Just outside the Abbey is "Broad Sanctuary," a name that commemorates the ancient rights and powers of the Church in protecting political victims and offenders from the law. "The Sanctuary" in mediæval times was a square Norman tower, containing two cruciform chapels. Here did that poor Queen, Elizabeth Woodville, wife of Edward IV., seek refuge twice in her chequered and mournful life; it was on her second flight hither, in her widowhood, with all her children, that her "young princes, her tender babes," were dragged away from her to be murdered by their uncle Richard of Gloucester. In all the structural alterations of Westminster, its old Hall, built first by William Rufus, has always mercifully been spared. It was rebuilt by Richard II., who, if only for the sake of such a monument, deserved of England a better fate. This Hall, which has witnessed more tragedies than any other London building, is principally famous to us as the place of trial of Charles Stuart, King of England, 1649. Here, with the Naseby banners hanging over his devoted head, Charles showed all that firmness and control that had been so conspicuously lacking in his life. Macaulay describes it thus: "The great hall of William Rufus, the hall which had resounded with acclamations at the inauguration of thirty kings: the hall which had witnessed the just sentence of Bacon and the just absolution of Somers; the hall where the eloquence of Strafford had for a moment awed and melted a victorious party inflamed with just resentment; the hall where Charles had confronted the High Court of Justice with the placid courage which has half redeemed his fame." [Illustration: _Victoria Tower, Westminster._] On Barry's enormous Gothic Palace, the Houses of Parliament--Time, which does so much both for the London buildings and for the opinions of Londoners,--will no doubt deliver a favourable verdict. Its florid richness of decoration, unsuitable, say art critics, to such a vast building, was in imitation of Henry VIIth's miniature chapel opposite. Its galleries and courts, almost as labyrinthine as the Westminster cloisters, require a long experience to understand and unravel. That Sir Charles Barry has worked Westminster Hall into his newer palace, entitles him to our respect and gratitude. In Old Palace Yard is that equestrian statue of Richard Coeur-de-Lion that has won so much praise from the greatest of our art critics. Old Palace Yard, too, has tragic associations. It was here that the Gunpowder Plot conspirators suffered death, opposite the windows of the house through which they had carried the gunpowder into the cellars under the threatened House of Lords. Here, also, Sir Walter Raleigh was executed in 1618.