Tower: An Epic History of the Tower of London

by Jones, Nigel

  Both men hailed from the same small corner of the world. Henry was born in 1387 in Monmouth – a quarter of a century before his father Henry Bolingbroke seized the throne from Richard II to become Henry IV. Oldcastle was born between 1360 and 1378 at Almeley in nearby Herefordshire, the son and heir of Sir Richard Oldcastle. John Oldcastle served in Henry IV’s campaigns against the Scots and the Welsh rebellion of Owain Glyndwr, when he first met Prince Henry. In 1408 Oldcastle leapt upwards from country knight to landed aristocracy when he married Joan, 4th Baroness Cobham. The couple were hardly novices in the marriage stakes: Joan was Oldcastle’s third wife, and he was her fourth husband. The new Lord Cobham’s home was the resplendent Cooling Castle on the Kentish marshes, and through his marriage Oldcastle acquired broad acres in five counties: Kent, Norfolk, Northamptonshire, Wiltshire and his native Herefordshire. An MP, praised by the new king as ‘one of my most trustworthy soldiers’, Oldcastle had arrived. But he placed everything in jeopardy by espousing new, dangerously radical, religious ideas.

  Oldcastle was entranced by the novel doctrines dubbed as ‘Lollardy’ (the term comes from the Dutch word for ‘mumbling’), an insulting epithet eventually proudly adopted by the preachers of the ‘New Light’. The Lollards were the early-morning stars of the Reformation, taking their inspiration from the English reformer John Wycliffe’s teaching. They sympathised with the poor, and criticised the rampant corruption of the Church; believing that devout laymen could preach the Gospels as well as any priest. Lollards denied the necessity of a hierarchical clergy, founding their faith firmly on the Scriptures studied in Wycliffe’s first English Bible. As ‘premature Protestants’ they were fiercely persecuted as heretics.

  Oldcastle emerged as a promoter of Lollard ideas in 1410 when churches on his Kentish estate were put under a Church interdict for allowing unlicensed preachers. The chief persecutor was Thomas Arundel, Archbishop of Canterbury. When the archbishop heard that Oldcastle had put up Lollard preachers in Cooling Castle as his house guests, he complained to the king. Henry confronted his friend at Windsor Castle. Speaking with an old soldier’s bluntness, Oldcastle pledged that his life and fortune were at the king’s disposal – but not his sincere private beliefs. Oldcastle withdrew to Cooling in disgrace. In fifteenth-century Europe, once the word ‘heresy’ was heard, reason retreated and the hangman approached.

  Or rather, the flames drew near. Another bone of contention between Oldcastle and Arundel was Sir John’s objection to a new law which the archbishop had adopted from the Spanish Inquisition: allowing heretics to be burned at the stake. Oldcastle objected to the barbaric foreign import, and Arundel duly noted another charge against the king’s mentor. His chance to strike Oldcastle down finally came when a spy reported that a heretical book belonging to Sir John had been seized at a Paternoster Row bookshop. This time the king stood aside. The law would take its terrible course.

  Arundel summoned Oldcastle to appear before an ecclesiastical court. From behind Cooling’s battlements, Oldcastle defied him. Arundel procured a royal writ from the king that the old soldier could not disobey. He was taken under guard to the Tower, and handed over to the lieutenant, Sir Robert Morley. The lieutenant treated his prisoner with respect and lodged him in the Beauchamp Tower, then the most comfortable accommodation in the fortress. (Afterwards, the tower was alternatively named ‘Cobham Tower’ in Oldcastle’s honour.) Here he was visited by friars and priests who vainly attempted to argue him out of his stubbornly held heretical opinions.

  On 23 September 1413 Oldcastle was taken from the Tower to the church court in an old Dominican convent on Ludgate Hill, with his bitter foe, Arundel, presiding. The jury was composed of Augustinian canons and Carmelite friars. Oldcastle, the denouncer of monkish abuses, was now on trial for his life before a jury of monks. He made a ‘confession of faith’ declaring that he believed in the Sacraments of the Church, but holding out against the adoration of images of the Virgin or the saints – which, he said, was heathen idolatry. He also denied the ‘Real Presence’ – that the body and blood of Christ were present in Holy Communion. This was the Protestant programme as laid out by Luther a century later. But the time for such bold ideas had not yet come. Horror-struck, one juror denounced Oldcastle for ‘flat heresy’ and on 25 September he was sentenced to die at the stake.

  On hearing the sentence, Oldcastle replied:

  Ye judge the body, which is but a wretched thing, yet am I certain and sure that ye can do no harm to my soul. He who created that, will of His own mercy and promise save it. As to these articles [his opinions] I will stand to them, even to the very death – by the grace of my eternal God.

  Despite his brave defiance, Sir John seemed bound for the flames. Once again, however, the king came to his old friend’s rescue. He granted him a forty-day stay of execution, hoping that he would recant. The Church spread false rumours that this was indeed what the ‘good Lord Cobham’ had done.

  To counter their spin, Oldcastle had a rebuttal smuggled out from the Tower and pasted up around the city by Lollard friends. But Oldcastle’s heroic accomplices were prepared to do even more and on 29 September 1416 they struck. The court records for 1416 at the subsequent trial in Newgate Gaol of Oldcastle’s chief rescuer, a fur dealer and parchment maker named William Fisher, take up the tale:

  William Fyssher … of London … together with other traitors … whose names are unknown, did go privily to the Tower, and break into that prison and falsely and traitorously withdraw the said John Oldcastle therefrom, and take him from thence to his own dwelling house, in the parish of St Sepulchre in Smithfield, and did falsely and traitorously harbour him in that said dwelling-house, knowing that he was a traitor and there did keep the said John Oldcastle in secret until the Wednesday next after the Feast of our Lord’s Epiphany [6 January]. Upon which Wednesday the aforesaid William; together with the said John Oldcastle and other traitors, these conspiring and imagining how to slay our said Lord the King, and also the brothers and heirs of the same Lord the King and to destroy and disinherit other nobles of the realm of England, and to make the aforesaid John Oldcastle regent of the realm, on the same Wednesday, armed and arrayed in warlike guise falsely and traitorously, against his allegiance, did arise, and from thence and then and there did proceed towards a certain great field in the parish of St Giles, there to carry out and finally fulfil his false, nefarious and traitorous purpose.

  Oldcastle had gone too far. Private religious opinions were one thing; treason and open rebellion quite another. The suspicion must be that Sir John’s escape from the Tower (like Flambard’s dramatic exit three centuries previously) had inside help, possibly from the king himself. Why else did no one bother to properly search Oldcastle’s own town house in Smithfield during the three months he had been ‘harboured’ there? But if Henry had been prepared to overlook Oldcastle’s stubborn adherence to his Lollard principles for the sentimental sake of their old friendship, he could not turn a blind eye to armed revolt.

  The Lollards’ plan was apparently to seize the king and his brothers during a Twelfth Night mumming feast at Eltham, when, disguised as revellers, Lollards would infiltrate the festivities. But the plot was betrayed to Henry by a carpenter. The king, at his best in a crisis, moved fast. Taking his brothers and Archbishop Arundel with him, he left the party at Eltham and galloped hard for London. Once in the capital, he ordered the city gates to be closed and guarded, and stationed armed retainers, emblazoned with white crosses as their recognition sign, in woods around the Lollards’ rendezvous point in St Giles’ Fields. As they gathered, the ambush was sprung. The king and his guards fell on the rebels, and in a short but sharp fight, some were killed and the rest captured. Among those arrested was William Fisher who would be hanged at Tyburn, his head spiked as a traitor on London Bridge.

  Oldcastle managed to escape again. He spent the next four years flitting from one hiding place to another, in Kent, Hertfordshire and Yorkshire. Once, warned of a raid on his hiding
place in a humble peasant’s cottage in St Albans, he evaded his pursuers by seconds, in his haste leaving religious books behind. They were found to have the pictures of the saints carefully defaced in accordance with Oldcastle’s Lollard beliefs. Finally, he made his way back to Herefordshire, his childhood home.

  But Oldcastle was not a man to disappear quietly from history. Courageous, foolhardy, a fighter to the last, he continued to conspire from his rural backwater. Finally, in November 1417, his long escape came to an end. Hiding out with fellow Lollards in a woodland glade still known as ‘Cobham’s Garden’ on Pant-mawr farm, Broniarth, in mid-Wales, he arranged to meet a local landowner, Edward, Lord Charleton of Powys. Charleton decided to betray the old rebel, and arrived at the meeting with a band of armed retainers. There was a brief fight, ending only when Oldcastle was ‘sore wounded ere he would be taken’. He was secured and carried to London on a litter. There is some bitter satisfaction in the knowledge that the treacherous Welsh peer who betrayed him died of natural causes before he could claim his thirty pieces of silver – the 1,000-mark reward on Oldcastle’s head.

  There were to be no more narrow escapes. Like Mortimer, Oldcastle was returned to the Tower from which he had once fled, and condemned twice over. He was already a convicted heretic, and now he was a traitor too. As such he was to be doubly punished: burned as a heretic, hanged as a traitor. On 14 December 1417 he was taken from the Tower to St Giles’ Fields, the scene of the abortive Lollard plot in 1414. Here he was hanged over a burning pyre which eventually consumed both the gallant Sir John and the gallows he dangled from. Oldcastle died as steadfastly as he had lived – a premature Protestant martyr whose courage was only matched by his indiscretion. He deserves better than the caricature of Shakespeare’s buffoonish portrayal. Sir John Oldcastle was composed of the stuff of which true heroes are made.

  Heroes and martyrs are not the exclusive property of any single denomination. In the great divide that opened in England in 1534 when Henry VIII broke with Rome, there were to be plentiful martyrs on both sides of the doctrinal schism. One prisoner of the Tower who managed to avoid an agonising death at the hands of a state which some 150 years after Oldcastle’s death had finally become Protestant, yet suffered a prolonged, painful martyrdom nonetheless, was the Jesuit priest Father John Gerard.

  Like Oldcastle, Gerard, a big man physically and morally, was born with the martyrdom gene. By a huge irony, his grandfather, Thomas Gerrard, rector of All Hallows, Cheapside, was an early Protestant in the reign of Henry VIII. Thomas Gerrard was one of a group of Lutherans burned for heresy in Smithfield on 30 July 1540. John Gerard’s father, also called Thomas, was by contrast militantly Catholic and also suffered for his faith. He was imprisoned in the Tower for plotting to free Mary, Queen of Scots, as part of the Catholic Rising of the North against Elizabeth I in 1569.

  Born in 1564, John Gerard was five years old at the time of his father’s arrest. Thomas Gerard was freed in 1573, and returned to his country estate at Bryn in Lancashire. John went up to Exeter College, Oxford aged twelve. Traditionalist Oxford was a hotbed of Catholicism, and so persuasive was the boy Gerard that he converted one of his tutors to the old faith. In 1577 he was sent down for refusing to attend an Anglican service, and successfully applied for a licence to continue his studies in Europe.

  For three years he studied at the English College at Douai in the Spanish Netherlands. The college had been founded in 1568 by William Allen, an exiled Oxford academic on a mission to overthrow Queen Elizabeth and return England to the Roman faith. Allen’s college trained scores of young English exiles as ‘seminary priests’ and returned them secretly to their native land. Allen fell under the potent influence of the Jesuits, the shock troops of the Counter-Reformation. Founded by the Spanish knight Ignatius Loyola in 1540, the Jesuits had a formidable (to their friends) or frightening (to their foes) reputation for semi-military discipline, doctrinal rigour, cunning guile and an austerely fanatical devotion to their faith.

  Gerard decided to become a Jesuit priest but after unwisely returning to England, he was arrested and spent a year inside London’s fetid Marshalsea jail. The Marshalsea was bursting with fellow Catholics. In May 1584, one of them, the young Derbyshire squire Anthony Babington – later notorious for his plot to kill Elizabeth and put Mary, Queen of Scots on the throne – stood bail for Gerard, who immediately fled to France. Gerard was a young man in a hurry. He persuaded the Pope himself, Pius V, to grant him special dispensation to be ordained a Jesuit priest below the statutory age. Finally, on 15 August 1588, in the week that the Spanish Armada was defeated and dispersed, twenty-one-year-old Gerard was admitted to the priesthood along with another English Jesuit, Edward Oldcorne. A month and a half later, on 28 October, the two young men stood together on a Norfolk beach just south of Cromer. Their mission to reclaim their homeland had begun.

  Gerard spent the next eight years living the hunted life of a priest on the run. His unquenchable faith helped him survive. A big, jovial bear of a man, he did not look like a priest. Dressed as an English gentleman he looked the part because he was the part. Moving from recusant house to house, he evaded the ever-eager armies of licensed ‘pursuivants’ – posses authorised to hunt down fugitive priests. It was a brutal cat-and-mouse game. Since the Armada, Catholics (like Western Communists in the Cold War) had become not just followers of an alien ideology but potential traitors – enemies within who, at any moment, could rise up to kill the queen and murder good Protestants in their beds.

  Gerard’s autobiography reads like a memoir of an SOE agent in occupied Europe during the Second World War. There is the same mistrust: could the servant bringing the priest meals betray the presence of a mysterious stranger in the house? The same all-pervasive fear of detection and arrest. The same hurried secret meetings in supposedly safe houses. The same false names and identities. Instead of concealed radio sets and weapons there are the hidden vestments, chalices and other telltale forbidden objects for conducting Mass. And there are the same artfully concealed hiding places.

  Most of the ‘priest holes’ which litter the old Catholic houses of rural England were the work of one remarkable man: Nicholas Owen. Born in the early 1560s to a poor but devoutly Catholic Oxford family, little Owen – he may have been a dwarf, and he was certainly very small, a handicap he turned to advantage when constructing his priest holes – was a genius of carpentry. He knew how to create seamless joints invisible to the untrained eye; how to conceal a hide in a room with typically Tudor wooden panelling; how to build a staircase with a hidden chamber beneath.

  Beginning in 1588, the fateful Armada year, for seventeen years Owen faithfully carried out his self-appointed task as hide builder to England’s embattled Catholics, often working with Gerard who said:

  I verily think that no man can be said to have done more good of all those who laboured in the English vineyard. He was the immediate occasion of saving many hundreds of persons, both ecclesiastical and secular.

  Owen passed from one house to another – linked beads along the rosary of Catholic homes in sore need of spiritual comfort – constructing his priest holes. Always working alone – for reasons of security – and often at night, Owen created scores of hiding places in ingenious locations. Many times he would build several priest holes per house, so artfully concealed that some may remain undiscovered to this day.

  Eventually, in 1594, the Elizabethan state caught up with Gerard. Betrayed by John Frank, a trusted servant in an Essex house owned by a recusant family called Wiseman, Gerard had the narrowest of escapes from a persistent posse of pursuivants who surrounded the house at dawn on Easter Monday. They practically demolished the house around him. Sustained only by a jar of quince jelly, he successfully withstood a five-day ‘siege’ in one of Owen’s tiny hides without betraying his presence. After recovering from the ordeal, he and Owen – known to intimates as ‘Big John’ and ‘Little John’ – were smuggled to a safe town house in Holborn owned by the Wisemans.<
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  Innocently, the family matriarch, Mrs Wiseman, sent the treacherous John Frank to Holborn with a letter for Gerard. The servant delivered his message late on 23 April, and then hurried off to alert the authorities. Two hours later, Gerard and Owen were woken by a thunderous midnight knocking. There were no priest holes to hide in, and their bedchamber had only one door. As Owen hastily burned Mrs Wiseman’s incriminating letter, the pursuivants burst into the room. Gerard and Owen were prisoners.

  Taken to the Counter prison in London’s Poultry, they were separated, and the questioning began. An obvious gentleman, Gerard was treated gently at first, though Owen was more roughly handled. Gerard stoutly denied his real identity until proofs – provided by Frank – were presented to him. He continued to shield the Wisemans from suspicion, thereby saving their lives. At this point, Gerard was confronted with Elizabethan England’s torturer-in-chief, Richard Topcliffe. This man, MP for Old Sarum, was chief persecutor of England’s embattled Catholics. He enjoyed the queen’s trust, and received official permission to set up a private torture chamber in his Westminster home. Topcliffe was terrifying enough to make the strongest captive quail. ‘I am Topcliffe!’ the persecutor announced as he entered Gerard’s cell. Slapping his sword on a table for dramatic effect, he added menacingly, ‘No doubt you have heard people talking about me.’ But Gerard was not intimidated. ‘His acting was lost on me,’ he recalled. ‘I was not in the least frightened.’ In fact, claimed Gerard, to show his defiance he was ‘deliberately rude’ to his tormentor. To put extra pressure on the priest, both Owen and Richard Fulwood – Gerard’s servant, hauled in by the relentless Topcliffe in another raid – were tortured using the manacles, a simple but fiendishly effective device introduced into the English penal system by Topcliffe himself.