“‘There may be writing on it with invisible ink,’ said one of his comrades.
“‘It is wetted, but I think it is only with tears,’ answered the senior. ‘I cannot keep it from the poor gentleman.’
“‘Ah, Master Coleby,’ said his comrade, in a gentle tone of reproach, ‘you would have been wearing a better coat than a yeoman’s to-day had it not been for a tender heart.’”
“‘It signifies little,’ said old Coleby, ‘while my heart is true to my King, what I feel in discharging my duty, or what coat keeps my old bosom from the cold weather.’”
Spoken like a true son of the old Tower, we say, and feel ourselves already with Peveril listening to the warders’ talk as they take him to his cell. We begin to breathe the Tower atmosphere, we hear a groan from one cell, the clank of chains from another; we see a young yeoman whispering words of love into the ear of a maid who was born and has grown up within the battlements that bound us on all sides, and we see some boys at play round the spot where to-morrow a human being may suffer death. And over all this little world within the walls, where comedy and tragedy shake hands each day, rises the Conqueror’s Norman keep unchanged and unchangeable. Here is a quarry indeed in which to dig for material for a whole series of novels and plays, and yet Sir Walter beheads our little romance on Tower Green, and spirits us away “into a more bustling scene.”
Shakespeare brings us to the Tower four times in the course of the three parts of _King Henry VI._ and four times during _King Richard III._ In the former play we witness the death of the imprisoned Edmund Mortimer; in the fourth act of Part II. there is a short Tower scene of a dozen lines; the sixth scene of Part III. Act IV., headed “A room in the Tower,” brings us to King Henry asking the Lieutenant of the Tower what fees incurred during his (the King’s), captivity are due to him; and in the sixth scene of the last act of the same part, we are again in “A room in the Tower,” where “King Henry is discovered sitting with a book in his hand, the Lieutenant attending.” Here, in the course of the scene, Henry is stabbed by Gloucester, and with the words, “O, God forgive my sins, and pardon thee!” dies. In _Richard III._ when, in the first act, we are taken into the “room in the Tower” in which Clarence is murdered, and see the evil deed performed as, later in the play, we are again in the Tower at the smothering of the sleeping Princes, we feel that Shakespeare has in these moving scenes brought before our eyes the grim reality of two evil deeds done in secret within the prison-house set up by William the Norman and Henry III. But here, again, our dramatist is only telling over again the story told in England’s records, and it is all a tale of unrelieved gloom. That is why we have come to associate the Tower with murder, torture, and evil passions. We forget that the sun shone on the Royal Palace, on the Green, and even sent a beam of its rays into many a dreary cell; that flowers grew in the constable’s garden and made fragrance there as sweetly as in the cottage gardens deep down in the quietude of the shires; that jailors and warders had not invariably hearts of stone; that prisoners by taking thought and snatching an instant opportunity had found a way through the walls, then to a boat on the river, and so to liberty. In describing the shifts and hopes and disappointments that at last reached their close in so happy a “curtain,” we would wish our dramatist had been moved to write another _All’s Well That Ends Well_, with a Tower background.