Tower: An Epic History of the Tower of London

by Jones, Nigel

  Surrey’s mind was not yet entirely fixed on the hereafter, however. As the gravity of his situation dawned on him, he made a desperate attempt to escape. He was aided by his manservant, Martin, one of two attendants he was allowed in the Tower. Martin smuggled a dagger in to his master, hidden in his breeches. He was instructed to descend to nearby St Katherine’s dock, hire a boat and await his earl, who hoped to be with him by midnight. Surrey had carefully observed his chambers, which had been refurbished for the coronation of Anne Boleyn – when the latest mod con, a latrine, had been installed.

  Surrey had noted that the waste shaft running down from the privy emptied directly into the river beneath – except at low tide. After dark, it would, he worked out, be possible for a thin man such as himself to squeeze into this evil-smelling exit, clamber down inside it, drop unseen into the soft sludge below, rejoin Martin and sail away to freedom. He would use the dagger, if necessary, to kill the two warders posted to keep an eye on him.

  When the long winter evening drew in, the earl put his plan into action. He complained of feeling ill, and said he would turn in for an early night. The guards reassured him that they would not disturb him before midnight. Doubtless relieved of being spared the need to kill them, Surrey later crept from his bed and checked that the river was low. Shortly before midnight, he removed the latrine lid and saw that there was only about two feet of water at the bottom of the shaft. He scrambled in and began to climb down the slippery, smelly tube.

  But he had left it just a little too late. At that moment, the guards returned and saw at once that his bed was empty. Storming into the closet, one warder reached down and grabbed the earl by the arm, hauling him back into the room. The other guard shouted for help, and more warders ran to their aid, restrained the struggling Surrey, and shackled his feet with manacles. Outside the Tower, hearing the hue and cry, Martin made himself scarce – along with the money that his master had given him to hire the boat.

  On 13 January, a cold winter’s day, Surrey, elegantly dressed in a satin cloak trimmed with rabbit’s fur lent him by the compassionate Knyvett, was led from the Tower to the Guildhall for his trial. The day before, his treacherous father had put the cherry on the cake of his son’s fate by signing a confession of high treason that implicated Surrey in the quartering of the royal arms. Since there was no argument that Surrey had commissioned the arms in question, and since the king had pronounced this to be treason, the duke’s confession was tantamount to signing his own son’s death warrant, and there was little for the jury to argue over. Yet when the inevitable ‘Guilty’ verdict was returned, and an axe’s blade was turned towards Surrey, the proud earl could not resist one last, indignant outburst. ‘Of what have you found me guilty?’ he demanded. ‘Surely you will find no law that justifies you, but I know the king wants to get rid of the noble blood around him and to employ none but low people.’

  Despite this public outburst, so typical of Surrey’s fiercely snobbish but fearless spirit, Henry rescinded the savage sentence of hanging, drawing and quartering at Tyburn, and substituted decapitation on Tower Hill. A week after his trial Surrey was led from his cell and climbed the slope to the scaffold. Among the papers left in his cell was a poem of stoic resignation, coupled with an irrepressible cry of rage against the ‘wretches’ who had laid him low. It began:

  These storms are past, these clouds are over blown

  And humble cheer great rigour hath repressed;

  For the default is set a pain foreknown,

  And patience graft in a determined breast.

  And ended:

  But when my glass presented unto me

  The cureless wound that bleedeth day and night

  To think alas such hap [luck] should granted be

  Unto a wretch that hath no heart to fight

  To spill that blood that hath so oft been shed

  For Britain’s sake, alas, and now is dead.

  A week after Surrey’s execution, on 27 January, the act of attainder against his father passed, clearing the way for Norfolk to follow his son to the block. It only needed the king to sign for the headsman’s axe to fall. But it never did, for at two o’clock on the frosty morning of 28 January King Henry himself drew his last breath. Thomas Cranmer, perhaps the closest this monster of selfishness could come to calling a friend, had been summoned to offer the king his last spiritual solace. Meanwhile, Sir Anthony Denny and the other reformers, eager to get their hands on the levers of power, impatiently paced the gallery outside the death chamber. The archbishop, called from his home in Lambeth Palace in the middle of the night, hastened across the river to Whitehall Palace and found the dying king beyond speech. When Cranmer asked him if he died in grace, he pressed his hand. So passed England’s Stalin, a murderous monster who had raised his kingdom to great power status in Europe, but at the cost of despoiling its cultural heritage in the religious houses, and the needless sacrifice of a river of innocent blood.

  CHAPTER TEN

  TUDOR CHILDREN

  SPARED FROM DEATH by his murderous master’s demise, the Duke of Norfolk nevertheless remained incarcerated in the Tower for six more years – though in more comfortable circumstances than most of his fellow ‘guests’. The despicable old rogue thus survived the reign of the fiercely Protestant Edward VI while the boy king and his ministers instituted a thoroughgoing religious Reformation which overturned the ancient Catholic rituals that Norfolk and his cohorts had striven to uphold.

  The Edwardian Reformation was more drastic than anything seen between his father Henry’s break with Rome and Cromwell’s Puritan Commonwealth. This Calvinist purge saw the abolition of the Latin Mass, which was replaced by Holy Communion in the English tongue; Cranmer’s Book of Common Prayer, a masterpiece of limpid English prose, was made compulsory; elaborate altars, rood-screens, stained glass and other regalia were replaced by plain walls, tables and glass. The Tower itself did not escape this hurricane of change: the priests at both St John’s Chapel and St Peter ad Vincula were replaced by Protestant chaplains.

  King Edward was no stranger to the Tower. He had known the fortress literally from the cradle. The cannons installed there by his father had roared 2,000 shots to celebrate his birth, and as a child he had often visited the fortress when its palace was being expensively refurbished. Henry VIII’s contribution to the Tower’s military architecture had been the construction of mounts to support his heavy artillery: Legge’s Mount at the Tower’s north-west corner, and Brass Mount at its north-east. Many of the Tower’s cannons had actually been made there, and the Royal Ordnance Factory, housed close to the Royal Mint, meant that the west and northern parts of the fortress were a busy industrial plant – with billowing clouds of smoke and steam, the deafening clang of metal, and sizzling shards of hot flying iron.

  Henry’s addition to the Tower’s civil architecture was a tidying up of the higgledy-piggledy medieval building work. He reroofed the chapel of St Peter ad Vincula after a fire early in his reign. Today’s chestnut-wood roof is Henry’s work, along with the chapel’s elegant arches and windows. Henry certainly ensured that his two wives and the various ministers executed by his command had a fine resting place. As the great nineteenth-century historian Thomas Babington Macaulay wrote of St Peter’s:

  There is no sadder spot on earth … Death is there associated, not as in Westminster Abbey and St Paul’s, with genius and virtue … but with whatever is darkest in human nature and human destiny, with the savage triumph of implacable enemies, with the inconstancy, the ingratitude, the cowardice of friends, with all the miseries of former greatness and of blighted fame.

  The typically Tudor black and white half-timbered houses seen to the left of the Bloody Tower as visitors pass into the Tower’s Inner Ward, were also built by Henry and were used to provide comfortable modern lodgings for the lieutenant and for his highest-ranking prisoners. Increasingly, it was to such small, easily heated wood-panelled rooms that the Tower’s resident inhabitants were drawn and
the great echoing halls of the palace – despite Henry’s refurbishments – gradually fell into disuse and decay, to be finally demolished a century later by Oliver Cromwell and Charles II.

  So it was to a gleaming and spruced-up Tower that ten-year-old King Edward VI rode on the last day of January 1547, three days after his fearsome father’s death. Beside him rode his uncle Edward Seymour, Earl of Hertford, his presence a visible sign that he was the real power in the land. They were met at the Lion Gate by Constable Gage and Archbishop Cranmer. The boy king and his retinue were escorted to the Tower’s palace, its walls ‘richly hung and garnished with cloth of Arras and cloth of Estate’. The great halls were so crowded with jostling courtiers, all jockeying for power and influence in the new regime, that the Tower’s limited accommodation overflowed and many were forced to seek lodgings elsewhere.

  King and court remained in the Tower for a fortnight while preparations were made for Henry’s funeral at Windsor – he had asked to lie next to Edward’s mother, Jane Seymour – and the coronation. Behind the scenes, frantic politicking was in progress. Edward Seymour assumed the title of Protector – in effect regent – during his nephew’s minority, and his fellow council members needed to be cajoled, and if necessary bribed or threatened, to agree. To grease the wheels, a wholesale award of peerages was announced coinciding with the coronation. Seymour himself became Duke of Somerset; his future rival John Dudley was named Earl of Warwick, while Thomas Wriothesley became Earl of Southampton. Peerages went too to Wriothesley’s fellow Tower torturer, Sir Richard Rich, and to Edward Seymour’s younger brother Sir Thomas who also became Lord High Admiral. Thomas Seymour, after an indecent interval of barely a couple of months, married Henry VIII’s very merry widow, Catherine Parr, who had been his mistress when Henry’s greedy eyes had first fallen upon her.

  On 19 February, in the traditional pre-coronation ceremony, Edward created forty new Knights of the Bath at the Tower. The next day, resplendent in white velvet, and dripping with diamonds, rubies and pearls, the boy king rode out on a white horse caparisoned in crimson satin and beaded with pearls to meet his people. Their cheers of delight were doubtless tinged with relief that the reign of his grim old father was finally over. The elaborate coronation was shortened and adapted to a monarch of Edward’s tender years, and special acts, like an acrobat sliding down a cable from the steeple of St Paul’s Cathedral, were laid on to amuse him. Even so, the fragile thin boy appeared understandably fatigued – and his pale and wan features betrayed the early presence of the tuberculosis that would kill him.

  Somerset and his fellow reformers were well aware that their lives hung on the frail thread of Edward’s failing health. The succession was a problem. Under Henry VIII’s will, the crown would pass, in the event of the boy’s death, to his elder half-sister, Princess Mary, the staunchly Catholic daughter of Katharine of Aragon; and then, if Mary died childless, to his other half-sister, the moderately Protestant Lady Elizabeth, daughter of Anne Boleyn. Edward, a pious and highly learned boy, had embraced extreme evangelical Protestantism with all the fervour of youth. So long as he lived, the Reformation sweeping through the kingdom would continue. But how long would that be?

  Somerset’s position as protector was undermined by the reckless behaviour of his younger brother, Thomas Seymour. Wild and ambitious, Thomas had demanded the guardianship of the young king as the price for supporting his brother as Protector. Bought off instead with a peerage and the Admiralty, he still attempted to gain access to Edward as often as he could. His insensate ambition even extended to wanting to marry one of the royal princesses, Mary or Elizabeth – he did not much mind which. His wife, the dowager Queen Catherine Parr, was Elizabeth’s guardian, and by marrying her before Henry’s corpse was cold, Seymour was in constant close proximity to the pubertal princess. Catherine herself seems to have been so bedazzled by Seymour’s glamour that she was blind to his intrigues.

  Elizabeth was not the only royal child in Catherine’s household. As Seymour and the quickly pregnant Catherine Parr started to enjoy married life, he became the guardian of Lady Jane Grey, eleven-year-old eldest daughter of Henry Grey, Duke of Suffolk, and his Duchess, Frances – the daughter of Henry VIII’s younger sister Mary. Fatally for Jane’s future, royal blood ran thickly in her veins since she was also descended from Queen Elizabeth Woodville by her first husband, Sir John Grey, and her second, Edward IV.

  Like her second cousin Elizabeth, Jane from her earliest years was a formidable scholar, perhaps the most learned child in Europe. Partly to escape her cruelly neglectful parents, Jane sought solace in her books. Like King Edward, she was a fervent Protestant who could best any Catholic priest in theological argument. During his wife’s pregnancy, however, it was not to the pious and decidedly blue-stockinged Jane that bold Thomas Seymour laid siege – but to the lively redhead Elizabeth, at fourteen a nubile and far from shy teenager. A bare-legged Seymour would steal into Elizabeth’s room in their Chelsea town house for games of slap and tickle so lively that it was difficult to tell where boisterous horseplay ended and erotic foreplay began. Amidst Elizabeth’s shrieks and blushes Seymour would strip off the bedclothes, exposing her half-naked body. These were dangerous games indeed, and he would pay dearly for them.

  Thomas Seymour’s relations with his elder brother were anything but fraternal. With the resentment often felt by a younger brother for his elder sibling, the younger Seymour deeply resented his brother’s power, and control over the king. At first, Somerset tolerated his brother’s outrageous behaviour. Gradually, however, as Seymour increased his influence over Edward by telling him that the protector was keeping him short of cash and making him ‘a beggarly king’, and even supplying the boy with regular pocket money himself, Somerset’s irritation turned to alarm.

  That alarm became downright panic when, in August 1548, Catherine Parr gave birth to a girl, Mary – and within a week was dead from puerperal fever. The bereaved Seymour was now free to further his political career by marital intrigues. He toyed again with marrying Princess Elizabeth, who had grown so infatuated with him that a jealous Catherine had had her transferred from her household. Alternatively, Seymour meditated marrying his ward Jane Grey to his nephew King Edward. Finally, however, it was Seymour’s own insane impetuosity which brought him down.

  Seymour attempted to get physical possession of a monarch he feared was being deliberately kept out of his reach. Early on the morning of 16 January 1549, with two servants at his side and a pistol in his hand, he broke into Edward’s privy garden at Westminster and attempted to gain access to the king’s bedroom itself. As he struggled with the key, Edward’s pet spaniel bit him, and an enraged Seymour shot the dog dead. The commotion alerted the royal guard who rushed in shouting, ‘Murder!’ Fortunately, the only murder victim was the faithful hound, and Seymour – feebly protesting that he had merely been testing the efficiency of royal security – was hustled away to the Tower.

  Seymour’s moment of madness brought his house of cards down about his ears. As his attempted abduction was investigated, gossip about his familiarity with Princess Elizabeth spread. The princess herself was questioned, and her maid Kat Ashley was hauled into the Tower for more rigorous interrogation. Under the pressure, Mistress Ashley made a full confession, testifying that Seymour had seen Elizabeth near naked; that he had slapped her buttocks, and that the couple had been caught embracing by the late Queen Catherine. It was more than enough to condemn Seymour, who was accused of thirty-three charges, including treason.

  Because Seymour was the king’s uncle and had been the husband of a queen, the entire Privy Council waited on him at the Tower to read the charge sheet. True to his proud and arrogant nature, Seymour refused to answer them. A bill of attainder with an automatic death sentence was hastily drawn up and signed – in a shaky hand – by his brother, the Protector. As he waited for death Seymour himself put pen to paper. Like his equally proud predecessor, the Earl of Surrey, he turned to poetry to express
his last thoughts:

  Forgetting God to love a King

  Hath been my rod, or else nothing

  In this frail life, being a blast

  Of care and strife till it be past;

  Yet God did call me in my pride

  Lest I should fall and from him slide

  For whom he loves he must correct

  That they may be of his elect.

  Then death hast thee, thou shalt me gain

  Immortality with Him to reign.

  Lord! Send the King in years as Noye

  In governing this realm in joy

  And after this frail life such grace

  That in thy bliss he may find place.

  Deprived of writing materials, Seymour ingeniously devised his own means of communicating. Fashioning a pen from metal buttons and wires pulled from his own tunic, he manufactured a secret ink ‘so craftily and with such workmanship as the like hath not been seen’. He used these to write two letters – to the Princesses Mary and Elizabeth – urging them to overthrow their brother and liberate him. He sewed the letters into the soles of his velvet slippers, ordering his servants to deliver them. But the slipper missives were discovered and read by the council – and with that the last possibility of reprieve vanished. Elizabeth herself lost no time in distancing herself from the man who had been her first love. Told of his execution on her fifteenth birthday she coldly but accurately remarked, ‘This day died a man of much wit and very little judgement.’