Knighton’s wife, whose husband was the Constable of the Tower, was set to watch the Queen, and repeat all she said to her husband, who was in correspondence with Cromwell. In writing to the latter, Knighton says that Lady Boleyn (Anne’s aunt) and a “Mestrys Cosyn” were kept in the same room with the Queen; both of these ladies were Anne’s bitter enemies, and they acted as spies upon the unhappy prisoner. “I have,” writes Knighton, “everything told me by Mestrys Cosyn that she thynks mete for me to knowe.”
The trial was held in the large room, called at that time the King’s Hall, which is on the second floor of the White Tower, adjoining the Chapel of St John’s. Here a gallery had been erected for the judges, and seats and benches for the Lords. The Duke of Norfolk, who presided, sat under the “clothe of estate,” and represented the King as High Steward of England. By a singular coincidence Norfolk was uncle to both Anne Boleyn and the second wife whom Henry beheaded, Catherine Howard. At Norfolk’s feet sat his son, the Earl of Surrey, both holding staffs in their hands—Norfolk that of the Lord High Steward, Surrey that of Earl Marshal. On the Duke’s right hand sat the Lord Chancellor, and on his left the Duke of Suffolk, the peers occupying seats on either side of the chamber, in the order of their degree. Led by the Constable of the Tower and the Lieutenant (Sir Edmund Walsingham), the Queen was brought to the bar. Anne Boleyn’s defence was admirable, and must have greatly disconcerted her judges, who knew that no defence, however convincing, could avail her; she was already sentenced by the King. Not one of these men, with their high-sounding names and titles, dared to give their vote in her favour. All, to a man, declared on their consciences that the Queen was guilty. Surely some of the innocent blood counted against these noble cowards as well as against their master, when their day of reckoning arrived. Norfolk, whose tears appear always to have been at command, wept “so that the water,” writes Constantyne in his Memorial, “roune in his eyes,” when he pronounced the sentence, which ran thus: “Because thou hast offended our Sovereign the King’s Grace, in committing treason against his person, and here attainted of the same, the law of the realm is this; that thou shalt be burnt here within the Tower of London, on the Green, else to have thy head smitten off as the King’s pleasure shall be further known of the same.”[9]
According to Froude, Anne Boleyn’s trial was conducted “with a scrupulousness without a parallel in the criminal history of the time.” One can only wonder what kind of a trial that would be which was not conducted with the “scrupulousness” that characterised the proceedings in the King’s Hall, under the Duke of Norfolk, when Anne Boleyn was condemned to die.
On the 17th of May the Queen was taken to Lambeth Palace, where she made her confession to Archbishop Cranmer, but, according to Bishop Burnet, any statements that she made then were induced by the prospect of saving her life; but this cannot be proved.
Up to the last Anne appears to have maintained her cheerfulness and lightness of heart. Knighton writing to Cromwell tells him that, whilst dining with him, the Queen had announced her intention of going to Antwerp, as if she fully expected to be released. Another time she said to him, “If any man accuse me, I can say but nay, and they can bring no witness”; and also, “I think the King does this to prove me.” In Burnet’s “History” the following incident, which took place shortly before Anne’s execution, and which I think goes far to prove her innocence of the charges brought against her, is recounted: “The day before she suffered, upon a strict search of her past life, she called to mind that she had played the step-mother too severely to Lady Mary (afterwards Queen Mary), and had done her many injuries. Upon which, she made the Lieutenant of the Tower’s lady sit down in the Chair of State; which the other, after some ceremony, doing, she fell down on her knees, and with many tears charged the lady, as she would answer it to God, to go in her name, and do, as she had done, to the Lady Mary, and ask her forgiveness for the wrongs she had done her.” Speede, alluding in his “History” to this scene, says, “as she cleared her conscience of the lesser crimes, so undoubtedly could she have done of the greater, if any had been committed.”
In a long letter Knighton wrote to Cromwell on the 18th of May, he says that the Queen had sent for him to be present when she received the Sacrament in her prison. “And at my commyng,” he writes, “she sayd, ‘Mr Knighton, I hear say that I shall not dye affore noon, and I am very sory therefore; for I had thowtt to be ded by thys time and past my payne.’ I told hyr it should be no payne it was so suttel, and then she sayd, ‘I have heard say the executioner was very good and I have a lyttel neck,’ and put her hand about it lawying hartely. I have seen many men and also women executed, and that they have been in grate sorrow; and to my knowledge thys lady hasse muche joy and plesur in dethe.” One may infer from the tone of this letter that Knighton did not believe in Anne’s guilt.
A little before noon on the 19th May, Anne Boleyn, accompanied by four of her ladies, came out of her prison on to Tower Green, attended by Sir William Knighton. Near the scaffold stood the Duke of Suffolk and the Duke of Richmond, the latter a natural son of the King’s; there also were the Lord Chancellor and Secretary Cromwell, the Lord Mayor and the Sheriffs of London and Westminster; in all, about thirty persons gathered at the Tower that bright May morning to behold a sight that had never been witnessed in England before—the execution of a Queen. Henry had given orders that the execution should be as private as possible, fearing the effect of the public sympathy with his victim, if many persons were admitted to see her die. To the very last Anne showed a steadfast courage, and may be said to have looked death fearlessly and without faltering in the face. After a few words full of resignation to her fate, and of forgiveness for those who had brought about her death, even for the chief of these, she said: “And thus I take my leave of the world, and of you all, and I heartily desire you all to pray for me.” After she had finished speaking her ladies came to her and placed a bandage over her eyes, and left her, all weeping bitterly. Kneeling, but keeping her upright position of body, for on this occasion no block was used—and the headsman, who had been specially brought over from Calais, did his work with a sword—she received the stroke of death “with resolution,” writes a contemporary and eye-witness, “and so sedately as herself to cover her feet with her garments.” And thus, and without more to say or do, was her head stricken off, she making no confession of her fault, and only saying, “O Lord God, have pity on my soul.”
When all was over, one of the ladies took up her head, the others the body, and covering them with a sheet, placed them in a chest which was ready for the purpose, and carried the remains to St Peter’s Chapel, “where they say she lieth buried.”
“Such,” writes Lord de Ros in his “Memorials of the Tower,” “was the end of this most unfortunate lady, who but three years before had entered the Tower in triumph as the idol of the King, and the admiration of all around her. Levities, which even now would be thought slight and pardonable, but which in that coarse and licentious Court could hardly deserve a moderate censure, were the only offences found against her, unless the extorted accusation of Smeaton was to be regarded as proof of any deeper guilt.” At about the time of Anne’s execution, her brother, Lord Rochford, and three gentlemen of the Court, Brereton, Western, and Norris, were sentenced to death as accomplices in the crime of which she was accused. Mark Smeaton, a musician who, on the promise of pardon, had confessed his and the Queen’s guilt whilst under torture, was hanged. The accusation against Anne Boleyn and her brother, Lord Rochford, consisted only of the charge that he had one morning entered his sister’s chamber, and, whilst conversing with her in the presence of her attendants, had rested his hand upon the bed. Rochford died declaring his innocence, as did the other gentlemen who died with him. They were all buried in the churchyard of the Chapel of St Peter.
The day after Anne Boleyn’s execution, Henry married Jane Seymour. There is a tradition that the King had ordered a gun to be fired from the roof of the White Tower, then mounted with cannon, which he could see from his palace, as a signal that Anne Boleyn had ceased to live.
When Queen Victoria visited the Tower for the first time, and was shown the place on the Green on which the scaffold had stood where Jane Grey and Anne Boleyn had been executed, and where the grass, tradition said, never grew, Her Majesty ordered the brass tablet that now records those tragic events, to be placed on the spot, with the words, “Site of the ancient scaffold: on this spot Queen Anne Boleyn was beheaded on the 19th May 1536.”
The year 1537 saw the Tower full of prisoners, the result of the rising in the North, called the Pilgrimage of Grace. Thomas Cromwell’s crusade against the religious endowments of the country, his spoliation of the monasteries, his wholesale butchery of the monks and friars, had stirred up a violent feeling of resistance in the north of England. A report had been spread that as soon as the monasteries had been ruined and destroyed, it would be the turn of the parish churches, and the people of Lincoln and Yorkshire took instant alarm. A zealous Roman Catholic, named Robert Aske, headed the rebellion, bearing a banner emblazoned with the five wounds of Christ. The peril became so great that Henry found it necessary to send an army against the insurgents, the Duke of Norfolk being appointed its general. But Norfolk hesitated to bring matters to a crisis, and temporised. He promised that the grievances of the people should be heard, and a Parliament was summoned in the North to consider their complaints, and mend or end them. However, in 1537, Henry, breaking faith with the Pilgrimage of Grace, seized the ring-leaders, and established a Council in the North, which was a precursor, in cruelty and bloodshed, of Jeffreys’ Bloody Assize in Devonshire, a century and a half later. Cromwell instituted a reign of terror. His commissioners tore down, among others, such incomparable buildings as Fountains, Rievaulx, and Jervaulx Abbeys; the sacred fanes were gutted, their roofs torn off, and the holy shrines abandoned to the bats and owls, serving as quarries for anyone who cared to cart away the materials. The Abbots and heads of these, and many other religious houses, were either hanged out of hand, or sent in droves to London, and placed in the Tower. Among many others, the Abbots of Rievaulx, Fountains, and Jervaulx, and the Prior of Bridlington, after being imprisoned in the Tower, were hanged as traitors at Tyburn. Two peers, Lord Darcey and Lord Hussey, who had taken part in the Pilgrimage of Grace, were beheaded, the former on Tower Hill, and the latter at Lincoln; Sir Robert Constable, Sir Francis Bagot, Sir Thomas Percy, the brother of the Earl of Northumberland, Sir Stephen Hamilton, William Lumley, Nicholas Tempest, Robert Aske, and Sir John Bulwer, also suffered death, and, horrible to relate, the wife of the last was burnt at Smithfield.
Thomas Cromwell, in his treatment of women, resembled Judge Jeffreys, and, monstrous as is the fact of a woman being burnt to death in the reign of Henry VIII. for a political offence, it is not quite so revolting as the case of Elizabeth Gaunt, executed in the reign of the second James for sheltering one of the followers of Monmouth after the Battle of Sedgemoor. Both Cromwell and Jeffreys were the obedient tools of their masters, who, to quote the great Duke of Marlborough’s remark when describing James II., “This marble,” he said, laying his hand on a marble chimney-piece, “is not harder than the King’s heart.”
Secretary Cromwell, having put down the rising in the North of the country in this ruthless fashion, turned his attention to the West, where there yet lingered, amongst the descendants of the great houses of de la Pole and Courtenay, the last hopes of the Yorkists. In order to accomplish his object of exterminating them, Cromwell required the services of a traitor; and this he soon found in the person of Sir Geoffrey de la Pole, brother of Viscount Montagu. How it was that Geoffrey turned traitor, and denounced his own kith and kin to Cromwell is not known, but his treachery threw into the Secretary’s power not only his own brother, Montagu, but also Henry Courtenay, Marquis of Exeter, together with Sir Edward Nevill and Sir Nicholas Carew. They were charged with maintaining a traitorous correspondence with Cardinal Pole; and all perished on Tower Hill on 9th January 1539. Geoffrey’s brother, Henry de la Pole, Lord Montagu, was the son of Margaret, Countess of Salisbury, and the brother of Cardinal Pole. Born in 1492, he was consequently about fifty when he was executed. He had served in the Army, had fought in France, and had been one of the most conspicuous of Henry’s followers on the Field of the Cloth of Gold. He had married Jane Nevill, a daughter of Lord Abergavenny, but had no son to succeed him. Another of Geoffrey de la Pole’s victims, Henry Courtenay, was one of the most distinguished of Henry’s nobles. Three years previously he had commanded the Royal army, and only a few months before his own trial he had presided as High Steward of England at the proceedings which had resulted in the condemnation to death of Lords Darcey and Hussey. He was son of the tenth Earl of Devonshire, and head of the great house of Courtenay, whose descent from the Eastern Emperors has been so eloquently set forth by Gibbon. His mother was imprisoned in the Tower at the same time as himself; she shortly afterwards died there. Courtenay was forty-five at the time of his execution. Geoffrey de la Pole’s treachery brought him little good, for shortly after the death of his kinsmen we find him a prisoner in the Beauchamp Tower, where his name can still be seen carved with the date, 1562. He died there after Elizabeth’s accession.
There is in the possession of Lord Donnington, an interesting portrait of a stately young lady in the costume of the days of Henry VII. The face is handsome and refined, although somewhat too long; the neck is finely formed, but this, too, is unusually long. In her jewelled left hand she holds a sprig of honeysuckle, or it may have been the intention of the artist to represent the broom flower, the French genet (Planta Genesta), the badge and origin of the name Plantagenet. This portrait represents Margaret Plantagenet, Countess of Salisbury, the daughter of the murdered Duke of Clarence, brother of Edward IV.; her mother was a daughter of the great Earl of Warwick, the King-maker. Thus, as the representative of the Plantagenets and of the Nevills, her position was second only to that of the reigning family. She had married Sir Richard Pole, and was the mother of Lord Montagu, of the distinguished prelate, Reginald Pole, who had fled to Rome, where a Cardinal’s red hat awaited him, as well as of the traitor Sir Geoffrey. Born in 1470, Lady Salisbury was nearly seventy years old when, by Henry’s orders, she was imprisoned in the Tower. There was no charge which could possibly be brought against the aged noblewoman, and she was kept more as a hostage on her son, the Cardinal’s, account, than for any alleged cause of offence. Her close relationship to the late dynasty was in reality her only crime, but this was sufficient to bring her grey head to the block.
Lord Herbert of Cherbury, in his history of Henry VIII., tells the story of Lady Salisbury’s horrible but heroic death as follows:—“Shortly after,” Lord Herbert writes, alluding to the death of the Marchioness of Exeter, the mother of Courtenay, in the Tower, “followed the Countess of Salisbury’s execution (27th May 1541), the old lady being brought to the scaffold, set up in the Tower, was commanded to lay her head on the block; but she, as a person of great quality assured me, refused, saying, ‘So should traitors do, and I am none’; neither would it serve that the executioners told her it was the fashion, so turning her grey head every way, she bid him, if he would have her head, to get it as he could; so that he was constrained to fetch it off slovenly.” Lingard quotes a passage from a letter of Cardinal Pole’s in which he says his mother’s last words were, “Blessed are they who suffer persecution for righteousness sake”; but, to judge from Lord Herbert’s account of the frightful scene at her death, the poor old Countess, although she may have said these words at some period of her imprisonment, could scarcely have uttered them at its awful close. Henry appears to have added intentionally severe hardships to his kinswoman’s imprisonment in the Tower, probably hoping that she would die in consequence, and save him the ignominy of butchering her in public. One of the Tower gaolers, named Phillips, writing to a member of the Privy Council about Lady Salisbury, says, “The Lady Salisbury maketh great moan, for that she wanteth necessary apparel, both for change, and also to keep her warm. Her gentlewoman, Mistress Constance, has no manner of change, and that she hath is sore worn” (Miscellaneous Exchequer Documents).
Lady Salisbury was Lady of the Manor of Christchurch in Hampshire, and there she had built a chapel in the church, called after her the Salisbury Chapel. This building was adorned with elaborate carving and tracery wrought in Caen stone, her effigy being within the chantry, representing the Countess kneeling before the Trinity; beneath were a coat of arms and the motto, “Spes in deo est.” Thomas Cromwell’s Commissioners caused this chapel to be dismantled. The effigy was destroyed, but the chantry itself still remains as a memorial of the last of the Plantagenets. The aged Countess’s mutilated remains were buried in St Peter’s Chapel in the Tower.
Five years after the judicial murder of More and Fisher, their traducer and bitter enemy, Thomas Cromwell, who had been created Earl of Essex by Henry in 1540—only three months before his sudden fall—suffered death on Tower Hill. A parallel has been drawn between Cromwell and Jeffreys in their brutal administration of what they considered justice, and a second parallel might very fittingly be drawn between Henry’s secretary and Maximilian Robespierre. Both sprang from the people; both rose to almost supreme power; both attained their ends by the force of their overwhelming ambition and intense determination of character; both were untroubled by any touch of pity or qualm of conscience; and both ended their lives upon the scaffold.
Very little is known of Cromwell’s early years. He was the son of a blacksmith, and was born at Putney in 1490. At Wolsey’s death he darted into power, and his influence with the King became stronger than even the Cardinal’s had ever been. Cromwell once owned to Cranmer, after he had attained the position of the most powerful subject in the realm, that in early life he had been a “ruffian,” and a ruffian he remained until his death on Tower Hill. Henry required an unscrupulous instrument to carry out his schemes in suppressing the religious orders, and in Cromwell he found a man as utterly lacking in principles as he himself. Cromwell was exactly what he described himself as having been in his youth to Cranmer, but a ruffian without heart, feeling, or conscience. I have compared Thomas Cromwell to Robespierre, and the likeness can be even traced in their lineaments. There is an admirable engraving which has all the marks of being a faithful likeness of Cromwell in the “Herologia,” and a portrait of him in the National Portrait Gallery, and in both the facial resemblance to Robespierre is remarkable. The features are of the ferret type, not brutal by any means, but the suggestion of the weasel in both faces is strongly marked. Cromwell made a close study of Machiavelli, and “The Prince” was his constant companion, philosopher, and guide; Cæsar Borgia could not have followed the precepts of the cynical Florentine more literally than did the ennobled son of the Putney blacksmith.
It was his aim to make the King supreme both in Church and State. In order to achieve this object, the Church was first pillaged, and when he and his master were glutted with the spoils of monasteries and abbeys, he turned his attention to the State, sweeping off the heads of those nobles whom he considered sufficiently independent in their views to resist the merging of the supreme power in the sovereign. For ten years—from 1530 to 1540—there was an English “Terror.” Even Henry himself, who seemed to fear neither man nor God, feared Cromwell. It was Cromwell who was more responsible than Henry for the deaths of More and Fisher; it was Cromwell who, when the Pilgrimage of Grace took place, carried fire and sword into Yorkshire, and afterwards into Devonshire; it was Cromwell who instigated Henry to exterminate the families of de la Pole and Courtenay; it was Cromwell who threatened to destroy Cardinal Pole, although the latter had put the seas between himself and the terrible instrument of the King’s enmity. “There may be found ways enough in Italy,” he wrote to the Cardinal, “to rid a treacherous subject. When justice can take no place by process of law at home, sometimes she may be enforced to take new means abroad.” The Cardinal soon learnt what Cromwell meant by “justice at home,” when the news reached him in Italy that Cromwell and the King had butchered his aged mother upon Tower Green. Shortly before his fall—and this fact of his career is similar to that of Robespierre—Cromwell had attained what was practically the supreme power. Besides being Earl of Essex, he was also Great Chamberlain of England, Vicar-General of the Church, the head of all foreign and domestic affairs, and President of the Star Chamber—the most supreme and most redoubtable council in the land, which corresponded in its power to the Council of the Ten at Venice.
Like Robespierre again, in private life Cromwell lived simply and without ostentation—a strong contrast this to his old master and patron, the magnificent Wolsey. Whether Cromwell possessed any redeeming points in his character history has not recorded, but his fall was singular, as sudden and as unexpected as had been his rise. It was brought about by a woman, although indirectly. Cromwell had arranged the marriage of Henry with Anne of Cleves, and when the King found that princess lacking in all the charms with which she had been accredited both by painters and courtiers, he not only spoke of her as “a Flanders mare,” but visited his disappointment upon the negotiator of the marriage, and, from being Henry’s most trusted adviser, Cromwell became the object of his royal master’s implacable hatred.
The old historian Stowe thus relates the fall of the newly created Earl of Essex: “The King’s wrath was kindled against all those that were preferrers of this match, whereof the Lord Cromwell was the chief, for the which, and for dealing somewhat too far in some matters beyond the King’s good liking, were the occasions of his hasty death.” On the 10th of June 1540, Cromwell, who had been in his place in the House of Lords the same afternoon, was arrested and placed in the Tower; so sudden was the effect of Henry’s rage. Cranmer, who appears to have been a true friend of the fallen Minister, wrote to Henry in his behalf, but with the usual result.
Foxe, the martyrologist, bears witness to the courage and unshaken firmness evinced by Cromwell during his imprisonment. On the 29th of the month he was condemned to death by both Houses of Parliament. The day after he wrote a piteous letter to the King, which ends thus, “Most Gracious Prince, I can say but mercy, mercy, mercy!” But Henry and mercy were strangers, and the former slayer of women and children must have bitterly regretted the little of the same quality that he had shown to others in the days of his power.
A month later he was beheaded. On his way to Tower Hill he met Lord Hungerford, bound on a similar errand—the distance from the Tower to Tower Hill takes but five minutes, walking very slowly—and whilst these two were making their way to their final earthly destruction, Cromwell appears to have encouraged his fellow-sufferer, who was complaining and bewailing the approach of death, as they faced the Hill together, and the grim shadow that was closing round them. “And so,” writes Foxe, “went they together to the place of execution, and took their death patientlie.”
What Cromwell said in his dying speech on the scaffold has been made uncertain by the garbled accounts of his words; but, to judge from these, he made a better exit from the world than his career in it would have led one to expect. The executioner was awkward, and, according to the chroniclers, Stowe, Hall, and Foxe, “very ungoodly performed his office.” Cromwell was fifty years of age when his career thus ended. From the son of a blacksmith, and with no manner of advantages, he had risen from his humble surroundings at Putney to become an Earl, a Knight of the Garter, Chancellor of the University of Cambridge, Keeper of the Privy Seal, and Lord Great Chamberlain of England. He did much evil, but he accomplished two good things for the benefit of his country, which should be put upon the other side of his account; he caused the Bible to be printed in English in 1538, and he instituted the system of parish registers, which he himself superintended.
The Lord Hungerford of Heytesbury, who has been mentioned as having been beheaded at the same time as Cromwell, had been accused of having persuaded some persons to prophesy how long the King would live. It was probably only a trumped-up charge, and certainly, if true, not of any greater offence than that of lèse majesté, but it was considered quite sufficient to bring the too curious inquirer to the scaffold. In the same year, as has already been stated, Lord Leonard Grey was executed.
An apparently justifiable execution took place in the year 1541, that of Lord Dacre, on Tower Hill, he being, according to Holinshed’s Chronicle, guilty of murder.
Cromwell, although not a professed Protestant, had always protected the followers of that faith, but with his death they were again persecuted by Henry, and at the end of July 1541 three of the most prominent of the Lutherans, Dr Robert Barnes, Thomas Gerard, and William Jerome, were haled to the dungeons of the Tower, and thence dragged through the City on hurdles, and burnt at Smithfield. On the same day (30th July) Henry, with his almost incredible impartiality when engaged on persecution, caused four Roman Catholic priests—Doctor Abel, Fetherstone, Powel, and Cooke—to be burnt to death at the same place (Hall).
In the Beauchamp Tower is a carving, representing a bell, on which the capital letter “A” is cut. This is a rebus carved by the learned and unfortunate Dr Abel, while he was awaiting his trial and execution in this tower. Abel was a man of great learning, and had been domestic chaplain to Catherine of Arragon, and had offended the King by championing Catherine’s cause during the trial of divorce between her and Henry. Below Dr Abel’s rebus appears the name of “Doctor Cooke, 1540,” which is the inscription of Lawrence Cooke, Prior of Doncaster. These four priests were martyrs for the old faith, like More and Fisher, and many less known Roman Catholics, who preferred death rather than acknowledge Henry’s supremacy in the Church of England.
Six years after Anne Boleyn’s execution upon Tower Green, another of Henry’s Queens was led out from her prison in the Tower, to a similar doom on that same spot.
In the case of Queen Catherine Howard, one cannot, alas! feel that the poor victim was innocent of the charge which the King had brought against her. Catherine Howard was an erring woman, much to be pitied. She confessed her guilt both to Archbishop Cranmer and many Lords of the Council, to Suffolk, Southampton, and also to Thirlby, the Bishop of Westminster—the only Bishop who ever occupied that see.
On the 10th of February 1542 Queen Catherine Howard was brought from Sion House, where she and Lady Rochford had passed the winter in close confinement, to the Tower, and three days later both these unhappy ladies were beheaded on the scaffold on Tower Green. Both died with courage, and both confessed their guilt before the axe fell, for on this occasion the services of the Calais executioner were not called into requisition. An eye-witness of their deaths, named Otwell Johnson, in a letter written by him (and which is undoubtedly genuine, as Sir Henry Ellice includes it in his first series of “Original Letters”), declares that both victims “made the moost godly and chrystian end, that ever was hard tell of I thynke sins the world’s creation.” So the last act in these poor women’s lives atoned for the evil of which they had been undoubtedly guilty. Weever, a contemporary, alludes thus to the Queen’s burial: “Within the choir of this chapel (St Peter’s) lieth buried near the relics of the said Annie Bollein, the body of Katherine, the fifth wife of King Henry VIII., who, having continued his wife but the space of one year, six months, and four days, was attainted by Parliament and beheaded here in the Tower upon the 13th of February 1542.” Lady Rochford shared her mistress’s place of interment. Catherine Howard was but twenty-two years of age when her life closed so tragically. Culpepper and Dereham, who were charged with being the Queen’s paramours, were hanged at Tyburn, and some of her relatives suffered imprisonment in the Tower on her account. Among these were her grandmother, “old Duchess of Norfolk,” as Shakespeare calls her; Lord and Lady William Howard, and the Countess of Bridgwater, the daughter of Thomas, second Duke of Norfolk. By a singular coincidence, the Duke of Norfolk, who had presided at the trial of Anne Boleyn, was uncle both to that unfortunate Queen and to Catherine Howard, and when the latter was attainted, he wrote thus to Henry: “The abominable deeds done by two of my nieces against your Highness have brought me into the greatest perplexity that ever poor wretch was in” (State Papers: Domestic Series). The “poor wretch” himself came within an ace of losing his own head by Henry’s orders, and the King’s death the day before that fixed for Norfolk’s execution, alone saved him from perishing on the scaffold.
An unusual occurrence happened in the Tower in this same year of Catherine Howard’s death, Arthur Lisle Plantagenet, Viscount Lisle, dying of joy, according to old Hall, on hearing that he was declared innocent of the charge upon which he had been placed in the Tower, that he had intended to betray the town of Calais. Arthur Lisle was a natural son of Edward IV., and had served in the Navy, of which he was a Vice-Admiral. He had been knighted and created Viscount Lisle in 1523, and given the Garter in the following year.
It is about this time that the first mention is made of that most uncomfortable dungeon in the White Tower, named from the smallness of its size, “Little Ease,” Hall, in his “Chronicles,” stating that one of the officers belonging to the Sheriffs of London was placed in this prison.
The disaster to the Scottish Army at Solway Moss in 1542 brought many Scottish prisoners to the Tower, thus repeating the history of the building during the reigns of the first and third Edwards. Among them were the Earls of Cassillis and Glencairn, Maxwell, Oliphant, and Somerville, together with some twenty knights; they were not long in the Tower, however, being sent to various places to undergo their terms of imprisonment.
One of the most memorable names connected with the Tower in the reign of Henry VIII. is that of Anne Askew, or Ascue, as it is sometimes spelt, the daughter of Sir William Askew, the head of an old Lincolnshire family. In early life she had married a Mr Kyme, so that when her persecution for her faith took place—a persecution which has immortalised her name—it would have been more correct to have called her by her husband’s name; however, her maiden appellation has clung to her, and will always remain the one by which she is known. Kyme appears to have been a bigoted Roman Catholic, and his wife’s strong attachment to the Reformed faith may have been increased by his conduct towards her, for he seems to have been a good-for-nothing fellow who made her life the reverse of a happy one. Amongst Anne’s friends in London who belonged to the Reformed faith, was no less a person than Catherine Howard’s successor as Henry’s wife, Queen Catherine Parr. Anne, it appears, had some post about the Queen’s person; at any rate, she was known to many of the principal ladies of the Court. An Act known as “The Six Articles,” which obtained the popular name of “The Whip with Six Strings,” had been made law in 1539. The first clause of this Act ordained that whoever disagreed with the declaration of the Statute of Transubstantiation or the Real Presence, that the “Natural Blood Body and Blood of Christ” were present in the Sacrament, should suffer death by fire. Many men and women had been barbarously killed for denying the truth of this doctrine, and amongst those who suffered martyrdom was Anne Askew. To the horror of such a death Henry and his Council added that of torture, in order to force the victim to recant; torture, although illegal, was often, nay commonly, used in Henry’s reign.
Lord de Ros’s account of Anne Askew’s sufferings and death are too interesting to need an apology for my quoting it here:
“In March 1545, she was summoned before an Inquest or Commission at the Guildhall, and subjected to a long examination by one Dare, when she displayed an intelligence and shrewdness, which, with her modest, gentle demeanour, drew the admiration even of her enemies. Being remanded to the Compter, she was shortly after brought before Bishop Bonner for examination, who exercised all his subtlety to entangle her in her replies; and at length drew out a written summary, in which he had grossly perverted their meaning, and desired her, after hearing it read, to declare whether or not she would subscribe to its contents. Her answer merits to be recorded, ‘I believe,’ she said, ‘as much therof as is agreable to the Holy Scriptures; and I desire that this sentence may be added to it.’ Furious at what he called her obstinate evasions, Bonner was about to proceed to violent extremities, when by the interference of some powerful friend, and probably for other reasons, she was allowed to be released on the bail of her cousin, one Brittayne, who, during the examination, at which he was present, had judiciously cautioned her ‘not to set her weak woman’s wit to his lordship’s great wisdom.’ We have no record of the cause, or rather pretext, of her being, about three months afterwards, again arrested. This time her husband, Kyme, was brought up along with her before the Privy Council, sitting at Greenwich. Wriothesley, the Chancellor, now undertook her examination, and chiefly on the great point of Transubstantiation, on which she firmly refused to abandon her own convictions, and was committed to Newgate; from whence she wrote some devotional letters, which show her to have possessed considerable talent. Her next appearance was before the Council at the Guildhall, when, after an examination by a silly Lord Mayor (Martin), in which she entirely foiled him by her simplicity and good sense, she was plainly told, that unless she renounced her errors, and distinctly declared her acquiescence in the Six Articles, she must prepare to die; and, on her firm refusal, she was condemned, without any trial by jury, to be burned as an heretic. Meantime, instead of being sent back to Newgate, she was committed to the Tower, with a view to subject her to the torture of the rack, for which the gloomy seclusion of that fortress afforded greater convenience than the ordinary prison of Newgate, with the hope of inducing her to incriminate the Duchess of Suffolk, the Countess of Sussex, the Countess of Hertford, and other ladies who were supposed to have assisted her with money for her support in prison. She was too high-minded and grateful to betray them; and whatever might have been the case, she declared that she had been chiefly kept from starvation by her faithful maid, who went out and begged for her of the ‘’prentices and others she met in the street.’
“The unhappy lady was now carried to a dungeon, and laid on the rack in the presence of the Lieutenant of the Tower, Sir A. Knyvett, and Wriothesley, the Chancellor, Rich, a creature of Bonner, and a secretary, sitting at her side to take down her words. But when she endured the torture without opening her lips in reply to the Chancellor’s questions, he became furious, and seizing the wheel himself, strained it with all his force, till Knyvett, revolting at such cruelty, insisted on her release from the dreadful machine. It was but in time to save her life, for she had twice swooned, and her limbs had been so stretched, and her joints so injured, that she was never again able to walk without support. Wriothesley hastened to Westminster to complain to the King of the Lieutenant’s lenity; but the latter, getting into his barge with a favourable tide, arrived before him, obtained immediate audience, and told his tale so honestly and with such earnestness, that Henry’s hard heart was softened for once, and approving his conduct he dismissed him with favour. A stronger reason for this may have been that the rack was regarded with such horror by the people as to be applied only in secrecy; and had Anne expired under it, and the fact became known, some violent outbreak might have been apprehended in the City. She was shortly afterwards carried to Smithfield and there burnt to ashes, together with three other persons for the same cause, in the presence of the Duke of Norfolk, the Earl of Bedford, Sir Thomas Wriothesley, the Lord Mayor, and a vast concourse of people. One of the peers, learning that there was some gunpowder about the stakes, became frightened lest any accident should happen to himself from the faggots being blown into the air; but the Earl of Bedford assuring him that no such chance could occur, and that it was only to hasten the deaths of the sufferers, he remained looking on with the same barbarous indifference as the brutal mob who had assembled to witness the dreadful spectacle.”
Anne Askew’s fellow-sufferers were named John Lascels (? Lascelles), John Adams, and Nicholas Beleinian; there is a woodcut of their martyrdom in Foxe’s book.
Anne Askew’s death appears to have been fraught with some danger to Queen Catherine Parr. Aware of the Queen’s sympathy for Anne, and her leaning towards the Reformed faith, Wriothesley, the bigoted Lord Chancellor, went so far as to draw up a warrant for Catherine’s arrest. Fortunately for the Queen she was warned of her danger, and either was actually frightened into a fever, or feigned illness. During an interview with the King, the suffering Queen so worked upon his feelings, that when Wriothesley appeared with a guard to take her into custody, Henry turned upon him, and, heaping the foulest abuse upon him, drove him from the presence (Speed’s Chronicle). Luckily for Catherine Parr the days of Henry were near their end, or it is more than probable that she would have shared the fate of Anne Boleyn and Catherine Howard.
In 1546 peace had been made between England and France, and in order to ratify the treaty the French sent their Lord High Admiral to England, with the Bishop of Evreux, and some other nobles. Landing at Greenwich, they were conducted with great ceremony to the Tower—where a splendid banquet awaited them in the palace of the fortress—by the Earls of Essex and Derby in the royal barge. After leaving the Tower they proceeded to Lambeth Palace, and thence to Hampton Court, where the treaty was signed. These were the last guests of the Sovereign in the Tower. The last State prisoner to be executed in Henry’s reign was the gifted and brilliantly endowed Earl of Surrey, the eldest son of Thomas Howard, third Duke of Norfolk, who, as I have said before, also narrowly escaped with his life.
Henry VIII., for the good of his people, was dying fast at the close of the year 1546. His once handsome and athletic form had become a bloated mass of corruption. His nature, always cruel, became fiend-like during his later years, owing to his physical sufferings. He knew that death was gaining upon him rapidly, but whilst he lived he determined still to destroy, and when even in the very grasp of the King of Terrors, still sent out his death orders. No cause can be assigned for the King, while his wicked old life was fast ebbing away from him, ordering the death of Norfolk and his son Surrey. The only possible reason was that perhaps Henry feared they might wield too great an influence after his death, when his heir, Edward, should have become King.
Henry intended that his son’s uncle, Lord Hertford, Queen Jane Seymour’s brother, should be his sole guardian, and for a wretched pretext Norfolk and Surrey were arrested, imprisoned in the Tower, and sentenced to death. Of the Duke of Norfolk, Sir Walter Raleigh wrote in the preface to his great History: “Henry knew not how to value his deservings, having never omitted anything that concerned his own honour and the King’s service.” Despite his weakness for tears, Norfolk may rank amongst the English worthies, for he had done good service to the State, both in arms and council. He had commanded the English army at the Battle of Flodden, and had led another army during a second victorious war in Scotland; he had also led the English van in the war with France. In Ireland he had been one of the best and most just of the English Lords-Deputy. By the accident of birth the Duke was of the blood-royal, being descended from the Mowbrays; further than this, he had married one of the daughters of Edward IV., and two of his nieces had been Queens of England. For his own safety he was perilously near the steps of the throne, and his birth was too high, the story of his life too romantic, for Henry to tolerate his surviving himself, consequently, with reason or without, his death was determined upon; Henry was never troubled by lack of just cause. The dying King excused his treatment of the Duke and his son Surrey to foreign courts, by giving out that they had conspired to take upon themselves the government of the State; this was a pure invention. Another and a still more ridiculous charge brought against them was that Norfolk and his son had quartered in their shield the royal arms of Edward the Confessor. This charge could not have hoodwinked the most simple, for it had been the custom of the Duke’s family long before he himself was born to have these arms quartered upon their shield. However, on the 14th of January 1547, the House of Lords, without even the form of a trial, and without examining either the Duke or his son, passed a bill of attainder against them, and the end of the month was fixed for their execution.
While awaiting his trial in the Tower Norfolk appears to have been inclined—to make use of a racing expression—to “hedge,” as regarded his religious opinions. The Duke had always professed himself a Catholic, both by birth and conviction, but from his prison he sent a petition to the Lords of the Council in which, after asking their permission to have some books sent to him from Lambeth, he adds, “for unless I have books to read ere I fall asleep, and after I wake again, I cannot sleep, nor have done these dozen years. That I may have mass, and be bound upon my life not to speak to him who says mass, which he may do in the other chamber whilst I remain within. That I may be allowed sheets to lie in; to have licence in the daytime to walk in the chamber without, and in the night be locked in as I am now. I would gladly have licence to send to London to buy one book of St Austin, ‘de Civitate Dei,’ and one of Josephus, ‘de Antiquitatibus,’ and another of Sabellius, who doth declare most of any book that I have read, how the Bishop of Rome from time to time hath usurped his power against all Princes by their unwise sufferance” (“Seward’s Anecdotes,” Ed. 1798).
Surrey was placed in the Tower at the same time as his father. Not only was Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, a charming poet, especially when writing of love, of which his verses addressed to the “Fair Geraldine” are perhaps his best, but he was also remarkable in the history of English literature as having been the first writer of blank verse in our language; he was also a distinguished soldier. But thirty years old when his fate came upon him, he was a national loss, and in killing Surrey, Henry destroyed one of England’s most gifted sons. Not being a peer, Surrey was tried before a Common jury at the Guildhall on the 13th January 1547. He made a splendid defence where no defence was necessary, and where no defence, however eloquent, and no career, however blameless, would have saved him. With the axe’s edge turned towards him he left the Guildhall for the Tower, and six days later one of the wisest, noblest, and most gifted heads that England possessed, rolled in the bloody sawdust of the scaffold on Tower Hill. Norfolk’s life was only saved by the providential death of Henry VIII., which took place only a few hours before the time fixed for the Duke’s execution. He remained a prisoner in the Tower until the reign of Mary Tudor, and lived to preside at the trial of the Duke of Northumberland, and again to take up arms when Wyatt’s rebellion broke out, although then in his eightieth year. He died a natural death in his bed—a rare event with the heads of his house—in 1554, aged eighty-one. Norfolk had lived in the reign of eight English sovereigns—from the reign of Henry VI. to that of Mary Tudor.