In 1562 a suspected conspiracy to set the Queen of Scots--ill-fated Mary--on the English throne was the cause of Arthur and Edmund de la Pole, great-grandchildren of the murdered Duke of Clarence, being put into the Beauchamp Tower, where, when we reach that portion of the buildings on our rounds, we shall see their inscriptions on the walls. The brothers were fated never to leave their place of confinement alive. After fourteen years of respite, Tower Hill again claimed a victim, the Duke of Norfolk suffering there in June 1579. In the following year Roman Catholic prisoners were brought, one might say in droves, to Tower cells. Many of them were subjected to torture either by the rack, the “Scavenger’s Daughter,” the thumbscrew, or the boot. In 1581 Father Campion, a Jesuit, was hurried to death, and in 1583 we hear of one captive committing suicide in order to escape the awful fate of dismemberment that many of his fellow-prisoners had suffered. It seems as if the sanity of life, the sweet wholesomeness we associate with the Merrie England of Shakespeare’s time, had not pierced the solid crust of Tower tradition. To lay down a comedy of the great dramatist and take up contemporary records of the Tower is as if one had stepped out of the warm sunshine and fragrant air of mid-June into a dark, damp vault whose atmosphere stings with the chill of a November night. Tower dungeons were becoming too crowded. Many a poor obscure captive was sent over to France, perhaps to a harder lot, and the vacant places were filled by political offenders. Northumberland killed himself in the Tower; Arundel, made prisoner with him, died--from self-imposed privations, it is said--some months after. Sir John Perrot, Lord Deputy of Ireland, was charged with using some hasty words against the Queen, and that was considered sufficiently dire an offence for Lord Chancellor Hatton to have him brought to the Tower. But Elizabeth refused to sign the warrant for his execution. He died, in his captivity, after six months, of a broken heart. Of the imprisonment of Raleigh, and of Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex, something will be said when we come to examine those portions of the Tower with which their names are associated. With the death of Elizabeth the curtain falls on the last of the Tudors--a race of sovereigns who had used their faithful Tower well, as palace, fortress, prison, and secret place in which their enemies were put out of existence. Of many of the greater names of Elizabeth’s reign, Tower annals bear no record, but soldier, statesman, or ecclesiastic, having crossed the Queen’s humour, found it but a step from Court favour to Traitor’s Gate.