CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTION
If I were ance at London Tower
Where I was wont to be,
I never mair suld gang frae hame
Till borne on a bier tree.
Old Scots Ballad.
The Tower as palace and prison has been singularly neglected in literature. When we consider the part it has played in our history, how closely it is knit up in the woof and web of our national life, from far-off days when England had not risen to the measure of her greatness, down to the last Hanoverian, this fact surprises us. Shakespeare might well have laid all the scenes of another Hamlet within its walls; Scott might have given its name to another Waverley Novel. The possibilities are endless. If Scott had touched it we should have been spared the gloomy sentimentalities of Ainsworth; Shakespeare, in five acts, could have given us a truer picture of Tower comedy and tragedy than the tomes of Bayley and De Ros. Scott would have cast the same romance over the Tower as he did over the rugged strip of land that lies between Callander and Inversnaid. We do not go to the Trossachs because we have read of it in a gazetteer, nor would we seek the Forest of Arden because we desired to walk in a wood. Burnham Beeches would serve the purpose equally well. But we go to the Tower because we have some vague idea that in our school-days we remember it having been mentioned, during the history lesson, as a place where men were put into dungeons, sometimes tortured, frequently beheaded. We have some indistinct notion, too, that our earlier kings lived there, but whether they lived there at the same time as the men of State they had imprisoned, executed, or burnt, we should not like to say off-hand. And if the Court was held here in the Tower, we have never tried to imagine in what part of the building it could have been properly accommodated. We can accept Whitehall and Windsor without a murmur, for the very names suggest kingliness and ample space. But—the Tower! It seems too grim and grimy, too insignificant in position, too circumscribed to conjure up visions of olden pageantries of State. It is just here that the master-hand would have changed our view. A tragedy for the stage of the Blackfriars Theatre or the Globe in Southwark, the work of a month of summer mornings at Abbotsford, or of winter afternoons in Castle Street, would have fixed for all time the essentials in the picture, and we should have gone to the Tower with the definite aim of seeing the walls wherein a Malvolio strutted, where a Macbeth made murder, or where a Romeo pined. As we walked over Tower Green we might have expected to meet a Dandie Dinmont with the Peppers and Mustards at his heels, a Rashleigh lurking by, a Dugald Dalgetty of Drumthwacket discussing the merits of Rhenish wine and Kirschenwasser with the yeomen warders. Had we lived in the Tower through the greater part of a book, as we are shut up in Loch Leven Castle with Queen Mary in The Abbot, we should have visited again and again the rooms and cells in which, with Roland Graeme and the Douglases, we had spent so unforgettable a time in our lives.
It is true that Shakespeare lays scenes of his historical plays in the Tower, and that Scott brings Julian Peveril and Nigel within its Traitor’s Gate, for a space; but the dramatist is merely copying locality from the history books, and the novelist is so impatient with the fate that has carried two of his young men under the archway of the Bloody Tower that he cuts off his chapter with the words, “But the thoughts and occurrences of a prison are too uniform for a narrative, and we must now convey our readers into a more bustling scene.” Really, Sir Walter, this is too scant an excuse to drive us out of one of the most wonderful buildings in the world to “the spacious mansion of the Duke of Buckingham with the demesne belonging to it,” the foundations of which are now covered by the Hotel Cecil, and the “demesne” blotted out by the buildings of the Strand and the Adelphi.
“The tide carried them up under a dark and lowering arch, closed at the upper end by the well-known Traitor’s Gate, formed like a wicket of huge intersecting bars of wood, through which might be seen a dim and imperfect view of soldiers and warders upon duty, and of the steep ascending causeway which leads up from the river into the interior of the fortress. By this gate—and it is the well-known circumstance which assigned its name—those accused of State crimes were usually committed to the Tower. The Thames afforded a secret and silent mode of conveyance for transporting thither such whose fallen fortunes might move the commiseration, or whose popular qualities might excite the sympathy, of the public; and even where no cause for especial secrecy existed, the peace of the city was undisturbed by the tumult attending the passage of the prisoner and his guards through the most frequented streets.” Here we have the beginning of quite an admirable Tower romance. Our hero lands at the fatal steps, and as he walks up under the Bloody Tower a handkerchief is dropped down from the window of the cell in which Archbishop Laud was imprisoned. From within that darkened room “a female voice, in a tone wherein grief and joy were indescribably mixed, exclaimed, ‘My son!—my dear son!’” We feel our plot moves quickly when the warder picks up the mysterious bit of cambric and “looks at it with the jealous minuteness of one who is accustomed to detect secret correspondence in the most trifling acts of intercourse.
“‘There may be writing on it with invisible ink,’ said one of his comrades.
“‘It is wetted, but I think it is only with tears,’ answered the senior. ‘I cannot keep it from the poor gentleman.’
“‘Ah, Master Coleby,’ said his comrade, in a gentle tone of reproach, ‘you would have been wearing a better coat than a yeoman’s to-day had it not been for a tender heart.’”
“‘It signifies little,’ said old Coleby, ‘while my heart is true to my King, what I feel in discharging my duty, or what coat keeps my old bosom from the cold weather.’”
Spoken like a true son of the old Tower, we say, and feel ourselves already with Peveril listening to the warders’ talk as they take him to his cell. We begin to breathe the Tower atmosphere, we hear a groan from one cell, the clank of chains from another; we see a young yeoman whispering words of love into the ear of a maid who was born and has grown up within the battlements that bound us on all sides, and we see some boys at play round the spot where to-morrow a human being may suffer death. And over all this little world within the walls, where comedy and tragedy shake hands each day, rises the Conqueror’s Norman keep unchanged and unchangeable. Here is a quarry indeed in which to dig for material for a whole series of novels and plays, and yet Sir Walter beheads our little romance on Tower Green, and spirits us away “into a more bustling scene.”