Tales From the Tower of London (10 page)

Two weeks later it was the new moon. That night, as his shift ended, Bawd told Alice to pass the rope back through the cell door. With the coil of rope over his shoulder, he hurried out of the tower before his replacement showed up for work. At ten o’clock that night, Alice’s last guard of the day went off duty, dousing the torches on his way out as he always did. When she heard the ‘clunk’ of the lock in the outside door, Alice went to work. After tucking the duplicate key safely in her bodice, she took the stick Bawd had smuggled in to her, and reached through the gap under the cell door where food was passed to her. With the end of the stick she began fumbling blindly for the pin that secured the hasp on the door. After locating the pin she began tapping it upwards to drive it out of the hasp, jarring the door with her knee to help work it loose. After several nerve-racking minutes, the pin fell to the floor and the door swung open. Feeling her way along the darkened hall and down the steps to the outer door, Alice took the duplicate key from her bodice, unlocked the door and stepped into the darkness of the tower yard.

To make herself as invisible as possible, she pulled the hood of her long, dark cloak over her head. In the chill March night, Alice hurried away from Coldharbour Tower, feeling her way through the narrow alleyways and up the stone stairs leading to the flat roof of the tower straddling Traitors’ Gate and the small wharf where the condemned were brought into the Tower from the Thames. Here, on the roof of St Thomas’s Tower, John Bawd was waiting. He had tied one end of the rope to an old iron hook embedded in the stone parapet wall and now waited anxiously for Alice to arrive before dropping the rope down the outside of the tower so they could make good their escape. Peering over the parapet, they waited till the night watch passed on their regular rounds of the streets on the opposite side of the moat. Once passed, it would be at least half an hour before they returned. By then John and Alice would be long gone.

Sliding carefully down the rope, first John and then Alice landed silently on the tiny wharf next to Traitors’ Gate. Untying the small boat used to ferry prisoners from the shore into the Tower, they glided silently across the moat and up to Iron Gate Steps on the far shore. As they stepped out, John pushed the boat back into the moat and towards the wharf; it might look strange if it were spotted tied to the shore and they had to do everything possible to buy time before their escape was discovered.

As the couple walked across the grassy verge towards a nearby road lined with cottages inhabited by Tower guards with families, Bawd told Alice that he had rented a pair of horses and tethered them nearby. These would carry them to the home of his friend Jeffrey Harrison who had agreed to let them hide out for a few days until the guard had stopped looking for them in the immediate vicinity of the Tower. This should give them enough time to escape London and find passage to the continent. Walking slowly towards the horses, the pair held each other close, talking in hushed tones. Undoubtedly they were excited to be so close to freedom and at the same time terrified they would be discovered. They clung to each other out of excitement, desperation and in the hope that a pair of young lovers would not attract any undue attention from anyone who might pass them on the road.

Just as they rounded the last corner on their way up Tower Hill to the waiting horses, they were confronted by a group of men carrying lanterns coming in the opposite direction down the narrow lane. The two huddled closer, trying to hide their faces from anyone who might recognise them. Glancing up, Bawd recognised the night watch. They were early. They shouldn’t be at this point for at least another ten minutes. Had the escape taken longer than he thought? Too late. One of the guards, Charles Gore was an old friend and immediately recognised Bawd, calling out a greeting. Waving and mumbling a reply, Bawd and Alice hurried on, pressing themselves against the cottages to stay beyond the reach of the lantern light. But Gore was also an occasional guard of Alice Tankerville and when the pair squeezed past the guard he recognised her. In a few seconds of panic and confusion, the guard fell on John Bawd and Alice Tankerville, snatching away all hope of escape and freedom. There was now no doubt what the future held for either of them.

Alice was hauled back to her cell where a padlock was put on the door and a 24-hour guard posted outside. At the same time, John Bawd was taken temporarily to the Counter Gaol for questioning. Even without torture, he confessed everything, insisting that he was driven to betray his office and his king ‘only by the love and affection he bore her’.

For Sir Edmund Walsingham, Lieutenant of the Tower and devoted servant of the crown, the next day must have been one of very mixed emotions. On the one hand, a member of his staff had nearly helped a condemned prisoner escape justice. If the breakout had been successful it would almost certainly have cost Sir Edmund his job, and considering the mercurial temperament of the king, it could also have cost him his head. On the other hand, the plotters had been recaptured and a messenger had brought word that John Wolfe had been apprehended attempting to slip back into England. Evidently, word of his trial and conviction had not reached him in Ireland. Now, everyone would pay for their crimes.

John Bawd was moved to the notorious cell known as ‘Little Ease’, a cramped hole so small a man could neither stand up nor lie down in it but was constantly forced to remain in a foetal position. Bawd’s interment there is the first of a few scant references to Little Ease, and its exact location has never been determined. Some historians insist it was in the White Tower, but it is more likely that it was located in the cellars beneath the old Flint Tower which was rebuilt in the eighteenth century, obliterating any evidence of the cell. Wherever it was, Little Ease was undoubtedly a nasty place. Bawd was only allowed out for an occasional torturing; not to make him confess, he had already done that freely. The torture was simply a gruesome part of his punishment for treason, of which more was to come.

For Alice Tankerville and John Wolfe, the end came soon, but not quickly. On 31 March 1534 the pair were carted from the Tower to the stone retaining walls lining the Thames embankment. Here they were securely wrapped in chains and lowered into the water at low tide. Their guards and a crowd of ghoulish fun-seekers gathered to watch as the tide turned and began to creep back in. Inch by inch, the filthy water of the Thames crept up over their legs to their waist and on to their chest; finally drowning the helpless, terrified couple as they struggled frantically to hold their heads above the relentless rising tide. According to the official State Papers of Lord Lisle, an entry for Sunday, 28 March of that year states: ‘Wolfe and his wife Alice Tankerville will be hanged in chains at low water mark upon the Thames on Tuesday. John Bawd is in Little Ease cell in the Tower and is to be racked and hanged.’

For his part in helping plot history’s only attempted escape by a woman from the Tower of London, John Bawd was racked until his muscles tore and his arms and legs were pulled from their sockets, leaving him in excruciating pain and unable to move on his own. As a final humiliation he was wrapped in chains and suspended over the outer walls of the Tower complex where he slowly died of exposure and dehydration. His body was left to hang there for months, picked at by the crows and the Tower ravens, a festering public display intended to serve as an example to anyone foolish enough to think they could escape the king’s justice.

For all this mayhem, tragedy and treason, and despite the legitimate efforts of the courts and official investigators, the historical record never mentions that Henry VIII’s 366 gold crowns were ever recovered, leaving open the question of whether John Wolfe and Alice Tankerville were actually guilty of any involvement in the crime. If they were, their punishment, gruesome as it was, was no more than could be expected by a convicted traitor during the harsh reign of Henry VIII. If they were innocent, their deaths were not only horrible, but a gross miscarriage of justice.

Henry VIII came to the throne of England in 1509 as a rather awkward seventeen-year-old whose life had been sheltered from nearly all the world’s realities. But within a few years he developed into the very model of a fairy-tale prince. Shortly before his twenty-fifth birthday the Venetian ambassador described him this way: ‘His majesty is the handsomest potentate I ever set eyes on; above the usual height . . . his complexion [is] fair and bright, with auburn hair combed straight and short . . . his throat rather long and thick. . . . He speaks French, English and Latin and a little Italian, plays well on the lute and harpsichord, sings from books on sight, draws the bow with greater strength than any man in England, and jousts marvellously. Believe me he is in every respect a most accomplished Prince. . .’. But as is the case with so many people, time and the harsh realities of life turned Henry into something very different from what was promised in his youth.

By 1540 Henry had gone through three wives and was on the verge of taking a fourth. When his first Queen, Catherine of Aragon, grew fat and ugly and had only provided her husband with one child, a daughter, Henry divorced her in favour of the young, haughty Anne Boleyn. When she, too, could do no better than give him a single daughter, Henry trumped up sufficient evidence of adultery to send her to the block after less than three years of marriage. His third wife, Jane Seymour, was a gentle, pious woman who gave him the son he longed for but died less than a week after Prince Edward’s birth.

Jane’s death sent Henry, and by extension the entire English court, into a prolonged period of mourning. The once light-hearted monarch became morose and bitter. The masquerade parties, jousts and banquets gave way to sombre gatherings at which the king sought refuge in food and drink, gradually becoming a bloated caricature of his former self. The jousts and hunting parties, too, disappeared, partly as the result of a leg injury he had suffered during his marriage to Anne Boleyn. The wound never healed, leaving Henry with a weeping ulcer on one leg.

In an attempt to cheer up their king and endear themselves and their political goals to him, the reforming party at court – led by Henry’s personal secretary Thomas Cromwell and the Archbishop of Canterbury Thomas Cranmer – connived a fourth marriage with Anne, the daughter of the Duke of Cleves. It was a disaster. The two hated each other at first sight. At the age of forty-eight Henry was grossly fat, gouty, prematurely aged and foul tempered. Anne was unschooled in the courtly graces of music, dancing and needlework; neither had she taken up the English habit of regular bathing. Worst of all, she could probably out-think Henry and insisted on arguing religion and politics with him. As a staunch Lutheran Protestant, Anne’s views on church reform were just too liberal for Henry, even though he had long since broken with Roman Catholicism. Behind her back Henry took to calling her ‘the great Flanders mare’. There was no doubt the marriage would not last.

With another divorce imminent, the conservative faction at court, led by Bishop Gardiner and Thomas Howard the Duke of Norfolk, who had been out of favour since Henry’s ill-fated marriage to his niece Anne Boleyn, saw a way to get themselves, and their religious views, back in favour. If they could find a young woman more to the king’s tastes, he might replace Anne with her. Better still, the fall of Anne might discredit the hated Thomas Cromwell. To this end, Norfolk inveigled a position in Anne’s household for his niece Katherine Howard.

Only weeks after Anne officially came to court so did Katherine. At fifteen years of age, Katherine Howard was a silly, frivolous child with big brown eyes and auburn hair. Still plump with baby-fat, the 4 foot 11 inch Katherine was awestruck by the glitter of the court, and particularly by the monumental figure of King Henry, who presided over it. To keep her happy, and hopefully throw her directly in front of the king’s wandering gaze, in the spring of 1540 her uncle secured her an invitation to a masked ball.

Katherine’s upbringing had been nothing if not unconventional. Orphaned at the age of ten, she spent the next five years in the household of her step-grandmother, the Dowager Duchess of Norfolk. Although she was well advanced in years, the duchess kept a massive household peopled with youngsters collected from her extended family. Too old to oversee them properly, she generally left the children to their own devices. They were not abused, but neither were they educated, given the diversions necessary for young people, nor properly supervised. Housed in dormitories divided by sex, the youngsters were left with no more chaperoning than a locked door intended to keep the boys and girls apart at night. Obviously it did not work.

The gentlewomen’s chamber was the site of almost nightly parties, which frequently included the young men of the household who simply crawled out of their own window and in through the window of the girls’ chamber. Inevitably, along with the games, laughing and drinking came a lot of sexual experimentation. One of the first of the young men to catch Katherine Howard’s thirteen-year-old eye was the duchess’s music master, a man named Edward Manox. After a few romps in the bedroom, however, Katherine dumped him in favour of her distant cousin, the handsome and charming Francis Dereham. Dereham and Katherine became constant bed partners, excusing their illicit sex by insisting they were going to marry, even calling each other ‘husband’ and ‘wife’. Outraged at being dumped, Manox wrote a letter to the dowager duchess detailing Katherine’s latest affair. The duchess caught her granddaughter and Dereham in bed together and beat her; but it was only a momentary solution to a long-term problem. By any standards, Katherine Howard was a wild child.

Given the girl’s own history, and the king’s mercurial record with his past wives, Katherine was hardly the most appropriate marriage candidate to put before Henry VIII. But when Henry took notice of the tiny, vivacious girl, her uncle ‘commended her pure and honest conditions’. That one recommendation was all it took. According to a contemporary account, ‘The King’s Highness did cast a fantasy to Katherine Howard the first time that ever his Grace saw her.’ Undoubtedly, her uncle Norfolk encouraged the girl to return the king’s attention; at the same time cautioning her to keep a discreet distance. If the king was allowed to take her for a mistress, he would not need her as a wife; and it was a royal marriage that Norfolk needed.