in a dream upsetting them with his
crozier and saying that he did this "as a good citizen of London,
because these new buildings were not put up for the defence of the
realm but to overawe the town," and he added this charming remark: "If
I had not undertaken the duty myself St. Edward or another would have
done it."

Even when Henry's misfortunes were at an end, and when the Battle of
Evesham was won, the Tower was perpetually unfortunate. A body of
rebels surrounded it, and in the defence were present a great number
of Jews, who had fled from the fighting in the city only to find
themselves pressed for service in defence of the fortress. From that
moment they make no further appearance in English military history
till the South African War, unless indeed their appearance in chains
thirteen years later in this same Tower as prisoners for financial
trickery can be counted a military event.

Upon this occasion the siege was raised by the promptitude and energy
of Prince Edward--the man who as King was to march to Caernarvon and to
the Grampians had already in his boyhood shown the energy and the
military aptitude of his grandfather King John. He was but twenty
years old, yet he had already done all the fighting at Lewes, he had
already won Evesham, and now, at the end of spring, he made one march
from Windsor to the Tower and relieved it. It was almost the last time
that the Tower stood for the success of authority. From this time
onwards it is, as it had been before, the unfortunate symbol of
successful rebellion. Edward II. had to leave it in his fatal year of
1326, the Londoners poured in and incidentally massacred the Bishop of
Exeter, into whose hands it had been entrusted.

In 1460 it surrendered to the House of York, and from that time
onwards becomes more and more of a prison and less and less of a
fortress.

The preponderatingly military aspect of the Thames Valley in English
history dwindles with the dwindling of military energy in our
civilisation, and passes with the passing of a governing class that
was military rather than commercial.

Sites which owed their importance to strategical position, and which
had hence grown into considerable towns, ceased to show any but a
civilian character, and even in the only episode of consequence
wherein fighting occurred in England since the Middle Ages--the
episode of the Civil Wars--the banks of the Thames, though perpetually
infested by either army, saw very lit