21. The Tower from Great Tower Street (South Porch of Allhallows Barking) 184 22. Church of Allhallows Barking by the Tower (East side of South Aisle) 202 _Sketch Plan of the Tower at end of Volume._ THE TOWER OF LONDON CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION If I were ance at London Tower Where I was wont to be, I never mair suld gang frae hame Till borne on a bier tree. _Old Scots Ballad._ The Tower as palace and prison has been singularly neglected in literature. When we consider the part it has played in our history, how closely it is knit up in the woof and web of our national life, from far-off days when England had not risen to the measure of her greatness, down to the last Hanoverian, this fact surprises us. Shakespeare might well have laid all the scenes of another _Hamlet_ within its walls; Scott might have given its name to another Waverley Novel. The possibilities are endless. If Scott had touched it we should have been spared the gloomy sentimentalities of Ainsworth; Shakespeare, in five acts, could have given us a truer picture of Tower comedy and tragedy than the tomes of Bayley and De Ros. Scott would have cast the same romance over the Tower as he did over the rugged strip of land that lies between Callander and Inversnaid. We do not go to the Trossachs because we have read of it in a gazetteer, nor would we seek the Forest of Arden because we desired to walk in a wood. Burnham Beeches would serve the purpose equally well. But we go to the Tower because we have some vague idea that in our school-days we remember it having been mentioned, during the history lesson, as a place where men were put into dungeons, sometimes tortured, frequently beheaded. We have some indistinct notion, too, that our earlier kings lived there, but whether they lived there at the same time as the men of State they had imprisoned, executed, or burnt, we should not like to say off-hand. And if the Court was held here in the Tower, we have never tried to imagine in what part of the building it could have been properly accommodated. We can accept Whitehall and Windsor without a murmur, for the very names suggest kingliness and ample space. But--the Tower! It seems too grim and grimy, too insignificant in position, too circumscribed to conjure up visions of olden pageantries of State. It is just here that the master-hand would have changed our view. A tragedy for the stage of the Blackfriars Theatre or the Globe in Southwark, the work of a month of summer mornings at Abbotsford, or of winter afternoons in Castle Street, would have fixed for all time the essentials in the picture, and we should have gone to the Tower with the definite aim of seeing the walls wherein a Malvolio strutted, where a Macbeth made murder, or where a Romeo pined. As we walked over Tower Green we might have expected to