SCARCELY a hundred and fifty years have elapsed since that long and lofty range of buildings-which now presents to the eye of the spectator from Tower Hill such a melancholy picture of roofless walls and "window'd raggedness"-opened wide its doors to admit the brilliant assemblage which came thither to celebrate the final completion of the edifice. Amid the clang of martial music, and the people's shouts of welcome, the great defender of Protestantism, the able warrior and statesman who had so recently exchanged his principality and stadtholdership for the British monarchy, William III. and his Queen, Mary, passed up the spacious staircase to the magnificent banquet that awaited them in a still more magnificent room. This was a scene calculated to arouse a long train of associations in the King's mind. Whilst others looked only on the picturesque features of the festivity, the military decorations of the place, the splendid dresses of the guests, and the white gloves and aprons of the attending workmen and

VOL. II.

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labourers, the badges of their masonic fraternity, he remembered that the man who was now wandering through Europe, secking to recover by force the crown he had lost by his policy, had laid the foundation of the edifice in which he, the more fortunate, sat. Cold, too, as his temperament might be, it is hardly in nature to suppose that the memories of the entire locality swept across his mind without some quickening of the blood in his veins at finding himself, a foreigner, in that ancient palace of the sovereigns of England, surrounded by eminent Englishmen of all parties, whose presence he might justly have looked upon as representative of the national desire to honour him as the king of the national choice. But a still deeper emotion was no doubt awakened by the scene. The Tower, the Arsenal, and the cheerful faces around, were types that it required no poetical nature to feel of the warfare he had so long waged for the maintenance of the religion which it seemed the object of his life to promote, and the eventual success of which he must now have felt was assured to him, by the mighty increase of power and influence which he obtained when the British sceptre was placed in his hands. The scene, we repeat, here mentioned, took place but a century and a half Well may ago. the poet sing

"What great events from little causes spring!"

A workman overlooks a few live embers in a stove on leaving it for the night, or a spark ignites the soot in its flue, and suddenly not only is this banquetting-room changed into the dreary-looking ruin before mentioned, but the fate of the entire Tower, its chapel, its council-room, its prison memorials, its records, its regalia, are all placed in imminent jeopardy. The event of the night of Saturday the 30th day of October, 1841, was indeed of no ordinary moment. The sentinel's warning musket, the sudden sounding of bugles, the prolonged roll of drums, and the hurrying of the startled soldiers of the garrison into their respective ranks, which followed the first alarm of danger, never announced in the Tower the presence of a more dangerous enemy. Scarcely had the flames passed from the Tower where they were first scen, into the Armoury wherein William had been feasted, and began to appear through the windows opening upon the great area, endeavouring to snatch as it were into its embraces the White Tower immediately opposite, before it was remembered that immense quantities of gunpowder were stored in that tower. The scene at that moment presented were a subject for no common pencil. The dark night so terribly illuminated by the great central body of fire; the gushes of flames darting at intervals through the more distant windows; here the keepers of the priceless crowns, orbs, and sceptres of the Regalia, bearing them off, little heeding in what manner, to a more distant part of the Tower; there the train of soldiers hastening to throw into the moat the latent mischief, which needed but the touch of the smallest spark to sweep the Tower and all its inhabitants into indistinguishable ruin; lastly, the sea of human faces on the neighbouring hill; the anxious crowd at the entrance clamouring for admittance to their friends and relatives, and the solitary sentinel with his even tread marching to and fro, as though nothing but that could concern him, whatever might be passing around. A few days and how striking a contrast to this scene appears in the same place. All is cold, dark, and dreary: the walls still stand, but no longer shut out the November storm. The beautiful sculpture

(the Royal Arms) placed by Gibbons over the main entrance is fortunately preserved uninjured. Within, one vast heap of charred cannons, muskets, swords, the wreck of the late beautiful Armoury, is seen, with here and there some wellknown trophy-the huge mortar used by William soon after his visit here, at the siege of Namur, the famous Camperdown anchor, or a Waterloo field-pieceprojecting from the mass, as if to satisfy the anxious inquirer that they at least were safe. On the whole, however, we have much reason to congratulate ourselves that, such a calamity having happened, so few of those historical memorials which constitute the great wealth of the Tower have been involved in it. It has also done what perhaps no other influence could have accomplished in its stead,-enhanced our appreciation of those memorials, and we may hope thus prepared the way for measures that shall insure their permanent safety. If so, the nation will hardly begrudge the loss its has experienced. Before we inquire what was the nature and extent of this loss, it may be useful to glance back at the history of the Arsenal, of which the great storehouse, lately destroyed, constituted the principal modern feature.

The use of the Tower as an arsenal would of course naturally follow its occupation as the chief place of kingly residence; and the same security which the Tower promised whenever necessary to the royal person, would be equally desired for that important part of the royal property in the middle ages, his military stores. The first mention of matters of this kind occurs in the reign of John, when Geoffrey de Mandeville, being commanded to surrender the Tower to the Archdeacon of Durham, special attention is directed to the "arms and other stores." The nature of such stores appears in the following reign, in a mandate issued to the Archdeacon of Durham, to transmit to the Tower "twenty-six suits of armour, five iron cuirasses, one iron collar, three pairs of iron fetters, and nine iron helmets," which had been left in his charge. In subsequent notices referring to this and the following century, we find mentioned coat-armours, great engines, supposed to be battering-rams, espringalls, quarrells, hauberks, lances, arblasts, bows, arrows, and bow-strings. There were painted and plain bows, the price of the former being eighteenpence, of the latter a shilling. The arrows were a shilling per sheaf. But the most interesting document we possess in connexion with the ancient Arsenal, is an inventory of the reign of Henry VI., from which we transcribe a few "items."

"First, eight swords, and a long blade of a sword made in wafters (that is, with the flat of the blade placed in the usual direction of the edge, so as to strike or waft the wind at every blow), some greater and some smaller, for to learn the King to play in his tender age.

"Item; a little harness (or suit of armour) that the Earl of Warwick made for the King, or [before] that he went over the sea, garnished with gold," &c. A great number of banners of satin woven with the arms of England and France, or of St. George, banners of the Trinity, banners of Our Lady, with pennons and feathers, are mentioned, with the accompanying marginal memorandum that most of them had been used at the interment of the "three queens, that is to say, Queen Katherine, the Queen of France, and Queen Johan," and of "my lord of Bedford, and my lady his wife," and that the pennons were "set about the hearses of them, and where that it liked him that had the rule thereof."

"Item; three little coat-armours, which be the sergeant's fee of the armoury, and so delivered by the King's commandment to him because that they were so little, and will serve no man, for they were made for him when he was but seven years of age.' Some fifty standards of worsted, with the arms of England and France, or France only (the latter no doubt trophies of many a "well-foughten field"), are next mentioned, with the accompanying curious observation, “the which standards be worn and spended in carrying of the King's harness in and out into his chamber for default of their stuffs." We have here an amusing exhibition of the economy of the King's household! Annexed to the list of certain quantities of coarse red silk, and red velvet, four gross of points, and six arming nails, is the observation, "all expended, and much more, to one of the King's harness." Among the other miscellaneous articles noticed in the inventory, are old jousting saddles painted of divers works; other saddles of different kinds, broken, and "old great coffers bound with iron, and lacking keys, which were cast out of an old house in the Tower of London," because "they would serve for nothing." The writer must have been some sly, satirical humourist, who having been called to account probably for things he looked upon as of little moment, or as stray waifs that should be left to his own proper use and advantage, revenged himself in the only safe way. He appears determined to enjoy his joke whatever becomes of the perquisite. The last item we shall quote seems to us peculiarly rich. It refers to "one bow-staff, worm-eaten, delivered by the King's commandment to my lord of Gloucester, when he went over to Calais.”

In the reign of Edward VI., an inventory was taken of the stores and habiliments of war in the different arsenals of the kingdom, the manuscript of which is in the possession of the Society of Antiquaries. We there find reference to brigandines, or military jackets, the sleeves of some of which were covered with cloth of gold, others with blue satin; targets, with small gun-barrels projecting from the centre instead of boss and spike; (in one case a single target having twenty of these "guns ;") "a target of the shell of tortoise;" barbs of steel for horses, graven and enamelled blue; pole-axes with gun-barrels in the end; gilt poleaxes, with the handles or staves covered with crimson velvet, and fringed with "silk of gold;" great and little "holly-water sprincles;" which, according to Sir Samuel Meyrick, were staves with large cylindrical heads, and a spear point at the extremity, &c. We shall only add to these particulars that, in the time of Elizabeth, the Arsenal still included a large store of the popular old English weapons. There were, for instance, above eight thousand bows, with staves and bowstrings for six thousand more, fourteen thousand sheaves of arrows, also a considerable quantity of cross-bows, "slur-bows," and "long-bow arrows for fire-works." The names of many of the former officers of the Tower, like those of the numerous old weapons we have mentioned, belong to a period, and a system which have entirely passed away. There was the Balistarius, or keeper and provider of cross-bows, whose income in the time of Henry III. was a shilling a day, to which were added yearly a doublet and surcoat furred with lambskin, and allowance for three servants. The Attiliator Balistarum had the duty imposed on him of providing harness and other accoutrements for the cross-bows. He received sevenpence halfpenny a day, and a robe once a year. The Bowyer was intrusted with the care and provision of the ordinary long-bow; and the Fletcher

with all that pertained to the arrows required for them. Lastly, the Galeater attended to that important part of every complete suit of armour the helmet, or head-piece; whilst the Armourer took the remainder under his management. All these officers were, in the reign of Edward IV., subordinate to the Master of the King's Ordnance. A Master-General remains still at the head of the establishment, which we need scarcely say is the chief Arsenal of the empire, from which issue all orders of direction for the disposal of military stores. Beside the large building opposite the southern side of the White Tower and the Great Storehouse, or its site, the Ordnance Office occupies various places as store-rooms, including the large rooms extending below the Council Chamber, which require no further notice.

The Great Storehouse consisted of three stories, the lowest called the Train of Artillery, the second the Small Arms Armoury, the third the Tent Room. The building measured 345 feet in length and 60 in width. The Train of Artillery was so called from its having been at first used as the place of deposit for fieldpieces intended for actual service; but many years ago these were all removed to Woolwich, and the place chiefly devoted to the collection and exhibition of such instruments or trophies of warfare as possessed some more than common interest. Wherever the visitor directed his eyes, he beheld pieces of ordnance, of all shapes, sizes, and periods, every one of which recalled to the mind some one or other of the great events of our naval or military history. As he passed along towards the right he beheld a large iron gun on its carriage, both decayed, and covered with marine products. That was one of the cannons of the Royal George, which "went down" with brave Admiral Kempenfeldt, and was recovered from

the wreck in 1834. Glancing as he passed at the singularly long and small brass Maltese cannon, measuring above seventeen feet in length, though only in technical language a seven-pounder, and another strange-looking piece of the reign of Charles II., his attention was next arrested by two very elegant and large brass pieces taken from the walls of Vigo about 1704. On the breeches were finely carved lions couchant, and near the muzzles of each an effigy of St. Barbara, to whom they had been dedicated. Among the other noticeable pieces were two beautiful brass lichornes, taken from a Turkish frigate, but manufactured in St. Petersburgh; two one-pounder brass guns mounted, and most elaborately