In a house on the western side of Tower Hill Lady Raleigh dwelt with her son when her husband was denied her society. From her window she could look out day by day upon the Brick Tower to which Raleigh had been removed, and tradition asserts that she was able to communicate with him and send him gifts in spite of Waad’s stringent orders. The house in which William Penn was born, on October 14, 1644, stood on the east side of the hill; its site is covered by the new roadway leading to the Minories. Penn was sent to school at Chigwell, in Essex, and it was during those days of boyhood that he had been impressed by the preaching of a Quaker preacher which led him to forsake the Church of his baptism (he was baptized, as we shall see in the following chapter, in Allhallows Barking), and join the Society of Friends. Thomas Otway, the poet, abused by Rochester in his _Session of the Poets_, and praised by Dryden, died, it is believed of starvation, in the Bull Inn on Tower Hill, when only thirty-four years old. That great Elizabethan, Edmund Spenser, was born near Tower Hill in 1552, and passed his boyhood there, before going, when sixteen, to Pembroke College, Cambridge. In Little Tower Street, in a timber-fronted, many-gabled house, now, alas, swept away, James Thomson wrote his poem _Summer_, published in 1727. So much for literary associations.
Peter the Great, who raised Russia “out of the slough of ignorance and obscurity,” in order to superintend the building of a navy took upon himself the task of learning shipbuilding, first as a common labourer, afterwards as a master craftsman. He came to London for four months and worked in the dockyards by day and drank heavily in a public-house in Allhallows Barking parish at night. He was accustomed “to resort to an inn in Great Tower Street and smoke and drink ale and brandy, almost enough to float the vessel he had been helping to construct.” Barrow, his biographer, states that “the landlord had the Czar of Muscovy’s head painted and put up for his sign, which continued until the year 1808, when a person of the name of Waxel took a fancy to the old sign and offered the then occupier of the house to paint him a new one for it. A copy was accordingly made from the original, which maintains its station to the present day as the sign of the Czar’s Head.” The house has since been rebuilt and the sign removed, but the name remains. While the Earl of Rochester was in disgrace at Court in Charles II.’s time he is said to have “robed and bearded himself as an Italian quack or mountebank physician, and, under the name of Bendo, set up at a goldsmith’s house, next door to the Black Swan in Tower Street,” where he advertised that he “was to be seen from three of the clock in the afternoon till eight at night.” The second Duke of Buckingham came, once or twice in disguise, in his days of political intrigue, to a house facing Tower Hill, to consult an old astrologer who professed to draw horoscopes. In Seething Lane, then known as Sidon Lane, which runs from Allhallows Barking to the Church of St. Olave’s, Hart Street, Sir Francis Walsingham, Queen Elizabeth’s principal secretary, dwelt “in a fair and large house.” This foe of the Jesuits died here on April 5, 1590, “and was buried next night, at ten of the clock, in Paul’s Church.”