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Read Ebook: Authorised Guide to the Tower of London by Loftie W J William John
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Ebook has 61 lines and 13550 words, and 2 pages
On leaving the large room, in the case in the archway will be seen axes, horsemen's hammers and maces, all designed for breaking and rending armour. Observe also various forms of the bayonet, from the early plug bayonet to the later socketed type of that weapon.
The next case contains rapiers and swords and bucklers. Observe the raised bars on the latter, to entangle and break the sword-point. The mounted figure in brown armour shows the equipment of the cavalry in the early part of the seventeenth century, the armour being browned or blacked to prevent rust and to avoid detection at a distance.
In the next enclosure on the right is a mounted figure of Charles I when young. The armour is apparently of French make, and is very interesting as being a double suit--that is, it represents the equipment of the cuirassier or cavalryman of about 1610, and then by removing the helmet and the armour for the arms and legs, and substituting the pott and the short thigh defences we have the equipment of the foot soldier as seen in the figures of pikemen on the other side of the room. The small silvered cap and breast and back in another glass case was made for Charles II when prince.
In a small case are unfinished portions of a helmet and gorget, and a gilt and engraved vamplate belonging to a suit of Henry Prince of Wales.
On the walls are portions of horse armour, bucklers for foot soldiers, and several shields simulating the embossed ornamentation of the sixteenth century.
The space in front of the chapel is called Tower Green, and was used as a burial ground; in the middle is a small square plot, paved with granite, showing the site on which stood at rare intervals the scaffold on which private executions took place. It has been specially paved by the orders of Her late Majesty. The following persons are known to have been executed on this spot:--
They were all beheaded with an axe except Queen Anne Boleyn, whose head was cut off with a sword by the executioner of St. Omer, brought over for the purpose. The executioner of the Earl of Essex was not able to do his work with less than three strokes, and was mobbed and beaten by the populace on his way home. The bodies of all six were buried in the Chapel of St. Peter.
Lord Hastings was also beheaded on Tower Green by order of the Duke of Gloucester in 1483.
The visitor who has time to spare will find many other records of this kind in the Beauchamp Tower, the oldest of all being the name of "Thomas Talbot 1462" , supposed to have been concerned in the Wars of the Roses. Emerging again upon Tower Green we see on the right the
now called the King's House. The Hall door, where a sentry stands, is the same through which Lord Nithisdale escaped in female dress, the night before he was to have been beheaded, 1716. Some parts of the house are of great antiquity, among them the rooms in the Bell Tower, those on the upper storey which open on the leads and the rampart known as The Prisoners' Walk, and the Council Room, a handsome apartment containing a curious monument of the Gunpowder Plot. In this room Guy Fawkes and his associates were examined, 1605. The interior of the King's House is not shown to the public. Next to it is the house of the Gentleman Gaoler, or Chief Warder. It was in this house that Lady Jane Grey lived when a prisoner, and from its windows saw her husband go forth from the adjoining Beauchamp Tower to his execution on Tower Hill, and his headless body brought to the chapel "in a carre," while the scaffold was being prepared for her own death on the Green in front, which took place on the same day, Monday, 12th February, 1554.
NOTE.--Visitors who wish to know more about the Tower are referred to the works of Bayley, of Brayley and Britton, of Doyne C. Bell, of G.T. Clark, and of Hepworth Dixon.
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