Tower: An Epic History of the Tower of London Read online

  On the orders of Gloucester and Arundel, Burley was executed on Tower Hill. He was the first man to suffer official state execution there, but he would not be the last. Richard never forgot or forgave the judicial murder of his old tutor, carried out in the face of the pleas from his beloved queen, who fell to her knees in front of the ‘Merciless Parliament’ to beg in vain for a reprieve. Richard’s hatred of his enemies grew and festered. When Anne died at the Thameside royal manor of Sheen in 1394, the king, maddened with grief, ordered the palace itself to be totally destroyed. He was still clearly unstable at Anne’s funeral in Windsor, and when one of the appellants, the Earl of Arundel, turned up late for the ceremony an enraged Richard struck the nobleman in the face with a staff, drawing blood and defiling the church. It was not a happy omen.

  In July 1397, almost a decade after his humiliation at the hands of the Lords Appellant, Richard felt strong enough to take his revenge. He planned his vengeance like a Borgia poisoning, inviting his three chief enemies – his uncle the Duke of Gloucester, and the Earls of Arundel and Warwick – to a feast at the Lord Chancellor’s residence on the Strand. Suspicious of Richard’s intentions, Gloucester remained at his country estate at Pleshey in Essex, and Arundel also stayed away; but Thomas Beauchamp, Earl of Warwick, trustingly turned up. Richard kindly waited until his guest had eaten his fill before making his move. Men-at-arms burst in and seized the startled peer, hurrying him through the dark riverside garden to the north bank of the Thames where a boat was waiting. He was rowed down to the Tower and lodged in the turret in the middle of the west wall that from henceforward would bear his family name: the Beauchamp Tower.

  After his dramatic arrest, Beauchamp saved himself by breaking down ‘like a wretched old woman’, according to the chronicler Adam of Usk, and incriminating his fellow lords for conspiring against the Crown. Spared death, he nevertheless languished in the Tower for months, and had his lands and titles forfeited. He survived to gloat over Richard’s final downfall in 1399.

  Beauchamp’s fellow appellants were less fortunate. Arundel – who had so infuriated Richard at his wife’s funeral – unwisely accepted the king’s promise of safe conduct and surrendered. He too was sent straight to the Tower, condemned to death and, on Richard’s vindictive special orders, executed at the same spot on Tower Hill where Burley had died. On his way to the scaffold, Arundel called for the cords binding his hands to be loosened, so he could distribute alms to the poor. Such gestures made him a hero to the common folk, who hailed him as a martyr and flocked to the church of the Austin Friars in Broad Street, where the earl’s beheaded body was buried. Burley’s death was also remembered by the king in the less public vengeance wreaked on his own uncle, the Duke of Gloucester, arrested in person by Richard at his manor of Pleshey. The duke’s wife begged her nephew for mercy. Richard appeared to accede to her tearful pleas: ‘I will grant him mercy,’ he began silkily, before hissing, ‘… in the same measure that he meted out to Burley.’

  Thirsty for vengeance though he was, the hostile demonstrations which had followed Arundel’s death warned Richard that it would be unwise publicly to kill his own aged uncle. Instead, the fallen royal duke was taken to the Tower and then, in a departure from the norm, secretly smuggled out of Traitor’s Gate, and shipped over the Channel to Calais. Here he was quietly done to death. Gloucester was apparently asphyxiated between the feather mattresses of his bed, with five heavy thugs lying on top. Piquantly, the man given the task of organising the murder was Thomas Mowbray, Earl of Nottingham, one of the original five Lords Appellant, who had defected to Richard’s side and was given this unpleasant task to prove his new allegiance.

  Of the original five Lords Appellant, just two were left standing after Richard’s savage purge. Mowbray was made Duke of Norfolk as a reward for presiding over Gloucester’s murder; while the king’s cousin, Henry Bolingbroke, was also given a dukedom – that of Hereford – in a bid to buy his loyalty. But granting such baubles did not mean that Richard had forgotten their earlier disloyalty: once more, he was biding his time. His tactic was to divide the two new dukes, before eliminating them piecemeal. The king let Mowbray know that he, Richard, was planning to relieve Bolingbroke and his ageing father, John of Gaunt, of their titles and lands – possibly even of their lives.

  Mowbray passed on this news when he met Bolingbroke out riding. An outraged Bolingbroke promptly stormed off to the king to demand an explanation. Richard summoned Mowbray, who hotly denied saying any such thing. Slyly, the monarch turned the matter over to Parliament who ordered the two dukes to settle their quarrel in a joust. The duel was to take place near Coventry in September 1398, and a large aristocratic audience assembled to watch the dukes, in their gorgeously coloured livery, fight for their lives. But at the very last minute Richard intervened, stopped the contest, and ordered both men to be banished abroad: Bolingbroke for ten years and Mowbray for life. Mowbray departed for Venice, where he died of plague within a year, while Bolingbroke left for Paris.

  The following February, 1399, Bolingbroke’s father, John of Gaunt, died. Richard seized the chance of appropriating his uncle’s lavish Lancastrian property for himself. He declared Bolingbroke’s exile permanent and his inheritance forfeit. In June – with Richard absent in Ireland – Bolingbroke landed at Ravenspur in Yorkshire to reclaim his inheritance. The widespread acclaim which greeted his arrival decided him: he would replace Richard on the throne. Two factors swayed him: Richard’s evident unpopularity, and the fact that he himself – a grandson of Edward III – was of the blood royal and in his own estimation would make a far better king than the incumbent.

  Bolingbroke’s tiny army swelled, while that of the absent king dwindled. By the time Richard returned from Ireland in early September, his forces had melted away. He fell into Henry’s hands at Conwy Castle in north Wales, and was taken to another of Edward I’s great castles at nearby Flint where a promise to abdicate was extracted from him. Shaken by the evident hatred of his subjects – at one point he was pelted with refuse – Richard’s morale collapsed and he became, in the words of a biographer, ‘a mumbling neurotic … sunk in acute melancholia’. In this sad state he was brought to London, and lodged in the White Tower, a prisoner there like the kings of France and Scotland before him. To Richard II, however, belongs the dubious distinction of being the first English monarch to be imprisoned in the Tower.

  On 30 September 1399 the Tower witnessed another first: Richard signed an instrument of abdication there – the first English king to do so, and the first to affix his signature rather than the seal (he had given up the royal signet to Henry). The document ran:

  I Richard, by the grace of God king of England and of France and lord of Ireland … resign all my kingly majesty, dignity and crown … And with deed and word I leave off and resign them and go from them for evermore, for I know, acknowledge and deem myself to be, and have been, insufficient, unable and unprofitable, and for my deserts not unworthily to be put down.

  That was the public statement, though privately, according to Adam of Usk, one of the wise men brought in by Henry to legitimise the Lancastrian takeover, Richard railed bitterly against his fate, his words reproduced in Shakespeare’s Richard II:

  ‘My God! A wonderful land is this, and a fickle; which hath exiled, slain, destroyed or ruined so many kings, rulers and great men, and is ever tainted and toileth with strife, and variance and envy.’

  The wise men were as rude about Richard publicly as he was about them privately, accepting the abdication because of the king’s ‘perjuries, sacrileges, unnatural crimes, exactions from his subjects, reduction of his people to slavery, cowardice and weakness of rule’. Within a fortnight, Bolingbroke had himself crowned King Henry IV, riding from the Tower to Westmuster Abbey as to the manner born. A bitter Richard remained in the Tower, but as the century turned, in January 1400, a revolt by diehard Ricardian nobles broke out. Henry realised that as long as Richard lived he would be a focus for rebellion. At de
ad of night, fettered in chains, the fallen king was removed from the Tower and taken to Leeds Castle in Kent before being carried north to Pontefract Castle in Yorkshire. By mid-February, he was dead.

  No one knows exactly how Richard met his end. The usual suggestion is that he was deliberately starved to death, though it is possible that he himself went on a hunger strike. The short timescale, however, seems improbably rapid for such a slow means of murder, and the medical historian Dr Clifford Brewer has suggested poisoning – possibly by the death cap fungus (Amanita phalloides), which is easily chopped up in food and inflicts lethal damage on liver and kidneys – as a suitable means of non-violent dispatch. Whatever the method, it seems beyond question that Henry ordered his cousin’s elimination – and was for ever haunted by guilt for having done so.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  UNEASY HEADS

  SO UNEASY WAS the new king about the legitimacy of his usurpation, that he went out of his way to underline his own royal status from the very start. Henry’s grandfather, Edward III, had famously founded the most noble order of English chivalry, the Garter. Not to be outdone, at the outset of his reign Henry founded his own order too. Himself unusually hygienic for a medieval monarch – he took a weekly tub – Henry decided to call his new creation the Order of the Bath. On the evening before his coronation, 12 October 1399, the king made forty-six of his family, friends and followers – including his own four sons and the Earl of Arundel, son of the Lord Appellant executed by Richard – the inaugural knights of the new order. Forty-six baths had been lugged into the great hall of the White Tower and placed under individual canopies. The candidate knights then stripped off and stepped into the rapidly cooling water which had laboriously been heated in the Tower’s kitchens and poured in by their servants.

  As the knights splashed and wallowed, the king entered the hall with a procession of priests and attendants. Approaching each knight in turn, Henry traced the sign of the cross on their wet backs and pronounced:

  ‘You shall honour God above all things; you shall be steadfast in the Faith of Christ; you shall love the King your Sovereign Lord, and him and his right defend with all your power; you shall defend maidens, widows and orphans in their rights, and shall suffer no extortion, as far as you may prevent it; and of as great honour be this Order unto you, as ever it was to any of your progenitors or others.’

  Once this first stage of purification had been performed, the king withdrew, and the knights got out of their baths and were vigorously towelled dry by their pages before retiring to rest on forty-six beds. When the Tower bell rang the curfew, they rose, put on the long brown gowns of monks, and processed next door into St John’s Chapel. Here they spent the long and chilly autumn night kneeling in a vigil of prayer and meditation, before rising – their limbs cramped with cold – and placing a lighted candle on the altar with a penny offering. The taper symbolised their spiritual readiness; the coin the token tribute paid to the king who had initiated the order. After donning shining new helmets and gleaming armour, the knights paraded across the yard to the Tower’s palace where Henry presented each of them with a shiny sword newly made in the Tower armoury.

  By then, the Tower was abuzz with preparations for the coronation. After a hearty breakfast, Henry – who had chosen the day partly because it was the feast day of Edward the Confessor, holiest of English kings, and partly because it was the first anniversary of his last parting from his father as he left England for exile – was magnificently arrayed in robes of cloth of gold. Bareheaded, despite the October rain, he left the Tower on a white horse, before dismounting to walk solemnly through the streets, attended by a retinue of 900 nobles and knights, and gravely acknowledging the acclamation of the crowds while the fountains he passed ran red with wine. The coronation itself included the anointing of the new king with sacred oil said to have been given to St Thomas Becket by the Virgin Mary, and miraculously just discovered in the cellars of the Tower where it had lain for centuries. Whoever was anointed with the oil was said to be destined to regain England’s lost lands in France – a feat which proved beyond both Henry himself and his namesake son and grandson, despite being anointed in their turn with Becket’s oil.

  Behind the celebrations were darker undertones. As the new archbishop, Thomas Arundel, was about to place the crown on Henry’s head, he noticed that the monarch’s hair was alive with lice – and as Henry prepared to offer the ritual gold coin to God, he dropped it; it rolled away and was never recovered. In a superstitious age such signs were ominous indeed. There was no doubting the new king’s popularity in his capital, but among his own class many resented his usurption. Thus, though Henry was able to secure the throne for himself and his son Henry V, the first seeds were already being sown for a dynastic conflict – the Wars of the Roses between York and Lancaster, the two branches of the Plantagenet House – that would tear England apart across the next century.

  * * *

  Plotting against Henry began almost as soon as the coronation oil was dry. The first conspiracy was hatched in mid-December in Westminster Abbey, the building where Henry had been crowned a bare two months before. A group of five Ricardian nobles, known as the Counter-Appellants, and a clutch of discontented clerics, including the disposed Archbishop of Canterbury, laid their unholy scheme. The plotters’ plan was a simple one. On Epiphany, 6 January 1400, Henry was to hold a grand tournament at Windsor to which the disloyal lords had been invited. They intended to raise an army, swoop on Windsor and arrest Henry and his four sons, along with the new Archbishop Arundel.

  The plot might well have succeeded but one of those at the abbey betrayed it. Once made aware of the conspiracy, Henry acted with characteristic decisiveness. Having sent a warning to Archbishop Arundel, early on the evening of 4 January, accompanied by his young sons, he set out from Windsor on a dramatic ride through the gathering winter dark to London. Avoiding the plotters mustering at Kingston-upon-Thames, he arrived at the city gates at 9 p.m. where he met the lord mayor, riding out to warn him of the revolt. Henry made straight for the Tower, where he spent the night summoning the citizens of London to arms, offering a hefty cash inducement of eighteen pence for a mounted knight and nine pence per archer to join his forces.

  By morning Henry had his army assembled with near-miraculous speed. He rode out of the Tower at the head of his men. The overwhelming majority of Londoners were ready to defend the usurping Henry rather than risk a return to Richard’s tyranny. In London, a King Richard look-alike, named Richard Maudelyeyn, recruited by the plotters to impersonate the absent king, was hanged with a few followers. And the other plotters were rounded up and executed, two nobles having their severed heads sent to Henry in a basket.

  One plotter, Sir Thomas Blount, not being a peer, was denied the privilege of a swift beheading and endured the full horrors of a traitor’s death. At Oxford, he was hanged, cut down while still alive, and then revived; his abdomen was slit and his entrails drawn out and burned as he watched the grisly proceedings while seated on a bench. Asked if he wanted a drink, he replied with a magnificent death’s door jest, ‘No, for I should not know where to put it.’ King Henry himself sat in judgement on Blount and several other conspirators. Twenty-six of the Epiphany plotters were executed in all. One who was spared was John Ferrour, the same man who had rescued the teenage Henry when the mob had invaded the Tower at the height of the Peasants’ Revolt two decades before. Henry remembered and saved his former saviour.

  Although the Epiphany revolt had been comprehensively crushed, it sealed the fate of Richard, whose body, encased in a lead coffin with only the face exposed, was brought from Yorkshire and exhibited at the Tower to prove to doubters that he really was dead. But Henry’s troubles were only just beginning. His entire fourteen-year reign was racked by revolts. In September 1400 the discontented Welsh nobleman Owain Glyndwr made Henry pay handsomely for calling him a ‘barefoot rascal’ and turned a local border dispute with Henry’s Marcher henchman Lord Grey of Ruthin
into a Welsh national revolt. The rising rumbled on until the end of Henry’s reign and elevated Owain into his people’s hero.

  Alongside Glyndwr’s rebellion in Wales, Anglo-Scottish relations proved as troublesome as ever. In March 1406 the heir to the Scottish throne, twelve-year-old Prince James Stewart, was shipwrecked off the east coast of England while en route to France, where he had been sent by his father for his own safety following his elder brother David’s assassination. Sadly for the young prince, it was a case of out of the frying pan of lethal Scottish dynastic politics and into the fire of Henry IV’s ruthlessness. James was taken hostage by English pirates, and passed from their hands to those of the king. The prince, with his tutor, the Earl of Orkney, was clapped into the Tower to join a fellow Celt: Owain Glyndwr’s eldest son, Gruffydd. Young Glyndwr had been taken prisoner after a Welsh defeat at the hands of Prince Henry of Monmouth, displaying the military prowess that would win him immortality at Agincourt as Henry V. After languishing in the Tower for six years, Gruffydd fell victim to one of the recurrent epidemics of bubonic plague that swept the country in the wake of the Black Death.

  The news of his son’s kidnap so shocked Prince James’s father, King Robert III of Scotland, that within weeks of the abduction he was dead of grief. So James acceded to the Scottish throne as King James I while King Henry’s prisoner in the Tower. The fact that James was now king did not immediately improve his lot. In Scotland, his uncle, Robert Stewart, Duke of Albany, became regent and showed little inclination to raise the large ransom Henry demanded for his nephew’s return. So poor James remained in the Tower for two years until he was moved to Nottingham Castle. Here he stayed a captive for a further sixteen years.