Tower: An Epic History of the Tower of London (56 page)

Back at the Tower, the plan had started to unravel. Seymour had carefully studied the comings and goings of tradesmen visiting the fortress. He had noted that a certain carter delivered hay and firewood each evening, departing immediately after calling at his last stop, St Thomas’s Tower. The cart would remain outside the tower’s west door for five minutes. Here, William decided, was his best chance. If he could swap places with the carter, he would be able to drive out himself under the Byward and Middle Towers – and the noses of their guards – to freedom.

William’s barber, Thomas Batten, contacted the carter. Money changed hands. That night, along with his usual change of fine clean clothes, Batten brought some unusually rough garments to his master – the carter’s homespun apparel – and a horsewhip. All seemed ready. But on the evening
set for the escape, for reasons unknown, the carter did not appear. Boiling with frustration, William peered from his window as the hazy June dusk gathered. One hour went by. Then two. Then, just when all seemed lost, the cart slowly creaked into view.

Dressed in the carter’s coarse clothes, Seymour tore down the same spiral stairs that Edmund Nevill had descended twelve years before. He cautiously opened the door at the tower’s foot. The carter heard him and casually strolled round to let the tail of the cart down and rummage among his hay bales. In a single stride, William took the man’s place on the driving platform. He cracked his whip and urged the plodding carthorse out towards the Byward Tower. Behind him the carter flattened himself under the hay. The sentries at the Byward and Middle Towers, used to its daily visits, barely gave the departing cart – or its driver – a glance as it clattered under the arches. Once outside, William steered the cart sharp left, down to the wharf and the river. At a spot called the Iron Gate – where Tower Bridge stands today – he halted. A trusted friend, Edward Rodney, was still waiting with a boat. Running two hours late as he was, William wasted no time for farewells to the carter, but dashed down the steps and jumped aboard.

When they reached the inn at Blackwall where they were supposed to meet Arbella and her party, the reception committee were nowhere to be seen. Tragically, they had only missed each other by minutes. Arbella had lingered at the inn as long as she dared. But after waiting with steadily diminishing hope for two hours, at eight o’ clock – about the time her husband was casting off from the Iron Gate – her attendants had persuaded her that unless they continued downriver the tide would turn and all would be lost. In two boats, the little party rowed downstream to Leigh in Essex in the gathering darkness. Arbella was wrapped in her voluminous velvet coat against the river’s chill. En route they passed the lighted windows of Greenwich Palace, where the year before Arbella had married William, and where the king was now in residence, blissfully unaware of this fresh defiance. When he found out, his rage would know no bounds.

Ironically, the agent of discovery was to be William’s own beloved younger brother, Francis. At eight o’clock the next morning, Francis Seymour received a letter from Edward Rodney, telling him not to expect to see his brother again for some time. His suspicions aroused, the young man sped to the Tower and compelled the barber Thomas Batten to open the door of William’s cell. It was empty, William having quit the fortress
twelve and a half hours previously. Desperate to cover his own back, Francis told the Tower’s lieutenant, Sir William Wade, of the breakout. Wade hastened to Greenwich to inform the king.

An enraged James issued a proclamation inveighing against Arbella and William’s ‘divers great and heynous offences’; and naming ‘divers Lewd persons’ who had assisted their escape. Anyone who aided the runaways, the king said darkly, did so at their peril, and anyone apprehending them, he added, would have the reward of knowing that their action would please their monarch: ‘Wee would take [it] as an acceptable service.’

While this notice was being posted in the London streets, and search parties were combing the capital, the two fugitives were tossing uncomfortably in separate boats as their tragi-comedy of errors continued. Having reached, with great difficulty and delay, the waiting French ship lying off Leigh, Arbella and her party found they had missed the tide to carry them away from England. Later, William and Rodney also arrived at Leigh. Seeing no sign of the French ship, they rowed out to a collier, the
Charles
, whose master, a Captain Seerson, proved willing, for a hefty fee of £40, to delay collecting his coals from Newcastle, and ferry the fugitives to Calais instead.

As they sailed out along the Thames estuary on the Tuesday morning tide, William and Rodney spotted a French ship heave to. Suspecting that this was the ship that had collected Arbella, they asked Seerson to anchor and row over to the foreign ship to investigate. Apparently afraid of being abandoned if the vessel was not the right one, they themselves stayed on the
Charles
. Seerson obediently boarded the French ship. While there he saw a woman sitting on a hatch: this was almost certainly either Arbella herself or Miss Bradshaw, but contact was not established. Anxious not to lose his fat fee, Seerson returned to the
Charles
and told William and Rodney that the French ship was not the one they sought. The collier skipper’s avarice had snapped the last, tenuous thread binding William and Arbella together. They would never meet again.

The
Charles
continued her cross-Channel voyage. Contrary winds first blew her north along the Essex coast to Harwich, then eastwards away from Calais. Only after four days of fearful winds, on the evening of 8 June, did they arrive off Ostend. Groggy from seasickness, William and Rodney struggled ashore, expecting to meet Arbella. But she was in an entirely different place: she had replaced her husband in the Tower.

* * *

Inevitably, word of the mysterious strangers who had so urgently sought a cross-Channel passage at Leigh had spread, reaching the ears of the local naval commander Admiral Sir William Monson. He sent the fast pinnace
Adventure
, skippered by Captain Griffin Cockett, in pursuit. Cockett spotted Arbella’s ship, which, buffeted by the same winds which had delayed William, was wallowing in heavy seas off Calais. The French coast was only a mile away, but tantalisingly out of reach. Cockett soon overtook the slower ship. Thirteen musket shots whistling through his sails and rigging persuaded the French captain, Tassin Corve, to heave to, and a dejected Arbella and her accomplices were arrested. Within sight of safety, her desperate bid for freedom with the husband she adored had finally failed.

James’s vengeance on the cousin who had defied him was vicious and extended to all those who had – knowingly or unwittingly – helped in her attempt. Everyone with the remotest connection to the conspiracy – even the innocent wigmaker who had made Arbella’s peruke – was rounded up and jailed. Those held ranged from Arbella’s physician, Dr Moundford, and the hapless Mrs Adams, to the humble boatmen who had rowed her down the Thames. Also detained were the two captains, Corve and Seerson, and even the priest who had officiated at the couple’s marriage. Arbella’s servants Crompton and Markham were questioned at the Tower – and Markham was even racked to loosen his tongue. Arbella herself, along with her scheming aunt Mary, Countess of Shrewsbury, who had organised the whole affair, were also flung in the Tower. The huge sum of cash – £3,000 – that Arbella had raised to fund her new life abroad was confiscated. Closely confined to a cell in the Bell Tower, she literally pined away. She refused to eat, the symptoms of porphyria reappeared, and in 1615, sick and lonely, she died in the Tower.

The husband she had hardly known did not mourn his bride for long. Any threat to James’s lineage had died with Arbella, and in 1616 William was forgiven. He returned to England and made a more acceptable second marriage – to Frances Devereux, daughter of Elizabeth I’s favourite, Robert, Earl of Essex, the last person to be beheaded within the Tower walls in 1601. William, made Marquess of Hertford, sired seven children with Frances, and found more favour with James’s son, Charles I, than he had with his father.

He was made tutor to the Prince of Wales, the future Charles II, and in the Civil War, took a prominent – if largely unsuccessful – military
role as commander of Royalist forces in the west. William was among the chosen companions allowed to attend King Charles I before his execution in 1649. He made his peace with the victorious Parliamentarians, however, and sat out Cromwell’s rule in comfortable country retirement. William lived to witness the Restoration, dying in 1661 aged seventy-two. The year he died, Charles II granted his old tutor his executed great-grandfather’s title and William was buried, loaded with years and honours, as the 2nd Duke of Somerset. That summer night when he fled the Tower in a common carter’s clothes must have seemed a very long time ago. But he had not forgotten his tragic first wife. Seymour’s will requested that he be buried alongside her in Westminster Abbey. That wish was not fulfilled: instead William lies with his second wife Frances and other members of the Seymour family in the eleventh-century church of St Mary the Virgin in the Wiltshire village of Bledwyn Magna.

The twenty years of Civil War, Commonwealth, Protectorate and Restoration between 1640 and 1660 were as turbulent for the Tower as for the rest of the country. Many famous prisoners passed in and out of its walls. Security was often lax, and as well as the escapes described here, others exited by such crude means as sawing the doors off their cells. The changing cast list of its prisoners fluctuated with the turning fortunes of war, and the destinies of two prominent inmates who managed to escape the Tower faithfully reflected the era’s topsy-turvy politics. One was a faithful Royalist; the other a loyal Roundhead.

Lord Arthur Capel of Hadham Hall in Essex, from his long ringletted locks to his pointed Van Dyck beard, was the very image of a Cavalier. In the Second Civil War of 1648, when Royalists rose in Capel’s native Essex, he was prominent among the Cavaliers who grimly held the county town of Colchester against a two-month siege by Thomas, Lord Fairfax, commander of the New Model Army.

By then, both sides had been hardened by four years of bitter war, and little quarter was asked or given. When Colchester was starved into surrender at the end of August, after the population had been reduced to eating horses, cats, dogs and – according to rumour – their own children, even the moderate Fairfax was in an unforgiving mood. The two commanders of the Royalist garrison, Sir Charles Lucas and Sir George Lisle, were shot by firing squad. But Fairfax was more merciful to his fellow peers among the Cavaliers than the men whom he called common
‘soldiers of fortune’. Both Lord Capel and Lord Norwich were packed off to the Tower to await Parliament’s pleasure.

Capel was visited by his loyal wife Elizabeth and at least some of their five sons and four daughters (like his fellow Tower escapers Edmund Nevill and William Seymour, he was remarkably fecund). He was urged to escape by his family and friends, who suggested that he should swim the moat. When Capel objected that he was a non-swimmer, it occurred to someone that this might not be necessary. Since milord was so tall, he could wade across instead.

His friends circled the moat, looking for a spot where the murky water might be fordable. Eventually they found a place where accumulated filth provided a narrow causeway of sludge. Ropes and a grappling iron were smuggled into Capel’s cell between the Lieutenant’s Lodgings and the Beauchamp Tower. The bars on his cell window were carefully loosened in advance of the attempt, and on a particularly dark, foggy autumn night late in 1649, he wrapped one rope around his torso, fixed the other end securely, and slid down into the shadows. He used the second rope with the grappling iron to climb the curtain wall, and worked his way along the battlements until he reached the place where the moat was apparently shallow.

Securing his rope to the battlements with the iron, Capel slid down it and fearlessly slipped into the icy water. He was rewarded when his feet touched bottom and the water was at chest level. But as he stepped out, his feet sinking into the oozy slime, the water level rose alarmingly until it was lapping his beard. At the same time, he was becoming disorientated in the mist. For all his courage as a soldier, Capel began to feel the panic of the non-swimmer out of his depth. Then, miraculously, the water level fell again. He found his footing and once more began to step forward. A few more paces, and he reached the slimy, reeking ooze of the far bank. His friends saw him and rushed to his rescue.

Frozen and filthy, Capel was helped by willing hands to a waiting coach, and within an hour was bathed, dry and secure in a Royalist safe house in the nearby Temple. The hue and cry raised for him was formidable. To lose such a prominent Royalist prize was an unendurable humiliation for the Roundheads. Royalist houses in the city were raided and searched, and after a couple of days the friends sheltering Capel decided to move him south of the river until the frenzy had died down. It was a fatal mistake.

He was taken at dead of night to Temple Steps where a hired boat rowed him across the Thames to Lambeth Marsh. But his great height was a giveaway, and the suspicious boatman heard one of his companions address Capel as ‘my Lord’. Greedy for the reward which had been placed on the nobleman’s head, the waterman landed them safely before pocketing his ferryman’s fee. He then – at a discreet distance – followed the group to their destination, noted the address, and hurried off to inform the authorities and claim his twenty pieces of silver – for £20 was the reward for Capel’s recapture.

Capel was rearrested and returned to the Tower. His master the king was on trial for his life after he too had fled captivity and been recaptured. Capel had letters smuggled out of the Tower urging his friends to rescue the king – another black mark against him which came to Parliament’s attention. After Charles’s execution at the end of January, Parliament was not in a merciful mood, and Capel was condemned to share the monarch’s fate. Capel was highly regarded for his nobility and devotion to his chosen cause. When his loyal wife Elizabeth petitioned for his life, it took a speech by Oliver Cromwell himself to confirm the death sentence by a mere three votes. Capel’s very qualities of courage, industry and resolution, argued Cromwell, would always make him ‘a thorn in the side’ of Parliament if they allowed him to live.