The Great Fire of 1666 put the Tower in great danger. Had it reached the walls and set alight the stores of gunpowder lying within, we should have had very little of the work of the Conqueror and Henry III. left to us. The King himself had ordered the demolition of surrounding buildings, and by such means was the progress of the fire checked; Pepys, of course, was running about, and we hear of him “on one of the high places of the Tower” where he was able to look towards London Bridge and did see “an infinite great fire.” George Villiers, second Duke of Buckingham, began his series of five imprisonments in the Tower in 1658, during the Protectorate, and continued them well into Charles’s reign. But though constantly in trouble his offences were as constantly forgiven by the King, and he was never a captive very long. Of Colonel Blood’s escapade in 1671 something will be said in the third chapter, but the irrepressible Pepys was hunting for treasure--not Crown jewels--in 1662 when he was led to believe a sum of £7000 was “hid in the Tower.” He and assistants set to work to dig for this hidden gold, but “it raining and the work being done in the open garden” the search was abandoned. The treasure is yet undiscovered. The amazing [Illustration: GATEWAY OF BLOODY TOWER WITH ENTRANCE TO JEWEL HOUSE (WAKEFIELD TOWER)] Pepys was himself a captive in the Tower from May 1679 to February 1680, and seems to have lived fairly well there if the account of his expenses be any criterion. William Penn was also a captive about this time, and wrote _No Cross, no Crown_ during his imprisonment. That singular invention of Titus Oates, called the Popish Plot, sent about forty men to the block, among them William, Lord Stafford, who was executed on Tower Hill on December 29, 1680. Three years later, the Rye House Plot brought Lord William Russell and Algernon Sidney to the Tower and execution, while Essex, who had also been lodged in the dungeons, and had, like Russell and Sidney, not actually been concerned in the assassination scheme planned at Rye House, was found in his prison with his throat cut.