by Paul Simpson
Nearly five hundred years later, Jesuit priest Father John Gerard carried out an equally hazardous escape from the Tower, and unusually, we have a full account of the incident which Gerard himself penned a few years later. Gerard’s father had been imprisoned in the Tower himself after becoming involved in one of the plots to free Mary Queen of Scots from her imprisonment at Tutbury in Staffordshire; he was able to buy his way out of prison, but would return behind bars in 1586 for his part in the Babington Plot, an attempt to remove Queen Elizabeth from the throne of England.
Gerard was brought up as a Catholic at a time when those who professed the faith in that Church were subject to persecution. He was educated on the continent, since there were limited opportunities for Catholics in England, and returned home in 1584, aged twenty, although that journey soon ended with a sojourn in Marshalsea Prison. After three years back in Europe, Gerard came back to England, charged with keeping the Catholic faith alive. Between 1588 and 1594 he acted as an undercover agent for the Society of Jesuits in England, frequently evading arrest through good fortune. He was betrayed in April 1594 but when he refused to recant his faith, or to reveal who had been assisting him, he was put in close confinement, and eventually sent to the Clink prison, south of the Thames. After he became a focal point for Catholics even while imprisoned there, the authorities moved him on 12 April 1597 to the Tower of London, where he was given a room in the Salt Tower, part of the Inner Ward of the Tower, built in the thirteenth century.
Gerard was tortured in the Tower on at least three occasions – his autobiography gives a graphic account of the manner and effects of the various schemes that they devised to try to get him to talk – but whenever he was asked to confess, he simply said, “I cannot and I will not.” Once the torture stopped, Gerard was allowed to recover, and during that time he asked to be allowed to have some oranges. Although he used the peel to create rosaries, he was keeping the juice for a more clandestine purpose. He wasn’t allowed a pen or paper, but was given a quill to pick his teeth. Part of this he adapted into a pen, and used the orange juice as ink. In this way, he was able to send messages to his friends outside the prison on the wrappers he was permitted for the rosaries – invisible to the naked eye, such messages could be read if the paper on which they were written was warmed up. After a few months, his warder permitted him to use a pencil and paper, and Gerard wrote innocuous lines to his friends in pencil while using the orange juice to pass on instructions. When he realized that the warder was illiterate, he stopped worrying about what he read.
The priest also began conspiring with other prisoners within the Tower of London. He knew that fellow Catholic John Arden was imprisoned in the Cradle Tower, which was opposite his cell. Arden was under sentence of death but had been kept in the Tower for over ten years. His warder, Bonner, eventually agreed to allow the two men to dine together – and, unknown to the jailer, celebrate the Mass. In his autobiography, Gerard claims that at that stage he had no thoughts of escape; he simply wanted to share communion with a fellow Catholic. But when he realized how close the Cradle Tower was to the moat that goes round the outer fortifications, he thought it might be possible to use a rope to get down to the wall beyond the moat.
Gerard wrote to two friends, John Lillie and Richard Fulwood, asking them to come to the far side of the moat on a specific night, bringing a rope with them. They would tie that to a stake, then Gerard and Arden would throw an iron ball attached to a stout thread across. Lillie and Fulwood were then to tie the cord to the free end of the rope, which the two imprisoned men could then draw up to them.
Before they went ahead with what was bound to be a risky venture, Gerard checked to see whether his warder would be willing to be bribed to allow him simply to walk out. When the warder refused point-blank, saying it would make him an outlaw and he would be hanged, Gerard reverted to the original plan.
On the chosen night, 3 October, Gerard was taken across to Arden’s cell and locked in by the warder. Once the jailer had gone, the two men cut through a bolt on the inner door leading to the roof and made their way up the stairs. Fulwood, Lillie and a third man were rowing down the Thames as planned – but the plan was thwarted when a local man started chatting with the accomplices, believing they were fishermen. By the time they had got rid of him, and allowed time for him to fall asleep, it was too late for them to land and try the escape. Reluctantly deciding not to proceed, the three men started to row away but discovered to their horror that the tide had turned, forcing their boat against piles driven into the riverbed. Their boat capsized but luckily they were rescued. Once they knew their friends had been saved, Arden and Gerard returned to the cell, hoping the warder wouldn’t have noticed the broken bolt.
Nearly being drowned didn’t deter Lillie, who wrote to Gerard the next day saying that “with God’s help we will be back tonight”. Gerard was able to persuade the warder to allow him back to Arden’s cell for a second consecutive night, and before he left his own room he wrote three letters, assuring the authorities that the warder wasn’t complicit in the escape.
This time, things went more smoothly, at least initially. The three rescuers were able to land safely and fix the rope to a stake. The iron ball was thrown without a problem, and the cord attached to the rope. However, well-meaning interference from one of Gerard’s priestly colleagues meant that the rope was much thicker than Gerard had anticipated – Father Garnet had wanted to be certain it could support Gerard’s weight, but it made it much harder to pull it up.
Eventually the double rope was ready, but then they realized that it was stretching almost horizontally between the top of the not particularly tall tower and the stake on the far side. The plan had been to slide down the rope using a combination of gravity and the men’s weight. That wasn’t feasible – they would have to go down hand over hand, and Gerard’s hands had been seriously injured during his torture.
Arden went first, and his weight made the rope even more slack. Gerard therefore had to twist his legs around the rope to make sure he didn’t fall. After three or four yards going face downwards, Gerard’s body swung round under its own weight and he nearly fell. It took him ages to get as far as the middle of the rope, but once he reached it, his strength deserted him. With a great deal of effort he managed to travel nearly as far as the wall, where John Lillie was waiting. Lillie grabbed his legs and pulled him over the wall, then put him safely on the ground.
The original plan had been to pull the rope away from the top of the tower, but in the end they cut it, and allowed half to dangle against the wall of the tower. That was probably wise, as otherwise it would have made a big splash as it fell in the moat, alerting the authorities. After a brief restorative drink, they headed for the boat. After rowing a good distance, they landed, and went into hiding on the outskirts of the city.
Gerard had made sure that Bonner, his warder, was given a chance to flee. Each day, the man had met with Lillie to exchange letters on Gerard’s behalf, and on the morning of the escape, the warder went to the rendezvous as normal. There he was handed a letter that Gerard had written for him, which offered him safety. The warder gratefully accepted the offer, particularly after he learned from a colleague that Sir John Peyton, the Lieutenant of the Tower of London, was searching for him after the escape had been discovered.
The three letters Gerard had left behind were taken to the Privy Council, and although Peyton asked for permission to search the whole of London “and the liberties” for the fugitives, he was told not to bother. “You can’t hope to find him,” Gerard said the Lieutenant was told. “If he has friends who are prepared to do all this for him, you can count on it, they will have no difficulty in finding him horses and a hiding place and keeping him well out of your reach.”
John Gerard stayed in England for some time, continuing his work, but a number of friends of his were implicated in the Gunpowder Plot in November 1605, what Gerard described as an attempt “to remove at a single stroke all their enemies
and the principal enemies of the Catholic cause”. He escaped with the help of the Spanish and Netherlands ambassadors in April 1606, and remained in Europe until his death in 1637.
The Restoration of the Monarchy in 1660, which followed the English Civil War and the rule of the Protectorate under Oliver Cromwell and then his son Richard, saw Colonel John Lambert imprisoned in the Tower. Lambert was a key figure around which the Parliamentarians hoped to rally to prevent the return of Charles Stuart, and his escape was a huge coup. He was helped by some of those who worked there, according to the account of his escape, which comes to us via the famous diarist Samuel Pepys. His diary for April 1660 relates the story, as it had been told to him.
The Royalists had taken control of the Tower in March 1660, and Sir Arthur Hazelrigge and Lambert were sent there. On 12 April, around 8 p.m., Lambert made his escape by sliding down a rope from his window, using a handkerchief on each hand to prevent friction burns. Six of his men were waiting for him and hurried him onto a barge. Meanwhile, in order to give Lambert plenty of time to make a clean getaway, his bed maker got into his bed and put on his nightcap. When the warder came round to lock the door for the night, the curtains were already drawn, and the woman gave a brief reply when the warder wished Lambert a good night’s sleep. The following morning, the warder was horrified to see the woman there: “In the name of God, Joan, what makes you here?” he demanded. “Where is my Lord Lambert?” She told him that Lambert was gone, but she could not tell where. Hardly surprisingly, Joan was incarcerated.
Lambert was free for less than a fortnight: his attempt to foment an uprising collapsed, and he was returned to the Tower on 22 April. He didn’t give up easily: according to one report, after he tried to escape for a second time, he was caught by the sentries on guard and confined in irons. That still didn’t quench his fire: in March 1661, it was reported that he had consulted an astrologer over whether to try to escape or not. As a result, he was transferred to Castle Cornet in Guernsey in November 1661, and then to St Nicholas Island off Plymouth, where he died in 1684.
The other escape from the Tower of London that is regularly cited as one of the most audacious tried from any prison was that of William Maxwell, Fifth Earl of Nithsdale, who was spirited out of the grounds by his wife Winifred, Lady Nithsdale after all her petitions to King and Parliament had come to nothing in the aftermath of the Jacobite rebellion of 1715. As with Father John Gerard’s exploits, a full contemporary account of the escape exists, courtesy of a letter written by Lady Nithsdale to her sister, who was Abbess of the English Augustine nuns at Bruges. This was faithfully reproduced by John Burke in his 1836 history of “the Commoners of Great Britain and Ireland”, and is as detailed as any modern exposé would be.
Following the accession to the throne in 1714 of a Hanoverian Protestant king, George I, there was considerable uprest, and a full-scale uprising in Scotland (known subsequently as The Fifteen). This led to the Battle of Preston in November 1715, at the end of which 1468 Jacobites were taken prisoner, including 463 Englishmen, among them George Seton, Fifth Earl of Winton, and the Earl of Nithsdale. Both noblemen were sentenced to death and sent to the Tower of London.
Three months after the battle, Nithsdale escaped from the Tower. His wife had travelled down from Scotland to be with him, and demonstrated her determination from the start: the roads were blocked with snow, so the stagecoach couldn’t go beyond York. Accompanied by her maid, she therefore rode down on horseback, even though the snow was often deeper than the horses’ waists.
Arriving in London, she wasted no time. She asked to be allowed to visit her husband, but was told that this would only be possible if she agreed to be confined with him. Knowing that that would completely hinder her from organizing either his pardoning or his escape, she refused, but managed to bribe her way into the Tower most days to see him.
Lord Nithsdale was keen that his wife petition the king for him to be pardoned, and even though she thought it would serve no purpose, she agreed. George I wanted nothing to do with her: he ignored her as she entreated him to accept her petition, but she grabbed hold of the skirts of his coat, and was pulled along with him from one state room to the next before one of his servants grabbed her around the waist, and the other removed her hand from the king’s person. As she suspected, even once it had been received, the petition didn’t do any good, and when news of the way George had treated her began to spread, the king’s reputation suffered – and thus made him even less well disposed towards the Nithsdale family.
It quickly became clear to Lady Nithsdale that the king and the lords intended to make an example of her husband, and she tried to make him understand that the only way to avoid the executioner’s axe was to escape from the Tower. Even as she went through the motions of trying to persuade the lords to intercede with the king to pardon the prisoners, she was putting her plan into action.
By the third week of February, she was a regular visitor at the Tower, and on Thursday 22, she came across in the evening, full of bonhomie and cheer, telling the guards that she was there to pass on good news to the prisoners: the lords had agreed to intercede with the king. This was true, to an extent: they had indeed passed such a motion, but with strings attached that Lady Nithsdale knew her husband couldn’t (and shouldn’t) accept.
Lord Nithsdale was scheduled to die on the morning of 24 February. The morning before, Lady Nithsdale made sure that everything was set up to spirit her husband out of the country if she could successfully get him out of the Tower. That evening, she pressed two women into service: the lady with whom she lodged, Mrs Mills, and Hilton, a friend of her servant Evans. The tall and slim Miss Hilton wore two riding hoods on their way into the Tower: the second was to be worn later by Mrs Mills, who, thanks to her advanced pregnancy, was very similar to Lord Nithsdale in stature. The plan was simple: Lord Nithsdale would exit the Tower wearing Mrs Mills’ riding hood, and with any luck, the guards wouldn’t look too closely at the “pregnant woman” leaving.
Lady Nithsdale did her best to ensure the guards were confused. The various women with her came in and out as required to bring the garments in, and Lady Nithsdale addressed them loudly by name. She then adjusted her husband’s appearance, using items which she had brought into the Tower on previous occasions. She painted his eyebrows to match those of Mrs Mills, and gave him a wig of similar-coloured hair. Since he hadn’t shaved, she rouged his cheeks to disguise his facial hair.
Timing was critical. Lady Nithsdale knew full well that her disguise wouldn’t stand up to much examination, so she needed to get her husband past the guards as dusk was falling, but before the candles were lit. As soon as he was ready, she led him out of his room, as he dabbed a handkerchief at his eyes, pretending to be the upset Mrs Mills going off on an errand. She carefully walked in front of him, in case his masculine gait gave away the deception to the guards, and was relieved when she could pass him over to her maid Evans, who was waiting at the foot of the stairs. Evans was supposed to hand him over to Mr Mills, but he panicked when he saw Lord Nithsdale, so Evans used her own judgement and hid the fugitive with some friends.
Meanwhile, Lady Nithsdale had returned to her husband’s cell, apparently waiting for her friend to return after running the errand. She kept up a dialogue with herself, imitating her husband’s voice, then once it became clear that Evans and Lord Nithsdale had got away, she stood in the doorway of the cell and said loudly that she would have to go and sort out the situation that had arisen, but hopefully would return to see him later that evening. She did her best to ensure that the escape wouldn’t be noticed by pulling the string of the latch through so the door could only be opened from the inside, and told her husband’s servant not to disturb him until he called.
Lady Nithsdale then went by a roundabout route to the house of her friend, the Duchess of Montrose (her description of using coaches and hired sedan chairs to throw people off her scent could come from a spy thriller) to find out what the reaction to the esc
ape was. King George was understandably furious but Lady Nithsdale couldn’t care – she was reunited with her husband in a small attic room where they stayed until he could be smuggled out by the Venetian Ambassador. She then stayed in England until she had an opportunity to sort out her affairs, so her son wouldn’t suffer, making a perilous trek up to Scotland to retrieve various papers from her home.
This added insult to injury as far as the king was concerned. He issued orders to have her arrested, claiming that she “had given him more trouble and anxiety than any other woman in Europe”. Realizing that she had pushed things as far as she dared, Lady Nithsdale departed for Europe. She and her husband lived in poverty in Rome at the court of the Stuart Pretender for the rest of their lives.
George Seton, Fifth Earl of Winton, apparently also escaped from the Tower, although he is not included in the list of escapees in the Tower’s official records. According to Sir Walter Scott, he “made good use of his mechanical skill, sawing through with great ingenuity the bars of the windows of his prison, through which he made his escape”. He too ended up in Rome.
The most recent “escape” was perhaps the most casual. According to the report in the Evening Post in 1919, a subaltern imprisoned there told a court martial that he simply walked out one evening and went to the West End of London for a good dinner. However, when he returned to the Tower, the gates were shut, so he came back the next morning. “It was not done in the Jack Sheppard kind of way,” the officer’s solicitor told the court, “but was a boyish prank. Moreover it was of benefit to the authorities by calling attention to the slackness there.”
Maybe it was a good thing that the Tower ceased to be used as a prison shortly afterwards!
Sources:
Gower, Ronald Charles Sutherland: The Tower of London volume 2 (George Bell, 1901, scanned by Forgotten Books)
Farr, David: John Lambert, Parliamentary Soldier and Cromwellian Major-General, 1619-1684 (Boydell Press, 2003)