One of the most interesting escapes from the Tower is closely connected with this place, and although the story of adventures that befell a poor Jesuit priest named Father Gerard, in the reign of Elizabeth, is a long one, it deserves being told in some detail, for the manner of his escape from the fortress is one of the most curious records of prison-breaking. Father Gerard, together with many other Roman Catholic priests, was hunted down as a criminal of the deepest dye, and being captured, was clapped into the Salt Tower, in a prison on its upper floor, the charge against him being that he was concerned in a plot against the life of the Queen. He was examined on the day of his arrival in the Tower by the Lords of the Council in the Governor’s Lodging—now the King’s House, and in the same room in which Guy Fawkes was afterwards interrogated. Amongst Father Gerard’s judges were the Attorney-General, Sir Edward Coke, Sir Francis Bacon, and Sir William Waad. Questioned as to the plot, in which another priest, Father Garnet, was involved, Gerard refused to give any information. He was told that if he persisted in his silence he would be tortured, and an order was produced by which they were given permission (for torture has always been illegal in England) if necessary “to prolong the torture from day to day as long as life lasted.” The threat failing in its effect Gerard was taken to “the place appointed for the torture,” and, to quote his own words, “We went in a sort of solemn procession, the attendants preceding us with lighted candles because the place was underground (the subterranean passage under the White Tower) and very dark, especially about the entrance. It was a place of immense extent, and in it were ranged divers sorts of racks, and other instruments of torture. Some of these they displayed before me, and told me that I should have to taste them. They led me to a great upright beam or pillar of wood, which was one of the supports of this vast crypt.”
Father Gerard was then hung up by his hands, these having first been placed in iron gauntlets which were attached to an iron rod fixed in the pillar. A stool upon which he stood was taken from under him, and he hung by his wrists, the whole weight of his body depending from them. He was a heavy man, and his sufferings were acute. Whilst in this position the Commissioners looked on, pressing the suffering man with questions, but receiving no reply they left him, and for the next hour the wretched priest hung suspended by his tortured wrists. He fainted several times from the anguish; later in the afternoon Sir William Waad returned and again tried to obtain some confession from Gerard, but when nothing could be wrung from him, Waad turned on his heel in a rage, crying, “Hang thou then, till you rot.” Raleigh’s description of the Lieutenant of the Tower as “that beast Waad” had certainly some justification. When the tolling of the bell in the Bell Tower gave the signal that the fortress would be closed, the Commissioners were obliged to leave the Tower, and the poor, tortured, half-dead priest was taken down, and, scarcely able to crawl, was led back to his prison in the Salt Tower. On the following day Gerard was again taken to the Lieutenant’s Lodging, where Waad informed him that he had been with “Master Secretary Cecil,” who knew for a fact that Father Gerard had been mixed up with other plotters in schemes against Elizabeth’s life, and that more details would have to be given by him on this matter. Again Gerard refused to say anything that could compromise others, upon which Waad summoned a terrible personage, the chief superintendent of the torturers of the prison, to whom Sir William said, “I deliver this man into your hands. You are to wrack him twice a day until such time as he chooses to confess.” Thereupon, says Father Gerard, they went down again to the torture chamber with the same solemnity as on the previous day, and he was again subjected to the torture of the gauntlets, made additionally painful from the swollen state of his hands and wrists. He swooned repeatedly, and was revived with some difficulty. All through these hours of agony he refused to give one name, or to make any kind of confession of guilt, and Waad swore and raged in vain. As long, Gerard declared, as he lived he would say nothing. For the third time he was tortured and hung up by the wrists. But when Waad at length saw the futility of torturing him to death he ordered him to be taken back to his prison, whence, as we shall see, he effected his escape.
Another Roman Catholic, named John Arden, who was a fellow-prisoner of Gerard’s at this time, was confined in the Cradle Tower, a small tower in the Outer Ward standing on the Ballium wall some 100 feet south of the Salt Tower and facing the Thames. The two prisoners were sufficiently near to see each other from their respective prison windows, the space between the two towers being then occupied by the Privy garden of the Palace. Father Gerard persuaded his gaoler to allow him to pay Arden a visit in his prison, and the two men, laying their heads together, concocted the following plan. By writing to their friends outside the tower in orange juice, which caused the letters to be invisible unless subjected to a treatment known to the initiated, Father Gerard succeeded in getting a thin cord with a leaden weight attached to one end. It was further planned that upon a certain night a boat should be brought to a certain place by the river bank opposite the Cradle Tower. On this particular evening Father Gerard lingered late in Arden’s prison, and when the pre-arranged hour came they slung the lead at the end of the line across the moat. This was caught by their friends in the boat, and a stout rope having been fastened to the line, the two prisoners hauled it over the roof of the Cradle Tower from the boat, and made it fast. Gerard was the first to descend from the roof, swarming along the rope in the darkness; and he reached the boat in safety. For three weeks after the torture of the gauntlets, his hands were paralysed, and it was five months before the sense of touch returned to them.
Next to the Salt Tower in the Inner Ward stands the Lanthorn Tower, which has been entirely rebuilt. In former days this tower communicated with the exterior rampart by an embattled gateway; it faces the river and stands half-way between the Salt and the Wakefield Towers. In Henry VIII.’s time the Lanthorn Tower was called the New Tower, and then formed the end of the Queen’s Gallery in the Palace, “over the Kyng’s bede-chamber and prevy closet,” as the survey taken in that reign describes it. This tower had been almost destroyed in a fire in 1788, and what remained was removed, only the basement vault being left. This basement was used as a cellar by the keeper of the soldiers’ canteen, which stood on the opposite side of the way: to such base uses had the old tower of the Palace adorned by Henry III. fallen. Henry III. built the Ballium wall and fortified it with this tower, which he fitted up splendidly for his own habitation, and whose chambers he decorated with frescoes; the subject of one of these was the story of Antiochus. The tower was circular in shape, and surmounted by a small turret, as can be seen by referring to Haiward and Gascoyne’s plan. After the fire of 1788 a huge unsightly warehouse was built on its site, blocking out the fortress from the river front. This monstrosity was only removed some five-and-twenty years ago. The present building is as nearly as possible a reproduction of the original tower of Henry the Third, by Salvin, who also carried out the building of the handsome curtain wall of the Inner Ward, commencing at the Salt Tower and terminating at the Wakefield Tower.
In an interesting article in the Nineteenth Century, Mr A. B. Mitford says that, although it was impossible to give back the stones that prated of the wars of the Roses, “the old towers and walls rose again as nearly as possible similar to their predecessors as the skill of man could make them,” under Salvin’s superintendence. There is a view of the old Lanthorn Tower before its destruction in 1788, in a rare print of the early part of the eighteenth century, which is here reproduced.
The Outer Ward
The Outer Ward forms a strip of ground varying in breadth from 20 to 100 feet, its wall forming the scarp of the moat. It is defended by bastions to the north-east and north-west, which are 80 feet in diameter, that to the north-east being called the Brass Mount Battery, that to the north-west, Legge’s Mount, so named from George Legge, first Earl of Dartmouth, who was Master-General of Ordnance in the reign of Charles II. The Brass Mount probably derived its name from the cannon with which it was mounted. Between these bastions is a more modern one, called the North Bastion. These three bastions defend the north side of the fortress. Of the five towers which protected the Palace on the river front, the Byward and St Thomas’s Towers have already been described. There remain the Cradle, the Well, and the Develin Towers to notice.
The Cradle Tower stands parallel with the Well Tower on the outer or curtain wall. It was through an archway in the Cradle Tower that the principal entrance from the river lay in former times. From the top of the tower a square-shaped turret rises on the western side. The Cradle Tower dates from the reign of Henry III., and prisoners were landed here as well as at Traitor’s Gate, entering the fortress over a drawbridge. Its upper chambers, which were in the form of the letter ⏉, are believed to have formed part of the Palace. The present tower is altogether modern, having been rebuilt from the foundations in 1878. The next tower on the curtain wall is the Well Tower, also entirely rebuilt. It is rectangular, and forms a portion of the curtain wall. Its basement lies below the level of the Inner Ward, and within it is a vaulted chamber 11 feet high by 14 feet wide, from which a well staircase leads to an upper room, and thence on to the rampart.
The last of these towers at the eastern end of the fortress is the Develin Tower. In 1549 it was known as Galligman’s Tower, and in the plan of the Tower in 1597 it is called the “tower leading to the Inner Gate.” Formerly, it was used as a powder magazine.