Tower: An Epic History of the Tower of London (66 page)

The four Leveller leaders did not let their incarceration hinder their agitation. From the Tower they wrote and distributed a new pamphlet,
An Agreement of the Free people of England
. Lilburne was especially productive of pamphlets and polemics. It was said that even in the Tower it was ‘impossible to separate him from ink’, and words flew from his pen like sparks struck from a smithy. Eventually, Parliament banished him and Walwyn to the Netherlands, where the two ardent republicans found themselves conspiring with their fellow exiles from the Royalist camp. Returning incognito to England, Lilburne was arrested and sent back to the Tower in 1653. Freed yet again, he became a Quaker in 1655 and forsook a lifetime of noisy political activism for the quietist life.

If most Levellers were content to keep their opposition to Cromwell’s regime to words, the same could not be said of those militant republicans who – like their Royalist opponents – actively sought the death of the dictator. Edward Sexby and Miles Sindercombe were two ex-Cromwellian soldiers who believed their former military chiefs had sold out the ‘good old cause’ of Roundhead republicanism. After the suppression of the Leveller-inspired army mutinies in 1649, both fled abroad and actively plotted Cromwell’s death, issuing a pamphlet,
Killing No Murder
, justifying the assassination of tyrants.

In 1656 Sindercombe returned to England to put his theories into action. With a group of fellow malcontents, he rented two houses close to Whitehall Palace, from where they intended to shoot Cromwell with an arquebus. Finding that the crowded streets made it difficult to get a clear shot, the conspirators relocated to Hammersmith where they planned to kill Cromwell on his way to or from his favourite out-of-town residence, Hampton Court Palace, by shooting at him with a home-made infernal machine consisting of seven blunderbusses tied together. When Cromwell failed to show on the appointed day, Sindercombe’s gang moved again – this time to Hyde Park where they hoped to shoot the Lord Protector while he was out riding. After they had broken the hinges to the park’s gates for a quick getaway, Cromwell upset their plans by calling his would-be assassin, one John Cecil, over to discuss the imperfections of his horse.

In despair, the plotters changed their method of execution to arson. Infiltrating the ancient rooms and corridors of Whitehall Palace, Sindercombe hid in the palace’s chapel and set it on fire, intending to incinerate Cromwell in his bed. By this time the regime was aware of
the plot. Cromwell had his own efficient spymaster, John Thurloe, a man with the espionage genius of Francis Walsingham, whose network of agents across Europe monitored the rival exile communities of Royalists and republicans. Sindercombe was arrested before the fire had taken hold, and had his nose sliced off with a sword before he was subdued.

He and Cecil were taken to the Tower where Cecil saved his skin by agreeing to testify against his confederates. After failing in a bid to bribe his warders to let him go, Sindercombe cheated the executioner on the night before he was due to be beheaded by persuading his sister to slip him a draught of poison when she made an eve-of-execution visit to his cell to bid him farewell. Asking his guards to leave him alone while he said his final prayers, Sindercombe swallowed the poison and died. Despite this unorthodox exit, the law took its course, and his lifeless corpse was dragged up Tower Hill on a hurdle and solemnly interred with an iron-tipped stake marking the spot ‘as an example of terror to all traitors for the time to come’.

The following year, Edward Sexby returned to pick up the threads of conspiracy left by his friend Sindercombe. But on his arrival he found that Thurloe’s nets were so tight that any possibility of a successful assassination had vanished. Despondent, he decided to return to the Continent – only to be arrested as he boarded a ship bound for Flanders. Sexby, too, was detained in the Tower and harshly interrogated. His sufferings may have contributed to his death there from fever in January 1658 – just under eight months before the demise of his enemy Cromwell.

Cromwell disdained the Tower as a residence. Given its state of decay and the proximity of the many prisoners he sent there, this is scarcely surprising. He did, however, take an interest in the fortress. Indeed, he succeeded his rival General Fairfax as its constable, and made his mark on the place – albeit in a destructive way. Not only were the Crown jewels – which Cromwell considered worthless baubles – melted down and sold off, but the Lord Protector took the demolition ball to the Tower’s physical fabric too. The now redundant Jewel House abutting the White Tower went. So did the old royal Palace to the south of the White Tower. The structure which had witnessed so many of the Tower’s historic moments was unceremoniously torn down. Its stonework was left lying in untidy heaps until Charles II had them carted away. With it went the ancient
Coldharbour Tower and the nearby Wardrobe Tower, which had once housed the state’s documents.

Like the Tower, the Lord Protecter left the realm in a state of chaos. His increasingly unpopular regime had alienated not only Royalists and republicans, but ordinary folk who wanted to enjoy the harmless pleasure of the theatre and Christmas without interference from an overbearing state. Cromwell’s designated successor, his son Richard, proved far from a chip off the old block – being unable to unite the warring generals who held the real power.

Eventually one general, George Monck, emerged as literally the kingmaker: the man who was instrumental in restoring Charles II. In his own changes of allegiance – Royalist, reluctant Roundhead, loyal Cromwellian, and back full circle to Royalism again – Monck epitomises the journey made by so many of his fellow Tower prisoners in the two troubled decades between 1640 and 1660. Born in 1608 to an impoverished West Country gentry family, Monck sought a military career. Europe, with the Thirty Years’ War raging, offered plentiful opportunities to acquire practical military experience and Monck seized them with both hands.

As a mercenary soldier, Monck served in Spain, France and the Netherlands. When the Civil War broke out, he sided with the king, but was captured by an old soldiering friend, Thomas Fairfax, at Nantwich in 1644. At first Fairfax kept his captive in comfortable accommodation in Hull, hoping to persuade him to offer his talents to Parliament. But Monck stubbornly stayed loyal to the king, so sterner persuasion was decided upon: Monck was taken to the Tower, and told he would stay there unless or until he changed his allegiance.

Monck was confined in St Thomas’s Tower. Apart from the rising damp from the river below, his chief problem was lack of cash. Prisoners were expected to pay for their accommodation – including extra food to augment the Tower’s inadequate basic diet, laundry, writing materials and the necessary bribes to their warders. Although his elder brother Thomas sent him £50, the money was soon gone, and Monck was compelled to beg for more. Across the chasm of war, the king, from Oxford, despite his own desperate cash shortage, sent Monck a generous gift of £100 in gold coins. Perhaps Charles was remembering the way he had let down another loyal servant, Strafford, in his hour of need in the Tower. Or maybe the money was a reminder of where Monck’s true loyalties should lie.

Monck remained in the Tower for two and a half years, steadfastly
refusing his captors’ threats and blandishments, and remaining true to his Royalist cause. To while away the weary hours, Monck wrote a textbook,
Observations upon Military and Political Affairs
. Though unpublished in his lifetime, the book remained an influential text for centuries. Monck had a modern military mind, emphasising the importance of good intelligence and a sound supply system. ‘Intelligence is the most powerful means to undertake brave Designs and to avoid great ruines.’ A good general should not be ‘so prodigal of his Soldiers’ blood as though men were made only to fill ditches and to be the woeful executioners of his rashness’. Such sensible compassion was new in warfare and marks Monck out as the very model of a modern major-general (a rank he had not yet in fact obtained).

Life in the Tower was not all endless frustration for George Monck, however. According to the garrulous antiquary John Aubrey, Monck found, if not true love, then a lifelong loyal partner in the fortress. His laundry, darning and sewing were attended to by a seamstress called Anne – or ‘Nan’ – Clarges, the twenty-five-year-old daughter of a blacksmith who lived and worked on the corner of London’s Drury Lane and the Strand. Her father, John Clarges, had shod the horses of Monck’s regiment. Nan had had a rough, tough city upbringing. Local women had once ganged up on her and shaved her pudenda for spreading reports that one of their husbands had been ‘clappt’ (afflicted with a venereal pox), and her tongue would get her into trouble later in life too.

Though reportedly unfamiliar with soap and water herself, Nan had somehow obtained the contract to supply clean linen to the Tower’s more privileged prisoners. Aubrey says that, despite being married to an elderly man named Ratford, with whom she ran a glove and perfume shop in the city, the seamstress ‘was kind to [Monck] in a double capacity’ and became his mistress. Eventually, after her husband’s death, Nan became pregnant by Monck. The news was broken to him by her brother, Thomas Clarges, on board ship after Monck had become an admiral in the first Anglo-Dutch naval war. On being told by Clarges that his sister had been ‘brought to bed’, Monck asked in alarm, ‘Of what?’ ‘Of a son,’ Clarges replied. ‘Why, then,’ responded Monck, ‘she is my wife’ – and married her.

The forceful Nan established such an ascendancy over her husband that the man who was said to be fearless on the battlefield was terrified of her cutting tongue. An ardent Royalist, she influenced the decisive part he played in bringing about the Restoration. Nan could never shake off her humble origins, however, and even after Charles II had made her husband
Duke of Albemarle in gratitude for restoring him to the throne, his homespun duchess often embarrassed Monck with her plebeian language and rough-hewn ways. Her brother Tom rose on her petticoats, becoming a knight, a diplomat and a man of property after the Restoration; London’s fashionable Clarges Street is named after him.

Meanwhile, as Monck expounded military theory inside the Tower, outside its walls the real war, without his participation, was going from bad to worse for the king’s cause. After the king’s decisive defeat at Naseby in June 1645, Monck reluctantly concluded that Charles’s cause was irretrievably lost. It was time to make his peace with the victorious Parliamentarians. His chance came in April 1646 when Parliament agreed that captured Royalists could be released if they swore not to take up arms against Parliament again. Monck indicated that he was ready to take such an oath – although it seems that he never actually did so. In July he was freed to take a command in the English army battling the seemingly endless Catholic rebellion in Ireland. In doing so he demonstrated the sly political skills he would increasingly show. By fighting in Ireland he would be combating the king’s enemies without directly helping the Roundhead ‘rebels’.

Desperate to prove himself worthy to be the ideal commander whose qualities he had outlined in his
Observations
, Monck extricated himself from Ireland, like the Earl of Essex before him, by making an unauthorised peace treaty with the rebels. In 1650 he joined Cromwell in Scotland, and was Cromwell’s chief lieutenant in his great victory over the Scots at Dunbar. The following year, Cromwell trusted the old Royalist enough to hand over command of Scotland to Monck, now a major-general. Monck completed the Cromwellian conquest of Scotland and remained there as governor. When Cromwell died, Monck put into practice his long-cherished plan of bringing back the Stuarts. Cautiously he moved his army south, peacefully disposing of the oppositon as he did so. Public opinion in the country, tired of the stifling Cromwellian dictatorship, hankered for a return of Royalist rule, and Monck had little difficulty in engineering the Restoration – sending diehard republicans like Lambert to languish in the Tower where he himself had once rotted.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

IRON DUKES AND LUNATIC LORDS

GEORGE MONCK’S SKILFUL
managing of the return of the king reaped him rich rewards after Charles II returned in triumph to London on his thirtieth birthday in May 1660. The second son of a Devonshire squire ended as the Duke of Albemarle, Earl of Torrington, Baron Beauchamp and a Knight of the Garter. As well as his titles, Monck was given substantial lands by his grateful monarch, including (though he never visited them) the colonies of North and South Carolina in the ever-expanding Americas. But the general acclaim and relief which greeted the Restoration masked underlying tensions which had not gone away. The conflicts – Anglicanism versus Calvinist dissent and Roman Catholicism; the struggle between Royalist absolutism and awakening Parliamentary democracy; the competition between a landed aristocracy and gentry and a rising urban mercantile class – had not been solved by the Civil War and would continue to seed division for centuries to come.

A youthful victim of the continuing religious ferment thrown up by the Civil War was young William Penn, later the founder of Pennsylvania. Born in 1644, close to the Tower, to a wealthy city family in the midst of the first Civil War, Penn converted to Quakerism – one of the myriad sects thrown up from the maelstrom of English Protestantism, and considerably more militant than its modern descendant. The early Quakers, with their insistence on social equality and their disdain for priests and kings, were seen as a threat to order, and after writing an unlicensed pamphlet denouncing the established Anglican religion in 1668, young Penn was thrown into the Tower for blasphemy, where bishops and theologians visited the stubborn young firebrand in an effort to convince him of the error of his ways. They failed. ‘The Tower is to me the worst argument in the world,’ Penn told his interlocutors. ‘My prison will be my grave before I will budge a jot.’ Unknown to his principled son, Penn’s father
bought him out with a substantial bribe and he went to America to successfully seek better fortune.