Tower: An Epic History of the Tower of London

by Jones, Nigel

  The snuffing out of Buckingham’s abortive rebellion had not ended the threat to Richard III’s rule. The man he loftily misspelled as ‘Henry Tydder’ lived still, an ever present threat. Knowing that Henry would attempt another invasion, Richard sent agents to try to abduct him in Brittany. Forewarned, Henry narrowly escaped by fleeing into neighbouring France where he began to collect mercenaries for his second bid for the throne.

  In the closing months of Richard’s reign it must have seemed to him as if God was smiting him for murdering the little princes. Firstly, his own only son Prince Edward wasted away and died, probably of tuberculosis. Richard was apparently devastated by grief; and his son’s death made his own hold on power even shakier, since there was now no heir to the throne. Then Queen Anne died in March 1485. It says much for Richard’s reputation that it was widely believed that he had had her poisoned – to clear the way for him to marry his own niece, Edward IV’s daughter Elizabeth of York.

  By the early summer of 1485, Richard’s invasion fears were at fever pitch. He imported gunsmiths from Flanders to the Tower’s armoury to make ‘Serpentines’ – the latest state-of-the-art cannon, long, thin and mounted on a pivot to increase their range and flexibility in firing their four-pound shot. Not knowing where Henry was to land, Richard moved to Nottingham in the Midlands so he could rapidly march to any corner of the kingdom. His proclamations of treason against ‘Tydder’ took on an increasingly hysterical tone. Finally, in August 1485, the news that he had dreaded reached Richard: Henry Tudor had landed at Milford Haven in his native south Wales. With a minuscule army of French mercenaries he was on the march.

  Richard III only discovered the true depths of his unpopularity when his allies deserted him as he confronted Henry’s outnumbered army near Bosworth in Leicestershire on 22 August 1485. The battle should have been a walkover for the king, but a large force led by Lord Stanley and his brother Sir William Stanley, on whom the king had been relying, deserted at the crucial moment and joined Henry. Richard, screaming, ‘Treason!’ rather than Shakespeare’s ‘My kingdom for a horse!’, was cut down in the Midlands mud.

  The battered and bleeding little corpse was slung unceremoniously across a horse’s back and Richard’s own herald, trailing his white boar banner, was forced to lead his late master’s body back to Leicester, where he was hastily buried. On the battlefield, a servant of Henry Tudor’s mother Margaret Beaufort found the gold coronet that had surmounted Richard’s helmet lying in a hawthorn bush and took it to his master, Lord Stanley. Hastily making up for his late intervention on the winning side, Stanley placed it on Henry’s head, shouting, ‘King Henry! King Henry!’ Few realised it at the time, but a new dynasty was born at that moment and the wars which had blighted and bled England for as long as almost anyone could remember were almost over.

  Almost – but not quite. No usurper could be completely confident, and just as Henry Tudor’s ancestor and namesake Henry IV spent his reign foiling plots and putting down revolts, so Henry VII’s hold on his newly acquired throne was decidedly shaky. Margaret, Duchess of Burgundy, the sister of Edward IV and Richard III, was behind numerous Yorkist plots to regain the throne. Since almost all the genuine Yorkist heirs were dead or jailed, Margaret was obliged to support pretenders. The only living Yorkist with a genuine claim was young Edward, Earl of Warwick, teenage son of the union between the unlamented Duke of Clarence, and Isabel, daughter of Warwick the Kingmaker. Richard III had taken the precaution of locking the lad up in Yorkshire, and after Bosworth Henry VII had him brought to the Tower and kept under strict guard. Either because he had barely known freedom or because of a genetic weakness, young Warwick had the feeble mental fragility of a previous Tower incumbent – Henry VI – and hardly posed a serious threat to the throne.

  Although King Henry could not afford to let this blighted Yorkist sprig flourish, he treated another flower of the Yorkist line more kindly. Elizabeth of York, eldest daughter of Edward IV and Elizabeth Woodville, had been betrothed to Henry during Buckingham’s rebellion, and when he arrived in London after Bosworth, Henry fulfilled his pledge to wed her. First, though, he had to convert the impromptu crowning on the battlefield into a formal coronation. Tall, dark, and though not handsome, of suitable regal manner, Henry was determined to stamp his mark on his kingdom by luxuriously lavish celebrations to impress on his subjects that their new king was here to stay.

  Though notoriously mean, Henry spared no expense for his coronation. He knew that appearances mattered. He spent his pre-coronation night at the Tower, creating a dozen new Knights of the Bath, with the ritual baths heated in the dungeons beneath the White Tower ‘as of old time hath been accustomed’. And it was to the Tower that the court returned after processing through the city to the formal coronation in Westminster Abbey. The new king hosted a banquet in the Tower palace’s great hall, at which that great Lancastrian survivor the Earl of Oxford – participant in so many losing battles, but whose strategy had at last triumphed at Bosworth – set the crown on the new monarch’s head.

  Henry lost no more time in wedding Elizabeth of York, which he did on 18 January 1486. His wedding gift to his bride was a strangely appropriate present to a woman destined to die in the Tower – the volume of verse written by the Duke of Orléans in the long years after Agincourt when the French nobleman had been a prisoner in the fortress, patiently awaiting ransom. Exactly nine months after the wedding, the comely Elizabeth – her face is said to be the model for the queen on packs of playing cards – gave birth to the first of their seven children, Prince Arthur. The pregnancy delayed the queen’s own coronation, which took place amidst great pomp and splendour in November of the following year.

  The Tower was once again the scene of elaborate ceremonies surrounding the event, which Henry intended as the final sealing of the union between the savagely sundered Houses of York and Lancaster in his own new Tudor dynasty. He had a new Tudor rose – a blend of the red and white flowers of the rival feuding families – designed to symbolise the fresh beginning. Henry’s public devotion to his queen was not all show. He genuinely adored his Yorkist bride. On the morning of her coronation the queen was brought upriver from the palace at Greenwich in a fleet of barges ‘freshly furnished with banners and streamers of silk’. The king waited on the Tower’s wharf to receive her and the royal couple spent the traditional pre-coronation night in the Tower. The next day Elizabeth, tall, beautiful, and dressed in rich gold and damask, with an ermine cloak over which her golden hair, under a golden crown, cascaded, was carried to Westminster Abbey in a litter, also festooned with cloth of gold and damask. Mean he might have been, but Henry was determined to demonstrate that the Tudors were monarchs by right as well as conquest.

  There were many who disputed that right. Six months before Elizabeth’s coronation, in the very last battle of the Wars of the Roses, Henry was forced to confront an armed challenge to his Crown. The moving spirits behind the revolt were Margaret of Burgundy and John de la Pole, Earl of Lincoln. Ironically, Lincoln was the grandson of the Duke of Suffolk, the Lancastrian stalwart whose murder at sea in 1450 had sparked the whole bloody cycle of the Roses wars. Suffolk’s son, John de la Pole, had switched allegiance to the Yorkists, and had married Elizabeth, sister of Edward IV and Richard III – thus endowing his eleven children with a dribble of Yorkist royal blood. Lincoln and his numerous siblings therefore had their own ambitions for the Crown. He had been encouraged by Richard III, who had recognised his nephew as heir to the throne after the death of his own son.

  Early in 1487, a Yorkist priest in Oxford, Richard Symonds, identified a bright pupil of his, a baker’s boy named Lambert Simnel, as a suitable stand-in for the simpleton Earl of Warwick imprisoned in the Tower. Wiping the flour from Simnel’s face, Symonds coached him in his new role, spreading stories that Warwick had escaped. The priest brought his pretender to Dublin – a Yorkist hotbed – where Simnel was recognised as Warwick by the powerful Fitzgerald clan, who sent the good news to Burgu
ndy that a viable Yorkist claimant had appeared.

  Margaret of Burgundy, ever eager to make mischief for the Lancastrians, supplied 2,000 hired mercenaries under Martin Schwartz, a German soldier of fortune, and money to pay them. Two leaders of the exiled Yorkists, Lincoln and Viscount Lovell (Richard’s former henchman ‘Lovell our dog’), sailed to Dublin to lead the expedition against Henry’s England. Henry, learning of Simnel’s pretensions, fetched the real Warwick out of his Tower cell and paraded him through London’s streets. But the Yorkists had their candidate and intended to go through with the masquerade. Simnel was crowned in Dublin as King Edward VI and coins were minted in his name.

  In June 1487, the Yorkists, with Schwartz’s 2,000 mercenaries and 6,000 enthusiastic but ill-trained Irish ‘kerns’, and their protégé ‘King Edward VI’ aka Simnel in tow, landed in Lancashire. Henry dealt decisively with the Yorkist pretender. The royal army met the Yorkists near the village of Stoke in the East Midlands. The last army of the White Rose was trounced. Lincoln and Schwartz were killed, Lovell disappeared, and Lambert Simnel fell from his brief royal status to resume his culinary duties – as a scullion in the royal kitchens, where he allegedly invented the simnel cake.

  There would be no such mercy for the next Yorkist pretender. Four years after Simnel’s royal dreams were smothered at Stoke, another Yorkist pretender appeared in Ireland. The delicately handsome youth called himself Richard, Duke of York, and claimed to be the younger of the two princes who had disappeared in the Tower in 1483. He was actually probably Perkin Warbeck, the son of a Flemish boatman. Resembling the young Edward IV, he may indeed have been one of that libertine king’s innumerable bastards, but could also even have been the illegitimate son of Margaret of Burgundy herself by a cardinal. Warbeck, whoever he really was, well served the purposes of his alleged aunt, Margaret of Burgundy, tireless fount of all Yorkist plots against Henry Tudor. Margaret received Perkin at her court, coached him in royal ways, and officially recognised him as her missing nephew. He was also recognised by King Charles VII of France, and the new Holy Roman Emperor, Maximilian, who had a common interest in keeping England weak and war-torn. Warbeck spent his young manhood trailing around the courts of Europe to stake his claim as the new ‘White Rose of York’ before making his debut in the British Isles in 1491.

  Like that of his predecessor Simnel, the chosen first venue for Warbeck’s tour was Ireland. Failing to arouse much enthusiasm in Cork, he appeared off Kent in 1495 with a small fleet provided by Margaret. An advance guard sent ashore without Warbeck was rapidly rounded up. The eighty prisoners were taken to the Tower ‘railed in ropes like horses drawing a cart’ and executed on Tower Hill. The pretender himself sailed back to Ireland, and then to Scotland where he received a more friendly reception from King James IV – as keen to make trouble for England as his Continental cousins. James funded Warbeck’s enterprise, and even furnished the self-proclaimed ‘King Richard IV’ with an aristocratic wife: Lady Katherine Gordon, daughter of the Earl of Huntley.

  The Scottish–Yorkist invasion was stopped in Northumbria. Once again Warbeck returned to Ireland, before in October 1497 arriving in Cornwall, where a rebellion had broken out against Henry’s rapacious taxation. Warbeck placed himself at the head of a rebel army of 6,000 but proved militarily inept, deserting his men at Taunton, and fleeing to the sanctuary of Beaulieu Abbey in Hampshire where he fell into Henry’s hands. Taken to the Tower, Warbeck was provisionally released and even received at court, where a curious Henry questioned him closely about his mysterious origins. Warbeck took advantage of the lenient conditions of his captivity to attempt an escape. Henry punished him by exposing him to the insults and brickbats of the London mob, and then humiliatingly forced him to make a public confession of his imposture in the presence of his wife (who had borne him two children). Warbeck was then returned to the Tower. He remained in close captivity there for two years in a cell adjacent to Warwick. The wily Henry allowed the two young men to associate and walk around the Tower’s walls together. Evidently, he was giving them enough rope to hang themselves.

  The king’s hand was finally forced by the impending marriage of his elder son, Prince Arthur, to Katherine of Aragon, daughter of King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella of Spain. Ferdinand informed Henry that the marriage was off unless the Yorkist threat to his throne was removed once and for all. He was not prepared to entrust his daughter to a here-today, gone-tomorrow monarch. Henry – who never let sentiment stand in the way of realpolitik – acted with ruthless efficiency to wipe out the Yorkist threat. In 1499 both Warbeck and his new friend Warwick were accused of plotting to murder the constable of the Tower, Sir John Digby, escape from the fortress, and for good measure set fire to the Tower as they left. They were also charged with having bribed a warder to assist their unlikely schemes.

  There could be only one verdict for such capital crimes: death. Poor Warwick, who had spent fourteen years as Henry’s prisoner merely on account of his Yorkist blood, was so simple minded that, as a spectator at his trial remarked, ‘He could not discern a goose from a capon.’ Tried before that reliable Lancastrian hit man Lord Oxford, he was condemned and beheaded on Tower Hill.

  Warbeck, despite his royal pretensions, was punished as a commoner. Humiliatingly conveyed from the Tower to Tyburn on a hurdle, he was hanged with the warder he had supposedly tried to bribe. Yet again he read out a confession that he had been a pretender all along. Henry also took the chance to eliminate another rival of dubious loyalty. Sir William Stanley, who had saved the day at Bosworth by dramatically throwing his weight behind Henry at the crucial moment, was accused of having backed Warbeck’s bid for the Crown. In fact, Stanley, the Lord Chamberlain, had merely said that if Warbeck truly was Richard of York, he would be obliged to support him. Such careless talk was enough to cost him his life. He was imprisoned in the White Tower before an appointment with the headsman on Tower Hill.

  The murder of Warwick – for murder it was – was not well received in the country at large. Popular pity for the unfortunate young man ran high. After his death it was rumoured that he had pronounced a dying curse on the House of Tudor, prophesying that from then on no male member of the dynasty would grow to manhood. Whether apocryphal or not, the prophecy would come true.

  There was just one loose thread left for Henry to tie before he could be completely confident that the throne was his. Sir James Tyrell, Richard III’s henchman who had organised the elimination of the princes in the Tower in 1483 had, as an efficient administrator, been pardoned by Henry and confirmed as governor of Guisnes Castle outside Calais. But Tyrell secretly remained true to his Yorkist roots. In 1501 he came out for the next Yorkist claimant: Edmund de la Pole, Earl of Suffolk, younger brother of the Earl of Lincoln whose bid for the throne using Lambert Simnel had ended so bloodily at Stoke. Suffolk fled into exile at Guisnes where Tyrell gave him shelter. Henry grimly laid siege to the castle, lured Tyrell out and had him brought to the Tower, the scene of his great crime, and tortured – with hideous irony in the dungeons under the White Tower. Tormented beyond endurance, Tyrell blurted out the truth about his role in the deaths of the princes – and was duly executed. The princes were avenged.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  THE KING’S GREAT MATTER

  AS THE SIXTEENTH century opened, King Henry VII, at last secure on his hard-acquired throne, celebrated the beginning of the Tudor age at the Tower with that traditional mark of confidence in the stability and continuity of a ruling dynasty: a royal wedding. The bridegroom was Prince Arthur, at fifteen the first fruit of the reunion between the sundered Houses of Lancaster and York, and the bride, the shy and demure sixteen-year-old Princess Katherine of Aragon, daughter of King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella of Spain.

  In October 1501 King Henry and Queen Elizabeth moved into the Tower’s palace to prepare for the nuptial festivities. The Tower’s tilting yard was the scene of daily jousts, and its great hall echoed nightly to the carousing of lavish banquets and danc
es. Henry was the last monarch to treat the Tower as a home. He embellished the royal apartments, adding a gallery to the Cradle Tower, and converting the nearby Lanthorn Tower into an adjunct of the royal palace, complete with a bedchamber and privy closet. He spent much time at the palace and his personal bodyguard – the Yeomen of the Guard, in their scarlet Tudor liveries – were direct ancestors of the Yeoman Warders who are the proud custodians of the Tower today.

  Henry’s eventual abandonment of his beloved palace marked the start of the Tower’s decline from glittering royal pleasure dome to gloomy decay, and its sinister sixteenth-century role as the site of torment and martyrdom for Protestants and priests in turn; and the last station of condemned queens and nobles on their way to execution. This transformation in the Tower’s fortunes was speeded by two tragic personal bereavements. In 1502, just five months after his wedding so hopefully feasted at the Tower, Prince Arthur died at Ludlow Castle, probably from tuberculosis. The following year, in February 1503, nine days after giving birth in the Tower to a daughter, Katherine, Queen Elizabeth herself, now in her late thirties, died there, probably from puerperal fever – just yards from the spot where her two brothers had been murdered and where their undiscovered bodies still lay. The baby Katherine died a few days later.

  Henry’s triple bereavement hit him hard. He gave orders for Elizabeth’s body to be embalmed ‘with gums, balms, spices, sweet wine and wax’ and on Sunday 12 February, the corpse was borne from the royal palace to St John’s Chapel in the White Tower which had been hung in black mourning silk and crêpe. For three days, surrounded by 500 tall candles, the queen’s body lay in state while priests chanted the prayers for the dead. The body was then taken in solemn state and buried in Westminster Abbey. After these disasters Henry, never the happiest of men, became ever more morose, miserly and miserable. He never remarried, and though Arthur’s widowed teenage bride Katherine was betrothed to his second son and heir, the tall, clever, athletic and strapping Henry, the king himself moped his life away, eventually succumbing to the same disease which had killed his eldest son – tuberculosis – in April 1509.