Picturesque Sketches of London, Past and Present

by Thomas Miller

The night before his execution he wrote the following lines in a leaf of the Bible:

“Even such is time, that takes on trust
Our youth, our joys, our all we have,
And pays us but with age and dust;
Who in the dark and silent grave,
When we have wander’d all our ways,
Shuts up the story of our days.”

Russel, Sydney, Shaftesbury, Buckingham, Laud, Davenant, and a score or more of others, whose names are mixed up with the stormy events of the period in which they lived, were prisoners in the Tower. These past away. Then came those who took part with the Pretender; some of whom were executed, a few pardoned; while others, like the Earl of Nithsdale, escaped. Then the names of Gordon, Burdett, and such like, of but little note in the present century, and they end

“This strange eventful history.”

The chapel of St. Peter’s ad Vincula stands at the north-west corner of the Tower, and must formerly have been very beautiful, though now sadly disfigured by modern innovators, who are cursed with such a taste as ought to be left only to its free indulgence in the walls of Bethlehem or St. Luke’s.

Here were interred the headless bodies of Queen Catherine Howard, Anne Boleyn, Margaret Countess of Shrewsbury, Lady Jane Grey: beauty, virtue, and talent, each bared her fair neck—the blow was struck, and now,

“After life’s fitful fever, they sleep well.”

Here also repose Sir Thomas More, Cromwell, Earl of Essex, Seymour the Lord Admiral, and (strange retribution) his brother, the Protector Somerset; Dudley, the husband of Lady Jane Grey; Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex—all beheaded. The catalogue may be dismissed in the words of Shakspeare, where he

“Tells sad stories of the death of kings:
How some have been deposed; some slain in war;
Some haunted by the ghosts they have deposed;
Some poison’d by their wives, some sleeping kill’d:
All murdered!”

Macaulay, in his History of England, speaking of this chapel, says: “There is no sadder spot on earth than this little cemetery. Death is there associated, not, as in Westminster Abbey and St. Paul’s, with genius and virtue, with public veneration, and with imperishable renown; not, as in our humblest churches and churchyards, with every thing that is most endearing in social and domestic charities, but with whatever is darkest in human nature and in human destiny, with the savage triumph of implacable enemies, with the inconstancy, the ingratitude, the cowardice of friends, with all the miseries of fallen greatness and of blighted fame.”