Tower: An Epic History of the Tower of London

by Jones, Nigel

Prynne found the records in a chaotic mess. They had been thrown into a room in the White Tower, and were lying scattered in heaps with no attempt at order. Prynne primly described the state in which he found them:

  I have been almost choked with the dust of neglected records interred in their own rubbish for sundry years in the White Tower; their rust eating out the tops of my gloves with their touch, and their dust rendering me, twice a day, as black as a chimney sweeper.

  Somewhat surprisingly, Prynne proved an admirable historian of the Tower and his last decade was spent happily in the fortress where he had once suffered. The old polemicist was seen at work there by the gossipy antiquarian John Aubrey who described him among his now ordered papers, wearing:

  … a long quilt cap, which came two or three inches over his eyes, which served him as an umbrella to defend his eyes from the light. About every two or three hours his man was to bring him a roll and a pot of ale to refocillate his wasted spirits. So he studied and drank, and munched some bread; this maintained him till night and then he made a good supper.

  Prynne’s experience of seeing the two sides of the Tower – as captive, and as custodian – was not unique in Civil War England. London’s lord mayor, Sir Richard Gurney, the capital’s leading Royalist and a former Tower lieutenant, was deprived of his office by Parliament and imprisoned in the fortress where he had once presided in pomp, only being freed as his death approached in 1647. The man Parliament installed as lord mayor in Gurney’s place, a Puritan MP named Sir Isaac Pennington, was also made lieutenant of the Tower in place of Sir John Conyers. Pennington, in his turn, was deposed at the Restoration and imprisoned in his former workplace, where he soon died.

  Nor was Prynne the only man to turn his coat politically in the wars. Two who followed him – or attempted to – in his erratic progress across the political spectrum were Sir John Hotham and his son, another John. The Hothams, scions of an old Yorkshire family, were early Parliamentary heroes, seizing their bastion, Hull, and denying the king entry to this vital port. Their action – in January 1642 – precipitated the Civil War, in which both fought for Parliament. However, the hotheaded younger Hotham fell out with his fellow Yorkshire Roundheads and persuaded his father to change sides. The Hothams were in the midst of negotiations to hand Hull over to the Royalists – in return for a hefty £20,000 bribe – when their treachery was discovered. They were arrested, brought to the Tower, and, on successive days, executed.

  Another Parliamentary governor of another port – Plymouth in Devon – Sir Alexander Carew, suffered a fate similar to that of the Hothams. He too was originally a stout Parliamentarian. Refusing to vote against the attainder that killed Strafford, Carew replied, ‘If I was sure to be the next man that should suffer upon the same scaffold with the same axe, I would give my consent to the passing of it.’ Little did he know then that this would be exactly what happened to him. Entrusted by Parliament with holding Plymouth, a rare Roundhead outpost in the Royalist West Country, Carew opened negotiations with the Cavaliers to hand the port over. But he was betrayed by a servant and brought to the Tower from Plymouth by sea. Here he was held for a year before – despite his wife’s plea that he was insane – being executed on Tower Hill like Strafford before him. Ironically, his younger brother, who remained true to the Roundhead cause, was hanged, drawn and quartered as a regicide after the Restoration.

  In the 1640s and 1650s, the Tower was crammed with more prisoners than at any time since the Elizabethan persecution of Catholic priests and plotters in the 1580s and 1590s. At first, most of the captives were Royalist prisoners of war and peers who could not accept the assault on hereditary privilege culminating in the first English republic. It is estimated that no fewer than one third of the entire House of Lords were imprisoned in the fortress during this period.

  As well as peers, the Tower played host to a pair of precious poets during these troubled times. Edmund Waller combined the writing of classically restrained lyric verse with a successful Parliamentary career. A moderate man in an age of extremes, he was one of the delegates appointed by Parliament in 1643 to negotiate with Charles I on a possible compromise peace. The atmosphere in the Royalist capital, Oxford, seems to have influenced Waller, and on his return to London he became involved in a Cavalier conspiracy – named ‘Waller’s Plot’ in his honour – to seize the Tower, liberate its Royalist prisoners and use it as a base to take over London for the king. The plot was betrayed and Waller was arrested. Fortunately for him, he was a distant cousin of Cromwell and still had friends among his fellow MPs, which – along with his abject betrayal of his co-conspirators – saved his life when he was tried for treason after spending several months as a prisoner in the fortress he had hoped to seize. Even so, he was forced to pay a fine of £10,000, and exiled – a sentence only remitted after he wrote a fawning poetic ‘Panegyric’ to Cromwell in 1655. After the Restoration, he wrote a similar grovelling verse tribute to Charles II, and when teased by the king that his verses in praise of Cromwell were of higher quality, Waller neatly replied, ‘Sire, we poets succeed better in fiction than in truth.’

  The Tower’s other poet prisoner, Sir William Davenant, was a godson – and rumoured to be even a natural son – of Shakespeare, who often stayed at Davenant’s birthplace, the Crown Inn, Oxford, en route between London and Stratford. Davenant certainly inherited some of the Bard’s literary interests, if not his genius, and turned out a wide array of works, ranging from love lyrics to England’s first opera libretto, The Siege of Rhodes. Appointed Poet Laureate by Charles I on the death of his mentor and collaborator Ben Jonson, Davenant fought bravely for the king’s cause in the Civil War and went into exile in France with Charles II. Named as Lieutenant-Governor of Maryland, Davenant was crossing to the Americas with a cargo of white slaves for the colonies culled from French jails when he was captured in mid-Channel by a Parliamentary warship.

  Imprisoned on the Isle of Wight, Davenant wrote a heroic verse epic, Gondibert, and had just published it when he was transferred to the Tower to await his trial. The poem included verses in praise of a woman John Aubrey calls ‘a handsome black wench’, who reputedly infected the libidinous poet with syphilis – causing him to lose his nose to the disease. He spent a year – 1651 – in the Tower before, like Waller before him, benefiting from the aid of a greater poet than himself, Cromwell’s Latin secretary, John Milton, who successfully begged his boss for Davenant’s release. Influential in the Restoration theatre that followed the Cromwellian ice age, Davenant was responsible for the revival of the plays of his godfather, Shakespeare, as well as staging his own works. He was buried in the Poets’ Corner of Westminster Abbey.

  After the Parliamentarians triumphed in 1645, simmering tensions between a Parliament dominated by Presbyterian sympathisers and an army leaning heavily towards radical Puritan ‘independents’ – a host of sects including Baptists, Anabaptists, Muggletonians and ‘Fifth Monarchy Men’ – burst into the open, and the Tower’s already overcrowded cells stretched still further to accommodate more men whose views were at variance with the dominant faction.

  In such conditions security at the Tower lapsed, and several notable escapes were made – including those of General Lambert and Lord Capel. The famous escape in drag of the Jacobite Lord Nithsdale was anticipated by another Scotsman, John Middleton, who had started as a distinguished Parliamentary soldier, defeating the great Royalist hero Montrose, but had switched support to Charles II after Charles I’s execution. As Charles’s military commander at the battle of Worcester, Middleton was defeated, wounded, captured and brought to the Tower. He soon escaped in women’s clothes brought in by his wife, slipped across to France and rejoined Charles, who made him an earl after the Restoration.

  Edward Massie was another Parliamentary hero turned Royalist whose career curiously parallels that of Middleton. Famed for his epic defence as governor of Gloucester against a Royalist siege conducted by Charles I himself, Massie later emerged as a moderate Presbyteri
an in the struggle against the extreme republicans. Disgusted by Charles’s execution, Massie joined Charles II in exile, was wounded at Worcester, captured after the battle – and succeeded in escaping from the Tower by shinning up a chimney and crossing to France. Like Middleton, he was rewarded with lands and titles after the Restoration.

  After Cromwell finally settled the Parliament versus army conflict in the latter’s favour by dissolving both the Long Parliament that had sat since Pym’s day and the Rump Parliament of leftovers after repeated purges, he established a military dictatorship called the Commonwealth, with himself as ‘Lord Protector’. The remaining Royalist prisoners in the Tower were joined by various radicals and republicans – loosely known as ‘Levellers’ – whose leading spokesman was John Lilburne, dubbed ‘Freeborn’ John. Advocating ideas of social equality far in advance of their era, the Levellers became a major force in the New Model Army that had won the Civil War. But their radical proposals for regular Parliaments voted for by all adult males were seen as a dire threat to property and privilege by the army’s ‘Grandees’: Generals Cromwell, Fairfax and Ireton.

  The clash between the Grandees and the Levellers was at first conducted only with words – at the army debates at Putney and in the pamphlets churned out by Lilburne and the other Leveller leaders. Soon, however, the intoxicating Leveller doctrines led to army mutinies which were put down only with bloodshed. Parliament in 1649 decided that the Tower was the best place for Lilburne and the other chief Leveller agitators, William Walwyn, Richard Overton and Thomas Prince. It was not ‘Freeborn’ John’s first experience of the Tower. He had been consigned there in 1647 for attacking his former Parliamentary army commander, the Earl of Manchester, for his lacklustre conduct of the war. Cromwell, who shared Lilburne’s jaundiced opinion of the half-hearted Manchester’s military ability, helped get him out; but Lilburne was such a habitually quarrelsome spirit (it was said that when he died ‘John’ would quarrel with ‘Lilburne’ about the best place to be buried) that he was soon biting the hand that had freed him, making himself one of the sharpest thorns in Cromwell’s side.

  The four Leveller leaders did not let their incarceration hinder their agitation. From the Tower they wrote and distributed a new pamphlet, An Agreement of the Free people of England. Lilburne was especially productive of pamphlets and polemics. It was said that even in the Tower it was ‘impossible to separate him from ink’, and words flew from his pen like sparks struck from a smithy. Eventually, Parliament banished him and Walwyn to the Netherlands, where the two ardent republicans found themselves conspiring with their fellow exiles from the Royalist camp. Returning incognito to England, Lilburne was arrested and sent back to the Tower in 1653. Freed yet again, he became a Quaker in 1655 and forsook a lifetime of noisy political activism for the quietist life.

  If most Levellers were content to keep their opposition to Cromwell’s regime to words, the same could not be said of those militant republicans who – like their Royalist opponents – actively sought the death of the dictator. Edward Sexby and Miles Sindercombe were two ex-Cromwellian soldiers who believed their former military chiefs had sold out the ‘good old cause’ of Roundhead republicanism. After the suppression of the Leveller-inspired army mutinies in 1649, both fled abroad and actively plotted Cromwell’s death, issuing a pamphlet, Killing No Murder, justifying the assassination of tyrants.

  In 1656 Sindercombe returned to England to put his theories into action. With a group of fellow malcontents, he rented two houses close to Whitehall Palace, from where they intended to shoot Cromwell with an arquebus. Finding that the crowded streets made it difficult to get a clear shot, the conspirators relocated to Hammersmith where they planned to kill Cromwell on his way to or from his favourite out-of-town residence, Hampton Court Palace, by shooting at him with a home-made infernal machine consisting of seven blunderbusses tied together. When Cromwell failed to show on the appointed day, Sindercombe’s gang moved again – this time to Hyde Park where they hoped to shoot the Lord Protector while he was out riding. After they had broken the hinges to the park’s gates for a quick getaway, Cromwell upset their plans by calling his would-be assassin, one John Cecil, over to discuss the imperfections of his horse.

  In despair, the plotters changed their method of execution to arson. Infiltrating the ancient rooms and corridors of Whitehall Palace, Sindercombe hid in the palace’s chapel and set it on fire, intending to incinerate Cromwell in his bed. By this time the regime was aware of the plot. Cromwell had his own efficient spymaster, John Thurloe, a man with the espionage genius of Francis Walsingham, whose network of agents across Europe monitored the rival exile communities of Royalists and republicans. Sindercombe was arrested before the fire had taken hold, and had his nose sliced off with a sword before he was subdued.

  He and Cecil were taken to the Tower where Cecil saved his skin by agreeing to testify against his confederates. After failing in a bid to bribe his warders to let him go, Sindercombe cheated the executioner on the night before he was due to be beheaded by persuading his sister to slip him a draught of poison when she made an eve-of-execution visit to his cell to bid him farewell. Asking his guards to leave him alone while he said his final prayers, Sindercombe swallowed the poison and died. Despite this unorthodox exit, the law took its course, and his lifeless corpse was dragged up Tower Hill on a hurdle and solemnly interred with an iron-tipped stake marking the spot ‘as an example of terror to all traitors for the time to come’.

  The following year, Edward Sexby returned to pick up the threads of conspiracy left by his friend Sindercombe. But on his arrival he found that Thurloe’s nets were so tight that any possibility of a successful assassination had vanished. Despondent, he decided to return to the Continent – only to be arrested as he boarded a ship bound for Flanders. Sexby, too, was detained in the Tower and harshly interrogated. His sufferings may have contributed to his death there from fever in January 1658 – just under eight months before the demise of his enemy Cromwell.

  Cromwell disdained the Tower as a residence. Given its state of decay and the proximity of the many prisoners he sent there, this is scarcely surprising. He did, however, take an interest in the fortress. Indeed, he succeeded his rival General Fairfax as its constable, and made his mark on the place – albeit in a destructive way. Not only were the Crown jewels – which Cromwell considered worthless baubles – melted down and sold off, but the Lord Protector took the demolition ball to the Tower’s physical fabric too. The now redundant Jewel House abutting the White Tower went. So did the old royal Palace to the south of the White Tower. The structure which had witnessed so many of the Tower’s historic moments was unceremoniously torn down. Its stonework was left lying in untidy heaps until Charles II had them carted away. With it went the ancient Coldharbour Tower and the nearby Wardrobe Tower, which had once housed the state’s documents.

  Like the Tower, the Lord Protecter left the realm in a state of chaos. His increasingly unpopular regime had alienated not only Royalists and republicans, but ordinary folk who wanted to enjoy the harmless pleasure of the theatre and Christmas without interference from an overbearing state. Cromwell’s designated successor, his son Richard, proved far from a chip off the old block – being unable to unite the warring generals who held the real power.

  Eventually one general, George Monck, emerged as literally the kingmaker: the man who was instrumental in restoring Charles II. In his own changes of allegiance – Royalist, reluctant Roundhead, loyal Cromwellian, and back full circle to Royalism again – Monck epitomises the journey made by so many of his fellow Tower prisoners in the two troubled decades between 1640 and 1660. Born in 1608 to an impoverished West Country gentry family, Monck sought a military career. Europe, with the Thirty Years’ War raging, offered plentiful opportunities to acquire practical military experience and Monck seized them with both hands.

  As a mercenary soldier, Monck served in Spain, France and the Netherlands. When the Civil War broke out, he sided w
ith the king, but was captured by an old soldiering friend, Thomas Fairfax, at Nantwich in 1644. At first Fairfax kept his captive in comfortable accommodation in Hull, hoping to persuade him to offer his talents to Parliament. But Monck stubbornly stayed loyal to the king, so sterner persuasion was decided upon: Monck was taken to the Tower, and told he would stay there unless or until he changed his allegiance.

  Monck was confined in St Thomas’s Tower. Apart from the rising damp from the river below, his chief problem was lack of cash. Prisoners were expected to pay for their accommodation – including extra food to augment the Tower’s inadequate basic diet, laundry, writing materials and the necessary bribes to their warders. Although his elder brother Thomas sent him £50, the money was soon gone, and Monck was compelled to beg for more. Across the chasm of war, the king, from Oxford, despite his own desperate cash shortage, sent Monck a generous gift of £100 in gold coins. Perhaps Charles was remembering the way he had let down another loyal servant, Strafford, in his hour of need in the Tower. Or maybe the money was a reminder of where Monck’s true loyalties should lie.

  Monck remained in the Tower for two and a half years, steadfastly refusing his captors’ threats and blandishments, and remaining true to his Royalist cause. To while away the weary hours, Monck wrote a textbook, Observations upon Military and Political Affairs. Though unpublished in his lifetime, the book remained an influential text for centuries. Monck had a modern military mind, emphasising the importance of good intelligence and a sound supply system. ‘Intelligence is the most powerful means to undertake brave Designs and to avoid great ruines.’ A good general should not be ‘so prodigal of his Soldiers’ blood as though men were made only to fill ditches and to be the woeful executioners of his rashness’. Such sensible compassion was new in warfare and marks Monck out as the very model of a modern major-general (a rank he had not yet in fact obtained).