Tower: An Epic History of the Tower of London (37 page)

Lord! Send the King in years as Noye

In governing this realm in joy

And after this frail life such grace

That in thy bliss he may find place
.

Deprived of writing materials, Seymour ingeniously devised his own means of communicating. Fashioning a pen from metal buttons and wires pulled from his own tunic, he manufactured a secret ink ‘so craftily and with such workmanship as the like hath not been seen’. He used these to write two letters – to the Princesses Mary and Elizabeth – urging them to overthrow their brother and liberate him. He sewed the letters into the soles of his velvet slippers, ordering his servants to deliver them. But the slipper missives were discovered and read by the council – and with that the last possibility of reprieve vanished. Elizabeth herself lost no time in distancing herself from the man who had been her first love. Told of his execution on her fifteenth birthday she coldly but accurately remarked, ‘This day died a man of much wit and very little judgement.’

Seymour was beheaded on Tower Hill on 19 March. Few details survive of his last moments, but according to the later Protestant martyr Bishop Hugh Latimer, he died ‘dangerously, irksomely, horribly’. The preacher added that he was a man ‘furthest from the fear of God that ever I knew or heard of in England’. Latimer’s testimony is suspect, however, for at the time he uttered it, he was in the pay of Somerset, who had ordered him to blacken his brother’s reputation to deflect attention from his own growing unpopularity. Despite separating himself from his unruly sibling, however, Somerset fulfilled the
prophecy being whispered in the streets, that ‘the fall of one brother would be the overthrow of the other’. Within a few years, Edward Seymour would be treading in his brother’s footsteps along the melancholy path from the Tower to the scaffold.

Somerset’s fall was brought about by a combination of economic and religious discontent, and the machinations of a man, John Dudley, who proved a more ruthless operator than he in the worst Tudor tradition. 1549 became a year of revolt as the kingdom’s woes came to a violent head. Somerset was ill-placed to deal with the crisis as his reputation had been fatally undermined by his brother’s fate. Damned by family association with such a man, Somerset was also damned by his part in his brother’s death, with one woman telling him to his face that Thomas’s blood ‘cried against thee unto God from the very ground’.

The religious Reformation had got out of hand, with liberty becoming licence. Ordinary folk were confused and offended by the sudden ending of ancient traditions – candles being withdrawn from the festival of Candlemas, for instance – and with the introduction of Cranmer’s unfamiliar English Book of Common Prayer. Their bewilderment was exacerbated by landlords racking up rents to cope with rampant inflation, and enclosing land which had been common for centuries. Instead of taking a firm line with the discontent, Somerset let things drift.

In the summer of 1549 the pressure cooker exploded. A Whit Sunday protest against Cranmer’s new prayer book in the Devonshire village of Sampford Courtenay became a fully fledged rebellion that crackled across Devon and Cornwall like a raging brush fire. Two officials sent to enforce the government’s new religious edicts were murdered by mobs, and encouraged by their priests, a rebel army besieged and seized Exeter. Ominously, the rebels adopted as their emblem the five wounds of Christ – the same symbol used by the Pilgrimage of Grace in Henry VIII’s reign.

While Somerset dithered, the council sent an armed force to confront the rebels, but by the time they arrived in the West Country, a fresh revolt – centred on economic, rather than religious, grievances – had broken out in East Anglia. Peasant labourers tore down the fences that local landowners had thrown up to enclose their estates, preventing the landless poor from grazing their animals or growing crops. One of the landowners targeted, Robert Kett, unexpectedly joined the protesters and swiftly became the revolt’s leader. Kett planted himself under an oak on Mousehold
Heath outside Norwich, the second largest city in England, and laid down the law as his followers tore down enclosures across the county.

The two rebellions threatened a pincer movement on London from east and west. The Privy Council unanimously blamed the Protector for the unrest. Although Somerset attempted to crack down on both outbreaks, he would not be forgiven by his fellow grandees for his radical reforms and weakness in countenancing a revolt that looked alarmingly like an egalitarian social revolution. In the late summer, Lord Russell, commander of the government forces, retook Exeter and in three pitched battles, finally smashed the prayer book rebellion. More than 3,000 rebels died, and hundreds more were executed in subsequent reprisals.

Simultaneously, Kett’s rebellion was also snuffed out. The Privy Council’s hard man, John Dudley, Earl of Warwick, rode to Norfolk with a large army, stiffened by seasoned Swiss mercenaries. A battle took place in Norwich and on Mousehold Heath, which destroyed Kett’s untrained peasant army. Dudley allowed most of Kett’s followers to return to their hovels. A few ringleaders, however, were hanged from Kett’s oak tree, and Kett himself and his brother William were taken to the Tower. There they were tried and sentenced to death before being carted back to Norwich for the ghastly final act: like Robert Aske, leader of the Pilgrimage of Grace, both suffered the slow torture of being hanged in chains.

The twin revolts spelled the death of Somerset, too. Within a few weeks he was deposed by John Dudley, whose prompt response to rebellion had contrasted so painfully with Somerset’s dithering. Recent research, however, has revealed suspicious links between Kett’s revolt and Dudley, the man who apparently quashed it so firmly. One of Dudley’s Privy Council cronies, Sir Richard Southwell, was channelling government cash intended for the suppression of the rebellion to the rebels themselves. Moreover, Southwell visited Kett during his brief incarceration in the Tower, and was himself later confined to the Tower for financial malpractice. Finally, in his will, Southwell left £40 to Kett’s son, who was in his service. It seems possible, if not likely, that Dudley, using Southwell as his go-between, was manipulating the rebellion to discredit and dispose of his rival Somerset. His involvement may also explain his relative leniency to the rebels.

In October 1549, Dudley gathered the majority of the council in London and secured the Tower against an attempt to take it by Somerset,
who was holding the king at Windsor Castle. (‘Methinks this is a prison,’ the astute boy told his uncle.) As his support drained away, Somerset was reduced to pathetically begging his former colleagues to spare his life. Arrested at Windsor by the ubiquitous Sir Anthony Wingfield, captain of the guard, he was taken to the Tower. The king, who was fond of his Protestant uncle, was informed that he was ill. The deception, however, would not last long.

The few Catholics on the council, led by Thomas Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton, thought that the duke’s downfall meant that the Reformation would be stopped in its tracks. When, however, at young King Edward’s insistence, Dudley gave orders for the reforms to proceed at full steam – with bonfires being made of Catholic relics in marketplaces across the country – the Catholics decided that he was as bad as Somerset and must suffer the same fate. Wriothesley went to the Tower in December to interrogate the former Protector, hoping that he would incriminate Dudley, taking with him his fellow councillors the Earl of Arundel and William Paulet.

Somerset told his interrogators that if he was guilty of treason, then so was Dudley. This was music to Wriothesley’s ears. On their way out of the Tower he told his companions, ‘I thought ever we should find them [Somerset and Dudley] traitors both, and both worthy to die on my advice.’ Arundel agreed that Dudley should join Somerset in the Tower. But Paulet wisely kept his counsel. He went straight to Dudley and warned him of Wriothesley’s plot. At the next council meeting, held in Dudley’s house in Holborn as the earl was either ill or feigning sickness, Wriothesley demanded that Somerset be executed for his ‘many treasons’. Knowing that his was the next name on Wriothesley’s little list, Dudley sprang out of his bed ‘with a warlike visage’, laid his hand on his sword, and snarled at Wriothesley, ‘My lord, you seek his blood and he that seeketh his blood would have mine also.’ Dudley summoned the guard and had Wriothesley confined to his nearby house. His co-conspirator Arundel was also placed under house arrest, and deprived of office. Sore and seeking revenge, he became an embittered enemy of Dudley. For Wriothesley, losing office was a death sentence. He died – possibly by suicide – in July 1550.

Having secured supremacy in the council, Dudley dished out the usual round of peerages and posts to reward supporters. Paulet, who had revealed Wriothesley’s plot, became the Earl of Wiltshire; Russell,
who had vanquished the prayer book rebellion, became Earl of Bedford; while Northampton – who had been less successful at putting down Kett’s rebellion – became Lord Great Chamberlain. Sir Anthony Wingfield at last reaped a reward for all the high-profile arrests he had carried out as captain of the guard, being promoted to Comptroller. Somerset’s secretary, Sir Thomas Smith, who was sharing his master’s imprisonment in the Tower, made a cynical comment in verse on Dudley’s honours list.

This day made new Duke, Marquis or Baron

Yet may the axe stand near the door

Every thing is not ended as it is begun

God will have the stroke, either after or before
.

King Edward pressed for his uncle’s release from the Tower. This accorded with Dudley’s plans, since he saw the humbled ex-protector as a useful firewall to deflect criticism from his own policies. In early February 1550 Somerset was bailed for the hefty sum of £10,000 and formally pardoned – though he was kept under house arrest at Syon Park for the time being. Somerset did not stay out in the cold for long. In April he was received by the king and dined with his supplanter Dudley, and the following month he was taken back on the council, his misrule seemingly forgiven if not forgotten.

Somerset’s brief spell in the Tower appeared to have made him a humbler and wiser man. He had read improving Protestant tracts finding therein ‘great comfort … which hath much relieved the grief of our mind’. At first the reconciliation between the former friends seemed permanent. The seal was set on their amity by the wedding, in June 1550, between Somerset’s daughter Anne and Dudley’s son Lord Lisle – though it was noted that Somerset was not present to give his daughter away.

But Somerset could not resist returning to politicking for position and power. His tactics were to seek a reconciliation with his old Catholic enemies. He visited the ultra-Catholic Bishop Stephen Gardiner in the Tower, seeking his agreement to recognise Cranmer’s prayer book. Tired of the Tower, the hard-line Gardiner, somewhat surprisingly, agreed. But when told of Gardiner’s submission Dudley insisted that he make a full confession of his errors, and returned with Somerset to the Tower to hear them. An indignant
Gardiner refused, declaring he would rather take a dip in the polluted sewer that was the Thames, and stayed inside.

In early October 1551, exactly two years after Somerset’s first fall from grace, a defector from his camp, Sir Thomas Palmer, told Dudley that Somerset was planning to ignite a popular revolt against his rule. The ‘Good Duke’ had always enjoyed great popularity among the common people, and Dudley found Palmer’s tale both credible and convenient. Among those named by Palmer as plotters was Sir Miles Partridge, who was to raise the city of London apprentices, using them to seize and hold the Tower. As in an efficient modern police state, Somerset and his followers were rounded up in a single morning. The ‘Good Duke’ himself was the first to be arrested at Westminster. Along with two of his sons, he was taken back to the Tower. By the end of the week a dozen of the duke’s closest associates – including his beautiful but unpopular second wife, Anne Stanhope, and the Earl of Arundel – had joined him there.

Although noblemen like Somerset and Arundel were spared torture, the council authorised its use on lesser conspirators. After some were locked in a room at the Tower without food or water, confessions soon spilled out. Somerset was personally interrogated by Dudley. On the basis of the evidence extracted, Somerset was accused of attempting to abduct Dudley and seize the Tower, together with ‘the treasure, jewels and munitions of war therein contained’; and of inciting rebellion among the common people. He was rowed upriver from the Tower at 5 a.m. to Westminster Hall for the trial, for fear that his popularity might lead to a rescue attempt. Shouts of ‘God save the Duke!’ from the crowds milling outside penetrated the hall and may have influenced the jury, which, astonishingly for a state trial, cleared Somerset of treason. He was, however, convicted of attending unauthorised assemblies.

The mixed verdict caused confusion among Somerset’s supporters. Most assumed that he had been completely cleared and lustily cheered his expected release. To pacify them, Dudley promised to pardon the duke, telling him, ‘I will do my best that your life may be spared.’ Dudley’s duplicity in pretending to pardon the ‘Good Duke’ while privately contriving his death weighed heavily on his conscience. Two years later, facing his own execution, he admitted that ‘fraudulently procuring … [Somerset’s] unjust death’ was the sin for which he was most sorry.

The demonstrations in Somerset’s favour had unnerved Dudley. Again, he visited his rival in the Tower, apparently undecided as to whether to
execute or spare him again. Christmas passed with the country in frozen suspension as to its political future. Finally, Dudley resolved to execute Somerset before demands for his reprieve overwhelmed him. One factor in his decision was the resolution of King Edward himself. The boy had been persuaded by the evidence that his uncle was a traitor and commanded that ‘the law take its course’, signing the duke’s death warrant without a qualm. Historians have often portrayed Edward as a helpless puppet of Dudley, but the reverse seems to have been the case. The young king was determined to rule in his own right. He was prepared to go against his entire council to get his way. Now he ordered the execution of his own, once beloved, uncle without turning a hair. Edward was, after all, a true Tudor.