Tales From the Tower of London

by Donnelly, Mark P.

  It took time to collect them all. Wintour and Littleton were on the loose for nearly two months, but eventually everyone with the exception of Hugh Owen was taken into custody. Those captured included Fathers Garnet, Gerard and Oldcorne and others with only titular involvement in the plot, but no Jesuit was going to escape Cecil’s dragnet.

  Their crime was so horrible, their absolute conviction in their cause so unshakeable, that Waad, his inquisitors and the regular Tower Warders were unable to exercise any restraint in dealing with the prisoners. One after another the prisoners were racked, hung in manacles and deprived of food and drink. The indictment presented at their trial, claimed that ‘There [were] twenty and three several days spent in Examinations’.

  In the face of such gruesome treatment, some of the men held up amazingly well. Thomas Wintour, the only surviving member of the original group, was astoundingly blasé, saying, ‘I have often hazarded my life upon far lighter terms, and now would not refuse any good occasion wherein I might do service to the Catholic cause.’ Sir Everard Digby was more zealous about his part in the affair: ‘Oh! How full of joy I should die, if I could do anything for the Cause which I love more than my life’, adding that, had the assembled parliament actually been blown to kingdom come, ‘I do not think there were three worth saving that [w]ould have been lost.’ Eventually, strong or weak, zealous or stalwart, one by one the accused added their signatures to the confession based on Fawkes’ testimony. Of course, the Jesuit priests were another matter entirely. They had not actually been a part of the conspiracy but had only abetted it. They would require special handling.

  Cecil had decided to rid England once and for all of the malign, manipulative influence of the Jesuits. In order to extract the greatest possible amount of information from the priests, he cautioned Waad to take special care of them. These men were accustomed to devious methods and thought nothing of laying down their lives for their cause. Simple torture might fail completely on men who considered martyrdom the most desirable death they could hope for.

  Exhibiting remarkable finesse, William Waad put Father Henry Garnet into a dry, relatively airy cell and provided him with decent food and wine. He even made a sincere effort to chat civilly with Garnet. According to Garnet’s diary, he found his gaoler ‘very kindly in his usage and familiarity’. The cordial rapport between the two increased dramatically when Waad admitted that he wanted to be taken into the Catholic faith. In an apparently sympathetic gesture, Father Garnet was even allowed to visit some of the other prisoners, particularly fellow priest Father Oldcorne, with whom he was allowed to spend hours at a time, on a fairly regular basis. What Garnet did not know was that a hole in the stone wall of his cell allowed Waad and his secretary to overhear the two men’s conversations. Every word was copied down. When presented with the record of his conversations, Henry Garnet confessed to knowing virtually every detail of the plot, but insisted ‘it was not my part (as I thought) to disclose it’.

  On Monday 27 January 1606, the day Fathers Garnet and Oldcorne were arrested, the eight surviving core members of the Gunpowder Plot went to trial. Robert Wintour, Thomas Wintour, Guy Fawkes, John Grant, Ambrose Rookwood, Robert Keyes, Thomas Bates and Sir Everard Digby were tried together in what, for its time, must have been a media circus. Francis Tresham escaped his fate, having died in the Tower of natural causes on 23 December.

  To avoid any hint of religious persecution or bigotry, the king and Privy Council made sure that seated among the nine commissioners presiding at the trial were two Roman Catholics. The commissioners included: Sir John Popham, the Lord Chief Justice of England; Justice of the Common-Pleas Court, Sir Peter Warburton; the Earl of Nottingham; the Earl of Salisbury; the Earl of Suffolk; the Earl of Worcester; Thomas Fleming, the Lord Chief Baron of the Exchequer; the Earl of Devonshire and the Earl of Northampton.

  Once the court was assembled, the indictment against the eight prisoners was read aloud. Page after page of legal jargon, enumerating the crimes and intended crimes of the men were presented. No attempt was made to spare the court, nor the defendants, the full horror of what they had intended to do. Below is a brief excerpt from the opening passage of the indictment:

  That whereas our Sovereign Lord the King had, by the Advice and Assent of his Council, for divers weighty and urgent Occasions concerning, his Majesty, the State, and Defence of the Church and Kingdom of England, appointed a Parliament to be holden at his City of Westminster; That Henry Garnet, Superior of the Jesuits within the Realm of England, (called also by the several names of Wally, Darcy, Roberts, Farmer, and Henry Philips) Oswald Tesmond Jesuit, otherwise called Oswald Greenwell, John Gerrard Jesuit, (called also by the several names of Lee and Brooke) Robert Winter, Thomas Winter, Gentlemen, Guy Fawkes Gent. otherwise called Guy Johnson, Robert Keyes Gent. and Thomas Bates Yeoman, late Servant to Robert Catesby Esquire; together with the said Robert Catesby and Thomas Percy Esquires, John Wright and Christopher Wright Gentlemen, in open Rebellion and Insurrection against his Majesty, lately slain, and Francis Tresham Esq; lately dead; as false Traitors against our said Sovereign Lord the King . . . that it was lawful and meritorious to kill our said Sovereign Lord the King, and all other Hereticks [i.e. non-Catholics] within this Realm of England, for the Advancing and Enlargement of the pretended and usurped Authority and Jurisdiction of the Bishop of Rome, and for the restoring of the superstitious Romish Religion within this Realm of England . . .

  The indictment went on to recount the details of the affair as it had been explained in the confessions of Fawkes and Wintour, and claimed that the plot, and by implication all those involved in it, were the most monstrous, horrible conspiracy: ‘The Tongue of Man never deliver’d, The Ear of Man never heard, The Heart of Man never conceived, Nor the Malice of hellish or earthly Devil ever practised. . . . And surely of these things we may truly say . . . the Offences themselves . . . are so exorbitant and transcendent, and aggregated of so many bloody and fearful Crimes, as they cannot be aggravated by any Inference. . . .’ The government had, to say the least, a strong case against the accused.

  The evidence was duly presented and weighed but neither the verdict, nor the sentence, was ever in doubt. Guilty of treason: death by being hanged, drawn and quartered. Sentence to be carried out immediately. There were so many men to be despatched, and the work of hacking a man to pieces while he was still alive so time-consuming and exhausting, that two days were allowed for the executions, and still the executioner had to bring in two assistants.

  The first to go would be Digby, Wintour, Grant and Bates. On Thursday 30 January 1606, these four were dragged on hurdles to St Paul’s Churchyard and slowly, horrifically, put to death. The following day came the turn of Wintour, Rookwood, Keys and Fawkes, but theirs was to be a different place of execution. They were taken to the Old Palace Yard at Westminster, only a few yards from the cellars where they had planted their cache of gunpowder beneath the Houses of Parliament.

  After watching his three comrades torn to pieces before him, the last to go was Guido Fawkes. By then, the floor of the scaffold was awash with the blood and gore of the other three. Too crippled by his racking to walk, Fawkes was helped to the foot of the scaffold by his guards; but he insisted on mounting the steps himself. A contemporary account recorded the scene: ‘Last of all came the great[est] devil of all, Guy Fawkes, alias Johnson, who should have put fire to the powder. His body being weak with the torture and sickness he was scarce able to go up the ladder. . . . He made no speech, but with his crosses and idle ceremonies made his end . . .’.

  But Guy Fawkes had one last trick up his sleeve. After the hangman placed the noose around his neck, Fawkes flung himself from the edge of the scaffolding, breaking his neck instantly. The castration, disembowling, beheading and quartering would continue, but Fawkes would feel none of it. He died, according to the above account, ‘to the great joy of all the beholders that the land was ended of so wicked a villainy’.

  Following his execution it w
as suggested that Fawkes’ body parts be hung in chains outside parliament as a warning to other would-be traitors, but the idea was rejected. To be certain the point was not lost, the bodies of the four conspirators who had died at Holbech House were exhumed and beheaded. Within three months, most of the tertiary associates, including John Wintour, Ralph Ashley, Steven Littleton, Humphrey Littleton, Father Oldcorne and Father Garnet had also gone to the scaffold. Father Nicholas Owen officially committed suicide in the Tower in March 1606, but there is substantial evidence that he died under torture.

  Father John Gerard spent some months in the Tower, but managed to escape to the continent, and after deserting his companions at Holbech House, Hugh Owen somehow eluded the search for the plotters and made his way to Rome.

  The Gunpowder Plot was the most extensive and celebrated plot ever devised against the Crown of England. To commemorate its collapse, Sir William Waad erected a plaque in the Council Chamber of the Lieutenant’s Lodgings. With appropriately flowery language, the plaque reads: ‘To Almighty God, guardian arrester and avenger, who has punished this great and incredible conspiracy against our most merciful lord, the King . . . [which was] . . . moved by the treasonable hope of overthrowing the Kingdom . . . [by] the Jesuits of perfidious and serpentlike ungodliness, with others equally insane, were suddenly, wonderfully and divinely detected, at the very moment when ruin was impending, on the fifth day of November in the year of grace 1605 . . .’. Following is a list of the conspirators’ names. But in the public mind it is the little poem, still occasionally recited on 5 November, Guy Fawkes’ Night, that best commemorates the plot to blow up parliament:

  Remember, Remember, the fifth of November:

  Gunpowder, Treason and Plot.

  We know of no reason why Gunpowder Treason

  Should ever be forgot . . .

  10

  A RIGHT ROYAL HEIST

  Colonel Thomas Blood 1670–1

  When Thomas Blood was born in Ireland around 1618 he seemed to have a bright future. His father was a man of means, having made his fortune in iron manufacturing, and so well connected that by the time his son had turned twenty-one he had secured him a post as Justice of the Peace. By the time Thomas had grown to manhood he was a tall, dark, handsome man with a hawkish nose, a full mouth, blue eyes and enough Irish charm to make him a natural leader.

  When the English parliament went to war against the forces of King Charles I in 1642, Thomas Blood rushed to England to join Oliver Cromwell’s army in its fight against the Crown. There, he was commissioned as a lieutenant and assigned to the Commission of Peace, a body of spies responsible for subverting Royalist activities. Blood’s natural talent for duplicity and deceit soon made itself apparent as he played both sides against the middle, waylaying Royalist shipments of arms, supplies and gold, skimming off a hefty profit for himself before turning the rest over to his superiors. Profiteers have always been a part of war, but Thomas Blood was a master of the art.

  When King Charles was captured and sentenced to death by Cromwell’s parliament in 1649, England was destined to spend the next ten years suffering under the strict, puritanical rule of the Parliamentarian Commonwealth. But despite legal restrictions on even the simplest pleasures, the Commonwealth was a lawless time; and Thomas Blood made the most of it. Having received grants of land and property in his native Ireland as a reward for his services to parliament, Blood continued to amass cash with the help of the extensive network of spies and smugglers he had developed during the war. By 1650 he had affected the title of Colonel, although there is no evidence that he had ever earned such an exalted rank, and married the attractive young daughter of a well-to-do Lancashire landowner known to us only as Miss Holcroft. Life looked sweet for Colonel Blood, but the good life was already winding its way to an unhappy end.

  After a four-year dictatorial reign as Lord Protector of England, Oliver Cromwell died in 1658 and within a year young Charles II was called from exile in France to assume his father’s throne. Recognising the importance of putting on a good show, Charles set out to re-establish the monarchy with a display of pomp and grandeur that would have astounded even Elizabeth I. Affectionately called ‘the Merry Monarch’, Charles II was determined to wow his subjects with one grand ceremony after another. But missing from the necessary list of accoutrements were those imperial symbols of royal power, the crown, sceptre and orb. It seems that when the royal sceptre was presented to Oliver Cromwell six years earlier, he had snapped, ‘Take away that bauble’. And taken away they were, but no one has ever determined exactly where they went. What we do know is that these hallmarks of royal authority were sold at bargain-basement prices. According to Sir Edward Walker’s 1660 account: ‘through the Rapine of the late unhappy times, all the Royal Ornaments and Regalia heretofore preserved from age to age . . . were taken away, sold and destroyed . . .’. Now, if Charles was going to look like a proper king, he needed new regalia.

  Vast amounts of money, which Charles could not afford, were spent to make a new set of royal accoutrements, produced by the royal jeweller, who happened to be Charles’s cousin. To keep the new ‘baubles’ safe, the old Martin Tower in the inner ward of the Tower of London was converted into a royal jewel room. Built directly into the walls of the Tower complex, the Martin Tower seemed an ideally safe location for the new Crown Jewels.

  While Charles busied himself with his new look, his government was charged with securing the peace, fending off plots by disgruntled parliamentarians, and finding cash to finance the new king and government. Integral to the plan was stripping former supporters of Cromwell’s government of their money and land. Deprived of their wealth, the rebels should be in no position to make trouble for the Crown. One of the men charged with carrying out these orders was James Butler, 1st Duke of Ormond and Lord Lieutenant of Ireland.

  Former parliamentarian operatives were thrown out of their homes and forced to forfeit their land and money. One of those who felt the sting of this retribution was Colonel Thomas Blood. Not accustomed to being either homeless or penniless, Blood’s wife quickly abandoned her husband and returned to England. Angry and hurt, Blood vowed to take revenge on the English and their new king.

  Only months after his eviction in 1662, Blood joined a group of former parliamentarians and Irish republicans who were plotting to drive the English out of Ireland. Blood’s skill in manipulating people quickly made him one of the group’s primary movers as they planned their nationwide uprising. Gathering together some of his old friends from the war, and probably still his confederates in his continuing illegal activities, among Blood’s closest allies in the plot were James Desborough, Edward Perrot and John Kelfy. Together, they and the other leaders of the revolution laid their plans. Central to the plot was the seizure of Dublin Castle where the Duke of Ormond would be taken hostage and used as a bargaining chip in their dealings with the Crown. Not only was Ormond the king’s representative in Ireland, he had cost Blood everything he owned and it was his turn to suffer.

  Tragically for Blood, the plan unravelled only days before it went into motion. The revolutionaries had been unmasked. Dozens of them, including Blood’s brother-in-law, were arrested, tried and hanged. Blood and his small band of followers were luckier, for they escaped and scattered, but there was now a £1,000 reward on Blood’s head and considering that the average yearly wage of a craftsman was scarcely more than £10, it was a huge inducement for anyone to turn him in. But the clever Blood managed to flee to Holland before making his way back to England under an assumed name, passing himself off as a doctor and apothecary dealing in herbal medicines and quack cures.

  In London, Blood was seen hanging around Petty Wales, a seedy neighbourhood with a bad reputation that ran from the River Thames to Tower Hill. It is likely that he was rounding up his old gang while he hatched his next plot, and it didn’t take the resourceful Blood long to put his new plan into action. On 6 December 1670, James Butler, Duke of Ormond and Blood’s old nemesis, was s
natched from his carriage while on official business in London. The kidnapping took place on a busy London street, in the middle of the day. It had all the earmarks of bad, bold Thomas Blood.

  Whether Blood planned to hold Ormond for ransom, or simply kill him, has never been determined, but within days of the kidnapping Blood could sense the law closing in on him, and Ormond was released unharmed. Once again, Blood and his comrades slipped through the government’s fingers, but another £1,000 was added to the price on his head.

  Deciding it was time to leave England for a while, Blood went to Scotland, where he involved himself in a rebel uprising and was sighted at the Battle of Pentland Hills on 27 November 1666. Like all Blood’s previous plans, Pentland Hills went awry. Vastly superior English forces gunned down more than 500 rebels and the rest, including Blood, ran for their lives, scrambling across the rugged Scottish landscape.

  With three failed plots behind him, Blood was broke and desperate. He had to make one final play that would net him enough money to escape England forever. In a plot as bizarre as it was bold, Blood decided he would steal the new Crown Jewels of England. Gathering together his old comrades Desborough, Perrot and Kelfy, Blood now added two more members to his gang. One of them was a young woman whose name remains a mystery and the other was Thomas Hunt, a pleasant-looking, well-spoken young man who would play a central role in Blood’s latest far-fetched scheme.

  It had been easy for Blood to find out where the Crown Jewels were kept, for then, like now, they were on public display; King Charles wanted his subjects to be able to see the grandeur of the restored monarchy. The warden in charge of the jewels was Mr Talbot Edwards, a retired military officer who lived in apartments on the upper floors of the Martin Tower, by now called the Jewel Tower. In a room immediately below Edward’s apartment the royal regalia was stored in a cage made of heavy iron bars. Although the cage was large enough to walk around in, no one was allowed access except Edwards and official representatives of the king. Visitors were allowed to enter the room and peer at the crown, orb and sceptre through the bars, paying Talbot Edwards a few pennies for his time and trouble in showing them around.