Tower: An Epic History of the Tower of London (20 page)

Edward’s lifestyle at the Tower could not have been more different. Always a lover of luxury, he had his royal rooms sumptuously redecorated; they were aptly known as the ‘House of Magnificence’. They were divided into three great chambers: an audience chamber where visitors were entertained and foreign envoys received; an inner privy chamber where private business was conducted; and finally the holy of holies – the royal bedchamber – furnished with pallet beds for the half-dozen squires and gentlemen ushers who serviced the king’s most intimate needs: holding the basin in which he washed, the towel with which he dried himself, and the pot into which he pissed. The king’s own great tester bed was made and unmade with elaborate ritual, laid with sheets of blanched linen; velvet or satin pillows and bolsters; and an ermine fur counterpane on which holy water was sprinkled before it was used – often for distinctly unholy purposes. Here, behind discreetly drawn bed curtains to ward off the Tower’s river chill, the king would spend his nights chastely with favoured male friends, or more energetically with mistresses such as Elizabeth Lucy or Elizabeth Waite, one of whom bore the lusty young king an illegitimate son, Arthur Plantagenet, destined to end his days in the Tower where he may have been conceived – and possibly a daughter, Elizabeth, too.

If Edward had kept his compulsive womanising separate from his dynastic obligations he might have secured the House of York as England’s permanant ruling dynasty. But it was not to be. In 1464 he secretly married Elizabeth Woodville, the widow of a Lancastrian knight. Rumour had it that the pretty, blonde young widow had deliberately waylaid the susceptible king by standing under a tree with her young sons, holding one by either hand. The trio made a heart-wrenching picture as she pleaded for his help, and Edward was instantly smitten. However apocryphal this story, the legend well captures Elizabeth’s calculating ability to manipulate her royal target. A commoner, a Lancastrian, three years Edward’s senior, with a tribe of twelve greedy, grasping siblings in her baggage, Elizabeth had only one thing to recommend her: the randy Edward desperately fancied her. That powerful
urge overrode all political objections to the match. Why, then, did Edward not make Elizabeth his mistress as he had so many others? It was said he had wanted to do exactly that, to the extent of holding a dagger to her throat during his rough wooing. But Elizabeth was a cool customer. Like Anne Boleyn in the next century, she held out for a crown. So violent was Edward’s lust that he agreed and, despite his continuing infidelity, the union proved lasting and fruitful.

When Edward was forced to reveal his marriage to his shocked council six months later, Warwick in particular was outraged by the union with a penniless widow, whose Lancastrian father he had once insulted for his humble origins. The earl’s ire was increased as he had been in the act of negotiating a French royal match for the headstrong young king. Insultingly, after Edward made his stunning announcement, he asked Warwick personally to present the new queen to the council. As the kingdom’s richest magnate, Warwick saw himself as the power behind the throne. In his eyes, the House of York was his creation, and, fourteen years Edward’s senior, he saw him as a headstrong nephew. Now his exuberant protégé was threatening Warwick’s pre-eminence. This was intolerable.

Such were the seeds of Warwick’s discontent. Significantly, he refused to attend Elizabeth’s coronation after she had spent the traditional pre-ceremony night at the Tower in May 1465. That event was a magnificent affair. The queen, her loveliness enhanced by a satin gown and an array of glittering jewels, was borne by eight noblemen carrying poles from which her carriage was slung, out of her apartment to where six white ponies were waiting to be harnessed to it. In this splendid state she was carried out of the Tower through cheering crowds to Westminster Abbey. The new queen’s avaricious relatives made haste to grab the goodies that Elizabeth’s royal match had flung their way. Her upstart father, Lord Rivers, was created Lord Treasurer and two of her five brothers were among the fifty new Knights of the Bath dubbed at the Tower in honour of her coronation. In 1467 Warwick absented himself from court altogether in protest at the advancement of the queen’s seven sisters, five of whom had made richly rewarding marriages into the peerage, some seizing partners who Warwick had marked down for marriage into his own clan.

The earl was also angry at the king’s dismissal of his brother George Neville, Archbishop of York, from the post of Chancellor. Most demeaning of all to the Neville family’s honour, Warwick’s elderly aunt, the wealthy
Dowager Duchess of Norfolk, aged eighty, was hastily wed to the queen’s brother John, who was just twenty. A horrified chronicler, sarcastically calling the old duchess ‘a slip of a girl’, suggested that the Devil himself had arranged the outrageous match. Satanism, in fact, was widely rumoured to be the real reason behind the king’s infatuation with Elizabeth. The new upstart queen – in another parallel with Anne Boleyn – was said to be a sorceress who had bewitched the king. By 1469, proud Warwick had had enough and took the decisive step into conspiracy and rebellion.

Warwick had another monarch in mind to place upon the throne that Edward had sullied. The king had two surviving younger brothers. The youngest, Richard, Duke of Gloucester – one day to become England’s most notorious king – had, aged seventeen, shown loyalty amounting to hero worship of his glamorous royal brother. The elder, George, Duke of Clarence, was cut from very different cloth. These two would find prominent places in the Tower’s pantheon. One would become its greatest villain, the other its most bizarre victim. Clarence, born in 1449, was accurately summed up by Shakespeare as ‘false, fleeting, perjured Clarence’. Tall, like his brother, the duke had few other of Edward’s regal characteristics. Treacherous, malicious and impulsive, eaten up by envy and ambition, Clarence had foes aplenty, but he was his own worst enemy.

Once Warwick had abandoned dreams of being the king’s puppet master and turned to plotting his destruction, he chose Clarence as his cat’s paw. As captain of Calais, Warwick strongly favoured a French alliance to drive a wedge between the wily King Louis XI and the Lancastrian exiles planning a comeback from France led by Margaret of Anjou. Edward, dreaming of reigniting the Hundred Years’ War, allied himself with France’s great rival Burgundy, whose ruler, Duke Charles the Bold, had married his sister Margaret. As the 1460s wore on, there were growing signs that the exiled court of Queen Margaret in France had well-placed sympathisers in England. And Warwick carefully stirred and seasoned the bubbling cauldron of discontent.

In June 1468, a cobbler, John Cornelius, was arrested in Kent as he boarded a ship for France. Cornelius was a Lancastrian courier smuggling letters between Margaret’s court and secret Lancastrian cells in England. He was taken to the Tower and in the torture chambers beneath the White Tower the soles of the shoemaker’s feet were seared with flaming torches until,
in his agony, he began to gasp out his contacts’ names. They were a surprisingly high-placed circle, including city merchants, squires and knights. All were hauled into the Tower in their turn and tortured. One of those arrested was another Lancastrian agent, John Hawkins, a servant of Lord John Wenlock, a veteran soldier and former Speaker of the House of Commons who was a strong supporter of Warwick.

Hawkins was stretched on the most fearsome instrument in the Tower’s orchestra of pain: the rack. As his agonised screams echoed off the cellar walls with the tautening of the rack’s rollers, dragging his limbs from their sockets, Hawkins too named names, and an ever widening circle of covert Lancastrians came under suspicion. Hawkins and Cornelius, both limping from their tortures, were brought before Chief Justice Sir John Markham. The judge, an unusually humane man for that brutal age, refused to admit the Crown’s evidence against them as it had clearly been coerced by torture.

The queen’s father, Lord Rivers, the new Lord Treasurer, told the king that the uncooperative judge should be fired, to which Edward agreed. Poor Cornelius was then returned to the Tower’s torture chambers and still more vicious methods were applied. Red-hot pincers tore chunks of flesh from his body. These extreme measures killed Cornelius before he named more Lancastrian co-conspirators. Frustrated, the authorities continued the wave of arrests and executions into 1469. The moving force behind this reign of terror, from motives of avarice as much as political expediency, was the Woodville family.

Like the Despensers under Edward II, or the Beauforts behind Henry VI, the Woodvilles had become the inspiring instruments of royal tyranny. Idle Edward too easily let his spouse’s family have their grasping way. When John Hawkins, again under torture in the Tower, let slip the name of Sir Thomas Cook as a Lancastrian sympathiser, the Woodvilles seized their opportunity. Cook, a wealthy London alderman and former lord mayor, had in his house a costly wall tapestry or arras, woven in gold thread, depicting the siege of Jerusalem. This had been coveted by the queen’s mother, Jacquetta, now Duchess of Bedford, who had unsuccessfully offered Cook £800 for it.

When Cook was brought into the Tower for questioning, Jacquetta’s husband, Lord Rivers, ordered his men-at-arms to plunder Cook’s house. They turned his wife and family into the street and seized the Jerusalem arras, along with several other tapestries, also making off with jewels,
plus quantities of gilt and silver plate. Although Hawkins withdrew the accusations against Cook that had been wrung from him under torture, the authorities refused to release the alderman. Indeed, the king stripped him of his office, and grasping Queen Elizabeth got in on her parents’ act by demanding – under an obscure old law called ‘Queen’s Gold’ – a cut of £800 in addition to the massive £8,000 fine that Cook had to pay to secure his release from the Tower. He never recovered the goods or the cash that the Woodvilles had stolen, and died in poverty.

One nobleman who never wavered in his loyalty to the fallen House of Lancaster was John de Vere, 13th Earl of Oxford. His fidelity had been cemented in blood in 1462 after his father, the 12th Earl, and elder brother Aubrey, accused of plotting to restore the Lancastrians, were flung into the Tower and, despite their noble status, brutally executed. Father and son were first hanged, before being cut down half choked but still alive, castrated, then forced to watch their genitals burned in the executioners’ brazier. Next they were disembowelled while tied to chairs and had their intestines wound out of their abdomens on to a roller. After this gruesome display they were finally beheaded and their pitch-coated heads were spiked on London Bridge.

King Edward clumsily attempted to buy the loyalty of the new Earl of Oxford. He waived the usual attainder that prevented the relatives of traitors from inheriting their titles and estates; released his aged mother from house arrest and pardoned her; and allowed Oxford to take up his family’s hereditary office of Lord Chamberlain. Finally, he married Oxford to Warwick’s sister, Margaret. The king’s actions show that Edward – whatever his other gifts – was no psychologist. Though outwardly conforming – even presiding as chamberlain over Elizabeth Woodville’s coronation in 1465 – despite or because of the grim fate of his father and brother, Oxford remained an irreconcilable secret Lancastrian, awaiting his opportunity to strike.

As other Lancastrians were tortured in the Tower, they took cold comfort from the fact that the object of their steadfast loyalty – the shadow of the man who had once been Henry VI – was eking out his existence in the same fortress where they suffered. Late in 1468 there was a fresh wave of arrests. Those held included John Poynings and Richard Alford, accused of contacting the new Duke of Somerset – Edmund, a former prisoner in the Tower – and now a leading light at Queen Margaret’s
exiled court. Poynings and Alford were tortured before being executed on Tower Hill along with Richard Steeres, a pioneer of tennis in England and former servant of that other great Lancastrian stalwart, the Duke of Exeter. Steeres, like Cornelius, had been caught carrying letters to Queen Margaret. Finally, after the arrests of the heirs of two West Country Lancastrian lords, Sir Thomas Hungerford and Henry Courteney, a bigger fish – the Earl of Oxford himself – landed in the Tower.

After the awful fate dealt to his father and brother there, the young earl must have believed that his last hour had come, and that his next station after his Tower cell would be the scaffold. Instead, miraculously, he was released at Christmas 1468 after just a few weeks. Oxford’s stay in the Tower may have been short, but it was not easy. According to a contemporary report he was ‘kept in irons’ but whether this means that he was merely shackled, or subjected to the excruciating torture of being hanged, by his wrists from iron manacles, we do not know. It seems probable that the pressure was sufficient to open Oxford’s lips, for the same letter records that ‘he has confessed much’ and soon afterwards Hungerford and Courtenay were both hanged, drawn and quartered for treason.

In April 1469, King Edward pardoned Oxford for ‘all the offences committed by him’. But having seen the inside of the Tower, and experienced how murderous the Yorkist regime could be, Oxford was not willing to wait on the king’s fickle favours. In July, less than three months after his pardon, he was off. At Canterbury he attended a rendezvous of the discontented. There he met Richard, Earl of Warwick; Edward’s unruly brother Clarence; Warwick’s brother George Neville, Archbishop of York; and Warwick’s eldest daughter Isabel, whom the king had banned from marrying Clarence – thereby offending both his brother and Warwick. The high-ranking band of malcontents all had burning grievances against Edward and the Woodvilles. Defying the king, they set sail for Warwick’s citadel of Calais bent on vengeance.

There followed a year of complex plots, revolts and battles during which Warwick defied the king by marrying Isabel to Clarence; incited revolts against Edward; invaded England; deposed his protégé the King; executed the patriarch of the hated Woodvilles, the queen’s father Lord Rivers; and at one stage had two monarchs – Henry VI in the Tower, and Edward IV at Middleham in Yorkshire – in captivity. This earned him the nickname ‘the Kingmaker’. But the Kingmaker still needed a king. Edward turned
the tables when a genuine Lancastrian revolt forced Warwick to release him to defeat it. Restored to his kingship, Edward proclaimed Warwick and Clarence rebels and traitors, forcing them to flee to France