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

  Outraged English opinion demanded a surviving scapegoat; and the hated Suffolk fitted the bill. Oblivious of the gathering storm, Suffolk inflamed popular hostility by marrying his son John to his seven-year-old ward, Lady Margaret Beaufort, a possible claimant to the throne. (Indeed, although she would never rule herself, Margaret would go on to found England’s Tudor dynasty.) Suffolk’s move was widely seen as furthering his own ambition to be the power behind Henry’s shaky throne.

  When Parliament reassembled after the Christmas recess on 26 January 1450, hatred against Suffolk was at boiling point. Ignoring the duke’s plea that he was the victim of ‘Great infamy and defamation’, Parliament impeached him and hustled him off to the Tower. Suffolk’s plight was summed up in a gloating popular ballad:

  Now is the fox driven to hole!

  Hoo to him, hoo, hoo!

  For if he creep out

  He will you all undo.

  For a fortnight the duke remained in the ‘hole’ while the Commons drew up a bill of indictment against him. Suffolk was accused not only of handing over Maine and Anjou to the French, but also of planning a French invasion of England; and plotting to depose Henry VI in favour of his own son John. Suffolk was also charged with having conspired with his French friends to release Charles of Orléans from his long imprisonment in the Tower. The king and queen, who since he had arranged her marriage had regarded Suffolk as her second father, were desperate to save their favourite minister. In March Henry took the case out of the Commons’ hands, declaring that he would decide Suffolk’s fate. Parliament’s defiant response was to add yet more charges to the list, focusing on Suffolk’s blatant corruption.

  He had, the new indictment stated, ‘committed great, outrageous extortions and murders … suppressed justice … been insatiably covetous … embezzled the king’s own funds and taxes … to the full heavy discomfort of his true subjects’. Suffolk, summoned from his Tower cell, indignantly denied the charges as ‘too horrible to speak of … utterly false and untrue’. But Parliament was implacably set on destroying the duke. In a final effort to save him by putting him beyond his enemies’ reach, Henry sentenced Suffolk to be banished for five years from 1 May 1450.

  Freed from the Tower on 18 March, the fallen duke made for his house in St Giles to collect his belongings. But a mob of Londoners, furious that their prey had ‘crept out of his hole’, broke into the house, and assaulted Suffolk’s servants. The duke himself escaped via the back door, fleeing to his Suffolk estates where he lay low until Thursday 30 April – the last day before his appointed exile was to begin. He sailed from Ipswich for Calais, the port which, largely thanks to him, was now England’s only possession in northern France. He never arrived. Off Dover, his vessel was intercepted by a flotilla which had been lying in wait, led by a large warship the Nicholas of the Tower.

  As its name indicates, this ship was usually moored off the Tower’s wharf. The current constable of the Tower was Henry Holland, the young Duke of Exeter. He had inherited the office from his father two years before when he was just seventeen. Cruel and rapacious, Exeter was a chip off his father’s old block, who was immortalised in the nickname of the fiendish instrument of torture which the old brute had introduced to the Tower’s orchestra of terror. The rack, which pulled its victims’ limbs on ropes over rollers, stretching, tearing and eventually dislocating them, was dubbed ‘The Duke of Exeter’s daughter’. Years before, a clairvoyant had told Suffolk that if he could ‘escape the danger of the Tower’ he would be safe. Having got out of the fortress itself, Suffolk now learned with a sinking feeling the name of the ship to which he was rowed across the choppy Channel waters, and remembered the soothsayer’s warning. His fears were confirmed when he was hailed by the ship’s master, one Robert Wennington, with the chilling greeting, ‘Welcome, traitor!’

  Suffolk was detained aboard the Nicholas for more than twenty-four hours while a kangaroo court tried him on the articles of impeachment drawn up by Parliament. He was found guilty on all counts. The Paston Letters, a chronicle written by an East Anglian gentry family who knew Suffolk well, tell what happened next: ‘He was drawn out of the great ship into a boat, and there was an axe and a stock [block], and one of the lewdest of the ship bade him lay down his head.’ Then, disdaining the axe, the executioner ‘took a rusty sword and smote off his head with half a dozen strokes, and took away his gown of russet, and his doublet of velvet, mailed, and laid his body on the sands of Dover. And some say that his head was set on a pole by it.’

  Margaret of Anjou was told of Suffolk’s messy end by the duke’s widow, Alice Chaucer, granddaughter of the poet Geoffrey Chaucer. The young queen is said to have wept continuously for three days, refusing all food. Then, drying her tears, Margaret vowed vengeance. It was rumoured that Margaret and Henry were determined to wreak revenge for Suffolk’s death on the county which had succoured his killers: Kent. Suffolk’s closest ally on the Royal Council, the Crown Treasurer, Lord Saye, was said to be planning to depopulate the county, turning peasants and landlords off their land and replanting it as a massive hunting reserve. Kentishmen of every class, including lords and MPs, united against the threat.

  By the end of May groups of armed men, assembling across the county to celebrate Whitsun, had formed a rebel army. They had a leader, called Jack Cade. Like Wat Tyler, the Kentish rebel leader of seventy years before, Cade was probably a soldier who had served in France. His aliases included ‘Jack Amend-all’ and, significantly, ‘John Mortimer’, which gave a clue as to the real moving spirit behind the revolt. Mortimer was the maternal family name of Richard, Duke of York, the kingdom’s wealthiest magnate and an able administrator and soldier. Descended from Edward III via both his parents, he had an arguably better claim to the throne than the Lancastrians who sat on it. This had not mattered under the competent rule of Henry IV and Henry V who were both more than capable of seeing off challenges to the Crown. But now that the sceptre rested in the trembling hand of Henry VI, York began to wonder whether the right Plantagenet ruled. He was the obvious leader of a growing opposition to the corrupt and incompetent government.

  By mid-June Cade’s army had arrived at Blackheath – where Wat Tyler’s rebels had once camped. The court sent emissaries to hear Cade’s demands. After these were flatly rejected, a royal army of 20,000 gathered, and Cade retreated into Kent. A force under Sir Humphrey Stafford and his brother William was sent in hot pursuit, while the bulk of the royal army remained in London. Cade sprang an ambush at Sevenoaks on 18 June. After a hard fight, the Stafford brothers were killed, their army routed, and the victorious rebels marched once more against London.

  Henry fled his capital to distant Kenilworth Castle in Leicestershire. Before leaving, the king confined the hated and grasping treasurer, Lord Saye, to the Tower as the safest place for him. Once the king had gone, those members of the council remaining in London took refuge there too. Memories of the massacres during the Peasants’ Revolt were still fresh among the ruling caste. The rebels’ numbers had been swelled by support from Sussex, Surrey and Essex, as what had begun as a little local difficulty grew into a full-scale insurrection.

  On 29 June a swaggering Cade, wearing full armour beneath a scarlet cloak, and with the silver spurs of the slain Sir Humphrey Stafford jingling at his heels, was back on Blackheath with a much larger army. By 1 July he had advanced as far as Southwark, opposite the Tower. On 3 July Cade crossed the Thames and entered London. He came as a conqueror, clad in a royal blue velvet gown, carrying a shield studded with gold nails, and with a squire bearing a sword before him as if he were a king.

  Cade paused on London Bridge, drew his sword, and slashed through the ropes holding the drawbridge. The capital lay prostrate before him, and to underline the fact he was formally presented with the keys of the city. He proclaimed, ‘Now is Mortimer Lord of this city,’ before stalking off to be wined and dined by London’s aldermen, one of whom carved Cade’s meat as if he was his lord. That night Cade returned
to his quarters at the White Hart Inn in Southwark, but came back across the bridge the next day with his army at his back. The rebels’ mood had turned ugly, and they assembled in front of the Tower demanding the head of Lord Treasurer Saye. The Tower’s governor, Lord Thomas Scales, although a grizzled veteran of the Hundred Years’ War, thought discretion the better part of valour and tamely turned the hated minister over to the mob.

  A terrified Saye was dragged to the Guildhall where he was reunited with his son-in-law William Crowmer, the Sheriff of Kent, who had been taken from the Fleet prison. The two men – with a score of their cronies – were given a summary ‘trial’ before being marched to Cheapside and beheaded. Cade’s rising was degenerating into the bloody chaos of Wat Tyler’s revolt. Marking the descent into barbarity, Cade had the heads of Saye and Crowmer impaled on spears and obscenely made to ‘kiss’. The heads and the naked, bleeding torsos were then paraded around London before being spiked above London Bridge. Meanwhile, many of Cade’s men had begun to loot London. Cade himself, pressed to pay them, extorted money from the city merchants who had hitherto backed him.

  That night, after Cade and his leading followers had reeled drunkenly back across London Bridge to the White Hart, a worried delegation of merchants, led by the lord mayor, made their way through the fearful streets to the Tower. They pleaded with the governor, Lord Scales, to act against the spiralling anarchy. Scales agreed and ordered the 1,000-strong Tower garrison under Captain Matthew Gough, a fellow veteran of the fighting in France, to bar the city’s gates against the return of Cade’s marauding army in the morning.

  When Cade and his men realised what was happening, they stormed out of Southwark and a pitched battle ensued on the bridge. Ordinary citizens living in the houses along the bridge were caught up in the fighting; and some were flung screaming into the Thames. The battle raged all night, and Gough was among the forty-two Londoners slain. Cade’s men lost 200, and eventually gave way, burning the drawbridge as they retreated. Cade had shot his bolt. On promise of a pardon, he agreed to go home; but as in 1381, the authorities had no intention of keeping their word once the immediate danger had passed.

  Cade was declared an outlaw. Deserted by his followers, he fled into the Sussex woods. He was followed by royal puirsuivants, led by Alexander Iden, who had succeeded the murdered Crowmer as Sheriff of Kent. Iden cornered Cade in a garden at Heathfield where he was mortally wounded. Flung into a cart and brought to London, his body was beheaded and quartered. His head was set upon London Bridge, the scene of his last battle, in place of his victims Saye and Crowmer, facing south towards Kent. Cade’s quartered corpse was displayed as a grim warning in the various parts of the kingdom where his rebellion had flared and failed.

  Royal retribution did not stop there. In a judicial massacre known as ‘the harvest of heads’ Henry personally presided over the trials and executions of forty-two Kentish rebels. Feeble and pious he may have been, but with Margaret at his side, Henry VI did not lack the bloodthirsty tendencies of his forefathers. But despite the repression, Cade’s rebellion, the symptom of the woeful misgovernment of the kingdom under this broken reed of a man, was also a bloody taster of yet more brutal struggles to come.

  CHAPTER SIX

  ROSES ARE BLOOD RED

  IN AUGUST 1453 Henry VI’s always weak mind gave way entirely. He went mad after suffering a ‘sudden fright’. The onset of the attack may have been sudden, but in view of his antecedents, was scarcely surprising. Henry’s maternal grandfather, Charles VI of France, had also had fits of madness, suffering the awkward delusion that he was made of glass. Though exact diagnosis of Henry’s illness is now impossible, this suggests that a gene of mental instability was transmitted through his mother, Catherine de Valois. The attack left Henry in a paralysed stupor – possibly catatonic depression or schizophrenia – unable to move from the chair where he sat. He remained in this sad state for the next eighteen months.

  By the time that Henry was struck down, the political situation was rapidly reaching a point where the two factions – the court party and the York party – were so bitterly divided that only violence could resolve the issue. Time after time the rival sides squared up, only for a temporary truce to force the feud underground. Such a moment had come in May 1451 when a member of York’s affinity, Nicholas Young, MP for Bristol, moved a petition in the Commons calling for York officially to be made the childless Henry’s heir apparent. Young was locked in the Tower for his impertinence.

  As the year went on, both sides manoeuvred for advantage, knowing that conflict could not be avoided for ever. Among the most loyal supporters of the king were his young half-brothers, Edmund and Jasper Tudor. Following Henry V’s death in 1422, his widow, Catherine de Valois, was left bereft, a lusty young woman in the prime of life. She did not remain single for long. Owen Tudor, a handsome young Welshman of obscure origins, had become her Keeper of the Wardrobe. According to romantic rumour Owen had caught the queen’s notice when he stumbled, incapably drunk, into her lap. Intrigued, she spied on him as he swam nude, liked what she saw, and in the late 1420s, secretly married him. Although frowned on by the court, the union between queen and commoner was a happy one, producing six children. Owen was packed back into obscurity after Catherine died in 1437, but his two eldest sons, Edmund and Jasper, inherited their father’s charm and won the favour of Henry VI and Queen Margaret.

  On 5 January 1453 the Tower was a scene of splendour when the king invested his two half-siblings as earls. Edmund became Earl of Richmond, while Jasper was made Earl of Pembroke. On the chilly winter day, the two new noblemen were grateful to be arrayed in costly furs and gowns of cloth of gold and velvet; along with lands and incomes befitting their new status. The Lancastrian cause was further consolidated during this same Christmas holiday, when Queen Margaret at last fell pregnant. The queen’s favourite since Suffolk’s murder was the new head of the Beaufort clan, Edmund, 2nd Duke of Somerset – to the extent that he was rumoured to be the father of the son to whom she would give birth in October, after seven years of fruitless marriage to the apparently asexual and puritanical Henry.

  Desperate to hide the king’s condition, the queen had her lolling, speechless sack of a husband secretly transported to Westminster to await the birth of her baby, which took place on 13 October. She was safely delivered of a healthy boy, whom she named Edward. But when the child was shown to Henry there was no reaction: he briefly glanced at the infant before casting his eyes down again. But now the king’s illness could no longer be concealed. Unless he acknowledged Edward as his heir, a regency would have to be declared. A regency council was duly summoned. Finally, the Duke of York made his move.

  In December 1453, after York’s ally Sir William Oldhall had been appointed Speaker of the House of Commons, and London had filled with armed Yorkist adherents, the Commons impeached Somerset for treason. The same day, he followed the path already trodden by Suffolk to the Tower. Within hours, however, the queen had ordered her favourite’s release and Somerset left the fortress for his house at Blackfriars. Word that he was free soon spread, and a crowd of York’s supporters besieged his house and ransacked it. The duke barely escaped with his life, fleeing by barge along the river back to the safety of the Tower.

  Queen Margaret was desperate to prevent York from being made regent. On every count – his royal blood, his record as a competent administrator, and his status as the realm’s most powerful nobleman – York was qualified to rule in the mad king’s stead. But for Margaret, her future and that of her newborn child were at stake. If York once sat in her husband’s place, would he ever be shifted? Henry might never recover, his heir was a helpless baby, her chief supporter, Somerset, was in the Tower, and she herself was widely hated. All Margaret had going for her was the support of those nobles – a majority on the council – reluctant to give York regal powers; and her own tenacious will. For months she fought a desperate rearguard battle to get herself or Somerset – whom she had again freed fr
om the Tower – appointed regent. But while many nobles were suspicious of York’s dynastic ambition, they did not wish to be ruled by a haughty, imperious foreign woman. In March 1454, York became Protector of the Realm.

  York’s first act was to send Somerset back to the Tower. Tellingly, when the guards came to arrest him, they found Somerset in the queen’s apartments. Although powerless to prevent his detention, the fearless Margaret went out of her way to demonstrate her continuing loyalty to her favourite, even visiting him at the Tower. York packed her off with her son to join Henry in Windsor Castle while he set the dislocated kingdom to rights. Backed by the powerful Neville family, headed by the Earl of Salisbury, whom he made chancellor, and by Salisbury’s son, the Earl of Warwick, York made a good start, ruthlessly slashing court expenditure and travelling north to knock the heads of the warring Neville and Percy families together. While in the north, York locked up his unstable young son-in-law, the Duke of Exeter, hereditary constable of the Tower, in Pontefract Castle, as punishment for a revolt that Exeter had joined in Yorkshire the previous year. This, while demonstrating York’s admirable impartiality, had the unfortunate effect of turning the duke into a fanatical opponent of his father-in-law’s house, and a fierce partisan of the Lancastrians in the coming struggle.

  Back at the Tower, Somerset was scheming furiously to regain his freedom and influence. According to a Yorkist newsletter, from his cell Somerset recruited friars and seamen as spies to discover who was loyal to him, and who had strayed into York’s camp. The same newsletter claimed that Somerset’s henchmen had rented lodgings around the Tower with a view to seizing the fortress.

  * * *

  Then, on Christmas Day 1454 at Windsor, King Henry, like Rip Van Winkle, awoke from his long stupor. His recovery was as unexpected as the onset of the madness had been the previous year – and as unwelcome to York as it was good news for the court party. As soon as the king showed signs of regaining his senses, his son was again brought to him. This time he expressed delight and wonder, attributing Prince Edward’s paternity to the Holy Ghost. It was given out that the king was ‘well-amended … and in charity with all the world, and he would that all the Lords were so’. But despite the king’s pleasure in his own return to health, as historian R. L. Storey remarks, ‘If Henry’s insanity had been a tragedy, his recovery was a national disaster.’