nd escape from the Tower in 1597;[59] but the
history of the many illustrious captives who have suffered within these
walls would in itself suffice for a large volume, while so much, and
from so many pens, has already been written thereon, that I have
contented myself with few allusions thereto, and those necessarily of
the briefest.

It is much to be regretted that military exigencies have rendered it
needful to remove from the walls of the various prison cells many
interesting inscriptions with which their inmates strove to beguile the
monotony of captivity, and as far as possible to concentrate them in the
upper room within the Beauchamp tower, with which many of them have no
historic association whatever; but as the public would otherwise have
been debarred from any sight of them, this is far from being the
unmixed evil it might otherwise appear, while they have been fully
illustrated and carefully described by Bayley.

About the time of Edward I. a Mint was first established in the western
and northern portions of the outer bailey, where it remained until, in
1811, it was removed to the New Mint in East Smithfield, and the name
"Mint Street," given to that portion of the bailey, now commemorates
this circumstance.

When, about 1882, the extension of the "Inner Circle" Railway was in
progress, the site of the permanent scaffold on Great Tower Hill, upon
which so many sanguinary executions took place, was discovered in
Trinity Square, remains of its stout oak posts being found imbedded in
the ground. A blank space, with a small tablet in the grass of the
Square garden, now marks the spot.

In a recent work upon the Tower, an amazing theory has been seriously
put forward "of State barges entering the ditch, rowing onto a kind of
submerged slipway at the Cradle tower, when, _mirabile dictu_, boat and
all were to be lifted out of the water and drawn into the fortress!"
Such things are only possible in the vivid imagination of a writer
devoid of the most elementary knowledge of the purpose for which this
gateway was designed. It suffices to point out that no long State barge
could have entered the ditch without first performing the impossible
feat of sharply turning two corners at right angles in a space less than
its own length, and too confined to allow oars to be used, while there
are no recorded instances of such mediaeval equivalents of the modern
floating and depositing dock! The Cradle tower gate is too short