The Tower of London

by Arthur Poyser

The raised portcullis’ arch they pass,
The wicket with its bars of brass,
The entrance long and low,
Flanked at each turn by loopholes strait
Where bowmen might in ambush wait
(If force or fraud should burst the gate),
To gall an entering foe.
Scott.

The Gascoyne plan of 1597, reproduced at the end of this book, will show a straggling line of buildings running partly up the slope of Tower Hill and terminating in what was known as the Bulwark Gate. It was there that prisoners, with the exception, of course, of those who came by water to Traitor’s Gate, were, in Tudor times, delivered to the custodians of the Tower; and it was there, also, that all who were to be executed on Tower Hill were given by the Tower authorities into the charge of the City officials. Grass grew on the hill and its river slope in those days, and, leaving the Tower Gateway behind, one would, as it were, step into an open meadow, the declivity towards the Moat on one side and the cottages of Petty Wales on the other. The aspect of this main entrance to the Tower has been so altered that it is a little difficult nowadays to reconstruct it in imagination. The Moat made a semicircular bend where the present wooden stockade stands, and it had to be crossed at least twice—some accounts say three times—before the Byward Tower could be reached. The first drawbridge was protected by the Lion Gate; the Lion Tower stood near by to command that gate, and was surrounded by the waters of the Moat. All trace of these outer barbicans and waterways has disappeared; the Towers have been pulled down, the ditch filled up, to make the modern approach to the Wharf.

On the right, within the present wooden gateway, the unattractive erection known as the “ticket-office” occupies the site of the royal menagerie, which existed here from the days of our Norman kings to the year 1834, when it was removed to Regent’s Park, and from which the present Zoo has developed. In the time of Henry III. (1252) the Sheriffs of London were “ordered to pay fourpence a day for the maintenance of a white bear, and to provide a muzzle and chain to hold him while fishing in the Thames.” In Henry’s reign the first elephant seen in England since the time of the Romans came to the Tower menagerie, and lions and leopards followed. James I. and his friends came here frequently “to see lions and bears baited by dogs,” and in 1708 Strype, the historian, mentions “eagles, owls, and two cats of the mountain,” as occupants of the cages. In 1829, and during the last five years of its existence here, the collection consisted of lions, tigers, leopards, a jaguar, puma, ocelot, caracal, chetah, striped hyæna, hyæna dog, wolves, civet cats, grey ichneumon, paradoxurus, brown coati, racoon, and a pit of bears. The “Master of the King’s bears and apes” was an official of some importance, and received the princely salary of three halfpence a day; but this was in Plantagenet times.

Middle Tower.—The first “Tower” that the visitor of to-day passes under is called, by reason of its position at one time in the centre of the old ditch, the Middle Tower. Its great circular bastions commanded the outer drawbridge, and its gateway was defended by a double portcullis. The sharp turn in the approach—formerly a bridge, now a paved roadway—to this Tower would make it impossible to “rush” this gateway with any success. When Elizabeth returned as Queen to the Tower, which she had left, five years before, as prisoner, it was in front of this Middle Tower that she alighted from her horse and fell on her knees “to return thanks to God,” as Bishop Burnet writes, “who had delivered her from a danger so imminent, and from an escape as miraculous as that of David.”

The Moat and Byward Tower.—The bridge and causeway connecting the Middle and Byward Towers has altered little in appearance, and looks, to-day, very much as it does in Gascoyne’s plan. But the broad Moat has been drained; the water was pumped out in 1843, and the bed filled up with gravel and soil to form a drill ground. It was across that portion of the Moat lying to the north, under Tower Hill, that two attempts at escape were made in the last years of Charles I.’s reign. Monk, the future Duke of Albermarle, had been taken captive at the siege of Nantwich by Fairfax, and was a prisoner in the Tower for three years. With him were brought two fellow-prisoners, Lord Macguire and Colonel MacMahon.

They managed to escape from their cell by sawing through the door, at night, and lowered themselves from the Tower walls to the ditch by means of a rope which they had found, according to directions conveyed to them from without, inside a loaf of bread. They succeeded in swimming the Moat, but were unlucky enough to surprise a sentry, stationed near the Middle Tower, who had heard the splash they made when leaving the rope and jumping into the water. On their coming to the opposite bank they were re-taken, cast back into the prison, and shortly afterwards hanged at Tyburn. The Lieutenant of the Tower was heavily fined for “allowing the escape,” poor man! A few years afterwards, Lord Capel, made captive at the surrender of Colchester Castle, broke prison by having had tools and a rope secretly conveyed to him with instructions as to which part of the Moat he should find most shallow. With deliberation he performed all that was necessary to get himself outside the walls, but he found the depth of the ditch exceed his expectations. Attempting to wade across, he was nearly dragged under water by the weight of mud that clogged his feet, and was, at one point in his perilous progress through the water, about to call loudly for help lest he should be unable to continue the exertion necessary and so be drowned. However, cheered by friends waiting under cover of bushes on the Tower Hill bank, he came at last to firm ground. He was carried to rooms in the Temple, and from thence conveyed, some days later, to Lambeth. But the boatman who had carried the fugitive and his friends from the Temple Stairs, guessing who his passenger was, raised an alarm. Capel was discovered, put again in the Tower, and beheaded in March, 1649, beside Westminster Hall. The grim-looking Byward Tower is said to have been so named from the fact that the by-word, or password, had to be given at its gateway before admittance could be gained even to the outer ward of the fortress. On that side of it nearest the river, a postern gateway leads to a small drawbridge across the ditch. This gave access to the royal landing-place on the wharf, immediately opposite, and in this way privileged persons were able to enter the Tower without attention to those formalities necessary to gain entry to the buildings in the ordinary way. In the Byward Tower, to the right, under the archway, is the Warders’ Parlour, a finely-vaulted room, and outside its doorway we meet one or two of those Yeomen Warders, whose picturesque uniform, so closely associated with the Tower, was designed by Holbein the painter, and dates from Tudor days. These Yeomen Warders are sworn in as special constables, whose duties lie within the jurisdiction of the Tower, and they take rank with sergeant-majors in the army. When State trials were held in Westminster Hall the Yeoman Gaoler escorted the prisoner to and from the Tower, carrying the processional axe, still preserved in the King’s House here. The edge of the axe was turned towards the captive after his trial, during the sad return to the prison-house, if he had—as was nearly always the case—been condemned to die. This Yeoman still carries the historic axe in State processions, but it is now merely an emblem of a vanished power to destroy. Allied to the Warders are a body of men known as the Yeomen of the Guard, or Beefeaters, who attend on the King’s person at all his State functions, whether it be in procession or at levée. The Yeomen were first seen beyond Tower walls in the coronation procession of Henry VII. The eastern front of the Byward Tower has a quaint, old-world appearance, and has altered little since Elizabethan days.

Bell Tower.—This old Tower, at the angle of the Ballium Wall, contained at one time, within the turret still to be seen above its roof, the Tower bell, which in former days was used as an alarm signal. In the regulations of 1607 we find that “when the Tower bell doth ring at nights for the shutting in of the gates, all the prisoners, with their servants, are to withdraw themselves into their chambers, and not to goe forth that night.” The walls, built by Henry III., are of immense strength, the masonry being solid for fully ten feet above the ground. The Tower contains an upper and a lower dungeon, the former lit by comparatively modern windows, the latter still possessing narrow openings or arrow-slits. In the upper cell, the walls of which are eight feet thick, four notable prisoners were confined—Bishop Fisher and Anne Boleyn in Henry VIII.’s time, Princess Elizabeth in Mary’s reign, and Lady Arabella Stuart in the days of James I. Fisher was eighty years old when brought to linger here “in cold, in rags, and in misery.” The aged Bishop had refused to comply with the Act of Succession and acknowledge Henry supreme head of the Church of England. From this prison he wrote to Cromwell, “My dyett, also, God knoweth how slender it is at any tymes, and now in myn age my stomak may nott awaye but with a few kynd of meats, which if I want, I decay forthwith, and fall into crafs and diseases of my bodye, and kan not keep myself in health.” But no alleviation of his sufferings did he obtain, and early in the morning, when winter and spring had passed away, and slender rays of June sunshine had found entrance to his dismal dwelling-place, the Lieutenant of the Tower came to him to announce that a message from the King had arrived, and that Fisher was to suffer death that day. The Bishop took this as happy tidings, granting release from intolerable conditions of life. At nine o’clock he was carried to Little Tower Hill (towards the present Royal Mint buildings), praying as he went. On the scaffold he exclaimed, “Accedite ad eum et illuminamini, et facies vestræ non confundentur,” with hands uplifted, and, having spoken some few words to the crowd around, was repeating the words of the Thirty-first Psalm, “In thee, O Lord, have I put my trust,” when the axe fell. Into the lower dungeon Sir Thomas More was taken in the same month as Fisher (April 1534). More had been friend and companion to King Henry, and had held the office of Lord Chancellor after Wolsey. But past friendship and high services were forgotten when, with Fisher, he refused to accept the Oath in the Act of Succession, and he was committed to the Tower. For fifteen months he lay confined in this “close, filthy prison, shut up among mice and rats,” and was so weakened as to be “scarce able to stand,” when taken to the scaffold, on Tower Hill, on July 6, 1535. In Mr. Prothero’s Psalms in Human Life his last moments are thus described:—“The scaffold was unsteady, and, as he put his foot on the ladder, he said to the Lieutenant, ‘I pray thee see me safe up, and for my coming down let me shift for myself.’ After kneeling down on the scaffold and repeating the Psalm ‘Have mercy upon me, O God’ (Ps. li), which had always been his favourite prayer, he placed his head on the low log that served as a block, and received the fatal stroke.” His head was placed on London Bridge, but soon afterwards it was claimed by his devoted daughter and was buried with her at Canterbury when she died, in 1544. The bodies of Fisher and More are buried side by side, in St. Peter’s, on Tower Green, but Fisher’s remains had rested for some years in Allhallows Barking, on Tower Hill, before removal to the Tower chapel. At the entrance to the upper chamber of the Bell Tower from the passage on the wall, known as Queen Elizabeth’s Walk, there is the following inscription on the stone:—

BI·TORTVRE·STRAVNGE·MY·TROVTH·WAS·TRIED·YET OF·MY·LIBERTY·DENIED: THER·FOR·RESON·HATH·ME PERSWADED THAT PASYENS MVST BE YMBRASYD: THOGH HARD·FORTVNE·CHASYTH·ME·WYTH·SMART·YET·PASYENS SHALL·PREVAYL.