"What Citadels, what turrets, and what towers": mapping the Tower of London in Thomas Heywood's Lord Mayors' shows.

Deiter, Kristen

Although early modern English monarchs, especially Elizabeth I, James I, and Charles I, promoted a "royal ideology" that the Tower of London, a royal castle, represented sovereign power and authority, playwrights persistently constructed the Tower on stage in ways that challenged that ideology. They dramatized oppositional scenarios such as the sovereigns' prisoners escaping or being released from the Tower, monarchs' imprisonment in the Tower, subjects dictating how the sovereigns use the Tower, royal misuse of the Tower to justify rebellion or revenge, and the Tower's involvement in rebellions against monarchs. (1) Of the twenty-four extant English history plays that represented the Tower from 1579 to ca. 1634--all of which portrayed it as a symbol of opposition to the Crown--Thomas Heywood composed four. To put this number into perspective, of the sixteen known authors of these "Tower plays," only Shakespeare surpassed Heywood in the number written; collectively, Shakespeare and Heywood wrote over 40 percent of the Tower plays. (2) Heywood authored one-sixth of them--four times the number that most of the known Tower playwrights wrote. He was among the boldest in actually dramatizing an act of resistance to royal injustice at the Tower, and he alone personified the Tower itself as encouraging such resistance. (3) This quantitative and qualitative evidence demonstrates Heywood's strong voice of opposition to the royal ideology of the Tower in the 1590s, when his Tower plays were originally staged.

The Tower plays were part of a larger discourse of oppositional representations of the Tower. Other early-seventeenth-century artists portrayed the Tower as resistant to the Crown in a portrait, an illustrated broadside ballad, and a delftware plate, and some authors of Tower plays, including Michael Drayton as well as Heywood, also represented the Tower as antagonistic to the Crown in other literary genres. (4) For instance, in the early 1630s, Heywood published two prose works that further reveal his fascination with criticizing royal injustice at the Tower. In 1631 he published Englands Elizabeth: Her Life and Trovbles, During Her Minoritie, from the Cradle to the Crowne, a popular historical narrative that was reissued in 1632. (5) In it, Heywood very sympathetically, and with great emphasis on the Tower, both throughout the text and in marginal glosses, chronicles the histories of Anne Boleyn, Lady Jane Grey, and the future Elizabeth I at the Tower, along with many others who were executed there in the early Tudor period. The book concludes with Elizabeth's prayer of thanksgiving for her deliverance from imprisonment in the Tower, as she departs the Tower to begin her coronation procession, and finally, with the Tower's ordnance going off. (6) As in Heywood's 1604-05 Tower play If You Know Not Me, You Know No Bodie, or The Troubles of Queene Elizabeth, here he laments victims of Tudor tyranny at the Tower. Also in 1631, Heywood reissued Sir Richard Barckley's commonplace book, A Discourse of the Felicitie of Man, which Barckley had dedicated to the Queen in 1598. (7) Heywood, however, replaced this royal dedication with an address "in very respectful and laudatory terms to the disgraced Robert Carre [or Carr], Earl of Somerset," (8) who had been convicted of the 1613 murder of Sir Thomas Overbury, by poisoning, in the Tower. Carr, King James's "chief royal favourite" since 1607, had engaged in an adulterous affair with Frances Howard, wife of the Earl of Essex, as the spouses sought a divorce. James imprisoned Overbury, Carr's secretary, for refusing an overseas assignment devised to prevent Overbury from disclosing knowledge of Carr's affair. (9) In 1615 Carr was imprisoned in the Tower for Overbury's murder, and Howard soon joined him. Both were tried and sentenced to death in 1616 but released from the Tower in 1622, "caus[ing] public outrage, some even implying that the king was implicated in the murder." (10) Heywood was personally connected to these events through his friend, Sir William Helwysse, whose father, "Gervase [or Jervaise] Helwysse [or Helwisse], Lieutenant of the Tower during Overbury's imprisonment, [had been] executed in 1615 for his supposed part in the murder." (11) Apparently, Helwysse had tried to prevent Overbury's poisoning. Heywood's book's dedication to Carr, who was living in the country in relative obscurity in the 1630s, (12) evoked James's profound misuse of the Tower in the interconnected cases of Overbury, Carr, Howard, and Helwysse. This allusion in 1631 coincided with the revival of two of Heywood's Tower plays in ca. 1630, all of which shed light on Heywood's commitment to criticizing royal injustice at the Tower, reinforced the Tower as a transgressive cultural symbol in the 1630s, and helped set the cultural stage for Heywood's representations of the Tower in three Lord Mayors' Shows later in that decade.

Each year London's livery companies elected a new Lord Mayor from their ranks, and the new Lord Mayor's company sponsored the Show in his honor, which was performed on London's streets on 29 October. (13) As Tracey Hill explains, the Show "to celebrate the inauguration of the new Lord Mayor ... was usually composed of an eclectic mixture of extravagantly staged emblematic tableaux, music, dance and speeches, together with disparate crowd-pleasing effects such as fireworks and giants on stilts." (14) Almost invariably, the actors were children. (15) Anne Lancashire has traced the Shows' origins to the thirteenth century, when the newly-elected mayor and the two newly-elected sheriffs of London processed annually from London to the Exchequer in Westminster, a day or two after taking their oaths in London's Guildhall, for the king or his delegates to accept them into office. (16) The Shows, David Bergeron notes, "began in the mid-sixteenth century and flourished most opulently during the reigns of James I and Charles I." (17) By the seventeenth century, a Lord Mayor's Show entailed "a morning procession by the mayor and his entourage from his residence to the Guildhall, then a full civic procession to the Thames, where a fleet of barges, with livery company members in their gowns, escorted the mayor to Westminster, accompanied by vessels firing salutes and by water pageants: displays at the waterside and/or mounted on barges, with costumed actors and sometimes speeches." (18) After taking the oath of office before royal officials in Westminster, the mayor made the return journey through London, "accompanied by hundreds of others, including civic dignitaries [and] members of the livery companies." (19) During this journey to Guildhall, the mayor's company presented its Show, with thousands of Londoners lining the streets. (20) Lancaster calls the mayoral Show "an episodic theatrical form, structured not as a linear narrative but as a ... progressive series of moral, historical, and political displays and lessons set within the context of the overall mayoral procession." After a banquet at Guildhall, the procession resumed as the mayor journeyed first to St. Paul's for religious services and then to his residence, where the Show concluded with "a final pageant" and a speech, usually designated "the speech at night." (21) Several hundred copies of a booklet or pamphlet commemorating the Show were usually printed at the sponsoring livery company's expense, distributed to the guild members, and probably sold to the public but not distributed to event spectators as programs. (22)

Between 1631 and 1639, Heywood wrote seven mayoral Shows, including three that represent the Tower: Londini Sinus Salutis, or, Londons Harbour of Health, and Hapinesse, for the inauguration of Christopher Clethrowe, Ironmonger (1635); Londini Speculum: or, Londons Mirror, for Richard Fenn, Haberdasher (1637); and Porta Pietatis, or, The Port or Harbour of Piety, for Sir Maurice Abbott, Draper (1638). (23) Although only three of Heywood's mayoral Shows represent the Tower, as do only four of his numerous commercial plays, (24) all of these dramatic works portray the Tower in ways that challenge the Crown's authority, a testament to Heywood's commitment to resisting the royal ideology of the Tower.

This is not to suggest that Heywood was solely responsible for the Tower's representations in these Shows. Although his name appears on the printed pamphlets' title pages, mayoral Shows were collaboratively created with artificers and sometimes other writers. (25) In the printed pamphlet of each of these three Shows, Heywood thanks the artists, John and Mathias Christmas, who "Fashioned, Wrought, and Perfected" the Show's "Frames, Modells, and Structures" (Londini Sinus Salutis, sig. [B3r]), directed the Show (Londini Speculum, sig. [C4r]), and served as "the Modellers and Composers of those severall Peeces this day presented" (Porta Pietatis, sig. C2r). The Christmas brothers were likewise instrumental in negotiating the Shows' costs with the guilds. (26) In 1635, for instance, the Ironmongers accepted Heywood and John Christmas's presentation of "their Invencion of 5 pageantes" for Londini Sinus Salutis over another proposal, not necessarily for the Show's political content but because they were the lowest bidders. (27) The guilds, each with their own political aims that did not necessarily involve the Tower, also had some input into the Shows, though Hill contends that a Show's speeches were probably composed after the guild accepted a bid by the Show's creators. (28) Since the Ironmongers, Haberdashers, and Drapers, who paid for and oversaw these three Shows, all wanted their respective Show to emphasize "the glorification of the Lord Mayor, his Company, and the City of London," (29) these Shows primarily celebrate the mayors and each Company's history and contributions to the City. Moreover, Hill observes, with the exception of Heywood's 1639 Show, which may allude to Charles's misuse of the Tower, "one cannot posit wholesale antagonism from the Companies towards Charles and his policies," partly because "the political and religious affiliations of the City oligarchs varied from hardline Calvinist to loyal royalist," (30) Yet this diversity suggests a similarly wide range in attitudes among guild members regarding royal officials' clashes with Lord Mayors, and some guild members probably felt solidarity with each other against the Crown whenever a Tower official clashed with a Lord Mayor who represented the City's interests, even if that mayor belonged to a different livery company. Overall, the fact that the three Shows considered here had multiple creators did not diminish Heywood's role as their writer, nor did it preclude his planning the Tower's representations with the craftsmen who constructed the Shows' towers. As seventeenth-century London artists, the Christmas brothers may have known about and enjoyed creating resistant artistic representations of the Tower, as the previously mentioned artists had done in portraiture, song, an illustrative woodcut on a broadside ballad, and delftware. Heywood had a long history of portraying the Tower in writing in ways that resisted the Crown's dominant rhetoric, and his depictions of the Tower in these Shows resonate with those in his earlier writings, as I demonstrate below.

On the surface, the Tower's representations in Heywood's Shows can appear to support the royal ideology. Mayoral Shows resembled royal entries in both form and content, though royal entries followed a different route through London, beginning at the Tower. Since the middle ages, monarchs processed to the Tower, thereby reinforcing the castle's regal status, and the next day--or, by the sixteenth century, several days later--processed from there through London to Westminster. (31) The Tower occasionally featured in mayoral inaugurations, as well. In several instances, when the Barons of the Exchequer were unavailable in Westminster, or if the plague made the journey to Westminster too dangerous, the Lord Mayor took his oath at the Tower itself, that massive icon of royal authority, with the Constable of the Tower serving as the sovereign's delegate. (32) Moreover, the Lord Mayor was newly aligned with the monarch as "the chief royal official in the city" and the livery companies' liaison with the sovereign, and the livery companies patronized and oversaw the Shows' composition. (33) In fact, Bergeron has asserted that the Shows functioned partly "to praise and compliment the sovereign and magistrate." (34) He has also demonstrated the highly emblematic quality of the Shows, in which individual shows or pageants resemble the allegorical visual and verbal emblems printed in popular emblem books of that time, for the moral purpose of instructing the mayor. (35) Literary scholars have thus read the Shows as aiming to "promote service to the monarch and the city, admonishing the new magistrate to virtuous government." (36)

However, since this emblematic context was so traditional and familiar, it could also obscure or conceal politically dangerous messages, such as those that opposed the royal ideology of the Tower. The Tower's representations in these Shows, located in their cultural and historical contexts, yield resistant interpretations. This is partly because both the authors and audiences of the oppositional Tower plays and mayoral Shows overlapped. By the 1590s, famous playwrights--including several authors of Tower plays--began to compose the mayoral Shows, and by then, plays that generated new, resistant ways of representing the Tower, such as those mentioned above, were popular in London. (37) These new ideas about the Tower were circulating among playwrights and their audiences. By the 1630s, most of the Tower plays had been performed before heterogeneous audiences in open-air amphitheaters and inn-yards. Likewise, Lancashire and others have argued that mayoral Shows were "thoroughly inclusive in their ... city-wide audiences." (38) In his pamphlet commentary for Londini Speculum, Heywood acknowledges that "all Degrees, Ages, and Sexes are assembled" at the Show, and he appeals to his audience's full range of interpretive abilities, including a dance for "the vulgar" who prefer visual spectacles to speeches (C2). Livery company apprentices, who attended mayoral Shows, also attended commercial plays and sometimes rioted at the playhouses. (39) The Shows' large, heterogeneous audiences therefore comprised at least some Londoners who had attended Tower plays and, perhaps, read some of the many editions of Tower plays, including Heywood's, that were published by the early seventeenth century. (40) Hill has claimed that Heywood evidently expected some continuity in his mayoral Show audiences, and, as I will illustrate, he may also have recognized continuity between the audiences of his Tower plays and mayoral Shows. (41) Additionally, although recent scholarship by James Knowles, Curtis Perry, and William Hardin interprets mayoral Shows as "resolv[ing] political tensions" between the City and Crown, Richard Rowland has argued that Heywood's Shows, "by contrast, repeatedly and provocatively insist on bringing those tensions to the surface.... Heywood effectively reinvented the genre in order to confront those divisions; his shows ... reflect but also grapple with the conflicts that preoccupied [Londoners]." (42) In this essay I argue that Heywood's representations of the Tower in these three Shows underscored and deepened the conflict between London and the Crown as England moved toward civil war. Although it is impossible to argue with certainty that Heywood personally challenged the royal ideology of the Tower in these Shows, we can recognize in the Shows the continuing pattern of transgressive representations of the Tower in Heywood's writings and state the probability that Heywood resisted the Crown's dominant rhetoric of the Tower in the Shows. Heywood and his collaborators may even have calculated their representations of the Tower to take place at or near each Show's climax and perhaps at the very moment when the actual Tower came into its best view during the mayoral procession, heightening the Tower's transgressive power in the Shows.

An oppositional reading of the Tower in these Shows is significant for several reasons. First, Hill points out the need for scholarship on parallels between the Shows and other works by individual authors, as well as "cross-fertilisation between civic pageantry and other theatrical forms of culture in this period," and this study explores both. (43) For instance, two of Heywood's Tower plays, Parts I and II of If You Know Not Me, You Know No Bodie, were revived in ca.1630, and the latter play was republished with a new ending in 1633. (44) Thus, Heywood's Tower plays were enjoying exceptional popularity in the early 1630s, when his defiant representations of the Tower in the Shows reinforced and extended those in his plays. Second, Lancashire has argued that more of the Shows than scholars have acknowledged "were significant political commentaries on current major social and political problems." (45) Heywood's representations of the Tower in these Shows both comment upon and add to conflicts between the City and the Crown, a "chasm" that, Hill recognizes, "widened as the seventeenth century wore on." (46) As I have written elsewhere, considering the prolific Tower play production in London starting in 1590, a riot on Tower Hill in 1595, and the Essex rebels' original plot to seize the Tower in 1599, the Crown struggled to maintain its hold on the royal ideology of the Tower. It tried to do so partly through laws restricting visits to Tower prisoners, and partly through an authoritative survey of the Tower and its surroundings, but had made little headway by the mid-1630s. (47) To illustrate, one of the most antimonarchical cultural representations of the Tower, the aforementioned broadside ballad celebrating the life of an executed traitor, "A Lamentable Dittie Composed vpon the Death of Robert Lord Deuereux Late Earle of Essex, Who Was Beheaded in the Tower of London, vpon Ashwednesday in the Morning, 1601" (1603), was republished in 1620, 1625, and 1635--the year of Heywood's first mayoral Show that represented the Tower. (48) Heywood's Shows highlight, continue, and add to the texture of this conflict. Because of this struggle for the Tower's cultural meanings, and particularly in light of the twenty-four oppositional Tower plays, any suggestion of the Tower in drama in the late 1630s probed the royal ideology of the Tower, extending the conflict. Additionally, because Lord Mayors had frequently clashed with Tower officials in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as I will demonstrate in the account that follows, the Shows drew upon a public history that had developed the Tower as a symbol of Crown and City conflict. In the 1630s, with civil war fast approaching, these reminders contributed to tensions between the King and his subjects. Lastly, this study maps Heywood's representations of the Tower in his Shows to a specific street in the mayoral procession, from which the actual Tower was visible, indicating a new point of entry for scholarship on the Shows.

Heywood and his collaborators staged their mayoral Shows that represent the Tower during the height of conflicts that had brewed for centuries between Lord Mayors and royal officials, especially Lieutenants of the Tower. The City of London and the Crown had engaged in a persistent struggle, from the thirteenth through the sixteenth century, regarding the boundary of the Tower's Liberty, as Anna Keay has demonstrated. (49) The Tower was, in Lancashire's words, the "territory of the Crown," and "royal, not city, territory," but its situation in London made it a site of conflict between the Crown and Londoners, specifically regarding "the Liberty of the Tower--the point at which royal and civic authority met." (50) The Tower Liberty resembled the City of London's Liberties, as Stephen Mullaney explains: "From the walls of London out to the bars located up to a mile beyond them ... stretched the marginal and ambivalent domain of London's Liberties[,] ... zones of transition between one realm of authority and another.... The Liberties were free or 'at liberty' from ... obligation to the Crown, and only nominally under the jurisdiction of the lord mayor.... Liberties existed within the city walls as well.... Entering a Liberty ... meant crossing over into an ambiguous territory that was ... neither contained by civic authority nor fully removed from it." (51) Royal officials criticized mayors for demonstrating authority within the Tower Liberty, as on 29 June 1595, when Lord Mayor John Spencer, Clothworker, attempted to break up the apprentice riot on Tower Hill and was censured for drawing his sword there. (52)

Yet the history of the Tower Liberty grew even richer after the Elizabethan period that Keay has examined, and as the following examples illustrate, through the 1630s, when Heywood's Shows were staged, disputes over the Tower Liberty embroiled London's mayors. In 1605 the Lieutenant of the Tower, Sir William Waad, complained that Lord Mayor Thomas Lowe, Haberdasher, and his officials, the Aldermen of the City of London, were redirecting waste from the Minories into the town ditch, which then passed into the Tower ditch, corrupting the water and air quality near the Tower. (53) Later that year, after Lowe's successor, Leonard Halliday, Merchant Taylor, had been warned not to "renew any quarrels against this his Majesty's Royal Castle," Waad complained that Halliday had "compassed ... the Tower with the sword carried before him, accompanied with the Sheriffs, and a rabble of sergeants, and took possession of the [Tower] Postern, and so came back again in great bravery, bidding the people bear witness of his triumph." Waad claimed that Halliday "attempt[ed] to take from his Majesty the ground appertaining to this Royal Castle," and "if these intolerable courses be suffered, the Lord Mayors will not cease until they get the Tower into their possession." (54) The following spring, Waad mentioned Halliday's "offer[ing] some wrong to the liberties of this place" in a complaint that some London merchants were resisting making a traditional payment of bottles of wine owed to him. Evidently, Halliday had taken several bottles from Waad's servant and "wished the pox on all offices and officers." (55) In July, Waad complained that Halliday had approached the Tower with his sword drawn as he welcomed James I and the King of Denmark, when the royal guest landed at the Tower. Waad alleged that Halliday had "maintain[ed] so fruitless a contention with his Sovereign as if it were between two free Estates." (56)

A previously unpublished letter of the following year (transcribed in the appendix), from the Privy Council to the Lord Chancellor, demonstrates both the extent of the disputes with the City and royal officials' insistence that the Tower was the king's domain--but also the Council's avoidance of violating citizens' rights. The Council calls the Tower "his Maiestes auncient howse" and "his Maiestes Castle Royall," yet explains, "his Maiestie hath noe meaning to take from the Citty of London [any] parte of that which hath beene formerly graunted vnto them." Because of the controversies, the Council requests a commission "to heare the alligacions, and see Recordes, ... for the right of his Maiestie and in the behalfe of the Cittie, for the Liberties, boundes, and Gurisdiccions of both places" (57) Waad later wrote to the "Commissioners for the Tower Causes," which implies that a commission had been formed. (58)

Intermittently for the next two decades, Lieutenants of the Tower vigorously defended this royal territory from Lord Mayors' supposed intrusions. Two months after the 1606 letter, Waad complained that Lord Mayor John Watts, Clothworker, had encroached upon the Tower, aggressively adding, "Mayors have been fined and imprisoned, for less offences. Mutilated." (59) In July 1613, a meeting took place at Whitehall to settle a dispute between the new Lieutenant of the Tower, Gervase Helwysse, and Lord Mayor John Swinnerton, Merchant Taylor, and the aldermen, over a Tower official's arrest within the City. To force this official's release, Helwysse had illegally imprisoned innocent citizens at the Tower. (60) In March 1615 several Privy Councilors wrote to Helwysse, who had imprisoned laborers hired by Lord Mayor Thomas Hayes, Draper, and the aldermen, to pave an area near the Tower that was not clearly in the City's jurisdiction. (61) A few days later an Act of the Privy Council established that a commission would be formed to settle controversies between the Lieutenant of the Tower and the City of London, specifically "the Lord Maior, in right of the citty." Until the commission could be established, all controversies between Helwysse and the City were to cease. (62) Over six months later, the commission still had not been formed, though Helwysse and his warders were again charged with false imprisonment, presumably of a Londoner. (63) Another survey of the Tower was conducted in December 1623, culminating in a forty-three-page report, and a year later, a commission was finally formed. (64) In late 1624 the Privy Council passed An Act about the Tower of London, ordering that "the Lorde Mayor [John Gore, Merchant Taylor] and comunaltie of the cittie of London ... and lykewise the lieutenant [now Sir Allen Apsley] and all other lieutenantes and officers of the Tower of London" simply follow the decrees of October [sic] 1595 and July 1613 and respect the Liberties of the City and the Tower. (65)

A few years later, in Charles I's reign, Tower officials attempted to reclaim the Tower Liberty from Londoners who had built their homes there on land rented from the King. In 1629 several petitions from "his Majesty's tenants" expressed their concerns. (66) Although the Privy Council ordered the Gentleman Porter of the Tower not to bother the tenants, another petition was soon submitted. (67) The Council deferred a decision, writing that the King "when occasion shall require for the safetie of the said Tower might demolish and pull downe the said houses ... as nusances." (68) In 1632 Charles I indeed ordered that the tenants either clean the Tower ditches or "expect the pulling down of their houses," exhibiting far less concern for citizens' rights than the 1606 letter from James's government had shown. (69)

Another commission was to be formed in 1626 to judge a controversy between the City and the Tower, when Apsley removed a markstone that had been placed on Tower Hill, and that plan was renewed in 1631 when Apsley's successor repeated the action. (70) The Privy Council further ordered a commission to investigate and settle the "question growen betweene those of the Tower and the Cittie touching the extent of each of their liberties in some other places adjacent to the Tower." (71) And in October 1637, as Heywood was preparing Londini Speculum, Lord Mayor Edward Bromfield, Fishmonger, wrote to the Council to complain that some of the Tower's yeoman warders who kept shops within the City refused to contribute to the watch "for the safety of the city," as they were required to do. (72) As this brief history illustrates, disputes between the City--especially its mayors--and royal officials at the Tower continued through the 1630s. Heywood's portrayals of the Tower in his mayoral Shows both reflected and fueled this conflict.

In fact, this cultural context is critical for interpreting the geography of Heywood's mayoral Shows. Jean Robertson and D. J. Gordon point out that the "four or five pageants" within a seventeenth-century mayoral Show "were stationed at intervals between St. Paul's Churchyard and the Guildhall." (73) More precisely, after the mayor's barge passed the water show on the Thames, his land procession through London "encountered pageants at regular intervals along the route, traditionally Paul's Churchyard, the Little Conduit in Cheapside, and the Cross in Cheap." (74) Manley confirms, "The route to the Guildhall was from Baynard's Castle (Paul's Wharf) north to Paul's Chain, and from there through the Churchyard ... to Cheapside and St. Lawrence Lane (the site for what were usually the last two pageants in the later shows)." (75) Mapping these individual pageants or shows within Heywood's Lord Mayors' Shows to their actual locations in London produces more nuanced readings of these events because it enables us to consider what was in view during the Tower's representations in the Shows. Although many spectators at mayoral Shows may not have been able to hear the speeches distinctly, (76) a large number of them had an advantageous visual cue to facilitate a transgressive interpretation of the Tower.

In the printed text of each of these three Shows, the Tower is represented at what Manley calls "the climactic phase of the Lord Mayor's inaugural show"--when the procession travelled through Cheapside and the actual Tower itself was most clearly in view. (77) In these Shows, Heywood consistently represents the Tower in the fourth and/or fifth show; that is, the third and/or fourth show by land. Heywood's pamphlet commentary emphasizes this focal show (or shows) by explaining that the entire mayoral Show derives its title from the eponymous fourth show by land. And these key shows evidently took place at the Little Conduit and/or the Cross in Cheapside. The Little [water] Conduit appears on the "Agas" map (ca. 1561-70) at Cheapside and St. Martin's Le Grand, just northeast of St. Paul's Churchyard, and the Eleanor Cross in Cheapside appears three blocks east, at Cheapside and Wood Street, one block south and slightly west of Guildhall. (78) Perhaps because the Great Conduit, another water conduit east of the Cross in Cheapside, was castellated, it or another Cheapside structure was probably the site of a turreted "wood-and-canvas tower/castle" in Cheapside during three late-fourteenth-century royal entries. (79) These structures, "upon which and around which structures could be erected," were natural stations for tower/castle set pieces. (80) More important, from these eastern points in the procession route to Guildhall, the actual Tower was visible: its central building, the White Tower, was the second largest building in London throughout the seventeenth century. (81) The White Tower's turrets, between 106 and 111 feet tall, (82) are clearly seen today from the southern end of London Bridge, a distance of about one-half mile west and across the Thames from the Tower. The Cross and conduits in Cheapside stood slightly more than that distance northwest of the Tower, with far fewer built structures obstructing the view than in present-day London. Engravings, woodcuts, drawings, sketches, profile views, panoramas, and maps depicting London between 1540 and 1658, by artists such as J. Wood, Anthonis van den Wijngaerde, William Smith, Claes Jansz. Visscher, Wenceslaus Hollar, Georg Braun and Frans Hogenberg, William Faithorne, and others, indicate that the Tower's turrets were visible on the horizon, especially from locations northeast of St. Paul's and along Cheapside, London's "widest thoroughfare," which stretched for several blocks directly toward the Tower. (83)

As the actual Tower came most clearly into view, these three Shows represented the Tower through allusion. Subtly representing London spaces was not uncommon in early modern English drama. Jean E. Howard explains that most comedies that represent the Royal Exchange, for instance, "allude to it" rather than "depict the Exchange directly," and Hill emphasizes that, in mayoral Shows, criticism of the government was expressed "subtly and tentatively, in coded language and through the careful use of selected figures and emblems." (84) Indirect depictions of the Tower made it possible to represent this royal castle as a transgressive symbol in a dramatic form closely aligned with the government, and staging these representations in view of the Tower itself made them even more provocative.

Heywood's allusions to the Tower in his Shows depended upon his London audiences' knowledge of the Tower, whether they were observing the live events or reading the printed pamphlets. In 1598 John Stow recorded what early modern Londoners generally knew about the Tower. In his Survey of London--a frequently used source for mayoral Shows--Stow summarized the Tower's well-known functions as, among other things, "a citadel to defend or command the city; a royal palace for assemblies or treaties; ... [and] the armoury for warlike provision." (85) And each of Heywood's mayoral Shows examined here represents a built structure that is simultaneously a castle, a citadel, and/or an armory--and also a "Tower." Specifically, the fourth show or "Modell" of Londini Sinus Salutis is "a Castle munified with sundr[y] Peeces of Ordnance; and Accomodated with all suc[h] Persons as are needful for the defence of such a Citadell[:] the Gunner being ready to give fire upon all occasions" ([A8V]). The castle's ordnance actually goes off during this Show (B1). For both event spectators and readers, then, the firing of ordnance from this castle evoked the firing of ordnance from the Tower on royal occasions such as Elizabeth I's Accession Day celebration on 17 November 1595 and James I's visit to the Tower when he first arrived in London on 11 May 1603. (86) Also, this castle is presented by a mythological character closely associated with the Tower's defensive role: Mars, the Roman god of war ([A8V]), sitting "in the front of the Tower" ([A9]) or Castle/Tower. Similarly, the fourth show of Londini Speculum represents "an Imperiall Fort [...] a Cittadall [...] defenc'd with men and officers," which Bellona, the daughter, sister, or nurse of "Mars the god of Warre," presents, in a speech, as "a Royall Fort/ ... a Tower" (C2-2V). In a seventy-line passage, much of which Bellona speaks, Heywood employs the word fort eight times, including six instances alongside the word imperial or royal (C2-3), emphasizing and even overstating the royal quality of this allusive Fort/ Tower. And in Porta Pietatis, during the fourth show by land, Piety gives a speech describing "a Citadell, or Tower, ... guirt with a ring" (C1V). This ring around the Citadel/Tower evokes the Tower of London's concentric walls "in which one wall encircles another." (87) Certainly, the Tower was London's only royal castle, fortress, and armory, ringed by walls and defended by royal officers, from which ordnance was fired. As Heywood's original London audiences knew, especially when the actual Tower was most visible during the Shows, the "Towers" in these three London mayoral Shows, which Heywood also specifically identifies in the Shows as royal castles, fortresses, and/or armories, represented the Tower of London.

These allusions, through which Heywood introduces the Tower in his mayoral Shows, are essential for interpreting each Show's detailed representations of the Tower. In the following analysis of each Show, I briefly summarize the Show and then focus upon its depictions of the Tower of London.

Londini Sinus Salutis, or, Londons Harbour of Health, and Hapinesse (1635)

Londini Sinus Salutis comprises five shows, which Heywood describes as a show, a model, a platform, another model, and a pageant, and concludes with a speech at night. In the show by water, three Roman goddesses sent from Jupiter--Juno, Pallas, and Venus, attended by Cupid--bear gifts of Power, Wisdom, and Love, and Venus recites a speech. The next model by land represents the twelve signs of the Zodiac, corresponding to London's "Great Twelve livery companies," (88) and an "Astrologian" honors the Lord Mayor in a speech promoting mercy and justice ([A7V]). Heywood vaguely describes the third platform as "to please the vulgar" ([A8]). The fourth model is the aforementioned Castle/Tower where, after a history and description of Mars, Mars speaks. The fifth show, a pageant entitled "Sinus Salutis" (B1), follows, featuring a speech on virtuous government. Finally, Mars recites the speech at night.

In the fourth show of Londini Sinus Salutis, Heywood's pamphlet commentary connects the Castle/Tower to Mars, ancient Rome, and London, thereby evoking one facet of the royal ideology of the Tower: the anachronistic myth that Julius Caesar founded the Tower of London. (89) Heywood describes the scene: "Before [Mars] was portraied a Wolfe ... because the two Romane Twinnes the first founders of Rome, ROMVLVS and REMVS, were rained to be the sonnes of Mars" ([A8V]). The Show's spectators would have heard Mars repeatedly refer to himself, the Roman god of war, in a protective capacity, as the Tower was an armory: "Mars shall abroad protect you" (B1), and address the London audience as his descendants: "So many Sonnes of Mars, amongst you" ([A9]). As in the Tower plays, representations of the Tower alongside allusions to ancient Rome evoked the Tower's connection to Caesar. William Dunbar's fifteenth-century poem "In Honour of the City of London" had blended Mars and Caesar imagery by fashioning the Tower as "the hous of Mars victoryall" and ascribing the Tower to Caesar: "By Julyus Cesar thy Tour founded of old." (90) In the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, government officials promoted and expanded this myth of "Julius Caesar's Tower," (91) as did several Tower plays of the 1590s, including Heywood's The Second Part of King Edward the Fourth, when Richard, Duke of Gloucester, interrupts a conversation between his young nephews at the Tower, in which the boys question his choice of the Tower for their lodging: GLOUCESTER. [Aside] Vile brats, how they do descant on the Tower! My gentle nephew, they were ill-advised To tutor you with such unfitting terms-- Whoe'er they were--against this royal mansion: What if some part of it hath been reserved To be a prison for nobility? Follows it, therefore, that it cannot serve To any other use? Caesar himself, That built the same, within it kept his court. (scene 14, lines 55-63)

However, even as Gloucester's speech promotes the royal ideology of the Tower, and his first line's aside deprecates those whose discourse on the Tower derides this ideology, the audience knows Gloucester's evil plans. Heywood's choice to have a notoriously tyrannical character voice the royal ideology of the Tower, within the Tower, when one of his first acts as king will be to murder his nephews, the rightful heirs to the throne, epitomizes the royal ideology's emptiness and encourages opposition to the Crown.

Whereas in the play Heywood openly represents the Tower as a site of royal tyranny, in Londini Sinus Salutis the subversion is indirect. Heywood ostensibly depicts the Tower's defensive capabilities and connection to ancient Rome in a protective light. Mars, "Seated in this mur'd Citadel," proclaims, The Tormentary Art, not long since found, Which shatters Towers, & by which Ships are drown'd, I bring along; to let you understand These guard your safety, both by Sea, and Land." ([A9])

Yet the suggestion of "shatter[ing] Towers," such as His Majesty's Tower of London, resists the royal ideology, as does Mars's next depiction of "This Peacefull Citie ... whose power / Could to a Campe, it selfe change in an houre" ([A9V]). If London could so quickly convert itself into a military camp, then such a warlike camp could defend, fail to defend, or attack the monarch. This celebration of the Tower's role as a fortress and arsenal suggests a threat to the monarchy while celebrating Clethrowe's company, the Ironmongers, without whose "mixt Metalls (Sir) Iustice would cease" (B1). To emphasize the Tower's newly destabilized power and its significant role in the Show, as Mars's speech ends, "the Ordnance goeth off from the Castle" (B1), as it often did during royal celebrations at the actual Tower.

The fifth show, "styled Sinus Salutis" (B1), immediately follows this Castle/Tower passage and begins with a description, accessible only to readers of the printed Show, which elevates the mayor to a height that might have disconcerted the monarch: "Every Magistrate is a minister vnder God, appointed by his divine ordinance to that calling" (B1V). In one sense, this claim, like Heywood's explanation in this Show's dedicatory epistle that the mayoral office is "a calling ... because all such as sit in Iudicature, are Persons ordained by GOD, to examine Causes discreetely" (A3-3V), can be read as God's endorsing all vocations. Indeed, Heywood's Shows sometimes confirm the hierarchical relationship between kings and mayors, such as Londini Speculum's "Epistle Dedicatory" which calls kings and princes "the greatest Magistrates" and annually-elected ones "the lesse" (A2V). However, Heywood's language in all of these passages can also be interpreted as resonating with, and transgressing, the theory of the divine right of kings by minimizing the difference between kings and lesser magistrates. Charles I, who strongly believed in his own divine right to rule, would not have extended that belief to include the divine right of Lord Mayors. As Manley explains, "The neo-feudal ethos of the pageants only thinly concealed a rivalrous relationship, in which merchants liked to represent themselves as the peers of kings." (92) The suggestion of the mayor's equality with the King in Londini Sinus Salutis, following a literally explosive dramatic representation of the Tower in a mayoral Show by Heywood, who had written four highly oppositional Tower plays, may have been designed to instigate resistance to the Crown. And since monarchs did not regularly attend mayoral Shows before 1660, the Lord Mayor was "the sole figure of authority" at the event; indeed, the Lord Mayor's procession through London, like a royal progress, asserted his authority over the City. (93) Lancashire has argued that, by the seventeenth century, mayoral Shows in general had "developed theatrically ... as a competitive response to royal entry display ... focused on the Crown." (94) Asserting that "Every Magistrate is a minister vnder God, appointed by his divine ordinance to that calling" (B1v), however, carried the competition beyond expense or extravagance; in fact, this show was cost-effective rather than expensive. (95) The representation of firing the Tower's ordnance--an act typically reserved for royal celebrations--followed by this suggestion of the mayor's divine right to rule, defiantly equated mayoral power with royal power, which destabilized and diminished royal authority.

Londini Speculum: or, Londons Mirror (1637)

Londini Speculum comprises five shows and a speech at night. After a history of London and its ancient connection to Rome, in the show by water, St. Katherine, the Company of Haberdashers' patroness, recites a speech, and the Roman god Mercury delivers a message from Jupiter. The second show introduces the mathematician Pythagoras, who recites a speech "in Paules Church-yard" (C1), about the number four, identifying the four elements and their associated colors, complexions, digestive organs, and qualities; four winds; four moral virtues; and four kingdoms of Great Britain. The third entails "Anticke gesticulations ... devised onely for the vulgar" (C2). The fourth show features the allusive imperial Fort/ Tower and a speech by Bellona, Roman goddess of war. In the fifth show, called "Londons Mirrour" (C3), Opsis or Visus speaks of vision and of London. Pythagoras recites the speech at night.

Like Londini Sinus Salutis, Londini Speculum elevates mayoral power nearly to the height of royal power by locating the King's divine right to rule only slightly below God's, and the Lord Mayor's just below the King's. The second show's speech concludes: "That glorious [heavenly] Crowne, at which his Highnesse aimes. / Thus is our round Globe squard, figuring his power, / And yours beneath Him" (C1v-2). This hierarchy of God, King, and Lord Mayor almost immediately precedes the fourth show, which materially represents the Tower. Except for a nonverbal dance intended "for the vulgar," the transgressive second and fourth shows are basically continuous, representing the Tower in a manner of sustained resistance, as I illustrate below. Also like Londini Sinus Salutis, this Show appears to promote the royal ideology by developing the Fort/Tower's Roman connection through Bellona, who is closely associated with Mars and, by association, with ancient Rome and Julius Caesar. Lord Mayor Richard Fenn having been "A Souldier, Captaine, and a Colonell" (C2v), it was again natural for Heywood to emphasize the Tower's military and defensive role through Bellona's presenting the Tower as a fortress.

The fourth show also emphasizes the Tower's connection to the monarch through epithets in Bellona's speech, such as "Imperiall Fort" and "Royall Fort" (C2v). Heywood's pamphlet commentary not only specifies that this "Imperiall Fort" includes "his Majesties royall chamber" (C2), since the Tower had always been, in part, a royal palace, but also compares this chamber to the City of London. He writes, "It beareth the Title of an Imperiall Fort: nor is it compulsive, that here I should argue what a Fort is, a Skonce, or a Cittadall, ... nor what the opposures or defences are: my purpose is onely to expresse ... that this Fort which is stil'd Imperiall, defenc'd with men and officers, ... doth in the morall include his Majesties royall chamber, which is the City of London" (C2). First, Heywood's effusive insistence upon the redundancy of explaining such terms as "Fort" "Cittadall" and "defences" may hint that he desires his readers to recognize the Tower and/or to recall his representations of the Tower in one or more of his Tower plays. Second, Heywood's commentary echoes James I's royal entry pageants, in which Ben Jonson calls London "THE KINGS CHAMBER," and Thomas Dekker styles the Tower a "with-drawing Chamber" for the King. (96) Likewise, during "Bellonaes speech upon the Imperiall Fort" Bellona may be standing on the structure as she interprets the Tower as an "Embleme, which this day we bring, / To represent the Chamber of the King" (C2v). Labeling this tower an "Embleme" obscured the passage's oppositional representation of the Tower, perhaps allowing its inclusion in the Show.

Although Bellona connects the Tower to the Crown as "a Tower / Supported by no lesse than Soveraigne power," she destabilizes royal power and contests the royal ideology, as Londini Sinus Salutis had done, by calling the new mayor, and not the king, "the prime governour" of this "Royall Fort" (C2v). Moreover, in decidedly emblematic language, Bellona imagines the Tower under attack. Although "Theologicke vertues" reside at this tower, at war with them are allegorized sins "With thousands more, who assiduatly waite / This your Imperiall Fort to insidiate" (C3). Emblematically, this passage conventionally cautions the new mayor to avoid corruption. Yet Heywood's allusions to the Tower in this Show also compel a historical interpretation. It was oppositional enough to describe the "Imperiall Fort" as belonging to the Lord Mayor rather than the King. But Heywood furthermore suggests that "thousands" are waiting to "insidiate" the Tower--to "lie in wait for" or "plot against" it, implying a rebellion against the Crown. (97)

Bellona's speech describes another function of the Tower in ways that ostensibly support the royal ideology but actually undermine it. Heywood represents the Tower's royal function as a prison by personifying the Tower, a rhetorical move which playwrights had not employed since the 1590s. (98) In fact, as Stow did in 1603, (99) Heywood twice portrays this Fort/Tower as "she" reinforcing the personification (C3). Bellona claims that the Tower acts: she "compl[ies]," "knowes," "chide[s]" "load[s] her Cannons," "speak[s]," and "encounters" (C3). Heywood was one of only two playwrights whose staged plays personified the Tower, (100) as in Tyrell's lines after the princes' murder in The Second Part of King Edward the Fourth: "The very senseless stones, here in the walls, / Break out in tears but to behold the fact." Tyrell then reinforces the Tower's agency: "Methinks the Tower should rent down from the top, / To let the heaven look on this monstrous deed" (scene 17, lines 29-30, 37-38). Whenever Heywood and Shakespeare personified the Tower in the Tower plays, they did so in ways that opposed the monarchs' actions, and Heywood revives that technique here. Although on the surface this show illustrates royal power to imprison traitors and subordinate those who would defy royal authority, "great faults" are merely "with greater noise terrifi'd" (C3), reducing the usual punishments of imprisonment, torture, and execution at the Tower to being frightened by the noise of cannon fire. This show diminishes the King's authority over the Tower and the Tower's power to enforce royal threats.

Heywood entitled the fifth show "Londons Mirrour" (C3), thereby designating it the centerpiece of Londini Speculum: or, Londons Mirror. He explains in his pamphlet commentary, "This beareth the title of the whole Triumphe" (C3). Hill has read Heywood's explanation of this metaphorical mirror as "something almost threatening," where Heywood writes, "I have purposed so true and exact a Mirrour, that in it may be discovered as well that which beautifies the governour, as deformes the government" (B2v). (101) "Londons Mirrour" may be code for the Tower itself since, in this Show, Heywood verbally personifies and feminizes both a Citadel and the City of London, the first being a mirror for the second. As Bellona's speech personified the Fort/Tower, Heywood's commentary now personifies this Citadel: "The eyes are placed in the head as in a Citadel, to be watchtowers / and Centinels for the safety, and guiders and conductors for the solace of the body" (C3-3v). Opsis's speech likewise personifies London as feminine, a conventional trope that now unconventionally aligns the city with the personified Tower: For Londons selfe, if they shall first begin To examine her without, and then within, What Architectures, Palaces, what Bowers, What Citadels, what turrets, and what towers? ([C4])

Here, royal architecture such as "Palaces" and "Citadels" and the structural magnificence of "turrets" and "towers" all within London, suggest the Tower of London complex. Since the Tower's turrets were visible from this geographic point in the Show, Heywood's representing "Citadels" "turrets" and "towers" likewise mirrored--and called the listening and reading audiences' attention to--the actual Tower. In Londini Speculum, Heywood's double personification of the Tower and London as female indeed conceives of the Tower as a mirror, or even a synecdoche, for London. If the Tower of London is "Londons Mirrour," then this show transgresses the royal ideology by rewriting the Tower's symbolic meaning as that which "beautifies" London's "governour" the Lord Mayor, and "deformes the government" of the Crown. The "Speech at Night" delivered in front of the Lord Mayor's house--his own territory in London, where he probably felt most powerful--reminds him that the Tower celebrates not King Charles's military honors but his: "Your Military honours ... th' Imperiall Fort displayes" ([C4v]).

Porta Pietatis, or, The Port or Harbour of Piety (1638)

Porta Pietatis opens by celebrating the architecture of London and Westminster, especially contributions to buildings by Lord Mayors from the Drapers' Company. Five shows follow this historical introduction. In the show by water, Proteus recites a speech about trade. The four shows by land feature speeches by a Shepherd whose wool-producing flock surrounds him, celebrating global textiles; an Indian with a rhinoceros, emblem of power; a sailor on a ship, commending international commerce; and Piety, who stands on a structure with the Virgin Mary, surrounded by allegorical figures of Faith, Hope, Love, and other virtues. In this fourth show by land, which "bears the Title Porta Pietatis" (C1v), Piety describes the structure as "a Citadell, or Tower" ([B4v]). Proteus delivers a concluding speech at night.

As Rowland notes, Porta Pietatis begins in a subversive tone, as Heywood's pamphlet commentary pays tribute to the Lord Mayor's late brothers, George, Archbishop of Canterbury, who had resisted both James I and Charles I in religious matters; and Robert, Bishop of Salisbury, whose writings had "advocat[ed] limited monarchy and the legitimacy of resistance to ungodly rulers" (102) Heywood's commentary then links religion to London's architecture--smoothly transitioning to the Tower-by mentioning London and Westminster's "two Cathedrals" (A3) and by recalling the construction of London Bridge in stone, various chapels and churches, "Leaden-Hall" and "Almes-houses, Hospitalls, & c." (A3v-4). At "The fourth show by Land"--again with its eponymous title, the centerpiece of the entire Show--Heywood's commentary introduces "a Citadel, or Tower" and announces that this show "beares the Title Porta Pietatis, The Gate of Piety ... It is a delicate and artificiall composed structure, built Temple-fashion.... The Speaker is Piety her selfe" ([B4v]-C1). While Piety's description of this "Citadel, or Tower" as "delicate" may not evoke the Tower of London for today's readers, this adjective could, in the early modern period, signify "fine or exquisite in quality or nature" or "fine in workmanship; finely or exquisitely constructed," (103) which suited both the Tower and its model in the Show.

Heywood's religious imagery in Piety's speech is purposeful. Nearly all seventeenth-century Tower plays avoid connecting the Tower with Caesar, which supported the royal ideology; instead, they represent the Tower alongside English subjects' bodies and English Protestant spirituality, independent of the Crown. (104) Here, Heywood builds upon the Tower's religious representations in the Tower plays to undermine royal religious authority. Piety alludes to the Tower as a symbol of the monarch's authority to imprison religious dissenters: "Here sits Religion firme" (C1v). That this "Citadel, or Tower" is "guirt with a ring" (C1v) suggests the Tower's concentric curtain walls that confined royal prisoners. Yet Piety denies that this structure oppresses "Schismaticks" (C1v), as the Tower had done to Catholics for over a century. Despite the many religious prisoners who had been incarcerated and tortured in the Tower, this speech associates the Tower only with religious strength. Even Rowland, who argues that Heywood's mayoral Shows frequently contest royal interpretations of mythological figures such as Piety, has noted this speech's "surprisingly accommodating" presentation of religious settlement in London. (105) Yet Heywood once again defies the royal ideology. Since no religious dissenters had burned at the stake at the Tower, Piety truthfully states that the religious need not fear "the stake" (C1v) here--though Catholics had good reason to fear the rack, other tortures, and long imprisonment in the Tower, as well as beheading on Tower Hill. Thus, this Show demonstrates that the ideology of the Tower as a site of royal spiritual authority could be represented only by omitting the monarchs' well-known royal misuses of the Tower. Moreover, Heywood ironically represents the grisly Tower Hill scaffold as one that gently lifts souls to heaven: "And not a Scaffold rear'd to that intent, / But mounts a Soule above the Firmament ..." (C1v), questioning the royal justice of those executions.

Most oppositional of all, in an exceptionally emblematic tableau that features numerous allegorical characters labeled with mottoes as in an early modern emblem book for Heywood's event spectators, and in which Heywood's corresponding pamphlet commentary frequently employs the word "Motto" (C1) for his reading audience, Heywood represents the Virgin Mary. Evidently, Heywood was not a Puritan; whatever his religious leanings, here he continues to support Catholics, with their storied history of oppression at, and opposition to, the Tower. (106) Although the Virgin was the Drapers' patron saint, by 1572 her images had been expunged from their parlor hangings and badges, and no extant mayoral Show had ever represented her. (107) Nor had any Tower play represented such a blatantly Catholic icon as the Virgin herself. Yet here, Heywood represents her at the Tower and verges upon Catholic veneration by surrounding--and crowning--her with personified virtues including "devout acts": "Your Virgin-Saint sits next Religion crown'd" (C1v). Heywood's honoring this most Catholic saint, upon a "Citadel, or Tower" resists the ideology of the Tower as a site of royal Protestant power and symbolically supports Catholics, whose oppression the Tower plays had often represented. (108)

As I have shown elsewhere, both Shakespeare and Drayton had personal reasons for promoting resistance to the Crown through the Tower in their writings, (109) and evidently, so did Heywood. I have attempted to demonstrate in this essay that royal injustice at the Tower recurs as a theme throughout Heywood's prolific writings, including his mayoral Shows. He opposed the injustice that the Tower embodied in his culture, especially considering the hypocritical royal ideology of the Tower. Heywood subtly continued his project of contesting royal authority through allusive representations of the Tower in his mayoral Shows, which contributed to the growing tension between London and the Crown in the years leading up to the civil war. Each representation of the Tower in these Shows could have reminded Londoners in Heywood's original audiences--both the event spectators and readers of the printed pamphlets--of the Tower's representations in Tower plays, Heywood's prose works about the Tower, historical royal tyranny at the Tower, and/or Lord Mayors' actual power struggles with Tower officials. And the Tower's representation at or near each mayoral Show's climactic fourth show by land--in view of the actual Tower--reinforced the Shows' subversion of the royal ideology of the Tower.

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Appendix:

"The Privy Council to Lord Chancellor Egerton," 13 Oct. 1606, MS EL 6221, The Huntington Library, San Marino, CA (110)

After our right harty Commendacions to your good Lordships. Whereas there hath beene of Longe time greate Controversy betweene the Citty, and the Tower of London, about the boundes, limittes, and liberties of each place, by reason whereof, there hath oftentimes tumult, and disorder happened; ffor avoiding of which inconvenience, it is thought meete that the Boundes, and liberties of that his Maiestes auncient howse, and of the Gurisdiccion the Cittie doth hould by Charter from his Maiestes Progenitors might bee sett out, distinguished, and knowne; ffor as his Maiestie hath noe meaning to take from the Citty of London [any] parte of that which hath beene formerly graunted vnto them; Soe it is reason that the Tower being his Maiestes Castle Royall, should enioy those liberties, and extent of ground that aunciently did appertaine vnto it. ffor the deciding whereof, it is thought fitt, that a Commission vnder the greate Seale of England should bee directed to the twoe Lords cheife Justies, the Lord cheife Baron, the Chancellor of Tnexchequer, and Sir Roger Wilbraham knight, to heare the alligacions, and see Recordes, and that which can bee said for the right of his Maiestie and in the behalfe of the Cittie, for the Liberties, boundes, and Gurisdiccions of both places, how the same hath beene carried in time past; wherein his Maiestes Councell Learned may bee heard for the right of his Maiestie and the Councell of the Citty for t[h]em, soe that that reservacion bee made to his Maiestes Castle royall, of the Liber[damaged]nd Royaltie, which the same aunciently hath used, and in right doth appertaine. Therefore wee pray your Lordships to giue direccion that a Commission may bee graunted to the forenamed Commissioners to heare and determine the foresaid Controuersies; And these shalbe sufficient warrant vnto your Lordships And soe wee wish your Lordships right hartely well to fare ffrom Whitehall the 13th of October. 1606./Your good Lordships very assured loving friends; T Dorset Tho: Suffolke I Worcester I. Northampton Salisbury W. Knolly War. I Bruce Lo: Chancellor

NOTES

I presented an early version of this article at the Comparative Drama Sponsored Session on Materiality and Performance at the 2011 International Congress on Medieval Studies. I wish to thank Brian Williams, Scott Stenson, Jeremy Ekberg, Beth Powell, Ula Klein, Paulina Bounds, and the editors and anonymous readers at Comparative Drama for their generous responses to this essay.

(1) On the royal ideology of the Tower, see Kristen Deiter, The Tower of London in English Renaissance Drama: Icon of Opposition, Literary Criticism and Cultural Theory (New York: Routledge, 2008), 54-62. On oppositional representations of the Tower in drama, see 78-92.

(2) Deiter, Tower, 1-2. I use the term "Tower plays" to refer to commercial plays that represent the Tower of London, in much the same way that Jean E. Howard, in Theater of a City: The Places of London Comedy, 1598-1642 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), applies the term "Exchange plays" to plays that represent the Royal Exchange (24), or as Andrew Gurr, in Playgoing in Shakespeare's London, 3rd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), employs the terms "Elect Nation plays" (187), "humours plays" (189), "city comedies," "prodigal son plays" (190), "citizen comedy" and "anti-citizen play" (191). Shakespeare wrote six Tower plays (Deiter, Tower, 1-2). Thomas Heywood's Tower plays are The First and Second Parts of King Edward IV, 1592-99, ed. Richard Rowland, (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005), cited parenthically in the text; If You Know Not Me, You Know No Bodie, or The Troubles of Queene Elizabeth, 1604-05, in The Dramatic Works of Thomas Heywood, vol. 1 (1874; reprint, New York: Russell, 1964), 189-247; and If You Know Not Me, You Know No Body. The Second Part, 1604-05, in Dramatic Works, 249-344.

(3) On resistance in the Tower plays, see Deiter, Tower, 90n52; on the Tower's personification, see 133n67. Heywood dramatizes resistance in The First Part of KingEdward IV, when Falconbridge marches on London to free Henry VI from the Tower (scenes 2, 4, 9, and 10); he also notes "how the Tower doth 'tice us to come on, / To take out Henry the Sixth, there prisoner!" (scene 2, lines 83-84).

(4) On other artists, see Deiter, Tower, 101-12. On Drayton, see Kristen Deiter, "Locating Lady Jane Grey: The Tower of London in Michael Drayton's Englands Heroicall Epistles," Philological Quarterly 89 (2010): 435-56.

(5) Arthur Melville Clark, Thomas Heywood: Playwright and Miscellanist (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1931), 107; Thomas Heywood, Englands Elizabeth: Her Life and Trovbles, During Her Minoritie, from the Cradle to the Crowne (London, 1631), accessed 14 December 2013, Early English Books Online (hereafter EEBO).

(6) Heywood, Englands Elizabeth, 225-26, 234.

(7) Clark, 105, 107. See Richard Barckley, A Discourse of the Felicitie of Man (London, 1631), accessed 14 December 2013, EEBO.

(8) Clark, 105.

(9) James Travers, James I: The Masque of Monarchy, English Monarchs: Treasures of the National Archives (Kew, Richmond, Surrey: The National Archives, 2003), 59, 62-64.

(10) On the trial, see John Nichols, ed., The Progresses, Processions, and Magnificent Festivities of King James the First, 4 vols. (1828; reprint, New York: Franklin, 1967), 3:170. On the release and public outrage, see Brian A. Harrison, The Tower of London Prisoner Book: A Complete Chronology of Persons Known to Have Been Detained at Their Majesties' Pleasure, 1100-1941 (Leeds: Royal Armouries, 2004), 286.

(11) Clark, 107.

(12) Travers, 64, 66.

(13) On elections and the Shows' location, see Tracey Hill, Pageantry and Power: A Cultural History of the Early Modern Lord Mayor's Show, 1585-1639 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010), 54, 38. On sponsorship, see Richard Rowland, Thomas Heywood's Theatre, 1599-1639: Locations, Translations, and Conflict (Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2010), 302. On the date, see Jean Robertson and D. J. Gordon, eds., A Calendar of Dramatic Records in the Books of the Livery Companies of London, 1485-1640, Malone Society Collections, vol. 3 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1954), xxiv. Lawrence Manley, in Literature and Culture in Early Modern London (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), explains, "styling London's chief official the 'Lord Mayor'" was common by 1545; this "elevation of the mayoralty was a response to increasing frictions between the City and the Crown" (267).

(14) Hill, 1.

(15) Robertson and Gordon, xxxi.

(16) Anne Lancashire, London Civic Theatre: City Drama and Pageantry from Roman Times to 1558 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 52-53, 145.

(17) David M. Bergeron, "The Emblematic Nature of English Civic Pageantry," Renaissance Drama 1, n.s. (1968): 167-98 (169). See also Manley, 213.

(18) Anne Lancashire, "London Street Theater" in The Oxford Handbook of Early Modern Theatre, ed. Richard Dutton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 329. Lancashire uses the term pageant for "elaborate wood-and-canvas pageant constructions [that] were positioned at traditional stations along the route" (London Civic Theatre, 131). On this nomenclature, see also 144; and Hill, 12, 160-61.

(19) Hill, 1.

(20) Lancashire, "London Street Theater," 331. On the audience's size, see Hill, 4.

(21) Lancashire, "London Street Theater," 329.

(22) Robertson and Gordon, xxxii-xxxiii. See also Manley, 262. Each of Heywood's mayoral Shows, in its printed form, consists of dedications, historical introductions, prose descriptions of the water show and four shows by land, usually with speeches written in couplets, and a speech at night. As the Shows were performed, spectators experienced only the sights and speeches, without access to the printed information. Throughout my analysis, I specify what the event spectators versus the pamphlet readers could construe. Both audiences, which overlapped to an extent, included members of livery companies.

(23) Thomas Heywood, Londini Sinus Salutis, or, Londons Harbour of Health, and Hapinesse [...] (London, 1635), accessed 14 December 2013, EEBO; Londini Speculum: or, Londons Mirror [...] (London, 1637), accessed 14 December 2013, EEBO; Porta Pietatis, or, The Port or Harbour of Piety [...] (London, 1638), accessed 14 December 2013, EEBO. Of the Shows indexed in EEBO and English Drama, only these three by Heywood clearly represent the Tower of London.

(24) David Kathman, "Heywood, Thomas (ca.1573-1641)" in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004-13), accessed 13 August 2012, http://www. oxforddnb.com/view/article/13190.

(25) Hill, 84, 88; Robertson and Gordon, xliii. See also David M. Bergeron, ed., Thomas Heywood's Pageants: A Critical Edition (New York: Garland, 1986), 2.

(26) Bergeron, Thomas Heywood's Pageants, 2.

(27) Robertson and Gordon, xxxvii, 122-23.

(28) Hill, 69-70.

(29) Robertson and Gordon, xxxvii.

(30) Hill, 284; see also 270-71.

(31) On the similarity, see David M. Bergeron, English Civic Pageantry, 1558-1642, rev. ed., Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies 267 (NP: Arizona Board of Regents for Arizona State University, 2003), 126. On royal entries, see Anne Lancashire, "Dekker's Accession Pageant for James I," Early Theatre 12, no. 1 (2009): 39-50 (43).

(32) Lancashire, London Civic Theatre, 173; see also Hill, 33. The following years, and perhaps others, were Tower-oath years: 1525, 1535, 1536, 1540, 1543 (Lancashire, London Civic Theatre, 182); 1592, 1593 (Hill, 33); and 1603 (Robertson and Gordon, xxiv).

(33) On the Lord Mayor's responsibilities, see Sergei Lobanov-Rostovsky, "The Triumphes of Golde: Economic Authority in the Jacobean Lord Mayor's Show," ELH 60 (1993): 879-98 (890). On livery companies' patronage and oversight of the Shows, see Rowland, Heywood's Theatre, 302-03.

(34) David M. Bergeron, "The Elizabethan Lord Mayor's Show," Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 10 (1970): 269-95 (284).

(35) Bergeron, "Emblematic," passim. See also Bergeron, English Civic Pageantry, 126-235.

(36) Lobanov-Rostovsky, 881.

(37) Playwrights who wrote mayoral Shows included George Peele, Anthony Munday, Ben Jonson, Thomas Dekker, Thomas Middleton, John Webster, John Taylor, and Heywood (Hill, 337-42). Of these, Munday, Dekker, Webster, and Heywood had composed Tower plays (Deiter, Tower, 1-2).

(38) On Tower play audiences, see Deiter, Tower, 12. On mayoral Show audiences, see Lancashire, "London Street Theater," 323; see also Rowland, Heywood's Theatre, 361-65; and Hill, 4.

(39) Gurr, Playgoing, passim, especially 31, 56, 63, 69, 77-79, 203-04.

(40) Heywood's Edward IV plays, for instance, were published in six editions by 1626, according to Richard Rowland, Introduction, in Heywood, The First and Second Parts of King Edward IV, 1.

(41) Hill, 231.

(42) Rowland, Heywood's Theatre, 304-05, 305n7; see also 17.

(43) Hill, 23.

(44) On the revival, see Andrew Gurr, The Shakespearean Stage, 1574-1642, 3rd ed. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 237. On the republishing, see Rowland, Heywood's Theatre, 301.

(45) Lancashire, "London Street Theater," 331.

(46) Hill, 270. See also 280-81.

(47) On the early Tower plays, see Deiter, Tower, 1. On the apprentice riot and Essex rebellion, see 92-105. On laws against visiting Tower prisoners, see 74. On the survey of the Tower, see Anna Keay, The Elizabethan Tower of London: The Haiward and Gascoyne Plan of 1597, London Topographical Society 158 (London: London Topographical Society and Historic Royal Palaces, 2001), 26.

(48) Deiter, Tower, 200n 128.

(49) Keay, 8-11.

(50) On the Tower as royal territory, see Lancashire, London Civic Theatre, 47, 134; see also Lancashire, "Dekker's Accession Pageant" 40; and Lancashire, "London Street Theater," 336. On the Liberty of the Tower, see Keay, 8.

(51) Stephen Mullaney, The Place of the Stage: License, Play, and Power in Renaissance England (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995), 21. Susan Wells, in "Jacobean City Comedy and the Ideology of the City," ELH 48 (1981): 37-60, notes that London's Liberties were "Blackfriars, Whitefriars, Greyfriars, Spitalfields, Southwark, the Tower Hamlets, the Inns of Court, and some other areas" (42).

(52) Keay, 9. For the mayors' names and companies, see Hill, 337-42.

(53) "Sir William Waad to the Earl of Salisbury" 24 August 1605, Calendar of the Manuscripts of the Most Hon. the Marquis of Salisbury, 17: 387, accessed 9 August 2012, State Papers Online.

(54) "Sir William Waad to the Council" 21 December 1605, Calendar of the Manuscripts of the Most Hon. the Marquis of Salisbury, 17: 558, accessed 9 August 2012, State Papers Online.

(55) "Sir William Waad to the Earl of Salisbury" 26 April 1606, Calendar of the Manuscripts of the Most Hon. the Marquis of Salisbury, 18: 120, accessed 9 August 2012, State Papers Online.

(56) "Sir William Waad, Lieutenant of the Tower, to the Earl of Salisbury" 28 July 1606, Calendar of the Manuscripts of the Most Hon. the Marquis of Salisbury, 18:211, accessed 9 August 2012, State Papers Online.

(57) "The Privy Council to Lord Chancellor Egerton," 13 October 1606, MS EL 6221, The Huntington Library, San Marino, CA.

(58) "Sir William Waad to the Commissioners for the Tower Causes," 2 September 1608, accessed 19 August 2012, The Cecil Papers.

(59) "Sir William Waad to the King," 21 December 1606, accessed 9 August 2012, State Papers Online. On the December 1606 mayor's identity and company, see Hill, 339.

(60) "[Meeting] At Whitehall the 13 of July, 1613 ..." 13 July 1613, accessed 10 August 2012, State Papers Online.

(61) "A letter to Sir Jervaise Helwise, knight, Lieutenant of the Tower of London" 15 March 1615, accessed 10 August 2012, State Papers Online.

(62) "Whereas there hath of late yeares many questions and controversies ...," 26 March 1615, accessed 10 August 2012, State Papers Online.

(63) "Whereas, on the 26 of March last, their lordships did order ...,' 15 October 1615, accessed 10 August 2012, State Papers Online.

(64) On the survey, see "Survey of the Tower of London, by Sir Allan Apsley ...," 31 December 1623, accessed 12 August 2012, State Papers Online. On the commission, see "Commissioners [on abuses about the Tower] to the Council" 2 December 1624, accessed 12 August 2012, State Papers Online.

(65) "An Act about the Tower of London" 20 December 1624, accessed 12 August 2012, State Papers Online. The decree of "October 1595" is probably an erroneous reference to Elizabeth's Proclamation of 4 July 1595, "Prohibiting Unlawful Assembly under Martial Law" Tudor Royal Proclamations, ed. Paul L. Hughes and James F. Larkin, 3 vols. (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1969), 3: 143.

(66) "Petition of the King's tenants, inhabitants near the Tower of London, to the King" [1629?], accessed 12 Aug. 2012, State Papers Online; "Petition of his Majesty's Tenants Inhabiting Near the Tower of London to the Council," [March?] 1629, accessed 12 August 2012, State Papers Online.

(67) On the order, see "Wheras an humble Peticion was lately preferred to his Majestie ...," [17 June] 1629, accessed 12 August 2012, State Papers Online. On the petition, see "Petition of his Majesty's tenants inhabiting within the Liberty of the Tower to the King," 2 July 1629, accessed 12 August 2012, State Papers Online.

(68) "Whereas an humble Petitcion ...," 27 January 1630, accessed 2 August 2012, State Papers Online.

(69) "The King to the Lieutenant of the Tower" [June?] 1632, accessed 2 August 2012, State Papers Online.

(70) "Order of Council," 20 May 1631, accessed 12 August 2012, State Papers Online.

(71) "Whereas there was a Commission to be graunted ...," 20 [May] 1631, accessed 12 August 2012, State Papers Online.

(72) "Edward Bromfield, Lord Mayor of London, to the Council" 6 October 1637, accessed 9 August 2012, State Papers Online.

(73) Robertson and Gordon, xxvii.

(74) Lobanov-Rostovsky, 880. See also Hill, 3.

(75) Manley, 271-72.

(76) Robertson and Gordon, xli-xlii.

(77) Manley, 240.

(78) Adrian Prockter and Robert Taylor, The A to Z of Elizabethan London, London Topographical Society 122 (London: London Topographical Society, 1979). For the date of the "Agas" map, see vi. For the Little Conduit, see 43, 9. For the Eleanor Cross in Cheapside, see 9; this was "one of 12 memorial crosses erected by Edward I to mark the stages in the funeral procession of his queen, Eleanor" (58).

(79) Lancashire, London Civic Theatre, 45.

(80) Ibid., 139.

(81) Edward Impey and Geoffrey Parnell, The Tower of London: The Official Illustrated History (London: Merrill, 2000), 18.

(82) R. A. Brown, "Architectural Description," in The Tower of London: Its Buildings and Institutions, ed. John Charlton (London: HMSO, 1978), 48.

(83) On the maps and other geographic images, see Peter Barker, London: A History in Maps, London Topographical Society, 173 (London: London Topographical Society, in association with The British Library, 2012), 15-37. On Cheapside, see Lancashire, London Civic Theatre, 130. Although banners and fireworks may have distracted spectators from the Tower on the horizon, it is unlikely that giants obscured the view since they appeared less frequently in seventeenth-century mayoral Shows (Robertson and Gordon, xxv) and are not mentioned in the texts of the Shows examined here.

(84) Howard, 29; Hill, 271.

(85) John Stow, Stow's Survey of London, 2na ed. (1603; reprint, London: Dent, 1956), 55. On the Survey as a source, see Hill, 162.

(86) On Elizabeth, see John Stow, [Annals of England to 1603] (London, 1603), 1281, Open Library (accessed 25 May 2013). On James, see Nichols, 1:118.

(87) Impey and Parnell, 32 (emphasis mine).

(88) Hill, 54.

(89) Deiter, Tower, 29, 55-62. The Tower's construction began in the late eleventh century.

(90) William Dunbar, "In Honour of the City of London," in The Oxford Book of English Verse 1290-1900, ed. Arthur Quiller-Couch (Oxford: Clarendon, 1931), 27. See also Deiter, Tower, 41.

(91) Deiter, Tower, 55-62.

(92) Manley, 221.

(93) On Charles II attending mayoral Shows, see Manley, 213. Hill compares these Shows to royal progresses, 10, 17. The quotation is from 17.

(94) Lancashire, London Civic Theatre, 62.

(95) Robertson and Gordon, xxxvii, 122-23.

(96) Manley, 218, 241.

(97) Oxford English Dictionary Online, s.v. "insidiate," accessed 8 September 2013, www.oed.com.

(98) Deiter, Tower, 135.

(99) Stow, [Annals], 1281.

(100) Deiter, Tower, 133. The other playwright was Shakespeare. Heywood and Shakespeare also revised Sir Thomas More, which probably was not staged in the early modern period (212n67, 157n2).

(101) Hill, 272-73.

(102) Rowland, Heywood's Theatre, 343.

(103) Oxford English Dictionary Online, s.v. "delicate," accessed 8 September 2013, www.oed.com. On the survey, see "Survey of the Tower of London, by Sir Allan Apsley ...," 31 December 1623, accessed 12 August 2012, State Papers Online. On the commission, see "Commissioners [on abuses about the Tower] to the Council" 2 December 1624, accessed 12 August 2012, State Papers Online.

(104) Deiter, Tower, 114-49.

(105) Rowland, Heywood's Theatre, 302, 345.

(106) On Heywood's religion, see Kathman. On Catholics, see Deiter, Tower, 15-18.

(107) Rowland, Heywood's Theatre, 345, 345n105.

(108) On the religious facet of the royal ideology, see Deiter, Tower, 45-52. On Catholic resistance in the Tower plays, see Deiter, Tower, passim.

(109) On Shakespeare, see Deiter, Tower, 87-88. On Drayton, see Deiter, "Locating," 451-53.

(110) This letter is reproduced by permission of The Huntington Library, San Marino, CA. In this diplomatic transcription, I have expanded MS abbreviations in italic, silently lowered superscript letters, reproduced long s as short s, and, where the manuscript is damaged in two places, made notations or inserted missing letters in square brackets. The title "Lord Chancellor" appears in the lower left corner; it has been excised and reaffixed to the document. I thankfully acknowledge Heather Wolfe for clarifying this last point and for her helpful insights on the letter's rhetorical situation.