The guide led them from the White Tower to the green before the prison chapel—St. Peter’s.
“Stop here a moment, if you please, ladies and gentlemen,” he said.
They all paused, thinking from that point he was going to indicate some view or effect. But it was not so.
“Do you know where you stand, ladies? No? Well, you stand upon the exact spot where the head of Anne Boleyn fell under the executioner’s stroke.”
Anna impulsively sprang away. Dick and the General looked interested. But Drusilla heard him with something like indifference. Queen Anne’s sufferings were so long past and now so vague; Drusilla’s own were so present and so real. She was scarcely conscious of the remainder of her tour through the Tower buildings.
The guide led the party into St. Peter’s chapel; told them it had been built in the reign of Edward I., 1282, and showed them the flag stones in front of the altar beneath which repose the remains of the sainted Lady Jane Grey, the venerable Thomas Cromwell, the good and great Somerset, the accomplished Surrey, the brilliant Essex, and many other less exalted but no less honorable martyrs to truth and patriotism, victims to bigotry and tyranny.
Leaving St. Peter’s Chapel, our friends made the circuit of the twelve minor towers of the inner ward. These in the “good old times” were all used as prisons, lodgings for those who had had the misfortune to become obnoxious to despotism or fanaticism.
Among these the richest in historic associations is the Beauchamp Tower, popularly called the Beechum Tower, whose walls are cut all over with the autographs or other inscriptions of the illustrious dead, who in its gloomy dungeons pined away the last days of their violently ended lives.
The Brick Tower was pointed out as having been the prison of Lady Jane Gray; the Devereux Tower as that of the Earl of Essex; the Bell Tower as once the prison of the Princess Elizabeth when she was confined by the jealousy of her sister, Queen Mary; the Bowyer Tower as the place in which the Duke of Clarence was drowned in the butt of malmsey wine.
But that which filled the beholders with a deeper gloom than all the others was the Flint Tower, called for the superlative horror of its dungeons the Little Hell.