by Jones, Nigel
My living death by dying life is fed;
Grace more than nature keeps my heart alive,
Whose idle hopes and vain desires are dead.
Southwell’s desire for death was granted in 1595 when he was executed.
A young graduate of the exiled English Catholic colleges at Douai, Rheims and Rome that were turning out these missionaries was Gilbert Gifford, described as a beardless boy. Gifford was intercepted by Walsingham’s men on arriving at the Sussex port of Rye in December 1585. He was carrying letters in cipher destined for Mary Stuart from the Scots queen’s chief agents in France, Thomas Morgan and Charles Paget. (It is a tribute to the English spy chief’s fearsome thoroughness that both Morgan and Paget are suspected by some historians of having been double agents working for Walsingham, despite their ostensible loyalty to Mary.) Gifford and his letters were sent on to London to be examined by Walsingham and his chief code breaker and forger, Thomas Phelippes.
The spymasters saw at once that they had been handed the instrument to destroy Mary. On pain of torture and death, Gifford was persuaded to become a double agent working for Walsingham. He would proceed as planned to Chartley, the Staffordshire country house where Mary was held in increasingly close confinement by her rigidly Puritan keeper, Sir Amyas Paulet. Here, Gifford would open a channel of communications via an ingenious method that Walsingham’s backroom boy Phelippes had worked out after visiting the moated house. Weekly deliveries of keg beer were made to Chartley from the nearby town of Burton, and the empty barrels were picked up by the same brewer. The secret letters would be hidden inside the barrels’ bungs, and Gifford would be the postman. In this way, Mary’s covert correspondence could be monitored and doctored by the secret service, in order to secure the damning evidence that would send her to the block.
Gifford was a witting – and apparently willing – agent luring Mary to her doom, delivering her first letter from Morgan in almost a year. But the man whose letters finally ensured her – and his own – destruction was a starry-eyed young Catholic gentleman utterly devoted to the captive queen. Anthony Babington had met Mary while serving as a boy page to the Earl of Shrewbury, the Scots queen’s first guardian after her arrival from Scotland. Babington had fallen under her spell, and vowed to be the knight errant who would spring her from her prison. In the meantime he hid Catholic priests – including Campion – and ferried them around his native Midlands.
Travelling to France, Babington contacted Mary’s agents and offered to smuggle letters to her giving details of a new Catholic rising and her rescue. Back in London, he recruited a group of like-minded young Catholic gentlemen for a desperate double enterprise: to rescue Mary and to kidnap or kill Elizabeth. Revealing letters began to flow in and out of Chartley via the barrel-bung post. Mary was cautious, but after eighteen years of captivity she was growing desperate. Thomas Phelippes, running Gifford and his post for Walsingham, carefully forged additions to the letters ‘sexing them up’ to implicate Mary in treason. Plotting Mary’s escape was one thing – Elizabeth would hardly consent to her death on those grounds alone – but giving her approval to a Spanish invasion and her cousin’s killing would be her death warrant. Walsingham authorised Phelippes to manufacture the evidence.
Their forgeries were superfluous. In her next letter, a six-and-a-half-page effusion, Mary fitted her own neck to the block. The letter agreed to all Babington’s plans: the rising, her rescue, a Spanish invasion and – crucially – the murder of Elizabeth, even advising Babington on how to get away after the deed. Walsingham’s master forger was so confident that, after deciphering the self-incriminating letter, Phelippes sketched a gallows on the envelope before sending it on to his boss. In the late summer of 1586, armed with this damning evidence, Walsingham swooped. Babington and his fourteen young confederates were rounded up in London, along with their spiritual counsellor, the Catholic priest John Ballard, who went under the pseudonym ‘Captain Fortescue’. They joined their co-religionists in the Tower.
There was no mercy for the fanatical young idealists who had vowed to kill their queen. Elizabeth, who had naturally taken a personal interest in the unfolding conspiracy to murder her, ordered that the full gruesome medieval ritual of hanging, drawing and quartering should be carried out, in order ‘for more terror’ to be struck in the hearts of anyone tempted to emulate Babington. The plotters were executed in two groups in September. Tied to hurdles in the Tower, they were drawn to Holborn where the bloody and barbaric ritual was enacted. The slow deaths of Babington and his friends by strangulation, castration and final evisceration of their entrails and hearts so shocked even the hardened Tudor crowd, that when the second group were executed the following day, they were allowed to dangle on ropes until they were dead before the posthumous butchery began.
One of the men who died so horribly with Babington was Chideock Tichborne, a young Hampshire gentleman. On the eve of his bloody execution he wrote a poignant and tragic poetic farewell to his wife Agnes and a world he had hardly begun to know – probably the greatest, and certainly the saddest, work of literature of the many penned in the Tower:
My prime of youth is but a frost of cares,
My feast of joy is but a dish of pain,
My crop of corn is but a field of tares
And all my good is but vain hope of gain;
The day is past, and yet I saw no sun,
And now I live, and now my life is done.
My tale is heard and yet it was not told,
My fruit is fall’n and yet my leaves are green
My youth is spent and yet I am not old,
I saw the world and yet I was not seen;
My thread is cut and yet it is not spun,
And now I live, and now my life is done.
I sought my death and found it in my womb,
I looked for life and saw it was a shade,
I trod the earth and knew it was my tomb,
And now I die, and now I was but made;
My glass is full, and now my glass is run,
And now I live, and now my life is done.
The executon of the Babington plotters was but the starter to the main meal as far as Walsingham was concerned. He and Burghley were set upon Mary’s death, despite prolonged dithering on Elizabeth’s part. Mary’s trial and execution at Fotheringhay Castle, without the queen’s authorisation, followed in February 1587. Elizabeth threw a tantrum when told of her treacherous cousin’s demise, and sent one of the responsible officials to the Tower. She even briefly dismissed the faithful Burghley from court. She could not, however, afford to sulk for long: 1588 was the year of the Spanish Armada, and all Elizabeth’s and England’s energies went towards repelling it.
By 1603, it was clear that Elizabeth’s long reign was drawing to a close. The old lady spent long periods staring silently into space, her finger in her mouth, idly twirling a ring – perhaps the ring that had belonged to Essex – and dreaming of the past. Those around her began to make discreet arrangements for the future. Robert Cecil had already established contact with the heir apparent, Mary Stuart’s Scottish son James VI, in Edinburgh. Of rival claimants to the Crown, one, the Infanta Isabella of Spain, was daughter of the hated Philip of Spain. The other, Arbella Stuart, was suspected of Catholicism – and was an unmarried woman. England had had more than enough of single and infertile female rulers. James, though son of the Catholic martyr Mary, had been brought up as a Protestant, and, while interested in the thornier questions of theology, showed few signs of converting to Catholicism – despite the fact that his Danish-born queen, Anne, had done so. In addition, the Scottish king, though homosexual, had fathered three children by Anne – Henry, Charles and Elizabeth – so the Stuart succession was secure.
James was an oddball, which, considering his upbringing, was hardly surprising. His mother had narrowly escaped murder when he was still in her womb. While he was an infant, his father had been murdered and his mother, after outraging public opinion by marrying the murderer, had bee
n chased into exile. He had never seen her again. James had grown up a helpless puppet of Scottish political and religious factions, in constant danger of abduction and assassination. The man who had emerged from this singularly disturbed background was himself singularly disturbed. Understandably neurotic about his own security, he wore stab-proof padded jackets and breeches, slept in a cocoon of mattresses, forbade his courtiers to carry knives or swords, and was averse to violence. On the other hand, he had a strongly sadistic streak. As we have seen, he frequently visited the Tower menagerie to watch animals tearing each other to shreds. He adored hunting, and stayed in the saddle for hours, urinating and excreting on the hoof rather than dismounting. When a stag was killed, he delighted in the peculiar practice of plunging his spindly legs into the beast’s hot and bloody entrails.
James’s personal hygiene was poor. He rarely washed, his many phobias including a terror of water. His only concession to cleanliness was to wipe his fingers with a damp rag, and his courtiers claimed they could tell what the king had eaten by observing the stains adorning his clothes. He disguised his appalling stench by drenching himself with perfume. His ingrained dirt had darkened his skin to a velvety texture. James had goggle eyes and a tongue too big for his mouth, which lolled out when he slobbered over his male favourites’ necks, while his hands rummaged in their breeches. An unlikely intellectual, who wrote tracts against witchcraft and Ralegh’s tobacco, James lived up to his reputation as ‘the wisest fool in Christendom’ since his lack of common sense and cowardly, vindictive character make him one of Britain’s most unattractive monarchs.
This was the thirty-seven-year-old man who in March 1603 was brought the long-expected news that Elizabeth had died in the palace of Richmond, and that he was now King James I of England, the first Stuart monarch, and the first joint king of the feuding nations of England and Scotland. James’s accession initially pleased English Catholics, who optimistically looked forward to more tolerance than they had enjoyed under Elizabeth’s harsh repression. They were to be deeply disappointed. But the initial losers in the change of dynasty were the quintessential old Elizabethans who had gloried at fighting Spain on land and sea. No one was likelier to rub James on the raw than that ageing essence of Elizabethan swagger: Sir Walter Ralegh.
When Ralegh hastened to welcome the new king as he journeyed south, he was greeted coldly. ‘I have heard rawly of you, mon,’ spat the monarch in his strong Scots dialect, punning on the old warrior’s name. James’s dislike of Ralegh had been kindled during his feud with Essex, with whom the king had been in correspondence. His mind thoroughly poisoned, James stripped Ralegh of his job as captain of the guard, and turned him out of his London residence, Durham House. Later, he confiscated Ralegh’s country estate, Sherborne Castle, telling him, ‘I mun have it for Carr’ – Robert Carr being the gay king’s current boyfriend.
Ralegh was further tainted by his suspected involvement in two plots against the new Jacobean regime. The so-called Main Plot ran alongside the Bye Plot, a hare-brained venture dreamed up by two Catholic priests to capture James and force him to announce toleration of their religion. Ralegh’s friend Henry Brooke, Lord Cobham, and his brother became involved and were arrested. Ralegh was detained in July 1603 after his friend had falsely incriminated him. Outraged at finding himself back in the Tower accused of connection with a Catholic plot, and despairing of gaining the favour of the hostile king, Ralegh wrote grovelling letters to anyone he could think of who had the king’s ear. When these had no effect, in a fit of uncharacteristic self-pity Ralegh made a hysterical attempt at suicide by stabbing himself in the chest with a table knife, causing a superficial wound. On recovering, Ralegh changed tactics. His wails of innocence were replaced by a successful effort to charm the Tower’s lieutenant, Sir John Peyton. When Robert Cecil discovered what was afoot, he sacked Peyton, compensating him with one of Ralegh’s old jobs as governor of Jersey.
Ralegh was tried for treason at Winchester, for London was in the grip of one of its periodic plague outbreaks. Ralegh’s part in the downfall of Essex, the people’s hero, had made him wildly unpopular with the London public and on his way to the trial his coach was pelted with clay pipes – for his role as the chief importer of tobacco, and the high prices he charged for the noxious ‘sot-weed’, were also resented. The lynch mob grew so menacing that, in the words of a witness, it was ‘hob or nob whether he should have been brought alive through such multitudes of unruly people as did exclaim against him’. In acute danger of death, Ralegh responded loftily, ‘Dogs always bark at what they know not.’
Ralegh retained his sangfroid at his trial, responding to a vindictive tirade from the Attorney General, Sir Edward Coke, who called him a ‘monster … the most vile and execrable traitor that ever lived [with] an English face but a Spanish heart!’ by quietly replying, ‘You speak indiscreetly, barbarously and uncivilly.’ Convicted solely on his former friend Lord Cobham’s patently false evidence, and sentenced to death, Ralegh was taken back to the Bloody Tower to await his execution.
In imminent expectation of death, during a sleepless night, he wrote a moving final farewell to Bess:
Remember your poore child for his father’s sake, that chose you and loved you in his happiest tymes. Get those letters (if it be possible) which I writt to the Lords, wherein I sued for my life, but God knoweth it was for you and yours that I desired it, but it is true that I disdayne myself for begging it. And knowe it (deare wife) that your sonne is the child of a true man, and who, in his own respect, despiseth Death, and all his misshapen and oglie formes.
I cannot wright much. God knows how hardlie I stole this tyme, when all sleep; and it is tyme to separate my thoughts from the world. Begg my dead body, which living was denied you … I can wright noe more. Tyme and death call me awaye …
Yours that was; but now my owne, W. Ralegh.
To add to Ralegh’s anguish, Cobham himself, after being subjected to a mock execution by the sadistic James, got off with a sentence of imprisonment. Cobham was given privileged accommodation in the Tower’s Lieutenant’s Lodgings. As Ralegh paced the short section of the wall outside his tower (still known as ‘Ralegh’s Walk’) waiting for death it must have galled him to see the man who had put him there living as the new lieutenant’s guest. As it turned out, Ralegh would wait a full thirteen years for the axe to finally fall. The reprieve was thanks to one of his chief court enemies, Robert Cecil, who had always secretly hated the swaggering, cocksure sea dog, even though he had often allied with Ralegh – such as when they had combined against their mutual enemy, Essex. Now Cecil yielded to the desperate pleas of Bess Ralegh, his sister-in-law, and showed mercy.
The Bloody Tower, where Ralegh lived in two rooms on the upper floor, was a damp, cramped and miserable setting for the once wealthy and magnificent Ralegh. He was fifty-two now, elderly by seventeenth-century standards, and racked by frequent fevers. His old wounds troubled him, forcing him to lean heavily on a cane. The winter of 1603–4 was very cold, the walls ran with water, and the plague still raged, claiming victims within the Tower’s walls. Ralegh had a few comforts. His everyday needs were met by a servant, Dean, while a young man, John Talbot, doubled as his secretary and as tutor to Ralegh’s son Wat, who, aged eleven, was preparing for university. A waterman, Owen, brought beer to the captive, as the polluted water in the Tower was undrinkable.
Ralegh’s chief consolations were the faithful Bess and Wat, who were allowed unrestricted access to him, virtually sharing his imprisonment. Another son, Carew, conceived in the Tower, was born to Bess Ralegh in 1605 at the house on Tower Hill that she had rented. Sustained by his family’s support, Ralegh rallied, and began work on the most sustained and massive piece of literature written in the Tower: a complete History of the World.
A true Renaissance man, Ralegh’s life as a statesman and man of action had hitherto obscured his achievements as a writer and scholar, but restricted to the Tower’s tiny world, he was forced to focus on his li
terary gifts. The result was an explosion of intellectual productivity. Apart from the massive History, political tracts, poems, philosophical essays and letters poured from his quill. In addition, by exercising his charms on the new lieutenant, Sir George Harvey, who had replaced Peyton, Ralegh procured the use of a wooden shed in the lieutenant’s garden – where he cultivated his own herb garden. The hut was no ordinary potting shed. When Bloody Mary had crowded the Tower with Protestant prisoners, it had done duty as the cell where Bishop Hugh Latimer, a notable Protestant martyr, had been imprisoned; and more recently it had become a chicken coop.
Ralegh converted the hen hut into a laboratory for scientific and alchemical experiments, equipping it with retorts and copper tubing. In one experiment, he succeeded in extracting the salt from seawater and turned it into fresh water; in another, he invented a method for curing his beloved tobacco. All the while he developed yet more skills to add to his protean achievements: those of physician and herbalist. Always a self-healer who rarely consulted doctors, with the help of the herbs in his garden, some grown from cuttings he had brought back from the Amazon, Ralegh produced potions which became popular folk remedies in high society. The wife of the French ambassador, for example, seeing Ralegh gardening while on a visit to the Tower menagerie, successfully asked him to boil up and send her a bottle of his ‘Guinea balsam’. Another of Ralegh’s concoctions, a reviving cordial of strawberry water for relieving faintness, also proved popular with the ladies. The most celebrated of all his medicines, however, was a ‘Great Cordial’ – an elixir, probably containing quinine from the Americas, which he claimed could heal almost every ailment. Ralegh’s inquiring mind, though tethered, was now freed from worldly ambition and was inquiring still.
And now that he was a victim, his infamous pride humbled in adversity, Ralegh’s previously dire popularity took an astonishing upwards turn. Sympathetic crowds gathered on the Tower wharf to see the tall and stately Elizabethan hero as he limped along ‘Ralegh’s Walk’. They cheered him on his way, to which Ralegh responded with a grave bow. Court ladies, susceptible as ever to his charisma, flocked to visit him. A trip to see Ralegh in the Tower became part of the social round for London’s glitterati. The visitors he entertained ranged from a group of Indians he had brought from the Amazon (who rented a house on Tower Hill to be near him), to the astronomer and scientist Thomas Harriot, and Ralegh’s sea captain Lawrence Keymis – both faithful friends who had accompanied him to the Amazon and did not desert him now. The playwright and poet Ben Jonson, who would write a preface to Ralegh’s History, was also among his regular guests. Ralegh’s relationship with Jonson – a fervent Catholic, a brawling thug (he was imprisoned for killing an actor in a duel), and a literary genius – illustrates the breadth of his world, despite its narrow physical confines, and its eclecticism. The last embers of the astounding Elizabethan Renaissance were still burning brightly in the confines of the Bloody Tower.
