The Tower of London, (Vol. 2 of 2)

by Lord Ronald Sutherland Gower

CHAPTER XIII

CHARLES I. AND THE COMMONWEALTH

With the close of the reign of James I. the Tower ceased to be a royal residence—the Stuart kings, in fact, never passing more than a night or two in the old fortress prior to their coronation, after which they only visited it on very rare occasions. James himself only occupied the Tower-Palace on the eve of opening his first Parliament; and as the plague had broken out in the city at the time of Charles the First’s coronation, that king did not even stay the previous night in the building, nor does he appear ever to have visited the fortress during the whole of his stormy reign of four and twenty years.

A very remarkable man occupied a prison in the Tower early in Charles’s reign. This was Sir John Eliot, “fiery Eliot” Carlyle calls him. He was first of that noble band of patriots who defied Charles’s tyranny, and had been sent to the Tower in the winter of 1624–25 for censuring Buckingham during Charles’s second Parliament, but he remained there only a short time. In the March of 1628, however, Eliot, with a batch of independent members of the House of Commons—amongst whom were Denzil Holles, Selden, Valentine, Coryton, and Heyman—was again imprisoned in the Tower. Eliot had boldly declared that the “King’s judges, Privy Council, Judges and learned Council had conspired to trample under their feet the liberties of the subjects of the realm, and the liberties of the House.” Denzil Holles and Valentine were the two members who had kept the Speaker in his chair by main force; the others were committed to prison for using language reflecting on the King and his Ministers. For the following three months these members of Parliament were kept in close confinement in the fortress, books and all writing materials being strictly kept from them. In May, Sir John Eliot was taken to Westminster, where an inquiry was held but no judgment given. After his return to the Tower, however, Eliot was allowed to write letters, and was also given “the liberty of the Tower,” and permitted to see a few friends. In the month of October Eliot and the others were taken to the chambers of the Lord Chief-Justice, and thence to the Marshalsea Prison, a change which he jokingly described as having “left their Palace in London for country quarters at Southwark.” Then they were tried, and Eliot, being judged the most culpable, was fined two thousand pounds, and ordered to be imprisoned in the Tower during the King’s pleasure. As for the fine, Eliot remarked that he “possessed two cloaks, two suits of clothes, two pairs of boots, and a few books, and if they could pick two thousand pounds out of that, much good might it do them.” The fearless member never quitted the Tower again, for a galloping consumption carried him off two years after he had written the above lines. There can be no doubt that this consumption was not a little owing to the harsh treatment he endured. In 1630 he wrote to his friend Knightley, alluding to rumours of his being released. “Have no confidence in such reports; sand was the best material on which they rested, and the many fancies of the multitude; unless they pointed at that kind of libertie, ‘libertie of mynde.’ But other libertie I know not, having so little interest in her masters that I expect no service from her.” His prison was frequently changed, and many restraints were put upon him, for, on the 26th of December, he writes to his old friend, the famous John Hampden, that his lodgings have been moved. “I am now,” he says, “where candle-light may be suffered, but scarce fire. None but my servants, hardly my sonne, may have admittance to me; my friends I must desire for their own sake to forbear coming to the Tower.” Poor Eliot was dying fast in the year 1632, but his last letter to Hampden, dated the 22nd of March, is full of his old brave spirit, and the gentle humour that distinguished this great and good man. The letter concludes thus: “Great is the authority of princes, but greater much is theirs who both command our persons and our will. What the success of their Government will be must be referred to Him that is master of their power.” The doctor had informed the authorities that any fresh air and exercise would help Eliot to live, but all the air they gave him was a “smoky room,” and all the exercise, a few steps on the platform of a wall. On the 27th of November Eliot died, “not without a suspicion of foul play,” wrote Ludlow some years afterwards.

The Byward Tower

Eliot’s staunch friends, Pym and Hampden, moved in the House for a committee “to examine after what manner Sir John Eliot came to his death, his usage in the Tower, and to view the rooms and place where he was imprisoned and where he died, and to report the same to the House,” a motion which shows how matters had changed for the better since the days of Elizabeth, none of whose Parliaments would have dared thus to question the treatment of State prisoners.

The blame of his untimely death—for he was but forty-two—rests upon those who let him die by inches in his prison as much as if they had beheaded him on Tower Hill. John Eliot died a martyr in the cause of constitutional liberty as opposed to monarchical autocracy. Eliot’s son petitioned the King to be allowed to remove his father’s body to their old Cornish home at St Germains, but the vindictive and narrow-minded monarch, who would not even forgive Eliot after death had intervened, refused the prayer, writing at the foot of the petition, “Lett Sir John Eliot’s body be buried in the church of the parish where he died.” No stone marks the spot where he is buried, and his dust mingles with that of the illustrious dead in St Peter’s Chapel in the Tower, but his name will be remembered as long as liberty is loved in his native land.

We now come to a period of quite another sort.

In Carlyle’s “Historical Sketches,” John Felton, the assassin of Buckingham, is thus described:—“Short, swart figure, of military taciturnity, of Rhadamanthian energy and gravity.... Passing along Tower Hill one of these August days (in 1628) Lieutenant Felton sees a sheath-knife on a stall there, value thirteen pence, of short, broad blade, sharp trowel point.” We know the use Felton made of that Tower Hill knife on his visit to Portsmouth, where Buckingham was then about to set sail for his second expedition to La Rochelle; how he stabbed the gay Duke to the heart, exclaiming, as he struck him: “God have mercy on thy soul!” how he was promptly arrested, brought to London and imprisoned in the Tower.