by Jones, Nigel
As the winter light failed, Pepys and the governor left their warm snug to check on the labourers’ progress. Once again, they were disappointed. The four workmen, utterly exhausted, stood disconsolately around a gaping hole they had dug under the foundation of the garden wall: but of barrels of gold there was still no sign. At last, even the relentlessly optimistic Pepys gave up:
I bade them give over, and so all our hopes ended … and so home and to bed, a little displeased with my wife, who, poor wretch, is troubled with her lonely life.
As for Barkstead’s elusive treasure – even in the unlikely event of its ever having existed, it was never found. The Tower guards its secrets well.
The diarist’s next recorded visit to the Tower came in 1666. On hearing of the outbreak of the Great Fire of London from his servants in the early hours of Sunday 2 September, it was to the Tower that Pepys hastened from his home in nearby Seething Lane to assess the extent of the conflagration. He climbed to a high window in a western turret of the White Tower, accompanied by the small son of his old acquaintance Sir John Robinson, the lieutenant, to make his observation. The blaze had already consumed a large number of streets near its seat in a baker’s shop in Pudding Lane. The great mass of dense smoke and orange flame, and the homeless refugees displaced by the fire emerging on to Tower Hill with their salvaged belongings, so alarmed Pepys that he hired a boat and had himself rowed upstream past the inferno to Whitehall Palace to bring the king his first news of the fire that was consuming his capital.
The Great Fire posed a mortal danger to the Tower, despite its thick stone walls. The entire supply of the Royal Navy’s gunpowder – at least half a million pounds of it – was kept in the White Tower in the Royal Armoury’s arsenal. As a Navy Office mandarin, Pepys was acutely aware of the problem, and when, on the fourth day of the fire, the wind which had been fanning the flames shifted to the south, the danger became an imminent peril. Pepys’s friend and fellow diarist John Evelyn spelled out what would have happened had the flames reached the Tower’s magazine. The gigantic blast, he wrote, ‘would undoubtedly have not only beaten down and destroyed all the [London] Bridge, but sunk and torn all the vessels in the river and rendered the demolition beyond all expression for several miles even about the country at many miles distance’. A modern authority on the seventeenth century, Professor Ronald Hutton, has said that if the Tower’s magazine had gone up it would have been ‘the greatest explosion in early modern history’.
A desperate effort therefore was begun to remove the powder from the fire’s path. Royal Navy seamen, together with civilians press-ganged into helping them, staggered in and out of the Tower laden with heavy barrels of gunpowder which they loaded on to ships bound downriver to Woolwich and Greenwich. They sweated under their burdens, their task made desperately hazardous by smoke-darkened skies swirling with sparks from the fire – any one of which could have detonated a catastrophic blast. But the work went on until all the powder was taken out of harm’s way.
Gunpowder was not the only precious commodity in the Tower which needed to be preserved from the hungry flames. Soon after the fire began its devastating course, London’s goldsmiths and silversmiths started to arrive at the fortress gates bearing their money, metal and plate, seeking a place of safety for their wealth while the fire raged. A vast amount of treasure – worth some £1,200,000 – was taken into the Tower. No sooner was it safely stored, however, than the fire changed course as the easterly wind veered south and the smiths began to worry whether even the Tower would be safe. So once again, the treasure was moved: this time, like the gunpowder, it was hastily loaded on boats and taken upstream to the safety of Whitehall. The danger was real and close enough: Tower Street blazed, and the Dolphin Tavern, where Pepys had interrogated Wade and Evett, was burned down. When the great Elizabethan Custom House burst into flames, the conflagration was only 100 yards from the western walls of the Tower.
By this time, the authorities had realised that no conventional firefighting could stop the fire from engulfing the whole city in a ferocious blanket of flame. London’s narrow medieval streets were easy prey for the flames to leap over, ravenously feeding on the timbers and thatch of the huddled houses, tinder dry after an exceptionally parched summer. At first, attempts were made to pull houses in the fire’s path apart with billhooks, but when this method proved far too slow, orders went out to blow up buildings with gunpowder. This is what saved the Tower from a fiery death.
Using what gunpowder remained in the White Tower’s armoury, sailors began to blow up the hovels along the Tower Ditch – the wretched street lining the Tower’s western moat. Gunpowder was also used to demolish a wine shop and warehouse at the foot of Seething Lane, where Pepys lived and worked, narrowly saving the diarist’s home along with the Navy Office. He had famously already taken the precaution of burying his most valued possessions, including a prized Parmesan cheese, in his garden. At the Tower itself, the cacophony of roaring flames, crackling and crashing timbers, and human voices raised in cries of fear, were joined by the roars and screeches of the terrified creatures in the menagerie. Maddened by the heat and smoke, abandoned by their keepers and frightened by the crump of the explosions, the elephant, lions, apes and bears mixed their fear into the bubbling cauldron of terror caused by the fire.
And then, almost as suddenly as it had arisen, the Great Fire burned itself out. Five days after the burning baker’s oven sparked the catastrophe, the exhausted flames subsided and flickered out for lack of fuel. The walls of the Tower, smoke stains adding to the grime of centuries, looked out over a devastated city in which old St Paul’s Cathedral, eighty-four lesser churches, forty-four livery company halls, the ancient Guildhall and Baynard’s Castle – almost as old as the Tower itself – along with hundreds of mansions and thousands of lesser dwellings, had all been consumed in less than a week. But the Tower – as ever – had survived.
* * *
Pepys frequently visited the Tower in his leisure hours, as it was a short stroll from Seething Lane. In 1668, two years after the fire, and with London’s reconstruction under the guidance of Sir Christopher Wren well under way, the fortress was the scene of one of the libidinous diarist’s many flirtations. The actress Elizabeth Knipp, a star of the Restoration stage, had long been an object of Pepys’s lust. Sometimes she permitted his familiarities, but often slapped his wandering hands away – which only served to increase his interest. He squired her around the Tower on at least two occasions, taking her to see the menagerie, and another time along with a group of her female friends, paying old Talbot Edwards to show them the Crown jewels. (The visit came four years before Blood’s celebrated theft.) Pepys was duly impressed by the regalia on display, writing, ‘The Crown and sceptres and rich plate, which I myself never saw before … indeed, is noble and I mightily pleased with it.’
In the decade that followed, Pepys continued his climb up the greasy pole of government service. Although he gave up keeping his famous diary in 1669, fearing that writing by flickering candlelight, coupled with his growing mountain of professional paperwork, was endangering his eyesight, his worldly success rolled on. In 1673 he reached the summit of his career when he was appointed Secretary of the Admiralty and became an MP. For a few short years Pepys was on the pinnacle – enjoying regular access to the king and the esteem of most of his peers. In 1678, though, he fell, struck down by the poisonous politics of the Popish Plot.
The plot originated in the fevered brain of Titus Oates, an Anglican clergyman disgraced for sodomy, who had then studied at Catholic seminaries in Europe where he had acquired a smattering of knowledge of the Jesuits, shock troops of the Catholic Counter-Reformation, before being expelled for his disreputable conduct. Returning to England, Oates’s overactive imagination conceived a vast conspiracy hatched by the Jesuits to kill the king, murder all Protestants, and return the country to the rule of Rome. At a time when the memory of Bloody Mary’s burnings and the Gunpowder Plot were still strong, such
Protestant paranoia found a ready audience.
After interviewing Oates, the king, though immediately perceiving him to be a pathological liar, felt unable to resist the popular panic. On Oates’s accusations many innocent Catholics were arrested and several hanged. And after Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey, a magistrate to whom Oates had sworn an affadavit detailing his allegations, was found mysteriously murdered, panic turned to hysteria. Powerful Protestant politicians, notably two fallen Protestant members of the Cabal, the Earl of Shaftesbury and the Duke of Buckingham, both of whom had spent spells inside the Tower as their power waned, rode the wave of the plot to strike down their enemies. Their main aim was to exclude Pepys’s Catholic patron, James, Duke of York, from succeeding his brother on the throne. And when the duke was forced into exile at the height of the plot, Pepys was left defenceless.
Shaftesbury’s Whigs amassed a small army of hostile witnesses willing to accuse Pepys. Chief among these was James Scott, an acquaintence of Blood’s in the criminal underworld, and, like Blood, claiming the rank of colonel. Scott, another protégé of the villainous Buckingham, had all his friend’s criminal ingenuity, with additional malice thrown in. A plausible con man who had once purchased Long Island on a fraudulent prospectus, Scott was paid by Buckingham to accuse Pepys of betraying English naval secrets to Catholic France. A Whig MP named William Harbord, who was after Pepys’s Admiralty job, weighed in with the charge that ‘Mr Pepys is an ill [i.e. evil] man, and I will prove him so’ – while a disgruntled former servant of the diarist, John James, was prepared to swear that the employer who had fired him was a secret Papist.
On 20 May 1679, in the House of Commons, the deadly charges of ‘Piracy, Popery and Treachery’ were levelled at Pepys. Spluttering with indignation, Pepys rose to refute ‘so many things cast at me at once, and all by surprise’. Despite his repeated denials, as someone accused of treason, he was committed to the custody of the serjeant-at-arms, forced to resign as admiralty secretary – and taken as a prisoner to the Tower. In this dire situation, Pepys kept a cool head. He sent his French brother-in-law, ‘Balty’ St Michel, across the Channel to find evidence to expose Scott as the liar and fraudster he was. As a person of power, wealth and influence, Pepys had unrestricted ability to send and receive mail from the Tower, and get visits from his friends – his fellow diarist John Evelyn being one. A month after he was incarcerated, Pepys was released from the Tower on bail – but it took a whole year before his name was cleared and he was restored to his office.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CIVIL WARS AND UNCIVIL PEACE
SAMUEL PEPYS WAS a child of the Civil War. Born off Fleet Street in the heart of London, the gossipy diarist was already an adolescent when the conflict tore the nation apart. Though London – especially the city – remained a stronghold of Parliament throughout the struggle, and Royalist forces got no closer to the capital than the outlying western village of Turnham Green, the Tower played a central role in the unfolding drama.
Early in Charles I’s reign, the growing Parliamentary opposition was led by Sir John Eliot, a Cornish Puritan and a disciple of Walter Ralegh’s ‘advanced’ ideas for curbing monarchy and advancing Parliament. Eliot first tasted the Tower’s hospitality in 1626, when he made a fiery speech attacking the late James I’s favourite catamite, George Villiers, 1st Duke of Buckingham (father of Pepys’s enemy, the 2nd Duke). Buckingham was the favourite of both James I and Charles I, whose aggressive and foolish foreign policy, aimed simultaneously against Spain and France, had led to repeated military disasters and vast expense.
Three years later Eliot was back in the Tower, this time accompanied by eight fellow Puritan MPs. Eliot was now aiming his attacks on Charles’s promotion of the Anglo-Catholic ‘Arminianism’ of his Archbishop of Canterbury, William Laud – fated one day to grace the Tower too. During a stormy Commons debate, Eliot and a colleague forcibly held the speaker in his seat to prevent the sitting from being curtailed. Two days later, the unruly Parliamentarian was detained in the Bloody Tower, accused of ‘stirring up sedition’ – and this time he would not emerge alive.
Because Charles bitterly blamed Eliot for creating the climate of hatred against Buckingham that had led to the duke’s assassination in Portsmouth the previous year (the assassin, a disgruntled ex-officer named John Felton, had also been imprisoned in the Bloody Tower before his execution), he was determined to detain the MP ‘at his pleasure’ – which, as it turned out, meant for ever. Charles’s bitterness was doubtless exacerbated because he had been unable to torture the killer of his friend Buckingham. Threatened with the rack by Archbishop Laud, Felton had impudently retorted that torture was illegal under English law. Although this had never stopped anyone from being racked in the Tower before, Laud consulted the law books, found Felton was correct, and advised Charles not to proceed, as Buckingham had been so hated that torturing his assassin might provoke a riot, if not a revolution. Felton was hanged at Tyburn instead, and his rotting carcass was suspended in chains in Portsmouth near the scene of his crime.
The spirited Eliot was popular with his fellow politicians of all opinions: the forty correspondents he wrote to from the Tower included two men destined to die fighting on opposite sides in the coming Civil War; his fellow Puritan, John Hampden, to whom he entrusted the custody of his children; and a fellow Cornish aristocrat and Cavalier hero, Sir Bevil Grenville.
But King Charles’s petty malevolence against the man who had dared to defy him was implacable. On top of his perpetual imprisonment, he fined Eliot £2,000. Never wealthy, Eliot responded sardonically that he had ‘… two cloaks, two suits, two pairs of boots and galoshes, and a few books … and if they could pick £2,000 out of that, much good might it do them’. Like his hero Ralegh before him, Eliot devoted himself to literary composition. Along with his voluminous correspondence, he wrote books advocating parliamentary sovereignty (The Monarchy of Man and De Jure Melestatis: a Political Treatise of Government); a philosophical defence of his own position (An Apology for Socrates); and a history of Charles’s first Parliament – of which Eliot had been such an awkward Member. Sarcastically, Eliot reported to Hampden in 1630:
I have no news to give you but the happiness of this place, which is so like a paradise that there is none to trouble us but ourselves … Amongst the other rarities of this sphere there is newly here exposed some part of the [Crown] Jewels to be seen, the font the Prince [the future Charles II] was christened in and such others.
Charles’s response to Eliot’s resolute defiance in 1631 was to withdraw the privilege of the liberty of the Tower, remove him from the Bloody Tower, where he had been able to take the air on the ramparts in the footsteps of Walter Ralegh, and confine him to a damp, cold and dark cell. He was forbidden visits from his friends and even his family. Eliot complained:
I am now where candlelight may be suffered, but scarce fire. None but my servant, hardly my sons, may have admittance to me; my friends I must desire for their own sakes to forbear coming to the Tower.
Eliot was persecuted by being constantly moved from cell to cell – ten times in all.
Under such wretched conditions, his health rapidly declined. A hacking cough proclaimed the onset of the tuberculosis that rapidly gained a fatal hold. At last, the proud man bent to petition Charles for the freedom to take fresh air for his failing lungs. Charles callously rejected the request on the grounds that the petition ‘was not humble enough’. Realising that he was dying, his friends commissioned a portrait of Eliot painted in the Tower. Clad in a nightgown, with one hand on his hip and the other holding a book, he gazes out at the artist, defiant to the last. Eliot died in the Tower on 28 November 1632. The king’s cruelty pursued him beyond the grave: rejecting his family’s request that his body be released for burial in his beloved Cornwall, Charles spitefully ordered that he be interred in St Peter ad Vincula.
Sir John Eliot was the first martyr to the cause that would see the downfall of monarchy and the execution of the king
who had persecuted him. His example inspired others – like his friend John Hampden, and the leader of the Puritans in Parliament, John Pym – to complete the work he had started and end royal absolutism. But there were many on the other side of the quarrel equally determined to fight, and if necessary, die, to uphold the Crown.
One such was Thomas Wentworth, a Yorkshire gentleman whom Charles would create Earl of Strafford for his efforts to bolster royal authority. Strafford began his career as a critic of royal absolutism, but in 1628, he decided that attacks on the king’s authority had gone far enough, switched sides, and became an able – and ruthless – royal servant. ‘Black Tom tyrant’, as his enemies called the saturnine Wentworth, became King Charles’s enforcer in his native Yorkshire, as president of the Royal Council of the North. Promoted to Lord Deputy in Ireland, his hard-line policy of ‘Thorough’, aimed at keeping down the restless Catholic majority, succeeded in containing a Catholic rebellion.
As Strafford brought the north and Ireland to heel, William Laud, Charles’s peppery, red-faced little Archbishop of Canterbury, attempted to subject an increasingly Puritanical Church of England to an Anglo-Catholic Counter-Reformation. Laud’s rigidly enforced policy, with its emphasis on restoring altars, ritual, vestments and other ‘Popish’ ways to the Anglican Church, drove many Puritans into exile. (This was the era when the Mayflower took the Pilgrim Fathers to America’s shores.) Others, however, such as an obscure MP named Oliver Cromwell, resolved to stay and fight.