Anne Askew
One of the most memorable names connected with the Tower in the reign of Henry VIII. is that of Anne Askew, or Ascue, as it is sometimes spelt, the daughter of Sir William Askew, the head of an old Lincolnshire family. In early life she had married a Mr Kyme, so that when her persecution for her faith took place—a persecution which has immortalised her name—it would have been more correct to have called her by her husband’s name; however, her maiden appellation has clung to her, and will always remain the one by which she is known. Kyme appears to have been a bigoted Roman Catholic, and his wife’s strong attachment to the Reformed faith may have been increased by his conduct towards her, for he seems to have been a good-for-nothing fellow who made her life the reverse of a happy one. Amongst Anne’s friends in London who belonged to the Reformed faith, was no less a person than Catherine Howard’s successor as Henry’s wife, Queen Catherine Parr. Anne, it appears, had some post about the Queen’s person; at any rate, she was known to many of the principal ladies of the Court. An Act known as “The Six Articles,” which obtained the popular name of “The Whip with Six Strings,” had been made law in 1539. The first clause of this Act ordained that whoever disagreed with the declaration of the Statute of Transubstantiation or the Real Presence, that the “Natural Blood Body and Blood of Christ” were present in the Sacrament, should suffer death by fire. Many men and women had been barbarously killed for denying the truth of this doctrine, and amongst those who suffered martyrdom was Anne Askew. To the horror of such a death Henry and his Council added that of torture, in order to force the victim to recant; torture, although illegal, was often, nay commonly, used in Henry’s reign.
Lord de Ros’s account of Anne Askew’s sufferings and death are too interesting to need an apology for my quoting it here:
“In March 1545, she was summoned before an Inquest or Commission at the Guildhall, and subjected to a long examination by one Dare, when she displayed an intelligence and shrewdness, which, with her modest, gentle demeanour, drew the admiration even of her enemies. Being remanded to the Compter, she was shortly after brought before Bishop Bonner for examination, who exercised all his subtlety to entangle her in her replies; and at length drew out a written summary, in which he had grossly perverted their meaning, and desired her, after hearing it read, to declare whether or not she would subscribe to its contents. Her answer merits to be recorded, ‘I believe,’ she said, ‘as much therof as is agreable to the Holy Scriptures; and I desire that this sentence may be added to it.’ Furious at what he called her obstinate evasions, Bonner was about to proceed to violent extremities, when by the interference of some powerful friend, and probably for other reasons, she was allowed to be released on the bail of her cousin, one Brittayne, who, during the examination, at which he was present, had judiciously cautioned her ‘not to set her weak woman’s wit to his lordship’s great wisdom.’ We have no record of the cause, or rather pretext, of her being, about three months afterwards, again arrested. This time her husband, Kyme, was brought up along with her before the Privy Council, sitting at Greenwich. Wriothesley, the Chancellor, now undertook her examination, and chiefly on the great point of Transubstantiation, on which she firmly refused to abandon her own convictions, and was committed to Newgate; from whence she wrote some devotional letters, which show her to have possessed considerable talent. Her next appearance was before the Council at the Guildhall, when, after an examination by a silly Lord Mayor (Martin), in which she entirely foiled him by her simplicity and good sense, she was plainly told, that unless she renounced her errors, and distinctly declared her acquiescence in the Six Articles, she must prepare to die; and, on her firm refusal, she was condemned, without any trial by jury, to be burned as an heretic. Meantime, instead of being sent back to Newgate, she was committed to the Tower, with a view to subject her to the torture of the rack, for which the gloomy seclusion of that fortress afforded greater convenience than the ordinary prison of Newgate, with the hope of inducing her to incriminate the Duchess of Suffolk, the Countess of Sussex, the Countess of Hertford, and other ladies who were supposed to have assisted her with money for her support in prison. She was too high-minded and grateful to betray them; and whatever might have been the case, she declared that she had been chiefly kept from starvation by her faithful maid, who went out and begged for her of the ‘’prentices and others she met in the street.’
“The unhappy lady was now carried to a dungeon, and laid on the rack in the presence of the Lieutenant of the Tower, Sir A. Knyvett, and Wriothesley, the Chancellor, Rich, a creature of Bonner, and a secretary, sitting at her side to take down her words. But when she endured the torture without opening her lips in reply to the Chancellor’s questions, he became furious, and seizing the wheel himself, strained it with all his force, till Knyvett, revolting at such cruelty, insisted on her release from the dreadful machine. It was but in time to save her life, for she had twice swooned, and her limbs had been so stretched, and her joints so injured, that she was never again able to walk without support. Wriothesley hastened to Westminster to complain to the King of the Lieutenant’s lenity; but the latter, getting into his barge with a favourable tide, arrived before him, obtained immediate audience, and told his tale so honestly and with such earnestness, that Henry’s hard heart was softened for once, and approving his conduct he dismissed him with favour. A stronger reason for this may have been that the rack was regarded with such horror by the people as to be applied only in secrecy; and had Anne expired under it, and the fact became known, some violent outbreak might have been apprehended in the City. She was shortly afterwards carried to Smithfield and there burnt to ashes, together with three other persons for the same cause, in the presence of the Duke of Norfolk, the Earl of Bedford, Sir Thomas Wriothesley, the Lord Mayor, and a vast concourse of people. One of the peers, learning that there was some gunpowder about the stakes, became frightened lest any accident should happen to himself from the faggots being blown into the air; but the Earl of Bedford assuring him that no such chance could occur, and that it was only to hasten the deaths of the sufferers, he remained looking on with the same barbarous indifference as the brutal mob who had assembled to witness the dreadful spectacle.”
Traitors’ Gate, from the Bloody Tower
Anne Askew’s fellow-sufferers were named John Lascels (? Lascelles), John Adams, and Nicholas Beleinian; there is a woodcut of their martyrdom in Foxe’s book.
Anne Askew’s death appears to have been fraught with some danger to Queen Catherine Parr. Aware of the Queen’s sympathy for Anne, and her leaning towards the Reformed faith, Wriothesley, the bigoted Lord Chancellor, went so far as to draw up a warrant for Catherine’s arrest. Fortunately for the Queen she was warned of her danger, and either was actually frightened into a fever, or feigned illness. During an interview with the King, the suffering Queen so worked upon his feelings, that when Wriothesley appeared with a guard to take her into custody, Henry turned upon him, and, heaping the foulest abuse upon him, drove him from the presence (Speed’s Chronicle). Luckily for Catherine Parr the days of Henry were near their end, or it is more than probable that she would have shared the fate of Anne Boleyn and Catherine Howard.
In 1546 peace had been made between England and France, and in order to ratify the treaty the French sent their Lord High Admiral to England, with the Bishop of Evreux, and some other nobles. Landing at Greenwich, they were conducted with great ceremony to the Tower—where a splendid banquet awaited them in the palace of the fortress—by the Earls of Essex and Derby in the royal barge. After leaving the Tower they proceeded to Lambeth Palace, and thence to Hampton Court, where the treaty was signed. These were the last guests of the Sovereign in the Tower. The last State prisoner to be executed in Henry’s reign was the gifted and brilliantly endowed Earl of Surrey, the eldest son of Thomas Howard, third Duke of Norfolk, who, as I have said before, also narrowly escaped with his life.
Henry VIII., for the good of his people, was dying fast at the close of the year 1546. His once handsome and athletic form had become a bloated mass of corruption. His nature, always cruel, became fiend-like during his later years, owing to his physical sufferings. He knew that death was gaining upon him rapidly, but whilst he lived he determined still to destroy, and when even in the very grasp of the King of Terrors, still sent out his death orders. No cause can be assigned for the King, while his wicked old life was fast ebbing away from him, ordering the death of Norfolk and his son Surrey. The only possible reason was that perhaps Henry feared they might wield too great an influence after his death, when his heir, Edward, should have become King.
Henry intended that his son’s uncle, Lord Hertford, Queen Jane Seymour’s brother, should be his sole guardian, and for a wretched pretext Norfolk and Surrey were arrested, imprisoned in the Tower, and sentenced to death. Of the Duke of Norfolk, Sir Walter Raleigh wrote in the preface to his great History: “Henry knew not how to value his deservings, having never omitted anything that concerned his own honour and the King’s service.” Despite his weakness for tears, Norfolk may rank amongst the English worthies, for he had done good service to the State, both in arms and council. He had commanded the English army at the Battle of Flodden, and had led another army during a second victorious war in Scotland; he had also led the English van in the war with France. In Ireland he had been one of the best and most just of the English Lords-Deputy. By the accident of birth the Duke was of the blood-royal, being descended from the Mowbrays; further than this, he had married one of the daughters of Edward IV., and two of his nieces had been Queens of England. For his own safety he was perilously near the steps of the throne, and his birth was too high, the story of his life too romantic, for Henry to tolerate his surviving himself, consequently, with reason or without, his death was determined upon; Henry was never troubled by lack of just cause. The dying King excused his treatment of the Duke and his son Surrey to foreign courts, by giving out that they had conspired to take upon themselves the government of the State; this was a pure invention. Another and a still more ridiculous charge brought against them was that Norfolk and his son had quartered in their shield the royal arms of Edward the Confessor. This charge could not have hoodwinked the most simple, for it had been the custom of the Duke’s family long before he himself was born to have these arms quartered upon their shield. However, on the 14th of January 1547, the House of Lords, without even the form of a trial, and without examining either the Duke or his son, passed a bill of attainder against them, and the end of the month was fixed for their execution.
While awaiting his trial in the Tower Norfolk appears to have been inclined—to make use of a racing expression—to “hedge,” as regarded his religious opinions. The Duke had always professed himself a Catholic, both by birth and conviction, but from his prison he sent a petition to the Lords of the Council in which, after asking their permission to have some books sent to him from Lambeth, he adds, “for unless I have books to read ere I fall asleep, and after I wake again, I cannot sleep, nor have done these dozen years. That I may have mass, and be bound upon my life not to speak to him who says mass, which he may do in the other chamber whilst I remain within. That I may be allowed sheets to lie in; to have licence in the daytime to walk in the chamber without, and in the night be locked in as I am now. I would gladly have licence to send to London to buy one book of St Austin, ‘de Civitate Dei,’ and one of Josephus, ‘de Antiquitatibus,’ and another of Sabellius, who doth declare most of any book that I have read, how the Bishop of Rome from time to time hath usurped his power against all Princes by their unwise sufferance” (“Seward’s Anecdotes,” Ed. 1798).
Surrey was placed in the Tower at the same time as his father. Not only was Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, a charming poet, especially when writing of love, of which his verses addressed to the “Fair Geraldine” are perhaps his best, but he was also remarkable in the history of English literature as having been the first writer of blank verse in our language; he was also a distinguished soldier. But thirty years old when his fate came upon him, he was a national loss, and in killing Surrey, Henry destroyed one of England’s most gifted sons. Not being a peer, Surrey was tried before a Common jury at the Guildhall on the 13th January 1547. He made a splendid defence where no defence was necessary, and where no defence, however eloquent, and no career, however blameless, would have saved him. With the axe’s edge turned towards him he left the Guildhall for the Tower, and six days later one of the wisest, noblest, and most gifted heads that England possessed, rolled in the bloody sawdust of the scaffold on Tower Hill. Norfolk’s life was only saved by the providential death of Henry VIII., which took place only a few hours before the time fixed for the Duke’s execution. He remained a prisoner in the Tower until the reign of Mary Tudor, and lived to preside at the trial of the Duke of Northumberland, and again to take up arms when Wyatt’s rebellion broke out, although then in his eightieth year. He died a natural death in his bed—a rare event with the heads of his house—in 1554, aged eighty-one. Norfolk had lived in the reign of eight English sovereigns—from the reign of Henry VI. to that of Mary Tudor.
Back of the Byward Tower
CHAPTER IX
EDWARD VI
The boy King Edward VI. was only ten years of age when he succeeded to the throne. On the 30th of May 1547, he was brought in state to the Tower amidst an outburst of the people’s gladness, which, considering all the troubles they had for so long endured under the savage rule of the late monarch, must have been heartfelt and genuine.
Near the town of Midhurst in Sussex are the ruins of one of the finest of the old Tudor mansions, Cowdray House, the old home of the Montagus. In the reign of Edward VI. Cowdray belonged to Sir Antony Brown, who held the proud office of Grand Standard Bearer of England. Here it was that the boy King in the year of his accession was entertained by Sir Antony, and in his precocious diary the little monarch wrote that he was “marvellously, yea, rather excessively banketted.” Cowdray House—and that is my reason for writing about it here—contained a most interesting series of paintings upon its walls illustrating the events in the reign of Henry VIII. and that of his son, who was so “excessively banketted” within its halls. Among these paintings were representations of the siege of Boulogne by Henry VIII.; the Field of the Cloth of Gold; and a huge painting of the coronation of Edward VI., in which the long procession is seen wending its gorgeous length from the Tower to Westminster Abbey. All these paintings perished in the disastrous fire which destroyed Cowdray on the 24th of September 1793. Fortunately, George Vertue copied these paintings and engraved the copies in the middle of the eighteenth century, the engravings being published by the Society of Antiquaries. Next to the Bayeux tapestry, nothing more interesting than these pictured records of English history have come down to us.
Among the pageants and devices with which the joyous Londoners graced the occasion when the young King rode through the festive streets, was a very quaint one, which Holinshed thus describes: “An argosine (a sailor) came from the batilment of Saint Poule’s Church, upon a cable, beyng made faste to an anker at the deane’s doore, liying uppon his breaste, aidyng himself neither with hande nor foote, and after ascended to the middes of the same cable, and tumbled and plaied many pretie toies, wherat the Kyng and other of the peres and nobles of the realme laughed hartely.” A few days before his coronation Edward had taken his place upon a throne in the Tower, and had had his little hand kissed by the peers, receiving the accolade of knighthood from the hands of his maternal uncle, the Protector Somerset. But whilst he received knighthood from one uncle, to another he gave lodging in the Tower. The latter was Thomas, Lord Seymour of Sudley, Lord High Admiral of England. Lord Sudley—or as it is also written Sudeley—was an over-ambitious personage. He had married the late King’s widow, Catherine Parr, and after her death, which he is supposed to have hastened, he began to pay very marked attentions to the Princess Elizabeth. Although one does not wish to allude to any scandal that may have attached itself in the gossip of the time to the name of that Princess, the flirtation—to give Elizabeth’s conduct with the Lord High Admiral its mildest description—was at one time too notorious an episode in the future “Gloriana’s” career to be wholly omitted from mention. Who has not read of the “high jinks” carried on between them? How on one occasion Seymour was found cutting the Princess’s gown “into a hundred pieces,” in the gardens of Hanworth, and how on another he had the audacity to pay Elizabeth a visit in her bed-chamber, on which occasion she “ran out of her bed to her maidens, and then went behind the curtains of her bed.” Seymour was certainly uncommonly handsome, and it is well known that Elizabeth was very impressionable in the matter of manly beauty. Probably Elizabeth’s chances of one day succeeding to the Crown may have helped to make Seymour so forward in his advances, but it was neither his flirtation with the Princess, nor his marriage with Catherine Parr, that brought about his ruin; he was discovered to be intriguing against his all-powerful brother, the Protector Somerset. A warrant was issued for his arrest on the 17th of January 1549, and he was taken to the Tower, in spite of his threat to poignard any person who dared to lay hands on him (“State Papers,” Dom. Ed. VI.). “By God’s precious soul,” he wrote, “whosoever lays hands on me to fetch me to prison, I shall thrust my dagger into him.” It is not recorded whether he carried his threat into execution. He was repeatedly interrogated whilst in the Tower, but without any effect, and on the 25th of February the bill of attainder against him was introduced into the House of Lords. On the 2nd of March it passed the Commons, and three days later received the royal assent; on the 15th, Goodriche, Bishop of Ely, communicated to Seymour that he was to suffer death on the 20th.
The Protector has naturally been greatly blamed for the part he took in bringing his brother to the scaffold, and there is a curious passage in a letter written by the Princess Elizabeth to her sister Queen Mary, shortly after she herself was sent a prisoner to the Tower, in which she says, “In late days I hearde my Lorde Somerset say, that if his brother had bine suffered to speke to him, he had never suffered; but the persuasions were made to him so gret, that he was brought in beleafe that he could not live safely if the admirall lived; and that made him give his consent to his dethe.” The young King’s entry in his diary regarding his uncle’s death is extremely laconic: “The Lord Sudley, admiral of England, was condemned to death, and died in March ensuing.” Burnet in his “History” says, “What his behaviour was on the scaffold I do not find,” and indeed no record, as was the case with so many of his distinguished contemporaries, has come down to us of his last moments, except that Strype in his “History” says, that just before the end the Admiral bade his servant, “speed the thing that he wot of.”
This last message appears to have regarded two letters which he had written in the Tower, one to the Princess Elizabeth, and the other to the Princess Mary. They had been written in some kind of invisible ink, and, having no pen, he had written them with the point of an “uglet” which “he had plucked from his hose,” and they had been sewn between the sole of one of his velvet shoes. “By this means these letters came to light, and fell into the hands of the Protector and Council. The contents of these tended to this end, that the two sisters should conspire together against the Protector, enforcing many matters against him, to make these ladies jealous of him, as though he had, it may be, estranged the King their brother from them, or to deprive them of the right of their succession. Both these papers Latimer himself saw, and repeated publicly in his fourth sermon before the King, though in the last edition of his sermons the passage is left out.” The following, however, is the passage from Latimer’s most strange discourse on the death of the Lord High Admiral, which he preached before the King regarding his uncle’s death; a less charitable or courtly address is not often met with: “As touching the kind of his death, whether he be saved or no, I refer that to God. In the twinkling of an eye He may save a man or turn his heart. What he did I cannot tell, and when a man hath two strokes with an axe, who can tell but between two strokes he doth repent? It is hard to judge, but this I will say, if they will ask me what I think of his death, that he died very dangerously, irksomely and horribly. He was a wicked man and the realm is well rid of him” (“Latimer’s Sermons”).
The death of his brother made the Protector still more disliked by the people; he was already unpopular by reason of his rapaciousness and the manner in which he attained great wealth by the seizure of Church property. The huge palace he had built by the riverside, and called after himself Somerset House, was a standing witness of his overpowering greed in the eyes of all men. In order to increase the size of this building he had committed desecration by pulling down a church, and casting away the human remains that had been buried within it; such an action in those days was considered by the populace as a crime.
The elder brother soon followed the younger along the same gloomy road to the grave, thus fulfilling the words of the chronicler Grafton, who, when Seymour died, had written, “It was commonly talked that the fall of one brother would be the overthrow of the other, as soone after it came to passe.”
The Protector’s fall was brought about by John Dudley, Duke of Northumberland, his rival. At a meeting convened at Ely House, Holborn, at which Lord St John, the President of the Council, Northumberland, Southampton, Arundel, and five other members of the Privy Council were present, the Protector’s arrest was decided upon. When Somerset heard this startling news he took the young King from Hampton Court to Windsor, and prepared to defend himself by force to the last. His call to arms, however, met with no response; none of his former friends came forward in his support, and he felt that his cause was lost. Meanwhile the Privy Council had taken possession of the Tower and despatched Sir Philip Hoby as its messenger to the King at Windsor, with letters, “beseeching his highness to give credit to that which he should declare in their names; and the King gave him libertie to speak, and most gentlie heard all that he had to saie, and trulie he did so wiselie declare his message, and so gravelie told his tale in the name of the Lords, yea therewithal so vehementlie and greevous so against the Protector, who was also there present by the King, that in the end, the Lord Protector was commanded from the King’s presence” (“Grafton’s Chronicle”).
On the 12th of October, two days after the meeting of the Privy Council at Ely House, the Protector occupied the prison chamber at Beauchamp Tower. The once all-powerful Duke was brought to his knees in every sense of the term, for, on the 21st of January 1550, he actually signed a confession, kneeling before his nephew the King. Apparently, in consequence of this submission, Somerset was released from the Tower, as Edward records in his diary on the 6th of February, that his uncle “supped at Sir John Yorke’s, one of the sheriffes of London, where the Lords assembled to welcome him”; and on the 31st of March he reappeared at Court, the King writing under that date, “My Lord Somerset was delivered of his bondes and came to court.” On the 21st of April the King recorded, “It was granted that my lord of Somerset should have all his moveable goodes and leases, except those that be alreadie given.”
Warwick, who had about this time been created Duke of Northumberland, had arranged a marriage between his eldest son, Lord Lisle, and Somerset’s daughter, Lady Anne, in June 1550; but in spite of this alliance, the old feud between these enemies broke out again, with the result that on the 16th of October 1551, Somerset was again a prisoner in the Tower, on a charge of high treason. And that evening the royal diarist writes, “This morning none were at Westminster of the conspirators. The first was the duke, who came later than he was wont, of himself. After dinner he was apprehended.” On this occasion Somerset’s wife shared his imprisonment.
The indictment against the Duke was presented at the Guildhall on the 21st of November, a true bill being found by a jury of Middlesex. Strict orders were given to the Lord Mayor “to cause the citie to be well looked to and garded all to-morrow and the next night.” Two days afterwards the King entered in his diary, “The Lord Treasurer (this was William Paulet, created Marquis of Winchester in 1555) apointed high stuard for the arraignment of the Duke of Somerset.”
The King’s House
Stowe writes on the 2nd of December, “The sayde Duke brought out of the Tower of London, with the axe of the Tower borne before him, with a great number of billes, glaves, holbardes, and polaxes attending upon him; and was had from the Tower by water, and having shot London Bridge at five of the clock in the morning, so came unto Westminster Hall, where was made the middle of the Hall a new scaffold, where all the Lordes of the King’s Counsaill sate as his judges, and there was he arraigned and charged with many articles both of treason and felony. And when, after much speeche, he had answered not guiltie, he in all humble manner put himself to be tryed by his peeres who, after long consultations among themselves, gave their verdict that he was not guiltie of the treason, but of the felony.”
The King gave a long and very involved account of the Duke’s trial in his diary, far too long to quote; at the close he writes as follows:—“So the lordes acquited him of high treason and condemned him of treason feloniouse, and so he was adjudged to be hanged. He gave thankes to the lordis for their open trial and cried mercy of the Duke of Northumberland, the Marquis of Northamptoon, and the Erie of Pembroke for his ill meanings against them and made suet (suit) for his life, wife and children, servantes and dettes, and so departed without the axe of the Tower. The people knowing not the matter, shrieked half a dozen times so loud that from the halle dore it was heard at Charing Crosse plainely, and rumours went that he was quitte of all.”
Grafton writes of the Duke’s trial: “But nevertheless he was condemned to death, wherof shortlye after he tasted. The felony that he was condemned of was upon the statute made the last yere agaynst rebelles and unlawfull assemblyes, wherein among thinges is one branch that whosoever shall procure the death of any counsellor, that every such attempt or procurement shall be felonye, and by force of that statute the Duke of Somerset being, accompanyed with certain others, was charged that he purposed and attempted the death of the Duke of Northumberland. After the Duke was thus condemned he was agayne returned to the Tower, through London, where were bothe exclamations, the one cried for joye that he was acquitted, the other cried out that he was condemned. But howsoever they cried he was conveyed to the Tower where he remained until the twenty-second daye of January next following.” Burnet says that everything was done to prevent the young King taking the fate of his uncle to heart, there being many festivities at Court during the month, but the Bishop adds significantly, “he was not much concerned in his uncle’s preservation.”
The 22nd of January was a Friday, and at seven o’clock in the morning the fatal Hill was covered with a dense crowd, who had come out from all sides of London to see the Protector die. An eye-witness of the scene has left the following account of the Duke’s execution:—
“Soon after eight o’clock of the morning, the Duke of Somerset was beheaded on Tower Hill. There was as gret company as have been syne: the King’s gard behynde them with ther halbards and 1000 men with halbards of the priviledge of the Tower, Ratcliffe, Lymhouse, Whytechappell, Saint Katheryn, and Stretford, Bow, Hogston, and Shoerdyche, and ther were two sheriffs ther present seying the execuyson of my Lord” (Machyn).
Grafton adds that the Duke, “nothing changing voyce nor countenance, but in a manner with the same gesture that he partely used at home, kneeling down upon both his knees, and lifting up his handes, erected himself unto God. And after that he had ended a few shorte prayers, standing up agayne, and turning himself unto the East syde of the skaffolde, he uttered to the people these words.” Then follows a long speech in which the Duke rather praised himself for having upheld religion when he was in power. In the midst of his speech a great tumult arose, and Sir Anthony Browne of Cowdray was seen riding up the Hill, at the sight of whom loud cries of “Pardon! Pardon!” and “God save the King!” were raised by the people. Grafton continues his account thus: “The truth of this hurly-burly grewe hereof, as it was afterwards well knowen. The manner and custome is that when such executions are done out of the Tower, the inhabitants of certayne hamlets round about London, as Hogsden, Newynton, Shordiche, and others, are commanded to give their attendance with weapons upon the Lieutenant. And at this tyme, the Duke being upon the scaffolde, the people of one of the hamlets came late, and coming through the postern gate and espying the Duke upon the scaffolde, made haste and beganne to roune, and cried to their felowes that were behind, ‘Come away, come away.’ The people sodainely beholding them to come rounning with weapons, and knewe not the cause, cried, ‘Away, away,’ by reason whereof the people roun every way, not knowing whither or wherefore.” So great was the panic that many persons fell into the Tower moat. The Duke appears to have waited calmly until the disturbance ceased, and then resumed his speech. He gave a scroll to Dr Coxe, the Dean of Westminster, who attended him upon the scaffold, which probably contained a confession of faith. Coxe was afterwards made Bishop of Ely by Queen Elizabeth, after having been imprisoned in the Tower by Queen Mary, who deprived him of his Deanery, and it was to him that Elizabeth wrote her famous letter, “Proud Prelate, you know what you were before I made you what you are; if you do not immediately comply with my request, by God I will unfrock you.”
After bidding farewell to his friends about him, Somerset gave himself over to the executioner, “and kneling downe agayne in the straw untyed his shirtstrings, and the executioner coming to him, turned downe his collar rounde about his necke, and all other things which did let or hinder him. Then he, covering his face with his own handkerchiefe, lifting up his eyes unto heaven, where his only hope remained, laid himself downe alone, and there suffered the heavie stroke of the axe, which dispersed the head from his bodye, to the lamentable sight and griefe of thousands that heartily prayed God for him and entirely loved him.” Burnet declares that the people were generally “much affected by the execution,” which was somewhat strange, seeing how deeply unpopular the Protector had been, “and many threw handkerchiefs into the Duke’s blood, to preserve it in remembrance of him. One lady that met the Duke of Northumberland when he was led through the city in Queen Mary’s reign, shaking one of these bloody handkerchiefs, said, ‘Behold the blood of that worthy man, that good uncle of that excellent King, which was shed by thy malicious practice, it doth now begin apparently to revenge itself upon thee.’” In Edward’s diary is this laconic entry on 22nd January (1551–52): “The Duke of Somerset had his head cut off upon Towre hill between eight and nine a cloke in the morning.” The boy-king was certainly not much “concerned,” as Bishop Burnet remarked, for the fate of his uncle.
The Protector, like his brother the Admiral, was a singularly handsome man even in that age of handsome men, and according to Sir John Hayward, one of his contemporaries, was “courteous and affable.” A French writer of the period is not so complimentary in his appreciation of the Duke of Somerset, writing that he was a “homme de quelque entendement, couvert et simulé en ses actions, de la nature commune des Anglois, douce apparence, gracieuses paroles, et maligne volonté.”
One of the invariable results of the fall of a party chief in these so-called “good old days,” was that his most trusted friends and adherents fell after him; this occurred in the case of the Protector. The Earl of Arundel, Lords Grey and Paget, with others of his supporters, were sent to the Tower at the same time as the Duke, and of these, Sir Ralph Vane, Sir Michael Stanhope, Sir Thomas Arundel, and Sir Miles Partridge, were executed. Sir Ralph Vane had distinguished himself at the siege of Boulogne in 1544, where he had gained his knighthood, a distinction given in those times only for distinguished services on the field. James I. was the first monarch to prostitute this honour by making it a thing of sale. Vane had also fought in the Scottish campaign. “A man of fierce spirit,” Hayward characterises him, “both sodaine and bold, of no evill disposition, saving that he thought scantnesse of estate too great an evill.” Sir Ralph had in some manner offended the all-powerful Duke of Northumberland, and on some now unknown charge, he was lodged in the Tower in the March of 1551. He was released, but again imprisoned on a charge of conspiring with Somerset. He fled, hiding himself in a stable in Lambeth, but was re-arrested, and again placed in durance in the Tower. When examined by the Privy Council he showed a bold, even a defiant, front, “The time hath been,” he exclaimed, “when I was of some esteeme; but now we are at peace, which repenteth the coward and the courageous alike,” “and so with an obstinate resolution he made choice rather not to regard death than by any submission to intreat for life” (Hayward’s Edward VI.). When found guilty and sentenced to death he said that his blood would make Northumberland’s “pillow uneasy to him,” and Edward hearing of Sir Ralph’s replies to the Court, wrote in his diary under the date 27th January 1551–52, “Sir Ralph Vane was condemned of felony in treason, answering like a ruffian.” Sir Michael Stanhope was a cousin of Somerset’s, a fact sufficient in itself to condemn him. Sir Thomas Arundel, another of the condemned knights, was of Lamberne in Cornwall, and had been one of Wolsey’s attendants, being made a Knight of the Bath at Anne Boleyn’s coronation. In 1549 he was appointed Receiver-General of the Duchy of Cornwall. He had been accused of forming a conspiracy in Cornwall, for participation in which his relative, Humphrey Arundel, Governor of St Michael’s Mount, had been hanged at Tyburn in 1549, but Sir Thomas had been released from his imprisonment, the charge against him not having been proved. Shortly afterwards, however, he was again thrown into prison, charged with complicity in the Somerset conspiracy, the nature of this fresh charge being indicated by King Edward’s brief entry in his diary of 11th October 1551, “Sir Thomas Arrundel had ashuired my Lord that the Tower was sauf.” On the 16th October he was sent to the Tower, and Edward writes, “Arrondel was taken.” Arundel was tried the day after Sir Ralph Vane, and also sentenced to die. These and the two others were all executed on the same day, 26th February 1552. Sir Ralph Vane—or, as it should be spelt Fane, for he belonged to the same stock as the Fanes, Earls of Westmoreland, but in those days of euphonious spelling, it is found as Vane, Fane, Perne, and even Phane—and Sir Miles Partridge were hanged, whilst Sir Thomas Arundel and Sir Michael Stanley were beheaded. “Ther body wher putt into dyvers new coffens to be bered, and heds, into the Towre in cases, and ther bered” (Machyn’s Diary); the Earl of Arundel, Lords Grey and Paget were acquitted.
Edward’s short reign of six years ended on the 6th of July 1553, and considering the brief time he occupied the throne, there was a sufficiency of blood shed upon the scaffold, through the machinations of those around him, to have pleased the insatiable Henry the Eighth himself.
CHAPTER X
MARY TUDOR
Northumberland had persuaded the dying King to pass over his sisters, Mary and Elizabeth, in favour of Lady Jane Grey, the grand-daughter of Henry VII. by the marriage of Mary, daughter of that King, with Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk, as well as cousin to the late King Edward VI., and his own daughter-in-law; and the Privy Council, immediately after Edward’s death, had confirmed this measure. Northumberland’s plan, in which he had induced Edward to acquiesce, annulled both the Statute of Succession and the will of Henry VIII., for not only did it set aside both the late King’s sisters, but also the direct successors, to whom the crown would hereditarily fall, failing Henry’s daughters. These were the descendants of Henry’s eldest sister Queen Margaret, wife of James IV. of Scotland, who was represented by the girl Queen Mary Stuart, and, after her, by the descendants of Queen Margaret’s second marriage with the Earl of Angus, who were represented by Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley, Queen Margaret thus being grandmother to both Queen Mary Stuart and Lord Darnley. Henry VIII. himself, however, had passed over Queen Margaret’s claims in his will, and had placed the children of his younger sister, Mary, Duchess of Suffolk, next to his daughter Elizabeth in the succession. The Duchess of Suffolk’s daughter—Lady Frances Brandon—had married Henry Grey, Marquis of Dorset, by whom she had had three daughters, of whom Lady Jane Grey was the eldest.[10] Dorset, who became Duke of Suffolk during the Protectorate, having been given his father-in-law’s dukedom, was a fervent follower of the Reformed faith, his children sharing his religious beliefs.
The Duchess of Suffolk, Jane’s mother, who was still alive at this time (1553) was passed over in Northumberland’s scheme, since he had succeeded in wedding the daughter to his fourth son, Guildford Dudley, his firm expectation being that as the future Queen’s father-in-law he would have the government of the realm in his own hands. But Northumberland’s ambitious dream was a short one, and the awakening was terrible.
At the time of Edward’s death Lady Jane Grey (Lady Jane Guildford as she should be called, but as was the case with Anne Askew, the paternal name has always been retained) was living at Sion House, a house belonging to her father-in-law, and here a deputation of the Council, headed by Northumberland, Suffolk, Pembroke, and others, went to pay their homage to the new Queen; on the 9th of July 1553, Lady Jane, or as she was now styled, Queen Jane, entered the Tower in state.
Jane Grey was but a girl of sixteen when the ambition of her relatives drew her from the retired and studious life that she loved, and forced her to take up all the perils and troubles that surround a throne. A more perfect creature, according to the unanimous testimony of her contemporaries, never gladdened God’s earth. Her brow was lofty, her features were delicate and refined, bearing a winning sweetness and bright cheerfulness which made all those who were fortunate enough to approach her, at once attached to her with a sentiment little short of devotion. Young as she was, her knowledge, even for those days when the daughters of great houses received an education which to us would appear almost encyclopædic, was prodigious. According to her tutors, Aylmer and Roger Ascham, Jane Grey knew Greek, Latin, French, and Italian, being able to both write and speak these languages. Besides, she knew something of Hebrew, Arabic, and even Chaldee. She was proficient in music, and could play upon a variety of instruments, singing to her own accompaniment. In addition to these accomplishments she wrote a beautiful hand—a rare talent for the time—and was a past mistress in the use of her needle.
Queen Mary Tudor
(From a portrait at Latimer.)
Ascham’s account of his visit to Lady Jane at Broadgate has often been quoted, but it will bear quoting again:
“Before I went into Germany, I came to Broadgate in Leicestershire to take my leave of that noble lady, Lady Jane Grey, to whom I was exceedingly much beholden. Her parents the Duke and Duchess, and all the household, gentlemen and gentlewomen, were hunting in the park. I found her in her chamber reading the Phaedo of Plato in Greek, and that with as much delight as some gentlewomen would read a merry Tale of Boccaccio. After salutations and duty done, with some other talk, I asked her why she should lose such pastimes in the park. Smiling, she answered me, ‘All their sport in the park is but a shadow to the pleasure I find in Plato.’ However illustrious she was by fortune, and by royal extraction, these bore no proportion to the accomplishments of her mind adorned with the doctrines of Plato and the eloquence of Demosthenes.”[11]
With all her learning and her great accomplishments Lady Jane appears to have been entirely lacking in that provoking superiority and aloofness which, for want of a better word, we call “priggishness.” She was indeed that rare creature, a perfect woman in mind, and character, and person.
Most unwillingly did Lady Jane comply with Northumberland’s wishes. No crown could add to her happiness, which was not dependent upon this world’s state or station, nor one bestowed by the tinsel and glitter of earthly power or riches, but a “peace above all earthly dignities, a still and quiet conscience.” Jane Grey was not known to the Londoners, and Northumberland was heartily disliked because of his arrogance and overbearing manners, so it was not surprising that when they entered the city on the 10th of July, as the Duke himself said afterwards in deep chagrin, “not a single shout of welcome or God speed was raised as they passed through the silent crowd on their way to the Tower,” “With a grett company of lords and nobulls, and there was a shott of gunne and chambers as has nott been seen oft, between four and five of the clock” (Machyn). Jane Grey’s reign was not a long one.
On the 14th of July, Northumberland had left the Tower with his sons to take command of the troops that had been despatched against Mary, who, in the meantime, had been proclaimed Queen throughout London, whilst the fleet at Yarmouth had also declared for her, a warrant being issued for the arrest of Northumberland as a consequence. The Duke was at Cambridge when he was taken prisoner; he showed great cowardice, throwing his cap up in the air when he saw that his hopes were useless, crying, “God save Queen Mary!” and furthermore, when the Earl of Arundel, who had been sent by Mary, appeared on the scene, the Duke literally grovelled on his knees before him. But his tardy loyalty and his entreaties availed him little, for on the 25th of July he was lodged a prisoner in the Tower, where only a month before his word had been the supreme command. On the 18th of the following month he was arraigned for high treason in Westminster Hall, the Duke of Norfolk, who acted as Lord High Sheriff, breaking his wand upon giving sentence, which was a signal for the court to break up. Northumberland was taken back to the Tower and occupied a room in the Beauchamp Tower, where several inscriptions cut by his sons and himself are to be seen to this day.
Lady Jane Grey
(From the original portrait at Madresfield Court by Lucas van Heere)
The day after he entered the Tower the Duke received a visit from Gardiner, Bishop of Winchester, to whom he declared that he was a Roman Catholic at heart, and that he had always been a member of that faith. But although he “ratted” in his religion as well as in his politics, his facility of opinion was in vain. Gardiner was only too pleased to prove the Duke’s apostacy by a public ceremonial in which the changeable nobleman was the principal actor. Mass was said in the Chapel of the White Tower in which the Duke took part, and, that ended, he made a public confession, and a formal recantation of his former religion.
To return to Lady Jane Grey. When the news of Northumberland’s arrest at Cambridge reached the Tower, Lady Throckmorton, one of Lady Jane’s gentlewomen, on entering the Presence Chamber in the Palace, found that the canopy of state, and all the other ensigns of royalty had been removed. The nine days’ reign was at an end, and not unwillingly did Jane cease playing a part that she must have felt did not by right belong to her, and which must have been distasteful to her noble and upright nature. But a prison awaited both herself and her boy-husband, Guildford Dudley.
The tradition that Jane was imprisoned in the Brick Tower is incorrect, for at first she occupied a room in the Lieutenant’s House, now the King’s House, and later was removed to a house on the Green adjacent to the Lieutenant’s lodging, then occupied by the Gentleman gaoler of the Guard, Nathaniel Partridge by name. When Northumberland was led from the Beauchamp Tower to abjure his religion in the White Tower, Stowe writes that “Lady Jane looking through the windowe sawe the Duke and the reste going to the Church.” Jane’s feelings on learning Northumberland’s apostacy in the vain hope of saving his life, have been recorded in an anonymous MS. of the time, now in the British Museum (Harleian MSS. No. 194). The writer, who dined on the afternoon of the same day (29th August) with Partridge at the Gentleman gaoler’s house, met Lady Jane Grey there. After noting her graciousness to all present, he says that Lady Jane inquired whether Mass was being said in all the London churches, and on being answered that such was the case, she said that she did not think that so strange as the sudden conversion of the Duke, “for who would have thought,” she said, “that he would have done so?” On someone remarking that probably he had done so in order to obtain his pardon, “Pardon,” quoth she, “woe unto him! He hath brought me and our stock in most miserable calamity by his exceeding ambition. But for the answering that he hoped for his life by his turning, though other men be of that opinion, I utterly am not; for what man is there living, I pray you, although he had been innocent, that would hope of life in that case; being in the field against the Queen in person as general, and after his taking, so hated and evil-spoken of in the Commons? And at his coming into prison so wondered at, as the like was never heard at any man’s time. Should I, who am young in years, forsake my faith for the love of life? But God be merciful to us, for he sayeth who so denieth Him before man, he will not know him in His Father’s kingdom.” Whether Lady Jane spoke thus at Partridge’s dinner table is not possible of proof, “methinks the lady doth protest too much” for these to be the ipsissima verba of Lady Jane. Of her sorrow for Northumberland’s cowardice and smallness of spirit in allowing himself to be made an exhibition for the glorification of Queen Mary’s priests and creatures, there can be no doubt.
Lord Guildford Dudley
(From the original portrait at Madresfield Court by Lucas van Heere.)
The day after his recantation in the chapel of St John’s, Northumberland was beheaded. With him there went to the scaffold on Tower Hill, Sir John Gates and Sir Thomas Palmer, both these knights having been concerned in his conspiracy. Still clinging desperately to the hope of being pardoned at the last moment, Northumberland continued, as he was led to death, to profess his zeal for the Roman Catholic faith, and in the speech he made to the crowd from the scaffold declared that he was a fervent Papist. His example was not followed by his fellow-sufferers, both of whom died with manly fortitude, meeting their fate with a calm and unflinching demeanour. Others who had been implicated in Northumberland’s schemes, amongst whom were Lords Northampton, Warwick, and Ferrers, who had also been placed in the Tower, were pardoned, but their prisons were soon filled by fresh batches of captives. Of these new prisoners, the most important were Latimer, Bishop of Worcester, Cranmer, Archbishop of Canterbury, and Ridley, Bishop of London, and the fortress was so full that these three prelates were obliged to share the same prison-chamber. On the 8th of March in the following year, the Bishops were taken from the Tower to their martyrdom at Oxford.
During the month of September in this year, Lady Jane was allowed to walk in the garden of the Palace, her husband, according to a chronicler of the time, also being given, with his brother, Lord Harry Dudley, what was called “the liberty of the leads” in the Beauchamp Tower. This meant that they were allowed to promenade on the outer passage running along the top of the wall which connects the Beauchamp with the Bell Tower.
Queen Mary had entered the Tower on the 3rd of August, practically in triumph, and there she held her court until after the funeral of her brother, the late king; Mary was again in the Palace of the fortress prior to her coronation, which took place on the 1st of October. On her first visit to the Tower in August she found, on reaching Tower Green, a group of State prisoners who awaited her arrival on their knees. Among these prisoners of the late reign was the old Duke of Norfolk; near him knelt the young and handsome Edward Courtenay, Earl of Devonshire, who had passed most of his short life in the Tower. Here, too, was the Duchess of Somerset, imprisoned at the same time as her husband, who had so lately been beheaded on Tower Hill. Here, too, knelt the Bishops of Winchester and Durham, Gardiner and Tunstall. To all of these Mary spoke with some emotion; she had come as their deliverer, and for once she appeared a woman as well as a Queen. On the eve of her coronation Mary was accompanied to the Tower by her half-sister Elizabeth.
It is strange to picture three such strangely different women as Queen Mary, Elizabeth Tudor, and Lady Jane Grey, together within the walls of the fortress at this time. The first a Queen, who has left behind her a more hateful memory than many far worse women among monarchs; the second, then but a powerless and semi-captive princess, whose future fame as a sovereign and ruler might well excite the envy of the mightiest potentate, but who, as a woman, lacked all that is best and most admirable in her sex; and the third, an uncrowned girl-queen of but seventeen summers, whose fate has called forth the love and pity of thousands, and whose brief life and death are the brightest and saddest in all history.
Mary’s coronation was marked by all the wonted splendour and elaborate ceremonial of such functions at such a period, and Holinshed has recorded that her head was so weighed down by her jewelled crown that “she was faine to bear up her head with her hand.” A month later the State trials commenced.
On the 13th of November a remarkable procession passed through the Tower Gate, and wended its way through the streets of the City to the Guildhall. Preceded by the axe, borne by the Gentleman Chief Warder, first came Thomas Cranmer, the Archbishop of Canterbury, followed by Lord Guildford Dudley and Lady Jane Grey, attended by two of her ladies. Lady Jane wore a dress of black from head to foot which is thus described by the chronicler Machyn:—“A black gown of clothe, turned downe, the cappe lyned with fese velvett, and edged about with the same; in a French hoode, all black, with a black habilment; a black velvet boke before her, and another boke in her hande open.” This account does not give a very clear idea of Lady Jane’s costume, but the curious reader, if he visits the National Portrait Gallery, will find a little full-face portrait of Lady Jane Grey as she then appeared, in which she is represented in this very dress, which she wore at her execution as well as during the trial.
The trial was held before the Lord Mayor of London, Thomas White, by special commission, the Duke of Norfolk presiding as High Steward. All the prisoners who pleaded guilty were attached for high treason, “for assumption of the Royal authority by Lady Jane, for levying war against the Queen, and conspiring to set up another in her room,” and Lady Jane was sentenced “to be burned alive on Tower Hill or beheaded as the Queen pleases,” the verdict being afterwards confirmed by Act of Parliament.[12] After sentence had been pronounced the prisoners were taken back on foot to the Tower.
During the few days that remained to Jane on earth, she was allowed to walk in the garden of the Palace, a three-cornered plot of ground enclosed on the north by the Queen’s Gallery, on the east by the Salt and Well Towers, and on the south and river side by the Ballium wall, which ran from the Well to the Cradle Tower. Sad and solitary must these gardens have been in those dark December days, and the heart of Jane Grey must have been very heavy when she recalled the days of her free and happy girlhood at Broadgate and Sion. Guildford Dudley was also allowed his daily walk on the wall passage between the towers, but he and his young wife were not to meet again on this side of eternity. At the last hour, however, permission was given that Dudley might bid farewell to Jane on his way to death on Tower Hill, but she, fearing the effect of such a supreme leave-taking for both, declined to avail herself of this sad opportunity.
If, after the trial, there had been any intention on Mary’s part to pardon Lady Jane Grey, such intention was frustrated by the action of Jane’s father, who, in an evil moment for himself and his children, joined in Wyatt’s rebellion. Baker, in his chronicle, writing of these events, says: “The innocent lady must suffer for her father’s fault, for if her father, the Duke of Suffolk, had not this second time made shipwreck of his loyalty, his daughter had perhaps never tasted the salt waters of the Queen’s displeasure, but now on a rock of offence she is the first that must be removed.”
A few days before the end, Jane wrote the following letters to her father, probably just before his own arrest, which took place on the 10th of February 1554. These letters bear no dates; this feminine fault of not dating her letters is the only one that can be found with gentle Lady Jane Grey.
“Father, although it has pleased God to hasten my death by you, by whome my life should rather have beene lengthened, yet I can soe patiently take it, that I yield God more hearty thanks for shortening my woful dayes, than if all the world had been given into my possession, my life lengthened at mine owne will. And albeit I am well assured of your impatient dolours, redoubled many wayes, both in bewaling your own woe, and especially as I am informed, my wofull estate, yet my deare father, if I may, without offence, rejoyce in my own mishaps, herein I may account myselfe blessed that washing my hands with the innocence of my fact, my guiltless bloud may cry before the Lord, Mercy to the innocent! And yet though I must needs acknowledge, that beyng constraynd, and as you know well enough continually assayed, yet in taking upon me, I seemed to consent, and therein greivusly offended the Queen and her lawes, yet doe I assuredly trust that this my offence towards God is so much the lesse, in that being in so royall estate as I was, mine enforced honour never mingled with mine innocent heart. And thus, good father, I have opened unto you the state wherein I presently stand, my death at hand, although to you perhaps it may seem wofull yet to me there is nothing that can bee more welcome than from this vale of misery to aspire, and that having thrown off all joy and pleasure, with Christ my Saviour, in whose steadfast faith (if it may be lawfull for the daughter so to write to her father) the Lord that hath hitherto strengthened you, soe continue to keepe you, that at the last we may meete in heaven with the Father, Sonn, and Holy Ghost.—I am, Your most obedient daughter till death,
“Jane Dudley.”
(Harleian MSS., and Nichols’ Memoirs of Lady Jane Grey.)
Here is another of her letters to her father:
“To the Duke of Suffolk.
“The Lord comforte your Grace, and that in his worde, whearin all creatures onlye are to be comforted. And thoughe it hathe pleased God to take away two of your children, yet thincke not, I most humblye beseache your Grace, that you have loste them, but truste that we, by leavinge this mortall life, have wonne an immortal life. And I for my parte, as I have honoured your Grace in this life, wyll praye for you in another life.—Your Grace’s humble daughter,
“Jane Dudley.”
IANA GRAYA DECOLLATA.
Regia stirps tristi cinxi diademate crines
Regna sed omnipotens hinc meliora dedit
H. Holbeen in.
E. V. Wÿngaerde ex
On the 8th of February Queen Mary’s favourite priest, Feckenham, had an interview with Jane in her prison, of which Foxe the martyrologist has recounted the details at great length; but, needless to say, Lady Jane remained unshaken in her firm faith, and in her attitude to the Reformed religion. It had been ordered that Guildford Dudley should die on Tower Hill, whilst Jane suffered within the walls the same day, Monday the 12th of February being fixed for the double execution. On the eve of this day Jane was sufficiently calm to write a long “exhortation” for the use of her sister, Catherine Grey, writing it in the blank pages of a manuscript on vellum, entitled “De Arte Moriundi.” This exhortation is as full of devotion and perfect faith in the mercy of her Saviour as were the beautiful lines she wrote to her father.
Although Guildford wished for a last interview with Jane on the morning of their execution, she was firm in deciding that “the separation would be but for a moment” as she is reported to have said, adding, that if their meeting could benefit either of their souls she would be glad to see her husband, but she felt it would only add a fresh pang to their deaths, and they would soon be together in a world where there would be no more death or separation. The last moments of this unfortunate lady were inexpressibly tragic. About ten o’clock on the morning of the 12th of February, Guildford Dudley was led forth from his prison to the scaffold on Tower Hill, being met at the outer gate by Sir Thomas Offley, and passing under his wife’s windows as he crossed the Green. Bidding farewell to Sir Anthony Brown and Sir John Throgmorton, Guildford met his fate with high courage. His body was brought back to the Tower in a handcart, the head being placed in a cloth; and looking forth from her prison, Lady Jane was suddenly confronted with the remains of what a few minutes before had been her husband. But nothing could shake her fortitude, as the following account, taken from the Chronicles of Queen Jane and Queen Mary, shows:—
“By this tyme was ther a scaffolde made upon the grene over agaynst the White Tower for the saide Lady Jane to die upon.... The saide Lady being nothing at all abashed, neither with feare of her own deathe, which then approached, neither with the ded carcase of her husbande, when he was brought into the chappell, came forthe the Lieutenant (who was Sir John Bridges, afterwards Lord Chandos of Sudeley) leading hir, in the same gown wherein she was arrayned, hir countenance nothing abashed, neither her eyes mysted with teares, although her two gentlewomen Mistress Elizabeth Tylney and Mistress Eleyn wonderfully wept, with a boke in hir hand, whereon she praied all the way till she came to the saide scaffolde, whereon when she was mounted, this noble young ladie, as she was indued with singular gifts both of learning and knowledge, so was she as patient and mild as any lamb at hir execution.”
After praying for her enemies and herself, Jane turned to the priest Feckenham and inquired whether she could repeat a Psalm, and he assenting she repeated the fifty-first. She then handed her gloves and her handkerchief to one of her ladies, giving the book she had brought, to Thomas Bridges for him to give to his brother, Sir John. On a blank page of this book[13] she had written:
“For as mutche as you have desyred so simple a woman to wrighte in so worthye a booke, good mayster Lieuftenante, therefore I shall as a frende desyre you, and as a christian require you, to call uppon God to encline your harte to his lawes, to quicken you in his wayes, and not to take the worde of trewethe utterlye oute of youre mouthe. Lyve styll to dye, that by deathe you may purchas eternall life, and remember howe the ende of Mathusael, whoe as we reade in the scriptures was the longeste liver that was a manne, died at the laste; for as the precher sayethe, there is a tyme to be borne, and a tyme to dye: and the daye of deathe is better than the daye of oure birthe.—Youres, as the Lord knowethe, as a frende,
“Jane Duddeley.”
The chronicle of her death continues thus:
“Forthwith she untied her gowne. The hangman went to her to have helped her off therwith, then she desyred him to let her alone, turning towards her two gentlewomen, who helped her off therwith, and also her frose paste” (this most singular term means a matronly head-dress) “and neckercher, geving to her a fayre handkercher to knytte about her eyes. Then the hangman kneled downe, and asked her forgiveness whom she forgave most willingly. Then he willed her to stand upon the strawe, which doing she sawe the blocke. Then she sayd I pray you despatche me quickly. Then she kneled downe saying, ‘Will you take it off before I lay me downe?’ And the hangman answered her, ‘No, madame.’ She tied the kercher about her eyes. Then feeling for the block, saide ‘What shal I do, where is it?’ One of the standers by guyding her therunto, she layde her head downe upon the block, and stretched forth her body, and said, ‘Lord, into thy handes I commende my spirite,’ and so she ended” (Holinshed, and Chronicles of Queen Jane and Queen Mary).
No wonder that good old Foxe could not refrain from shedding tears when he recounted this tragedy, but sad as is the story of Jane Grey’s death, her life and its close are amongst England’s glories. Heroines are rare in all times and in all countries, but in Jane Grey we can boast of having had one of the truest and noblest of women, a perpetual legacy to us for all time. The name of Jane Grey shines out like some brilliant star amid the storm wrack that surrounds it on every side. Amidst all the bloodshed, crime, and cruelty of this sanguinary age of English history to read of that gentle spirit, that marvellously gifted, and most noble, pure, and gifted being, is like coming suddenly upon a beautiful white lily in the midst of a tangle of loathsome weeds.
Fuller, of “English Worthies” fame, has, in his quaint manner, summed up Jane Grey’s life in these words: “She had the birth of a Princess, the life of a saint, yet the death of a malefactor, for her parent’s offences, and she was longer a captive than a Queen in the Tower.” Both Jane and her husband were buried in the chapel of St Peter’s of the Tower.
The news of the Queen’s approaching marriage with Philip of Spain set half the country in a blaze. The men of Kent rose, headed by Sir Thomas Wyatt, as did those of Devon, led by Sir Peter Carew. As we have already seen, the Duke of Suffolk headed another rising in Leicestershire, but he was soon defeated and captured, and together with his brother Lord John Grey was taken to London and imprisoned in the Tower, on the 10th of February, two days before his daughter, Jane Grey’s, execution. It was only four months before, that Suffolk had received his daughter at the fortress as Queen of England, and he must have felt more than the bitterness of death at the thought that it was owing to his conduct in again leading an armed force against Queen Mary that Jane’s life, as well as his own, were sacrificed.
Five days after Jane had met her death on a scaffold which stood close to her father’s prison, he himself was taken to his trial at Westminster Hall. It was noted that when he left the fortress the Duke went “stoutly and cheerfully enough,” but that on his return when he landed at the water gate, “his countenance was heavy and pensive.” This is scarcely to be wondered at for he had been sentenced to death, and was beheaded on Tower Hill on the 23rd of the same month.
In the brief speech which he delivered to the people before his death the unfortunate Duke admitted the justice of his sentence, saying, “Masters, I have offended the Queen and her laws, and thereby I am justly condemned to die, and am willing to die, desiring all men to be obedient; and I pray God that this my death may be an example to all men, beseeching you all to bear me witness that I die in the faith of Christ trusting to be saved by his blood only, and by no other trumpery, the which died for me, and for all men that truly repent and steadfastly trust in him. And I do repent, desiring you all to pray to God for me that when you see my head depart from me, you will pray to God that he may receive my soul.”
Of Suffolk, Bishop Burnet writes; “That but for his weakness he would have died more pitied, if his practices had not brought his daughter to her end.”
Although it is probable that Suffolk’s body was buried in St Peter’s Chapel, his head is believed to be in the Church of the Holy Trinity in the Minories, a building which is within the ancient liberties of the Tower. The Duke’s town house was the converted convent of the church of the nuns of the order of Clares, so called after their foundress Santa Clara of Assisi. They were known as the “Sorores Minores,” whence the name of the district—the Minories. This building had been made over to Suffolk by Edward VI., and the present church of the Holy Trinity actually stands upon the site of the old convent chapel. This interesting edifice is now (1899) threatened with destruction, and in a few years it is extremely probable that the ground upon which it stands will be covered with warehouses or buildings connected with the London and North-Western Railway.
The head was found half-a-century ago in a small vault near the altar, and as it had been placed in sawdust made of oakwood, it is quite mummified, owing to the tannin in the oak. There is the mark of the blow of a sharp instrument above the place where the head was severed from the neck, and Sir George Scharf, than whom a better judge of an historical head whether on canvas or in a mummified state, never existed, wrote of it thus: “The arched form of the eyebrows and the aquiline shape of the nose, correspond with the portrait engraved in Lodge’s series from a picture at Hatfield; a duplicate of which is in the National Portrait Gallery.” This grim memento mori may some day find its way to the Tower, where it would be an object of much interest, although, if Suffolk’s ghost be consulted, it would perhaps plead for this melancholy relic of frail mortality to be placed in consecrated ground.
It was during Wyatt’s rebellion that the Tower was attacked for the last time in its history. Wyatt had defeated a force commanded by the old Duke of Norfolk and Sir Henry Jerningham, at Rochester, and from thence marched on to Gravesend, where he was met by some members of the Privy Council who had been sent to find out the exact nature of his demands: “The custody of the Tower, and the Queen within it!” was his modest request.
Henry Grey, Duke of Suffolk
(From the portrait by Joannes Corvus in the National Portrait Gallery.)
Mary, cruel and bigoted as she was, had inherited the courage of the Tudors, and as Wyatt approached the City, resolutely refused to take shelter in the Tower as she was strongly urged to do, offering a pension of one hundred pounds a year (about £1000 of our money value) to any one who would bring her Wyatt’s head. On the 3rd of February he arrived opposite to the Tower, cannonading the fortress from the Southwark side of the river, but without causing any hurt either to the buildings or to their defenders. In attempting to cross the river at London Bridge he was driven back, practically being compelled to retreat along the Southwark side as far as Kingston, where was the only other bridge by which he could gain the City and the Tower. Crossing this bridge, Wyatt now marched to the east upon a dark and stormy night; his men were worn out with fatigue, their spirits dashed by the recent repulse, and the consequence was that they melted away in shoals. Very few remained with him when he encountered the Royal troops drawn up at Hyde Park to bar his passage, and although he succeeded in pushing his way through the soldiers with a handful of his friends, he sank down utterly exhausted when he reached Temple Bar. The gate of the Bar was closed and he and his companions were immediately taken prisoners by Sir Maurice Berkeley.
There is a lengthy list of prisoners who were brought with Wyatt into the Tower, or shortly after his arrest. Amongst these were, Sir William Cobham and his brother George Cobham; Hugh Booth, Thomas Vane, Robert Rudstone, Sir George Harper, Edward Wyatt, Edward Fog, George Moore, Cuthbert Vaughan, Sir Henry Isley, two Culpeppers, and Thomas Rampton, who had been Suffolk’s secretary. Wyatt was beheaded on the 11th of February, the day before Lady Jane Grey and her husband, stoutly maintaining to the end, even under the torture of the rack, that Elizabeth had had no cognisance of his insurrection and had played no part in it as Queen Mary suspected. With all these prisoners the headsman and the hangman of the Tower had a busy time, and blood flowed freely on Tower Hill in the springtime of 1555. Some of these prisoners were, however, executed out of London. Sir Henry Isley and his brother suffered at Maidstone, the Knevets at Sevenoaks, and Bret, who had cannonaded the Tower during Wyatt’s rebellion, was hanged in chains at Rochester.
London in those days must have looked like some vast Golgotha. Gibbets were placed in all the principal streets, each bearing its ghastly load; and the decapitated heads and limbs of Queen Mary’s victims were stuck over many gates of the town, standing up in horrid clusters, especially on London Bridge, the air being tainted far and near with these grisly fragments of mortality. London had indeed been turned into a shamble; it had become a veritable city of blood, a precursor of an African Benin.
Whilst these scenes were taking place in her capital, Mary wedded Philip of Spain at Winchester, vainly attempting to make herself attractive to that morose prince.
From some words let fall, it is said by Wyatt, Mary ordered three members of the Privy Council to go to Ashbridge in Hertfordshire where her half-sister, the Princess Elizabeth, was then living in a state of semi-captivity. These three Privy Councillors were Sir Richard Southwell, Sir Edward Hastings, and Sir Thomas Cornwallis; they were accompanied by a guard of two hundred and fifty horsemen. On arriving late at night at Ashbridge they were told that the Princess was ill and was in bed, but they nevertheless forced their way into her bedroom. “Is the haste such,” cried Elizabeth, “that you could not have waited till the morning?” Their answer was that they had orders to bring her hence, dead or alive, and early the next morning she was taken in a litter by short stages to London, the journey, however, taking six days to accomplish, the people showing the Princess the most marked sympathy as she passed along the roads. On reaching Whitehall, Elizabeth was closely confined, being examined there by the Council; a fortnight later she was taken by water to the Tower and landed at Traitor’s Gate. Her proud attitude and indignant words on leaving her barge are well known, but, like most of her recorded sayings, are well worth repeating:—“Here landeth,” she exclaimed on putting her foot on the stone steps of that historic gate, “as true a subject, being a prisoner, as ever landed at these stairs, and before thee, O God, I speak it, having none other friends but thee.” She then seated herself, in spite of the heavy rain then falling, on a stone—some accounts have it on the steps themselves—saying with true Tudor determination, “Better sit here than in a worse place.” And it was not until the Gentleman Usher burst into tears that she could be induced to rise and enter her prison.
Middle Tower
Elizabeth once within the Tower, it became the more difficult for Mary and her Council to know how to act. Judging from her general character, Mary would have been only too ready to shed her sister’s blood, but the Council were more humane than the Queen, and while the followers of Wyatt, and Wyatt himself, were being tortured in order to extract some admissions whereby Elizabeth might be incriminated, the Princess was kept in close confinement. But nothing could be proved against her. In vain the crafty Gardiner examined and cross-examined Elizabeth herself; for a whole month she was not allowed to leave her prison room, mass being said daily in her apartment;—this must have been intensely irritating to the proud spirit of the Protestant Elizabeth. At length her health broke down and she was permitted to walk in the Queen’s Privy Garden, but always accompanied by the Constable of the Tower, the Lieutenant, and a guard of men. There is a story, and probably a true one, of a little boy, aged four, who was wont to bring the Princess flowers to brighten her prison room. On one occasion he was watched as he left, and strictly questioned, with the result that the little fellow’s kind attentions had to cease, by order of Sir John Gage, the Constable. Holinshed has narrated a quarrel that occurred between Elizabeth’s attendants with her in the Tower, and the Constable. The latter had given orders that when her servants brought the Princess’s dinner to the gates of the fortress they were not to be admitted, but were to hand over the provisions to the “common rascall souldiers.” Elizabeth’s servants strongly objected to this arrangement, complaining that the “rascalls” took most of the Princess’s dinner themselves before it reached her, but the only satisfaction they obtained from Sir John was that “if they presumed either to frown or shrug at him” he would “sette them where they should see neither sonne nor moon.” An application to the Privy Council forced the Constable to give way, but Holinshed remarks that he was not over-pleased at having to do so, “for he had good cheare and fared of the best, while her Grace paid for all.”
It being impossible to prove anything against Elizabeth she was at length allowed to leave her prison. This she did on the 19th May 1554, under the charge of Sir Henry Bedingfield, and was taken to Woodstock. There is a tradition that when it was known in the City that the Princess had been released from the Tower, some of its church bells rang merry peals of joy, and that when she became Queen she gave those churches silken bell-ropes.
The Earl of Warwick and his three brothers, Ambrose, Robert, and Henry Dudley, were still confined in the Beauchamp Tower, but the Earl died on the 21st of October 1554, and his brothers were released in the following year. About the same time other notable personages were set free, in order, it is thought, to curry favour with the populace and make the Spanish match less unpopular. These included the Archbishop of York, Sir Edward Warner, and some dozen other knights and gentlemen.
Then came the religious persecutions which were carried on by Mary with zest, and it has been estimated that during her short reign, and during the three and a half years that the persecution of the reformers lasted, no less than three hundred victims perished at the stake. These martyrs, however, did not suffer in vain, “You have lost the hearts of twenty thousand that were rank Papists within these twelve months,” wrote a Protestant to Bonner; and Latimer’s dying words to his fellow-martyr, as he was being tied to the stake at Oxford, will never be forgotten in England, “Play the man, Master Ridley, we shall this day light such a candle by God’s grace in England as I trust shall never be put out.”
At length, on the 17th of November, Mary died, and the people had peace, the last political prisoners in the Tower in her reign being Thomas, second son of Lord Stafford, and some of his followers, who had raised a rebellion against Mary’s government in the north of England. Stafford was beheaded on Tower Hill, and his followers were hanged at Tyburn.
CHAPTER XI
QUEEN ELIZABETH
The important position occupied by the Tower at the commencement of the reign of Elizabeth, and its connection with all branches of State affairs is shown by the great antiquary of that reign, John Stowe, who says it was “The citadel to defend and command the city, a royal palace for assemblies and treaties, a State prison for dangerous offenders, the only place for coining money, an armoury of warlike provisions, the treasury of the Crown jewels, and the storehouse of the Records of the Royal Courts of Justice at Westminster.”
Elizabeth’s imprisonment, four years previous to her accession, had not left kindly impressions of the Tower, and although her first visit to any royal palace after she became Queen on 28th November 1558, was to the fortress, she did not take up her abode there for any length of time, remaining at Somerset House, and at the palace at Whitehall, until Mary’s funeral had taken place.
Three days, however, before her coronation, Elizabeth entered the Palace of the Tower, the crowning taking place on Sunday the 15th January 1559. Elizabeth’s love of show and magnificence must have been amply gratified by the great pageant in which she was the central figure, the procession from the Tower to the Abbey being more brilliant than any in the history of the English Court.
Seated in an open chariot which glittered with gold and elaborate carvings, Elizabeth, blazing with jewels, passed through streets hung with tapestry and under triumphal arches, the ways being lined with the City companies in their handsome liveries of fur-lined scarlet. In Fleet Street a young woman, representing Deborah, stood beneath a palm tree, and prophesied the restoration of the House of Israel in rhymed couplets, whilst Gog and Magog received her Majesty at Temple Bar.
Although the horrors of Smithfield and other auto-da-fés had ceased with Mary’s reign, religious persecution on the part of the Reformers was all too rampant under Elizabeth. The new Queen inherited far too much of her father’s nature to brook any kind of opposition to her wishes. She was a strange compound of the greatest qualities and the meanest failings. Endowed with prodigious statecraft, her vanity was no less immense, and her jealousy of all who came between herself and those whom she liked and admired, caused her not only to commit acts of injustice, but actual crimes. Her mind, which had a grasp of affairs of state and policy that would have done credit to a great statesman, had also many of the weaknesses and pettinesses of a vain, frivolous, and foolish woman. Elizabeth’s conduct towards the unfortunate Catherine Grey, her cousin, and the younger sister of Lady Jane, shows the jealousy of her character in its worst light.
It was to Catherine Grey that Lady Jane, on the eve of her execution, had sent the book in which she had written the “exhortation.” Lady Catherine had married Lord Herbert of Cardiff, but had been separated from him, being known by her maiden name. In 1560 she had met at Hanworth, the house of her friend the Duchess of Somerset, the latter’s eldest son, Lord Hertford, the result of this meeting being that an affection had sprung up between them which was followed by a secret marriage, as it was known that Elizabeth would not approve of the match. The only confidante was Hertford’s sister, Lady Jane Seymour, and the young couple—he was only twenty-two and she twenty—were married as secretly as possible.
Catherine, accompanied by Lady Jane Seymour, walked from the Palace at Whitehall—they were both ladies-in-waiting on the Queen—along the river side at low tide, to Lord Hertford’s house near Fleet Street. Here the marriage took place, but, by a strange want of foresight or by some strange oversight, neither of the contracting parties were afterwards able to remember the name of the clergyman who married them, “with such words and ceremonies, and in that order, as it is there” (the Prayer Book) “set forth, he placing a ring containing five links of gold on her finger, as directed by the minister.” The Hertfords afterwards described the minister as being of the middle height, wearing an auburn beard and dressed in a long gown of black cloth.
The newly-wed Lady Hertford was too nearly related to the Queen to be allowed to please herself with regard to whom she married, and when the time drew near when further concealment was impossible, the poor lady was in a terrible dilemma. Lord Hertford appears to have been the more timid of the two, for when he found that his wife was about to become a mother, he, dreading the Queen’s anger, fled to France, leaving poor Lady Hertford to bear the brunt of Elizabeth’s imperious temper alone. To complicate matters, Lady Jane Seymour, who throughout this adventure had been the young couple’s only friend, died early in the year 1561. When concealment was no longer possible, Lady Hertford threw herself upon the mercy and generosity of her terrible mistress. But on being informed of what had happened, Elizabeth’s anger knew no bounds, and poor Lady Hertford was at once sent to the Tower, where shortly after her arrival her child was born. Hertford now returned to England, and was promptly arrested, being also imprisoned in the Tower, where he remained for many a long year.
In the meantime the Queen declared that the marriage was illegal, and a Commission sitting upon the matter, consisting of the Primate, Parker, and Grindal, Bishop of London, declared it null and void. Matters might perhaps have been arranged had not another child been born to the Hertfords. When Elizabeth heard that Lady Hertford had been again confined, her rage was ten times greater than before. She summarily dismissed the Lieutenant of the Tower, Sir Edward Warner, for having allowed the unfortunate couple to meet again, and ordered Hertford to be brought before the Star Chamber, when he was heavily fined and sent back to his prison, where he remained for the next nine years.
In the Wardrobe accounts of the Tower in the Landsdowne MSS. at the British Museum, there is a list of the furniture supplied to Lady Hertford in her prison. Tapestry and curtains are mentioned, also a bed with a “boulster of downe,” as well as Turkey carpets and a chair of cloth of gold with crimson velvet, with panels of copper gilt and the Queen’s arms at the back. All this furniture, which sounds very magnificent, is noted by the Lieutenant of the Tower as being, “old, worn, broken, and decayed,” but in a letter he addressed to Cecil he wrote that Lady Catherine’s monkeys and dogs had helped to damage it. One is glad to know that the poor lady was allowed her pets, however harmful to the furniture, to amuse her in her lonely prison, where she lingered for six years, dying there in 1567.
Considering Elizabeth’s own experience of the amenities of imprisonment in the Tower one would have thought that she might have shown more mercy to her unfortunate kinswoman. In later years Hertford consoled himself by marrying twice again, both his second and third wives being of the house of Howard. His marriage with Catherine Grey was only made valid in 1606, when the “minister” who had performed the ceremony was discovered, a jury at Common Law proving it a bonâ fide transaction, and making it legal.
Another unfortunate lady who was a victim of Elizabeth’s implacable jealousy was Lady Margaret Douglas, who married the Earl of Lennox. The Countess, like Lady Catherine Grey, was one of Elizabeth’s kinswomen, and owing to her near relationship her actions were a source of continual suspicion to the Queen. Lady Lennox suffered three imprisonments in the Tower; as Camden has it, she was “thrice cast into the Tower, not for any crime of treason, but for love matters; first, when Thomas Howard, son of the first Duke of Norfolk of that name, falling in love with her was imprisoned and died in the Tower of London; then for the love of Henry, Lord Darnley, her son, to Mary, Queen of Scots; and lastly for the love of Charles, her younger son, to Elizabeth Cavendish, mother to the Lady Arabella, with whom the Queen of Scots was accused to have made up the match.” In the description of the King’s House, reference has been made to the inscription in one of its rooms recording the imprisonment of the Countess of Lennox there; that inscription refers to her second incarceration in the Tower in 1565. Few women can have suffered so severely for the love affairs of their relatives as this unfortunate noblewoman.
The long struggle between Elizabeth and Mary Stuart, which only closed on the scaffold at Fotheringay in 1587, brought many prisoners of State to the Tower. Some of the earliest of these belonged to the de la Pole family, two brothers, Arthur and Edmund de la Pole, great-grandchildren of the murdered Duke of Clarence, being imprisoned in the Beauchamp Tower in 1562, on a charge of conspiring to set Mary Stuart on the English throne. There are, as we have seen, several inscriptions in the prison chamber of the Beauchamp Tower bearing the names of the two brothers. These two de la Pole brothers ended their lives within their Tower prison, whether guilty or not who can tell?
Few can realise the terrible and constant danger in which Elizabeth lived from the claim of Mary Stuart to the throne of England. Compared with France, England at the close of Mary Tudor’s reign was only a third-rate power, and never had the country sunk so low as a martial power as in the last years of her disastrous rule. We had no army, no fleet, only a huge debt, whilst the united population of England and Wales was less than that of London at the present time.
Motley has conjectured that at that time the population of Spain and Portugal numbered at least twelve millions. Spain possessed the most powerful fleet in the world, an immense army, with all the wealth of the Netherlands and the Indies wherewith to maintain them; consequently, when difficulties arose between France and England, Philip trusted that to save herself England would become a firm ally of Spain. But the Spanish monarch had left out of his reckoning the magnificent courage of England’s Queen, and the indomitable pluck, and bull-dog determination of her subjects to hold their own. All this should be remembered when the stern repression of all and every kind of conspiracy is brought against Elizabeth and her principal advisers, of whom Walsingham and Burleigh were the foremost. It was a desperate position, only possible of being defended and upheld by desperate means. The horrors perpetrated by the Romish bishops in the name of religion whilst Mary Tudor reigned, had given the English but too vivid a suggestion of the fate that would befall their country if the King of Spain were again to become its ruler, either as conqueror or as King-consort. This terror was the principal cause of the passionate tide of patriotism that under Elizabeth stirred our glorious little island to its very foundations, and had it not been for the detestation of foreign rule there would not have been that universal rallying round the Queen and country in the hour of danger, which was the marked feature of our people during that courageous woman’s reign.
A suspicion of conspiracy was sufficient in those days, electrical with perils for the Queen and the country, and on the 11th of October 1569 Thomas Howard, fourth Duke of Norfolk, the son of the ill-fated Surrey, and the grandson of the old Flodden duke, was brought a prisoner to the Tower on the charge of high treason, his intended marriage with Mary of Scots constituting the charge against him. In the following month the Queen thus directed Sir Henry Neville to attend to Norfolk’s safekeeping in the Tower. “The Lieutenant is permitted to remove the Duke to any lodging in the Tower near joining to the Long Gallery, so as it be none of the Queen’s own lodgings; and to suffer the Duke to have the commodity to walk in the gallery, having always of course the said Knollys in his company” (Hatfield Calendar of State Papers). Owing to the plague which raged in London in the following year, Norfolk was allowed to leave the Tower for his own home at the Charter House, still a prisoner; but he was soon back again in the fortress, a correspondence which he had carried on with Mary Stuart’s adherents having been discovered. Others implicated in the undoubted conspiracy to set Mary on the throne, were the Earls of Arundel and Southampton, Lord Lumley, Lord Cobham, his brother Thomas Cobham, and Henry Percy; these were all arrested. On his return to the Tower, Norfolk was confined in the Bloody Tower. About this time a batch of letters, written by a Florentine banker named Ridolfi to the Pope and to the Duke of Alva, on the perpetually recurring subject of Mary’s succession to the English throne after Elizabeth’s dethronement, were intercepted by Elizabeth’s government, with the result that a fresh batch of prisoners, with the Bishop of Ross, Sir Thomas Stanley, and Sir Thomas Gerrard amongst them, entered the fortress. These letters disclosed a conspiracy which was known under the name of the Italian Ridolfi, its prime instigator. Ridolfi, who was a resident in London, had crossed over to the Netherlands, where he had seen the Duke of Alva, informing that Spanish general that he had been commissioned by a large number of English Roman Catholic noblemen to send over a Spanish army to drive Elizabeth from the throne, and place Mary Stuart in the sovereignty in her stead. The Duke of Norfolk would then marry Mary, and by these means the English would return to the benign sway of the Holy Father, and become the faithful subjects of the gentle Philip. Alva had suggested that Elizabeth should be got rid of before he himself came to London with his army, Philip entirely agreeing with his general as to the necessity for her removal.
Queen Elizabeth’s Walk, from the Curfew Tower to the Beauchamp Tower
The mere chance of a packet of letters being intercepted not only saved Elizabeth’s life, but probably England as well from a terrible disaster.
The Ridolfi Plot conspirators were distributed in the various prisons of the fortress, in the Beauchamp and the Salt Towers, and in the Cold Harbour, much of the information regarding the conspiracy having been obtained from a young man called Charles Bailly, who was seized at Dover on his way to the Netherlands with a packet of treasonable letters. He was brought back to London, placed in the Tower and tortured, whereupon he confessed the names of several other persons implicated. Bailly left several inscriptions on the walls of the Beauchamp Tower where he was imprisoned.
On the 16th of January 1572 the Duke of Norfolk was taken from the Tower to Westminster to undergo his trial. He was charged with having entered into a treasonable conspiracy to depose the Queen and to take her life; of having invoked the aid of the Pope to liberate the Queen of Scots, of having intended to marry her, and for having attempted to restore Papacy in the realm.
The Duke, who was not allowed counsel, pleaded in his own behalf, attempting to prove that his intended marriage with Queen Mary of Scots would not have affected the life or throne of Elizabeth. “But,” replied the Queen’s Sergeant, Barham, “it is well known that you entered into a design for seizing the Tower, which is certainly the greatest strength of the Kingdom of England, and hence it follows, you then attempted the destruction of the Queen.” By his own letters to the Pope the Duke stood condemned, as well as by those written by him to the Duke of Alva, and to Ridolfi, in addition to others written from the Tower to Queen Mary by the Bishop of Ross. Norfolk was accordingly condemned, but Elizabeth appears to have wavered regarding the signing of his death warrant, for the Duke was her cousin. At length, however, the House of Commons insisted that the Duke must die for the safety of the State, and Elizabeth signed the warrant, and the 2nd of June was fixed for his execution.
The Duke wrote very appealingly to the Queen for pardon, beseeching her to forgive him for his “manifold offences” and “trusts that he may leave a lighter heart and a quieter conscience.” He desired Burghley to act as guardian to his orphaned children, and concluded his letter thus: “written by the woeful hand of a dead man, your Majesty’s most unworthy subject, and yet your Majesty’s, in my humble prayer, until the last breath, Thomas Howard.”
Fourteen years had passed since anyone had been executed on Tower Hill. The old wooden scaffold had fallen into decay, and it was found necessary to build a new one. Compared with former reigns the fact of no execution having taken place amongst the State prisoners for such a length of time does credit to Elizabeth’s clemency, Norfolk being the first to die for a crime against the State during her long reign. The Duke has found apologists among historians, and has been regarded as a hardly-used victim of Elizabeth and her Ministers. But his treason to the Queen he had sworn to obey and defend was proved beyond all manner of doubt, and his particular form of treason was the worst, having no possible extenuation, since he plotted for the admission of a foreign army into the realm, composed of the most bloodthirsty wretches that ever desecrated a country, and led by a general whose cruelty resembled that of a devil, and has left him infamous for all time.
Queen Elizabeth’s Walk, from the Beauchamp Tower to the Curfew Tower
Norfolk merited his doom, and the more illustrious his name and rank, the more grievous his fault. As to finding cause for pitying him on the ground of his attentions to Queen Mary, that, too, seems unnecessary. The Duke had never seen the Scottish Queen, nor is he likely to have felt much affection for a woman who had been implicated in her husband’s murder, and had allowed herself to be carried off by that husband’s assassin. Norfolk was accompanied to the scaffold by his old friend, Sir Henry Lee, the Master of the Ordnance.[14] Norfolk refused to have his eyes bandaged, and begging all present to pray for him, met his fate with calmness. “His head,” writes an unknown chronicler (Harleian MSS.), “with singular dexteritie of the executioner was with the appointed axe at one chop, off; and showed to all the people. Thus he finyshed his life, and afterwards his corpse was put into the coffyn; appertaninge to Barkynge Church, with the head also, and so was caryed by foure of the lyeutenant’s men and was buried in the Chappell in the Tower by Mr Dean (Dr Nowell) of Paules.” The Duke’s last words are worthy of remembrance. While reading the fifty-first Psalm, when he came to the verse, “Build up the walls of Jerusalem,” he paused an instant, and then said, “The walls of England, good Lord, I had almost forgotten, but not too late, I ask all the world forgiveness and I likewise forgive all the world.”
One of Queen Mary Stuart’s most devoted adherents was John Leslie, Bishop of Ross, who, like Norfolk, had been deeply implicated in the Ridolfi conspiracy, and had been imprisoned in the Bell Tower. When tried for treason, the Bishop pleaded that being an Ambassador he was not liable to the charge; he was kept for two years in the Tower and then he was banished.
Priests, and especially those who were Jesuits, were very harshly dealt with at this time, the utmost rigour being shown to all who opposed the Queen’s acts or intentions. We have one instance of this in the fate which befell that eminent theologian, John Stubbs, who had written a pamphlet against the proposed marriage of Elizabeth with the Duke of Anjou, the brother of the King of France, Charles IX., and himself afterwards King of that country under the title of Henry III. Dr Stubbs was sentenced to have his right hand cut off by the hangman, the unlucky printers of his pamphlet being treated in the same barbarous manner. Immediately his hand was cut off, Stubbs raised his cap with the other, shouting, “God save the Queen!”; this truly loyal incident was witnessed by the historian Camden.
Besides the penalty of losing the right hand for writing or printing matter which might be disapproved by the Queen or her Council, the same punishment was awarded to any person striking another within the precincts of the royal palaces, of which the Tower was one. Peter Burchet, a barrister of the Middle Temple, had been committed to the Tower in 1573 for attempting to kill the celebrated Admiral Sir John Hawkins, whom he had mistaken for Sir Christopher Hatton. During his imprisonment he killed a warder, or attendant, by knocking him on the head with a log of wood taken from the fire. For this he was condemned to death, but before being hanged at Temple Bar, his right hand was cut off for striking a blow in one of the royal palaces. At this time Elizabeth found it essential to drastically assert her authority, and in 1577 an individual named Sherin was not only imprisoned in the Tower for denying her supremacy, but was afterwards drawn on a hurdle to Tyburn, where he was hanged, disembowelled, and quartered. In that same year six other poor creatures were treated in the same manner, after being imprisoned in the fortress, for coining. From 1580 until the close of Elizabeth’s reign the penal laws were enforced with terrible rigour, owing to the invasion of the Jesuit missionary priests led by Parsons and Campion. Cardinal Allen’s seminary priests were ruthlessly hunted down, and when caught, imprisoned, generally tortured, and invariably executed. The Cardinal, who had set up a seminary for priests at Douai, maintained a large and ever increasing staff of young men who were ready to sacrifice their lives in what they believed to be the cause of Heaven. The first to suffer of these was Cuthbert Mayne. Between Elizabeth and the Cardinal the war became fierce and sanguinary. Plot was met by counter-plot, and Cecil showed himself as astute and deep as any Jesuit of them all, the priests of Douai and Allen’s Jesuits faring ill in consequence. Both Campion and Parsons had been at the English Universities, and both for a time succeeded in their mission of bringing over to their religion many from among the higher classes of this country. But Elizabeth’s great minister proved too strong for them, and Campion was arrested and sent to the Tower, whilst Parsons sought safety on the Continent. Campion, with two other priests named Sherin and Brian, was hanged at Tyburn. Many of the imprisoned priests were tortured in the Tower; some were placed in “Little Ease,” where they could neither stand up nor lie down at full length; some were racked, others subjected to the deadly embrace of the “Scavenger’s Daughter,” others being tortured by the “boot,” or the “gauntlets,” and hung up for hours by the wrists. Sir Owen Hopton, the Lieutenant of the Tower at this time, seems to have been a very hard-hearted gaoler, and on one occasion when he had forced some of these wretched priests, with the help of soldiers, into the Chapel of the Tower whilst service was being held, he boasted that he had no one under his charge who would not willingly enter a Protestant Church.
From 1580 onwards, the Tower was filled with State prisoners. In that year the Archbishop of Armagh and the Earls of Kildare and Clanricarde, and other Irish nobles who had taken part in Desmond’s insurrection, were imprisoned in the fortress, and three years later a number of persons concerned in one of the numerous plots against Elizabeth’s life were likewise sent there, among them John Somerville, a Warwickshire gentleman, and his wife, together with her parents, and a priest named Hugh Hall, declared to have designs to murder the Queen. Mrs Somerville, her mother, and the priest were spared; her husband committed suicide in Newgate, where he had been sent to be executed, and her father was hanged, drawn, and quartered at Smithfield. In the following year (1584) Francis Throgmorton, son of Sir John, suffered death for treason like his father, a correspondence between Queen Mary and himself having been discovered. In the month of January 1585, twenty-one priests lay in the Tower, but were afterwards shipped off to France. In this same year Henry Percy, eighth Earl of Northumberland, a zealous Roman Catholic, with Lord Arundel, the son of the fourth Duke of Norfolk, were imprisoned in the Tower. But Northumberland killed himself, locking his prison door, and shooting himself through the heart with a pistol he had concealed about him, being supposed to have committed suicide in order that his property should not come into possession of the Queen—whom he called by a very offensive epithet—as would have been the case had he been attainted of treason. Arundel died in the Beauchamp Tower after a long imprisonment, as has been told in the account of that building. His death was no doubt owing to the severity of his confinement, combined with the austerities he thought it his duty to inflict upon himself; he certainly deserves a place in the roll of those who have died martyrs to their faith.
Another conspiracy against the Queen’s life came to light in this same year, when a man named Parry was arrested on a charge of having received money from the Pope to assassinate Elizabeth, a fellow-conspirator named Neville being taken at the same time, it being alleged that they intended to shoot the Queen whilst she was riding. Neville, who was heir to the exiled Earl of Westmoreland, hearing of that nobleman’s death abroad, turned Queen’s evidence, hoping by this treachery to recover the forfeited Westmoreland estates. His confederate was hanged, and although Neville escaped a similar fate, he remained a prisoner for a considerable time in the Tower.
Axe and halter once more came into play in extinguishing what was known as the Babington Plot in 1586. Elizabeth had never run a greater peril of her life, and it was owing to this plot that Mary Stuart died on the scaffold at Fotheringay on the 8th of February in the following year. Anthony Babington was a youth of good family, holding a place at Court, and, like many other of Elizabeth’s courtiers, belonged to the Roman faith, the Queen being too courageous to forbid Roman Catholics from belonging to her household. The soul of the plot was one Ballard, a priest, who had induced Babington, with some other of his associates, also of the Court, to adventure their lives in order to release Mary Stuart, and to place her upon the throne after having got rid of Elizabeth. Walsingham, with his lynx-eyed prevoyance, discovered the plot, and Ballard with the rest were arrested, tried and condemned. According to Disraeli the elder (in his “Amenities of Literature”) the judge who presided at the trial, turning to Ballard, exclaimed, “Oh, Ballard, Ballard! What hast thou done? A company of brave youths, otherwise adorned with goodly gifts, by thy inducement thou hast brought to their utter destruction and confusion.” Besides Ballard and Babington, thirteen of these young conspirators were executed—to wit, Edward Windsor, brother of Lord Windsor, Thomas Salisbury, Charles Tilney, Chidiock Tichburn, Edward Abington, Robert Gage, John Travers, John Charnocks, John Jones, John Savage, R. Barnwell, Henry Dun, and Jerome Bellarmine. Their execution, accompanied with all its horrible details, lasted for two days, Babington exclaiming as he died, “Parce mihi, Domine Jesu!” On the second day the Queen gave orders that the remaining victims should be despatched quickly without undergoing the attendant horrors of partial hanging, drawing, and quartering.[15]
Mary’s execution followed in the next year, but it was Elizabeth’s secretary, Davison—he had been appointed about this time co-secretary with Walsingham—who had to bear all the odium of her death, Elizabeth accusing him of having despatched the death-warrant without her sanction. She sent him to the Tower and caused him to be fined so heavily that he was completely ruined in consequence. Another scandalously unjust imprisonment in the Tower of a loyal and faithful servant of the Queen, was that of Sir John Perrot, a natural son of Henry VIII. Perrot was a distinguished soldier, and had acted as Lord-Deputy in Ireland, where, by his justice and humanity and clear common-sense, he had done much to restore order and comparative prosperity to that distracted island. Sir John Perrot was cordially hated by the Lord Chancellor, Sir Christopher Hatton, who was particularly noted for his skill in dancing, this hatred having been aroused, it is said, by Perrot remarking that the Lord Chancellor “had come to the Court by his galliard.” This criticism resulted in Perrot’s being arrested, after being summoned from Ireland on a trumped-up charge of treason, and committed to the Tower in 1590. At his trial two years later, nothing could be proved against him except a few idle words that he had uttered concerning the Queen, and which had been repeated to her; nevertheless he was found guilty. When brought back to the Tower, Sir John exclaimed angrily to the Lieutenant, Sir Owen Hopton, “What! will the Queen suffer her brother to be offered up as a sacrifice to the envy of my strutting adversary?” On hearing this, the Queen burst out into one of her finest Tudor rages, and swearing “by her wonted oath,” as Naunton writes, “declared that the jury which had brought in this verdict were all knaves, and that she would not sign the warrant for execution.” So Sir John escaped the headman, but the gallant knight died that September in the Tower, Naunton thus describing the close of his life: “His haughtiness of spirit accompanied him to the last, and still, without any diminution of courage therein, it burst the cords of his magnanimitie.” In his youth Perrot had been distinguished for his good looks and strength of body. “He was,” writes Naunton, “of stature and size far beyond the ordinary man; he seems never to have known what fear was, and distinguished himself by martial exercises.” During a boar hunt in France in 1551, it was related of him that he rescued one of the hunters from the attack of a wild boar, “giving the boar such a blow that it did well-nigh part the head from the shoulders.”
From a memorandum drawn up by Sir Owen Hopton for the use of his successor, Sir Michael Blunt, in the Lieutenancy of the Tower in 1590, we find that the following prisoners were at that time confined in the fortress:—James Fitzgerald, the only son of the Earl of Desmond, who had come from Ireland as a hostage, Florence Macarthy, Sir Thomas Fitzherbert (who died in the Tower in the following year), Sir Thomas Williams, the Bishop of Laughlin, Sir Nicholas White, Sir Brian O’Rourke, “who hath the libertie to walk on the leades over his lodging,” and Sir Francis Darcy. All these prisoners were connected with the war in Ireland, or were suspected of conspiring against the Queen and her government.
The year 1592 is a memorable one in the life of the great Sir Walter Raleigh, for it was then that he began his long acquaintance with the prisons of the Tower, and from this time until his execution a quarter of a century later, Raleigh’s days were mainly passed within the walls of that building.
Raleigh’s first imprisonment in the Tower was owing to his marriage with Elizabeth Throgmorton, one of the Queen’s ladies, and the daughter of Sir Nicholas Throgmorton. Raleigh had wooed, won, and wedded his wife without Elizabeth’s knowledge or consent. The Queen, then over sixty years of age, was still as jealous and as vain as any young girl of sixteen, and for any of her favourites—and Raleigh at this time was the principal one—to marry without her august permission, and especially to marry one of her ladies, was in her eyes a most heinous crime, an aggravated form of lése-majestè, and it was only by the most fulsome flattery, the most grovelling abasement, that Sir Walter gained his freedom. In a letter from Sir Arthur Gorges, a cousin of Raleigh’s, to Sir Robert Cecil, there is an account of an extraordinary scene enacted by Sir Walter whilst in the Tower. “I cannot choose,” writes Gorges, “but advertise you of a strange tragedy that this day had like to have fallen out between the captain of the guard and the lieutenant of the ordnance, if I had not by great chance come at the very instant to have turned it into a comedy. For upon a report of Her Majesty’s being at Sir George Carew’s, Sir Walter Raleigh having gazed and sighed a long time at his study window, from whence he might discover the barges and boats about the Blackfriars stairs, suddenly he brake out into a great distemper, and swore that his enemies had on purpose brought Her Majesty thither to break his gall in sunder with Tantalus’s torment, that when she went away he might see death before his eyes, with many such like conceits. And as a man transported with passion, he swore to Sir George Carew that he would disguise himself, and get into a pair of oars to cure his mind with but a sight of the Queen, or else he protested his heart would break. But the trusty jailor would none of that, for displeasing the higher powers, as he said, which he more resented than the feeding of his humour, and so flatly refused to permit him. But in conclusion, upon this dispute they fell flat to choleric outrageous words, with straining and struggling at the doors, that all lameness was forgotten, and in the fury of the conflict, the jailor he had his new periwig torn off his crown, and yet here the struggle ended not, for at last they had gotten out their daggers. Which when I saw, I played the stickler between them, and so purchased such a rap on the knuckles, that I wished both their pates broken, and so with much ado they stayed their brawl to see my bloody fingers. At first I was ready to break with laughing to see them two scramble and brawl like madmen, until I saw the iron walking, and then I did my best to appease their fury. As yet I cannot reconcile them by any persuasions, for Sir Walter swears, that he shall hate him for so restraining him from the sight of his mistress, while he lives, for that he knows not (as he said) whether ever he shall see her again, when she is gone the progress. And Sir George on his side, swears that he would rather lose his longing, than he would draw on him Her Majesty’s displeasure by such liberty. Thus they continue in malice and snarling; but I am sure all the smart lighted on me. I cannot tell whether I should more allow of the passionate lover, or the trusty jailor. But if yourself had seen it, as I did, you would have been as heartily merry and sorry, as ever you were in all your life, for so short a time. I pray you pardon my hasty written narrative, which I acquaint you with, hoping you will be the peacemaker. But, good sir, let nobody know thereof, for I fear Sir Walter Raleigh will shortly grow to be Orlando Furioso, if the bright Angelica persevere against him.”
Here is a portion of a letter written by Sir Walter himself to Sir Robert Cecil, which the writer evidently wished should be shown to the Queen. “My heart,” he writes, “was never broken till this day, that I hear the Queen goes away so far off, whom I have followed so many years with so great love and desire, in so many journeys, and am now left behind her in a dark prison, all alone.” (This “dark prison” from which Raleigh writes, was probably the Brick Tower; in later years Sir Walter was to become acquainted with other prisons in the Tower.) “While she was yet at hand,” he continues, “that I might hear of her once in two or three days, my sorrows were the less, but even now my heart is cast into the depth of all misery. I, that was wont to behold her riding like Alexander, hunting like Diana, walking like Venus, the gentle wind blowing her fair hair about her pure face like a nymph, sometimes sitting in the shade like a goddess, sometimes singing like an angel, sometimes playing like Orpheus”—Alas! Sir Walter!
How long, in spite of the above fulsome letter, the Queen would have kept “her love-stricken swain,” as Raleigh called himself, within the Tower there is no knowing, if it had not been for the accident of his good ship, the Roebuck—which had escaped from the Spanish fleet sent to capture her—falling in, off Flores, with some great East Indian carracks bound for Lisbon. When the Roebuck had taken the great Spanish ship, the Madre de Dios, and brought her into Dartmouth with a huge treasure on board, which Raleigh himself estimated at half-a-million pounds, Elizabeth’s covetousness completely overmastered her resentment, and “her love-stricken swain” was set at liberty in September 1592, to arrange the disposal of the Spanish treasure—of which the Queen took the lion’s share.
Two attempts to poison Elizabeth were discovered in 1594. The first of these dastardly schemes was concocted by the Queen’s physician, a Spaniard or Portuguese named Lopez, who had been bribed by the Spanish governors of the Netherlands, Fuentes and Ibara, to administer poison to his royal mistress in some medicine. This plot is said to have been discovered by Essex. Lopez and two of his confederates met the fate they deserved, after being imprisoned in the Tower. According to Camden, Lopez declared on the scaffold that “He loved the Queen as much as he did Jesus Christ.” This sentiment coming from a Jew was received with much merriment by the spectators at the execution. The second plot was much more curious.
Walpole, a Jesuit priest, had bribed a groom in the royal stables, named Edward Squire, to rub some poison on the pommel of the Queen’s saddle, but, as may be supposed, the poison had no harmful effect, and priest and groom, being convicted, were hanged at Tyburn.
The last year of the sixteenth century saw the fall of one of Elizabeth’s most brilliant courtiers, Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex. After forty years of stern repression, Ireland, towards the close of Elizabeth’s reign, had become more Irish than ever. All the cruelties committed in that country by the Government of the Queen, cruelties in which Raleigh played so flagrant a part, had not crushed the Irish, and a larger army of occupation was found necessary.
Essex and Raleigh were bitter enemies. The chief cause of their dissension was the treatment of the Irish, Raleigh advising that they should be completely trodden under foot, whilst Essex urged a show of justice and some degree of goodwill towards the country and its inhabitants; but the favour shown by the Queen to both these remarkable men was also an additional cause for their mutual jealousy. Both were extremely self-willed, and their immense egotism, and lust for place and power, was the common ruin of each of them.
Essex was the youngest and last of that brilliant combination of soldier, statesman, and courtier, that added to the glory and charm of those “spacious days.”
Robert Devereux had many personal claims to Elizabeth’s good will. Strikingly handsome in face and form, he shone equally in the Court or in the field, and both by birth and marriage he was related to some of the most prominent persons attached to the Court. His father had been a personal friend of Elizabeth’s; his step-father was the Earl of Leicester; Sir Francis Knollys was his grandfather; Walsingham his father-in-law; Lord Hemsdon was his great-uncle, and the all-powerful Burleigh his guardian. To us Essex’s most conspicuous merit was that Shakespeare called him his friend. The poet was closely linked in the bonds of friendship both with Essex and with his dearest friend Southampton, and their fall is thought to have thrown the shadow of their misfortunes over the drama composed about the time of Essex’s execution, and Southampton’s disgrace and imprisonment. A Midsummer Night’s Dream had been written in honour of Essex’s marriage, and the only two books of verse that Shakespeare published had been dedicated to Southampton; and it was probably to the latter that the Sonnets were addressed, if he was not their actual inspirer.
On the eve of Essex’s disastrous expedition to Ireland, Shakespeare referred to his friend in the prologue of Act v. of the play of Henry V. After “broaching rebellion in Ireland,” Essex is thus referred to:
“Were now the general of our gracious empress
As in good time he may, from Ireland coming,
Bringing rebellion broached on his sword,
How many would the peaceful city quit
To welcome him!”
But the poet’s prophecy was not to be fulfilled; for two years after the declamation of these proud lines foretelling Essex’s glory, both their subject and Southampton—who had accompanied Essex to Ireland as Master of the Horse—were charged with treasonable conduct and neglect of duty. Thus Shakespeare lost his two most influential friends by one and the same fatality.
Essex, half mad with rage and disappointment at his failure, and smarting under the bitterness of mortified vanity and ambition, and under what he considered the ingratitude of the Queen, lost his self-control. Raleigh, he believed, had poisoned Elizabeth’s mind against him, quite forgetting his own insolences to his Sovereign on many occasions. Had he not during one of his outbursts of temper exclaimed in the hearing of some of the people attached to her person, that Elizabeth was as crooked in her mind as she was in her body? Essex must have been well aware that the aged monarch would never pardon such a speech; and it was probably one of the chief causes which led her to sign the warrant that consigned her former favourite to the scaffold.
Hic tvvs ille comes generosa essexia nostris
Qvem qvam gavdemvs rebvs adesse dvcem.
Enraged at the charges brought against him and the failure of the Irish expedition, Essex formed a wild plot to seize the Queen’s person, being assisted in the scheme by Southampton and some other hot-heads, amongst them, Rutland, Sandys, Cromwell, and Monteagle; with these were a band of about three hundred armed men. Although Essex was immensely popular with the Londoners, the sober citizens had no idea of imperilling their lives and possessions in such a harum-scarum adventure as this promised to be. Consequently Essex and his friends found no support, and instead of seizing the Queen and upsetting the Government they themselves were taken prisoners after a short siege in Essex’s townhouse. Early in February 1601 Essex with Southampton passed under Traitor’s Gate.
Essex occupied a prison in the Tower which owes its name to his having spent the last days of his short and brilliant life within its walls. On the 19th of February, Essex and Southampton were taken to their trial at Westminster Hall, and there were both adjudged guilty of high treason.
It appears that up to the last Essex expected a reprieve, as he took no leave of his family or of his friends. Lady Essex appealed to Cecil for her husband’s life, and Cecil perhaps might have saved him, had it not been—one regrets to write it—that Raleigh strongly urged the great minister by letter, to carry out the sentence (Lansdowne MSS. and Ellis’s “Original Letters”) and the law took its cruel course. Essex was so beloved by the people that, perhaps, for fear of an attempted rescue by the Londoners when they saw their favourite led out to die, his execution was arranged to take place within the gates of the fortress instead of upon Tower Hill. Camden indeed states that it was Essex’s own desire to die within the walls of the Tower, his reason for doing so being that the “acclamations of the citizens should have heven him up,” whatever that meant. He himself admitted that so long as he lived the Queen’s life would not be in safety, a most suicidal remark to make, but which he made nevertheless to Cecil four days before the end.
The following account of Essex’s last evening upon earth, and of his death, was written by an eye-witness of the execution, and is taken from the Calendar of State Papers (Dom. Series, 1598–1601).
“Feb. 25. 112.—Account of the execution of the Earl of Essex at 8 A.M. in the Tower.
“On Tuesday (24th February) night, between ten and twelve o’clock, he opened his window and said to the guards, ‘My good friends, pray for me, and to-morrow you shall see in me a strong God in a weak man; I have nothing to give you, for I have nothing left but that which I must pay to the Queen to-morrow in the morning.’ When he was brought from his lodging by the Lieutenant, he was attended on by three divines, and all the way from his chamber to the scaffold he called to God to give him strength and patience to the end, and said: ‘O God, give me true repentance, true patience, and true humility, and put all worldly thoughts out of my mind’; and he often entreated those that went with him to pray for him.
“Being come upon the scaffold which was set up in the midst of the court, he was apparelled in a gown of wrought velvet, a satin suit, and felt hat, all black; and first turning himself towards the divines, he said, ‘O God, be merciful unto me, the most wretched creature on the earth,’ and then turning himself towards the noblemen that sat on a form placed before the scaffold, he vayled his hat, and making reverence to the Lords, laid it away, and with his eyes most attentively fixed up to Heaven, spoke to this effect: ‘My Lords, and you my Christian brethren who are to be witnesses of this my just punishment, I confess to the glory of God that I am a most wretched sinner, and that my sins are more in number than the hairs of my head; that I have bestowed my youth in pride, lust, uncleanness, vainglory and divers other sins, according to the fashion of this world, wherein I have offended most grievously my God, and notwithstanding divers good motives inspired unto me from the Spirit of God, the good which I would I have not done; and the evil which I would not I have done; for all which I humbly beseech our Saviour Christ to be the Mediator unto the Eternal Majesty for my pardon; especially for this my last sin, this great, this bloody, this crying and this infectious sin, whereby so many, for love of me, have ventured their lives and souls, and have been drawn to offend God, to offend their Sovereign, and to offend the world, which is as great grief unto me as may be. Lord Jesus, forgive it us, and forgive it me, the most wretched of all; and I beseech Her Majesty, the State, and the Ministers thereof, to forgive it us. The Lord grant Her Majesty a prosperous reign, and a long one, if it be his will, O Lord, grant her a wise and understanding heart; O Lord, bless her and the nobles, and ministers of Church and State. And I beseech you and the world to have a charitable opinion of me for my intention towards Her Majesty, whose death, upon my salvation and before God, I protest I never meant, nor violence to her person; yet I confess I have received an honourable trial, and am justly condemned. And I desire all the world to forgive me, even as I freely and from my heart forgive all the world.
“‘And whereas I have been condemned for my religion, I was never, I thank God, Atheist or Papist, for I never denied the power of my God, not believing the word and scriptures, neither did I ever trust to be justified by my own works or merits, but hope as a true Christian for my salvation from God only, by the mercy and merits of my Saviour Jesus Christ, crucified for my sins. This faith I was brought up in, and therein am now ready to die; beseeching you all to join with me in prayer, not with eyes and lips only, but with lifted-up hands and minds, to the Lord for me, that my soul may be lifted up above all earthly things, for now I will give myself to my private prayer; yet for that I beseech you all to join with me, I will speak that you may hear.’
“Then putting off his gown and ruff and presenting himself before the block, he was, as it seemed, by one of the chaplains encouraged against the fear of death; to whom he answered, that having been divers times in places of danger, yet where death was never so present nor certain, he had felt the weakness of the flesh, and therefore desired God to strengthen him in that great conflict, and not to suffer the flesh to have any rule over him.
“Preparing to kneel down, he asked for the executioner, who on his knees also asked his pardon, to whom he said, ‘Thou art welcome to me; I forgive thee; thou art the minister of true justice.’ And then, with eyes fixed up to Heaven, he began his prayers, ‘O God, creator of all things and judge of all men, thou hast let me know by warrant of thy word, that Satan is then most busy when our end is nearest, and that Satan being resisted, will fly, I humbly beseech thee to assist me in this my last combat, and since thou acceptest even of our desires as of our acts, accept of my desires to resist him as with true resistance and perfect grace; what thou seest of my flesh to be frail [strengthen?] and give me patience to be as becometh me, in this just punishment inflicted upon me by so honourable a trial. Grant me the inward comfort of thy Spirit; let the Spirit seal unto my soul an assurance of thy mercies; lift my soul above all earthly cogitations, and when my life and body shall part, send thy blessed angels to be near unto me, which may convey it to the joys in Heaven,’ then saying the Lord’s Prayer, he iterated this petition, ‘As we forgive them that trespass against us,’ saying, ‘As we forgive all them that trespass against us.’
“Then one of the divines put him in mind to say over his belief, which he did, the doctor saying it softly before him, and added these words, ‘Lord Jesus, receive my soul; into thy hands, O Lord, I commend my spirit.’ He was likewise remembered by the divines to forgive and pray for his enemies. Whereupon he beseeched God to forgive them as freely as he did, ‘because,’ said he, ‘they bear the image of God as well as myself.’
“Asking what was fit for him to do for disposing himself to the block, and his doublet being taken off, after he had asked the executioner whether he would hinder him or no in a scarlet waistcoat, he bowed himself towards the block, and said, ‘O God, give me true humility and patience to endure to the end, and I pray you all to pray with me and for me, that when you shall see me stretch out my arms and my neck on the block, and the stroke ready to be given, it would please the everlasting God to send down his angels to carry my soul before his mercy seat,’ and then lifting up his eyes devotedly towards Heaven, he said, ‘Lord God, as unto thine altar I do come, offering up my body and my soul for a sacrifice, in humility and obedience to thy commandment, to thy ordinance, and to thy good pleasure, O God, I prostrate myself to my deserved punishment.’ Lying flat along the boards, his hand stretched out, he said, ‘Lord, have mercy upon me, thy prostrate servant,’ and therewithal fitting his head to the block, he was willed by one of the doctors to say the beginning of the 51st Psalm, Have mercy upon me, O God, etc., whereof he said two verses; the executioner being prepared he uttered these words, ‘Executioner, strike home. Come, Lord Jesus, come, Lord Jesus, and receive my soul; O Lord, into thy hands I commend my spirit.’ In the midst of which sentence his head was severed by the axe from the corpse at three blows, but the first deadly, and depriving all sense and motion.
“The noblemen present at his death were the Earls of Cumberland and Hertford, Lords Bindon, Darcy, Compton, and Thomas Howard, Constable of the Tower, Sir John Peyton, lieutenant with fifteen or sixteen partizans of the guard, and three divines, Messrs Montfort, Barlow, and Ashe Ashton.”
Writing of Essex’s death, Stowe says, “The body and the head were removed into the Tower, put into a coffin ready prepared, and buried by the Earl of Arundel and Duke of Norfolk in the Church of St Peter.” The above reads as if Essex’s remains had been buried by Arundel and Norfolk, but it is of course intended to convey the fact that the body of the Earl was placed alongside their graves.
There is a ghastly story told by G. S. Brandés in his work on Shakespeare, in which the Duke de Biron, Henry III. of France’s envoy to Elizabeth, relates a conversation he held with Elizabeth about Essex, in which she jested over her departed favourite; the Queen opened a box and took out of it Essex’s skull which she showed to Biron. This story has no shadow of proof or foundation, for had Essex’s head been taken out of the historic soil in which it mouldered in St Peter’s Chapel, and been given to the Queen, such an extraordinary proceeding would have been recorded; besides Elizabeth was not a monster, as such conduct with which Biron here credits her, would proclaim her to be.
Raleigh, at his own execution and speaking on the edge of the grave, solemnly denied that he had rejoiced over the death of Essex. He had, he acknowledged, watched the execution of his rival from the windows of the Armoury, those at the north end of the White Tower, which commanded a view of the scaffold—“where I saw him,” Sir Walter said, “but he saw not me, and my soul hath been many times grieved that I was not near to him when he died because I understood afterwards that he asked for me at his death, to be reconciled to me.” Thus at the early age of thirty-three ended the noble and gifted Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex and Eu, Viscount Hereford and Bourchier, Baron Ferrers of Chartley, Bourchier and Louvain.
When quite a youth Essex had married Frances, daughter of Sir Francis Walsingham, and his son Robert, born in 1592, lived to lead the army of the Parliament against Charles the First.
Contemporary writers have extolled Essex’s charm of character and beauty of person. Sir Robert Naunton, in his “Fragmenta Regalia,” writes that “there was in this young lord, together with a most goodly person, a kind of urbanity or innate courtesy.” So popular was Essex with the Londoners that he scarcely ever quitted the capital without a poem or song being sung and sold in the streets. After Essex’s death Raleigh, who, probably owing to his arrogance, was never a favourite with the citizens, was hooted by the mob, as were also Bacon and the other judges who had condemned the Earl. Even Elizabeth’s own popularity paled after Essex’s death, and she was ever after coldly received whenever she appeared amongst her lieges.
Southampton was kept a prisoner in the Tower until released by the order of James I. in the month of April 1603. During his imprisonment, a favourite cat of his appeared suddenly in his room, having come to his master by way of the chimney, and after his deliverance Southampton had his portrait painted with his faithful friend beside him. At Welbeck Abbey there are two portraits of this nobleman, and in one of them the cat appears by its master’s side.
Of the other conspirators in Essex’s plot, Sir Christopher Blunt, Sir Charles Danvers, Sir Gilley Merrick, and Henry Cuffe were executed, the first four being beheaded, and the two last hanged at Tyburn. Cuffe, who was Essex’s private secretary, appears to have been the principal instigator in the scheme for kidnapping the Queen; the other prisoners were pardoned.
For a long time the Queen hesitated to sign her old favourite’s death warrant; but finally wrote her name upon the fatal document, and by so doing probably shortened her own time on earth, for after Essex’s execution she fell into a state of morbid dejection which never lightened till the end. Her last days were lonely and full of terror, if not of despair. There are few accounts more tragic in history than the description given by those who saw the poor, painted old woman at this time—half delirious as the shades of death closed around her, thrusting a sword through the tapestry of her chamber, or lying on the ground propped up with cushions, refusing all nourishment, and having no one near her to whom she could turn for one loving look or tender word. There is no truth in the popular tale of the ring which Elizabeth is supposed to have given to Essex to be returned to her in any time of trouble, and detained until too late by Lady Nottingham.
Thus in domestic trouble and bloodshed closed the great Queen’s reign. When Elizabeth mounted the throne England was wretchedly weak and distracted, and apparently almost in the grasp of the huge Spanish octopus, the baleful arms of which were closing in around her. When the great Queen died, England was self-reliant and powerful. Elizabeth had not only been regarded by her own people with pride and admiration, but all Europe proclaimed her greatness. Bacon truly said that little or nothing was wanting to fill up the full measure of Elizabeth’s felicity; she had triumphed over all her enemies; and her bitterest foe, Philip of Spain, had gone to his grave five years before her own death, beaten and discredited, and like his so-called Invincible Armada, a wreck and a derision. The only other European sovereign who in any way could be compared with Elizabeth, and who survived her, was Henry of Navarre; and he had called Elizabeth his “other self.” In the next generation Cromwell, a still greater man than Henry IV. of France, speaking of Elizabeth said, “Queen Elizabeth of famous memory; we need not be ashamed to call her so.”
END OF VOL. I.
THE RIVERSIDE PRESS LIMITED, EDINBURGH
The Tower
T. Way, Lith: London.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] Mr G. H. Birch, F.S.A., the Curator of the Soane Museum, says of the extent of the Roman city, that it was “originally of smaller extent, and did not include the space now marked out by the line of apparently Roman walls, the proof being that interments have been found in the extended space, notably at the Union Bank of London and at Bow Churchyard, Cheapside. The first Roman city extended from the Tower to Aldgate, then along Leadenhall Street to Cornhill, returning by Wallbrook to Dowgate, and thence along Thames Street. Several of the bastions, notably the one in Camomile Street, are composed of destroyed Roman buildings and sculpture, and the work, although built in the Roman manner—that is, with courses of Roman tiles or bricks—is coarser in execution than the portion of the real Roman wall at Postern Row and Aldgate.”
[2] “As to the date of the extension,” writes Mr Birch, “it is difficult to say, but it was probably after the withdrawal of the Romans, but I hardly think as late as Alfred. The building points to the work of partly Romanised inhabitants, who would have been able to build only in the manner taught them by the Romans.”
[3] The wax effigies of the Kings and Queens covered with tawdry robes and gilt pasteboard crowns are far more attractive to the holiday crowd of visitors in the Abbey of Westminster than the tombs and shrines of the dead; and Madame Tussaud’s show attracts the public more than the National Gallery.
[4] This is the King’s or Queen’s House, according to the sex of the reigning Sovereign.
[5] He was the youngest son of John Apsley of Pulborough, Sussex. He purchased the office of Lieutenant of the Tower from his predecessor Sir George Moore, for £2500, and was sworn into office, March 3rd, 1617, which he held until his death, May 24th, 1630; he was also Surveyor of Victuals for the Navy. Whilst Lieutenant of the Tower, Sir Walter Raleigh was in his custody. He was thrice married. His second wife was Anne, daughter and heiress of Sir Peter Carew, by whom he had issue two sons and a daughter, Jocosa or Joyce, who married Lyster, second son of Sir Richard Blount, of Mapledurham, whose ancestors were also Lieutenants of the Tower. His third wife was Lucy, youngest daughter of Sir John St John, Knight of Lydiard Tregoz, Wilts, to whom he was married at St Anne’s, Blackfriars, on the 23rd December 1615, at which time he was of the age of forty-eight, whilst the lady was but sixteen. By this marriage he became brother-in-law of Sir Edward Villiers, Viscount Grandison, half-brother of George Villiers, first Duke of Buckingham. His eldest son by this marriage, who also became Sir Allen Apsley, was a zealous Royalist, and was successively Governor of Exeter and Barnstaple Castles, and, after the Restoration, Falconer to King Charles II., and Treasurer of the Household to James, Duke of York, afterwards James II. His daughter Frances married Sir Benjamin Bathurst, Knight, Governor of the Royal African and East India Companies and Cofferer to Queen Anne, and ancestor of Lord Chancellor Bathurst. Sir Allen Apsley, the Lieutenant of the Tower, had also four other sons and two daughters; of the latter, Barbara married Lieutenant-Colonel Hutchinson, and Lucy became the celebrated wife of his brother, Colonel John Hutchinson, Governor of Nottingham Castle, an earnest Parliamentarian. The life of the latter was written by his wife, who also left behind her her own autobiography, printed in 1808.
[6] Mr Birch thinks this improbable, and that the depth and clay bottom of the river would have rendered such a work impossible.
[7] Thomas of Woodstock, seventh son of Edward III., Duke of Gloucester and Aumarle, was born in 1355. He had held many important offices in the State. Froissart says he was “orguilleux et présomptueux de maniére.” At the time of his death he was fifty-two years of age.
“When he was brought again to the bar, to hear
His knell rung out, his judgment, he was stirr’d
With such an agony, he sweat extremely,
And some thing spoke in choler, ill, and hasty:
But he fell to himself again, and sweetly
In all the rest show’d a most noble patience—”
Henry VIII., Act i. scene 4.
[9] There is a large number of records now in the State Paper Office, which are known as the “Baga de Secretis,” and are the official papers connected with many of the most important State trials; these records are kept in ninety-one small bags or pouches, whence the name of the collection. They have been calendared in the third, fourth, and fifth Reports of the Deputy-Keeper of the Public Records. These interesting documents begin with the trial of Edmund Plantagenet, Earl of Warwick, in 1499, and end in the year 1813. In Pouch Nine there are the reports of the trials of Anne Boleyn and her brother Lord Rochford.
[10] On her father’s side Lady Jane Grey’s descent was as follows:—Thomas Grey was Queen Elizabeth Woodville’s (the Queen of Edward IV.) eldest son by her first marriage to Sir John Grey, eighth Lord Ferrers of Groby in Leicestershire. Sir John was killed at the second battle of St Albans, fighting on the side of King Henry. His son Thomas Grey was created Earl of Huntingdon in 1471 and Marquis of Dorset in 1475. In the latter year he married Cicely, the daughter and heiress of William, Lord Bonville and Harrington. By this marriage he had a family of seven sons and eight daughters, and his grandson was the father of Lady Jane Grey.
[11] I know of only one satisfactory portrait of Lady Jane Grey, and that belongs to Lord Beauchamp and is kept at Madresfield Court. By Lord Beauchamp’s kindness I am allowed to reproduce that portrait, together with its companion picture of Lord Guildford Dudley.
[12] The minutes of this trial are in the Baga de Secretis, Pouch xxiv. in the Public Record Office.
[13] This book, a manual of prayers in square vellum, is now in the Harleian MSS. in the British Museum. It is thought that Lady Jane had borrowed it from Sir John Brydges, carrying it with her to the scaffold, and there returning it to its owner by the hands of his brother, although, as the Lieutenant was present, it is difficult to understand why she did not give it to him personally.
[14] Sir Henry Lee was a great lover of jousts and tournaments, and was noted for his prowess in the lists. He died in 1611. His descendant, the present Lord Dillon, has inherited his ancestor’s love of armour and all that appertains to the study of knightly panoply and weapons. The country owes Lord Dillon a debt of gratitude for the admirable manner in which he has classified and re-arranged the collection of arms and armour in the White Tower, and for the exhaustive and excellent catalogue of the same.
[15] These executions took place on the 20th and 21st September 1586. Seven on the first day, and the remainder the next. The centre of Lincoln’s Inn Fields, which at that time had not been laid out, was the scene of these horrible barbarities.
Transcriber’s Notes:
- Blank pages have been removed.
- Obvious typographical errors have been silently corrected.