Tower: An Epic History of the Tower of London

by Jones, Nigel

  The next king, whoever he had been, would have seemed an improvement on grim and grasping Henry, but the fact that the eighteen-year-old Henry VIII appeared a Renaissance man personified only added to the general joy at his accession. Not yet showing the gross obesity of his maturity, young Henry had the imposing height and physique of his grandfather Edward IV. The golden-haired youth radiated a confidence and learning beyond his years. Originally intended for the Church, he was well versed in theology; he was also fluent in Latin and French, enjoyed swordplay and jousting, could sing and dance well, played a variety of instruments, and even composed music and songs. Flattering foreign diplomats compared him with the sun and moon in their swooning first reports on the glamorous new king.

  Within hours of succeeding to the Crown, however, Henry made a dramatic move that, while popular with his subjects, demonstrated his ruthless savagery that would become more and more apparent as his sensibility coarsened and his cruelty increased. The leading lights in his father’s council were the lawyers Edmund Dudley and Sir Richard Empson. The late king had used their legal skills to squeeze cash from his subjects. By such dubious methods as charging wealthy people with imaginary crimes, then dropping the proceedings on reception of a hefty bribe, they had diverted the vast sum of almost £5 million into their master’s coffers.

  Such extortions had not made them popular, and when Empson and Dudley realised that Henry was on his deathbed they had gathered their few friends around them to discuss their future. It was to be short. The day after Henry wheezed his last, the new king, en route by barge to the Tower for the traditional pre-coronation ceremonies, gave orders for the immediate arrest of the two hated ministers. They were flung into the Tower’s cells. Unable to kill his victims for merely doing their jobs too zealously, Henry trumped up a capital charge. Using the excuse of the gatherings at their houses as his father lay dying, Henry accused the pair of having treasonably attempted to block his accession and assassinate him.

  After an unsuccessful attempt to escape from the Tower, Dudley tried to worm his way back into royal favour by writing a treatise in his Tower cell, The Tree of Commonwealth. This early example of the considerable body of literature produced in the fortress hovered between shameless fawning – it was dedicated to Henry – and sound, pragmatic advice. It extolled the benefits of monarchy, counselled the king to rule firmly, but advised him to temper justice with mercy. All Dudley’s literary labour was in vain. After sixteen months of imprisonment the stone-hearted monarch had him and Empson executed in August 1510. Nor would Dudley be the last member of his family to suffer imprisonment and execution at the Tower. Astonishingly, both his son John, Duke of Northumberland, and his grandson Lord Guildford Dudley, would share his fate at the hands of Henry’s daughter, Queen Mary, for their abortive attempt to place Guildford’s wife Lady Jane Grey – another Tower victim – on the throne.

  Among the survival skills Henry VIII had inherited from his father was a healthy fear of reviving the ruinous Roses wars. This meant that anyone representing the dormant hopes of the House of York had to be neutralised or eliminated. William de la Pole, a scion of the family named as heirs by Richard III, spent a record thirty-eight years until his death imprisoned in the Tower solely because of his Yorkist blood. Even so, he was more fortunate than his elder brother Edmund, Earl of Suffolk, who had fled into exile near Calais to be sheltered by Sir James Tyrell, killer of the little princes. Returned to England, Edmund spent the best part of a decade locked up with his brother in the Tower. But Henry decided to do away with this relic of the Yorkist cause before departing on his first visit abroad as king. Almost casually, Henry gave orders for de la Pole to be beheaded on Tower Hill in April 1513.

  As was customary for a new reign, Henry had had the Tower refurbished for the joint coronation of himself and Katherine, marking the event with four decorative ‘caps’ – still there today – on the corner turrets of the White Tower; and having the halls of the royal palace hung with the Tudor colours of red, white and green. He arrayed a battery of modern cannon on the Tower’s riverside wharf to boom out a salute to his greater glory. On 22 June, the eve of the coronation, Henry created twenty-six Knights of the Bath; mostly his own cronies and contemporaries, who were ritually purified, bathed and shaved according to the ancient custom before serving the king at dinner and spending the pre-coronation night in prayer in St John’s Chapel.

  As the royal couple rode from the Tower to Westminster the following day, fountains and conduits spurted free wine for Londoners to toast the health of the newly wed monarchs. Henry rode bare-headed, his golden hair glowing in the summer sun, clad in a scarlet velvet robe and a gold tunic set with diamonds, rubies, pearls and emeralds. Behind him the queen sat in a litter drawn by two white palfreys. Katherine herself, ‘beautiful and godly to behold’, was dressed in white satin with her dark hair hanging loose down her back, surmounted by a gold coronet spangled with precious stones.

  Alas, the union which had begun in such shining splendour was not destined to prosper. Katherine – five years older than her youthful husband – gave birth to children who either were stillborn or died soon after their births. The only surviving child, born in 1516, Mary, was a girl rather than the longed-for male heir. As Henry had one healthy son, Henry Fitzroy, with his mistress Bessie Blount, he knew that any fault in fertility did not lie with him, and professed to believe that his marriage was cursed by God. He pointed to a verse in Leviticus in the Old Testament forbidding a man to lie with his dead brother’s wife. By 1525, Katherine’s childbearing days were done, and her husband began to look elsewhere. To secure the all-important continuation of his house, he decided, he would have to put Katherine aside and marry again.

  Henry’s desire for divorce became urgent when the king’s lust was added to reasons of state. Around 1526 Henry became deeply infatuated with Anne Boleyn, a raven-haired, dark-eyed, sharp-featured teenager whose high intelligence and cheeky vivacity whetted the king’s desire. The king had already made Anne’s elder sister, Mary, his mistress and assumed that Anne would fill the same position in her turn. Anne, however, played for higher stakes. A confident and calculating young woman whose education in the Netherlands and France had steeped her in the advanced ideas of the Protestant Reformation, Anne was not overawed by her royal suitor, whom she had known from an early age both at court – where she became a maid of honour to the queen – and during Henry’s visits to the Boleyn family home at Hever Castle in Kent.

  Encouraged by her ambitious father, Thomas Boleyn, and by her maternal uncle Thomas Howard, Duke of Norfolk, Anne set her sights on becoming queen. As her besotted childhood friend and Kentish neighbour, the poet Sir Thomas Wyatt – who would share her imprisonment in the Tower – wrote:

  There is written her fair neck about

  Noli me tangere; for Caesar’s I am

  And wild for to hold though I seem tame.

  The long political dominance of Henry’s chief minister, Cardinal Thomas Wolsey, ended with his failure to secure an increasingly impatient Henry a marriage annulment from Rome. He fell in 1529 (he would have died in the Tower had he not died en route there at Leicester Abbey instead), paving the way for the rise of his former secretary, Thomas Cromwell. A humbly born man like Wolsey, Cromwell rose to the top by hard work and administrative ability. It was he who restored the royal coffers by dissolving England’s monasteries and taking the accumulated wealth of the Church into the Crown’s hands (as well as his own).

  If Thomas Cromwell managed the political side of the king’s ‘great matter’ – as his search for a way out of the marriage was discreetly known – with ruthless ease, it was Thomas Cranmer who masterminded the theology of the English Reformation. Cranmer first came to prominence as one of the radical Cambridge theologians who drank in the bold new Protestant doctrines preached in Germany by Martin Luther. Rising to be chaplain to Anne Boleyn, Cranmer commended himself to Henry by suggesting that the king should ask English churchmen rather t
han Rome whether he could divorce Katherine and marry Anne. Tired of the Pope’s endless prevarications, Henry delightedly exclaimed, ‘He hath the right sow by the ear,’ and followed Cranmer’s advice. He would do the same for the rest of his reign.

  Between them, Cromwell and Cranmer carried through a very English Reformation. The king replaced the Pope as head of an English Church still broadly Catholic in its rituals. And the monasteries and other houses of religion were dissolved and had their assets seized by the state. By 1532, as Parliament began to levy the first fines and penalties on a Church reluctant to acknowledge Henry as its supreme head, Sir Thomas More resigned as Lord Chancellor, proving that his Catholic conscience was stronger than his worldly ambition. In January 1533 Cranmer secretly married Henry to Anne, who was already pregnant with the future Elizabeth I. In April Cranmer presided over a Church court that pronounced Henry’s marriage to Katherine null and void, and a fortnight later Anne was taken to the Tower for the traditional vigil preceding her coronation. More snubbed the king by refusing his personal invitation (and a £20 bribe to buy himself new clothes) to attend the event.

  Henry spared no expense in his lavish display of pride in his new wife. Cocking a snook at those who rejected Anne as an adventuress and harlot, he ostentatiously greeted his pregnant bride with a smacking public kiss when she arrived at the Tower’s wharf by barge from Greenwich for her coronation at Whitsun 1533. That night the usual score of Knights of the Bath were created and knelt in homage before the new queen. The following day, the coronation procession from the Tower to Westminster rivalled in magnificence anything that even that well-trodden route had ever seen.

  Through streets lined at Henry’s command with silk banners, gorgeous tapestries and hangings of crimson and cloth of gold, Anne rode in a carriage decked in damask. The queen was seated beneath a golden awning tinkling with bells, and wore a scarlet coronation robe glittering with jewels. Her slender neck, destined to be severed in just three years, was decorated with a necklace of pearls, ‘each larger than big chick-peas and diamonds of great value’. Her mane of black hair which had so enchanted Henry had been unpinned and fell about her hips. The fountains ran red with free wine and the coronation parade was headed by foreign ambassadors from France and Venice (the Spanish ambassador, like More, had boycotted the event) along with England’s great and good, including the Archbishops of Canterbury and York, London’s lord mayor and most of the peerage. It was an impressive display of Henry’s power to bend a reluctant populace to his will. But how capricious that will was to prove, the new queen would shortly discover.

  Almost exactly a year later, on 17 April 1534, the Tower would play host to a very different guest. The king’s patience with Thomas More’s refusal to take the oath acknowledging him as Supreme Head of the Church – now required of every subject – had finally run out. Henry – urged on by a vengeful Anne – ordered his fallen servant taken to the Tower. He was conveyed by river from his Chelsea home by Thomas Cromwell’s nephew Richard. More’s fallen status was brought dramatically home to him when, on arriving at the Tower, he was asked to give up the heavy gold chain bearing the Tudor rose that he wore so proudly in his famous Holbein portrait. He was also required to surrender his costly fur gown as a ‘fee’ to the grasping boatman.

  More was confined to the ground floor of the Bell Tower, a high vaulted chamber just inside the Tower’s main gateway, and the conditions of his imprisonment were not severe to begin with – although he had to write his first letters with a piece of charcoal until he was given pen and ink. The king evidently still hoped that a taste of the Tower would bring More to heel. He was allowed to keep his illiterate servant John Wood, although Wood was ordered to report any treasonable remarks made by his master. As a distinguished state prisoner More was permitted to enjoy the ‘liberties’ of the Tower, taking a daily stroll in the fortress’s gardens. More importantly to him, he was also allowed to attend Mass daily in the Tower’s chapel, and receive visits from his family, including his favourite daughter Margaret, who urged him to swear the oath as she and the rest of the family had all done. But More’s stubborn – or saintly – streak remained firm. Though tempted, he refused to yield.

  More’s initial confinement may not have been cruel, by the Tower’s grim standards, but it was certainly austere. His cell was about nineteen feet across, with walls thirteen feet thick, illuminated by a few slit windows. The hard earth floor was strewn with rushes and the prisoner slept on a thin straw pallet bed. A rough wooden table and chair completed the sparse furnishings. Situated only a few yards from the river, the Bell Tower was particularly susceptible to damp; and although More had the walls hung with straw mats to counter the chill and used a small brick stove, the cold was penetrating, even in the spring and summer. The gloomy atmosphere, with water constantly dripping down the dank walls and the slit windows providing the only light, apart from a guttering tallow candle, hit More’s health hard. An old man at fifty-seven, he complained of chest aches and leg cramps. His hair and the beard which he refused to cut turned white. Tormented by such bodily pains, he suffered far worse from the pangs of a tortured conscience.

  More spent long sleepless nights wrestling with insomnia partly prompted by guilt over the suffering he was bringing on his family. His letters from the Tower are among the most moving documents ever penned from the fortress. Always of a sado-masochistic temperament, More habitually wore a hair shirt crawling with lice to mortify his flesh; and as Lord Chancellor had delighted both in witnessing the torture of Protestant heretics, and in getting his daughter to flog him, allegedly for spiritual purposes. Now, as he flagellated himself in his cell, his imagination dwelt on the tortures awaiting him in the Tower’s dungeons if he persisted in his obstinacy. He found, he wrote, ‘my fleshe much more shrinkinge from payne and from death, than me thought it the part of a faithfull Christian man’. Nonetheless he strove to comfort his family, bidding them, ‘Make you all merry in the hope of heaven.’

  More put the tedious hours to literary and spiritual use, writing a devotional meditation on the Passion of Christ and, tellingly, A Dialogue of Comfort Against Tribulation. The tone of the Dialogue is a martyr’s resigned fortitude. As he meditates on the ‘four last things’ – death, judgement, heaven and hell – More concludes that only one final task remains to him: to make a good end of his life, forsaking earthly ties and temptations, and resigning himself to the infinite mercy of God.

  The authorities left More under no illusion as to his fate, making him watch a group of four Carthusian monks who had also refused to swear the oath going to their deaths from the Tower – where they had been held in fetters making it impossible for them to lie down or move – in May 1535. More’s only reaction was regret that he had not followed the religious vocation himself. Watching the Carthusians leaving the Tower en route to Tyburn, More remarked to his daughter Margaret that they went to their deaths ‘as cheerfully as bridegrooms to their marriage’.

  More knew that his own earthly journey was nearing its end and claimed to be glad of it. He told a fellow Tower prisoner, Dr Nicholas Wilson, a priest who had been chaplain to the king, ‘I have since I came to the Tower looked once or twice to have given up my ghost before this, and in good faith mine heart waxed the lighter in hope thereof.’ The devout Wilson was not made of the same stern stuff as More, since he finally submitted to the oath in 1537 after three years in the Tower.

  A few days after he had watched the monks going so cheerfully to their doom, More was summoned to a meeting of the Privy Council held in the Tower under Thomas Cromwell’s chairmanship. Still trying to break his resistance with kindness, they invited More – a former councillor – to sit with them. Stiffly aloof, he stood to give one of the greatest speeches in defence of the individual human conscience ever delivered, in words that rang to the Tower’s ancient rafters:

  ‘I am the king’s true, faithful subject … and daily pray for his Highness and all the realm. I do nobody harm. I say none
harm. I think none harm, but wish everybody good. And if this be not enough to keep a man alive, in good faith I long not to live. And I am dying already, and I have since I came here, been several times in the case that I thought to die within one hour, and I thank our Lord I was never sorry for it but rather sorry when the pang had passed. And therefore my poor body is at the king’s pleasure. Would God my death might do him some good.’

  The presence near More of another prisoner jailed on the same charge of refusing the oath gave him great comfort. John Fisher, the aged Bishop of Rochester, had been confessor to the king’s grandmother, Margaret Beaufort, but neither this connection nor his eighty years mollified Henry’s wrath when Fisher became the only English bishop to refuse the oath. A straight-talking Yorkshireman, Fisher scorned, unlike More, to take refuge in hair-splitting legalese. Fisher occupied the cell above More in the Bell Tower, but his imprisonment was even harsher than More’s, since the old man shivered on a thin straw mattress on the cold floor with no other furnishing. Often deprived of food for a day at a time, he suffered bitterly in the harsh winter of 1534–5, writing pathetically to Cromwell:

  I have neither shirt nor suit, nor yett other clothes … but that be ragged and rent so shamefully. Notwithstanding I might easily suffer that, if they would keep my body warm. But my diet also, God knoweth how slender it is at any tymes, and now in mine age my stomach may not away but with a few kinds of meats, which if I want [lack] I decay forthwith and fall into coughs and diseases.