Tower: An Epic History of the Tower of London (38 page)

On the evening of 21 January a royal messenger brought Somerset in the Tower the letter from Edward that he had been dreading. It notified him that his nephew had agreed to his execution the following morning. Somerset took the news philosophically. Reaching for the book of devotions he had been keeping in the Tower he wrote calmly:

Fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom
.

Put thy trust in the Lord with all thine heart
.

Be not wise in thine own conceit, but fear the

Lord and flee from evil
.

From the tower, the day before my death. E. Somerset
.

Around eight o’clock the following day, Somerset paced the melancholy path up Tower Hill in his brother’s footsteps. Hoping to fool the duke’s many friends, Dudley had announced that the execution would take place at noon, but the ploy failed: an enormous crowd lined the route, many murmuring their sympathy as the ‘Good Duke’ made his final journey. Reaching the scaffold, Somerset knelt and raised his hands in prayer. Facing east towards the rising sun he addressed the crowd. He said that he accepted his death and thanked God that he had been granted time to prepare for it. He affirmed that he did not regret the religious reforms that he had pushed through, and wished them to be pushed further still as the alternative to a ‘worse plague’.

At that point a single loud thunderclap split the silence, leaving Somerset dumbfounded and the crowd amazed. Some hurled themselves into the
Tower’s moat in fear. Many thought it an act of God to prevent the execution. Somerset silenced the murmuring crowd, asking them to pray for the king. When they responded with cries and whispers, he begged the people to be silent lest they disturb his final moments on earth. He then read out his confession from a scroll, shook hands with the witnesses on the scaffold, tipped the executioner who gently removed his gown and ruff, and without more ado knelt at the block. His head was severed by a single stroke, at which a great groan of disapproval went up from the crowd, many darting forward to soak their kerchiefs in the ‘Good Duke’s’ spurting blood.

Edward coolly recorded the event in his journal: ‘The Duke of Somerset had his head cut off on Tower Hill between eight and nine o’clock this morning.’

Like Macbeth after Duncan’s death, having achieved supreme power by reluctantly eliminating the man who stood in his path, Dudley began to feel that he was ‘stepped in blood so far that returning were as tedious as go o’er’. Somerset’s eldest son John died in the Tower of unknown causes, but the smaller fry of the conspiracy survived to be beheaded and hanged a month after their master. Noted for his unusual leniency earlier in his career, now that he had the power, Dudley began to exhibit all the hallmarks of a tyrant. Even light-hearted comments about the regime were visited by savage penalties such as ear cropping. Other malefactors had their ears nailed to the pillory. Elizabeth Huggons, a servant of Somerset, was sent to the Tower for commenting that Dudley deserved to die more than the late duke. Depression and ill health – including stomach ulcers, a sure sign of stress – plagued Dudley, who talked openly of desiring death.

He was not the only one to fall sick. As the New Year of 1553 opened, King Edward took to his bed with an ominously persistent cough. The illness could not be shaken away, and by May the king was coughing up blood and mucus. The tuberculosis bacillae, triggered by an attack of measles the previous April, were firmly lodged in the king’s lungs and he was clearly dying. Realising that he could not recover, Edward’s thoughts – and those of his Privy Council – turned to the succession.

Edward’s bigoted Protestantism revolted at the thought of his equally bigoted Catholic half-sister Mary succeeding him and undoing the Reformation. And although his younger half-sister Elizabeth, who was next in line after Mary, was a Protestant, she was also a daughter of the
condemned ‘concubine’ Anne Boleyn, and therefore a bastard. Edward decided to exclude both his half-sisters from the succession. Writing in the bedchamber of Greenwich Palace that had become his sickroom, Edward drew up a ‘Device for the succession’. Disinheriting his siblings, this document declared that the succession would pass down the line started by Henry VIII’s youngest sister, Mary, to her daughter Frances, and then to her firmly Protestant daughters Jane, Catherine and Mary Grey, and thence to their male heirs.

The king deciding this was one thing; persuading the Privy Council and Parliament to enact it was quite another. John Dudley, Duke of Northumberland, was naturally the strongest supporter of the scheme since, as the chief driving force behind the continuing Protestant Reformation, he would have everything to lose if Mary inherited the crown. Jane Grey, a slip of a girl, might, he thought, be easier to manipulate than the tough-minded Edward. To ensure that the kingdom stayed in his hands, Dudley hastily arranged for his youngest surviving son, Lord Guildford Dudley, a handsome seventeen-year-old, to marry Lady Jane.

To make assurance doubly sure, Northumberland also arranged for the son of one of his closest allies, Lord Herbert, Earl of Pembroke, to marry Jane’s younger sister Catherine Grey. At first Edward hoped to live long enough to see Lady Jane produce a son, but, with his stomach and feet swelling, he realised his time was fast running out. He therefore altered the ‘Device’ to give Jane herself the crown. For Edward, nothing was more important than keeping Catholicism and Princess Mary at bay. Although desperately sick, he browbeat his reluctant council into allowing Jane to be his heir. Naturally, in a male world, the blissfully ignorant Jane herself was not told that she was about to become queen.

By July, it was clear that the king was about to die. His fingernails and hair were falling out and his extremities were turning gangrenous. Although they had Jane under their control in Chelsea, the council failed to lay hands on the rival claimant, Princess Mary, who was living at Hunsdon near Ware, just twenty miles from London. The Duke of Northumberland fatally underestimated Mary, who, another true Tudor, was determined to claim the crown when her half-brother died. This long-expected event occurred on the evening of 9 July at Greenwich.

Immediately, Jane was moved to Syon Park on the river, where Northumberland and the council’s other leading lords attended her the
next day, knelt before her, broke the shattering news that the king had died – and named her as his heiress. Flabbergasted, Jane protested that Mary was the rightful queen. When the councillors insisted that Edward had excluded Mary and that it was her dynastic and religious duty to take the crown, Jane reacted with a storm of weeping. Her parents, the Duke and Duchess of Suffolk, having failed to pacify her, her new husband, Lord Guildford Dudley, was brought in who, with ‘prayers and caresses’, managed to calm his bride. Bullied and cajoled by her parents, the government and her husband, Jane eventually agreed to accept the unwanted crown. The following day, 11 July, as heralds proclaimed her accession to a muted reception in London, Jane was rowed downriver to the Tower. The fortress would become in rapid succession her palace, her prison, her scaffold – and her tomb.

Dressed in a white headdress and a green velvet gown embroidered with gold, with wide sleeves and a train borne by her mother, Jane landed at the Tower’s steps and ceremoniously entered under the Byward Tower. She was a tiny creature who disguised her small stature by wearing ‘stilts’ ( built-up cork heels) beneath her dress. Beside her walked the tall and attentive figure of her young husband, resplendent in white and silver. A pretty girl with auburn hair, hazel eyes, dark eyebrows, freckles, red lips and sparkling teeth, Jane was no one’s fool, and was as regal and insistent on her dignity as a queen – or ‘Jane the Quene’ as she signed herself – as she had been stubborn in refusing the job at first. She too was a true Tudor.

Conducted to the great hall of the old royal palace, Jane was seated on the throne amidst much ceremony. Among the precious stones and treasures brought out of the Tower’s jewel house by the Lord Treasurer, the Marquess of Winchester (formerly William Paulet, the man who had betrayed Wriothesley’s plot to Dudley), was the crown itself. Taken aback, Jane declined to try it on, but her indignation turned to fury when Winchester told her that another one would be made for her husband ‘King Guildford’. Jane declared that she might make her husband a duke, but never a king. Tudor women disliked sharing power with anyone.

Faced with her obduracy, Guildford did what any petulant adolescent might do: he fetched his mother. The Duchess of Northumberland scolded Jane like a schoolgirl, and when the queen remained defiant, declared that
her son would not sleep with her and ordered him to return to Syon. Again, Jane put her tiny foot down. She summoned the Earls of Arundel and Pembroke and commanded them to stop her husband from leaving the Tower. His place, she said, was at her side. A sulky Guildford obeyed his wife rather than his mother and stayed. He would not leave the Tower alive. The ancient fortress, as so often, for the next fortnight became the fulcrum of power where the nation’s future governance was decided.

While the new queen was unexpectedly asserting her new authority inside the Tower, outside its walls the people were displaying a very different reaction. The reading of the accession proclamation had received a de cidedly cool reception. Gilbert Potter, landlord of a London tavern, grumbled that ‘the lady Mary hath the better title’ when he heard it read at Cheapside, and was hauled away to have his ears chopped off ‘to the root’ for his temerity. Meanwhile, Northumberland had belatedly sent two of his sons, John and Robert Dudley, in search of Mary. With a posse of 300 horsemen, the Dudley brothers arrived at Hunsdon, only to find their bird had flown. Mary had secretly received word that Edward was dying from a sympathetic spy at the deathbed – probably the Earl of Arundel – and had fled into East Anglia, where the Dudley name was still reviled for the crushing of Kett’s rebellion in 1549.

Reaching Kenninghall, at the heart of the Catholic Howard estates, Mary sent a messenger, Thomas Hungate, to the council at the Tower, with a letter proudly asserting her claim to the crown and her right to rule. It was ‘strange’, she added acidly, that the council had not seen fit to inform her of her brother’s demise, but now that he was dead, she expected their loyal support. In a classic case of shooting a messenger, the elderly Hungate was contemptuously told by Northumberland that at his age he should have known better than to bring such insolent tidings – and flung into a dungeon.

It was dawning on the duke that Mary was a dangerous – indeed deadly – obstacle to his plans. His duchess, with a woman’s intuition of disaster, reacted to Hungate’s message by bursting into tears. Nonetheless, the council sent back a robust reply to Mary, signed by all twenty-three members, indignantly denying her claims, and calling on her to cease her ‘vexation’ and be ‘quiet and obedient’. At the same time, the council took the menace posed by Mary seriously enough to issue a propagandist proclamation in Jane’s name reminding the people that Mary was merely
a ‘bastard daughter to our great uncle Henry the eighth of famous memory’.

Meeting in almost continuous session, the council also took the decision to send an armed force into East Anglia and bring the vexatious Lady Mary back to the Tower where she could be safely kept under lock and key. The Duke of Suffolk, Jane’s father, was selected for the task, but behind the scenes his wife – a close friend of Mary – was hedging her bets, ostensibly backing her daughter Jane, whilst trying to keep channels open to Mary. As a result of his wife’s entreaties Suffolk declined the task, pleading ill health, and it devolved upon Northumberland himself, with his experience of quelling a previous East Anglian revolt.

Northumberland was reluctant to go. He felt his safest place was in the Tower beside the throne. There was no telling what the council would get up to behind his back. But since no one else seemed willing, he had no alternative. ‘Well, since ye think it good, I and mine will go,’ he told them, eyeing his fellow councillors suspiciously. ‘Not doubting of your fidelity to the Queen’s majesty, which I leave in your custody.’ Before leaving, he demanded that each member of the council reaffirm their loyalty to Queen Jane. Apparently reassured, he murmured, ‘Pray God it be so. Let us go into dinner.’ After the meal, he left London with some 600 horsemen and 2,000 foot soldiers, backed up by brass cannons supplied from the Tower’s armoury. He noted gloomily as they rode north through the city that though crowds assembled to watch them go, none had wished them ‘God-speed’.

On Saturday 14 July Northumberland’s force reached Cambridge, having rendezvoused with his sons John and Robert, and stopped en route to burn Swanston Hall, where Mary had stayed while flying from Hunsdon to Kenninghall. Meanwhile, Mary herself had not been idle. Seemingly spontaneously, men had flooded in from across East Anglia in her support, so that Kenninghall proved too small to hold them all. On the 13th she moved to Framlingham in Suffolk, the region’s largest castle. All over the country reports came in of towns refusing the council’s order to proclaim Queen Jane – and declaring for Mary instead.

In the Tower, the departure of Northumberland, the power behind Jane’s shaky throne, had given Mary’s secret sympathisers the signal to come out openly in her support. The Lord Treasurer, William Paulet, Marquess of Winchester, was a particularly flimsy reed – or rather, a willow, the bendy tree that he compared himself to when asked how he
had survived the dizzying religious changes of the century, during which he embraced no fewer than five faiths, from Catholicism to Puritan Calvinism. Winchester, Pembroke and other peers attempted to flee from the Tower, but were prevented from leaving by Suffolk, the queen’s father. The fortress’s great gates were then locked fast, and its keys delivered to Jane’s personal keeping.

It was time for the Earl of Arundel to take a delayed revenge on the man he now called a ‘thirster of blood’ and ‘the Tyrant’. Northumberland had imprisoned Arundel for a year in the Tower and fined him the equivalent of £3 million for his part in Somerset’s plots. Now, with typical Howard treachery, it was Arundel’s turn to plunge the dagger between the duke’s shoulder blades. He arranged for a special council meeting outside the Tower at Baynard’s Castle. Unconvincingly denying that he was motivated by personal malice, Arundel told his fellow councillors that Northumberland was trying to become ‘Lord of this land’ in place of the ‘rightful, lawful’ successor, Mary, who ‘shone with goodness’, and at whose hands they could expect ‘mercy and mild government’ – a spectacular misjudgement of the woman who was arguably the cruellest Tudor of all.