by Derek Wilson
There can be no doubt that Dudley hoped for a commutation of sentence and that this lay behind his acknowledgement of his offences and his grovelling pleas for mercy. On the same day that he attended mass in the church of St Peter ad Vincula he wrote in desperation to Arundel and Gardiner, begging them to intercede for him with Mary. Only a transcript version of his letter to the earl has survived but there seems little reason to doubt its genuineness.
. . . O my good lord remember how sweet life is, and how bitter ye contrary. Spare not your speech and pains, for God I hope hath not shut out all hope of comfort for me in that gracious, princely and womanlike heart . . . Once your fellow and loving companion but now worthy of no name but wretchedness and misery, JD.17
It reads like the emotionally unrestrained self-abasement of a man who has lost the last shreds of dignity, but we should not judge it by the standards of a later age. For someone in Dudley’s position it was the convention to throw oneself on the royal clemency. Cromwell in a similar situation had begged Henry VIII for ‘mercy, mercy, mercy’. Dudley could, morally, lay claim to some consideration. Though he had had rivals imprisoned and fined, he had never pursued any of them to death, with the exception of Somerset, and, during his last days in the Tower, he had made his peace with the late duke’s sons. Arundel had reason to be well aware of Dudley’s forbearance. Despite his intrigues with Wriothesley and Somerset, he had suffered nothing worse than some months’ incarceration in the Tower. His fine had been remitted in full and he had been restored to the Council. There is no evidence that he was now prepared to lift a finger to help Dudley.
Thus it was that, on the morning of 22 August, John Dudley was led out to Tower Hill and there given into the charge of the Sheriff of London who presided over the gruesome business of his execution. As was the convention, he made a speech to the throng gathered round the scaffold in which he confessed his offences, reiterated his resolve to die in the true Catholic faith and exhorted the people to remain loyal to their lawful sovereign. He spent some moments in prayer with Bishop Nicholas Heath, then knelt to place his head on the block.
It was forty-three years almost to the day since his father had perished on the same spot and there must have been some in the crowd who had witnessed that earlier execution. They will have compared the two events and, perhaps, murmured to themselves ‘like father, like son’. If Dudley reflected on these things from his different perspective, as surely he must have done during his last days, he might well have come to the same conclusion, though for different reasons. Edmund had loyally served his royal master. He had made a valuable contribution to the government of the Tudor state. In doing so he had drawn upon himself that universal loathing which could not be directed at the monarch. The next incumbent of the throne had found it expedient to brand him as the source of all the government’s unpopular policies and to punish him for the constitutional schemes of his sovereign. Like father, like son.
IV
THE LOVER
12
De Profundis
In a first floor room of the Beauchamp Tower within the Tower of London visitors can still see, among the various carved graffiti which generations of prisoners left for posterity a panel more elaborate than the rest. It represents the Dudley heraldic devices, the bear and ragged staff, and the double-tailed lion, and, beneath them, the name of the artist, ‘IOHN DVDLI’. With patient care the Duke of Northumberland’s eldest son inscribed this memorial and displayed his learning with a charming conceit: he encircled the legend with a border of leaves and flowers whose significance he explained in a verse carved below:
Yow that these beasts do wel behold and se
May deme with ease wherefore here made they be
With borders eke wherein [there may be found]
4 Brothers names who list to serche the grounde’
John affectionately represented his siblings by carving roses for Ambrose, gillyflowers for Guildford, oak leaves for Robert (Latin robur = oak) and honeysuckle for Henry. Robert, less ambitiously, chiselled an oak spray into the granite together with his initials. But perhaps the most moving memorial is the one word ‘IANE’, carved, we may assume, by seventeen-year-old Guildford.
He and Suffolk’s daughter had been thrown together in a loveless marriage and, during their very brief time together, Guildford had found it humiliating to be treated as a mere consort to his wife, for Jane had resolutely refused to bestow on him the title of ‘king’. As a result of this unwanted match the young man now had to endure cramped prison quarters, was separated (most of the time) from his bride and had the threat of execution hanging over him. He had every reason to resent those who had entangled him in their political coils. Yet such evidence as has survived indicates that Guildford wasted no time in bitter brooding. During Jane’s first days in captivity the earnest, young ex-queen wrote a short devotional treatise which later came into the possession of the Lieutenant of the Tower. Guildford added a brief prayer to it, in which he asked God to grant long life to his father.
The unity and solidarity of the Dudleys in adversity is really quite remarkable. They did not seek to distance themselves from their father’s disgrace and the family did not fall apart in mutual recrimination. The Duchess of Northumberland devoted all her energies to achieving her sons’ release and constantly petitioned friends at court to use their influence on the prisoners’ behalf. As men of social standing, they were able to command certain privileges, servants to attend them, food provided for their common table, furnishings sent from home for their comfort, books and even pets brought in for their amusement. Robert’s wife, Amy, had permission to visit him at ‘any convenient time’. Sometimes the brothers were invited to dine at the Lieutenant’s table and they were allocated periods for exercise on the leads between the Beauchamp and Bell Towers. Yet no alleviations of the harshness of their incarceration could lift from them the gloom of the complete reversion of their fortunes and the stress of not knowing what the future might hold.
Mary started her reign cautiously. She was wise enough and, perhaps, compassionate enough not to pursue everyone suspected of involvement in the plot to keep her from the throne. She did not parade her triumph over Northumberland by having his head stuck on a pole and displayed to the public gaze. She granted the petition of one man who was not ashamed to remain loyal to John Dudley:
John Cork, Lancaster Herald, sometime servant to this Duke, begged of Queen Mary to bury the head of his old master in the Tower of London, which was granted him with the whole body and performed accordingly. In remembrance whereof the said Lancaster did ever after bear for his crest a bear’s head silver, crowned gold.1
John Dudley’s corpse, united with its head, was buried before the altar in St Peter ad Vincula, beside the remains of the Duke of Somerset, thus imposing in death a fitting symmetry on the destinies of the one-time friends who had fallen out over their desire to rule Edwardian England. She set at liberty Suffolk, Northampton and other prominent members of Dudley’s faction. It was as she ran into opposition and discovered that the loneliness and rejection of her earlier years were as nothing compared with what she had to endure as queen that her attitude hardened. Her obsession with forcing her will upon her people grew and she ended shedding more innocent blood in five years than her father had in thirty-seven. Having been welcomed so enthusiastically, she must have been surprised by the speed with which the mood changed and by the animosity displayed by many of her subjects. The demonstrations began within weeks.
As early as 13 August the queen’s chaplain narrowly escaped death from a hostile crowd when he preached at St Paul’s Cross. Parliament, when it met in October, proved unco-operative about repealing old statutes. When, towards the end of the year, the news was published that the queen was negotiating a marriage with Philip, heir to the throne of Spain, national pride and hatred of papists merged in a general outcry. Country priests were manhandled. Scurrilous pamphlets were distributed. A dead dog with a ‘tonsured’ crown was
thrown in through one of the palace windows. Mary was obliged to double her personal guard and Bishop Gardiner received so many assassination threats that he was forced to take up residence in the royal household.
All this disturbance was bad news for the Dudley brothers. The fact that they were obliged to share their prison quarters was the result of the Tower rapidly filling up with fresh batches of detainees. Yet more worrying was the possible impact of unrest on the queen and her councillors. Mary was urged to demonstrate her resolve by making short work of all traitors. John Dudley, Earl of Warwick, was the only one of the brothers who actually stood condemned of treason, having been tried along with his father (Sir Andrew Dudley, Northumberland’s brother had been arraigned on 19 August) but, as the autumn set in, the shadow of the axe fell across the younger Dudleys. On 13 November, Ambrose, Henry and Guildford were arraigned at the Guildhall, along with Jane and Thomas Cranmer. Robert was temporarily spared because it was difficult to gather evidence concerning his activities in distant Norfolk. However, he too was taken to the Guildhall on 22 January for his show trial. But the City’s mood had changed and the prisoner must have been aware of it. Few citizens braved the cold to indulge the pleasure of shouting curses at the last of the detested Dudleys on his way to justice. Only a couple of weeks before some of them had, however, turned out to pelt Spanish visitors with snowballs. At the end of the dismal proceedings the pre-ordained sentence was read out. On a date as yet unspecified the convicted traitor was
to be brought through the middle of London to the gibbet at Tyburn, and there be hung and quickly brought down to the ground, and his entrails taken out of his body, while he was still alive, and burned, and that he should then be beheaded and his body divided in four parts, and that his head and his quarters should be taken and displayed at such places as the queen should assign . . .2
Still Mary stayed her hand and still there was hope. That hope suffered a severe blow within days. Several anti-Spanish gentlemen and noblemen had been planning a demonstration ever since they heard of the proposed royal marriage. Poor communication and faint hearts undermined the rising that erupted in February – but not before it had come within a whisker of success. While other participants failed to raise their promised forces, the hotheaded Thomas Wyatt, son of Northumberland’s old friend, raised 3,000 men in Kent and marched on London. Mary sent the aged Duke of Norfolk to confront the rebels at Rochester but when the royal troops came face to face with the enemy most of them threw down their weapons and the remnant fled back to London, ‘their coats torn, all ruined, without arrows or string in their bows’.3
Whatever information reached the Dudleys, they cannot have failed to be aware of the bustle and confusion around the Tower. Cannon were trundled out for the defence of the City, the castle’s own ordnance being trained on the south side of the river along which the rebels were advancing towards Southwark. Wyatt’s impetus came to a halt when he failed to capture London Bridge. He was obliged to move upstream to cross the Thames at Kingston. His forces were dwindling as they made their way back along the north bank. The critical moment came when some of Wyatt’s followers put to rout the royal guard at Whitehall, but were too few in number to follow up their advantage. Wyatt plunged on and the outcome eventually depended on the response of London’s citizens. Most remained inert. Few came out to join him but few also declared wholeheartedly for the queen.
The Dudleys became aware that the rebellion had fizzled out soon after dawn on 8 February when they heard the shouts and jeers of the garrison as Wyatt and hundreds of his bedraggled supporters were marched into the Tower. They saw the captives divided into groups and distributed among the overcrowded prison quarters, the majority being herded into the crypt below St John’s Chapel, the only space left, and conveniently close to the chamber where the rack was housed. The watchers could not but be fearful of the outcome. They knew that Mary would be forced to make her throne more secure. The only question to be answered was, how many heads would fall in the process. They were not kept wondering long. That very day the queen ordered the executions of Jane and Guildford. Neither had been implicated in Wyatt’s rebellion but Mary, like her father before her, considered it necessary to remove possible rival claimants. The unfortunate couple were ordered to prepare themselves for death the following day, although the date was subsequently moved to 12 February. By then the Duke of Suffolk had been re-arrested and a spate of hangings of rebellious lesser fry had begun. Gallows were set up at every London gate, one at the end of London Bridge, four in Southwark, one at Leadenhall, two in Cheapside, six or eight in Fleet Street and more at Charing Cross. The prisons were so full that some offenders had to be locked in churches, forty or more at a time.
Contemporary accounts report that Jane and Guildford faced death with quiet dignity. Not for them any grovelling last minute conversion. They shamed their elders by affirming their Protestant faith to the end. Jane, indeed, was openly contemptuous of her father-in-law’s apostasy when she told a visitor
. . . like as his life was wicked and full of dissimulation, so was his end thereafter. I pray God I, nor no friend of mine, die so. Should I who am young . . . forsake my faith for the love of life? Nay, God forbid! Much more he should not whose fatal course, although he had lived his just number of years, could not have long continued . . .4
Guildford was taken to the scaffold on Tower Hill, where he refused the ministrations of a Catholic priest before kneeling for the headsman. Jane was spared a public execution. She died, as was becoming customary for English queens, on Tower Green. She did not, as later moralizers insisted, rail against her father-in-law. She had more important things on her mind.
Good master Lieutenant, . . . I shall as a friend desire you, and as a Christian require you, to call upon God to incline your heart to his laws, to quicken you in his way, and not to take the word of truth utterly out of your mouth. Live still to die, that by death you may purchase eternal life . . . For, as the preacher saith, there is a time to be born and a time to die, and the day of death is better than the day of our birth. Yours, as the Lord knoweth, as a friend,
Jane Dudley5
Thus Jane wrote in the prayer book she handed to Sir John Bridges, the Lieutenant, during her last moments on earth. In point of fact, none of the younger Dudleys deserted the evangelical faith they had espoused during the heady days of radical fervour at the Edwardian court, although repeated assaults were made upon their religion by priests sent to draw them back into the Catholic fold.
The killings continued. On 23 February it was Suffolk’s turn to take the short walk out to Tower Hill. Less than a month later the one who posed the greatest potential threat to Mary’s security joined the Tower prisoners. Fickle public favour had by now transferred itself from Mary to Elizabeth. The unwed Protestant princess had a swelling crowd of sympathizers, some of whom were ready to plot and scheme on her behalf. It was on Palm Sunday, 18 March, that Princess Elizabeth came by barge to the Privy Stairs (not the grim portal of Traitor’s Gate, as legend would have it) and was escorted to lodgings prepared for her in the ancient palace complex adjacent to the White Tower. The princess was terrified of this place where her mother had been executed and now lay buried. She had pleaded not to be sent here but Gardiner had persuaded the queen and bullied the Council. So, briefly, Elizabeth shared incarceration with the Dudleys.
At the beginning of the next century the chronicler, William Camden, at a loss to explain Elizabeth’s attraction to Robert Dudley, pondered,
Whether this proceeded from any virtue of his, whereof he gave some shadowed tokens, or from their common condition or imprisonment under Queen Mary, or from his nativity and the hidden consent of the stars at the hour of their birth, and thereby a most straight conjunction of their minds, a man cannot easily say.6
This may be the origin of the romantic legend which proposed clandestine assignations between Robert and Elizabeth in some grim corner of the Tower as the breeding ground of their lasting love.
There is no evidence for any such meetings. But nor is there any proof that they did not take place. The strictest security surrounded the princess; she was not supposed to set foot outside her quarters without being guarded by five attendants. This does not mean that there was no contact at all between the two prisoners. They may have met as guests at the Lieutenant’s table. Robert may well have smuggled messages conveying loyalty and encouragement to Elizabeth. It is not beyond the bounds of possibility that the two young people may have been able to snatch a few moments’ conversation together. Despite the sternest injunctions, guards were always open to bribes. Only nine years later the Earl and Countess of Hertford found themselves in the Tower under royal displeasure. They were in separate lodgings and forbidden to meet. Yet during their captivity they managed to produce a baby.