Tower: An Epic History of the Tower of London (46 page)

Ralegh converted the hen hut into a laboratory for scientific and alchemical experiments, equipping it with retorts and copper tubing. In one experiment, he succeeded in extracting the salt from seawater and turned it into fresh water; in another, he invented a method for curing his beloved tobacco. All the while he developed yet more skills to add to his protean achievements: those of physician and herbalist. Always a self-healer who rarely consulted doctors, with the help of the herbs in his garden, some grown from cuttings he had brought back from the Amazon, Ralegh produced potions which became popular folk remedies in high society. The wife of the French ambassador, for example, seeing Ralegh gardening while on a visit to the Tower menagerie, successfully asked him to boil
up and send her a bottle of his ‘Guinea balsam’. Another of Ralegh’s concoctions, a reviving cordial of strawberry water for relieving faintness, also proved popular with the ladies. The most celebrated of all his medicines, however, was a ‘Great Cordial’ – an elixir, probably containing quinine from the Americas, which he claimed could heal almost every ailment. Ralegh’s inquiring mind, though tethered, was now freed from worldly ambition and was inquiring still.

And now that he was a victim, his infamous pride humbled in adversity, Ralegh’s previously dire popularity took an astonishing upwards turn. Sympathetic crowds gathered on the Tower wharf to see the tall and stately Elizabethan hero as he limped along ‘Ralegh’s Walk’. They cheered him on his way, to which Ralegh responded with a grave bow. Court ladies, susceptible as ever to his charisma, flocked to visit him. A trip to see Ralegh in the Tower became part of the social round for London’s glitterati. The visitors he entertained ranged from a group of Indians he had brought from the Amazon (who rented a house on Tower Hill to be near him), to the astronomer and scientist Thomas Harriot, and Ralegh’s sea captain Lawrence Keymis – both faithful friends who had accompanied him to the Amazon and did not desert him now. The playwright and poet Ben Jonson, who would write a preface to Ralegh’s
History
, was also among his regular guests. Ralegh’s relationship with Jonson – a fervent Catholic, a brawling thug (he was imprisoned for killing an actor in a duel), and a literary genius – illustrates the breadth of his world, despite its narrow physical confines, and its eclecticism. The last embers of the astounding Elizabethan Renaissance were still burning brightly in the confines of the Bloody Tower.

Curious about this man whom her husband so hated, but who was the talk of the town, James’s Catholic wife Anne of Denmark, and her brilliantly attractive eldest son, Prince Henry – who had inherited all his father’s intellectual gifts, but none of his defects of physique and character – also visited Ralegh. The old charmer strained every sinew to dazzle the prince, doubtless hoping that the firmly Protestant youngster would restore Ralegh to his rightful position. Henry duly fell under Ralegh’s spell, saying of his new hero, ‘Only my father would cage such a bird.’ Henry’s contempt for his cruel and cowardly father became ever more blatant. When James took a reluctant prince to see one of his gruesome animal fights at the Tower’s menagerie, Henry was sickened by the spectacle of three mastiffs being dispatched by a lion in quick succession. He asked his father to stop the
slaughter, but James decreed that ‘such a bonny battle’ must be fought to a finish. Eventually, the compassionate Henry begged Edward Alleyn, the theatrical entrepreneur who staged the baiting, to take one surviving mauled mastiff home, heal his wounds and ‘make much of him’.

Ralegh’s relationship with Prince Henry – who was the same age as his son Wat – soon transcended mercenary motives. Indeed, so frequent were the young prince’s hero-worshipping trips to see the star of the Bloody Tower – and so intense their discussions on exploration, seamanship, the Americas, religion and statecraft – that the sinister tower became a cross between a schoolroom and the nucleus of an alternative court. Early in their friendship Ralegh built the prince a model ship, and together they planned future voyages to the Americas that they would undertake when the ‘caged bird’ was free.

It was as a result of his relationship with the Prince of Wales that Ralegh conceived the huge project of writing his vast world
History
. On one level it can be seen as the record of Ralegh’s role as unofficial tutor to the very bright heir to the throne. But Ralegh’s global
History
, beginning at the Creation, was no dully didactic chronology, but rather a massive literary, philosophical and religious epic whose theme was the justification of God’s ways to mankind. As such, it convincingly refuted rumours that Ralegh was a secret atheist. And in its insistence on a universal moral law, it is a worthy precursor of Kant. Chronologically, the first volume of the
History
’s 1,364 folio pages got no further than 168 BC, but Ralegh was not shy of working in contemporary events such as the tactics used to repel the Armada, and reminiscences of his own youthful campaigns in France, when discussing ancient wars. He also used biblical and classical times as a transparent camouflage for his own often rueful reflections on kingship, justice and religion:

The judgments of God are for ever unchangeable, neyther is hee wearied by the long process of time, and won to give his blessing in one age to that which he hath cursed in another.

If the
History
has heroes, it is the great warriors of the ancient world, Alexander and Hannibal, whom Ralegh clearly perceives as forerunners of himself. Apart from its intrinsic interest as perhaps the greatest work ever to emerge from a prison cell, and its testimony to its author’s phenomenal industry and erudition, Ralegh’s
History
is a masterpiece of English prose written in the language’s springtime – the English of Shakespeare,
Marlowe, Jonson; and of the King James Bible. Despite its size and length, the book’s success was immediate. It went into ten editions – twice as many as Shakespeare’s plays – and its influence during and after the author’s lifetime was enormous. Its reflections on kingship, and its insistence that God trumped the authority of earthly rulers, were seized upon later in the seventeenth century by Roundhead radicals – including those Tower inmates the Leveller John Lilburne, and the pamphleteer William Prynne – who threw down and beheaded the son of the man who had persecuted Ralegh. Praised by the Protestant Parliamentary poets John Milton and Andrew Marvell, it was given by Oliver Cromwell himself to his own son. The liberal philosopher John Locke thought that if any gentleman wanted to improve his education he should read Ralegh’s book; and the great nineteenth-century historian, Lord Acton, though he described Ralegh as a ‘villainous adventurer’, declared that he nonetheless ‘venerated’ him for the
History
.

Predictably, though, one voice dissented from the chorus of praise: that of King James himself. James was astute enough to see that Ralegh’s attacks on ancient tyrants were lightly coded criticisms of himself. Spluttering that the book was ‘too saucy in its censuring of Princes’, the man who believed that he held his throne by divine right tried in vain to ban the book. He rightly read passages like this brutally accurate description of his ancestor Henry VIII as a reflection on his own fitness to rule: ‘If all the pictures and patternes of a merciless Prince were lost to the worlde, they might all again be painted to the life out of the story of this king.’ James’s opinion of the author was not improved by the fact that, at the time when he was negotiating with Spain to win a Spanish bride for Prince Henry, Ralegh, doubtless with the approval of the saucy prince, boldly but tactlessly wrote not one but two tracts denouncing the idea of marriage with his old foe.

Although he had planned his
History
in three volumes, Ralegh only completed the first. He had written twenty pages of the second volume when a curious incident stopped him in his tracks. Working in his study one day, Ralegh was distracted by a loud noise, and going to his window found a violent fight in progress among a group of workmen who had been carrying out some routine building maintenance. As Ralegh watched, one of the men was fatally injured. His curiosity aroused, Ralegh attempted to discover the cause of the deadly quarrel, but inquire as he might, he could never get a satisfactory answer. That was when he laid down his
pen and burned the first pages of the second volume. For, he reasoned, if he could not establish the truth about an event he had witnessed with his own eyes, how could he possibly write with authority about battles, rulers and happenings in faraway lands he had never visited, among peoples he knew of only from other – and most likely unreliable – writers? It was a sadly inconclusive end to one of the century’s great works.

For all his intense intellectual activity, Ralegh’s restless spirit found imprisonment intolerable. His frustration at having his wings so cruelly clipped is poignantly expressed in the desperate lines he wrote to his friend-turned-enemy Robert Cecil:

I cannot think myself to have bin an enemy, or such a viper, but that this great downfall of mine, this shame, loss and sorrow, may seem to your Lordship’s heart and soul a sufficient punishment and revenge. And, if there is nothing of so many years’ love and familiarity to lay in the other scale. O my God! How have my thoughts betrayed me in your Lordship’s nature, compassion and piety. For to die in perpetual prison I did not think that your Lordship could have wished to your strongest and most malicious enemies.

Cecil’s heart remained unmelted. He did, however, ensure that Bess Ralegh was not reduced to dire poverty because of her husband’s misfortune. Despite his own entreaties and Prince Henry’s pleas to his father to release his friend, Ralegh remained in the Tower. He was there to witness the two great crises which shook the Jacobean kingdom, both of which were played out in the fortress: the Gunpowder Plot and the murder of Sir Thomas Overbury.

It did not take long for the embattled English Catholic community to realise that the fond hopes they had placed in King James for a lifting of the punitive penalties they had suffered under Elizabeth, and which had driven many of them into poverty, exile, or both, were misplaced. Raised in the unforgiving world of the Calvinist Scottish Presbyterian Kirk, James had even separated the young Prince Henry from his mother when Anne converted to Catholicism, for fear that the prince would be contaminated by her faith. Although James took abject steps to seek peace with Spain, this was not through any sympathy for Catholicism, but merely because he was broke and mean, and hated war. The harsh anti-Papist laws of Elizabeth, with their stiff fines for non-attendance at Anglican Communion, and the ban on publicly celebrating the Mass,
were reaffirmed. In rage and despair, some hotheaded young Catholics turned to plot what one of them, Guy Fawkes, called ‘a desperate remedy for a desperate disease’.

The moving spirit in the Gunpowder Plot was not its fall guy, Fawkes, but its initiator, Sir Robert Catesby. Descended from Richard III’s thuggish lawyer William Catesby, Robert came from a Midlands Catholic gentry family. He had a streak of reckless extremism, and supported Essex’s wild rebellion – for which he was fined. Deeply disappointed by James’s failure to restore or even relieve Catholicism, in 1604 Catesby again turned to treason. He recruited a dozen fellow Catholic gentlemen – all, except Fawkes and his own servant Thomas Bates, related to him by blood or marriage – plus a couple of priests to give his plot their spiritual blessing. Then he outlined his scheme. The plot was an inhumanly audacious act of random mass terror like 9/11. The plan was to blow up the Houses of Parliament during the state opening by the king and Prince Henry on 5 November 1605 – a day when the entire English ruling caste, king, Lords and Commons, would assemble in a single building. Catesby planned to lay a gunpowder charge beneath them large enough to destroy everyone in the Palace of Westminster. After half a century’s apostasy, England would be literally blown back to Rome.

The plotters rented a coal cellar directly under the Palace of Westminster and filled it with barrels of gunpowder, reinforced by hundreds of metal bars to make the giant explosion even more deadly. The lethal load was stowed neatly away, camouflaged by bundles of firewood. Fawkes, a fanatical, red-headed giant who had proved his devotion to his faith by fighting for years in the Spanish army in the Netherlands, thereby acquiring his extensive knowledge of explosives, was placed in charge of the storeroom awaiting the fateful day.

As November neared, with their preparations complete, the plotters had time to consider the moral implications of their plan. There would be fellow Catholics, including friends and relations, among the assembled parliamentarians. Was it really right, they asked themselves – and their spirtual counsellors, the Jesuit priests Fathers Garnet and Greenaway – to destroy their co-religionists along with the heretics? The priests reassured them that saving the soul of the nation outweighed the loss of a few individual lives, but doubts lingered. One plotter, Francis Tresham, was particularly concerned about his brother-in-law Lord Monteagle, a Catholic peer due to attend the state opening.

Ten days before the event, someone – probably Tresham – apparently sent Monteagle an anonymous warning not to attend. The cryptic letter, delivered to a servant while the peer sat at supper at his home in Hoxton, advised him to skip the state opening as ‘they shall receive a terrible blow this Parliament, and yet they shall not see who hurts them’. This fairly transparent warning was passed to Robert Cecil by Monteagle, and from Cecil to King James. Paranoid about assassination, James ordered a thorough search of the parliamentary cellars.

Getting wind of the betrayal, Catesby and his chief lieutenant Tom Wintour taxed Tresham with having written the warning, but he hotly denied it. After a week with no apparent action from the authorities, Catesby breathed again. No one had disturbed their cellar, and it looked as though the government had ignored Monteagle’s warning. They decided to go ahead as planned. All the plotters except Tresham and Fawkes left London for the country where they planned to launch a Catholic revolt as soon as Parliament blew up.