Tower: An Epic History of the Tower of London (35 page)

The dirty work was entrusted to the kingdom’s highest-ranking legal officials, the Lord Chancellor, Sir Thomas Wriothesley, and his sidekick, the Solicitor General, Sir Richard Rich, assisted by the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Sir John Baker. Anne, in the brief interval between her torture and her barbaric execution, was able to write and smuggle out of the Tower her own vivid testimony of Tudor torture. Brought from her cell to the gloomy cellars beneath the White Tower on 29 June 1546, she was confronted by her high-ranking inquisitors, who bombarded her with questions about her links with Queen Catherine’s court – including comforts she had received in the Tower from the wives of the leading council reformers, Sir Anthony Denny and Edward Seymour, Earl of Hertford.

Frustrated by her non-committal answers, Wriothesley and Rich sent for the Tower’s lieutenant, Sir Anthony Knyvett, who was normally responsible for operating the rack on recalcitrant captives. Pointing out that it was unheard of to torture a woman, a distinctly unhappy Knyvett was overawed by his superiors, and ordered Anne – dressed only in a skimpy shift – to be roped to the fearful torture machine. Knyvett told his torturers to go easy on their victim, inflicting ‘just a pinch’ as a taster of the terrible torments that the rack could deliver. When this mild introduction failed to persuade Anne to be more forthcoming, Wriothesley and Rich ordered Knyvett to use the rack to its fullest extent. The lieutenant refused.

At that, the two officials shouldered the sweating torturers aside, and
throwing off their expensive gowns, flung themselves on the machine’s cranks. The rack’s rollers revolved, and its creaking ropes tautened, lifting Anne’s straining body from the wooden frame of the machine into the air, as her limbs were agonisingly drawn from their sockets. Her desperate screams rent the room, penetrating the White Tower’s ancient walls and the muffling earth itself, until she was heard by Lady Knyvett and her daughter, who were strolling in the Tower’s garden. Anne’s mind must have been a red mist of pain as her muscles tore and her sinews cracked, but still the questions kept coming.

She wrote a few days later, ‘Because I confessed no ladies and gentlewomen to be of my opinion, they kept me [on the rack] a long time. And because I lay still and did not cry [again] my Lord Chancellor [Wriothesley] and Master Rich took pains to rack me with their own hands till I was nigh dead.’ We cannot exclude the strong possibility that Wriothesley and Rich were exceeding their usual official duties because they obtained sexual satisfaction in sadistically torturing a near naked and attractive young woman. At any rate, it was at this point that Knyvett protested again and insisted that the torment be halted.

The ropes relaxed, Anne was untied, and collapsed, fainting, on the cold floor. They threw a bucket of water over her and then Wriothesley stretched himself beside her and for two hours grilled her, in her words, ‘with many flattering words, persuading me to leave my opinion. But my Lord God gave me grace to persevere and will do – I hope – to the very end.’ That end was not long in coming. A fortnight after her ordeal, Anne was carried – the rack had left her unable to walk – to Smithfield, the traditional site for the incineration of heretics. Here she was placed astride a stool chained to the stake and faggots were piled around her. As a last gesture of mercy before the fire was lit, her executioners hung a small bag of gunpowder around her neck, which exploded and killed her as the flames licked around her. Burned alongside Anne was John Lascelles, the Protestant who had first brought news of Katherine Howard’s adultery to Archbishop Cranmer. The Howards were taking a belated revenge.

The torture and burning of Anne Askew was more than the elimination of an uppity heretic woman. It was part of a Catholic conspiracy aimed at destroying the queen herself and ending the hold of the reformers on the now clearly moribund Henry. In early July 1546, between Anne’s
torture session in the Tower and her execution at Smithfield, Henry was persuaded to sign a warrant for the arrest of his sixth wife. Terrified, and only too mindful of the fates of Anne Boleyn and Katherine Howard before her, Catherine threw herself on Henry’s mercy and played the role of what she called ‘a poor silly woman’ unable to form judgements on matters of religion and eager to defer in this, as in all things, to her husband. Somewhat lamely, she suggested that she had only discussed her Protestant opinions with Henry as a way of distracting his attention from his mounting maladies.

Magnanimously, Henry forgave the queen, but forgot to tell Wriothesley – who had been tasked with arresting Catherine and escorting her to the Tower – of his change of heart. The next night the king was sitting with the soothing woman he called ‘Sweet Kate’ when the Lord Chancellor entered with forty halberdiers and tramped menacingly towards the queen, whose heart must have leapt in fear.

Enraged, Henry heaved his great bulk from the throne and boxed the hapless official’s ears, calling him a ‘knave and fool’. Sent on his way, Wriothesley’s humiliation marked the moment when the tide turned against the Catholic faction.

Deftly, the reformers Anthony Denny and John Dudley had eased themselves into key positions on the council and managed to exclude Bishop Gardiner from court altogether – Dudley even cuffing the cleric in the face as a mark of his contempt. Then it was the turn of the Howards. The family’s weakest link was not the old Duke of Norfolk – who over a lifetime of grovelling had honed his survival skills to a fine art – but his impetuous son, the Earl of Surrey.

This troubled and troublesome young man had got into hot water a number of times. He was a notorious drunken brawler: a noble yob as well as a social snob. His rowdy exploits included duelling and a drunken binge in which he and his fellow poet Sir Thomas Wyatt had fired pebbles from crossbows, breaking the windows of respectable London citizens and disrupting the trade of prostitutes touting for business in London’s red-light district of Southwark. Such behaviour had landed Surrey in prison more than once, but his contrition, often expressed in verse, had soon got him out again. He was a particular favourite of the king, who called him a ‘foolish, proud boy’. Surrey’s luck had held – until now.

His violent ways had, however, made a mortal enemy of one of the men who now dominated the council – Edward Seymour, Earl of Hertford. The feud had started when Surrey had struck Seymour in the face for suggesting that this scion of a traditionalist Catholic family sympathised with the Pilgrimage of Grace rebellion. Surrey had found himself in the Fleet prison, and although soon out again, he and Seymour remained at daggers drawn.

The rivalry came to a head in December 1546 in the final crisis of Henry’s reign. Knowing that the monarch was dying, the Seymours played on the king’s fears surrounding the succession and his precious Tudor line. They suggested that the Howards wanted to place the robust young Surrey on the throne in place of Henry’s son, the sickly Prince Edward. As evidence of this intention, they whispered, Surrey – who was indeed descended from royalty via both his parents – had had a coat of arms drawn up in which King Edward the Confessor’s arms had been quartered with his own. This little piece of heraldic snobbery would now be Surrey’s death warrant.

Surrey was discreetly arrested by Sir Anthony Wingfield, the same captain of the guard who had carried out the detention of Cromwell. Knowing of Surrey’s violent temper, Wingfield tricked him. Pretending that he had a request for Surrey to relay to his father, the Duke of Norfolk, Wingfield led the earl to a quiet corridor in the Palace of Westminster where a dozen burly halberdiers pounced and bundled him into a boat. After initial interrogation at Ely Place, Wriothesley’s house in Holborn, Surrey was taken to the Tower on Sunday 12 December. As he was led through the gawping crowds, his father, the Duke of Norfolk, joined him. Stripped of the Order of the Garter and his badge of office, the white staff of the Lord Treasurer, the seventy-three-year-old duke was almost apoplectic with indignation to find himself in the dread place where he had sent so many others. Sychophantically he told anyone who would listen that he was the king’s most loyal subject.

Such ‘loyalty’ cut no ice with the monstrous king when the succession of his dearly conceived son was at stake. His first act on getting the Howards safely in the Tower was to strip their estates. Commissioners were sent on a dawn raid to the Howard lands in East Anglia where anything transportable – tapestries, clothing, gold and silver plate – was catalogued, strapped into chests and heaved onto carts for transfer to the
royal coffers. Even the duke’s mistress, Elizabeth Holland, was stripped of gold buttons, pearl necklaces and the very rings from her fingers, before being interrogated on any treasonable pillow talk that the duke had indulged in.

At the Tower, once lodged in Constable Sir John Gage’s chambers, Norfolk put quill to paper and penned a grovelling appeal to his master. Protesting that a ‘great enemy’ must have been telling lies about him, Norfolk demonstrated his usual crawling ignominy. He offered to dump his faith if that would save his skin, telling Henry, ‘I shall stick to whatever laws you make’ and claiming that he would rather shed twenty lives than give the Pope ‘any power in this realm’.

In a stream of letters to the king and council, Norfolk plumbed the very dregs of degradation as he listed those unfortunates who he had hounded to their deaths – not least members of his own family – as proof of his own limitless loyalty. Over at St Thomas’s Tower, where Surrey was being held, the young poet adopted a more literary style of protest, writing verse letters inveighing against the false friends who had landed him in his plight:

It was a friendly foe, by shadow of good will

Mine old … dear friend, my guide that trapped me
;

Where I was wont to fetch the cure of all my care
,

And in his bosom hide my secret zeal to God
.

As aristocrats, the Howards had an easier time in the Tower than most state prisoners. The accounts of the lieutenant, Sir Anthony Knyvett, give a glimpse of the luxuries available to the VIP prisoners. They record that Norfolk spent the vast sum of £210 (almost £60,000 today) on comforts – including coal and candles – for himself and his attendants during the first two months of his detention. Surrey slept on a feather bed with two pillows, a pair of fustian blankets and a quilt. Five fine tapestries were hung on his cell walls to keep out the river’s clammy chill, and a coal fire was kept constantly blazing. When not penning pretty verses to his friends, the young poet passed his time in writing free translations of the Psalms, a suitably spiritual endeavour for a man about to make the journey into eternity.

Surrey’s mind was not yet entirely fixed on the hereafter, however. As the gravity of his situation dawned on him, he made a desperate attempt to escape. He was aided by his manservant, Martin, one of two attendants
he was allowed in the Tower. Martin smuggled a dagger in to his master, hidden in his breeches. He was instructed to descend to nearby St Katherine’s dock, hire a boat and await his earl, who hoped to be with him by midnight. Surrey had carefully observed his chambers, which had been refurbished for the coronation of Anne Boleyn – when the latest mod con, a latrine, had been installed.

Surrey had noted that the waste shaft running down from the privy emptied directly into the river beneath – except at low tide. After dark, it would, he worked out, be possible for a thin man such as himself to squeeze into this evil-smelling exit, clamber down inside it, drop unseen into the soft sludge below, rejoin Martin and sail away to freedom. He would use the dagger, if necessary, to kill the two warders posted to keep an eye on him.

When the long winter evening drew in, the earl put his plan into action. He complained of feeling ill, and said he would turn in for an early night. The guards reassured him that they would not disturb him before midnight. Doubtless relieved of being spared the need to kill them, Surrey later crept from his bed and checked that the river was low. Shortly before midnight, he removed the latrine lid and saw that there was only about two feet of water at the bottom of the shaft. He scrambled in and began to climb down the slippery, smelly tube.

But he had left it just a little too late. At that moment, the guards returned and saw at once that his bed was empty. Storming into the closet, one warder reached down and grabbed the earl by the arm, hauling him back into the room. The other guard shouted for help, and more warders ran to their aid, restrained the struggling Surrey, and shackled his feet with manacles. Outside the Tower, hearing the hue and cry, Martin made himself scarce – along with the money that his master had given him to hire the boat.

On 13 January, a cold winter’s day, Surrey, elegantly dressed in a satin cloak trimmed with rabbit’s fur lent him by the compassionate Knyvett, was led from the Tower to the Guildhall for his trial. The day before, his treacherous father had put the cherry on the cake of his son’s fate by signing a confession of high treason that implicated Surrey in the quartering of the royal arms. Since there was no argument that Surrey had commissioned the arms in question, and since the king had pronounced this to be treason, the duke’s confession was tantamount to signing his
own son’s death warrant, and there was little for the jury to argue over. Yet when the inevitable ‘Guilty’ verdict was returned, and an axe’s blade was turned towards Surrey, the proud earl could not resist one last, indignant outburst. ‘Of what have you found me guilty?’ he demanded. ‘Surely you will find no law that justifies you, but I know the king wants to get rid of the noble blood around him and to employ none but low people.’

Despite this public outburst, so typical of Surrey’s fiercely snobbish but fearless spirit, Henry rescinded the savage sentence of hanging, drawing and quartering at Tyburn, and substituted decapitation on Tower Hill. A week after his trial Surrey was led from his cell and climbed the slope to the scaffold. Among the papers left in his cell was a poem of stoic resignation, coupled with an irrepressible cry of rage against the ‘wretches’ who had laid him low. It began: