Tower: An Epic History of the Tower of London (57 page)

On 9 March 1649 Capel was brought to the block in New Palace Yard, Westminster. He walked to the scaffold through Westminster Hall ‘saluting his friends with a serene and undaunted countenance’. On the eve of his execution he had written movingly to his wife, ‘I shall leave thee my dear children; in them I live with thee; and leave thee to the protection of a most gracious God.’ He was accompanied to the scaffold by the Bishop of Winchester, Dr Morley, who described the parting from his ‘most dear lady’ as ‘the saddest spectacle I ever beheld’. Capel told his seventeen-year-old son, another Arthur, not to seek revenge for his death, and in a passionate speech to the crowd who had gathered to see him die, told them his only crime had been obedience to his lawful sovereign. He concluded by calling on them to give their allegiance to the new King Charles II, ‘a prince endowed with all those virtues which could make a nation happy’.

Missing the executioner among the crowd on the scaffold he asked, ‘Where is the gentleman?’ and when Richard Brandon, the headsman, came forward to ask the customary forgiveness from his victim, Capel
replied, ‘I forgive thee from my soul,’ and gave him a £5 tip to perform his work well. Brandon duly struck off Capel’s head with one stroke – as he had cleanly executed the king a few weeks previously – and Capel’s body was borne back to his Essex home for burial. Brandon himself died later that year, some said from remorse. The boatman who had betrayed Capel, it was said, ‘became the scorn and contempt of everybody, and lived afterwards in shame and misery’.

At the Restoration of Charles II, the king made young Arthur Capel the Earl of Essex – like William Seymour, Capel senior had been a tutor to the young prince during the Civil War. Lady Elizabeth Capel had died early that year and was buried with her husband in St Cecilia’s Church in Little Hadham.

John Lambert was one of the most attractive and able figures to emerge from the Civil War. Next to Fairfax and Cromwell himself, Lambert was the Parliamentarian officer arguably most endowed with military gifts, and his political skills exceeded those of the often clumsy protector, though in the end he found himself on the wrong side of history as public opinion reacted against the grim years of Puritan military rule.

Born into the Yorkshire gentry, Lambert learned his soldiering skills from his fellow Yorkshireman, Thomas Fairfax. Still under thirty when the war ended, Lambert transferred his loyalty to Cromwell, and was his trusted lieutenant in the great victories over the Scots and Royalists at Preston, Dunbar and Worcester. Popular in the army, and a moderate Republican in politics, Lambert seemed set fair to succeed Cromwell as Lord Protector, but he fell out with his chief for political as well as personal reasons. Handsome, vain and self-important, Lambert made little secret of his ambitions to succeed Cromwell, and was instrumental in blocking Oliver’s acceptance of Parliament’s offer of the crown: a slight which the Lord Protector never forgave.

Cromwell took his revenge in 1658, and Lambert was briskly removed from his posts in Parliament and the army – though compensated with a generous pension – shortly before the Lord Protector’s death. Lambert retired with his wife Frances and children to his house in Wimbledon, but re-emerged on to the political stage after the fall of Cromwell’s son Richard is 1659. One of the ruling Council of State, Lambert attempted to impose a new military dictatorship. But the zeitgeist had turned decisively against military rule, and was increasingly flowing towards a Royalist restoration.

After crushing Booth’s Royalist revolt near Manchester in 1659, Lambert was comprehensively outmanoeuvred by the secretly Royalist General Monck, deserted by the troops who had once adored him, and finally, in January 1660, as a result of Monck’s machinations, sent to the Tower by Parliament – who resented Lambert for having once dissolved it in the high-handed Cromwellian style. Without the attractive figurehead of Lambert to lead it, Republican resistance to Monck’s Royalism faded away, and by April the Restoration was a done deal: Charles II would return from his long exile the next month.

Brooding in his cell in St Thomas’s Tower – where Nevill and William Seymour had been confined before him – Lambert resolved to prevent this ‘happy return’ at the eleventh hour. Aided by Republican sympathisers, he plotted his escape with his customary military skill. A rope – woven from silk by ‘a lady’ for a £100 fee – was smuggled into the general’s cell, and on the overcast evening of 10 April, at about 8 p.m., Lambert left his cell by the window, whose bars had been pre-loosened. Handkerchiefs wrapped round his hands to prevent friction burns, he slithered down the rope, scaled the curtain wall, and, avoiding the sentries on the wharf, met up with half a dozen old Cromwellians waiting to receive him on the river with a hired barge.

Behind him in his cell bed, Lambert had left an extra precaution against early discovery – his bed maker, a girl named Joan, whom the handsome general had charmed into assisting his getaway. Joan, her features hidden under Lambert’s woollen nightcap, and her voice muffled by the bed curtains, had gruffly acknowledged the jailer’s cheery ‘Goodnight, my Lord’ when the turnkey did his rounds and locked ‘Lambert’ in for the night. The escape was not discovered, nor the alarm raised, until the same warder returned in the morning, and, to his dumbfounded astonishment, found Joan’s face staring out at him from under General Lambert’s nightcap. ‘In the name of God, Joan,’ cried the astonished jailer, ‘what makes you here?’ The answer we can only imagine.

With a £100 reward on his head, Lambert lay low in a Republican safe house somewhere in the labyrinth of London’s pre-Great Fire streets. As with the Elizabethan Catholics in the previous century, the Puritan Roundheads were now an unpopular minority, stubbornly clinging to their rigid beliefs against the prevailing Royalist reaction. But since the whole purpose of Lambert’s escape had been a political one – to rally the scattered supporters of the ‘good old cause’ for one glorious last stand, he
could not stay underground indefinitely. From his hiding place word went out for his old army comrades to rendezvous with him in the English Midlands, a conveniently central spot for rekindling the flickering embers of Republican resistance. And what better place, the romantic general decided, for a muster point, than the old battlefield of Edgehill?

The escarpment of Edgehill near Kineton in Warwickshire was crowded with ghosts. This was the place where, nearly two decades before, in October 1642, the first pitched battle of the Civil War had taken place, and freeborn Englishmen had flung down the gauntlet of revolt against a tyrannical King Charles I. So the summons went out. It was impossible to gather a substantial body of men without the government hearing about it, and Monck, effectively dictator of England as he awaited the return of the king, dispatched an old comrade to intercept Lambert before he reached the rendezvous.

Colonel Sir Richard Ingoldsby was a particularly piquant choice for the delicate task. For he was a regicide – one of the officers who had signed King Charles I’s death warrant. As such, he feared for his future under the regime of the son of the king whose head he had helped cut off. Therefore Ingoldsby was anxious to ingratiate himself with the new masters by foiling his old friends.

By the time Ingoldsby’s two regiments caught up with Lambert near Daventry, the general had been joined by six troops of horse under John Okey, an unreconstructed Republican diehard and regicide who had commanded the Roundhead dragoons at the battle of Naseby. Ingoldsby rode up and down the lines haranguing Lambert’s men. Did they, he demanded, want to restart the Civil War? None did, and their drawn pistols gradually dipped towards the ground as they gave up the fight. There would be no repetition of Edgehill. As his men melted away, Lambert himself took off across the fields mounted on a Barbary stallion. But the galloping horse became bogged down in a ploughed meadow, and Lambert was overtaken and rearrested. The implacable Ingoldsby refused his old comrade’s pleas to release him.

As they rode back towards London and the Tower, crowds gathered at Northampton to jeer the fallen hero. Their hoots led Lambert to recall a happier day in 1650, when he and Cromwell had ridden out of London together at the start of their victorious campaign in Scotland, to the cheers of a crowd. Naively, he had observed to Cromwell that he was glad they
had the nation on their side. The cynical Oliver had replied, ‘Do not trust to that; for these very persons would shout just as much if you and I were going to be hanged.’ Since execution was now his likely fate, concluded Lambert, he had added the mantle of prophet to all Cromwell’s other admired attributes.

In fact, John Lambert escaped execution, probably because he had not been a regicide. Ingoldsby, who had been, duly won forgiveness from the king for nipping the revolt in the bud. Returned to the Tower, Lambert was tried for treason and sentenced to perpetual imprisonment, serving the first part of his sentence at Guernsey’s Castle Cornet in the Channel Islands. His wife Frances secured permission to join him at the forbidding fortress and he was given freedom to roam the castle grounds, which led to another – unsuccessful – escape attempt in 1670. Brought back to England, he was more closely confined in another island fortress, that of St Nicholas (now called Drake’s Island) in Plymouth Sound.

Here Frances brought their ten children – for Lambert was yet another fertile Tower escaper – to visit their father. But when his loyal wife died at Christmas 1676, Lambert’s mind gave way, and the lonely prisoner lapsed into intermittent madness. He must have had lucid moments, however, for in 1683, after nearly a quarter of a century’s confinement, Lambert was visited by the man responsible for his sentence – Charles II himself, along with his brother James, Duke of York. They are reported to have spent more than an hour chatting with the last of their father’s Roundhead foes. The following year, still a prisoner, John Lambert found the ultimate release of death.

At first, in the reaction against the harshness of Cromwell’s rule, Charles II carried all before him. But lively Protestant fears of the influence of French and Spanish Catholicism – Charles’s brother and heir James and his queen, Catherine, were open Catholics, Charles himself a covert one – persisted. Such fears of a new royal tyranny, and a nostalgia for the political and religious radicalism of the 1640s and ’50s coalesced into a powerful opposition who began to call themselves ‘Whigs’. They had their first success in 1678–9 with the Popish Plot, a manifestation of widespread anti-Catholic paranoia, which saw several innocent Catholic peers executed and a serious attempt made to exclude James from the succession in favour of Charles’s illegitimate Protestant son, James, Duke of Monmouth.

But the Popish Plot and the Exclusion Crisis passed when Charles and
his court party – increasingly known as ‘Tories’ – turned the tables on the Whigs and engineered the exile of their chief, the Earl of Shaftesbury, after he had briefly tasted the Tower. Left leaderless, the Whig lords turned to conspiracy – or talking about it in their taverns and coffee-houses. But Charles, a canny and cynical political operator, trounced his Whig enemies by linking their harmless grumbling with a genuine – albeit botched – plot by Roundhead veterans to assassinate him and his brother in Hertfordshire on their return from horse racing at Newmarket. The smashing of this Rye House Plot, and the arrest of its instigators, gave Charles a perfect excuse to round up the Whig lords, hotheads who dreamed of deposing the monarchy and restoring an ideal republic.

The five Whig leaders, Lord Howard of Escrick, Algernon Sidney, Lord Russell, Lord Gerard and Forde, Lord Grey de Werke, were arrested and locked in the Tower. Another peer, Arthur Capel, the Earl of Essex, was a surprising recruit to the plotters’ ranks, and provides a tragic and mysterious coda to the death of his namesake father thirty years before. For this Arthur Capel was the same youth whom we last saw bidding a sad farewell to his father on the scaffold before the Cavalier’s execution.

Capel junior had served Charles II as faithfully as his father had served the ‘Merry Monarch’s’ father. He rose to be Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, sticking out among the crooked Restoration placemen for his honesty and efficiency. Fatally for him, however, he crossed the king’s notoriously corrupt mistress, Barbara Villiers, Duchess of Cleveland, by refusing to sanction her land grab for Dublin’s Phoenix Park. In revenge, she had him removed from his post. An embittered Essex, always a staunch Protestant, now joined the Whig opposition. Although not directly involved with the Rye House Plot, he was arrested in its wake and was cruelly – and doubtless deliberately – confined in the same room in the Tower between the Lieutenant’s Lodgings and the Beauchamp Tower that his father had occupied.

Three days later, on 13 July 1683, King Charles and his brother James, Duke of York, visited the Tower for the first time in years. The ostensible purpose of the trip was to inspect some new ordnance, but the royal visit coincided with the confinement of the Whig lords in the fortress, and the real agenda was to gloat over the humbling of their enemies. After the visit, as the royal party were embarking on their barge, escorted by the Tower lieutenant, Captain Tom Cheek, a cry of ‘Murder! Murder!’ was heard from inside the fortress.

In his locked and blood-spattered room, the Earl of Essex was found dead – his throat slashed by a razor. The wound, inflicted with extraordinary violence, had severed both jugular veins, his windpipe and oesophagus, and extended as far back as his spine, nearly decapitating him as his father had been beheaded before him. The king professed to be distressed when he heard the news. He claimed that he would not have had Essex put to death with his fellow Whigs over the Rye House Plot because ‘I owed him a life’. Charles was clearly still mindful of the services the elder Arthur Capel had rendered to his father and himself.

The Earl of Essex’s death remains one of the Tower’s most perplexing unsolved mysteries. Those who suspect murder have some compelling evidence: two children playing on Tower Green said they had seen a mysterious hand toss a bloody razor from the earl’s window onto the grass, just after hearing cries and the sounds of a scuffle. The blade, still bloody and wet, had instantly, they added, been retrieved by a maid and returned to the earl’s room. A soldier claimed that two mysterious strangers had been admitted to the lodgings just before the shouts of ‘Murder!’. Moreover, the medical evidence was odd: could a razor, wielded by the victim himself, really have cut through the neck to the backbone, inflicting wounds so deep that ‘an executioner with an axe could hardly have done more’?