by Jones, Nigel
In April 1640 Charles finally ran out of cash. Two expensive and ill-advised attempts to force the Presbyterian Scots to adopt the English system of bishops had resulted in the so-called Bishops’ Wars of 1639. But instead of tamely submitting to Charles’s commands, the Scots had formed a 20,000-strong army to defend their religious and political liberties to the death. Charles found his own army inadequate for the task of subduing the Scots – some being armed only with bows and arrows. He was obliged to agree to a humiliating peace. Still worse, he was forced to summon the Parliament he had dispensed with for eleven years.
The MPs were in an ugly mood. Led by John Pym, they were determined to bring down the twin pillars of royal rule, temporal and spiritual, in the persons of Strafford and Laud. Strafford was summoned to London by Parliament, going, as he wrote to a friend, ‘with more danger beset, I believe, than ever man went with out of Yorkshire; yet my heart is good and I find nothing cold within me’.
Pym had proclaimed that ‘Stone-dead hath no fellow’ and Strafford knew that before Parliament rose again either Pym or he would be no more. It was literally a duel to the death. Hearing that Pym planned to impeach him for high treason, Strafford planned to use a royal review of troops at the Tower as cover for a coup in which Pym and his friends would be arrested in the fortress and royal authority restored. But Pym had his spies at court, notably the beautiful intriguer Lucy Percy, Countess of Carlisle. Lady Carlisle, daughter of the ‘Wizard Earl’ of Northumberland, who had been imprisoned in the Tower along with Ralegh, had reputedly been the lover in succession of Strafford and Pym. After the Civil War, she swung round to Royalism once again – and was sent to the Tower as a suspected agent of Charles II, dying shortly after the 1660 Restoration.
Well aware from his mistress’s reports of what Strafford intended, Pym struck first. On 10 November, the day that Strafford arrived in London from Yorkshire, he was impeached by the Lords for high treason. Strafford declared that he would ‘look his accusers in the face’ – and was promptly arrested. On 25 November he was taken to the Tower in a closed coach through jeering crowds. Ruthless and tyrannical he may have been, but Strafford was also brave. Inside the Tower, he marshalled his defence, confident that his accusers lacked the evidence to convict him. Pym had him confined to a suite of three rooms in the Lieutenant’s Lodgings, and constantly watched. Strafford remained resolutely cheerful – going to daily services in the Tower’s chapel, and taking exercise with the lieutenant, Sir William Balfour, seemingly oblivious to the hostile mobs who gathered daily outside the Tower’s gates to howl for his head.
When he was brought by river to face his accusers in the House of Lords, the peers were shocked by Strafford’s appearance. After just two cold winter months in the Tower the tall, dark earl was now a grey, stooping figure, shrunken and leaning on a stick. But his mind was as quick as ever, and he refuted the allegations against him with scorn. Given a fortnight to consider his reply to the twenty-eight charges, he was rowed back to the Tower from where he wrote confidently to his wife, telling her that there was ‘nothing capital’ in the charges. Trustingly, he added:
I know at the worst His Majesty will pardon all, without hurting my fortune and then we shall be happy by God’s grace. Therefore comfort yourself, for I trust these clouds will away and that we shall have fair weather afterwards.
But Strafford had reckoned without the weakness and duplicity of his royal master and without Pym’s determination to destroy him. As he was rowed daily to Westminster for his eighteen-day trial, his ally Laud joined him in the Tower on 1 March. The cleric, nearing seventy, was, like Strafford, brought to the fortress in a closed coach through abusive crowds. He was lodged in the Bloody Tower. Strafford knew that his and Laud’s roles were to act as fall guys for the sins of their king.
Although the Commons was overwhelmingly against him – Pym’s supporters commanded a two-thirds majority – the Lords were more equivocal, and Strafford’s skilled defence succeeded in refuting most of the charges against him. The key accusation was that Strafford had intended to use troops from Ireland not just against the Scots, but against the king’s enemies in England, too. Since the sole ‘proofs’ of this rested on the suspect memory of a single man, Sir Henry Vane, Strafford was easily able to disprove it. Pym was now faced with the dire prospect of his enemy’s acquittal.
In this desperate extremity Pym resorted to an equally desperate strategm: an Act of Attainder. By this medieval device, last used in the Wars of the Roses, no evidence needed to be proved against a person accused of treason. By Parliament simply passing the act, the accused could be lawfully executed and his estates forfeit. It was legalised murder, but Pym now put the attainder against Strafford before Parliament.
Back at the Tower, blissfully unaware of the deadly new threat, Strafford was cock-a-hoop at his apparent demolition of the case against him. He had even exchanged a significant smile across the courtroom with the king at the conclusion of the trial. Now, a witness reported, the earl ‘walked up and down the Tower in high spirits, even singing songs of thanksgiving’. Charles wrote reassuringly, ‘Upon the word of a king, you shall not suffer in life, honour or fortune.’ Those words would come back to haunt both Strafford and the king.
The Commons rushed through the attainder, passing it by 204 votes to fifty-nine. It now remained for the Lords to accept or reject it, and for the king – who had just promised Strafford his protection – to sign it into law. Pressure on the Lords was intense. The fury of the London mob had been thoroughly aroused, and shops and businesses were abandoned as their owners surrounded Parliament, lustily yelling for Strafford’s death. But as the Lords debated, another plot was revealed which sealed Strafford’s fate.
In a typically maladroit move, Charles attempted another coup at the Tower designed to snatch Strafford from the jaws of death now closing upon him. The king first attempted to bribe the lieutenant, Sir William Balfour, with £20,000 to turn a blind eye to Strafford’s escape. The fallen minister’s faithful secretary, Guildford Slingsby, had chartered a ship which lay at Tilbury, ready to whisk Strafford abroad. To aid the escape, on 2 May a Captain Billingsby appeared at the Tower’s main gate with a troop of 100 soldiers, demanding admittance in the king’s name. The plotters, however, had reckoned without Balfour’s staunch Scots Presbyterianism, which made loyalty to Parliament his priority. He turned Billingsby and his men away, refused the king’s bribe and told Pym what was afoot.
The revelation of the Tower plot swung wavering lords behind the bill of attainder. Those who still hesitated were intimidated by the mob besieging Parliament, and many stayed away from the vital vote. When it came, the majority was wafer thin: just seven votes condemned Strafford to death. It was in vain that Charles had sent his eleven-year-old son, the future Charles II, to Parliament to make a personal plea for mercy. In vain too that he promised never to appoint Strafford to another office – ‘not even a constable’ – if only his life was spared. The mob now transferred its attention from Westminster to Whitehall, and threatening crowds surrounded Charles’s palace demanding that he sign the act that would take Strafford’s life.
As the king wriggled like a worm on a hook, Strafford nobly took the decision for him. In an extraordinary letter of self-sacrifice from the Tower, he released the king from his promise to save his life in order to preserve the peace and stability of the realm:
So now to set your Majesty’s conscience at liberty, I do most humbly beseech your Majesty for prevention of evils which may happen by your Refusal to pass this Bill …
With this letter, Strafford laid his own neck upon the block.
If Charles had been a stronger man he would have ignored the letter and insisted on reprieving his most loyal and able servant. But he was not. And with the howls of the besieging mob ringing in his ears, and tears running down his face, he signed the bill. Self-pityingly he declared that ‘my Lord of Strafford’s condition is happier than mine’, and when he himself faced the same
fate eight bloodstained years later, he claimed that he was being justly punished as atonement for his sin in permitting Strafford’s judicial killing. It is, however, doubtful whether even Charles could have saved Strafford from the fury of an aroused and vengeful populace. Lord Newport, a supposed Stuart sympathiser, whom the king had recently appointed constable of the Tower in the hope that he could somehow save Strafford, had, like Balfour, sniffed which way the political wind was blowing. Newport now sent a message to the palace that unless the king authorised Strafford’s execution he would order it on his own authority. Coming on top of Strafford’s own letter of renunciation, this finally pushed the king into signing away his faithful servant’s life.
When the fatal tidings were brought to Strafford, despair and disillusion broke through his mask of resignation and he burst out with the biblical quotation, ‘Put not your trust in princes, nor in the sons of men, for in them is no salvation.’ When told the news in the nearby Bloody Tower, Archbishop Laud was ever more bitter: Charles, he said, was a king who ‘knew neither how to be, or to be made, great’. Strafford spent his last days in calm preparation for death. After settling his business affairs and writing consoling letters to his family, he made his spiritual peace with the help of Archbishop James Ussher, the Calvinist Primate of Ireland, most famous for having calculated the precise date of the Creation as 23 October 4004 BC. Ussher reported that Strafford had repented his sins and sought forgiveness from his many enemies and ‘never was such a white soul returned to his maker’.
His soul may have been white, but Strafford was clad from head to toe in sombre black at eleven o’clock on 12 May when Lieutenant Balfour came to escort him to the scaffold. Passing beneath the Bloody Tower, Strafford paused to receive a final blessing from his old friend and ally, William Laud. Emotion overcame the old man, and having pronounced his blessing through his cell window, the cleric fell back in a dead faint. Strafford calmly walked on to meet his fate. So hated was ‘Black Tom tyrant’ that the huge open space of Tower Hill was completely filled with an exultant crowd of more than 100,000 who had come to see him die. Special stands had been erected to give paying punters a better view, and the Tower’s battlements were lined with curious, exultant or sympathetic spectators. The mob was so immense that they were pressing against the gates of the Tower itself, and an alarmed Balfour, fearing a lynching, begged Strafford to leave the Tower as he had entered it – in a closed coach.
Strafford would have none of it and he replied:
No, I dare look death in the face. And I hope the people too. I care not how I die, whether by the hand of the executioner, or by the madness and fury of the people. If that may give them better content it is all one to me.
The gates swung open and Strafford strode fearlessly up the hill, his fierce gaze reducing the hostile crowd to silence. From the scaffold itself he spoke an eloquent final message, doubting that the people’s happiness could be purchased by the shedding of his blood. He tried to comfort his brother George, who was weeping helplessly:
One stroke will make my wife husbandless, my dear children fatherless, my poor servants masterless, and separate me from my dear brother and all my friends. But let God be to you and them all in all.
Then, declaring that he cast off his doublet ‘as cheerfully as ever I did when I went to bed’, Strafford knelt at the block to receive his stroke. A roar of vengeful triumph arose as the executioner, Richard Brandon, lifted the severed head, still spurting blood. Horsemen at the edge of the crowd rode out through London’s streets and the villages beyond the city waving their hats in glee and yelling, ‘His head is off! His head is off!’ The Royalist diarist John Evelyn was in the crowd to see ‘the fatal stroke’, which severed what he called ‘the wisest head in England’. But Evelyn was in a minority. That May morning, England’s monarchy had fallen to its lowest point in popular esteem, and Charles’s ignoble offering up of the one man who could possibly have saved his tottering throne was a revelation. It showed to both his growing band of enemies and his diminishing group of friends his faithless – and fatal – weakness which would now lead his kingdom to civil war, and his own head to be lopped off with Strafford’s – ironically by the same impartial headsman, Richard Brandon.
As the kingdom spiralled towards armed conflict, both sides manoeuvred for advantage. King Charles saw the Tower as the key to controlling London, and at Christmas 1641 dismissed Sir William Balfour, who had betrayed him over Strafford, and installed a swashbuckling Cavalier soldier, Sir Thomas Lunsford, in his place as lieutenant. Known to be ‘fit for any wicked design’, the ruthless Lunsford would have transformed the Tower into a citadel to overawe London, with its strong Parliamentary sympathy. The battle over his appointment became a power struggle that Parliament was determined not to lose. The Commons told the king that London’s merchants would refuse to supply the Tower mint with bullion unless Lunsford was removed, thus halting the production of the nation’s coinage at a stroke.
Crucially, Charles had failed to replace Lord Newport as constable, and Newport refused to accept Lunsford as his lieutenant. The king was forced to back down, and Lunsford became the lieutenant with the shortest time in office on record – just four days. It was not, however, the end of Lunsford’s Tower connections. In 1645, after a brave and bloody career as a Royalist soldier in the Civil War, he was captured – and joined the hundreds of Royalists thronging the Tower as Parliament’s prisoners of war. Lunsford stayed in the Tower until 1647 when he was released on condition that he emigrated to Virginia, where he died in 1656.
After Lunsford’s dismissal, the king named another loyal soldier, Sir John Byron, to be lieutenant in Lunsford’s place. But Byron – an ancestor of the great Romantic poet – lasted little longer than Lunsford. Parliament checked Charles by drafting in its own militia – the City Trained Bands, a volunteer force composed largely of London apprentices – to beef up the Tower’s garrison. When Byron attempted to replace the Trained Bands with royal troops there was an armed clash – the first skirmish of the coming Civil War. Byron resigned in disgust, and Sir John Conyers, a Parliamentary loyalist, replaced him – from henceforth to the Restoration in 1660, the Tower remained firmly in Roundhead hands.
Charles left his capital in January 1642 after a bungled attempt to arrest John Pym and four of his closest Parliamentary associates. The king would only return to London as a prisoner. William Laud remained the Tower’s most distinguished inmate through the first Civil War, which broke out in August 1642. The fussy old archbishop busied himself with preparing his own defence against his eventual trial, and interfering in the services at the Tower chapel, even forbidding marriages if he thought the couples concerned were unsuited. Laud had to witness the destruction of his life’s work, as the Puritans, now in the ascendant, smashed his precious altar rails for firewood, and broke the stained glass decorating so many churches.
Laud’s fate mirrored that of his friend Strafford. After John Pym’s death from cancer, his chief tormentor was William Prynne, a Puritan preacher whom the archbishop had himself savagely persecuted in the days of his pomp for his ‘heretical’ pamphlets. Laud had had Prynne exposed in the pillory, had slit his nose, and ordered his ears cropped to bloody stumps, before finally branding his face with the letters ‘SL’ for ‘Seditious Libeller’. In addition Prynne had been fined £5,000 and imprisoned in the Tower. Now the tables were well and truly turned and the mutilated Prynne had the power to take revenge on his persecutor. His first move, in 1643, was to appear at the Bloody Tower early one morning accompanied by a guard of musketeers, while Laud was still in bed. Prynne took away twenty-one bundles of papers which Laud had meticulously assembled to bolster his defence.
Despite the lack of documentation, the old man’s phenomenal memory enabled him to put up a stout defence when he was finally tried in 1644. Like Strafford, he was rowed from the Tower to Westminster every day for his trial – except one particularly bitter January day when the river froze and he was driven
through hooting crowds in a coach. Like Strafford before him, when the evidence failed to make a charge of treason stick, Laud was convicted of trying to ‘subvert religion and the laws of the realm’ under a bill of attainder and condemned to death.
Laud was happy to die. His life’s work lay in ruins, his country was convulsed by civil war, and the king he had served had been exposed as a man of straw. In his will, drawn up in the Tower, the archbishop wrote with feeling, ‘I most willingly leave the world, being weary at the very heart at the vanities in it.’ He slept soundly the night before his execution, on 10 January 1645, and preached a fine sermon from the scaffold on Tower Hill, predicting that God would bring him ‘from the banks of the Red Sea into the Land of Promise’. As he knelt at the block, Laud saw between the planks of the scaffold’s floor that members of the public had gathered directly beneath. He called for more sawdust to be scattered as he had ‘no desire that his blood should fall on the heads of the people’. His last words as the axe was raised were, ‘I am coming, O Lord, as fast as I can.’
William Prynne’s subsequent history reflects the strange twists and turns in loyalty and fortune as the nation negotiated the switchback fortunes of civil war. Always a contrarian, Prynne sided with the Presbyterian members of Parliament who fell out with an increasingly radical army as the bitter war went on. Finally, Prynne was even reconciled to the Restoration of the monarchy under which he had been persecuted so relentlessly. After the return of Charles II in 1660, by a supreme irony, the man who had deprived Laud of the written records to mount his defence was himself made Keeper of the Records at the Tower by the new king.