Tower: An Epic History of the Tower of London (58 page)

Those believing that the earl committed suicide have also got a strong case: he was a moody, emotional man, much given to depression and introspection. The day before his death he had demanded a razor to pare his nails – a drastic instrument to accomplish such a routine task. Moreover, there was a motive: a peer who died before being executed for treason would escape the usual attainder, meaning the forfeiture of title, land and property. Did Essex act to save his family from penury? We will never know, but the day after his death an inquest jury brought in a speedy verdict of suicide. Despite the doubts, most historians have accepted that conclusion.

One Whig lord arrested with Essex, who also escaped the headsman’s axe – albeit by an easier method than Essex’s bloody razor – was Forde, Lord Grey de Werke. Lord Grey had the luck of the Devil; and he pushed it to the limit. Not only did he successfully carry out one of the most audacious escapes from the Tower, but returning to the fortress a second time
years later, facing an even graver charge of treason, he managed to avoid the block yet again.

Grey was an opportunistic fellow. He appeared a typical wealthy Restoration rake, with a fine country seat at Uppark in Sussex. Beneath the foppish facade, however, beat a rebel heart: his grandfather was Henry Ireton, Cromwell’s son-in-law and most trusted lieutenant, the hard man of the English revolution. Grey’s first experience of the Tower had come in 1682, when he had been locked up there accused of eloping to France with his sister-in-law, the eighteen-year-old Lady Henrietta Berkeley. Disarmingly, he explained to a court – presided over by the notorious future ‘Hanging Judge’ George Jeffreys – that having married Lady Mary Berkeley, ‘expecting a maidenhead … but not finding it, hee resolved to have one in the family, if any be left’.

Released after it was revealed that the lusty Lady Henrietta was herself secretly married to another man, Grey turned his energies from sexual to political intrigue. A prominent member of the Whig opposition, he tirelessly promoted the claims of his drinking and wenching crony, the Protestant Duke of Monmouth, to succeed his father Charles II as king. Intensely irritated, Charles added Grey’s name to the list of Whig lords rounded up after the Rye House Plot. Grey was arrested by a king’s messenger, Henry Denham. When Denham arrived at the Tower’s gate with his prisoner, the hour was late and the gate was firmly shut. This presented Denham with a problem: Charles’s orders specified that Grey had to be handed over to Tom Cheek, the Tower lieutenant, in person. Grey suggested that they should adjourn to one of the many taverns near the Tower in the local ‘liberty’ – a slum known as Petty Wales – and while away the hours in convivial style until the gates opened.

Prisoner and escort settled down in a riverside inn, with its clientele of soldiers, sailors and Tower warders, to carouse the night away. Denham drank deeply of the wine that Grey paid for, but his companion was unusually abstemious. Grey was already weighing up the chances of escape. As the night wore on, and more wine flowed, Denham grew flushed and fuddled. Grey, however, while affecting to join in the drunken merrymaking, remained alert. Finally, Denham slumped on the table, snoring in sottish slumber.

This might have been Grey’s chance to get away, but he hesitated. The inn was filled with the Tower’s warders and officers, who would be unlikely to let this important political prisoner go. As dawn broke, the boom of a
signal cannon, and the unmistakable clanking and crashing of the Tower’s gates opening were clearly heard in the inn. Denham stirred, lurched to his feet, and the two men left the tavern to meet the morning. Quite casually, Grey strolled towards the gatehouse – the Middle Tower – with the stumbling, hungover Denham staggering along in his wake. Grey engaged the sentries on the gate in easy conversation: he was innocent, he protested, and he asked to see his old friend Tom Cheek, the lieutenant. He was not yet up, the guards told Grey, and in the meantime, he was admitted to the Tower to wait.

Grey and Denham passed through the forbidding gateway and crossed the stone bridge over the moat to the inner gatehouse, the Byward Tower, which at that early hour was deserted. Grey was at last alone with the hungover Denham. Here was his chance. Under the archway of the Byward Tower he knew that there was a passage – the Sally Port – to the right, leading directly to the wharf. This privy passage was for the convenience of important Tower visitors who wished to enter and leave discreetly. It was normally guarded, but at this early hour, it was not. Grey looked across at Denham. His escort was asleep on his feet. With a single step, Grey entered the dark passage and pushed the door at the end. By a miracle, it was open. In a moment he was on the wharf, and by another miracle, a wherry boat was already moored there, touting for trade.

Within seconds, Grey was on the river, and a few minutes later he was landing on the other side, at a tavern appropriately called the Pickled Herring. He disappeared into the crowds thronging the waking city and made his way towards Greenwich, where he begged and bribed his way on to a ship bound for Holland. Grey spent the next months among other English exiles in the Dutch republic, fruitlessly plotting to depose Charles. The king himself, when he heard how easily Grey had slipped his leash, was as enraged as his grandfather King James had been after William Seymour’s bolt. The hapless Denham sobered up fast when instead of his prisoner he was thrown into the Tower, where he spent the next six months. Robert Lock, the boatman who had unwittingly ferried Grey away from the Tower, was flung into the Marshalsea jail – despite pleading that he had lost a leg serving the king as a soldier.

In 1685 Charles died, and was succeeded by his Catholic brother James II. Grey and the other English exiles in Holland had been joined the previous year by the Duke of Monmouth, a charming but weak chancer who had been persuaded that he could be England’s Protestant king in
place of his uncle James. By June 1685 the motley crew of around eighty malcontents were ready for their desperate throw of the dice. With Monmouth at their head, they sailed in three ships to Lyme in Dorset, and began the ill-starred rebellion that would end at Sedgemoor – the last pitched battle on England’s soil. The command of Monmouth’s ‘cavalry’ – a couple of hundred nags and shire horses – was given to Lord Grey.

The rebels trailed disconsolately around the West Country, gathering a small army of 6,000 peasant farmers and ploughboys. Grey’s finest moment came at Wells Cathedral, when, single-handedly, he successfully defended the high altar against destruction by overzealous Protestant idolaters in his army. His role at Sedgemoor, when the professional royal army destroyed Monmouth’s brave but ill-trained amateurs, was less glorious. His cavalry ran away, and he himself accompanied Monmouth in a precipitous flight on horseback, leaving their foot soldiers to be massacred by the victorious Royalists.

Lord Grey now made a belated return to the Tower – exactly two years after fleeing it. Arrested with Monmouth near Poole, he again escaped near-certain death, although on this occasion by more ignoble means. He turned king’s evidence and testified against his fellow rebels – including his friend Monmouth, who was beheaded with an agonising half-dozen strokes of a blunt axe. Grey successfully bargained for his life, using a huge chunk – £40,000 – of his vast wealth as a bribe to dodge the block. There were rumours that he bore a grudge against Monmouth, the handsome duke having seduced Grey’s wayward wife Mary. Grey survived to hail the Glorious Revolution of 1688 that succeeded where he and Monmouth had failed, in deposing James and ushering in the Protestant William of Orange. William made Grey an earl and he died in 1701 – a truly lucky man.

With the Whigs and Protestants once more firmly in the saddle after 1688, the role of romantic underdog rebels reverted to the Jacobites: those who charged their glasses to toast the ‘king over the water’ – the exiled James II – and his son, James Edward, and grandson Charles Edward, respectively the Old and Young Pretenders. Jacobite loyalty was strongest in Catholic northern England and the Scottish Highlands. When the last Stuart monarch, James II’s Anglican daughter Anne, died childless in 1714, the Protestant succession – and thus the crown – went to
her German cousins, the House of Hanover, in the unlovely person of King George I.

The Jacobites imagined that patriotic Britons would rather have one of their own – whatever his religion – on the throne, than this uncouth German. They forgot that James Edward, too, was practically a foreigner: since fleeing abroad with his parents as a newborn infant in 1688, he had never seen the land he aspired to rule. Nevertheless, the Scottish Jacobite plotters went ahead in 1715 with a fully fledged rising on James Edward’s behalf.

The Scottish peer William Maxwell, 5th Earl of Nithsdale, was steeped in Stuart loyalty. Born in 1676, on coming of age Nithsdale had travelled to France to pledge allegiance to the exiled James II. While at James’s court in St Germain, Nithsdale had met, wooed and in 1699 married, an equally fervent Jacobite – Winifred Herbert, daughter of the Marquess of Powys. The couple returned to the Nithsdale family estate at Terregles in Dumfries, and enjoyed sixteen years of quiet domestic life raising their five children before the Jacobite call to arms came in 1715.

After proclaiming the Old Pretender King James in the Scottish Borders, Nithsdale joined the English Jacobite army under Thomas Forster at Hexham in Northumberland. But the rebels were overwhelmed by King George’s professional redcoats at the Battle of Preston, and Nithsdale and six fellow Jacobite peers surrendered and were brought to the Tower. Lady Nithsdale, still aged only thirty-six, received the news of her husband’s capture just before Christmas 1715, and resolved to save her beloved. Pausing only to hide incriminating papers in the walls of her home, she and her maid, a Welsh girl named Evans, set off on the long journey south in the dead of winter.

The first obstacle facing the dauntless countess was the weather. The winter of 1715/16 was savage, and thick snow blanketed the roads. All communications with London were cut, and Lady Nithsdale was in an agony of ignorance. For all she knew, her husband had been tried and condemned already. As the roads were impassable for carriages, Winifred and Evans set off on horseback on the first stage of their 400-mile journey south. By Christmas Day, they had reached an inn near Newcastle. She had time to scribble a letter to her sister describing their ride though screaming gales and deep snowdrifts: ‘Such a journey, I believe, was scarce
ever made, considering the weather, but with God’s help an earnest desire can achieve a great deal.’

At Newcastle, the two women boarded a stagecoach for York, 100 miles to the south. They hoped to be able to catch the regular mail coach to London, but when they reached York, a new blizzard had blocked the roads, and once again they took to horseback. Lady Nithsdale bought two hardy mounts and, without pausing to rest, they resumed the journey. A fortnight after setting out, the two brave riders finally arrived in London. Immensely relieved to hear that her husband was still alive – although about to be tried for high treason before the High Court of Parliament – Lady Nithsdale took rooms with a Jacobite sympathiser, a Mrs Mills, and set about preparing an appeal to the House of Lords against what she feared would be an inevitable death sentence.

Her fears were justified. The six Jacobite peers were condemned to pay the supreme penalty. Three were reprieved by King George but the others – an English peer Lord Derwentwater, and the two Scottish Lords Kenmure and Nithsdale – were told they would die in three weeks on 24 February. Desperately, Lady Nithsdale decided to petition the king in person to plead for her husband’s life. Knowing she would never reach the monarch if her true identity was known, she disguised herself as a maidservant and arrived at the back door of St James’s Palace. A woman as desperate and determined as she was found little difficulty in talking her way inside, and pretending to dust the furniture as she went, she made her way from room to room in search of the king.

She tracked him down to a small antechamber and, according to her own account, flung herself at his feet and blurted out in French – their common language, since the new German king of England could not speak English – that she was ‘the unfortunate Countess of Nithsdale’ come to plead for her husband’s life. Startled by this unwelcome intrusion, the king tried to leave the room, but the distraught woman clung on to the tails of his coat, begging for mercy. The king stumbled out as best he could with Lady Nithsdale dragging behind him on her knees, still pleading for her lord’s life. Two servants came to the king’s rescue. One caught the countess round her waist, while the other prised her hands from the monarch’s coat. The appeal petition that she had presented to Parliament pleading for mercy for the condemned man fell to the floor as she fainted away.

That night, Winifred visited her husband in the Tower to tell him of
the failure of her mission. Nithsdale was held in a room off the Council Chamber in the Lieutenant’s Lodgings (now called the Queen’s House) – the room where Guy Fawkes had been interrogated a century before. Nithsdale took the news stoically, and began working on the speech he planned to deliver from the scaffold. His indomitable wife, however, had by no means given up. On her daily visits, she carefully scanned the Tower’s geography. Having ruled out the traditional exit for Tower prisoners – out of the window and over the walls – she began to think of a better route. The Council Chamber adjoining her husband’s room was always filled with people – warders, soldiers, officers and officials, the lieutenant’s servants and their children – constantly coming and going. The place was a hubbub of noise. The prisoner awaiting death was almost out of sight and out of mind.

Lady Nithsdale came up with an escape plan – fantastic, foolhardy even, but possibly, given a large slice of luck, with a sporting chance of success. Taking leave of her husband, she told Evans of her scheme. She meant to dress Nithsdale in women’s clothes and smuggle him out of the room under the noses of the milling guards. She would dress him in mob cap and skirt, swathe him in a voluminous brown cloak, paint his face with her cosmetics – taking care to lighten his distinctive dark eyebrows – and then take him out of the condemned cell, weeping and wailing as he went, with his head bowed and his hands held to his crying eyes. Such histrionics from Nithsdale’s womenfolk would be quite understandable, given that he was due to die in a few short hours.