Tales From the Tower of London (25 page)

Obviously, all this did not go unnoticed in high places. When a member of the House of Lords spoke out against Jeffreys’ blatant disregard for the law and the king’s support for his methods, he was rewarded by having a corpse chained to the front gate of his house. By the beginning of 1687 objections to the king’s and Jeffreys’ medieval tactics had risen to the level of political uproar. Without hesitation the king addressed the charges in the simplest way possible. He dissolved parliament. Not surprisingly, the Lord Chief Justice ruled that his action had been well within the bounds of the law. King James had effectively re-established the absolute monarchy he wanted so badly.

Now ruling virtually by decree, James’s rearrangement of the country to suit himself accelerated at an ever faster pace. In the spring of 1688 he appointed a Roman Catholic as President of Oxford University; and when the Archbishop of Canterbury and six other bishops protested at the move, he had them arrested and sent to the Tower. As the barge carrying the prisoners of faith moved slowly up the Thames, the riverbanks were crowded with cheering, seething masses of Londoners. When the bishops were marched up the steps at Traitors’ Gate, even the tower warders knelt in respect. Every day during their incarceration, the banks of the Tower moat were ringed with cheering crowds that refused to leave. The case had aroused so much public indignation that the king and Judge Jeffreys had no choice but to set aside their usual summary justice and arrange for a jury trial.

The trial of the seven bishops lasted only one day, but to the surprise of the king and the judge, the jury’s deliberations went on all night. The next morning, 30 June, the jurors delivered the unanimous verdict of ‘not guilty’. To the frustration of king and judge, the bishops were released. Now that someone had found the courage to stand up to the dreaded judge and the tyrannical king, a few members of the dissolved parliament also seemed to rediscover their manhood. Within hours of the bishops’ release, a group of Lords drafted a letter to James’s daughter and her husband, Queen Mary and King William of the Netherlands, with the unprecedented request to mount an army and invade England with the express purpose of driving the king from the throne.

Obviously it did not take as long for word of this potential disaster to reach King James as it did for King William to reach his decision. Despite frantic attempts at political back-pedalling and trying desperately to make some sort of weak amends for more than two years of tyranny, no one seemed to be in the mood for an apology. On 5 November 1688, William of Orange landed with his army at Torbay and within hours all hint of support for King James had vanished. The army deserted in swarms to join William and spontaneous uprisings in support of ‘Dutch William’ broke out all over the country. Even James’s younger daughter Anne (later Queen Anne) deserted her father and sided with her sister and brother-in-law. Five weeks later, on 11 December, James gathered a few possessions in a small chest, put on the clothes of a servant and rowed down the Thames to catch a boat to the continent where he would spend the rest of his life as an exile at the court of Louis XIV of France. In a last act of petty defiance, as he rowed away from London, King James II tossed the Great Seal into the water, knowing that without it parliament could not legally enact emergency measures into law.

With his protector gone, there was nothing left for the hated Judge Jeffreys to do but flee for his life. The day after the king fled London, Jeffreys disguised himself as a common sailor and trimmed his massive eyebrows to alter his face. Next, he hired a cart into which he loaded several small chests and headed through London towards the docks at Wapping where he had arranged passage to the continent aboard a coal barge scheduled to sail on the morning tide. Dragging his chests aboard the barge, Jeffreys settled himself out of sight to wait till morning. But George Jeffreys was an alcoholic and it was only a matter of hours before his rampant thirst and shattered nerves got the better of him. Creeping silently from the barge, he stole up Wapping steps and headed directly to the nearby Red Crow Tavern.

Seated alone at a corner table, the judge attempted to drink himself into a stupor, but was interrupted by a well-dressed young man who approached him and asked if he was Judge Jeffreys. Keeping his face in the shadows, Jeffreys mumbled that he didn’t know what the man was talking about. But the man did know. He was a copy clerk who had once been hauled before Jeffreys’ bench and received a ‘lick from the rough side of the judge’s tongue’. There was no doubt this was the same man. In seconds, everyone in the tavern had started shouting and throwing food and beer at Jeffreys who scurried into a corner in an attempt to keep from being beaten to death or lynched on the spot. Fearing a riot, the landlord sent a runner to fetch the local militia, known as the ‘trained bands’.

By the time the militia arrived, a crowd had gathered at the door and joined the drunken chorus of customers hurling beer and invective at the figure cowering in the back corner of the inn. Fighting their way through the mob, the watch dragged Jeffreys through the screaming crowd, grasping and clutching at the most hated man in London. As the judge was pulled and pushed into the street he shouted at the watch: ‘Keep them off, gentlemen! For God’s sake, keep them off.’ While most of the watch remained behind to quiet the seething crowd, the remainder flagged down a passing carriage and pushed George Jeffreys inside, telling the coachman to drive as fast as he could to the home of the Lord Mayor. To protect their prisoner from the rocks and mud being flung into the coach from all sides, one of the soldiers was forced to straddle Jeffreys’ body to cover him.

Passing near the house of Sir John Chapman the Lord Mayor was Sir Edmund King, physician to the late King Charles II. In his diary, Sir Edmund wrote, ‘I was in Cheapside when the Chancellor was brought to my Lord Mayor. . . . There never was such joy, not a man sorry that we could see. They longed to have him out of the coach, had he not had a good guard.’ The guards roused the sleeping Lord Mayor from his bed, insisting they had a prisoner who could not wait till morning. Stumbling, half asleep and in his nightclothes, to his reception hall, the Lord Mayor took one look at the cowering figure of George Jeffreys and instantly suffered a massive coronary. He died a few days later. Before the militia could decide what to do with either Jeffreys or the dying Lord Mayor, the sound of hundreds of screaming voices came floating through the narrow streets. The mob was hot on the trail of George Jeffreys. Frantic not to be turned over to justice even more crude and barbaric than his own, Jeffreys begged the watch to take him somewhere safe; and the only place anyone could think of that might be safe enough was the Tower of London. He even offered to draw up, and sign, his own arrest warrant. The watch happily agreed and bundled him off to the one place in London where Jeffreys was safe from the people and the people were safe from Jeffreys.

Meanwhile, the contingent of the night watch remaining at the Red Crow had searched the boats and barges at the nearby docks. There, on board a coal barge scheduled to sail for the continent, they found what was officially described as: ‘35,000 gold guineas . . . besides a great amount of silver, which he had set on board . . .’

By morning parliament had received word of the Tower’s latest guest. They immediately issued a warrant to the Lieutenant of the Tower, which read, in part: ‘We, the peers of this realm . . . do hereby . . . require you to take into your custody . . . George, Lord Jeffreys . . . and to keep him safe prisoner until further order . . .’.

But even the Tower proved insufficient to keep Judge Jeffreys safe from the hatred of the people. Many of those who had been victimised in his court came to jeer and laugh through the bars of his cell door, throwing rotten food and spitting on him. One day when a barrel of oysters arrived at his cell, Jeffreys commented to one of the guards: ‘Thank God, I still have some friends left.’ But when he opened the cask, it contained only empty oyster shells with a length of rope tied into a noose lying on top. On one occasion, Jeffreys talked to a visiting clergyman about his role in the Bloody Assizes. Like so many men complicit in mass crimes, Jeffreys insisted he was only following orders. But then he added, ‘and I have this further to say for myself, that I was not half bloody enough for him that sent me thither.’

In an act that could be seen as either leniency, or simple expediency, parliament allowed Jeffreys to purchase brandy – as much of it as he wanted so long as his money held out. Four months later, on 18 April 1689, the 41-year-old George Jeffreys, once Lord Chief Justice of England and Lord Chancellor, died in an alcoholic stupor from complications brought on by bladder stones.

As Jeffreys had not been convicted of any crime, parliament felt free to offer his body to anyone who wished to claim it for proper burial. There were no takers. Consequently, Jeffreys was interred in the chapel of St Peter ad Vincula within the grounds of the Tower where so many of his victims had found their final rest. In a bizarre and ironic twist of fate, the grave of George Jeffreys lies immediately alongside that of James Scott, Duke of Monmouth.

When James Stuart (James II) was driven from the throne in 1688, his successors, William and Mary, and their successor, Queen Anne, were all technically Stuarts, but the royal family itself was pushed further and further from the line of succession. When Queen Anne died in 1714 with no surviving children, parliament had to decide between returning to the direct Stuart lineage – populated with staunch Roman Catholics – and offering the crown to some other, comfortably Protestant relative of the late queen. It seems to have been a fairly unanimous decision. The new king would be Anne’s distant cousin George, Elector of Hanover.

Apart from the fact that George couldn’t speak a single word of English, his elevation to King of England was generally acceptable, at least among the more progressively minded. Hardcore conservatives and the Scots in general were outraged. Within weeks they raised the banner of James Edward Stuart – exiled son of the late James II – insisting they would drive the German usurper from the throne.

Predictably, the uprising ended unhappily and was of little historical consequence; but it did spawn the most daring and amazing escape attempt in the history of the Tower of London.

Since before the Norman invasion, the Maxwell family had played an important role in Britain’s political arena. The earliest recorded member of the family was a Saxon named Undwin who fled to Scotland to escape persecution at the hands of William the Conqueror. Within a century, Undwin’s descendants had picked up a Scottish knighthood, and a century after that they had adopted the surname Maxwell and risen to the rank of Chamberlain of Scotland.

From their meteoric rise in society it is reasonable to assume that the Maxwells were a family of outstanding fighters. They fought and died heroically at Falkirk in 1298 and in many other battles before and after. By 1346 the sire of the most honoured branch of the family was granted the title ‘Lord’ Maxwell, which made him and his descendants the official heads of the Maxwell clan. They were also Lords of Caerlaverock, Pencaitland and Mearns, and kept their family seat at Lochmaben Castle. Enriched with all these lands and titles, the lord of the Maxwell clan became one of the three dozen most powerful men in Scotland. Despite the fact that Sir Herbert Maxwell was even made a lord of the Scottish parliament in 1440, the family seems to have clung to their tradition of fighting at any, and every, opportunity. Sometimes they fought heroically in battle and sometimes they just fought. A son of the 2nd Lord Maxwell was killed by the Lord of Cockpool in a violent argument over a football game and the 9th Lord was beheaded for having murdered the Lord of Johnstone and a litany of other crimes.

In 1545 Lord John Maxwell and his private army of two thousand soldiers held the family castle of Lochmaben against an entire English army while the English held his father and brother prisoners. The argument seems to have centred around the Maxwells’ support for Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots. It was a stand that made them few friends at the English court, but Mary granted them the additional title Lords of Herries.

When Mary Queen of Scots’ son, James VI, inherited the English throne in 1603 and became James I of England, the Maxwell fortune seemed secure. They even picked up a new title, Earls of Nithsdale. By the time the Stuart line was replaced by the House of Hanover in 1714, the Maxwells’ day in the sun appeared to be over, but the new head of the Maxwell clan, William Maxwell, 5th Earl of Nithsdale, didn’t seem to mind. The formerly violent Maxwell clan had settled into the refined life of the country gentry and fighting was seen as a thing of the past.

William Maxwell was born in 1676 at the family seat of Terregles in Dumfriesshire and inherited his titles at the tender age of seven on the death of his father. His mother raised him to be a devout Catholic and a loyal servant to the Stuart monarchy. In his early twenties, the young Lord Nithsdale travelled to France to swear his loyalty to the now exiled King James II. While there he met Lady Winifred Herbert, daughter of the Marquess of Powys, who had followed King James into exile in 1688. William Maxwell and Winifred Herbert fell in love and were married on 2 March 1699. A few months later, they returned to Terregles, Scotland, to take up the duties of lord of the manor. Their story would have probably ended there except for the fact that in 1715, after the couple had enjoyed sixteen years of quiet married life, George I was offered the British throne.

In September of that year, a group of powerful Scottish lords began plotting to overthrow King George and replace him with the exiled heir to the throne, James Edward Stuart – son of the now deceased James II – known to the Scots as ‘The King Over the Water’ and to the English as ‘The Old Pretender’.

The rebels called themselves ‘Jacobites’ after the latinised form of James, the Christian name of nearly all males in the royal Stuart line. The most noble and powerful men in Scotland joined the cause, applying ever-increasing pressure on their peers to join them. William Maxwell could hardly refuse the call; he had, after all, personally sworn to uphold the Stuarts in front of King James II. With the Maxwells on board, the lords raised their army and sent word to James Edward Stuart to come to Scotland in anticipation of assuming his throne.