Tower: An Epic History of the Tower of London (62 page)

Eventually, he threw himself on the king’s mercy, gambling that the fit of rage in which the king had ordered Buckingham’s arrest had probably passed. Buckingham was again ordered to the Tower. However, the manner of his entry suggests that he knew his stay within its walls would be as
short as usual. He journeyed there by coach, accompanied by a group of hard-drinking cronies, and, as they passed through Bishopsgate, stopped for dinner and more alcoholic refreshment at the Sun Inn. A crowd gathered, and Buckingham played up to his public by bowing to his admiring audience from the tavern’s balcony. Samuel Pepys recorded in his diary that the duke sent word ahead to the Tower apologising for his delayed arrival, and promising that he would be there as soon as he had dined. On 12 July 1667, Pepys also recorded the sequel to Buckingham’s last Tower stay:

The Duke of Buckingham was before the Council the other day, and there did carry it very submissively and pleasingly to the King …

Two days later Buckingham was freed.

A decade later, Pepys himself would have good cause to regret that Buckingham had got off so lightly. He had already experienced the duke’s spite and the damage it could do. In 1668 he realised that Buckingham was targeting one of his own patrons on the Navy Board, Lord William Coventry, for destruction, noting that the duke ‘will ruin Coventry if he can’. Buckingham had both a personal and a political grudge against Coventry. Politically, Buckingham opposed the succession of Charles’s Catholic brother James, whose secretary and ally Coventry had been. Personally, Coventry had been on the Select Commission that had interrogated Buckingham during his most recent incarceration in the Tower. For taking part in this humiliating procedure, Buckingham would not forgive him.

Buckingham’s method of attack was subtle. A patron of the Restoration stage, the duke turned playwright himself. In 1668 he wrote a comedy,
The Country Gentleman
, which mocked Coventry as a character called Sir Cautious Trouble-All, a fussy little bureaucrat who had invented a circular desk with a hole in the middle in which he could sit, turning this way and that to deal with the piles of paper surrounding him. Since Coventry had proudly invented just such a desk himself, and had shown it off to – among others – Pepys (who recorded it in his diary), the insult was obvious. Getting wind of the play while it was still in rehearsal, the offended official complained to Charles, who demanded the script from Buckingham. Artfully, the duke presented his play to the king – minus the scene in which Sir Cautious appeared. Finding the text innocuous, Charles told
Coventry to bother him no more. Enraged, Coventry next turned to Tom Killigrew, manager of the King’s House Theatre where the play was about to open. He threatened that he would pay thugs to slit the nose of any actor daring to mock him on the stage. When this too failed to halt the production (Killigrew knew that Buckingham, with his underworld contacts like Blood, could far outdo Coventry in the matter of hiring hoodlums), Coventry challenged the duke to a duel.

This was a fantastically foolish move. Buckingham was one of the deadliest duellists in the land, and had recently killed Francis Talbot, the 11th Earl of Shrewsbury, in a duel, by running him through with a rapier. The earl had had the misfortune to be the cuckolded husband of Buckingham’s long-term mistress, Anna, Countess of Shrewsbury, an open affair which scandalised even a Restoration court noted for its sexual loucheness. It was rumoured that the countess had held the horses while her lover had fought it out with her husband, and after the former had killed the latter, had joyously ridden off with the victor. Although Buckingham would doubtless have been happy to administer the same cold steel to Coventry, this scandal was still too recent for him to risk skewering a second peer. Instead he reported Coventry’s challenge to the king.

Not only was duelling between privy councillors illegal, Charles had also specifically commanded Coventry to drop his complaints about the play. Furious at this direct defiance, the king had Coventry committed to the Tower. Coventry’s friends were so appalled at the way he had been treated that they literally queued up to visit him there. One visitor was Pepys, who counted no fewer than sixty coaches drawn up outside the fortress, before going in to see his friend at his cell in the Brick Tower. They ‘walked and talked … an hour alone, from one good thing to another’. The diarist well knew who was behind Coventry’s persecution, commenting, ‘The Duke of Buckingham will be so flushed.’ Coventry’s friends, including the king’s brother James, succeeded in obtaining his release from the Tower. But although he remained an MP, his career was ruined. It was now dangerous for an ambitious man on the make like Pepys to be seen with Coventry – and he made an excuse to avoid accompanying the fallen statesman on one of their formerly habitual strolls through St James’s Park. As for Buckingham’s offending play, having served its malign purpose, it was refused a licence and not performed.

Like Coventry, Pepys had been one of the Duke of York’s men since
James’s appointment as Lord High Admiral to run the navy. But in the wake of the 1678 Popish Plot, associates of the duke were in danger of arrest, ruin and even death. Pepys knew that to incur the enmity of Buckingham was dangerous. But the rakish duke and he were on opposite sides of the growing political gulf dividing England. For, although not a Catholic himself, in the eyes of the Protestant Whigs, anyone as closely linked to the Duke of York as Pepys was guilty by association. As the diarist wrote to York, ‘For, whether I will or no, a Papist I must be because favoured by your Royal Highness.’ Now it was Pepys’s turn to be devoured by wolves – and thrown into the Tower.

Pepys was familiar enough with both the benign and the malign aspects of the Tower before he joined the long list of its prisoners. As an ambitious young man taking his first steps in his civil service career he had curried favour with Lord Montagu, his boss in the Navy Office, by taking some of Montagu’s ten children to visit the menagerie there.

In 1662 Pepys was back at the Tower on another mission for Montagu, now ennobled as the Earl of Sandwich. His mentor had received a report that Sir John Barkstead, Tower lieutenant under Cromwell, and a regicide, had buried thousands of pounds in gold coins (the alleged amount ranged between £7,000 and £50,000) in butter barrels inside the fortress when he realised that the political winds were shifting and he was about to lose his job. Barkstead had then fled into exile in Germany. But he was lured back to his doom by another former Cromwellian, Sir George Downing, England’s ambassador in the Netherlands. To cement his credentials as a born-again Royalist, this reptilian individual – the man whose name is immortalised in the street where Britain’s prime ministers reside, which he once owned – set a trap for Barkstead and two other exiled regicides, Colonel John Okey and Miles Corbet, and arrested them at their lodgings in Delft as they relaxed over beer and tobacco.

The betrayal of Downing was particularly repellent as he himself had served as chaplain in Okey’s regiment during their Cromwellian days. The three regicides were shipped back to Britain, and held in the Tower before suffering hanging, drawing and quartering at Tyburn. Pepys saw them taken to their deaths and remarked that ‘they all looked very cheerful’ considering the circumstances. Pepys, who owed his early rise in the Admiralty to Downing’s patronage, nevertheless called his former boss ‘a perfidious rogue’ and ‘a low villain’ for his triple abduction. Fearing
that the funeral of the popular Okey would turn into a riot by Cromwellian sympathisers, King Charles broke his word to Okey’s widow and refused to release the body to her for burial. Instead, his mutilated corpse was transported back to the Tower where it was secretly interred. Barkstead, a notably cruel persecutor of Royalist prisoners during his time running the Tower, was treated with even less respect. His head was spiked on a pole and mounted on St Thomas’s Tower looking over the river.

Pepys’s current boss, Lord Montagu, was himself a former Cromwellian loyalist who, like Downing, had accommodated himself to the new Royalist regime. Professing to believe the story of Barkstead’s hidden gold – for Cromwell’s lieutenant had received the substantial salary of £2,000 per annum as reward for his distasteful duties at the Tower – Montagu ordered Pepys to conduct a detailed search for the buried treasure. King Charles II, always short of cash, authorised the hunt on condition that he received a generous cut of any money found.

On 30 October 1661, six months after Barkstead’s grisly end, Pepys presented himself to the Tower’s constable and lieutenant, Sir John Robinson (who combined the two jobs with that of Lord Mayor of London), and began his quest. Wade and Evett, the two men whose story had sparked the search, took Pepys and his digging party, equipped with picks and shovels, to the vaulted basement of the Bell Tower, Sir Thomas More’s grim prison. Here they started to dig in the earthen floor. Five hours of frantic excavation produced much sweat and cursing and a large heap of turned soil and stones – but no sign of gold. Frustrated, but undaunted, Pepys entrusted the Bell Tower’s key to Robinson’s deputy governor – ‘Lord, what a young, simple, fantastic coxcomb,’ as he characteristically described him in the diary – promising to return and continue the search.

Two days later, he was back. Three more hours of digging produced the same negative results as before. Pepys adjourned to the nearby Dolphin Tavern with Wade and Evett to question them more closely. They promised to bring their witness – a woman who claimed to have been Barkstead’s mistress – to their next digging session. On Friday 7 November, a week after the gold rush had begun, Pepys and his gold-diggers made their third visit to the Bell Tower. Barkstead’s supposed mistress – wearing a disguise to hide her modesty – appeared as promised and confirmed that this was where she had seen her lover burying his barrels. Thus encouraged, the gold-diggers went back to work, only pausing for lunch: ‘Upon the head of a barrel [we] dined very merrily,’ wrote Pepys. By the end of the day
they were exhausted and had dug over the entire area of the Bell Tower’s floor – to no avail. Pepys concluded philosophically, ‘We were forced to give over our expectations, though I do believe there must be money hidden somewhere by him, or else he did delude this woman in hopes to oblige her to further serving him, which I am apt to believe.’

But the hunt was still not quite over. Wade and Evett reported to Pepys that Barkstead’s mistress’s memory had been at fault. The barrels were buried, she now remembered, not in the Bell Tower, but in Barkstead’s former garden outside the Lieutenant’s Lodgings. Although it was now December, and the earth was frozen solid, in an astonishing triumph of hope over experience, Pepys suppressed any doubts about the two con men’s credibility, and once again returned to the Tower. This time, Pepys did not personally participate in the dig, contenting himself with watching from a window in the governor’s house as workmen broke the ice-hard soil in the garden outside the Bloody Tower. Here, snugly sitting before a roaring fire with refreshments to hand, Pepys kept one eye on his chilly diggers and the other reading John Fletcher’s play
A Wife for a Month
, which he loftily pronounced as containing ‘no great wit or language’.

As the winter light failed, Pepys and the governor left their warm snug to check on the labourers’ progress. Once again, they were disappointed. The four workmen, utterly exhausted, stood disconsolately around a gaping hole they had dug under the foundation of the garden wall: but of barrels of gold there was still no sign. At last, even the relentlessly optimistic Pepys gave up:

I bade them give over, and so all our hopes ended … and so home and to bed, a little displeased with my wife, who, poor wretch, is troubled with her lonely life.

As for Barkstead’s elusive treasure – even in the unlikely event of its ever having existed, it was never found. The Tower guards its secrets well.

The diarist’s next recorded visit to the Tower came in 1666. On hearing of the outbreak of the Great Fire of London from his servants in the early hours of Sunday 2 September, it was to the Tower that Pepys hastened from his home in nearby Seething Lane to assess the extent of the conflagration. He climbed to a high window in a western turret of the White Tower, accompanied by the small son of his old acquaintance Sir John Robinson, the lieutenant, to make his observation. The blaze had already
consumed a large number of streets near its seat in a baker’s shop in Pudding Lane. The great mass of dense smoke and orange flame, and the homeless refugees displaced by the fire emerging on to Tower Hill with their salvaged belongings, so alarmed Pepys that he hired a boat and had himself rowed upstream past the inferno to Whitehall Palace to bring the king his first news of the fire that was consuming his capital.

The Great Fire posed a mortal danger to the Tower, despite its thick stone walls. The entire supply of the Royal Navy’s gunpowder – at least half a million pounds of it – was kept in the White Tower in the Royal Armoury’s arsenal. As a Navy Office mandarin, Pepys was acutely aware of the problem, and when, on the fourth day of the fire, the wind which had been fanning the flames shifted to the south, the danger became an imminent peril. Pepys’s friend and fellow diarist John Evelyn spelled out what would have happened had the flames reached the Tower’s magazine. The gigantic blast, he wrote, ‘would undoubtedly have not only beaten down and destroyed all the [London] Bridge, but sunk and torn all the vessels in the river and rendered the demolition beyond all expression for several miles even about the country at many miles distance’. A modern authority on the seventeenth century, Professor Ronald Hutton, has said that if the Tower’s magazine had gone up it would have been ‘the greatest explosion in early modern history’.

A desperate effort therefore was begun to remove the powder from the fire’s path. Royal Navy seamen, together with civilians press-ganged into helping them, staggered in and out of the Tower laden with heavy barrels of gunpowder which they loaded on to ships bound downriver to Woolwich and Greenwich. They sweated under their burdens, their task made desperately hazardous by smoke-darkened skies swirling with sparks from the fire – any one of which could have detonated a catastrophic blast. But the work went on until all the powder was taken out of harm’s way.