On this same spot, in 1483, the Protector, afterward Richard III., came in among the lords in council, and asked the Bishop of Ely to send to his gardens in Ely Place, off Holborn, for some strawberries. The terror which royalty inspired—and with good reason in that day—is well described by Sir Thomas More, who was himself a prisoner in less than a half century after the scene which he so graphically describes:
“He returned into the chamber, among them, all changed, with a wonderful sour, angry countenance, knitting the brows, frowning and frothing and gnawing of the lips; and so sat him down in his place, all the lords much dismayed and sore marvelling of this manner of sudden change, and what thing should him ail.” Then asking what should be the punishment of those who conspired against his life, and being told that they should be punished as traitors, he then accused his brother’s wife and his own wife. “‘Then,’ said the Protector,” continues More, “‘ye shall see in what wise that sorceress and that other witch ... have by their sorcery and witchcraft wasted my body!’ And therewith he plucked up his doublet sleeve to his elbow upon his left arm, and he shewed a werish withered arm, and small as it was never other. And thereupon every man’s mind sore misgave him, well perceiving that this matter was but a quarrel ... no man was there present but well knew that his arm was ever such since his birth. Nevertheless the lord chamberlain answered, and said: ‘Certainly, my lord, if they have so heinously done they be worthy heinous punishment.’ ‘What,’ quoth the Protector, ‘thou servest me ill with ifs and with ands; I tell thee they have so done, and that I will make good on thy body, traitor!... I will not to dinner until I see thy head off.’ Within an hour, the lord chamberlain’s head rolled in the dust.”
The author of the “Utopia,” being a knight, was leniently treated while in the Tower. He paid ten shillings a week for himself and five shillings for his servant. Occasionally his friends came to see him, and urged in vain that he should propitiate Henry VIII. and his wife, Anne Boleyn, against whose marriage he had objected. But he remained immovable. “Is not this house as nigh heaven as my own?” he asked, serenely, when wife and daughters pleaded with him to reconsider. Lady More petitioned Henry for her husband’s pardon, on the ground of his illness and her poverty; she had been forced to sell her clothing to pay her husband’s fees in prison. But Henry had no mercy on the gentle scholar, the greatest English genius of his day, and who had been lord chancellor of England.
For a time he was allowed to write, but later, books and writing materials were removed; yet he occasionally succeeded in writing to his wife and daughter Margaret on scraps of paper with pieces of coal. “Thenceforth,” says his biographer, “he caused the shutters of his cell to be closed, and spent most of his time in the dark.”
When the end came, his sentence to be hanged at Tyburn was commuted by the king to beheadal at Tower Hill. Cheerful, and even with a tone of jest, he said to the lieutenant on the scaffold, “I pray thee, see me safely up, and for my coming down, let me shift for myself.” He removed his beard from the block, saying, “it had never committed treason,” and told the bystanders that he died “in and for the faith of the Catholic Church,” and prayed God to send the king good counsel. More’s body was buried in St. Peter’s Church, where that of the fair young Anne Boleyn herself was soon to lie. His head, after the savage custom of the time, was parboiled and affixed to a pole on London Bridge.
Dark and bloody were the associations that centre around the Tower in the century preceding Milton’s. Few of these have touched the popular heart more than those which cluster around the girl-queen of nine days—the fair Lady Jane Grey. In the Brick Tower, where she was imprisoned, she wrote her last brave, pathetic words to her father and sister upon the leaves of her Greek Testament. From her prison window she saw the headless body of her boy-husband pass by in a cart from Tower Hill, and cried: “Oh, Guildford! Guildford! the antepast is not so bitter that thou hast tasted, and which I soon shall taste, as to make my flesh tremble; it is nothing compared with that feast of which we shall partake this day in heaven.”
When she was ready to lay her fair young head upon the block, she cried: “I pray you all, good Christian people, to bear me witness that I die a true Christian woman.” “Then tied she the handkerchief about her eyes, and feeling for the block, she said, ‘What shall I do? Where is it?’ One of the standers-by guiding her thereunto, she laid her head down upon the block, and then stretched forth her body, and said: ‘Lord, into thy hands I commend my spirit.’” So perished this girl of eighteen, whose beauty, learning, and tragic fate make her one of the most pathetic figures in history.
The most interesting parts of the Tower, including St. Peter’s Church, the dungeons, Raleigh’s cell, and the spot where he wrote his “History of the World,” are not shown to ordinary visitors. They can be seen, however, by the receipt of a written order from the Constable of the Tower, and should not be missed by any student of English history. Even a few moments spent in those dark lower vaults help the torpid imagination of those who live in freedom as cheap and common as the air they breathe to realise through what horror and bloody sweat of brave men and women in the past his freedom has been bought. Though these dungeons now are clean and a few modern openings through the massive walls admit some feeble rays of light, it is not difficult to conjure up the black darkness, filth, and vermin, and noisome odours of the past, or the shrieks of saint or sinner, who, like Anne Askew and Guy Fawkes, suffered upon the rack. Only two years before Milton’s birth, the conspirators of the Gunpowder Plot were immured in these dungeons, and then hanged, cut down, and disembowelled while they were still living.
In Milton’s youth, in 1630, while he was writing Latin verses at Christ’s College, Cambridge, that brave, heroic, noble soul, Sir John Eliot, was committed to the Tower. Those were sad days for England. Free speech in Parliament was throttled. The nation’s ancient liberties were in jeopardy. Says the historian, Green: “The early struggle for Parliamentary liberty centres in the figure of Sir John Eliot.... He was now in the first vigour of manhood, with a mind exquisitely cultivated, and familiar with the poetry and learning of his day, a nature singularly lofty and devout, a fearless and vehement temperament. But his intellect was as clear and cool as his temper was ardent. What he believed in was the English Parliament. He saw in it the collective wisdom of the realm, and in that wisdom he put a firmer trust than in the statecraft of kings.” Of the memorable scene in Parliament in which he moved the presentation to the king of a remonstrance, in the session of 1628, a letter of the times gives a description. By royal orders the Speaker of the House stopped him, and Eliot sat abruptly down amid the solemn silence of the members. “Then appeared such a spectacle of passions as the like had seldom been seen in such an assembly; some weeping, some expostulating, some prophesying of the fatal ruin of our kingdom, some playing the divines in confessing their sins and country’s sins.... There were above an hundred weeping eyes, many who offered to speak being interrupted and silenced by their own passions.”
Says President Theodore Roosevelt of Sir John Eliot: “He took his stand firmly on the ground that the king was not the master of Parliament, and of course this could but mean ultimately that Parliament was master of the king. In other words, he was one of the earliest leaders of the movement which has produced English freedom and English government as we now know them. He was also its martyr. He was kept in the Tower, without air or exercise, for three years, the king vindictively refusing to allow the slightest relaxation in his confinement, even when it brought on consumption. In December, 1632, he died; and the king’s hatred found its last expression in denying to his kinsfolk the privilege of burying him in his Cornish home.”