The Tower of London, (Vol. 2 of 2)

During the four years in which James the Second misgoverned England, the most interesting events connected with the Tower were the tragedy of the Duke of Monmouth’s death, and the imprisonment of the Seven Bishops.

James was the first of our sovereigns to omit passing the night previous to his coronation in the Tower, and the fortress now ceased entirely to be a royal residence, being given over to the uses which it still fulfils.

After the Duke of Monmouth’s capture near the New Forest, on the 13th of July 1685, after his luckless attempt to wrest the Crown from James at Sedgemoor, he, with Lord Grey of Wark, was brought to London and imprisoned in the Tower, the warrant for his committal being thus worded: “James, Duke of Monmouth, 13 July, for High Treason in levying war against the King and assuming a title to the Crown.” Monmouth had married Lady Anne Scott, daughter of the Earl of Buccleuch, when he was only fourteen years of age, but the union does not appear to have been a happy one. When the Duchess came to take her last leave of him after his condemnation, the interview is said “to have passed with decency, but without tokens of affection”; the prisoner’s heart was elsewhere. Monmouth had no lack of clergymen to see him pass out of the world at the close of his short and wasted life, for during the day and night before he died, four ecclesiastics were in attendance upon him, and they never left him till the end. These were Tenison, then Vicar of St Martin’s-in-the-Fields, but afterwards Bishop of Lincoln, and Primate; Turner, Bishop of Rochester; Hooper, afterwards Bishop of Bath and Wells; and the saint-like Thomas Ken, Bishop of Bath and Wells. When Tenison reproached the Duke for the want of feeling he had shown towards his wife, Monmouth replied that “his heart was turned against her, because in his affliction she had gone to the play and into public companies, by which I knew she did not love me.” The woman he loved best, and with whom he had been living, was Lady Harriet Wentworth, the daughter of Lord Cleveland.

Accompanied by the four clergymen, Monmouth left the Tower on the morning of the 15th of July, at ten o’clock; the writ for the delivery of the Duke’s body to the Sheriffs is still to be seen in the Record Office, being addressed to Sir William Gostling and Sir Peter Vanderpatt, and endorsed by them on receiving the Duke from the charge of the Lieutenant of the Tower.

Monmouth passed on foot through a lane of soldiers, preceded by three officers, who carried pistols and accompanied him on to the scaffold. The Duke’s appearance caused a commotion in the crowd which had come to see him die; he had always been a favourite with the people, his personal beauty probably being the principal reason for his popularity; and he was also regarded as a kind of hero on the Protestant side, as opposed to James the Second and the Romish priests. The populace had recently given him the title of “King Monmouth.”

The scaffold was all draped in black. Monmouth made no speech to the people, but only conversed with the clergymen near him; but he had prepared the following statement, written on a sheet of paper, which he gave to one of the Bishops:—“I declare that the title of King was forced upon me, and that it was very much contrary to my opinion when I was proclaimed. For the satisfaction of the world I do declare that the late King told me he was never married to my mother. Having declared this, I hope that the King who is now, will not let my children suffer on this account. And to this I put my hand this 15 July 1685. Monmouth.” This extraordinary statement was also signed by the four clerics and the two Sheriffs.

“Pray do your business well,” Monmouth said to Jack Ketch, the headsman. “Do not serve me as you did my Lord Russell. I have heard you struck him four or five times; if you strike me twice, I cannot promise you not to stir.” Unfortunately poor Monmouth was even worse served by the executioner than Russell had been, and it was not until the blows had been repeated five times that the once beautiful head was separated from the body. Jack Ketch was almost torn to pieces by the horrified and furious mob.

It is almost incredible to believe, did one not know the baseness of James’s character, that he had two medals struck in commemoration of Monmouth’s execution—“savage medals,” as they were appropriately called. “Thus,” writes John Evelyn of Monmouth’s death, “ended this quondam Duke, darling of his father, and the ladies, being extremely handsome and adroit; an excellent soldier and dancer, a favourite of the people, of an easy nature, seduced by knaves, who would have set him up only to make a property, and taken the opportunity of the King being of another religion, to gather a party of discontented men. He failed and perished, had a virtuous and excellent lady that brought him great riches and a second Dukedom in Scotland.”

The son of that Marquis of Argyll who had raised the standard of rebellion in Scotland in conjunction with Monmouth’s rising in England, and who was beheaded in Edinburgh in the same year, was a prisoner in the Tower for some weeks. The following is the entry with reference to him taken from the Tower records:—“25 June 1685. Archibald Campbell, son to the late Marquis of Argyll, upon suspicion of dangerous practices to the State. Signed by his Majesty’s command. Sunderland.” The young man was, however, discharged on the 19th of the following October. After his liberation he went to Holland, returning to England with William III., when he was created first Duke of Argyll.

The Stuarts had solemnly vowed to rule England in the Reformed and Protestant faith, but within a quarter of a century of their restoration, the Church of Rome had not only been allowed by them to recover many of its privileges, but Roman Catholicism had become the religion of the King and court. James had set aside the Test Act, a measure passed by Parliament in 1663, which required every individual in the civil and military employment of the State to take the oath of supremacy and allegiance, to declare against the doctrine of transubstantiation, and to declare in favour of the doctrine of the Sacrament as taught by the Church of England. By annulling this act James re-admitted Roman Catholics to any office in the country, both in civil and military situations. Four Roman Catholic peers were added to the Privy Council; priests and Jesuits flocked into the country in great numbers, and Mass was publicly celebrated in the Chapel Royal. London again saw the almost forgotten costumes of the different religious orders, the brown-robed Franciscans, and the white-robed Carmelites, whilst the Jesuit priests opened a school at the Savoy. At the same time the King added largely to the standing army, and a camp of thirteen thousand men was established at Hounslow, destined, if James thought necessary, to keep the capital in check. Whilst James was thus trying to coerce his subjects to the Roman Catholic religion, the Protestants across the Channel were being persecuted by Louis; for by a strange coincidence—if not by a prearranged plan—the same year that saw the violation of the Test Act in England, witnessed the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in France, with the result that thousands of French reformers were driven from their homes and crossed to England—a living proof of the curse that a bigoted and arbitrary ruler could be to his subjects.

In the succeeding year, 1686, James attempted to gag the English Church. The King had appointed two Roman Catholic priests to high preferments—Massey to the Deanery of Christ Church, and Parker to the See of Oxford; and when the English clergy protested from their pulpits against these appointments, James summoned an Ecclesiastical Commission, at the head of which he placed Jeffreys. The first action of this Commission was to suspend Compton, Bishop of London, who had refused to suspend the Dean of Norwich (Sharpe), one of the offending preachers against the Papist appointments made by the King.

In 1687 Oxford had the high honour of bringing about the Revolution, which saved England from a fresh tyranny and led to the final overthrow of the Stuart princes.

James intended to place a Roman Catholic, of the name of Farmer, over the Fellows at Magdalen College; but the College, instead of accepting this nominee of the King, chose one of their number, Hough, for their head. Whereupon, the Ecclesiastical Court, with Jeffreys at its head, declared the Magdalen election null and void, and Parker, the Bishop of Oxford, James’s nominee to that see, was forced upon Magdalen as its President. Parker died in 1688, and James again appointed a Roman Catholic bishop in partibus, Bonaventure Giffard, to take his place. Previously, the King had visited Oxford, and after abusing the Fellows for their independence, had expelled five-and-twenty of them. These arbitrary measures led to a clerical revolt throughout England. In the April of the following year, James issued a form of indulgence, which he ordered to be read in all the churches. By this form the King hoped to unite the Roman Catholics with the Protestant Nonconformists under the banner of “liberty of conscience” against the Church, and thus make the Church herself assist in her own defeat by the use of his ecclesiastical supremacy (Wakeman’s “History of the Church of England”).

The clergy protested, and six bishops, with Sancroft, the Archbishop of Canterbury, at their head, drew up a petition to the King, protesting against the form. The petition was most humble; it stated that the petitioners considered this Declaration of Indulgence to religious dissenters to be founded “upon such a dispensing power as hath often been declared illegal by Parliament, and particularly in the years 1662 and 1672, and in the beginning of your Majesty’s reign; and in a matter of so great moment and consequence to the whole nation, both in Church and State, your petitioners cannot, in providence, honour, or conscience, so far make themselves parties to it as the distributors of it all over the nation, and the solemn publication of it once again, even in God’s House, and in the time of Divine Service, must amount to in common and reasonable contention.”

The King read the petition, scowled, and returned it to Sancroft, saying angrily: “I did not expect this from the Church of England!” adding, “If I change my mind you shall hear from me; if not, I shall expect my commands shall be obeyed.”

Three weeks afterwards the Bishops and the Archbishop were summoned to appear before the Privy Council. Jeffreys insolently inquired whether they were ready to give recognisances to be tried for misdemeanours before the Court of the King’s Bench, and waiving their plea of being Peers of Parliament, he refused the prelates bail, and had them committed to the Tower. In order to avoid the demonstration in the Bishops’ favour, which both James and Jeffreys dreaded if they were taken through the streets of the city, they were conveyed to the Tower in the royal barge along the river. But their passage to the fortress was one long ovation, and as the barge approached the Tower, numbers of people rushed knee-deep into the water to receive the blessing of the prelates, and, on their arrival, even the warders received them kneeling at the landing-place.

As the Seven Bishops passed under St Thomas’s Tower, and landed at the Traitor’s Gate, the bells of St Peter’s Chapel were ringing for evening service. Passing over the green, they entered the chapel and attended the service. The appropriateness of the second lesson struck all who were present, being a chapter in the 2nd of Corinthians—“Giving no offence in anything, that the ministry be not blamed: but in all things approving ourselves as the ministers of God, in much patience, in afflictions, in distresses, in imprisonments.”

A most uncomfortable week must have been passed by these Reverend Fathers of the Church in the Tower, for they were all crowded together in the by no means spacious Martin Tower. On the 15th of June they were taken from the Tower to the bar of the Court of King’s Bench—on this occasion they were admitted to bail. Their trial began a fortnight later, taking place in Westminster Hall, and was one of the most memorable of the great historic events that that building has witnessed. When the verdict of “Not guilty” was pronounced, the old oak roof of William Rufus’s hall re-echoed with the shouts of the people gathered below; it was a moment, as Wakeman has eloquently written in his “History of the Church of England,” “unparalleled in the history of English courts of law. The crowd within and without Westminster Hall broke into a frenzy of enthusiastic joy. Men fell upon each other’s necks, and wept and shouted and laughed and wept again; and amid the cheers of men and the boom of cannon the heroes of the Church passed in safety to their homes.”

The names of these seven “humble heroes” who had so nobly stood up in defence of the rights of the Church of England and of the liberty of their land, were Sancroft, the Primate; Thomas Ken, Bishop of Bath and Wells; William Lloyd, Bishop of St Asaph’s; John Lake, Bishop of Chichester; Thomas White, Bishop of Peterborough; Jonathan Trelawney, Bishop of Bristol; and Francis Turner, Bishop of Ely. Sancroft had been promoted from the Deanery of St Paul’s to Canterbury after the death of Archbishop Sheldon, and had helped much in the rebuilding of St Paul’s. He left a fine library to Emmanuel College, Cambridge, of which he had been master. Thomas Ken was famous for his unaffected piety, and the beautiful hymn he composed. Lloyd helped Bishop Burnet to write his “History of the Reformation.” Lake had fought in the army of Charles I., and had been Bishop of Man and Bishop of Bristol, before occupying the See of Chichester; Trelawney was successively Bishop of Bristol, Exeter, and Winchester; and Francis Turner had been Dean of Winchester, a position he had held, together with the Bishopric of Rochester, before being preferred to Ely.

Compared with these men the State prisoners in the Tower in the reign of James II. were not of much interest. After Monmouth’s rebellion, Lord Stamford, with Lord Delamere and Charles Gerrard, “commonly called Lord Bandon,” were prisoners in the fortress. Sir Robert Cotton and John Crewe Offleigh were in the Tower charged with “dangerous and treasonable practices,” and also Mr J. Cook, a member of the House of Commons, “for his indecent and undutiful speech, reflecting on the King and the House of Commons.”

A strange case was that of Sir Bevil Skelton, who was a prisoner in September 1688, and “who had been recalled from France for exceeding his instructions in certain political transactions,” for not only was he speedily released, but was made Governor of the Tower, an appointment which caused much dissatisfaction. This appointment was the last of James’s unpopular acts, and when, three months later, the King fled the country, the House of Lords removed Skelton from his post, and gave the keys of the Tower into the custody of Lord Lucas.

On the 11th of December 1688, James left Whitehall, a King without a crown, and as he crossed the Thames to reach Lambeth, he dropped the Great Seal into the river, hoping thereby that everything would fall into confusion for the want of that symbol of legitimate authority. The curious Dutch engraving representing the amiable act of the last of our male Stuart monarchs gives a view of old London Bridge, and the Tower beyond, looming large against a wintry sky. On the same day that James threw away the Great Seal of England, his Lord Chancellor, the justly detested Jeffreys, was taken, in the disguise of a common sailor, in a small house at Wapping, as he was about to go on board a collier which would have taken him to Hamburg. Once in the power of the mob, Jeffreys’ life was in deadly peril, and he suffered severely at the hands of the people, but was finally rescued and taken before the Lord Mayor, who, poor man, died in a fit soon after the terrible judge had been brought before him, more revolting in his abject terror of death than even during the Bloody Assizes in the West, when he had condemned shoals of men and women to tortures and death with jibes and ghastly pleasantry. Protected by two regiments of the City train-bands, Jeffreys was taken into the Tower on the 12th of December, and given in charge of Lord Lucas, the Governor. The warrant of Jeffreys’ arrest, which is unique, is among the Tower records, and runs as follows:—“We, the peers of this Realm, being assembled with some of the Privy Council, do hereby will and require you to take into your custody the body of George, Lord Jeffreys (herewith sent to you), and to keep him safe prisoner until further order; for which this shall be your sufficient warrant.” This warrant is signed by thirteen peers, including the Bishop of Winchester.

James having fled, and the Great Seal being at the bottom of the Thames, there was no King or Parliament existing at the time the warrant was made out. Jeffreys was half dead with terror when the coach in which he was taken to the Tower entered its gates. All the way from the Mansion House he had implored the soldiers about him to preserve him from the furious rabble that surged around the carriage with ferocious cries of a well-merited hatred. This brute, who had sent scores of innocent people to the block and the gallows, who had rejoiced, like the fiend he was, at the sufferings of his victims as they left his presence for the gibbet, or the plantations, to be sold as slaves, now attempted to excite pity for himself amongst those persons who came to see him in the Tower, by telling them that he had only acted as he had done by the orders of King James, and that James had chidden him for showing too much clemency.

Jeffreys was only forty years old when he was taken to the Tower, but he soon wasted away, tormented, one might imagine, by the spectres of those whom he had destroyed, and of the thousands whom he had made desolate. Whether he died from drinking brandy to excess or not, is of little moment, but according to Oldnixon, his body “continued to decay” until the 19th of April 1689, when he died at the age of forty-one. He had been Chief-Justice at thirty-five, and Lord Chancellor at thirty-seven. No one looking at his portrait in the National Portrait Gallery would imagine that the melancholy-looking and distinguished young man, with his long, flowing wig, could be the most cruel, vindictive, and unmerciful judge with whom the English Bench has ever been cursed.