And now we come to Elizabeth's prisoners, the Roman Catholic plotters against her throne and life. In a room of the Belfry Tower are the names of the Countess of Lennox and her attendants. This countess was cousin to Elizabeth, and married by Henry to the Earl of Lennox. While Elizabeth was proposing Lord Robert Dudley to Mary as a husband, offering, as the condition of her accepting a Protestant husband, to at once appoint Mary heir to the throne, the Countess of Lennox was proposing her son Darnley, a Catholic. Immediately before the latter marriage taking place the countess was sent to the Tower, not to be released till Darnley's miserable death. Lennox himself was assassinated, and the countess, released from the Tower, died poor, and was buried in at the Queen's expense.

Of other victims of Mary Queen of Scots the Tower bears traces. of these was a young Fleming, named Charles Bailly, who was employed by the ambassador in London, John Leslie, the intriguing Bishop of Ross, to carry dangerous letters to Brussels and Madrid, respecting the plots of the Duke of Norfolk. In vain Elizabeth had said to the duke,

Take care, my lord, on what pillow you lay your head.

I.H.S.

1571

. Die

10

Aprilis. Wise men ought circumspectly to see what they do, to examine before they speak, to prove before they take in hand, to beware whose company they use, and, above all things, to whom they trust.-CHARLES BAILLY.

In a prison in the Tower the Bishop of Ross confessed the Norfolk and Northumberland plots, and declared Mary's privity to the death of Darnley. He has left his name carved in the Bloody Tower, with a long Latin inscription, now half erased.

Another pseudo-Catholic martyr of this reign was Philip Howard, a son of the Duke of Norfolk and Mary the daughter of the Earl of Arundel, a weak intriguing man. He has left in the large room of the Beauchamp Tower this inscription, carved in an Italian hand:--

The more suffering for Christ in this world, so much the more glory with Christ in the life to come--ARUNDELL.

June 22, 1587

.

Arundel was a pervert, and had been captured while on his way to join the army of Philip of Spain. Having lost favour with Elizabeth for having gone over to the Church of Rome, Arundel had despaired of further progress at Court, and had fled to Spain on the very eve of the Armada. By means of bribes paid by his wife, Arundel contrived to have mass celebrated in his cell. For this offence he was condemned to death; but the Queen pardoned the poor fanatic, and he lingered in prison for years, at the end of which he died-poisoned, as the Jesuits said; but more probably from the injury he had done his health by repeated fasts.

Of that wilful and unfortunate favourite of Elizabeth, the [extra_illustrations.2.71.1] , we shall say little here. His story belongs more naturally to another part of our work--the chapter on , where he lived. His rash revolt we have already glanced at. At the age of he laid down his head on the block on Tower Green. He was attended by divines, to whom he expressed deep penitence for his

great sin, bloody sin, crying and infectious sin,

On James's accession, that great man, yet not without many a stain, [extra_illustrations.2.71.2] , became a tenant of the Bloody Tower. He had been imprisoned before by Elizabeth in the Brick Tower; for having seduced Elizabeth Throgmorton, of her maids of honour.

A very great part of the

second

and long imprisonment of the founder of Virginia,

was spent in the Bloody Tower and the adjoining Garden House, writing at this grated window, working in the little garden on which it opened, pacing the terrace on this wall, which was afterwards famous as Raleigh's Walk. Hither came to him the wits and poets, the scholars and inventors of his time--Jonson and Burrell, Hariot and Pettto crack light jokes, to discuss rabbinical lore, to sound the depths of philosophy, to map out Virginia, to study the shipbuilder's art. In the Garden House he distilled essences and spirits, compounded his great cordial, discovered a method (afterwards lost) of turning salt water into sweet, received the visits of Prince Henry, wrote his political tracts, invented the modern war-ship, wrote his

History of the World.

Raleigh was several times in the Tower; but many vaults and cells pointed out by the warders in absurd places-such as the hole in Little Ease, a recess in the crypt, a cell in the Martin Tower, and in the Beauchamp Tower--were never occupied by him. After the seduction of his future wife, Raleigh was placed in the Brick Tower, the residence of Sir George Carew, Master of the Ordnance, and his own cousin, and was released upon his marriage. As a step towards peace with Spain, James I., on his accession, imprisoned Raleigh in the Bloody Tower. The pretext for his seizure was his aiding Lord Cobham, the brother-in-law of Cecil, in a plot to raise Arabella Stuart to the throne. Cobham, clinging to life with the baseness of Claudio, in , accused Raleigh of complicity, and then retracted. A report was spread that Raleigh had tried to stab himself while sitting at the Lieutenant's table. He remained a prisoner for years. His wife and son were allowed to live at the Tower, where her husband and his poor servants lived on a week. He was at last, from poverty, obliged to part with his faithful friend, Thomas Hariot, whom he had sent to Virginia in , and whose mathematical discoveries Descartes is said to have stolen.

During this long imprisonment, Raleigh was allowed to use a hen-roost in the garden near the

No man but my father would keep such a bird in a cage.

After his release and unsuccessful voyage to seek for gold in Guiana, Raleigh returned to the Tower, and was placed in a poor upper room of the Brick Tower. He had at pleasant rooms in the Wardrobe Tower. But Spain had now resolved on his death, and James was ready to consent. His enemies urged him in vain to suicide. The morning he died, Peter, his barber, complained, as he dressed his master to go to the scaffold, that his head had not been curled that morning.

Let them comb it that shall have it,

In a chamber of the house of the Lieutenant of the Tower, looking out on the Thames, several oak panels bear inscriptions, some of them probably

James the Great, King of Great Britain, illustrious for piety, justice, foresight, learning, hardihood, clemency, and the other regal virtues; champion and patron of the Christian faith, of the public safety, and of universal peace; author most subtle, most august, and most auspicious:

Queen Anne, the most serene daughter of Frederick the Second, invincible King of the Danes:

Prince Henry, ornament of nature, strengthened with learning, blest with grace, born and given to us from God:

Charles, Duke of York, divinely disposed to every virtue:

Elizabeth, full sister of both, most worthy of her parents:

Do Thou, all-seeing, protect these as the apple of the eye, and guard them without fear from wicked men beneath the shadow of Thy wings.

To Almighty God, the guardian, arrester, and avenger, who has punished this great and incredible conspiracy against our most merciful Lord the King, our most serene Lady the Queen, our divinely disposed Prince, and the rest of our Royal House; and against all persons of quality, our ancient nobility, our soldiers, prelates, and judges; the authors and advocates of which conspiracy, Romanised Jesuits, of perfidious, Catholic, and serpent-like ungodliness, with others equally criminal and insane, were moved by the furious desire of destroying the true Christian religion, and by the treasonous hope of overthrowing the kingdom, root and branch; and which was suddenly, wonderfully, and divinely detected, at the very moment when the ruin was impending, on the 5th day of November, in the year of grace 1605--William Waad, whom the King has appointed his Lieutenant of the Tower, returns, on the ninth of October, in the sixth year of the reign of James the First, 1608, his great and everlasting thanks.

Fawkes was confined in a dungeon of the Keep. He would not at disclose his accomplices,

Father Garnet was found hiding at Hendlip Hall, in Worcestershire. He was at confined in the Keep, then in a chamber on the lower tier of the Bloody Tower. When it was said to him,

You shall have no place in the calendar,

I am not worthy of it,

but I hope to have a place in heaven.

Another Tower prisoner in this reign was the [extra_illustrations.2.73.2] , a patron of science. His kinsman, Thomas Percy, had been deep in the plot, and was the man who hired the cellar where the barrels of powder were laid. He was allotted a house in the Martin Tower, at the north-east angle of the fortress, afterwards the Jewel House, where Colonel Blood made his impudent dash on the regalia. There he remained for years, pacing daily on the terrace which connected his rooms with the Brick Tower and the Constable's Tower, and which still bears his name. A sun-dial fixed for him on the south face of the Martin Tower, by the famous astronomer Hariot, is still to be seen there. Accused of wishing to put himself at the head of the English Catholics, he was fined , deprived of all his appointments, and sentenced to imprisonment for life. He spent his time in mathematical studies, and kept Hariot by his side. He was a friend of Raleigh, and was visited by men of science. He was at last released by the intercession of his beautiful daughter Lucy, who had married Hay, a Court favourite, afterwards Earl of Carlisle.

Nor must we forget that fair prisoner, [extra_illustrations.2.74.1] , a kinswoman of James, who was sent to the Tower for daring to marry her relation, William Seymour, who was also of royal descent. Seymour escaped to France, but she remained years in the Tower, in neglect arid penury, and died at last, worn out with pining for freedom, her mind a wreck.

The murder of Sir Thomas Overbury in the Tower is of the darkest of the many dark pages in the reign of James I. It was the last great crime committed in the blood-stained building where so many good and wise men had pined away half their lives. Overbury, a poet and statesman of genius, was the friend of the king's young Scotch favourite, Carr. When a handsome boy he had been injured in a tilt, and had attracted the king's attention. James, eager to load his young Ganymede with favours, wedded him to the divorced wife of Lord Essex, a beautiful but infamous woman, whose marriage had been conducted at with great splendour, Inigo Jones supplying the scenery, and Ben Jonson, in beautiful verse, eulogising the handsome couple in fallacious prophecies. Carr ruled the king, and Overbury ruled Carr. All went well between the friends, who had begun life together, till Overbury had exerted himself to prevent Carr's marriage with the divorced Lady Essex. The lady then resolved on his death. She tried to bribe assassins and poisoners, and, all these plans failing, the king was persuaded to send him as an envoy to Moscow. Overbury refusing to go, was thrown into the Bloody Tower. Here Lady Essex exerted all her arts to take away his life. An infamous man, named Sir Gervaise Helwyss, was appointed Lieutenant of the Tower, and a servant of Mrs. Turner, the infamous poisoner (mentioned in our, chapter on ), placed as keeper in the Bloody Tower. Poisoned jellies and tarts were frequently sent to Overbury by Lady--Essex in the name of Carr, and poisons were mixed in almost everything he took. Yet so strong was the poet's constitution, that he still bore up, till a French apothecary was sent to him, who administered medicines that soon produced death. The marriage of Lady Essex and Carr, now made an earl, soon took place, and was celebrated with great splendour at . The Earl of Northampton, who had aided Lady Essex in this crime, died a few months afterwards, and all was for a time hushed up. In the meantime Overbury's friends had printed his fine poem of (the model of virtue held out for his friend's example), and editions of the poem had roused public attention. Just at this time, a boy employed in the Tower by the French apothecary who gave Overbury his , fell sick in Flanders, and confessed his crime to the English resident. Gradually the murder came out. The Lieutenant of the Tower half confessed, and the criminals were soon under arrest. Hands were also laid on Carr and his wife, Mrs. Turner, Weston, the man placed in charge of Overbury, and an apothecary, Franklin. The nation was infuriated and cried for vengeance. There were even rumours that the same wretches had poisoned Prince Henry, the heir to James's throne. Helwyss was hung in chains on ; Mrs. Turner at Tyburn; Franklin and Weston were contemptuously put to death. The trial of the greater culprits followed. The countess pleaded guilty, and was condemned to death; and in Carr's case the chief evidence was suppressed. Eventually the earl and countess were pardoned. They left the Bloody Tower and the Garden House, and lived in seclusion and disgrace. The only child of these murderers was the mother of that excellent Lord William Russell who was afterwards beheaded.

Mention of every State prisoner whom the Tower has housed would in itself fill a volume. We must therefore confine ourselves to brief notices of the greater names. Nor must his innocence prevent our mentioning, after the murderers, of Overbury, that patriarch of English philosophy, [extra_illustrations.2.74.2]  who, on his sudden fall from greatness, when Buckingham threw him as a sop to appease the people, was confined here for a period which, though short, must have been of extreme mental agony. He was only imprisoned day in the Lieutenant's house.

To die in this disgraceful place, and before the time of His Majesty's grace, is even the worst that could be,

bribes.

But we must hasten on to the reign of Charles, when Felton struck that deadly blow in the doorway at Portsmouth, and Charles's hated favourite, the Duke of Buckingham, fell dead. Felton, an officer whose claims had been disregarded, had stabbed the duke, believing him to be a public enemy. He was lodged in the Bloody Tower, and as he passed to his prison the people cried,

The Lord bless thee!

Windmill

Then came to the Tower that tough, obstinate lawyer, [extra_illustrations.2.75.1] , who, for an attack on theatres, was put in the pillory, fined , and had both his ears shorn off. After years' imprisonment Prynne again attacked [extra_illustrations.2.75.2]  Popish practices, and was again punished. But the tide was now turning. Presently through the Tower gates passed [extra_illustrations.2.75.3] , that dark bold spirit that had resolved to brave it out for despotism, and in the attempt was trodden under foot. Charles gave him up to the people, in of his feeble and vain attempts to conciliate those whom he had wronged. When there was fear Strafford might be torn to pieces on his way to the scaffold, he said,

I care not how I die, by the executioner or by the people.

The Tower prisoners of Charles II.'s time were men of less mark and of less interest. The offender was [extra_illustrations.2.75.4] , the author of that political romance, the publication of which Cromwell had been too magnanimous to resent. He eventually became insane, and after several changes of prison, died and was buried next Raleigh, in . In the same foolish revelling reign the Duke of Richmond got shut up in the Tower for weeks, being compromised for proposing marriage to Frances Terese, of the king's mistresses (the

Britannia

The half-mad Duke of Buckingham seems to have been fond of the Tower, for he was no less than times imprisoned there. The time (before the Restoration), Cromwell had imprisoned him for marrying the daughter of Fairfax. The last time, he accompanied Shaftesbury, Salisbury, and Wharton, for opposing the Courtier Parliament. [extra_illustrations.2.75.5] , the eminent Quaker, was also imprisoned in the Tower in Charles's reign, nominally for writing a Unitarian, pamphlet, but really to vex his father, the Admiral, who had indirectly accused the Duke of York of cowardice at sea, on the eve of a great engagement with the Dutch. Stillingfleet at last argued the inflexible prisoner into Christianity, and he was released.

When, on the discovery of the Rye House Plot, [extra_illustrations.2.75.6]  was arrested, he was sent to the Tower , and then to Newgate.

Arbitrary government cannot be set up in England,

without wading through my blood.

Sir, we have orders to stop nobody's breath but yours.

Another victim of this reign was the famous [extra_illustrations.2.75.7] . a stern opponent of Charles, but no plotter against his person. The wretch [extra_illustrations.2.75.8]  hounded on the jury to a verdict. Sidney's last words in court were a prayer that the guilt of his death might not be imputed to London. On his way to , he said,

I know that my Redeemer liveth, and I die for the old cause.

Another turn of Fortune's wheel, and James, [extra_illustrations.2.75.9] ,the fugitive from Sedgemoor, was found half-starved in a ditch, and was brought to his prison lodgings at the Lieutenant's house. He proved a mere craven, offered to turn Catholic to save his life, and talked only of his mistress. Tenison, the Vicar of , refused him the sacrament, and the last words of the prelates in attendance were, as the axe fell,

God accept your imperfect repentance.

James fled, and the next State prisoner was that cruel and brutal myrmidon of his, Judge Jeffreys. Detected in the disguise of a sailor, he was taken, and with difficulty saved from the enraged mob. He was discovered at a low ale-house in by a man whom he had once bullied and frightened in court. He spent his time in the Bloody Tower drinking, of which he at last died. He was at buried near the Duke of Monmouth, then removed to St. Mary Aldermary. Our readers will remember the cruel jest played upon Jeffreys in the Tower, by a man who sent him a barrel,

In , when Sir John Fenwick was in the Tower for a plot to assassinate King William, his friends, afraid he would

squeak,

The Scotch Jacobite lords were the next visitors to the Tower. When the white cockade was trodden into the mire, the leaders of the chevalier's followers soon found their way there. The Earl of Derwentwater (about whom so many north-country ballads exist) and [extra_illustrations.2.76.1] , the grandson of Charles II., perished on . Derwentwater's last words were,

I die a Roman Catholic. I am in perfect charity with all the world; I thank God for it. I hope to be forgiven the trespasses of my youth by the Father of infinite mercy, into whose hands I commend my soul.

God bless King James,

Lord Nithsdale also escaped, thanks to his brave wife. His escape is of the prettiest romances connected with the Tower. Failing to obtain mercy from George I., who shook her from him, she struck out, in her love and despair, a stratagem worthy, of a noble wife. With the help of some female friends and a useful Welsh servant girl, she disguised her husband as her maid, and with painted cheeks, hood, and muffler, he contrived to pass the sentries and escape to the house of the Venetian agent. The next morning the earl would have perished with his comrades.

In , Pope's friend Atterbury, the Jacobite Bishop of Rochester, was thrown into the Tower, and, with ferocious drollery, it was advised that he should be thrown to the Tower lions. Layer; a barrister, of his fellow-conspirators, was chained in the Tower and soon after executed. The unlucky ' brought more Scottish lords to the Tower; the Earl of Cromartie, the Earl of Kilmarnock, Derwentwater's younger brother, Lord Balmerino, and that hoary old rascal, [extra_illustrations.2.76.2] , whom Hogarth sketched on his way to London, as he was jotting off the number of the rebel clans on his mischievous old fingers. Cromartie was spared: of the rest, Kilmarnock died ; then the scaffold was strewn with fresh sawdust, the block new covered, a new axe brought, and the executioner re-clad, by the time old Balmerino appeared, calm and careless, as with the air of an old soldier he stopped to read the inscription upon his own coffin. At Lovat's execution, in , a scaffold fell with some of the spectators, and the doomed man chuckled and said,

The mair mischief, the mair sport.

Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori,

Of Wilkes's imprisonment in the Tower we shall have occasion to speak elsewhere.

Then came other days, when Pitt frightened England with rumours of revolutionary conspiracies. The leaders of the London. Corresponding Society, and the Society for Constitutional Information, were seized in I-the Habeas Corpus Act being most tyrannically suspended. Among the reformers then tried on a charge of constructive treason were Horne Tooke, the adversary of Junius, Thelwall, and Hardy, a shoemaker (secretary of the Corresponding Society). Erskine defended Hardy, who was acquitted; as also were Home Tooke and Thelwall, to the delight of all lovers of progress.

Sir Francis Burdett's story will come more naturally into our chapter, but a few facts about his imprisonment in the Tower will not be out of place. In he was committed by a Tory for a bold letter which he had written to his constituents on the case of John Gale Jones, a delegate of the Corresponding Society, who had been lodged in Newgate for a libel on the House. Burdett denied the power of the House to order imprisonment, or to keep men in prison untried.

The year brought some less noble prisoners than Sir Francis to the Tower. The Spa Fields riots were followed by the arrest of Watson, a bankrupt surgeon, Preston, a cordwainer, and Hooper, a labourer, all of whom were members of certain socialist clubs.

The desperate but foolish Cato Street conspirators of were the last State prisoners lodged in the Tower, which Mr. Dixon seems to think was thus robbed of all its dignity. The cells that have held Ings, the butcher, and Davidson, the negro, can never be perfumed sufficiently to hold noble traitors or villains of mediaeval magnitude. Thistlewood, that low Cataline, who had served in the army, was lodged in the Bloody Tower, as the place of honour, Brunt in the Byeward Tower, Ings and Davidson in the Water Gate, and Tidd in the -Gun Battery.

[extra_illustrations.2.71.1] Earl of Essex

[extra_illustrations.2.71.2] Sir Walter Raleigh

[extra_illustrations.2.73.1] Fawkes interrogated by King James

[extra_illustrations.2.73.2] Earl of Northumberland

[extra_illustrations.2.74.1] Arabella Stuart

[extra_illustrations.2.74.2] Lord Bacon

[extra_illustrations.2.75.1] Prynne

[extra_illustrations.2.75.2] Archbishop Laud's

[extra_illustrations.2.75.3] Thomas Wentworth, Earl of Strafford

[extra_illustrations.2.75.4] James Harrington

[extra_illustrations.2.75.5] Penn

[extra_illustrations.2.75.6] Lord William Russell

[extra_illustrations.2.75.7] Algernon Sidney

[extra_illustrations.2.75.8] Jeffreys

[extra_illustrations.2.75.9] Duke of Monmouth

[extra_illustrations.2.76.1] Lord Kenmure

[extra_illustrations.2.76.2] Simon, Lord Lovat