Of all the illustrious prisoners who have been immured here Sir Walter Raleigh is the most interesting. The steps which lead to the first floor of the prison tower open on an arched door, through which he must often have passed; they are as old as the Tower itself, which dates back to Richard III. or Richard II. In the Elizabethan survey of the Tower a walled garden is shown on the plan, facing the north. This was the garden which helped to soften the long imprisonment passed by Sir Walter, and here he whiled away many of the weary hours of his long captivity tending his flowers, or distilling essences in a little garden house which he had built himself. These occupations and the composition of his huge fragment, the famous “History of the World,” which he wrote in the Tower, must have been Raleigh’s greatest consolations during the fourteen long years he passed in the fortress. Raleigh also had the company of his family during one period of his imprisonment, and he was also allowed to have some of the natives he had brought back from Guiana to attend upon him. As the years of his imprisonment increased so did his troubles, and he suffered cruelly from rheumatism and palsy whilst in the Bloody Tower, and in 1606 it was found necessary, if his life was to be preserved, to change his prison. For Raleigh’s memory, among other reasons, the interior of the Bloody Tower is well worth visiting, although the rooms have been modernised. They are now occupied by one of the warders and his family. One chamber is pointed out as that in which the little York princes were smothered. This room has been divided into two, but there is nothing to show that the walls and the ceiling are not the same as those which were there when the murderers entered, having presumably passed through a window at the end of a passage which opens out on to the terraced wall overlooking the river.