Tales From the Tower of London

by Donnelly, Mark P.

  But even the hardened Mary could not believe that Jane Grey was a traitor; she had simply been a pawn in a massive game of power politics. To that end, the day before Jane’s trial, Mary called her to court and told her privately that although a verdict of guilty was certain, she and her husband would be pardoned and, as soon as possible, set free.

  On 13 November, Jane and Guildford, along with two of his brothers, Ambrose and Henry, were sent to trial at the Guildhall surrounded by a guard of four hundred soldiers. They all pleaded guilty to the charge of treason, and the sentence of death was only a matter of form. True to her word, on the following day Queen Mary arranged their pardon.

  Everything might have gone according to plan had Mary not made a proclamation in early December, announcing her intention to marry Prince (soon to be King) Philip of Spain. Hostility against her Catholic religion now overshadowed the public’s belief in her inherited right to the throne. Visions of Spanish rule and the Spanish Inquisition being imported into England sent waves of panic through the church and lay community alike.

  Among the tens of thousands of incensed Englishmen was Sir Thomas Wyatt. Wyatt had never been particularly political, nor especially religious. Even his background was not notably auspicious; his father had been executed for committing adultery with Anne Boleyn. But the thought of England becoming a Spanish satellite was too much for Wyatt to bear and he began raising an army to oppose the queen and, if necessary, to drive her from the throne. One of those who flocked to Wyatt’s cause was the Duke of Suffolk, father of the captive Lady Jane. Undoubtedly, some of Suffolk’s patriotic fervour was spurred on by guilt for having manipulated, and then abandoned, his daughter. Whatever the case, by mid-January Wyatt and Suffolk had an army of more than four thousand men, which they led to Rochester, seizing the city and sending out a call for support from Londoners. Initially Wyatt’s chances looked good. When the Duke of Norfolk led an army into the field to subdue the rebellion, hundreds of his men deserted to join Wyatt’s cause.

  On 3 February 1554, Wyatt’s army entered the outskirts of London, through the Southwark district and moved towards the Tower where they took up position across the river, demanding custody of both Queen Mary and Lady Jane Grey. It probably came as no surprise that their demand was rejected out of hand. Without hesitation, Wyatt and Suffolk began bombarding the Tower walls, irrespective of the danger their artillery might present to Jane Grey. But Wyatt’s guns were no match for the massive cannon and mortars mounted on the walls of the Tower. Within an hour, Wyatt began abandoning his position, slowly retreating through the streets of London. Suffolk stood his ground longer but, eventually, he too had to give up the fight. It wasn’t long before, Wyatt and nearly three hundred of his supporters, including Jane’s father, were captured by the queen’s forces near Temple Bar and hauled unceremoniously back to a Tower already overcrowded by the arrests made when Mary took the throne. Never in its long history had the Tower held so many prisoners at one time.

  More than one hundred of Wyatt’s rebels would eventually be hanged or beheaded, forty-five of them on one day alone. Wyatt himself would be among the last to go. When his turn came, Wyatt was subjected to all the public humiliation and pain of the worst of medieval tortures: being hanged, drawn and quartered. But even with the deaths of Northumberland and Wyatt, Mary’s fears were not put to rest. So long as Jane Grey remained a focus of public sympathy, Mary would not rest easy. Jane Grey would have to die. Two days after Wyatt’s execution, Jane and Guildford were told that their pardon had been rescinded and they would go to the block in a matter of days.

  On hearing the news, Jane’s ladies-in-waiting broke down in tears, but Jane tried to comfort them, saying ‘O faithful companions of my sorrows . . . are we not born into life to suffer adversity and even disgrace? When has the time been that the innocent were not exposed to violence and oppression? The quarrel is God’s, but undoubtedly the victory is ours.’

  It would seem that even the hard-hearted Mary had no taste for killing her sixteen-year-old cousin and sent her personal confessor, Dr John Feckenham, to Jane with a message of hope. If she would convert to Catholicism, the execution might still be called off. On 8 February, Feckenham took the message to Jane and urged her to convert, but Jane told him that she did not have time for a religious controversy. Feckenham took her statement literally and reported to the queen that Jane needed more time to search her soul. Mary agreed to a three-day stay of execution. Excitedly, Feckenham rushed back to Jane with the news. Realising that he had completely misunderstood her intent, Jane said, ‘You are much deceived, sir, if you think I have any desire for longer life; for I assure you . . . my life has been so tedious to me that I long for nothing so much as death; and since it is the Queen’s pleasure, I am most willing to undergo it.’

  Desperate to save the girl, Feckenham even proposed that he and Jane debate their respective beliefs publicly. Exhausted and frustrated, Jane answered, ‘This disputation may be fit for the living, but not for the dying. Leave me to make peace with God.’ When Feckenham replied that he was afraid that he would not see Jane again, she told him, ‘that is true, unless God . . . opens the eyes of your heart’. Implicit in this answer was Jane’s belief that Feckenham, as a Catholic, would not be accepted into heaven. It was a sentiment that was undoubtedly not lost on Feckenham.

  Although he had failed to convert Jane to the Roman Catholic Church and thereby save her life, Feckenham had been deeply moved by the girl’s piety and strength of character. As a final gesture to Jane, he asked Queen Mary if he might accompany her young cousin to the scaffold. Probably hoping for a last-minute conversion, Mary gave her consent.

  Even with the certainty of death hanging over her, Jane seems to have spent her last few days relatively composed, if not calm. She occupied her time writing in her diary, recalling the facts of her short, turbulent reign and sending letters to friends and family. Among those to whom she wrote was her cousin, the queen. Here, she admitted her guilt and explained the circumstances that led her to the end of her young life. ‘Although my fault be such that but for the goodness and clemency of the Queen, I can have no hope of finding pardon . . . [my own] lack of prudence . . . deserve[s] heavy punishment. . . . It being known that the error imputed to me had not been altogether caused by myself.’

  She also wrote to her father who was being confined in the nearby Martin tower. ‘Father’, she began, ‘although it hath pleased God to hasten my death by you, by whom my life should have rather been lengthened, yet can I so patiently take it, that I yield to God more hearty thanks. . . . I count myself blessed that . . . my guiltless blood may cry before the Lord, “Mercy to the innocent”.’ She closed the letter ‘I am your obedient daughter till death, Jane Dudley.’

  On the very eve of her execution, she wrote in her diary the following words, ‘If justice be done with my body, my soul will find mercy with God. If my faults deserve punishment, my youth, at least, and my imprudence, were worthy of excuse; God and posterity will show me favour.’ While Jane occupied her mind with writing, in the nearby Beauchamp tower her twenty-year-old husband spent his time thinking about Jane and the life they might have had together. On the wall of his cell he carved a single word in Latin script – IANE. It remains there to this day.

  On the morning of 12 February, just six days after Wyatt’s rebellion had been put down, Jane and Guildford Dudley were scheduled to go to the block. In a last-minute request to the queen, Guildford asked that he might spend a few minutes with his wife before going to his execution. Obviously moved, Mary consented. Jane, however, did not. Instead, she sent a note to her husband, insisting that to meet under their present circumstances would be too painful and could only drain whatever emotional strength they still had. The letter said, in part, that they should ‘omit these moments of grief’ and that they would ‘shortly meet in a better world where friendships were happy and unions indissoluble’. Jane did agree to watch from the window of her cell as Guildford was led th
rough from the Tower and to wave to him as he passed.

  Once on Tower Hill, Guildford’s courage failed him. Terrified and shaking, he could not bring himself to make the customary final speech for fear he would break down in tears. Sinking to his knees before the ugly oak block, he muttered, ‘Pray for me, pray for me, pray for me.’ Transfixed with emotion, Jane had remained at the window of her cell long after Guildford and the guards passed out of sight and through the gates of the Tower. She was still standing there nearly twenty minutes later when the handcart bearing her husband’s body trundled back in through the gates. By his side, wrapped in a blood-soaked cloth, was a large round object. It was his head. Slumping to the floor, Jane sobbed ‘Oh! Guildford! Guildford!’

  Less than an hour later it was Jane’s turn on the block. To spare her the public humiliation of an execution on Tower Hill, a special scaffold had been erected on Tower Green inside the walls of the Tower compound.

  As Lady Jane Grey mounted the steps of the scaffold, wearing the same black dress she had worn at her trial, she commented to those around her, ‘Good people, I am come hither to die, and by law I am condemned to do the same. . . . I pray you all . . . to hear my witness, that I die a good Christian woman, and that I do look to be saved by no other means but only by the mercy of God in the blood of His only Son Jesus Christ. . . . And now, good people, while I am alive, I pray you assist me with my prayers.’

  Having knelt and prayed, Jane turned to Dr Feckenham, who had been waiting on the scaffold when she arrived, and asked if she might be allowed to recite the 51st Psalm. Choked with emotion, Feckenham could not answer, but nodded his assent. Then, only minutes before her death, in a loud, clear voice, Jane repeated the psalm, from memory and without flaw. By the time she rose, Feckenham was in tears. Jane stepped over to him and said, ‘God will abundantly requite you, good sir, for your humanity to me’ – and then added wryly, ‘though your discourses gave me more uneasiness than all the terrors of my approaching death.’ With that she kissed him on the cheek and squeezed his hand, as though she had enough strength for both of them.

  Now, Jane calmly stepped towards the block and removed her outer gown. But as she prepared to kneel, she was told that there would be a five-minute wait in case of a last-minute reprieve. For five long minutes the entire company stood there in dead silence. Jane stared at the ugly black oak block in front of her while everyone else stared at her. The reprieve never came.

  Finally, the executioner stepped forward and knelt down beside Jane, asking her forgiveness for what he was about to do. He then instructed her to approach the block. For a moment Jane looked confused. ‘Stand upon the straw, madame’ he said quietly. Turning one last time, Jane said to him: ‘I pray you dispatch me quickly’, then added, ‘You will not take it off before I lay me down?’ ‘No, Madame’, he assured her.

  Kneeling in front of the block, Jane tied a white handkerchief around her eyes and then felt for the block. But she had kneeled too soon. The block was out of reach. Now panicking, she waved her hands in the air first one way and then another, muttering, ‘Where is it? What shall I do? Where is it?’ Frozen in horror, no one on the scaffold seemed able to move. Finally, one of the small crowd surrounding the scaffold mounted the steps and guided her hands to the block. As she crawled forward on her knees and laid her head into the hollow, Lady Jane Grey, Queen of England for nine days, said in a firm voice, ‘Lord, into thy hands I commend my spirit.’

  When the executioner had finished his work, according to law he picked up the bleeding head of the sixteen-year-old girl, held it high in the air, and proclaimed, ‘So perish all the Queen’s enemies. Behold – the head of a traitor!’

  In the seven months since Jane Grey had first entered the Tower to be declared Queen of England, she had never left. England’s most unwilling monarch, who had reigned for only nine days, was laid to rest in front of the altar of St Peter ad Vincula Church in the Tower compound next to her husband, Guildford Dudley. Jane’s father, Henry Grey, Duke of Suffolk, followed his daughter to the block eleven days later on 23 February 1554. Guildford Dudley’s brother John died in his cell, but his brothers Ambrose and Robert escaped death; Robert went on to be elevated to the title of Earl of Leicester and is best remembered as ‘Robin’, Queen Elizabeth I’s friend, confidant and lover.

  But in the months and years before Elizabeth came to the throne, many of Queen Mary’s supporters would come to regret their choice of sides in the war between Jane and Mary. Her vicious persecution of Protestants would send hundreds to the block or the stake, there to be burned as heretics. Nor would posterity remember her kindly, referring to her not as Queen Mary Tudor but simply as Bloody Mary.

  7

  THE DEVIL’S DANCING BEAR

  Bishop Edmund Bonner and Cuthbert Symson 1553–9

  When Mary Tudor came to the throne of England in August 1553 crowds of supporters swarmed through the streets of London to welcome her. Across the city and throughout southern England church bells rang in celebration. The short, violent term of Jane Grey’s reign was over and the uncertainty of the sickly young Edward VI’s five-year reign was past. Stability had finally returned to England. Or so it seemed for the moment.

  In truth, Mary Tudor was a woman bent on vengeance. Her father, Henry VIII, had divorced her mother, Queen Catherine of Aragon, and declared Mary illegitimate in an effort to bar her from the throne. He had also outlawed the Roman Catholic Church to which Mary was so devoutly attached that throughout her life she reportedly wore a nun’s habit beneath her gown. Now, at last, Mary was in a position to wreak a very personal revenge on everyone who had supported the religious upheavals that had so nearly deprived her of the crown.

  On the very day Mary entered London those hard-line Catholics who had survived her father’s purges were released from the Tower and brought before the queen. Kissing each of them on the cheek, she released them from their years of imprisonment and reinstated them in their old positions. The Protestant-leaning Church of England was outlawed and Protestants in the church and government were stripped of office and instructed to convert back to Catholicism. If they resisted, they were clapped in the Tower.

  The main points of contention between Protestants and Catholics – beyond recognising the Pope as supreme head of the church – were purely dogmatic details. The most obvious difference was that the Roman Church insisted the mass be said in Latin rather than the common tongue. More subtle, but even more central to the faith, was the act of communion. According to Catholic doctrine the wine and bread used in the celebration of communion literally became the body and blood of Christ after having been blessed and ingested, through a miracle called Transubstantiation. Protestants believed that the communion was a purely symbolic representation of Jesus’ death and resurrection. This seemingly tiny article of faith would lead to more confusion, death and destruction of religious property on both sides of the argument than we, today, can possibly imagine.

  In her drive to bring England back to the Catholic faith, Mary needed the support of law. To that end she reinstituted the medieval heresy statutes of 1401 which allowed ecclesiastical courts to deal with all cases of religious impropriety, many of which were considered capital crimes punishable first by excommunication by church authorities and then being burnt at the stake on order of the civil courts. But such a massive legal change was going to take time. So, as an interim step, Mary passed a law allowing local constables and churchwardens to arrest anyone they suspected of heresy and keep them confined until they repented their sins. This convenient intermediary step removed the necessity of a trial; the accused was simply held without bail as long as necessary. To establish these first steps on the long road to reform, and later to enforce the revived heresy laws, Mary needed administrators as merciless as she was.

  Among those released from the Tower on Mary’s triumphal entry into London had been Bishop Edmund Bonner. Just two days after his release Bonner was restored to his old position as Bishop of London
and charged by Mary with ensuring the populace quickly readopted the Catholic faith; willingly if possible, forcibly if necessary. It was a job for which Edmund Bonner would prove ideally suited.

  Born about 1500, Bonner had grown to be an outstanding student during his years at Pembroke College, Oxford. In 1519 he graduated with degrees in both civic and canon law and later that same year took the vows of a priest. But Bonner’s main concern was neither with theology nor matters of the spirit. He was a lawyer through and through. Taking the vows of the church simply gained him access to the halls of power where he could manipulate people, and the law, to suit his own best interests. A huge bear of a man with cold, steel-blue eyes and massive hairy hands, Bonner cut an imposing figure in the robes of a judicial cleric. Between his outstanding record at Oxford and his dominating physical presence it was only a matter of time before somebody of importance noticed Bonner. That somebody was Thomas Cromwell, Henry VIII’s right-hand man and holder of the Privy Seal.