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Passage in the Bloody Tower by which the Murderers approached
George Cruikshank
November 1840
Wood-engraving
9 cm high by 8.1 cm wide, vignetted
In Book II, Ch. XXXIII, of Ainsworth's The Tower of London, facing p. 220.
[Click on image to enlarge it and mouse over text for links.]
Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham.
"Your highness will be not turned from your purpose by such idle fears," rejoined Renard, in as sarcastic a tone as he dared assume. “Not only your throne may be endangered, if you suffer them to live, but the Catholic religion."
"True,"replied Mary, "I will no longer hesitate."
And she attached her signature to the warrant.
Renard watched her with a look of such fiendish exultation, that an unseen person who gazed at the moment into the room, seeing a tall dark figure, dilated by the gloom, for it was deepening twilight, and a countenance from which everything human was banished, thought he beheld a demon, and, fascinated by terror, could not withdraw his eyes. At the same moment, too, the queen’s favourite dog, which was couched at her feet, and for a short time previously had been uttering a low growl, now broke into a fierce bark, and sprang towards the passage-window. Mary turned to ascertain the cause of the animal's disquietude, and perceived that it had stiffened in every joint, while its barking changed to a dismal howl. Not without misgiving, she glanced towards the window— and there, at the very place whence she had often heard that the murderers had gazed upon the slumbering innocents before the bloody deed was done— there, between those bars, she beheld a hideous black mask, through the holes of which glared a pair of flashing orbs. [Chapter XXXIII. — "How Nightgall was bribed by De Noailles to assassinate Simon Renard; and how Jane's death-warrant was signed," pp. 351-52]
Left: The wood-engraving of the room where by tradition the sons of Edward IV were murdered by agents of the Duke of Gloucester, South Side of the Room in which the Young Princes were Murdered as it looked in 1840. Centre: North Side of the Room in which the Princes were Murdered (November 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 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, Simon Renard, and the mysterious mask 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.
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Last modified 28 October 2017