Tales From the Tower of London (17 page)

While no account of Symson’s martyrdom survives, there is a contemporary account of another burning that took place on the order of Edmund Bonner. The following is a portion of that account:

his nether parts did burn first . . . but the flame only singed his upper parts. . . . In this fire he said with a loud voice, ‘Lord Jesus, have mercy upon me! Lord Jesus, receive my spirit.’ And these were the last words he was heard to utter. But when he was [burnt] black in the mouth, and his tongue so swollen that he could not speak, yet his lips [moved] until they were shrunk to the gums: and he knocked his breast with his hands until one of his arms fell off, and then knocked still with the other, while the fat, water and blood dropped out at his fingers’ ends, until his strength was gone and his hand clave fast upon his breast. Then . . . bowing forwards, he yielded up his spirit. Thus was he there three quarters of an hour or more in the fire.

On 17 November 1558, less than eight months after Cuthbert Symson’s execution, Queen Mary Tudor, now commonly known as ‘Bloody Mary’, died of uterine cancer. Following Mary to the throne was her younger sister, Elizabeth. The new monarch immediately set about righting the injustices of her sister’s reign. Hard-line Catholics were replaced by moderate Protestants and, unlike her sister, Elizabeth was not willing to execute people for either their faith or even their actions under the previous reign – not even the Bishop of London, Edmund Bonner. But when Elizabeth received Bonner in court, as a sign of her contempt she refused to allow him to kiss her hand.

On 25 June 1559 Elizabeth outlawed the saying of the Catholic mass, but Bonner would not comply. Twice the Royal Council sent him letters to cease, finally ordering him to resign his bishopric. Still Bonner refused. On 20 April 1560, Elizabeth’s patience came to an end; the Devil’s Dancing Bear was arrested and sent to the Tower to await trial.

The case against Bonner was irrefutable. However many ‘heretics’ had been sent to the stake during Mary’s reign, the number of victims sentenced from Bonner’s court was disproportionately large. More than one-third of all Protestants that had died during Mary’s five-year reign were from the diocese of London. In all, one hundred and thirteen Londoners had been burned at the stake. Of these, Bonner sentenced eighty-nine personally and the execution of the other twenty-four had been signed by him. Bonner was stripped of his power and sent to Marshalsea prison in perpetuity.

Strangely, over the ten years of his incarceration, Bonner remained cheerful, never complaining about his captivity. A visitor referred to him as being ‘a most courteous man and gentlemanly both in manners and appearance’. But there, in the cold, damp cell, Bonner had nearly a decade to contemplate the crimes he had committed in the name of God and his sovereign. On 5 September 1569, Edmund Bonner died, taking his case to a court far higher and more just than those he had held.

The Elizabethan age is remembered today as an almost magical, glittering time filled with music, magnificent clothes and great works of literature. There is little doubt that it seemed less idyllic at the time, particularly to Queen Elizabeth. Over a reign of thirty-eight years, her father, Henry VIII, had transformed himself from a handsome, enlightened young king into a grotesquely fat butcher who sent two wives, dozens of friends and hundreds of enemies to the scaffold. He ripped his kingdom apart by making war on the Catholic Church, viciously persecuting Catholics and extremist Protestants alike, and some of the persecution spilled over on to the young Elizabeth.

At the tender age of three, Elizabeth became trapped in her father’s maelstrom when he declared her illegitimate as a part of his plan to rid himself of her mother, Anne Boleyn. Anne herself had been beheaded on Tower Green in May 1536, six months before Elizabeth’s third birthday. From that day on, the Tower would be a place of nightmares for Elizabeth.

When her elder half-sister, the fanatically Catholic Mary Tudor, came to the throne in 1553, Elizabeth found that being a Protestant princess in a Catholic kingdom made her a dangerous liability. Protestant plotters bent on overthrowing Mary did so in her name. In the religious pogroms that dominated Mary’s reign, Elizabeth was arrested and sent to the Tower. She was transported in the dead of night to prevent crowds of supporters from gathering along the banks of the Thames. By the time Elizabeth’s barge reached Traitors’ Gate, the 21-year-old princess was too terrified to step out of the boat. The charge was treason. The penalty was death. Before Elizabeth could be brought to trial, Mary came to believe she was pregnant. With the lineage apparently secure, Elizabeth no longer seemed such a threat and was released to house arrest at Hatfield House. But Mary was not pregnant. The swelling was a massive, malignant tumour. When the queen died in November 1558 the crown passed to her younger sister, Princess Elizabeth.

According to long-standing tradition, Elizabeth was transported to the Tower of London to await her coronation. This time, her journey to the Tower was a joyous occasion. Bloody Mary was dead and a new monarch was taking the throne. In celebration, the Tower cannons were fired continuously for more than half an hour. But the grim old Tower was still a place of terror for the new queen. When she left its confines for Westminster Abbey and her coronation, Elizabeth swore never to set foot in the Tower again. Her enemies would not be so lucky.

The new reign did not have an auspicious start. At twenty-five, Elizabeth was nervous and highly strung; she had inherited a kingdom exhausted by religious factionalism, turmoil and state-sanctioned cruelty, and her ministers urged immediate action to heal the nation. Overwhelmed, Elizabeth became a master of procrastination and reconciliation. Adhering to what she called her ‘golden mean’, the queen walked a treacherous political middle ground in an effort to keep her kingdom from sliding into the same turmoil that had marked the reigns of her father and sister. Religiously, Elizabeth was liberal and tolerant. In her own words, ‘There is one God and one Christ Jesus, and all the rest is a dispute over petty trifles.’ Unfortunately, many of her subjects were not so open-minded.

Elizabeth knew she was treading through a minefield of enemies anxious to bring her down. She commented, ‘I must deal with nobles of diverse humours . . . and people who, although they make great demonstrations of love towards me, are nevertheless fickle and inconstant and I must fear everything.’ Out of sheer necessity she became an astute politician who, according to her contemporary Sir John Hayward, kept ‘her eyes set upon one, [while] her ear listened to another, her judgment on a third, and to a fourth she addressed her speech’.

No matter how terrified she was, Elizabeth never let her fear show. When the Spanish Ambassador informed her that because she was a heretic, the King of Spain was considering declaring war on England, she calmly said, ‘I am more afraid of making a fault in my Latin than of all the Kings of Spain, France and Scotland . . . and all their confederates. I have the heart of a man, not of a woman, and I am not afraid of anything.’ Cautiously, courageously, Elizabeth set about protecting her kingdom, insisting that those who administered the law in her name be strong, but fair; harsh measures were only to be used when the life of the kingdom, or of the queen herself were in peril.

In spite of her tolerant attitude, or perhaps because of it, Elizabeth’s court became a hotbed of intrigue. Spies and plotters swarmed around her like flies drawn to over-ripe fruit, each jockeying for position in an effort to influence the queen, the government and the nation. Because the line between religion and secular politics had been virtually obliterated during the reigns of her father, her brother Edward and her sister Mary, most of the spies were Catholics bent on returning England to the Catholic Church by whatever means necessary. Many of the spies were funded and instructed in espionage by Jesuit priests who had been specially trained by England’s staunchly Catholic enemies France, Spain and Rome. If there were more Catholic plots against Elizabeth than there had been Protestant plots against her sister Mary, it was because the Catholics were better organised and far better funded than the Protestants could ever hope to be. In the face of all the plotting and manoeuvring, Elizabeth and her council were forced into constant vigilance as the kingdom teetered on the narrow edge of religious turmoil.

To keep the rival factions in check, Elizabeth and her Secretary of State, Lord Burghley, relied on Sir Francis Walsingham. Walsingham’s job was to spy on the spies and it was a position for which he was eminently suited. A staunch Protestant, Walsingham had fled to continental Europe when Mary Tudor came to the throne and reinstituted the Catholic religion. During Mary’s five-year reign, Walsingham wandered the courts of Europe studying law, language and, significantly, the different methods employed by various governments to gather intelligence. Cultured, well-educated, and a cousin of the playwright Sir Francis Bacon, Walsingham used his good name and engaging manner to ferret out information and secrets in one country after another. Everything he learned was passed on to other English exiles and Protestant activists back home. By the time Elizabeth came to the throne Walsingham had become a brilliant, if slightly machiavellian, politician. Once called to court, he would devote the next thirty years and his entire personal fortune to keeping his queen well informed and out of danger.

Of all the threats to Elizabeth’s position and the stability of the realm, the greatest came in the form of her cousin, Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots. Born the daughter of James V of Scotland and Marie de Guise of France, at sixteen Mary was wed to Francis II of France. Two years later her husband died and the childless Mary no longer had any place at the French court. Consequently, in 1560, the eighteen-year-old widow returned home to claim her throne. But Scotland was a far cry from France. Poor, backward and fanatically Protestant, Scotland was not at all what the cultured, spoiled and staunchly Catholic Mary had in mind.

The lairds of Scotland, led by her brother James, had no more use for Mary than she had for them. After eight disastrous years of intrigue, factionalism, mismanagement, clan warfare and murder, Mary fled across the border to England in the hope of finding sanctuary and raising an army to crush her brother and his allies. It is more than likely that she also had her eye on Elizabeth’s throne. Certainly her strong claim to the throne, her religion and continental connections, combined with the vastly greater appeal of ruling England than being stuck in Scotland, would have made this an enticing possibility. What Mary did not know was that Elizabeth and Walsingham knew as much about her plans as she did. When she crossed the border into England she was promptly arrested and would remain an unhappy guest of her cousin for the next eighteen years.

If Elizabeth knew how politically dangerous Mary was, Walsingham was even more concerned than his sovereign. Year after year he urged Elizabeth to do away with Mary on the grounds that she was a rallying point for both English and continental Catholics bent on toppling Elizabeth. But the queen would not hear of it. She would not be a party to murdering her cousin and her own position was not so secure that she could risk setting the precedent of murdering another monarch, particularly one with connections to the entire Catholic community in Europe.

Once it became clear that most of Mary’s support came not from Scotland or Europe, but from English Catholics, Walsingham urged Elizabeth to send Mary back to Scotland where her own brother and his supporters would surely kill her. Again, Elizabeth refused. It was still no better than murder; Mary would simply remain in England where her every move could be kept under close watch. In 1585, seventeen years after Mary’s arrest, parliament passed a bill known as the Bond of Association, obviously aimed directly at Mary and her continuing manipulations to free herself and take control of England. The bond stated that if anyone plotted against the crown on behalf of any claimant to the throne, then the pretender in whose name they were acting, whether they were aware of the plot or not, was as guilty as the plotters and subject to execution as a traitor. Now all Walsingham had to do was wait until the next Catholic plot bubbled to the surface, and Elizabeth would have to defy the law if she wanted to protect her cousin.

Only months after the Bond of Association was enacted, a Walsingham spy named Gilbert Gifford came to his master with word of a new plot to put Mary Stuart on the throne of England. According to Gifford, the chief conspirators were a Jesuit priest named Father John Ballard and Anthony Babington. Handsome and well-bred, the 26-year-old Babington came from a family so well connected that he had served as a page to Mary Tudor during her years on the throne. Obviously the Babingtons, or at least Anthony, had not welcomed Elizabeth’s return to liberalised religion.

Babington had already gathered more than a dozen like-minded young men, and together they were plotting to free Mary Stuart. Foolishly, in his zeal Babington had told far too many people of his plans. Among his thirteen followers were Gifford who, though a Catholic, was loyal to his queen, and at least one other member of Walsingham’s nexus of informants. To Walsingham’s absolute joy, once the group was organised enough to make contact with the Scottish queen, they elected Gifford as their courier. As he began moving encoded letters back and forth between Babington and the imprisoned queen, Gifford took them to Walsingham first so they could be copied. The originals remained with the spymaster and forged copies were delivered in their place. Meanwhile, Walsingham’s code-breaker, Thomas Phelippse, began unravelling the ciphers. Amazingly, the key fell right into Walsingham’s hands. It seems that Mary could no more interpret the code than Phelippse, and when the time came to deliver the key to her, it was passed through Gifford’s hands. Babington and his friends may have been zealous, but when it came to conspiracy they were rank amateurs.