Tower: An Epic History of the Tower of London

by Jones, Nigel

  Lady Nithsdale came up with an escape plan – fantastic, foolhardy even, but possibly, given a large slice of luck, with a sporting chance of success. Taking leave of her husband, she told Evans of her scheme. She meant to dress Nithsdale in women’s clothes and smuggle him out of the room under the noses of the milling guards. She would dress him in mob cap and skirt, swathe him in a voluminous brown cloak, paint his face with her cosmetics – taking care to lighten his distinctive dark eyebrows – and then take him out of the condemned cell, weeping and wailing as he went, with his head bowed and his hands held to his crying eyes. Such histrionics from Nithsdale’s womenfolk would be quite understandable, given that he was due to die in a few short hours.

  Time was pressing, and Lady Nithsdale swiftly recruited the helpers she needed to carry out her plan. Evans, as usual a tower of strength, had a friend, Miss Hilton, who agreed to play her part. Appropriately for the drama she was directing, Winifred’s lodgings with Mrs Mills were in theatrical Drury Lane, and she added the landlady to her cast list. Miss Hilton was tall and thin; Mrs Mills equally tall – but stout. Lord Nithsdale was tall too, and Mrs Mills’s riding cloak would fit him a treat, especially in the hours of winter darkness. A friend of Mrs Mills, a Mrs Morgan, also conveniently tall, was persuaded to join the cast. Finally, Mr Mills agreed to act as their coach driver. Naturally, the actors were all provided with the fake names of the characters they would play.

  For a successful production, Lady Nithsdale needed convincing costumes. She sent Evans out to buy five identical hooded cloaks. The date was 23 February – tomorrow, unless her plan worked, her husband would die by the axe. Late that afternoon, as the short winter day faded, Lady Nithsdale, accompanied by Evans, Miss Hilton, Mrs Mills and Mrs Morgan, set out by coach to bid a final, fond farewell to the condemned man. Mrs Morgan, tallest and slimmest of the actors, put on two gowns, one over the other; then added two identical brown cloaks. The other women donned identical brown cloaks. Lady Nithsdale also carried her cosmetics bag and a bottle of brandy.

  They arrived at the Tower, and parked their carriage at the gate with Mr Mills. The identically clad women went into the Tower and made their way through the Inner Ward where frozen snow was still piled in corners. They were let into the Lieutenant’s Lodgings in the King’s House, where Lady Nithsdale was told she could only take one companion at a time into her husband’s room. Leaving Evans at the entrance, she went in first with Mrs Morgan. Once inside, Mrs Morgan slipped off her outer dress, and Lord Nithsdale struggled into the unfamiliar garb. Lady Nithsdale went to work with her make-up sticks and brushes on her husband’s face. His dark eyebrows were lightened; his black stubble whitened; his pale cheeks rouged. Finally, a scarf was wrapped round his face, a maid’s cap was set on his head, and the curls of a red wig – to simulate Mrs Mills’s auburn hair – were carefully arranged.

  Mrs Morgan left, lamenting loudly. She was replaced by Miss Hilton, who added her velvet riding cloak to Lord Nithsdale’s ensemble. All the while, Lady Nithsdale was conversing in loud tones with her friends and visitors, saying that she was to re-present her petition to the king that night, and had every hope of obtaining a reprieve. She and Miss Hilton left the room and descended the stairs, and met Mrs Mills coming in. Lady Nithsdale returned with her to the cell. As they passed through the Council Chamber, the women put on a fine theatrical performance: keening and moaning, with much fluttering of handkerchiefs and loud blowing of noses. Slightly bemused by the comings and goings of these weeping women, and embarrassed at their distress, the guards glanced up and quickly returned to their card games. Once in Nithsdale’s cell, Mrs Mills gave up her travelling cloak with its hood, before she too left the room. Playing his part gamely, Lord Nithsdale called after her, ‘My dear Mrs Catherine [Mills’s assumed name], pray go in all haste and send in my wife’s waiting maid.’

  The Nithsdales were left alone. Lady Nithsdale had never examined her husband’s handsome features more closely. If he passed her scrutiny he might just pass the casual glances of the guards. Now the testing time had arrived. Taking a deep breath, she opened the door and ushered her husband into the Council Chamber, carefully shutting the door behind her. Boldly Nithsdale walked through the crowded room. His height was disguised by his bowed head under his hood. A muffler was wrapped around his mouth and a handkerchief hid the rest of his face. Softly, he sniffed and snuffled. His wife followed him. As they reached the end of the timbered room, a guard stepped forward. The Nithsdales’ hearts missed a beat – but the sentry was only solicitously opening the door for the two unhappy ‘ladies’. They left the room, and Lady Nithsdale said in a loud voice, ‘For God’s sake, Mrs Betty, make haste and fetch my maid.’ Then she turned and returned alone to her husband’s cell. Making sure not to trip over his skirts, Lord Nithsdale descended the stairs to join the faithful Evans. Together, lord and maid crossed the Inner Ward, went through the Byward and Middle Towers and got into the coach which Mr Mills was driving. He whipped up the horses and the coach crunched away across the snow.

  Back in the cell, Lady Nithsdale put on a star solo performance. Throwing her voice like a trained ventriloquist, she carried on a loud conversation with herself – playing the part of her husband. For up to half an hour, the bizarre conversation continued – the high female voice answered by Lord Nithsdale’s deep masculine tones. Then she came out. Holding the door half-open, she spoke back into the empty room. She told her nonexistent spouse to keep his head and hopes high. She was returning to the palace and had faith that she would come back with the king’s reprieve. Until then, he should be of good heart and watch and pray. Then, slamming the door so hard that the latch on its string fell out of the lock, she begged the guards to be compassionate and not disturb her husband: he was praying hard and if her petition failed, he was facing his last night on earth.

  Once again, Lady Winifred tripped through the crowded council room, followed by the sympathetic looks of the soldiers who saw only a distraught woman about to be brutally widowed. She descended the stairs, pausing to tell a servant coming in with candles not to disturb his lordship, and exited the Tower into the frosty February night. Within half an hour she had rejoined her husband in a nearby safe house. The next morning, they watched in horror from an attic window as Nithsdale’s Jacobite companions, Lords Kenmure and Derwentwater, paid the price for their rebellion as they were beheaded on Tower Hill. Lord Nithsdale had one person to thank that he had not shared their fate: his loving and resourceful wife.

  After lying low for three days, the couple parted again. Nithsdale was taken to the household of the Stuart-sympathising Venetian ambassador, where he was once again put in disguise.

  This time his role was to play one of the ambassador’s footmen. A powdered wig and a tight gaudy uniform replaced the billlowing female robes, and Nithsdale safely left the country for Italy’s sunnier climes. Lady Nithsdale had one more task to perform. By a circuitous route, she made her way back to the family seat and retrieved the papers she had hidden. Then she rejoined her husband in Rome. Neither would ever see their native land again. They lived on, poor but happy, until Nithsdale’s death in 1744, aged sixty-eight.

  Five years later, in 1749, the courageous Lady Nithsdale joined him. Both were finally brought back and buried in the Catholic family chapel of their relatives the Dukes of Norfolk at Arundel in Sussex. The Duchess of Norfolk still has the brown cloak used by Nithsdale in his dramatic escape. As for King George, he said of the lady who had clung so tightly to his coat-tails, that she had caused him more trouble than any other woman in Christendom. Later, he saw things differently. ‘For a man in milord’s situation,’ he said of the escape, ‘it was the very best thing he could have done.’

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  RESTORATION ROMPS

  IT IS SCARCELY surprising that Henry III showed a more than casual interest in jewels and regal regalia. Not only did he incline to aesthetic things for their own sake, being of an artistic and religious rather tha
n a martial nature; but his own personal interest in the Crown jewels – or the lack of them – was also intimately bound up with his earliest experiences. His father, King John – a rival with his son in the ‘worst English king’ stakes – famously ‘lost’ the Crown jewels in the Wash estuary. It was quite usual for medieval kings, constantly on the move around their kingdoms, to carry such royal regalia with them to impress their authority on local people with rich visual symbols wherever they went. Whether John’s loss was due to incompetence or ill luck, there was literally precious little left when Henry, a nine-year-old child, was crowned in Gloucester after his father’s death in 1216 – a simple gold circlet standing in for the missing crown.

  It may have been his father’s carelessness that caused Henry, in 1230, to be the first monarch to order that the core of the jewels – the crown, the orb and sceptre, symbols of a monarch’s temporal power and spiritual authority – should be kept in the secure setting of the Tower when not required on the road. In doing so, he began the connection between the jewels and the Tower that endures to this day. However, in his own way, Henry was as careless with the jewels as his father had been. Permanently cash strapped – not least as a result of the costly work improving the Tower – he pawned the precious metals and sacred stones to a syndicate of French merchants. On Henry’s death in 1272, they were hastily redeemed and returned to England, since they were needed for the coronation of his son and successor, Edward I.

  It was Edward – like his father, a great augmenter of the Tower’s defences and fortifications – who concentrated all the Crown jewels at the Tower, rather than just the basic royal toolkit of crown, orb and sceptre. Their previous home, since the time of Edward the Confessor, had been Westminster Abbey. But, after some of the treasures were stolen, Edward decided that the Tower was the safest place to house the whole collection. For good measure he sent the abbot and forty-eight monks from Westminster to the Tower too, as a punishment for not keeping his jewels safe.

  After starting the Hundred Years’ War, Edward I’s grandson, Edward III, was forced to the humiliating necessity of pawning the jewels again to meet the considerable costs of the conflict. Since he was at war with France, the lucky recipients were a group of Flemish merchants. The jewels were again redeemed and returned to the Tower, only to be pawned yet once more by Richard II – another spendthrift monarch in the mould of Henry III. More patriotic, Henry V, the victor of Agincourt, pledged some of the jewels to the mayor and citizens of London for 10,000 marks – again to meet the costs of the Hundred Years’ War which he had relaunched. His unhappy son, Henry VI, continued this practice of pledging the jewels against loans from merchants. (Ironically, the Wakefield Tower, where Henry was confined and murdered, became during the nineteenth century the place where the jewels were kept.)

  By the reign of the first Stuart king, James I, the Tudors, a famously grasping dynasty, had not only ceased pawning the jewels, but had built the collection up into a treasury of great value housed in a supposedly ‘secret Jewelhouse’ built by Elizabeth I beside the White Tower. James personally signed an inventory of the jewels kept in an ‘iron cheste’ which included a coronet and circlet set with precious stones; a new richly jewelled coronet specially made for his queen, Anne of Denmark; no fewer than fifteen gold collars glowing with diamonds and other precious stones, and such costly trinkets as a purse inlaid with copper, a supposed ‘long pece of unicorn horn’, and other exotica obtained for Queen Elizabeth on their far-flung voyages by her sea dogs Francis Drake and Martin Frobisher.

  Then, just as the Civil Wars of the 1640s brought ruination to human lives, so too they spelled disaster to the Crown jewels. First to go was the gold and silver plate used for ceremonial banquets. Smuggled from the Tower to Oxford, Charles I’s wartime capital, at the outbreak of the war by Royalist sympathisers, the plate was melted down and sold to fill the Cavaliers’ depleted war chests. The end of the Civil War left the whole nation impoverished, and the Parliamentary victors had no time for such fripperies as royal jewels and regalia. The decision was taken to remove the jewels from the Tower and break them up, melt them down for conversion to coinage, or sell them off.

  The metal was converted into Cromwell’s Commonwealth coinage at the Tower mint. But before consigning them to the furnace, a record was made of the treasure. Among the items destroyed were the imperial crown of ‘massy gold’ weighing seven pounds and six ounces, which was valued at £1,110; and the queen’s crown, weighing about half the king’s, which was valued at £338. Miscellaneous precious stones, including diamonds, rubies and sapphires, were together valued at £355; and there were assorted other items including two sceptres, a silver gilt rod, and the orb, or ‘globe’, which weighed one and a half pounds and was valued at £57. Also consigned to the furnace were two ancient Saxon crowns, reputedly once worn by King Alfred the Great and Queen Edith, which were brought from Westminster Abbey to the Tower and destroyed there. To their credit, some MPs protested against this wanton vandalism of such priceless ancient artefacts, but without success. The only items that survived from this massive meltdown ‘bonfire of the vanities’ were three swords, a solitary coronation anointing spoon, and a silver salt cellar once belonging to Elizabeth I which had been hidden by the monks at Westminster Abbey. Them and the Black Prince’s ruby.

  This magnificent blood-red stone, the size of a small chicken’s egg – and actually, to be technically correct, a spinel rather than a ruby proper – has adorned the crowns of English monarchs since at least 1415, when it was worn by Henry V in his helmet at Agincourt. It first came into the Crown’s possession when it was appropriated by another famous warrior prince of the Hundred Years’ War with France – Edward III’s eldest son, Edward the Black Prince. As with many famous jewels, there are several legends attached to this stone, some of them, befitting its colour, bloody ones. The legend of how the prince first acquired the stone is one such story. A chivalrous warrior equalling if not surpassing his famous father, the Black Prince won his spurs – and the Prince of Wales’s feathers and motto ‘Ich Dien’ – on the battlefield of Crécy in 1336. Twenty years later, he was to win glory against France in his own right, capturing the French king after his triumph at Poitiers in 1356. Later still, in pursuit of an anti-French Spanish alliance, the prince journeyed to the heart of Old Castile in central Spain which was riven by civil war. Here he helped the province’s king, the aptly named Pedro the Cruel, defeat his rebellious French-backed half-brother at the battle of Nájera in 1367.

  Pedro’s sadism disgusted the chivalrous English prince, and he sought to divest himself of this unwelcome friend. A genuine breakdown of his health gave him the excuse he needed to go, but Pedro was short of cash to pay the prince off for restoring him to his throne. Pedro had shown the prince his proudest possession – the bulbous, blood-red spinel. He had acquired the jewel, he bragged, by typically foul means. Originally it had been in the possession of Abu Said, a Moorish prince of Granada. Pedro had lured Abu Said to Seville, killed his servants, and then treacherously murdered his guest with his own hands, finding the stone in the dead man’s clothes. Now the Black Prince demanded – and got – the stone as the price for his help.

  But the bloodstained stone did not bring the prince good fortune. Never recovering his broken health, he died in 1376 before inheriting his father’s throne. He left the spinel as his legacy. We next hear of the jewel at Agincourt, adorning the battle helmet of Henry V. At the height of the battle, in single combat with the Duc d’Alençon, Henry received a tremendous blow from d’Alençon’s sword which dented the helmet. The jewel, however, survived, and may even have deflected d’Alençon’s almost deadly blow. Reputedly worn by Richard III in his crown at another battle, Bosworth in 1485, it did not bring that murderous monarch the luck that Henry had enjoyed. The crown, with its spinel, as legend has it, rolled under a hawthorn bush just as Richard succumbed to his enemies and went down crying, ‘Treason!’ Retrieved by Lord Stanley, it was placed on
the head of the new king, Henry VII, inaugurator of the Tudor dynasty.

  The spinel continued to be the chief adornment of the crowns of England’s kings and queens until the grand destruction of the Crown jewels under Oliver Cromwell’s Commonwealth. When the great state crown itself was broken up, the spinel was saved and sold – for what was even then the derisory sum of £4 – to a secret Royalist sympathiser who carefully preserved it until the Restoration of Charles II in 1660. The spinel, too, was then proudly restored to its rightful place at the front centre of the king’s state crown. This skilled job was the work of Charles’s court jeweller, Sir Robert Vyner. To emphasise the continuity of monarchy, Vyner was told to make the new jewels as much like the destroyed originals as possible. Fortunately, detailed records survived in the Tower, enabling Vyner to reconstruct the regalia. The work cost Charles the substantial sum of £32,000.

  Money was always a problem for the Merry Monarch. He was generous with his promises to courtiers, supporters and mistresses; but the pensions that he lavished on so many were all too often in arrears – or never paid at all. The keeper of the restored Crown jewels during his reign, Sir Gilbert Talbot, was one of the favoured few who was exceptionally well remunerated for his duties. Allocated an annual salary of £50, Talbot had his own rent-free grace and favour apartment at the Tower, and the choice of rooms in other royal palaces too. He also received food amounting to ‘fourteen double dishes per diem’. On top of all this he got a cut of £300 from the King’s New Year’s Gift money – a sort of tax on the nobility in the form of a cash ‘gift’ levied on the lords and paid to the king, that Talbot was responsible for collecting. He received another £300 annually in tips from foreign ambassadors to whom he presented gifts from the king. And as if all this was not enough to support a comfortable lifestyle, Talbot also creamed off a hefty £800 in sweeteners from the silversmiths and goldsmiths whom he favoured to execute royal commissions. The perks of his job also entitled Talbot to a closed cart for carrying his goods around; his own coronation robes; and the right to precede all the judges of the land in formal processions. As the cherry on his cake, Talbot alone had the singular honour of placing and removing Charles’s crown on the king’s head whenever he was required to wear it.