Elizabethan statesmen were riding in from Richmond, where their mistress lay dead, to Whitehall Gate, where at ten in the morning they proclaimed King James I.... The Lords of the Council showed themselves agreed that there should be no revolution. The decision was silently endorsed by a grateful nation. In city and manor-house men laid aside their arms and breathed again.” In Mr. G. M. Trevelyan’s admirable England under the Stuarts, from which these words are taken, a delightful description is given of the state of England at the coming of the King of Scotland to the English throne, and the chapters might well be read in connection with any study of Tower history. For, to understand the happenings within the Tower, it is profitable to have some detailed knowledge of the state of society outside its walls.
King James, after his progress “during a month of spring weather” from Edinburgh, came to the Tower and held his first Court there. The usual procession to the Abbey was abandoned owing to plague that lurked in city streets, and rejoicings within Tower walls were less lusty than usual, but the King rode in state from Tower Hill to Westminster two years later to open his first Parliament. It is interesting to read in Mr. Sidney Lee’s Life of Shakespeare that Shakespeare himself, with eight players of the King’s company of actors, walked “from the Tower of London to Westminster in the procession which accompanied the King in his formal entry into London.” There is no other positive record of the great dramatist and poet having visited the Tower. We can but conjecture that a building so indissolubly bound up with the nation’s history would offer no mute appeal to such a mind as his, and that he must have come, at times, to look upon the place where, down to his own day, so many tragic deeds had been done.
Early in James’s reign many eminent prisoners were brought to the Tower in connection with a plot, as the timid King thought, to place the Crown on the head of Lady Arabella Stuart, his first cousin on the mother’s side. In May 1611 Lady Arabella had married young William Seymour. This event brought both bride and bridegroom into royal disfavour. The husband was shut up in the Tower, and the wife kept in captivity at Lambeth Palace. But this did not daunt them. Lady Arabella, on being taken north on the way to Durham, pleaded illness when scarcely out of sight of London. In disguise she escaped to Blackwall and took ship at Leigh-on-Sea, there to await her husband, who had succeeded in getting out of the Tower by dressing as a labourer and following out a cart laden with wood. From the wharf, Seymour sailed to Leigh, but found that the French vessel in which his wife had sought shelter had gone down the river some hours before. He managed to cross to Ostend, but Lady Arabella was caught in mid-channel and conveyed back to Tower walls, which she never left again. In her latter years she became insane, and, dying in 1615, was buried at midnight beside Mary Queen of Scots in the Abbey. Seymour allowed unmerited punishment to fall on his young wife, remained abroad until the storm was over, married again, and lived long enough to see the Restoration. The conspiracy of 1603 had been the cause of the execution of George Brook, brother of Lord Cobham, and two priests went to death with him. Lord Cobham himself, and Lord Grey de Wilton, were brought to the steps of the scaffold not many days after, for participation in the same plot. Before the headsman had done his work a reprieve arrived, and they were sent back to their place of captivity.
In 1604 the Guy Fawkes conspiracy necessitated a fresh batch of captives being lodged in the Tower, and during our visit to the dungeons beneath the White Tower we shall learn something of their fate, and of the fate, also, of another prisoner of this period, Sir Thomas Overbury, poisoned in the Bloody Tower. Felton, the rogue responsible for the assassination of Buckingham, had bought the knife with which he did the deed on Tower Hill at a booth there. He was brought to the Tower on his arrest and confined until the day of his hanging at Tyburn. They were not always, however, political offences that filled the Tower cells at this period; a private quarrel was the cause of Lords Arundel and Spencer being given quarters in the prison, and Lord Audley was beheaded on Tower Hill in 1631 for committing crimes which were so revolting as to encourage the belief that he was insane.
With Charles I.—who did not visit the Tower, as far as is known, during his life—the number of noble prisoners by no means grows less. In November 1640 the Earl of Strafford was put in the Tower and condemned to death after trial in Westminster Hall. The King was anxious to save him; the Tower was to be seized and Strafford set at liberty; the royal plans failed; Charles forsook his favourite even after having sworn that not a hair of his head should be injured. The prisoner could anticipate but one end. “Sweet Harte,” he wrote to his wife, “it is long since I writt to you, for I am here in such trouble as gives me little or noe respett.” Archbishop Laud had also been put in the prison-fortress, and as Strafford passed down the sloping pathway that leads from Tower Green to Traitor’s Gate, on his way to execution, Laud, from the window above the arch of Bloody Tower, gave his friend his blessing. The Earl was led out to Tower Hill and suffered death there on May 12, 1641. It is said that 200,000 people witnessed the event, and that it was celebrated by the lighting of bonfires at night. The Archbishop had been arrested at Lambeth Palace and brought to the Tower by the river. He remained for four years in his room in the Bloody Tower, and in his diary describes the visit paid to him by Prynne, “who seeing me safe in bed, falls first to my pockets to rifle them” in the search for papers, which he found in plenty. “He bound up my papers, left two sentinels at my door, and went his way.” On March 10, 1643, Laud was brought to a trial in Westminster Hall which lasted twenty days. Because he had—so the charge was worded—“attempted to subvert religion and the fundamental laws of the realm,” he was condemned, and on Tower Hill, on January 10, 1645, when seventy-two years of age, beheaded. He was buried, as we shall see in a later chapter, in the church of Allhallows Barking, near by. Readers of John Inglesant will remember the vivid description given in that book of these days in the reign of the first Charles, and in the moving picture of the life of the time Laud played no inconsiderable part. “Laud,” says Bishop Collins in his exhaustive Laud Commemoration volume, “deserves to be commemorated as among other things, a true forerunner of social leaders of our own day. To him, at any rate, a man is a man, and no man can be more; the great, the rich, the educated, had no hope of favour from him; rather he reserved his mercy for the poor, the ignorant, and the lowly.... We thank God for his noble care for the poor, and his large and generous aims for the English race; for his splendid example of diligent service in Church and State; for his work as the great promoter of learning of his age.” From such an authority these words are valuable and do much to set the balance right after the splenetic outbursts of Carlyle and many a lesser writer.
August, 1642, had seen the outbreak of the Civil War; Charles was at Nottingham; the Tower was in the keeping of Parliament, and its captives were those who adhered to the King. We find a Lord Mayor of London amongst them for publishing the King’s proclamation with regard to the militia, and gallant Cavaliers in plenty filled the cells. Sir John Hotham and his son, charged with attempting to give Hull over to the Royalists while it was being held for Parliament, were brought to the Tower in 1643, and to Tower Hill in the following year. Sir Alexander Carew, Governor of Plymouth, was beheaded shortly afterwards on a similar indictment. When the King had himself suffered death at the block, in Whitehall, the Tower contained many of his supporters, and amongst those who shared their royal master’s fate were the Earl of Holland, the Duke of Hamilton, and Arthur, Lord Capel. A fine old knight of Wales, Sir John Owen, taken at the same time, and condemned to death, was, by Ireton’s intercession, pardoned, and he returned in peace to Wales. Worcester fight sent a batch of prisoners to the fortress, and in the same year (1651), a preacher at St. Lawrence Jewry, named Christopher Love, found to be in correspondence with the second Charles, was beheaded on Tower Hill. A picture of the scene on the Hill at the time of his death, engraved by a Dutchman, is one of the first drawings, after those of Strafford and Laud, of an execution on that famous spot. Lucy Barlow, mother of the Duke of Monmouth, who had been imprisoned in the Tower with her young son, was released by Cromwell after a long detention. Cromwell was, during the last years of the Protectorate, in constant fear of assassination. Miles Syndercombe, at one time in his confidence, made an attempt on his life in 1657. Having been sentenced to death, Syndercombe took fate in his own hands, terminated his life in the solitude of his cell, and the body was dragged at a horse’s tail from Tower Hill to Tyburn. Dr. John Hewitt, concerned in a rising in Kent in favour of the Restoration, was beheaded on Tower Hill with another plotter, Sir Henry Slingsley. The frequent escapes from Tower walls during the Commonwealth period would lead to the belief that the place was not guarded with the customary rigour when Cromwell was in power, but when he died the Tower became an important centre of attention. Colonel Fitz, then Lieutenant, had, so it is said, arranged to admit three hundred men of the Parliamentary army. This little negotiation was not carried to its desired conclusion, and a fresh garrison was placed in the fortress on discovery of the plot. But unrest was evident within the walls; the lack of agreement of those in charge was followed by the seizure of the Tower by General Monk in the name of Charles II. He released numbers of Cromwellian prisoners and placed a strong garrison there under Major Nicholson. During the months that passed before the return of Charles, the Tower held many important prisoners. In 1660 Colonel John Lambert was made captive for opposing Monk’s scheme for the Restoration. Pepys, who comes upon the scene to illumine the time with his detailed accounts of happenings grave and gay, gives, “as related by Rugge,” an account of Lambert’s escape. At eight of the clock at night, it appears, he slid down, by a rope tied fast to his window, and was awaited by men ready to take him off by the river. “She who made the bed being privy to his escape, that night, to blind the warder when he came to lock the chamber door, went to bed, and possessed Colonel Lambert’s place and put on his night-cap.” This interesting female was duly discovered in the morning, after having deluded the jailer by replying in a manly voice to his “good-night” the evening before, and was herself made captive for her temerity. Lambert, who had succeeded in getting to Warwickshire, was recaptured and subsequently banished.
When Charles II. came to the throne the early years of his rule were occupied in punishing, with merciless severity, all who had in any way been aiders or abettors of those responsible for his father’s tragic death. In the Restoration year the Marquis of Argyll, afterwards executed in Edinburgh, was a Tower prisoner. Poor Sir Harry Vane, not in any way convicted of complicity with the regicides, was brought to Tower Hill in 1662, and there suffered execution without a shadow of justice to cover the crime. Pepys rose “at four o’clock in the morning” of the day when Vane was to suffer. “About eleven o’clock we all went out to Tower Hill, and there, over against the scaffold, made on purpose this day, saw Sir Harry Vane brought. A very great press of people.” The people of London at that time went out to see men brought to the block, just as their successors patronise a Lord Mayor’s show. Pepys had taken a window in Trinity Square, but was unable to see the actual fall of the axe because “the scaffold was so crowded that we could not see it done.” Charles II. was the last of the kings to sleep in the Tower the night before coronation, and he, in keeping with tradition, made a number of Knights of the Bath who would, after the ceremonies in St. John’s Chapel, ride with him in the procession to Westminster on the following day. Of course Pepys had secured a window “in Corne-hill, and there we had a good room to ourselves, with wine and good cake, and saw the show very well.... Glorious was the show with gold and silver, that we were not able to look at it, our eyes at last being so much overcome,” but the volatile diarist has sufficiently recovered the power of vision to observe that “both the King and Duke of York took notice of us as they saw us at the window.” This proved to be one of the “most glorious cavalcades” that ever left the Tower.
The Great Fire of 1666 put the Tower in great danger. Had it reached the walls and set alight the stores of gunpowder lying within, we should have had very little of the work of the Conqueror and Henry III. left to us. The King himself had ordered the demolition of surrounding buildings, and by such means was the progress of the fire checked; Pepys, of course, was running about, and we hear of him “on one of the high places of the Tower” where he was able to look towards London Bridge and did see “an infinite great fire.” George Villiers, second Duke of Buckingham, began his series of five imprisonments in the Tower in 1658, during the Protectorate, and continued them well into Charles’s reign. But though constantly in trouble his offences were as constantly forgiven by the King, and he was never a captive very long. Of Colonel Blood’s escapade in 1671 something will be said in the third chapter, but the irrepressible Pepys was hunting for treasure—not Crown jewels—in 1662 when he was led to believe a sum of £7000 was “hid in the Tower.” He and assistants set to work to dig for this hidden gold, but “it raining and the work being done in the open garden” the search was abandoned. The treasure is yet undiscovered. The amazing