Our party alighted from their carriage at the great gate, flanked by embattled turrets at the south-western angle of the walls.
Having paid their sixpence each as entrance fee, they passed over the stone bridge across the moat and found themselves within the outer ward, between the two lines of wall.
Here, overpowered by the spirit of the past, they looked around them, feeling something of the awe that children feel in a churchyard in the dusk of evening. The spirit of the past was indeed before them—and not only in the hoary walls of the middle ages, but in the living creatures of the day; for the warders of the Tower, the Extraordinary Yeomen of the Royal Guard, commonly called the “Beef Eaters,” were dressed in the costume of the time of Henry the Eighth.
One of these stepped up to General Lyon, and saluting respectfully, tendered his service as guide.
“And there are the buildings and there the costumes, this the ground and that the sky that met the eyes of beautiful Anne Boleyn as she first came to this place a bride and a queen, and last as a victim and a convict,” murmured Drusilla, dreamily and half unconsciously.
“Queen Anne entered by that postern at the water side, when she came here in state before her coronation; but the last time she was here she was brought in by the Traitors’ Gate, a few days before her execution,” said the literal warder, speaking just as if he had been an eyewitness to both proceedings.
Drusilla stared at him, and thought he really might have been an actor in those long past tragedies; in his costume of that day he looked like a ghost of the past.
“Where was Lady Jane Grey brought in when she was brought here a prisoner!”
“Through the Traitors’ Gate.”
“Ah, it seems that all who offended majesty in those palmy days, however innocent they might have been, were traitors. Where is that Traitors’ Gate?”