what must have met the eye, at almost any period of the earlier history of the Tower, could the entire buildings have been suddenly unroofed, and its most secret recesses laid open to the broad day! No refinement of physical cruelty ever devised by fiction but has here had its prototype in reality; no mode of mental suffering that has not here exhibited itself; and, we may add, no heights of human fortitude that have not been reached by the occupants of those earth-buried cells. It is not the greater inhabitants of the Tower only to whom these remarks apply. Inscriptions yet remain on the walls, like so many voices ascending from out the vast multitude of humbler prisoners, arousing our warmest sympathies and admiration for them too, whom we are but too apt to forget in the presence of their more distinguished fellows. How profoundly melancholy is this expression of grief, inscribed on the wall of the Beauchamp Tower!" Since fortune hath chosen that my hope should go to the wind to complain, I wish the time were destroyed: my planet being ever sad and unpropitious. Wilim: Tyrrel, 1541.”* Who was William Tyrrel? No one can tell. He is but one of thousands who have passed from the cheerful sunshine and great business of life into inscrutable darkness, and perhaps into the welcomed, because tortureless, and quiet grave. Dante's line, written over the infernal portals, Renounce all hope who enter here, would indeed have been a suitable inscription for the Tower gateway, and there would have been little cause to fear a recurrence of an incident that did once take place, the death of a prisoner, who had so given up all hope, from mere revulsion of feeling at being informed he was free. Such liberations were never dangerously frequent. Yet there were men who could look upon so dread a trial as this without despair,-who would even take it to their bosoms whilst they wrote upon their prison walls in letters that, to our eyes, still make the place luminous :-" The most unhappy man is he that is not patient in adversities; for men are not killed with the adversities they have, but with the impatience they suffer."

The history of the Tower-Prison is necessarily, in a great measure, a reflex of the history of the monarchs of England, and, in every age, borrows its hues from their characters. So strikingly true is this, that there could be no doubt, for instance, as to the ambition of Edward I., or the weakness of Edward II., the lusts of Henry VIII., the bigotry of Mary, or the vanity of Elizabeth, if we possessed no other records than these walls could furnish.

Prior to the reign of the first of these sovereigns, the principal persons who had been confined in the Tower were Ralph Flambard, the minister of Rufus's extortion and tyranny, who escaped in the mode before described; his less successful imitator, Griffin, son of the Prince of North Wales; and Hubert de Burgh, the brave, single-minded, but unfortunate minister of John and Henry III. Edward kept the Tower in continual requisition. First, he fell upon the Jews, (in 1282,) who were seized without distinction in every part of England, on the pretence of clipping and adulterating coin, and six hundred of their number thrown into the Tower. The Welsh next furnished a supply of victims for these insatiable walls; then the Scotch, during the king's attempts to subjugate these countries. The battle of Dunbar, in 1296, placed in Edward's hands not only the Scottish king, Baliol, but a large portion of the most influential Scottish * Translated from the old Italian original, as given in Mr. Bailey's History.

nobility, many of whom shared their sovereign's captivity in the Tower. But the great memory of the Tower in this reign is Wallace, who entered its gloomy walls in 1305, and, after undergoing a kind of trial, was dragged from thence through Cheapside to Smithfield, tied to horses' tails, and there executed with barbarities according but too well with the infamy of the deed. Lastly, the courts of law, and the monastic cloister, swelled the immense number of prisoners during this period, the Chief Justice of the King's Bench, and several other judges, having been committed for corruption, and the entire inmates of Westminster Abbey, abbot, monks, and servants, on suspicion of theft. This was a curious affair. Whilst Edward was in Scotland, in 1303, his treasury, then kept in the Abbey, was broken open, and robbed to the extent, it is said, of a hundred thousand pounds. No thief could be discovered, so Edward summarily packed off to the Tower the whole establishment, of eighty-one persons. They were tried, and acquitted. We have here a striking proof of Edward's determined character. The abbot, however, had perhaps as little of the spirit of Becket as the King of Henry II.

Edward II. troubled himself little with foreign acquisitions, but not the less did the Tower find a sufficiency of inhabitants. The Knights Templars were now dissolved, and all the knights south of the Trent committed to the great stateprison, where the Master died. The continued struggles of the Welsh to recover their independence again resulted in the imprisonment in the Tower of many of their bravest champions, some of whom died there, others were liberated after long confinement. But internal dissension was the chief feature of this reign, and, consequently, whichever of the two parties was uppermost, the weak King or his discontented barons, Englishmen still thronged the dungeons. Another escape marks this period. Elated by some little successes, the King all at once grew bold, and attacked the more powerful of his enemies on the borders of Wales, where he was little expected. Lord Mortimer and several other barons were seized, and committed to the Tower. Here he gained over his keeper, and having invited Stephen de Segrave, the constable, with the other chief officers of the Tower, to a banquet, he made them intoxicated, and got safely off to France. He then joined the Queen, and immediately set on foot the conspiracy which ended in Edward's imprisonment in his own palace here, and subsequent murder. A day of retribution was approaching. By the young King Edward III.'s order, Mortimer was, as we have before mentioned, suddenly arrested at Nottingham, and brought, with his two sons and others, to the Tower, loaded with chains, and there left in one of its darkest dungeons till the period of his trial and execution. This first act of the new monarch told his subjects that a new period was dawning upon them. France and Scotland were again the battlefields on which English valour exhibited itself to the eyes of the world, and each country continued through this long and brilliant reign to pour their tribute of illustrious captives into our great fortress. John Earl of Murray, one of the great supports of the Scottish throne, was taken prisoner in 1336, and, being unable to raise the immense ransom demanded, lingered here for some years. The mode of his liberation is not the least remarkable part of his history. In 1340 he was granted to William Earl of Salisbury, like so much land or live. stock, "to do with him as most for his advantage;" and, remarkably enough,

ultimately was exchanged for his own keeper (on Salisbury's being made prisoner in France), through the intercession of the King of Scotland. In 1346 another terrible blow desolated the hearths of half the nobility and knighthood of Scotland; this was the battle of Neville's Cross, near Durham, in which David Bruce, the King, the Earls of Fife, Monteith, Wigtown, and Carrick, the Lord Douglas, and fifty other distinguished chiefs, fell into the hands of the English. The King was immediately conducted, with all honour and ceremony, under an escort of twenty thousand men, to London, through the streets of which he passed towards the Tower, mounted on a high black courser; the civic companies lining the whole way on the occasion, habited in their liveries. Eleven dreary years did the unhappy monarch spend in the Tower before he could obtain his liberation, even on the high condition of engaging to pay one hundred thousand marks, and delivering some of his principal nobility as hostages. Some of his nobility were still less fortunate. The Earl of Monteith, having previously done fealty to Edward, was hanged and quartered. Let us turn next to the evidences of the French campaigns. In 1346, Edward having taken Caen, a goodly town, and full of drapery and other merchandise, and rich burgesses, and noble ladies and damsels, and fine churches, and one of the fairest castles in all Normandy," sent off to the Tower, as the fruits of his success, the Constable of France, with the Count de Tankerville, three hundred opulent citizens, and an immense amount of booty. In 1347 the Tower gates opened to admit thirteen prisoners, twelve of whom had been known only as peaceful citizens a few months before; yet even the grim warders themselves must have warmed with something like admiration, as they looked upon these same citizens now, and learned they were the men whose fame had spread far and wide, as the heroic defenders of Calais whilst it could be defended, and its saviours afterwards by their giving themselves up to the conqueror as an expiatory sacrifice for the crime of their fellow-citizens in refusing so long to yield their beloved town to foreigners. The Governor of Calais, John de Viennes, was at their head. The next important French prisoner was Charles de Blois, whose struggle for the dukedom of Brittany, against De Montford and his fair and gallant Countess, had cost both nations so much blood and treasure. He was not liberated till 1356, and then only after heavy ransom had been exacted. In 1357, news of a great battle that had taken place in France began to be bruited abroad, in which it was said the English had thrown all their other recent victories into the shade. Accordingly, on the 24th of May, the assembled multitudes of the metropolis beheld their favourite Black Prince enter at the head of a triumphal procession that surpassed even the wildest tales of rumour. The King of France, his son, four other princes of the blood, eight earls, and an innumerable train of lesser but still important personages, graced the pageant of the victor of Poictiers. The chief residence of John was the Savoy; the other illustrious prisoners were mostly confined in that prison whose terrible walls must by this time have become almost as much an object of awe in France and in Scotland as in our own country. Another eminent member of the bench, William de Thorp, Chief Justice of the Common Pleas, was in the present reign degraded for venality and corruption, and thrown into the Tower. The frequent occurrence of cases of this kind is a noticeable commentary on the state of things at home, whilst our

monarchs were wasting their talents, energies, and revenues, to say nothing of their slaughtered subjects, in attempts at foreign subjugation. We shall only mention one other captive of Edward's reign. Valeran, Earl of St. Paul, a young French noble, as distinguished for his elegance of manners as for his bravery, was made prisoner in a skirmish near Lyques, and presented to the English King. The rugged Tower itself seems to have grown gracious to the light-hearted young foreigner whilst he stayed in it; and when he left it, it was for a confinement of a gentler description. At Windsor he met the Lady Maud, who was then residing at the castle with her mother, the Princess of Wales; both, it appears, had a taste for “dancing and carolling;" the result was that Earl St. Paul returned to his native country richer by a wife, "the fairest lady in all England," than he had left it. The remarkable similarity between the circumstances attending this match, and those attending the marriage of the poet-King of Scotland, will not escape the notice of the readers of a previous number-St. Mary Overies.

The weakness of the next sovereign, Richard II., produced again the lamentable results which had marked the reign of the second Edward,-internal warfare, jealousies, struggles of rival noblemen for power, &c. The closeness of the parallel indeed is extraordinary, for in the end, Richard, like his predecessor, was deposed, imprisoned in his own Palace-Tower-and only removed from thence to be mysteriously murdered. During this period many distinguished men were confined here; some but as a step to their execution. Sir Simon Burley, the companion of the present King, chosen by his father, the Black Prince, whilst Richard was yet a boy, and one of the bravest and most accomplished men of his time, was the chief of these victims to the spirit of faction. He was executed on Tower Hill, on the spot afterwards destined to be famous for scenes of a similar kind. Froissart, noticing this event, says: To write of his shameful death right sore displeaseth me; for when I was young I found him a noble knight, sage and wise." On the breaking up of the confederacy, at whose instance this savage deed had taken place, its chief members fell into Richard's hands; of whom the Duke of Gloucester perished, no one knows how, in the castle of Calais; and the Earls of Arundel and Warwick, Lord Cobham, and Sir John Cheyney, took their late victim's place in the Tower, and the first (Arundel) followed his footsteps still further, even to the gallows on the neighbouring hill. This improvement in the King's affairs was but temporary; the star of Bolingbroke was now in the ascendant. We need only add to the account of subsequent events given in the preceding paper, that Richard during his confinement had the anguish of beholding three of his adherents, who were supposed to have been implicated in the death of the Earl of Gloucester at Calais, brought under the very window of his room, tied to horses' tails, and dragged off towards Cheapside, where they were beheaded on a fishmonger's stall. One captive in the Tower during this reign yet remains to be mentioned, who has not been noticed by the historians of the edifice, though one of the most memorable of its unwilling visitants. The great poet Chaucer was confined in the Tower not less than three years, during which he wrote his prose work called The Testament of Love,' in imitation of the example of Boethius, who, under a similar calamity, produced his Consolations of Philosophy.' The work is in the form of a dia

4

logue between the prisoner and Love, who visits him in his cell here, and listens to his account of his misfortunes, and their cause, namely, the politics of London, and his devotion to the Lady Marguerite, under which designation he fancifully refers to the spiritual comfort of the Church. Chaucer, like his great patron, John of Gaunt, was a firm Wickliffite, and took part in the struggle between the Court and the City concerning the re-election of John of Northampton, a follower of Wickliffe, and one of the Duke's partisans. A commotion ensued, some lives were lost, John of Northampton was sent to prison, and Chaucer, who was implicated in the affair, fled to Zealand for a time; then returned to England, was arrested, and thrown into the Tower. He appears to have been liberated about 1389, and at the price of certain disclosures, which have been too readily assumed as dishonourable, considering that he retained the friendship of his illustrious patron; and John of Northampton received the royal pardon these apparently being the only two persons, if any, affected by his

statements.

Among the prisoners in the Tower concerned in the conspiracy that broke out almost immediately after Bolingbroke's accession to the throne, was his own brother-in-law, the Earl of Huntingdon, who was beheaded without trial, and his head placed on London Bridge, till his wife (Bolingbroke's sister) obtained permission for its decent burial with the body in the college of Pleshy. Among the other distinguished captives of this reign were a kinsman and son of Owen Glendower; and James I. of Scotland, whom we have recently mentioned, who was confined here at several different periods. This reign is also characterised by the passing of an act against heretics, or Lollards, which soon began to fill the Tower dungeons with a new species of sufferers, and invest them with a more melancholy interest. The first leader of these founders of English Protestantism was a man in every way worthy of the high but fearful mission allotted to himthis was Sir John Oldcastle Lord Cobham, a man of talent and courage, who had been the intimate associate of Henry V. prior to his accession to the throne. In the first year of this King's reign Lord Cobham was accused of heresy; and Henry, having in vain endeavoured to convince his early friend of his errors, left him to the operation of the ecclesiastical law, by which he was ultimately sentenced to the flames. On hearing his fate pronounced, he fell on his knees in the Court and fervently prayed Heaven's mercy for his persecutors. Owing possibly in some way to the secret desire of the King that he should escape, Cobham managed to get out of the Tower, and in spite of the immense reward offered for his apprehension remained four years at liberty. In 1417 he unhappily again fell into the hands of his remorseless persecutors, and was drawn from the Tower to St. Giles's Fields, hanged by the middle with a chain, and burnt to death. Turning from this and other similarly unhappy recollections of the Tower during the reign of Henry V., the reverse of the bright picture which too often alone occupies our thoughts when we think of the conqueror of Agincourt, we again meet with a continual stream of French captives pouring into the Tower; some of whom, including the Duke of Bourbon and Marshal Boucicaut, died within its walls. The Duke of Orleans, taken also in the great battle we have mentioned, spent many years in the Tower, amusing himself, as already noticed, with poetical

recreations.