Tower: An Epic History of the Tower of London (55 page)

Parry was arrested, taken to the Tower and executed in March 1585. Nevill did not share his fate, but the authorities decided that, while no danger to the state, this potential troublemaker was best kept in custody. So he lingered in a kind of limbo in the Tower, as the days stretched into weeks, the weeks into months, then into years. But Edmund Nevill was a patient man, and a resourceful one. Once he realised that his imprisonment could last indefinitely, he decided to escape. He had been given fairly free rein in the Tower, and was frequently allowed out of his cell in St Thomas’s Tower above Traitor’s Gate to exercise. He built up an intimate knowledge of the fortress’s geography, and during his wanderings picked up various odds and ends, including scraps of metal which he fashioned into that traditional escaper’s tool: a file.

Working methodically and quietly night after night, Nevill sawed through the bars of his cell window. Choosing a moonless night for his
escape, he silently squeezed through and jumped down to the ground. Only the Tower’s outer curtain wall stood between him and freedom. He had studied its masonry and selected a point where the stonework was rough and offered handholds. The old soldier was an athletic man, and he sprang lithely over the wall before sliding quietly into the stagnant and slimy moat and swimming across. Dripping, stinking, but exultant, he emerged on the other side. Edmund Nevill was free.

It was morning before he was missed. Immediately a hue and cry was raised and travellers leaving London were stopped and searched. But Nevill was already clear of the city and heading for the coast. Some 6 miles from the capital he was forced by hunger to stop at a village shop for food and drink. Here he was overtaken by a horseman from London who had heard of the escape. Nevill’s wet clothes, encrusted with the moat’s malodorous mud, betrayed him. He was arrested and returned to the Tower.

Back in his old cell, Edmund was shackled with heavy leg irons during the day, and as an extra punishment, a wooden block replaced the pillow on his bed. More months and years passed, and the vigilance of his jailers inevitably relaxed with time. In 1588 Edmund successfully applied for his wife Jane to be allowed to visit him, and in September 1590, his former privilege of having the ‘libertie of the Tower’ was restored.

Edmund had either kept his old file or made a new one, and once more set to work on an escape plan. He also had a rope that his wife had smuggled into his cell. Again, he chose a dark night to effect his exit. Scrambling silently out of his cell window after removing the bars he had previously filed through, again he crossed to the curtain wall and hurled his rope, with a grappling hook attached, to the top and heaved himself up. So far, his luck had held. But it was about to run out.

He had intended using the rope to descend the wall, but to his horror, found it much too short. He would have to jump into the moat with an unpleasantly loud splash, shattering the quiet of the night. The sentries inside the Tower heard the splash, and went out to investigate as Edmund desperately struck out for the far bank. He hit the other side ahead of the pursuing guards. Quick as a flash, he adopted the guise of an indignant member of the public chasing an escapee, and set off in hot pursuit of his imaginary quarry with loud cries of ‘Stop!’ But long confinement and his soggy clothes slowed Edmund down. He
was brought to the ground by a fleet-footed turnkey. His second escape had been foiled.

Back in his cell, heavily shackled as before, Edmund rethought his tactics. He recognised that subtler methods would be needed if he was to be lucky a third time. Patient as ever, he formulated a new plan and began to work towards its fulfilment in 1596. His first step, as with Gerard, was to trick his jailer, Henry Frewen. He adopted the habit, every time Frewen entered his cell, of sitting, silent and motionless, against his cell window. Over weeks, Frewen grew used to seeing his prisoner brooding over his fate, and hardly gave Edmund a second glance. Using material and straw that he had laboriously collected, Edmund made a dummy mannequin, roughly his own size. He dressed it in his clothes, sat it in his usual window seat, leaning forward as if lost in thought, and, as a final touch, masked the model by draping his velvet cloak around its shoulders.

Then he put the next stage of his plan into operation. His deceptively simple idea was to change his identity from Edmund Nevill, Tower political prisoner, to Edmund Nevill, jobbing Tower blacksmith. He had carefully carved a set of farrier’s tools in wood, smearing them with polish to give a dark metallic sheen, and had sewn a blacksmith’s apron from strips of leather and cloth. Hanging his fake ‘tools’ from a belt, he rolled up his sleeves, rubbed dirt, dust and polish into his face and forearms as if he had come straight from his forge, and waited for Frewen’s familiar steps climbing the steep spiral staircase to his door.

As he heard the approaching turnkey, Edmund hid in an alcove behind the cell door. The keys rattled, the bolts shot, and the door swung open, hiding Edmund, as the warder entered carrying his food. As Frewen, half-aware of Edmund’s familiar figure in the window, moved across the cell, the real Edmund tiptoed nimbly around the open door and darted down the stairs. Once in the open air, he began to stroll towards the main Tower gateway as casually as he could. Freedom must have again seemed so close that Edmund only had to seize it.

A woman suddenly appeared, nosily quizzing the ‘blacksmith’ as to his identity and business. As Edmund started to stutter an explanation, a breathless Frewen appeared in the doorway. The dummy had not fooled him for long and Edmund’s ruse had been discovered. Sadly, the serial escaper was returned to his cell. Now, however, an end was at last in sight. Perhaps recognising that whatever danger Edmund had once posed to the
state had long passed, in 1598 the authorities released him after thirteen years’ incarceration. He left England with his wife and their seven children, and spent the rest of his life doggedly – but unsuccessfully – pursuing his claim to be recognised as the successor of his cousin Charles as 7th Earl of Westmorland.

Despite acknowledging the validity of Edmund’s claim, the mean-spirited James I refused to grant it, and Edmund remained in exile until his death in Brussels in 1640, forty-two years after gaining his freedom from the Tower. We can still admire his dauntless spirit today – and in person, in the shape of his magnificent effigy, kneeling opposite his faithful wife Jane, surrounded by their three sons and four daughters. The monument, which stands in the twelfth-century parish church of St Mary Magdalene in East Ham in London’s east end, reads:

IN MEMORIA SACRUM

In memory of The Right Honourable EDMOND NEVILL Lord Latimer, Earl of Westmorland, and Dam Jane his wife with the memorials of their seven children. Which Edmond was lineally descended from the honorable blood of Kings and princes in ye line of ye 7th Earl of Westmorland of the name of Nevill
.

The story of two royal lovers star-crossed in a way that Romeo and Juliet could not have imagined is one of the Tower’s most tragic tales. Lady Arbella Stuart and her husband William Seymour might have known that their match would end in tears if they had studied the bloody history of their own respective families more closely. But we can salute their courage in attempting to escape the chains that genes, history and a poisonously vile king wrapped around them.

The couple had much in common, including ties of blood. They were both Tudors, being directly descended from sisters of Henry VIII. Arbella was the great-granddaughter of Henry’s elder sister Margaret, Queen of Scotland; William was the great-great-grandson of Henry’s younger sister Mary, Duchess of Suffolk. Bloodshed and violence had blighted both their family lines. Arbella was also the niece of Mary, Queen of Scots and her husband Henry Darnley. Thus, fatally for her future, she was first cousin to that ill-starred couple’s son, King James. Arbella’s grandmother, Margaret Douglas, had also been flung in the Tower by her own uncle, Henry VIII, when the old tyrant had found out about her unsuitable love
affair with Lord Thomas Howard – who, unforgiven by the king, had died there of jail fever in 1537.

The closer that young lovers were to the throne in Tudor and Jacobean England, the more their passion could bring them to the Tower – and the grave. William’s paternal great-grandfather, Edward Seymour, Duke of Somerset – Protector of England under his nephew, the boy king Edward VI – had been imprisoned in the Tower and executed on Tower Hill; while his maternal grandmother, Lady Catherine Grey, had been imprisoned in the Tower by Queen Elizabeth for her temerity in marrying his grandfather, Ned Seymour, and what was worse, falling pregnant. Both grandparents, as we have seen, had been jailed in the Tower – never meeting again after they had unwisely conceived a second child in the fortress. Undaunted by the unfortunate example of his grandparents, William Seymour was also to aim high for love, only to fall and yet rise again.

Born in 1575, and orphaned as a young child, Arbella had been brought up by a quintessential Elizabethan great lady, Elizabeth Talbot, Countess of Shrewsbury, known as ‘Bess of Hardwick’, her domineering maternal grandmother. Escaping from Bess’s tyranny in 1603 when her cousin James succeeded Queen Elizabeth on the English throne, the plain and sickly Arbella came to court hoping that the king would help her make a good marriage. However, the king’s mind was poisoned by rumours that she could become an alternate candidate for the English throne. Marriage negotiations with various candidates came to nothing, and in 1510 a desperate and now ageing Arbella (she was thirty-four, ancient for a royal bride) married twenty-two-year-old William Seymour, a man she barely knew, at dead of night in Greenwich Palace. When he found out a fortnight later, King James flew into a furious rage, and ordered the newly-weds’ immediate arrest for daring to marry without his permission. William was flung into the Tower, while Arbella was placed under house arrest across the Thames in Lambeth.

At first William was comfortably housed in the lodgings of the Tower lieutenant, Sir William Wade. However, the hard-faced lieutenant made an uncongenial host, and William was soon removed to St Thomas’s Tower. Seymour’s room had windows overlooking the river on one side, and on the other over the short raised walkway from the Bloody Tower known as Ralegh’s Walk, where the redoubtable Elizabethan adventurer – the Tower’s most distinguished current resident – stretched his legs during his long confinement.

To make his quarters homelier, Seymour borrowed furniture, costly tapestries, silver plate, candlesticks and fine linen from Arbella’s house; and was loaned a substantial sum by his grandfather, the Earl of Hertford. William’s marriage with the semi-royal Arbella had given him credit with local tradesmen who loaned him cash and goods to make his spartan cell comfortable. And he was also given the ‘Libertie of the Tower’ – that precious freedom to wander at will within the fortress’s precincts. Like Edmund Nevill, he would put his liberty to good use.

Poor Arbella, always mentally frail, was driven to the brink of madness by the enforced separation from her new husband. She wrote pathetic, distracted pleas to the hard-hearted king, begging to be forgiven and reunited with William. Almost a year passed with no response. Then, driven by desperation, Arbella got her servants to row her across the river to St Thomas’s Tower, and, standing on the wharf, spoke to Seymour through his cell window. The king got to hear of the clandestine meeting and was vexed to renewed fury. He ordered Arbella north in the care of the Bishop of Durham. The sick woman got no further than Highgate before an onset of alarming symptoms, including the purple-coloured urine typical of the ‘royal malady’ porphyria, halted her progress. Her physician, Dr Moundford, told an enraged James that she could not physically go further, and she was taken to a Parson Adams’s house in Barnet to recuperate.

At this point, Arbella’s fabulously wealthy aunt, Mary Talbot, Countess of Shrewsbury, like some fairy godmother, took an ostensibly benevolent interest in her niece’s desperate situation. The countess was cut from the same tough cloth as her mother, Bess of Hardwick. Possibly genuinely motivated by pity for the young couple, but more probably hoping to advance herself using them as her instruments, she came to the rescue. After failing in her own attempt to obtain a pardon for the miscreants from the malevolent king, she resolved to spirit both Arbella and Seymour out of the country beyond James’s reach.

The countess set in motion a complex escape plan costing thousands of pounds. A French ship and crew were hired; officials were bribed; and clandestine meetings set up to ensure that everyone involved – especially the two principals – knew exactly what they had to do. But there were fundamental flaws in the countess’s over-elaborate scheme. Too many people were in the know: no fewer than nine of the couple’s servants and
attendants were involved in the double escape, plus a score of sailors and watermen. And fatally, there was no provision for a fallback Plan B should Arbella and William fail to meet at their agreed rendezvous. Inevitably, given that so many things could go wrong, something did.

All began well. On Monday 3 June 1611, Arbella told her Barnet hostess, Mrs Adams, that she intended to go out in disguise that night to meet her husband, returning early in the morning. Spurred by sympathy for the romantic assignation, Mrs Adams helped Arbella don her drag: a man’s doublet and a long peruke wig, topped off with a black slouch hat; with showy long red-topped yellow boots, a cloak and a rapier sword. Accompanied by a servant, William Markham, Arbella set off for ‘a sorry inn’ where she was to pick up horses hired by Hugh Crompton, another servant.

The ostler holding the horses noted the bizarre appearance of the ‘gentleman’ mounting the gelding. Observing Arbella as she awkwardly sat astride the beast (she would previously only have ridden a ladylike side-saddle), the man doubted out loud whether they would make it to London. Undaunted, Arbella wobbled off with Crompton and Markham riding beside her. After a fourteen-mile cross-country journey they arrived in time for the six o’clock rendezvous at a riverside tavern in Blackwall where she was due to meet William. Here, as arranged, were two of William’s servants, Edward Reeves and Edward Kirton, along with Arbella’s lady-in-waiting Ann Bradshaw. The little group settled down to wait for William to appear.