On the left of the second recess in this room is written in the stone “I.W.S. 1571. Die Aprilis. Wise men ought circumspectly to see what they do—to examine before they speake—to prove before they take in hand—to beware whose company they use, and above all things, to whom they truste—Charles Bailly.” Bailly was a young Fleming who had been involved in one of the many plots to free Mary Stuart from her captivity; to judge from the above inscription he had reason to regret the company he had kept, and those in whom he had trusted. Near Bailly’s inscription, but outside the recess, is the name of John Store, Doctor. Store was one of the few of those who suffered death after imprisonment in the Tower, whose fate was merited. He was a bigoted Roman Catholic priest, whose intolerance and severity towards the Reformers procured him the office of Chancellor to the University of Oxford under Mary Tudor. He is said to have out-Bonnered Bonner in his persecutions of those of the Reformed faith who fell into his hands. When Elizabeth came to the throne Store fled to the Netherlands. But he was brought back, imprisoned in the Beauchamp Tower in 1571, and ended his career on the gallows at Tyburn.
There are several inscriptions in this chamber relating to the family of Pole, or, as the name is spelt on the walls, Poole. One of these is in the third recess in a loophole—E. Poole. This is Edmund Pole, a great-grandson of the murdered Duke of Clarence; he and his brother Arthur were here in 1562, being both involved in one of the real or imaginary plots against Elizabeth. Edmund Pole has engraved here that most consolatory of the Psalms, the cxxvi.—“Die semini in lachrimis in exilititiane meter.” In another recess is “A. Pole, 1564. I.H.S. To serve God. To endure penance. To obey fate is to reign.” Both brothers ended their sad lives in this prison. One name carved in this chamber has a deeper pathos than any inscription could convey; it is that of “Jane,” and it appears in two places in the Beauchamp Tower. One would like to think it inscribed by that peerless Jane Grey herself, but, as she was not imprisoned here, it was probably the handiwork of her husband, Guildford Dudley, or some adherent to her cause and sharer in her misfortune.
The name of Thomas Fitzgerald in one of the recesses records that it was here that the ninth Earl of Kildare with five of his uncles was imprisoned, having been inveigled from Ireland by Henry VIII. They were executed at Tyburn in 1538 for being concerned in a series of wild deeds in Ireland, amongst which the murder of the Archbishop of Armagh was the chief. Here, too, is the name of Thomas Cobham, with the date 1555, he being one of three brothers of that name who were placed in the Beauchamp for taking part in Sir Thomas Wyatt’s rebellion.
The earliest date in this tower is 1462, which is cut by the side of the name of Thomas Talbot. In all there are ninety-one names on the walls, of which I have noted the most important only.
To the north, and attached to the Beauchamp Tower, is the Chaplain’s house, with an uninteresting modernised front facing the Green, and but a few paces distant is a small paved plot of ground railed in by order of Queen Victoria. This little plot marks the site of the scaffold, and, above all things, it is sanctified by the memory of Lady Jane Grey. The first victim to suffer death on this spot was Anne Boleyn in 1538, and the last, Essex, the favourite of Elizabeth, in 1601. Here, too, in 1541, the venerable Countess of Salisbury was literally butchered; in the following year Catherine Howard was beheaded with her companion in misfortune, if not in guilt, Lady Rochford. Lord Hastings, Richard III.’s victim, was, I imagine, beheaded immediately beneath the walls of the White Tower, for the description of his sudden end shows that the site of Jane Grey’s scaffold was too distant for Richard Crookback to have glutted his eyes with Hastings’s death.
Prison Chamber in the Beauchamp Tower.
In former times the ground around the site of the scaffold on the Green was a place of burial, being the churchyard of the Chapel which faces it. “With the exception of the Abbey Church of St Peter’s at Westminster,” writes Mr Doyne Bell in his interesting monograph on the Chapel of St Peter ad Vincula in the Tower (a most appropriate title for a building of such tragic memories), “there is no ecclesiastical edifice in the United Kingdom in which (so far as it has been used as a place of sepulture) is contained so much historical interest as the Chapel of St Peter ad Vincula in the Tower of London. Within its walls have been received the mortal remains of many, whose names, though not recorded on the stones of the pavement, must yet ever live in the pages of English history.” Macaulay in a well-known passage has called this chapel “the saddest spot on earth,” and in a less well-known passage has expressed his disgust at the vandalism which had “transformed this interesting little church into the likeness of a meeting-house in a manufacturing town.” Since the historian expressed this well-merited indignation at the treatment accorded to St Peter’s Chapel, the fabric has undergone a much needed restoration, happily not in the bad sense of that term, since it has been restored as much as possible to its condition in the middle of the sixteenth century. This restoration has been mercifully undertaken and skilfully executed, externally as well as internally, in every detail.
As far back as the reign of John, or even that of Henry I., a church stood on the site of St Peter’s Chapel. In the reign of Henry III., a Royal warrant, of the year 1241, was issued by that monarch at Windsor, directing that the Royal pew in St Peter’s should be repaired for the use of the King and Queen, and instructions were given for the refurbishing of a tabernacle with carved figures of St Peter, St Michael, and St Katherine. Of this church only a few vestiges remain in the crypt of the present chapel, which was built by Edward III. In a warrant dated from Fotheringay in July 1305–6, that King orders Ralph de Sandwich, Constable of the Tower, “to be reimbursed for various expenses incurred by him in the construction of our new chapel within the Tower.”
St Peter’s consists of a nave and a single aisle on its northern side; in length it is 66 feet, in width 54, and in height 25.