Castles, Customs, and Kings: True Tales by English Historical Fiction Authors

by English Historical Fiction Authors

  Surveyors were appointed to search for potential royal wardships throughout the realm. Managing all of this was a Master of the King’s Wards who supervised royal wardships and administered the lands and revenues of wards during the period of crown control, and sold those not to be retained. The revenues went into the king’s private funds.

  In 1540, Henry VIII replaced the office of Master of the King’s Wards with the Court of Wards, which assumed complete control of wards and the administration of their lands and the selling of the wardships. Eventually, the Court of Wards became one of the Tudor crown’s most lucrative ministries.

  In the reign of Elizabeth I, the last Tudor monarch, the Court of Wards was supervised by Sir William Cecil (later Lord Burghley) who exerted enormous control over this court, keeping several lucrative and important wardships for himself.

  I became familiar with the situation of royal wardships when I wrote The Queen’s Lady. My book features Sir Thomas More, Henry VIII’s chancellor, who famously went to the execution block rather than swear the oath that Henry was supreme head of the church in England, a title Henry created in order to divorce Catherine of Aragon and marry Anne Boleyn.

  Sir Thomas More had two wards, Anne Cresacre and Giles Heron. He brought them up in his household where they were educated alongside his children. Eventually, Anne married More’s son John, and Giles married More’s daughter Cecily. The marriages seem to have been happy ones.

  Anne Cresacre’s story inspired me to create another ward for Sir Thomas More: Honor Larke, the heroine of my novel The Queen’s Lady. Honor grows up revering More and becomes a lady-in-waiting to Catherine of Aragon. Forced to take sides in the religious extremism of the day, Honor fights to save the church’s victims from death at the stake, bringing her into conflict with her once-beloved guardian. She enlists Richard Thornleigh, a rogue sea captain, in her missions of mercy, and eventually risks her life to try to save Sir Thomas from the wrath of the King.

  The Execution of Sir Thomas More

  by Barbara Kyle

  A Man For All Seasons, the 1966 film based on Robert Bolt’s play and starring Paul Scofield, imprinted on a generation a glowing picture of Sir Thomas More as a warmhearted humanist: a loving family man, a brilliant lawyer and writer, and a steadfast friend of Henry VIII until the rift over Henry’s break with the Roman church brought More to the execution block.

  A child of the ‘60s, I was drawn to More the humanist when I began to write my novel The Queen’s Lady, the first in what became the seven-book Thornleigh Saga. What I discovered in my research was a complex and conflicted man. As Henry’s Chancellor, More banned books and burned men at the stake. He was a child of his time, of course, and his time—the Reformation—terrified him.

  Deeply conservative, More loathed and feared the radicalism of the German Lutherans. He was shaken by the news of the sack of Rome, a barbarous rampage by a mixed brew of Spanish, Italian, and German mercenary troops who, unpaid after fighting for the Emperor Charles, mutinied and stormed the city.

  They massacred a third of the population, prodded cardinals through the streets to be butchered, auctioned off nuns who were then raped at their altars, and shredded precious manuscripts of the Vatican library to use them for horses’ bedding. The carnage stunned Europe.

  As Chancellor of England, More was vigilant at upholding the church’s authority as the supreme pillar of the state. At that time Bibles printed in English were illegal (the church allowed only Bibles in Latin), and More authorized raids on secret gatherings of people who had smuggled in English Bibles. He destroyed the books and sent the criminals, if they did not recant their heresy, to the stake to be burned.

  Like complex ideologues of our own time, More, while condemning others to death, was also a caring and loving father. He wrote affectionate letters to his children whenever he was away on his business for the king, and, quite unusually for the period, he educated his daughters on an equal footing with his son. He was so proud of his daughter Margaret’s erudition he encouraged her to correspond regularly with his friend, the great Dutch intellectual humanist, Desiderius Erasmus.

  More himself was eventually and famously forced to choose sides in the religious extremism of the day and a horrifying choice it was, when his friend Henry, the king, demanded that all men swear an oath acknowledging him as supreme head of the church in England. Henry’s break with the Roman church was the result of his implacable drive to get the Pope to annul his marriage to Catherine so he could marry Anne Boleyn. The penalty for refusing to take the oath was death. The vast majority of Henry’s subjects complied. But Sir Thomas More believed that no king was, or could ever be, the supreme head of the church, and that if he swore the oath he would perjure his immortal soul. Along with several Carthusian monks and Bishop John Fisher, More chose death.

  On the scaffold, as the executioner stood ready with his axe, More’s last words were true to his complex nature: “I die the king’s good servant, but God’s first.”

  English Crime and Punishment: Death by Pyre—A More Seemly Death for Women?

  by Teresa Thomas Bohannon

  Death by pyre was a frequent method of punishment in the barbarous days of many nations. In Britain it was used by the Anglo-Saxons as the penalty of certain crimes, and, as the standard punishment of witchcraft, it was maintained throughout the Middle Ages.

  The laws of Athelstan, (the first king of a unified England, 927 A.D.) brutally decreed that a female slave convicted of theft was to be burned alive by eighty other female slaves. In addition, being burnt at the stake was from early times the recognized method of dealing with heretics of all classes and many different religions.

  What is perhaps lesser known is the fact that death by fire was commonly used to punish women for civil offenses...as a more seemly death than hanging, since they did not need to be displayed naked as they would if drawn and quartered. This practice was considered by the framers of the law as a commutation of the sentence of hanging, and a concession made to the sex of the offenders.

  “For as the decency due to the sex,” says Blackstone, “forbids the exposing and publicly mangling their bodies, their sentence is, to be drawn to the gallows, and there to be burnt alive.” He adds:

  the humanity of the English nation has authorised, by a tacit consent, an almost general mitigation of such part of these judgments as savours of torture and cruelty, a sledge or hurdle being usually allowed to such traitors as are condemned to be drawn, and there being very few instances (and those accidental and by negligence) of any persons being disemboweled or burnt till previously deprived of sensation by strangling.

  The annals of King’s Lynn tells us that, in the year 1515, a woman was burnt in the market-place for the murder of her husband. Twenty years later, a Dutchman was burnt for reputed heresy. In the same town, in 1590, Margaret Read was burnt for witchcraft. Eight years later, a woman was executed for witchcraft, and in the year 1616, another woman suffered death for the same crime.

  In 1791, at King’s Lynn, the landlady of a public-house was murdered by a man let into the house at the dead of night by a servant girl. The man was hanged for committing the crime, and the girl was burnt at the stake for assisting the murderer to enter the dwelling.

  On 25 May 1537, Lady Ann Bulmer was convicted of high treason and burned at the stake by Henry VIII for her role in Bigod’s Rebellion.

  In 1681, under English Colonial law, a slave named Maria tried to kill her owner by setting his house on fire. She was convicted of arson and burned at the stake at Roxbury, Massachusetts, and following suspected slave revolt plots in 1708, one woman was burnt alive in New York.

  There is an account of a burning at Lincoln in 1722. Eleanor Elsom was condemned to death for the murder of her husband, and was ordered to be burnt at the stake. She was clothed in a cloth, “made like a shift,” saturated with tar, and her limbs w
ere also smeared with the same inflammable substance, while a tarred bonnet had been placed on her head. She was brought out of the prison barefoot, and, being put on a hurdle, was drawn on a sledge to the place of execution near the gallows. Upon arrival, some time was passed in prayer, after which the executioner placed her on a tar barrel, a height of three feet, against the stake. A rope ran through a pulley in the stake, and was placed around her neck, she herself fixing it with her hands. Three irons also held her body to the stake, and the rope being pulled tight, the tar barrel was taken aside and the fire lighted.

  The details in the Lincoln Date Book state that she was probably quite dead before the fire reached her, as the executioner pulled upon the rope several times whilst the irons were being fixed. The body was seen amid the flames for nearly half-an-hour, though, through the dryness of the wood and the quantity of tar, the fire was exceedingly fierce.

  An instance in which the negligence of the executioner caused death to be unnecessarily prolonged is found in the case of Catherine Hayes, who was executed at Tyburn, November 3, 1726, for the murder of her husband. She was being strangled in the accustomed manner, but the fire scorching the hands of the executioner, he relaxed the rope before she had become unconscious, and in spite of the efforts at once made to hasten combustion, she suffered for a considerable time the greatest agonies.

  Two paragraphs, dealing with such cases, are in the London Magazine for July, 1735, and are as follow:

  At the assizes, at Northampton, Mary Fawson was condemned to be burnt for poisoning her husband, and Elizabeth Wilson to be hanged for picking a farmer’s pocket of thirty shillings.

  Among the persons capitally convicted at the assizes, at Chelmsford, are Herbert Hayns, one of Gregory’s gang, who is to be hung in chains, and a woman, for poisoning her husband, is to be burnt.

  In the next number of the same magazine, the first-mentioned criminal is again spoken of:

  Mrs. Fawson was burnt at Northampton for poisoning her husband. Her behaviour in prison was with the utmost signs of contrition. She would not, to satisfy people’s curiosity, be unveiled to anyone. She confessed the justice of her sentence, and died with great composure of mind.

  And also:

  Margaret Onion was burnt at a stake at Chelmsford, for poisoning her husband. She was a poor, ignorant creature, and confessed the fact.

  We obtain from Mr. John Glyde, jun., particulars of another case of burning for husband murder (styled petty treason). In April, 1763, Margery Beddingfield and a farm servant, named Richard Ringe, her paramour, had murdered John Beddingfield, of Sternfield. The latter criminal was the actual murderer, the wife being considered an accomplice. He was condemned to be hanged and she burnt, at the same time and place, and her sentence was that she should “be taken from hence to the place from whence you came, and thence to the place of execution, on Saturday next, where you are to be burnt until you be dead: and the Lord have mercy on your soul.” Accordingly, on the day appointed, she was taken to Rushmere Heath, near Ipswich, and there strangled and burnt.

  Coining was, until a late period, an offense which met with capital punishment. In May 1777, a girl of little more than fourteen years of age had, at her master’s command, concealed a number of whitewashed farthings to represent shillings, for which she was found guilty of treason and sentenced to be burnt. Her master was already hanged, and the faggots but awaiting the application of the match to blaze in fury around her, when Lord Weymouth, who happened to be passing that way, humanely interfered. Said a writer in the Quarterly Review, “a mere accident saved the nation from this crime and this national disgrace.”

  In Harrison’s Derby and Nottingham Journal, for September 23, 1779, is an account of two persons who were several days previously tried and convicted for high treason, the indictment being for coining shillings in Cold Bath Field, and for coining shillings in Nag’s Head Yard, Bishopsgate Street. The culprit in the latter case was a man named John Fields, and in the former a woman called Isabella Condon. They were sentenced to be drawn on a hurdle to the place of execution, the man to be hanged and the woman burnt.

  Phœbe Harris, in 1786, was burnt in front of Newgate. The Chelmsford Chronicle of June 23, 1786, gives an account of her execution. After furnishing particulars of six men being hanged for various crimes, the report says:

  About a quarter of an hour after the platform had dropped, the female convicted [Phœbe Harris, convicted of counterfeiting the coin called shillings] was led by two officers of justice from Newgate to a stake fixed in the ground about midway between the scaffold and the pump. The stake was about eleven feet high, and, near the top of it was inserted a curved piece of iron, to which the end of the halter was tied. The prisoner stood on a low stool, which, after the ordinary had prayed with her a short time, being taken away, she was suspended by the neck (her feet being scarcely more than twelve or fourteen inches from the pavement). Soon after the signs of life had ceased, two cartloads of fagots were placed round her and set on fire; the flames presently burning the halter, the convict fell a few inches, and was then sustained by an iron chain passed over her chest and affixed to the stake. Some scattered remains of the body were perceptible in the fire at half-past ten o’clock. The fire had not completely burnt out at twelve o’clock.

  The last instance on record is that of Christian Murphy, alias Bowman, who was burnt on March 18, 1789, for coining.

  The barbarous laws which permitted such repugnant exhibitions were repealed by the 30th George III., cap. 48, which provided that, after the 5th of June, 1790, women were to suffer hanging, as in the case of men.

  English Queens, Anne Boleyn and Catherine Howard (wives two and five of Henry VIII), were both condemned to burn at the stake; however, their sentences were commuted to beheading. His sixth wife, Lady Catherine Parr, was also to be condemned to the tower with the same intention; however, she avoided her fate by soothing his temper along with his ulcerated leg. Lady Jane Grey was also condemned to burn at the stake for attempting to usurp her cousin Mary’s throne; she, however, was beheaded despite the fact that her cousin later became known as “Bloody Mary” for burning so many Protestants at the stake during her five year reign.

  In Thomas Mallory’s Le Morte d’ Arthur, Queen Guinevere was also sentenced to burn at the stake, but was literally rescued at the last moment by Sir Lancelot, thus presaging the beginning of the end for the glory of Camelot.

  One of the more dramatic scenes in my historical fantasy, Shadows in a Timeless Myth, concerns a ritual burning at the stake (auto-de-fé) of thirteen victims and a rescue attempt during the time of the Spanish Inquisition.

  Little Ease: Torture and the Tudors

  by Nancy Bilyeau

  On a March night in 1534, a man and woman hurried past a row of cottages on the outer grounds of the Tower of London. They had almost reached the gateway to Tower Hill and, not far beyond it, the city of London, when a group of yeomen warders on night watch appeared in their path, holding lanterns.

  In response, the young couple turned toward each other in what seemed a lovers’ embrace. But something about the man caught the attention of Yeoman Warder Charles Gore. He held his lantern higher and within seconds recognized the pair. The man was a fellow yeoman warder, John Bawd, and the woman was Alice Tankerville, a condemned thief and prisoner.

  So ended the Tower’s first known escape attempt by a woman.

  But Alice’s accomplice and admirer, the guard John Bawd, was destined to enter the Tower record books too, and for the grimmest of reasons—he is the first known occupant of a peculiar torture cell used during the reigns of the Tudors and early Stuarts.

  The windowless cell measured 1.2m (4 square feet) and bore the faintly prim name of Little Ease. The prisoner within it could not stand nor sit nor lie down but crouched over, in increasing agony, until freed from the suffocating, dark space.

 
Torture and the Tower of London have long had an uneasy relationship. The echoes of those screams are part of the walled fortress’ allure, along with the X marks the spot of Queen Anne Boleyn’s and the Lady Jane Grey’s decapitations and the tales of the travails of inmates Ralegh, Cranmer, Fisher, and More.

  Today’s visitors see for themselves, in well-curated exhibits, the replicas of the rack and other devices fashioned for pain. Tower publications are emphatic: torture only took place during a brief span in its near 1,000-year history. Which is true. But it happened, and with an intensity that cannot be denied.

  In 1215, England outlawed torture through the passage of Magna Carta, except by royal warrant. The first king to authorize it, reluctantly, was Edward II. He submitted to intense pressure from the Pope to follow the lead of the king of France and demolish the Order of the Knights Templar, part of a tradition begun during the Crusades.

  King Philip IV of France, jealous of the Templars’ wealth and power, charged them with heresy, obscene rituals, idolatry, and other offenses. The French knights denied all, and were duly tortured. Some who broke down and “confessed” were released; all who denied wrongdoing were burned at the stake.

  Once Edward II had ordered imprisonment of members of the English chapter, French monks arrived in London bearing their instruments of torture. In 1311, the Knights Templar “were questioned and examined in the presence of notaries while suffering under the torments of the rack” within the Tower of London as well as the prisons of Aldgate, Ludgate, Newgate, and Bishopgate, according to The History of the Knights Templar, the Temple Church, and the Temple, by Charles G. Addison. And so the Tower—principally a royal residence, military stronghold, armory, and menagerie up until that time—was baptized in torture.