Tower: An Epic History of the Tower of London (52 page)

Roger went to the court of Count William I of Hainault (the modern Netherlands) to prepare their invasion of England, while Isabella stayed in France, raising men and money. Count William agreed to subsidise the enterprise, and provide the ships, in return for a pledge that his daughter Philippa would marry young Prince Edward. Meanwhile, a plot by Hugh Despenser to murder the lovers was foiled when a ship containing barrels of silver to bribe French courtiers to murder Mortimer was intercepted and the Despensers’ treasure diverted to Hainault to fund Mortimer’s overthrow of their despotism.

By September 1326 Mortimer had gathered an invasion armada of almost 100 ships with a small army of 1,500 mercenary soldiers off Rotterdam. On 21 September, Isabella and Mortimer embarked and a week later landed at the mouth of the River Orwell in Suffolk. Edward awaited their arrival at the Tower. At first, he was not unduly worried. Against the tiny invasion force, he had a notional army of 50,000. Thanks to the Despensers’ extortions, the Royal Exchequer was full of cash to pay the troops. But, as Edward and the Despensers discovered, no money could buy the loyalty they had wantonly squandered. The soldiers they summoned ignored the call. Instead of the king, their allegiance went to Isabella. As Isabella and
Mortimer’s growing army moved towards Oxford, Edward and Despenser abandoned the Tower and fled west, making for Despenser’s lands in south Wales. The Tower’s lieutenant, the hated Bishop Walter de Stapledon, was caught seeking sanctuary in St Paul’s Cathedral, and had his head sawn off with a bread knife.

By the time Edward and Despenser arrived in Wales, royal authority had melted away. Riding with a handful of retainers, they were caught near Neath on 16 November, arrested and separated. Despenser was taken to Hereford where the triumphant queen was waiting. Knowing he could expect no mercy from the ‘She-wolf’ Despenser tried to starve himself to death, but Isabella was implacable. On 24 November, Hugh and two followers were paraded before an immense crowd who hooted and jeered the fallen tyrant. Crowned with mocking nettles, the doomed man was pulled from his horse, stripped naked and had biblical verses denouncing ambition and evil scrawled on his emaciated flesh. Led into the market square where a vengeful Mortimer and Isabella sat, Despenser listened while his many sins were listed. Judged a traitor and thief, he was condemned to the terrible punishment of being hanged, drawn and quartered.

Dragged by four horses to one of his own castles, Despenser was tied to an enormous fifty-foot ladder and hoisted high above his castle walls. The executioner clambered up a parallel ladder and set about his grisly task. First, the condemned man’s genitals were sliced off and flung into a bonfire at the foot of the ladder. Then the executioner plunged his knife into Hugh’s abdomen and cut out his guts, throwing the entrails into the fire. Finally, Despenser’s chest was ripped open and his heart followed the other organs into the flames. The despot was then quartered and his head sent to London for display, while his limbs and torso were dispatched to the four corners of the kingdon he had tyrannised. York, Newcastle, Dover and Bristol – the city where his own father had earlier been executed – all received a hunk of flesh. It was a horrible but fitting end for a monstrous tyrant. We can be sure that Isabella and Roger had enjoyed the show.

King Edward II’s fate, in contrast to his favourite’s very public end, was private and masked in mystery. The deposed monarch was shuttled from castle to castle between Kenilworth, Corfe and Berkeley near Gloucester. In January 1327, at Kenilworth, Edward had publicly agreed to abdicate.
But with the Despensers dead, popular sympathy for the deposed monarch returned, and there were several serious attempts to rescue him from his cell. His frustrated jailers had tried without success to kill him by putting him in a dungeon filled with stagnant water and decaying animal cadavers, while shaving him with ditch water.

Mortimer apparently now decided that such methods were too slow, and gave orders to kill the stubborn king as quickly and unobtrusively as possible. According to legend, Edward was either suffocated in his cell or suffered the exquisite agony of having a red-hot copper rod inserted through a horn into his rectum and twisted in his bowels while he was pinioned under a table or mattress. It has been suggested that this fiendish, agonising means of dispatching the king was either to conceal the crime by leaving no exterior marks on the corpse, or as a symbolic punishment for Edward’s homosexuality, or both. It has also been plausibly proposed by medieval historian Ian Mortimer that Edward did
not
die in Berkeley, but survived his supposed death by some fourteen years as a wandering hermit after he had been successfully sprung from the castle. Whatever the truth, Edward’s reign effectively ended with his abdication in January 1327, even if his life did not.

Roger Mortimer’s life now entered its final act. Effectively dictator of the kingdom, he was, as lover of the queen regent, also guardian of the teenage monarch, Edward III. Mortimer’s position was not enviable, since many noblemen did not relish submitting to another tyrant. Young Edward’s feelings about the man who had probably murdered his father, usurping his place in his mother’s bed, are also unlikely to have been friendly. In addition, Mortimer treated the king with arrogant disrespect.

At a tournament held at his seat, Wigmore Castle, in the summer of 1329, Roger played the part of King Arthur in a pageant – having himself crowned before the young king. Power appears to have gone to Mortimer’s head, and he began to act in a way that, ironically, mirrored the tyrannical behaviour of the man he had deposed: Hugh Despenser. Mortimer styled himself Earl of March, overlord of his native region, and acquired large estates, oppressing those who opposed him. His most unforgivable deed was to implicate Edmund, Earl of Kent, younger brother of Edward II, in a plot to free the imprisoned monarch. Mortimer personally oversaw the earl’s trial and decapitation. In the words of his namesake biographer Ian Mortimer, ‘He had grown too mighty … Despenser’s brutal tyranny
had been reborn.’ Or, as Roger’s own son Geoffrey told him, Mortimer had morphed from chivalrous knight into the ‘King of Folly’.

Nemesis swiftly followed. In October 1330, at Nottingham Castle, a band of nobles, led by their young king, now almost eighteen, stole into the castle at night via a tunnel in the sandstone rock on which the fortress stood. After a brief brawl, Mortimer was arrested. Edward ignored his mother’s plea to ‘spare the gentle Mortimer’ and Roger was returned to the familiar surroundings of the Tower. This time, there would be no escape.

Edward III gave orders that Mortimer, his son Geoffrey, and his chief henchman Simon Bereford should be literally walled up in the Tower. Their cell’s door and windows were filled in with masonry and mortar, and the room was placed under the round-the-clock guard of six serjeants-at-arms supervised by two knights of the royal household. To make security doubly sure, Edward himself moved into the room next door. The Mortimers and Bereford, kept alive on bread and water, spent a miserable month incarcerated inside their dark and chilly prison.

Then, laden with heavy chains, Roger was taken to Westminster Hall to be tried for treason. He was gagged to prevent him from speaking, and rapidly condemned to death. Returned to the Tower, on 29 November he was placed on an ox hide and bumped painfully along the uneven roads between the Tower and the gallows at Tyburn. Battered but alive, he made a short speech to the crowd confessing the injustice of his execution the Earl of Kent. He was then hanged. The king was more merciful to his mother, who ended her days comfortably enough in 1358 – nearly three decades after the ignominious execution of her lover and partner in power.

Sir John Oldcastle is best known today as the model for Shakespeare’s uproarious Sir John Falstaff. Early versions of
Henry IV
Parts 1 and 2 featured a character called Sir John Oldcastle, though when the play was printed in 1598, the surname ‘Falstaff’ had been substituted. In truth, the real historical Oldcastle – lean, hard and courageous – bore no resemblance to Shakespeare’s cowardly, vainglorious ‘fat knight’, and there was little to laugh about in Oldcastle’s life and tragic death. He did, however, have one thing in common with his fictional counterpart: he was a bosom companion of young Prince Hal, later England’s
quintessential hero monarch Henry V, forever associated with his famous victory at Agincourt in 1415.

Both men hailed from the same small corner of the world. Henry was born in 1387 in Monmouth – a quarter of a century before his father Henry Bolingbroke seized the throne from Richard II to become Henry IV. Oldcastle was born between 1360 and 1378 at Almeley in nearby Herefordshire, the son and heir of Sir Richard Oldcastle. John Oldcastle served in Henry IV’s campaigns against the Scots and the Welsh rebellion of Owain Glyndwr, when he first met Prince Henry. In 1408 Oldcastle leapt upwards from country knight to landed aristocracy when he married Joan, 4th Baroness Cobham. The couple were hardly novices in the marriage stakes: Joan was Oldcastle’s third wife, and he was her fourth husband. The new Lord Cobham’s home was the resplendent Cooling Castle on the Kentish marshes, and through his marriage Oldcastle acquired broad acres in five counties: Kent, Norfolk, Northamptonshire, Wiltshire and his native Herefordshire. An MP, praised by the new king as ‘one of my most trustworthy soldiers’, Oldcastle had arrived. But he placed everything in jeopardy by espousing new, dangerously radical, religious ideas.

Oldcastle was entranced by the novel doctrines dubbed as ‘Lollardy’ (the term comes from the Dutch word for ‘mumbling’), an insulting epithet eventually proudly adopted by the preachers of the ‘New Light’. The Lollards were the early-morning stars of the Reformation, taking their inspiration from the English reformer John Wycliffe’s teaching. They sympathised with the poor, and criticised the rampant corruption of the Church; believing that devout laymen could preach the Gospels as well as any priest. Lollards denied the necessity of a hierarchical clergy, founding their faith firmly on the Scriptures studied in Wycliffe’s first English Bible. As ‘premature Protestants’ they were fiercely persecuted as heretics.

Oldcastle emerged as a promoter of Lollard ideas in 1410 when churches on his Kentish estate were put under a Church interdict for allowing unlicensed preachers. The chief persecutor was Thomas Arundel, Archbishop of Canterbury. When the archbishop heard that Oldcastle had put up Lollard preachers in Cooling Castle as his house guests, he complained to the king. Henry confronted his friend at Windsor Castle. Speaking with an old soldier’s bluntness, Oldcastle pledged that his life and fortune were at the king’s disposal – but not his sincere private beliefs. Oldcastle withdrew to Cooling in disgrace. In fifteenth-century Europe,
once the word ‘heresy’ was heard, reason retreated and the hangman approached.

Or rather, the flames drew near. Another bone of contention between Oldcastle and Arundel was Sir John’s objection to a new law which the archbishop had adopted from the Spanish Inquisition: allowing heretics to be burned at the stake. Oldcastle objected to the barbaric foreign import, and Arundel duly noted another charge against the king’s mentor. His chance to strike Oldcastle down finally came when a spy reported that a heretical book belonging to Sir John had been seized at a Paternoster Row bookshop. This time the king stood aside. The law would take its terrible course.

Arundel summoned Oldcastle to appear before an ecclesiastical court. From behind Cooling’s battlements, Oldcastle defied him. Arundel procured a royal writ from the king that the old soldier could not disobey. He was taken under guard to the Tower, and handed over to the lieutenant, Sir Robert Morley. The lieutenant treated his prisoner with respect and lodged him in the Beauchamp Tower, then the most comfortable accommodation in the fortress. (Afterwards, the tower was alternatively named ‘Cobham Tower’ in Oldcastle’s honour.) Here he was visited by friars and priests who vainly attempted to argue him out of his stubbornly held heretical opinions.

On 23 September 1413 Oldcastle was taken from the Tower to the church court in an old Dominican convent on Ludgate Hill, with his bitter foe, Arundel, presiding. The jury was composed of Augustinian canons and Carmelite friars. Oldcastle, the denouncer of monkish abuses, was now on trial for his life before a jury of monks. He made a ‘confession of faith’ declaring that he believed in the Sacraments of the Church, but holding out against the adoration of images of the Virgin or the saints – which, he said, was heathen idolatry. He also denied the ‘Real Presence’ – that the body and blood of Christ were present in Holy Communion. This was the Protestant programme as laid out by Luther a century later. But the time for such bold ideas had not yet come. Horror-struck, one juror denounced Oldcastle for ‘flat heresy’ and on 25 September he was sentenced to die at the stake.

On hearing the sentence, Oldcastle replied:

Ye judge the body, which is but a wretched thing, yet am I certain and sure that ye can do no harm to my soul. He who created that, will of His
own mercy and promise save it. As to these articles [his opinions] I will stand to them, even to the very death – by the grace of my eternal God.

Despite his brave defiance, Sir John seemed bound for the flames. Once again, however, the king came to his old friend’s rescue. He granted him a forty-day stay of execution, hoping that he would recant. The Church spread false rumours that this was indeed what the ‘good Lord Cobham’ had done.

To counter their spin, Oldcastle had a rebuttal smuggled out from the Tower and pasted up around the city by Lollard friends. But Oldcastle’s heroic accomplices were prepared to do even more and on 29 September 1416 they struck. The court records for 1416 at the subsequent trial in Newgate Gaol of Oldcastle’s chief rescuer, a fur dealer and parchment maker named William Fisher, take up the tale:

William Fyssher … of London … together with other traitors … whose names are unknown, did go privily to the Tower, and break into that prison and falsely and traitorously withdraw the said John Oldcastle therefrom, and take him from thence to his own dwelling house, in the parish of St Sepulchre in Smithfield, and did falsely and traitorously harbour him in that said dwelling-house, knowing that he was a traitor and there did keep the said John Oldcastle in secret until the Wednesday next after the Feast of our Lord’s Epiphany [6 January]. Upon which Wednesday the aforesaid William; together with the said John Oldcastle and other traitors, these conspiring and imagining how to slay our said Lord the King, and also the brothers and heirs of the same Lord the King and to destroy and disinherit other nobles of the realm of England, and to make the aforesaid John Oldcastle regent of the realm, on the same Wednesday, armed and arrayed in warlike guise falsely and traitorously, against his allegiance, did arise, and from thence and then and there did proceed towards a certain great field in the parish of St Giles, there to carry out and finally fulfil his false, nefarious and traitorous purpose.