Tower: An Epic History of the Tower of London

by Jones, Nigel

  To make assurance doubly sure, Northumberland also arranged for the son of one of his closest allies, Lord Herbert, Earl of Pembroke, to marry Jane’s younger sister Catherine Grey. At first Edward hoped to live long enough to see Lady Jane produce a son, but, with his stomach and feet swelling, he realised his time was fast running out. He therefore altered the ‘Device’ to give Jane herself the crown. For Edward, nothing was more important than keeping Catholicism and Princess Mary at bay. Although desperately sick, he browbeat his reluctant council into allowing Jane to be his heir. Naturally, in a male world, the blissfully ignorant Jane herself was not told that she was about to become queen.

  By July, it was clear that the king was about to die. His fingernails and hair were falling out and his extremities were turning gangrenous. Although they had Jane under their control in Chelsea, the council failed to lay hands on the rival claimant, Princess Mary, who was living at Hunsdon near Ware, just twenty miles from London. The Duke of Northumberland fatally underestimated Mary, who, another true Tudor, was determined to claim the crown when her half-brother died. This long-expected event occurred on the evening of 9 July at Greenwich.

  Immediately, Jane was moved to Syon Park on the river, where Northumberland and the council’s other leading lords attended her the next day, knelt before her, broke the shattering news that the king had died – and named her as his heiress. Flabbergasted, Jane protested that Mary was the rightful queen. When the councillors insisted that Edward had excluded Mary and that it was her dynastic and religious duty to take the crown, Jane reacted with a storm of weeping. Her parents, the Duke and Duchess of Suffolk, having failed to pacify her, her new husband, Lord Guildford Dudley, was brought in who, with ‘prayers and caresses’, managed to calm his bride. Bullied and cajoled by her parents, the government and her husband, Jane eventually agreed to accept the unwanted crown. The following day, 11 July, as heralds proclaimed her accession to a muted reception in London, Jane was rowed downriver to the Tower. The fortress would become in rapid succession her palace, her prison, her scaffold – and her tomb.

  Dressed in a white headdress and a green velvet gown embroidered with gold, with wide sleeves and a train borne by her mother, Jane landed at the Tower’s steps and ceremoniously entered under the Byward Tower. She was a tiny creature who disguised her small stature by wearing ‘stilts’ ( built-up cork heels) beneath her dress. Beside her walked the tall and attentive figure of her young husband, resplendent in white and silver. A pretty girl with auburn hair, hazel eyes, dark eyebrows, freckles, red lips and sparkling teeth, Jane was no one’s fool, and was as regal and insistent on her dignity as a queen – or ‘Jane the Quene’ as she signed herself – as she had been stubborn in refusing the job at first. She too was a true Tudor.

  Conducted to the great hall of the old royal palace, Jane was seated on the throne amidst much ceremony. Among the precious stones and treasures brought out of the Tower’s jewel house by the Lord Treasurer, the Marquess of Winchester (formerly William Paulet, the man who had betrayed Wriothesley’s plot to Dudley), was the crown itself. Taken aback, Jane declined to try it on, but her indignation turned to fury when Winchester told her that another one would be made for her husband ‘King Guildford’. Jane declared that she might make her husband a duke, but never a king. Tudor women disliked sharing power with anyone.

  Faced with her obduracy, Guildford did what any petulant adolescent might do: he fetched his mother. The Duchess of Northumberland scolded Jane like a schoolgirl, and when the queen remained defiant, declared that her son would not sleep with her and ordered him to return to Syon. Again, Jane put her tiny foot down. She summoned the Earls of Arundel and Pembroke and commanded them to stop her husband from leaving the Tower. His place, she said, was at her side. A sulky Guildford obeyed his wife rather than his mother and stayed. He would not leave the Tower alive. The ancient fortress, as so often, for the next fortnight became the fulcrum of power where the nation’s future governance was decided.

  While the new queen was unexpectedly asserting her new authority inside the Tower, outside its walls the people were displaying a very different reaction. The reading of the accession proclamation had received a de cidedly cool reception. Gilbert Potter, landlord of a London tavern, grumbled that ‘the lady Mary hath the better title’ when he heard it read at Cheapside, and was hauled away to have his ears chopped off ‘to the root’ for his temerity. Meanwhile, Northumberland had belatedly sent two of his sons, John and Robert Dudley, in search of Mary. With a posse of 300 horsemen, the Dudley brothers arrived at Hunsdon, only to find their bird had flown. Mary had secretly received word that Edward was dying from a sympathetic spy at the deathbed – probably the Earl of Arundel – and had fled into East Anglia, where the Dudley name was still reviled for the crushing of Kett’s rebellion in 1549.

  Reaching Kenninghall, at the heart of the Catholic Howard estates, Mary sent a messenger, Thomas Hungate, to the council at the Tower, with a letter proudly asserting her claim to the crown and her right to rule. It was ‘strange’, she added acidly, that the council had not seen fit to inform her of her brother’s demise, but now that he was dead, she expected their loyal support. In a classic case of shooting a messenger, the elderly Hungate was contemptuously told by Northumberland that at his age he should have known better than to bring such insolent tidings – and flung into a dungeon.

  It was dawning on the duke that Mary was a dangerous – indeed deadly – obstacle to his plans. His duchess, with a woman’s intuition of disaster, reacted to Hungate’s message by bursting into tears. Nonetheless, the council sent back a robust reply to Mary, signed by all twenty-three members, indignantly denying her claims, and calling on her to cease her ‘vexation’ and be ‘quiet and obedient’. At the same time, the council took the menace posed by Mary seriously enough to issue a propagandist proclamation in Jane’s name reminding the people that Mary was merely a ‘bastard daughter to our great uncle Henry the eighth of famous memory’.

  Meeting in almost continuous session, the council also took the decision to send an armed force into East Anglia and bring the vexatious Lady Mary back to the Tower where she could be safely kept under lock and key. The Duke of Suffolk, Jane’s father, was selected for the task, but behind the scenes his wife – a close friend of Mary – was hedging her bets, ostensibly backing her daughter Jane, whilst trying to keep channels open to Mary. As a result of his wife’s entreaties Suffolk declined the task, pleading ill health, and it devolved upon Northumberland himself, with his experience of quelling a previous East Anglian revolt.

  Northumberland was reluctant to go. He felt his safest place was in the Tower beside the throne. There was no telling what the council would get up to behind his back. But since no one else seemed willing, he had no alternative. ‘Well, since ye think it good, I and mine will go,’ he told them, eyeing his fellow councillors suspiciously. ‘Not doubting of your fidelity to the Queen’s majesty, which I leave in your custody.’ Before leaving, he demanded that each member of the council reaffirm their loyalty to Queen Jane. Apparently reassured, he murmured, ‘Pray God it be so. Let us go into dinner.’ After the meal, he left London with some 600 horsemen and 2,000 foot soldiers, backed up by brass cannons supplied from the Tower’s armoury. He noted gloomily as they rode north through the city that though crowds assembled to watch them go, none had wished them ‘God-speed’.

  On Saturday 14 July Northumberland’s force reached Cambridge, having rendezvoused with his sons John and Robert, and stopped en route to burn Swanston Hall, where Mary had stayed while flying from Hunsdon to Kenninghall. Meanwhile, Mary herself had not been idle. Seemingly spontaneously, men had flooded in from across East Anglia in her support, so that Kenninghall proved too small to hold them all. On the 13th she moved to Framlingham in Suffolk, the region’s largest castle. All over the country reports came in of towns refusing the council’s order to proclaim Queen Jane – and declaring for Mary instead.

  In the Tower, the d
eparture of Northumberland, the power behind Jane’s shaky throne, had given Mary’s secret sympathisers the signal to come out openly in her support. The Lord Treasurer, William Paulet, Marquess of Winchester, was a particularly flimsy reed – or rather, a willow, the bendy tree that he compared himself to when asked how he had survived the dizzying religious changes of the century, during which he embraced no fewer than five faiths, from Catholicism to Puritan Calvinism. Winchester, Pembroke and other peers attempted to flee from the Tower, but were prevented from leaving by Suffolk, the queen’s father. The fortress’s great gates were then locked fast, and its keys delivered to Jane’s personal keeping.

  It was time for the Earl of Arundel to take a delayed revenge on the man he now called a ‘thirster of blood’ and ‘the Tyrant’. Northumberland had imprisoned Arundel for a year in the Tower and fined him the equivalent of £3 million for his part in Somerset’s plots. Now, with typical Howard treachery, it was Arundel’s turn to plunge the dagger between the duke’s shoulder blades. He arranged for a special council meeting outside the Tower at Baynard’s Castle. Unconvincingly denying that he was motivated by personal malice, Arundel told his fellow councillors that Northumberland was trying to become ‘Lord of this land’ in place of the ‘rightful, lawful’ successor, Mary, who ‘shone with goodness’, and at whose hands they could expect ‘mercy and mild government’ – a spectacular misjudgement of the woman who was arguably the cruellest Tudor of all.

  As soon as Arundel sat down, the hotheaded Earl of Pembroke – hitherto Northumberland’s most loyal ally – sprang to his feet, smacked his sword and vowed melodramatically, ‘If my Lord of Arundel’s persuasions cannot prevail with you, either this sword shall make Mary Queen, or I will lose my life.’ Pembroke almost outdid Winchester in his inconstancy. Although he had recently married his son Henry to Jane’s younger sister Catherine, after deserting the Greys he had the marriage annulled and threw little Catherine out of the house.

  The desertion of these leading councillors was decisive. To a man, the rest of the council switched sides. Totally reversing their actions of only a few days before, they hastily arranged for heralds to proclaim Mary as queen at Cheapside and other central London locations. In contrast to the sullen silence that had greeted the proclamation of Queen Jane, the announcement was received with wild rejoicing by Londoners. Caps and coins were flung in the air, bonfires were lit in celebration, toasts were drunk to the new queen, and a solemn Catholic Te Deum was sung at St Paul’s.

  At the Tower, as noise of the celebrations faintly penetrated the thick walls, a heavy-hearted Duke of Suffolk entered the room where his daughter sat at supper and broke the news that her reign of nine days was at an end, and that she must accept Mary as queen. His daughter tartly replied that this was better advice than his original order to take the crown had been. The duke tore down the cloth of estate, symbolising the majesty of monarchy, that hung above her head. Finally, he crept out of the Tower, and proclaimed Mary as queen on Tower Hill, before slinking off into the gathering summer twilight. Back in the Tower, poor Jane, deserted by those who had fawned upon her, was left alone. Doubtless she wished that she could go home too. But that mercy would not be granted to her. Instead, the Yeomen Guards escorted her from the royal palace to the Lieutenant’s Lodgings. In the space of an hour, the queen had become the prisoner.

  At 5 p.m. in Cambridge on the same day, Northumberland, too, threw in the towel. Or rather, threw his cap in the air as he proclaimed Mary queen in the marketplace. His eyes, though, betrayed his real feelings as he staggered, weeping, back to his lodgings. He was accosted by an onlooker who asked him his plans. Mary, Northumberland replied, was a ‘merciful woman’ whom he would petition for pardon. ‘Be assured you will never escape death,’ replied the prophetic stranger, ‘for if she would save you, they that now rule will kill you.’

  News of her triumph reached Mary at Framlingham on 20 July as she returned to the castle from inspecting the army that had rallied to her in the little Suffolk town. The bringer of the good tidings – together with a grovelling letter signed by the whole Royal Council – was the Earl of Arundel, the main instigator of the council’s change of heart. Mary tasked him with the doubtless sweet duty of arresting his old enemy, Northumberland, in Cambridge. Ten days later, Northumberland returned to the capital in Arundel’s custody. As they rode towards the Tower, an army of 4,000 men was needed to protect the fallen duke from the wrath of the crowds who yelled, ‘Death to the traitors and God save the Queen!’ At Bishopsgate, a figure waving a sword, with dirty bandages hiding the bloody stumps of his freshly severed ears, accosted Northumberland.

  It was Gilbert Potter, the innkeeper who had been the sole Londoner with the courage to openly dispute Jane’s right to the throne. Now that the fickle crowd had followed him, he had his say again. ‘Behold the free tongue of an honest citizen, as you have disfigured the head of an innocent man by the mutilation of his ears, so shall you be dragged to the punishment due to treason, according to your deserts!’ he roared. Stung by the words, and perhaps scared also, Northumberland turned to Arundel, demanding to know why ‘this impudent fellow’ was allowed to ‘afflict him’ before any charges had been brought against him. ‘Be of good courage,’ Arundel answered. ‘Although I cannot stop the tongues of men accusing you, yet I will stop their hands from hurting you.’

  As they rode over Tower Hill, women waved kerchiefs stained brown with the blood of the ‘Good Duke’ Somerset shed at that spot. It was a sombre reminder to Northumberland that he would soon share his rival’s fate. Once in the Tower, Northumberland was taken to its grimmest location – the ‘Bloody’ Tower. He was separated from his five sons. Henry, John, Ambrose, Robert and Guildford Dudley – who had all loyally joined their father’s attempt to make Jane queen – were kept together across the Inner Ward in the Beauchamp Tower, where John whiled away the long hours by carving an elaborate rendition of the Dudley coat of arms, the bear and ragged staff, into the stone wall, where it can still be seen today.

  Mary herself reached her new capital on 3 August, after a slow but triumphant progress from Framlingham. Mounted on a palfrey, guarded by 1,000 soldiers, and gorgeously arrayed in purple velvet encrusted with gold and pearls, the new queen also headed for the Tower. Her reception was very different from Northumberland’s. She could barely force her horse through the cheering throngs, whose hoarse hurrahs competed with the frantic ringing of church bells and the blasts of trumpets.

  Arriving at the Tower, Mary was greeted by a small line of gentlemen and one lady, all kneeling uncomfortably on the hard ground. Blinking in the summer sunshine after years in the Tower’s shadows were the old Duke of Norfolk – the great survivor from Henry VIII’s reign who had been incarcerated there since just before the old monster’s death – and two Catholic prelates, Bishops Stephen Gardiner of Winchester and Edmund Bonner of London. These elderly men were joined by one young man, who, despite his youth, had been immured in the Tower for longer than any of them. Edward Courtenay, shortly to be made 1st Earl of Devon, had been held there for fifteen years since 1538 solely because he was the great-grandson of Edward IV, and the last Yorkist claimant to the throne. Anne Stanhope, the Duchess of Somerset, held in the fortress since her husband’s execution, completed the line-up. Mary smiled at them all fondly, and kissed each in turn. ‘These are my prisoners,’ she said proudly, freeing them.

  * * *

  Mary’s first duty was to arrange the funeral of her dead half-brother. The boy king was buried in Westminster Abbey in a Protestant service presided over by Cranmer. The queen stayed away, attending a Catholic Requiem Mass at St John’s Chapel in the White Tower instead. Elsewhere in the Tower, Lady Jane Grey, the tiny figure at the centre of the recent storm, wrote a long letter to Mary from the Lieutenant’s Lodgings explaining her part in the proceedings. She freely admitted her fault in allowing herself to be persuaded to take the crown – but denied that either ambition or malice towards Mary had prompted her
action. ‘No one can say either that I sought it [the throne] as my own, or that I was pleased with it.’ At first, Mary was inclined to believe Jane’s honest protestations of innocence and pardon her. But her advisers – in particular Simon Renard, the imperial ambassador in London – persuaded her that Jane free would inevitably become a magnet for opposition, and an alternative queen once Mary’s popularity waned. So Jane stayed in the Tower – her fate suspended.

  There was, however, no chance of clemency for Northumberland and his closest associates. Tried at Westminster Hall on 18 August along with his son John and the Marquess of Northampton, brother of Queen Catherine Parr, Northumberland exonerated Jane Grey, affirming that she had only claimed the crown ‘by enticement and force’. For himself, he could only plead that his ‘treason’ had consisted in following the commands of the late King Edward – a course, he pointed out, which all the lords trying him had followed too. If he were guilty, so were they. Brushing this aside, the court – once again presided over, as in the treason trials of Henry VIII’s day, by the vicious old Duke of Norfolk – sentenced Northumberland, Northampton and the younger John Dudley to death.

  Their deaths – along with those of three of their lesser henchmen – were fixed for Monday 21 August. But as he prepared to walk to the scaffold that morning, Northumberland grasped at a final straw. Urgently, he told his guards of a last request – he wished to hear a Catholic Mass in the Tower before he died. This was a propaganda coup that Mary’s new Catholic regime could not afford to pass up. For the driver of the Edwardian Reformation to convert to the old faith in the hour of his death was little short of miraculous. Even if it meant postponing his execution for twenty-four hours, the opportunity must be grasped.

  A Mass was swiftly arranged in St Peter ad Vincula. Northumberland attended, along with the associates due to die with him. Just before he received the host, Northumberland told the congregation that Catholicism was ‘the very right and true way’. He and they, he added, had been seduced from ‘true religion these sixteen years past’ (i.e. since Henry VIII’s break with Rome), ‘by the false and erroneous preaching of the new preachers’. He himself regretted, he concluded, having ‘pulled down the Mass’ and was grateful that his power to do further wrong had been halted.