ANCIENT LONDON.-No. II.

IN the reign of Henry III. the Tower afforded the king shelter from the turbulence of his barons, and served a double turn in his quarrels with the citizens, who, to the discredit of the days of chivalry, are reported to have insulted the queen with abusive language, and an attack with mud and missiles, when betaking herself to her barque, so that she was compelled to retreat before the rabble, and seek protection behind the bulwarks, where her royal lord brooded retaliation in renewed amercement and incarceration. The wars of Edward I. filled the Tower with Welsh and Scotch captives, as in point of numbers the Jews, in previous reigns, had monopolized those doleful lodgings, on the pretence of clipping and adulterating the coinage, as many as six hundred being incarcerated.

Kings, nobles, Jews, templars, and flat-capped citizens, found accommodation in this evil lodging; and to enhance the medley the poets were nobly represented in the person of Geoffrey Chaucer, who wrote his prose work called The Testament of Love' in the Tower, where he lay three years. Another poetical captive was Charles, Duke of Orleans, who shared his captivity with his brother John, Duke of Angoulême, prisoners of Agincourt, and beguiled the time by the composition of a book of poems, still extant in the Harleian collection in the British Museum; the locality of this production being identified by an illumination, wherein are portrayed, with considerable fidelity, several features of the Tower, as it appeared in the reign of Henry V. In this view, St. Thomas's, or Traitor's Tower, is a conspicuous object; and immediately beyond-the Bloody Tower having not been then erected is the Keep, or White Tower. Here the captive prince goes even further than to confute the Irishman's saying, "that a man cannot be in two places at once, unless he be a bird," for here he in his human character is in three places at the same point of time. By a kind of stage contrivance, a view of the interior of the Keep is afforded through the opening of a wide arch, where Charles is seen at a table penning his book of poems, his guards drawn up in the background. At a western window of the Keep he looks tranquilly forth to witness a valedictory interview between himself and an armed retainer, whose company wait at hand with their horses.

Between the Keep and the gate called the Middle Tower is the

Bell Tower; the Byward Tower does not appear, having been a subsequent erection. The Beauchamp Tower, the Devlyn Tower, the Flint Tower, and the Bowyer Tower, succeed on the west flank of the Keep. Westward of the Tower enclosure are the buildings called Petty Wales, from their having been appointed as a lodging for the Princes of Wales, when they repaired to the City.

In the next place is seen London Bridge, with the pier containing St. Thomas's Chapel, and the perilous fall which succeeded the ebb of the tide previous to the modern reconstruction of the bridge. Further west is the steelyard, or wharf, of the merchants of Allemaine. In the distance the view terminates with St. Paul's, and intermediate is a church greatly resembling St. Mary Overies, which, perhaps, by a licence akin to that with which he has endowed the prince with ubiquity, the illuminator may have thought fit to transpose to the north side of the Thames, on the right of the picture. The buildings of the City are overtopped by the turrets of Tower royal.

Among some wholesale committals to the Tower were the abbot, monks, and lay brethren of Westminster Abbey, on suspicion of robbing the king. This proceeding, which included no less than eighty-one persons, was the resolute act of Edward I., whose treasury was despoiled, during his absence in Scotland, to the enormous extent, it is said, of 100,000. The suspected were tried and acquitted; and it is remarkable that we find no report of any particular expression of indignation in connection with such an inroad upon the immunities of the church.

The battle of Neville's Cross, in 1346, brought to the Tower the Scottish King, David Bruce, the Earls of Fife, Wigton, Monteith, and Carrick, Lord Douglas, and fifty other distinguished leaders. The king was honourably escorted to London by a guard of twenty thousand men. He rode through the streets to the Tower on a stately black steed, the way being lined by the civic companies in their liveries. After lingering eleven years in bondage, the king obtained his release on the engagement to pay the enormous ransom of one hundred thousand marks, and to deliver as hostages some of his chief nobility. The Earl of Monteith, who had previously done fealty to Edward, was hanged, and his quarters disposed of according to the barbarous formula in cases of treason.

The French wars brought in their turn many illustrious persons within the restraint of those walls, among whom were the Constable of France, the Count de Tankerville, and of the citizens of Caen, captured by the English, three hundred. In 1347 followed the

twelve heroic citizens of Calais, whose lives, but not their liberty, were spared at the intercession of the queen. These were headed by the Governor of Calais, John de Viennes. Charles de Blois, the aspirant to the dukedom of Brittany, the followers of the captive French King John, who himself was detained in the Savoy, and other eminent Frenchmen, swell the annals of this comprehensive fortress, a tithe of whose captives is beyond the limits of enumeration here; but the wayward and ill-starred Richard II. must not be overlooked among the eminent sojourners in this his own palace and state prison; nor the Earls of Arundel and Warwick, and Lord Cobham; the latter, who was committed on the charge of heresy, contrived to escape after being sentenced to the stake, but was fated to return eventually to the same place, from whence he was drawn on a hurdle to St. Giles in the Fields, where he was hung by the middle of his body on an iron chain and burned to death.

The wars of the Roses, in succession, made many a bloody entry in the annals of the Tower. The Earl of Oxford, Lord Aubrey de Vere, and others of the high nobility, passed through the brief transition from the cell to the scaffold as mastery made the right, while the feeble king, like a feather on the water, rose with the flood or fell with the ebb as the tide of faction swayed.

"Ye towers of Julius, London's lasting shame,

With many a midnight murder fed."

The second line in the couplet is supported partly by proof, and in other instances only corroborated by the indirect tokens, which are received as evidence in cases where a deed done in the dark is indicated by circumstances of kindred obscurity.

Of such a complexion is the shadow that hangs over the final scene of the meek king Henry VI. After the battle of Tewkesbury, he passed by a ready transition, within those walls, from the palace to the prison, where, in a cell apart from that which held his highspirited queen, Margaret of Anjou, he was found dead.

The deed like that of the murder of the young princes is popularly believed to have been a step in the ruthless career of the Duke of Gloucester, by which he realized a short-lived usurpation, speedily quenched in his blood on the field of Bosworth. The attainder of his brother, Clarence, was a more ostensible proceeding, in which he took a prominent share. The Bowyer Tower is the traditionary scene of the strange mode of shuffling off this mortal coil, of which "unsteady Clarence" is said to have made choice-drowning in a butt of his favourite Malmsey.

A vault beneath, opening by a trap-door upon the upper cell, was pointed to as the way, whereby the assistants in this deed of eccentric horror obtained access to their victim. The fire of 1841, and the subsequent restorations, have changed the air of this dungeon, whose former gloomy aspect was in keeping with such associations. The poisoning of Sir Thomas Overbury fills up the tale of secret murder, leaving a background of gloomy speculation touching the fate of others of less note, the results of various modes of torture, the vague implications of suicide, and the buried secrets of lower dungeons, even the clue to whose subterranean recesses has in more merciful times been lost in oblivion. The Tower Green, a spot facing the small chapel of St. Peter ad Vincula, shares with Tower Hill in the crowded records of the axe and scaffold: here it was, according to Sir Thomas More, that Hastings was hurried from the council chamber in the White Tower, by the arbitrary mandate of Gloucester-then protectorand without prayer or preparation, his head struck off upon a piece of timber furnished by accident to the hand of his executioner. Here likewise fell the venerable head of Margaret, Countess of Salisbury, whose only crimes appear to have been the continuation of the royal line of Plantagenet, of which she was the last representative, and that she was the mother of Cardinal Pole. The high-spirited lady is stated to have refused to lay her head upon the block, declining to submit to die like a traitor, being conscious of no crime; and she was pursued about the scaffold by the executioner, who, after many blows, succeeded in striking off her head. But the consecrated memory of this fatal spot is the execution of Lady Jane Grey, which so closely succeeded that of Guilford, the facile instrument of his father's ambition, that in passing to the scaffold she encountered his headless corpse in its transition from Tower Hill to St. Peter's Chapel. Even at this shock her constaney did not fail her: "O Guilford, Guilford," was her greeting, "the antepast is not so bitter that thou hast tasted, and which I shall soon taste, as to make my flesh tremble; it is nothing compared to the feast of which we shall partake this day in heaven.” At the scaffold she said to the executioner, "I pray you despatch me quickly;" and as she knelt, inquired, "Will you take it off before I lay me down?" He replied, "No, madam." Then she tied the handkerchief about her eyes, and feeling for the block, she said, "Where is it? where is it?" One of the standers-by guided her thereunto, and she laid down her head upon the block, and stretched forth her body, and said, "Lord, into thy hands I commend my spirit."

As St. John's Chapel is the chapel proper of the Tower, the chapel of St. Peter may be regarded as that of the scaffolds of Tower Green and Tower Hill. The victim to the lust and tyranny of Henry VIII., the beautiful Anna Boleyn, whose dust moulders in those vaults, appears by an inscription in the wall within the Martin Tower to have been there imprisoned. We learn by a letter from Sir William Kingston, the lieutenant of the Tower, to Cromwell, that he told her she should be placed in the lodging that she lay in at her coronation. At this ill-associated indulgence she cried out, "It is too good for me. Jesus have mercy upon me," and kneeling down she wept apace, and in the same sorrow fell into a great laughing. Such is the contemporary report of her hysterical passion of grief at the contrast her condition then presented, to that when, in her ambition and womanly confidence, she intrusted herself to the blandishments of an uxorious but capricious and ruthless husband. She was buried without memorial beneath the altar in St. Peter's Chapel, and by her side her brother Lord Rochford, who was involved in her unhappy doom; Catherine Howard, and the infamous abettor of her crime, Lady Rochford, likewise moulder there. In the same vault also lie the illustrious Sir Thomas More; Bishop Fisher; the Admiral Seymour and his brother the Protector; Cromwell, Henry's creature; the Duke of Norfolk, suitor of Mary Queen of Scots, and his son the Earl of Arundel, who died in prison in the Tower; Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex, the object of Elizabeth's love, and rash tempter of her resentment, stronger than affection; and, under the communion table, the restless and ambitious son of Charles II. and Mrs. Lucy Waters, James Duke of Monmouth; the Scottish rebel lords, Kilmarnock and Balmerino, and the graceless traitor, Simon Lord Lovat. The chapel, whose walls enclose the headless trunks of so many, or the dust which once composed them, is a plain edifice erected by Edward III., containing the monuments of Sir Richard Blount and Sir Michael his son, both lieutenants of the Tower in 1564 and 1592. A recumbent figure on an altartomb represents the person of Sir Richard Cholmondely, knight, lieutenant of the Tower in the reign of Henry VIII. A stone in the floor records that "Talbot Edwards, late keeper of his majesty's regalia, 30th September 1674, aged 80," was here laid. It is needless to state that this ancient servant of the Tower was that Talbot Edwards who suffered from the plot of the infamous Colonel Blood to take possession of the crown jewels, and whose fidelity met with such slight notice, while the traitor himself was