THE TOWER.--TOWER HILL
Except Westminster Abbey, no spot in England is so connected with every
phase of England's history as is the Tower of London. A map, printed in
the generation before Milton, shows us the ancient moat full of water, and
the space within its walls that now is gravelled then covered with
greensward. North of St. Peter's little church, where lay the bones of
Anne Boleyn, stretched a row of narrow gabled houses like those seen in
the neighbouring London streets. The White Tower, built by William the
Conqueror, stands to-day practically as it stood in William's time and
Milton's. Built of durable flint stones, it has withstood time's decay as
few other buildings erected far more recently have done, when they were of
the soft, disintegrating quality of stone so often used in London. True,
Christopher Wren faced the windows with stone in the Italian style, and
somewhat modernised the exterior, but the interior remains practically as
it was built over eight hundred years ago.
As there is no need of duplicating here the main facts about its history,
which are to be found in every guide-book, let us confine ourselves to the
chief literary and historical associations with it, that must have
appealed to the boy and man, John Milton.
One can imagine few things more exciting and stimulating to the mind of an
observant boy in 1620 than a visit to the Tower. In the days when circuses
were unknown, and menageries of strange beasts were a rare sight, the view
of such behind the grated walls of Lion's Tower must have delighted any
London lad. The wild beasts were not very numerous,--only a few lions and
leopards and "cat lions,"--but no doubt they were as satisfactory as the
modern "Zoo" to eyes that were unsatiated with such novelties. Whether
small boys were allowed for sixpence to see the rich display of state
jewels is not quite clear, yet it is certain that they were shown to
strangers.
Says that indefatigable antiquarian, Stow, whose old age almost touched
the babyhood of Milton: "This Tower is a citadel to defend or command the
city; a royal palace for assemblies or treaties; a prison of state for the
most dangerous offenders; the only place of coinage for all England at
the time; the armory for warlike provisions; the treasury of the
ornaments and jewels of the Crown; and general conserver of the records of
the king's courts of justice at Westminster."
In Milton's boyhood, the royal palace in the southeast corner of the
inclosure was standing. But in his manhood, his staunch friend, Oliver,
having got possession, it was pulled down. The little Norman chapel of St.
John, within the Tower, is one of the best bits of Norman work now extant
in England. Its triforium, which extends over the aisles and semicircular
east end, probably was used in ancient days to permit the queen and her
ladies to attend the celebration of the mass, unseen by the congregation
below. The chapel was dismantled before Milton's time. But doubtless as he
entered it he could picture in it, more vividly than we in our later age,
that scene when from sunset until sunrise forty-six noblemen and gentlemen
knelt and watched their armour, before King Henry IV., on the next day,
bestowed upon them the newly created Order of the Bath.
In this chapel, while he was kneeling in prayer, the lieutenant of the
Tower received an order to murder the young Edward V. and his brother, and
refused to obey it. Here Queen Mary attended mass for her brother, Edward
VI.
In the present armory, once the council chamber, King Richard II. was
released from prison, and sceptre in hand and the crown on his head,
abdicated in favour of Henry IV. Shakespeare thus depicts the scene, and
puts the following words into the mouth of the mournful king:
"I give this heavy weight from off my head,
And this unwieldy sceptre from my hand,
The pride of kingly sway from out my heart;
With mine own tears I wash away my balm,
With mine own hands I give away my crown,
With mine own tongue deny my sacred state,
With mine own breath release all duteous oaths,
My manors, rents, revenues I forego;
My acts, decrees, and statutes I deny.
God pardon all oaths that are broke to me,
God keep all oaths unbroke are made to thee.
Make me that nothing have with nothing grieved,
And thou with all pleased that hath all achieved!
Long may'st thou live in Richard's seat to sit,
And soon lie Richard in an earthen pit!
God save King Henry, unkinged Richard says,
And send him many years of sunshine days!"
On this same spot, in 1483, the Protector, afterward Richard III., came in
among the lords in council, and asked the Bishop of Ely to send to his
gardens in Ely Place, off Holborn, for some strawberries. The terror which
royalty inspired--and with good reason in that day--is well described by
Sir Thomas More, who was himself a prisoner in less than a half century
after the scene which he so graphically describes:
"He returned into the chamber, among them, all changed, with a wonderful
sour, angry countenance, knitting the brows, frowning and frothing and
gnawing of the lips; and so sat him down in his place, all the lords much
dismayed and sore marvelling of this manner of sudden change, and what
thing should him ail." Then asking what should be the punishment of those
who conspired against his life, and being told that they should be
punished as traitors, he then accused his brother's wife and his own wife.
"'Then,' said the Protector," continues More, "'ye shall see in what wise
that sorceress and that other witch ... have by their sorcery and
witchcraft wasted my body!' And therewith he plucked up his doublet sleeve
to his elbow upon his left arm, and he shewed a werish withered arm, and
small as it was never other. And thereupon every man's mind sore misgave
him, well perceiving that this matter was but a quarrel ... no man was
there present but well knew that his arm was ever such since his birth.
Nevertheless the lord chamberlain answered, and said: 'Certainly, my lord,
if they have so heinously done they be worthy heinous punishment.' 'What,'
quoth the Protector, 'thou servest me ill with ifs and with ands; I tell
thee they have so done, and that I will make good on thy body,
traitor!... I will not to dinner until I see thy head off.' Within an
hour, the lord chamberlain's head rolled in the dust."
The author of the "Utopia," being a knight, was leniently treated while in
the Tower. He paid ten shillings a week for himself and five shillings for
his servant. Occasionally his friends came to see him, and urged in vain
that he should propitiate Henry VIII. and his wife, Anne Boleyn, against
whose marriage he had objected. But he remained immovable. "Is not this
house as nigh heaven as my own?" he asked, serenely, when wife and
daughters pleaded with him to reconsider. Lady More petitioned Henry for
her husband's pardon, on the ground of his illness and her poverty; she
had been forced to sell her clothing to pay her husband's fees in prison.
But Henry had no mercy on the gentle scholar, the greatest English genius
of his day, and who had been lord chancellor of England.
For a time he was allowed to write, but later, books and writing materials
were removed; yet he occasionally succeeded in writing to his wife and
daughter Margaret on scraps of paper with pieces of coal. "Thenceforth,"
says his biographer, "he caused the shutters of his cell to be closed, and
spent most of his time in the dark."
When the end came, his sentence to be hanged at Tyburn was commuted by the
king to beheadal at Tower Hill. Cheerful, and even with a tone of jest, he
said to the lieutenant on the scaffold, "I pray thee, see me safely up,
and for my coming down, let me shift for myself." He removed his beard
from the block, saying, "it had never committed treason," and told the
bystanders that he died "in and for the faith of the Catholic Church," and
prayed God to send the king good counsel. More's body was buried in St.
Peter's Church, where that of the fair young Anne Boleyn herself was soon
to lie. His head, after the savage custom of the time, was parboiled and
affixed to a pole on London Bridge.
Dark and bloody were the associations that centre around the Tower in the
century preceding Milton's. Few of these have touched the popular heart
more than those which cluster around the girl-queen of nine days--the fair
Lady Jane Grey. In the Brick Tower, where she was imprisoned, she wrote
her last brave, pathetic words to her father and sister upon the leaves of
her Greek Testament. From her prison window she saw the headless body of
her boy-husband pass by in a cart from Tower Hill, and cried: "Oh,
Guildford! Guildford! the antepast is not so bitter that thou hast tasted,
and which I soon shall taste, as to make my flesh tremble; it is nothing
compared with that feast of which we shall partake this day in heaven."
When she was ready to lay her fair young head upon the block, she cried:
"I pray you all, good Christian people, to bear me witness that I die a
true Christian woman." "Then tied she the handkerchief about her eyes, and
feeling for the block, she said, 'What shall I do? Where is it?' One of
the standers-by guiding her thereunto, she laid her head down upon the
block, and then stretched forth her body, and said: 'Lord, into thy hands
I commend my spirit.'" So perished this girl of eighteen, whose beauty,
learning, and tragic fate make her one of the most pathetic figures in
history.
The most interesting parts of the Tower, including St. Peter's Church, the
dungeons, Raleigh's cell, and the spot where he wrote his "History of the
World," are not shown to ordinary visitors. They can be seen, however, by
the receipt of a written order from the Constable of the Tower, and should
not be missed by any student of English history. Even a few moments spent
in those dark lower vaults help the torpid imagination of those who live
in freedom as cheap and common as the air they breathe to realise through
what horror and bloody sweat of brave men and women in the past his
freedom has been bought. Though these dungeons now are clean and a few
modern openings through the massive walls admit some feeble rays of light,
it is not difficult to conjure up the black darkness, filth, and vermin,
and noisome odours of the past, or the shrieks of saint or sinner, who,
like Anne Askew and Guy Fawkes, suffered upon the rack. Only two years
before Milton's birth, the conspirators of the Gunpowder Plot were immured
in these dungeons, and then hanged, cut down, and disembowelled while they
were still living.
In Milton's youth, in 1630, while he was writing Latin verses at Christ's
College, Cambridge, that brave, heroic, noble soul, Sir John Eliot, was
committed to the Tower. Those were sad days for England. Free speech in
Parliament was throttled. The nation's ancient liberties were in jeopardy.
Says the historian, Green: "The early struggle for Parliamentary liberty
centres in the figure of Sir John Eliot.... He was now in the first vigour
of manhood, with a mind exquisitely cultivated, and familiar with the
poetry and learning of his day, a nature singularly lofty and devout, a
fearless and vehement temperament. But his intellect was as clear and cool
as his temper was ardent. What he believed in was the English Parliament.
He saw in it the collective wisdom of the realm, and in that wisdom he
put a firmer trust than in the statecraft of kings." Of the memorable
scene in Parliament in which he moved the presentation to the king of a
remonstrance, in the session of 1628, a letter of the times gives a
description. By royal orders the Speaker of the House stopped him, and
Eliot sat abruptly down amid the solemn silence of the members. "Then
appeared such a spectacle of passions as the like had seldom been seen in
such an assembly; some weeping, some expostulating, some prophesying of
the fatal ruin of our kingdom, some playing the divines in confessing
their sins and country's sins.... There were above an hundred weeping
eyes, many who offered to speak being interrupted and silenced by their
own passions."
Says President Theodore Roosevelt of Sir John Eliot: "He took his stand
firmly on the ground that the king was not the master of Parliament, and
of course this could but mean ultimately that Parliament was master of the
king. In other words, he was one of the earliest leaders of the movement
which has produced English freedom and English government as we now know
them. He was also its martyr. He was kept in the Tower, without air or
exercise, for three years, the king vindictively refusing to allow the
slightest relaxation in his confinement, even when it brought on
consumption. In December, 1632, he died; and the king's hatred found its
last expression in denying to his kinsfolk the privilege of burying him in
his Cornish home."
At last the "man of blood," who had tried to wrest England's liberties,
himself perished upon the scaffold at Whitehall, and in his condemnation
the same author cites his treatment of Sir John Eliot as one of his
greatest crimes. "Justice was certainly done, and until the death penalty
is abolished for all malefactors, we need waste scant sympathy on the man
who so hated the upholders of freedom that his vengeance against Eliot
could be satisfied only with Eliot's death; who so utterly lacked loyalty,
that he signed the death-warrant of Strafford when Strafford had merely
done his bidding; who had made the blood of Englishmen flow like water, to
establish his right to rule; and who, with incurable duplicity, incurable
double-dealing, had sought to turn the generosity of his victorious foes
to their own hurt."
These grisly tales of executions and of scenes of fortitude we close with
a few words on that valiant, noble soul, Sir Harry Vane, to whom Milton
dedicated the well-known sonnet beginning: "Vane, young in years, but in
sage counsel old."
Speaking before the Phi Beta Kappa of Harvard University, Wendell
Phillips, America's silver-tongued orator, uttered a memorable word upon
the man whose governorship of Massachusetts for two years of its infant
history makes the name of Vane for ever dear to the American descendants
of the Puritans:
"... Roger Williams and Sir Harry Vane, the two men deepest in thought and
bravest in speech of all who spoke English in their day, and equal to any
in practical statesmanship. Sir Harry Vane--in my judgment the noblest
human being who ever walked the streets of yonder city--I do not forget
Franklin or Sam Adams, Washington or Fayette, Garrison or John Brown. But
Vane dwells an arrow's flight above them all, and his touch consecrated
the continent to measureless toleration of opinion and entire equality of
rights. We are told we can find in Plato 'all the intellectual life of
Europe for two thousand years.' So you can find in Vane the pure gold of
two hundred and fifty years of American civilisation, with no particle of
its dross. Plato would have welcomed him to the Academy, and Fenelon
kneeled with him at the altar. He made Somers and John Marshall possible;
like Carnot, he organised victory; and Milton pales before him in the
stainlessness of his record. He stands among English statesmen
preeminently the representative, in practice and in theory, of serene
faith in the safety of trusting truth wholly to her own defence. For other
men we walk backward, and throw over their memories the mantle of charity
and excuse, saying reverently, 'Remember the temptation and the age.' But
Vane's ermine has no stain; no act of his needs explanation or apology;
and in thought he stands abreast of the age--like pure intellect, belongs
to all time. Carlyle said, in years when his words were worth heeding,
'Young men, close your Byron and open your Goethe.' If my counsel had
weight in these halls, I should say, 'Young men, close your John Winthrop
and Washington, your Jefferson and Webster, and open Sir Harry Vane.' It
was the generation that knew Vane who gave to our Alma Mater for a seal
the simple pledge, Veritas."--_Wendell Phillips, in his Harvard address on
the "Scholar in the Republic."_
To the profligate Charles II. few men must have seemed more dangerous than
the man who had dared to teach that the king had three "superiors, God,
Law, and Parliament." The man who had once walked through the stately
halls of Raby Castle as its master found a Tower cell his last earthly
abiding-place.
When Sir Harry Vane was arraigned as a "false traitor," he made his own
defence, well knowing what the end would be, but determined, for the sake
of England and the cause he loved, to put his plea on record. For ten
hours he fought for his life without refreshment, then later, in his
prison, wrote out the substance of his plea. Though, as his biographer
relates, "he had torn to pieces as if they were so much rotten thread the
legal meshes in which his hunters sought to hold him fast," his doom was
sealed. Something was gained when the original sentence of hideous torture
and dismemberment was commuted into simple beheading. The day before his
execution, Vane said to his children: "Resolve to suffer anything from men
rather than sin against God.... I can willingly leave this place and
outward enjoyments, for those I shall meet with hereafter in a better
country. I have made it my business to acquaint myself with the society of
Heaven. Be not you troubled, for I am going home to my Father."
"As one goes through Eastcheap to-day, out upon the open space of Tower
Hill, he finds himself among prosaic surroundings. Over the pavement
rattles the traffic from the great London docks close at hand. High
warehouses rise at the side; the sooty trail of steamers pollutes the air
toward the river. In one direction, however, the view has suggestions the
reverse of commonplace. Looking thither the sensitive beholder feels with
deep emotion the fact brought home to him, that to men of English speech,
the earth has scarcely a spot more memorable than the ground where he is
standing. There rise, as they have risen for eight hundred years, the gray
walls of the Tower,--the moat in the foreground, the battlemented line of
masonry behind; within, the white keep, with its four turrets.... As
mothers have shed tears there for imprisoned children, so children
standing there have wondered which blocks in the grim masonry covered the
dungeons of their fathers and mothers. Again and again, too, through the
ages, all London has gathered, waiting in a hush for the dropping of the
drawbridge before the Byward Tower, and the coming forth of the mournful
train, conducting some world-famous man to the block draped with black, on
the scaffold to the left, where the hill is highest.... On the 14th of
June in 1662 in the full glory of the summer, Vane, in the strength of his
manhood, was brought forth to die." Thus writes James K. Hosmer in his
scholarly biography of Vane. He quotes an eye-witness, who relates how
cheerfully and readily Vane went from his chamber to the sledge which took
him to the scaffold, and how "from the tops of houses, and out of windows,
the people used such means and gestures as might best discover, at a
distance, their respects and love to him, crying aloud, 'The Lord go with
you, the great God of Heaven and Earth appear in you and for you.' When
asked how he did, he answered, 'Never better in my life.' Loud were the
acclamations of the people, crying out, 'The Lord Jesus go with your dear
soul.'" As Vane stepped upon the scaffold, clad in a black suit and cloak
and scarlet waistcoat, a silence fell, and calmly, serenely, he addressed
the throng around him. His address displeased the officers, and the
trumpets were commanded to silence him. His words, however, had been well
prepared and delivered in writing to a friend, so that the world to-day
knows with what dignity and truth he spoke. His prayer, however, was not
thus broken. "Thy servant, that is now falling asleep, doth heartily
desire of thee, that thou shouldst forgive his enemies, and not lay this
sin to their charge.... I bless the Lord that I have not deserted the
righteous cause for which I suffer."
The heads of Cromwell and Bradshaw hung on the poles of Westminster Hall
when Vane's fell. Blake's and Ireton's bodies had been flung into
dishonoured graves. Pym and Hampden had died early in the civil strife.
Algernon Sidney was to be a later victim. In Jewin Street the blind Milton
was solacing himself in an uncertain seclusion and quietude, with the
preparation of his "Paradise Lost." Everything the Puritans had stood for
seemed eclipsed. But the truths these men had lived and died for could not
die. Says Lowell, writing for his countrymen: "It was the red dint on
Charles's block that marked one in our era."
The reign of the Stuarts was doomed, and the Nemesis of what they stood
for was assured. Says John Richard Green: "England for the last two
hundred years has done little more than carry out in a slow and tentative
way, but very surely, the programme laid down by Vane and his friends at
the close of the Civil War." It was government of the people, by the
people, for the people, for which Vane and Washington and Lincoln lived.
Without the foresight and the valour of the brave man who died on Tower
Hill the work accomplished by the two later heroes might not have been
assured.