The garlands wither on your brow;
Then boast no more your mighty deeds;
Upon Death’s purple altar now
See where the victor-victim bleeds:
Your heads must come
To the cold tomb;
Only the actions of the just
Smell sweet, and blossom in their dust.
J. Shirley.

The actual spot on which the scaffold was erected on the hill is marked, in the garden by which it is now surrounded, by a square of stone paving set in the turf just within the gate on the south-western side of the enclosure. Happy children skip and play on this blood-stained bit of ground; the flowers leap up in April and the birds make melody in May; Nature has healed the sore and done lavishly to make us forget, by her gifts, that here was the scene of angry mobs crying for the slaughter of some of the nation’s noblest men. The{154} block was set up on a high wooden platform so that the ceremony of decapitation was performed well above the heads of the dense crowd that gathered on the hill when the more notable Tower prisoners were brought here to die. It is stated that during the making of the tunnel that goes through Tower Hill to-day the wooden foundations of the scaffold were discovered, and also, near by, the remains of two victims whose bodies had been interred there. Neither the imbedded timber nor the human bones were disturbed, and both still lie beneath the turf to fix accurately the spot of execution. Tower Hill seems to have possessed a gallows also, for we find frequent record of criminals being “hanged in chains” there, either for State or other offences. Under an oak tree that grew on the slope towards the Tower gateway, the public stocks stood, and in the vestry minutes of Allhallows Barking, under the date December 16, 1657, we find it recorded that an order was given “for the erection of stocks and whipping-post required by the statute at the churchyard corner in Tower Street against Mr. Lowe’s, the draper’s, with a convenient shed over them.” How Mr. Lowe, the draper, took the proposition we are not informed, but if he expressed his feelings in forcible language he{155} might, perchance, have met the fate of his neighbour, Mr. Holland, who, three years previously, on April 26, 1654, “was fined 3s. 4d. by Alderman Tichbourne for vain oaths sworn” within the parish of Allhallows. Tower Hill would seem, in those days, to have had a peculiar attraction for “beggars and common vagrants.” It was a popular resort for those who lived to beg and those who begged to live—two very different classes of people, but both equally inconvenient. In the middle seventeenth century the condition of affairs became serious and gave alarm both to officials and to the annoyed inhabitants of the district. In May, 1647, the Vestry of Allhallows “takes into consideration the destitute condition of the poor, and it is ordered that a collection for the poor shall be made every second Sabbath in the month; the churchwardens shall stand at the door ... to receive the freewill offerings of the parishioners,” and in 1654 the residents appeal to the Lord Mayor, for “grate, grate, very grate are your petitioners’ wants, and may it please your Honour to afford them some relief ... without which they are unable to maintain so great a charge.” Hither came “a poore starving Frenchman,” who was solaced with 2s.; a like sum was granted to{156} a “poore Spaniard turned Protestant” and a “poore Dutch minister.” The dwellers on the side of Tower Hill were themselves at times reprimanded by the authorities, for we find that in May, 1653, “Goodman Dawson and his wife” are summoned to appear, “because they would not let their daughter, aged seventeen, go out to service: their pension to be stopped as long as they encourage such indolence,” which seems a just enough proceeding.

This district suffered severely during the three years after the Great Fire. Tower Hill lay on the eastern edge of the city of desolation. The poor proprietor of the Blue Bell tavern, which stood in picturesque angularities overlooking the hill before the catastrophe which reduced it, to quote its owner’s words, “to nothing but a ruinous heap of rubbish,” sought exemption, in 1669, from arrears of lawful dues. These old inns bordering Tower Hill were the scene of frequent “Parish dinners,” at which the consumption of food was so considerable as to lead one to believe that Tower Hill was noted in those days, as it is to-day, for its fresh air, which sharpens the edge of appetite. These feeds were partaken of by just as many “men of import in the parish” as could get into a small{157}

Image unavailable: THE TOWER AND TOWER HILL, SHOWING SITE OF THE SCAFFOLD, IN THE GARDEN
THE TOWER AND TOWER HILL, SHOWING SITE OF THE SCAFFOLD, IN THE GARDEN

room, “mine host’s best parlour.” On April 26, 1629, they consumed “5 stone of beefe, 2 legges of mutton, 2 quarters of lamb, 3 capons,” and so on. A few weeks afterwards they are at it again and “dine upon 5 ribbs of beef, a side of lamb, 2 legges of mutton, 2 capons; and did drink wine and beer to the value of ￡l:7s.” This reminds one of Falstaff’s feeds in Eastcheap and his capacity for imbibing Canary sack. At one meal, in Henry IV., Shakespeare makes the fat knight, if we go by the bill presented afterwards, drink sixteen pints of wine! In 1632 sack was sold in the City at 9d. per quart, claret at 5d., and Malmsey and muscadine at 8d.

In Queen Anne’s reign Tower Hill is described as “an open and spacious place, set with trees, extending round the west and north parts of the Tower, where there are many good new buildings, mostly inhabited by gentry and merchants.” In the contemporary drawings it is shown as an open space, but singularly devoid of trees. The artists may have been so intent upon crowding their pictures with tightly packed citizens gazing upon the decapitation of some unfortunate nobleman that they forgot to put in the trees. Certainly several of the fine trees that now adorn Trinity{158} Square are of some age, and represent the survivors of that fragment of the ancient forest which crept up to the eastern side of the hill, and which we see so plainly marked in many of the old maps.

In a house on the western side of Tower Hill Lady Raleigh dwelt with her son when her husband was denied her society. From her window she could look out day by day upon the Brick Tower to which Raleigh had been removed, and tradition asserts that she was able to communicate with him and send him gifts in spite of Waad’s stringent orders. The house in which William Penn was born, on October 14, 1644, stood on the east side of the hill; its site is covered by the new roadway leading to the Minories. Penn was sent to school at Chigwell, in Essex, and it was during those days of boyhood that he had been impressed by the preaching of a Quaker preacher which led him to forsake the Church of his baptism (he was baptized, as we shall see in the following chapter, in Allhallows Barking), and join the Society of Friends. Thomas Otway, the poet, abused by Rochester in his Session of the Poets, and praised by Dryden, died, it is believed of starvation, in the Bull Inn on Tower Hill, when only thirty-four{159} years old. That great Elizabethan, Edmund Spenser, was born near Tower Hill in 1552, and passed his boyhood there, before going, when sixteen, to Pembroke College, Cambridge. In Little Tower Street, in a timber-fronted, many-gabled house, now, alas, swept away, James Thomson wrote his poem Summer, published in 1727. So much for literary associations.

Peter the Great, who raised Russia “out of the slough of ignorance and obscurity,” in order to superintend the building of a navy took upon himself the task of learning shipbuilding, first as a common labourer, afterwards as a master craftsman. He came to London for four months and worked in the dockyards by day and drank heavily in a public-house in Allhallows Barking parish at night. He was accustomed “to resort to an inn in Great Tower Street and smoke and drink ale and brandy, almost enough to float the vessel he had been helping to construct.” Barrow, his biographer, states that “the landlord had the Czar of Muscovy’s head painted and put up for his sign, which continued until the year 1808, when a person of the name of Waxel took a fancy to the old sign and offered the then occupier of the house to paint him a new one for it. A copy was accordingly made from the{160} original, which maintains its station to the present day as the sign of the Czar’s Head.” The house has since been rebuilt and the sign removed, but the name remains. While the Earl of Rochester was in disgrace at Court in Charles II.’s time he is said to have “robed and bearded himself as an Italian quack or mountebank physician, and, under the name of Bendo, set up at a goldsmith’s house, next door to the Black Swan in Tower Street,” where he advertised that he “was to be seen from three of the clock in the afternoon till eight at night.” The second Duke of Buckingham came, once or twice in disguise, in his days of political intrigue, to a house facing Tower Hill, to consult an old astrologer who professed to draw horoscopes. In Seething Lane, then known as Sidon Lane, which runs from Allhallows Barki............