Tower: An Epic History of the Tower of London (48 page)

One such man was Henry Percy, 9th Earl of Northumberland, whose father, the 8th Earl, had died so mysteriously in the Tower – by either murder or suicide – during his third bout of imprisonment as a suspected Catholic conspirator. The 9th Earl was also strongly suspected of being a crypto-Catholic, as were most members of his ancient family. Percy’s chief interest, however, lay in science and the occult – dangerously heterodox pursuits which won him the nickname ‘the Wizard Earl’. The dividing line between alchemy and chemistry, at the dawn of the seventeenth century, was still a blurred one. His great wealth allowed Percy to fund his scientific experiments, and his circle included such free spirits in the arts and sciences as the magus John Dee, playwright Christopher Marlowe, astronomer Thomas Harriot, and – of course – Walter Ralegh. Meetings of the discussion circle known as ‘the School of Night’ were reputed to have taken place at the Wizard Earl’s London home, Syon Park.

Neither Percy’s wealth and social position nor his non-dogmatic nature saved him from persection after the Gunpowder Plot. He was first cousin to Tom Percy who had died with Catesby at Holbeche House, and the earl had employed his cousin as a steward to collect rents from his estates. It was suspected that some of this cash had funded the plot, as Percy had rented the cellar where the powder had been stored. The cousins had even dined together at Syon Park on the eve of the plot’s discovery. This was more than enough to indict the earl, who was convicted in the Star Chamber court of ‘misprision’ – i.e. foreknowledge – of treason.

Though he escaped the supreme penalty, the earl’s punishment was severe enough. He was condemned to perpetual imprisonment and fined a massive £30,000 (perhaps £4 million in today’s values). He was destined to remain in the Tower for even longer than his friend Ralegh – languishing there for sixteen years. Life in the fortress, though, was not entirely uncongenial for the Wizard Earl who, mildly deaf, was of a reclusive disposition anyway.

A highly privileged prisoner, the earl took over the Martin Tower – the future home of the Crown jewels – as his private apartments-cum-library and laboratory, where he experimented, among other things, on turning stale alcohol into drinkable whisky. For relaxation he built a bowling alley. He had his own cook, and paid Wade £100 annually to keep him in the comfort to which he was accustomed. The gruff old lieutenant was further softened by presents of rubies for his daughter, given by the Wizard Earl’s wife, who, like Bess Ralegh, rented a nearby house on Tower Hill. Like his friend Ralegh, the earl turned his time in the Tower to good literary account, writing a volume in 1609 of wise advice to his son and heir, Lord Percy, who sometimes stayed with him in the Tower.

The earl and Ralegh swapped books on Machiavelli and Tasso; on warfare, astronomy, astrology and the exploration of the Americas; and held court to a stream of distinguished scholarly visitors. The arrival in the Tower of this congenial fellow spirit was welcome news for Ralegh. The two captives’ shared interest in such subjects as maths, navigation, astronomy and chemistry must have eased the passing of many weary Tower nights. Despite his huge fine, Northumberland was still rich enough to pay pensions to a trio of mathematicians – Thomas Hariot, Thomas Hughes and Walter Warner – whom he called his ‘Three Magi’; and the presence of such powerful minds made the Tower’s atmosphere at the time akin to a university college. Hariot even voluntarily took up residence in the Tower so that he could be close to his two detained patrons. From the Tower he corresponded with the great German astronomer Johannes Kepler on the properties of rainbows.

In May 1612, the death of Robert Cecil, ennobled by James as Lord Salisbury, was welcomed by Ralegh with a bitter epitaph, as he regarded the clever little crook-backed minister as a former friend who had betrayed him. But with Cecil’s death the Jacobean court plunged towards corrupt decadence; and the kingdom, without his guiding hand on the tiller, sailed ever closer
to Ralegh’s old enemy Spain. Far more important than Cecil’s passing, however, was the sudden demise that autumn of Ralegh’s patron and pupil, Prince Henry.

The prince, a keen swimmer, unwisely took a dip in the Thames one hot day. The seventeenth-century river was more or less an open sewer, and Henry contracted typhoid fever from the toxic water. In the last extremity of his illness, his mother insisted – against her husband’s wishes – that a phial of Ralegh’s ‘Great Cordial’ should be brought from the Tower and administered to the prince, who was already in a coma. Ralegh’s elixir was poured between the prince’s lips and for a minute a miracle seemed to happen. The unconscious boy opened his eyes, sat up and spoke. But it was a false rally. Henry lapsed back into his coma and died on 6 November. With him perished Ralegh’s last hope of early release – and much of the spirit seemed to flicker out of the old warrior.

The deaths of Cecil and Henry left a gaping vacuum at the heart of James’s kingdom. The space was inadequately filled by the gay king’s favourite, Robert Carr. A handsome fellow Scot, whom the besotted king created Viscount Rochester, Carr was little more than a pretty face. He was a political nincompoop, utterly unable to perfom the various jobs the king bestowed on him. He depended almost entirely on his closest friend, Sir Thomas Overbury, an ambitious and intelligent young courtier who had steered Carr’s career since the young Scot had first attracted James’s attention by dramatically breaking a leg at a tournament in front of the royal box.

His curiosity aroused, James visited Carr as he recovered, and interest soon turned into besotted lust. Carr was entrusted with the sort of state business that Cecil had once handled, but, too incompetent to master it, he thrust the paperwork in Overbury’s direction. Overbury thus became, by default, the king’s chief minister at one remove, and Queen Anne summed up the situation admirably if cattily when she observed that ‘Carr ruled her husband and Overbury ruled Carr’. Such influence made the proud and arrogant Overbury many enemies.

Carr soon became the lust object of another important player. This time his admirer was not an ugly, middle-aged male, but a young, beautiful and utterly ruthless woman. Frances Howard, Countess of Essex, was yet another sprig of the infamous Howard dynasty. As a fourteen-year-old, she had been married to the thirteen-year-old son of the executed Earl of Essex,
but the couple had been separated after the ceremony and young Essex had been sent on a prolonged European tour. On his return, he failed to consummate his marriage. It is unclear whose fault this was. Essex’s second wife also complained of his impotence, but he protested that he was capable of sex with other women, and even demonstrated his prowess to doubting friends by lifting his nightshirt to exhibit a powerful erection.

There is no doubt, however, about Frances’s reluctance to grant her husband his conjugal rights. She used every excuse, from illness to absence, to keep him from her bed, and when they were alone, he complained, she dampened his ardour with a stream of abuse. To extinguish any remaining desire, it was said, she employed necromancers to make waxen images of the unfortunate Essex. These effigies’ outsize genitalia would be melted, or transfixed with pins. Frances’s reluctance to copulate with her husband became desperate when, around 1610, she fell violently in lust, if not love, with the king’s catamite, Robert Carr.

At first, wishing to keep his friend happy, Thomas Overbury encouraged the dalliance. A gifted writer, among his other talents, Overbury even penned the love letters that Carr sent to Frances. When it dawned on him that the couple wanted to marry, however, Overbury reverted to violent opposition, as he could see himself losing his hold over his feeble friend, who would become a creature of the Howard clan.

The head of the Howard family at this time was Frances’s great-uncle, Henry Howard, Earl of Northampton. Younger brother of the 4th Duke of Norfolk executed by Elizabeth, and second son of the Earl of Surrey whose execution had been ordered on his deathbed by Henry VIII, Northampton had all his life been a closet Catholic. His family’s record of treason and suspicion of his secret faith had kept him away from the power he craved throughout Elizabeth’s reign, but he had carefully cultivated contacts with James, and with the king’s accession, at last came into his own. Northampton became the kingdom’s second minister after Cecil. He was a schemer and deceiver without rival. His long years in the cold had embittered him, and he was determined to rule James via his great-niece and her empty-headed husband-to-be Carr. As Overbury stood in his way, Overbury had to go.

Overbury’s opposition to the match had hit frantic heights. He wrote a best-selling tract,
The Wife
, proving why Frances would be an unsuitable spouse to his friend. The former friends had a furious public row when Overbury called Frances a ‘whore’. On hearing of this, the ruthless young
woman and her evil old great-uncle concocted a scheme to dispose of Overbury – permanently. It is uncertain whether the dim-witted Carr was yet privy to their murderous plans, but he was certainly ready for his friend to be consigned to the Tower for a while. The plotters needed to have Overbury off the scene when Frances applied for an annulment of her marriage to Essex on grounds of his impotency.

In April 1513, the king offered Overbury – who had been a diplomat – two foreign ambassadorships, one to distant Moscow. Overbury indignantly refused both. He was instantly, and much to his amazement, rowed off to the Tower on charges of ‘disobedience’ and lodged in the ground floor of the Bloody Tower, becoming Sir Walter Ralegh’s neighbour. Meanwhile the conspiracy to destroy him got into gear. The Howards’ first step was to procure an annulment of Frances’s marriage to Essex. Despite the doubts of the bishops who sat on a special commission to decide the issue, Frances swore blind that she was still
virgo intacta
. Midwives who examined the heavily veiled woman claiming to be Frances agreed – though there were strong rumours that a virginal stand-in had been substituted. While the commission deliberated, at the Tower, the second stage of the plot was initiated.

The slow poisoning of Sir Thomas Overbury is the most macabre murder case in the Tower’s history. It is one of John Webster’s Jacobean dramas made putrid flesh: full of sexual jealousy, revenge, intrigue, the occult and murderous sadism. The Howards knew that Sir William Wade, though a tough and cruel lieutenant, was also an honest man who did things by the book. There was no hope of inveigling him into a scheme to illicitly kill one of his charges, so he had to be removed. Using as an excuse Wade’s failure to prevent the temporary escape of Arbella Stuart from the Tower (
see
Chapter Thirteen
, ‘Great Escapes’) Wade was fired and replaced by Sir Gervase Elwes, a lawyer and tool of the Howards to whom he paid a hefty £2,000 ‘thank-you’ for his preferment. It was not money well spent, as it would cost Elwes his life.

Frances Howard had her poisons – and her poisoners – ready. Her chief accomplice was her friend and confidante Mrs Anne Turner, a young widow, who had, as a sideline to her other interests as a brothel madam, caterer and poisoner, developed a combined starch and yellow dye which, thanks to her contacts at court (her brother was the king’s falconer), had made stiff yellow ruffs and sleeves extremely fashionable. Mrs Turner, in turn, employed a pox-ridden city apothecary, James Franklin, to make up
the poisons to kill Overbury. The final step was to get Richard Weston, a servant of Mrs Turner, appointed as Overbury’s keeper in the Tower. His job would be to administer the poisons. Overbury did not yet know it, but he was now entirely at the mercy of his merciless enemies.

The conspirators moved cautiously and with devilish cunning. They even made Overbury complicit in his own death by suggesting that if he took small doses of poison – purgatives known as ‘vomits’ – and made himself ill, the king would look more sympathetically on his abject pleas to be released. Naively, Overbury went along with the plan, unaware that real, deadly, poisons were also being fed to him. On 6 May Mrs Turner passed a phial of green and yellow poison called
rosalgar
(red arsenic) to Weston, who was met by Sir Gervase Elwes as he carried the suspicious-looking substance to the Bloody Tower in one hand while bearing a bowl of Overbury’s supper soup in the other. ‘Shall I give it to him now?’ asked the warder. Elwes, either feigning innocence or genuinely ignorant, asked him what was in the bottle. ‘As if you did not know, sir,’ snorted Weston, going into the tower. ‘They will have me give it to him, first or last.’

Three days later, on 9 May, Weston mixed the arsenic into Overbury’s evening broth. The poor prisoner spent the rest of the night excreting, vomiting and retching. Weston demanded his reward from Mrs Turner, but was told he would only get it when Overbury was safely dead. ‘Perfect your work, and you shall have your hire,’ she said. Overbury continued to sicken, and three weeks later wrote to Carr, pleading for his former friend to use his influence with the king to get him out, and complaining of his illness. The favourite responded sympathetically, saying the time for his release was not yet right but as soon as possible he would ‘hasten your delivery’. In hindsight, that phrase has a very sinister ring. With the letter, Carr enclosed a white powder which he claimed would help Overbury’s sickness. The trusting man took it – and grew much worse, excreting sixty stools in one night.

Although the conspirators prevented his family and friends from seeing him, Overbury was attended by teams of doctors – some probably in the poisoners’ pay – who assured the patient that sickness and lassitude were part of a prisoner’s lot in the Tower. Among the doctors he consulted was King James’s personal physician, the celebrated Swiss Huguenot Sir Theodore de Mayerne. A piteous letter from Overbury describes his symptoms after a visit from Mayerne:

This morning, notwithstanding my fasting till yesterday, I find a great heat continues in all my body, and the same desire of drink and loathing of meat etc. I was let blood Wednesday 10 o’clock, yet today, Friday, my heat slackens not, the same loathing of meat, having eaten not a bit since Thursday sennight [fortnight] to this hour, and the same vomiting yesternight. About 8 o’clock after Mr Mayerns was gone I fainted.