Pepys was himself a captive in the Tower from May 1679 to February 1680, and seems to have lived fairly well there if the account of his expenses be any criterion. William Penn was also a captive about this time, and wrote No Cross, no Crown during his imprisonment. That singular invention of Titus Oates, called the Popish Plot, sent about forty men to the block, among them William, Lord Stafford, who was executed on Tower Hill on December 29, 1680. Three years later, the Rye House Plot brought Lord William Russell and Algernon Sidney to the Tower and execution, while Essex, who had also been lodged in the dungeons, and had, like Russell and Sidney, not actually been concerned in the assassination scheme planned at Rye House, was found in his prison with his throat cut.
James II. omitted the procession from Tower to Westminster, and it has never since been observed as a necessary prelude to a king’s coronation. There is no likelihood of the custom ever being revived now that the Tower has fallen from its high estate as a royal residence. The young son of Lucy Walters, who had lived in the Tower, as we have seen, as a boy, now returned as the defeated Duke of Monmouth, beloved of the people for his handsome face, but unstable in character. He was beheaded in 1685, on Tower Hill, having been led there with difficulty through the dense crowd of citizens gathered to see him die, and to cheer him on the sad way up to the top of the hill and the scaffold. A contemporary engraving shows the excited populace packed closely together in solid ranks. Jack Ketch, the headsman, was almost torn limb from limb by the infuriated mob when he had made four ineffectual strokes on the neck of the victim and had severed the head with the fifth. The Seven Bishops came to the Martin Tower in 1688, and Judge Jeffreys, of infamous record, died in the Bloody Tower—what was the fate that lodged him in a place so appropriately named?—in 1689. King James had fled the country, and without bloodshed the great Revolution of 1688 was brought about.
Sir William Fenwick, who had been found guilty of high treason, was the only victim brought to Tower Hill during the time of William and Mary, but there were many prisoners of State in the Tower, partisans, for the most part, of the Stuarts. Charles, Lord Mohun, was made a prisoner within the walls in this reign, not for “adhering to their Majesties’ enemies” but for having killed a celebrated comedian, in a quarrel about a famous actress. In 1695 Sir Christopher Wren examined the Beauchamp and Bloody Towers, “to report what it would cost to repaire and putt them in a condition” to hold more prisoners. The Tower capacities, it is evident, were being tested to the utmost limit.
Queen Anne had some French prisoners of war immured in the Tower soon after her accession, and, in 1712, Sir Robert Walpole was nominally a captive there. I say nominally, because his apartment during his confinement from February to July was crowded by fashionable visitors whose carriages blocked the gateway at the foot of Tower Hill. We are indeed in modern times when captivity in the old fortress-prison was treated as a society function; Walpole’s rooms were, after his release, occupied—I used this milder term, as he could not, in the strict sense, be called a captive—by the Earl of Lansdowne, author of that unpresentable comedy, The Old Gallant.
With the House of Hanover the Tower records take a graver turn. Under George I. the rebellion of 1715 brought young Derwentwater, taken prisoner at Preston, to the Tower. Lord Kenmure was captured at the same time, with other Jacobite Lords, and was brought, with Derwentwater, to Tower Hill, and there, together, they were executed. Kenmure was put to death first, and all marks of his tragic end having been removed from the scaffold, Derwentwater was brought out of the house on Tower Hill (where Catherine House now stands), to suffer on the same block. The crowd in Trinity Square had been disappointed of a third victim, for Lord Nithsdale, as we shall see later, managed to escape from the Tower on the evening before. In 1722 the Jacobites plotted to seize the Tower; their plan failed; they were made prisoners there instead, and lay in the dungeons for several months. We have passed through the period of The Black Dwarf and come to the days of Waverley and the romantic “Forty-five.” In 1744 three men of a Highland regiment, which had mutinied on being ordered to Flanders after being promised that foreign service should not be required, were shot on Tower Green; others were sent to the plantations. This roused great resentment in Scotland, and prepared the way for the coming of Prince Charles Edward, who landed on the Island of Eriskay in July 1745. This young hero of incomparable song and story was, to quote Andrew Lang, “the last of a princely lineage whose annals are a world’s wonder for pity, and crime, and sorrow,” and Prince Charlie “has excelled them all in his share of the confessed yet mysterious charm of his House.” After Culloden a sad harvest was reaped on Tower Hill, and we shall hear more of the last of the Jacobites, who perished at the block for their loyalty, when we visit the scene of their sufferings.
A few political prisoners in George III.’s reign; the committal of Arthur O’Connor, one of the “United Irishmen,” in 1798; the imprisonment of Sir Francis Burdett in 1810; and the placing there of the Cato Street conspirators in 1820, brings our list of captives to a close.
In Queen Victoria’s time, on October 30, 1841, a fire occurred within the Inner Ward of the Tower, which threatened at one time during its fury to make sad havoc of surrounding buildings. The storehouse of arms which stood where the barracks are now placed, to the east of St. Peter’s Church, was gutted, and the smoke and flames were blown over towards the White Tower. Fortunately, the store alone was destroyed, and it was reported to have been ugly enough to deserve its fate. The Tower’s last trial came upon it, unawares, in January 24, 1885, when the “Fenians” laid an infernal machine in the Banqueting Room of the White Tower. The explosion that followed did considerable damage to the exhibits in the building, and many visitors were injured, but the White Tower itself, secure in its rock-like strength, was in no way the worse for what might, in more modern buildings, have rent the walls asunder.