Tales From the Tower of London (9 page)

Adding some credence to the claim that Tyrell was harbouring the boys is an interesting item found in the docket book of Richard’s Privy Seal dated 1484. The entry refers to the fact that, acting on behalf of the king, Tyrell was sent ‘over the sea into the parts of Flanders for diverse matters concerning greatly Ourselves . . .’. The ‘ourselves’ alluded to must certainly have meant Richard. Is it possible that Tyrell was escorting the boys to the safety of the continent or making arrangements for them to go later? If Richard was already in fear for his throne, he might have wanted the boys well out of the way for their own safety. If Henry Tudor, the Woodvilles and the Lancastrian party managed to unseat him, nowhere in England would be safe enough for the boys. Tyrell’s trip might also explain why Elizabeth Woodville went to stay with them at Gipping Hall. If they were being spirited out of the country, it might have been her last chance to see them. Adding some weight to this strange tale are two bizarre uprisings that took place during Henry Tudor’s reign. Even if Henry VII was never certain about the boys’ fate, the uprisings frightened him enough to take them both very seriously.

Less than two years after Henry came to the throne a boy in his early teens appeared in Dublin claiming to be the Earl of Warwick. Clearly, since Warwick was imprisoned in the Tower, the boy was not who he claimed to be, but so many people believed the rumours that Warwick had escaped that it was an easy claim to make. The boy must have been relatively convincing, he even fooled Henry VI’s widow, Margaret of Anjou. He fooled a lot of others too, because in May 1487, he was crowned King Edward VI by the Irish (who hated Henry VII and were anxious to find a way to unseat him).

Since Henry had the real Warwick behind bars he knew the boy in Ireland was an impostor. To prove this to the public he even had Warwick hauled out of the Tower and paraded through the streets of London all the way to St Paul’s Cathedral. Why then did he simultaneously use this occasion to lock his mother-in-law Elizabeth Woodville (he had married one of the three daughters she had entrusted to Richard when she came out of sanctuary) in a convent and confiscate all her belongings?

In 1487, Margaret of Burgundy (the same Margaret of Burgundy who had sent a cask of wine to the real Warwick whom she knew to be locked in the Tower) backed the pretender, with an army of Irish and German mercenaries. With this support, the supposed Earl of Warwick promptly challenged the English. At the Battle of Stoke, in June of that year, the rebels were defeated and their young king taken prisoner. Now identified as ‘Lambert Simnel’ the boy was no longer the twelve- or thirteen-year-old described earlier, but only about ten years old. After deciding his enemies had used the boy as a dupe, Henry graciously took pity on him and put him to work in the royal kitchens where he is recorded to have died in about 1525.

Now here are the problems with the story. If Margaret of Burgundy, and presumably Margaret of Anjou, both knew the real Warwick was being held in the Tower, why did they identify the boy as Warwick? Why was Henry so quick to cloister Elizabeth Woodville when word of the pretender reached him, even though he had the real Warwick under lock and key? How did the twelve- or thirteen-year-old who was crowned king in Dublin turn out to be a ten-year-old boy named Lambert Simnel?

Could it be that the boy claiming to be the Earl of Warwick was actually Prince Richard, the younger of the two missing princes? If so, why would he pretend to be his own cousin (Warwick) rather than admit to his identity? Possibly because it provided him some protection and possibly because Warwick had been named Richard III’s official heir while Prince Richard and his brother Edward V had been declared bastards and denied the right of accession. Did Henry Tudor lock up his mother-in-law to prevent her from recognising her own son? Did the Irish rebels make a last-minute substitution to keep the real Prince Richard from falling into Henry Tudor’s hands? There is one last point worth considering. No one who threatened Henry VII, even from afar or in the minutest way, managed to escape the most severe punishment. Why then, did he allow Lambert Simnel to live out his life as a royal retainer?

In 1491, only four years after the curious incident of Lambert Simnel, an almost identical incident occurred in almost the same way. A boy named Perkin Warbeck appeared in Cork, Ireland, claiming to be none other than the Earl of Warwick. Then, inexplicably, he changed his story claiming to be Prince Richard of York, the younger of the two brothers. To prove his identity, the ‘prince’ travelled around Europe visiting his supposed relatives. He was fêted by Charles VIII of France and, as the other Prince Richard before him, identified by Margaret of Burgundy. Many others who had known the young princes also identified him.

By the time Warbeck returned to Ireland in 1493 he declared himself ready to claim his inheritance. He attempted to invade England through Scotland in 1495 with the help of James IV, who was also convinced of his identity. The invasion failed, so he tried again in 1496 and again in 1497. If the first two attempts failed to get off the ground, the third went disastrously wrong. In October 1497 the ‘prince’ was taken prisoner by the king’s soldiers at the Battle of Taunton and brought before Henry VII to explain himself. The boy now admitted that he was not Prince Richard, but only Perkin ‘Warbeque’, the son of an illiterate boatman from Tournai, Flanders. How much of the story Henry believed we will never know, but where he had shown uncharacteristic leniency to Lambert Simnel, he had Warbeck thrown into the Tower. In the cell next to him was none other than the real Earl of Warwick.

The two remained locked in adjoining cells until late in 1499. The boys, both now about twenty-five, were accused of plotting to burn down the Tower of London in order to escape and make their way to Flanders where they planned to launch another bid to put Warwick on the throne. In retribution for this supposed plot, Henry ordered the execution of the boys, along with a Tower warder who was accused of being their accomplice. On 23 November 1499 the Earl of Warwick was beheaded on Tower Hill while Warbeck and the gaoler were hanged at Tyburn.

Henry VII could now rest easy, but the rest of us are left with an endless string of questions. How did the son of an illiterate Flemish boatman come to have the education, linguistic skills and social graces that allowed him to pass himself off as an English prince in front of half the crowned heads of Europe and still look so much like the missing prince that he could fool various members of his own family? Stranger still, of all the countries Perkin Warbeck might have hailed from, how is it that he just happened to be from the place Sir James Tyrell had travelled to on behalf of Richard III?

Whatever really happened to the princes following their mysterious disappearance, and the murder of Henry VI twelve years previously, the Tower had developed such a malign reputation that no future monarch of England would live in it. The venerable fortress now began the long descent from royal residence to state prison that would mark its future.

An interesting footnote to the centuries of accusations that have swirled around Richard III and the disappearance of his nephews took place in the United States in 1997. In an extraordinary mock trial, Richard III was brought up on charges of murdering his nephews. Presiding was a panel of three US Supreme Court judges. Cases for both prosecution and defence were duly presented. The judges returned a unanimous verdict of ‘not guilty on all counts’.

It is one of history’s better-known facts that Henry VIII had marital problems. Less well known than his acrimonious relations with six successive wives, however, is the fact that in at least one instance, a clever and beautiful woman nearly got away with picking Henry’s pocket without being married to him, or ever even having met him. Like two of Henry’s wives her story, too, ended in the confines of the Tower of London.

In October 1531, agents of the king and parliament arrived at the London docks expecting to collect a shipment of 366 gold crowns that had been shipped from the continent to help replenish King Henry’s perpetually depleted royal treasury. With a modern equivalent value of more than £700,000 it was, quite literally, a king’s ransom. To the guards’ surprise, despite having been transported in an iron bound chest, which was securely locked, chained to the floor of the ship and kept under constant guard while at sea and in port, the gold had vanished.

A massive investigation was launched to recover the gold and bring the perpetrators of the theft to justice, but it took nearly two years before the scanty trail of evidence pointed the finger at a ne’er-do-well sailor named John Wolfe. Wolfe had a reputation as a petty thief, sometime pirate and general thug, but there was little evidence to connect him with the theft beyond the fact that he had been part of the crew that was aboard while it lay at anchor in the London docks. Under the circumstances, however, that was enough for the crown to issue a warrant for Wolfe’s arrest. By the early summer of 1533 he had been apprehended and dragged off to the Tower where he awaited arraignment on charges of conspiracy, theft and treason: not easy charges to face at any time, but especially not under the somewhat tyrannical reign of Henry VIII.

While Wolfe languished in his cell, his common-law wife Alice Tankerville, who, by all accounts, was a charmer, visited him almost daily. Over the course of her visits, the comely and seductive Alice made friends with two of her husband’s jailers, William Denys and John Bawd. Denys and Bawd were both young and unmarried and more than a little taken with Alice’s obvious charms. They allowed her to bring wine, decent food and treats to her husband, and Bawd and Denys probably received more than their fair share of the woman’s attention in appreciation of their leniency.

Nearly six months after his arrest, the case against Wolfe collapsed for lack of evidence and he was released. Although free, he decided it would probably be a smart move to leave the country until things cooled off. Ireland seemed a good choice for an extended holiday, but before he left Wolfe met privately with John Bawd and asked him if he would look after Alice while he was gone. Already desperately smitten, Bawd readily agreed.

Only weeks after Wolfe’s departure, new evidence turned up in the case of the king’s missing gold and it would seem that it not only pointed directly at Wolfe himself, but also implicated Alice Tankerville as an accomplice. Wolfe, of course, was long gone; so to avoid losing any more time over the case both he and Alice Tankerville were tried
in absentia
by parliament. Even Alice, who was often seen around the Tower where she went to visit John Bawd, was not notified of the charges, or the trial, in which she had been named as a co-defendant. Within days the pair were found guilty of theft and treason and sentenced to death. Only then were formal arrest warrants issued.

In February 1534, Alice Tankerville was seized and thrown into a windowless cell in Coldharbour Tower, located near the west side of the original White Tower. The only light that filtered into her cell came through a tiny, barred window in the heavy oak cell door. Her hands and feet were shackled, and the shackles were attached to heavy chains looped through iron rings set into the wall. Here she would wait until John Wolfe was recaptured, the authorities decided to execute her alone, or she simply died. Even by the standards of the day Alice’s treatment was so unusually harsh that the daughter of Sir Edmund Walsingham, the Lieutenant of the Tower, interceded with her father on Alice’s behalf. Reluctantly, Walsingham agreed to remove the heavy irons so long as both her cell door and the outer door of Coldharbour Tower remained locked at all times. Food would have to be pushed through a gap beneath the cell door.

During Alice’s confinement, one of the guards whose schedule placed him on guard duty in the Coldharbour Tower was her old friend, Will Denys. Distressed and concerned for this lovely woman who had been so nice to him while he had guarded her husband, Denys brought Alice small gifts and visited her even when he was not on duty. As his visits increased in regularity and length, gossip filtered back to his boss, Sir John Walsingham, and within a few short weeks Denys was out looking for a new job.

No matter, Alice Tankerville was a very resourceful young woman. Somehow, John Bawd had his schedule changed so he was Alice’s guard on an almost daily basis. Through the tiny window in her cell door, Bawd’s and Alice’s relationship developed into a romance, at least on John Bawd’s part, and together they conceived a daring escape plan. Alice told Bawd that Will Denys had once mentioned a possible escape route out of Coldharbour Tower, and urged him to verify its feasibility. Together they would work out the final details. At the risk of losing both his job and his head, Bawd agreed. He had already lost his heart to her, so no risk was thought too great to save his Alice from the sort of grisly death that inevitably awaited her.

Over the next few days, Bawd had a long conversation with a trusted friend named Jeffrey Harrison and a much shorter one with an hosteller who kept a stable not far from the Tower. He also purchased two lengths of rope from a dockside merchant named Sampson at a cost of 13 pence. Next he needed a copy of the key to the outside door of Coldharbour Tower, which had been constantly locked since Alice’s shackles had been removed. There was no way his usual key could be used. When the last guard went off duty at ten o’clock at night, all keys had to be returned to the main guard office. Carefully, Bawd made a duplicate key, filing it away a bit at a time and hiding it in his uniform so he could test it in the lock until it worked perfectly. Finally, he found a smooth, round stick about 18 inches in length.

When this strange collection of tools was complete, John Bawd smuggled them in to work with him. Through the bars of Alice’s cell door, he passed the key, the rope and the stick so she could hide them under the straw on her cell floor where they were far less likely to be noticed than if he put them in his trunk in the warder’s dormitory. Now, the pair made their final plans and waited impatiently for a moonless night when the near-total darkness was most likely to cover their escape.