THE TOWER OF LONDON AND ITS MARTYRS.

A STRANGE surprise awaits the traveler who comes to London for the first time up the Thames. His course has lain by stately Greenwich, and smoky Woolwich, through miles and miles of shipping, sometimes scattered, sometimes massed near the entrance of the various docks. As he gets nearer to the city, the warehouses line the banks on either side, and the vessels grow denser; till at length, like a great triumphal arch, rises before him, the immense Tower Bridge, one of the modern glories of up-to-date engineering. But no sooner is this passed than he sees on the north bank, dwarfed by its gigantic neighbor, the grey walls of a mediæval fortress, with a vast square tower, turrets at each corner, standing in its midst. It carries one back at once five hundred years and more, to the days before Christopher Columbus, to days which are, to the stranger, pre-historic times; and the puffing steamers of all sizes, of all shapes, of all countries, that fill the river, (at that point the Pool is its familiar name) only make the contrast the greater. Yes, to the traveler from new lands, this is one of the sights that must fascinate him—the past, that is gone for ever, face to face with all that is newest in the present. Need I tell you, that this fortress is the Tower of London? Those old bulwarks contain the very epitome of English History. The pathos of its tragedy is written on its walls.

But I beg to offer myself as a guide rather to its religious history, to the part it played in the cruel work of crushing out the old faith in the days of Tudor and Stuart Sovereigns. One is not allowed to step ashore near hand; but the pen is a potent magician, and by a simple stroke overrules the will of ship captain, of guards, of governor; and every gate opens, and every door, before its privileged powers.

The pedigree of the fortress leads us back to Imperial Cæsar. That first conqueror of Britain built a fort at the entrance of London from the sea. He placed it just where the great roads he had constructed met and crossed, so that it at once defended the town from outside foes, and kept a strong grip on factious Britons. But the city on the Thames dwindled down during the wild days of Danish invasions; and it was the last invader, the iron Conqueror, William the Norman, that set at work on the site of Cæsar's fort to raise up a stronghold, to keep in subjection his new capital. Henry II had a skilful chancellor, to be in after years the martyred St. Thomas of Canterbury, and

à Becket pushed on the works. But to Henry III, the Beauclerk learned in architecture, great builder of the new Westminster Abbey, the Tower owes chiefest progress and greatest beauty.

In time the grim fortress became a royal palace, the mint of the realm, the storehouse of the archives, and, worse than all, a prison for any who, in the constant flux and reflux of parties and of warring princes, was unfortunate enough to collide with those in power.

And when the lust and pride of Henry Tudor had broken with the mother and head of all the churches, then amidst other prisoners, the most noteworthy, or, at all events, those who appeal most to our interest, were those who stood by the faith of their fathers, who were loyal to Peter, and through him to God. The ordinary visitor to the Tower comes up from the bowels of the earth at the Metropolitan Mark Lane Railway Station, and passing by an old church, which, please to note, is St. Mary's Barking, finds himself in an open space. Trinity House, with a large oval of green turf in front-pray note that too-and to his right the vast five-square bastions, with their many turrets, and the great White Tower, and all around the walls the broad moat. The entrance is barred by a gate, fenced with towers at either hand, and then over a bridge which spans the moat, in old days a drawbridge, we come to a second gate, still sterner and more massive, where soldiers are on guard. What a sad procession has gone through those gates of death, when, to be confined to the Tower, meant to be condemned! And how many have come forth only to mount the scaffold on Tower Hill! The spot is still marked by a white stone in the midst of that oasis of green in front of Trinity House, which we have just passed. You can see it through the high iron railings that close it in. It is the Calvary of East London.

We now find ourselves within the outer walls of the fortress. To our left rises a brick circular building, the Bell Tower, in whose highest story, shivering in the cold, hardly covered with his worn and tattered garments, was imprisoned the one Bishop who dared to tell the tyrant, "thou must not make thyself Christ's vicegerent in England or elsewhere," Blessed John Fisher, the honored friend and confessor of Henry's grandmother, the good Countess of Richmond, the most learned Prelate in the Realm, quondam Chancellor of Cambridge, where he had been the instrument of the foundation of two colleges, but above all, the holiest bishop in England, who had refused preferment to be faithful to his first spouse, the poor diocese of Rochester.

Next to the Bell Tower is the house of the Governor, the scene of so many dark intrigues, of so many heartless and cruel questionings. For therein is the Council chamber, where victims were prepared for the sacrifice, browbeaten, even tortured, confronted by false brethren and unscrupulous spies, in order to wrench from them admissions which would gain a verdict against them by the time-serving justices (?) in Westminster Hall. There that precious Solomon, James I, has left a lying memorial of Gunpowder Treason a list carved in stone of all guilty or not guilty, whom he, in his wisdom, and at Cecil's dictation, has chosen to write down as parties to that wicked and ill-starred plot. There the graceful and heroic Blessed Father Bryant was subjected to the agony of having needles thrust under his nails to force him to reveal Father Parson's whereabouts, the leader of the forlorn hope of Jesuits, of whom Blessed Edmund Campion was the companion.

Further on to our right opens out what once was the Water Gate, by which those who came directly from the Thames were brought into the Tower. As treason was the plea on which most of the hopeless prisoners were condemned, it took the name of the Traitors' Gate. The Tower under which it opens was dedicated to St. Thomas of Canterbury by his moral murderer, Henry II. How many martyrs have been brought from their sentence at Westminster Hall to their condemned cell through this grim gate! When they went up the river to their trial for a capital offense the executioner was a conspicuous object, a sort of figurehead, standing at the prow, his axe turned from the prisoners. When sentence had been passed, there again he was to be seen, his glittering blade turned towards its future victims. And among those who came, with the sign of their fate displayed, strange proofs of God's tardy vengeance were often manifest. Thither came all the sovereigns, the night before their coronation, and a mighty water pageant often conveyed them for the ceremony to the Abbey of Westminster.

In 1533, surrounded by more than ordinary splendor, Anne Boleyn, intoxicated with her success, married, God knows how, to her King, and now to be crowned, left the palace in the Tower in all the glory of her royal robes for the Abbey. How different from that wretched woman, but three years later, brought back through the same gate to be tried in the adjoining hall in the Tower, under the most vile accusations, knowing that another woman had supplanted her, as she had supplanted the holy and noble matron, Queen Catharine, and knowing

too that Henry's hate was as unswerving as his lust. She, the occasion, the cause of the terrible revolution by which the Tudor, at Thomas Cromwell's advice, had met the non possumus of the Pope, by the open revolt against Christ's Vicar, which sacrificed the Communion of the Saints, for that miserable flirt! Did this come before her, as she stood her trial, with her very father, and her uncle, on the bench to give the verdict against her, which involved among others, in its death-sentence, even her own brother?

And four years later the boat of death brought one still more immediately responsible for the awful crime of the rejection of Catholic Faith and Unity, him who had apparently first suggested it to Henry as the way out of his dilemma and who, at all events, as Vicar General to the new-fangled Pope, had flattered his every passion, had furthered his every crime. Thomas Cromwell had just reached the height of his exaltation. The baseborn man was now Lord Chamberlain, had just been created Earl of Essex, had found a fourth wife of his own choice for his royal master, had heaped up enormous wealth from the spoil of the Church. In an instant he was cast down. His infamous invention, which he had used against so many of his victims, a bill of attainder was passed unanimously through both houses, which made further trial needless, and his head fell on Tower Hill four days after, in the midst of universal joy.

Now I ask you to turn round, and you will see, facing the Traitors' Gate, a tower which bears a name, which fits equally almost every portion of this prison of horrors. It is the Bloody Tower and where tradition tells the two children of Edward IV were murdered, and where one of the Earls of Northumberland was found killed in the reign of Elizabeth. The gateway, in its wide open jaw, carries a dark and sharp set of teeth, the portcullis with its formidable spikes, which is still in working order. As we pass under it, a door in an adjoining Tower admits one to the brilliant show of Crown Jewels. They have lost nearly all their interest, and all their archæological value, because their settings were all melted down at the time of the Commonwealth. On ascending a gentle slope we reach the foot of the White Tower to our right; when a flight of steps brings into view the Beauchamp Tower to our left with an open space before it; in front of us a humble looking church, the parish church of the royal Tower, and the resting place of so many who were beheaded on Tower Hill, or whose heads fell on the very place where we are standing. For on this paved square died Anne Boleyn, and Henry VIII's fourth wife, Catherine