Tower: An Epic History of the Tower of London (54 page)

The day after arriving in the Tower, Gerard’s own moment of martyrdom arrived as he was led out to face his torturers. The reception committee waiting in the gloomy cellar of the White Tower, a windowless vault lit only by flickering torches, was a high-powered one, befitting Gerard’s status as a renegade member of the ruling caste. In the chair was Sir Edward Coke, Attorney General and legal pinnacle of the Elizabethan state. Coke was accompanied by Sir Thomas Fleming, the Solicitor General; Sir Richard Berkeley, the Tower’s lieutenant; Sir William Wade or Waad, the notoriously cruel future Tower lieutenant and privy councillor; and last, but not least, the MP, lawyer, philosopher, scientist and writer, the ambitious Sir Francis Bacon.

After a preliminary interrogation, in which his inquisitors attempted in vain to get Gerard to name his correspondents from the Clink, the panel applied the next turn of the screw: they showed him the Privy Council’s
warrant authorising them to torture him. Then, preceded by jailers with lighted candles, they led him into the dim inner recess of the torture chamber itself. Here he was shown the dreaded manacles. As Gerard remained steadfast, the torture began. The manacles were clamped around his wrists and fixed to an iron staple high up on a wooden post. Then the wooden steps that Gerard was standing on were removed. To his tormentors’ consternation, the priest was so tall that his toes still touched the ground, obliging them to scrabble in the dirt of the earthen floor until they had dug a pit so that he could dangle free, his heavy weight hanging agonisingly from his pinioned wrists.

Asked again to confess, Gerard found himself unable to speak even if he had wanted to:

I could hardly utter the words, such a gripping pain came over me. It was worst in my chest and belly, my hands and arms. All the blood in my body seemed to rush up into my arms and hands and I thought that blood was oozing out from the ends of my fingers and the pores of my skin. But it was only a sensation caused by my flesh swelling above the irons holding them.

Fighting down a natural urge to tell the torturers what they wanted to know and end his suffering, Gerard remained obdurate. The lawyers and politicians left him to the care of the turnkeys and he blacked out. The steps were replaced and he recovered consciousness and began to pray. Hearing this, the jailers removed the steps again and the whole painful process was repeated eight or nine times across an endless afternoon.

At five o’clock the Tower’s bell rang out. This signalled the end of their shift and knocking-off time for the torturers, who freed Gerard and half dragged, half carried the fainting man back to his cell. The next day, he was taken back to the torture chamber for more of the same treatment. This time, however, his wrists were so swollen by the previous day’s torments that the manacles would barely fit around the bruised skin. Hung up as before, he fainted again and at first could not be revived. The lieutenant, Sir Richard Berkeley, was summoned by the alarmed turnkeys, and Gerard came to on a bench with warm water being dribbled down his throat and nostrils – a sixteenth-century version of waterboarding. The torture session continued, but Berkeley appeared uncomfortable, and after an hour he had the punishment halted.

The lieutenant’s revulsion at Gerard’s suffering is thought to have been
the reason for Berkeley’s resignation a few weeks later. In the meantime, Gerard was again returned to his cell in the Salt Tower and the increasingly sympathetic care of his gaoler, a man named Bonner. Berkeley himself, guilt-stricken at the priest’s treatment, wrote to Elizabeth’s chief minister, Robert Cecil, petitioning for Gerard, ‘ill and weak’ as he was, to be allowed out of his cell occasionally to ‘take the air on a wall near his prison’. Berkeley added compassionately, ‘The man needs physic [medicine].’ Berkeley was not the only official to feel uncomfortable at Gerard’s suffering. Bacon, too, had declined to be present for the second day’s torture. The polymath was not to know that he was himself destined to see the inside of the Tower several years later after being charged with bribery and corruption.

Gerard was in a lamentable state. His wrists remained monstrously swollen, and his arms and shoulders felt as though they had been dislocated. Unable to dress or feed himself, he depended on Bonner’s charity to survive. It took three weeks before some movement began to return to Gerard’s arms. By this time, a relationship had developed between the priest and his turnkey that would eventually open Gerard’s path to freedom. Day by day he increased his influence over the susceptible Bonner. The intimate bond that had blossomed between them as the warder cut up Gerard’s food, shaved him and helped him to dress and undress would pay the ultimate dividend for the Jesuit. For his first favour to his prisoner Bonner promised to obtain money from Gerard’s friends at the Clink. The cash would be used in part to bribe him to win Gerard more solid favours.

Bonner used some of the money to buy his charge a bag of oranges. Exercising his still-stiff hands and fingers, Gerard fashioned a rosary from the peel. But instead of drinking the juice he squeezed it into a jar. Then, using a home-made toothpick as a pen, Gerard wrote a message to his friends in the Clink in the invisible ink of the orange juice, which became briefly visible when the paper was heated. He scrawled a few innocuous lines in charcoal across the secret letter as cover to allay suspicion, and, using Bonner as his postman, sent the missive, together with the peel rosary, to the Clink. By this means, the ever-resourceful and indomitable Gerard had once again established a secure, if fragile, channel of communication to his Catholic comrades outside the Tower’s walls.

At last, motivated by money as well as sympathy, Bonner became Gerard’s trusted ally and agent. It says much for the Jesuit’s powers of
persuasion that he was able to turn the victim of his blackmail into an accomplice without incurring the warder’s resentment. Like British PoWs in wartime Germany who inveigled the ‘Goons’ guarding them into a small transgression, using this hold to demand ever greater favours, Gerard gradually reversed their roles and turned his jailer into his prisoner.

Meanwhile, plans were afoot to effect Gerard’s escape. The priest and his allies outside the Tower – including Nicholas Owen who had meanwhile been freed – laid their schemes carefully. As a first step, some six months into his imprisonment in the Tower, Gerard made contact, by signalling in mime language, with a fellow Catholic prisoner. John Arden, a Northamptonshire recusant, had been held in the Cradle Tower under sentence of death for ten years for an alleged plot against the queen’s life. His cell lay some thirty yards from Gerard’s eyrie in the Salt Tower. The Cradle Tower was a small and seemingly insignificant structure, but, crucially, it lay in the south curtain wall of the Tower’s Outer Ward, overlooking the Thames.

Using his hold over Bonner, Gerard strengthened his links with Arden. His first message was written in juice on a wrapper around an orange. Not understanding Gerard’s mime signals, Arden threw it in his cell fire. Then Gerard persuaded – and paid – Bonner to take his messages in clear. Finally he prevailed upon him to let him go across to the Cradle Tower under cover of darkness, and spend several hours with Arden, praying and delivering spiritual comfort. Gradually, these nocturnal visits became a regular occurrence. As a long-term prisoner, Arden had been allowed visits from his wife, who regularly brought in a covered basket of provisions which, after so many years, the guards now rarely bothered to search. Mrs Arden smuggled in the holy objects needed for the two men to celebrate Mass, and then something of more immediate and worldly value to them: a long length of cord.

Gerard selected the evening of 3 October 1597 for the breakout. Careful preparations had been made, both inside the Tower and without, where a getaway boat was waiting on the river. Bonner escorted Gerard across to the Cradle Tower and – not being privy to the escape plot – locked him in. As soon as he had departed, Gerard and Arden set to work. They managed to break the bolt on the cell door that led to the tower’s roof. As the main Tower bell chimed midnight, the two men were on the roof looking out over the river. They saw their escape boat rowed by John Lillie, one of Gerard’s old cellmates from the Clink, and Gerard’s faithful
servant Richard Fulwood (who had himself escaped from prison the previous year) – with Gerard’s old warder from the Clink at the tiller manoeuvring towards the shore.

Then, disaster struck. A resident in one of the houses along the Tower wharf, noticing the unusual sight of a boat mooring at midnight, emerged and questioned the three boatmen. To mollify the inquisitive man, the trio cast off again. But now the river tide had begun to turn. Borne by its irresistible force, the little boat drifted away from the bank. The two would-be escapers watched helplessly from the Tower’s battlements as the current carried away their hopes of rescue. A new crisis now arose which nearly turned disappointment into complete catastrophe. The gathering tide swept the boat up and pinned it against one of the piles of London Bridge, threatening to capsize the frail craft at any moment.

Horrified, Arden and Gerard heard the desperate cries of the men caught in the mill-race. Crowds with lanterns gathered along the banks and on the bridge to watch as other boats surrounded the stricken craft, not daring to approach too closely lest they be sucked into the same vortex. Fortunately, a sea-going ship strong enough to resist the tide appeared, and the men were hauled to safety. Relieved, but still deeply disappointed, Arden and Gerard returned to the cell they had hoped to quit for ever. In the morning Gerard was heartened to receive a letter from Lillie interpreting the rescue as a sign from God that their escape had merely been postponed. With his help they would succeed next time.

At midnight on the next night, 4/5 October, Arden and Gerard were once again in place on top of the battlements. Again they watched, hearts in mouths, as the little boat moored at the wharf. Lillie and Fulwood, carrying a stout rope, emerged and fastened it to a towpath stake. Gerard threw down the cord which Mrs Arden had smuggled in to them, with a small iron ball attached to carry it over the moat. Fulwood tied the rope to the cord and Gerard hauled it up to the roof where he secured it to a heavy cannon.

Arden was first to slide down. But the rope, which was by no means taut, sagged under his weight and began to flap about as Gerard added his considerable bulk to it and began his descent. Gerard started to spin helplessly like a giant top around the loosening rope. Suspended a few feet over the black water of the moat, he clung on for dear life. Now, the agonising toll wreaked by the torturers’ manacles on his arms and
shoulders began to tell, and Gerard started to feel desperately tired as he inched out into space. He prayed fervently for salvation, and his prayers were answered. Somehow, he summoned up the last reserve of his ebbing strength and dragged himself along the slackening rope. But reaching the wall separating the moat from the wharf, Gerard found that even divine aid could not get him over, and he dangled helplessly on the rope’s end with his feet brushing the top of the wall. John Lillie scrambled up and bodily heaved Gerard over. Both men collapsed in a gasping heap on the cobbles of the wharf.

They struggled to their boat and rowed away as silently as they could. Putting ashore before light as far away from the Tower as they could go, Lillie took responsibility for hiding Arden, while Gerard’s servant Fulwood resumed his old role with his master. At a prearranged safe house in Spitalfields, another old friend was waiting with fresh horses: Nicholas Owen. The reunited travelling companions were soon on the road again – riding west towards the village of Uxbridge, near today’s Heathrow airport, where Henry Garnet was waiting to receive them. John Gerard would never see the inside of a prison cell again. Arden, too, after his decade in the Tower, managed to evade the long arm of the Elizabethan state.

It says much for Gerard that he had not made his successful escape without caring for the fate of the man who, however unwittingly, had made it all possible: Warder Bonner. The priest had left behind three letters: one to the new lieutenant of the Tower, Sir John Peyton, who had recently replaced the squeamish Berkeley. The letter exonerated Bonner from any knowledge of, or responsibility for, his escape. A second letter went to the Privy Council, justifying his breakout and similarly exonerating both Bonner and Peyton. The third letter went to Bonner himself and was dispatched by special messenger to catch the jailer at home before he left for the Tower. Gerard explained what he had done; warned Bonner against reporting for work; and offered him a lifetime annuity of 200 florins to stay away from London and lie low in a Catholic safe house. Wisely, Bonner took this advice, and used Gerard’s money to make a new life for himself and his family. He died in 1602 after converting to Catholicism.

With undiminished faith and courage, Gerard resumed his mission to England’s Catholic community until the discovery of the Gunpowder Plot made the country too hot to hold even his fiery spirit. He left England
disguised as a Spanish diplomat in May 1606. Little Nicholas Owen, hide builder extraordinaire, was far less fortunate. Arrested with Edward Oldcorne, the priest who had arrived in England with Gerard, Owen died under torture in the Tower. Oldcorne was executed at Tyburn. His eyeball flew out as his head was severed and is preserved as a sacred relic to this day. John Gerard lived on in Rome, dying, aged seventy-three, on 27 July 1637. He had more than earned his peaceful end.

Of all the thirty-seven men and women who succeeded in escaping the Tower, only one managed the feat twice, and very nearly succeeded a third time. In 1598, one year after Gerard and Arden’s escape, Edmund Nevill finally bid farewell to the Tower where he had been incarcerated – on and off – for thirteen long years.

Edmund was a scion of the powerful northern Neville family; he fell on hard times after his cousin, Charles Neville, 6th Earl of Westmorland, co-led the Catholic Northern Rising in 1569. As an ex-soldier of fortune who had – suspiciously – served with the Spanish army in their vicious war against the Protestant Dutch, Nevill was a marked man. Amidst the increasing paranoia of late Elizabethan England, he was suspected of conspiring in the Catholic cause. In 1584 Nevill was approached by William Parry, a Welsh Catholic MP notorious for his garrulous instability. Parry tried to inveigle Edmund into a fantastic plot to assassinate Elizabeth. Suspecting that Parry was an agent provocateur, Nevill informed the authorities of the Welshman’s plan.