102. Houndsditch.
103. Crutched Friars.
104. Priory of Holy Trinity.
105. Aldgate. 		106. St. Botolph, Aldgate.
107. The Minories.
108. The Postern Gate.
109. Great Tower Hill. 		110. Place of Execution.
111. Allhallow’s Church, Barking.
112. The Custom House.
113. Tower of London. 		114. The White Tower.
115. Traitor’s Gate.
116. Little Tower Hill.
117. East Smithfield. 		118. Stepney. 119. St. Catherine’s Church.
120. St. Catherine’s Dock.
121. St. Catherine’s Hospital. 		122. Isle of Dogs.
123. Monastery of Bermondsey.
124. Says Court, Deptford.
125. Palace of Placentia.

[Larger image][150 kb] [Largest image] [1mb]

Buckingham, that the Duke of Norfolk, not without tears, delivered sentence thus: “You are to be led back to prison, laid on a hurdle, and so drawn to the place of execution; you are there to be hanged, cut down alive, your members cut off and cast into the fire, your bowels burnt before your eyes, your head smitten off, your body quartered and divided at the King’s will.” Buckingham heard this terrible form of punishment with calmness, and said that so should traitors be spoken unto, but that he was never one. After the trial, which had lasted nearly a week, the Duke was conveyed on the river from Westminster to the Temple steps and brought through Eastcheap to the Tower. Buckingham’s last words as he mounted the scaffold on the Green were that he died a true man to the King, “whom, through my own negligence and lack of grace I have offended.” In a few moments his head was off, the block was covered with his blood, and some good friars took up his body, covered it with a cloak, and carried it to the Church of Austin Friars, where it was buried with all solemnity. So fell the once mighty Buckingham, and in his last moments, and after his death, he was not forgotten by “poor religious men, to whom, in his lifetime, he had been kind.”

Again the curtain falls on tragedy and rises on comedy. Twelve years later Tower Green was given over to revelry; and laughter, singing, and mumming were revived under the walls of the White Tower. A writer of the time speaks of the “marvellous cunning pageants,” and the “fountains running with wine” as Henry brought hither his new Queen, Anne Boleyn, for whom, on her entry “there was such a pele of gonnes as hath not byn herde lyke a great while before.” Once more, also, there was made procession, in state, but with scant applause of the people this time, from Tower Hill to Westminster. Soon the shadows return, and the “gonnes” and the music cease. Three short years pass and Anne Boleyn comes back to the Tower in sadness and in silence. On the spot where Buckingham suffered, her head, on May 19, 1536, was severed from her body. Three days afterwards Henry had married Jane Seymour.

During the short life of Anne Boleyn as Queen, Bishop Fisher and Sir Thomas More had come to the scaffold. Their imprisonment and death are dealt with in the next chapter. The “Pilgrimage of Grace,” a religious rising in the North, mostly within the borders of Yorkshire, to protest against the spoliation of the monasteries and the threatened attack on the parish churches, caused many a leader to be confined within the Tower. Its dungeons were filled with prisoners.

The magnificent Abbeys of Rievaulx, Fountains, and Jervaulx, in the Yorkshire dales, were pulled down, and to this day their noble ruins cry shame upon the despoilers. To the Tower came the Abbots of Jervaulx and Fountains, with the Prior of Bridlington, and they were hanged, eventually, at Tyburn Tree. Other prisoners were Lords Hussey and Darcey; the first was beheaded in Lincoln, the other on Tower Hill. With them were brought Sir Robert Constable, Sir John and Lady Bulmer, Sir Thomas Percy, Sir Francis Bigod, Sir Stephen Hamilton, Robert Aske, William, son of Lord Lumley, and many a one of Yorkshire birth whose names have not come down to us. All were put to death, without mercy, in 1537.

Two years after the suppression of this rising in the North a smouldering Yorkist insurrection in the West was stamped out by the usual method of securing the leaders, in this case Henry Courtenay, Marquis of Exeter, Sir Edward Nevill and Sir Nicholas Carew, and taking off their heads on Tower Hill. Others were seized about this time, accused of being implicated in certain traitorous correspondence, and were also brought to the Tower. Amongst them were Lord Montague and Sir Geoffrey Pole, with their mother the Countess of Salisbury, Sir Adrian Fortescue, Sir Thomas Dingley, and the Marchioness of Exeter. As regards the aged Countess of Salisbury, in a contemporary document it is said that “she maketh great moan, for that she wanteth necessary apparel, both for change and also to keep her warm.” In a history dealing with the period, by Lord Herbert of Cherbury, we have a description of the Countess’s last moments, which were tragic enough even for Tower records. On May 28, 1541, “the old lady was brought to the scaffold, set up in the Tower [on Tower Green], and was commanded to lay her head on the block; but she, as a person of great quality assured me, refused, saying, ‘I am no traitor’; neither would it serve that the executioner told her it was the fashion, so turning her grey head every way, she bid him, if he would have her head, to get it off as he could; so that he was constrained to fetch it off slovenly.” However, Froude discredits this story, and it certainly seems to be almost too fantastic to be true. Still, the fact remains that the Countess was subjected to unnecessarily harsh treatment while in the Tower, for the reason, it is said, that the King hoped she might die under the privations and so save him bringing her to the block. To Thomas Cromwell, the instigator of the terrible punishments that were meted out to those concerned in the risings, fate had already brought retribution. In 1540 he had been created Earl of Essex; a few months afterwards his fall came; on a day of July in that year he, too, came to the Tower and suffered the death, on Tower Green, that he had prescribed for others. The Tower was becoming like some mighty monster whose craving for human blood was hard to satisfy. Accuser and accused, yeoman and earl, youth and age, innocence and guilt, seemed to come alike into its greedy maw. Cromwell was taken from the House of Lords to the Tower, and the angry King would listen to no word in his favour. Whatever his crimes as tyrant-councillor to Henry, two things may be reckoned to his credit, for no man is altogether bad. The Bible was printed in English, in 1538, at his wish, and he initiated a system of keeping parish registers. At the time of Cromwell’s death the Tower was inconveniently full of “Protestant heretics,” three of whom were got rid of by the simple expedient of burning them in Smithfield, while an equal number of Catholics, who were prepared to deny the King’s supremacy in matters ecclesiastical, went with them.

The King had not been too busy with ridding himself of enemies, or supposed enemies, to neglect other things. He had married and divorced Anne of Cleves, and had taken Katherine Howard to be his Queen. But her fate was not long delayed, and another royal head was brought to the axe on Tower Green. Before her death she had asked that the block might be brought to her cell in order that she might learn how to lay her head upon it, and this strange request was granted. Lady Rochford, the Queen’s companion, was executed on the Green after her mistress had suffered. An eye-witness of the executions has left it on record that both victims made “the moost godly and chrystian end that ever was heard tell of, I thynke sins the world’s creation.” Katherine Howard was only twenty-two years old when the Tower claimed her life. Many of her relatives were imprisoned at the same time, among them being her grandmother, the Duchess of Norfolk, the Countess of Bridgewater, Lord and Lady William Howard, and Thomas, Duke of Norfolk. It is rather startling to find that a prisoner in the Tower could “die for joy” upon hearing that the charge brought against him was not proven. This singular death released the troubled soul of Viscount Lisle from the walls of his dungeon and from the trials of this mortal life, in the year that Queen Katherine was brought to the Green.

From execution we turn to torture. Anne Askew, “an ardent believer in the Reformed faith,” was cast into the Tower for denying the doctrine of Transubstantiation. In an account of her sufferings by Lord de Ros we are told that “the unhappy lady was carried to a dungeon and laid on the rack in the presence of the Lieutenant of the Tower and Chancellor Wriothesley. 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 [the Lieutenant], revolting at such cruelty, insisted on her release from the dreadful machine. It was but just 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.... 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.” Religious bigotry, alas, is still with us, but men have saner notions to-day as to the value of mere religious opinions, and poor Anne had the misfortune to live in a ruder age than ours. But her sufferings are not forgotten; religious tyranny has lost the power to send to the rack and the stake, and to her, and all who suffered, be due honour given.