This torture was the rack.
‘It is the poynte of a wyse man to try and then to truste,
For hapy is he who fyndeth on that is juste.’—R. C.
The following is the conceit of a poor lover:
‘Thomas Willynagh, Goldsmithe. My hart is yours tel dethe.’
And by the side is a figure of a ‘bleeding hart,’ and another of ‘dethe.’ The initials, T. W. and P. A. on each side of the bleeding heart, are doubtless those of the lover and his mistress.”
This was the Tower in which Anne Boleyn was imprisoned. It is on record, that, when she passed under the Traitor’s Gate, she fell on her knees and prayed, declaring herself innocent. When about to be beheaded on the Green, she refused to have her eyes bandaged (those eyes into which her brutal, tiger-like husband had so often fondly looked), but kept them riveted on the headsman, who, while she gleamed on him, had not power to strike the blow, until some one attracted her attention, and then, when her eyes were turned away, he took off his shoes, strode forward noiselessly, and struck off her head.
Another inscription in this tower, in Italian, runs as follows:
“Since fortune hath chosen that my hope should go to the wind, to complain, I wish the time were destroyed, my planet being ever sad and unpropitious.”—Wilim Tyrree, 1541.
One underground cell was called the Rats’ Dungeon; it was below high-water mark, and dark as the grave. At high-water, hundreds of rats are believed to have sought shelter in this hideous cavern, until the tide subsided. In this den, it is said, prisoners were sometimes thrust, when the rack was found of no avail in extorting a confession. But all the shrieks and struggles would be drowned deep down in this inhuman hell, and only the Angel of Death left to look on the maddening horrors of the wretched prisoners. The imagination shrinks back, as, through the darkness of bygone years, it pictures for a moment the terrible tragedies which must have been enacted in such a blood-stained dungeon.