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THE TOWER OF LONDON.

[William Hepworth Dixon, born in the West Riding of Yorkshire, 30th June, 1821. He has earned distinction and popularity as a biographer, historian,

traveller, and critic. He became a member of the Inner Temple in 1846; was one of the most active of the deputy-commissioners for the Exhibition of 1851; was editor of the Athenæum from 1853 till 1869; in the latter year was appointed one of the magistrates of Middlesex. His principal works are: John Howard and the Prisonworld of Europe; Life of William Penn, the founder of Pennsylvannia; Robert Blake, Admiral and General at Sea; Life of Lord Bacon: The Holy Land; New America; Spiritual Wives: Free Russia; The Switzers: Her Majesty's Tower, from which we take the following extract; Diana,

Lady Lyle: Ruby Grey: &c. Of Mr. Dixon as a writer the Edinburgh Review says: “His style is good and easy. There is life in his narrative and vigour in his descrip

tions." Died Dec. 27, 1879.]

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 group of buildings known in our common speech as the Tower of London, in official phrase as Her Majesty's Tower; a mass of ramparts, walls, and gates; the most ancient and most poetic pile in Europe.

Seen from the hill outside, the Tower appears to be white with age and wrinkled by remorse. The home of our stoutest kings, the grave of our noblest knights, the scene of our gayest revels, the field of our darkest crimes, that edifice speaks at once to the eye and to the soul. Gray keep, green tree, black gate, and frowning battlement, stand out, apart from all objects far and near them, menacing, picturesque, enchaining; working on the senses like a spell; and calling us away from our daily mood into a world of romance, like that which we find painted in light and shadow on Shakspeare's page.

Looking at the Tower as either a prison, a palace, or a court,-picture, poetry, and drama crowd upon the mind; and if the fancy dwells most frequently on the state prison, this is because the soul is more readily kindled by a human interest than fired by an archaic and official fact. For one man who would care to see the room in which a council met or a court was held, a hundred men would like to see the chamber in which Lady Jane Grey was lodged, the cell in which Sir Walter Raleigh wrote, the tower from which Sir John Oldcastle escaped. Who would not like to stand for a moment by those steps on which Ann Boleyn knelt; pause by that slit in the wall through which Arthur De la Pole gazed; and linger, if he could, in

that room in which Cranmer, Latimer, and Ridley searched the New Testament together?

are.

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 Put seas between us and the Thames, this Tower will cling to us like a thing of life. It colours Shakspeare's page. It casts a momentary gloom over Bacon's story. Many of our books were written in its vaults; the Duke of Orleans' 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 palaces 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 Cæsar; a legend taken up by Shakspeare ar d the poets, in favour of which the name of Cæsar'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, and a Saxon stronghold may have stood upon the spot. The buildings as we have them now in block and plan were commenced by William the Conqueror; and the series of apartments in Cæsar'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 eight hundred years of historic life, its nineteen hundred years 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 Tuileries in that of Elizabeth. In the time of our civil war Versailles was yet a swamp. The Escorial belongs to the seventeenth century; Sans Souci to the eighteenth. The Serail of Jerusalem is a Turkish edifice. The palaces of Athens, of Cairo, of Tehran, 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 against 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 as 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, the armoury, 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 splendour, its deepest misery, and its darkest shame. The soil beneath your feet is richer in blood than many a great battlefield; 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 day, 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 May-day 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, Cæsar'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 sort that of our English society as well as of our English kings. Here were kept the royal wardrobe and the royal jewels; and hither come with their goodly wares, the tiremen, the goldsmiths, the chasers and embroiderers, from Flanders, Italy, and Almaigne. Close by were the Mint, the lions' dens, 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.

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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 travelled 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, afterwards 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 time in the Tower, but much of his. money in adding to its strength and beauty. Adam de Lamburn was his master mason; but, Henry 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 sculpture, 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 178

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chapel which served for the devotion 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, one of the noblest arches in the world, 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 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 eightpence; 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 were slain by command of Richard. Here Margaret of Salisbury was hacked into pieces on the block.

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.

Turning through a sally-port in the Byeward Gate, you cross the south arm of the ditch, and come out on the wharf,—a strip of strand in front of the fortress won from the river, and kept in its place by masonry and piles. This wharf, the work of Henry the Builder, is one of the wonders of his reign; for the whole strip of earth had to be seized from the Thames, and covered from the daily ravage of its tides. At this bend of the river the scour is hard, the roll enormous. Piles had to be driven into the mud and silt; rubble had to be thrown in

between these piles; and then the whole mass united with fronts and bars of stone. All Adam de Lamburn's skill was taxed to resist the weight of water, yet keep the sluices open by which he fed the ditch. Most of all was this the case when the king began to build a new barbican athwart the sluice. This work, of which the proper name was for many ages the Water Gate, commands the only outlet from the Tower into the Thames; spanning the ditch and sweeping the wharf, both to the left and right. So soon as the wharf was taken from the river-bed, this work became essential to the defensive line.

London folk felt none of the king's pride in the construction of this great wharf and barbican. In fact, these works were in the last degree unpopular, and on news of any mishap occurring to them the Commons went almost mad with joy. Once they sent to the king a formal complaint against these works. Henry assured his people that the wharf and Water Gate would not harm their city. Still the citizens felt sore. Then, on St. George's night, 1240, while the people were at prayer, the Water Gate and wall fell down, no man knew why. No doubt the tides were high that spring, and the soft silt of the river gave way beneath the wash. Anyhow they fell.

Henry, too great a builder to despair, began again; this time with a better plan; yet on the self-same night of the ensuing year his barbican crashed down into the river, one mass of stones. A monk of St. Albans, who tells the tale, asserts that a priest who was passing near the fortress saw the spirit of an archbishop, dressed in his robes, holding a cross, and attended by the spirit of a clerk, gazing sternly on these new works. As the priest came up, the figure spake to the masons, "Why build ye these?" As he spoke, he struck the walls sharply with the holy cross, on which they reeled and sank into the river, leaving a wreath of smoke behind. The priest was too much scared to accost the more potent spirit; but he turned to the humble clerk, and asked him the archbishop's name. "St. Thomas the Martyr," said the shade. The priest, growing bolder, asked him why the Martyr had done this deed? "St. Thomas," said the spirit, "by birth a citizen, mislikes these works, because they are raised in scorn and against the public right. For this cause he has thrown them down beyond the tyrant's power to restore them."

But the shade was not strong enough to scare the king. Twelve thousand marks had been spent on that heap of ruins; yet the barbican being necessary to his wharf, the Builder,