Even when Henry’s misfortunes were at an end, and when the Battle of Evesham was won, the Tower was perpetually unfortunate.  A body of rebels surrounded it, and in the defence were present a great number of Jews, who had fled from the fighting in the city only to find themselves pressed for service in defence of the fortress.  From that moment they make no further appearance in English military history till the South African War, unless indeed their appearance in chains thirteen years later in this same Tower as prisoners for financial trickery can be counted a military event.

Upon this occasion the siege was raised by the promptitude and energy of Prince Edward—­the man who as King was to march to Caernarvon and to the Grampians had already in his boyhood shown the energy and the military aptitude of his grandfather King John.  He was but twenty years old, yet he had already done all the fighting at Lewes, he had already won Evesham, and now, at the end of spring, he made one march from Windsor to the Tower and relieved it.  It was almost the last time that the Tower stood for the success of authority.  From this time onwards it is, as it had been before, the unfortunate symbol of successful rebellion.  Edward II. had to leave it in his fatal year of 1326, the Londoners poured in and incidentally massacred the Bishop of Exeter, into whose hands it had been entrusted.

In 1460 it surrendered to the House of York, and from that time onwards becomes more and more of a prison and less and less of a fortress.

The preponderatingly military aspect of the Thames Valley in English history dwindles with the dwindling of military energy in our civilisation, and passes with the passing of a governing class that was military rather than commercial.

Sites which owed their importance to strategical position, and which had hence grown into considerable towns, ceased to show any but a civilian character, and even in the only episode of consequence wherein fighting occurred in England since the Middle Ages—­the episode of the Civil Wars—­the banks of the Thames, though perpetually infested by either army, saw very little serious fighting, and that although the line of the Thames was the critical line of action during the first stage of the war.

For the Civil Wars as a whole were but an affair upon the flank of the general struggle in Europe:  the losses were never heavy, and in the first stages one can hardly call it fighting at all.

The losses at the skirmish of Edge Hill were, indeed, respectable, though most of them seem to have been incurred after the true fighting ceased, but with that exception, and especially upon the line of the Thames itself, the losses were extraordinarily small.