Tower: An Epic History of the Tower of London

by Jones, Nigel

  Monday morning dawned dank and misty. It was an early start for the members of the Privy Council who had been summoned as official witnesses to the execution. They arrived by river and, dressed in fur-lined gowns against the cold, took their places on the wooden benches surrounding the black-draped scaffold to the north of the White Tower. It was the same structure on which Anne Boleyn had died, as if Henry had left it standing with the knowledge that he would kill another queen there some day. A group of more humble spectators, with connections to the condemned woman, were allowed in through the Tower’s landward entrance to see the spectacle. One of these, a confectioner named Otwell Johnson, who had supplied dainties and sweetmeats to the queen, left us the only eye-witness account of the proceedings, in a letter written soon afterwards to his brother.

  At 7 a.m., Gage rapped on the door of Katherine’s chamber. The victim was ready to be offered up. Dressed in black velvet, with a cloak covering her gown, Katherine and her ladies were led down to the Inner Ward and around the corner of the White Tower to the scaffold. The spectators were not as numerous as the crowd which had seen Anne Boleyn die, and watched in silence as the tiny figure mounted the scaffold and tipped the masked headsman who knelt to ask her forgiveness. Katherine’s speech from the scaffold, as noted by Johnson, was equally traditional. She had finally mastered her fears and met death with dignity.

  In Johnson’s account, there is no mention of the legend that Katherine said that she died a queen, but would rather have died ‘the wife of Thomas Culpeper’. Instead, he said, she made a conventional affirmation that her death was a just punishment for her ‘heinous offences’ against God and the king. She concluded by asking people to pray for Henry – and for herself – before allowing her ladies to bandage her eyes and shut out the light for the last time. She knelt in the straw and laid her head on the block as she had practised the night before. The executioner severed her neck with a single stroke, holding it up by her auburn hair with the cry, ‘Behold the head of a traitor!’

  As Katherine’s head and body were bundled up in a black shroud by her weeping ladies, ready to be taken away for burial next to her cousin Anne in St Peter’s chapel, Lady Rochford was brought to the scaffold in her turn. When Katherine’s blood was sluiced away with buckets of water, and fresh straw strewn, the grim ritual was repeated for the woman who had helped condemn her. Jane Rochford too admitted her offences and declared her death to be just and merited. She too exhorted her audience to treat her death as an awful example and amend their own sins. She too knelt in the damp straw and received her death in a single stroke. Otwell Johnson was mightily impressed by the grace shown by the two women in death. ‘Their souls are with God,’ he told his brother. ‘For they made the most Godly and Christian end that ever was heard tell of (I think) since the world’s creation.’

  One of those who had watched Katherine Howard’s end – as he had observed that of his other cousin, Anne Boleyn – was the Duke of Norfolk’s son and heir, Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey. He was the great white hope of his ambitious, grasping family. Dashing, daring, good-looking, impetuous – a man who combined love of the arts with the talents of a warrior – Surrey was a gifted poet who reputedly introduced the sonnet form from the Italian into English verse. A crony and drinking buddy of his fellow poet Sir Thomas Wyatt, Surrey shared the driving ambition that was his dynasty’s defining characteristic. Unlike his despicable father, however, he lacked the sycophantic skills necessary to survive in Henry’s murderous court. And his recklessness would finally bring the old duke to the Tower – and himself to the scaffold.

  The downfall of Katherine Howard dealt a severe blow to the Howard family’s hopes of controlling the king and the succession. It had not, however, utterly destroyed them. The final years of Henry’s reign were dominated by the see-saw struggle between the radical Protestants and conservative Catholics, led politically by Norfolk, and theologically by Stephen Gardiner, the hard-line Bishop of Winchester, a cleric with a nose like a buzzard’s beak, and a penchant for burning heretics whenever he could smell them out.

  The Protestants, under the guidance of the deceptively mild-mannered Thomas Cranmer, Archbishop of Canterbury, included a cluster of thrusting new men who, while not particularly devout themselves, were happy to ride the wave of the Reformation to propel themselves into power. The reformers included the uncles of Henry’s heir, Prince Edward, brothers of the late queen, Jane Seymour: Edward Seymour, Earl of Hertford, and his even more ambitious younger brother Thomas Seymour. Allied with the Seymours was John Dudley, Lord Lisle, son of Edmund Dudley, the grasping finance minister whose execution had been one of the first acts of Henry’s reign; and the king’s fixer, Sir Anthony Denny, a secretary of state who controlled access to the monarch.

  The balance of power on the council between Catholic conservatives and Protestant reformers was held by men like Thomas Wriothesley and Richard Rich – ambitious, time-serving opportunists, who while officially orthodox Catholics, were happy to swing with whichever wind was blowing, so long as it kept them in wealth and power. Unlike Norfolk, Surrey, the Seymours and Dudley, these men’s visits to the Tower were confined to their official duties as interrogators and torturers, and they both died in their beds and kept their heads.

  The two rival factions waged a constant proxy war on each other by making martyrs out of the fervent followers of their faiths from lower social stations. Their hope was that these humble folk would implicate their co-religionists in more influential positions. The Tower was thus often crowded with prisoners whose only crime was too loud a proclamation of their faith, or those who had stubbornly clung to doctrines that had passed out of favour. During the king’s divorce from Katherine of Aragon, the dissolution of the monasteries, and the Pilgrimage of Grace, the full weight of official persecution had fallen heaviest on Catholic monks, friars and priests. After the fall of Cromwell, it was Protestant heretics who suffered torture and death – often the agonising deaths of burning at the stake. And even after the execution of Katherine Howard and the decline of her family, it took the death of the king and the advent of his staunchly Protestant young son, Edward VI, before the wind shifted definitely towards reform once more.

  Though he had displaced the Pope as head of the Church and dissolved the religious houses, Henry remained a doctrinal conservative. Even after the reformers on the council, taking a leaf from the Howards’ book, had succeeded in engineering Henry’s sixth marriage in 1543 – to one of their number, Thomas Seymour’s mistress, a Cumbrian widow named Catherine Parr – Protestants continued to be persecuted, although the kindly Catherine did what she could to ameliorate their suffering. One martyr she was unable to save was a fellow north country gentlewoman, Anne Askew.

  Askew, a feisty young woman in her early twenties, was a sixteenth-century proto-feminist, who had embraced Protestant doctrines and been thrown out of her Lincolnshire home by her husband, Thomas Kyme, for her hot gospelling. Coming to London, she had drawn unwelcome attention by her Protestant preaching. In the chauvinist eyes of the Church, to quote Samuel Johnson, witnessing a woman preacher was like seeing a dog walking on its hind legs. ‘It is not done well, but you are surprised to see it done at all.’ Being a Protestant was bad enough, but being a young and beautiful woman preacher was a near obscene sacrilege.

  Askew was repeatedly arrested, sent back to her husband, and, when she returned to London, put in the Tower on charges of heresy. Specifically, she had denied the ‘Real Presence’ – the Catholic dogma that the consecrated wafers and wine consumed during Mass miraculously constituted the actual body and blood of Christ. Anne held that ‘God made man, but that man can make God I never yet read’. Hearing rumours that this bold Protestant had contacts with the court circle surrounding the new queen, the council’s Catholics resolved to extract such incriminating information from Anne by force. In this way, they could bring down their reforming rivals along with their royal patron. They decided to do what had never been done before
– to torture a woman in the Tower.

  The dirty work was entrusted to the kingdom’s highest-ranking legal officials, the Lord Chancellor, Sir Thomas Wriothesley, and his sidekick, the Solicitor General, Sir Richard Rich, assisted by the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Sir John Baker. Anne, in the brief interval between her torture and her barbaric execution, was able to write and smuggle out of the Tower her own vivid testimony of Tudor torture. Brought from her cell to the gloomy cellars beneath the White Tower on 29 June 1546, she was confronted by her high-ranking inquisitors, who bombarded her with questions about her links with Queen Catherine’s court – including comforts she had received in the Tower from the wives of the leading council reformers, Sir Anthony Denny and Edward Seymour, Earl of Hertford.

  Frustrated by her non-committal answers, Wriothesley and Rich sent for the Tower’s lieutenant, Sir Anthony Knyvett, who was normally responsible for operating the rack on recalcitrant captives. Pointing out that it was unheard of to torture a woman, a distinctly unhappy Knyvett was overawed by his superiors, and ordered Anne – dressed only in a skimpy shift – to be roped to the fearful torture machine. Knyvett told his torturers to go easy on their victim, inflicting ‘just a pinch’ as a taster of the terrible torments that the rack could deliver. When this mild introduction failed to persuade Anne to be more forthcoming, Wriothesley and Rich ordered Knyvett to use the rack to its fullest extent. The lieutenant refused.

  At that, the two officials shouldered the sweating torturers aside, and throwing off their expensive gowns, flung themselves on the machine’s cranks. The rack’s rollers revolved, and its creaking ropes tautened, lifting Anne’s straining body from the wooden frame of the machine into the air, as her limbs were agonisingly drawn from their sockets. Her desperate screams rent the room, penetrating the White Tower’s ancient walls and the muffling earth itself, until she was heard by Lady Knyvett and her daughter, who were strolling in the Tower’s garden. Anne’s mind must have been a red mist of pain as her muscles tore and her sinews cracked, but still the questions kept coming.

  She wrote a few days later, ‘Because I confessed no ladies and gentlewomen to be of my opinion, they kept me [on the rack] a long time. And because I lay still and did not cry [again] my Lord Chancellor [Wriothesley] and Master Rich took pains to rack me with their own hands till I was nigh dead.’ We cannot exclude the strong possibility that Wriothesley and Rich were exceeding their usual official duties because they obtained sexual satisfaction in sadistically torturing a near naked and attractive young woman. At any rate, it was at this point that Knyvett protested again and insisted that the torment be halted.

  The ropes relaxed, Anne was untied, and collapsed, fainting, on the cold floor. They threw a bucket of water over her and then Wriothesley stretched himself beside her and for two hours grilled her, in her words, ‘with many flattering words, persuading me to leave my opinion. But my Lord God gave me grace to persevere and will do – I hope – to the very end.’ That end was not long in coming. A fortnight after her ordeal, Anne was carried – the rack had left her unable to walk – to Smithfield, the traditional site for the incineration of heretics. Here she was placed astride a stool chained to the stake and faggots were piled around her. As a last gesture of mercy before the fire was lit, her executioners hung a small bag of gunpowder around her neck, which exploded and killed her as the flames licked around her. Burned alongside Anne was John Lascelles, the Protestant who had first brought news of Katherine Howard’s adultery to Archbishop Cranmer. The Howards were taking a belated revenge.

  The torture and burning of Anne Askew was more than the elimination of an uppity heretic woman. It was part of a Catholic conspiracy aimed at destroying the queen herself and ending the hold of the reformers on the now clearly moribund Henry. In early July 1546, between Anne’s torture session in the Tower and her execution at Smithfield, Henry was persuaded to sign a warrant for the arrest of his sixth wife. Terrified, and only too mindful of the fates of Anne Boleyn and Katherine Howard before her, Catherine threw herself on Henry’s mercy and played the role of what she called ‘a poor silly woman’ unable to form judgements on matters of religion and eager to defer in this, as in all things, to her husband. Somewhat lamely, she suggested that she had only discussed her Protestant opinions with Henry as a way of distracting his attention from his mounting maladies.

  Magnanimously, Henry forgave the queen, but forgot to tell Wriothesley – who had been tasked with arresting Catherine and escorting her to the Tower – of his change of heart. The next night the king was sitting with the soothing woman he called ‘Sweet Kate’ when the Lord Chancellor entered with forty halberdiers and tramped menacingly towards the queen, whose heart must have leapt in fear.

  Enraged, Henry heaved his great bulk from the throne and boxed the hapless official’s ears, calling him a ‘knave and fool’. Sent on his way, Wriothesley’s humiliation marked the moment when the tide turned against the Catholic faction.

  Deftly, the reformers Anthony Denny and John Dudley had eased themselves into key positions on the council and managed to exclude Bishop Gardiner from court altogether – Dudley even cuffing the cleric in the face as a mark of his contempt. Then it was the turn of the Howards. The family’s weakest link was not the old Duke of Norfolk – who over a lifetime of grovelling had honed his survival skills to a fine art – but his impetuous son, the Earl of Surrey.

  This troubled and troublesome young man had got into hot water a number of times. He was a notorious drunken brawler: a noble yob as well as a social snob. His rowdy exploits included duelling and a drunken binge in which he and his fellow poet Sir Thomas Wyatt had fired pebbles from crossbows, breaking the windows of respectable London citizens and disrupting the trade of prostitutes touting for business in London’s red-light district of Southwark. Such behaviour had landed Surrey in prison more than once, but his contrition, often expressed in verse, had soon got him out again. He was a particular favourite of the king, who called him a ‘foolish, proud boy’. Surrey’s luck had held – until now.

  His violent ways had, however, made a mortal enemy of one of the men who now dominated the council – Edward Seymour, Earl of Hertford. The feud had started when Surrey had struck Seymour in the face for suggesting that this scion of a traditionalist Catholic family sympathised with the Pilgrimage of Grace rebellion. Surrey had found himself in the Fleet prison, and although soon out again, he and Seymour remained at daggers drawn.

  The rivalry came to a head in December 1546 in the final crisis of Henry’s reign. Knowing that the monarch was dying, the Seymours played on the king’s fears surrounding the succession and his precious Tudor line. They suggested that the Howards wanted to place the robust young Surrey on the throne in place of Henry’s son, the sickly Prince Edward. As evidence of this intention, they whispered, Surrey – who was indeed descended from royalty via both his parents – had had a coat of arms drawn up in which King Edward the Confessor’s arms had been quartered with his own. This little piece of heraldic snobbery would now be Surrey’s death warrant.

  Surrey was discreetly arrested by Sir Anthony Wingfield, the same captain of the guard who had carried out the detention of Cromwell. Knowing of Surrey’s violent temper, Wingfield tricked him. Pretending that he had a request for Surrey to relay to his father, the Duke of Norfolk, Wingfield led the earl to a quiet corridor in the Palace of Westminster where a dozen burly halberdiers pounced and bundled him into a boat. After initial interrogation at Ely Place, Wriothesley’s house in Holborn, Surrey was taken to the Tower on Sunday 12 December. As he was led through the gawping crowds, his father, the Duke of Norfolk, joined him. Stripped of the Order of the Garter and his badge of office, the white staff of the Lord Treasurer, the seventy-three-year-old duke was almost apoplectic with indignation to find himself in the dread place where he had sent so many others. Sychophantically he told anyone who would listen that he was the king’s most loyal subject.

  Such ‘loyalty’ cut no ice with the mon
strous king when the succession of his dearly conceived son was at stake. His first act on getting the Howards safely in the Tower was to strip their estates. Commissioners were sent on a dawn raid to the Howard lands in East Anglia where anything transportable – tapestries, clothing, gold and silver plate – was catalogued, strapped into chests and heaved onto carts for transfer to the royal coffers. Even the duke’s mistress, Elizabeth Holland, was stripped of gold buttons, pearl necklaces and the very rings from her fingers, before being interrogated on any treasonable pillow talk that the duke had indulged in.

  At the Tower, once lodged in Constable Sir John Gage’s chambers, Norfolk put quill to paper and penned a grovelling appeal to his master. Protesting that a ‘great enemy’ must have been telling lies about him, Norfolk demonstrated his usual crawling ignominy. He offered to dump his faith if that would save his skin, telling Henry, ‘I shall stick to whatever laws you make’ and claiming that he would rather shed twenty lives than give the Pope ‘any power in this realm’.

  In a stream of letters to the king and council, Norfolk plumbed the very dregs of degradation as he listed those unfortunates who he had hounded to their deaths – not least members of his own family – as proof of his own limitless loyalty. Over at St Thomas’s Tower, where Surrey was being held, the young poet adopted a more literary style of protest, writing verse letters inveighing against the false friends who had landed him in his plight:

  It was a friendly foe, by shadow of good will

  Mine old … dear friend, my guide that trapped me;

  Where I was wont to fetch the cure of all my care,

  And in his bosom hide my secret zeal to God.

  As aristocrats, the Howards had an easier time in the Tower than most state prisoners. The accounts of the lieutenant, Sir Anthony Knyvett, give a glimpse of the luxuries available to the VIP prisoners. They record that Norfolk spent the vast sum of £210 (almost £60,000 today) on comforts – including coal and candles – for himself and his attendants during the first two months of his detention. Surrey slept on a feather bed with two pillows, a pair of fustian blankets and a quilt. Five fine tapestries were hung on his cell walls to keep out the river’s clammy chill, and a coal fire was kept constantly blazing. When not penning pretty verses to his friends, the young poet passed his time in writing free translations of the Psalms, a suitably spiritual endeavour for a man about to make the journey into eternity.