[Illustration: _Tomb of the Blount Family in Sᵗ. Peter’s Chapel._]
At the back of the chapel of St Peter, and at the north-western angle of the Inner Ward, stands the Devereux Tower, which contains two storeys, the lower one being of massive masonry. This tower dates from the reign of Richard the First. In the Elizabethan survey of the fortress it is named Robyn the Devylls Tower, and in later times it was known as the Develin Tower, and as such it appears in Haiward’s plan. No record has come down as to the meaning of these names, but the present appellation dates from the reign of Elizabeth, when Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex, was a prisoner there. The upper part of the tower is modern, and modern windows have taken the place of the old loopholes in the 11 feet thick walls, a change which has destroyed the character of the building; formerly it was most gloomy and forbidding. A small winding staircase within the tower leads to a couple of prisons constructed in the thickness of the Ballium wall. A secret passage is supposed to have led thence, to the Flint Tower which stands to the east of the Devereux Tower, communicating also with the vaults under St Peter’s Chapel. Nothing remains, however, in the present modernised state of these passages and prisons to indicate their former appearance. Early in the nineteenth century the lower floor of the Devereux Tower was used as a kitchen and other offices connected with the ordnance; the upper portion was occupied by the Master Furbisher of the Small Arms. The old kitchen, beneath which is a dungeon, has a fine vaulted ceiling.
The Flint Tower lies due east, at a distance of 90 feet from the Devereux Tower, but as it was found to be in an entirely ruinous state in 1796, the old fabric was pulled down and the present ugly brick tower rose in its place. The old tower had been known by the unflattering name of “Little Hell,” probably from the noisomeness of its dungeons, and it had the evil reputation of having the worst prisons in the fortress. Another 90 feet from the Flint Tower stands the Bowyer Tower, of which only the base is ancient, the remainder of the building being modern; this tower dates from the reign of Edward the Third, and it was here that the Duke of Clarence is traditionally said to have been drowned in a butt of Malmsey (Malvoisie) wine. According to those learned historians of the Tower, Britton and Brayley, who wrote in the early part of the nineteenth century, there was a vault in a dungeon in this tower closed by a trap door, which opened on a flight of steps; from these steps a narrow cell led into a secret passage made in the thickness of the Ballium wall. This was one of the many secret passages which ran below ground, and of which, as has already been noticed, an important one was discovered when the Main Guard building was demolished in 1899. Mr G. J. Clark, a great authority in these matters, has stated his belief that there were several of these secret passages in the fortress. One of these, he thinks, ran between the White Tower and the King’s House, and Father Gerard’s account of the way he was led to and from the White Tower and the Governor’s or King’s House points to an underground passage between those buildings. It has been surmised that a subterranean passage led from out the Tower below the Thames to the Southwark side of London; in the Beauchamp Tower a secret passage was discovered in the thickness of the Ballium wall, where persons might have been placed to watch and overhear all that went on within the tower.[6]