_Execution of the Earl of Strafford, May 12ᵗʰ. 1641._] / The first beginnings of a Tower regiment, according to Mr J. H. Round, was the appointment of two hundred men as Tower Guards in 1640. In November of the same year Charles promised to remove this garrison, but he did not do so until the city offered to lend him £25,000, on the condition that these troops should be taken away, as well as the ordnance from the White Tower, which was a perpetual menace to the safety of the city. Aersen, the Dutch Ambassador, writing to his Government about this time, says, “le dessein semble aller sur le tour.” Still the King would not withdraw the soldiers or the cannon, and then the House of Lords expostulated with him, but Charles excused his breach of faith by saying that his object was merely to insure the safety of the stores and ammunition in the fortress. After his plot to seize the Tower had been made public, the train bands belonging to the Tower Hamlets occupied and garrisoned the fortress. These train bands, as well as those of Southwark and Westminster, were distinct from the city train bands. On the 3rd of January 1642, the King made another attempt to garrison the Tower with his own troops, which also proved a failure. On this occasion Sir John Byron entered the fortress with a detachment of gunners and disarmed the men of the Tower Hamlets, but the city train bands came to the rescue, and Byron, with his gunners, had to beat a retreat. When, in 1642, the Lieutenant of the Tower, Sir John Conyers, resigned his charge, the Parliament conferred the Lieutenancy upon the Lord Mayor of London. Later, in 1647, when the city had taken the side of the Parliament against the King, Fairfax was appointed Constable; the Constables had succeeded each other according to the chances which brought the King or the Parliament to the top, thus Lord Cottrington had been replaced by Sir William Balfour, and he in his turn had given room to Sir Thomas Lumsford, a “soldier of fortune,” writes Ludlow of him in his “Memoirs,” “fit for any wicked design.” Lumsford, so uncomplimentarily referred to by Ludlow, was supposed to be willing to act according to the King’s good pleasure, and succeeded in making himself so unpopular with the Londoners, that they petitioned the House of Lords to beg the King to place the custody of the Tower in other hands, the Lord Mayor saying he could not undertake to prevent the apprentices from rising were Lumsford allowed to remain in office; so Charles unwillingly gave the keys of the fortress to the care of Sir John Byron. Byron, in his turn, was succeeded by Sir John Conyers, who had distinguished himself in the Scottish wars and had been Governor of Berwick; and after Conyers followed Lord Mayor Pennington,[4] “in order,” as Clarendon writes, “that the citizens might see that they were trusted to hold their own reins and had a jurisdiction committed to them which had