In the Beauchamp Tower, at the very bottom or foundation, is a subterraneous cell known as the "Rats' Dungeon," a hideous hell-hole, below low-water mark, and dark as the despair of the human souls who were confined there in the days when men were fond of cutting each others' throats for conscience sake. At high water, thousands of rats sought shelter in this dungeon until the floods subsided. Woe be to the poor wretches there confined when the rats swarmed in, screaming like human beings in agony.
In this den, prisoners were starved when the rack had failed to wring a confession from them. Here all their shrieks and struggles were drowned deep in this infernal hole with only the eye of the Almighty to look upon the maddening horrors which the wretched prisoners had to endure before Death came to relieve them.
One night with the rats was enough,—at break of day only a heap of gnawed bones remained to tell the tale.
IMPRISONMENT OF ANNE BOLEYN.
In one of the upper stories of the Tower there is an apartment with one grated window and a rough oaken planked floor, where Anne Boleyn was confined when her royal paramour had determined to send her neck to the axe. The unhappy woman, as she passed through the Traitor's Gate, read her fate in its dread aspect, and as she passed beneath its arch she rose in the barge, fell on her knees and prayed God to have mercy on her, and defend her from her Royal lover's rage. When she was shown her apartment, its naked and forbidding aspect terrified her sore, and she cried out in a maniacal frenzy, "It's too good for me, Jesu have mercy upon me." Then she knelt down weeping and laughing like a mad woman. When her head lay on the block the executioner was afraid to strike off her head, as she refused to have her eyes bandaged, and at last he had to take off his shoes, and cause another person to approach her while he came from behind and clumsily hacked off her head.
When the Marchioness of Salisbury, an aged and venerable lady, was led to execution, she stoutly declared she was not a traitor, and refused to lay her head on the block, and the headsman was compelled to follow her all around the scaffold, striking at her as if she was a bullock, until finally her gray head was hacked off.
The Princess Elizabeth, afterwards Queen of that name, having been suspected of complicity in the hasty insurrection of Sir Thomas Wyatt, she was committed to the Tower by order of her sister, Queen Mary.
As she passed under the Traitor's Gate, through which her mother, Anne Boleyn, and Wyatt (who had fought for her) had preceded her, the proud heart of Elizabeth failed her and she burst into tears. At first she refused to get out of the boat, but seeing that force would be used, she cried out to the rowers—
"Here landeth as true a subject, being a prisoner, as ever landed at these stairs; and before Thee, oh God, I speak it, having no other friend than Thee."