Elizabeth once within the Tower, it became the more difficult for Mary and her Council to know how to act. Judging from her general character, Mary would have been only too ready to shed her sister’s blood, but the Council were more humane than the Queen, and while the followers of Wyatt, and Wyatt himself, were being tortured in order to extract some admissions whereby Elizabeth might be incriminated, the Princess was kept in close confinement. But nothing could be proved against her. In vain the crafty Gardiner examined and cross-examined Elizabeth herself; for a whole month she was not allowed to leave her prison room, mass being said daily in her apartment;—this must have been intensely irritating to the proud spirit of the Protestant Elizabeth. At length her health broke down and she was permitted to walk in the Queen’s Privy Garden, but always accompanied by the Constable of the Tower, the Lieutenant, and a guard of men. There is a story, and probably a true one, of a little boy, aged four, who was wont to bring the Princess flowers to brighten her prison room. On one occasion he was watched as he left, and strictly questioned, with the result that the little fellow’s kind attentions had to cease, by order of Sir John Gage, the Constable. Holinshed has narrated a quarrel that occurred between Elizabeth’s attendants with her in the Tower, and the Constable. The latter had given orders that when her servants brought the Princess’s dinner to the gates of the fortress they were not to be admitted, but were to hand over the provisions to the “common rascall souldiers.” Elizabeth’s servants strongly objected to this arrangement, complaining that the “rascalls” took most of the Princess’s dinner themselves before it reached her, but the only satisfaction they obtained from Sir John was that “if they presumed either to frown or shrug at him” he would “sette them where they should see neither sonne nor moon.” An application to the Privy Council forced the Constable to give way, but Holinshed remarks that he was not over-pleased at having to do so, “for he had good cheare and fared of the best, while her Grace paid for all.” It being impossible to prove anything against Elizabeth she was at length allowed to leave her prison. This she did on the 19th May 1554, under the charge of Sir Henry Bedingfield, and was taken to Woodstock. There is a tradition that when it was known in the City that the Princess had been released from the Tower, some of its church bells rang merry peals of joy, and that when she became Queen she gave those churches silken bell-ropes.