as a convenient place for ridding himself of all he wished to put out of his way. Victim after victim suffered cruel death within its walls. His brother Clarence mysteriously disappeared—tradition has maintained he was drowned in a butt of Malmsey wine, but that has never been proved in any way. However, the secrecy as to the manner of his death makes it none the less tragic to the imagination; how his last moments were passed the stones of the Bowyer Tower alone could tell us.
Young Edward V. was brought to the Tower by the Dukes of Gloucester and Buckingham, professing great loyalty and arranging that his coronation should take place on the 22nd of June following. But Richard of Gloucester was determined that if craft and strategy could accomplish his ends the next coronation would be his own. Lord Hastings, over loyal to the boy King was brought to the axe on Tower Green, and an attempt was made by the scheming Richard, who was now Protector, to prove that Edward was no true heir to the Crown. It was with a fine show of unwillingness that he accepted the call to kingship, but in July, 1483, he was crowned at Westminster. Edward, and his ten-year-old brother, Richard, disappeared. We shall return to a consideration of their fate when examining the Bloody Tower.
Richard III., following the custom, gave sumptuous entertainments in the Tower to celebrate his first days as King, and the usual elaborate procession issued forth on the coronation day from the Tower gate, climbed the hill, and wended its way through the tortuous London streets to the city of Westminster, beyond. Richard seems to have spent much of his time, when in his capital, within his fortress-palace, and to have taken interest in at least one building near by. The Church of Allhallows Barking, on Tower Hill, as we shall see in Chapter VI., owes much to Richard, who appears to have considered Tower Walls thick enough to hide his evil deeds and keep out his good ones.
During this reign, as we find in the Wyatt Papers, a State prisoner, Sir Henry Wyatt, was thrown into a Tower dungeon for favouring Tudor claims and supporting Henry of Richmond. Richard, it is said, had him tortured, but the brave soldier refused to forsake his “poor and unhappy master” (afterwards Henry VII.) and so “the King, in a rage, had him confined in a low and narrow cell where he had not clothes sufficient to warm him and was an-hungered.” The legend proceeds: “He had starved then, had not God, who sent a crow to feed His prophet, sent this and his country’s martyr a cat both to feed and warm him. It was his own relation from whom I had the story. A cat came one day down into the dungeon, and, as it were, offered herself unto him. He was glad of her, laid her on his bosom to warm him, and, by making much of her, won her love. After this she would come every day unto him divers times, and, when she could get one, brought him a pigeon. He complained to his keeper of his cold and short fare. The answer was ‘He durst not better it.’ ‘But,’ said Sir Henry, ‘if I can provide any, will you promise to dress it for me?’ ‘I may well enough,’ said the keeper, ‘you are safe for that matter,’ and being urged again, promised him and kept his promise.” The jailor dressed each time the pigeon the cat provided, and the prisoner was no longer an-hungered. Sir Henry Wyatt in his days of prosperity, when Henry VII. had come to the throne and made his faithful follower a Privy Councillor, “did ever make much of cats” and, the old writer goes on, “perhaps you will not find his picture anywhere but with a cat beside him.” Wyatt afterwards became rich enough, under kingly favour, to purchase Allington Castle, one of the finest places of its kind in Kent. There are other Tower stories of men, saddened in their captivity, being helped in various ways by dumb animals. Many of them, we may hope, are true.
Our necessarily rapid journey through history has brought us to the illustrious Tudor Kings and Queens. The Tower was never more prominent in England’s records than during Tudor reign, from seventh Henry to the last days of great Elizabeth. The early years of the new King were to be remembered by an imprisonment in Tower walls that had little sense of justice as excuse. When the Duke of Clarence was put to death in Edward IV.’s reign, he left behind him his eldest son, then only three years old, whom Richard, after his own son’s death, had a mind to nominate as his heir. This was Edward, Earl of Warwick, who came to be shut up simply because he was a representative of the fallen house of York and had a better right to claim the Crown than Henry Tudor. That was his only offence, but it was sufficient; he lingered in confinement while Lambert Simnel was impersonating him in Ireland in 1487; he was led forth from his cell to parade city streets, for a day of what must have tasted almost like happy freedom, in order that he might be seen of the people; and once again was he brought back to his place of confinement. Henry’s position was again in danger, when, in 1492, Perkin Warbeck, a young Fleming, landed in Ireland and proclaimed himself to be Richard Plantagenet, Duke of York, son of Edward IV. His tale was that when his “brother” Edward was murdered in the Tower, he had escaped. He was even greeted, some time afterwards, by the Duchess of Burgundy, Edward IV.’s sister, as her nephew, and called the “White Rose of England.” With assistance from France and Scotland, Warbeck landed in England, and after many vicissitudes was captured, and put in the Tower, from whence he planned to escape and involved Edward of Warwick in the plot. This gave Henry his opportunity. Warbeck was hanged at Tyburn, and poor Warwick ended his long captivity at the block on Tower Hill. So was played another act of Tower tragedy. Sir William Stanley, concerned in the Warbeck rising, was also brought to the Tower, tried in the Council Chamber, condemned, and beheaded on Tower Hill on February 16, 1495. Still the plottings against the unpopular Henry went on, and the headsman had ample work to do. To Tower Hill came Sir James Tyrrell, who had taken part in the murder of the Princes, and Sir John Wyndham—both brought there for the aid they had given to the plottings of Edmund de la Pole, Earl of Suffolk.
But now comes a break in the tales of bloodshed, and the Tower awoke once more to the sounds of feasting and rejoicing. In celebration of the marriage of Prince Arthur and Katherine of Aragon in St. Paul’s Cathedral, great tournaments and banquetings took place within the Tower and in its immediate vicinity. Tower Hill was gay with the coming and going of festive crowds; the Tower walls echoed what they seldom heard—the sounds of piping and dancing. Records tell us, too, of elaborate pageants which strove to show the descent of the bridegroom from Arthur of the Round Table. This method of impressing the moving scenes of history on the spectator is not unknown to us in the present day. Hardly had five months passed away, however, when the Prince, who was but a lad of fifteen, lay dead, and his mother, Elizabeth of York, who had given birth to a daughter in the Tower in 1503, died nine days after Prince Arthur. When six more years had passed, the King, whose reign had been so troubled, was laid by the side of his wife, in “the glorious shrine in Westminster Abbey which bears his name.”
Henry VIII. was now on the throne, at the age of eighteen, and once again the Tower looms largely in the view, and approaches the height of its notoriety as State prison and antechamber to the place of death. But, as in former times, the record is not one of unrelieved gloom. The two sides of the picture are admirably exemplified at the beginning of Henry’s reign, for, shortly after he had imprisoned his father’s “extortioners,” Empson and Dudley, and subsequently caused them to be beheaded on Tower Hill, he made great show and ceremony during the Court held at the Tower before the first of his many weddings. Twenty-four Knights of the Bath were created, and, with all the ancient pomp and splendour—for Henry had a keen eye for the picturesque—the usual procession from Tower to Westminster duly impressed, by its glitter, a populace ever ready to acclaim a coronation, in the too-human hope that the new will prove better than the old.
The young King appointed Commissioners to make additions and improvements within the Tower. The roomy Lieutenant’s House was built, and had access to the adjoining towers; additional warders’ houses were erected and alterations were made within the Bell and St. Thomas’s Towers. About this time the White Tower received attention, and from the State Papers of the period we learn that it was “embattled, coped, indented, and cressed with Caen stone to the extent of five hundred feet.” It is almost as though Henry were anxious that his royal prison should be prepared to receive the many new occupants of its rooms and dungeons that he was about to send there, for no sooner were these renovations completed than the chronicle of bloodshed begins afresh.
The Earl of Suffolk, already spoken of in connection with a plot in the preceding reign, came to the axe in 1513; a few years passed and the Tower was filled with men apprehended in City riots, in an attempt to subdue which the Tower guns were actually “fired upon the city”; Edward, Duke of Buckingham, at one time a favourite of Henry’s, was traduced by Wolsey, who represented, out of revenge, that the Duke laid some claim to the Crown, and he was beheaded on Tower Green on May 17, 1521. In Brewer’s Introduction to the State Papers of Henry VIII., we read, with reference to this trial and death of