Half-a-mile below London Bridge, on ground which was once a bluff,
commanding the Thames from St. Saviour's Creek to St. Olave's Wharf,
stands the Tower; a mass of ramparts, walls, and gates, the most ancient
and most poetic pile in Europe.... The Tower has an attraction for us akin
to that of the house in which we were born, the school in which we were
trained. Go where we may, that grim old edifice on the Pool goes with us;
a part of all we know, and of all we are. Put seas between us and the
Thames, this Tower will cling to us, like a thing of life. It colors
Shakespeare's page. It casts a momentary gloom over Bacon's story. Many of
our books were written in its vaults; the Duke of Orleans's "Poesies,"
Raleigh's "Historie of the World," Eliot's "Monarchy of Man," and Penn's
"No Cross, No Crown."
Even as to length of days, the Tower has no rival among places and
prisons, its origin, like that of the Iliad, that of the Sphinx, that of
the Newton Stone, being lost in the nebulous ages, long before our
definite history took shape. Old writers date it from the days of Caesar;
a legend taken up by Shakespeare and the poets in favor of which the name
of Caesar's tower remains in popular use to this very day. A Roman wall
can even yet be traced near some parts of the ditch. The Tower is
mentioned in the Saxon Chronicle in a way not incompatible with the fact
of a Saxon stronghold having stood upon this spot. The buildings as we
have them now in block and plan were commenced by William the Conqueror;
and the series of apartments in Caesar's tower--hall, gallery,
council-chamber, chapel--were built in the early Norman reigns, and used
as a royal residence by all our Norman kings. What can Europe show to
compare against such a tale?
Set against the Tower of London--with its 800 years of historic life, its
1,900 prisons of traditional fame--all other palaces and prisons appear
like things of an hour. The oldest bit of palace in Europe, that of the
west front of the Burg in Vienna, is of the time of Henry the Third. The
Kremlin in Moscow, the Doge's Palazzo in Venice, are of the fourteenth
century. The Seraglio in Stamboul was built by Mohammed the Second. The
oldest part of the Vatican was commenced by Borgia, whose name it bears.
The old Louvre was commenced in the reign of Henry the Eighth; the
Tuilleries in that of Elizabeth. In the time of our civil war Versailles
was yet a swamp. Sans Souci and the Escurial belong to the eighteenth
century. The Serail of Jerusalem is a Turkish edifice. The palaces of
Athens, of Cairo, of Teheran, are all of modern date.
Neither can the prisons which remain in fact as well as in history and
drama--with the one exception of St. Angelo in Rome--compare with the
Tower. The Bastile is gone; the Bargello has become a museum; the Piombi
are removed from the Doge's roof. Vincennes, Spandau, Spilberg, Magdeburg,
are all modern in comparison with a jail from which Ralph Flambard escaped
so long ago in the year 1100, the date of the First Crusade.
Standing on Tower Hill, looking down on the dark lines of wall--picking
out keep and turret, bastion and ballium, chapel and belfry--the
jewel-house, armory, the mounts, the casemates, the open leads, the
Bye-ward-gate, the Belfry, the Bloody tower--the whole edifice seems alive
with story--the story of a nation's highest splendor, its deepest misery,
and its darkest shame. The soil beneath your feet is richer in blood than
many a great battle-field; for out upon this sod has been poured, from
generation to generation, a stream of the noblest life in our land.
Should you have come to this spot alone, in the early days when the Tower
is noisy with martial doings, you may haply catch in the hum which rises
from the ditch and issues from the wall below you--broken by roll of drum,
by blast of bugle, by tramp of soldiers--some echoes, as it were, of a
far-off time, some hints of a Mayday revel, of a state execution, of a
royal entry. You may catch some sound which recalls the thrum of a queen's
virginal, the cry of a victim on the rack, the laughter of a bridal feast.
For all these sights and sounds--the dance of love and the dance of
death--are part of that gay and tragic memory which clings around the
Tower.
From the reign of Stephen down to that of Henry of Richmond, Caesar's
tower (the great Norman keep, now called the White Tower), was a main part
of the royal palace; and for that large interval of time the story of the
White Tower is in some part that of our English society as well as of our
English kings. Here were kept the royal wardrobe and the royal jewels; and
hither came with their goody wares the tiremen, the goldsmiths, the
chasers and embroiderers, from Flanders, Italy, and Almaigne. Close by
were the Mint, the lion's den, the old archery-grounds, the Court of
King's Bench, the Court of Common Pleas, the Queen's gardens, the royal
banqueting-hall, so that art and trade, science and manners, literature
and law, sport and politics, find themselves equally at home.
Two great architects designed the main parts of the Tower: Gundulf the
Weeper and Henry the Builder; one a poor Norman monk, the other a great
English king.
Gundulf, a Benedictine friar, had, for that age, seen a great deal of the
world; for he had not only lived in Rouen and Caen, but had traveled in
the East. Familiar with the glories of Saracenic art, no less than with
the Norman simplicities of Bec, St. Ouen, and St. Etienne, a pupil of
Lanfranc, a friend of Anselm, he had been employed in the monastery of Bec
to marshal with the eye of an artist all the pictorial ceremonies of his
church. But he was chiefly known in that convent as a weeper. No monk at
Bec could cry so often and so much as Gundulf. He could weep with those
who wept, nay, he could weep with those who sported, for his tears welled
forth from what seemed to be an unfailing source.
As the price of his exile from Bec, Gundulf received the crozier of
Rochester, in which city he rebuilt the cathedral and perhaps designed the
castle, since the great keep on the Medway has a sister's likeness to the
great keep on the Thames. His works in London were the White Tower, the
first St. Peter's Church, and the old barbican, afterward known as the
Hall Tower, and now used as the Jewel House.
The cost of these works was great; the discontent caused by them was sore.
Ralph, Bishop of Durham, the able and rapacious minister who had to raise
the money, was hated and reviled by the Commons with peculiar bitterness
of heart and phrase. He was called Flambard, or Firebrand. He was
represented as a devouring lion. Still the great edifice grew up, and
Gundulf, who lived to the age of fourscore, saw his great keep completed
from basement to battlement.
Henry the Third, a prince of epical fancies as Corffe, Conway, Beaumaris
and many other fine poems in stone attest, not only spent much of his
money in adding to its beauty and strength, ... but was his own chief
clerk of the works. The Water Gate, the embanked wharf, the Cradle Tower,
the Lantern, which he made his bedroom and private closet, the Galleyman
Tower, and the first wall appear to have been his gifts. But the prince
who did so much for Westminster Abbey, not content with giving stone and
piles to the home in which he dwelt, enriched the chambers with frescoes
and sculptures, the chapels with carving and glass, making St. John's
Chapel in the White Tower splendid with saints, St. Peter's Church on the
Tower Green musical with bells. In the Hall Tower, from which a passage
led through the Great Hall into the King's bedroom in the Lantern, he
built a tiny chapel for his private use--a chapel which served for the
devotions of his successors until Henry the Sixth was stabbed to death
before the cross. Sparing neither skill nor gold to make the great
fortress worthy of his art, he sent to Purbeck for marble and to Caen for
stone. The dabs of lime, the spawls of flint, the layers of brick which
deface the walls and towers in too many places are of either earlier or
later times. The marble shafts, the noble groins, the delicate traceries,
are Henry's work. Traitor's Gate was built by him. In short, nearly all
that is purest in art is traceable to his reign.
Edward the First may be added, at a distance, to the list of builders. In
his reign the original Church of St. Peter's fell into ruin; the wrecks
were carted away, and the present edifice was built. The bill of costs for
clearing the ground is still extant in Fetter Lane. Twelve men, who were
paid twopence a day wages, were employed on the work for twenty days. The
cost of pulling down the old chapel was forty-six shillings and eight
pence; that of digging foundations for the new chapel forty shillings.
That chapel has suffered from wardens and lieutenants; yet the shell is of
very fine Norman work.
From the days of Henry the builder down to those of Henry of Richmond the
Tower, as the strongest place in the south of England, was by turns the
magnificent home and the miserable jail of all our princes. Here Richard
the Second held his court and gave up his crown. Here Henry the Sixth was
murdered. Here the Duke of Clarence was drowned in wine. Here King Edward
and the Duke of York was slain by command of Richard. Here Margaret of
Salisbury suffered her tragic fate.
Henry of Richmond kept his royal state in the Tower, receiving his
ambassadors, counting his angels, making presents to his bride, Elizabeth
of York. Among other gifts to that lady on her nuptial day was a Royal
Book of verse, composed by a prisoner in the keep.