THE TOWER OF LONDON

View of the Tower in the time of Charles I.
(From an etching by Hollar.)

THE
TOWER OF LONDON

BY
LORD RONALD SUTHERLAND GOWER, F.S.A.
ONE OF THE TRUSTEES OF THE NATIONAL PORTRAIT GALLERY

With Numerous Illustrations

IN TWO VOLUMES

VOL. II.

LONDON
GEORGE BELL & SONS
1902

CONTENTS

CHAPTER
XII. [THE STUARTS—JAMES I.]
XIII. [CHARLES I. AND THE COMMONWEALTH]
XIV. [CHARLES II.]
XV. [JAMES II.]
XVI. [WILLIAM AND MARY]
XVII. [QUEEN ANNE]
XVIII. [GEORGE I.]
XIX. [GEORGE II.]
XX. [GEORGE III.]
XXI. [THE LATE REIGNS]
[The Fire of 1841]
[The Fenian Attempt to Blow up the White Tower, Jan. 24th, 1885]
APPENDIX
[I.] DISPUTES BETWEEN THE CITY OF LONDON AND THE OFFICIALS OF THE TOWER AS TO THE RIGHTS AND PRIVILEGES OF THE TOWER
[II.] THE BEHAVIOUR AND CHARACTER OF THE THREE HIGHLANDERS WHO WERE SHOT ON JULY 18TH, 1743
[III.] DATES OF RESTORATIONS CARRIED ON BY H.M. OFFICE OF WORKS AT THE TOWER OF LONDON TO THE PRESENT TIME
[IV.] RECENT DISCOVERIES AT THE TOWER (WITH A PLAN)
[V.] THE BLOODY TOWER
[VI.] STAINED GLASS IN THE TOWER
[VII.] LIST OF THE CONSTABLES OF THE TOWER
[INDEX]

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

PHOTOGRAVURE PLATES

BLOCKS

THE TOWER

CHAPTER XII

THE STUARTS—JAMES I.

In Nichols’s “Progresses,” that mine of information regarding James I., his court and times, it is related that James paid his first visit to the Tower on 3rd May 1603, “when His Majesty set forward from the Charter House and went quietly on horseback to Whitehall where he took barge. Having shot the bridge, his present landing was expected at the Tower stayres, but it pleased His Highness to passe the Towre stairs toward St Katherines, and there stayed on the water to see the ordinance on the White Tower (commonly called Julius Cæsar’s Tower) being in number twenty pieces, with the great ordinance on the Towre wharfe, being in number 100, and chalmers to the number of 130, discharged and shot off. Of which, all services were sufficiently performed by the gunners, that a peale of so good order was never heard before; which was most commendable to all sorts, and very acceptable to the King.”[1]

Owing to the plague then raging in London, the customary procession at the coronation was omitted, although the King rode in state from the Tower to Westminster, preparatory to the opening of his first Parliament on 15th of March 1605, as the Londoners had made their welcome for him ready. In Mr Sidney Lee’s “Life of Shakespeare,” he states that Shakespeare, with eight other players of the King’s company of actors, “walked from the Tower of London to Westminster in the procession which accompanied the King in his formal entry into London. Each actor received four and a half yards of scarlet cloth to wear as a cloak on the occasion, and in the document authorising the grant, Shakespeare’s name stands first on the list.” This is the only time that we can positively know that Shakespeare was ever at the Tower; but his frequent introduction of the fortress into his historical dramas makes it certain that he must often have visited a place so full of dramatic episodes and historical memories.[2]

Four months earlier, while staying at Wilton, news had reached James of a plot to place the crown upon the head of Lady Arabella Stuart, and a large batch of alleged conspirators were taken to the Tower in consequence. Among them was Sir Walter Raleigh, Lord Cobham, and his brother, George Brooke, Thomas Lord Grey de Wilton, Sir Griffin Maskham, Sir Edward Parham, Bartholomew Brookesby, Anthony Copley, and two priests named Weston and Clarke. This conspiracy, if it deserves the name, and for which Raleigh was for the second time sent to the Tower, owed its existence to the unlucky Arabella, daughter of Charles Stuart, Earl of Lennox, younger brother of Darnley, and consequently James’s first cousin on the mother’s side.

State Procession from the Tower in the days of the Stuarts.

Arabella Stuart was also related to the Tudors, and this double relationship to the reigning sovereign and to the late Queen was her greatest misfortune, and the cause of her untimely death. She appears to have been amiable, refined, virtuous, and good-looking, but of a somewhat frail physique and countenance, to judge by the excellent miniature which Oliver painted of her. That her mind was not a strong one is very evident, and one cannot be surprised that she became insane under the burden of her misfortunes.

Lady Arabella was made use of as a tool by James’s enemies, and at Lord Cobham’s trial it was conclusively proved that she had no share in any of the schemes which had the placing of herself on the throne for their object. Had it not been for her unfortunate marriage she would probably have ended her life in peaceful obscurity. This unhappy lady disliked the life of a court, and had lived principally with her grandmother, old Lady Shrewsbury, “Bess of Hardwicke,” as that much-married and firm-minded dame was nicknamed, in her beautiful homes of Chatsworth and Hardwicke Hall, in Derbyshire. In the last year of Elizabeth’s reign, Arabella, whose hand had been asked in marriage by many suitors, and amongst them by Henry IV. of France, and the Archduke Mathias, met, and fell in love with William Seymour, grandson of the Earl of Hertford, and had been kept in close confinement by the Queen in consequence.

The plot to place Lady Arabella on the throne was regarded as dangerous by the court, owing to James’s unpopularity, which was not surprising, for at that time everything Scottish was cordially detested by the English. The Scotch had been as inimical to us as either the French or the Spaniards, and for a far longer period, whilst the Scottish alliance with France had added still more to the national dislike. Neither was the new King’s appearance one to win the admiration of his new subjects, for a more ungainly individual had surely never appeared out of a booth at a fair. The English were as susceptible then, as they are now, to the outward appearance of their rulers, and even Henry VIII., for all his tyranny and cruelty, was popular among the people on account of his fine presence; and when Elizabeth appeared in public, all aglow with splendour, her lieges shouted themselves hoarse with delight, and worshipped that “bright occidental effulgence.” What a contrast to these was James Stuart. With his huge head, and padded shanks, his great tongue lolling from out his mouth, his goggle eyes, and rolling gait, and the incomprehensible, to English ears, jargon of Lowland Scotch which he spoke, his was not a very kingly figure, and he made anything but a favourable impression upon his new subjects. It appears that Raleigh, at the time of James’s arrival, let fall some remarks which were repeated to the King, to the effect that it would be well not to allow the Scottish locusts to eat too much of the Southern pastures. It has been supposed that Raleigh, at a meeting at Whitehall, proposed to found a republic, and Aubrey, a contemporary writer, even gives his words, “Let us keep the staff in our own hands, and set up a commonwealth, and not remain subject to a needy beggarly nation.” Raleigh met the King for the first time at Burleigh, when James, who prided himself on his wit, said to Sir Walter, that he thought but “rawly” of him; it is a vile pun, but is interesting as showing the way in which his contemporaries pronounced Raleigh’s name.

Cecil, who had brought Essex to the scaffold, now lost no time in bringing Raleigh, Essex’s rival, to the Tower, and on the 20th of July 1603, the prison gates of that fortress once again closed upon the founder of Virginia, on a charge of treason, based on the Arabella Stuart conspiracy, nor did they open for him until twelve years had passed. On the following day Raleigh attempted to stab himself with a table-knife, for he seems to have been maddened by his treatment by James and Cecil. In November the plague was so violent in London, that the Law Courts were transferred to Winchester, and it was to that city that Sir Walter and his fellow-prisoners were taken and tried on a charge of “attempting to deprive the King of his crown and dignity; to molest the Government, and alter the true religion established in England, and to levy war against the King.”

George Brooke, a brother of Lord Cobham’s, and two priests were found guilty and executed, Lords Grey de Wilton, Cobham, and Raleigh were respited, and were taken back to their prison in the Tower. Cobham never regained his liberty, he was a ruined man, and died probably in the Tower. The place of his burial is unknown.

The de Cobhams were an early family of importance in the twelfth century, and from the thirteenth to the sixteenth one of the most powerful in the south of England. Henry de Cobham was summoned to Parliament in 1313. The direct line ended in Joan de Cobham, who married five times; her third husband was Sir John Oldcastle, commonly called Lord Cobham, jure uxoris, but inaccurately, for he was summoned to Parliament under his own name, Oldcastle.

In descent from Joan was Henry Brooke, Lord Cobham, attainted first of James the First. He was born 1564, and succeeded to the title 1596–7, and shortly after installed Knight of the Garter. He married Francis Howard, daughter of the Earl of Nottingham, and widow of the Earl of Kildare. He was committed to the Tower December 16th, 1603, tried, and condemned to death, and actually brought out to be executed, but had been privately reprieved beforehand by James the First, who played with Cobham and Gray, and their companions, as a cat would with mice. After fifteen years’ rigorous confinement in the Tower, his health failed, and he was allowed out, attended by his gaolers, to visit Bath. This was in 1617, and was taken so ill on his way back he had to stay at Odiham, Hants, at the house of his brother-in-law, Sir Edward Moore. He died, with very little doubt, in the Tower, January 24th, 1619, but the place of his burial has been undiscovered. He had been well supplied with books, for the Lieutenant of the Tower seized a thousand volumes at the time of his death of “all learning and languages.” In a letter from Sir Thomas Wynne to Sir Dudley Carlton (State Papers, Dom Jac, 1st vol., 105), 28th of January 1619, occurs this passage: “My Lord Cobham is dead, and lyeth unburied as yet for want of money; he died a papist.” This probably was only gossip. While in the Tower he was allowed eight pounds a week for maintenance, but very little of this ever reached him, it probably was absorbed by his keepers and the Lieutenant. During his long imprisonment Lady Kildare never troubled herself further about him. She lived comfortably, first at Cobham, and afterwards at Copthall, Essex.

By the will of George, Lord Cobham, 1552, the Cobham estates, by an elaborate settlement, were strictly entailed, so that Henry, Lord Cobham, only had a life interest, and the King could not seize them; and probably it was to that fact he owed his life, for the King could possess them during his life, but not alienate them.

Unfortunately, the next heir was the son of George Brooke, executed for treason at Winchester, Lord Cobham’s brother, who, at the time of his uncle’s death, was an infant of tender age, and without friends, so negotiations were carried on with the next in succession, Duke Brooke, a cousin of Lord Cobham’s, and this man parted with his prospective rights to the King for about £10,000, which enabled this “specimen of King craft” to enter into possession. Duke Brooke, dying soon after, Charles Brooke, his brother, parted with several other manors to Cecil, Earl of Salisbury. None of these transactions were legal; Henry, Lord Cobham, was not dead, nor the children of George Brooke, William, and his two sisters, Frances and Elizabeth. For some reason they were “restored in blood,” but with the express proviso they should not inherit any of the property of their fathers or their uncles; nor was William to take the title of Lord Cobham. And this was all done with the connivance of Cecil, Lord Burleigh, brother-in-law to Henry, Lord Cobham. No wonder William Brooke became a devoted Parliamentarian in the next reign, and died fighting against the King at Newbury, 1643. Many letters of Henry Brooke have been preserved while in the Tower: “To my very good Lord and Brother-in-law, Lord Burleigh.” He must both have been clever and learned, for during his captivity he translated Seneca’s treatises, De Providentia, De Ira, De Tranquilitate, De Vita Beata, and De Paupertate: the original manuscript of one, De Providentia, is in the library at Ufford Place, Suffolk, the seat of his representative, Edward Brooke, Esq., written in a beautifully fine hand. Raleigh and Cobham’s “treason” was that known as the Main or Spanish Treason, one of the supposed objects of which was to place the Lady Arabella Stuart on the throne.

The Moat looking West

Lord Grey de Wilton, a young man of great promise, died in St Thomas’s Tower in 1617, after passing nine years in the Brick Tower. Lord Grey had made an eloquent defence during his trial, which lasted from eight in the morning until eight at night, during which, according to the Hardwicke State Papers, many “subtle traverses and escapes,” took place. When Grey was asked why judgment of death should not be passed against him, he replied, “I have nothing to say.” Then he paused a little, and added, “And yet a word of Tacitus comes into my mind, ‘non eadem omnibus decora,’ the house of the Wiltons have spent many lives in their Princes’ service and Grey cannot beg his.”

For the next twelve years the Tower was Raleigh’s home, and not till he had succeeded in bribing King James’s favourite, George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, by the payment of a large sum of money, did he again obtain his liberty. Before settling down in the Tower, and while the plague was still raging, Raleigh, with his wife and son, were taken to the Fleet Prison on several occasions. At length they were placed in the not uncomfortable rooms in the Bloody Tower, which he, with his family and servants, must have quite filled, for besides Lady Raleigh and her son Carew, there were two servants named Dean and Talbot, and a boy, who was probably a son of Talbot’s. Their imprisonment was not absolutely rigid, for they were allowed the visits of a clergyman named Hawthorne, a doctor, Turner, and a surgeon, Dr John, as well as those of Sir Walter’s agent, who came up from Raleigh’s place, Sherborn, so that he was kept in touch with his affairs; one or two other friends were also admitted. In addition to these privileges Sir Walter was allowed the run—the liberty as it would be called then—of the Lieutenant of the Tower’s garden, which lay at the foot of the Bloody Tower, as has already been mentioned in the description of that place.

In 1604 the penal laws against the Roman Catholics were re-enacted by Parliament, and in the following year the famous Gunpowder Plot was discovered, with the consequence that in the month of November of that year the Tower received many of the principal conspirators, and still more of those individuals who were in some way or other concerned in it. Foremost amongst the latter were the aged Earl of Northumberland, Henry Percy, and with him were Henry, Lord Mordaunt, Lord Stourton, and three Jesuit priests, Fathers Garnet, Oldcorn, and Gerrard. Northumberland, besides having to pay an enormous fine, was kept a prisoner in the Tower for sixteen years; Mordaunt and Stourton were also heavily fined and remanded to the fortress during the King’s pleasure; Fathers Garnet and Oldcorn were hanged—the former at St Paul’s, in the usual manner, after being cruelly tortured, the latter at Worcester. As for the third priest, Gerrard, I have in another part of this work described the treatment he endured and his escape from the Tower.

The Byward Tower and Moat from the Wharf

Of the active conspirators, besides Guy Fawkes—who was executed with Thomas Winter, Rookwood, and Keyes in Old Palace Yard—Sir Everard Digby, the father of the accomplished Sir Kenelm, Robert Winter, Grant, and Bates, were drawn on hurdles to the west end of St Paul’s Churchyard, where they were done to death in the approved fashion of execution for high treason.

Guy Fawkes and most of his fellow-prisoners while in the Tower had been placed in the subterranean dungeons beneath the White Tower. Fawkes, besides being tortured by the rack, was placed in “Little Ease,” in which horrible hole he is supposed to have been kept for fifty days. Father Oldcorn was imprisoned in the lower room of the Bloody Tower, whilst Father Fisher was in the White Tower; Northumberland, the “Wizard Earl,” as he was called on account of his leaning towards chemical experiments, was lodged in the Martin Tower.

Until the month of August in that year (1605), Sir Walter Raleigh’s imprisonment in the Bloody Tower had not been very stringent. Sir George Harvey had filled the position of Lieutenant of the Tower, and Sir George and Sir Walter were on friendly terms. His lodging, for a prison, was comfortable enough; his wife and son were still with him, Lady Raleigh having been confined of a second son about this time. In addition to the attendance of his servants and the visits of his friends, as I have mentioned before, he was allowed to have all the books he required for the great literary labour that now began to occupy much of his time. When not working in his little garden by the Tower, or experimenting with his chemicals and decoctions in a small outbuilding which he had built in the garden, or taking exercise on the wall terrace which overlooked the wharf and the river beyond, he would be writing at his “History of the World,” that wonderful fragment which is one of the marvels of our literature.

Unfortunately for Sir Walter, his friend Sir George Harvey, with whom he often dined and passed the evening, ceased being Lieutenant at this time, being succeeded by Sir William Waad. Raleigh’s feelings towards the new Lieutenant appear to have resembled those of Napoleon to Sir Hudson Lowe. Waad, who had been Clerk of the Council, on his side seems to have had a personal dislike to the great captive over whom he was placed in charge, and to have done all he could—and he had the power of doing a great deal—to render Raleigh’s life as unpleasant and galling as possible. For instance, Waad ordered a brick wall to be built in front of the terrace where Raleigh walked, so that the captive could no longer watch the passing life beneath him on the wharf or river. Then Waad complained to Cecil of Raleigh making himself too conspicuous to the people who passed beneath the Bloody Tower, and, not content with annoying Sir Walter, pestered Lady Raleigh, and deprived her of the poor satisfaction of driving her coach into the courtyard of the fortress, a privilege that had hitherto been allowed her. In these and many other petty ways the new Lieutenant contrived to make himself as unpleasant as he possibly could to Raleigh and his wife.

During the alarm consequent upon the Gunpowder Plot, Raleigh was examined by the Council, probably in the Lieutenant’s, now the King’s House, but naturally nothing could be found to implicate him with the conspiracy, and the King had to bide his time before he could bring his great subject to the block. In 1610, for some unknown reason, Sir Walter was kept a close prisoner in his tower for three months, and Lady Raleigh was taken from him.

In Disraeli’s “Amenities of Literature” is the following interesting description of those friends of Sir Walter who shared his pursuits and studies in the Tower:—

“A circumstance as remarkable as the work itself” (“History of the World”) “occurred in the author’s long imprisonment. By one of the strange coincidences in human affairs, it happened that in the Tower Raleigh was surrounded by the highest literary and scientific circle in the nation. Henry, the ninth Earl of Northumberland, on the suspicion of having favoured his relation Piercy, the Gunpowder Plot conspirator, was cast into this State prison, and confined during many years. This Earl delighted in what Anthony Wood describes as ‘the obscure parts of learning.’ He was a magnificent Mecaenas, and not only pensioned scientific men, but daily assembled them at his table, and in these intellectual communions, participating in their pursuits, he passed his life. His learned society was designated as ‘the Atlantis of the Northumberland world’! But that world had other inhabitants, antiquaries and astrologers, chemists and naturalists. There was seen Thomas Allen, another Roger Bacon, ‘terrible and tho’ vulgar,’ famed for his ‘Bibliotheca Alleniana,’ a rich collection of manuscripts, most of which have been preserved in the Bodleian; the name of Allen survives in the ardent commemorations of Camden, of Spelman, and of Selden. He was accompanied by his friend Doctor Dee, but whether Dee ever tried their patience or their wonder by his ‘Diary of Conferences with Spirits’ we find no record, and by the astronomical Torporley, a disciple of Lucretius, for his philosophy consisted of stones; several of his manuscripts remain in Sion College. The muster-roll is too long to run over. In this galaxy of the learned the brightest star was Thomas Hariot, who merited the distinction of being ‘the Universal Philosopher’; his inventions in algebra Descarte, when in England, silently adopted, but which Dr Wallis afterwards indignantly reclaimed; his skill in interpreting the text of Homer excited the grateful admiration of Chalman when occupied by his version. Bishop Corbet has described

‘Deep Hariot’s mine

In which there is no dross.’

“Two other men, Walter Warner, who is said to have suggested to Harvey the great discovery of the circulation of the blood, and Robert Huer, famed for his ‘Treatise on the Globes’—these, with Hariot, were the Earl’s constant companions; and at a period when science seemed connected with necromancy, the world distinguished the Earl and his three friends as ‘Henry the Wizard and his three Magi.’... Such were the men of science, daily guests in the Tower during the imprisonment of Raleigh; and when he had constructed his laboratory to pursue his chemical experiments, he must have multiplied their wonders. With one he had been intimately connected early in life, Hariot had been his mathematical tutor, was domesticated in his house, and became his confidential agent in the expedition to Virginia. Raleigh had warmly recommended his friend to the Earl of Northumberland, and Sion House became Hariot’s home and observatory.”

The elder Disraeli has argued that Raleigh could not possibly have written the whole of that large tome, “The History of the World,” himself, for want of books of reference whilst in the Tower. But as his friends supplied him with books, and he himself had probably taken copious notes for the work while living in the old home of the Desmonds at Youghal, in Ireland, where a remnant of the old Desmond library is still existing, the argument can scarcely be considered proved. The late Sir John Pope Hennessy has pointed out in his work on “Raleigh in Ireland,” that, by an odd coincidence, the son of the sixteenth Earl of Desmond, whose lands Raleigh held in Ireland, was a fellow-prisoner of Sir Walter’s in the Tower during his first imprisonment in the fortress during Elizabeth’s reign. Desmond died in prison in 1608, and was buried in St Peter’s Chapel. Raleigh had this youth’s sad fate in his mind, it seems, when he wrote from the Tower, “Wee shall be judged as we judge—and be dealt withal as wee deal with others in this life, if wee believe God Himself.”

An almost contemporary historian, Sir Richard Baker, refers to Raleigh’s imprisonment in the following quaint manner:—“He was kept in the Tower, where he had great honour; he spent his time in writing, and had been a happy man if he had never been released.” A strange description, surely, of what is generally understood by the term, “happy man.”

Henry, Prince of Wales, seems to have been the only member of his family who appreciated Sir Walter, frequently visiting him at the Tower. On one of the occasions when he had left him, the young prince remarked to one of his following that no king except his father could keep such a bird in such a cage. The Prince’s mother, Queen Anne, seems also to have shown some interest in Raleigh’s fate, and to have tried to induce her miserable husband to set him free.

Arabella Stuart.
(From a Contemporary Miniature.)

In 1611 Arabella Stuart was brought a prisoner into the Tower, and with her, Lady Shrewsbury. When the news of Arabella’s marriage with young William Seymour reached the King, her fate was sealed, for by this marriage the half-captivity in which she had lived was changed into captivity for life; and few of James the First’s evil actions, and they were not a few, were more mean or cowardly than his treatment of his poor kinswoman, Arabella Hertford.

She had never been known to mix in politics, and if she had any ambition, it was the noble ambition of wishing to lead a pure life away from an infamous court. Poor Arabella used to declare that although she was often asked to marry some foreign prince, nothing on earth would induce her to marry any man whom she did not know, or for whom she had no liking.

At Christmastide of 1609, James, hearing a rumour that seemed to point to Arabella being married to some foreign prince, had sent her to the Tower, releasing her when he discovered that his fears were groundless, and giving his consent to her marrying one of his subjects should she wish to do so. Unfortunately, Arabella took advantage of the King’s consent, trusting to his word, but she found to her bitter cost how hollow and false that promise was. In the following February (1610) she plighted her troth to William Seymour, both probably relying upon the Royal word. Whether James had forgotten that Seymour was a probable suitor for Arabella’s hand when he gave his promise cannot be known, but Arabella could not have made a more unlucky choice, as far as she herself was concerned, for the Suffolk claims had been recognised by Act of Parliament; and the same Parliament which had acknowledged James the First could not alter the order of succession, and, consequently, William Seymour being the grandson of Lord Hertford, by his wife, Catharine Grey, was in what was called the “Suffolk Succession.” His marriage to Arabella brought her still nearer to the Crown, and any children born of the marriage would have had a good chance of succeeding to the throne.

The young couple were summoned to appear before the Council, and were charged to give up all thoughts of marriage. But, in spite of King and Council, they were secretly married in the month of May 1611—a month said to be unlucky for marriages. Two months afterwards the news reached the King, and the storm burst over the unlucky lovers. Arabella was sent a prisoner to Lambeth Palace, and her husband to the Tower. From Lambeth Arabella was first removed to the house of Mr Conyers at Highgate, and thence she was to be sent to Durham Castle in charge of the Bishop. At Highgate, however, she fell ill, or pretended to fall ill, and the famous attempt made to escape by herself and her husband took place.

By some means she procured a disguise in the shape of a wig and male attire, with long, yellow riding-boots and a rapier, and thus accoutred, on the 4th of June she rode to Blackwall, where she had hoped to find her husband, but, failing in this, she rowed with a female attendant and a Mr Markham, who had accompanied her from Highgate, to a French vessel lying near Leigh, which took them on board. Seymour, also disguised, escaped from the Tower by following a cart laden with wooden billets. He got away unperceived, and managed to reach a boat waiting for him by the wharf at the Iron Gate, but, on arriving at Leigh, they found the French ship, with Arabella on board, had put out to sea. The weather was against the ship in which Seymour was sailing making Calais, and he had to go on to Ostend, where he disembarked.

Lady Arabella Seymour.

Sweet brother
every one forſakes me but those that cannot helpe me.
Your most unfortunate ſister
Arbella Seymaure

Her Autograph from the Original in the Possession of John Thane.

Meanwhile, a hue and cry rang out from London. King’s messengers galloped in hot haste from Whitehall to Deptford, and orders arrived at all the southern ports to search all ships and barks that might contain the runaways; a proclamation was issued to arrest the principals and the abettors of their flight. A ship of war was sent over to Calais, and others were despatched along the French coast as far as Flanders to intercept the fugitives. When half-way across the Channel, one of these vessels, named the Adventurer, came in sight of a ship crowding on all sail in order to reach Calais; the wind, meanwhile, had dropped, and further flight was impossible. A boat was lowered from the Adventurer, the crew who manned it being armed to the teeth. A few shots were exchanged, and the flying vessel, which proved to be French, was boarded, and the poor runaway was taken back to the English man-of-war; on board of her Arabella was made a prisoner, and as a prisoner was landed at the Tower, never to leave it again until her luckless body was taken from it for burial at Westminster.

James made as much ado about this attempted escape of the Hertfords as if he had discovered a second Gunpowder Plot. And not only did he have all those who had been concerned in Arabella’s flight seized and imprisoned in the Tower, but kept the Countess of Shrewsbury and the Earl strict prisoners in their house, and ordered the old Earl of Hertford to appear before him.

From all appearances William Seymour showed a lack of courage at this time, not unlike the husband of Lady Catherine Seymour in the last reign, for he remained abroad while the storm with all its fury fell and crushed his young wife. Poor Arabella lingered on in her prison till death released her from her troubles on the 25th of September 1615. She had been kept both in the Belfry Tower and in the Lieutenant’s House, but had lost her reason some time previous to her final release both from durance and the world. Her body was taken in the dead of night to Westminster Abbey, and placed below the coffin of Mary Queen of Scots. Mickle, the author of “Cumnor Hall,” and “There’s nae luck about the house,” is credited with having written the touching ballad on Arabella Stuart, which is included in Evans’s “Old Ballads.”

“Where London’s Tower its turrets shew,

So stately by old Thames’s side,

Fair Arabella, child of woe,

For many a day had sat and sighed.

And as she heard the waves arise,

And as she heard the black wind roar,

As fast did heave her heartfelt sighs,

And still so fast her tears did pour.”

William Seymour survived Arabella for nearly half-a-century; he married again, his second wife being a sister of the Parliamentary general, the Earl of Essex, the son of Elizabeth’s favourite and victim. In 1660 Seymour became Duke of Somerset, and lived just long enough to welcome Charles II. He had shown far more loyalty to Charles I. than he had done to poor Arabella Stuart.

In 1613, Sir William Waad, to the great delight of Raleigh, as well as of the other prisoners in the Tower, vacated his post as Lieutenant. He had been charged with the theft of the unfortunate Arabella’s jewels, but his dismissal was also connected with a still more tragic story—the murder of Sir Thomas Overbury—a murder which throws a very lurid light upon the doings of James the First’s court and courtiers. Two years before Arabella’s death, the Tower had been the scene of a most foul murder. Scandalous as was the court of James, murder had not yet been associated with it, but in the year 1613 the fate of Sir Thomas Overbury added that dark crime to its other villainies.

The portraiture of Robert Car Earle of Somerset, Vicount Rochester, Knight of the most noble order of the Garter &c. And of the Ladie Francis his wife.

The Earl & Countess of Somerset.
(From a Contemporary Print.)

Macaulay has compared the court of James the First to that of Nero; it would have been more correct to have likened it to that of the Valois, Henry III. Although it was never proved, there were strong suspicions that the somewhat sudden death of Henry, Prince of Wales, was brought about by poison, and there is no doubt that poison was made use of by James’s courtiers, as the death of Overbury proves. Sir Thomas Overbury was the confidant of the King’s worthless favourite, Robert Carr, a handsome youth who had been brought by James from Scotland in his train, and whom he had knighted in 1607. James had also given Raleigh’s confiscated estates to his favourite two years after making him a knight, and in 1614 created him Lord Rochester and Earl of Somerset, as well as Lord Chamberlain. Overbury belonged to a Gloucestershire family, and had travelled on the Continent, whence he returned what was then called “a finished gentleman.” Overbury and Carr were firm friends, and it was probably on the recommendation of the latter that James knighted Overbury in 1608. When, however, Somerset determined to marry the notoriously improper Lady Frances Howard, the daughter of the Earl of Suffolk, and the girl-wife of Lord Essex, from whom she was separated, Overbury most strongly persuaded his friend from committing such a rash action. His attitude coming to the knowledge of Lady Frances, she vowed to avenge herself upon Sir Thomas, and carried her threat to its bitter execution. On some frivolous pretext Overbury was sent to the Tower; Lady Somerset, as Lady Frances had become, notwithstanding Overbury’s advice, now determined to rid herself of the man she mostly feared. With the help of a notorious quack, and of a procuress, Mrs Turner, with whom she had been brought up, she set about the task of consummating her revenge. Poison was supplied by Mrs Turner, with which the unfortunate Overbury was slowly killed; but as the drug—it is believed to have been corrosive sublimate—did not act sufficiently quickly, two hired assassins, named Franklin and Lobell, were called in, and stifled the victim with a pillow. Sir William Waad at this time had ceased to be the Lieutenant, through Lady Essex’s influence, and had been succeeded by Sir Gervase Elwes, a creature of Somerset’s, who was not only cognisant of Overbury’s death in the Bloody Tower, where he was confined, but even aided Lady Somerset in her crime. Mrs Turner was the inventor of a peculiar yellow starch which was used for stiffening the ruffs worn at that time; she wore one of these ruffs when she was sentenced to die for her participation in this murder by the Chief-Justice, Sir Edward Coke, and was also hanged in it at Tyburn in March 1615, with the natural consequence that yellow starched ruffs suddenly ceased to be the fashion. Lady Somerset was also tried, and although found guilty of Overbury’s murder, received a pardon from the King, but she and her husband, Somerset, spent six years as prisoners in the Tower, where they occupied the same rooms in the Bloody Tower which shortly before had been tenanted by the wife’s victim. Sir Thomas Overbury was buried in St Peter’s Chapel, his grave lying next to that of Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex.

Prince Henry’s death in 1612 was a terrible loss to Raleigh. The Queen had already tasted Sir Walter’s famous cordial or elixir, and when her son was given up by the physicians, Anne implored them to try Raleigh’s specific medicine, which, according to its inventor, was safe to cure all diseases save those produced by poison. Henry was already speechless when the elixir was administered to him, but after he had swallowed one or two drops he was able to utter a few words before he expired. What was the nature of this wonderful mixture of Raleigh’s cannot now be ascertained, although Charles II.’s French physician, Le Febre, prepared what was believed to be the actual concoction and wrote a treatise upon it. Some of its ingredients were indeed awful, the flesh of vipers forming one of them, and it speaks much for the strength of James’s Queen that she survived the taking of this terrible physic.

VERA EFFIGIES CLARISSMI VIRI DOMNI GUALTHERI RALEGH EQV AUR. etc

AMORE ET VIRTVTE

The true and lively portraiture of the honourable and learned Knight Sr. Walter Ralegh.

Raleigh had intended dedicating his history to Prince Henry, but after that young Prince’s death he seems to have lost his former zest in the work. There is a story told that he threw part of the manuscript into the fire on hearing that Walter Burr, the publisher of the first edition in 1614, had been a loser by bringing it out. Of that first part Mr Hume, in his “Life of Raleigh,” writes, “The history, as it exists, is probably the greatest work ever produced in captivity, except Don Quixote. The learning contained in it is perfectly encyclopædic. Raleigh had always been a lover and a collector of books, and had doubtless laid out the plan of the work in his mind before his fall. He had near him in the Tower his learned Hariot, who was indefatigable in helping his master. Ben Jonson boasted that he had contributed to the work, and such books or knowledge as could not be obtained or consulted by a prisoner, were made available by scholars like Robert Burhill, by Hughes, Warner, or Hariot. Sir John Hoskyns, a great stylist in his day, would advise with regard to construction, and from many other quarters aid of various sorts was obtained. But, withal, the work is purely Raleigh’s. No student of his fine, flowing, majestic style will admit that any other pen but his can have produced it. The vast learning employed in it is now, for the most part, obsolete, but the human asides where Raleigh’s personality reveals itself, the little bits of incidental autobiography, the witty, apt illustrations, will prevent the work itself from dying. To judge from a remark in the preface, the author intended at a later stage to concentrate his history with that mainly of his own country, and it would seem that the portion of the book published was to a great extent introductory. Great as were his powers and self-confidence, it must have been obvious to him that it would have been impossible for a man of his age (he was in his sixtieth year when he began the work) to complete a history of the whole world on the same scale, the first six books published reaching from the beginning of the world to the end of the second Macedonian war. In any case,” adds Mr Hume, “the book will ever remain a noble fragment of a design, which could only have been conceived by a master-mind.” And who, recalling those mighty lines on death with which Raleigh bids farewell to his great work, but will agree with the above admirable criticism of the work?

“O Eloquent, just and mighty Death! whom none could advise thou hast persuaded: what now none hath dared thou hast done; and whom the world hath flattered, thou only hast cast out of the world and despised: thou hast drawn together all the far-stretched greatness, all the pride, cruelty, ambition of man, and covered it over with these two narrow words: ‘Hic Jacet.’” How noble, too, are the introductory lines to Ben Jonson, wherein he commends the serious study of history:

“... that nor the good might be defrauded, nor the great so cured;

But both might know their ways are understood,

And the reward and punishment assured.”

No wonder that James disapproved of such sentiments and said of the “History,” “it is too saucy in censuring the acts of princes.”

To Raleigh, more than to any other of the great Elizabethan heroes, does England owe her mighty earth-embracing dominion. Sir Walter never ceased to urge the expansion of the empire, nor wearied in his efforts to make the English fleet the foremost in all the seas, not only as a check to Spain, but in order that the colonial possessions of the kingdom might be increased; and he, more than any of our great soldier-statesmen deserved those noble lines of Milton: “Those who of thy free Grace didst build up this Brittanick Empire to a glorious and enviable height, with all her daughter islands about her, stay us in this felicitie.”

In 1616 Raleigh was allowed to leave the fortress, but, as I have said before, in order to obtain his liberty he had been obliged to bribe George Villiers and his brother, who had roused James’s cupidity by persuading him that if Raleigh were allowed to lead a fresh expedition to the West Indies, he might return with a great treasure of which James would take the lion’s share. A warrant, dated the 19th of March of this year, was drawn up, giving Raleigh permission to go abroad in order that he might make the necessary arrangements for his voyage. The twelve years of imprisonment had sadly marred and aged the gallant knight, but his spirit was as bold and courageous as ever, and he employed the first days of his liberty in revisiting his old London haunts; many changes must have struck him in the city. In Visscher’s panoramic view of London, taken from Southwark nearly opposite to St Paul’s, a very clear general impression may be gained of the appearance of the English capital in that year of sixteen hundred and sixteen, the year when Shakespeare was dying at Stratford-on-Avon, when Raleigh was on his way to his last journey across the Atlantic, and when Francis Bacon was writing his famous essays in Gray’s Inn. Those quaint, circular, Martello-like buildings in the foreground are the Globe and Swan theatres, with the Bear Garden close by; but the former theatre, in Visscher’s view, is not the one so intimately connected with Shakespeare, for that was burned down in 1613, and the building represented here is the new one erected upon its site. Opposite to the Swan Theatre, on the Surrey side of the river, are Paris Garden Stairs, where was a much frequented ferry, Blackfriars Bridge now spanning the river where this ferry once used to ply. There was also a theatre at Blackfriars, and Shakespeare and his players must often have used the ferry on their way from the Globe Theatre across the river from Blackfriars, where the poet lived. In front is old St Paul’s, towering over all the surrounding buildings and dwarfing the highest; scores of spires and towers break the skyline as the eye follows the panorama towards the west, where stands the former old London Bridge, covered along its sides with picturesque houses. So large and massive are the great blocks of gabled buildings that span the bridge, that it presents the appearance of a little town crossing the river, such as is the Ponte Vecchio at Florence in little. The gates at its ends are covered with men’s heads, stuck all over their roofs like pins upon a pincushion. More steeples and towers crown the opposite bank, and as the eye travels farther eastward it is arrested by the Tower, with its encircling wall, and its river wharf all covered with cannon. The river is alive with vessels of every shape and size, State barges and little pinnaces, great galleons and small craft, appear in all directions, some with, some without sails. Beyond, the distant hills of Middlesex and Essex are dotted with villages and hamlets, whilst on the heights of Highgate cluster a group of windmills. It is a wonderful panorama that the old Dutch artist has handed down to us. Looking at it we see the same scene, the same picture of time-honoured churches and palaces, the noblest river in the world flowing beneath them, and bearing on its shining surface all the pleasure, commerce, industry, and travail of old London, that Shakespeare did, when, standing near his theatre at Bankside, he gazed upon that shifting scene. All is changed now, except the Tower. The great Gothic cathedral of St Paul’s and most of its surrounding churches, whose towers and spires helped to make old London an object of beauty, perished in the great fire which swept over the city fifty years after Visscher drew his panorama. Old London Bridge escaped the fire, and indeed remained until 1834, although the houses clustering over it had been removed at the close of the reign of George II., and the only prominent building in the panorama which Shakespeare or Raleigh would now be able to recognise, could they look across the rivers Styx and Thames, would be the great White Tower with its surrounding lesser towers and battlements. All the rest, like “the baseless fabric of a vision,” has passed away for ever.

But to return to Sir Walter Raleigh. He invested all that remained of his own and his wife’s fortunes in furnishing the expedition to Guiana, which proved so disastrous, on which he now embarked. On his return, a ruined man and a prisoner, he expressed his amazement at having thus in one desperate bid placed his life and all that he possessed in that unlucky venture. But before Raleigh had left England, Gondomar, the Spanish Ambassador, had told his master, the King of Spain, that Raleigh was a pre-doomed man. For James had not only revealed every detail relating to the Guiana expedition to Gondomar, but on condition that if any subject or property belonging to Spain were touched he had promised to hand over Raleigh to the Spanish Government in order that he might be hanged at Seville. To assure Gondomar of his good faith, James actually showed the ambassador a private letter written him by Raleigh, in which the exact number of his ships, men, and the place where the great silver mine was said to be located on the Orinoco, were all set forth. As the Spaniards claimed the whole of Guiana, it was evident that if Raleigh landed there he must infringe upon the Spanish possessions, and thus place himself, according to James’s promise to Gondomar, in the power of his enemies.

The expedition sailed from England at the end of March 1617, from Plymouth, and consisted of fourteen ships and nine hundred men. But its story was one of continued disaster, and on the 21st of June 1618, writing to his friend Lord Carew, Raleigh gives a detailed account of all his misfortunes. In the postscript he adds: “I beg you will excuse me to my Lords for not writing to them, because want of sleep for fear of being surprised in my cabin at night” (even on his own ship he was a prisoner, the crew having mutinied) “has almost deprived me of sight, and some return of the pleurisy which I had in the Tower has so weakened my hand that I cannot hold the pen.” Sir Walter’s eldest son was killed gallantly fighting in Guiana.

Then followed a miserable time, and on his road to London the hope of life at times impelled him to attempt escape, but he was doomed to drink the bitter cup of his King’s ingratitude to the dregs. On the 10th of August he again entered the Tower where so much of his life had been spent, and which was now to be his last abode on earth.

The next day the Council of State met to decide upon Sir Walter’s fate, and incredible as it seems, it was actually debated whether Raleigh should be handed over to the tender mercies of the Spaniards or executed in London. Surely if what passed on this earth could have been known to Elizabeth, she would have burst her tomb at Westminster to protest against this abomination, this unspeakable shame and disgrace to the name of England.

James was now all impatience to get rid of Raleigh as quickly as possible; he trembled at the threats of Gondomar, and had the sapient monarch not given his word that Raleigh should die? The great difficulty before the Council, however, was to find a pretext for condemning Raleigh to death. Bacon and his colleagues racked their wise brains to invent a cause by which he could be found guilty of high treason. At length the Lord Chief-Justice, Montagu, with a committee of the Council decided that the King should issue a warrant for the re-affirmation of the death sentence given at Winchester in 1603, by which it might be made valid and carried out. Sir Walter pleaded that the King’s commission appointing him head of the Guiana expedition with powers of life and death, invalidated the former sentence and its punishment, both in the eyes of justice and of reason. But Sir Walter was overruled. On the 24th of October the warrant for the execution was signed and sealed by the King, and four days later Sir Walter was taken from the Tower to the King’s Bench. He was then suffering from ague, and having been roused from his sleep very early had not had time to have his now snow-white hair dressed with his usual care. One of his servants noticed this as he was being taken away, and telling him of it, Raleigh answered, smiling, “Let them kem (comb) it that have it,” then he added, “Peter, dost thou know of any plaister to set a man’s head on again when it is cut off?”

Entrance to the Bloody Tower and Steps leading to Raleigh’s Walk

The end being now so certain and so near, the bright courage of the man returned; there was no shrinking with the closing scene so close at hand. He was not brought back to the Tower after his condemnation, and he passed his last night upon earth in the Gate House at Westminster, close to which the scaffold stood in Old Palace Yard. He had a last parting that evening with his devoted wife, his “dear Bess,” but neither dared to speak of their only remaining son—that would have been too bitter a pang for them to bear. Sir Walter’s last words to his wife were full of hope and courage: “It is well, dear Bess,” he said, referring to Lady Raleigh having been promised his body next day, the only mercy allowed her by the Council, “that thou mayest dispose of that dead which thou hadst not always the disposing of when alive.” Then she left him. During the long hours of that last night, he composed those beautiful lines which will last as long as the language in which they are written:

“Even such is time! who takes in trust

Our youth, our joys, and all we have,

And pays us but with earth and dust:

Who in the dark and silent grave,

When we have wandered all our ways,

Shuts up the story of our days.

But from that earth, that grave, that dust,

The Lord shall raise me up I trust.”

Raleigh wrote these lines in a Bible which he had brought with him from the Tower.

Carlyle has summed up Raleigh’s life and death in the following pregnant lines, in his “Historical Sketches”:—

“On the morning of the 29th of October 1618 in Palace Yard, a cold morning, equivalent to our 8th of November, behold Sir Walter Raleigh, a tall gray-headed man of sixty-five gone. He has been in far countries, seen the El Dorado, penetrated into the fabulous dragon-realms of the West, hanged Spaniards in Ireland, rifled Spaniards in Orinoco—for forty years in quest a most busy man; has appeared in many characters; this is his last appearance on any stage. Probably as brave a soul as lives in England;—he has come here to die by the headman’s axe. What crime? Alas, he has been unfortunate: become an eyesore to the Spanish, and did not discover El Dorado mine. Since Winchester, when John Gibb came galloping (with a reprieve), he has been lain thirteen years in the Tower; the travails of that strong heart have been many. Poor Raleigh, toiling, travelling always: in Court drawing-rooms, on the hot shore of Guiana, with gold and promotions in his fancy, with suicide, death, and despair in clear sight of him; toiling till his brain is broken (his own expression) and his heart is broken: here stands he at last; after many travails it has come to this with him.”

Sir Walter Raleigh died a martyr to the cause of a Greater Britain; his life thrown as a sop to the Spanish Cerberus by the most debased and ignoble of our kings. Raleigh’s faults were undoubtedly many, but his great qualities, his superb courage, his devotion to his country, his faith in the future greatness of England, were infinitely greater, and outweighed a thousand times all his failings. The onus of the guilt of his death—a judicial murder if ever there was one—must be borne by the base councillors who truckled to the King, and by the King himself who, Judas-like, sold Raleigh to Spain.

Some less interesting State prisoners occupied the Tower towards the close of the inglorious reign of James Stuart. Among these were Gervase, Lord Clifford, imprisoned for threatening the Lord Keeper in 1617. Clifford committed suicide in the Tower in the following year. About the same time, Sir Thomas Luke, one of the Secretaries of State, and his daughter, were imprisoned in the Tower on the charge of insulting Lady Exeter, whom they accused of incest and witchcraft, but, whether the charges were true or false, they were soon liberated. James’s court seems to have combined all the vices, for Lord and Lady Suffolk were also prisoners in the fortress about the same time, accused of bribery and corruption.

To the Tower also were sent the two great lawyers—Lord Chancellor Bacon, and Sir Edward Coke—the former for having received bribes, the latter for the part he had taken in supporting the privileges of the House of Commons. Here, also, two noble lords, the Earl of Arundel and Lord Spencer, were in durance, owing to a quarrel between them in the House of Lords, when Arundel had insulted Spencer by telling him that at no distant time back his ancestors had been engaged in tending sheep, to which Lord Spencer responded: “When my ancestors were keeping sheep, yours were plotting treason.” The dispute seems scarcely of sufficient importance to have sent both disputants to the Tower.

In 1622 the Earl of Oxford and Robert Philip, together with some members of Parliament, were sent to the fortress for objecting too publicly to the suggested marriage of the Prince of Wales, afterwards Charles I., with a Spanish princess; and the Earl of Bristol was also in the Tower for matters connected with the same projected alliance. It was not always safe to have an opinion of one’s own under James the First.

The last State prisoner of mark to be sent to the Tower in James’s reign was Lionel Cranfield, Earl of Middlesex, who had been found guilty of receiving bribes in his official capacity as Lord High Treasurer.

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.

The reason, or reasons, for Felton killing Buckingham have never been made clear. He appears to have been a soured religious fanatic, but the crime was doubtless owing to some fancied injustice regarding his promotion in the army; and it has been thought that it was merely an act of private vengeance, rather than one of political significance. But after his arrest a paper was found fastened in Felton’s hat, with the following writing upon it:—“That man is cowardly, base, and deserveth not the name of a gentleman or soldier, that is not willing to sacrifice his life for the sake of his God, King, and his countrie. Lett no man commend me for doing of it, but rather discommend themselves as the cause of it, for if God hath not taken away our hearts for our sins, he would not have gone so long unpunished.—Jno. Felton.” A sentiment which goes to show that Felton assassinated Buckingham with the fanatical idea of benefiting his country.

So hated was Buckingham by the people, that Felton passed into the Tower amid blessings and prayers. He was placed in the prison lately occupied by Sir John Eliot in the Bloody Tower, and before his death made two requests—one, that he might be permitted to take the Holy Communion, and the other that he might be executed with a halter round his neck, ashes on his head, and sackcloth round his loins. On being threatened with the rack in order to induce him to give the names of his accomplices, Felton said to Lord Dorset that, in the first place, he would not believe that it was the King’s wish that he should be tortured, it being illegal; and, secondly, that if he were racked, he would name Dorset, and none but him—a capital answer. When he was asked why sentence of death should not be passed upon him, he answered: “I am sorry both that I have shed the blood of a man who is the image of God, and taken away the life of so near a subject of the King.” As a last favour, he begged that his right hand might be struck off before he was hanged. He suffered at Tyburn, and his body was gibbeted in chains at Portsmouth. “His dead body,” writes Evelyn, “is carried down to Portsmouth, hangs high there. I hear it creak in the wind.” An eye-witness describes Felton as showing much courage and calm during his trial and at his death, and Philip, Earl of Exeter, who attended the execution, declared that he had never seen such valour and piety, “more temperately mixed,” as in Felton’s demeanour. This is surely one of the strangest mysteries in our history.

Prisoners still continued to come to the Tower, and in 1631, Mervin, Lord Audley, was executed on Tower Hill for a crime not of a political nature. Six years later a very distinguished ecclesiastic, John Williams, Bishop of Lincoln, was imprisoned for four years within the Tower walls. Williams, who was a Privy Councillor, had repeated some remarks made by the King, in which His Majesty had advocated greater leniency in the treatment of the Puritans, and was accused of revealing Charles’s private conversation, and being an enemy of Laud’s was very hardly dealt with in consequence. He was deposed from his bishopric, fined £10,000, and imprisoned in the Tower, where he caused some surprise, if not scandal, by not attending the church services in the fortress. However, after his release, Williams was reconciled to the King, and in 1641 became Archbishop of York. He had been successively Dean of Salisbury and Dean of Westminster, and had succeeded Bacon as Lord Chancellor in 1621, just before he had been appointed to the See of Lincoln. Williams certainly belonged to the Church Militant, and during the Civil War defended Conway Castle most gallantly for the royal cause. At the end of December 1641, he was back again in the Tower, with ten other Bishops who had protested that, owing to their being kept out of the House of Lords by the violence of the mob, all Acts passed during their absence were illegal. The Peers arrested the protesting Bishops on a charge of high treason; and on a very cold and snowy December night they were all sent to the Tower, where they remained until the May of 1642.

Lord Loudon, who had been sent by the Scottish Covenanters to Charles, had a narrow escape of leaving his head on Tower Hill in 1639. According to Clarendon, a letter was discovered of a treasonable nature, signed by Loudon, addressed to Louis XIII. of France, and Charles ordered Sir William Balfour, by virtue of a warrant signed by the royal hand, to have the Scottish lord executed the following morning. In this terrible dilemma Loudon bethought him of his friend, the Marquis of Hamilton, and gave the Lieutenant a message for that nobleman. Now it was one of the privileges of the Lieutenant of the Tower that he could at any time, or in any place, claim an audience with the sovereign. Hamilton persuaded Balfour to go with him to Charles, but on arriving at Whitehall, they found that the King had already retired for the night. Balfour, however, taking advantage of his privilege, entered the room with Hamilton, and together they besought Charles to re-consider his decision, pointing out to him that Loudon was protected by his quality as Ambassador from the Scotch. The King, as was his wont, was obdurate. “No,” he said; “the warrant must be obeyed.” At length the Marquis, having begged in vain, left the chamber, saying, “Well, then, if your Majesty be so determined, I’ll go and get ready to ride post for Scotland to-morrow morning, for I am sure before night the whole city will be in an uproar, and they’ll come and pull your Majesty out of your palace. I’ll get as far as I can, and declare to my countrymen that I had no hand in it.” On hearing this, Charles called for the warrant and destroyed it. Loudon was soon afterwards released (Oldnixon’s “History of the Stuarts”).

Now comes the story of the last days of one of Charles’s most noted counsellors—last days that, as in the case of many before him, were passed within the grim precincts of the Tower, and were the prelude to execution. On the 11th of November 1640, the Earl of Strafford was at Whitehall laying before Charles a scheme for accusing the heads of the parliamentary party of holding a treasonable correspondence with the Scotch army, then encamped in the North of England. Whilst he was with the King the news reached him that Pym at that very moment was impeaching him in the House of Commons on the charge of high treason. Strafford at once made his way to the House, but was not allowed to speak, and shortly afterwards heard his committal made out for the Tower. At the same time Archbishop Laud was arrested at Lambeth Palace, and carried off to the great State prison. “As I went to my barge,” Laud writes in his diary, “hundreds of my poor neighbours stood there and prayed for my safety and return to my home.” But neither he nor Strafford were ever to return to their homes. Perhaps Strafford’s life might have been saved had it not been for the King’s action, for when it became known that Charles had plotted with the hope of inducing the Scottish army to march on London, seize the Tower and liberate Strafford, the great Earl was practically doomed. The city rose as one man, a huge mob surging round the Houses of Parliament and the Palace of Whitehall, shouting “Justice.”

For fifteen days Strafford faced his accusers and judges at Westminster Hall, his defence being a splendid piece of oratory. He proved that on the ground of high treason his judgment would not count, and his judges were compelled to introduce an Act of Attainder in order to convict him; but for the next six months he was kept in the Tower, uncertain as to his ultimate fate until the 12th of May 1641, when the Bill of Attainder was passed by the Lords.[3]

Charles had sworn to Strafford that not a single hair of his head should be injured; but on the Earl writing to him and offering his life as the only means of healing the troubles of the country, the King yielded, and deserting his minister, gave his assent to the execution, and signed the warrant.

On the following morning Strafford was led out to die. There is no more dramatic episode in the great struggle between Charles and his people than that when Strafford, amidst his guards, passed beneath the gateway of the Bloody Tower, where, from an upper window, his old friend, Archbishop Laud, gave him his blessing. The Archbishop, overcome, sank back fainting into the arms of his attendants. “I hope,” he is reported to have said, “by God’s assistance and through mine own innocency that when I come to my own execution, I shall shew the world how much more sensible I am to my Lord Strafford’s loss than I am to my own.”

Knowing how bitterly Strafford was hated by the people, the Lieutenant of the Tower invited him to drive to Tower Hill in his coach, fearing he might be torn to pieces if he went on foot. Strafford, however, declined the offer, saying, “No, Mr Lieutenant, I dare look death in the face, and I trust the people too.” With the Earl were the Archbishop of Armagh (Ussher), Lord Cleveland, and his brother, Sir George Wentworth. On reaching the scaffold Strafford made a short speech, followed by a long prayer, and giving his final messages for his wife and children to his brother, said: “One stroke more will make my wife husbandless, my dear children fatherless, my poor servants masterless, and will separate me from my dear brother and all my friends; but let God be to you and to them all in all.” He then removed his doublet, and said, “I thank God that I am no more afraid of death, but as cheerfully put off my doublet at this time as ever I did when I went to bed.” Then placing a white cap upon his head, and thrusting his long hair beneath it, he knelt down at the block, the Archbishop also kneeling on one side and a clergyman upon the other, the Archbishop clasping Strafford’s hands in both his own. After they had left him Strafford gave the sign for the executioner to strike by thrusting out both his hands, and at one blow, “the wisest head in England,” as John Evelyn, who was present, says, “was severed from his body.” On that night London blazed with bonfires, and the people rejoiced as if in celebration of some great victory.

The great Earl’s mistake was in serving and trusting such a king as Charles. Later on it transpired that Charles had a plan of removing Strafford from the Tower by throwing a hundred men into the fortress, thus relieving the Earl, and keeping possession of the Tower as a check upon the city. In pursuance of this plan, on the 2nd May 1641, Captain Billingsby with a force of one hundred men presented himself at the gates of the Tower, but Sir William Balfour refused to admit them, and the King’s scheme for taking the fortress fell to the ground.

The true maner of the execution of thomas earle of strafford Lord
Lieutenant of Ireland vpon Tower hill the 12th of May 1641

  1. Doctor Vsher Lord Primate of Ireland
  2. the Sherifes of London
  3. the Earle of Strafford
  4. his kindred and Friends

Execution of the Earl of Strafford, May 12th. 1641.

The first beginnings of a Tower regiment, according to Mr J. H. Round, was the appointment of two hundred men as Tower Guards in 1640. In November of the same year Charles promised to remove this garrison, but he did not do so until the city offered to lend him £25,000, on the condition that these troops should be taken away, as well as the ordnance from the White Tower, which was a perpetual menace to the safety of the city. Aersen, the Dutch Ambassador, writing to his Government about this time, says, “le dessein semble aller sur le tour.” Still the King would not withdraw the soldiers or the cannon, and then the House of Lords expostulated with him, but Charles excused his breach of faith by saying that his object was merely to insure the safety of the stores and ammunition in the fortress.

After his plot to seize the Tower had been made public, the train bands belonging to the Tower Hamlets occupied and garrisoned the fortress. These train bands, as well as those of Southwark and Westminster, were distinct from the city train bands. On the 3rd of January 1642, the King made another attempt to garrison the Tower with his own troops, which also proved a failure. On this occasion Sir John Byron entered the fortress with a detachment of gunners and disarmed the men of the Tower Hamlets, but the city train bands came to the rescue, and Byron, with his gunners, had to beat a retreat. When, in 1642, the Lieutenant of the Tower, Sir John Conyers, resigned his charge, the Parliament conferred the Lieutenancy upon the Lord Mayor of London. Later, in 1647, when the city had taken the side of the Parliament against the King, Fairfax was appointed Constable; the Constables had succeeded each other according to the chances which brought the King or the Parliament to the top, thus Lord Cottrington had been replaced by Sir William Balfour, and he in his turn had given room to Sir Thomas Lumsford, a “soldier of fortune,” writes Ludlow of him in his “Memoirs,” “fit for any wicked design.” Lumsford, so uncomplimentarily referred to by Ludlow, was supposed to be willing to act according to the King’s good pleasure, and succeeded in making himself so unpopular with the Londoners, that they petitioned the House of Lords to beg the King to place the custody of the Tower in other hands, the Lord Mayor saying he could not undertake to prevent the apprentices from rising were Lumsford allowed to remain in office; so Charles unwillingly gave the keys of the fortress to the care of Sir John Byron. Byron, in his turn, was succeeded by Sir John Conyers, who had distinguished himself in the Scottish wars and had been Governor of Berwick; and after Conyers followed Lord Mayor Pennington,[4] “in order,” as Clarendon writes, “that the citizens might see that they were trusted to hold their own reins and had a jurisdiction committed to them which had always checked their own.” From 1643 to 1647 the Tower remained in the hands of the Parliament. In the latter year the army obtained the mastery, and Sir Thomas Fairfax, the Commander-in-Chief, became its Constable, under him being Colonel Tichbourne as Lieutenant of the fortress. Shortly after the King’s execution, however, Fairfax resigned his post of Constable, none other than Cromwell, himself, stepping into the vacant place.

But we must return to Archbishop Laud, who for four years was a prisoner in the Bloody Tower in the prison chamber over the gateway of that gloomy building.

In his diary, the Archbishop has left a minute account of a domiciliary visit paid him by William Prynne in 1643. The Archbishop’s trial being determined on by the House of Lords, Prynne was commissioned by the Peers to obtain Laud’s private papers. “Mr Prynne,” writes the Archbishop, “came into the Tower with other searchers as soon as the gates were open. Other men went to other prisoners; he made haste to my lodging, commanded the warder to open my doors, left two musketeer centinels below, that no man might go in or out, and one at the stairhead. With three others, which had their muskets already cocked, he came into my chamber, and found me in bed, as my servants were in theirs. I presently thought on my blessed Saviour when Judas led in the swords and staves about him.”—This surely is rather a bold comparison for an Archbishop to make?—“Mr Prynne, seeing me safe in bed, falls first to my pockets to rifle them; and by that time my two servants came running in half ready. I demanded the sight of his warrant; he shewed it to me, and therein was expressed that he should search my pockets. The warrant came from the close committee, and the hands that were to it were these: E. Manchester, W. Saye and Seale, Wharton, H. Vane, Gilbert Gerard, and John Pym. Did they remember when they gave their warrant how odious it was to Parliament, and some of themselves, to have the pockets of men searched? When my pockets had been sufficiently ransacked, I rose and got my clothes about me, and so, half ready, with my gown about my shoulders, he held me in the search till half-past nine of the clock in the morning. He took from me twenty and one bundles of papers which I had prepared for my defence; two Letters which came to me from his gracious Majesty, about Chartham and my other benefices; the Scottish service books or diary, containing all the occurrences of my life, and my book of private devotions, both which last were written through with my own hand. Nor could I get him to leave this last, but he must needs see what passed between God and me, a thing, I think, scarce offered to any Christian. The last place that he rifled was my trunk, which stood by my bedside. In that he found nothing, but about forty pounds in money, for my necessary expenses, which he meddled not with, and a bundle of some gloves. This bundle he was so careful to open, so that he caused each glove to be looked into. Upon this I tendered him one pair of gloves, which he refusing, I told him he might take them, and fear no bribe, for he had already done me all the mischief he could, and I asked no favour of him, so he thanked me, took the gloves, bound up my papers, left two centinels at my door, and went his way.”—(From “Troubles and Trials of Archbishop Laud.”)

Prynne, whose ears Laud had been the means of cutting off some half-dozen years before, must have enjoyed this visit to his old foe. On the 10th of March 1643, the Archbishop was brought to his trial in Westminster Hall, but amongst all the charges brought against him none could be considered as proving him guilty of high treason. Serjeant Wild was obliged to admit this, but said that when all the Archbishop’s transgressions of the law were put together they made “many grand treasons.” To this Laud’s counsel made answer, “I crave you mercy, good Mr Serjeant, I never understood before this that two hundred couple of black rabbits made a black horse.”—(In Archbishop Tennison’s MSS. in Lambeth Library. Quoted by Bayley.)

Laud’s trial lasted for twenty days, the chief accusation brought against him being that he had “attempted to subvert religion and the fundamental laws of the realm.” The outcome of the trial was that Laud was beheaded on Tower Hill on 10th of January 1644. Laud was a strange compound of bigotry and intolerance, of courage and of devotion to what he considered to be the true Church, and of which he seemed to regard himself as a kind of Anglican Pope. His life and character are enigmas to those who study them, and his death became him far better than his life had done.

WILLIAM LAUD
Aerts Bisschop van Cantelbury, binnen London
Onthalft den 10 January, Anno 1645

Arnt Pieters Excudit

Carlyle, in a delightful passage in his posthumously published “Historical Studies,” writes: “Future ages, if they do not, as is likelier, totally forget ‘W. Cant,’ will range him under the category of Incredibilities. Not again in the dead strata which lie under men’s feet, will such a fossil be dug up. This wonderful wonder of wonders, were it not even this, a zealous Chief Priest, at once persecutor and martyr, who has no discernible religion of his own?” “No one,” said Laud, when told of the day on which he was to die, “no one can be more ready to send me out of life than I am to go.” Indeed, no one could have left life in a calmer or more tranquil manner than did the Archbishop. It must be a great support to have a sublime opinion of oneself, and if ever man had a sublime opinion of himself it was Laud. The comparison he made in his diary, and which I have already quoted, between his Saviour and himself—between Prynne-Judas and Laud-Christ—proves the ineffable self-conceit of the prelate.

The fact that he himself was notoriously indifferent, if not callous, to the sufferings of others, has destroyed all the sympathy that might have been felt for this strange character in his fall and tribulations. For a mere difference of opinion Laud would order ears to be lopped off, noses slit, and brows and cheeks to be branded with red-hot iron. His best and most enduring monument is the addition he made to St John’s College at Oxford, of which he was at one time the president, and in whose chapel his remains were re-interred, after resting for a time in the Church of All Hallows, Barking, and in the library of which his spectre is said to be seen occasionally gliding on moonlight nights, between the old bookshelves.

After the month of August 1642, when Charles had unfurled his standard at Nottingham, the Tower, although nominally still in the King’s possession, was in reality held by the Parliament; and its prisoners were those who were opposed to the representatives of the people. Among these was Sir Ralph Hopton, who had protested against a violent address made by the Parliament against Charles, Sir Ralph having declared that his fellow-members “seemed to ground an opinion of the King’s apostacy upon less evidence than would serve to hang a fellow for stealing a horse.” This remark brought him to the Tower, where he was soon joined by another member of Parliament, Trelawney (or Trelauney), who had informed the House of Commons that they could not legally appoint a guard of troops for themselves without the King’s assent, under pain of high treason (Clarendon).

Sir Ralph, afterwards Lord Hopton of Stratton, distinguished himself later in the war in the West of England, where he had much success, and with the help of Sir Beville Grenville, gained a signal victory over the Parliamentarians at Stamford Hill, near Stratton, in Cornwall. Fairfax, however, ultimately proved too strong for him, and finally Hopton left England, dying at Bruges in 1652.

Besides these, Sir Thomas Bedingfield and Sir James Gardner were committed to the Tower by the House of Lords, “for refusing to be of the counsel of the Attorney-General,” whilst the Earl of Bristol and Judge Mallet followed them to the fortress, “merely for having seen the Kentish petition.” This petition was drawn up by the principal inhabitants of that county, praying, “that the militia might not otherwise be exercised in that county than the known law permitted, and that the Book of Common Prayer, established by law, might be observed.” Lord Bristol soon obtained his liberty, but Mallet was kept a prisoner for two years on the charge of being “a fomentor and protector of malignant factions against the Parliament” (Clarendon).

In the same year, Sir Richard Gurney, Lord Mayor of London, was sent to the Tower on the charge of having caused the King’s proclamation against the militia, and for suppressing petitions to Parliament, to be published in the city. Sir Richard was dismissed from his mayoralty, and imprisoned during the pleasure of the House. Another Lord Mayor, loyal to the cause of the King, Sir Abraham Reynoldson, was, six years later, also a prisoner in the Tower; but his incarceration lasted only two months, whilst Gurney, it seems, remained for several years in the fortress. The Parliament meted out heavy punishment for “opinions,” Lord Montagu of Boughton, the Earl of Berkshire, and some Norfolk squires, being likewise sent to the Tower on a charge of favouring the King’s side, and of being hostile to the Parliament. In 1643 Justice Berkeley was imprisoned by order of the Lords on a charge of high treason, and also a Mr Montagu, a “messenger” from the French Court to the King.

At this time whole batches of Cavaliers began to be frequently brought to the Tower. Of these, Sir William Moreton, who was captured at the fall of Sudeley Castle, of which he was the governor, remained a prisoner until the Restoration, when he was made a judge. Another was Daniel O’Neale, who had greatly distinguished himself on the royal side in the Scottish war, and later in England. He was committed to the Tower on the invariable charge of high treason, but, like Lord Nithsdale, about half-a-century later, he managed to break his prison in female attire, and succeeded in reaching Holland, whence he returned to serve under Rupert as a lieutenant-colonel in the Prince’s cavalry. According to Clarendon, O’Neale became a celebrated adept in court intrigue in the time of Charles II.

In this year (1643), Sir John Conyers was in command of the fortress, having received the charge from the Parliament in the hope that he would be gained over to that side. On being asked to take the command of the Parliamentary army, Conyers, however, declined, his refusal causing so much annoyance to the leaders of that party that he thought it more prudent to resign his charge of the Tower, being, as Clarendon puts it, too conscientious, “to keep His Majesty’s only fort which he could not apply to his services.” His place, as has already been said, was given to Sir Isaac Pennington, Lord Mayor of London.

In 1644, Sir John Hotham, and his son, Captain Hotham, who had been imprisoned in the Tower in the preceding summer on the charge of intending to surrender the town of Hull to the King, were both beheaded on Tower Hill. Hotham may be described as the Bazaine of the Parliament. The town of Hull was the greatest magazine of arms and ammunition in England. Charles had in vain summoned Hotham, who was the Governor for the Parliament, to surrender the town, and on his refusal had declared him a traitor. There is little doubt that both Hotham and his son were Royalists at heart, and both were convicted of having entered into a correspondence with the King’s party in order to come to terms for the surrender of the town and arsenal to the Royalist forces.

Another governor—Sir Alexander Carew, who held Plymouth for the Parliament—was beheaded in the same month as the Hothams for a like “intention.” Carew is said to have been decapitated with the same axe with which Strafford was killed, and it was reported that at the time of Strafford’s trial, Carew had said that sooner than not vote for the Earl’s death, he would be ready to be the next man to suffer on the same scaffold, and with the same axe: a wish which was literally fulfilled. (Dugdale’s “Short View of the Late Troubles.”)

By one of those strange vagaries of fortune which are the characteristic of the history of this period, and in which the Tower played its accustomed part of imprisonment, George Monk, the future Duke of Albemarle, and one of the makers of our history, was imprisoned in the Tower for three years after his capture by Fairfax at the siege of Nantwich. He was a colonel at the time, and only regained his freedom by consenting to take the command of the Parliamentary forces sent to Ireland (Ludlow’s Memoirs).

Two of Monk’s fellow-prisoners, Lord Macquire and Colonel MacMahon, who had both been fighting on the Royalist side in Ireland, made a desperate attempt to escape from the Tower in this same year (1644). They succeeded in sawing through their prison door and lowered themselves by a rope, which they had been enabled to find through directions written on a slip of paper that had been placed in a loaf of bread, sent to them by some of their friends. They got down into the moat, across which they swam, but were taken on the other side and hanged at Tyburn in February 1645, although Macquire pleaded that, as an Irish peer, he had the right of dying by the axe and not by the halter. For allowing the escape of these officers from their prison chamber the Lieutenant of the Tower was fined heavily.

That splendid cavalier, “Old Loyalty,” as he was proudly called, John Paulett, Marquis of Worcester, who had defended Baring House so long and so well, came a prisoner into the Tower in this same year, accompanied by Sir Robert Peake, who had aided him in the defence of his home, and who had also been taken prisoner after the storming of the place. They were followed by Sir John Strangways, who had been taken at the siege of Cardiff. In 1647 Sir John Maynard, Serjeant Glynn, the Recorder of London, and the Lord Mayor, Sir John Gayre, with some of his aldermen and sheriffs, were in the Tower, and amongst the Royalists who were brought to the fortress as Charles’s fate was closing over him, were the Earl of Cleveland, Judge Jenkins, Sir Lewis Davies, and Sir John Stowell.

At the time of the King’s death on the scaffold in front of the Banqueting House at Whitehall, many of his most devoted adherents were close prisoners in the Tower, among them being James, Duke of Hamilton, one of Charles’s closest friends, who had made a rash attempt to invade England in 1648, and, meeting Cromwell, was defeated and made prisoner at Uttoxeter. For fellows in misfortune the Duke had George Goring, Earl of Norwich, Lord Capel, and the Earl of Holland—taken after the surrender of Colchester Castle—and Sir John Owen. The imprisonment of captured Royalists by the Parliament was but too often the prelude to their execution, but before the Duke and Lord Holland were beheaded, much interest was made to save them—more particularly Lord Holland; but Cromwell was obdurate, and they were both put to death in New Palace Yard. Lord Capel had succeeded in getting out of his prison. There is an interesting account of his escape and recapture given by Lord Clarendon in his “History,” and, although lengthy, may be quoted here as throwing an interesting light upon those times of revolution. “The Lord Capel, shortly after he was brought prisoner to the Tower from Windsor Castle, had, by a wonderful adventure, having a cord and all things necessary conveyed to him, let himself down out of the window of his chamber in the night, over the wall of the Tower, and had been directed through what part of the ditch he might be best able to wade. Whether he found the right place, or whether there was no safer place, he found the water and the mud so deep, that if he had not been by the head taller than other men, he must have perished, since the water came up to his chin. The way was so long to the other side, and the fatigue of drawing himself out of so much mud so intolerable, that his spirits were near spent, and he was once ready to call out for help, as thinking it better to be carried back to the prison, than to be found in such a place, from whence he could not extricate himself, and where he was ready to expire. But it pleased God that he got at last to the other side, where his friends expected him, and carried him to a chamber in the Temple, where he remained two or three nights secure from any discovery, notwithstanding the diligence that could not be used to recover a man they designed to use no better. After two or three days a friend whom he trusted much, and who had deserved to be trusted, conceiving he might be more secure in a place to which there was less resort, and where there were so many harboured who were every day sought after, had provided a lodging for him in a private house in Lambeth Marsh; and calling upon him in an evening when it was dark, to go thither, they chose rather to take a boat they found ready at the Temple Stairs, than to trust one of that people with their secret, and it was so late that there was only one boat left there. In that the Lord Capel (as well disguised as he thought necessary) and his friend put themselves, and bid the waterman to row them to Lambeth. Whether, in their passage thither, the other gentleman called him ‘my lord,’ as was confidently repeated, or whether the waterman had any jealousy by observing what he thought was a disguise, when they were landed, the wicked waterman undiscerned followed them, till he saw into what house they went; and then went to an officer and demanded: ‘What he would give him to bring him to the place where Lord Capel lay?’ And the officer promising to give him ten pounds, he led him presently to the house, where that excellent person was seized upon, and the next day carried to the Tower.”

Lord Capel was after this sentenced to be hanged, but this was commuted to his being beheaded, the sentence being carried out in front of Westminster Hall on the 9th March 1649. Clarendon writes of him as being, “the noblest champion his party possessed; a man in whom the malice of his enemies could discover very few faults, and whom his friends could not wish better accomplished.” Arthur Capel had been created Baron Capel of Hadham in Hertfordshire by Charles I., and his son, Arthur, was created Earl of Essex by Charles II., coming, as we shall see, to a tragic end in the Tower in that monarch’s reign.

Sir John Owen, that gallant Welsh knight, who had fought long and valiantly for the Royal cause, was taken prisoner at the engagement near Llandegas, and was imprisoned with the Duke of Hamilton and his fellow-Cavaliers at Windsor Castle before going to the Tower. At his trial Owen told his judges “that he was a plain gentleman of Wales, who had been taught to obey the King; that he had served him honestly during the war, and finding that many honest men endeavoured to raise forces whereby he might get out of prison, he did the like.” When he was condemned to be beheaded, he made his judges a low bow and said: “It was a great honour to a poor gentleman of Wales to lose his head with such noble lords; for, by God,” he added, “he was afraid they would have hanged him.” But the gallant old Cavalier did not lose his head, for Ireton stood up in the House and said that although the noble lords who had been condemned to death had many advocates, plain Sir John Owen had not one to speak for him. Ireton interceded so well, that Sir John was pardoned, and after a few months’ imprisonment in the Tower, was released. He went back to his beloved country, where he died in 1666, and rests in the church of Penmorven, in his native county of Carnarvonshire.

The execution of the other Cavaliers caused much indignation, and, as was the fashion of the times, some pamphlets were written on the subject against those in power, Colonel John Lilburne being the most prominent of the pamphleteers. He, with three other writers, Walwayn, Prince, and Overton, were sent to the Tower by order of the Parliament for writing against its authority. Lilburne was banished the country, the others were liberated. The Colonel, who was known as “Freeborn John,” was a born pamphleteer, and no amount of prisons or pillories stopped his output of what was certainly seditious matter. There is a strong resemblance between “Freeborn John” and the French pamphleteer, Rochefort, of our own time, for whatever Government was in power he opposed it by his writings. In later life he became a Quaker, because he was determined to enjoy what he considered “Christian Liberty.”

The Parliament met with considerable opposition from the Lord Mayor of the city. In 1648 Lord Mayor Sir Abraham Reynardson was kept prisoner in the Tower for two months, because he refused to publish in the city the Ordinance of the House of Commons, abolishing the title of King. Sir Abraham was one of the city worthies. He had been Master of the Merchant Taylors Company in 1640–41, and had filled the highest civic post in the city for six months prior to his imprisonment, and had valiantly resisted the “turbulent disorders,” and the tyranny of the Rump Parliament, which had tried in vain to force the Corporation of London to follow its commands. Sir Abraham was not only imprisoned, but was also fined £2000, and degraded from the office of Lord Mayor. Reynardson’s generosity was great, and he is reported to have spent £20,000 whilst he was Lord Mayor, not inclusive of the heavy fine. But his loyalty to the Crown was unshaken, and he most willingly suffered both loss of office and fortune in the Royalist cause. His portrait, recently acquired by the Company of Merchant Taylors, is one of the most interesting features of their splendid hall. Sir Abraham was re-elected to the Lord Mayoralty on the return of Charles II. (see C. M. Clode’s “Memoirs of Sir A. Reynardson”). The list of Royalist prisoners gained additions almost every month. At this time an agent of the young King’s, named Penruddock, was in the Tower with Sir John Gell, Colonel Eusebius Andrews, and Captains Benson and Ashley. Colonel Andrews, an old Royalist, was beheaded on Tower Hill; Gell, who was a Parliamentary General, and who left some interesting memoirs of the Civil War, was released after an imprisonment of two years. Benson was hanged at Tyburn, and Ashley was liberated. All these were suspected of plotting against the Parliament, and to them may be added Lords Beauchamp, Bellasis, and Chandos, committed to the Tower by the Council of State, “upon the suspicion of designing new troubles.” Lord Howard of Escrick and a minister named Love were in the Tower at the same period—the former, who was a member of Parliament, being imprisoned on a charge of bribery whilst contesting the city of Carlisle; he was dismissed the House and fined £10,000. The minister, Christopher Love, had been a preacher at St Anne’s, Aldersgate, and St Lawrence’s, Jewry, and was the author of many theological works. After the death of Charles the First he became as violent a Royalist as he had been a republican, and was found to be in correspondence with Charles the Second. His pardon was eagerly begged by many London parishes, and by no less than fifty-four of the clergy, but all they could get was a respite for a month, and Love was beheaded in July 1651. His execution caused much stir, as is proved by the fact that a Dutch allegorical engraving was made of the scene, an engraving which, after those of the executions of Strafford and Laud, is the earliest representation of an execution on Tower Hill in existence. Lord Clarendon writes that “when Love was on the scaffold he appeared with a marvellous undauntedness.” In the same year, after the Battle of Worcester, the Tower was filled with the captured Royalists from that disastrous fight. With these came the Earls of Lauderdale, Kelly, and Rothes, General Massey and General Middleton, the earls being soon removed to Windsor Castle, where they remained prisoners until the Restoration. The two generals were enabled to escape from the Tower, and joined Charles in Paris, “to the grief and vexation of the very soul of Cromwell,” writes Clarendon. These constant escapes from the Tower during the power of the Parliament and the Commonwealth would seem to point to great laxity in its protection, or to sympathy on the part of its guardians with the prisoners.

In the September of the following year the famous Edward Somerset, Marquis of Worcester, and Earl of Glamorgan, was a prisoner of the Commonwealth in the Tower. It was he who, with much show of probability, is supposed to have come within reasonable distance of inventing the steam-engine. He published in 1665 a book with a long title, which may be abbreviated into “A Century of Invention,” which Horace Walpole unkindly called “an amazing piece of folly.” Worcester died in 1667, and the model of his steam-engine is supposed to have been buried with him.

During the closing years of the Protectorate most of the State prisoners in the Tower were those implicated in schemes for assassinating Cromwell. One of these schemes, in 1654, brought Lord Oxford, Sir Richard Willis, Sir Gilbert Gerrard, and his brother, John Gerrard, with other Cavaliers, to the fortress, charged with belonging to a set of conspirators who aimed at taking the Protector’s life. It was proved that they had met at a tavern where it was proposed to kill Cromwell, seize the Tower, and proclaim Prince Charles king. One of the conspirators, named Fox, turned what would now be called king’s evidence, with the result that two of his fellow-conspirators were executed—Vowel, who was hanged at Charing Cross, and John Gerrard, who was beheaded on Tower Hill.

In the following year Cromwell made a raid among the officers of the Cavalier party, many of whom were seized and cashiered, Major-General Overton being sent to the Tower. Two other generals came there to bear him company in the same year, Generals Penn and Venables. They had made a disastrously unsuccessful expedition to the West Indies, which so exasperated Cromwell that on their return he ordered both of them to be imprisoned. A year later the Lieutenant of the Tower was ordered to release “one that goes by the name of Lucy Barlow, who for some time hath been a prisoner in the Tower of London. She passeth under the character of Charles Stuart’s wife; and hath a young son whom she openly declareth to be his; and it is generally believed; the boy being very like him; and both the mother and child provided for by him” (“Mercuris Politicus,” 1656). This Lucy Barlow was better known later on as Lucy Walters, and her son, who was then, and for some time to come, known by the name of James Crofts, became Duke of Monmouth.

Clarendon describes at some length the strange story of the death in the Tower, in 1657, of Miles Syndercombe, once an intimate friend of Cromwell’s, but who for some unknown reason became involved in one of the many plots for assassinating the Protector. Syndercombe was sentenced to death, and it being expected that an attempt at his rescue might take place, he was most carefully guarded in his prison. On the morning of the day fixed for the execution, however, Syndercombe was found dead in his bed, but nevertheless the corpse was dragged at a horse’s tail to the place of execution, a stake being driven through it after it was buried: Cromwell’s enemies accused him of having caused his former friend to be poisoned.

Cromwell, who, with all his natural courage lived in constant terror of assassination, in 1658 ordered all Royalists to live twenty miles away from London, and sent Colonel Russell, Sir William Compton, and Sir William Clayton, together with Henry Mordaunt, Lord Peterborough’s brother, to the Tower. Mordaunt had been in the young King’s employment, and, with a Dr Hewet, was put upon his trial for conspiracy. Mordaunt was acquitted, but Hewet was found guilty, and beheaded on Tower Hill. Another eminent Royalist, Sir Henry Slingsby, a great Yorkshire magnate who had fought for Charles, was also beheaded in the same year.

During the short interval that elapsed between the death of Cromwell in September 1658 and the return of Charles II. in May 1660, the Tower contained many important prisoners. Among them were Lady Mary Howard, the daughter of the Earl of Berkshire, and another lady, a Mrs Sumner, both of whom appear to have been mixed up in Mordaunt’s conspiracy against Cromwell, as well as a Mr Ernestus Byron and a Mr Harlow for the same cause. Other Royalists then in the fortress were Lord Falkland, Lord Delaware, the Earl of Chesterfield, Lords Falconbridge, Bellasis, Charles Howard, and Castleton, who had all taken part in a Royalist rising in Cheshire under the leadership of Sir George Booth. None of these, however, suffered more than a short imprisonment.

While the faction of the Parliament was making a desperate stand against the military party in the government of the country, an attempt was made by the former to seize the Tower. “The Lieutenant, Colonel Fitz, had consented that Colonel Okey, with 300 men, should be dispersed in the vicinity prepared for the enterprise, promising that on a certain day he would cause the gates to be opened at an early hour for the passage of the Colonel’s carriage, at which time Colonel Okey with his men, embracing the opportunity, might seize the guards and make themselves masters of the place. This plot, however, was discovered, and on the night before its intended execution Colonel Desborough being despatched from the Army, with a body of horse, changed the guards, seized the Lieutenant, and placed a fresh garrison in the Tower under the command of Colonel Miller” (Ludlow’s “Memoirs”).

Shortly after this episode, and during a disturbance amongst the soldiers there, Lenthal, the Speaker of the House of Commons, proceeded to the Tower, and removing the Lieutenant, who had been appointed by the Committee of Safety, conferred the government of the fortress upon Sir Anthony Ashley Cooper. But when General Monk declared for the King, that officer seized the fortress in the name of his royal master, released many of the prisoners, and placed in it a garrison commanded by Major Nicholson.

It was now the turn of the Royalists, and in the month of March 1660, Sir Arthur Hazelrigge and Colonel John Lambert were placed in the Tower because they had opposed Monk’s design for the restoration of the King, an event which showed the other members of the Committee in which direction the wind was blowing, and they made an attempt to secure the Tower by victualling the fortress, with the intention of standing a siege if it were necessary. Ludlow proposed that a force of two thousand men should join Colonel Morley’s regiment in the Tower, that the building itself should be stored with provisions for six months, and that two thousand sailors should also be placed within its walls as an additional security for its defence. This scheme, however, came to nothing.

Samuel Pepys has given a description of how Lambert escaped from his prison in the Tower, “The manner of the escape of John Lambert out of the Tower, as related by Rugge:—That about eight of the clock at night he escaped by a rope tied fast to his window, by which he slid down, and in each hand he had a handkerchief; and six men were ready to receive him, who had a barge to hasten him away. She who made the bed, being privy to his escape, that night, to blind the warder when he came to lock the chamber door, went to bed, and possessed Colonel Lambert’s place and put on his night-cap. So, when the said warder came to lock the door according to his usual manner, he found the curtains drawn, and conceiving it to be Colonel Lambert, he said, ‘Good-night, my lord.’ To which a seeming voice replied, and prevented all further jealousies. The next morning, on coming to unlock the door, and espying her face, he cried out, ‘In the name of God, Joan, what makes you here? Where is my Lord Lambert?’ She said, ‘He is gone; but I cannot tell whither.’ Whereupon he caused her to rise and carried her before the officer in the Tower, and (she) was committed to custody. Some said that a lady knit for him a garter of silk, by which he was conveyed down, and that she received £100 for her pains.”

Lambert was, however, retaken by Colonel Ingoldsby in Warwickshire, together with some other Roundhead officers who had joined him, and he was again placed in the Tower. At the Restoration he was banished to Guernsey, where he remained a prisoner until his death in 1683. Lambert had a high military reputation amongst the Roundheads, and had contributed greatly to the victory at Naseby, as well as defeating the Royalists both in Scotland and in the Midlands: his fame was such that Cromwell was supposed to have been somewhat jealous of his successes.

Vaulting in the Cradle Tower

CHAPTER XIV

CHARLES II.

Immediately after the return of Charles II. in the month of May 1660, the trials and executions of the late King’s judges began. The first of the regicides to be sent to the Tower was Major-General Thomas Harrison, who was committed for high treason on 19th May, and on the 11th of the following October, drawn on a hurdle to Charing Cross, and there hanged and quartered. Harrison, who was the son of a Nantwich butcher, and had been bred for the law, had been useful to the Protector in keeping down the Presbyterian faction. He died stoutly asserting the righteousness of the cause for which he suffered. The same fate befell Gregory Clement and Colonel John James, both members of the High Court of Justice which had condemned Charles I. Clement had succeeded in hiding himself in a house near Gray’s Inn, but was discovered and brought before the Commissioners of the Militia, to whom, however, he was not known by sight. He would probably have escaped, when it chanced that a blind man came into the room as Clement was quitting it, and recognised him by his voice, upon which Clement was arrested and sent to the Tower (Ludlow’s “Memoirs”). Among the other regicides confined within the Tower during that summer were Colonel Bamfield, Colonel Hunks, Colonel Phair, Francis Corker, Captain Hewlet, and John Cook, the last of whom had conducted the prosecution against the King. Hewlet was accused of having been one of the masked executioners at Whitehall, but this was never proved.

James Harrington, the author of the political romance called “The Commonwealth of Oceana,” was imprisoned in the Tower early in this reign. He became insane, and was transferred from prison to prison. His book, by which he was made famous, laid down a plea for a lasting republic, the government of which was to be maintained by rotation. This unhappy author died in 1677, and was laid near Sir Walter Raleigh in St Margaret’s, Westminster.

In the same summer of Charles’s restoration, the Marquis of Argyll, who was shortly afterwards beheaded at Edinburgh, was a prisoner in the Tower charged with high treason, and with having sided with Cromwell; with him was the Marquis of Antrim. The Laird of Swinton was another prisoner of this year, being imprisoned upon various charges, one of which was that he intended to kill the King whilst pretending to be touched by Charles for “the evil”—i.e. scrofula; and also for deserting the army at the Battle of Dunbar.

The next illustrious name that one comes to in the portentous annals of the Tower is that of Sir Harry Vane, whose death was a monstrous injustice, Charles confessing as much when he himself said of Vane that “he was too dangerous a man to let live, if we can honestly put him out of the way.” Although Vane had much to do in bringing Strafford to his death, he was not in any way concerned with the execution of Charles I., and had, on the contrary, always been opposed to that great mistake. However, in the month of July 1660, he was sent to the Tower, whence he was taken to be imprisoned in the Scilly Isles, then brought back to the Tower in March 1662, and beheaded on Tower Hill in that same year. At his trial he had pleaded Charles’s promise of a “merciful indemnity to all those not immediately concerned in his father’s death,” which should, at any rate, have saved Sir Harry from the scaffold. But Vane was too good a man for Charles to tolerate, and his execution was a judicial murder of the basest kind. Both Houses of Parliament had voted for an Act of Indemnity in Vane’s favour, but they were overruled by the King and his creatures. Pepys took the trouble to rise early on the morning of the 14th of June to see Vane’s execution. “Up by four o’clock in the morning and upon business in my office. Then we sat down to business, and about eleven o’clock, having a room got ready for us, we all went out to the Tower Hill; and there, over against the scaffold, made on purpose this day, saw Sir Harry Vane brought. A very great press of people. He made a long speech, many times interrupted by the Sheriffs and others there, and they would have taken his paper out of his hand, but he would not let it go. But they caused all the books of those that writ after him (reporters?) to be given to the Sheriffe, and the trumpets were brought under the scaffold that he might not be heard. Then he prayed, and so fitted himself, and received the blow; but the scaffold was so crowded that we could not see it done.” Sir Harry had been a thorn in Cromwell’s flesh, and the Protector’s exclamation, “The Lord deliver me from Sir Harry Vane!” is historical.

To return to the year 1660, Colonels Axten and Hacker, the latter of whom had commanded the guard at the King’s trial and at his execution, together with one of his judges, Thomas Scott, were hanged at Charing Cross.

In October of the same year, Henry Martin, one of the most prominent of the regicides, was imprisoned for life, and died twenty years later in Chepstow Castle. Another was General Edmund Ludlow, author of the “Memoirs,” who died in Switzerland, after an exile of thirty-two years. Some twenty persons in all were executed in the most brutal fashion, while the bodies of Cromwell, Ireton, and the greatest sailor that England ever had before Nelson, Blake, were torn from their graves in the Abbey, gibbeted at Tyburn, and buried beneath the gallows, Cromwell’s head having been cut from the body and stuck up on Westminster Hall. Charles’s government respected neither the dead nor the rights of nations in the matter of taking vengeance upon the late King’s judges.

Old Cannon and Mortars on the west side of the White Tower

On the 22nd of April 1661, Charles left Whitehall in state for the Tower, to prepare for his coronation in the Abbey the following day, as was the custom. Charles the Second was the last of our sovereigns to sleep in the Tower on the eve of his coronation, he being lodged that night in the royal apartments on the southern side of the White Tower, the greater part of the Palace, including the Great Hall, having been pulled down during the Protectorate.

We will let Pepys recount the procession from the Tower—where, as was also the custom, Charles had created a number of Knights of the Bath—to Whitehall. “Up early and made myself as fine as I could, and put on my velvet coat, the first day that I put it on, though made half a year ago. And being ready, Sir W. Batten, my Lady, and his two daughters, and his son and wife, and Sir W. Penn, and his son and I, went to Mr Young’s, the flagmaker, in Corne-hill; and there we had a good room to ourselves, with wine and good cake, and saw the show very well. In which it is impossible to relate the glory of the day, expressed in the clothes of them that rid, and their horses and horse-clothes, among others my Lord Sandwich’s embroidery and diamonds were ordinary among them. The Knights of the Bath was a brave show of itself; and their Esquires, among which Mr Armiger was an Esquire to one of the Knights. Remarquable were the two men that represented the two Dukes of Normandy and Aquitaine. The Bishops came next after Barons, which is the higher place; which makes me think that the next Parliament they will be called to the House of Lords. My Lord Monk rode bare after the King, and led in his hand a spare horse, as being the Master of the Horse; the King, in a most rich and embroidered suit and cloak, looked most noble. Wadlow the vintner (Wadlow was the original of ‘Sir Simon the King,’ the favourite air of Squire Western in ‘Tom Jones’) at the Devil in Flete Streete, did lead a fine company of soldiers, all young comely men, in white doublets. Then followed the Vice-Chamberlain, Sir G. Carteret, a company of men all like Turks; but I know not yet what they are for. The streets all gravelled, and the houses hung with carpets before them, made brave show, and the ladies out of the windows, one of which over against us I took much notice of, and spoke to her, which made good sport among us. Glorious was the show with gold and silver, that we were not able to look at it, our eyes at last being so much overcome with it. Both the King and the Duke of York took notice of us, as they saw us at the window.”

Another contemporary writer says: “Even the vaunting French confessed their pomps of the late marriage with the Infanta of Spain (the wedding of Louis XIV. with Maria Theresa of Spain) at their Majesties’ entrance into Paris, to be inferior in state, gallantry, and riches, to this most glorious cavalcade from the Tower.”

The same year that saw the coronation of Charles witnessed a strange form of punishment to three prisoners in the Tower. These were Lord Monson, Sir Henry Mildmay, and Robert Wallop, who were imprisoned for holding republican views. They were sentenced to lose their rank, to be drawn on hurdles to Tyburn from the Tower and back again, and imprisoned for life.

A large number of other political prisoners were sent to the different prisons throughout the country, and many were also shipped off to the Pacific Islands, where they were sold as slaves. Perhaps the worst case of any was that of three of the late King’s judges who had escaped into Holland. They were seized in that country by an emissary of the English Government, and, against all the laws of nations, brought back to England, imprisoned in the Tower, and suffered death as felons. These three men were Colonel Okey—whom we mentioned as having attempted to seize the Tower after Cromwell’s death—Colonel Barkstead, and Miles Corbet. They were executed in April 1662. Barkstead had been knighted by Cromwell, the Parliament had entrusted him with the custody of the Tower, and he had also acted as Major-General of London. He is supposed to have enriched himself whilst head of the Tower, by exacting money from the prisoners in his keeping. His head was placed over the Traitor’s Gate in the Tower. Although he and his companions may have deserved their fate, the manner of their seizure reflects the greatest discredit upon the government of Charles, which, as I have already said, neither respected the rights of the living nor reverenced the dead.

STEEPLE IN SOUTHWARKE IN ITS FLOURISHING CONDITION BEFORE THE FIRE
Designed by W. Hollar of Prage

London before the Great Fire.
(From an engraving by Hollar.)

Between the years 1660 and 1667, some necessary repairs were undertaken in the Tower, some five hundred pounds being expended thereon. In 1680 more extensive repairs were made, owing to reports made by members of the House of Lords who had been appointed by the King in Council, to inquire into “repairs and other works to be done, in and about the said Tower of London, for the safety and convenience of the garrison therein” (Harleian MSS.). An elaborate report was drawn up, the estimate for the necessary alterations amounting to £6097, 2s., but like most of the important undertakings at that time, little, if anything, was accomplished. The order for these repairs issued by the Treasury stated that the above sum would be provided “so soon as the state of His Majesty’s affairs would permit”: but knowing the state of Charles’s “affairs,” we may be sure nothing came of it.

During the Great Fire of 1666, the Tower ran the most perilous risk in all its history of utter destruction, and it was only by the timely blowing up of the buildings which abutted on the walls of the fortress and by the side of the moat, that the historical structure was saved. The conflagration began at midnight on the 1st September in a house in Pudding Lane, not far from where the monument erected in its commemoration now stands. Pepys, that most invaluable of chroniclers and domestic historians, then lived in Seething Lane, Crutched Friars. “Lord’s Day, 2nd September,” he writes: “I made myself ready presently, and walked to the Tower, and there got up upon one of the high places (perhaps Pepys mounted to the top of the White Tower), Sir J. Robinson’s little son going up with me. And there I did see the houses at that end of the bridge all on fire, and an infinite great fire in this and the other side of this and of that bridge.” On the seventh of this September Pepys bears witness to the King’s energy in bringing assistance to the sufferers by the conflagration. “In the meantime,” he writes, “his Majesty got to the Tower by water, to demolish the houses about the Graffs (?), which being built entirely about it, had they taken fire, and attacked the White Tower where the magazine of powder lay, would undoubtedly not only have beaten down and destroyed all the bridge, but sunk and torn the vessels in the river, and rendered the demolition beyond expression, for several miles about the country.”

Charles certainly showed the Stuart courage as well as resourcefulness at a crisis, for there can be little doubt that he was chiefly instrumental in saving the Tower, by ordering the blowing up of the dangerous buildings attached to its walls.

In Hollar’s panoramic view of London before and after the Great Fire, here reproduced, it will be seen how very close was the approach of the conflagration to the walls of the ancient fortress. Another danger threatened the Tower in this same year, a Captain Rathbone, with some other officers, having formed a plan for scaling the outer walls, and killing Sir John Robinson,[5] after securing the gates. It was one of the Anti-Royalist plots with which the period was so rife, and, like the majority of them, ended in failure; Rathbone and his gang were taken prisoners and promptly hanged at Tyburn.

APPEARETH NOW AFTER THE SAD CALAMITIE AND DESTRVCTION BY FIRE In the Yeare M. DC. LXVI.

Wenceslaus Hollar delin: et sculp: 1666, Cum Privilegio.

London after the Great Fire.
(From an engraving by Hollar.)

Among other prisoners there at this time was Thomas, Lord Buller of Moor Park, incarcerated for having challenged the Duke of Buckingham to a duel, and also the Marquis of Dorchester, for “quarrelling with and using ill language to that duke”; the latter was likewise in the Tower, and not for the first time. On this occasion Buckingham was charged with treasonable correspondence and with stirring up a mutiny in the Army. Few persons of the time were so frequently made acquainted with the prison chambers of the Tower as this roystering ne’er-do-well, “that life of pleasure, and that soul of whim,” George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, who was, in all, five times confined in the Tower, his first visit having been paid during the Protectorate because he had married Fairfax’s daughter, an event that greatly enraged Cromwell. In 1666 he was imprisoned for insulting Lord Ossory, the son of the Duke of Ormond, in the House of Lords. But he was never a prisoner for long, the last occasion being when, together with Shaftesbury, Wharton, and Salisbury, he opposed the “Courtiers’ Parliament.” All four were sent to the Tower, but Buckingham, after making a humble apology, was released. On leaving the Tower he passed under Shaftesbury’s windows; the latter had refused to submit. “What,” said Shaftesbury to Buckingham, “are you leaving us?” “Why, yes,” answered Buckingham, “such giddy fellows as I am can never stay long in one place.”

Constantly in trouble, Buckingham was so boon a companion of the King’s that Charles could not long let him remain out of his sight, whatever the follies of which the Duke might have been guilty. Another of these brilliant but dissipated friends and courtiers of Charles II. who was sent to the Tower, was the infamously famous John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester. He was there in 1669 for having abducted Elizabeth Mallet, “la triste héritière,” as Grammont calls her. Ultimately Rochester married the lady, and she made a most devoted wife to a most worthless and unfaithful husband.

Charles had been greatly irritated by the preference of the beautiful Frances Stuart, “la Belle Stewart” of Grammont, for the Duke of Richmond, and his rival had to pass three weeks in the Tower in consequence of the Royal jealousy. The Duke, however, had his way, and married the fair Frances after eloping with her. Another of Charles’s courtiers was placed in the fortress in 1665, Lord Morley, for having killed a Mr Hastings. Morley was a noted duellist, and also what was afterwards termed a “Mohawk,” and aided by one, Bromwich, had murdered his victim in a street brawl.

Pepys, we have noted, was often in and about the Tower during these years, but the most interesting entry in his diary relating to the fortress, belongs to the year 1662. Under the date of the 20th October he writes: “To my Lord Sandwich, who was in his chamber all alone, and did inform me that an old acquaintance hath discovered to him £7000 hid in the Tower, of which he was to have two for the discovery, my lord two, and the King the other three, when it is found; and the King’s warrant to search, runs for me and one Mr Lee. So we went, and the guard at the Tower Gate making me leave my sword, I was forced to stay so long at the alehouse close by, till my boy run home for my cloak. Then walked to Minchen Lane, and got from Sir H. Bennet the King’s warrant for the paying of £2000 to my lord and other two of the discoverers. After dinner we broke the matter to the Lord Mayor, who did not, and durst not, appear the least averse to it. So Lee and I and Mr Wade were joined by Evett, the guide, W. Giffin, and a porter with pickaxes. Coming to the Tower, our guide demanded a candle, and down into the cellars he goes. He went into several little cellars and then out-of-doors to view, but none did answer so well to the marks as one arched vault, where after much talk, to digging we went, till about eight o’clock at night, but could find nothing, yet the guides were not discouraged. Locking the door, we left for the night, and up to the Deputy Governor, and he do undertake to keep the key, that none shall go down without his privity. November 1st. To the Tower to make one trial more, where we staid several hours, and dug a great deal under the arches, but we missed of all and so we went away the second time like fools. To the Dolphin Tower. Met Wade and Evett, who do say that they had from Barkstead’s own mouth.” Pepys and his fellow treasure-hunters then paused in their operations, but on the 17th December we read in this Diary, “This morning were Lee, Wade, and Evett, intending to have gone upon our new design upon the Tower, but it raining, and the work being done in the open garden, we put it off to Friday next.” And this is the last we hear of the Tower treasure, and for all that we know that £7000 is still under some vault in the old building, hidden in the “butter firkins” in which it was supposed to have been placed.

Castrum Royale Londinense, vulgo the Tower.

The Tower in the time of Charles II.
(From an etching by Hollar.)

Three years after the Great Fire, Pepys gives an account of a visit he paid to his friend Sir William Coventry on the 11th of March 1669, when he went to see him in what was then called “My Lord of Northumberland’s Walk,” a place not now to be identified, which had at its end an iron shield with the Earl’s arms engraved upon it and holes in which to place a peg for every turn made by the pedestrian during his walk: this must have been the prison exercise of the so-called “Wizard Earl,” Raleigh’s friend.

Pepys visited his friend Sir William Coventry very frequently when the latter was imprisoned in the Tower. Sir William had, through the medium of Henry Savile, challenged the Duke of Buckingham to a duel in March 1669, and three days after the challenge Savile was committed to the Gate House Prison, and Coventry to the Tower.

Savile was a gentleman of the Duke of York’s, who, being indignant at the slight put upon him by being sent to the Gate House, asked if he might not be sent to the Tower, and his wish was granted. Pepys was unremitting in his attentions to his old friend Coventry, although by constantly seeing him he was placing himself in the black books of Charles and the Duke of York. We find him calling, on March 4th, upon Coventry in his prison in the Brick Tower when he was in charge of a son of “Major Bayly’s, one of the officers of the Ordnance,” again on the following day he visits him and finds Coventry, “with abundance of company with him.” The visits were continued on the following days until the 16th of the same month, after which Coventry was liberated. The stir his imprisonment had made, and the number of visitors who called upon him—in one day some sixty coaches stood waiting outside the Tower Gates for those who called on Sir William—had much annoyed the King, the Duke of York, and Buckingham. Sir William Coventry, of whom Bishop Burnet writes that he was “a man of great notions and eminent virtue; the best speaker in the House of Commons, and capable of bearing the chief ministry, as it was once thought he was very near it, and deserved it more than all the rest did,” after this quarrel with Buckingham and his imprisonment in the Tower retired from public affairs, going to Minster Lovel in Oxfordshire, and dying at the age of sixty, in 1686. He had been Secretary of the Admiralty, and twice member for Yarmouth, and in 1667 had been one of the Commission of the Treasury.

Colonel Blood.
(From a Contemporary Engraving.)

There is a blank in the list of commitments to the Tower between the years 1668 and 1678. They are supposed to have been lost, but we know that the year after Pepys’ friend Sir John Robinson had ceased to command in the Tower, the gossiping diarist himself was a prisoner within the walls, having been in some way concerned in the so-called Popish Plot of 1679. It is greatly to be deplored that no account of Samuel’s experiences in the Tower have come down to us, for his diary ends ten years before this date: Pepys was in the Tower from the month of May 1679 until the following February. His expenses, however, have been recorded:—“For safe keeping of Sir Anthony Deane and Mr Pepys, from and for the 22nd day of May 1679 unto and for the 24th of June 1679, being four weeks and six dayes, at £3 per week, ancient allowance, and 13s. 4d. per weeke, present demands, according to the retrenchments, £6, 9s. 6d.” (Bayley’s “Tower of London.”)

Among other prisoners in the Tower in this reign was Nathaniel Desborow, or Disbrew, as his name is sometimes written. Desborow was Cromwell’s brother-in-law, “clumsy and ungainly in his person,” and, a born plotter, he hated all who were placed above him. He had been made Chancellor of Ireland by his nephew Richard Cromwell, but nevertheless he helped to pull down the Protector’s son and successor from his short-lived position. There were many others besides, imprisoned for political and non-political offences, and of the latter was Stephen Thomson, who was imprisoned for “stealing and conveying beyond the seas the sole daughter and heiress of Sir Edmund Alleyn, deceased, she being an infant.”

The most sensational event that occurred in the Tower during the reign of Charles II. was the attempt made by a ruffian who called himself “Colonel” Blood to steal the Crown and Regalia. Blood, half sailor, half highwayman, and a complete scoundrel, was about fifty years old when, in the month of May 1671, he made what was literally a dash for the Crown. Blood appears to have served under Cromwell, and consequently styled himself “Colonel”; after the war he became a spy of the Government, and a short time before his performance at the Tower he had almost succeeded in having the old Duke of Ormond hanged on the gallows at Tyburn.

At this time Sir Gilbert Talbot held the appointment of “Master of the Jewel House.” The allowance for this charge had been reduced, and, as a kind of compensation, the Master had permission to allow the public to inspect the Regalia, then kept in the Martin Tower, or Jewel Tower, as it was then called, a fee being charged which became the Master’s perquisite. Three weeks before Blood made his attempt, he had called at the Martin Tower disguised as a clergyman, “with a long cloak, cassock, and canonical girdle.” He was accompanied by a woman whom he represented as his wife. The lady requested permission to see the Regalia, but soon after being admitted to the Tower complained of “a qualm upon her stomach,” and old Talbot Edwards, who had been an old servant of Sir Gilbert’s, and had been placed by him in charge of the Regalia, called to his wife to look after the soi-disant Mrs Blood. That lady having been given something to remove her “qualms” was, together with her husband, most profuse in the expression of her gratitude to the old keeper and his wife, and promised to return upon an early occasion.

The next time Blood came to the Tower he was alone, bringing some gloves for Edwards’s wife as a token of gratitude for the kindness shown to “Mrs Blood.” On this occasion he informed Edwards that he had a young nephew who was well off, and in search of a wife, and suggested that a match might be arranged between him and their daughter. Blood was invited to bring his nephew to make the acquaintance of the young lady, and it was arranged that the old couple should give a dinner at which the meeting should take place. At the dinner Blood took it upon himself, being still in his clerical disguise, to say grace, which he did with great unction, concluding with a long-winded oration, and a prayer for the Royal family. After the meal he visited the rooms in the Tower, and seeing a fine pair of pistols hanging on the wall, asked if he might buy them to give to a friend. He then said that he would return with a couple of friends who were about to leave London, and who were anxious to see the Regalia before leaving, it being decided that he should bring them the next morning. That day was the 9th of May, and at seven in the morning old Talbot Edwards was ready to receive his reverend friend and his companions, who soon put in an appearance. Blood and his confederates had arms concealed about them, each carrying daggers, pocket pistols, and rapier blades in their canes.

They were taken up the stairs into the room where the Regalia was kept, but immediately they had entered, the ruffians threw a cloak over Edwards’s head and gagged him with a wooden plug, which had a small hole in it so that the person gagged could breathe; this they fastened with a piece of waxed leather which encircled his neck, and placed an iron hook on his nose so as to prevent him from crying out. They swore they would murder him if he attempted to give an alarm—which the poor old fellow could scarcely have done under the circumstances. But the plucky old keeper struggled hard, whereupon they beat him upon the head with a wooden mallet, and stabbed him until he fainted. The villains, thinking they had killed him, then turned their attention to rifling the treasures in the room. One of them, Parrot, put the orb in his breeches pocket, Blood placed the Crown under his cloak, and the third began to file the sceptre in two pieces, it being too long to carry away without being seen. At this moment steps were heard; Edwards’s young son having just returned from Flanders in the very nick of time. The thieves dashed down the stairs past the young man who was coming up, carrying with them the orb and crown, the sceptre being left behind in the hurry of their flight. The pursuit was immediate; young Edwards had brought with him his brother-in-law, a Captain Beckman, and the latter hearing cries of “Treason! Murder!” from the terrified women in the Tower, and the cry “The Crown is stolen!” rushed after Blood and the two other men. These had meanwhile crossed the drawbridge between the Main Guard at the White Tower and the Wharf; at the bridge a warder had tried to stop them, but Blood fired his pistol, and the man, although not wounded, fell to the ground, and they dashed past him. At St Katharine’s Gate, near which horses were in waiting for the thieves, Beckman overtook them; Blood again discharged his pistol but missed his pursuer, who ducking his head, promptly seized the sham clergyman, from under whose cloak the Crown fell to the ground, rolling in the gutter. Then followed what the London Gazette of the day called a “robustious struggle,” Blood ultimately being secured, remarking that “It was a gallant attempt, for it was for a Crown!”

When the Crown fell to the ground, some of the gems came loose from their settings, and a large ruby, which had belonged to the sceptre, was found in Parrot’s pocket. Little harm, however, was done, except to the poor old keeper, who was nearly eighty years of age and had been terribly injured; he was soon past all suffering, and was buried in the Chapel of St Peter’s, where his gravestone can still be seen.

After his capture Blood occupied a prison in the White Tower for a short time, but the King soon sent for him. And although it is not, and cannot be known, whether Charles was an accessory or not in the attempted theft, or whether Blood knew too much of the King’s affairs, yet, whatever the reason, Blood was not only pardoned but rewarded, the King giving him a pension of £500 a year, and bestowing upon him landed estates in Ireland, the “Colonel” becoming one of the most assiduous of the Whitehall courtiers. Whether Charles also rewarded Blood’s accomplices is not recorded, but none of them were ever punished for the attempted robbery. John Evelyn recounts meeting Blood at court on the 10th of May 1671. “How he came to be pardoned,” he writes, “and ever received into favour, not only after this but several other exploits almost as daring, both in Ireland and here, I never could come to understand. This man had not only a daring, but a villainous unmerciful look, a false countenance, but very well-spoken, and dangerously insinuating.”

Charles the Second, always in want of money, might very possibly have commissioned Blood, after he had stolen the Crown, to pawn or sell its gems in Holland or elsewhere, and the thieves could then have divided the spoil. There can be little doubt that had not young Edwards and his brother-in-law arrived at the Tower when they did, Blood and the two, or others, would have got safely away with the jewels. The plot had been admirably planned, and only the accident of the return of the keeper’s son, which Blood could not possibly have foreseen, prevented its successful accomplishment.

In later years Blood is said to have become a Quaker—not a desirable recruit for that most respectable body, one would imagine. He died in 1680, and has had the honour of having had his bold, bad face placed in the National Portrait Gallery; it fully bears out Evelyn’s description of the “villainous unmerciful” look of the man.

A very different individual from Blood, who was also in the Tower about the same time, was William Penn, the founder of Pennsylvania. He had been imprisoned for no offence, unless that of writing a pamphlet on Unitarianism could be considered a punishable crime. William Penn’s father, the celebrated Admiral, Sir William, had accused the Duke of York of showing cowardice in a sea fight with the Dutch, and the son’s pamphlet was made the stick with which to beat the father. Young Penn passed some months in the Tower, where he wrote his famous work, “No Cross, no Crown.” Edward Stillingfleet, Bishop of Worcester, was sent to the Tower to see, and to convert, the young Quaker from his errors in belief, but Penn only said to the prelate: “The Tower is to me the worst argument in the world,” and Stillingfleet found that he could make no impression.

In 1678, William Howard, Viscount Stafford, a Roman Catholic peer, was accused of being concerned in the Popish Plot, that monstrous tangle of lies, invented, for the greater part, by the infamous Titus Oates. Stafford was accused by Oates, with four other Roman Catholic peers, of being mixed up in the plot to overthrow the King, and to place the Duke of York upon the throne. From his place in the House of Lords Stafford had declared his innocence of the charge, but he was committed to close imprisonment in the Tower in the month of October (1678), remaining a prisoner until the month of November 1680, when he was tried at Westminster Hall, Titus Oates being the principal witness against him. In Reresby’s “Memoirs” it is said that Charles wished to save Stafford, whom he knew to be innocent; but his mistress, the Duchess of Portsmouth, whom Reresby believed to have been bribed, prevented the King from acting in the matter as he would otherwise have done, and Charles allowed an innocent man to be judicially murdered in order not to thwart his mistress’s wishes. Stafford was beheaded on Tower Hill on the 29th of December 1680, the crowd hooting him on his way to the scaffold, for Titus Oates’s infamous accusations had made any Roman Catholic an object of hatred to the populace. On Stafford asking one of the Sheriffs, of the name of Cornish, to interfere, the latter brutally replied: “I am ordered to stop no man’s mouth but your own.” So fervently, however, did Stafford proclaim his innocence on the scaffold, that many of the spectators, “with heads uncovered, exclaimed: ‘We believe you, God bless you, my Lord!’” “He perished,” writes Sir J. Reresby, “in the firmest denial of what had been laid to his charge, and that in so cogent and persuasive a manner, that all the beholders believed his words, and grieved his destiny.” The same tribunal which had condemned Stafford, three years after his death reversed the attainder they had pronounced against him, it having, in the meanwhile, been proved that Stafford had perished an innocent man, done to death by the false witness of the villain Oates. Lord Stafford was buried in the Chapel of St Peter’s.

William, Lord Russell.
(From the Portrait in the National Portrait Gallery)

The Rye House Plot brought two of the best and noblest heads in England to the block—William, Lord Russell, and Algernon Sidney. Both suffered death for the good cause of the liberty of England. Russell was the proto-martyr in that faith, Sidney the second.

England under Charles the Second was fast drifting back into the worst of the tyrannies that had darkened her former history. The King, as he proved on his death-bed, was a Roman Catholic in religion, and although professing to belong to the Church of England, moved in the steps of his brother James, who was an avowed Papist; and the country was rapidly becoming, politically, a dependency of the French King, and, in religion, a fief of the Pope. The four most conspicuous Englishmen who clearly saw the danger that threatened the freedom, both civil and religious, of England, and who had done their utmost to save their country—patriots in the best sense of that much-abused term, were at the time of the discovery of the Rye House Plot in 1683, either out of the country or in prison.

Shaftesbury, after an imprisonment of five weeks in the Tower, had crossed to Holland after his liberation in November 1681. The news of his acquittal had been received with great rejoicings in the city, Reresby writing that “the rabble lighted bonfires.” The Duke of York, according to Lenthall, expressed his indignation publicly at “such insolent defiance of authority such as he had never before known.” But Shaftesbury’s friends and admirers had a medal struck in honour of his liberation, on one side being the Earl’s portrait in profile, and on the other a view of London taken from the Southwark side of the Thames, with the sun casting its rays over the Tower from out the clouds; above is inscribed the word, “Laetamur,” with the date 24 of November 1681 beneath. This medal gave rise to Dryden’s satirical poem called “The Medal,” in which he compares Shaftesbury to Achitophel.

Russell, Sidney, and Essex were arrested and placed in the prisons of the Tower. They suffered death in the cause of constitutional liberty, as against the arbitrary power of the King, and also for wishing to exclude the Duke of York from the succession to the throne after his brother’s death. This plan was quite distinct from the Rye House Plot—a plot that arranged for the assassination of the King and the Duke of York on their road to Newmarket races.

Russell and Sidney were betrayed by Lord Howard of Escrick, and although warned of his danger, Russell, unlike Shaftesbury, refused to flee, saying he had done nothing to make him fear meeting the justice of his country. However, on entering the Tower, he seems to have had a foreboding of his fate, for turning round to his attendant, Taunton, he said he knew that there was “a determination against him to take his life, for the devil is unchained.” “From the moment of his arrest,” writes Bishop Burnet, “he looked upon himself as a dying man, and turned his thoughts wholly to another world. He read much in the Scriptures, particularly in the Psalms. But, whilst he behaved with the serenity of a man prepared for death, his friends exhibited an honourable anxiety to save his life. Lord Essex would not leave his house, lest his absconding might incline a jury to give more credit to the evidence against Lord Russell. The Duke of Monmouth offered to come in and share fortunes with him, if it would do him any service. But he answered, ‘It would be of no advantage to him to have his friends die with him.’”

During the fortnight which elapsed between his arrest and his sentence, Russell’s devoted wife did all that was humanly possible to save her husband’s life, and the night before the trial she wrote to him: “Your friends believe I can do you some service at your trial. I am certainly willing to try; my resolution will hold out, pray let yours. But it may be the Court will not let me. However, do let me try.” Lady Russell not only tried, but succeeded in being of assistance to her husband during his trial, which took place in Westminster Hall on July 13th, 1683. Lord Russell asked his judges if he might have “some one to help his memory,” as he put it, and the request being granted, “My wife,” he said, “is here to do it.” And all through that long summer day, whilst he was being tried for his life, Lady Russell sat by her husband’s side writing down notes of the evidence, and giving him her advice. When the news came, during the course of the trial, that Essex had been found in the Tower with his throat cut, Russell burst into tears. He wept for the fate of his friend, whilst his own misfortunes only made him appear the more serene and indifferent to the malice of his enemies. Jeffries, who presided, took care in his charge to the jury to turn Essex’s untimely end into an additional proof of Russell’s guilt.

Essex had been arrested soon after Russell, and on the same charge, that of being concerned in the Rye House Plot, and was accused of high treason. Taken from his seat at Cassiobury to the Tower, he was placed in the same room which was occupied by his father. It is described in the depositions placed before the Commissioners in William the Third’s time, as being “on the left hand as you go up the mound, after passing the Bloody Tower Gate.” In Dalrymple’s history it is stated that Essex was confined in the same room which his father, Lord Capel, had occupied, and in which Lady Essex’s grandfather, the Earl of Northumberland, had killed himself in Elizabeth’s reign. To this prison Essex was brought in the month of July in the year 1683—a year so fatal to some of England’s truest patriots—and there, as has already been stated, he was found with his throat cut. Whether Essex died by his own hand, or by the hands of others, will never be known. On the whole, the evidence points to suicide; and this is the opinion of the most trustworthy authorities, such as Green and Gardiner.

Arthur Capel, Earl of Essex, had been one of the most popular of the liberal leaders in the country. He had held high offices in the State, he had been Ambassador from the court of Charles II. to that of Copenhagen, he had been Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland, and, for a short time, Prime Minister. The only son of the gallant Lord Capel of Hadham, who had been executed by Cromwell, Essex had every reason to expect some gratitude from the son of the man for whose sake his father had given his life. But with the Stuarts the sense of gratitude was an unknown quantity, and Essex was doomed to share the fates of his friends, Russell and Sidney, accused by the same traitor who had betrayed both them and himself. On the day of Essex’s death, the King and his brother James had been visiting the Tower, a place in which neither of them had set foot for a dozen years. After James’s flight at the Revolution, it was eagerly believed that this visit was in some way connected with Essex’s death. In a curious contemporary print, Essex is seen being murdered by three well-dressed individuals, the position in which his body was found after death being also shown at the same time. In the depositions alluded to above, the sentry at the prison door stated that two men had entered the room on the morning of the Earl’s death, that an alarm was given by Essex’s valet when he found his master’s body on the floor of the closet next his bedroom with his throat cut. Two children deposed that they had seen a hand throwing a razor out of the Earl’s window, that a woman then left the house and picked it up. A sentry, named Robert Meek, who had made some remarks tending to prove that Essex had met with foul play, was found dead soon afterwards in the Tower moat.

Arthur Comte d’Essex

Gate and Portcullis in the Bloody Tower

Bad and heartless as were both the King and his brother James, none can believe that they would commit a cold-blooded murder themselves; and had they hired others to do so, the fact of the brothers having gone that same morning to the fortress gives the idea of murder high improbability, and Essex’s death will remain one of the many unsolved tragic mysteries of the Tower. That the authorities believed the theory of suicide is proved by the register of St Peter’s in the Tower, in which is the following entry: “Arthur, Earl of Essex, cutt his own throat within the Tower, July 13, 1683. Buried in this Chapel.”

But to return to Lord Russell. After his condemnation, and during the few days that were left to him on earth, Russell was visited by Tillotson, Dean of Canterbury, as well as by Bishop Burnet, both of whom urged him to sign a paper declaring his adherence to the principle of non-resistance, which they declared to be an article of Christian faith. Russell said, in answer, that he had always believed in the right of a nation to defend its religion and liberties when they were threatened, expressing his willingness to give up his life in their defence; and if he erred in this, “God,” he said, “would forgive him, as it would be the sin of ignorance.” He also told the prelates that both he and Lady Russell were agreed on this subject, and that nothing could alter their views. Lady Russell was fighting in these days to save the life she valued far above her own; but all was useless; it was a hopeless struggle. “I wish,” said Lord Russell, “that my wife would give over beating every bush for my preservation”; but he added, “if it will be any consolation for her after my death to have done her utmost to save me I cannot blame her.”

On the 19th of July, two days before the day fixed for his execution, Russell wrote a letter to the King that was not to be delivered to Charles until after the writer’s death. In that letter he assured the monarch that “he had always acted for the best interests of the Crown, and that if he had been mistaken he hoped the King’s displeasure would be satisfied with his death, and would not extend to his widow and children.” The following day he received the Blessed Sacrament from Tillotson. “Do you believe all the Articles of the Christian Faith as taught by the Church of England?” asked the Dean; and Russell assenting, “Do you,” continued the Dean, “forgive all your enemies?” “With all my heart,” answered Russell. Then after reading and signing the paper which he intended to give to the Sheriff on the scaffold—his farewell to his country—Russell sent for his wife, who came at once, bringing with her their three children. “Stay and sup with me,” he said to her, “let us eat our last earthly food together.” At ten o’clock that night the parting between these two took place. “Both,” writes Burnet, “were silent and trembling, their eyes full of tears which did not overflow. When she had left, ‘Now,’ said he, ‘the bitterness of death is past.’ Then he broke down: ‘What a blessing she has been to me, and what a misery it would have been if she had been crying to me to turn informer and to be a Lord Howard.’ And then he praised his devoted wife to the good Bishop as she deserved to be praised, for a nobler, more loyal or devoted wife than Rachel, Lady Russell, is not to be found in all history.”

Some of the things Russell said to Burnet on that last evening of his life are well worth recording. Speaking of death he said, “What a great change death made, and how wonderfully those new scenes would strike on a soul.” He had heard, he told Burnet, “how some persons who had been born blind were struck when, by the couching of their cataracts, they obtained their sight; but what,” said he, “if the first thing they saw were the rising sun?”

Lincoln’s Inn Fields was the place chosen for his execution, the scaffold being erected not far from his own house. This was on the 29th of July, and when the Sheriffs arrived to take him they found Russell quietly winding up his watch. “Now,” he said, “I have done with time, and must think henceforward of Eternity.” He then gave the watch as a souvenir to Burnet, that good old Bishop of Salisbury who had clung so closely to his friend in his trials as to a beloved brother, and to whom we owe the touching account of that friend’s last days upon earth.

On the 7th of December of this same year, Algernon Sidney was executed on Tower Hill, having been condemned to death by a picked jury and the infamous Chief-Justice Jeffreys, on the trumped-up charge of conspiring against the life of Charles; only one witness appeared against him, but he was condemned by his writings, which were certainly strongly republican; yet, considering what the rule of the second Charles had become, a man of Algernon Sidney’s lofty spirit, with his love of freedom, could not have written or thought otherwise. It has been well said of him that not only did he write from his judgment but also from his heart, and he informed his readers of that which he felt as well as that which he knew. He was condemned principally for the treatise in which he advocated the rights of subjects, under certain contingencies, to depose their king, and although this paper had never been published, or, in fact, printed, it was sufficient material for Jeffreys, who bullied the jury into a committal against Sidney. Algernon Sidney’s life had been as noble as was his name, but his unbending republican principles had made him the bête noire of both Charles and James, and any evidence by which he could be entrapped into a charge of treason was welcome to them. When he came forth from the Tower to die in the cause of liberty, “Englishmen,” as Dalrymple has finely written, “wept not for him as they had done for Lord Russell, their pulses beat high, their hearts swelled, they felt an unusual grandeur and elevation of mind whilst they looked upon him.” One of the Sheriffs asked Sidney if it was his intention to make a speech upon the scaffold, to which he answered, “I have made my peace with God, and have nothing to say to man,” adding, “I am ready to die, and will give you no further trouble.” His last prayers were for “the good old cause.” When his head lay on the block, the executioner asked him if he would raise it again. “Not till the general resurrection; strike on!” And these were Algernon Sidney’s last words.

James, Duke of Monmouth.
(From a Contemporary Engraving.)

CHAPTER XV

JAMES II.

During the four years in which James the Second misgoverned England, the most interesting events connected with the Tower were the tragedy of the Duke of Monmouth’s death, and the imprisonment of the Seven Bishops.

James was the first of our sovereigns to omit passing the night previous to his coronation in the Tower, and the fortress now ceased entirely to be a royal residence, being given over to the uses which it still fulfils.

After the Duke of Monmouth’s capture near the New Forest, on the 13th of July 1685, after his luckless attempt to wrest the Crown from James at Sedgemoor, he, with Lord Grey of Wark, was brought to London and imprisoned in the Tower, the warrant for his committal being thus worded: “James, Duke of Monmouth, 13 July, for High Treason in levying war against the King and assuming a title to the Crown.” Monmouth had married Lady Anne Scott, daughter of the Earl of Buccleuch, when he was only fourteen years of age, but the union does not appear to have been a happy one. When the Duchess came to take her last leave of him after his condemnation, the interview is said “to have passed with decency, but without tokens of affection”; the prisoner’s heart was elsewhere. Monmouth had no lack of clergymen to see him pass out of the world at the close of his short and wasted life, for during the day and night before he died, four ecclesiastics were in attendance upon him, and they never left him till the end. These were Tenison, then Vicar of St Martin’s-in-the-Fields, but afterwards Bishop of Lincoln, and Primate; Turner, Bishop of Rochester; Hooper, afterwards Bishop of Bath and Wells; and the saint-like Thomas Ken, Bishop of Bath and Wells. When Tenison reproached the Duke for the want of feeling he had shown towards his wife, Monmouth replied that “his heart was turned against her, because in his affliction she had gone to the play and into public companies, by which I knew she did not love me.” The woman he loved best, and with whom he had been living, was Lady Harriet Wentworth, the daughter of Lord Cleveland.

Accompanied by the four clergymen, Monmouth left the Tower on the morning of the 15th of July, at ten o’clock; the writ for the delivery of the Duke’s body to the Sheriffs is still to be seen in the Record Office, being addressed to Sir William Gostling and Sir Peter Vanderpatt, and endorsed by them on receiving the Duke from the charge of the Lieutenant of the Tower.

Monmouth passed on foot through a lane of soldiers, preceded by three officers, who carried pistols and accompanied him on to the scaffold. The Duke’s appearance caused a commotion in the crowd which had come to see him die; he had always been a favourite with the people, his personal beauty probably being the principal reason for his popularity; and he was also regarded as a kind of hero on the Protestant side, as opposed to James the Second and the Romish priests. The populace had recently given him the title of “King Monmouth.”

The scaffold was all draped in black. Monmouth made no speech to the people, but only conversed with the clergymen near him; but he had prepared the following statement, written on a sheet of paper, which he gave to one of the Bishops:—“I declare that the title of King was forced upon me, and that it was very much contrary to my opinion when I was proclaimed. For the satisfaction of the world I do declare that the late King told me he was never married to my mother. Having declared this, I hope that the King who is now, will not let my children suffer on this account. And to this I put my hand this 15 July 1685. Monmouth.” This extraordinary statement was also signed by the four clerics and the two Sheriffs.

Execution of the Duke of Monmouth, July, 1685.

“Pray do your business well,” Monmouth said to Jack Ketch, the headsman. “Do not serve me as you did my Lord Russell. I have heard you struck him four or five times; if you strike me twice, I cannot promise you not to stir.” Unfortunately poor Monmouth was even worse served by the executioner than Russell had been, and it was not until the blows had been repeated five times that the once beautiful head was separated from the body. Jack Ketch was almost torn to pieces by the horrified and furious mob.

It is almost incredible to believe, did one not know the baseness of James’s character, that he had two medals struck in commemoration of Monmouth’s execution—“savage medals,” as they were appropriately called. “Thus,” writes John Evelyn of Monmouth’s death, “ended this quondam Duke, darling of his father, and the ladies, being extremely handsome and adroit; an excellent soldier and dancer, a favourite of the people, of an easy nature, seduced by knaves, who would have set him up only to make a property, and taken the opportunity of the King being of another religion, to gather a party of discontented men. He failed and perished, had a virtuous and excellent lady that brought him great riches and a second Dukedom in Scotland.”

The son of that Marquis of Argyll who had raised the standard of rebellion in Scotland in conjunction with Monmouth’s rising in England, and who was beheaded in Edinburgh in the same year, was a prisoner in the Tower for some weeks. The following is the entry with reference to him taken from the Tower records:—“25 June 1685. Archibald Campbell, son to the late Marquis of Argyll, upon suspicion of dangerous practices to the State. Signed by his Majesty’s command. Sunderland.” The young man was, however, discharged on the 19th of the following October. After his liberation he went to Holland, returning to England with William III., when he was created first Duke of Argyll.

The Stuarts had solemnly vowed to rule England in the Reformed and Protestant faith, but within a quarter of a century of their restoration, the Church of Rome had not only been allowed by them to recover many of its privileges, but Roman Catholicism had become the religion of the King and court. James had set aside the Test Act, a measure passed by Parliament in 1663, which required every individual in the civil and military employment of the State to take the oath of supremacy and allegiance, to declare against the doctrine of transubstantiation, and to declare in favour of the doctrine of the Sacrament as taught by the Church of England. By annulling this act James re-admitted Roman Catholics to any office in the country, both in civil and military situations. Four Roman Catholic peers were added to the Privy Council; priests and Jesuits flocked into the country in great numbers, and Mass was publicly celebrated in the Chapel Royal. London again saw the almost forgotten costumes of the different religious orders, the brown-robed Franciscans, and the white-robed Carmelites, whilst the Jesuit priests opened a school at the Savoy. At the same time the King added largely to the standing army, and a camp of thirteen thousand men was established at Hounslow, destined, if James thought necessary, to keep the capital in check. Whilst James was thus trying to coerce his subjects to the Roman Catholic religion, the Protestants across the Channel were being persecuted by Louis; for by a strange coincidence—if not by a prearranged plan—the same year that saw the violation of the Test Act in England, witnessed the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in France, with the result that thousands of French reformers were driven from their homes and crossed to England—a living proof of the curse that a bigoted and arbitrary ruler could be to his subjects.

Contemporary Portraits of
The Duke of Monmouth & others.

In the succeeding year, 1686, James attempted to gag the English Church. The King had appointed two Roman Catholic priests to high preferments—Massey to the Deanery of Christ Church, and Parker to the See of Oxford; and when the English clergy protested from their pulpits against these appointments, James summoned an Ecclesiastical Commission, at the head of which he placed Jeffreys. The first action of this Commission was to suspend Compton, Bishop of London, who had refused to suspend the Dean of Norwich (Sharpe), one of the offending preachers against the Papist appointments made by the King.

In 1687 Oxford had the high honour of bringing about the Revolution, which saved England from a fresh tyranny and led to the final overthrow of the Stuart princes.

James intended to place a Roman Catholic, of the name of Farmer, over the Fellows at Magdalen College; but the College, instead of accepting this nominee of the King, chose one of their number, Hough, for their head. Whereupon, the Ecclesiastical Court, with Jeffreys at its head, declared the Magdalen election null and void, and Parker, the Bishop of Oxford, James’s nominee to that see, was forced upon Magdalen as its President. Parker died in 1688, and James again appointed a Roman Catholic bishop in partibus, Bonaventure Giffard, to take his place. Previously, the King had visited Oxford, and after abusing the Fellows for their independence, had expelled five-and-twenty of them. These arbitrary measures led to a clerical revolt throughout England. In the April of the following year, James issued a form of indulgence, which he ordered to be read in all the churches. By this form the King hoped to unite the Roman Catholics with the Protestant Nonconformists under the banner of “liberty of conscience” against the Church, and thus make the Church herself assist in her own defeat by the use of his ecclesiastical supremacy (Wakeman’s “History of the Church of England”).

The clergy protested, and six bishops, with Sancroft, the Archbishop of Canterbury, at their head, drew up a petition to the King, protesting against the form. The petition was most humble; it stated that the petitioners considered this Declaration of Indulgence to religious dissenters to be founded “upon such a dispensing power as hath often been declared illegal by Parliament, and particularly in the years 1662 and 1672, and in the beginning of your Majesty’s reign; and in a matter of so great moment and consequence to the whole nation, both in Church and State, your petitioners cannot, in providence, honour, or conscience, so far make themselves parties to it as the distributors of it all over the nation, and the solemn publication of it once again, even in God’s House, and in the time of Divine Service, must amount to in common and reasonable contention.”

The King read the petition, scowled, and returned it to Sancroft, saying angrily: “I did not expect this from the Church of England!” adding, “If I change my mind you shall hear from me; if not, I shall expect my commands shall be obeyed.”

Three weeks afterwards the Bishops and the Archbishop were summoned to appear before the Privy Council. Jeffreys insolently inquired whether they were ready to give recognisances to be tried for misdemeanours before the Court of the King’s Bench, and waiving their plea of being Peers of Parliament, he refused the prelates bail, and had them committed to the Tower. In order to avoid the demonstration in the Bishops’ favour, which both James and Jeffreys dreaded if they were taken through the streets of the city, they were conveyed to the Tower in the royal barge along the river. But their passage to the fortress was one long ovation, and as the barge approached the Tower, numbers of people rushed knee-deep into the water to receive the blessing of the prelates, and, on their arrival, even the warders received them kneeling at the landing-place.

The Seven Bishops.
(From a Contemporary Print.)

As the Seven Bishops passed under St Thomas’s Tower, and landed at the Traitor’s Gate, the bells of St Peter’s Chapel were ringing for evening service. Passing over the green, they entered the chapel and attended the service. The appropriateness of the second lesson struck all who were present, being a chapter in the 2nd of Corinthians—“Giving no offence in anything, that the ministry be not blamed: but in all things approving ourselves as the ministers of God, in much patience, in afflictions, in distresses, in imprisonments.”

A most uncomfortable week must have been passed by these Reverend Fathers of the Church in the Tower, for they were all crowded together in the by no means spacious Martin Tower. On the 15th of June they were taken from the Tower to the bar of the Court of King’s Bench—on this occasion they were admitted to bail. Their trial began a fortnight later, taking place in Westminster Hall, and was one of the most memorable of the great historic events that that building has witnessed. When the verdict of “Not guilty” was pronounced, the old oak roof of William Rufus’s hall re-echoed with the shouts of the people gathered below; it was a moment, as Wakeman has eloquently written in his “History of the Church of England,” “unparalleled in the history of English courts of law. The crowd within and without Westminster Hall broke into a frenzy of enthusiastic joy. Men fell upon each other’s necks, and wept and shouted and laughed and wept again; and amid the cheers of men and the boom of cannon the heroes of the Church passed in safety to their homes.”

The names of these seven “humble heroes” who had so nobly stood up in defence of the rights of the Church of England and of the liberty of their land, were Sancroft, the Primate; Thomas Ken, Bishop of Bath and Wells; William Lloyd, Bishop of St Asaph’s; John Lake, Bishop of Chichester; Thomas White, Bishop of Peterborough; Jonathan Trelawney, Bishop of Bristol; and Francis Turner, Bishop of Ely. Sancroft had been promoted from the Deanery of St Paul’s to Canterbury after the death of Archbishop Sheldon, and had helped much in the rebuilding of St Paul’s. He left a fine library to Emmanuel College, Cambridge, of which he had been master. Thomas Ken was famous for his unaffected piety, and the beautiful hymn he composed. Lloyd helped Bishop Burnet to write his “History of the Reformation.” Lake had fought in the army of Charles I., and had been Bishop of Man and Bishop of Bristol, before occupying the See of Chichester; Trelawney was successively Bishop of Bristol, Exeter, and Winchester; and Francis Turner had been Dean of Winchester, a position he had held, together with the Bishopric of Rochester, before being preferred to Ely.

Compared with these men the State prisoners in the Tower in the reign of James II. were not of much interest. After Monmouth’s rebellion, Lord Stamford, with Lord Delamere and Charles Gerrard, “commonly called Lord Bandon,” were prisoners in the fortress. Sir Robert Cotton and John Crewe Offleigh were in the Tower charged with “dangerous and treasonable practices,” and also Mr J. Cook, a member of the House of Commons, “for his indecent and undutiful speech, reflecting on the King and the House of Commons.”

A strange case was that of Sir Bevil Skelton, who was a prisoner in September 1688, and “who had been recalled from France for exceeding his instructions in certain political transactions,” for not only was he speedily released, but was made Governor of the Tower, an appointment which caused much dissatisfaction. This appointment was the last of James’s unpopular acts, and when, three months later, the King fled the country, the House of Lords removed Skelton from his post, and gave the keys of the Tower into the custody of Lord Lucas.

The Seven Bishops going by Water to the Tower.

On the 11th of December 1688, James left Whitehall, a King without a crown, and as he crossed the Thames to reach Lambeth, he dropped the Great Seal into the river, hoping thereby that everything would fall into confusion for the want of that symbol of legitimate authority. The curious Dutch engraving representing the amiable act of the last of our male Stuart monarchs gives a view of old London Bridge, and the Tower beyond, looming large against a wintry sky. On the same day that James threw away the Great Seal of England, his Lord Chancellor, the justly detested Jeffreys, was taken, in the disguise of a common sailor, in a small house at Wapping, as he was about to go on board a collier which would have taken him to Hamburg. Once in the power of the mob, Jeffreys’ life was in deadly peril, and he suffered severely at the hands of the people, but was finally rescued and taken before the Lord Mayor, who, poor man, died in a fit soon after the terrible judge had been brought before him, more revolting in his abject terror of death than even during the Bloody Assizes in the West, when he had condemned shoals of men and women to tortures and death with jibes and ghastly pleasantry. Protected by two regiments of the City train-bands, Jeffreys was taken into the Tower on the 12th of December, and given in charge of Lord Lucas, the Governor. The warrant of Jeffreys’ arrest, which is unique, is among the Tower records, and runs as follows:—“We, the peers of this Realm, being assembled with some of the Privy Council, do hereby will and require you to take into your custody the body of George, Lord Jeffreys (herewith sent to you), and to keep him safe prisoner until further order; for which this shall be your sufficient warrant.” This warrant is signed by thirteen peers, including the Bishop of Winchester.

James having fled, and the Great Seal being at the bottom of the Thames, there was no King or Parliament existing at the time the warrant was made out. Jeffreys was half dead with terror when the coach in which he was taken to the Tower entered its gates. All the way from the Mansion House he had implored the soldiers about him to preserve him from the furious rabble that surged around the carriage with ferocious cries of a well-merited hatred. This brute, who had sent scores of innocent people to the block and the gallows, who had rejoiced, like the fiend he was, at the sufferings of his victims as they left his presence for the gibbet, or the plantations, to be sold as slaves, now attempted to excite pity for himself amongst those persons who came to see him in the Tower, by telling them that he had only acted as he had done by the orders of King James, and that James had chidden him for showing too much clemency.

Jeffreys was only forty years old when he was taken to the Tower, but he soon wasted away, tormented, one might imagine, by the spectres of those whom he had destroyed, and of the thousands whom he had made desolate. Whether he died from drinking brandy to excess or not, is of little moment, but according to Oldnixon, his body “continued to decay” until the 19th of April 1689, when he died at the age of forty-one. He had been Chief-Justice at thirty-five, and Lord Chancellor at thirty-seven. No one looking at his portrait in the National Portrait Gallery would imagine that the melancholy-looking and distinguished young man, with his long, flowing wig, could be the most cruel, vindictive, and unmerciful judge with whom the English Bench has ever been cursed.

de k: vhicht by nacht uyt het hof met de seegels vant Rÿck:

CHAPTER XVI

WILLIAM AND MARY

Only one prisoner of State suffered death during the twelve years of the joint reigns of William of Orange and Mary. This was Sir John Fenwick, who had been implicated in a plot to assassinate William, and being found guilty of high treason, was beheaded on Tower Hill on 28th January 1697.

There were, however, a number of more or less unfortunate important State prisoners at different times in the fortress, the most interesting of these being the future Duke of Marlborough, for “abetting and adhering to their Majesties’ enemies.” In Lord Wolseley’s admirable history of that great soldier’s life, we read under the date of 5th May 1697: “Marlborough was kept a close prisoner in the Tower, no one being allowed to see him except by order of the Secretary of State. His wife left the Princess Anne at Sion House in order to be near him in town, and she left no means untried to obtain his release. There still exist many orders signed by Lord Nottingham granting her permission to see him in prison, the earliest being dated five days after his committal, and worded ‘for this time only.’ A Mr Chudleigh was a frequent visitor; the first order of admission given him was to see Marlborough in presence of a warder, ‘for this time only.’ Later on, we find an order addressed to Lord Lucas, the Constable of the Tower, signifying the Queen’s pleasure that friends and relatives of the prisoners lately committed should have access to them from time to time. They were subsequently allowed to dine together, when all dread of invasion had passed away. Marlborough, in the Tower, had fewer friends than ever, but his wife makes honourable mention of Lord Bradford, who not only refused to sign the warrant which committed him to prison, but paid him a visit when there.... Writing to Lady Marlborough, Princess Anne says: ‘I hear Lord Marlborough is sent to the Tower, and though I am certain they have nothing against him, and expected by your letter it would be so, yet I was struck when I was told of it, for methinks it is a dismal thing to have one’s friends sent to that place.’... ‘At length, on June 15, Marlborough was brought before the Court of King’s Bench on a writ of habeas corpus, and released from the Tower upon finding bail for £6000 for his appearance when required.’” (“Life of Marlborough,” vol. ii.)

The same charge of “abetting and adhering to their Majesties’ enemies,” upon which Marlborough had been imprisoned, was brought against Lord Brudenell, the Earl of Huntingdon, Sir Robert Thorold, and Colonel Langston.

In the same year the ruffianly head of the gang of “Mohawks,” Lord Mohun, who figures in Thackeray’s “Esmond,” was twice in the Tower for having committed two assassinations—the first, that of the actor William Mountford, whom Mohun had murdered in a quarrel over the celebrated actress, Mrs Bracegirdle; and the second, when, with Edward, Earl of Warwick, he had helped to kill one Richard Coate. In 1695, Sir Basil Firebrace was in the Tower, as well as the Earls of Salisbury, Peterborough, and Arran, with Lord Montgomery, all imprisoned on the charge of being concerned in Jacobite plots. With these were Sir Edward Hale, Sir Thomas Jenner, Lord Castlemaine, Lord Forbes, Colonel Lumley, Captain Shackerley, Lord Preston, Sir Richard Cleaver, Sir Robert Hamilton, and Edward Griffin, upon whom James conferred a barony whilst he was imprisoned in the Tower, a title James had no more right to bestow than Griffin had to receive. Griffin, it seems, owed his imprisonment to an accident. He was in active correspondence with the court at St Germains, and had ordered a large pewter bottle to be made with a false bottom, in which to conceal letters. Late one night he gave this bottle to his cook with directions to have it soldered. Whilst this was being done, a packet of letters was discovered in the false bottom directed to James II. The cook was immediately seized, and Griffin, with his wife, was sent to the Tower, whence, however, he made his escape, but soon afterwards surrendered himself to the authorities. He died in the Tower in 1710.

View of the Tower in the time of James II.