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North View of the Bloody Tower
George Cruikshank
December 1840
Wood-engraving
9.7 cm high by 9.5 cm wide, vignetted
For Book II, Ch. XXXIV, of Ainsworth's The Tower of London, top of p. 353.
[Click on image to enlarge it and mouse over text for links.]
Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham.
As Elizabeth passed beneath the portal of the Bloody Tower, on her way to the lieutenant's lodgings, whither she was conducted after quitting Traitor's Gate, by Bedingfeld and Sussex, she encountered the giants, who doffed their caps at her approach, and fell upon their knees. All three were greatly affected, especially Magog, whose soft and sensitive nature was completely overcome. Big tears rolled down his cheeks, and in attempting to utter a few words of consolation, his voice failed him. Touched by his distress, Elizabeth halted for a moment, and laying her hand on his broad shoulder, said in a tone, and with a look calculated to enforce her words, "Bear up, good fellow, and like a man. If I shed no tears for myself, those who love me need shed none. It is the duty of my friends to comfort— not to dishearten me. My ease is not so hopeless as you think. The queen will never condemn the innocent, and unheard. Get up, I say, and put a bold face on the matter, or you are not your father's son."
Roused by this address, Magog obeyed, and rearing his bulky frame to its full height, so that his head almost touched the spikes of the portcullis, cried in a voice of thunder, "Would your innocence might be proved by the combat, madam, as in our —" and he hesitated,— "I mean your royal father's time! I would undertake to maintain your truth against any odds. Nay, I and my brethren would bid defiance to the whole host of your accusers."
"Though I may not claim you as champions," replied Elizabeth; "I will fight my own battle, as stoutly as you could fight it for me." [Chapter XXXIV. — How the Princess Elizabeth was confronted with Sir Thomas Wyat in the Torture-chamber," pp. 353-54]
It is an historical fact that Elizabeth after Wyat's arrest became a prisoner-of-state in the Bell Tower, one of the least known of the twenty-one towers in the Tower of London complex. Built by King Henry III between 1238 and 1272, the tower was known as "The Garden Tower" because it opened formerly on the Constable's Garden, and only acquired its more sinister sobriquet after the murders of the sons of Edward IV in the 1480s. The architectural style of the medieval Bloody Tower is late Norman or Romanesque, with restoration in the Edwardian Gothic mode. The grooves for working a massive portcullis, the chains and a windlass (still to be seen on the upper floor, and once used to raise and lower the defensive portcullis) attest to the fact that Henry III intended the Bloody Tower to be part of the fortress's defenses. But the Bloody Tower has an unsavoury and not underserved reputation as a jail for such high-ranking prisoners-of-state and notables as the courtier and explorer Sir Walter Raleigh, Archbishop Cranmer, Bishops Ridley and Latimer (burned at the stake at Oxford in 1556), Henry Percy, and the Hanging Judge Jeffreys, and the notorious plotter Sir Thomas Overbury. Elizabeth does not even merit the consideration of being housed in the more spacious Bloody Tower because Renard has made that suite his office and residence in order to advise Mary.
The illustrations that precede the discussion between Simon Renard, the crafty Spanish ambassador, and Queen Mary as to the merits of executing Lady Jane Grey for treason establish the appearance of that and adjacent rooms in the Bloody Tower in 1840. The concentration of illustrations of the Bloody Tower at a curtain in the serial — in Chapters 33 (the November instalment) and 34 (the December instalment) — attest to its importance as the setting for Mary's deliberations about thefate of Jane Seymour, the necessity for whose execution Renard successfully argues as hermere existence threatens Mary's hold on the throne and the future of the Roman Catholic Church in England. The repetition of the Bloody Tower, under whose archway Elizabeth walks on her way to the Bell Tower, ominously suggests that Elizabeth may share her cousin's fate on the scaffold.
Left: The wood-engraving of the room where by tradition the sons of Edward IV were murdered by agents of the Duke of Gloucester, South Side of the Room in which the Young Princes were Murdered as it looked in 1840. Centre: Passage in the Bloody Tower by which the Murderers approached (November 1840). Right: The imagined scene as Renard and Mary deliberate over consigning her cousin to the scaffold for treason, The Death-Warrant (November 1840). [Click on images to enlarge them.]
Above: The highly realistic but mundane wood-engraving of the passageway that Gloucester's agents supposedly used in 1482, North Side of the Room in which the Princes were Murdered [Click on image to enlarge it.]
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Last modified 18 October 2017