Tower: An Epic History of the Tower of London (53 page)

Oldcastle had gone too far. Private religious opinions were one thing; treason and open rebellion quite another. The suspicion must be that Sir John’s escape from the Tower (like Flambard’s dramatic exit three centuries previously) had inside help, possibly from the king himself. Why else did no one bother to properly search Oldcastle’s own town house in Smithfield during the three months he had been ‘harboured’ there? But if Henry had been
prepared to overlook Oldcastle’s stubborn adherence to his Lollard principles for the sentimental sake of their old friendship, he could not turn a blind eye to armed revolt.

The Lollards’ plan was apparently to seize the king and his brothers during a Twelfth Night mumming feast at Eltham, when, disguised as revellers, Lollards would infiltrate the festivities. But the plot was betrayed to Henry by a carpenter. The king, at his best in a crisis, moved fast. Taking his brothers and Archbishop Arundel with him, he left the party at Eltham and galloped hard for London. Once in the capital, he ordered the city gates to be closed and guarded, and stationed armed retainers, emblazoned with white crosses as their recognition sign, in woods around the Lollards’ rendezvous point in St Giles’ Fields. As they gathered, the ambush was sprung. The king and his guards fell on the rebels, and in a short but sharp fight, some were killed and the rest captured. Among those arrested was William Fisher who would be hanged at Tyburn, his head spiked as a traitor on London Bridge.

Oldcastle managed to escape again. He spent the next four years flitting from one hiding place to another, in Kent, Hertfordshire and Yorkshire. Once, warned of a raid on his hiding place in a humble peasant’s cottage in St Albans, he evaded his pursuers by seconds, in his haste leaving religious books behind. They were found to have the pictures of the saints carefully defaced in accordance with Oldcastle’s Lollard beliefs. Finally, he made his way back to Herefordshire, his childhood home.

But Oldcastle was not a man to disappear quietly from history. Courageous, foolhardy, a fighter to the last, he continued to conspire from his rural backwater. Finally, in November 1417, his long escape came to an end. Hiding out with fellow Lollards in a woodland glade still known as ‘Cobham’s Garden’ on Pant-mawr farm, Broniarth, in mid-Wales, he arranged to meet a local landowner, Edward, Lord Charleton of Powys. Charleton decided to betray the old rebel, and arrived at the meeting with a band of armed retainers. There was a brief fight, ending only when Oldcastle was ‘sore wounded ere he would be taken’. He was secured and carried to London on a litter. There is some bitter satisfaction in the knowledge that the treacherous Welsh peer who betrayed him died of natural causes before he could claim his thirty pieces of silver – the 1,000-mark reward on Oldcastle’s head.

There were to be no more narrow escapes. Like Mortimer, Oldcastle
was returned to the Tower from which he had once fled, and condemned twice over. He was already a convicted heretic, and now he was a traitor too. As such he was to be doubly punished: burned as a heretic, hanged as a traitor. On 14 December 1417 he was taken from the Tower to St Giles’ Fields, the scene of the abortive Lollard plot in 1414. Here he was hanged over a burning pyre which eventually consumed both the gallant Sir John and the gallows he dangled from. Oldcastle died as steadfastly as he had lived – a premature Protestant martyr whose courage was only matched by his indiscretion. He deserves better than the caricature of Shakespeare’s buffoonish portrayal. Sir John Oldcastle was composed of the stuff of which true heroes are made.

Heroes and martyrs are not the exclusive property of any single denomination. In the great divide that opened in England in 1534 when Henry VIII broke with Rome, there were to be plentiful martyrs on both sides of the doctrinal schism. One prisoner of the Tower who managed to avoid an agonising death at the hands of a state which some 150 years after Oldcastle’s death had finally become Protestant, yet suffered a prolonged, painful martyrdom nonetheless, was the Jesuit priest Father John Gerard.

Like Oldcastle, Gerard, a big man physically and morally, was born with the martyrdom gene. By a huge irony, his grandfather, Thomas Gerrard, rector of All Hallows, Cheapside, was an early Protestant in the reign of Henry VIII. Thomas Gerrard was one of a group of Lutherans burned for heresy in Smithfield on 30 July 1540. John Gerard’s father, also called Thomas, was by contrast militantly Catholic and also suffered for his faith. He was imprisoned in the Tower for plotting to free Mary, Queen of Scots, as part of the Catholic Rising of the North against Elizabeth I in 1569.

Born in 1564, John Gerard was five years old at the time of his father’s arrest. Thomas Gerard was freed in 1573, and returned to his country estate at Bryn in Lancashire. John went up to Exeter College, Oxford aged twelve. Traditionalist Oxford was a hotbed of Catholicism, and so persuasive was the boy Gerard that he converted one of his tutors to the old faith. In 1577 he was sent down for refusing to attend an Anglican service, and successfully applied for a licence to continue his studies in Europe.

For three years he studied at the English College at Douai in the Spanish Netherlands. The college had been founded in 1568 by William Allen, an
exiled Oxford academic on a mission to overthrow Queen Elizabeth and return England to the Roman faith. Allen’s college trained scores of young English exiles as ‘seminary priests’ and returned them secretly to their native land. Allen fell under the potent influence of the Jesuits, the shock troops of the Counter-Reformation. Founded by the Spanish knight Ignatius Loyola in 1540, the Jesuits had a formidable (to their friends) or frightening (to their foes) reputation for semi-military discipline, doctrinal rigour, cunning guile and an austerely fanatical devotion to their faith.

Gerard decided to become a Jesuit priest but after unwisely returning to England, he was arrested and spent a year inside London’s fetid Marshalsea jail. The Marshalsea was bursting with fellow Catholics. In May 1584, one of them, the young Derbyshire squire Anthony Babington – later notorious for his plot to kill Elizabeth and put Mary, Queen of Scots on the throne – stood bail for Gerard, who immediately fled to France. Gerard was a young man in a hurry. He persuaded the Pope himself, Pius V, to grant him special dispensation to be ordained a Jesuit priest below the statutory age. Finally, on 15 August 1588, in the week that the Spanish Armada was defeated and dispersed, twenty-one-year-old Gerard was admitted to the priesthood along with another English Jesuit, Edward Oldcorne. A month and a half later, on 28 October, the two young men stood together on a Norfolk beach just south of Cromer. Their mission to reclaim their homeland had begun.

Gerard spent the next eight years living the hunted life of a priest on the run. His unquenchable faith helped him survive. A big, jovial bear of a man, he did not
look
like a priest. Dressed as an English gentleman he looked the part because he
was
the part. Moving from recusant house to house, he evaded the ever-eager armies of licensed ‘pursuivants’ – posses authorised to hunt down fugitive priests. It was a brutal cat-and-mouse game. Since the Armada, Catholics (like Western Communists in the Cold War) had become not just followers of an alien ideology but potential traitors – enemies within who, at any moment, could rise up to kill the queen and murder good Protestants in their beds.

Gerard’s autobiography reads like a memoir of an SOE agent in occupied Europe during the Second World War. There is the same mistrust: could the servant bringing the priest meals betray the presence of a mysterious stranger in the house? The same all-pervasive fear of detection and arrest. The same hurried secret meetings in supposedly safe houses. The same false names and identities. Instead of concealed radio sets and weapons
there are the hidden vestments, chalices and other telltale forbidden objects for conducting Mass. And there are the same artfully concealed hiding places.

Most of the ‘priest holes’ which litter the old Catholic houses of rural England were the work of one remarkable man: Nicholas Owen. Born in the early 1560s to a poor but devoutly Catholic Oxford family, little Owen – he may have been a dwarf, and he was certainly very small, a handicap he turned to advantage when constructing his priest holes – was a genius of carpentry. He knew how to create seamless joints invisible to the untrained eye; how to conceal a hide in a room with typically Tudor wooden panelling; how to build a staircase with a hidden chamber beneath.

Beginning in 1588, the fateful Armada year, for seventeen years Owen faithfully carried out his self-appointed task as hide builder to England’s embattled Catholics, often working with Gerard who said:

I verily think that no man can be said to have done more good of all those who laboured in the English vineyard. He was the immediate occasion of saving many hundreds of persons, both ecclesiastical and secular.

Owen passed from one house to another – linked beads along the rosary of Catholic homes in sore need of spiritual comfort – constructing his priest holes. Always working alone – for reasons of security – and often at night, Owen created scores of hiding places in ingenious locations. Many times he would build several priest holes per house, so artfully concealed that some may remain undiscovered to this day.

Eventually, in 1594, the Elizabethan state caught up with Gerard. Betrayed by John Frank, a trusted servant in an Essex house owned by a recusant family called Wiseman, Gerard had the narrowest of escapes from a persistent posse of pursuivants who surrounded the house at dawn on Easter Monday. They practically demolished the house around him. Sustained only by a jar of quince jelly, he successfully withstood a five-day ‘siege’ in one of Owen’s tiny hides without betraying his presence. After recovering from the ordeal, he and Owen – known to intimates as ‘Big John’ and ‘Little John’ – were smuggled to a safe town house in Holborn owned by the Wisemans.

Innocently, the family matriarch, Mrs Wiseman, sent the treacherous John Frank to Holborn with a letter for Gerard. The servant delivered his message late on 23 April, and then hurried off to alert the authorities.
Two hours later, Gerard and Owen were woken by a thunderous midnight knocking. There were no priest holes to hide in, and their bedchamber had only one door. As Owen hastily burned Mrs Wiseman’s incriminating letter, the pursuivants burst into the room. Gerard and Owen were prisoners.

Taken to the Counter prison in London’s Poultry, they were separated, and the questioning began. An obvious gentleman, Gerard was treated gently at first, though Owen was more roughly handled. Gerard stoutly denied his real identity until proofs – provided by Frank – were presented to him. He continued to shield the Wisemans from suspicion, thereby saving their lives. At this point, Gerard was confronted with Elizabethan England’s torturer-in-chief, Richard Topcliffe. This man, MP for Old Sarum, was chief persecutor of England’s embattled Catholics. He enjoyed the queen’s trust, and received official permission to set up a private torture chamber in his Westminster home. Topcliffe was terrifying enough to make the strongest captive quail. ‘I am Topcliffe!’ the persecutor announced as he entered Gerard’s cell. Slapping his sword on a table for dramatic effect, he added menacingly, ‘No doubt you have heard people talking about me.’ But Gerard was not intimidated. ‘His acting was lost on me,’ he recalled. ‘I was not in the least frightened.’ In fact, claimed Gerard, to show his defiance he was ‘deliberately rude’ to his tormentor. To put extra pressure on the priest, both Owen and Richard Fulwood – Gerard’s servant, hauled in by the relentless Topcliffe in another raid – were tortured using the manacles, a simple but fiendishly effective device introduced into the English penal system by Topcliffe himself.

The manacles or gauntlets consisted of a pair of handcuffs, jointed in the middle like a horse’s bit. The victim was suspended by his wrists from a hook high on the wall while standing on wooden blocks. The blocks were then removed, leaving the unfortunate prisoner dangling, suspended from his pinioned wrists. According to Gerard, both Owen and Fulwood were subjected to this agonising torture for a full three hours.

After more than two months of fruitless questioning in the Counter prison – ‘Only my priesthood could be proved against me,’ commented Gerard tersely – his fellow Catholics managed to bribe a senior legal official to get Gerard transferred to the milder regime of the Clink jail. The Clink was a prison in the maze of alleys on the south bank of the Thames close to where the Globe theatre was packing in the groundlings to see Shakespeare’s new plays. Gerard said of the transfer that it was ‘a
translation from Purgatory to Paradise’. The Clink was crammed with Catholics, who by bribery and blackmail had forced their jailers to give them the free run of the prison. They were thus able to plot and communicate with their co-religionists in the outside world without interference. Gerard was even able to arrange safe houses for fellow priests newly arrived from Europe while in the Clink.

But such liberty would not last. In April 1597 the authorities belatedly woke up to the fact that Gerard was continuing his conspiratorial work despite having been in their custody for three years. Once again, he had been betrayed. The agent of his downfall was probably a fellow Catholic priest and Clink inmate, Robert Barwise. Gerard was promptly sent to the tender mercies of the Tower of London’s torturers.

Gerard was immured in the Salt Tower, on the south-eastern corner of the fortress’s Inner Ward. Daylight revealed the evidence of fellow Catholics who had been lodged in the same grim chamber. Prominent on the wall was carved the name ‘HENRY WALPOLE’ – still clearly visible to Tower visitors today. The man who had laboriously chiselled out his signature was a fellow Jesuit priest who had spent more than a year in the Tower being tortured by Topcliffe, before being taken to York and hanged in 1595. Putting Gerard in the martyr’s old cell was probably intended as psychological torture, but the robust priest took it more positively. Merely seeing Walpole’s name, he said, had given him comfort to be in ‘a place sanctified by this great and holy martyr’.