TO visit the Tower is to draw aside the curtain that separates the past from the present. It is to go back a thousand years, and commune with those who have long ages been dust, and of whom only a memory remains. Once in the Tower, one seems to be with them, to see them, and to feel their influence as though they were living, moving beings, and not historical ghosts.

The vast structure, now in the heart of the great city, though once on its borders, is as much out of place in this day and age of the world, as a soldier would be in any of the suits of armor within its walls. It is war in the midst of peace, it is a fortress surrounded by traffic, it is lawless force against law, it is simply an incongruity, and only valuable and interesting as showing what was, in comparison with what is.

It was built originally as a stronghold, to keep the fiery and oft-times rebellious citizens of London in check, and was afterward occupied alternately, or at the same time, as a prison or palace. Many a terrible drama has been enacted within the ancient walls, many a broken heart has wasted away within the solid stone in its gloomy dungeons, and many a noble head has parted company with its body, under its cold shadow, and there is any quantity of “human interest,” as the dramatists say, connected with it. There is a strong flavor of murder all through it, there is cruelty written upon every stone, and treachery and death on every inch of the cold, paved floors.

If a king desired to put quietly out of the way a dangerous rival, or if he lusted after a woman, or wanted anything that was especially unlawful and damnable, he could not have been better fixed for the business than with this fortress, provided he had a sufficient number of servitors to do his bidding faithfully. And that sort of material was very plenty, in those days, for kings who had the means of rewarding them. The devil himself could not have fitted up a better arrangement if he had given his whole mind to the matter, and his ability in this direction is unquestioned.

There are dungeons where an unfortunate’s cries could never be heard; there are cells so strong that escape was simply impossible, even without the watchful care of the soldiery with which it was filled, and in short over each of its gates might well be written, “Who enters here leaves hope behind.” It is a wonderful but an intensely disagreeable place.

These old places are not the most cheerful in the world, but still I like them. A ride behind a tandem team through the green lanes of Hampstead, with the beautiful hedges on either hand, and the quaint old houses with their steep red-tiled roofs, and their low rooms and curious little windows that look more like eyes than windows, the broad fields, grass green, (grass is greener in England than America,) with the beautiful sleek cattle feeding peacefully, is a more pleasant thing, for it is a singular as well as delightful mixture of to-day and yesterday. The fields and cattle are of to-day, the houses are of a long ago yesterday, but there is added what the Tower has not, the sun, which is of yesterday, to-day, and to-morrow, shining down, and lighting up the quiet glories that surround you. This is not depressing. The houses fit the atmosphere—in good sooth I cannot imagine such houses in any other atmosphere, and certainly the atmosphere would not be complete without the houses. Everything adapts itself to everything else. A pale face would be as much out of place in an American rum shop as a strawberry patch in an alkaline desert. Rum requires something lurid—the quiet, soft, hazy English atmosphere exactly fits the soft brown and the subdued red that almost narrowly escapes being a brown of the houses.

But in the Tower you have nothing that is soft, nothing that is pleasant, nothing one would like to have about him.

The Tower is a good thing for a world to see, so that it can know what to avoid.

Two teachers of elocution were in great rivalry. One gave an exhibition with his pupils.

“Where are your classes to-day?” asked a friend of the other one.

“Gone to Mr. Blank’s exhibition.”

“Do you permit your pupils to attend your rival’s exhibition?”

“Certainly. I want them to learn what to avoid.”

No light ever penetrates its gloomy walls. There are but two colors—the blackened wood painted by time, and the cold gray of the stones. All the color indicates cruelty—the very stones typify the character of the men who put them together, and their successors who used them. It is the cruelest appearing place on the face of the earth, now that the French Bastile is gone, and I doubt if a Frenchman could possibly construct a place so grimly severe, so unutterably merciless as the Tower. He would have had some fancy about it—it would have been lighted up somehow.

The Tower is so severe that a picture of a beheading, or of a torture, would be cheerful by contrast and improve it.

I would suggest now, that to enliven the old place a bit, and save a man from giving way too much to the depression that governs the spot, that a fresco be painted representing the burning of John Rogers at the stake, or the disemboweling of the Waldenses, or some cheerful historical picture of that kind. Should the artist select pictures from Fox’s Book of Martyrs, that one where the soldiers are crowding people off a precipice so that they fall upon iron spikes about four feet long, would impart a cheerful tone to the surroundings in the Tower and make one feel more kindly toward his race.

As it is, he who enters and stays awhile becomes a convert to the doctrine of Total Depravity. He gets blood-thirsty himself, and feels like snatching up some one of the million weapons that are stored there and killing somebody. The articles preserved with so much care are all suggestive of blood. It is a Moloch of a place; but one must see it, all the same.

The most cheerful place in the great structure is the jewel room, or tower, as it is called. It isn’t very much of a room, but there is a great deal in it which is of interest. Here are kept the regalia appertaining to the throne. In glass cases very carefully guarded are all the crowns of the royal family, and the scepters and things which they display on state occasions, and a rare lot they are.

The prevailing impression among those not used to royalty is that the King and Queen and the rest of their “royal nibses,” as an American would irreverently say, go about dressed in velvet robes, covered with jewels, with crowns upon their heads; that when the Queen goes to bed at night she removes the crown, or a dozen maids of honor do it for her, and that she resumes it the first thing in the morning, before she comes down to breakfast. A moment’s reflection will show any one the impossibility of anything of the kind. A crown would be no protection for the head, and velvet robes would be exceedingly warm in summer, and not warm enough in winter; and besides were the Queen to wear a crown with some millions of dollars’ worth of precious stones in it, some enterprising footpad would have it in no time, and then what would she do?

For these reasons, which ought to be satisfactory to any reflective mind, the crowns and articles of like nature are kept in the tower, and are only worn on state occasions, when the public want a free show.

At all other times the Queen dresses like any other lady, with a regular dress, and bustles, and all that sort of thing, and a bonnet, and she dresses frightfully plain, so all the milliners and modistes say, too plain for their trade; for Victoria, to a certain extent, sets the fashion, which the court follows.

But in these cases you shall see the Queen’s crown, a cap of purple velvet enclosed in hoops of silver, surmounted by a ball and cross, and glittering with actual diamonds. In the center is an immense sapphire, and in front is a famous heart-shaped ruby, said to have been worn by the Black Prince. I don’t know the value of this article, or where he stole it, but if Victoria gets hard-up and wants to raise money, I presume the Jews in Petticoat Lane would advance a million or two on it, and take their chances. Queens have done this before now, and all the crown jewels in Europe have been in the hands of the Israelites at different times; but I rather think Victoria will worry through. She has an income of many thousands of pounds a year, and is very economical. If I remember aright, she sent the starving Irish a thousand pounds, which was about her income for an hour. And then an admiring Parliament, to make it good to her, voted her thirty thousand pounds sterling, which the people accepted without a murmur. She finds profit in liberality.

Then there is St. Edward’s Crown, the Prince of Wales’s, the ancient Queen’s Crown, the Queen’s Diadem, that of Charles the Second, and a dozen or two others, with scepters and rods, and all sorts of things which are carried before, or behind, or on one side or the other, of Kings and Queens, on occasions of great solemnity, when the people are to be impressed with a sense of the importance of these individuals to the world at large. The famous Koihnoor, stolen from an East India Prince, some years since, is there—in glass, which is a swindle. We wanted, and expected, when we paid our sixpence, to see the genuine article, not a base imitation. It is as it is at side-shows at a circus, you are allured inside by a picture of a vast giraffe, nipping boughs from trees, and when you have paid and are in, you are shown a stuffed giraffe, who can no more eat boughs from tall trees than he could preach a funeral sermon. Possibly we should have demanded our money back, but we didn’t.

From the jewel room you pass on to an infinity of towers, all through long halls, how long I can’t say, filled with all sorts of armor and weapons. Horses are set up and figures placed upon them, dressed in the identical armor worn by the old kings and nobles, who, in their day, rode about the country clad in iron fish scales, with a half ton of iron, more or less, on their heads, engaged in the (to them) delightful occupation of burning each other’s castles and killing the occupants. They did not require a “cause,” or anything of the sort. If Sir Hugh Bloody-bones wanted the wife or daughter of Sir Magnus Blunderbore, he simply donned his iron, picked up his lance, called together the inferior cut-throats who followed and lived upon him, and went for it. Sir Magnus, if not surprised and murdered in cold blood, and he was generally not, for those old ruffians slept upon their arms, harried the country for supplies, shut the clumsy gates of his castle, and stood the siege. If the castle was carried, all within were put to death, except such of Sir Magnus’ cut-throats who were willing to join Sir Hugh, the women were carried off, and so on. The survivors were willing, always, to join the victor. The successful Knight would say, “Now look here, you fellows, Sir Magnus is dead. I slew him, and you can’t get provisions from him any more, while with me there will always be plenty of prog. I shall keep you busy, for there are other castles to storm, and I am not very particular with my men.”

And they would all “take service,” as they called it, with the successful robber, and go right on as usual. They would take anything.

It was a cheerful life these ancient murderers lived, though the people who supported them didn’t find it so pleasant.

The Horse Armory, so called because the figures in it are mostly equestrian, is one hundred and fifty feet in length by thirty-four in width. There sits a Knight of the time of Henry VI., in complete armor, lance and all, just as he appeared when he started out to kill somebody and steal his effects. The armor, understand, is not a fac-simile, it is the genuine thing, actually worn by the marauder of that time. Then come Knights of the time of Edward III. and Edward IV., both on their horses and armored from top to bottom. How any man could carry such a load of iron and sit upon a horse, and how any horse could carry such a mass of iron, with his own, for the horses were armored also, passes my comprehension. Imagine a man in July, with the thermometer at ninety-five in the shade, with a steel pot on his head, covering his face entirely, with little holes to admit air, with a breast-plate of boiler-iron, and a similar one on his back, with his arms and hands guarded with iron, and his legs and feet likewise, with swords and battle-axes, and daggers hung to him, and a lance fourteen feet in length, to handle, doing battle. Yet they wore all this, and in Palestine, and in every other hot country in the world.

Woe to the Knight who was unhorsed with all this pot-metal on him. He couldn’t rise under the load, and the other one could prod him to death at his leisure, and enjoy himself at it as long as he pleased.

Next to this is the figure of that wonderful old Mormon, Henry VIII. The armor on this figure is the most curious and valuable in the collection. It was presented to him on the occasion of his marriage to Catherine, his No.—,—I forget what her number was—and he wore it at many a tournament. This King, it will be remembered, had a way of getting rid of wives that was far superior to Indiana divorce courts. Whenever he saw a woman that he thought he wanted, and he had an eye for women, he merely accused his wife of being unfaithful to him, and had a court which always brought her in guilty, and her head was chopped off without ceremony, and he married his new flame, only to accuse her and bring her before the court and chop her head off in her turn. He finished eight in this way. It was the Pope’s opposition to one of these little arrangements that brought about the divorce of England from the Church of Rome, and was the beginning of the Protestant movement. But for Henry’s terrible liking for women and his peremptory and decisive way of divorcing wives, I probably to-day should have been a Catholic! What great events spring from trifling causes.

All the way down the long hall are equestrian figures, all armed in the identical armor worn by the men whose names they bear, and between the figures are the arms of the various periods of English history since men took to killing each other as a trade. In this and adjoining halls are grouped very artistically the arms of every country of the globe, and of all ages and times. There are guns of every possible kind, most of them of very rare workmanship, for the mechanics of those old days put more work upon arms than upon anything else, and swords and daggers, and battle-axes, and various devices for knocking out brains.

By the way, the revolver is popularly supposed to be an American invention, but it is not. There are a score of revolvers here that were made almost as soon as gunpowder was invented and came into use. The very one from which Colonel Colt got the idea of a repeating arm is here, and it is identical in construction with that which now graces the thighs of so many Americans, and which has done so much for the glory of our happy country. They were not very much used, however, as, owing to the imperfect means of firing the loads, all the barrels were liable to go off at once, invariably killing the shooter without materially damaging the shootee. The invention of the percussion cap made the revolver practicable, and Colonel Colt’s widow is living in great luxury upon an idea taken by her husband from the Tower of London, the work of some humble mechanic hundreds of years ago. I doubt not that if she could find the heirs of that mechanic she would pension them. But they were doubtless all killed in the wars of the day, and so it probably would not be worth her while to try to seek them out.

To enumerate everything that is curious in the way of arms and armor in this hall would be to make a catalogue. It takes more than a day to merely see (not study) this collection, and then one has his mind overloaded.

The different buildings that make up what is known collectively as the Tower, have all histories, and all bloody ones. There is nothing but blood connected with it. In the White Tower, Sir Walter Raleigh was confined, and near his den is that once occupied by Rudstone, Culpepper, and Sir Thomas Wyat, who were all beheaded on Tower Hill. The Council Room was used by the Kings when they wanted to give some sort of show of law for a murder, and in this the Council sat when Richard III. ordered Lord Hastings to instant execution.

The Bloody Tower (that would be the proper name for all of them) was where Richard III. was supposed to have murdered the two children of Edward IV., his brother, on which event Shakespeare founded his play of that name. Some English historians have endeavored to show that Richard was no such a man as Shakespeare represents. Instead of being a hump backed, distorted villain, such as we see upon the stage, they insist that he was the handsomest man of his time; that he did not even try to murder the Princes, and, moreover, that he was one of the most humane, politic Kings England ever had, and during his short reign of nine months, instituted material reforms, and did more to promote the welfare of England than any King who had preceded or followed him. Also, they deny the story of his drowning his brother Clarence in a butt of Malmsey wine, and likewise his murder of King Henry.

Probably these historians are right. Since it has been shown that General Jackson did not fight his men behind a breastwork of cotton bales, a delusion that grew up with me, and since it has been demonstrated that there is no maelstrom on the coast of Norway, that takes down ships and whales into its terrible vortex, as shown in the ancient geographies of thirty years ago, I have lost faith in everything. When I want romance I read history, and when I hunger for history I read novels. But whether he was a good man or a bad,

Shakespeare has fixed his flint for all time. The essayist may essay, and facts may be piled up mountain high in his favor, but Richard will always appear to us as Shakespeare painted him, a hump-backed, withered-legged man with a villainous face, killing Princes, stabbing Kings and drowning brothers in wine. Still, I don’t suppose Richard cares now what is said of him. If he killed the Princes, they, dying young and before they could be Kings, and consequently comparatively pure, he will never meet them. If he did not, and is with them, they have had ample time to arrange their little differences. The opinion of the world makes little difference to Richard, whereever he is. Nevertheless, as I wish to stand well with the world hereafter, I shall try not to get the ill-will of the poets whose works are likely to live. Richard’s reputation should be a warning.

The bloody record continues. Devereux Tower is where the brilliant Essex was confined till he was “privately beheaded.” The Byward Tower is where Duke Clarence is said to have been drowned in the wine, which was a great waste of wine, though it was a delicate compliment to the Duke, who was fond of it. It was probably distributed among the soldiers who did the job. In the Brick Tower Lady Jane Grey was immured, and in the Martin Tower Anne Boleyn, one of Henry VIII.’s wives, was confined, till she was beheaded, as well as “several unhappy gentlemen” who were foolish enough to stand up for her, who also had their heads chopped off. The word “unhappy” is not misused in their case. In the Salt Tower is shown an inscription made by a gentleman who was accused of using enchantments “to the hurt of Sir W. St. Lowe and my ladye,” who also found himself short a head one fine morning. It was a comfortable time to live when “Sir W. St. Lowe,” a court favorite, could accuse a man he owed money to of being a wizard, and then ordering him beheaded. It was easier to pay debts in those days than going through bankruptcy is now.

There were so many murders committed in the Beauchamp Tower that in the guide books it is counted worthy of a chapter by itself, not only because of the number, but because of the peculiarly atrocious quality of them. The other murderers were mere apprentices at the business compared with those who had the Beauchamp tower in charge. They were artists, and knew all about it. They gave their whole mind to it. Marmaduke Neville with fifty others who believed in Mary, Queen of Scots, were confined in this tower, and they were all beheaded in one day. Likewise Mr. William Tyrrell, who had some differences with the government; then the Earl Arundel was beheaded from this interesting old slaughter house for aspiring to the hand of Mary Queen of Scots. It appears that a man couldn’t safely make love in those days. But as he was tried for his religion—not for love—he was not beheaded, but was mercifully permitted to “languish in prison” till he died. It is probable that his jailors did not feed him on porter-house steaks.

The Earl of Warwick and the three brothers Dudley were here. The Duke, the eldest of the three, was beheaded, and the others mercifully starved to death. A gentleman named Gyfford was put to the rack in the Tower, and finally consenting to answer the questions put to him—your rack was a rare persuader—was probably dismissed. But doubtless the headsman got him. Dr. Stohr, who refused to deny his religion—he was a Catholic—was imprisoned here, and was released only to suffer a cruel death at Tyburn. Being a Catholic, and murdered by Protestants, we may draw from his history the useful lesson that persecution was not, strictly speaking, confined to the Catholic church, as is popularly supposed. The Protestants, when in power, knew the uses of the rack, and thumbscrew, and stake, just as well as the Catholics, and they were just as handy with them.

The Brothers Poole wanted Mary to be the Queen, and they went the long road from here.

But the list is too long for these pages.

That you may be perfectly sure of the accuracy of these things, the identical headsman’s block is carefully preserved, with the ax he used and the mask he wore when engaged in his delightful duty. The ax is shaped very like a butcher’s cleaver, and the mask is about the most fiendish face that a devilish ingenuity could devise. Ugly and devilish as it is, it was probably an improvement on the face it concealed. You are shown the thumbscrew and rack. The thumbscrew would extort a confession from a dead man; and the rack—well, that is something inconceivably devilish. You are laid in a box; ropes on windlasses are tied to your ankles and wrists; then the windlasses are turned, inch by inch, till your joints are dislocated. After enduring the rack and answering questions the way they desired,—for a man in that apparatus would say anything for a moment’s respite—you are hurried to the block for fear you may recant as soon as you get out of it. Then what was said in the rack was put upon record as a testimony on which to rack and behead other people. Those were the “good old days of merrie England.”

THE BYWARD TOWER.

[From the West.