THE TOWER OF LONDON
To me it is the storehouse of mistakes—a place redolent with the memory of bygone blunders—where the great men of the nation, like Sir Thomas More, Archbishop Cranmer and Sir Walter Raleigh, and innocent, beautiful things like the little Princes and Lady Jane Grey, were done to death. There must surely be left something of Lady Jane’s agony when she saw the headless body of her young husband carried past her on the morning when she knew that she too was to die—something of the sickening sense of injustice that great men like Raleigh and More must have felt as their doom approached.
Of course, for less squeamish people there is an unending interest in the historical and architectural features of the Tower. It is open every week-day from ten to six in summer and ten to five in winter, and on Saturdays the fees to the White Tower and the Jewel House are not necessary. It is staffed by a constable, a lieutenant, a resident governor and about 100 yeomen warders called Beefeaters, all of which information, as well as the fact that the best way to reach it is from Mark Lane station on the Underground, is writ large in Mr. Muirhead’s excellent Blue Book on London.
Writ more small are tales that almost make me want to go and see for myself the place where Charles d’Orleans, the royal French poet, who wrote such haunting songs as “Dieu qu’il la fait bon regarder,” was held a prisoner for fifteen long years. Other things it seems besides murders happened in the Tower,—Henry the Eighth made two of his marriages here, James the First lived here for a time (a fact that does not mitigate my distaste for the Tower), and
TRAITOR’S GATE, TOWER OF LONDON
North or Inside View of Traitor’s Gate being the principal entrance of the Tower of London from the River and through which stole prisoners of rank and dignity were formerly conveyed to the Tower
Charles the Second slept here the night before his coronation in 1661. No monarch has done that since his day. Then, if guide-books may be believed, there are hundreds of things in the armouries and weapon room and small-arms room, the cloak on which Wolfe died in far-off Quebec, a Grinling Gibbons carved head of Charles the Second, and armour and weapons of every period.