With the close of the reign of James I. the Tower ceased to be a royal residence—the Stuart kings, in fact, never passing more than a night or two in the old fortress prior to their coronation, after which they only visited it on very rare occasions. James himself only occupied the Tower-Palace on the eve of opening his first Parliament; and as the plague had broken out in the city at the time of Charles the First’s coronation, that king did not even stay the previous night in the building, nor does he appear ever to have visited the fortress during the whole of his stormy reign of four and twenty years. A very remarkable man occupied a prison in the Tower early in Charles’s reign. This was Sir John Eliot, “fiery Eliot” Carlyle calls him. He was first of that noble band of patriots who defied Charles’s tyranny, and had been sent to the Tower in the winter of 1624–25 for censuring Buckingham during Charles’s second Parliament, but he remained there only a short time. In the March of 1628, however, Eliot, with a batch of independent members of the House of Commons—amongst whom were Denzil Holles, Selden, Valentine, Coryton, and Heyman—was again imprisoned in the Tower. Eliot had boldly declared that the “King’s judges, Privy Council, Judges and learned Council had conspired to trample under their feet the liberties of the subjects of the realm, and the liberties of the House.” Denzil Holles and Valentine were the two members who had kept the Speaker in his chair by main force; the others were committed to prison for using language reflecting on the King and his Ministers. For the following three months these members of Parliament were kept in close confinement in the fortress, books and all writing materials being strictly kept from them. In May, Sir John Eliot was taken to Westminster, where an inquiry was held but no judgment given. After his return to the Tower, however, Eliot was allowed to write letters, and was also given “the liberty of the Tower,” and permitted to see a few friends. In the month of October Eliot and the others were taken to the chambers of the Lord Chief-Justice, and thence to the Marshalsea Prison, a change which he jokingly described as having “left their Palace in London for country quarters at Southwark.” Then they were tried, and Eliot, being judged the most culpable, was fined two thousand pounds, and ordered to be imprisoned in the Tower during the King’s pleasure. As for the fine, Eliot remarked that he “possessed two cloaks, two suits of clothes, two pairs of boots, and a few books, and if they could pick two thousand pounds out of that, much good might it do them.” The fearless member never quitted the Tower again, for a galloping consumption carried him off two years after he had written the above lines. There can be no doubt that this consumption was not a little owing to the harsh treatment he endured. In 1630 he wrote to his friend Knightley, alluding to rumours of his being released.