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.”