Lord Ronald Sutherland Gower

“ Lord Lovat was assisted up the steps of the scaffold by two warders, and looking round on the great multitude of people, exclaimed, “God save us! why should there be such a bustle about taking off an old grey head, that cannot go up three steps without three bodies to support it.” Then seeing that one of his friends looked very unhappy, he slapped him on the shoulder, saying: “Cheer up thy heart, man, I am not afraid, why should you?” Like old Lord Balmerino, he felt the edge of the axe, and examined his coffin, upon which was inscribed: “Simon Fraser Dominus de Lovat, Decollat April 9, 1747. ”

“ He wore a superb dress, a pale-coloured silk coat edged with silver lace, and was accompanied by grenadiers, and horse and foot guards, his carriage being followed by some of the coaches of members of his family, and his hearse, which was also drawn by six horses. The streets were so crowded to see this unusual sight, that it took the procession three hours to reach Tyburn from the Tower. Lord Ferrers went out of the world in a far more becoming manner than he had lived in it. ”

“ Once in the power of the mob, Jeffreys’ life was in deadly peril, and he suffered severely at the hands of the people, but was finally rescued and taken before the Lord Mayor, who, poor man, died in a fit soon after the terrible judge had been brought before him, more revolting in his abject terror of death than even during the Bloody Assizes in the West, when he had condemned shoals of men and women to tortures and death with jibes and ghastly pleasantry. ”

“ Three years after Walpole had left his rooms in the Tower they were occupied by George Granville, Earl of Lansdowne—a nobleman of strong Jacobite proclivities. He was a poet as well as a Jacobite, and finding Walpole’s name written on the window of the room, he wrote beneath it the following distich:—
“Good unexpected, evil unforeseen,
Appear by turns, as fortune shifts the scene;
Some, raised aloft, come tumbling down amain,
And fall so hard, they bound and rise again.” ”

“ This flame was immediately succeeded by a shivering of all the glass in the windows, the crashing of the woodwork, and the falling of hundreds of rifles from the armoury racks, while a dense cloud of dust darkened the interior of the building, and made it impossible for the visitors or officials to discover where the explosion had occurred. A wild panic ensued, and as the dust gradually cleared away, the people rushed in a wild helter-skelter down the staircase, and poured out of the Tower. ”

“ The old fortress, however, has undergone much structural alterations and needed restoration, in which, although great mistakes have been made, as must inevitably be the case when such a group of old buildings as those in the Tower are touched, the result, on the whole, has benefited the appearance of the fortress, and above all, aided the preservation for future ages of the noblest and most historical group of buildings that exists in our land. May they endure: may they be venerated by future generations of our race as they deserve to be. ”

“ Monmouth passed on foot through a lane of soldiers, preceded by three officers, who carried pistols and accompanied him on to the scaffold. The Duke’s appearance caused a commotion in the crowd which had come to see him die; he had always been a favourite with the people, his personal beauty probably being the principal reason for his popularity; and he was also regarded as a kind of hero on the Protestant side, as opposed to James the Second and the Romish priests. ”

“ How unreasonable was it for any Man to pretend to determine what Weight any Plea would have before a Court of Judicature determining in a Case of Life and Death; and how unjust to the Prisoners, to advise them to conceal any Circumstance in their Case that might have the smallest Tendency towards alleviating their Crimes, or raising the smallest Motions of Compassion towards them in the Breasts of their Judges! ”

“ The Lord Capel, shortly after he was brought prisoner to the Tower from Windsor Castle, had, by a wonderful adventure, having a cord and all things necessary conveyed to him, let himself down out of the window of his chamber in the night, over the wall of the Tower, and had been directed through what part of the ditch he might be best able to wade. Whether he found the right place, or whether there was no safer place, he found the water and the mud so deep, that if he had not been by the head taller than other men, he must have perished, since the water came up to his chin. ”

“ He had been charged with the theft of the unfortunate Arabella’s jewels, but his dismissal was also connected with a still more tragic story—the murder of Sir Thomas Overbury—a murder which throws a very lurid light upon the doings of James the First’s court and courtiers. Two years before Arabella’s death, the Tower had been the scene of a most foul murder. Scandalous as was the court of James, murder had not yet been associated with it, but in the year 1613 the fate of Sir Thomas Overbury added that dark crime to its other villainies. ”

“ As the Seven Bishops passed under St Thomas’s Tower, and landed at the Traitor’s Gate, the bells of St Peter’s Chapel were ringing for evening service. Passing over the green, they entered the chapel and attended the service. The appropriateness of the second lesson struck all who were present, being a chapter in the 2nd of Corinthians—“Giving no offence in anything, that the ministry be not blamed: but in all things approving ourselves as the ministers of God, in much patience, in afflictions, in distresses, in imprisonments.” ”

“ Perhaps Strafford’s life might have been saved had it not been for the King’s action, for when it became known that Charles had plotted with the hope of inducing the Scottish army35 to march on London, seize the Tower and liberate Strafford, the great Earl was practically doomed. The city rose as one man, a huge mob surging round the Houses of Parliament and the Palace of Whitehall, shouting “Justice.” ”

“ On the 11th of December 1688, James left Whitehall, a King without a crown, and as he crossed the Thames to reach Lambeth, he dropped the Great Seal into the river, hoping thereby that everything would fall into confusion for the want of that symbol of legitimate authority. The curious Dutch engraving representing the amiable act of the last of our male Stuart monarchs gives a view of old London Bridge, and the Tower beyond, looming large against a wintry sky. ”

“ THE LATE REIGNS During the late reigns there is little that calls for record in the history of the Tower: happy is the land that has no history. But for the fire in 1841, which destroyed the ugly old Armoury of William III.’s time, and the dastardly attempt made in 1885 to blow up the White Tower, no events of much interest have happened. ”

“ In June 1780, that half-crazed fanatic, Lord George Gordon, was a prisoner in the Tower, charged with the instigation of the “No Popery” riots, which for a time had placed London in peril of mob-rule, and caused great loss of life and property by fire and pillage. After a trial which lasted twenty-one hours, Lord George was declared not guilty. A few years later, however, he was doomed to end his life in Newgate prison. At the same time that Lord George was a prisoner in the fortress, the Earl of Pomfret was committed there for having challenged the Duke of Grafton to fight a duel. ”

“ Laud’s trial lasted for twenty days, the chief accusation brought against him being that he had “attempted to subvert religion and the fundamental laws of the realm.” The outcome of the trial was that Laud was beheaded on Tower Hill on 10th of January 1644. Laud was a strange compound of bigotry and intolerance, of courage and of devotion to what he considered to be the true Church, and of which he seemed to regard himself as a kind of Anglican Pope. His life and character are enigmas to those who study them, and his death became him far better than his life had done. ”

“ After some forms are past, the Peers must have 20 days notice. Lady Cromarty is in town, has been at the Tower to enquire after her lord. She was at Williamson’s, and cryd most bitterly, but no one is suffered so much as to look up at the windows. They were all brought into Williamson’s, and from there one by one conducted to their apartments. No one knows where the other is, and they are kept very strict, since the King of France has ordered a most insolent Letter, and takes himself to be King of England to forbid us punishing the Rebels. ”

“ The Scotch had been as inimical to us as either the French or the Spaniards, and for a far longer period, whilst the Scottish alliance with France had added still more to the national dislike. Neither was the new King’s appearance one to win the admiration of his new subjects, for a more ungainly individual had surely never appeared out of a booth at a fair. The English were as susceptible then, as they are now, to the outward appearance of their rulers, and even Henry VIII., for all his tyranny and cruelty, was popular among the people on account of his fine presence ”

“ Constantly in trouble, Buckingham was so boon a companion of the King’s that Charles could not long let him remain out of his sight, whatever the follies of which the Duke might have been guilty. Another of these brilliant but dissipated friends and courtiers of Charles II. who was sent to the Tower, was the infamously famous John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester. He was there in 1669 for having abducted Elizabeth Mallet, “la triste héritière,” as Grammont calls her. Ultimately Rochester married the lady, and she made a most devoted wife to a most worthless and unfaithful husband. ”

“ From a raised platform, which was flush with the scaffold, the Jacobite lords walked from the house, which stood immediately opposite to the spot where so many remarkable men have perished by the axe of the headsman. During the last few years the actual site of the scaffold has been marked by a tablet in the garden that now surrounds the place of execution, where the axe had done its work from the time of Edward Plantagenet, Earl of Warwick, the son of the Duke of Clarence, to that of Simon Fraser, Lord Lovat. ”

“ Sir John Owen, that gallant Welsh knight, who had fought long and valiantly for the Royal cause, was taken prisoner at the engagement near Llandegas, and was imprisoned with the Duke of Hamilton and his fellow-Cavaliers48 at Windsor Castle before going to the Tower. At his trial Owen told his judges “that he was a plain gentleman of Wales, who had been taught to obey the King; that he had served him honestly during the war, and finding that many honest men endeavoured to raise forces whereby he might get out of prison, he did the like.” ”

“ Charles Radclyffe, was the younger brother of James, Earl of Derwentwater, and with him had been taken prisoner at Preston, and condemned to death after trial and conviction. But he had been respited, and it was thought would ultimately have been pardoned, had he not escaped from his prison in Newgate. He went to France, and following the Pretender to Rome, was given a small pension by that prince, and this was literally all that he had to live upon. Later, he returned to Paris, and there he married the widow of Lord Newburgh, by whom he had a son. ”

“ The late Sir John Pope Hennessy has pointed out in his work on “Raleigh in Ireland,” that, by an odd coincidence, the son of the sixteenth Earl of Desmond, whose lands Raleigh held in Ireland, was a fellow-prisoner of Sir Walter’s in the Tower during his first imprisonment in the fortress during Elizabeth’s reign. Desmond died in prison in 1608, and was buried in St Peter’s Chapel. Raleigh had this youth’s sad fate in his mind, it seems, when he wrote from the Tower, “Wee shall be judged as we judge—and be dealt withal as wee deal with others in this life, if wee believe God Himself.” ”

“ Before leaving Torreglas she had buried all the most important family records in the garden. Accompanied by her faithful Welsh maid, Evans, and a groom, she rode to Newcastle, and thence by public stage to York, where the snow lay so thick that no mail-coach could leave the city for the south. Nothing daunted, Lady Nithsdale rode all the way to London. ”

“ The next event in the history of the Tower is the imprisonment and execution of the Scotch Jacobite lords after the rebellion of 1745. For more than a score of years the old fortress had been free of political prisoners, and Tower Hill had seen no more executions. The blood of the “Rebel Lords,” as they were called, was the last that dyed the scaffold in England. These “Rebel Lords” were the Marquis of Tullibardine, the Earl of Cromarty, and Lords Kilmarnock and Balmerino. ”

“ In November the plague was so violent in London, that the Law Courts were transferred to Winchester, and it was to that city that Sir Walter and his fellow-prisoners were taken and tried on a charge of “attempting to deprive the King of his crown and dignity; to molest the Government, and alter the true religion established in England, and to levy war against the King.”
George Brooke, a brother of Lord Cobham’s, and two priests were found guilty and executed, Lords Grey de Wilton, Cobham, and Raleigh were respited, and were taken back to their prison in the Tower. ”