But now comes a break in the tales of bloodshed, and the Tower awoke once more to the sounds of feasting and rejoicing. In celebration of the marriage of Prince Arthur and Katherine of Aragon in St. Paul’s Cathedral, great tournaments and banquetings took place within the Tower and in its immediate vicinity. Tower Hill was gay with the coming and going of festive crowds; the Tower walls echoed what they seldom heard--the sounds of piping and dancing. Records tell us, too, of elaborate pageants which strove to show the descent of the bridegroom from Arthur of the Round Table. This method of impressing the moving scenes of history on the spectator is not unknown to us in the present day. Hardly had five months passed away, however, when the Prince, who was but a lad of fifteen, lay dead, and his mother, Elizabeth of York, who had given birth to a daughter in the Tower in 1503, died nine days after Prince Arthur. When six more years had passed, the King, whose reign had been so troubled, was laid by the side of his wife, in “the glorious shrine in Westminster Abbey which bears his name.” Henry VIII. was now on the throne, at the age of eighteen, and once again the Tower looms largely in the view, and approaches the height of its notoriety as State prison and antechamber to the place of death. But, as in former times, the record is not one of unrelieved gloom. The two sides of the picture are admirably exemplified at the beginning of Henry’s reign, for, shortly after he had imprisoned his father’s “extortioners,” Empson and Dudley, and subsequently caused them to be beheaded on Tower Hill, he made great show and ceremony during the Court held at the Tower before the first of his many weddings. Twenty-four Knights of the Bath were created, and, with all the ancient pomp and splendour--for Henry had a keen eye for the picturesque--the usual procession from Tower to Westminster duly impressed, by its glitter, a populace ever ready to acclaim a coronation, in the too-human hope that the new will prove better than the old. The young King appointed Commissioners to make additions and improvements within the Tower. The roomy Lieutenant’s House was built, and had access to the adjoining towers; additional warders’ houses were erected and alterations were made within the Bell and St. Thomas’s Towers. About this time the White Tower received attention, and from the State Papers of the period we learn that it was “embattled, coped, indented, and cressed with Caen stone to the extent of five hundred feet.” It is almost as though Henry were anxious that his royal prison should be prepared to receive the many new occupants of its rooms and dungeons that he was about to send there, for no sooner were these renovations completed than the chronicle of bloodshed begins afresh.