Towton Heath was fought and lost by the Lancastrians; the Battle of Hexham crushed the remnant of the King’s army; the valiant Queen Margaret fled, taking her young son with her; and, very soon afterwards, poor Henry himself was led captive, and placed in the Wakefield Tower where, in the room in which the regalia is shown at the present day, he was murdered, we are told, by Richard of Gloucester or, more probably, by his orders, on May 21, 1471. But before his death, Warwick--that king-maker slain at Barnet in 1471--had given orders for Henry to be led on horseback through the city streets “while a turncoat populace shouted ‘God save King Harry!’” This was a poor and short-lived triumph. The weary-hearted King, “clad in a blue gown,” soon returned to the walls he was fated never again to leave alive. The city was flourishing under Yorkist rule and was not minded to seek Lancastrian restoration. It was the pull of prosperity against sentiment; the former won, as it usually contrives to do, and along with sentiment down went King Henry. Queen Margaret had meanwhile been brought to the Tower. Though she and her husband were both within Tower gates they did not meet again. The Queen was imprisoned for five years--for part of that time at Windsor--and then was allowed to return to her own country. We meet her once again in Scott’s _Anne of Geierstein_. Cannon, that had, as has been said, come into use for the first time at Crecy, were during Henry’s reign used by the Yorkists to “batter down” the walls of the Tower, but unsuccessfully. In 1843, when the moat was dried and cleared out, a large number of stone cannon-balls were discovered, and in all probability were those used at this bombardment. Edward IV. had given the customary feast at the Tower on the coronation-eve and “made” thirty-two knights within its walls. These Knights of the Bath, “arrayed in blue gowns, with hoods and tokens of white silk upon their shoulders” rode before the new King on his progress from the Tower to Westminster Abbey on his coronation day. The King began his reign by sending Lancastrians to the Tower and beheading two, Sir Thomas Tudenham and Sir William Tyrrell, on Tower Hill. The Tower had come upon its darkest days. Though Edward favoured the fortress a good deal as a place of residence, rebuilt its fortifications and deepened its moat, he also used it [Illustration: PORTION OF THE ARMOURY, WHITE TOWER] as a convenient place for ridding himself of all he wished to put out of his way. Victim after victim suffered cruel death within its walls. His brother Clarence mysteriously disappeared--tradition has maintained he was drowned in a butt of Malmsey wine, but that has never been proved in any way. However, the secrecy as to the manner of his death makes it none the less tragic to the imagination; how his last moments were passed the stones of the Bowyer Tower alone could tell us.