LONDON AND ITS CELEBRITIES. TOWER HILL, CHAPTER I. ALLHALLOWS BARKING, CRUTCHED FRIARS, EAST SMITHFIELD, WAPPING. Illustrious Personages Executed on Tower Hill - Melancholy Death of Otway - Anecdote of Rochester Peter the Great Church of Allhallows Barking - Seething Lane The Minories Miserable Death of Lord Cobham - Goodman's Fields Theatre-St. Katherine's Church Ratcliffe Highway- Murders of the Marrs and Williamsons - Execution Dock-Judge Jeffreys - Stepney. WHO is there whose heart is so dead to every generous impulse as to have stood without feelings of deep emotion upon that famous hill, where so many of the gallant and the powerful have perished by a bloody and untimely death? Here fell the wise and witty Sir Thomas More; the great Protector Duke of Somerset ; and the young and accomplished Earl of Surrey! Here died the lofty Strafford and the venerable Laud; the unbending patriot, Algernon Sidney, and the gay and graceful Duke of Monmouth! Who is there who has not sought to fix in his mind's eye the identical spot where they fell, the exact site of the fatal stage and of its terrible paraphernalia? Who is there who has not endeavoured to identify the old edifice' from which the gallant Derwentwater and the virtuous Kenmure were led through avenues of soldiers to the block? or who has not sought for the house "adjoining the scaffold" where the gentle Kilmarnock breathed his last sigh, and where the intrepid Balmerino grasped affectionately, and for the last time, the hand of the friend. who had so often dashed with him through the ranks of the foe on the field of battle? Among a host of scarcely less illustrious personages who perished by the hand of the executioner on Tower Hill, may be mentioned Edward Plantagenet, Earl of Warwick, son of the false and perjured Clarence; the handsome and accomplished adventurer, Perkin Warbeck; the gallant Sir William Stanley, who placed the crown on the head of Henry the Seventh on the field of Bosworth; the powerful Edward Stafford, Duke of Buckingham; Thomas Cromwell, Earl of Essex, the successor of Wolsey in the favour of Henry the Eighth ; George, Lord Rochford, brother of Anne Boleyn; Margaret, Countess of Salisbury, mother of Cardinal Pole; the ambitious Lord Seymour of Sudeley, uncle to Edward the Sixth, and brother 'The old Transport Office. |