_Rambles—The Tower._
In Paternoster-Row I cruised about, and came to Amen Corner quite too
soon for satisfaction. I strove also to understand the precise bounds of
Little Britain, as I plodded therein, and bethought me of its right
worshipful reputation for books and men of letters in olden times. In
Cheapside, I could see nothing but John Gilpin and his family, till I
came to Bow Church, and, by good luck, heard a full peal of the very
bells that make cockneys, and that whilom made poor Whittington o’ the
Cat a Lord Mayor. What they were ringing for did not appear, as the
Church was shut. So I fared on through the Poultry and Corn-hill, paying
due deference to the Royal Exchange, till on a sudden, by some odd
crooks and twistings through the very ventricles of this heart of the
Metropolis, I came before the Tower. It gave me a thrill of emotion to
see it before me: and ‘here is Tower-Hill,’ said I—‘here stood the
scaffold—and I am sure these walls must have been the last things seen,
before they closed their eyes forever, by Strafford, and by Laud, and by
so many before and after.’ And these the towers of Caesar, and their
history the history of England almost ever since his conquest!
The Church of All-Hallows, Barking, happened to stand open, much to my
satisfaction, as I was threading a very narrow and old-fashioned street
near the Tower; and I entered, with a thrill of emotion, to behold the
venerable interior, where the service for the burial of the dead was
read over the bleeding corpse of Archbishop Laud, as it was brought in
just after the axe had made him a martyr, and here temporarily interred.
I remembered that Southey remarks that the Prayer-Book itself seemed to
share in his funeral, for on the same day, the Parliament made it a
crime to use it in any solemnity whatever: and I endeavored to recall
the scene of desolation which must then have smitten to the heart any
true son of the Church of England who was its spectator, beholding, as
he did, the Primate of all England going down into the sepulchre, as the
last, apparently, of his dignity and order; the Church herself beheaded,
if not destroyed, with him; and the Prayer-Book reading its own burial!
Thank God, there I stood, two hundred years later, a living witness of
the resurrection of that Church and its ritual, and of its powerful
life, in the new world of the West. I trust I did not offer a vain
thanksgiving upon the spot. I then looked at the old tombs and brasses,
which are interesting, if not fine. Here kneel a worshipful old knight
and his dame, with their nine or ten children, demurely cut in
alabaster, upon the common tomb of the parents; and there is a brass,
said to be Flemish, commemorating another pair, who were laid to rest
the same year that saw Bishop Fisher and Sir Thomas More beheaded and
interred in this same Church. Here, too, is some fine carving; and some
of the pews have curious adornings, in token of their being the place
for magistrates and high parochial functionaries, of divers degrees.
Surely, no one should fail to see this Church when he visits the Tower.
And now I turned towards that old historic pile, repeating, as it rose
upon my sight, those striking lines of Gray’s—
“Ye Towers of Julius, London’s lasting shame,
With many a foul and midnight murder fed!”
Its very foundations were laid in blood, if so be, indeed, as the old
chronicler asserts, “its mortar was tempered with the blood of beasts;”
and for long ages it has never slaked its thirst for the blood of human
beings, till now, in the halcyon days of Victoria, it stands a lonely
monument of those barbarian elements, out of which has risen the nobler
fabric of British freedom. Nor should it be forgotten, that popular
violence as well as princely tyranny, has glutted the spot with murder.
Of the many worthies whom we must remember here, none were more grossly
butchered than Laud and Strafford, the victims of a ravening fanaticism;
unless we except those gentler sufferers, whose sex and spotless
innocence leave their murderers without even the appearance of excuse. A
cold chill fell upon me as I entered the fatal precincts, thinking how
many had passed the same gates never to return. If there be a haunted
spot in all the world, it should be this Tower; and, indeed, strange
stories are on credible record, which might well assist the fancy in
conceiving that the ghosts of its old tenants, of the fouler sort, do
sometimes revisit the scene of their dark and dreadful deaths.
The red-liveried yeomen, in the costume of the guards of Edward VI.,
receive you as you enter the gate beneath its old portcullis, and these
are themselves no poor auxiliaries to your efforts at reproducing the
past. One of them (they are popularly known as _beef-eaters_) conducts
you to the Armory and Jewel-room forthwith, it being taken for granted
that you have come to see these things particularly. Imagine yourself,
then, passing through an immense outer-wall, in the circuit of which are
set, like sentinels, the several inferior citadels, known as the Bloody
Tower, the Beauchamp Tower, and the like. You gain the open court, or
area, and in the centre rises the immense quadrangular and turreted
mass, which overhangs this part of London: it is the Keep, or White
Tower, called also Cæsar’s, though built by William the Norman. You pass
the Bloody Tower, in which the young princes were smothered by the
hunch-back Richard, and are shown into the Armory. Here you see, amid
all sorts of bristling weapons, the sovereigns of England, from Edward
I. to James II., all on horseback, and most of them in the armour of
their times. The growth and decline of knightly harness is thus
exhibited entire, from the “twisted mail” of Edward’s hauberk, down to
the merely ornamental breast-plate of the recreant Stuart. What a
procession! Some of the visors are down, and others are lifted—but to
an imaginative eye, every figure appears instinct with vitality. Their
very steeds, in their plated steel and ancient housings, seem clothed
with thunder. Elizabeth, of course, retains her own fantastic costume,
but there she sits before you, in spite of her peacock display, a
glorious memorial of Tilbury, and you can fancy her prancing before her
troops, and inspiring them to repel the “foul scorn” of the Armada. That
very suit of armour, now stuffed with the resemblance of her father, was
once worn by bluff old Hal himself; and further on, is the beautiful
array of steel, in which the goodly limbs of the Royal Martyr were once
actually encased. Nor are the heroes of this august Valhalla without
other trophies of their times and achievements. Here are bills, pikes
and partizans, Lochaber-axes and glaives, broadswords and stilettoes;
and then all manner of fire-arms, from the earliest and heaviest
matchlock down through all the grades of muskets, to musketoons,
pistols, and pistolets. And then there are saw-shot, and bar-shot, and
spike-shot, and star-shot; and then culverins and petards; and weapons
offensive and defensive of all sorts and kinds. And they bear marks of
having been well used in their day. Here the wars of the Roses have
battered a helmet and pierced a shield: through that hole in the
corslet, once spouted the rich blood of a hero at Tewksbury: that visor
was rusted by the last sigh of another such as Marmion, on
Flodden-field. Even this bludgeon of a staff, with pistols at the
handle, has dealt midnight blows in the hands of the British Blue-beard,
as he patrolled the streets of his capital, in the spirit of Haroun Al
Raschid, somewhat heightened by the spirit of wine.
I was not above looking curiously and thoughtfully at the exhibition of
Popery, displayed in the relics of the Armada. At the Crystal Palace
there was a very bold and enticing parade of the modern instruments of
this Protean enthusiasm, in the shape of candlesticks and monstrances,
thuribles and pyxes, and all sorts of embroideries, spangles, laces, and
millinery. By such things it would convert England now. In Elizabeth’s
day, its missionaries were less attractive. Bilboes, collars,
thumb-screws, and iron cravats; stocks, fetters, and manacles; a sort of
portable Inquisition was, in short, the great reliance of the Pope in
those times, for the reduction of the heretic English: and here, no
doubt, old Fuller would go on to say, that “if forsooth we should feel
closely about the fine things of even modern Poperie, we might,
perchance, find a prickly point, or a sharp edge, or a rough chain, if
not faggots and gun-powder also, stowed away among all their fancy
stuffes and petticoats.” I could not satisfy myself with looking at
these antiquarian treasures however, nor shall I attempt to satisfy my
reader by detailing them. Let him think how he would feel to touch the
very axe that divided the little fair neck of Anne Boleyn, and the
stiffer sinews of the Earl of Essex. Even the block on which old Lovat
laid his worthless head, loaded with crimes as many as his hoary hairs,
gives one a shudder, though no man pitied him when he fell. It is,
moreover, a monument of interest, because there the axe stayed, and has
never since been lifted on the head of a British subject. He died in
1746, in the cause of the young Pretender; and possibly this fact
suggested to me the thought, (by which alone I can convey any just idea
of this Armory,) that the whole exhibition seems to be a complete
property-room of the Waverley novels. If the characters of those
successive tales could have deposited in one room the antiquarian
implements and costumes to which they gave a sort of resurrection, they
would have furnished us with very much such a collection as that of this
Armory of the Tower.
A new stone strong room has been built for the Royal Jewels, and one now
sees the Regalia by day-light. It is a glittering show; but nothing
seems to be very ancient in the collection, except the spoon wherewith
anointing oil has been poured on all the royal heads that have been
crowned since the days of Edward the Confessor. How many Archbishops
have held its handle; how many princes have been touched with its bowl!
At the bare thought, all the history of England seemed to rise before my
sight, and I felt that there is a value in such symbols of a Nation’s
continuous existence. When displayed, not as gewgaws of a vulgar pomp,
but as the memorials of a fruitful antiquity, they cannot but inspire a
sentiment of veneration in every beholder, and serve to keep alive the
vestal flame of loyalty and love for a throne which is invested, indeed,
with traditional splendours, but which rests on the surer foundations of
existing freedom and righteous law.
When I stood again in the open court, I longed to be told nothing so
much as where the old Archbishop was confined, when he gave Strafford
that parting benediction. It had been arranged by Usher, their common
friend, that they should thus take leave of one another. The noble
Strafford came forth walking to the scaffold on Tower-hill, but craved
permission to do his last observance to his friend. For a moment he
feared the old primate had forgotten him, but just then he appeared at
the dismal window of his own prison. “My Lord—your prayers and your
blessing”—said Strafford, kneeling down: and the benediction was given
accordingly; after which the primate swooned in a fit of sorrow, while
the stout Earl rising, said, “God protect your innocence,” and then
stepped onward with a military bearing, and passed to his execution, as
if it were to a triumph. Somewhere here, all this went on! I could
almost fancy it before my eye. Then, too, I thought of Raleigh. And
here, hard by, was the undoubted spot, within the walls, where stood the
scaffold on which suffered the Queens Anne Boleyn and Katharine Howard;
and Lady Jane Gray, more lovely and more innocent than either. But it
was not the thing to be looking at such a spot in broad daylight. How
much I should have been pleased with the privilege of lodging, just one
night in the White Tower, not to sleep, but to stand at my window and
look out upon the Court, and upon Tower-hill, by pale moonlight, and
so—to think, and think, and think!
By dint of perseverance, I gained admission to the Beauchamp Tower,
occupied at present by some officers as a mess-room. The apartments are
covered with carvings and inscriptions, the work of many illustrious
prisoners, in past times, and with some that merely tell of human
sorrow, mysteriously, and without the name of any one that is known, to
satisfy the curiosity they excite. A rich carving, in which figures the
well-known _bear and ragged staff_, reveals the prison thoughts of
Dudley, Earl of Warwick, father-in-law to the Lady Jane. There is
another inscription, very naturally ascribed to poor Lord Guilford
Dudley—the simple letters IANE. His sweet Jane was soon to breathe her
farewells to him from her own lonely cell, and, after seeing his
bleeding corpse brought in from the scaffold, to follow him to the
block. The initials R. D. betray the work of another Dudley, who lived
to be the favorite of Elizabeth, and the dismal husband of Amy Robsart.
Here figure also memorials of Henry’s victims, and of the Marian
Confessors, and not a few of those who suffered under the last of the
Tudors. Underneath these rooms is the “rats’ dungeon,” where many have
suffered the extreme of human agony; and directly overhead is “the
doleful prison” of Anne Boleyn. Remorseless, indeed, must have been the
heart of her husband, if in truth she sent him the letter, said to have
been endited there, and if, after reading it, he could still abandon to
the block the head that had so often reclined in his bosom.
I was resolved not to leave these awful precincts until I had also
visited the Church of _St. Peter ad Vincula_, the burial-place of so
many of those whom I had thus endeavored to recall to mind. After some
patience and perseverance I was admitted, and stood upon what a clever
writer has justly called one of the saddest spots on earth. So many
graves, of so many destroyed worthies, are here gathered together, that
one necessarily thinks, as he stands by them, of the day of judgment.
What a resurrection there will be in this place at that day—a
resurrection of the just and the unjust! The Church is sadly disfigured,
and should be reverently restored, but its pointed arches and mural
monuments, with kneeling figures, and one rich altar-tomb, with
effigies, still elevate the interior above an ordinary effect. Near this
tomb repose the bodies of the weak Kilmarnock and the sturdy Balmerino;
and upon my saying something about them to the sexton, he told me that,
in digging lately, he had come to the relics of their coffins. He then
lifted a cushion in one of the seats, and showed me the coffin-plates,
which he had taken from the earth. Sure enough, there they were, quite
legible, inscribed with their names and titles, and the sad date, 1746.
I remembered how I had read in a contemporary number of “The Gentleman’s
Magazine,” and in Horace Walpole’s gossip, the contrary impressions made
upon these Jacobites by the scene in which they were to suffer.
Kilmarnock acted pitiably, for his conscience was alive to his sin and
folly; but Balmerino was troubled with very little of a conscience
whatever, and what he had was such as to persuade him that he was dying
in a good cause. The old hero cried “God save King James,” to the last;
and, striding up to his coffin, put on his glasses, and read this very
inscription, and said it was all right. Now, I was reading it fresh from
the earth, after a hundred years had gone by. It greatly moved me. Then,
I thought of Laud hobbling into this chapel, lame and feeble, leaning on
his servant, but standing up amid the people, while the preacher railed
at him; said preacher wearing his gown over a buff jerkin, as the
holder, at the same time, of a parochial benefice in Essex, and the
captaincy of a troop of horse in the rebel army! But where did memories
begin or end, when I tried to collect them in such a place? Here lies,
beneath the altar, the daring Duke of Monmouth, hacked and hewed to
death by his awkward headsman; and, not less barbarously murdered, here
lies that venerable lady, the last of the Plantagenets. Cromwell lies
there, for helping Henry Bluebeard; and there, too, More and Fisher, for
resisting him; Anne Boleyn and Lord Rochford lie there, for being
innocent; and Katherine Howard and lady Rochford, for being guilty. Two
Dukes are buried between the two Queens; and there Lord Guilford Dudley
once more reposes with his lovely Lady Jane. Here lies brother slain by
brother, the slayer sharing, in his turn, the fate of the slain; and
these, with Monmouth, mercilessly condemned by his uncle, and the two
Queens murdered by their own husband, seem to accomplish the melancholy
record with associations of crime the most complicate, and of
accountability the most dreadful that can well be imagined. Oh, God!
what reckonings yet to be settled by Thee alone, are laid up against
that day, even in the little compass of these walls.
I made a parting circuit to survey the Bloody Tower and its
sharp-toothed portcullis—the only one in England that still rises and
falls in a gate-way, and refuses not its office; the Bowyer’s Tower, in
which poor Clarence was drowned in Malmsey; the Brick Tower, said to
have been the prison of Lady Jane Grey; and the Salt Tower, which, with
its adjoining wall, I found nearly demolished, and in process of
restoration. Finally, I went round upon the water-side and surveyed the
Traitor’s Gate, so called. Here, then, are the jaws of this devouring
monster, sated at last, apparently; but who knows? Under that arch have
passed, one after another, those great historic characters, whose names
we have already reviewed. They abandoned hope when they entered here;
and almost always with good reason. One alone on whom, in youthful
sorrow, and by a sister’s cruel injunction, these massive gates yawned
and closed, became, in turn, their mistress; and—alas! for human
nature—made them often gape for others. Think of Elizabeth Tudor
passing under this arch, the captive of the Bloody Mary! Who then could
have foreseen the days of Hooker, and of Burleigh, and of Shakspeare?
Think of old Laud in his barge, day after day, returning through this
arch from his trial, to his prison, exhausted and panting like a hart
pierced by the archers, from the cruel shafts of Prynne and his
confederates, but accompanied, perhaps, by his noble defender, Sir
Matthew Hale. Oh! could he but have seen the Anglican Church of the
nineteenth century, how thin would have seemed the clouds which were
gathering around her at that awful period, and which he feared, no
doubt, were to overwhelm her forever. Such were some of the thoughts,
partly sad, but largely grateful, with which I found myself chained to
the place; and even when it was time to go, still disposed to linger
about the spot, and bend musingly above the Traitors’ Gate of the Tower.