Immediately after the return of Charles II. in the month of May 1660, the trials and executions of the late King’s judges began. The first of the regicides to be sent to the Tower was Major-General Thomas Harrison, who was committed for high treason on 19th May, and on the 11th of the following October, drawn on a hurdle to Charing Cross, and there hanged and quartered. Harrison, who was the son of a Nantwich butcher, and had been bred for the law, had been useful to the Protector in keeping down the Presbyterian faction. He died stoutly asserting the righteousness of the cause for which he suffered. The same fate befell Gregory Clement and Colonel John James, both members of the High Court of Justice which had condemned Charles I. Clement had succeeded in hiding himself in a house near Gray’s Inn, but was discovered and brought before the Commissioners of the Militia, to whom, however, he was not known by sight. He would probably have escaped, when it chanced that a blind man came into the room as Clement was quitting it, and recognised him by his voice, upon which Clement was arrested and sent to the Tower (Ludlow’s “Memoirs”). Among the other regicides confined within the Tower during that summer were Colonel Bamfield, Colonel Hunks, Colonel Phair, Francis Corker, Captain Hewlet, and John Cook, the last of whom had conducted the prosecution against the King. Hewlet was accused of having been one of the masked executioners at Whitehall, but this was never proved.
James Harrington, the author of the political romance called “The Commonwealth of Oceana,” was imprisoned in the Tower early in this reign. He became insane, and was transferred from prison to prison. His book, by which he was made famous, laid down a plea for a lasting republic, the government of which was to be maintained by rotation. This unhappy author died in 1677, and was laid near Sir Walter Raleigh in St Margaret’s, Westminster.
In the same summer of Charles’s restoration, the Marquis of Argyll, who was shortly afterwards beheaded at Edinburgh, was a prisoner in the Tower charged with high treason, and with having sided with Cromwell; with him was the Marquis of Antrim. The Laird of Swinton was another prisoner of this year, being imprisoned upon various charges, one of which was that he intended to kill the King whilst pretending to be touched by Charles for “the evil”—i.e. scrofula; and also for deserting the army at the Battle of Dunbar.
The next illustrious name that one comes to in the portentous annals of the Tower is that of Sir Harry Vane, whose death was a monstrous injustice, Charles confessing as much when he himself said of Vane that “he was too dangerous a man to let live, if we can honestly put him out of the way.” Although Vane had much to do in bringing Strafford to his death, he was not in any way concerned with the execution of Charles I., and had, on the contrary, always been opposed to that great mistake. However, in the month of July 1660, he was sent to the Tower, whence he was taken to be imprisoned in the Scilly Isles, then brought back to the Tower in March 1662, and beheaded on Tower Hill in that same year. At his trial he had pleaded Charles’s promise of a “merciful indemnity to all those not immediately concerned in his father’s death,” which should, at any rate, have saved Sir Harry from the scaffold. But Vane was too good a man for Charles to tolerate, and his execution was a judicial murder of the basest kind. Both Houses of Parliament had voted for an Act of Indemnity in Vane’s favour, but they were overruled by the King and his creatures. Pepys took the trouble to rise early on the morning of the 14th of June to see Vane’s execution. “Up by four o’clock in the morning and upon business in my office. Then we sat down to business, and about eleven o’clock, having a room got ready for us, we all went out to the Tower Hill; and there, over against the scaffold, made on purpose this day, saw Sir Harry Vane brought. A very great press of people. He made a long speech, many times interrupted by the Sheriffs and others there, and they would have taken his paper out of his hand, but he would not let it go. But they caused all the books of those that writ after him (reporters?) to be given to the Sheriffe, and the trumpets were brought under the scaffold that he might not be heard. Then he prayed, and so fitted himself, and received the blow; but the scaffold was so crowded that we could not see it done.” Sir Harry had been a thorn in Cromwell’s flesh, and the Protector’s exclamation, “The Lord deliver me from Sir Harry Vane!” is historical.
To return to the year 1660, Colonels Axten and Hacker, the latter of whom had commanded the guard at the King’s trial and at his execution, together with one of his judges, Thomas Scott, were hanged at Charing Cross.
In October of the same year, Henry Martin, one of the most prominent of the regicides, was imprisoned for life, and died twenty years later in Chepstow Castle. Another was General Edmund Ludlow, author of the “Memoirs,” who died in Switzerland, after an exile of thirty-two years. Some twenty persons in all were executed in the most brutal fashion, while the bodies of Cromwell, Ireton, and the greatest sailor that England ever had before Nelson, Blake, were torn from their graves in the Abbey, gibbeted at Tyburn, and buried beneath the gallows, Cromwell’s head having been cut from the body and stuck up on Westminster Hall. Charles’s government respected neither the dead nor the rights of nations in the matter of taking vengeance upon the late King’s judges.
On the 22nd of April 1661, Charles left Whitehall in state for the Tower, to prepare for his coronation in the Abbey the following day, as was the custom. Charles the Second was the last of our sovereigns to sleep in the Tower on the eve of his coronation, he being lodged that night in the royal apartments on the southern side of the White Tower, the greater part of the Palace, including the Great Hall, having been pulled down during the Protectorate.
We will let Pepys recount the procession from the Tower—where, as was also the custom, Charles had created a number of Knights of the Bath—to Whitehall. “Up early and made myself as fine as I could, and put on my velvet coat, the first day that I put it on, though made half a year ago. And being ready, Sir W. Batten, my Lady, and his two daughters, and his son and wife, and Sir W. Penn, and his son and I, went to Mr Young’s, the flagmaker, in Corne-hill; and there we had a good room to ourselves, with wine and good cake, and saw the show very well. In which it is impossible to relate the glory of the day, expressed in the clothes of them that rid, and their horses and horse-clothes, among others my Lord Sandwich’s embroidery and diamonds were ordinary among them. The Knights of the Bath was a brave show of itself; and their Esquires, among which Mr Armiger was an Esquire to one of the Knights. Remarquable were the two men that represented the two Dukes of Normandy and Aquitaine. The Bishops came next after Barons, which is the higher place; which makes me think that the next Parliament they will be called to the House of Lords. My Lord Monk rode bare after the King, and led in his hand a spare horse, as being the Master of the Horse; the King, in a most rich and embroidered suit and cloak, looked most noble. Wadlow the vintner (Wadlow was the original of ‘Sir Simon the King,’ the favourite air of Squire Western in ‘Tom Jones’) at the Devil in Flete Streete, did lead a fine company of soldiers, all young comely men, in white doublets. Then followed the Vice-Chamberlain, Sir G. Carteret, a company of men all like Turks; but I know not yet what they are for. The streets all gravelled, and the houses hung with carpets before them, made brave show, and the ladies out of the windows, one of which over against us I took much notice of, and spoke to her, which made good sport among us. Glorious was the show with gold and silver, that we were not able to look at it, our eyes at last being so much overcome with it. Both the King and the Duke of York took notice of us, as they saw us at the window.”
Another contemporary writer says: “Even the vaunting French confessed their pomps of the late marriage with the Infanta of Spain (the wedding of Louis XIV. with Maria Theresa of Spain) at their Majesties’ entrance into Paris, to be inferior in state, gallantry, and riches, to this most glorious cavalcade from the Tower.”
The same year that saw the coronation of Charles witnessed a strange form of punishment to three prisoners in the Tower. These were Lord Monson, Sir Henry Mildmay, and Robert Wallop, who were imprisoned for holding republican views. They were sentenced to lose their rank, to be drawn on hurdles to Tyburn from the Tower and back again, and imprisoned for life.
A large number of other political prisoners were sent to the different prisons throughout the country, and many were also shipped off to the Pacific Islands, where they were sold as slaves. Perhaps the worst case of any was that of three of the late King’s judges who had escaped into Holland. They were seized in that country by an emissary of the English Government, and, against all the laws of nations, brought back to England, imprisoned in the Tower, and suffered death as felons. These three men were Colonel Okey—whom we mentioned as having attempted to seize the Tower after Cromwell’s death—Colonel Barkstead, and Miles Corbet. They were executed in April 1662. Barkstead had been knighted by Cromwell, the Parliament had entrusted him with the custody of the Tower, and he had also acted as Major-General of London. He is supposed to have enriched himself whilst head of the Tower, by exacting money from the prisoners in his keeping. His head was placed over the Traitor’s Gate in the Tower. Although he and his companions may have deserved their fate, the manner of their seizure reflects the greatest discredit upon the government of Charles, which, as I have already said, neither respected the rights of the living nor reverenced the dead.
Between the years 1660 and 1667, some necessary repairs were undertaken in the Tower, some five hundred pounds being expended thereon. In 1680 more extensive repairs were made, owing to reports made by members of the House of Lords who had been appointed by the King in Council, to inquire into “repairs and other works to be done, in and about the said Tower of London, for the safety and convenience of the garrison therein” (Harleian MSS.). An elaborate report was drawn up, the estimate for the necessary alterations amounting to £6097, 2s., but like most of the important undertakings at that time, little, if anything, was accomplished. The order for these repairs issued by the Treasury stated that the above sum would be provided “so soon as the state of His Majesty’s affairs would permit”: but knowing the state of Charles’s “affairs,” we may be sure nothing came of it.
During the Great Fire of 1666, the Tower ran the most perilous risk in all its history of utter destruction, and it was only by the timely blowing up of the buildings which abutted on the walls of the fortress and by the side of the moat, that the historical structure was saved. The conflagration began at midnight on the 1st September in a house in Pudding Lane, not far from where the monument erected in its commemoration now stands. Pepys, that most invaluable of chroniclers and domestic historians, then lived in Seething Lane, Crutched Friars. “Lord’s Day, 2nd September,” he writes: “I made myself ready presently, and walked to the Tower, and there got up upon one of the high places (perhaps Pepys mounted to the top of the White Tower), Sir J. Robinson’s little son going up with me. And there I did see the houses at that end of the bridge all on fire, and an infinite great fire in this and the other side of this and of that bridge.” On the seventh of this September Pepys bears witness to the King’s energy in bringing assistance to the sufferers by the conflagration. “In the meantime,” he writes, “his Majesty got to the Tower by water, to demolish the houses about the Graffs (?), which being built entirely about it, had they taken fire, and attacked the White Tower where the magazine of powder lay, would undoubtedly not only have beaten down and destroyed all the bridge, but sunk and torn the vessels in the river, and rendered the demolition beyond expression, for several miles about the country.”
Charles certainly showed the Stuart courage as well as resourcefulness at a crisis, for there can be little doubt that he was chiefly instrumental in saving the Tower, by ordering the blowing up of the dangerous buildings attached to its walls.
In Hollar’s panoramic view of London before and after the Great Fire, here reproduced, it will be seen how very close was the approach of the conflagration to the walls of the ancient fortress. Another danger threatened the Tower in this same year, a Captain Rathbone, with some other officers, having formed a plan for scaling the outer walls, and killing Sir John Robinson,[5] after securing the gates. It was one of the Anti-Royalist plots with which the period was so rife, and, like the majority of them, ended in failure; Rathbone and his gang were taken prisoners and promptly hanged at Tyburn.
Among other prisoners there at this time was Thomas, Lord Buller of Moor Park, incarcerated for having challenged the Duke of Buckingham to a duel, and also the Marquis of Dorchester, for “quarrelling with and using ill language to that duke”; the latter was likewise in the Tower, and not for the first time. On this occasion Buckingham was charged with treasonable correspondence and with stirring up a mutiny in the Army. Few persons of the time were so frequently made acquainted with the prison chambers of the Tower as this roystering ne’er-do-well, “that life of pleasure, and that soul of whim,” George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, who was, in all, five times confined in the Tower, his first visit having been paid during the Protectorate because he had married Fairfax’s daughter, an event that greatly enraged Cromwell. In 1666 he was imprisoned for insulting Lord Ossory, the son of the Duke of Ormond, in the House of Lords. But he was never a prisoner for long, the last occasion being when, together with Shaftesbury, Wharton, and Salisbury, he opposed the “Courtiers’ Parliament.” All four were sent to the Tower, but Buckingham, after making a humble apology, was released. On leaving the Tower he passed under Shaftesbury’s windows; the latter had refused to submit. “What,” said Shaftesbury to Buckingham, “are you leaving us?” “Why, yes,” answered Buckingham, “such giddy fellows as I am can never stay long in one place.”
Constantly in trouble, Buckingham was so boon a companion of the King’s that Charles could not long let him remain out of his sight, whatever the follies of which the Duke might have been guilty. Another of these brilliant but dissipated friends and courtiers of Charles II. who was sent to the Tower, was the infamously famous John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester. He was there in 1669 for having abducted Elizabeth Mallet, “la triste héritière,” as Grammont calls her. Ultimately Rochester married the lady, and she made a most devoted wife to a most worthless and unfaithful husband.
Charles had been greatly irritated by the preference of the beautiful Frances Stuart, “la Belle Stewart” of Grammont, for the Duke of Richmond, and his rival had to pass three weeks in the Tower in consequence of the Royal jealousy. The Duke, however, had his way, and married the fair Frances after eloping with her. Another of Charles’s courtiers was placed in the fortress in 1665, Lord Morley, for having killed a Mr Hastings. Morley was a noted duellist, and also what was afterwards termed a “Mohawk,” and aided by one, Bromwich, had murdered his victim in a street brawl.
Pepys, we have noted, was often in and about the Tower during these years, but the most interesting entry in his diary relating to the fortress, belongs to the year 1662. Under the date of the 20th October he writes: “To my Lord Sandwich, who was in his chamber all alone, and did inform me that an old acquaintance hath discovered to him £7000 hid in the Tower, of which he was to have two for the discovery, my lord two, and the King the other three, when it is found; and the King’s warrant to search, runs for me and one Mr Lee. So we went, and the guard at the Tower Gate making me leave my sword, I was forced to stay so long at the alehouse close by, till my boy run home for my cloak. Then walked to Minchen Lane, and got from Sir H. Bennet the King’s warrant for the paying of £2000 to my lord and other two of the discoverers. After dinner we broke the matter to the Lord Mayor, who did not, and durst not, appear the least averse to it. So Lee and I and Mr Wade were joined by Evett, the guide, W. Giffin, and a porter with pickaxes. Coming to the Tower, our guide demanded a candle, and down into the cellars he goes. He went into several little cellars and then out-of-doors to view, but none did answer so well to the marks as one arched vault, where after much talk, to digging we went, till about eight o’clock at night, but could find nothing, yet the guides were not discouraged. Locking the door, we left for the night, and up to the Deputy Governor, and he do undertake to keep the key, that none shall go down without his privity. November 1st. To the Tower to make one trial more, where we staid several hours, and dug a great deal under the arches, but we missed of all and so we went away the second time like fools. To the Dolphin Tower. Met Wade and Evett, who do say that they had from Barkstead’s own mouth.” Pepys and his fellow treasure-hunters then paused in their operations, but on the 17th December we read in this Diary, “This morning were Lee, Wade, and Evett, intending to have gone upon our new design upon the Tower, but it raining, and the work being done in the open garden, we put it off to Friday next.” And this is the last we hear of the Tower treasure, and for all that we know that £7000 is still under some vault in the old building, hidden in the “butter firkins” in which it was supposed to have been placed.
Three years after the Great Fire, Pepys gives an account of a visit he paid to his friend Sir William Coventry on the 11th of March 1669, when he went to see him in what was then called “My Lord of Northumberland’s Walk,” a place not now to be identified, which had at its end an iron shield with the Earl’s arms engraved upon it and holes in which to place a peg for every turn made by the pedestrian during his walk: this must have been the prison exercise of the so-called “Wizard Earl,” Raleigh’s friend.
Pepys visited his friend Sir William Coventry very frequently when the latter was imprisoned in the Tower. Sir William had, through the medium of Henry Savile, challenged the Duke of Buckingham to a duel in March 1669, and three days after the challenge Savile was committed to the Gate House Prison, and Coventry to the Tower.
Savile was a gentleman of the Duke of York’s, who, being indignant at the slight put upon him by being sent to the Gate House, asked if he might not be sent to the Tower, and his wish was granted. Pepys was unremitting in his attentions to his old friend Coventry, although by constantly seeing him he was placing himself in the black books of Charles and the Duke of York. We find him calling, on March 4th, upon Coventry in his prison in the Brick Tower when he was in charge of a son of “Major Bayly’s, one of the officers of the Ordnance,” again on the following day he visits him and finds Coventry, “with abundance of company with him.” The visits were continued on the following days until the 16th of the same month, after which Coventry was liberated. The stir his imprisonment had made, and the number of visitors who called upon him—in one day some sixty coaches stood waiting outside the Tower Gates for those who called on Sir William—had much annoyed the King, the Duke of York, and Buckingham. Sir William Coventry, of whom Bishop Burnet writes that he was “a man of great notions and eminent virtue; the best speaker in the House of Commons, and capable of bearing the chief ministry, as it was once thought he was very near it, and deserved it more than all the rest did,” after this quarrel with Buckingham and his imprisonment in the Tower retired from public affairs, going to Minster Lovel in Oxfordshire, and dying at the age of sixty, in 1686. He had been Secretary of the Admiralty, and twice member for Yarmouth, and in 1667 had been one of the Commission of the Treasury.
There is a blank in the list of commitments to the Tower between the years 1668 and 1678. They are supposed to have been lost, but we know that the year after Pepys’ friend Sir John Robinson had ceased to command in the Tower, the gossiping diarist himself was a prisoner within the walls, having been in some way concerned in the so-called Popish Plot of 1679. It is greatly to be deplored that no account of Samuel’s experiences in the Tower have come down to us, for his diary ends ten years before this date: Pepys was in the Tower from the month of May 1679 until the following February. His expenses, however, have been recorded:—“For safe keeping of Sir Anthony Deane and Mr Pepys, from and for the 22nd day of May 1679 unto and for the 24th of June 1679, being four weeks and six dayes, at £3 per week, ancient allowance, and 13s. 4d. per weeke, present demands, according to the retrenchments, £6, 9s. 6d.” (Bayley’s “Tower of London.”)
Among other prisoners in the Tower in this reign was Nathaniel Desborow, or Disbrew, as his name is sometimes written. Desborow was Cromwell’s brother-in-law, “clumsy and ungainly in his person,” and, a born plotter, he hated all who were placed above him. He had been made Chancellor of Ireland by his nephew Richard Cromwell, but nevertheless he helped to pull down the Protector’s son and successor from his short-lived position. There were many others besides, imprisoned for political and non-political offences, and of the latter was Stephen Thomson, who was imprisoned for “stealing and conveying beyond the seas the sole daughter and heiress of Sir Edmund Alleyn, deceased, she being an infant.”
The most sensational event that occurred in the Tower during the reign of Charles II. was the attempt made by a ruffian who called himself “Colonel” Blood to steal the Crown and Regalia. Blood, half sailor, half highwayman, and a complete scoundrel, was about fifty years old when, in the month of May 1671, he made what was literally a dash for the Crown. Blood appears to have served under Cromwell, and consequently styled himself “Colonel”; after the war he became a spy of the Government, and a short time before his performance at the Tower he had almost succeeded in having the old Duke of Ormond hanged on the gallows at Tyburn.
At this time Sir Gilbert Talbot held the appointment of “Master of the Jewel House.” The allowance for this charge had been reduced, and, as a kind of compensation, the Master had permission to allow the public to inspect the Regalia, then kept in the Martin Tower, or Jewel Tower, as it was then called, a fee being charged which became the Master’s perquisite. Three weeks before Blood made his attempt, he had called at the Martin Tower disguised as a clergyman, “with a long cloak, cassock, and canonical girdle.” He was accompanied by a woman whom he represented as his wife. The lady requested permission to see the Regalia, but soon after being admitted to the Tower complained of “a qualm upon her stomach,” and old Talbot Edwards, who had been an old servant of Sir Gilbert’s, and had been placed by him in charge of the Regalia, called to his wife to look after the soi-disant Mrs Blood. That lady having been given something to remove her “qualms” was, together with her husband, most profuse in the expression of her gratitude to the old keeper and his wife, and promised to return upon an early occasion.
The next time Blood came to the Tower he was alone, bringing some gloves for Edwards’s wife as a token of gratitude for the kindness shown to “Mrs Blood.” On this occasion he informed Edwards that he had a young nephew who was well off, and in search of a wife, and suggested that a match might be arranged between him and their daughter. Blood was invited to bring his nephew to make the acquaintance of the young lady, and it was arranged that the old couple should give a dinner at which the meeting should take place. At the dinner Blood took it upon himself, being still in his clerical disguise, to say grace, which he did with great unction, concluding with a long-winded oration, and a prayer for the Royal family. After the meal he visited the rooms in the Tower, and seeing a fine pair of pistols hanging on the wall, asked if he might buy them to give to a friend. He then said that he would return with a couple of friends who were about to leave London, and who were anxious to see the Regalia before leaving, it being decided that he should bring them the next morning. That day was the 9th of May, and at seven in the morning old Talbot Edwards was ready to receive his reverend friend and his companions, who soon put in an appearance. Blood and his confederates had arms concealed about them, each carrying daggers, pocket pistols, and rapier blades in their canes.
They were taken up the stairs into the room where the Regalia was kept, but immediately they had entered, the ruffians threw a cloak over Edwards’s head and gagged him with a wooden plug, which had a small hole in it so that the person gagged could breathe; this they fastened with a piece of waxed leather which encircled his neck, and placed an iron hook on his nose so as to prevent him from crying out. They swore they would murder him if he attempted to give an alarm—which the poor old fellow could scarcely have done under the circumstances. But the plucky old keeper struggled hard, whereupon they beat him upon the head with a wooden mallet, and stabbed him until he fainted. The villains, thinking they had killed him, then turned their attention to rifling the treasures in the room. One of them, Parrot, put the orb in his breeches pocket, Blood placed the Crown under his cloak, and the third began to file the sceptre in two pieces, it being too long to carry away without being seen. At this moment steps were heard; Edwards’s young son having just returned from Flanders in the very nick of time. The thieves dashed down the stairs past the young man who was coming up, carrying with them the orb and crown, the sceptre being left behind in the hurry of their flight. The pursuit was immediate; young Edwards had brought with him his brother-in-law, a Captain Beckman, and the latter hearing cries of “Treason! Murder!” from the terrified women in the Tower, and the cry “The Crown is stolen!” rushed after Blood and the two other men. These had meanwhile crossed the drawbridge between the Main Guard at the White Tower and the Wharf; at the bridge a warder had tried to stop them, but Blood fired his pistol, and the man, although not wounded, fell to the ground, and they dashed past him. At St Katharine’s Gate, near which horses were in waiting for the thieves, Beckman overtook them; Blood again discharged his pistol but missed his pursuer, who ducking his head, promptly seized the sham clergyman, from under whose cloak the Crown fell to the ground, rolling in the gutter. Then followed what the London Gazette of the day called a “robustious struggle,” Blood ultimately being secured, remarking that “It was a gallant attempt, for it was for a Crown!”
When the Crown fell to the ground, some of the gems came loose from their settings, and a large ruby, which had belonged to the sceptre, was found in Parrot’s pocket. Little harm, however, was done, except to the poor old keeper, who was nearly eighty years of age and had been terribly injured; he was soon past all suffering, and was buried in the Chapel of St Peter’s, where his gravestone can still be seen.
After his capture Blood occupied a prison in the White Tower for a short time, but the King soon sent for him. And although it is not, and cannot be known, whether Charles was an accessory or not in the attempted theft, or whether Blood knew too much of the King’s affairs, yet, whatever the reason, Blood was not only pardoned but rewarded, the King giving him a pension of £500 a year, and bestowing upon him landed estates in Ireland, the “Colonel” becoming one of the most assiduous of the Whitehall courtiers. Whether Charles also rewarded Blood’s accomplices is not recorded, but none of them were ever punished for the attempted robbery. John Evelyn recounts meeting Blood at court on the 10th of May 1671. “How he came to be pardoned,” he writes, “and ever received into favour, not only after this but several other exploits almost as daring, both in Ireland and here, I never could come to understand. This man had not only a daring, but a villainous unmerciful look, a false countenance, but very well-spoken, and dangerously insinuating.”
Charles the Second, always in want of money, might very possibly have commissioned Blood, after he had stolen the Crown, to pawn or sell its gems in Holland or elsewhere, and the thieves could then have divided the spoil. There can be little doubt that had not young Edwards and his brother-in-law arrived at the Tower when they did, Blood and the two, or others, would have got safely away with the jewels. The plot had been admirably planned, and only the accident of the return of the keeper’s son, which Blood could not possibly have foreseen, prevented its successful accomplishment.
In later years Blood is said to have become a Quaker—not a desirable recruit for that most respectable body, one would imagine. He died in 1680, and has had the honour of having had his bold, bad face placed in the National Portrait Gallery; it fully bears out Evelyn’s description of the “villainous unmerciful” look of the man.
A very different individual from Blood, who was also in the Tower about the same time, was William Penn, the founder of Pennsylvania. He had been imprisoned for no offence, unless that of writing a pamphlet on Unitarianism could be considered a punishable crime. William Penn’s father, the celebrated Admiral, Sir William, had accused the Duke of York of showing cowardice in a sea fight with the Dutch, and the son’s pamphlet was made the stick with which to beat the father. Young Penn passed some months in the Tower, where he wrote his famous work, “No Cross, no Crown.” Edward Stillingfleet, Bishop of Worcester, was sent to the Tower to see, and to convert, the young Quaker from his errors in belief, but Penn only said to the prelate: “The Tower is to me the worst argument in the world,” and Stillingfleet found that he could make no impression.
In 1678, William Howard, Viscount Stafford, a Roman Catholic peer, was accused of being concerned in the Popish Plot, that monstrous tangle of lies, invented, for the greater part, by the infamous Titus Oates. Stafford was accused by Oates, with four other Roman Catholic peers, of being mixed up in the plot to overthrow the King, and to place the Duke of York upon the throne. From his place in the House of Lords Stafford had declared his innocence of the charge, but he was committed to close imprisonment in the Tower in the month of October (1678), remaining a prisoner until the month of November 1680, when he was tried at Westminster Hall, Titus Oates being the principal witness against him. In Reresby’s “Memoirs” it is said that Charles wished to save Stafford, whom he knew to be innocent; but his mistress, the Duchess of Portsmouth, whom Reresby believed to have been bribed, prevented the King from acting in the matter as he would otherwise have done, and Charles allowed an innocent man to be judicially murdered in order not to thwart his mistress’s wishes. Stafford was beheaded on Tower Hill on the 29th of December 1680, the crowd hooting him on his way to the scaffold, for Titus Oates’s infamous accusations had made any Roman Catholic an object of hatred to the populace. On Stafford asking one of the Sheriffs, of the name of Cornish, to interfere, the latter brutally replied: “I am ordered to stop no man’s mouth but your own.” So fervently, however, did Stafford proclaim his innocence on the scaffold, that many of the spectators, “with heads uncovered, exclaimed: ‘We believe you, God bless you, my Lord!’” “He perished,” writes Sir J. Reresby, “in the firmest denial of what had been laid to his charge, and that in so cogent and persuasive a manner, that all the beholders believed his words, and grieved his destiny.” The same tribunal which had condemned Stafford, three years after his death reversed the attainder they had pronounced against him, it having, in the meanwhile, been proved that Stafford had perished an innocent man, done to death by the false witness of the villain Oates. Lord Stafford was buried in the Chapel of St Peter’s.
The Rye House Plot brought two of the best and noblest heads in England to the block—William, Lord Russell, and Algernon Sidney. Both suffered death for the good cause of the liberty of England. Russell was the proto-martyr in that faith, Sidney the second.
England under Charles the Second was fast drifting back into the worst of the tyrannies that had darkened her former history. The King, as he proved on his death-bed, was a Roman Catholic in religion, and although professing to belong to the Church of England, moved in the steps of his brother James, who was an avowed Papist; and the country was rapidly becoming, politically, a dependency of the French King, and, in religion, a fief of the Pope. The four most conspicuous Englishmen who clearly saw the danger that threatened the freedom, both civil and religious, of England, and who had done their utmost to save their country—patriots in the best sense of that much-abused term, were at the time of the discovery of the Rye House Plot in 1683, either out of the country or in prison.
Shaftesbury, after an imprisonment of five weeks in the Tower, had crossed to Holland after his liberation in November 1681. The news of his acquittal had been received with great rejoicings in the city, Reresby writing that “the rabble lighted bonfires.” The Duke of York, according to Lenthall, expressed his indignation publicly at “such insolent defiance of authority such as he had never before known.” But Shaftesbury’s friends and admirers had a medal struck in honour of his liberation, on one side being the Earl’s portrait in profile, and on the other a view of London taken from the Southwark side of the Thames, with the sun casting its rays over the Tower from out the clouds; above is inscribed the word, “Laetamur,” with the date 24 of November 1681 beneath. This medal gave rise to Dryden’s satirical poem called “The Medal,” in which he compares Shaftesbury to Achitophel.
Russell, Sidney, and Essex were arrested and placed in the prisons of the Tower. They suffered death in the cause of constitutional liberty, as against the arbitrary power of the King, and also for wishing to exclude the Duke of York from the succession to the throne after his brother’s death. This plan was quite distinct from the Rye House Plot—a plot that arranged for the assassination of the King and the Duke of York on their road to Newmarket races.
Russell and Sidney were betrayed by Lord Howard of Escrick, and although warned of his danger, Russell, unlike Shaftesbury, refused to flee, saying he had done nothing to make him fear meeting the justice of his country. However, on entering the Tower, he seems to have had a foreboding of his fate, for turning round to his attendant, Taunton, he said he knew that there was “a determination against him to take his life, for the devil is unchained.” “From the moment of his arrest,” writes Bishop Burnet, “he looked upon himself as a dying man, and turned his thoughts wholly to another world. He read much in the Scriptures, particularly in the Psalms. But, whilst he behaved with the serenity of a man prepared for death, his friends exhibited an honourable anxiety to save his life. Lord Essex would not leave his house, lest his absconding might incline a jury to give more credit to the evidence against Lord Russell. The Duke of Monmouth offered to come in and share fortunes with him, if it would do him any service. But he answered, ‘It would be of no advantage to him to have his friends die with him.’”
During the fortnight which elapsed between his arrest and his sentence, Russell’s devoted wife did all that was humanly possible to save her husband’s life, and the night before the trial she wrote to him: “Your friends believe I can do you some service at your trial. I am certainly willing to try; my resolution will hold out, pray let yours. But it may be the Court will not let me. However, do let me try.” Lady Russell not only tried, but succeeded in being of assistance to her husband during his trial, which took place in Westminster Hall on July 13th, 1683. Lord Russell asked his judges if he might have “some one to help his memory,” as he put it, and the request being granted, “My wife,” he said, “is here to do it.” And all through that long summer day, whilst he was being tried for his life, Lady Russell sat by her husband’s side writing down notes of the evidence, and giving him her advice. When the news came, during the course of the trial, that Essex had been found in the Tower with his throat cut, Russell burst into tears. He wept for the fate of his friend, whilst his own misfortunes only made him appear the more serene and indifferent to the malice of his enemies. Jeffries, who presided, took care in his charge to the jury to turn Essex’s untimely end into an additional proof of Russell’s guilt.
Essex had been arrested soon after Russell, and on the same charge, that of being concerned in the Rye House Plot, and was accused of high treason. Taken from his seat at Cassiobury to the Tower, he was placed in the same room which was occupied by his father. It is described in the depositions placed before the Commissioners in William the Third’s time, as being “on the left hand as you go up the mound, after passing the Bloody Tower Gate.” In Dalrymple’s history it is stated that Essex was confined in the same room which his father, Lord Capel, had occupied, and in which Lady Essex’s grandfather, the Earl of Northumberland, had killed himself in Elizabeth’s reign. To this prison Essex was brought in the month of July in the year 1683—a year so fatal to some of England’s truest patriots—and there, as has already been stated, he was found with his throat cut. Whether Essex died by his own hand, or by the hands of others, will never be known. On the whole, the evidence points to suicide; and this is the opinion of the most trustworthy authorities, such as Green and Gardiner.
Arthur Capel, Earl of Essex, had been one of the most popular of the liberal leaders in the country. He had held high offices in the State, he had been Ambassador from the court of Charles II. to that of Copenhagen, he had been Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland, and, for a short time, Prime Minister. The only son of the gallant Lord Capel of Hadham, who had been executed by Cromwell, Essex had every reason to expect some gratitude from the son of the man for whose sake his father had given his life. But with the Stuarts the sense of gratitude was an unknown quantity, and Essex was doomed to share the fates of his friends, Russell and Sidney, accused by the same traitor who had betrayed both them and himself. On the day of Essex’s death, the King and his brother James had been visiting the Tower, a place in which neither of them had set foot for a dozen years. After James’s flight at the Revolution, it was eagerly believed that this visit was in some way connected with Essex’s death. In a curious contemporary print, Essex is seen being murdered by three well-dressed individuals, the position in which his body was found after death being also shown at the same time. In the depositions alluded to above, the sentry at the prison door stated that two men had entered the room on the morning of the Earl’s death, that an alarm was given by Essex’s valet when he found his master’s body on the floor of the closet next his bedroom with his throat cut. Two children deposed that they had seen a hand throwing a razor out of the Earl’s window, that a woman then left the house and picked it up. A sentry, named Robert Meek, who had made some remarks tending to prove that Essex had met with foul play, was found dead soon afterwards in the Tower moat.
Bad and heartless as were both the King and his brother James, none can believe that they would commit a cold-blooded murder themselves; and had they hired others to do so, the fact of the brothers having gone that same morning to the fortress gives the idea of murder high improbability, and Essex’s death will remain one of the many unsolved tragic mysteries of the Tower. That the authorities believed the theory of suicide is proved by the register of St Peter’s in the Tower, in which is the following entry: “Arthur, Earl of Essex, cutt his own throat within the Tower, July 13, 1683. Buried in this Chapel.”
But to return to Lord Russell. After his condemnation, and during the few days that were left to him on earth, Russell was visited by Tillotson, Dean of Canterbury, as well as by Bishop Burnet, both of whom urged him to sign a paper declaring his adherence to the principle of non-resistance, which they declared to be an article of Christian faith. Russell said, in answer, that he had always believed in the right of a nation to defend its religion and liberties when they were threatened, expressing his willingness to give up his life in their defence; and if he erred in this, “God,” he said, “would forgive him, as it would be the sin of ignorance.” He also told the prelates that both he and Lady Russell were agreed on this subject, and that nothing could alter their views. Lady Russell was fighting in these days to save the life she valued far above her own; but all was useless; it was a hopeless struggle. “I wish,” said Lord Russell, “that my wife would give over beating every bush for my preservation”; but he added, “if it will be any consolation for her after my death to have done her utmost to save me I cannot blame her.”
On the 19th of July, two days before the day fixed for his execution, Russell wrote a letter to the King that was not to be delivered to Charles until after the writer’s death. In that letter he assured the monarch that “he had always acted for the best interests of the Crown, and that if he had been mistaken he hoped the King’s displeasure would be satisfied with his death, and would not extend to his widow and children.” The following day he received the Blessed Sacrament from Tillotson. “Do you believe all the Articles of the Christian Faith as taught by the Church of England?” asked the Dean; and Russell assenting, “Do you,” continued the Dean, “forgive all your enemies?” “With all my heart,” answered Russell. Then after reading and signing the paper which he intended to give to the Sheriff on the scaffold—his farewell to his country—Russell sent for his wife, who came at once, bringing with her their three children. “Stay and sup with me,” he said to her, “let us eat our last earthly food together.” At ten o’clock that night the parting between these two took place. “Both,” writes Burnet, “were silent and trembling, their eyes full of tears which did not overflow. When she had left, ‘Now,’ said he, ‘the bitterness of death is past.’ Then he broke down: ‘What a blessing she has been to me, and what a misery it would have been if she had been crying to me to turn informer and to be a Lord Howard.’ And then he praised his devoted wife to the good Bishop as she deserved to be praised, for a nobler, more loyal or devoted wife than Rachel, Lady Russell, is not to be found in all history.”
Some of the things Russell said to Burnet on that last evening of his life are well worth recording. Speaking of death he said, “What a great change death made, and how wonderfully those new scenes would strike on a soul.” He had heard, he told Burnet, “how some persons who had been born blind were struck when, by the couching of their cataracts, they obtained their sight; but what,” said he, “if the first thing they saw were the rising sun?”
Lincoln’s Inn Fields was the place chosen for his execution, the scaffold being erected not far from his own house. This was on the 29th of July, and when the Sheriffs arrived to take him they found Russell quietly winding up his watch. “Now,” he said, “I have done with time, and must think henceforward of Eternity.” He then gave the watch as a souvenir to Burnet, that good old Bishop of Salisbury who had clung so closely to his friend in his trials as to a beloved brother, and to whom we owe the touching account of that friend’s last days upon earth.
On the 7th of December of this same year, Algernon Sidney was executed on Tower Hill, having been condemned to death by a picked jury and the infamous Chief-Justice Jeffreys, on the trumped-up charge of conspiring against the life of Charles; only one witness appeared against him, but he was condemned by his writings, which were certainly strongly republican; yet, considering what the rule of the second Charles had become, a man of Algernon Sidney’s lofty spirit, with his love of freedom, could not have written or thought otherwise. It has been well said of him that not only did he write from his judgment but also from his heart, and he informed his readers of that which he felt as well as that which he knew. He was condemned principally for the treatise in which he advocated the rights of subjects, under certain contingencies, to depose their king, and although this paper had never been published, or, in fact, printed, it was sufficient material for Jeffreys, who bullied the jury into a committal against Sidney. Algernon Sidney’s life had been as noble as was his name, but his unbending republican principles had made him the bête noire of both Charles and James, and any evidence by which he could be entrapped into a charge of treason was welcome to them. When he came forth from the Tower to die in the cause of liberty, “Englishmen,” as Dalrymple has finely written, “wept not for him as they had done for Lord Russell, their pulses beat high, their hearts swelled, they felt an unusual grandeur and elevation of mind whilst they looked upon him.” One of the Sheriffs asked Sidney if it was his intention to make a speech upon the scaffold, to which he answered, “I have made my peace with God, and have nothing to say to man,” adding, “I am ready to die, and will give you no further trouble.” His last prayers were for “the good old cause.” When his head lay on the block, the executioner asked him if he would raise it again. “Not till the general resurrection; strike on!” And these were Algernon Sidney’s last words.