Tower: An Epic History of the Tower of London (65 page)

After Lunsford’s dismissal, the king named another loyal soldier, Sir John Byron, to be lieutenant in Lunsford’s place. But Byron – an ancestor
of the great Romantic poet – lasted little longer than Lunsford. Parliament checked Charles by drafting in its own militia – the City Trained Bands, a volunteer force composed largely of London apprentices – to beef up the Tower’s garrison. When Byron attempted to replace the Trained Bands with royal troops there was an armed clash – the first skirmish of the coming Civil War. Byron resigned in disgust, and Sir John Conyers, a Parliamentary loyalist, replaced him – from henceforth to the Restoration in 1660, the Tower remained firmly in Roundhead hands.

Charles left his capital in January 1642 after a bungled attempt to arrest John Pym and four of his closest Parliamentary associates. The king would only return to London as a prisoner. William Laud remained the Tower’s most distinguished inmate through the first Civil War, which broke out in August 1642. The fussy old archbishop busied himself with preparing his own defence against his eventual trial, and interfering in the services at the Tower chapel, even forbidding marriages if he thought the couples concerned were unsuited. Laud had to witness the destruction of his life’s work, as the Puritans, now in the ascendant, smashed his precious altar rails for firewood, and broke the stained glass decorating so many churches.

Laud’s fate mirrored that of his friend Strafford. After John Pym’s death from cancer, his chief tormentor was William Prynne, a Puritan preacher whom the archbishop had himself savagely persecuted in the days of his pomp for his ‘heretical’ pamphlets. Laud had had Prynne exposed in the pillory, had slit his nose, and ordered his ears cropped to bloody stumps, before finally branding his face with the letters ‘SL’ for ‘Seditious Libeller’. In addition Prynne had been fined £5,000 and imprisoned in the Tower. Now the tables were well and truly turned and the mutilated Prynne had the power to take revenge on his persecutor. His first move, in 1643, was to appear at the Bloody Tower early one morning accompanied by a guard of musketeers, while Laud was still in bed. Prynne took away twenty-one bundles of papers which Laud had meticulously assembled to bolster his defence.

Despite the lack of documentation, the old man’s phenomenal memory enabled him to put up a stout defence when he was finally tried in 1644. Like Strafford, he was rowed from the Tower to Westminster every day for his trial – except one particularly bitter January day when the river froze and he was driven through hooting crowds in a coach. Like Strafford before him, when the evidence failed to make a charge of treason stick,
Laud was convicted of trying to ‘subvert religion and the laws of the realm’ under a bill of attainder and condemned to death.

Laud was happy to die. His life’s work lay in ruins, his country was convulsed by civil war, and the king he had served had been exposed as a man of straw. In his will, drawn up in the Tower, the archbishop wrote with feeling, ‘I most willingly leave the world, being weary at the very heart at the vanities in it.’ He slept soundly the night before his execution, on 10 January 1645, and preached a fine sermon from the scaffold on Tower Hill, predicting that God would bring him ‘from the banks of the Red Sea into the Land of Promise’. As he knelt at the block, Laud saw between the planks of the scaffold’s floor that members of the public had gathered directly beneath. He called for more sawdust to be scattered as he had ‘no desire that his blood should fall on the heads of the people’. His last words as the axe was raised were, ‘I am coming, O Lord, as fast as I can.’

William Prynne’s subsequent history reflects the strange twists and turns in loyalty and fortune as the nation negotiated the switchback fortunes of civil war. Always a contrarian, Prynne sided with the Presbyterian members of Parliament who fell out with an increasingly radical army as the bitter war went on. Finally, Prynne was even reconciled to the Restoration of the monarchy under which he had been persecuted so relentlessly. After the return of Charles II in 1660, by a supreme irony, the man who had deprived Laud of the written records to mount his defence was himself made Keeper of the Records at the Tower by the new king.

Prynne found the records in a chaotic mess. They had been thrown into a room in the White Tower, and were lying scattered in heaps with no attempt at order. Prynne primly described the state in which he found them:

I have been almost choked with the dust of neglected records interred in their own rubbish for sundry years in the White Tower; their rust eating out the tops of my gloves with their touch, and their dust rendering me, twice a day, as black as a chimney sweeper.

Somewhat surprisingly, Prynne proved an admirable historian of the Tower and his last decade was spent happily in the fortress where he had once suffered. The old polemicist was seen at work there by the gossipy antiquarian John Aubrey who described him among his now ordered papers, wearing:

… a long quilt cap, which came two or three inches over his eyes, which served him as an umbrella to defend his eyes from the light. About every two or three hours his man was to bring him a roll and a pot of ale to refocillate his wasted spirits. So he studied and drank, and munched some bread; this maintained him till night and then he made a good supper.

Prynne’s experience of seeing the two sides of the Tower – as captive, and as custodian – was not unique in Civil War England. London’s lord mayor, Sir Richard Gurney, the capital’s leading Royalist and a former Tower lieutenant, was deprived of his office by Parliament and imprisoned in the fortress where he had once presided in pomp, only being freed as his death approached in 1647. The man Parliament installed as lord mayor in Gurney’s place, a Puritan MP named Sir Isaac Pennington, was also made lieutenant of the Tower in place of Sir John Conyers. Pennington, in his turn, was deposed at the Restoration and imprisoned in his former workplace, where he soon died.

Nor was Prynne the only man to turn his coat politically in the wars. Two who followed him – or attempted to – in his erratic progress across the political spectrum were Sir John Hotham and his son, another John. The Hothams, scions of an old Yorkshire family, were early Parliamentary heroes, seizing their bastion, Hull, and denying the king entry to this vital port. Their action – in January 1642 – precipitated the Civil War, in which both fought for Parliament. However, the hotheaded younger Hotham fell out with his fellow Yorkshire Roundheads and persuaded his father to change sides. The Hothams were in the midst of negotiations to hand Hull over to the Royalists – in return for a hefty £20,000 bribe – when their treachery was discovered. They were arrested, brought to the Tower, and, on successive days, executed.

Another Parliamentary governor of another port – Plymouth in Devon – Sir Alexander Carew, suffered a fate similar to that of the Hothams. He too was originally a stout Parliamentarian. Refusing to vote against the attainder that killed Strafford, Carew replied, ‘If I was sure to be the next man that should suffer upon the same scaffold with the same axe, I would give my consent to the passing of it.’ Little did he know then that this would be exactly what happened to him. Entrusted by Parliament with holding Plymouth, a rare Roundhead outpost in the Royalist West Country, Carew opened negotiations with the Cavaliers to hand the port over. But he was betrayed by a servant and brought to the Tower from
Plymouth by sea. Here he was held for a year before – despite his wife’s plea that he was insane – being executed on Tower Hill like Strafford before him. Ironically, his younger brother, who remained true to the Roundhead cause, was hanged, drawn and quartered as a regicide after the Restoration.

In the 1640s and 1650s, the Tower was crammed with more prisoners than at any time since the Elizabethan persecution of Catholic priests and plotters in the 1580s and 1590s. At first, most of the captives were Royalist prisoners of war and peers who could not accept the assault on hereditary privilege culminating in the first English republic. It is estimated that no fewer than one third of the entire House of Lords were imprisoned in the fortress during this period.

As well as peers, the Tower played host to a pair of precious poets during these troubled times. Edmund Waller combined the writing of classically restrained lyric verse with a successful Parliamentary career. A moderate man in an age of extremes, he was one of the delegates appointed by Parliament in 1643 to negotiate with Charles I on a possible compromise peace. The atmosphere in the Royalist capital, Oxford, seems to have influenced Waller, and on his return to London he became involved in a Cavalier conspiracy – named ‘Waller’s Plot’ in his honour – to seize the Tower, liberate its Royalist prisoners and use it as a base to take over London for the king. The plot was betrayed and Waller was arrested. Fortunately for him, he was a distant cousin of Cromwell and still had friends among his fellow MPs, which – along with his abject betrayal of his co-conspirators – saved his life when he was tried for treason after spending several months as a prisoner in the fortress he had hoped to seize. Even so, he was forced to pay a fine of £10,000, and exiled – a sentence only remitted after he wrote a fawning poetic ‘
Panegyric
’ to Cromwell in 1655. After the Restoration, he wrote a similar grovelling verse tribute to Charles II, and when teased by the king that his verses in praise of Cromwell were of higher quality, Waller neatly replied, ‘Sire, we poets succeed better in fiction than in truth.’

The Tower’s other poet prisoner, Sir William Davenant, was a godson – and rumoured to be even a natural son – of Shakespeare, who often stayed at Davenant’s birthplace, the Crown Inn, Oxford, en route between London and Stratford. Davenant certainly inherited some of the Bard’s literary interests, if not his genius, and turned out a wide array of works,
ranging from love lyrics to England’s first opera libretto,
The Siege of Rhodes
. Appointed Poet Laureate by Charles I on the death of his mentor and collaborator Ben Jonson, Davenant fought bravely for the king’s cause in the Civil War and went into exile in France with Charles II. Named as Lieutenant-Governor of Maryland, Davenant was crossing to the Americas with a cargo of white slaves for the colonies culled from French jails when he was captured in mid-Channel by a Parliamentary warship.

Imprisoned on the Isle of Wight, Davenant wrote a heroic verse epic,
Gondibert
, and had just published it when he was transferred to the Tower to await his trial. The poem included verses in praise of a woman John Aubrey calls ‘a handsome black wench’, who reputedly infected the libidinous poet with syphilis – causing him to lose his nose to the disease. He spent a year – 1651 – in the Tower before, like Waller before him, benefiting from the aid of a greater poet than himself, Cromwell’s Latin secretary, John Milton, who successfully begged his boss for Davenant’s release. Influential in the Restoration theatre that followed the Cromwellian ice age, Davenant was responsible for the revival of the plays of his godfather, Shakespeare, as well as staging his own works. He was buried in the Poets’ Corner of Westminster Abbey.

After the Parliamentarians triumphed in 1645, simmering tensions between a Parliament dominated by Presbyterian sympathisers and an army leaning heavily towards radical Puritan ‘independents’ – a host of sects including Baptists, Anabaptists, Muggletonians and ‘Fifth Monarchy Men’ – burst into the open, and the Tower’s already overcrowded cells stretched still further to accommodate more men whose views were at variance with the dominant faction.

In such conditions security at the Tower lapsed, and several notable escapes were made – including those of General Lambert and Lord Capel. The famous escape in drag of the Jacobite Lord Nithsdale was anticipated by another Scotsman, John Middleton, who had started as a distinguished Parliamentary soldier, defeating the great Royalist hero Montrose, but had switched support to Charles II after Charles I’s execution. As Charles’s military commander at the battle of Worcester, Middleton was defeated, wounded, captured and brought to the Tower. He soon escaped in women’s clothes brought in by his wife, slipped across to France and rejoined Charles, who made him an earl after the Restoration.

Edward Massie was another Parliamentary hero turned Royalist whose
career curiously parallels that of Middleton. Famed for his epic defence as governor of Gloucester against a Royalist siege conducted by Charles I himself, Massie later emerged as a moderate Presbyterian in the struggle against the extreme republicans. Disgusted by Charles’s execution, Massie joined Charles II in exile, was wounded at Worcester, captured after the battle – and succeeded in escaping from the Tower by shinning up a chimney and crossing to France. Like Middleton, he was rewarded with lands and titles after the Restoration.

After Cromwell finally settled the Parliament versus army conflict in the latter’s favour by dissolving both the Long Parliament that had sat since Pym’s day and the Rump Parliament of leftovers after repeated purges, he established a military dictatorship called the Commonwealth, with himself as ‘Lord Protector’. The remaining Royalist prisoners in the Tower were joined by various radicals and republicans – loosely known as ‘Levellers’ – whose leading spokesman was John Lilburne, dubbed ‘Freeborn’ John. Advocating ideas of social equality far in advance of their era, the Levellers became a major force in the New Model Army that had won the Civil War. But their radical proposals for regular Parliaments voted for by all adult males were seen as a dire threat to property and privilege by the army’s ‘Grandees’: Generals Cromwell, Fairfax and Ireton.

The clash between the Grandees and the Levellers was at first conducted only with words – at the army debates at Putney and in the pamphlets churned out by Lilburne and the other Leveller leaders. Soon, however, the intoxicating Leveller doctrines led to army mutinies which were put down only with bloodshed. Parliament in 1649 decided that the Tower was the best place for Lilburne and the other chief Leveller agitators, William Walwyn, Richard Overton and Thomas Prince. It was not ‘Freeborn’ John’s first experience of the Tower. He had been consigned there in 1647 for attacking his former Parliamentary army commander, the Earl of Manchester, for his lacklustre conduct of the war. Cromwell, who shared Lilburne’s jaundiced opinion of the half-hearted Manchester’s military ability, helped get him out; but Lilburne was such a habitually quarrelsome spirit (it was said that when he died ‘John’ would quarrel with ‘Lilburne’ about the best place to be buried) that he was soon biting the hand that had freed him, making himself one of the sharpest thorns in Cromwell’s side.