Highways and Byways in LondonCook, Emily Constance Baird
History
Highways and Byways in London
Cook, Emily Constance Baird
London (England) -- Description and travel
bravely as they had lived, many of the sturdy and loyal followers of a
bad cause, who might say, with Macaulay's typical "Jacobite":
"To my true king I offered, free from stain,
Courage and faith; vain faith, and courage vain."
Later, the martyr annals of the Tower were in a measure defiled by the
introduction of real and noteworthy criminals, and the imprisonment
within its walls of such wretches as the Gunpowder Plot conspirators,
the infamous murderers of Sir Thomas Overbury, and the notorious Judge
Jeffreys. But the desecration of these is past; the Tower has long
ceased to be a State Prison, and the halo of its earlier victims still
is paramount there. The very names of certain localities recall their
tragedies: "Bloody Tower," commemorating the murder of the young
princes, sons of Edward IV., whose bones were found here under a
staircase; Traitor's Gate,--the gate of the doomed,--the grim disused
archway, with a portcullis, looking towards, and in ancient times
opening on to, the river.
The Tower is full of lovely "bits" for the sketcher. The succession of
fine old gates that span the entrance-road, and the ring of encircling
towers called the "Inner Ward," though necessarily restored in places,
have still a fine air of antiquity; which air of antiquity the massive
walls, narrow window-slits, and the close-growing mantle of ivy that,
in places, adds a welcome note of greenery, do much to maintain. The
effect, at any rate, is complete. In the Tower precincts you seem to
be really in mediæval London. Just so, you imagine, in all essentials,
only still grassy and not quite so shut in by houses, must "Tower
Green" have looked on that terrible day so dramatically described by
Froude:
"A little before noon, on the 19th of May, Anne Boleyn,
Queen of England, was led down to the green where the young
grass and the white daisies of summer were freshly bursting
in the sunshine. A little cannon stood loaded on the
battlements, the motionless cannoneer was ready with smoking
linstock at his side, and when the crawling hand upon the
dial of the great Tower clock touched the midday hour, that
cannon would tell to London that all was over."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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