THE LANCASTRIANS
NEITHER of the succeeding reigns—those of Henry IV. and of Henry V.—have left many traces upon the history of the Tower, although both these sovereigns occasionally lived within its walls, but in those days the fortress had become less of a Palace and more of a State prison. There was a picturesque ceremony, however, in the Tower on the eve of Henry the Fourth’s coronation, when forty-six new knights of the Order of the Bath “watched their arms” throughout the night of the 11th of October (1399) in the Chapel of the White Tower.
With Henry of Lancaster the list of State prisoners recommences; Llewellyn, a relation of Owen Glendower’s, coming there in 1402, being followed three years later by Owen’s son Griffin, and other leaders of the Welsh, taken at the battle of Usk. Nor did Henry fail to visit his wrath upon offending priests, for in 1403 the Abbot of the Friar Preachers at Winchelsea, was interned in the Tower, with other ecclesiastics, charged with intending to incite the people to rebellion, and with having written “railing rimes, malicious meters, and tauntyng verses against the King”; their literary ability brought these unlucky priests to the gallows at Tyburn. But the most important prisoner of State whom we find in the Tower in Henry’s reign, was Prince James of Scotland, the son and heir of Robert III. The young Prince, who was only nine years of age, was being sent to France to be educated, and, encountering heavy weather, was driven ashore at Flamborough Head in Yorkshire. Notwithstanding the fact that England and Scotland were then at peace, Henry seized the prince and his attendants, contrary to all the laws of justice and hospitality, imprisoning him within the Tower, together with the Earl of Orkney, who was accompanying him as his guardian. When the news reached King Robert of Scotland in 1406, he is said to have died of a broken heart, the young prince becoming de facto king of that country, but Henry still kept him a prisoner. After remaining for two years at the Tower, he was taken to Nottingham Castle, and it was not until the accession of Henry the Sixth that he regained his liberty, having been a prisoner for eighteen years.
Henry V. became King in 1412, and in the “Chronicles of London” is an account of the goodly array which accompanied the new monarch to the Tower, “and ayens hym was a gret rydynge of men of London, and brought hym to the Tower upon the Fryday, and on the morowe he rood through Chepe with a gret rought of lordes and knyghtes, the whiche he hadde newe made in the Towre on the night before, unto Westᵐʳ.”
An infamous law had been enacted against the followers of Wyckliffe in 1401, and during the hero of Agincourt’s reign the Tower was full of these persecuted people; indeed, the one great blot upon Henry’s memory is the barbarous treatment of the Lollards by the Church. Of these reformers Sir John Oldcastle (afterwards he bore the title of Lord Cobham in right of his wife) was the most distinguished. He had been one of the foremost warriors in the French campaigns, and appears in every way to have been an honour to his class. By the provisions of the iniquitous clerical decree of 1401, the Bishops were allowed a free hand in persecuting, to the death, all those who were suspected of following Wyckliffe’s teaching; all preachers of his doctrine were liable to be arrested, as well as owners of heretical books. If the doctrines were not abjured, the Church had the power of handing the culprits over to the officers of the Crown, and these, according to the legal enactment of this religious persecution, the “first legal enactment,” as J. R. Green calls it in his history, “of religious bloodshed which defiled our Statute Book,” could burn the offender alive, “on a high place before the people.”
The first martyr to suffer for the purer faith in England was a priest of Lynn, William Sautre. Oldcastle was the head of these reformers, and although a personal friend of the young King, the Bishops allowed no ties of friendship, no valiant services for his country, to weigh in his favour, or to stand between them and their prey. They demanded the body of Oldcastle, alive or dead, and Henry reluctantly, but weakly, gave up his old friend into the power of the bloodthirsty prelates, Oldcastle being taken by force in his castle of Cowling. He was brought to the Tower but succeeded in making his escape, whereupon the Lollards, encouraged by once more having their chief at their head, rose in arms. They, however, were speedily defeated and a wholesale butchery ensued, thirty-nine of the more prominent amongst them being burnt or hanged. Oldcastle was brought a second time to the Tower and did not again escape from the clutches of the priests; they had their way, and burnt the gallant old knight, hung in chains over a slow fire, on Christmas Day 1417, at Smithfield, in front of his own house. “Oldcastle died a martyr,” as Shakespeare pithily says. His life and death inspired Tennyson to write a noble poem on this heroic warrior-martyr.
It is almost as if Henry’s early death, at the age of thirty-four, came as a judgment for allowing Oldcastle to fall into the hands of the priests; and the memory of the subduer of France will ever bear the dark shadow of Oldcastle’s cruel murder. Although it would not be fair to the English clergy to compare them with their Spanish and French brothers in the matter of cruelty, they were not far behind them in their remorseless persecution of all who dared to differ from their doctrines. Until the rule of the priest was forcibly extinguished by Elizabeth’s adoption of the Reformed faith, executions and tortures which would have disgraced savages, formed part of the English Code. But in spite of the priests, the torture chamber, and the stake, the spirit of Wyckliffe and his followers was not quenched in the country; it always existed most strongly in the country towns, and when the persecution of Queen Mary and Bishop Bonner outraged the great bulk of the nation, the fires of reform, which had only smouldered, but which had never been extinguished, burst out into flame, and the hateful reign of the persecuting priest was finally and for ever overthrown.
The campaigns in France, like those in Wales and Scotland, added to the distinguished prisoners of State placed within the durance of the Tower walls by the fortune of war. Of the French came the Dukes of Bourbon and Orleans, with the Counts of Eu, Vendome, the Marshal Boucicourt, and many other knights after the Battle of Agincourt in 1415. I have made mention elsewhere of the famous imprisonment of the Duke of Orleans in the White Tower. He was released in 1440, on the payment of a ransom of fifty thousand pounds, a sum approximately ten times that of our present money value; but many of these French captives died in the Tower, among them the Duke of Bourbon and the Marshal Boucicourt.
After the death of Henry V., and during the Protectorate which governed the country during the minority of Henry VI., the young King’s guardian, the Bishop of Winchester, taking advantage of the absence of Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, the actual Protector, reinforced the garrison of the Tower, and on the Duke’s return from France refused to admit him to the fortress, with the result that the aid of Parliament had to be invoked to arrange matters between the Duke and the Bishop. Throughout Henry’s troubled reign the Tower was full of prisoners, some of them French and Scotch taken in the wars, and amongst others Owen Tudor, the father of the future Henry VII. The Duchess of Gloucester, an aunt by marriage of the King, was also imprisoned in the fortress upon the charge of witchcraft and sorcery, a circumstance of which Shakespeare made signal use in his tragedy dealing with the unfortunate Henry’s life.
In 1450, the Tower was again the scene of civil strife. In that year Jack Cade’s insurrection took place, and with that insurrection the name of one of England’s greatest nobles was connected, William de la Pole, Duke of Suffolk. The history of his family was distinguished. His father had fallen at the siege of Harfleur; his eldest brother had died on the field of Agincourt, and two others had perished in the Battle of Jargeau. The Duke himself had willingly given himself up as a hostage for his youngest brother, who had been taken prisoner in France, where, however, he had died before his ransom could be collected. Suffolk had been a Knight of the Garter for thirty years at the time of the Cade rebellion, and throughout those three decades had served the King faithfully, both at home and abroad, as he told his accusers when he was brought before the Parliament at Westminster on a charge of high treason. But he had many enemies, and these vamped up the charge of treason against him on the ridiculous ground of his having laid up provisions and military stores at Wallingford Castle, with the intention of sending them to the French. Upon this absurd charge Suffolk was committed to the Tower, but as nothing could be proved against him he was shortly afterwards released, but sentenced to be banished the country. For some unexplained reason Suffolk was intensely disliked by the people, and all the misfortunes of the time—the English defeats in France and the unpopularity of the government of the day—were laid to his account by the populace. His end was pitiful. He had taken ship at Dover to cross to Calais, but was seized on board by the captain of another vessel named Nicholas of the Tower. On hearing the name of the ship Suffolk is said to have lost all his fortitude, for it had been prophesied to him that if he “could avoid water and escape the danger of the Tower, he would be safe, and so his heart failed him.” The old prophecy came true, for shortly after his capture his head was hacked off by several strokes of a rusty sword, and his body was cast upon the beach at Dover. Thus miserably perished William de la Pole, Duke, Marquis, and Earl of Suffolk, Duke of Dreux, Earl of Pembroke, Baron de la Pole of Wingfield, and other titles and dignities.
St. Thomas’s Tower, from the Wharf.
Jack Cade’s insurrection was the beginning of a long series of civil strifes which at last broke out into the civil war that raged from 1450 to 1471; this was the War of the Roses, so called from the badges worn by the opposing factions, the Lancastrians wearing the Red, and the Yorkists the White Rose.
At the outset of the war, London was at the mercy of a riotous mob, headed by the redoubtable Cade, who had assumed the name of Mortimer. The charge of the Tower had been confided to Lord Scales and Sir Mathew Gough. Lord Saye, who was at this time Lord High Treasurer, was a prisoner in the Tower, an Order in Council having placed him there, as a means, it was hoped, of pacifying the rioters, who, however, attacked the fortress from the Southwark side of the river, aided by Cade and his followers, but retreated at nightfall across London Bridge. Scales, with the help of the Lord Mayor, made a sortie from the Tower, barricading the bridge, whilst Gough commanded the rebels’ position across the water from the battlements of the fortress. At this juncture the Archbishop of Canterbury, who had taken shelter within the Tower, called for a general amnesty, and this being granted, the rebellion died out of its own accord, Cade being captured and killed by the Sheriff of Kent, and his followers dispersed to their homes. Meanwhile the King had sunk into a state of semi-idiocy, his mind, never a strong one, having doubtless been affected by the unceasing trouble around him; besides, he was the grandson of Charles VI. of France, so that his mental condition is easily accounted for. The Duke of Somerset, grandson of John of Gaunt, now took the foremost place in the Council, but after a short period of seclusion, Henry was again able to act as King.