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 THE TOWER OF LONDON SHAKESPEARE paid
homage to a common opinion, resting on “none assured ground” (as Stowe
declared), when he described the Tower of London as “Julius Cæsar’s ill-erected
tower.” On its site there was indeed the Arx Palatina, a Roman stronghold,
remains of which have been unearthed in recent years within the precincts of
the Tower; but Stowe correctly pointed out in his “Survey of London,” that “the
original author and founder as well of this as also of many other towers,
castels, and great buildings within the Realm” was William the Conqueror, who
not later than 1078 saw the massive walls of the White Tower rise up under the
direction of Gundulph, Bishop of Rochester, known to his contemporaries as “the
weeping monk of Bec.” Possibly Gundulph
was plunged into gloom by the realization that his Benedictine habit concealed
a genius in the science of military architecture, but his sorrow did not
interfere with his work. This, the earliest and most famous of the Norman keeps
in England, was intended to outlast history itself; as indeed it seemed to do
when Londoners began to call it Cæsar’s. The stones were selected, and of
proved strength; the walls varied from 10 feet to 15 feet in thickness, the
mortar binding the stones of the lower courses, far from being “tempered with
the bloud of beasts,” as a later tradition held, was a more practical compound
of lime and cockle shells; while the keep was divided, to increase its
strength, by an internal cross-wall from basement to battlement, between 10
feet and 6 feet in width. There was no military engine of the day that could
damage the White Tower, and, as the science of warfare improved, monarch after
monarch threw around it moat and wall, and a girdle of strong towers. By the time of
Edward III’s death, the fortress stood complete. It faced the river on ground
gently rising to Tower Hill. The keep was surrounded by a wall studded with
twelve round towers, which are famous by their various names — the Bloody
Tower, the Beauchamp, the Devereux, to recall a few — for their associations
with prisoners of high rank, and even with murders done by royal command. These
towers enclosed the Palace Ward, for between the keep and the south wall was
the royal palace, swept away by Cromwell and the Stuarts to make room for
storehouses. Around the defence of the Palace Ward, and very close to it, was the
outer wall, making between a narrow ward, in which an enemy, were he able to
enter it, would find himself without cover from missiles and without room to
manoeuvre a battering ram. This was only one of the difficulties of an
attacking force, which would have had to cross a broad moat supplied from the
Thames in order to make a breach in the outer defences. The moat was filled up
by the Duke of Wellington when he held the position of Constable of the Tower,
on account of its effects upon the health of the garrison; and no doubt in its
day it killed as many people as the headsman’s axe. It was Henry III (a
builder with an outstanding reputation, if it rested on nothing else than his
work at Westminster and Windsor) who constructed “the wharf “as a protection: a
broad walk like the Embankment, formed of rubble thrown down between piles.
Spanning the moat to the wharf was St. Thomas’ Tower, in reality a barbican,
since the entrance from the river was by a wonderfully engineered gateway at
its base, known to history as Traitors’ Gate, through which have passed some of
England’s finest and some of her vilest men. The tower, which contains a little
oratory dedicated to St. Thomas-à-Becket, must have been named after that saint
as a peace offering. Naturally enough
Londoners had no love for the royal fortress, typifying as it did the power of
the monarchy in the very face of their civic independence and, as Henry III had
difficulties and disasters in the course of his building, the townsfolk
ascribed them to the judgments of Heaven. Even more galling to a Plantagenet,
they said it was a judgment of St. Thomas; and in a vision the murdered
Archbishop was seen by “a holy and discreet priest,” overturning the walls with
his crozier. The visionary also reported that St. Thomas accompanied his
devastating labours by the quaint remark that if he himself had not found the
occasion to ruin the work, St. Edmund or some other saint most certainly would
have done so. But Henry persevered, and to-day Londoners are proud of the walls
that so much displeased their ancestors. As a prison the
Tower of London retains its romantic interest to the full, however little it is
now a menace or a defence for London, even with its regimental garrison and its
sturdy Beefeaters. But the chain of prisoners which began with Ralph Flambard
(who soon enough let himself down the wall by a rope, firmly grasping his
crozier) perhaps did not end with the brave spy, Lieutenant Lodi, or with Roger
Casement. Between the two extremes of type and time, between the Bishop and the
spy, is a succession that has left a long tale of intrigue, of torture, of
death, sometimes of escape, and a group of inscriptions cut or painted upon the
prison walls, which forms a sort of marginal annotation to the history of the country.
Most pathetic of all is the inscription “IANE,” in the Beauchamp Tower,
traditionally the work of Guildford Dudley, whose wife, Lady Jane Grey, was
also imprisoned nearby. The Dudleys, the Fitzgeralds of Kildare, and the Poles
(who were of royal blood, and therefore dangerous to the Tudors) were among the
families which were practically extirpated by imprisonment in the Tower. Arthur
Pole left a beautiful inscription: “I. H. S. A passage perillus maketh a porte
pleasant. Ao. 1568.” There is a grim complaint in the Beauchamp Tower: “By
tortyre straynge mi troyth was tryed yet of my liberty denied 1581 Thomas
Myagh.” Of those who were
condemned to death a favoured few were executed at the block within the
fortress on Tower Green. These were Anne Boleyn, Katherine Howard, the Countess
of Salisbury, Viscountess Rochford, Lady Jane Grey, and Devereux, Earl of
Essex. The last-named owed the comparative privacy of his death to the fickle
favour of Elizabeth, and the others to their sex, for there is no record of any
woman being executed in public on Tower Hill, where so many Englishmen died;
some, like Sir Thomas More, with a smile, and some like the Duke of Mon mouth,
in agony, for the axe, in his case, was blunt, and the executioner nervous. Unless the body of
the sufferer was granted to relatives, it was brought back for burial to the
Church of St. Peter-ad-Vincula, in the Palace Ward, founded by Henry I and
rebuilt by Henry VIII, who had need of it for his many victims. Queen Anne
Boleyn and Queen Katherine Howard lie together in death; Cardinal Fisher and
Sir Thomas More were brought here for burial a short time before Thomas
Cromwell, who gave evidence against them; and here the Jacobite lords,
Balmerino, Kilmarnock and Lovat were given at least a better grave than the
seventy-odd Scotch prisoners of the ‘45, who were imprisoned in a dungeon in
the Wakefield Tower, where many of them died for want of air and food. There are good
stories to tell of escapes from the Tower. Not the least daring was that of
Father Gerard, the Jesuit, who let himself down by a rope to a boat in the
Thames, despite the fact that he had been suspended in iron clamps by his hands
for such long periods that they were paralysed; or that of the Jacobite Lord
Nithsdale who, by the devotion of his wife, escaped disguised as a serving maid
on the eve of his execution. As for the other
associations of the Tower, who has not heard of the cell named “Little Ease,”
of the young Princes buried hugger-mugger at the foot of the chapel stairs that
they might lie in some sort within consecrated ground; and who wishes to hear
again of the “Scavenger’s daughter,” the thumbscrews, or the racks which the
Tudors used so constantly, under the direction of wretches like Wriothesley and
Topcliffe? But, although the
human interest of the Tower can never be exhausted, one cannot ignore the
institutions or the buildings that grew up within its walls. Architecturally
the Chapel of St. John the Evangelist is one of the finest pieces of Norman
work now preserved to us. It is on the second floor of the White Tower, its
crypt below, and above, forming a triforium arcade, is the mural gallery which
runs around the whole wall of the third floor, so that it is evident how far
the Norman builders considered a chapel one of the structural necessities of a
keep. Subsequently, however, it fell upon evil days. Robbed of statues and
stained glass, it was filled with a confused mass of putrefying documents,
which were actually a danger on account of “the cankerous smell and evil scent
“; but it was cleared in the last century, fortunately before the army clothing
department was able to carry out a design to convert it into a tailor’s
warehouse. In the White Tower
also was the Council Chamber, and the room where the judge of the King’s Bench
sat long ago, while the Court of Common Pleas was held in the hall of the
palace, now swept away. The Mint, once one of many, was established in the
fortress which was always the natural stronghold for the king’s treasure, and
is still the depository for the regalia. It is evident,
then, that in the late war the Germans showed some insight into the meaning of
history when they made a special attack upon the Tower of London. An unexploded
bomb or two were found in the ground, a small window was broken in the
Wakefield Tower, and a pigeon was killed, while German cartoonists and
medallists were delighting their compatriots with pictures of London Bridge
fallen down at last, and the Tower a burning ruin; for what we call morale is a
pride in past traditions, and the spirit of England would have suffered in the
destruction of the Tower.  THE TOWER OF LONDON (THE MIDDLE GATEWAY). |
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