Tower: An Epic History of the Tower of London (44 page)

The first serious threat came in 1569, the year after Mary’s arrival in England. At first given considerable freedom, she was able to communicate with her supporters and encourage their treasonable plans. A plot was hatched among the traditionally Catholic northern nobility to rise against Elizabeth in her favour. The plotters planned for Mary to marry Thomas Howard, 4th Duke of Norfolk. The duke was the son of the Earl of
Surrey, the last victim of Henry VIII’s reign to be executed at the Tower. As Elizabeth’s Lord Lieutenant of the north, the 4th duke had been deputed to receive Mary. Thrice widowed, yet still under thirty, Norfolk had fallen in love with her, signalling his willingness to reign at her side in Elizabeth’s place.

The duke’s hopes of marrying Mary were encouraged by his sister, Jane Howard, wife of the Earl of Westmoreland, one of the two leaders of the coming revolt. Thomas Percy, 7th Earl of Northumberland, and Charles Neville, 6th Earl of Westmoreland, were the hereditary heads of the north’s ancient aristocratic dynasties. They were both Catholics attracted by the prospect of a new Catholic Queen Mary to champion their religion. Norfolk – though nominally a Protestant – allowed himself to be drawn into the plot.

The rebels captured Durham, whose ancient cathedral echoed to the Mass for the first time in years. However, resolute action by the queen and council nipped the Northern rising in the bud. The rebel troops melted away as they moved south; the two earls fled to Scotland; and Norfolk, found cowering on his East Anglian estates, was thrown into the Tower. Elizabeth gave him the same comfortable quarters at the east end of the royal palace that Southampton would occupy, so Norfolk could stretch his legs in the palace’s long gallery. Elizabeth rather liked the handsome duke, despite his weakness and overt ambition. Norfolk’s friends at court quietly pleaded his case, and kept him informed of developments via messages on black paper, dropped into the dark corners of his privy, and letters rolled into tubes and inserted through a hole bored in his wall. Although interrogated personally by William Cecil, Norfolk managed to avoid incriminating himself.

Francis Walsingham, however, had eyes and ear everywhere, and the spymaster’s patience was soon amply rewarded. In 1570, encouraged by the Pope’s bull
Regenis in Excelsis
releasing Catholics from their duty to Elizabeth and calling for her overthrow or death, Roberto Ridolfi, a Florentine banker based in London, lent his name to a new plot. The queen was to be assassinated; a Spanish army would descend on England from the Netherlands; and Mary would marry Norfolk and reign over a Catholic country once again.

Meanwhile, Norfolk was freed from the Tower but was still under strict surveillance. He foolishly let Ridolfi inveigle him into his plot and thus put his neck upon the block that Walsingham had set up. In September
1571, a Catholic courier, Charles Bailly – under scrutiny since a spell in the Tower the previous year – was caught at Dover carrying letters detailing Spanish support for the plot. After the discovery of coded letters from Norfolk to Mary’s more suspect friends, the duke was re-arrested. This time there were to be no palace privileges. Norfolk was lodged in the place with the most evil reputation of all: the Bloody Tower.

Three other towers – the Salt, the Coldharbour and the Beauchamp – filled with the duke’s co-conspirators. Although Norfolk, as a nobleman, was spared torture, Bailly was racked, and in excruciating pain, revealed the key to the ciphers he had been carrying, and the names of the other plotters. Their plans included a scheme to seize the Tower in Mary’s name, and this alone was enough to convict the duke of treason in January 1572. Urged on by Walsingham and Cecil, the reluctant queen put her signature to the duke’s death warrant four times – only to cancel it each time. The effect of this cruel psychological torture on the duke over six agonising months can only be imagined. To be repeatedly told to prepare for an imminent death – and just as repeatedly reprieved – was a refined torment worse than the rack. Finally, however, there was no reprieve. Norfolk was beheaded on Tower Hill in June 1572.

He died courageously, with the executioner severing his head ‘with singular dexterity’. Norfolk’s was the first head to fall there there for a dozen years, and a new scaffold had to be constructed to replace the rotten old one.

One of the two earls who had led the Northern Rising – Thomas Percy, Earl of Northumberland – was sold to the English by the Scots, and beheaded at York. His co-leader, Charles Neville, Earl of Westmoreland, lived out a life in exile on a Spanish pension. He never saw his wife, Jane Howard, or his four children again. Thomas Percy’s younger brother Henry, the new Earl of Northumberland, despite having shown no previous disloyalty – indeed he had fought for the government against the Northern Rising – took up his dead brother’s cause as soon as he inherited his title. Twice he was put in the Tower, and twice he persuaded the authorities to let him out again. But it would not be third time lucky for the foolhardy peer.

In 1584 another Catholic plot was discovered. It took its name from Francis Throckmorton, a cousin of Walter Ralegh’s wife Bess. The details were the mixture as before: a cross-Channel invasion in support of an
English Catholic rising aimed at deposing Elizabeth and putting Mary in her place. Northumberland, freed from the Tower, held a plotters’ meeting at one of his country houses, Petworth, in Sussex. Word of this reached the government, and two plotters, Throckmorton and William Shelley, were arrested, taken to the Tower and racked.

At first Throckmorton was confident that he could withstand the rack’s rigours. He wrote a coded message to friends on a playing card pledging to die a thousand deaths before he would betray them. The spirit was undoubtedly willing, but the flesh strained and the sinews snapped – and soon Throckmorton and Shelley were naming names, places and dates. Armed with their confessions, the authorities had Northumberland arrested again in December 1584. He was interrogated, though not tortured, denying all knowledge of the plot. Eventually, Throckmorton was executed, but the problem of Northumberland remained.

On 21 June 1585, the problem was solved. Northumberland was found shot dead in his Tower cell – a pistol loaded with three balls had been discharged through his heart. An inquest jury brought in a hasty verdict of suicide, but pamphlets were printed across Europe accusing the government of murder. Sir Walter Ralegh later alleged that one of his court rivals, Sir Christopher Hatton, had ordered the killing on behalf of the Privy Council, using the Tower’s ardently Protestant lieutenant, Sir Owen Hopton, as the murderer. At length, the rumours forced the government to mount an inquiry – which confirmed the suicide verdict. This is unconvincing. Northumberland was buried in the Tower’s chapel, St Peter ad Vincula, which, had he been a genuine suicide, would not have been allowed. The weight of the admittedly scanty evidence points to murder for reasons of state. At all events, the earl was yet another victim in a lengthening list of mysterious deaths at the Tower.

The fortresss claimed its victims in various ways. The son of the executed Duke of Norfolk, Philip Fitzalan, Earl of Arundel, was imprisoned there in 1585, apparently for little more than his Catholic faith. Chiselled into the wall of his cell in the Beauchamp Tower, he added his name with a flourish to those of the Dudleys and several of his own co-religionists who had been previous inmates. He even carved the date: 22 June 1587, two years after Northumberland’s mysterious death, and a year before the Spanish Armada arrived. A pious and gentle man, Arundel lived a monastic life during his decade in the Tower, giving away much of the money he
received for his own maintenance to the poor, and subsisting on a frugal diet.

In 1588, Arundel’s wife bribed a warder to leave a door open so that a Catholic priest, imprisoned in the nearby Bell Tower, could steal along the walkway once used by Elizabeth for exercise and say Mass in his cell. When the government heard that the Mass had been to pray for the success of the Armada, the priest was tortured into confessing. Arundel was then tried for treason and condemned to death – though the sentence was never carried out. Instead, in 1595, the earl caught dysentery – a condition exacerbated by his poor diet. Knowing that he was dying, he petitioned the queen to be able to see his wife and child before he expired. She replied that if he renounced his religion he would be released. Arundel scornfully refused, saying he wished he had more lives that he could sacrifice for his faith – and duly died. Buried in St Peter ad Vincula, he was later exhumed and beatified, and now lies in the Howard family’s chapel in the Sussex town from which he took his title, yet another martyr to the religious intolerance that disfigured the Tudor century.

In 1587 came the Babington Plot, the most important of all the Catholic conspiracies aimed at eliminating Elizabeth and substituting Mary. The plot was carefully manipulated by Walsingham’s spies to make a trap to destroy Mary, ‘this devilish woman’ as Walsingham called her. Throughout the 1580s, the twin threats of Spanish invasion and Catholic subversion grew – and so did the government’s efforts to counter them. Walsingham had agents in every European capital; the ports were closely watched; suspect travellers were questioned; and Catholic houses harbouring Jesuit missionary priests were repeatedly raided.

One such priest was the saintly scholar Edmund Campion, who, after his capture in 1581, suffered the torments of the tiny Tower cell known as ‘Little Ease’ – a niche in a wall in the White Tower’s cellars designed so it was impossible for the inmate to stand or lie down, the crouched position adopted causing agonising cramps. This having failed to teach Campion the error of his ways, he was racked three times. His arms were so badly dislocated that he was unable to raise them at his trial and execution.

A Jesuit who evaded Walsingham’s bloodhounds for eight years before he was caught was the poet–priest Father Robert Southwell. Holed up in the country homes of Catholic recusants, he wrote devotional verse such
as
The Burning Babe
. In 1592, however, Southwell fell into the merciless hands of Richard Topcliffe, the queen’s notoriously sadistic persecutor-in-chief of fugitive Catholics. Tortured in the private chamber that Topcliffe kept for the purpose in his London house, Southwell was then thrust into a tiny dungeon known as ‘Limbo’ in the Gatehouse prison at Westminster. When he was found crawling with lice, his father petitioned that he be tried and executed immediately as the gentleman he was rather than endure further suffering.

The authorities transferred the poet–priest to the Tower, where he was de-loused and allowed new clothes and books. The government’s ‘humanity’, however, had a purpose: to make Southwell talk. During his three years in the Tower he endured no fewer then ten sessions of torture. His sole consolations were his faith and his poetry:

O life! What lets thee from a quick decease?

O death! What draws thee from a present prey?

My feast is done, my soul would be at ease
,

My grace is said: O death! Come take away
.

Thus still I die, yet still do I revive
,

My living death by dying life is fed
;

Grace more than nature keeps my heart alive
,

Whose idle hopes and vain desires are dead
.

Southwell’s desire for death was granted in 1595 when he was executed.

A young graduate of the exiled English Catholic colleges at Douai, Rheims and Rome that were turning out these missionaries was Gilbert Gifford, described as a beardless boy. Gifford was intercepted by Walsingham’s men on arriving at the Sussex port of Rye in December 1585. He was carrying letters in cipher destined for Mary Stuart from the Scots queen’s chief agents in France, Thomas Morgan and Charles Paget. (It is a tribute to the English spy chief’s fearsome thoroughness that both Morgan and Paget are suspected by some historians of having been double agents working for Walsingham, despite their ostensible loyalty to Mary.) Gifford and his letters were sent on to London to be examined by Walsingham and his chief code breaker and forger, Thomas Phelippes.

The spymasters saw at once that they had been handed the instrument to destroy Mary. On pain of torture and death, Gifford was persuaded to
become a double agent working for Walsingham. He would proceed as planned to Chartley, the Staffordshire country house where Mary was held in increasingly close confinement by her rigidly Puritan keeper, Sir Amyas Paulet. Here, Gifford would open a channel of communications via an ingenious method that Walsingham’s backroom boy Phelippes had worked out after visiting the moated house. Weekly deliveries of keg beer were made to Chartley from the nearby town of Burton, and the empty barrels were picked up by the same brewer. The secret letters would be hidden inside the barrels’ bungs, and Gifford would be the postman. In this way, Mary’s covert correspondence could be monitored and doctored by the secret service, in order to secure the damning evidence that would send her to the block.

Gifford was a witting – and apparently willing – agent luring Mary to her doom, delivering her first letter from Morgan in almost a year. But the man whose letters finally ensured her – and his own – destruction was a starry-eyed young Catholic gentleman utterly devoted to the captive queen. Anthony Babington had met Mary while serving as a boy page to the Earl of Shrewbury, the Scots queen’s first guardian after her arrival from Scotland. Babington had fallen under her spell, and vowed to be the knight errant who would spring her from her prison. In the meantime he hid Catholic priests – including Campion – and ferried them around his native Midlands.

Travelling to France, Babington contacted Mary’s agents and offered to smuggle letters to her giving details of a new Catholic rising and her rescue. Back in London, he recruited a group of like-minded young Catholic gentlemen for a desperate double enterprise: to rescue Mary and to kidnap or kill Elizabeth. Revealing letters began to flow in and out of Chartley via the barrel-bung post. Mary was cautious, but after eighteen years of captivity she was growing desperate. Thomas Phelippes, running Gifford and his post for Walsingham, carefully forged additions to the letters ‘sexing them up’ to implicate Mary in treason. Plotting Mary’s escape was one thing – Elizabeth would hardly consent to her death on those grounds alone – but giving her approval to a Spanish invasion and her cousin’s killing would be her death warrant. Walsingham authorised Phelippes to manufacture the evidence.