His Queen and the newly-born princess were with him in the frail bark when it was tossed hither and thither, and its timbers riven by the storm, and in the midst thereof he prostrated himself and made a solemn vow, calling upon the nobles and ecclesiastics who accompanied him to bear witness thereto, that if God in His mercy should permit him to land safely in England, he would build and endow on the spot where he landed a monastery to the honour of God and our Lady of Graces. At length, after beating up the river as well as they were able with their broken rudder and shattered sails, the mariners drew the vessel alongside the shore a little to the east of East Smithfield, when the royal party landed, and passed, amid the acclamations of the few people congregated on the river bank, to the Tower, and offered up thanks in the chapel for their deliverance. Very different in aspect was the district eastward of Aldgate and the Tower when King Edward and his retinue landed there, from what it presents at present, with its docks, wharves, and warehouses, its stately ships and steam-vessels, to which the ship of King Edward might have served as a boat slung on davits by their side; its wilderness of houses, countless miles of the squalid homes of wretchedness, poverty, and crime; with multitudes of lofty chimneys, belching forth volumes of black smoke rising from the midst, and railways traversing it in every direction, accompanied by the incessant thunder of rushing trains, and the screeching whistle of the locomotive. The scene that presented itself to the monarch when stepping upon the river bank from his vessel was that of a flat expanse of pasture land and marshes, stretching away northward and eastward, protected from inundation by the embankment of the river, the work of the Romans, which, however, was not always effectual, as the Thames frequently overflowed defective portions of the bank and laid the land under water. There were also many rills and streamlets meandering along from the high lands of the north, which lost themselves in the marshes or found an outlet into the river.