Tower: An Epic History of the Tower of London

by Jones, Nigel

  For while the Earl and the Council were pleading, my Lords guzzled as if they had not eaten for a fortnight, smoking also plenty of tobacco. Then they went into a room to give their voices; and there, stupid with eating and drunk with smoking, they condemned the two Earls.

  Once back in the Tower, Essex refused to see his wife or children. Under the evil influence of the Revd Abdy Ashton, a Puritan preacher spying for the government, he wrote a four-page statement naming co-conspirators, including his own sister.

  Although Essex claimed to have done with the ‘baubles’ of this world and to have his eyes firmly fixed on eternity, a tale about his last days in the Tower suggests that he still had hopes of the queen’s mercy. The story goes that a besotted Elizabeth had once given Essex a ring, telling him that if he ever returned it, whatever his crime, he would be forgiven. Essex decided that the time had surely now come. Wrenching the ring from his finger and leaning out of the Devereux Tower, Essex entrusted his ring to a passing pageboy. He ordered the lad to take it to Lady Scrope, a female admirer of his at court, and via her to give it to the queen. The boy sped off on his mission. But instead of presenting the ring to Lady Scrope, he gave it to her sister, Lady Nottingham, wife of Lord Charles Howard, the Tower constable and one of Essex’s worst enemies. Lady Nottingham kept the ring and the secret to herself. Two years later, when both Lady Nottingham and the queen were near death, she told all to Elizabeth. The monarch cried in anguish, ‘God may forgive you – but I never can.’

  Essex’s execution was fixed for Ash Wednesday, 25 February 1601. Elizabeth, fearing a violent popular reaction to the killing of the celebrity earl, had decreed that he be privately beheaded within the Tower’s walls. Essex would be the last person – and the only man (unless we count the messy deaths of the Duke of Clarence and Lord Hastings) – to be executed inside the fortress until a series of German spies were shot there in the two world wars. Elizabeth had ordered two executioners to attend, lest, as she explained, ‘should one faint the other may perform it’.

  Informed that he would die the next morning, Essex told his guards that for all his former wealth he would be unable to tip them: ‘For I have nothing left save that which I must pay to the Queen in the morning.’ The earl spent his last night on his knees praying. They came for him at 7 a.m. It was a wet and chilly winter morning, and Essex wore a black felt hat, and a black velvet cloak over a black satin suit. He walked through the drizzle accompanied by several Puritan preachers. The earl mounted the scaffold on the same spot when Anne Boleyn, Katherine Howard and Jane Grey had died.

  Essex must have looked askance at his hated rival Ralegh, who, with grim satisfaction, was present in his capacity as captain of the Yeoman Guard. Ralegh had written a vicious letter to Cecil warning him not to reprieve Essex: ‘If you take it for good counsel to relent towards this tyrant, you will repent when it shall be too late.’ Now, after some in the crowd protested at his tasteless presence, Ralegh withdrew from the scaffold to the White Tower, where he watched from a window; although the story that he callously puffed a pipe of his imported tobacco as Essex died may be a malicious rumour.

  Raising his voice against the wind and rain, Essex told the crowd that he had been justly tried and condemned; and rightfully ‘spewed out of the realm’. His sins, he said, were more numerous than the hairs on his head. ‘I have bestowed my youth in wantonness, lust, and uncleanness. I have been puffed up with pride, vanity and love of this wicked world’s pleasures.’ He protested, however, that he had never intended to harm the queen. Nor, he added, with a sly dig at Ralegh’s supposed atheism, had he ever disbelieved in God. His greatest regret, Essex concluded, was that men had died for his pride and ambition. Now he would atone. He asked those present to pray for and forgive him – as he ‘forgave the whole world’.

  He was ready. From force of habit, he called for his manservant Williams to help him disrobe. But Williams was not there. Hair plastered against his wet skin by the rain, Essex had to remove his cloak and ruff himself, then unbutton his black doublet to reveal a splash of colour – his waistcoat, soon to be spattered with his own blood, was bright scarlet. Refusing a blindfold, he lay flat on the wet straw as psalms and prayers were intoned, before he flung out his arms and called on the headsman to strike home. But the man botched his job. The first blow of the slippery axe bit into the earl’s shoulder. The second also went astray. Only with the third stroke was that proud head off and in the executioner’s hands as he held it by the hair and asked the crowd to behold the head of a traitor.

  Southampton’s obsequious conduct in court, and the intervention of Robert Cecil on his behalf, were enough to win him a reprieve – though he stayed in the Tower for the two years that Elizabeth had left to reign. The earl was comfortably lodged in an apartment at the east end of the Tower’s royal palace. Here he had a sitting room and bedchamber with mullioned windows rather than bars. The queen was merciful to the young dandy, allowing Southampton’s mother to visit her errant son. Elizabeth also allowed him medicines for his frequent chills and fevers which were exacerbated by the unsalubrious Thames and the Tower’s filthy moat.

  Southampton had companions in his captivity. He had one attendant, Captain Hart, who grumbled that he was a prisoner too. More welcome than the grouchy Hart was Southampton’s pet, a faithful black and white cat, which, Tower legend alleged, had made its way to his quarters via the chimney. The cat featured in a famous portrait that Southampton had painted of himself after his imprisonment. An inset shows a picture of the Tower itself with the defiant Latin tag ‘In vinculis invictus’ (‘In chains unbowed’).

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  PAPISTS, PLOTS AND POISONS

  DESPITE THE RIVALRY of Ralegh and Essex, real power in Elizabethan England was in the hands of less glamorous figures who had never boarded a Spanish galleon, sunk in an Irish bog, sought for El Dorado, or singed the King of Spain’s beard, but who controlled the destinies of the kingdom from behind the scenes. These were her secretaries of state William Cecil, Lord Burghley, and after him his hunchbacked second son Robert Cecil, who equalled and perhaps surpassed his father in guile, ruthlessness and his dedication to maintain England as a Protestant power. The Cecils were sustained by the queen’s lifelong companion Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, and by the creator and master of her secret service, the austere Sir Francis Walsingham.

  This quartet were responsible for resisting the twin threats of Spanish invasion from without and Catholic conspiracy to kill the queen from within. So long as Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots, lived – especially after her Scottish subjects kicked her out and she fled to England in 1568 – she would pose an intolerable threat to a Protestant England. As a succession of plots were uncovered by Walsingham’s spies, so the cells of the Tower filled with genuine Catholic conspirators, compromised Catholic noblemen, innocent Catholic citizens and hunted Catholic priests. Elizabeth’s promise not to ‘make windows into men’s souls’ was forgotten in the interests of the state’s survival.

  The first serious threat came in 1569, the year after Mary’s arrival in England. At first given considerable freedom, she was able to communicate with her supporters and encourage their treasonable plans. A plot was hatched among the traditionally Catholic northern nobility to rise against Elizabeth in her favour. The plotters planned for Mary to marry Thomas Howard, 4th Duke of Norfolk. The duke was the son of the Earl of Surrey, the last victim of Henry VIII’s reign to be executed at the Tower. As Elizabeth’s Lord Lieutenant of the north, the 4th duke had been deputed to receive Mary. Thrice widowed, yet still under thirty, Norfolk had fallen in love with her, signalling his willingness to reign at her side in Elizabeth’s place.

  The duke’s hopes of marrying Mary were encouraged by his sister, Jane Howard, wife of the Earl of Westmoreland, one of the two leaders of the coming revolt. Thomas Percy, 7th Earl of Northumberland, and Charles Neville, 6th Earl of Westmoreland, were the hereditary heads of the north’s ancient aristocratic dynasties. They wer
e both Catholics attracted by the prospect of a new Catholic Queen Mary to champion their religion. Norfolk – though nominally a Protestant – allowed himself to be drawn into the plot.

  The rebels captured Durham, whose ancient cathedral echoed to the Mass for the first time in years. However, resolute action by the queen and council nipped the Northern rising in the bud. The rebel troops melted away as they moved south; the two earls fled to Scotland; and Norfolk, found cowering on his East Anglian estates, was thrown into the Tower. Elizabeth gave him the same comfortable quarters at the east end of the royal palace that Southampton would occupy, so Norfolk could stretch his legs in the palace’s long gallery. Elizabeth rather liked the handsome duke, despite his weakness and overt ambition. Norfolk’s friends at court quietly pleaded his case, and kept him informed of developments via messages on black paper, dropped into the dark corners of his privy, and letters rolled into tubes and inserted through a hole bored in his wall. Although interrogated personally by William Cecil, Norfolk managed to avoid incriminating himself.

  Francis Walsingham, however, had eyes and ear everywhere, and the spymaster’s patience was soon amply rewarded. In 1570, encouraged by the Pope’s bull Regenis in Excelsis releasing Catholics from their duty to Elizabeth and calling for her overthrow or death, Roberto Ridolfi, a Florentine banker based in London, lent his name to a new plot. The queen was to be assassinated; a Spanish army would descend on England from the Netherlands; and Mary would marry Norfolk and reign over a Catholic country once again.

  Meanwhile, Norfolk was freed from the Tower but was still under strict surveillance. He foolishly let Ridolfi inveigle him into his plot and thus put his neck upon the block that Walsingham had set up. In September 1571, a Catholic courier, Charles Bailly – under scrutiny since a spell in the Tower the previous year – was caught at Dover carrying letters detailing Spanish support for the plot. After the discovery of coded letters from Norfolk to Mary’s more suspect friends, the duke was re-arrested. This time there were to be no palace privileges. Norfolk was lodged in the place with the most evil reputation of all: the Bloody Tower.

  Three other towers – the Salt, the Coldharbour and the Beauchamp – filled with the duke’s co-conspirators. Although Norfolk, as a nobleman, was spared torture, Bailly was racked, and in excruciating pain, revealed the key to the ciphers he had been carrying, and the names of the other plotters. Their plans included a scheme to seize the Tower in Mary’s name, and this alone was enough to convict the duke of treason in January 1572. Urged on by Walsingham and Cecil, the reluctant queen put her signature to the duke’s death warrant four times – only to cancel it each time. The effect of this cruel psychological torture on the duke over six agonising months can only be imagined. To be repeatedly told to prepare for an imminent death – and just as repeatedly reprieved – was a refined torment worse than the rack. Finally, however, there was no reprieve. Norfolk was beheaded on Tower Hill in June 1572.

  He died courageously, with the executioner severing his head ‘with singular dexterity’. Norfolk’s was the first head to fall there there for a dozen years, and a new scaffold had to be constructed to replace the rotten old one.

  One of the two earls who had led the Northern Rising – Thomas Percy, Earl of Northumberland – was sold to the English by the Scots, and beheaded at York. His co-leader, Charles Neville, Earl of Westmoreland, lived out a life in exile on a Spanish pension. He never saw his wife, Jane Howard, or his four children again. Thomas Percy’s younger brother Henry, the new Earl of Northumberland, despite having shown no previous disloyalty – indeed he had fought for the government against the Northern Rising – took up his dead brother’s cause as soon as he inherited his title. Twice he was put in the Tower, and twice he persuaded the authorities to let him out again. But it would not be third time lucky for the foolhardy peer.

  In 1584 another Catholic plot was discovered. It took its name from Francis Throckmorton, a cousin of Walter Ralegh’s wife Bess. The details were the mixture as before: a cross-Channel invasion in support of an English Catholic rising aimed at deposing Elizabeth and putting Mary in her place. Northumberland, freed from the Tower, held a plotters’ meeting at one of his country houses, Petworth, in Sussex. Word of this reached the government, and two plotters, Throckmorton and William Shelley, were arrested, taken to the Tower and racked.

  At first Throckmorton was confident that he could withstand the rack’s rigours. He wrote a coded message to friends on a playing card pledging to die a thousand deaths before he would betray them. The spirit was undoubtedly willing, but the flesh strained and the sinews snapped – and soon Throckmorton and Shelley were naming names, places and dates. Armed with their confessions, the authorities had Northumberland arrested again in December 1584. He was interrogated, though not tortured, denying all knowledge of the plot. Eventually, Throckmorton was executed, but the problem of Northumberland remained.

  On 21 June 1585, the problem was solved. Northumberland was found shot dead in his Tower cell – a pistol loaded with three balls had been discharged through his heart. An inquest jury brought in a hasty verdict of suicide, but pamphlets were printed across Europe accusing the government of murder. Sir Walter Ralegh later alleged that one of his court rivals, Sir Christopher Hatton, had ordered the killing on behalf of the Privy Council, using the Tower’s ardently Protestant lieutenant, Sir Owen Hopton, as the murderer. At length, the rumours forced the government to mount an inquiry – which confirmed the suicide verdict. This is unconvincing. Northumberland was buried in the Tower’s chapel, St Peter ad Vincula, which, had he been a genuine suicide, would not have been allowed. The weight of the admittedly scanty evidence points to murder for reasons of state. At all events, the earl was yet another victim in a lengthening list of mysterious deaths at the Tower.

  The fortresss claimed its victims in various ways. The son of the executed Duke of Norfolk, Philip Fitzalan, Earl of Arundel, was imprisoned there in 1585, apparently for little more than his Catholic faith. Chiselled into the wall of his cell in the Beauchamp Tower, he added his name with a flourish to those of the Dudleys and several of his own co-religionists who had been previous inmates. He even carved the date: 22 June 1587, two years after Northumberland’s mysterious death, and a year before the Spanish Armada arrived. A pious and gentle man, Arundel lived a monastic life during his decade in the Tower, giving away much of the money he received for his own maintenance to the poor, and subsisting on a frugal diet.

  In 1588, Arundel’s wife bribed a warder to leave a door open so that a Catholic priest, imprisoned in the nearby Bell Tower, could steal along the walkway once used by Elizabeth for exercise and say Mass in his cell. When the government heard that the Mass had been to pray for the success of the Armada, the priest was tortured into confessing. Arundel was then tried for treason and condemned to death – though the sentence was never carried out. Instead, in 1595, the earl caught dysentery – a condition exacerbated by his poor diet. Knowing that he was dying, he petitioned the queen to be able to see his wife and child before he expired. She replied that if he renounced his religion he would be released. Arundel scornfully refused, saying he wished he had more lives that he could sacrifice for his faith – and duly died. Buried in St Peter ad Vincula, he was later exhumed and beatified, and now lies in the Howard family’s chapel in the Sussex town from which he took his title, yet another martyr to the religious intolerance that disfigured the Tudor century.

  In 1587 came the Babington Plot, the most important of all the Catholic conspiracies aimed at eliminating Elizabeth and substituting Mary. The plot was carefully manipulated by Walsingham’s spies to make a trap to destroy Mary, ‘this devilish woman’ as Walsingham called her. Throughout the 1580s, the twin threats of Spanish invasion and Catholic subversion grew – and so did the government’s efforts to counter them. Walsingham had agents in every European capital; the ports were closely watched; suspect travellers were questioned; and Catholic houses harbouring Jesuit missionary pri
ests were repeatedly raided.

  One such priest was the saintly scholar Edmund Campion, who, after his capture in 1581, suffered the torments of the tiny Tower cell known as ‘Little Ease’ – a niche in a wall in the White Tower’s cellars designed so it was impossible for the inmate to stand or lie down, the crouched position adopted causing agonising cramps. This having failed to teach Campion the error of his ways, he was racked three times. His arms were so badly dislocated that he was unable to raise them at his trial and execution.

  A Jesuit who evaded Walsingham’s bloodhounds for eight years before he was caught was the poet–priest Father Robert Southwell. Holed up in the country homes of Catholic recusants, he wrote devotional verse such as The Burning Babe. In 1592, however, Southwell fell into the merciless hands of Richard Topcliffe, the queen’s notoriously sadistic persecutor-in-chief of fugitive Catholics. Tortured in the private chamber that Topcliffe kept for the purpose in his London house, Southwell was then thrust into a tiny dungeon known as ‘Limbo’ in the Gatehouse prison at Westminster. When he was found crawling with lice, his father petitioned that he be tried and executed immediately as the gentleman he was rather than endure further suffering.

  The authorities transferred the poet–priest to the Tower, where he was de-loused and allowed new clothes and books. The government’s ‘humanity’, however, had a purpose: to make Southwell talk. During his three years in the Tower he endured no fewer then ten sessions of torture. His sole consolations were his faith and his poetry:

  O life! What lets thee from a quick decease?

  O death! What draws thee from a present prey?

  My feast is done, my soul would be at ease,

  My grace is said: O death! Come take away.

  Thus still I die, yet still do I revive,