Tower: An Epic History of the Tower of London (29 page)

More put the tedious hours to literary and spiritual use, writing a devotional meditation on the Passion of Christ and, tellingly,
A Dialogue of Comfort Against Tribulation
. The tone of the
Dialogue
is a martyr’s resigned fortitude. As he meditates on the ‘four last things’ – death, judgement, heaven and hell – More concludes that only one final task remains to him: to make a good end of his life, forsaking earthly ties and temptations, and resigning himself to the infinite mercy of God.

The authorities left More under no illusion as to his fate, making him watch a group of four Carthusian monks who had also refused to swear the oath going to their deaths from the Tower – where they had been held in fetters making it impossible for them to lie down or move – in May 1535. More’s only reaction was regret that he had not followed the religious vocation himself. Watching the Carthusians leaving the Tower en route to Tyburn, More remarked to his daughter Margaret that they went to their deaths ‘as cheerfully as bridegrooms to their marriage’.

More knew that his own earthly journey was nearing its end and claimed to be glad of it. He told a fellow Tower prisoner, Dr Nicholas Wilson, a
priest who had been chaplain to the king, ‘I have since I came to the Tower looked once or twice to have given up my ghost before this, and in good faith mine heart waxed the lighter in hope thereof.’ The devout Wilson was not made of the same stern stuff as More, since he finally submitted to the oath in 1537 after three years in the Tower.

A few days after he had watched the monks going so cheerfully to their doom, More was summoned to a meeting of the Privy Council held in the Tower under Thomas Cromwell’s chairmanship. Still trying to break his resistance with kindness, they invited More – a former councillor – to sit with them. Stiffly aloof, he stood to give one of the greatest speeches in defence of the individual human conscience ever delivered, in words that rang to the Tower’s ancient rafters:

‘I am the king’s true, faithful subject … and daily pray for his Highness and all the realm. I do nobody harm. I say none harm. I think none harm, but wish everybody good. And if this be not enough to keep a man alive, in good faith I long not to live. And I am dying already, and I have since I came here, been several times in the case that I thought to die within one hour, and I thank our Lord I was never sorry for it but rather sorry when the pang had passed. And therefore my poor body is at the king’s pleasure. Would God my death might do him some good.’

The presence near More of another prisoner jailed on the same charge of refusing the oath gave him great comfort. John Fisher, the aged Bishop of Rochester, had been confessor to the king’s grandmother, Margaret Beaufort, but neither this connection nor his eighty years mollified Henry’s wrath when Fisher became the only English bishop to refuse the oath. A straight-talking Yorkshireman, Fisher scorned, unlike More, to take refuge in hair-splitting legalese. Fisher occupied the cell above More in the Bell Tower, but his imprisonment was even harsher than More’s, since the old man shivered on a thin straw mattress on the cold floor with no other furnishing. Often deprived of food for a day at a time, he suffered bitterly in the harsh winter of 1534–5, writing pathetically to Cromwell:

I have neither shirt nor suit, nor yett other clothes … but that be ragged and rent so shamefully. Notwithstanding I might easily suffer that, if they would keep my body warm. But my diet also, God knoweth how slender it is at any tymes, and now in mine age my stomach may not away but
with a few kinds of meats, which if I want [lack] I decay forthwith and fall into coughs and diseases.

Fisher’s fate – and probably that of More, too – was sealed when the new Pope, Paul III, hearing of his suffering, made him a cardinal. An enraged Henry vowed furiously that he would send Fisher’s head to Rome for its red hat. At dawn on 22 June 1535, the lieutenant of the Tower, Sir Edward Walsingham, climbed the wooden staircase that connected his luxurious lodgings with Fisher’s spartan cell. He told the old bishop that he was to die that day. Fisher begged for a few more hours’ rest ‘by reason of my great weakness and infirmity’ and Walsingham promised to return at 9 a.m. At the appointed hour, helped by an attendant, Fisher dressed for the last time and walked unaided beneath the arch of the Bloody Tower and along the causeway to the Bulwark Gateway, where he collapsed and apologised for being too weak to go further – and for being unable to give his escorts their customary tip, on account of having ‘nothing left’.

The old man faced his end with dignity and quiet courage, asking the crowd on Tower Hill to help him with their prayers so that he did not weaken in his allegiance to his Catholic faith as he received his ‘stroke of death’. After the axe fell, people marvelled that Fisher’s emaciated body could produce such fountains of blood, but the way his remains were treated after his head was struck off reflected no credit on his killers. His corpse was stripped, impaled on spears, and flung into a common grave at the nearby church of All Hallows by the Tower – only to be dug up a fortnight later and reburied within the Tower walls at St Peter ad Vincula.

By then More, too, lay under the shadow of death. After another confrontation with the council in which all Cromwell’s subtlety had failed to draw an incriminating denial of the king’s spiritual authority from More, harsher pressure was applied: he was denied the use of the books and writing materials that had sustained him in the Tower for more than a year. Withdrawing such a privilege from a man whose whole life had been devoted to letters was tantamount to stepping on More’s oxygen tube. It was also the means by which his long travail in the Tower was ended. The man who came to More’s cell to take away his books was a former protégé of his, an unscrupulous lawyer named Sir Richard Rich who, insatiably ambitious, had risen to be Solicitor General.

Rich had already used his black arts in interrogating Fisher to provoke the old cleric into making fatally damaging admissions. Now, as he supervised the strapping up and packing into a sack of More’s books by two lesser officials, Sir Richard Southwell and William Palmer, Rich engaged his former mentor in seemingly casual conversation. Devastated by the loss of his spiritual food, a despairing More pulled the blinds against the strong summer light streaming through the slit windows into his cell and sat despondently in darkness. When Rich asked him why, More replied, ‘Now that the goods and implements are taken away the shop must be closed.’ More apparently let down his guard as Rich continued to badger him. According to Rich’s account – which was used in the indictment that finally sent More to the scaffold – the two lawyers engaged in legal banter, batting forth absurd scenarios. What if Parliament made Rich king – would More accept that? Marry, More batted back, what if Parliament declared that God was not God, what would Rich say then?

Rich then posed another question and, fatally, More answered it. Parliament had voted to accept the king as Supreme Head of the Church. If, as More said, he accepted Parliament’s decisions, why did he not accept this one? More agreed that Parliament had passed the Act of Supremacy. But, he added, ‘Most foreign countries do not accept the same,’ meaning that that particular law was against the universal law of Christendom. This was treason. Rich wrote a memo of his conversation for his master Cromwell who used it to frame More. The amoral Rich was easily induced to ‘sex up’ his conversation with More to have Sir Thomas specifically deny Henry’s right to head the Church – a piece of perjury which More scornfully rejected at his trial in Westminster Hall. Was it likely, he asked, that he would entrust not just his life but his immortal soul to a rogue like Rich whom he had always despised as a liar? Although Southwell and Palmer both declined to back Rich up, claiming that they had been too far away to hear the fatal conversation, Rich’s perjured word was enough. More was condemned to death.

More welcomed his martyrdom and used his last speech to caution his judges that they too stood near death. He was confident of going to heaven, he said, but warned his judges that he would only meet them ‘merrily’ there if they renounced their impious heresy and returned to the old faith. An axe turned towards him as a mark of condemnation, More then returned to the Tower by river. The Tower’s constable, Sir William Kingston, a gnarled old soldier, had come to know and love More
during his long detention and burst into tears when they disembarked at the fortress. More comforted him. They would, he assured Kingston, ‘meet merrily’ in heaven thereafter. On the Tower’s wharf there was an affecting scene as More’s children, led by his favourite daughter Margaret, pushed through the thicket of spearmen guarding him to tearfully embrace their father. That night – again reduced to writing in charcoal – More penned his last letter to Margaret. Sending her his hair shirt and a final blessing, More told Margaret that he ‘longed to go to God’.

At dawn on Thursday, 6 July 1535, Sir Thomas Pope, a former friend and privy councillor, was sent to tell More that he would die that day. More thanked him for his ‘good tidings’ and asked him to pass greetings to the king who was killing him, together with his thanks for letting him live long enough in the Tower to reconcile himself to God. More was, he told Pope, beholden to Henry for ‘ridding me out of the miseries of this wretched world. And therefore will I not fail earnestly to pray for his grace, both here and in another world.’

In readiness for making a grand exit, More donned his finest clothes. But when Pope pointed out that the executioner got to keep his victim’s clothing as part of his fee, More swapped the costly garments for a simple grey smock belonging to his faithful servant, John Wood. To make sure that the headsman made a clean cut, though, he generously tipped him with a gold angel coin. In the clear light of the summer morning, More trod steadily up the gentle slope of Tower Hill, clutching a small red cross. When he reached the scaffold, he saw that the wooden structure was old and tottering. He turned to the Tower’s lieutenant, Sir Edward Walsingham, and spoke a magnificent exit jest: ‘I pray you, Master Lieutenant, see me safe up, and for my coming down let me shift for myself.’

More slowly mounted the creaking structure and was greeted at the top by the executioner who knelt to ask his forgiveness. The prisoner graciously granted it and briefly addressed the crowd gathered below. (Henry, fearing the power of More’s eloquence, had sent him a message commanding him not to say much. More, as ever an obedient servant of the Crown, obeyed.) He blessed the crowd, and affirmed that he died a good Catholic and a faithful servant of the king, adding significantly, ‘but God’s servant first’. Then, only pausing to ask the executioner to strike straight, he tied a linen bandage around his own eyes with a steady hand and lay full length, stretching his neck out over the low block. He
carefully lifted his beard clear, remarking that it should not be cut as it had not committed treason. Then the axe fell.

Less than a year after More’s head had replaced that of his fellow martyr John Fisher on the spikes of London Bridge, the woman who had been their nemesis fell too. The capricious Henry had already tired of Anne well before More’s head was taken off, and when the news of the execution was brought to him at Greenwich as he was playing dice, he turned to the queen and viciously hissed, ‘It is because of you that the honestest man in my kingdom is dead,’ before stalking angrily away. Henry’s disdain for Anne was compounded of several factors: the familiar psychological pattern of long pent-up lust turning sour as soon as it is satisfied; resentment of the time and trouble Anne’s reluctance to become his mistress had caused; guilt over the deaths of More and the other martyrs; annoyance at the queen’s headstrong, arrogant and domineering behaviour; and the fact that he was already involved with the woman who would succeed Anne in his affections – a demure maid of honour to the queen called Jane Seymour.

But the most pressing reason of state behind the king’s brutal decision to rid himself of the woman for whom he had changed the kingdom’s religion was her failure to produce a male heir. After giving birth to the Lady Elizabeth in 1533, she had rapidly conceived again – only to suffer a miscarriage in March 1534. Anne miscarried again in 1535, just after hearing that the king had been hurt in a jousting fall; and in January 1536, following another shock – the death of her old rival Katherine of Aragon – she gave birth to a stillborn premature male child. At that, Henry finally gave up. ‘You shall have no more sons from
me
,’ he pointedly told her.

Anne had no shortage of enemies at court. Ever since Henry had first conceived his passion for her, wagging tongues had accused Anne of sorcery, spreading stories that the queen had such infallible signs of a witch as six fingers on one hand. The Catholic faction loyal to Katherine, encouraged by the imperial ambassador, Eustace Chapuys, worked tirelessly for her downfall. Henry – his paranoia, possibly exacerbated by his chronic endocrinal condition, Cushing’s syndrome – ever increasing, eagerly jumped to the conclusion that his union with Anne, as with Katherine, was a sin against God, cursed by the lack of a live male heir. And once again he reached for the same solution as before: finding a new bride among his queen’s ladies.

Henry’s rage against the woman he had once lusted after could only be
slaked with blood. His loyal servant, Thomas Cromwell, constructed a case against Anne. Her unpopularity, the rumours that she was a witch and her reputation as a teasing flirt with a circle of adoring young men combined to give Cromwell the weapons to ensure Anne’s destruction. With a wolf’s nose for the weakest animal in her pack, he picked on Mark Smeaton, a low-born musician favoured by Anne for his skill at the lute and virginals.

Smeaton, an effeminate, timid youth, was an unlikely candidate for the role Cromwell had cast him for – that of Anne’s lover – but he would serve as the instrument to bring her down. On 30 April 1536 the unsuspecting musician was invited to dinner at Cromwell’s riverside London town house in Stepney, just east of the Tower. Bursting with pride at this unexpected favour from the kingdom’s most prominent statesman, Smeaton arrived, only to be immediately arrested. Preliminary torture was applied in Cromwell’s presence. It did not take much to break the young man’s will. A knotted rope was wound round his skull and steadily tightened with a stick as Cromwell’s voice penetrated through the fog of pain.