On the night of Saturday, the 30th of October 1841, the great Armoury, or storehouse, to the east of St Peter’s Chapel, was completely gutted. The fire broke out in the Bowyer Tower, which abutted on the Armoury; an overheated flue in a stove is supposed to have been the cause. The Armoury had been commenced in the reign of James II. and completed in the reign of William and Mary, to whom, when it was finished, a banquet had been given in the great hall of the building. This hall, which occupied the whole length of the first floor, was afterwards used as a storehouse for small arms, 150,000 stands of which were destroyed by the fire; besides these, were numbers of cannon and trophies taken in the field. The loss caused by the conflagration was estimated at £200,000. The Regalia was saved from the Martin Tower by one of the superintendents of the Metropolitan police, named Pierce, an incident of bravery which Cruikshank perpetuated in one of his finest etchings. Accompanied by the Keeper of the Jewels and his wife, Pierce, with some other officials, broke the bars of the cage behind which the Royal jewels were kept, with crowbars, and then at great personal risk he managed to squeeze himself through the narrow opening thus made, handing out the crown, orb, and sceptre to those outside. The silver font was too large to pass through the opening, and it was necessary to break away another bar of the grating. Repeated cries from the outside now warned the party to leave the Jewel Room, as the fire was rapidly gaining upon the tower, but Pierce remained until he had secured the whole of the Regalia. The heat inside was so intense that some of the cloth upon which the Crown jewels rested was charred. “Some public reward to Mr Pierce,” writes Chamber, in his “Book of Days,” “who had so gallantly imperilled himself to save the Regalia of the United Kingdom, would have been a fitting tribute to his bravery. But no such recompense was ever bestowed.” [Illustration: _Sketch of the Fire at the Tower in 1841._]