TRIAL OF CHARLES I.
The guide left the party a few minutes, and then returned with a bunch of keys.
He led the way to a small room in which the little sons of Edward had been lodged, to be accessible to the murderers. Here the unhappy children were smothered in bed. The room, apart from its dreadful associations, was a pleasant one looking out on the Thames.
The party was next shown the stairs at the foot of which the remains of the princes were discovered.
“I can imagine,” said Ernest Wynn, “the life of the boys in the Tower. How they went from window to window and looked out on the Thames, the sunlight, and the sky as we do now; how they saw the bright, happy faces pass, and children in the distance at play; how they watched, it may be, the lights in their dead father’s palace at night, and how they wondered why the freedom of the gay world beyond the prison was denied them. It is said that an old man who loved them used to play on some instrument in the evening under the walls of the Tower, and thus express to them his sympathy which he could not do in words.”
“The burial of Richard III., who caused the death of the royal children,” said Master Lewis, “was almost as pitiful as that of the princes themselves. After the fatal battle, his naked body was thrown upon a sorry steed and carried over the bridge to Leicester amid derision and scorn. For two hot summer days it was exposed to the jeers of the mob, and then was laid in a tomb costing £10 1s., to rest fifty years. The tomb was dashed in pieces during the Reformation, the bones thrown into the river and the stone coffin, according to tradition, used as a horse-trough.”
The collection of armor in an apartment of the Tower called the Horse Armory, a building over one hundred and fifty feet long, presented a spectacle that filled our visitors with wonder. It seemed like a sudden reproduction of the faded days of chivalry. On each side of the room was a row of knights in armor, in different attitudes, looking as though they were real knights under some spell of enchantment, waiting for the magic word to start them into life again.
