sent.

people to behold their King; the coronation-day was also fixed, and fifty young gentlemen of family received letters requiring their attendance in the Tower, four days before the ceremony preparatory to their creation as Knights of the Bath. A few days pass on, and a council is sitting in that same memorable chamber before described-the Duke as Protector, the Duke of Buckingham, the Archbishop of York, the Bishop of Ely, Lords Stanley and Hastings being of the number. So agreeable is the tone of the meeting, that the Duke in the exuberance of his spirits relieves the dulness of the business by complimenting the Bishop of Ely on the excellent strawberries he has noticed in his garden, and even requests a mess of them. The gratified Bishop immediately sends a servant to Ely Place for some of the fruit. Suddenly a cry of "Treason!" is heard in the adjoining apartment; Gloucester rushes to the door, where he is met by a party of armed men, who at his command arrest all present except the Duke of Buckingham; and before the astonished nobles have well recovered from their surprise, they behold, from the windows of their prison, Lord Hastings beheaded on the green in front of St. Peter's Chapel; and when they are released, about three weeks later, it is to join in the coronation procession of Richard III., and, strange to say, the number of nobles and other persons of rank and distinction present on the occasion was so great as to give a marked character to it; and still stranger, there is proof on record that the young Edward himself was intended to have been preIn the wardrobe accounts for 1483 is an entry respecting" Lord Edward, son of the late King Edward IV., for his apparel and array," which includes “ short gown of crimson cloth of gold lined with black velvet, a long gown of similar material lined with green damask, a doublet and stomacher of black satin, a bonnet of purple velvet, nine horse-harnesses and nine saddle-housings of blue velvet, gilt spurs, with many other rich articles, and magnificent apparel for his henchmen and pages." It is not at all difficult to discover why the young "Lord Edward" did not share in the ceremony; his appearance would have excited too many speculations and remarks to be at all agreeable or even safe to his crafty uncle; the wonder is, that the idea should ever have been raised. Subsequent events in connexion with the fate of the Princes have been matter of much controversy; but really, after all, there appears no solid reason to distrust Sir Thomas More's statement, who wrote only five-and-twenty years after their occurrence, when a variety of sources, that he might not be able to acknowledge publicly, were open to him for the acquisition of materials: the Chancellor's character, at all events, ought to free him from any suspicion of giving currency to mere rumours. His account is as follows:-" King Richard, after his coronation, taking his way to Gloucester, to visit in his new honour the town of which he bore the name of old, devised as he rode to fulfil that thing which he had before intended. And forasmuch as his mind misgave him that, his nephews living, men would not reckon that he could have right to the realm, he thought therefore without delay to rid them; as though killing of his kinsmen might aid his cause and make him kindly King. Thereupon he sent John Greene, whom he specially trusted, unto Sir Robert Brakenbury, constable of the Tower, with a letter, and credence also, that the same Sir Robert in any wise should put the two children to death. This John Greene did his errand to Brakenbury, kneeling before our Lady in the Tower, who plainly answered that he would never put them to death to die

therefore. With which answer Greene returned, recounting the same to King Richard at Warwick, yet on his journey; wherewith he took such displeasure and thought, that the same night he said to a secret page of his, 'Oh! whom shall a man trust? They that I have brought up myself, they that I thought would have mostly surely served me, even those fail, and at my commandment will do nothing for me.' Sir,' quoth the page, there lieth one in the pallet-chamber without that I dare well say to do your grace pleasure: the thing were right hard that he would refuse;' meaning by this Sir James Tyrell." This man was seen and tempted, and the result was that he "devised that they should be murdered in their beds, and no blood shed: to the execution whereof he appointed Miles Forest, one of the four that before kept them, a fellow flesh-bred in murder before time; and to him he joined one John Dighton, his own horse-keeper, a big, broad, square, and strong knave." "Then, all the other being removed from them, this Miles Forest and John Dighton, about midnight, came into the chamber and suddenly wrapped them up amongst the clothes, keeping down by force the feather-bed and pillows hard upon their mouths, that within a while they smothered and stifled them, and, their breaths failing, they gave up to God their innocent souls into the joys of heaven, leaving to their tormentors their bodies dead in bed; after which the wretches laid them out upon the bed, and fetched Tyrell to see them; and when he was satisfied of their death, he caused the murderers to bury them at the stair-foot, meetly deep in the ground, under a great heap of stones." We quit these melancholy but romantic details with the observation that the stranger who now visits the Chapel of the White Tower will see, at the end of the passage which leads from the outer door to the foot of the circular staircase winding upwards to the sacred edifice, the old trunk of a mulberry-tree reared against the wall in the corner. The passage is formed on one side by the outer wall of the Tower, and on the other by a modern erection; originally the stairs here were open to the air, and formed the outer entrance. Beneath these stairs, in 1674, were found bones of a proportion "answerable to the ages of the royal youths," which were accordingly, by Charles II.'s orders, honourably interred in Henry VII.'s Chapel at Westminster. The spot was marked by the erection of the mulberry-tree referred to, which was cut down a few years ago, when the present passage was enclosed.

The battle of Bosworth Field and the death of Richard took place in August, 1485, and in October following Henry was crowned, with the usual procession and splendour. His union with Elizabeth, involving, as far as the nation was concerned, a much more important union, that of the rival houses which had so long deluged England with fratricidal blood, led to another queenly coronation, although Henry delayed that ceremony so long as to excite, in connexion with other evidences of his conduct towards her, a pretty general disgust among his subjects. Moved at last by considerations of this nature, he fixed for the day the 25th of November, 1487. Two days before, the Queen came by water from Greenwich, attended by the Mayor, Sheriffs, and Aldermen, and many citizens, chosen some from each craft, wearing their liveries, in barges "freshly furnished with banners and streamers of silk." One of the barges, called the Bachelor's, contained "many gentlemanly pageants well and curiously devised to do her highness sport and pleasure." Henry received her at the Tower, and conducted

her to the royal apartments, where their majesties "kept open household and frank resort" for all the Court. On the morrow, after dinner, the Queen was "royally apparelled, having about her a kirtle of white cloth of gold of damask, and a mantle of the same suit furred with ermines, fastened before her breast with a great lace curiously wrought of gold and silk, and rich knobs of gold at the end tasselled; her fair yellow hair hanging down plain behind her back, with a caul (or net-work) of pipes over it, and a circlet of gold richly garnished with precious stones upon her head." This was indeed a figure worthy to be the central object of the rich picture presented by the pageant which conducted her to Westminster, in a litter hung with cloth of gold of damask, and having large pillows of down covered with the same material. The whole ceremony appears to have been conducted in a fine poetical spirit: thus, in many parts of the City, instead of the usual absurd conceits meeting her eye, she was welcomed by fair children arrayed in angelic costume, singing sweet songs as she passed. Another festive period marks the history of the Palace-Tower in this reign, on the occasion of the marriage of Henry's son, Prince Arthur, to Katherine, daughter of the King of Spain, when a splendid tournament was held here. Two years later, the Queen, who was a frequent but generally solitary resident, died in the Tower a few days after giving birth to a daughter, who did not long survive her.

The accession of a young king, and that king the tasteful, magnificent-minded Henry, for such he was in the first few years of his rule, gave the Tower a new period of splendour; and subsequent events, indeed, promised to make coronation processions become almost as frequent, and to be almost as much looked for, as those which still annually regale the eyes of the citizens of London. But after two ceremonies of the kind, the first being prior to his own and Katherine of Arragon's coronation, and the next prior to that of Anne Boleyn, Henry began to find such displays very expensive, and, having no doubt a prudent misgiving as to the limits of the number of opportunities that the future might afford, at once stopped short. Jane Seymour and her successors accordingly remained uncrowned, so far as the ceremony was concerned. With the exception of the visit of the French nobles after the conference of Guysnes and Arde, who were brought from Greenwich to the Tower in the royal barge, by the Earls of Essex and Derby, and there sumptuously feasted, we find little matter for observation during Henry's reign; who does not appear latterly to have been a very frequent visitor. Little susceptible to any sense of decency or remorse as he lived to show himself, the sight of the spot where Anne Boleyn, the mother of one of his children, had perished on the scaffold, innocent in all probability of any real crime, except that of standing betwixt him and the gratification of his reckless passions, could scarcely be agreeable even to the callous King. He died in 1547, and his son, Edward VI., was immediately conducted from Hatfield to the Tower, where he resided until the day preceding his coronation.

Lady Jane Grey's sovereignty, if sovereignty it may be called, was too brief even for the performance of the coronation ceremonies; so we pass on to those of Mary, the first Queen of England crowned in her own right. With pious and sisterly affection, Mary delayed that ceremony till her brother's funeral, who was buried in Henry VII.'s Chapel, Westminster, according to the forms of the Protestant Church, Mary contenting herself for the present by the very significant intima

tion of her religious views exhibited in the performance of mass, to celebrate the exequies of her brother, in the Tower Chapel. During this period, and whilst the preparations for her coronation were in progress, Mary held her court in the Tower, formed her council, and prepared her measures for the subversion of the new faith. The coronation procession took place on the 30th of September, 1553. The Queen rode in a chariot covered with cloth of gold, and after her, in another chariot, Henry's fourth wife, Anne of Cleves, who, not having enjoyed the luxury of a coronation in her own case, seemed by her smiling face quite contented to enjoy it now in another's. A circlet of gold beset with precious stones had been provided for the Queen, which during the ceremony proved so massy and ponderous, that she was fain to bear up her head with her hand; this same crown her sister Elizabeth carried in the procession, and complained to Noailles, as we have elsewhere noticed, of its weight. "Be patient," was the adroit answer; "it will seem lighter when on your own head." The Princess had little reason to be impatient, for five years only elapsed before she found herself again passing along through that line of crowded streets, herself the "cynosure of all eyes;" and, as she was sure to have remarked, the object of a more heartfelt welcome than had been accorded to her sister. All that ingenuity or wealth could do in the preparation of stately pageants, sumptuous shows, and cunning devices, was done; the figures of the Queen's ancestors, including, with a delightful forgetfulness of the past, Henry and Anne Boleyn (her mother) walking most affectionately together, were represented on stages at the street corners-prophecies and poems were showered upon her; here Time led forth his daughter Truth, who presented a Bible to her Majesty, which she took, reverently pressing it to her bosom; there Gog and Magog, having left Guildhall for Temple Bar, spread before her eyes a tablet of Latin verse, expounding the mysteries hidden beneath the recondite pageants she had beheld. But the day had its pleasanter, because more genuine, evidence of the popular joy, which for once proved to be well founded. Holinshed deserves our gratitude for recording the following charming passage:-"How many nosegays did her grace receive at poor women's hands!-how often stayed she her chariot when she saw any single body offer to speak to her grace! A bunch of rosemary given her grace, with a supplication by a poor woman about Fleet Bridge, was seen in her chariot till her grace came to Westminster." Better feelings, and higher thoughts too, than gratified vanity could originate, were evidently at work in Elizabeth's mind: "Be ye well assured," said she at one part of her progress, "I shall stand your good Queen;" nor did her reign on the whole belie this earnest and solemn promise.

With the solitary attempt at revival of the old custom on Charles II.'s accession, already described, the Palace History may be said to close with the reign of James I., who "passed triumphantly," we are told, from the Tower to Westminster, that he might not altogether disappoint the people; but no proper procession took place, on account of the plague. We have already alluded to the passion of this King for the royal lions; and we therefore at once proceed to describe the foundation and progress of the Tower Menagerie.

Henry III., receiving a present of three leopards from the Emperor Frederick, in allusion to his shield of arms, which bore three of these animals, placed them in the Tower, and subsequently added a white bear, for which the sheriffs of

London were ordered to provide a muzzle and an iron chain to secure him when out of the water, and a long and stout cord to hold him when fishing in the Thames. In the same reign, to the great wonder of the people, who actually came up from different parts of the country to see him, an elephant was added to the collection. In the time of Edward II. we find that there was also a lion in the Tower, for which the sheriffs of London had to provide daily a quarter of mutton. It has been well observed that, whilst about this time we find records of different orders being given to pay sixpence a day for the maintenance of this animal, several esquires, prisoners, were at the same time to be allowed just one penny per day each. By the reign of Henry VI. the office of Keeper had become one of consideration, and persons of family alone seem to have been nominated. It may be interesting to know the price of a lion three hundred years ago; we quote therefore the following item from Henry VIII.'s privy purse expenses, 1532:"Paid to an almoner for bringing of a lion to the King's grace, £6. 13s. 4d." It was not merely to see the beasts that James I. so frequently visited them; a barbarous sport, attempted (happily in vain) to be revived in our own time,the baiting of the lion with dogs,-was frequently got up for his recreation. In 1604, after a little preliminary amusement, such as watching the lion and lioness kill and suck the blood of a cock, two mastiffs were let loose upon a lion, and a terrible battle ensued. On another occasion three of the fiercest dogs in the bear-garden were put one after the other to a lion; but we have neither space nor desire for the repetition of the sickening details. In 1609, the King, Queen, and Prince Henry being present, a great bear, which had killed a child, negligently left in the bear-house, was put in succession to the fiercest lions in the Tower, but none of them would fight their grizzly antagonist. The spec