Tower: An Epic History of the Tower of London

by Jones, Nigel

  The brutal repression that followed Monmouth’s rising fatally increased James’s unpopularity. And when in June 1688 the king’s equally fervently Catholic Italian second wife, Mary of Modena, gave birth to a male heir, Prince James Edward, the growing opposition acted. The king already had two adult daughters by his first marriage: Mary, wife of William of Orange, the stadtholder or ruler of the Netherlands; and Anne, who was married to Prince George of Denmark but lived in London. Both women were fervent Protestants who deeply disapproved of their father’s Catholicism. The birth of their infant half-brother persuaded them, and the powerful Whig lords, that James had to go. If he stayed, the prospect of a Catholic heir completing England’s reconversion to Rome was inevitable – and intolerable. James brought his house tumbling down in the same month when he issued a so-called ‘Declaration of Indulgence’, removing the remaining discrimination against Catholics and Dissenters, and ordered it to be read from the pulpits of all Anglican churches. Seven Anglican bishops – headed by the Archbishop of Canterbury and including Thomas Ken – refused the order, and were sent to the Tower for their temerity.

  For once, the whole range of Protestant opinion united behind the Anglican clerics. London was thick with crowds demonstrating their support, so they had to be brought to the Tower by boat to forestall a rescue attempt. Arriving at the Tower’s wharf, people rushed forwards to touch the hems of their vestments, and the guards who admitted them to the fortress drank toasts to their health. Only the Tower’s lieutenant, Sir Edward Hales, who had cynically followed the king’s conversion to Catholicism to aid his career, treated the clerics – according to diarist John Evelyn, who visited them in the Tower – ‘very surlily’. Even the Tower’s chaplain, ordered to read the Declaration of Indulgence from his pulpit, refused – and was dismissed.

  After a week, the bishops were brought to trial at Westminster Hall. They were triumphantly acquitted by a London jury and freed. The verdict, to the king’s fury, was celebrated across the city with bonfires and triumphant Protestant parades. That night, another magnificent seven – a group of the kingdom’s leading peers – wrote to William of Orange inviting him and his wife Mary, James’s daughter, to cross from Holland to take the throne. William did not need to be asked twice. A cold, calculating man, he was actuated not so much by his Protestantism – still less by love of his wife and her English homeland – but by his Dutch patriotism. As in the time of Philip II of Spain, Dutch Protestantism was under siege from a militantly Catholic and expansionist power, Louis XIV’s France. If England, with her large navy and newly professional army, could be brought into the war against France, the Netherlands would be saved. Despite the three naval wars they had fought under Cromwell and Charles II, England and Holland were natural allies: both maritime Protestant trading nations with a healthy tradition of religious toleration and dissent, and a common interest in opposing French domination of Europe.

  On 5 November 1688 – the anniversary of the Catholic Gunpowder Plot – blown by a ‘Protestant wind’, William landed at Torbay in Devon. Unlike that of Monmouth and his motley band of malcontents, this was a professionally planned invasion – the first successful one since another William’s 1066 conquest. Instead of Monmouth’s pathetic three boats, William had a Dutch fleet of sixty ships and an international army of 15,000 soldiers hardened by years of fighting the French. Crucially, he also carried a printing press to turn out Protestant propaganda to an increasingly literate people. James, menaced by desertions even within his own family (his daughters joined the Williamite camp), moved sluggishly to Salisbury with a royal army, which, though it numbered 25,000, was of doubtful loyalty. While the king was prostrated by a severe nosebleed, his cause was irretrievably lost.

  After an inconclusive council of war, John Churchill led a group of officers across the winter countryside to join William’s army. He left behind a letter to the king justifying his desertion on the grounds that his conscience and religion came before obedience to the sovereign who had promoted him. A week later, Churchill was back in Salisbury with William’s triumphant army and James had fled. As his regime collapsed, James made his way to Dover – only to be arrested and returned to London. Magnanimous in victory, William allowed him to escape again, this time successfully. James went to the court of his co-religionist Louis XIV in France and exile, where – apart from an unsuccessful attempt to recover his throne from Ireland – he remained for the rest of his life.

  In London, Judge George Jeffreys was left marooned by his master’s flight. Well aware of how deeply he was hated, Jeffreys knew that he could expect little mercy if he was caught. Trimming his bushy eyebrows, he disguised himself as a sailor, boarding a coal barge anchored in the Thames. However, the alcoholic judge could not resist slipping ashore for a last drink before sailing. Jeffreys adjourned to the Red Cow tavern in Wapping. Here, he was recognised by a former victim and a hostile crowd gathered. Fortunately for Jeffreys, he was taken into the custody of the London Trained Bands militia who took him, at his own request, terrified but unharmed – to the Tower. So desperate was Jeffreys to get into the safest fortress in London that he even offered to sign his own warrant of committal to the prison.

  Although he was saved from the fury of the mob, the Tower did not provide a complete sanctuary from the people’s vengeance. Jeffreys’ visitors included several of those who had appeared in the dock before him. They roundly abused the fallen judge through the bars of his cell door, throwing rotten food and spitting at him as Jeffreys cowered in a corner. When a barrel of oysters arrived from an anonymous well-wisher, Jeffreys greedily seized on it as manna from heaven, proving that he still had friends. Alas! The gift was a cruel jest: when opened, all the oyster shells were empty and curled at the bottom of the barrel was a noose tied with a hangman’s knot.

  Allowed a plentiful supply of brandy, Jeffreys drank himself into a stupor, mawkishly telling anyone who would listen that in conducting the Bloody Assize, he had only been carrying out the king’s orders. After four months in the Tower, Jeffreys, aged only forty-one, died of kidney disease aggravated by alcoholism. No one came forward to claim his hated body, so by a supreme irony, he was buried next to Monmouth’s grave in St Peter ad Vincula. The venal Tower constable Sir Edward Hales, it is pleasant to record, also failed to escape into exile. He tried to sail for France disguised as King James’s servant, but, like Jeffreys, was recognised, arrested and sent to the Tower – this time as a prisoner.

  At first John Churchill did not profit from switching his allegiance. Sidelined under James for his stubborn Protestantism, he found himself cold-shouldered by William who did not trust a deserter and promoted his own Dutch lieutenants. The new King William III’s distrust was well merited. Despite his desertion of James, Churchill was careful to keep lines open to the Jacobites. The Jacobites were dominant in Catholic Ireland and strong in Scotland and the north, too. The Tory party, having dominated government in the reigns of Charles II and James II, found themselves out in the cold, displaced by their Whig rivals who had summoned William. The Tories, too, looked longingly to ‘the king over the water’. Once again the familiar divisions of the Wars of the Roses and the Civil Wars yawned open: the impoverished Catholic north and west stuck loyally to the old ways; the progressive, prosperous Protestant south and east welcomed the Williamite Revolution, and supported the coronation of William and Mary as the new joint monarchs.

  The Tower filled with those who stayed loyal to the old regime. For the next half-century most of the fortress’s political prisoners were Jacobites. Among the first were a trio of peers: Lord Preston, Lord Dartmouth and Henry Hyde, Earl of Clarendon. Preston, though a Protestant, was loyal to James and accepted money from Louis XIV to stir up Jacobite revolution in his native north. Jailed in the Tower, he was freed – only to be caught red-handed crossing the Channel with papers revealing the existence of a 20,000-strong French army at Cherbourg poised to invade. Condemned to death, Preston saved his skin by betraying his fellow
conspirators, including Clarendon and Dartmouth.

  Clarendon’s loyalty to James was easily explained: as the brother of James’s first wife, Anne Hyde, he was the exiled king’s brother-in-law (although also the uncle of the new Queen Mary II, and her sister Princess Anne). Despite this relationship Queen Mary felt obliged to send her Jacobite uncle to the Tower after Preston’s revelation of his treachery. The indulgent queen allowed Clarendon’s wife to lodge with him, and he was visited by that assiduous Tower tourist John Evelyn. Finally, after many months he was freed, on condition that he remained on his country estates and conspired no more. Lord Dartmouth was less lucky. He was already familiar with the Tower when he arrived there as a prisoner, for he had been the fortress’s constable under James. Dartmouth died of a stroke soon after arriving at his old home.

  In May 1692, the Jacobites in the Tower were joined by John Churchill, now Lord Marlborough, the title of his eventual dukedom. Churchill landed in the Tower as the victim of a malicious forger. Robert Young, a skilled imitator of handwriting, had forged a letter demanding James’s restoration signed by several high-ranking peers, along with the ex-Archbishop of Canterbury, William Sanford, who – despite having been sent to the Tower by James – had stayed steadfast and been dismissed for refusing to crown William and Mary at Westminster; and Bishop Sprat of Rochester. The final signature forged by Young had been that of John Churchill, whose writing characteristically lacked dots (allegedly so the mean soldier could save on ink). Young’s facsimile was so convincing that when shown the letter Churchill had failed to recognise it as a fake. Young persuaded a fellow crook named Blackhead to secrete his forgery among Bishop Sprat’s papers. Failing to do this, Blackhead had merely left the incriminating document in a flowerpot in the bishop’s house where it had been found by the authorities who had been tipped off by Young. An alarmed council took no chances. Despite the letter’s dubious provenance, Churchill was arrested on the strength of it and taken to the Tower.

  Churchill’s main supporter was his feisty wife Sarah, a domineering beauty who had established an ascendancy over Princess Anne, the heiress to the throne. Anne, a dumpy, short-sighted woman depressed by her failure to produce a healthy heir despite multiple births and pregnancies, confided her woes to Sarah whom she called ‘Mrs Freeman’, while Sarah dubbed Anne ‘Mrs Morley’. The tone of the relationship can be detected in Anne’s girlish letters to her friend:

  I hear Lord Marlborough is sent to the Tower; and although I am certain they have nothing against him yet I was struck when I was told it, for methinks it is a dismal thing to be sent to that place … But let them do what they please, nothing shall ever vex me so I can have the satisfaction of seeing dear Mrs Freeman and I swear I would live on bread and water, between four walls, without repining. For as long as you continue kind, nothing can ever be a real mortification to your faithful Mrs Morley.

  Sarah visited her husband daily in the Tower to keep his spirits up. After he had spent more than a month there, the council examined Young and Blackhead. The atmosphere of panic in which Marlborough had been arrested had abated after the French invasion fleet had been routed, and the council was prepared to look more critically at the rogues who had sought the great soldier’s downfall. Blackhead collapsed under forceful questioning and admitted that Young had given him the document. On hearing that the accusation had broken down, Marlborough applied for a writ of Habeas Corpus and was released on bail. His return to Sarah was darkened, however, by the death of their two-year-old younger son, Charlie, who had passed away while his father had been in the Tower. Young was convicted of perjury and jailed. But after he escaped from the King’s Bench prison his crimes caught up with him and he was hanged at Tyburn in 1698 for forging coins.

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  It was not the Churchill family’s last brush with the fortress. Marlborough’s brother George, who would head the Royal Navy while John was winning his famous victories over France on land, was also imprisoned in the Tower for taking bribes; while yet another brother, Charles, a soldier like John, became lieutenant of the Tower after Marlborough’s great victory at Blenheim. That battle, and those that followed it – Ramillies, Oudenarde and Malplaquet – established Marlborough as the greatest general of his age, and put Britain (England and Scotland formally united in 1704) firmly on Europe’s map as a superpower in the making. Small wonder that Sir Winston Churchill revered the ancestor who made his family’s fortune.

  The religious conflicts which had dominated the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries slowly gave way before the dawning Enlightenment to political and economic power struggles between nation states. One notable Tower prisoner who exemplified the new pragmatic age was Britain’s first recognised prime minister, the Norfolk squire Sir Robert Walpole. Although Marlborough was a man of war and Walpole one of peace – seeing war as a waste of both men and money – the two men had other things in common. Both were Whigs. Both, too, in keeping with the acquisitive spirit of the age, were unprincipled and spectacularly corrupt, Walpole famously opining that ‘every man has his price’. Walpole’s peace policy kept England out of European wars for the long years of his premiership and his habit of taking bribes allowed him to build a fabulous stately home in his native Norfolk. It also brought him to the Tower.

  Ironically for a peace-loving man, Walpole was serving as Secretary for War in 1712 when he was accused of corruption and embezzling government funds. His political enemies had him committed to the Tower. But Walpole continued to hold court from there, distributing his ill-gotten largesse in wining and dining visitors who could be influential in getting him out. The wily Walpole also forked out for tear-jerking propaganda – one pamphlet called him The Jewel in the Tower – portraying himself as a wronged innocent. Expelled from the house, his loyal Norfolk constituents returned him unopposed at the subsequent by-election. Even so, Walpole was kept in the Tower for six dreary months, during which time he wrote a history of Parliament, an institution he managed and manipulated more successfully than any politician since John Pym. On his release, he resumed his upwardly mobile political career as if nothing had happened.

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  The year after Queen Anne was succeeded by the German-speaking Hanoverian George I, the Jacobites launched the 1715 rising in favour of James II’s son, James Edward, ‘the Old Pretender’, which led to the dramatic escape from the Tower of Lord Nithsdale. In 1745 came the much more serious rebellion of the Scottish clans in support of James Edward’s son, Charles Edward, aka ‘Bonnie Prince Charlie’ or ‘the Young Pretender’. The prince’s Highland army took Edinburgh, marched south and reached Derby before a lack of English support caused it to turn tail for Scotland, where the Jacobites were crushed by the Hanoverians at Culloden in April 1746 – the last pitched battle on British soil.

  After the rising’s failure, as after the failure of the 1715 revolt, another clutch of Scottish Jacobite peers arrived at the Tower. One was the elderly Simon, Lord Lovat, chief of the Fraser clan, who, after a life devoted to selfish personal pleasure and domestic abuse (he had raped an aunt after his uncle’s death before forcing her to marry him to acquire her husband’s estate), had unwisely, aged over eighty, committed himself to Bonnie Prince Charlie’s doomed cause. Found hiding in a hollow tree on an island after Culloden, the wicked but irrepressible old scoundrel attempted to shift the blame for his treason on to his son. He continued this heartless farce even after arriving at the Tower, telling the lieutenant, ‘We can hang my eldest son and then my second son will be my heir and can marry your niece.’

  Lovat’s chutzpah is evident in the report of his trial by Robert Walpole’s gossipy son Horace. Lovat told the lords that he would have broken out of the Tower if he were a younger man. Told that much younger men had been successfully held there he replied, ‘Yes – but they were inexperienced. They had not broke out of as many gaols as I have.’ (Lovat had indeed escaped from prison while in French exile.) On his way to his trial a woman thrust her head into Lovat’s
coach and taunted him with the words, ‘You ugly old dog, don’t you think you will have that frightful head cut off?’ Lovat (whose admittedly unhandsome features were brilliantly etched by William Hogarth as he awaited trial) responded unabashed, ‘You ugly old bitch, I believe I shall.’

  He was right. Lovat was sentenced to be beheaded on Tower Hill. On 9 April 1747, a year after Culloden, the old man was taken by coach the short distance from the Tower and had to be helped up the steps of the scaffold. He did not die alone. A vast crowd had assembled to see his departure, and one of the crowded stands erected to give spectators a better view collapsed under their weight. Twenty people died. When told of the disaster, Lovat replied with characteristic callousness, ‘The more who go, the better the sport.’ Urged to hurry as he laboriously prepared to die, the old man grumbled, ‘God save us! Why should there be such a bustle about taking off an old grey head, that needs cannot go up three steps without three bodies to support it?’ Lovat was the last person to be beheaded on the hill where so many had died before him.

  Lovat’s three prime characteristics – murderous psychopathology, aristocratic eccentricity and physical ugliness – came together in a trio of famous Tower prisoners of the eighteenth century. The first, Laurence Shirley, 4th Earl Ferrers, was a sadistic rake whose violence and drunken womanising (he had a mistress, Mrs Clifford, and a parallel family of four children) did not delight his pretty young wife, who separated from him in 1758 after enduring six years of abuse. His excesses put his extensive Midlands estates in danger, and trustees were appointed to manage them. Ferrers resented any curb on his activities, and in January 1760 after summoning one of the trustees – an elderly steward named John Johnson – to an interview, he shot the old man dead.