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.”