When Charles II. came to the throne the early years of his rule were occupied in punishing, with merciless severity, all who had in any way been aiders or abettors of those responsible for his father’s tragic death. In the Restoration year the Marquis of Argyll, afterwards executed in Edinburgh, was a Tower prisoner. Poor Sir Harry Vane, not in any way convicted of complicity with the regicides, was brought to Tower Hill in 1662, and there suffered execution without a shadow of justice to cover the crime. Pepys rose “at four o’clock in the morning” of the day when Vane was to suffer. “About eleven o’clock we all went out to Tower Hill, and there, over against the scaffold, made on purpose this day, saw Sir Harry Vane brought. A very great press of people.” The people of London at that time went out to see men brought to the block, just as their successors patronise a Lord Mayor’s show. Pepys had taken a window in Trinity Square, but was unable to see the actual fall of the axe because “the scaffold was so crowded that we could not see it done.” Charles II. was the last of the kings to sleep in the Tower the night before coronation, and he, in keeping with tradition, made a number of Knights of the Bath who would, after the ceremonies in St. John’s Chapel, ride with him in the procession to Westminster on the following day. Of course Pepys had secured a window “in Corne-hill, and there we had a good room to ourselves, with wine and good cake, and saw the show very well.... Glorious was the show with gold and silver, that we were not able to look at it, our eyes at last being so much overcome,” but the volatile diarist has sufficiently recovered the power of vision to observe that “both the King and Duke of York took notice of us as they saw us at the window.” This proved to be one of the “most glorious cavalcades” that ever left the Tower.
The Great Fire of 1666 put the Tower in great danger. Had it reached the walls and set alight the stores of gunpowder lying within, we should have had very little of the work of the Conqueror and Henry III. left to us. The King himself had ordered the demolition of surrounding buildings, and by such means was the progress of the fire checked; Pepys, of course, was running about, and we hear of him “on one of the high places of the Tower” where he was able to look towards London Bridge and did see “an infinite great fire.” George Villiers, second Duke of Buckingham, began his series of five imprisonments in the Tower in 1658, during the Protectorate, and continued them well into Charles’s reign. But though constantly in trouble his offences were as constantly forgiven by the King, and he was never a captive very long. Of Colonel Blood’s escapade in 1671 something will be said in the third chapter, but the irrepressible Pepys was hunting for treasure--not Crown jewels--in 1662 when he was led to believe a sum of £7000 was “hid in the Tower.” He and assistants set to work to dig for this hidden gold, but “it raining and the work being done in the open garden” the search was abandoned. The treasure is yet undiscovered. The amazing