[Victorian Web Home —> W. Harrison Ainsworth —> Illustration —> William Alfred Delamotte —> Windsor Castle —> Next]
Garter Tower, from the Summit of the Curfew Tower
W. A. Delamotte
1842
Wood-engraving
9.9 cm high by 7.4 cm wide, vignetted
Twelfth Delamotte illustration for W. Harrison Ainsworth's Windsor Castle. An Historical Romance, first published in the August 1842 number of Ainsworth's Magazine; Chapter III; volume, p. 31.
[Click on image to enlarge it.]
Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham.
"Away with him!" cried Henry. "I myself will go to the Garter Tower to see it done. Farewell for a short while, sweetheart. I will read these partisans of Catherine a terrible lesson."
As the butcher was hurried off to the Curfew Tower, the king proceeded with his attendants to the Garter Tower, and ascended to its summit.
In less than ten minutes a stout pole, like the mast of a ship, was thrust through the battlements of the Curfew Tower, on the side looking towards the town. To this pole a rope, of some dozen feet in length, and having a noose at one end, was firmly secured. The butcher was then brought forth, bound hand and foot, and the noose was thrown over his neck.
While this was passing, the wretched man descried a person looking at him from a window in a wooden structure projecting from the side of the tower. [Chapter III. "Of the Grand Procession to Windsor Castle; Of the Meeting ofKing Henry the Eighth and Anne Boleyn at the Lower Gate; Of their Entrance into the Castle; And how the Butcher was Hanged from the Curfew Tower," pp. 31-32]
The remarkable hanging of the young Windsor butcher merely for his expressing loyalty to the woman who is still technically Queen of England underscores the capriciousness of the Tudor monarch. The nineteenth-century signs on the buildings in the background of Delamotte's sketch remind the readers that they are in a very different era. Victoria may reign, but she does not rule; rather, due process and the Common Law of the realm would never tolerate such an atrocity for merely exercising free speech. The sign for a local printer in particular underscores the profound differences between Henry's reign and Victoria's. From where unfortunate Mark Fytton was executed three hundred years before the reader looks across at the Garter Tower, from the summit of which Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn watched the execution. The scene is made All the more mundane by Delamotte's recording the unruly bushes growing on the summit of the Curfew Tower, and of the proletarian laundry on the clothesline at the very bottom of the picture.
Above: Tony Johannot's painterly realisation of the historic scene that unfolds in Delamotte's wood-engraving on the facing pages, The Meeting of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn [Click on image to enlarge it.]
Ainsworth, William Harrison. Windsor Castle. An Historical Romance. Illustrated by George Cruikshank and Tony Johannot. With designs on wood by W. Alfred Delamotte. London: Routledge, 1880. Based on the Henry Colburn edition of 1844.
Patten, Robert L. Chapter 30, "The 'Hoc' Goes Down." George Cruikshank's Life, Times, and Art, vol. 2: 1835-1878. Rutgers, NJ: Rutgers U. P., 1991; London: The Lutterworth Press, 1996. Pp. 153-186.
Worth, George J. William Harrison Ainsworth. New York: Twayne, 1972.
Last modified 8 December 2017