Necropolis: London & it's Dead (5 page)

The mural of the
danse macabre
made a profound impression on Sir Thomas More. Speaking of the remembrance of Death, he says:

But if we not only here this word Death, but also let sink into our heartes, the very fantasye and depe imaginacion thereof, we shall parceive therby that we wer never so gretly moved by the beholding of the Daunce of Death pictured in Poules [Paul’s], as we shal fele ourself stered and altered by the feling of that imaginacion in our hertes. And no marvell. For these pictures expresse only y
^e
lothely figure of our dead bony bodies, bitten away y
^e
flesh.
²⁰

More himself was executed on the orders of Henry VIII in 1535, after opposing the Reformation. In 1549, the
danse macabre
also fell victim, when the chapel was destroyed on the orders of the Duke of Somerset, the Lord Protector, who was salvaging materials to build his mansion on the Strand. According to Stow:

In the year 1549, on the tenth of Aprill, the said Chappell by commaundement of the Duke of Summerset, was begun to bee pulled downe, with the whole Cloystrie, the daunce of Death, the Tombes, and monuments: so that nothing thereof was left, but the bare plot ground, which is since converted into a garden, for the Pety Canons.
²¹

The
danse macabre
might have been destroyed, but Lydgate’s sentiments had impressed themselves on generations of Londoners:
Deth spareth not/pore ne blode royal.
²²
Death was universal; but the manner in which that death was observed was another matter. Doctor Machabre would knock on a palace door, just as he did on the door of a humble minstrel. But the funeral of a royal conjured up a unique blend of religious and dramatic elements: it would become the Theatre of Death.

3: MEMENTO MORI

The Theatre of Death

When beggars die, there are no comets seen;

The heavens themselves blaze forth the death of princes.
¹

Life for the Elizabethans was nasty, brutish and short. Londoners lived with the constant prospect of violent death. There were, for instance, the lethal knife-fights, such as the one that killed dramatist Kit Marlowe in the Deptford Tavern; public executions; and, of course, the plague, which continued to menace the city from the outskirts of town, ‘pitching his tent in the polluted suburbs, like a Spanish leaguer, or stalking Tamberlaine’, according to the excitable polemicist, Thomas Dekker.

Long before the epidemic of 1665, London endured a series of outbreaks of the plague, the worst of which occurred in the year of the Queen’s death, 1603. In his ironically entitled
The Wonderful Year
,
²
Dekker portrayed London as one vast burial ground, gaping with a hundred hungry graves. So many coffins harassed the churches that there was no room left for weddings, and every individual faced a grisly end, and ‘must one day be thrown, like stinking carrion, into a rank and common grave’.

Death and burial were a public spectacle. Shakespeare may have seen for himself the gravediggers at St Ann’s, Soho, playing skittles with skulls and bones.
³
There is an echo of this in
Hamlet
, as the tragic hero commands Yorick’s skull: ‘Now get you to my lady’s chamber, and tell her, let her paint an inch thick, to this favour she must come; make her laugh at that.’
⁴

Hamlet
’s gravediggers are hearty artisans, who regard themselves akin to Adam, the first man and the original gardener, and see no shame in their occupation. They are not unsympathetic creations. Public opinion, however, had already revealed a degree of antipathy to those who made a living from death. Dekker referred to ‘merry sextons, hungry coffin-sellers, and nasty grave-makers, employed, like moles, in casting up of earth and digging of trenches’. Bosola, about to murder the Duchess of Malfi in Webster’s tragedy of the same name, describes himself as a tomb-maker, and in Act 4, Scene 2, asks: ‘Do we grow fantastical in our death bed? Do we affect fashion in the grave?’ Bosola, who enters another scene with a human leg over one shoulder, is a grotesque creation, a necrophiliac monster, but a monster familiar to the audiences of his time.

The sixteenth century was still a period when the living shared their space with the dead; churchyards continued to be employed for a variety of activities. St Paul’s Churchyard, which extended further to the north than it does today, was a worldly place, put to a number of uses that would today be condemned as inappropriate. The historian William Maitland noted that in 1569, ‘A Lottery was set on Foot in St Paul’s Churchyard, where it was begun to be drawn at the West Door of the Church on the 11th of January, and continued incessantly drawing, Day and Night, till the 6th of May following.’
⁵

The Cathedral became a judgment-hall for foreign heretics who were condemned to be burned at Smithfield. One tract describes the south aisle in the late sixteenth century as being a centre of ‘usury and popery and the north side for simony’ (buying or selling of ecclesiastical preferment). In addition to all kinds of rendezvous and
brawls, intrigues and conspiracies, there was a horse-fair, and the middle aisle, Paul’s Walk, was a fashionable promenading ground for the rich and eccentric every morning and afternoon.

St Paul’s was also the venue for another vital Elizabethan activity: religious and political controversy. St Paul’s Cross, at the north-east corner of the Cathedral, was constructed of timber and mounted upon steps of stone covered with lead. Dating from 1299, its original purpose was to inspire passers-by to pray for the repose of the dead, in keeping with Catholic doctrine. However, the cross soon became a popular soapbox, the Speaker’s Corner of its day, from which announcements and harangues on all such matters as the authorities judged to be of public concern were poured into the ear and heart of the populace. The cross featured all shades of opinion, from clerics to charlatans and cranks. Bishops Latimer and Ridley frequently preached at St Paul’s Cross, proclaiming to crowds of eager listeners the opinions that later cost them their lives. They needed bodyguards to protect them from the crowd, and eventually, on the orders of Mary Tudor, they were burned at the stake in 1555.

There was a strong link between drama and death. In addition to famous clerics thundering out their message from the pulpit (and suffering public execution), mystery plays had been performed in churches from the tenth century onwards. At the church of St Catherine Cree, Leadenhall Street, plays included
The Massacre of the Innocents
, the shepherds feeding their flocks on Christmas Eve, and scenes from the life of St Catherine. Originally, plays took place inside the church, but these were banned during the Reformation by the Bishop of London. After this, troupes of strolling players performed a more advanced form of drama in the churchyards. An old parish record includes the following entry: ‘Receyved of Hugh Grymes, for lycens geven to certen players to playe their enterludes in the churche-yarde from the feast of Easter, An D’ni. 1560, untyll the feaste of Seynt Mychaell Tharchangell next comynge, every holydaye, to the use of the parysshe, the some of 27s and 8d.’
⁶

Two funerals represent the extremes of sixteenth-century death: that of Anne Boleyn, discarded wife and victim of a public execution in 1536; and that of her daughter, Elizabeth I, the supreme monarch, whose funeral in 1603 was one of the most spectacular London has ever seen, in its combination of tradition, religion, political gesture and theatrical event.

Death by public execution was a common fate in sixteenth-century London. England under the Tudors was a police state, and there was no telling where the axe might fall. A trusted statesman, Sir Thomas More, Speaker of the House of Commons, was executed in 1535; as was a beautiful young Queen. Something more than the ubiquitous threat of plague inspired the English pamphleteer and playwright Thomas Nashe when he reflected in 1600 that:

Brightness falls from the air

Queens have died young and fair
⁷

Brightness could also be the blade of a sword, flashing down on a pretty neck. Dishonoured and discarded, condemned on trumped-up charges, Anne Bolyen was sent to the Tower of London on 2 May 1536. King Henry VIII had tired of his twenty-nine-year-old Queen after a marriage of less than three years, and her failure to bear him a male heir. After she miscarried a boy, he accused her of witchcraft, adultery and incest.

A barge carried Anne from Greenwich, along the same route that she had taken to prepare for her Coronation, and, handed over to a Constable at Traitor’s Gate, she became hysterical, laughing and crying by turns. Anne was escorted to her last home–a cell in the Lieutenant’s lodgings, fourteen foot square by eight foot high, with a casement window looking out over Tower Green. The sheer drop beneath left no prospect of escape. Few people emerged alive from the Tower. From being a mighty fortress, designed to impress Londoners and foreigners alike, it had become England’s state prison.

During the Tudor period, the Tower had four known burial grounds, consisting of the churchyard of St Peter Ad Vincula, its vaults, and the outer graveyard, as well as a little strip by the eastern wall, that was used for the burial of prisoners and members of the household. Burial also took place within the Tower. In 1674, the remains of two young children were discovered buried at the foot of the staircase of the White Tower. ‘Meetly deep in the ground, under a great heap of stones,’ describes Holmes. Assuming these to be the bodies of the two little Princes murdered on the orders of Richard III, Charles II had them reinterred in Westminster Abbey.
⁸

It was from the Tower that Anne wrote her last letter to Henry. Pleading for mercy towards ‘the infant princess, your daughter’, Anne begged for a fair trial: ‘Let not my sworn enemies sit as my accusers and my judges; yea, let me receive an open trial, for my truth shall fear no open shame.’ Imploring pardon for ‘those poor gentlemen who are in prisonment for my sake’, Anne was unable to resist a snide reference to Jane Seymour, ‘that party for whose sake I am now as I am’.
⁹

It made no difference, of course. Henry had long resolved to be rid of her. After a show trial on 15 May, before 200 people, Anne was acquitted of incest, for which the traditional punishment was being burned at the stake. She was, however, found guilty of treason. Anne went to the scaffold on Tower Green on 19 May, in a dark grey gown with a crimson petticoat. Her executioner, from Calais, was said to be an expert in his field. Joking that she was in a safe pair of hands and pointing out that ‘I have a little neck!’ Anne forgave those who had brought her to this pass, prayed for her husband, and was blindfolded. According to Stow, the executioner smote off her head at one stroke with a sword. Next day, dressed in white, Henry married Jane Seymour.

There was to be no heraldic funeral for Anne. Instead, her body, with the head, was placed in a narrow chest, in the choir of the Chapel Royal of St Peter Ad Vincula, adjacent to the Tower. This church was the last resting-place of executed nobility and those who
had died awaiting capital punishment in London’s Death Row. The Earl of Arundel, the Dukes of Somerset, Monmouth, Norfolk and Northumberland were buried there, and Anne was later joined by another of Henry’s wives, Catherine Howard, and Lady Jane Grey, the Nine Days’ Queen. An item claimed to be the head of Lady Jane’s father, the Duke of Suffolk, was put on show at the nearby Holy Trinity Church, Minories, late into the nineteenth century. Displayed in a glass case, it was preserved like leather, with strands of hair still clinging to the scalp, and a wound visible where the axeman had struck a first, unsuccessful blow.

Anne’s body was identified during renovations to the chapel in 1876, and she was reinterred, her final resting-place marked on the marble floor. Macaulay later wrote of St Peter’s that:

…there is no sadder spot on earth…Death is there associated, not, as in Westminster and St Paul’s, with genius and virtue, with public veneration and with imperishable renown; not, as in our humblest churches and churchyards, with everything that is most endearing in social and domestic charities: but with whatever is darkest in human nature and in human destiny; with the savage triumph of implacable enemies, with the inconstancy, the ingratitude, the cowardice of friends, with all the miseries of fallen greatness and of blighted fame. Thither have been carried through successive ages, by the rude hands of gaolers, without one mourner following, the bleeding relics of men, who had been the captains of armies, the leaders of parties, the oracles of senates, and the ornaments of Courts.
¹⁰

The Tower, eight centuries of tragedy and suffering within its walls, has inevitably attracted more than its fair share of ghost stories. Sir Walter Raleigh’s phantom is said to flit about the cells; the white figure of a woman has appeared on Tower Green and, just as suddenly, vanished. In 1864, a sentry posted beneath the window of Anne Boleyn’s chamber was found unconscious. Court-martialled
for being asleep at his post, the soldier claimed he had been approached by a figure. He challenged it, but the figure bore down on him relentlessly. When he charged it with his bayonet and met no resistance, he collapsed in a faint. At his court martial, two witnesses said they had looked out of the window of the Bloody Tower before going to bed. In the clear, cold moonlight they too had seen a figure approach the sentry, and seen everything happen just as he had described. The sentry was acquitted.