information secretly obtained, many persons were arrested in various parts of England, on the charge of being concerned with him in an attempt to disturb the government. Ten or twelve of them were imprisoned in the Tower, till the king's death, and two executed in London. The one was Sir James Windham, and the other Sir James Tyrrel. The fate of the latter excited no sympathy. He was the guilty instrument of bloody King Richard, in the murder of the two young princes, and the world rejoiced that vengeance had come upon him at last.

Henry, though he afterwards obtained possession of the person of the Earl of Suffolk, did not dare to bring him to trial, and he remained in the Tower a close prisoner till the death of the tyrant. These were hard times, not only for the high in rank, but for the rich in the world's wealth. The aldermen and wealthy citizens of London found the reputation of men of substance exceedingly inconvenient, and were often forced to pay large sums to the rapacious king, or rot in the dungeons of the Tower. Empson and Dudley, his still more rapacious instruments, delighted in fleecing an alderman. Sir William Capel was fined 20007. for some slight dereliction of duty when he was Lord Mayor of London eleven years previously, and because he murmured at the sentence, was committed to the Tower. Alderman Harris was also singled out as a victim, and died of a broken heart in consequence. Sir Lawrence Aylmer, and the two gentlemen who had served the office of sheriff during his mayoralty, were fined in large sums for some im

aginary stretch of authority many years before, and kept in close confinement in the Tower for their refusal to pay it. it. Most of them ultimately paid the fine, but Sir William Capel and Sir Lawrence Aylmer were resolute, and preferred the dungeons to submission to such injustice. They remained in prison till the death of Henry.

But the catalogue of blood and sorrow swells upon us as we write. The victims of the Tower rise up in long review before us-so many and so innocent as to make us sick at heart in wading through the chronicles for the records of their fate. The next reign surpassed even that of Henry VII. in the number of victims inclosed within the gloomy portals of this building.

The first prisoners committed to the Tower in the reign of Henry VIII. were two men odious in the sight of the people. The instruments of a tyrant are always more hated than the tyrant himself; and upon the devoted heads of Empson and Dudley was accumulated all the ill-will that men were afraid of venting upon the memory of their employer. Henry VIII. saw how much popularity he might gain by sacrificing these men, and he sacrificed them; for it cannot be supposed that with his notions and his temper, he could have felt much indignation against them for a crime of no greater magnitude than oppressing a people for the profit of a king. While common informers of less note were set in the pillory or beaten to death in the streets, these two, after a short imprisonment in the Tower, were 2 E

VOL. II.

beheaded on Tower Hill, with all the pomp and pageantry of judicial manslaughter.

For the next twelve years the dungeons of the Tower were all but tenantless. Henry had not shed the blood of his own enemies; Empson and Dudley had not interfered with his plans, thwarted his pas sions, or conspired against his authority, and in consigning them to the scaffold he did not know the sweetness of revenge. His appetite for blood was not whetted by their fate, and it took a long interval to instil thoroughly into him a few of those Algerine notions of prompt decapitation and plurality of wives, for which he was afterwards so much distinguished. The first of a long line of illustrious victims to his fears, his passions, and his prejudices, was Edward Bohun, duke of Buckingham, thrown into the Tower and beheaded in 1521. This nobleman was descended, through a female, from King Edward III., and had given too much encouragement to a designing astrologer, who had prophesied that he would be king of England, should Henry die without issue. The Lords Abergavenny and Montague were imprisoned at the same time, but escaped the axe of the executioner. No doubt there was treason in the duke's offence; but he seems to have acted more from thoughtlessness than wickedness. He conducted himself bravely during his trial. The Duke of Norfolk, whose son had married Buckingham's daughter, was created lord steward, to preside at the inquisition, and upon him devolved the duty of passing sentence. He wept

piteously as he uttered the awful words-" Sir Edward Bohun, duke of Buckingham, you have been found guilty by your peers. You shall be led to the king's prison, and there laid on a hurdle, and so drawn to the place of execution. There you shall be hanged, cut down alive, your members cut off and cast into the fire, your bowels burnt before you, your head smitten off, your body quartered and divided at the king's will; and may God have mercy on your soul. Amen!" Buckingham replied that such words were proper to be said to a traitor; but he was never one. He forgave them all his death, and desired their prayers, but said he would never sue to the king for his life. He was led into a barge at Westminster, and landed at the Temple Stairs, and so on through the streets of London to the Tower, where on the following day he was beheaded.

Again there was a long interval of fourteen years, during which time the Tower received no illustrious prisoners. Henry was not yet an accomplished taker-off of heads. He served a long apprenticeship, and did not give the world all at once a warning how dangerous and expert a practitioner he would become. But when he next thirsted for blood, his victims were great, and innocent, and distinguished. John Fisher, the bishop of Rochester, was thrown into the Tower, in his extreme old age, for refusing an oath which it went against his conscience to take, and for concealing the treasonable fooleries of Elizabeth Barton, the Holy Maid of Kent. He remained in his dungeon for more than a twelvemonth, without

a covering to keep him from the cold on the winter nights, and scarcely a rag to cover his nakedness. He was a man eminent for his learning, his piety, and his many amiable qualities. Cromwell, the secre tary, relieved his necessities in secret, at the risk of his own head; but still the aged prelate remained in a woful state, until the knife of the executic ner sent him to a better world.

Twelve days afterwards (July 4th, 1535,) Sir Thomas More, as good a man, and a more celebrated, was brought to the scaffold for the very same offence. His original sentence was perpetual imprisonment, but his death was needful to his tyrant, as a warning to men of lesser note. He was brought to trial, and condemned at last for an unguarded speech to a man who had been sent as a spy upon him. He died as he had lived-serene and cheerful.

Hitherto the captives of the Tower had been men: some of them old, some of them young, and some of them children; but as yet, no woman had suffered a long imprisonment within its walls, with the exception of Margaret, queen of Henry VI., ransomed by the King of France. Poor Anne Boleyn, with beauty for her dower and for her curse, was the first illustrious lady consigned to its dark dungeons-only to be brought forth to die the death of the felon. Her unhappy charms ceased to be agreeable in the sight of her lord; and therefore she was committed to prison upon charges the most foul, but supported upon evidence so slight, that all the world thought shame. Her cheerfulness, her youthful buoyancy of