THE TOWER OF LONDON.*
IN the Tower of London and the Abbey Church of West• minster England possesses two buildings the like of which can be found in no other Christian land. Some there may be of greater antiquity, but none that has so long served, without solution of continuity, the purpose for which it was designed and been so closely identified with the national life and history. The Tower, as we know it, owes its origin to William I., but he built on the site where the Romans before him had erected a fortress, and for the same reason: it was the best defensive position on the Lower Thames, protecting the eastern side of the City and the seaward end of the river. More than this, the Tower in course of time became, as the antiquary, John Stowe, puts it, " a Royal palace for assemblies and treaties, a State prison for dangerous offenders, the only place for coining money, an armoury of warlike provisions, the treasury of the Crown jewels, and the storehouse of the Records of the Royal Courts of Justice at Westminster." Also, it must be added, the scene of countless tragedies, of as many crimes as the palace of an Eastern potentate, as many cruelties as the dungeons of the Holy Office at Madrid, and of more woes than the Bridge of Sighs at Venice. Every part of the Tower, as Lord Ronald Gower remarks, is rich in history and tradition; nearly every stone, if it had a tongue, might tell a tale stranger than any coined by a romancer's brain. Our author gives us the history of the Tower as a building, describing it as it was and is, and relating at length the vicissitudes and alterations which it has undergone, and the restorations and vandalism from which it has suffered ; but his is no dryasdust history, the narrative being enlivened by pleasant asides, anecdotes more or less relevant, and the mention of things not generally known, as, for instance, that the portcullises of the Bloody and the Byward Towers are in working order to this day, and the only machines of the sort in England that can still be used for their original purposes, and that the ceremony of receiving the keys is still observed. Every night, shortly before the witching hour, the chief warder and the yeoman porter march with an escort of beefeaters from the main guard to the outer gate, which the yeoman porter closes and locks. As the party returns the sentries demand, " Who goes there ? " The yeoman porter answers, " The keys," whereupon a sentry calls out, "Advance King Edward's keys." The keys are then taken to the • The Tower of Loudon. By Lord Ronald Sutherland Gower, Pak 2 vole. 1.ondon e. Bell and Sons. [21s. net.] King's House, and left for the night in the Constable's office. The password of the Tower is known only to three persons, the King, the Constable, and the Lord Mayor of London, to the last of whom it is imparted every quarter in a missive signed by the Sovereign.
The oldest and most historically important part of the fortress is, of course, the Norman Keep, built by the Conqueror, and since the reign of Edward III., when the outer walls were first whitewashed, known asthe White Tower. It was in the Council Chamber on the fourth floor of the Keep that Richard III. charged Hastings with treason, and ordered him to be led out and straightway executed. In the White Tower were his nephews put to death and buried. In the reign of Charles II. bones believed to have been theirs were found at the foot of a double flight of stone stairs facing the river, and eventually removed thence to Westminster Abby. In a sub-crypt of the chapel Guy Fawkes is said to have passed the last fifty days of his life, and in the deepest dungeon near by hundreds of Jews were imprisoned by order of King John. The Norman Chapel (St. John's), one of the most beautiful of its sort in England, received hard measure at the time of the Reforma- tion, being by order of the Government despoiled of its artistic treasures and ecclesiastical ornaments. Its frescos were effaced by whitewash, its stained-glass windows de- stroyed. The chapel afterwards became a receptacle for the Tower records, and in the last century the authorities actually proposed to use it as a warehouse for military clothing,—a fate from which it was saved by the Prince Consort, who had the chapel rid of its rubbish and dirt, the accumulation of ages, and restored to something like its pristine condition ; but its ancient splendours—the mural paintings, the windows " richly dight," the rood-screen and cross, the two " fair images " ordered to be set up by Henry gone for ever.
Though the Tower has served as a palace and (in stormy times) a refuge for our Kings, and its King's House still exists, it has far oftener served as a prison, and no prison has held more illustrious captives, or is associated with more mournful memories. Said Charles of Orleans, who was confined in the Tower: "I have had experience myself, and in my prison of England, for the weariness, danger, and dis- pleasure in which I there lay, I have many a time wished I had been slain at the battle where they took me." Among others were Baliol, King of Scots, and his son ; John, King of France, and his son; David Bruce and many of his nobles; and the son of Llewellyn, who lost his life while trying to escape. His rope breaking, he fell headlong and was found at the foot of the Tower "with his head thrust in between his shoulders." But the prisoners of war consigned to the safe keeping of the Constable of the Tower were a drop in a bucket as compared with prisoners of State, most of whom left it only twice : the first time to be tried in Westminster Hall, the second to be beheaded on Tower Hill. Paul Hentzner, a German traveller (quoted by the author) who visited the Tower in the reign of Queen Elizabeth, makes the significant remark : " It is to be noted that when any of the nobility are sent hither on the charge of high crimes, punishable with death, such as treason, they seldom or never recover their liberty." He might have added, " and generally lose their lives." In the interval between trial and execution these unfortunates were often so ill-treated that they must have looked forward to death as a happy release. Especially was this so with the victims of Henry VIII. Fisher, Bishop of Rochester, being at the time seventy-eight years old and a prisoner in the Tower, wrote thus to Cromwell :— •
"I byseche you to be Rode, master, unto me in my necessitie ; for I have neither shirt nor ante, nor yett other clothes that ate necessary for me to wear, but that they bee ragged, and rent so shamefully. Notwithstanding, I might easily suffer that if they would keep my body warm. But my dyett also, God knoweth how slender it is at any tymes, and now in myn age my stomach may not away but wyth a few kinds of meat, which if I want, I decay forthwith, and fall into coals and diseases of my bodge, and kan not kcep myself in health."
The poor old man's appeal, though laid before the King, failed to soften his heart. His hardships ended only when
his bead fell on the scaffold. Lord Ronald Gower, who has strong opinions and makes no secret of them, condemns Henry without stint or measure, and consigns his memory to everlasting infamy. Henry was certainly not a Monarch to
whose memory we can do reverence. He not only put into practice the precepts of Machiavelli's " Prince," but when it was a question of " feeding fat" a grudge or gratifying a desire he spared neither man nor woman. Henry, in short, was as unmoral as Napoleon, as ruthless as a Spanish Inquisitor, a3 remorseless as a Corsican brigand. All the same, be was a statesman, and rendered the realm good service. A weaker or more humane Monarch would have brought it to ruin. The Tudors were, in a sense, usurpers. There were Pre- tenders with better claims than they, ready and eager to leap into their seats; and the least show of hesitation on Henry's part had brought about another War of the Roses (which ended with the battle of Bosworth Field in 1485, —not, as the author has it, in 1471), whose result- ing horrors would have caused greater sufferings than all Henry's cruelties put together and a thousand times multiplied. Moreover, his victims were mostly of the old nobility. With the commonalty, to whom he assured quiet lives, his government was popular, else (there being in those days no standing army) had the people not endured his rule; and Lord Ronald Gower, who is apparently a fervent Protestant, should have a good word for the King who defied a Pope and made the Reformation possible.
Lord Ronald Gower, as will be seen, does not limit himself to a mere history of the Tower. He has many digressions and some irrelevances. But his book teems with information which it must have cost him great pains to gather. It is also ad- mirablyillustrated, full of human interest, and both instructive and entertaining. We could, however, wish the work had been better written. The author has no style worth mentioning, and makes strange mistakes. His very first sentence runs thus :— " Nothing has come down to us of any authentic value re- garding ancient London until Tacitus writes of Londinium as a place celebrated for the number of its merchants and the confluence of traffic." The author seems to be un- aware that there is such a good old word as "begin,'' invariably using in its stead "commence." Imagine the first verse of the first chapter of Genesis being rendered " In the commencement God made heaven and earth ! " This, however, is rather a vulgarism than a grammatical error. Not so the awkward phrase : " Thomas u Becket is supposed to have wished to have been made Constable of the fortress," which is neither sense nor good English. But the fault of using the perfect form of the infinitive for the indefinite form is too common, even with writers who ought to know better, to be very blameworthy. On the other hand, splitting infinitives is as wrong as saying "neither of the parties [to a marriage contract] were," and such a passage as the following is almost ludicrous : " The Earl of Warwick had received an invitation to meet the King at dinner, at the palace of the Lord Chancellor, Edmund de Strafford, who was also Bishop of Exeter, which was in the Strand." There are other solecisms on which we need not dwell, and we point out these only because they mar an otherwise capital book, and with a little care might so easily have been avoided.
The general reader will probably deem the second volume more entertaining than the first, inasmuch as it is more modern. It deals with the history of the Tower in Stuart and Commonwealth times and during the reigns of the Georges and Queen Victoria, relates many tragic and stirring episodes, and describes the imprisonment and execution of the Scottish rebel Lords, the fire of 1841, and the Fenian attempt to blow up the White Tower in 1885. It is never dull and often lively, full of true stories more interesting than any in- ventions, and so enriched with portraits and other illustra- tions as to render it a desirable possession to all who love books and take pleasure in reading histories.
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