On the following day, 19th August, four of the chief of those who had ridden out of London with Northumberland against Mary—Sir Andrew Dudley,[272] Sir John Gates, Sir Harry Gates, and Sir Thomas Palmer—were sentenced to death in Westminster Hall.
Next day Northumberland made a public renunciation of the Protestant religion, either in the Church of St. Peter-ad-Vincula, or else in the chapel in the White Tower; the former place is more generally accepted. Some forty of the principal citizens of London were present; and the Marquis of Northampton, Sir Andrew Dudley, Sir Henry Gates, and Sir Thomas Palmer, were also reconciled to the Latin Church at the same time. The ex-conspirators knelt during Mass, saying the Confiteor after the celebrant, who was probably Gardiner. When the Mass was concluded, they one after another asked each other forgiveness, kneeling as they did so. After this they all went in front of the altar, where, on bended knees, they confessed to Gardiner, that “they were the same men in the faith, according as they had confessed to him before, and that they all would die in the Catholic faith.” Having received the Eucharist, the Duke turned to the congregation and said, “Truly, good people, I profess here before you all that I have received the sacrament, according to the true Catholic faith; and the plague that is upon this realm, and upon us now, is, that we have erred from the faith these sixteen years, and this I protest unto you all, from the bottom of my heart.” Northampton, Andrew Dudley, Gates, and Palmer made the same statement, and they were all conducted back to their respective prisons.[273] There can be no doubt, that, if this ceremony took place in St. Peter’s, Lady Jane must have seen, from the windows of the Deputy-Lieutenant’s house, the procession of her father-in-law and his followers on their way to hear Mass, and her grief on learning that they had abandoned Protestantism was, as we learn from her own lips, intense.
The evening of the 21st August, Northumberland was informed by the Lieutenant of the Tower that he was to die next day, whereupon he wrote the following abject letter to his brother-in-law and captor, the Earl of Arundel:—
“Honble lord, and in this my distress my especial refuge, most woeful was the news I received this evening by Mr. Lieutenant, that I must prepare myself against to-morrow to receive my deadly stroke. Alas, my good lord, is my crime so heinous as no redemption but my blood can wash away the spots thereof? An old proverb there is, and that most true, that a living dog is better than a dead lion. Oh! that it would please her good grace to give me life, yea, the life of a dog, if I might but live and kiss her feet, and spend both life and all in her honourable services, as I have the best part already, under her worthy brother, and most glorious father. Oh! that her mercy were such, as she would consider how little profit my dead and dismembered body can bring her; but how great and glorious an honor it will be in all posterity when the report shall be that so gracious and mighty a queen, had granted life to so miserable and penitent an object. Your honble usage and promise to me since these my troubles, have made me bold to challenge this kindness at your hands. Pardon me if I have done amiss therein, and spare not, I pray, your bended knees for me in this distress. The God of Heaven, it may be, will requite it one day, on you or yours; and, if my life be lengthened by your mediation, and my good lord chancellor’s (to whom I have also sent my blurred letters), I will ever owe it to you, to be spent at your honble feet. Oh! my good lord, remember how sweet life is, and how bitter the contrary. Spare not your speech and pains; for God, I hope, hath not shut out all hopes of comfort from me in that gracious, princely and womanly heart; but that, as the doleful news of death hath wounded to death, both my soule and body, so the comfortable news of life, shall be a new resurrection to my woeful heart. But if no remedy can be found, either by imprisonment, confiscation, banishment, and the like, I can say no more, but, God grant me patience to endure, and a heart to forgive the whole world.
“Once your fellow, and loving companion, but now worthy of no name but wretchedness and misery.
J. D.”[274]
It must have cost the haughty Northumberland dear, to write so humble a supplication; but he was a man of strong domestic affections, and realised that if he were spared, his children and brothers might also be saved. But Mary’s hate, thoroughly Spanish in its intensity, was implacable; and if, as some historians seem to think, the prisoner hoped to obtain his freedom by returning to the religion of his ancestors,[275] he made a terrible mistake. The Queen may have rejoiced that the chances of his eternal salvation were enhanced, according to her views, by his conversion, but none the less did the outraged sovereign and woman claim the head of her arch-enemy, and worst detractor.
Machyn tells us of a strange incident, in connection with the Duke’s execution, which tends to prove it was to have taken place on the 21st August, and to have been accomplished by the common hangman. Says the chronicler in question: “The xxj of August was, by viij of the clock in the morning, on the Tower hill about XM (i.e. “about ten thousand”) men and women for to have seen the execution of the Duke of Northumberland, for the scaffold was made ready and sand and straw was brought, and all the men that belong to the Tower,[276] as Hoxton, Shoreditch, Bow, Ratclyff, Limehouse, Saint Katherines, and the waiters [attendants] of the Tower, and the guard, and sheriff’s officers, and every man stand in order with their halbards, and lanes made (i.e. barriers placed so as to admit of the free passages of the troops and officials) and the hangman was there, and suddenly they were commanded to depart.”[277] The fact that the hangman was present seems to denote that the order, changing the sentence from hanging and disembowelling, to decapitation, had not yet been made. Northumberland had given way at his trial to an unusual display of emotional terror, as the barbarous details of the sort of death to which he was condemned were read out to him, and probably efforts were therefore made, and not in vain, to spare him so atrocious an ordeal and substitute the more merciful and dignified death by the axe. Maybe it was this which occasioned the postponement of the grim ceremony.
According to a MS, now in the Brussels Archives, entitled, Les événements en Angleterre, 1553–4, the Duke of Northumberland was allowed to take a pathetic leave of his youngest son, “whom he pressed again and again to his breast, sighing and weeping a deluge of tears, as he kissed him for the last time.”
The executions of Northumberland, Sir John Gates, and Sir Thomas Palmer, took place on 22nd August, on Tower Hill. The prisoners were first delivered over to the Sheriffs of London by the Lieutenant of the Tower. As soon as the Duke was confronted with Sir John Gates, he exclaimed, “Sir John, God have mercy on us, for this day shall end both our lives, and I pray you forgive me whatsoever I have offended, and I forgive you with all my heart. Although you and your counsel was a great occasion thereof (i.e. “of my troubles”). “Well,” returned Gates, “I forgive you all, as I would be forgiven, and yet you and your authority was the original cause of it, altogether, but the Lord pardon you, and I pray you forgive me.” They then bowed to each other, and the Duke, who was garbed in “swan-coloured (i.e. grey) damask,” went forward to the scaffold, looking dejected. Bishop Heath, crucifix in hand, walked with him. On the way, when they were outside the Tower gates, a woman rushed forward, and waving in his face a handkerchief, which had been dipped in the blood of Somerset, cried out, “Behold, the blood which thou did cause to be unjustly shed, does now apparently begin to revenge itself on thee!” The guards dragged her away, and the condemned proceeded on their way to Tower Hill. On the scaffold, the Duke took off his outer cloak, and leaning over the rail, on the east side, made his farewell speech to the people, of which several versions exist. He admitted that he had been “an evil liver”; begged the Queen’s forgiveness, kneeling; alluded to his accomplices, and would not name them; regretted his religious errors; professed his attachment to the Catholic Church, asking the Bishop of Worcester, Heath, to bear witness to his sincerity, to which the prelate answered “Yea”; and finally, asking all to pray for him, he knelt down, and recited the De Profundis, after which he made the sign of the cross, in the sawdust of the scaffold, and stooped and kissed it. Then, rising, he bared his neck, tied the handkerchief over his eyes, and, turning to the executioner, said he was ready. The fellow, who was lame in one leg, took good aim—and in a flash, John Dudley, Duke of Northumberland, was no more. Sir John Gates would not have his eyes bandaged, and died a fearful death, after three blows from the axe. Palmer was beheaded at one stroke. Both made lengthy speeches, in which they styled themselves staunch Catholics. It is said that when the horrible scene was over, children came and dipped cloths in Northumberland’s blood, to be preserved as a memorial of him, and this despite his unpopularity.[278]
A pathetic incident occurred in connection with the burial of the Duke’s remains. One of his servants, John Cock, sufficiently attached to his memory to have a care for the whereabouts of his last resting place, waited upon Queen Mary and prayed her to command that his master’s head should be given to him. “In God’s name,” answered Her Majesty, somewhat irate, “take the whole body as well, and give your lord proper burial.” Acting on this permission, Cock took Northumberland’s corpse and laid it to rest in the Church of St. Peter-ad-Vincula, beside the coffin of the Duke of Somerset!