young Princes in 1483, who, he believes, were not only smothered, but also buried, within the Tower. He argues very strongly in favour of the identity of what is known as "The Bloody Tower" with the scene of their murder; he points out the ancient tradition which has always assigned a certain small chamber within the walls of that

particular tower as the spot where the barbarous deed was done; and he observes, that express mention is made of it as the scene of the murder in a complimentary oration in Latin, addressed to James I. by the authorities of the Tower, on his visit to that place within one hundred and twenty years of Richard's usurpation. He remarks,

"It was always a sequel to the tradition of the murder of the princes, that the priest of the Tower' had buried their bodies in some concealed place, as we know from Shakspeare: and, surely, it was not unreasonable to infer, when two children's bodies, corresponding in age and in period of decay with the date of the murder, were discovered in Charles II.'s time, by some workmen, at the foot VOL. II., N. S. 1869.

NN

of a staircase about seventy yards distant from the Bloody Tower,that these were the bones of the princes."

It might be added, that although Charles II. was by no means of a credulous or imaginative nature, he had the remains of the two children transferred, with royal honours, to Westminster Abbey, and ordered his Master-General of the Ordnance to plant a mulberry-tree upon the spot where the bones were discovered, with the idea, no doubt, of perpetuating the remembrance of so foul a deed of blood by associating it with the blood-stained juice of its fruit.

With regard to the author of this murder, Mr. Dixon observes"Thanks to our great poet, no name is stamped so darkly on the Tower as that of Gloucester. Richard seems to haunt the pile. If the word Tower crops up in talk, nine persons out of ten will throw his figure into the front. They see, in their mind's eye, Gloucester with his knife at King Henry's throat; Gloucester denouncing Hastings at the board; Gloucester in rusty armour on the wall. Men picture him as drowning his brother Clarence in the butt of wine; as murdering his nephew, King Edward and the Duke of York. The localities of his crimes, and of the crimes imputed to him, are shown. He stabbed King Henry in the Hall Tower, now the Jewel House. He accused Lord Hastings in the Council Chamber, and struck off his head on the terrace below the keep. He drowned his brother in the Bowyer Tower. He addressed the citizens from the terrace now known as Raleigh's Walk. Brackenbury was kneeling in St. John's Chapel when he received the King's order to kill the princes. The boys were lodged by him in the rooms over the entrance-gate, then known as the Garden Tower. They were interred in the passage, at the foot of a private stair. The bones of these royal youths were afterwards dug out from behind a stair in the keep."

Another chapter devoted by Lord de Ros to the sad story of Anne Boleyn, introduces us to the Beauchamp Tower, in which the unhappy queen was confined. The accompanying views of its access and interior, we need hardly remark, are full of melancholy interest. Lord de Ros holds that whatever faults may be laid to her charge, Anne had done nothing to deserve the death to which the tyrant, who had once loved her, consigned her on Tower Hill. "Levities," he writes, "which even now would be thought slight and pardonable, but which in that coarse and licentious court could hardly deserve even a moderate censure, were the only offences brought against her, unless the extorted accusation of Smeaton can be regarded as a proof of any deeper guilt." Indeed, as he elsewhere seems to suggest, the

very precautions taken at her execution to exclude the public gaze from so savage a deed, imply that the nation at large held her really innocent of the charges for which she lost her head by the axe of the executioner.

But the name of the Beauchamp Tower is associated with the story of other noble and unhappy prisoners whom their near connection

with royalty in the Tudor times consigned to the prison and the scaffold. The youthful and beautiful Lady Jane Grey, a few years later, became an inmate of this same Beauchamp Tower. Of her Lord de Ros remarks:

"Few victims of a harsh and cruel exercise of the laws of treason have excited more interest than Lady Jane Grey. Her entire innocence of all personal guilt, her devotion to her ambitious parents, and her position as a young and tender bride, all combine to render her story one of the saddest of those which stain the annals of the Tower. That her father was, to all intents, guilty of a deliberate and determined act of treason cannot be questioned, nor that he deserved a traitor's doom; but it seems to have been a needless severity to involve her in the same fate as her father, when no other crime could be alleged against her than a reluctant obedience to the solicitations and authority of her parents."

Lord de Ros devotes a long and most interesting chapter to the history of the Gunpowder Plot, and its connection with the Tower of London; and he gives an illustration of the interior of the Council Chamber in the Governor's House, where Guy Fawkes was examined

and put to the rack; and from which same room it is believed that the Earl of Nithsdale effected his escape when a prisoner under sentence of death for his share in the Scottish Rebellion of 1715. The illustrations of Guy Fawkes' dungeon in the White Tower, called "Little Ease" and of the door of his dungeon, are of more than ordinary interest. We are glad to notice that Lord de Ros is not ashamed to own his conviction that "oppressed and insulted as the Roman Catholics had been by laws and penalties disgraceful to any civilised nation, yet the large majority of their body showed great abhorrence of the measure proposed by the conspirators, and expressed but little sympathy for the fate of the leaders of the Gunpowder Plot." Such a fact deserves all possible publicity in the cause of historic truth.

We have neither time nor space to follow Lord de Ros through the most interesting and instructive chapters in which he tells the melancholy story of the Earl of Arundel, and those of Lady Arabella Stuart, of the Earl of Kildare, of the Princess Elizabeth, of Sir Walter Raleigh, of the Seven Bishops, and the victims of the two Scottish Rebellions of 1715 and 1745, and how, after the suppression of the latter outbreak, and the execution of Simon, Lord Lovat, the heads

man's axe and block became a subject for antiquarian study, and no longer a living power and influence in the nation. The illustration which Lord de Ros gives us of these once fearful emblems and instruments of arbitrary power in the hands of Tudor and Stuart, and

even of Hanoverian Sovereigns, will now serve to call up feelings of pity only, not of fear and terror.

As might be expected, his lordship does not bring his work to a close without recording at length the story of the murder of the Hartgills by Lord Stourton and that nobleman's execution for the deed; the execution of Lord Ferrers for the cruel murder of his steward; the committal of the late Earl of Thanet to the Tower for high treason at the end of the last century, and his imprisonment, and the incarceration of the Cato Street Conspirators, almost within our own remembrance, in the same place. His lordship's chapters

on the ancient armour and the ordnance in the Tower are naturally enough full of interest, for he writes as a soldier upon a soldier's subject; and we must not conclude without owning that we have derived great pleasure from the chapter which he devotes to a history of the Tower Menagerie. Very many of the ancient feudal customs are still observed at the Tower, in the internal arrangement of the fortress, just as they were in the days of the Plantagenets: witness the following extract, with which we conclude this paper :

"The ceremony which accompanies the closing of the Tower Gates is of very ancient origin, and had reference to the safety of the Royal Palace, as well as to the security of State prisoners. A few minutes before midnight, the yeoman porter attends at the main guard, and applies for the 'escort for the keys.' This consists of a party of six privates commanded by a sergeant, who accompany the