Tower: An Epic History of the Tower of London (39 page)

As soon as Arundel sat down, the hotheaded Earl of Pembroke – hitherto Northumberland’s most loyal ally – sprang to his feet, smacked his sword and vowed melodramatically, ‘If my Lord of Arundel’s persuasions cannot prevail with you, either this sword shall make Mary Queen, or I will lose my life.’ Pembroke almost outdid Winchester in his inconstancy. Although he had recently married his son Henry to Jane’s younger sister Catherine, after deserting the Greys he had the marriage annulled and threw little Catherine out of the house.

The desertion of these leading councillors was decisive. To a man, the rest of the council switched sides. Totally reversing their actions of only a few days before, they hastily arranged for heralds to proclaim Mary as queen at Cheapside and other central London locations. In contrast to the sullen silence that had greeted the proclamation of Queen Jane, the announcement was received with wild rejoicing by Londoners. Caps and coins were flung in the air, bonfires were lit in celebration, toasts were drunk to the new queen, and a solemn Catholic
Te Deum
was sung at St Paul’s.

At the Tower, as noise of the celebrations faintly penetrated the thick walls, a heavy-hearted Duke of Suffolk entered the room where his daughter sat at supper and broke the news that her reign of nine days was
at an end, and that she must accept Mary as queen. His daughter tartly replied that this was better advice than his original order to take the crown had been. The duke tore down the cloth of estate, symbolising the majesty of monarchy, that hung above her head. Finally, he crept out of the Tower, and proclaimed Mary as queen on Tower Hill, before slinking off into the gathering summer twilight. Back in the Tower, poor Jane, deserted by those who had fawned upon her, was left alone. Doubtless she wished that she could go home too. But that mercy would not be granted to her. Instead, the Yeomen Guards escorted her from the royal palace to the Lieutenant’s Lodgings. In the space of an hour, the queen had become the prisoner.

At 5 p.m. in Cambridge on the same day, Northumberland, too, threw in the towel. Or rather, threw his cap in the air as he proclaimed Mary queen in the marketplace. His eyes, though, betrayed his real feelings as he staggered, weeping, back to his lodgings. He was accosted by an onlooker who asked him his plans. Mary, Northumberland replied, was a ‘merciful woman’ whom he would petition for pardon. ‘Be assured you will never escape death,’ replied the prophetic stranger, ‘for if she would save you, they that now rule will kill you.’

News of her triumph reached Mary at Framlingham on 20 July as she returned to the castle from inspecting the army that had rallied to her in the little Suffolk town. The bringer of the good tidings – together with a grovelling letter signed by the whole Royal Council – was the Earl of Arundel, the main instigator of the council’s change of heart. Mary tasked him with the doubtless sweet duty of arresting his old enemy, Northumberland, in Cambridge. Ten days later, Northumberland returned to the capital in Arundel’s custody. As they rode towards the Tower, an army of 4,000 men was needed to protect the fallen duke from the wrath of the crowds who yelled, ‘Death to the traitors and God save the Queen!’ At Bishopsgate, a figure waving a sword, with dirty bandages hiding the bloody stumps of his freshly severed ears, accosted Northumberland.

It was Gilbert Potter, the innkeeper who had been the sole Londoner with the courage to openly dispute Jane’s right to the throne. Now that the fickle crowd had followed him, he had his say again. ‘Behold the free tongue of an honest citizen, as you have disfigured the head of an innocent man by the mutilation of his ears, so shall you be dragged to the punishment due to treason, according to your deserts!’ he roared. Stung by the
words, and perhaps scared also, Northumberland turned to Arundel, demanding to know why ‘this impudent fellow’ was allowed to ‘afflict him’ before any charges had been brought against him. ‘Be of good courage,’ Arundel answered. ‘Although I cannot stop the tongues of men accusing you, yet I will stop their hands from hurting you.’

As they rode over Tower Hill, women waved kerchiefs stained brown with the blood of the ‘Good Duke’ Somerset shed at that spot. It was a sombre reminder to Northumberland that he would soon share his rival’s fate. Once in the Tower, Northumberland was taken to its grimmest location – the ‘Bloody’ Tower. He was separated from his five sons. Henry, John, Ambrose, Robert and Guildford Dudley – who had all loyally joined their father’s attempt to make Jane queen – were kept together across the Inner Ward in the Beauchamp Tower, where John whiled away the long hours by carving an elaborate rendition of the Dudley coat of arms, the bear and ragged staff, into the stone wall, where it can still be seen today.

Mary herself reached her new capital on 3 August, after a slow but triumphant progress from Framlingham. Mounted on a palfrey, guarded by 1,000 soldiers, and gorgeously arrayed in purple velvet encrusted with gold and pearls, the new queen also headed for the Tower. Her reception was very different from Northumberland’s. She could barely force her horse through the cheering throngs, whose hoarse hurrahs competed with the frantic ringing of church bells and the blasts of trumpets.

Arriving at the Tower, Mary was greeted by a small line of gentlemen and one lady, all kneeling uncomfortably on the hard ground. Blinking in the summer sunshine after years in the Tower’s shadows were the old Duke of Norfolk – the great survivor from Henry VIII’s reign who had been incarcerated there since just before the old monster’s death – and two Catholic prelates, Bishops Stephen Gardiner of Winchester and Edmund Bonner of London. These elderly men were joined by one young man, who, despite his youth, had been immured in the Tower for longer than any of them. Edward Courtenay, shortly to be made 1st Earl of Devon, had been held there for fifteen years since 1538 solely because he was the great-grandson of Edward IV, and the last Yorkist claimant to the throne. Anne Stanhope, the Duchess of Somerset, held in the fortress since her husband’s execution, completed the line-up. Mary smiled at them all fondly, and kissed each in turn. ‘These are my prisoners,’ she said proudly, freeing them.

* * *

Mary’s first duty was to arrange the funeral of her dead half-brother. The boy king was buried in Westminster Abbey in a Protestant service presided over by Cranmer. The queen stayed away, attending a Catholic Requiem Mass at St John’s Chapel in the White Tower instead. Elsewhere in the Tower, Lady Jane Grey, the tiny figure at the centre of the recent storm, wrote a long letter to Mary from the Lieutenant’s Lodgings explaining her part in the proceedings. She freely admitted her fault in allowing herself to be persuaded to take the crown – but denied that either ambition or malice towards Mary had prompted her action. ‘No one can say either that I sought it [the throne] as my own, or that I was pleased with it.’ At first, Mary was inclined to believe Jane’s honest protestations of innocence and pardon her. But her advisers – in particular Simon Renard, the imperial ambassador in London – persuaded her that Jane free would inevitably become a magnet for opposition, and an alternative queen once Mary’s popularity waned. So Jane stayed in the Tower – her fate suspended.

There was, however, no chance of clemency for Northumberland and his closest associates. Tried at Westminster Hall on 18 August along with his son John and the Marquess of Northampton, brother of Queen Catherine Parr, Northumberland exonerated Jane Grey, affirming that she had only claimed the crown ‘by enticement and force’. For himself, he could only plead that his ‘treason’ had consisted in following the commands of the late King Edward – a course, he pointed out, which all the lords trying him had followed too. If he were guilty, so were they. Brushing this aside, the court – once again presided over, as in the treason trials of Henry VIII’s day, by the vicious old Duke of Norfolk – sentenced Northumberland, Northampton and the younger John Dudley to death.

Their deaths – along with those of three of their lesser henchmen – were fixed for Monday 21 August. But as he prepared to walk to the scaffold that morning, Northumberland grasped at a final straw. Urgently, he told his guards of a last request – he wished to hear a Catholic Mass in the Tower before he died. This was a propaganda coup that Mary’s new Catholic regime could not afford to pass up. For the driver of the Edwardian Reformation to convert to the old faith in the hour of his death was little short of miraculous. Even if it meant postponing his execution for twenty-four hours, the opportunity must be grasped.

A Mass was swiftly arranged in St Peter ad Vincula. Northumberland attended, along with the associates due to die with him. Just before he
received the host, Northumberland told the congregation that Catholicism was ‘the very right and true way’. He and they, he added, had been seduced from ‘true religion these sixteen years past’ (i.e. since Henry VIII’s break with Rome), ‘by the false and erroneous preaching of the new preachers’. He himself regretted, he concluded, having ‘pulled down the Mass’ and was grateful that his power to do further wrong had been halted.

Whether Northumberland’s renunciation of the Protestant religion and sudden conversion to Catholicism was genuine, expedient – in the hope of saving his own life and those of his family and friends or at least preserving his children’s inheritance – or, as seems most likely of all, merely desperate cannot be said with certainty. He would, however, have died with more dignity if he had stuck to the cause for which he had hazarded everything. In this respect the girl he had treated as his puppet – Jane herself, who watched from her window overlooking the Inner Ward as Northumberland demeaned himself at the chapel – set a more steadfast example of courage and fidelity than the man who had exploited her.

That night, his last on earth, Northumberland doggedly fought on for his life. The grovelling letter he wrote from the Bloody Tower to his old enemy Arundel, pleading for him to intercede with the queen, gives a measure of his desperation:

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 live 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, that I might but live and kiss her feet. Once your fellow and loving companion, but now worthy of no name but wretchedness and misery. J.D.

By the next morning, Northumberland had given up any slight hopes of a last-minute reprieve. As he mounted the scaffold on Tower Hill, almost exactly forty-three years after his father Edmund had died at the same bloody spot, he threw off his sand-coloured cloak, leant casually on the rail and addressed the crowd. He had been an ‘evil liver’, he confessed, who had been led astray by those Protestant pastors who had persuaded him to renounce the ‘Catholic faith and the true doctrine of Christ’. He blamed the nation’s turning away from Rome for all the ‘misery, sedition, division and rebellion’ that had troubled England ever since. Finally, as was customary, he thanked the monarch who was putting him to death for her ‘mercy’ in giving him the ‘time and respect’ to repent. Then, with
a final prayer and a recital of the psalm
De Profundis
, he submitted to the executioner, who deftly removed his doublet and handed him a kerchief blindfold. Northumberland knelt at the block and lost his head in one blow.

The two men who died with him, Sir Thomas Palmer, whose defection from Somerset’s camp had been instrumental in bringing the ‘Good Duke’ down, and Sir John Gates, former captain of King Edward’s guard, offered contrasting studies in bravado and meekness in their last moments. Gates had been sought out by Northumberland that morning when they had attended their final Mass in the Tower, and exchanged mutual forgiveness, though both blamed each other for their predicament. Gates, with a soldier’s courage, refused a blindfold. A decision he may have regretted when the headsman botched his job and took three blows to decapitate him.

Palmer, by contrast, swaggered on to a scaffold already slippery with blood, cheerfully roaring, ‘Good morrow!’ to the crowd. He told them that he had had a vision of Christ sitting at God’s right hand while in ‘a little dark corner in yon Tower’; and his cheeriness was prompted by the knowledge that he was bound for heaven that very day. In contrast to the turncoat Northumberland, he said he died in the Protestant faith, and was happy to leave a vain world in which he had found ‘nothing but ambition, flattery, foolishness, vainglory, pride, discord, slander, boasting, hatred and malice’. Death was not to be feared, he affirmed: ‘Not even the bloody axe itself shall make me afraid.’ Greeting the executioner, Palmer jested, ‘Come on, good fellow, art thou he that must do the deed? I forgive thee with all my heart.’ Laying his neck in the slot on the block, he joked that it fitted perfectly, said a last prayer and, like Northumberland, lost his head in a single stroke. The three bodies were carted back to the Tower and buried at St Peter’s where they had worshipped less than an hour before.

We have an unusually detailed account of Jane Grey’s time in the Tower, thanks to Rowland Lee, an official of the Royal Mint who had access to her. Lee seems to have developed a crush on the spirited young ex-queen, and his pen portrait of her vividly conveys her personality. A week after Northumberland’s demise Lee dined with Jane and found her still regal, but full of praise for Mary’s ‘mercy’. She was indignant at Northumberland for abandoning the Protestant faith so easily. ‘As his life was wicked and
full of dissimulation – so was his end thereafter.’ Jane promised that if and when she was in the same position she would not renounce her faith so lightly. She was as good as her word.

While in the Tower, as a noblewoman of royal blood, Jane was permitted to retain four attendants: two ladies, a manservant and her former nurse. The government paid a generous ninety shillings a week for her keep, plus twenty shillings for each of her servants. She was allowed liberty to stroll and enjoy the late summer in the gardens, as well as to read the books of her choice. Her companions in the Tower included the Protestant prelates Thomas Cranmer and Hugh Latimer, who took the places of the Catholic Bishops Gardiner and Bonner. Jane was not, however, permitted to meet her husband Guildford Dudley, who remained confined with his brothers in the Beauchamp Tower. A distant glimpse of Guildford as he stretched his long legs on the tower’s lead roof was the most that Jane was permitted.