[Victorian Web Home —> Visual Arts —> Illustration —> George Cruikshank —> The Tower of London —> W. H. Ainsworth —> Next]
South Side of the Room in which the Young Princes were Murdered
George Cruikshank
November 1840
Wood-engraving
8.7 cm high by 8.1 cm wide
In Book II, Ch. XXXIII, of Ainsworth's The Tower of London, p. 350.
[Click on image to enlarge it.]
Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham.
The interview about to be related took place in the large octangular chamber previously described. It was sumptuously furnished: the walls were hung with arras from the looms of Flanders, and the deep recesses occupied with couches, or sideboards loaded with costly cups and vessels.
Hastily advancing towards the queen, the lady prostrated herself at her feet, and, throwing aside her disguise, revealed the features of Jane. She extended her hands supplicatingly towards Mary, and fixed her streaming eyes upon her, but was for some moments unable to speak.
"I am come to submit myself to your highness's mercy," she said, as soon as she could find utterance.
"Mercy!" exclaimed Mary, scornfully. "You shall receive justice, but no mercy."
"I neither deserve, nor desire it," replied Jane. "I have deeply, but not wilfully — Heaven is my witness!—offended your majesty, and I will willingly pay the penalty of my fault."
"What would you with me?"demanded Mary. "I have acceded to this interview in consideration of your voluntary submission. But be brief. I have important business before me, and my heart is steeled to tears and supplications."
"Say not so, gracious madam,” rejoined Jane. “A woman’s heart can never be closed to the pleadings of the unfortunate of her own sex, still less the heart of one so compassionate as your highness. I do not sue for myself."
"For whom, then?” demanded the queen.
"For my husband,” replied Jane.
"I am about to sign his death-warrant,"replied Mary, in a freezing tone.
"I will not attempt to exculpate him, madam," returned Jane, restraining her emotion by a powerful effort, "for his offence cannot be extenuated. Nay, I deplore his rashness as much as your highness can condemn it. But I am well assured that vindictiveness is no part of your royal nature — that you disdain to crush a fallen foe — and that, when the purposes of justice are answered, no sentiments but those of clemency will sway your bosom. I myself, contrary to my own wishes, have been the pretext for the late insurrection, it is right I should suffer, because while my life remains, your highness may not feel secure. But my husband has no claims, pretended or otherwise, to the throne, and when I am removed, all fear of him will be at an end. Let what I have done speak my sincerity. I could have escaped to France, if I had chosen. But I did not choose to accept safety on such terms. Well knowing with whom I had to deal — knowing also that my life is of more importance than my husband’s, I have come to offer myself for him. If your highness has any pity for me, extend it to him, and heap his faults on my head."[Chapter XXXI. — "How Jane surrendered herself a prisoner; and how she besought Queen Mary to spare her husband," pp. 341-342]
Left: The wood-engraving of the hallway in the Bloody Tower in 1840, Passage in the Bloody Tower by which the Murderers approached (November 1840). Centre: A placid, neatly-furnished Victorian was supposedly where the sons of Edward IV were assassinated: North Side of the Room in which the Princes were Murdered (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.]
Cruikshank juxtaposes a vignetted wood-engraving of the quietly furnished domestic space as it existed in 1840 (p. 350) with Ainsworth's dramatic scene involving Mary Tudor, the Spanish ambassador, and the mysterious masked figure at the window. In fact, this tidy Victorian parlour is the last of three such present-day scenes that are sharply at variance with the sanguine associations of the suite of rooms which the machiavellian Simon Renard occupies in the novel, which, as the juxtaposition of the wood-engravings and the steel-engraving suggest, blends a strictly historical strain (the execution of Lady Jane Grey) and a fictional element involving the jailor Nightgall, his jealousy of Cuthbert Cholmondeley, and his lust for Alexia and Cicely. As the text in these pages stipulates, Mary has been working on correspondence at the writing desk in the ambassador's apartment in the upper storey of the Bloody Tower, receiving but not always acceding to Renard's advice regarding impending executions. She has, however, reluctantly just signed the death-warrants for her cousins, Lady Jane and Lord Guildford Dudley as their continued existence poses a threat both to her rule and the continued existence of the Roman Catholic Church in England.
In the culminating steel-engraving Cruikshank fails to invest Renard's apartment with the ominous overtones appropriate to either the scene in which Nightgall, disguised, interrupts the discussion over whether to execute Jane. Tradition holds that in this very room the Duke of Gloucester's henchman Sir James Tyrell murdered the young "Princes in the Tower" in June 1483. The discovery of their skeletons in a stone staircase on the south side of the White Tower in 1674 may have resolved their mysterious disappearance, although it failed to confirm the tradition that the sons of Edward IV died in this very room — although the Church of England has continued to refuse to allow either set of remains to be subjected to DNA analysis to identify them as the remains of the princes. Close to the writing of the novel, the draining of the Tower moat between 1830 and 1840 exposed a great many bones, some of which were attributed to the missing princes, so that the story continued to be of some topical interest at the time that Ainsworth was writing the novel. Nightgall's decision to accept the French ambassador's commission to assassinate Renard proves his undoing.
Built by King Henry III between 1238 and 1272, the tower was originally 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 the Bloody Tower was always intended to be part of the fortress's defenses; for example, the grooves for working a massive portcullis remain, as do the chains and a windlass (still to be seen on the upper floor), once used to raise and lower the defensive portcullis. 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.
"Ainsworth, William Harrison." http://biography.com
Ainsworth, William Harrison. The Tower of London. Illustrated by George Cruikshank. London: Richard Bentley, 1840.
Burton, Anthony. "Cruikshank as an Illustrator of Fiction." George Cruikshank: A Revaluation. Ed. Robert L. Patten. Princeton: Princeton U. P., 1974, rev., 1992. Pp. 92-128.
Carver, Stephen. Ainsworth and Friends: Essays on 19th Century Literature & The Gothic. 11 September 2017.
Department of Environment, Great Britain. The Tower of London. London: Her Majesty's Stationery Office, 1967, rpt. 1971.
Chesson, Wilfred Hugh. George Cruikshank. The Popular Library of Art. London: Duckworth, 1908.
Golden, Catherine J. "Ainsworth, William Harrison (1805-1882." Victorian Britain: An Encyclopedia, ed. Sally Mitchell. New York and London: Garland, 1988. Page 14.
Kelly, Patrick. "William Harrison Ainsworth." Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vol. 21, "Victorian Novelists Before 1885," ed. Ira Bruce Nadel and William E. Fredeman. Detroit: Gale Research, 1983. Pp. 3-9.
McLean, Ruari. George Cruikshank: His Life and Work as a Book Illustrator. English Masters of Black-and-White. London: Art and Technics, 1948.
Pitkin Pictorials. Prisoners in the Tower. Caterham & Crawley: Garrod and Lofthouse International, 1972.
Sutherland, John. "The Tower of London" in The Stanford Companion to Victorian Fiction. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 19893. P. 633.
Steig, Michael. "George Cruikshank and the Grotesque: A Psychodynamic Approach." George Cruikshank: A Revaluation. Ed. Robert L. Patten. Princeton: Princeton U. P., 1974, rev., 1992. Pp. 189-212.
Vogler, Richard A. Graphic Works of George Cruikshank. Dover Pictorial Archive Series. New York: Dover, 1979.
Worth, George J. William Harrison Ainsworth. New York: Twayne, 1972.
Vann, J. Don. "The Tower of London, thirteen parts in twelve monthly instalments, January-December 1840." Victorian Novels in Serial. New York: MLA, 1985. Pp. 19-20.
Last modified 28 October 2017