Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusky death. Out, out, brief candle.”
Just in front of this chapel is the spot on which the scaffold was built; the spot where the best blood of England flowed like water; the spot which mars the escutcheon of the Tudors with an ineffaceable stain; the spot where Englishmen first looked upon the spectacle of the blood of their countrywoman flowing beneath the blows of a foreign headsman. Here fell the heads of two of the wives of Henry VIII.; here the hapless Lady Jane was despatched, and the gallant Essex met his death by orders of Henry’s daughters, fit representatives of their father; here was enacted that revolting scene, the butchery of the venerable mother of Cardinal Pole, the Countess of Salisbury. She was sister of the Earl of Warwick, and daughter of the murdered Clarence. Her only crime seems to have been her royal blood. When brought out to execution, she refused to lay her head on the block, saying haughtily, “So do traitors use to do, and I am no traitor.” The sequel is almost too sickening to be rehearsed. The executioner pursued his victim around the scaffold, striking at her with his axe, and finally dragged her by her white hairs to the block. Thus miserably perished the last of the Plantagenets.
Heavier fell the rain and wilder blew the wind as we slowly took our way toward the outer entrance to the Tower. In the patter of the rain upon the stone flagging beneath us, we seemed to hear the footsteps of a countless, headless throng; in the slow drip, drip of the raindrops from the gloomy walls, the drip, drip of warm life blood trickling down and ebbing away; borne on the wail of the wind there seemed to come sighs of anguish, moaning voices long since silenced, voices from out a dreadful past, voices that cried aloud for vengeance. And as the great gates of the Tower clanged behind us, in a tremendous peal of thunder, there seemed to come an answering voice from heaven, “Vengeance is mine, I will repay.”
GEOGRAPHY OF THE HEAVENS FOR APRIL.
BY PROF. M. B. GOFF,
Western University of Pennsylvania.