If I were ance at London Tower
Where I was wont to be,
I never mair suld gang frae hame
Till borne on a bier tree.
Old Scots Ballad.
The Tower as palace and prison has been singularly neglected in literature. When we consider the part it has played in our history, how closely it is knit up in the woof and web of our national life, from far-off days when England had not risen to the measure of her greatness, down to the last Hanoverian, this fact surprises us. Shakespeare might well have laid all the scenes of another Hamlet within its walls; Scott might have given its name to another Waverley Novel. The possibilities are endless. If Scott had touched it we should have been spared the gloomy sentimentalities{2} of Ainsworth; Shakespeare, in five acts, could have given us a truer picture of Tower comedy and tragedy than the tomes of Bayley and De Ros. Scott would have cast the same romance over the Tower as he did over the rugged strip of land that lies between Callander and Inversnaid. We do not go to the Trossachs because we have read of it in a gazetteer, nor would we seek the Forest of Arden because we desired to walk in a wood. Burnham Beeches would serve the purpose equally well. But we go to the Tower because we have some vague idea that in our school-days we remember it having been mentioned, during the history lesson, as a place where men were put into dungeons, sometimes tortured, frequently beheaded. We have some indistinct notion, too, that our earlier kings lived there, but whether they lived there at the same time as the men of State they had imprisoned, executed, or burnt, we should not like to say off-hand. And if the Court was held here in the Tower, we have never tried to imagine in what part of the building it could have been properly accommodated. We can accept Whitehall and Windsor without a murmur, for the very names suggest kingliness and ample space. But—the Tower! It seems too grim and grimy,{3} too insignificant in position, too circumscribed to conjure up visions of olden pageantries of State. It is just here that the master-hand would have changed our view. A tragedy for the stage of the Blackfriars Theatre or the Globe in Southwark, the work of a month of summer mornings at Abbotsford, or of winter afternoons in Castle Street, would have fixed for all time the essentials in the picture, and we should have gone to the Tower with the definite aim of seeing the walls wherein a Malvolio strutted, where a Macbeth made murder, or where a Romeo pined. As we walked over Tower Green we might have expected to meet a Dandie Dinmont with the Peppers and Mustards at his heels, a Rashleigh lurking by, a Dugald Dalgetty of Drumthwacket discussing the merits of Rhenish wine and Kirschenwasser with the yeomen warders. Had we lived in the Tower through the greater part of a book, as we are shut up in Loch Leven Castle with Queen Mary in The Abbot, we should have visited again and again the rooms and cells in which, with Roland Graeme and the Douglases, we had spent so unforgettable a time in our lives.
It is true that Shakespeare lays scenes of his historical plays in the Tower, and that Scott brings{4} Julian Peveril and Nigel within its Traitor’s Gate, for a space; but the dramatist is merely copying locality from the history books, and the novelist is so impatient with the fate that has carried two of his young men under the archway of the Bloody Tower that he cuts off his chapter with the words, “But the thoughts and occurrences of a prison are too uniform for a narrative, and we must now convey our readers into a more bustling scene.” Really, Sir Walter, this is too scant an excuse to drive us out of one of the most wonderful buildings in the world to “the spacious mansion of the Duke of Buckingham with the demesne belonging to it,” the foundations of which are now covered by the Hotel Cecil, and the “demesne” blotted out by the buildings of the Strand and the Adelphi.
“The tide carried them up under a dark and lowering arch, closed at the upper end by the well-known Traitor’s Gate, formed like a wicket of huge intersecting bars of wood, through which might be seen a dim and imperfect view of soldiers and warders upon duty, and of the steep ascending causeway which leads up from the river into the interior of the fortress. By this gate—and it is the well-known circumstance which assigned its{5} name—those accused of State crimes were usually committed to the Tower. The Thames afforded a secret and silent mode of conveyance for transporting thither such whose fallen fortunes might move the commiseration, or whose popular qualities might excite the sympathy, of the public; and even where no cause for especial secrecy existed, the peace of the city was undisturbed by the tumult attending the passage of the prisoner and his guards through the most frequented streets.” Here we have the beginning of quite an admirable Tower romance. Our hero lands at the fatal steps, and as he walks up under the Bloody Tower a handkerchief is dropped down from the window of the cell in which Archbishop Laud was imprisoned. From within that darkened room “a female voice, in a tone wherein grief and joy were indescribably mixed, exclaimed, ‘My son!—my dear son!’” We feel our plot moves quickly when the warder picks up the mysterious bit of cambric and “looks at it with the jealous minuteness of one who is accustomed to detect secret correspondence in the most trifling acts of intercourse.
“‘There may be writing on it with invisible ink,’ said one of his comrades.
“‘It is wetted, but I think it is only with tears,’{6} answered the senior. ‘I cannot keep it from the poor gentleman.’
“‘Ah, Master Coleby,’ said his comrade, in a gentle tone of reproach, ‘you would have been wearing a better coat than a yeoman’s to-day had it not been for a tender heart.’”
“‘It signifies little,’ said old Coleby, ‘while my heart is true to my King, what I feel in discharging my duty, or what coat keeps my old bosom from the cold weather.’”
Spoken like a true son of the old Tower, we say, and feel ourselves already with Peveril listening to the warders’ talk as they take him to his cell. We begin to breathe the Tower atmosphere, we hear a groan from one cell, the clank of chains from another; we see a young yeoman whispering words of love into the ear of a maid who was born and has grown up within the battlements that bound us on all sides, and we see some boys at play round the spot where to-morrow a human being may suffer death. And over all this little world within the walls, where comedy and tragedy shake hands each day, rises the Conqueror’s Norman keep unchanged and unchangeable. Here is a quarry indeed in which to dig for material for a whole series of novels and plays, and{7} yet Sir Walter beheads our little romance on Tower Green, and spirits us away “into a more bustling scene.”
Shakespeare brings us to the Tower four times in the course of the three parts of King Henry VI. and four times during King Richard III. In the former play we witness the death of the imprisoned Edmund Mortimer; in the fourth act of Part II. there is a short Tower scene of a dozen lines; the sixth scene of Part III. Act IV., headed “A room in the Tower,” brings us to King Henry asking the Lieutenant of the Tower what fees incurred during his (the King’s), captivity are due to him; and in the sixth scene of the last act of the same part, we are again in “A room in the Tower,” where “King Henry is discovered sitting with a book in his hand, the Lieutenant attending.” Here, in the course of the scene, Henry is stabbed by Gloucester, and with the words, “O, God forgive my sins, and pardon thee!” dies. In Richard III. when, in the first act, we are taken into the “room in the Tower” in which Clarence is murdered, and see the evil deed performed as, later in the play, we are again in the Tower at the smothering of the sleeping Princes, we feel that Shakespeare has in these moving scenes brought{8} before our eyes the grim reality of two evil deeds done in secret within the prison-house set up by William the Norman and Henry III. But here, again, our dramatist is only telling over again the story told in England’s records, and it is all a tale of unrelieved gloom. That is why we have come to associate the Tower with murder, torture, and evil passions. We forget that the sun shone on the Royal Palace, on the Green, and even sent a beam of its rays into many a dreary cell; that flowers grew in the constable’s garden and made fragrance there as sweetly as in the cottage gardens deep down in the quietude of the shires; that jailors and warders had not invariably hearts of stone; that prisoners by taking thought and snatching an instant opportunity had found a way through the walls, then to a boat on the river, and so to liberty. In describing the shifts and hopes and disappointments that at last reached their close in so happy a “curtain,” we would wish our dramatist had been moved to write another All’s Well That Ends Well, with a Tower background.
When we discover Prince Henry, Poins, and old Sir John at their “deep drinking” at the Boar’s Head Tavern, we feel we have the Eastcheap of the early fifteenth century re-created for us, and{9}
Image unavailable: THE BYWARD AND BELL TOWERS, WITH THE KING’S HOUSE ON THE RIGHT, LOOKING FROM THE TRAITOR’S GATE
THE BYWARD AND BELL TOWERS, WITH THE KING’S HOUSE ON THE RIGHT, LOOKING FROM THE TRAITOR’S GATE
that is because Shakespeare is allowing his fancy free play and is not bound down to the repetition of mere historical facts. So would we have gained had he dealt thus with the Tower and laid a stage-romance there, as well as the portions of the strictly historical plays we have already referred to. The history of the Tower, as the history of other places, will give us names of famous men and the numbering of years in plenty, but of the inner everyday life of some early century there—nothing. It is only the skilful in stagecraft and romance that dare touch the Tower to turn its records to such uses; men of less skill fail, and give us novels and plays that make weary reading and weary sitting-out. Many a tale has been penned of the times of the Papist prosecution, for instance, into which the people of the Tower have been brought, but so feeble has the grasp of the subject been that we turn to actual history for the “real romance” and exclaim, with greater conviction than ever, that fact is more wonderful than fiction.
It has been said that “the distinctive charm of the historical novel is that it seems to combine fact and fiction in a way that tickles the intellectual palate. In conversation we are interested in a story if some one we know is an actor in it.{10} Historical fiction has a like piquancy because it mingles men and women known to tradition and history with fictitious heroes and heroines and minor characters. Then life is large and important; we learn what it is to be of some service to the State; we feel the fascination of great causes and great leaders, the reviving influence of the liberty of wide spaces in time and distance. There we breathe an ampler ether, a diviner air,” and in spite of Sir Leslie Stephen, who characterises the historical romance as “pure cram or else pure fiction,” we prefer to have our history made living for us by the touch of a Shakespeare or a Scott.
To come to our own day, I can imagine no more delightful excursion into the brighter side of Tower romance than the wholly fictitious but happily conceived Savoy opera, The Yeomen of the Guard. Who can look upon the White Tower here, after seeing its model on the Savoy stage, and yet not remember the delicious melodies of the opera? The very spirit of Tower times of long ago, of Tower griefs and joys, of Tower quips and cranks and lilting songs, seems brought before us in the theatre when, on the rising of the curtain, we look across Tower Gr............