With Charles I.--who did not visit the Tower, as far as is known, during his life--the number of noble prisoners by no means grows less. In November 1640 the Earl of Strafford was put in the Tower and condemned to death after trial in Westminster Hall. The King was anxious to save him; the Tower was to be seized and Strafford set at liberty; the royal plans failed; Charles forsook his favourite even after having sworn that not a hair of his head should be injured. The prisoner could anticipate but one end. “Sweet Harte,” he wrote to his wife, “it is long since I writt to you, for I am here in such trouble as gives me little or noe respett.” Archbishop Laud had also been put in the prison-fortress, and as Strafford passed down the sloping pathway that leads from Tower Green to Traitor’s Gate, on his way to execution, Laud, from the window above the arch of Bloody Tower, gave his friend his blessing. The Earl was led out to Tower Hill and suffered death there on May 12, 1641. It is said that 200,000 people witnessed the event, and that it was celebrated by the lighting of bonfires at night. The Archbishop had been arrested at Lambeth Palace and brought to the Tower by the river. He remained for four years in his room in the Bloody Tower, and in his diary describes the visit paid to him by Prynne, “who seeing me safe in bed, falls first to my pockets to rifle them” in the search for papers, which he found in plenty. “He bound up my papers, left two sentinels at my door, and went his way.” On March 10, 1643, Laud was brought to a trial in Westminster Hall which lasted twenty days. Because he had--so the charge was worded--“attempted to subvert religion and the fundamental laws of the realm,” he was condemned, and on Tower Hill, on January 10, 1645, when seventy-two years of age, beheaded. He was buried, as we shall see in a later chapter, in the church of Allhallows Barking, near by. Readers of _John Inglesant_ will remember the vivid description given in that book of these days in the reign of the first Charles, and in the moving picture of the life of the time Laud played no inconsiderable part. “Laud,” says Bishop Collins in his exhaustive _Laud Commemoration_ volume, “deserves to be commemorated as among other things, a true forerunner of social leaders of our own day. To him, at any rate, a man is a man, and no man can be more; the great, the rich, the educated, had no hope of favour from him; rather he reserved his mercy for the poor, the ignorant, and the lowly.... We thank God for his noble care for the poor, and his large and generous aims for the English race; for his splendid example of diligent service in Church and State; for his work as the great promoter of learning of his age.” From such an authority these words are valuable and do much to set the balance right after the splenetic outbursts of Carlyle and many a lesser writer.