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.
[Illustration: _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.