The Tower of London in 1900

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EARLY ENGLISH PORCELAIN C & S; LONDON SHAPE, ORIENTAL THEME. CA. 1820-40 PERFECT
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1571 London Geo. Buchanan's Mary Queen of Scots original 1st ed in English
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Arthur H. Beavan continued his survey of the City in Imperial London, 1901, with this look at the Tower of London:

No building in the world appeals so forcibly to the imagination of the English-speaking race as the Tower of London, which has been practically untouched since its erection nine centuries ago - a unique monument of our national history. Together with Tower Hill, it is also one of the few places in London possessing a distinctive foreign aspect.

From the Hill, at dusk, one saw only its general outline with the Gothic Tower Bridge rising high in the background, while the irregularity of the fortress itself, the lights gleaming high up from miniature windows, with gas-lamps faintly illuminating at intervals the spacious outworks, the wide expanse of the Hill with its numerous trees somewhat like a boulevard, all combined to emphasize the resemblance of the Tower precincts to some old continental town.

Soon after William the Conqueror came into power, he selected the ground upon which the Tower stands, and began building a massive Keep to replace the frail Norman defence which had on the same site surrounded the old Roman bastions, upon whose solid brick foundations the great Keep was erected.

The entire "Liberty of the Tower," as it is called, covers about twenty-six acres, the actual buildings occupying slightly over twelve of them.

They are mainly in Norman and Henry III style, though within the walls may be found specimens of nearly all periods of architecture.

The Tower of London belongs archaeologically to the concentric class of fortress, the Keep not in one corner of the castle, but in the middle.

Thirteen towers at varying distances guard the Inner Ward that surrounds the Keep or White Tower; the Outer Ward has eight, some of them forts in themselves; and the whole is engirdled by a wide moat long ago disused for defensive purposes.

Every British Sovereign down to Charles II's time occupied the Tower at intervals, but the palace where they lodged which stood close to the Wakefield Tower was demolished in Cromwell's time, and its site was now covered by modern warehouses.

Of course the visitor would "do" the Tower, and see all that is permitted to be inspected, viz. the exteriors of some of the detached towers, the Traitor's Gate, the Regalia in the Jewel House, the great White Tower with its Norman Chapel of St. John's, the Banqueting Chamber, the State Floor, the Council Chamber, the Armoury, the Parade outside the Keep, the fatal Tower Green where in Tudor days six distinguished executions took place (all the victims, except the last, Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex, being women), and the deeply interesting Beauchamp Tower with the pathetic inscriptions of prisoners on its walls.

But much remained that, unfortunately, was not shown to any but specially privileged persons.

The public were not admitted into the little church of St. Peter ad Vincula on the Green where lie the bodies of Anne Boleyn, the Countess of Salisbury, Katherine Howard, Lady Jane Grey and her husband, the Earl of Essex, etc.

They were excluded from the Bloody Tower, traditional scene of the murder of the young Princes, Edward and Richard, of the suicide of the eighth Earl of Northumberland, and possibly of the death of Henry VI; it was also one of Sir Walter Raleigh's lodging-places.

They were debarred entrance to the Bell Tower where Princess, afterwards Queen, Elizabeth I was imprisoned; to another of Raleigh's quarters; and to the dungeon beneath the Keep where Guy Fawkes after his trial in the Queen's House (also closed) was confined in a small cell whose walls he could touch on each side with outstretched arms.

It was from this Queen's House that Lord Nithsdale escaped on the eve of his projected execution after the Pretender's rising in 1715.

There were also half-a-dozen other outlying places of interest in the Tower from which visitors, for no very cogent reason, were shut out.

Close to the Tower, and just off the Minories, was Holy Trinity Church (rebuilt in 1706), in whose churchyard were deposited under a stone bearing date 1745 some human bones brought from the plains of Culloden.

In the sacred edifice was a head, said to be that of John Dudley, Duke of Northumberland, who was executed on Tower Hill in I553.

A railed-in space within the garden on Tower Hill contains a spot marked by a stone where the first permanent gibbet was set up by Edward IV, and which became the usual place for State executions, and there the said Duke suffered as so many had before him, and as others were destined to suffer, until, with the decapitation of Lord Lovat in the reign of George II, they came to an end.

Trinity House on the north side of the Hill is a plain building erected for the "Brotherhood of the most glorious and indivisible Trinity," a famous corporation dating back to Henry VIII's time, which takes charge of all the light-houses, light-ships, and buoys, and regulates the national pilotage, etc.

Next: The City of London in 1900: City Churches