Underneath our feet is a deep channel, now dry, where the river once ran in to fill up the moat. It flowed under a great gloomy archway with a gate, and when the river was running here everyone who came to the Tower by water had to land at that gate. It has an awful name, and some of the very saddest memories belong to it. It is called Traitor's Gate. In those old days, when people used their river much more than we do now, they owned barges, great boats covered with an awning, and when they wanted to go from Westminster to the Tower they did not think of driving, for the streets were narrow and badly paved, the roads between London and Westminster quite dangerous; and they could not go by train, for no one had ever imagined anything so wonderful as a train, so they went by water.
When the prisoners who were in the Tower had to be tried before judges they were taken up the river in barges to Westminster, where all the evidence was heard, and then they were brought back again. How many of them made that last sad journey and entered the Traitor's Gate never to come out again! They had been to Westminster to be tried, feeling quite sure something would happen in their favour, and they would be set free; and then they had heard the sentence that they were to be beheaded! They came back down the river, and the sunshine might be just as gay, the water as sparkling, as when they went, but to them it would all seem different. The journey was short, too short for a man who knew it was his last! Then when they reached the Tower the barge would sail on up to the Traitor's Gate, and the dark shadow of the heavy walls would fall on the prisoner, and he would feel a chill at his heart as he stepped out on to those cold gray stones.
Of some of those who suffered in the Tower you have heard. Sir Thomas More landed here when he came in his barge from Chelsea, but we know that he was too brave and good to feel much fear. Lady Jane Grey landed here when her father and father-in-law brought her here, calling her Queen; she came as a queen, but stayed here afterwards as a prisoner. Did any warning tell her this when she stepped out of the boat?
Queen Elizabeth came here, too, when she was only a princess. Her sister Mary was on the throne, and Mary feared that people would make Elizabeth queen, so she sent her as a prisoner to the Tower. We know the very words Elizabeth said as she landed, though nearly three hundred and fifty years have passed since then. She exclaimed: 'Here landeth as true a subject, being a prisoner, as ever landed on these stairs, and before Thee, O God, I speak it, having none other friends but Thee.' Then she sat down on a stone, and said: 'Better sit on a stone than in a cell.' And only the entreaties of her attendant moved her to get up and go on. She was a prisoner for several years, and at first was not allowed to go out of her cell at all. Afterwards, when she became Queen on Mary's death, one of the first places she visited was the Tower, perhaps because she felt pleased at being a Queen instead of a prisoner, and wanted to enjoy the contrast.