The Tower of London, (Vol. 2 of 2)

by Lord Ronald Sutherland Gower

As the Seven Bishops passed under St Thomas’s Tower, and landed at the Traitor’s Gate, the bells of St Peter’s Chapel were ringing for evening service. Passing over the green, they entered the chapel and attended the service. The appropriateness of the second lesson struck all who were present, being a chapter in the 2nd of Corinthians—“Giving no offence in anything, that the ministry be not blamed: but in all things approving ourselves as the ministers of God, in much patience, in afflictions, in distresses, in imprisonments.”

A most uncomfortable week must have been passed by these Reverend Fathers of the Church in the Tower, for they were all crowded together in the by no means spacious Martin Tower. On the 15th of June they were taken from the Tower to the bar of the Court of King’s Bench—on this occasion they were admitted to bail. Their trial began a fortnight later, taking place in Westminster Hall, and was one of the most memorable of the great historic events that that building has witnessed. When the verdict of “Not guilty” was pronounced, the old oak roof of William Rufus’s hall re-echoed with the shouts of the people gathered below; it was a moment, as Wakeman has eloquently written in his “History of the Church of England,” “unparalleled in the history of English courts of law. The crowd within and without Westminster Hall broke into a frenzy of enthusiastic joy. Men fell upon each other’s necks, and wept and shouted and laughed and wept again; and amid the cheers of men and the boom of cannon the heroes of the Church passed in safety to their homes.”

The names of these seven “humble heroes” who had so nobly stood up in defence of the rights of the Church of England and of the liberty of their land, were Sancroft, the Primate; Thomas Ken, Bishop of Bath and Wells; William Lloyd, Bishop of St Asaph’s; John Lake, Bishop of Chichester; Thomas White, Bishop of Peterborough; Jonathan Trelawney, Bishop of Bristol; and Francis Turner, Bishop of Ely. Sancroft had been promoted from the Deanery of St Paul’s to Canterbury after the death of Archbishop Sheldon, and had helped much in the rebuilding of St Paul’s. He left a fine library to Emmanuel College, Cambridge, of which he had been master. Thomas Ken was famous for his unaffected piety, and the beautiful hymn he composed. Lloyd helped Bishop Burnet to write his “History of the Reformation.” Lake had fought in the army of Charles I., and had been Bishop of Man and Bishop of Bristol, before occupying the See of Chichester; Trelawney was successively Bishop of Bristol, Exeter, and Winchester; and Francis Turner had been Dean of Winchester, a position he had held, together with the Bishopric of Rochester, before being preferred to Ely.

Compared with these men the State prisoners in the Tower in the reign of James II. were not of much interest. After Monmouth’s rebellion, Lord Stamford, with Lord Delamere and Charles Gerrard, “commonly called Lord Bandon,” were prisoners in the fortress. Sir Robert Cotton and John Crewe Offleigh were in the Tower charged with “dangerous and treasonable practices,” and also Mr J. Cook, a member of the House of Commons, “for his indecent and undutiful speech, reflecting on the King and the House of Commons.”

A strange case was that of Sir Bevil Skelton, who was a prisoner in September 1688, and “who had been recalled from France for exceeding his instructions in certain political transactions,” for not only was he speedily released, but was made Governor of the Tower, an appointment which caused much dissatisfaction. This appointment was the last of James’s unpopular acts, and when, three months later, the King fled the country, the House of Lords removed Skelton from his post, and gave the keys of the Tower into the custody of Lord Lucas.

The Seven Bishops going by Water to the Tower.

On the 11th of December 1688, James left Whitehall, a King without a crown, and as he crossed the Thames to reach Lambeth, he dropped the Great Seal into the river, hoping thereby that everything would fall into confusion for the want of that symbol of legitimate authority. The curious Dutch engraving representing the amiable act of the last of our male Stuart monarchs gives a view of old London Bridge, and the Tower beyond, looming large against a wintry sky. On the same day that James threw away the Great Seal of England, his Lord Chancellor, the justly detested Jeffreys, was taken, in the disguise of a common sailor, in a small house at Wapping, as he was about to go on board a collier which would have taken him to Hamburg. Once in the power of the mob, Jeffreys’ life was in deadly peril, and he suffered severely at the hands of the people, but was finally rescued and taken before the Lord Mayor, who, poor man, died in a fit soon after the terrible judge had been brought before him, more revolting in his abject terror of death than even during the Bloody Assizes in the West, when he had condemned shoals of men and women to tortures and death with jibes and ghastly pleasantry. Protected by two regiments of the City train-bands, Jeffreys was taken into the Tower on the 12th of December, and given in charge of Lord Lucas, the Governor. The warrant of Jeffreys’ arrest, which is unique, is among the Tower records, and runs as follows:—“We, the peers of this Realm, being assembled with some of the Privy Council, do hereby will and require you to take into your custody the body of George, Lord Jeffreys (herewith sent to you), and to keep him safe prisoner until further order; for which this shall be your sufficient warrant.” This warrant is signed by thirteen peers, including the Bishop of Winchester.

James having fled, and the Great Seal being at the bottom of the Thames, there was no King or Parliament existing at the time the warrant was made out. Jeffreys was half dead with terror when the coach in which he was taken to the Tower entered its gates. All the way from the Mansion House he had implored the soldiers about him to preserve him from the furious rabble that surged around the carriage with ferocious cries of a well-merited hatred. This brute, who had sent scores of innocent people to the block and the gallows, who had rejoiced, like the fiend he was, at the sufferings of his victims as they left his presence for the gibbet, or the plantations, to be sold as slaves, now attempted to excite pity for himself amongst those persons who came to see him in the Tower, by telling them that he had only acted as he had done by the orders of King James, and that James had chidden him for showing too much clemency.

Jeffreys was only forty years old when he was taken to the Tower, but he soon wasted away, tormented, one might imagine, by the spectres of those whom he had destroyed, and of the thousands whom he had made desolate. Whether he died from drinking brandy to excess or not, is of little moment, but according to Oldnixon, his body “continued to decay” until the 19th of April 1689, when he died at the age of forty-one. He had been Chief-Justice at thirty-five, and Lord Chancellor at thirty-seven. No one looking at his portrait in the National Portrait Gallery would imagine that the melancholy-looking and distinguished young man, with his long, flowing wig, could be the most cruel, vindictive, and unmerciful judge with whom the English Bench has ever been cursed.