by Jones, Nigel
Jane’s demeanour on the scaffold was as self-possessed as the rest of her short life. In her final speech she regretted allowing herself to be made queen. Then, repeating a phrase she had used in her last letter to her father, she dramatically mimed washing her hands, declaring, ‘I do wash my hands thereof in innocence, before God, and the face of you, good Christian people, this day.’ She had agreed to the presence of her Catholic intellectual sparring partner Feckenham, and turning to him, asked whether she should recite the psalm ‘Have Mercy on me O God’. That done, she distributed a few last gifts. Her prayer book went to her host Lieutenant Bridges, inscribed:
Good master Lieutenant, Live still to die, that by death you may purchase eternal life. For, as the Preacher says, 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 knows, as a friend, Jane Dudley.
This done, Jane began to remove her outer garments and the executioner stepped up to assist. Jane sharply refused and sought the help of her two lady assistants. After asking the executioner to dispatch her quickly, she tied the blindfold around her eyes with her own hands. As the world plunged into blackness for a moment she panicked. Groping blindly for the block she cried, ‘What shall I do? Where is it?’ like a suddenly abandoned child. Helpful hands guided her, and, calm again, she spoke her last words: ‘Lord, into thy hands I commend my spirit.’ The axe fell.
Jane’s execution had done nothing to rid Mary of the succession problem. So long as another stubborn, rebellious and craftier Protestant girl – her half-sister Elizabeth – lived, and so long as Mary laboured fruitlessly under the perennial Tudor curse of an inability to produce a legitimate heir herself, then the Catholic restoration remained in peril. The malign influence of her Spanish and clerical advisers, and her growing despair about her failure to produce children, combined to embitter her and drive her towards becoming the familiar ‘Bloody Mary’: a cruel and bigoted tyrant, a bishop burner and slayer of her own people who, as a result, increasingly turned against her.
A few days after Jane’s death, Mary sent a posse of 250 horsemen to Ashridge, the country house in the Chiltern Hills where Elizabeth had been kept since the coronation. Wyatt had cleared her of any knowledge of his rising, even resisting the Tower’s torturers to insist on her innocence. But it was clear that it had been the rebel intention to place Elizabeth on the throne of a Protestant England. The posse’s mission was to bring Elizabeth captive to the capital. They arrived late at night when the princess was in bed. Despite being informed that she was ill, the leaders of the troops forced their way into her bedroom, telling her that the queen had ordered her brought to London dead or alive.
Early next morning, with Elizabeth in a litter, they set out. At her imperious insistence, they travelled slowly, reaching London almost a week later. Elizabeth was already demonstrating her penchant for procrastination that served her so well in later life. Indignantly protesting her innocence, she was examined by the council in Whitehall Palace, who, try as they might, could extract no damning admissions from her. She wrote to Mary, ‘protesting before God’ that she had never ‘practised, concealed, nor consented to anything that might be prejudicial to your person in any way, or dangerous to the state by any means’. But she was refused permission to see her half-sister and after a fortnight, was told that she was going to the Tower.
The fortress’s sinister reputation as death’s waiting room was already well established, and with the example of her mother, her paramour Thomas Seymour, and most recently Jane Grey before her, Elizabeth cannot be blamed for taking the terrible news as her death warrant. Few of her royal blood who entered the Tower as prisoners left it alive again. She furiously protested at being sent to ‘a place more wonted for a false traitor than a true subject’. But her lamentations were in vain, and on Palm Sunday, 18 March 1554, a barge took her from Whitehall’s wharf to the Tower.
It was a cold, cheerless, grey day, and the princess’s mood matched the weather. Her spirits were further depressed when she saw Traitor’s Gate, the entrance that for so many – including her mother – had meant a final exit from the earth. Rain had swollen the river, and making the excuse that she did not want to get her feet wet, she refused to leave the boat. Her escort, the ‘willowy’ old Marquess of Winchester, drily replied that she had no choice.
Finally, and very reluctantly, Elizabeth gave way, declaring, ‘Here landeth as true a subject, being a prisoner, as ever landed at these steps, and before thee O God, I speak it, having none other friends than thee.’ Then she sat down on the sopping stones, angrily arguing that as she was no traitor she would not go through the dreaded gate. Lieutenant Bridges, the man who had just seen Jane Grey to her death, pointed out that if she continued to sit in the river she would catch her death of cold. At last, calling on ‘all good friends and fellows to witness that she was no traitor but the queen’s true subject’, Elizabeth reluctantly followed the lieutenant through the gate.
The princess was housed, not in the relative comfort of the Lieutenant’s Lodgings where Jane had lately lived, but in the upper chamber of the Bell Tower – the same spartan accommodation where Bishop John Fisher had suffered, above the cell where Sir Thomas More had languished. At first her only privilege was to be allowed to walk for exercise along the rooftops – the leads – between the Bell and Beauchamp Towers, where the surviving Dudley boys were still held. One of them, Robert Dudley, whom she had known since childhood, would become the love of her largely loveless life. From her walkway, still known as ‘Princess Elizabeth’s Walk’, she was relieved to see the scaffold used for Jane’s execution being dismantled. She hoped it meant that the attempt to implicate her in Wyatt’s rising had finally failed.
Mary, however, still intensely suspicious of her half-sister, told the Tower authorities to keep a strict eye on her. The constable, Sir John Gage, ordered a particular watch kept on the food that she, a privileged prisoner, had sent in from outside the fortress. Elizabeth only received her victuals after they had been minutely examined by the Tower’s staff: a humiliating procedure that infuriated the haughty princess. Her complaints redoubled when she noticed that her guards were helping themselves to the choicest food before it reached her, to supplement their own meagre rations. The strong-willed Elizabeth was so insistent – threatening to report the pilfering to the queen – that she won her point. From then on the food was delivered to her own servants, who arranged to cook it in the lieutenant’s kitchens before serving it to their royal mistress.
As spring advanced, Elizabeth was allowed to walk in the Tower’s Privy Garden. The fortress’s other inmates were strictly forbidden to speak to her or even look at her. When a five-year-old son of a warder innocently presented her with a sprig of flowers, he was reprimanded and the bouquet instantly confiscated and torn to pieces lest it contain a hidden message. Elizabeth’s fellow prisoners included scores of Protestants brought into the fortress to repent of their ‘heresy’ or suffer the consequences. The week after her arrival, the Church of England’s top trio of reformers, headed by the aged Thomas Cranmer, with Hugh Latimer, Bishop of Worcester, and Nicholas Ridley, Bishop of London, were brought in. The Tower was so crowded that the three prelates had to share a cramped cell.
On 11 April, the overcrowding was slightly relieved when Sir Thomas Wyatt left the fortress to die on Tower Hill. From the scaffold he exonerated Elizabeth from all blame for his rising. A hundred of Wyatt’s rebels died with their leader – half of them hanged in London on a single day. Jane Grey’s father, Henry, Earl of Suffolk, was executed a few days after his daughter. The four surviving Dudley brothers – John, Ambrose, Henry and Robert – were luckier. They were detained until the autumn, then released – although John, the eldest, only survived for a fortnight, his death doubtless hastened by his confinement in the Tower, while Henry would die fighting in defence of Calais in Mary’s lost French wars.
Amidst this orgy of state violence, Elizabeth had a very clear idea of the
fate she would suffer if she made a single slip during her continual examinations by privy councillors and the ruthless Bishop Gardiner, who was quite determined to see her die. Far more guileful than Jane Grey, however, Elizabeth outwitted them all. Her confidence in her own cleverness is well expressed by the taunting couplet she is reputed to have scratched on a glass pane with a diamond ring:
Much suspected by me – nothing proved can be.
On 19 May, after two and a half months in the Tower, Elizabeth was freed. She left, as she had come, by water, travelling first to Richmond Palace – where she would die half a century later – then on to the rural seclusion of the palace at Woodstock in Oxfordshire. When next she returned to the Tower, she would be queen.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
FALLEN FAVOURITES
THE RELEASE FROM the Tower of Elizabeth and the Dudley brothers, along with genuine conspirators such as Edward Courtenay, Earl of Devon, was less the result of the Marian government adopting a policy of mercy, than a panicky attempt to win back lost public approval, disgusted both by Mary’s Spanish marriage and by the mass incineration of Protestants. During his brief stays in England after marrying Mary, Philip of Spain steered well clear of the Tower, only briefly visiting the fortress three times, and never staying there overnight. Mary, by contrast, spent the autumn and winter of 1555–6 there, hoping against hope that her absentee husband had made her pregnant.
These hopes turned to ashes – the ashes of more than 300 Protestants burned at the stake by Mary for refusing to renounce their heresy, a policy that has irredeemably blackened her name in history. Foremost among the martyrs were Cranmer, Latimer and Ridley – who went to the flames at Oxford after ten months in the Tower. Latimer prophesied at the stake that they were lighting a Protestant flame in England that would not be extinguished. Scores of ordinary men and women suffered similarly for the ‘crime’ of refusing to conform to the new Catholic orthodoxy. Mary’s bitter cruelty was fuelled by her failure to become pregnant – despite numerous wish-induced false alarms – and by her growing realisation that her husband was merely using her and her kingdom as an instrument of Spanish foreign policy. Mary obediently converted Spanish silver to coins at the Tower mint; supplied the Tower’s ordnance and ships to fight Philip’s campaigns against France; and filled her court with Spanish priests and monks. Her only reward was to lose Calais – England’s sole remaining possession in France – causing her famous lament that after her death the word ‘Calais’ would be found carved on her heart.
That death, in November 1558 – followed within hours by that of her chief spiritual adviser Cardinal Reginald Pole – was caused by uterine cancer, which Mary, pathetically, had mistaken for pregnancy. The news of her half-sister’s demise and her succession was brought to Elizabeth at Hatfield House, just north of London. Any sorrow at her sibling’s passing was short-lived, and a grateful nation joined in frantic rejoicing that a new ruler was on the throne with the promise of a future un-brightened by flames consuming human flesh.
Elizabeth arrived at the Tower on 28 November, after negotiating her way through London streets thronged with crowds cheering themselves hoarse. It was a very different entry from her last stay in the fortress. Although she knew that she would have to go through the formal coronation ceremonies at the Tower as custom and tradition dictated, Elizabeth – for very understandable reasons – was not anxious to prolong her time in the prison-palace that stood in her mind only for suffering, danger and death. Elizabeth’s long reign, in fact, marks a defining watershed in the Tower’s history – when its royal functions began to decline, and its image became indelibly associated with its darker role as prison and torture chamber to the elite. After Elizabeth, no monarch would ever reside there or treat the Tower as home again.
For the first week of Elizabeth’s reign, however, the Tower was the powerhouse where the future course of policy was set. Meeting constantly with her council in the palace’s great hall, the new queen, with her chief adviser William Cecil, later Lord Burghley, at her side, laid down her law. She turned her back on her sister’s policy, proclaiming that England would once again become a Protestant nation. Surviving Protestant clerics, like her Archbishop of Canterbury, Matthew Parker, were reappointed to posts newly vacated by their Catholic counterparts like Bishops Bonner and Gardiner. Elizabeth’s brand of the faith, however, would not be the extreme evangelism of her half-brother Edward. A moderate, middle-of-the-road Anglicanism, eschewing fundamentalist Calvinism on the Left and fanatical Catholicism on the Right, would be the order of the day. Elizabeth said that she had no wish to ‘make windows into men’s souls’. Sincere religious belief – so long as it did not threaten the security of the state – would not be punished by the fires of Smithfield.
It did not take long for these pious intentions to ram into the hard rocks of realpolitik. Elizabeth’s brother-in-law, Philip – who had now succeeded his father Charles V as Holy Roman Emperor and King of Spain – resented Elizabeth both for her Protestantism and for her patriotism, which threatened Spain’s place as the Western world’s pre-eminent power. Elizabeth’s reign would be dominated by a growing conflict with Spain and Catholic Europe, which, waged by land and sea, became an affair of state as England’s Catholic community were torn between their duty as subjects of the queen and their fidelity to their faith. After the Pope excommunicated Elizabeth for heresy, declaring that it was the duty of good Catholics to kill her, they inevitably were seen by an increasingly repressive state, as the malevolent enemy within: a fifth column of treacherous subversives who must convert, conform – or be crushed.
Elizabeth’s prime purpose was to ensure her own place on the throne. Like her father, she took any threat to the Crown personally. Historians are divided as to whether Elizabeth’s reluctance to marry was because she was unable to wed the real love of her life, Robert Dudley, her former companion in misery at the Tower; or because she refused to share power with any spouse. (Even Mary, devoted to her husband Philip, had refused his demand to be crowned king at her side.) Early in her reign, Elizabeth’s concerns about marriage, fertility and her royal rights became focused on the tiny figure of Catherine Grey.
Catherine was the younger sister of Jane Grey, with the same Royal blood as her executed sibling. Just before Jane’s reign, when her sister had wed Lord Guildford Dudley, Catherine had been married to Henry Herbert, Earl of Pembroke, son and heir of Northumberland’s chief lieutenant, as part of Northumberland’s machinations to make himself the power behind Jane’s throne. After the collapse of Jane’s reign, Herbert, at his repentant father’s urgent command, wasted no time in having the now inconvenient marriage to a traitor’s sister annulled on the grounds of non-consummation. Poor Catherine, her father and sister executed as traitors, was brutally cast adrift.
Elizabeth took pity on the jilted girl and made her a lady-in-waiting. But when Catherine made the mistake of falling for Edward ‘Ned’ Seymour, Earl of Hertford – handsome son and namesake of Edward VI’s fallen Lord Protector Somerset – the queen suddenly remembered that as great-granddaughter of her father Henry VIII, Catherine had a claim to the throne. Worse, in 1561 it emerged that Catherine and Seymour – who himself had a smidgen of royal blood via his mother’s descent from Edward III – had secretly married the previous year in the presence of a priest with Ned’s sister Jane as their sole witness. Worse still: Catherine was now pregnant.
Fearing the queen’s wrath, Catherine confided her secret to Robert Dudley, who promptly informed his royal mistress. Elizabeth, in a pattern that would become increasingly familiar, went almost mad with rage. Catherine was instantly arrested and taken to the Tower where – with savage irony – she was lodged in the Bell Tower, the grim prison where Elizabeth herself had been housed a few short years before. Seymour was in France when the secret came out. Ordered home by a furious Elizabeth, he was clapped in a cell in the White Tower – cruelly kept in strict seclusion from his wife, who was about to give birth.
Catherine was safely delivered of a boy on 24 September. The baby was baptised with his father’s name in St Peter ad Vincula, the very place where the headless corpses of the infant’s aunt, grandfather and great-uncle were decomposing. The two lieutenants of the Tower during Mary’s reign, Sir John Bridges, followed by his brother Thomas, were loyal Catholics dismissed by Elizabeth. They had been replaced by Sir Edward Warner, a Protestant who had held the post during Edward VI’s reign. Warner was under strict instructions from Elizabeth to keep the Seymours apart, but either through kindness or negligence, or bribery, he allowed Ned Seymour to make at least one conjugal visit to his spouse – which resulted in Catherine becoming pregnant again.
In February 1563 she gave birth to a second son, Thomas, at the Tower, who was also baptised at St Peter’s. When Elizabeth heard of this fresh act of insolence, her rage was titanic. Warner was summarily sacked and imprisoned in one of his own Tower cells and Seymour fined the vast sum of £15,000. One of the couple’s problems was that they were unable to prove that they were married. Seymour had entrusted the marriage certificate to Catherine before leaving for France – but she had since lost the document. Their only witness, Seymour’s sister Jane, had inconveniently died, and the priest who had conducted the ceremony was too frightened of the queen’s wrath to come forward. (He owned up thirty years later after Elizabeth was safely dead.)
Although the conditions of Catherine’s imprisonment were not harsh, as a surviving inventory of her comfortable furnishings proves, she, like her sister Jane before her, was now permitted only tantalising distant glimpses of her imprisoned husband in the Tower. Her furnishings included a bed with a down bolster, tapestries, curtains, Turkish carpets and a velvet-covered chair in crimson and gold, embroidered with the royal coat of arms. As some compensation for the lack of her husband, she was allowed a pet dog and a monkey. In the summer of 1563, an outbreak of plague in London caused the couple to be moved to the country – but they were still kept segregated.