As I have pointed out in the Introduction to this book, reliable historical details regarding the Tower are very meagre up to the date of the reign of Edward III., but with the reign of Richard II. the story of the Tower becomes of interest. Holinshed describes at some length the splendours of the new King’s coronation. How the youthful monarch, who was “as beautiful as an archangel”—as the life-size portrait of Richard in Westminster Abbey proves—clad in white robes, issued from the Tower surrounded by a vast retinue of knights and nobles. He tells us of the streets through which the royal cortege took its way to the Abbey, all adorned with tapestry, the conduits running with wine, and the pageants performed in the principal thoroughfares. Shortly after this Wat Tyler’s Rebellion broke out, and the young King with his mother sought refuge in the Tower. How the revolt ended is too well known to require telling here at length—how the mob surged angrily round the fortress, “at times,” as Froissart writes, “hooting as loud as if the devils were in them,” how Lord Mayor William Walworth advised Richard to sally forth and himself attack the rebel rout while they were asleep and drunk, and how the young sovereign decided to meet them at Mile End. How during his absence some of the rioters broke into the Tower, massacred the Archbishop of Canterbury, Simon of Sudbury, who, with Sir Robert Hales and some of the courtiers, had taken refuge in the Chapel in the White Tower, and how these were butchered; of the pillage of the royal apartments and the insults which the King’s mother, the widow of the Black Prince, was compelled to endure—all this has been told scores of times since old Froissart wrote his veracious account of these violences which read like a page from the French Revolution of 1789.