prisoners. In 1660 Colonel John Lambert was made captive for opposing
Monk’s scheme for the Restoration. Pepys, who comes upon the scene to
illumine the time with his detailed accounts of happenings grave and
gay, gives, “as related by Rugge,” an account of Lambert’s escape. At
eight of the clock at night, it appears, he slid down, by a rope tied
fast to his window, and was awaited by men ready to take him off by the
river. “She who made the bed being privy to his escape, that night, to
blind the warder when he came to lock the chamber door, went to bed, and
possessed Colonel Lambert’s place and put on his night-cap.” This
interesting female was duly discovered in the morning, after having
deluded the jailer by replying in a manly voice to his “good-night” the
evening before, and was herself made captive for her temerity. Lambert,
who had succeeded in getting to Warwickshire, was recaptured and
subsequently banished.
When Charles II. came to the throne the early years of his rule were
occupied in punishing, with merciless severity, all who had in any way
been aiders or abettors of those responsible for his father’s tragic
death. In the Restoration year the Marquis of Argyll, afterwards
executed in Edinburgh, was a Tower prisoner. Poor Sir Harry Vane, not in
any way convicted of complicity with the regicides, was brought to Tower
Hill in 1662, and there suffered execution without a shadow of justice
to cover the crime. Pepys rose “at four o’clock in the morning” of the
day when Vane was to suffer. “About eleven o’clock we all went out to
Tower Hill, and there, over against the scaffold, made on purpose this
day, saw Sir Harry Vane brought. A very great press of people.” The
people of London at that time went out to see men brought to the block,
just as their successors patronise a Lord Mayor’s show. Pepys had taken
a window in Trinity Square, but was unable to see the actual fall of the
axe because “the scaffold was so crowded that we could not see it done.”
Charles II. was the last of the kings to sleep in the Tower the night
before coronation, and he, in keeping with tradition, made a number of
Knights of the Bath who would, after the ceremonies in St. John’s
Chapel, ride with him in the procession to Westminster on the following
day. Of course Pepys had secured a window “in Corne-hill, and there we
had a good room to ourselves, with wine and good cake, and saw the show
very well.... Glorious was the show with gold and silver, that we were
not able to look at it, our eyes at last being so much overcome,” but
the volatile diarist has sufficiently recovered the power of vision to
observe that “both the King and Duke of York took notice of us as they
saw us at the window.” This proved to be one of the “most glorious
cavalcades” that ever left the Tower.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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