Tower: An Epic History of the Tower of London

by Jones, Nigel

  The Charles continued her cross-Channel voyage. Contrary winds first blew her north along the Essex coast to Harwich, then eastwards away from Calais. Only after four days of fearful winds, on the evening of 8 June, did they arrive off Ostend. Groggy from seasickness, William and Rodney struggled ashore, expecting to meet Arbella. But she was in an entirely different place: she had replaced her husband in the Tower.

  * * *

  Inevitably, word of the mysterious strangers who had so urgently sought a cross-Channel passage at Leigh had spread, reaching the ears of the local naval commander Admiral Sir William Monson. He sent the fast pinnace Adventure, skippered by Captain Griffin Cockett, in pursuit. Cockett spotted Arbella’s ship, which, buffeted by the same winds which had delayed William, was wallowing in heavy seas off Calais. The French coast was only a mile away, but tantalisingly out of reach. Cockett soon overtook the slower ship. Thirteen musket shots whistling through his sails and rigging persuaded the French captain, Tassin Corve, to heave to, and a dejected Arbella and her accomplices were arrested. Within sight of safety, her desperate bid for freedom with the husband she adored had finally failed.

  James’s vengeance on the cousin who had defied him was vicious and extended to all those who had – knowingly or unwittingly – helped in her attempt. Everyone with the remotest connection to the conspiracy – even the innocent wigmaker who had made Arbella’s peruke – was rounded up and jailed. Those held ranged from Arbella’s physician, Dr Moundford, and the hapless Mrs Adams, to the humble boatmen who had rowed her down the Thames. Also detained were the two captains, Corve and Seerson, and even the priest who had officiated at the couple’s marriage. Arbella’s servants Crompton and Markham were questioned at the Tower – and Markham was even racked to loosen his tongue. Arbella herself, along with her scheming aunt Mary, Countess of Shrewsbury, who had organised the whole affair, were also flung in the Tower. The huge sum of cash – £3,000 – that Arbella had raised to fund her new life abroad was confiscated. Closely confined to a cell in the Bell Tower, she literally pined away. She refused to eat, the symptoms of porphyria reappeared, and in 1615, sick and lonely, she died in the Tower.

  The husband she had hardly known did not mourn his bride for long. Any threat to James’s lineage had died with Arbella, and in 1616 William was forgiven. He returned to England and made a more acceptable second marriage – to Frances Devereux, daughter of Elizabeth I’s favourite, Robert, Earl of Essex, the last person to be beheaded within the Tower walls in 1601. William, made Marquess of Hertford, sired seven children with Frances, and found more favour with James’s son, Charles I, than he had with his father.

  He was made tutor to the Prince of Wales, the future Charles II, and in the Civil War, took a prominent – if largely unsuccessful – military role as commander of Royalist forces in the west. William was among the chosen companions allowed to attend King Charles I before his execution in 1649. He made his peace with the victorious Parliamentarians, however, and sat out Cromwell’s rule in comfortable country retirement. William lived to witness the Restoration, dying in 1661 aged seventy-two. The year he died, Charles II granted his old tutor his executed great-grandfather’s title and William was buried, loaded with years and honours, as the 2nd Duke of Somerset. That summer night when he fled the Tower in a common carter’s clothes must have seemed a very long time ago. But he had not forgotten his tragic first wife. Seymour’s will requested that he be buried alongside her in Westminster Abbey. That wish was not fulfilled: instead William lies with his second wife Frances and other members of the Seymour family in the eleventh-century church of St Mary the Virgin in the Wiltshire village of Bledwyn Magna.

  The twenty years of Civil War, Commonwealth, Protectorate and Restoration between 1640 and 1660 were as turbulent for the Tower as for the rest of the country. Many famous prisoners passed in and out of its walls. Security was often lax, and as well as the escapes described here, others exited by such crude means as sawing the doors off their cells. The changing cast list of its prisoners fluctuated with the turning fortunes of war, and the destinies of two prominent inmates who managed to escape the Tower faithfully reflected the era’s topsy-turvy politics. One was a faithful Royalist; the other a loyal Roundhead.

  Lord Arthur Capel of Hadham Hall in Essex, from his long ringletted locks to his pointed Van Dyck beard, was the very image of a Cavalier. In the Second Civil War of 1648, when Royalists rose in Capel’s native Essex, he was prominent among the Cavaliers who grimly held the county town of Colchester against a two-month siege by Thomas, Lord Fairfax, commander of the New Model Army.

  By then, both sides had been hardened by four years of bitter war, and little quarter was asked or given. When Colchester was starved into surrender at the end of August, after the population had been reduced to eating horses, cats, dogs and – according to rumour – their own children, even the moderate Fairfax was in an unforgiving mood. The two commanders of the Royalist garrison, Sir Charles Lucas and Sir George Lisle, were shot by firing squad. But Fairfax was more merciful to his fellow peers among the Cavaliers than the men whom he called common ‘soldiers of fortune’. Both Lord Capel and Lord Norwich were packed off to the Tower to await Parliament’s pleasure.

  Capel was visited by his loyal wife Elizabeth and at least some of their five sons and four daughters (like his fellow Tower escapers Edmund Nevill and William Seymour, he was remarkably fecund). He was urged to escape by his family and friends, who suggested that he should swim the moat. When Capel objected that he was a non-swimmer, it occurred to someone that this might not be necessary. Since milord was so tall, he could wade across instead.

  His friends circled the moat, looking for a spot where the murky water might be fordable. Eventually they found a place where accumulated filth provided a narrow causeway of sludge. Ropes and a grappling iron were smuggled into Capel’s cell between the Lieutenant’s Lodgings and the Beauchamp Tower. The bars on his cell window were carefully loosened in advance of the attempt, and on a particularly dark, foggy autumn night late in 1649, he wrapped one rope around his torso, fixed the other end securely, and slid down into the shadows. He used the second rope with the grappling iron to climb the curtain wall, and worked his way along the battlements until he reached the place where the moat was apparently shallow.

  Securing his rope to the battlements with the iron, Capel slid down it and fearlessly slipped into the icy water. He was rewarded when his feet touched bottom and the water was at chest level. But as he stepped out, his feet sinking into the oozy slime, the water level rose alarmingly until it was lapping his beard. At the same time, he was becoming disorientated in the mist. For all his courage as a soldier, Capel began to feel the panic of the non-swimmer out of his depth. Then, miraculously, the water level fell again. He found his footing and once more began to step forward. A few more paces, and he reached the slimy, reeking ooze of the far bank. His friends saw him and rushed to his rescue.

  Frozen and filthy, Capel was helped by willing hands to a waiting coach, and within an hour was bathed, dry and secure in a Royalist safe house in the nearby Temple. The hue and cry raised for him was formidable. To lose such a prominent Royalist prize was an unendurable humiliation for the Roundheads. Royalist houses in the city were raided and searched, and after a couple of days the friends sheltering Capel decided to move him south of the river until the frenzy had died down. It was a fatal mistake.

  He was taken at dead of night to Temple Steps where a hired boat rowed him across the Thames to Lambeth Marsh. But his great height was a giveaway, and the suspicious boatman heard one of his companions address Capel as ‘my Lord’. Greedy for the reward which had been placed on the nobleman’s head, the waterman landed them safely before pocketing his ferryman’s fee. He then – at a discreet distance – followed the group to their destination, noted the address, and hurried off to inform the authorities and claim his twenty pieces of silver – for £20 was the reward for Capel’s recapture.

  Capel
was rearrested and returned to the Tower. His master the king was on trial for his life after he too had fled captivity and been recaptured. Capel had letters smuggled out of the Tower urging his friends to rescue the king – another black mark against him which came to Parliament’s attention. After Charles’s execution at the end of January, Parliament was not in a merciful mood, and Capel was condemned to share the monarch’s fate. Capel was highly regarded for his nobility and devotion to his chosen cause. When his loyal wife Elizabeth petitioned for his life, it took a speech by Oliver Cromwell himself to confirm the death sentence by a mere three votes. Capel’s very qualities of courage, industry and resolution, argued Cromwell, would always make him ‘a thorn in the side’ of Parliament if they allowed him to live.

  On 9 March 1649 Capel was brought to the block in New Palace Yard, Westminster. He walked to the scaffold through Westminster Hall ‘saluting his friends with a serene and undaunted countenance’. On the eve of his execution he had written movingly to his wife, ‘I shall leave thee my dear children; in them I live with thee; and leave thee to the protection of a most gracious God.’ He was accompanied to the scaffold by the Bishop of Winchester, Dr Morley, who described the parting from his ‘most dear lady’ as ‘the saddest spectacle I ever beheld’. Capel told his seventeen-year-old son, another Arthur, not to seek revenge for his death, and in a passionate speech to the crowd who had gathered to see him die, told them his only crime had been obedience to his lawful sovereign. He concluded by calling on them to give their allegiance to the new King Charles II, ‘a prince endowed with all those virtues which could make a nation happy’.

  Missing the executioner among the crowd on the scaffold he asked, ‘Where is the gentleman?’ and when Richard Brandon, the headsman, came forward to ask the customary forgiveness from his victim, Capel replied, ‘I forgive thee from my soul,’ and gave him a £5 tip to perform his work well. Brandon duly struck off Capel’s head with one stroke – as he had cleanly executed the king a few weeks previously – and Capel’s body was borne back to his Essex home for burial. Brandon himself died later that year, some said from remorse. The boatman who had betrayed Capel, it was said, ‘became the scorn and contempt of everybody, and lived afterwards in shame and misery’.

  At the Restoration of Charles II, the king made young Arthur Capel the Earl of Essex – like William Seymour, Capel senior had been a tutor to the young prince during the Civil War. Lady Elizabeth Capel had died early that year and was buried with her husband in St Cecilia’s Church in Little Hadham.

  John Lambert was one of the most attractive and able figures to emerge from the Civil War. Next to Fairfax and Cromwell himself, Lambert was the Parliamentarian officer arguably most endowed with military gifts, and his political skills exceeded those of the often clumsy protector, though in the end he found himself on the wrong side of history as public opinion reacted against the grim years of Puritan military rule.

  Born into the Yorkshire gentry, Lambert learned his soldiering skills from his fellow Yorkshireman, Thomas Fairfax. Still under thirty when the war ended, Lambert transferred his loyalty to Cromwell, and was his trusted lieutenant in the great victories over the Scots and Royalists at Preston, Dunbar and Worcester. Popular in the army, and a moderate Republican in politics, Lambert seemed set fair to succeed Cromwell as Lord Protector, but he fell out with his chief for political as well as personal reasons. Handsome, vain and self-important, Lambert made little secret of his ambitions to succeed Cromwell, and was instrumental in blocking Oliver’s acceptance of Parliament’s offer of the crown: a slight which the Lord Protector never forgave.

  Cromwell took his revenge in 1658, and Lambert was briskly removed from his posts in Parliament and the army – though compensated with a generous pension – shortly before the Lord Protector’s death. Lambert retired with his wife Frances and children to his house in Wimbledon, but re-emerged on to the political stage after the fall of Cromwell’s son Richard is 1659. One of the ruling Council of State, Lambert attempted to impose a new military dictatorship. But the zeitgeist had turned decisively against military rule, and was increasingly flowing towards a Royalist restoration.

  After crushing Booth’s Royalist revolt near Manchester in 1659, Lambert was comprehensively outmanoeuvred by the secretly Royalist General Monck, deserted by the troops who had once adored him, and finally, in January 1660, as a result of Monck’s machinations, sent to the Tower by Parliament – who resented Lambert for having once dissolved it in the high-handed Cromwellian style. Without the attractive figurehead of Lambert to lead it, Republican resistance to Monck’s Royalism faded away, and by April the Restoration was a done deal: Charles II would return from his long exile the next month.

  Brooding in his cell in St Thomas’s Tower – where Nevill and William Seymour had been confined before him – Lambert resolved to prevent this ‘happy return’ at the eleventh hour. Aided by Republican sympathisers, he plotted his escape with his customary military skill. A rope – woven from silk by ‘a lady’ for a £100 fee – was smuggled into the general’s cell, and on the overcast evening of 10 April, at about 8 p.m., Lambert left his cell by the window, whose bars had been pre-loosened. Handkerchiefs wrapped round his hands to prevent friction burns, he slithered down the rope, scaled the curtain wall, and, avoiding the sentries on the wharf, met up with half a dozen old Cromwellians waiting to receive him on the river with a hired barge.

  Behind him in his cell bed, Lambert had left an extra precaution against early discovery – his bed maker, a girl named Joan, whom the handsome general had charmed into assisting his getaway. Joan, her features hidden under Lambert’s woollen nightcap, and her voice muffled by the bed curtains, had gruffly acknowledged the jailer’s cheery ‘Goodnight, my Lord’ when the turnkey did his rounds and locked ‘Lambert’ in for the night. The escape was not discovered, nor the alarm raised, until the same warder returned in the morning, and, to his dumbfounded astonishment, found Joan’s face staring out at him from under General Lambert’s nightcap. ‘In the name of God, Joan,’ cried the astonished jailer, ‘what makes you here?’ The answer we can only imagine.

  With a £100 reward on his head, Lambert lay low in a Republican safe house somewhere in the labyrinth of London’s pre-Great Fire streets. As with the Elizabethan Catholics in the previous century, the Puritan Roundheads were now an unpopular minority, stubbornly clinging to their rigid beliefs against the prevailing Royalist reaction. But since the whole purpose of Lambert’s escape had been a political one – to rally the scattered supporters of the ‘good old cause’ for one glorious last stand, he could not stay underground indefinitely. From his hiding place word went out for his old army comrades to rendezvous with him in the English Midlands, a conveniently central spot for rekindling the flickering embers of Republican resistance. And what better place, the romantic general decided, for a muster point, than the old battlefield of Edgehill?

  The escarpment of Edgehill near Kineton in Warwickshire was crowded with ghosts. This was the place where, nearly two decades before, in October 1642, the first pitched battle of the Civil War had taken place, and freeborn Englishmen had flung down the gauntlet of revolt against a tyrannical King Charles I. So the summons went out. It was impossible to gather a substantial body of men without the government hearing about it, and Monck, effectively dictator of England as he awaited the return of the king, dispatched an old comrade to intercept Lambert before he reached the rendezvous.

  Colonel Sir Richard Ingoldsby was a particularly piquant choice for the delicate task. For he was a regicide – one of the officers who had signed King Charles I’s death warrant. As such, he feared for his future under the regime of the son of the king whose head he had helped cut off. Therefore Ingoldsby was anxious to ingratiate himself with the new masters by foiling his old friends.

  By the time Ingoldsby’s two regiments caught up with Lambert near Daventry, the general had been joined by six troops of horse under John Okey, an unreconstructed Republican d
iehard and regicide who had commanded the Roundhead dragoons at the battle of Naseby. Ingoldsby rode up and down the lines haranguing Lambert’s men. Did they, he demanded, want to restart the Civil War? None did, and their drawn pistols gradually dipped towards the ground as they gave up the fight. There would be no repetition of Edgehill. As his men melted away, Lambert himself took off across the fields mounted on a Barbary stallion. But the galloping horse became bogged down in a ploughed meadow, and Lambert was overtaken and rearrested. The implacable Ingoldsby refused his old comrade’s pleas to release him.

  As they rode back towards London and the Tower, crowds gathered at Northampton to jeer the fallen hero. Their hoots led Lambert to recall a happier day in 1650, when he and Cromwell had ridden out of London together at the start of their victorious campaign in Scotland, to the cheers of a crowd. Naively, he had observed to Cromwell that he was glad they had the nation on their side. The cynical Oliver had replied, ‘Do not trust to that; for these very persons would shout just as much if you and I were going to be hanged.’ Since execution was now his likely fate, concluded Lambert, he had added the mantle of prophet to all Cromwell’s other admired attributes.

  In fact, John Lambert escaped execution, probably because he had not been a regicide. Ingoldsby, who had been, duly won forgiveness from the king for nipping the revolt in the bud. Returned to the Tower, Lambert was tried for treason and sentenced to perpetual imprisonment, serving the first part of his sentence at Guernsey’s Castle Cornet in the Channel Islands. His wife Frances secured permission to join him at the forbidding fortress and he was given freedom to roam the castle grounds, which led to another – unsuccessful – escape attempt in 1670. Brought back to England, he was more closely confined in another island fortress, that of St Nicholas (now called Drake’s Island) in Plymouth Sound.