“In the grey hours of morning, March 24, 1603, watch and ward was kept in London streets; and in all the neighbour counties men who had much at stake in time of crisis wove uncertain plans to meet the thousand chances that day might bring.... When day broke two horsemen were far on the northern road, each spurring to forestall the other at Holyrood with homage impatiently expected by the first ruler of the British Isles. At a more leisurely pace the Elizabethan statesmen were riding in from Richmond, where their mistress lay dead, to Whitehall Gate, where at ten in the morning they proclaimed King James I.... The Lords of the Council showed themselves agreed that there should be no revolution. The decision was silently endorsed by a grateful nation. In city and manor-house men laid aside their arms and breathed again.” In Mr. G. M. Trevelyan’s admirable _England under the Stuarts_, from which these words are taken, a delightful description is given of the state of England at the coming of the King of Scotland to the English throne, and the chapters might well be read in connection with any study of Tower history. For, to understand the happenings within the Tower, it is profitable to have some detailed knowledge of the state of society outside its walls. King James, after his progress “during a month of spring weather” from Edinburgh, came to the Tower and held his first Court there. The usual procession to the Abbey was abandoned owing to plague that lurked in city streets, and rejoicings within Tower walls were less lusty than usual, but the King rode in state from Tower Hill to Westminster two years later to open his first Parliament. It is interesting to read in Mr. Sidney Lee’s _Life of Shakespeare_ that Shakespeare himself, with eight players of the King’s company of actors, walked “from the Tower of London to Westminster in the procession which accompanied the King in his formal entry into London.” There is no other positive record of the great dramatist and poet having visited the Tower. We can but conjecture that a building so indissolubly bound up with the nation’s history would offer no mute appeal to such a mind as his, and that he must have come, at times, to look upon the place where, down to his own day, so many tragic deeds had been done.