1553-1554
Discontent at the Spanish match--Insurrections in the
country--Courtenay and Elizabeth--Suffolk a rebel--General
failure of the insurgents--Wyatt’s success--Marches to
London--Mary’s conduct--Apprehensions in London, and at the
palace--The fight--Wyatt a prisoner--Taken to the Tower.
When the year 1553 drew towards its close there was nothing to
indicate that any catastrophe was at hand. The crisis appeared to be
past and no further danger to be apprehended. Northumberland and his
principal accomplices had paid the penalty of their treason. Suffolk,
with lesser criminals, had been allowed to escape it; the rest of the
confederates had been practically pardoned. If some were still in
confinement it was understood to be without danger to life or limb.
In the Tower Lady Jane and her husband lay formally under sentence of
death, but the conditions of their captivity had been lightened; on
December 18 Lady Jane was accorded “the liberty of the Tower,” and was
permitted to walk in the Queen’s garden and on the hill; Guilford and
his brother--Elizabeth’s Leicester--were allowed the liberty of the
leads in the Bell Tower. Both Northampton and young Warwick--who did
not long survive his enfranchisement--had been released. No further
chastisement seemed likely to be inflicted in expiation of the late
attempt to keep Mary out of her rights.
Yet discontent was on the increase. As early as November steps had been
taken to induce Courtenay to head a new conspiracy. He was timid and
faint-hearted, and urged delay, and nothing had, so far, come of it.
It would be well, he said, advocating a policy of procrastination, to
wait to be certain that the Queen was determined upon the Spanish match
before taking hazardous measures to oppose it.[208]
Thus Christmas had found the country ostensibly at peace, and the
prisoners in the Tower with no reason to fear any change for the worse
in their condition. On the following day the thunder of the cannon
discharged as a welcome to the Emperor’s ambassadors sounded in their
ears, and was, though they were ignorant of it, the prelude of their
destruction. The arrival of envoys expressly charged with the marriage
negotiations put the matter beyond doubt; nor was England in a mood to
submit passively to a union it hated and feared.
By January 2 the Counts of Egmont and Laing and the Sieur de Corriers
had reached the capital; landing at the Tower, where they were greeted
with a salute from the guns, and met by the Earl of Devonshire, who
escorted them through the City. “The people, nothing rejoicing, held
down their heads sorrowfully.” When on the previous day the retinue
of the Spanish envoys had ridden through the town, more forcible
expression had been given to public opinion, and they had been pelted
with snowballs.[209]
Matters were pressed quickly on. By January 13 the formal announcement
of the unpopular arrangement, with its provisions, was made by Gardiner
in the Presence-chamber at Westminster to the lords and nobles there
assembled; hope could no longer be entertained that the Queen would be
otherwise persuaded. “These news,” adds the Tower diarist, “although
they were not unknown to many and very much disliked, yet being now in
this wise pronounced, was not only credited, but also heavily taken of
sundry men; yea, and almost each man was abashed, looking daily for
worse matters to grow shortly after.”
They did not look in vain. The unpopularity of the Spanish match was
the direct cause of the insurrections which soon broke out. Indirectly
it was the cause of the death of Lady Jane Grey.
Wild tales were afloat, rousing the passions of the angry people to
fever-heat. Some reports stated that Edward was still alive; others
asserted that the tower and the forts were to be seized and held by an
imperialist army; abuse of every kind was directed against the Prince
of Spain and his nation. Mary was said to have given her pledge that
she would marry no foreigner, and by the breach of this promise she was
declared to have forfeited the crown. Fresh schemes were set on foot
for a rising in the spring. It does not appear that the substitution
of Lady Jane for her cousin was again generally contemplated. That
plan had resulted in so complete a failure that it had probably been
tacitly admitted that the arrangement would not work. But the eyes of
many were turning towards Elizabeth. She was to wed Courtenay, and they
were jointly to occupy the throne. The two principally concerned were
not likely to have refused to fall in with the project had it seemed to
offer a fair chance of success, and France was in favour of it.
“By what I hear,” wrote Noailles, “it will be by my Lord Courtenay’s
own fault if he does not marry her, and she does not follow him to
Devonshire,”--the selected centre of operations--“but the misfortune
is that the said Courtenay is in such fear that he dares undertake
nothing. I see no reason that prevents him save lack of heart.”
Courtenay was in truth not the stuff of which conductors of revolutions
are made. Gratitude and loyalty would not have availed to keep him
true to Mary, and in able hands he might have become the instrument
of a rebellion. But Gardiner found no difficulty in so playing on his
apprehensions as to lead him to divulge the plots that were on foot;
and his revelations, or betrayals, whichever they are to be called,
precipitated the action of the conspirators. If their enterprise was to
be attempted, no time must be lost.[210]
On January 20 it became known that Devonshire was in arms, “resisting
the King of Spain’s coming,” and that Exeter was in the hands of the
insurgents. By the 25th the Duke of Suffolk, with his two brothers,
Lord John and Lord Leonard Grey, had fled from his house at Sheen, and
gone northwards to rouse his Warwickshire tenants to insurrection. It
was currently reported that he had narrowly escaped being detained,
a messenger from the Queen having arrived as he was on the point of
starting, with orders that he should repair to Court.
“Marry,” said the Duke, “I was coming to her Grace. Ye may see I am
booted and spurred ready to ride, and I will but break my fast and go.”
Bestowing a present upon the messenger, he gave him drink, and himself
departed, no one then knew whither.
That same day tidings had reached the Council that Kent had risen, Sir
Thomas Wyatt at its head, with Culpepper, Cobham, and others, alleging,
as their sole motives, resistance to the Prince of Spain, and the
removal of certain lords from the Council Board. Sir John Crofts had
proceeded to Wales to call upon it to join the insurrectionary movement.
The country being thus in a turmoil the two persons who should have
taken the lead and upon whom much of the success of the insurgents
depended were playing a cautious game. Courtenay was at Court, and
Elizabeth remained at Ashridge to watch the event, no doubt prepared
to shape her course accordingly. A letter addressed to her by her
partisans, counselling her withdrawal to Dunnington, as to a place of
greater safety, had been intercepted by the authorities; and she had
received an invitation, or command, to join her sister at St. James’s,
where, it was significantly added, she would be more secure than either
at Ashridge or Dunnington. On the score of ill-health she disobeyed the
summons, fortifying the house, and assembling around it some numbers of
armed retainers.
[Illustration:
From a photo by Emery Walker after a painting by Joannes Corvus in
the National Portrait Gallery.
HENRY GREY, DUKE OF SUFFOLK, K.G.]
The hopes built by the insurgents upon the general discontent
throughout the country were doomed to disappointment. It was one thing
to disapprove of the Queen’s choice; it was quite another to take up
arms against her. Devonshire proved cold; most of the leaders there
were seized, or compelled to make their escape to France; Crofts had
been pursued to Wales, and was arrested before he had time to rally any
support in the principality.
Suffolk had done no better in the Midlands. Authorities are divided
as to his intentions. By Dr. Lingard it is considered uncertain
whether he meant to press Elizabeth’s claims or to revive those of his
daughter. With either upon the throne the dominance of the Protestant
religion would have been ensured, and, unlike Northumberland, Suffolk
was sincere and honest in his attachment to the principles of the
Reformation. Other writers, however, assert categorically that he
caused Lady Jane to be proclaimed at his halting-places as he went
north; and the sequel seems to make it probable that she had been once
more forced into a position of dangerous prominence.
Whatever may have been the exact nature of the scheme he propounded,
the country made no response to his appeal; after a skirmish near
Coventry he gave up hopes of any immediate success, disbanded his
followers, and, betrayed by a tenant upon whose fidelity he had
believed he could count, fell into the hands of those in pursuit of
him. By February 10 he had gone to swell the numbers of the prisoners
in the Tower.
The rising in Kent had alone answered in any degree to the expectations
of its promoters. Drawn into the conspiracy, if his own assertions are
to be credited, by Courtenay, Wyatt had become the most conspicuous
leader of the insurrection known by his name. He was well fitted
for the post. Brave, skilful, and secret, he was, says Noailles, “un
gentilhomme le plus vaillant et assuré que j’ai jamais ouï parler”; and
whether or not he had been deserted by the man to whom it was due that
he had taken up arms, he was not disposed to submit to defeat without a
struggle.
Fixing his headquarters at Rochester, he had gathered together a body
of some fifteen thousand men, and was there found by the Duke of
Norfolk, sent at the head of the Queen’s forces against him. The utmost
enthusiasm prevailed amongst the insurgents, and when a herald arrived
in Rochester commissioned by the Duke to proclaim a pardon for all who
would consent to lay down arms, “each man cried that they had done
nothing wherefore they should need any pardon, and that quarrel which
they took they would die and live in it.”[211] Sir George Harper was in
fact the sole rebel who accepted the proffered boon.
Worse was to follow. At the first encounter of the royal troops with
the Kentish men Captain Bret, leading five hundred Londoners, went
over to the rebels, explaining in a spirited speech the grounds for
his desertion, the miseries which might be expected to befall the
nation should the Spaniards bear rule over it, and expressing his
determination to spend his blood “in the quarrel of this worthy
captain, Master Wyatt.”[212]
It was an ominous beginning to the struggle, and at the applause
greeting Bret’s announcement, the Duke of Norfolk, the Earl of Ormond,
and Jerningham, Captain of the Guard, fled. Wyatt, taking instant
advantage of the situation, rode in amongst the Queen’s troops, crying
out that any who desired to join him should be welcome and that those
who wished might depart.
Most of the men accepted the alternative of throwing in their lot with
Wyatt and his company, leaving their leaders to return without them
to London. “Ye should have seen,” adds the diarist, from whom these
details and many others of this episode are taken, “some of the Guard
come home, their coats turned, all ruined, without arrows or string in
their bow, or sword, in very strange wise; which discomfiture, like
as it was very heart-sore and displeasing to the Queen and Council,
even so it was almost no less joyous to the Londoners and most part of
others.”
With the capital in this temper, the juncture was a critical one. Wyatt
was marching on London, and who could say what reception he would
meet with at the hands of the discontented populace? The fact that he
was encountered at Deptford by a deputation from the Council, sent to
inquire into his demands, is proof of the apprehensions entertained.
The interview did not end amicably. Flushed with victory, Wyatt was not
disposed to be moderate. To Sir Edward Hastings, who asked the reason
why, calling himself a true subject, he played the part of a traitor,
he answered boldly that he had assembled the people to defend the realm
from the danger of being overrun by strangers, a result which must
follow from the proposed marriage of the Queen.
Hastings temporised. No stranger was yet come who need be suspected.
Therefore, if this was their only quarrel, the Queen would be content
they should be heard.
“To that I yield,” returned Wyatt warily, “but for my further surety I
would rather be trusted than trust.”
In carrying out this principle of caution it was reported that he had
pressed his demand for confidence so far as to require that the custody
of the Tower, and the Queen’s person within it, should be conceded to
him. If this was the case, he can scarcely have felt much surprise
that the negotiations were brought to an abrupt conclusion, Hastings
replying hotly that before his traitorous conditions should be granted,
Wyatt and twenty thousand with him should die. And thus the conference
ended.[213]
London was in a ferment. Mayor, aldermen, and many of the citizens went
about in armour, “the lawyers pleaded their causes in harness,” and
when Dr. Weston said Mass before the Queen on Ash Wednesday he wore
a coat of mail beneath his vestments. There had been no need to bid
the Spanish ambassadors to depart, those gentlemen having prudently
decamped as speedily as possible. Upon February 2 Mary in person
proceeded to the Guildhall, and, there meeting the chief amongst the
citizens, made them a speech which was an admirable combination of
appeal and independence, and showed that if outwardly she bore no
resemblance to father or sister the Tudor spirit was alive in her. She
had come, she said, to tell them what they already knew--of the treason
of the Kentish rebels, who demanded the possession of her person, the
keeping of the Tower, and the placing and displacing of her counsellors.
That day marked the crisis in the progress of the insurrection. Mary’s
visit to the Guildhall had taken place on February 2. When on the
following day Wyatt, leaving Deptford, marched to Southwark the tide
had turned. His followers were falling away; no other part of the
country was in arms to support him; and his position was becoming
desperate. His daring, nevertheless, did not fail. A price had been
put upon his head, and, aware of the proclamation, he caused his name
to be “fair written,” and set it on his cap. The act of bravado was
characteristic of the spirit of the popular leader.
Meantime the measures to be taken against him were anxiously
discussed. On the 4th Sir Nicholas Poynings, on duty at the Tower,
waited upon the Queen to receive her orders, and to learn whether the
ordnance was to be directed upon Southwark, and the houses knocked down
upon the heads of Wyatt and his men, quartered in that district.
Mary, to her honour, refused to authorise the drastic mode of attack.
“Nay,” she replied, “that were pity; for many poor men and householders
are like to be undone there and killed. For, God willing, they shall be
fought with to-morrow.”
The innocent were not to be involved in the destruction of the guilty.
Her decision was unwelcome at the Tower. The night before Sir John
Bridges had expressed his surprise to the sentinel on duty that the
rebels had not yet been fought.
“By God’s mother,” he added, “I fear there is some traitor abroad, that
they be suffered all this while. For surely if it had been about my
sentry [or beat] I would have fought with them myself, by God’s grace.”
Wyatt, strangely enough, was no less pitiful than the Queen. Although
she had refused permission for the discharge of the guns, they had been
directed by those responsible for them upon the spot where the rebel
body was stationed; and, in terror of a cannonade, the inhabitants, men
and women, approached the insurgent leader “in most lamentable wise,”
setting forth the danger his presence was bringing upon them, and
praying him for the love of God to have pity. The appeal was not made
in vain.
“At which words he, being partly abashed, stayed awhile, and then said
these, or much like words, ‘I pray you, my friends, content yourselves
a little, and I will soon ease you of this mischief. For God forbid
that you, or the least child here, should be hurt or killed on my
behalf,’ and so in most speedy manner marched away.”
A meeting was to have taken place before sunrise with some of the
disaffected in the City. By this means it had been hoped that a
surprise might be contrived. But a portion of Kingston Bridge, where
the river was to be crossed, had been destroyed; time was lost in
repairing it, and the assignation at Ludgate was missed. The scheme
had supplied Wyatt’s last chance and failure was staring him in the
face. Rats were leaving the sinking vessel. The Protestant Bishop of
Winchester, who had hitherto lent the countenance of his presence in
the camp to the insurgents, fled beyond seas; Sir George Harper, having
rejoined Wyatt’s forces, deserted for the second time, and made his
way to St. James’s to give warning to the Court of the approach of the
rebel leader.
Such being the condition of things, it is singular to find that at the
palace something like a panic was prevailing. Mary was entreated by
her ministers to seek safety at the Tower; and, though deciding in the
end to remain at her post, she appears at first to have been inclined
to act upon the suggestion. A plan of action was determined upon in
a hurried consultation. Wyatt, it was agreed, was to be permitted to
reach the City, with a certain number of his followers, and having been
thus detached from the main body of his troops it was hoped that he
would be trapped and seized.
In the meantime arrangements were made for the defence of the Queen and
the palace. Edward Underhyll, the Hot-Gospeller for whose child Lady
Jane had stood godmother six months earlier, and who was on duty as a
gentleman-pensioner at St. James’s, has left a graphic account of the
scene there that night, and of the terror of the Queen’s ladies when
the pensioners, armed with pole-axes, were placed on guard in their
mistress’s apartments. The breach of etiquette appears to have struck
them as an earnest of the peril to which it was owing. Was such a sight
ever seen, they cried, wringing their hands, that the Queen’s chamber
should be full of armed men?
Underhyll, for his part, soon received his dismissal. As the usher
charged with the duty looked at the list of the pensioners before
calling them over, his eye was caught by the well-known name of the
Hot-Gospeller.
“By God’s Body,” he said, “that heretic shall not watch here!” and
Underhyll, taking his men with him, and professing satisfaction at his
exemption from duty, went his way.
By the morning he had reconsidered the matter, and thought it well to
ignore his rebuff and return to his post. For the present, he joined
company with one of the Throckmortons, who had just left the palace
after reporting there the welcome tidings of the capture of the Duke of
Suffolk at Coventry, the two proceeding together to Ludgate, intending
to pass the remainder of the night in the City. The gate, however, was
found to be fast locked, and those on guard within explained, with much
ill-timed laughter, to the tired wayfarers outside, that they were not
entrusted with the keys, and could give admittance to none.
It was disconcerting intelligence to men in search of a lodging and
repose; and Throckmorton, in especial, fresh from his hurried journey,
felt that he was hardly treated.
“I am weary and faint,” he complained, “and I wax now cold.” No man
would open his door in this dangerous time, and he would perish that
night. Such was his piteous lament.
Underhyll, a man of resource, had a plan to propose.
“Let us go to Newgate,” he suggested. He thought himself secure of
an entrance there into the city. At the worst, he had acquaintances
within the prison--like most men at that day--having recently been
in confinement there. The door of the keeper of the gaol was without
the gate, and Underhyll entertained no doubts of finding a hospitable
reception in his old quarters. Throckmorton, it was true, declared
at first that he would almost as soon die in the street as seek so
ill-omened a refuge; but in the end the two proceeded thither, and, a
friend of Underhyll’s being fortunately in command of the guard placed
outside the gate, the wanderers were permitted to enter the City.
Whilst consternation and alarm were felt at the palace at the tidings
of Wyatt’s approach, the rebel leader himself must have been aware that
the game had been played and lost. Yet he kept up a bold front, and
refused to acknowledge that he was beaten.
“Twice have I knocked, and not been suffered to enter,” he was reported
to have said. “If I knock the third time I will come in, by God’s
grace.”
They were brave words. An incident of his march to Kingston
nevertheless sounds the note of a consciousness of impending defeat.
Meeting, as he went, a merchant of London who was known to him, he
charged him with a greeting to his fellow-citizens. “And say unto them
from me that when liberty and freedom was offered them they would not
accept it, neither would they admit me within their gates, who for
their freedom and the disburthening of their griefs and oppression by
strangers would have frankly spent my blood in that their cause and
quarrel; ... therefore they are the less to be bemoaned hereafter when
the miserable tyranny of strangers shall oppress them.”
It may be that by some amongst the men to whom the message was sent his
words were remembered thereafter.
Still the insurgents pushed on. By nine in the morning Knightsbridge
was reached. Disheartened, weary, and faint for lack of food, they
were in no condition to stand against the Queen’s troops. But the mere
fact of their vicinity was disquieting to those in no position to form
a correct estimate of their strength or weakness, and when Underhyll
returned to the palace he found confusion and turmoil there.
His men were stationed in the hall, which was to be their special
charge. Sir John Gage, with part of the guard, was placed outside the
gate, the rest of the guard were within the great courtyard; the Queen
occupying the gallery by the gatehouse, whence she could watch what
should befall.
This was the disposition of the defenders, when suddenly a body of the
rebels made their way to the very gates of the palace. A struggle took
place; Gage and three of the judges who had been with him retreated
hurriedly within the gates, Sir John, who was old, stumbling in his
haste and falling in the mire. Within all was in disorder. The gates
had clanged to behind Gage, his soldiers, and the men of law, as
they gained the shelter of the courtyard. Without the rebels were
using their bows and arrows. The guard stationed in the outer court,
attempting to make good their entrance to the hall, were forcibly
ejected by the gentlemen pensioners in charge of it. Poor Gage--“so
frighted that he could not speak to us”--and the three judges, also in
such terror that force would have been necessary to keep them out, were
alone admitted to the comparative safety it afforded.
There was in truth little reason for alarm. The manœuvre decided upon
during the night had been executed. The Queen’s troops, Pembroke at
their head, had deliberately permitted Wyatt to break through their
lines, and, with some hundreds of his men, to proceed eastward. Behind
him the enemy had closed up, and he was separated from the main body of
the rebels, thus left leaderless to be engaged by the royal forces. The
Queen’s orders had been successfully carried out. But to the anxious
watchers in the palace the affair may have worn the aspect of a defeat,
if not of a treason, and there were not wanting those who suspected
Pembroke of a betrayal of his trust. A shout was raised that all was
lost.
“Away, away! a barge, a barge!--let the Queen be placed in safety!” was
the cry.
Again Mary was to show that she was a Tudor. She would not beat a
retreat before rebels. Where, she inquired, was the Earl of Pembroke?
and receiving the answer that he was in the field, “Well then,” she
said, “fall to prayer, and I warrant you that we shall have better news
anon, for my lord will not deceive me, I know well. If he would, God
will not, in Whom my chief trust is, Who will not deceive me.”
Though it was well to have confidence in God, men with arms in their
hands would have liked to use them, and the pensioners entreated
Sir Richard Southwell, in authority within the palace, to have the
gates opened that they might try a fall with the enemy; else, they
threatened, they would break them down. It was too much shame that the
doors should be shut upon a few rebels.
Southwell was quite of the same mind; and, interceding with Mary,
obtained her leave for the pensioners to have their way, provided they
would not go out of her sight, since her trust was in them--a command
she reiterated as, the gates being thrown open, the band marched under
the gallery, where she still kept her place. It was not long before her
confidence in the commander of the royal troops was justified, and news
was brought that put an end to all fear. Wyatt was taken.
At the head of that body of his men who had been allowed to clear the
enemy’s lines, he had ridden on towards the City, had passed Temple
Bar and Fleet Street, till Ludgate was reached. There he halted. He
had kept his tryst, fulfilled the pledge he had given, and knocked,
as he had promised, at the gate. Let them open to him; Wyatt was
there--successful so long, he may have thought there was magic in the
name--Wyatt was there; the Queen had granted their requests.
The City remained unmoved; and, in terms of insult, Sir William Howard
refused him entrance.
“Avaunt, traitor,” he said, barring the way, “thou shalt not come in
here.”
It was the last blow. The poor chance that the City might have lent its
aid had constituted the single remaining possibility of a retrieval
of the fortunes of the insurrection. That vanished, the end was
inevitable. London had blustered, had expressed its detestation for the
Spanish match, had paraded its Protestantism; it was now plain that it
had not meant business, and the man who had taken it at its word was
doomed.
A strange little scene followed--a scene forming an interlude, as it
were, in the tumult and excitement of the hour. It may be that the
effects of the strain and fatigue of the last weeks, of the hopes
and fears that had filled them, of the march of the night before,
unlightened by any genuine anticipation of victory, were suddenly felt
by the man who had borne the burden and heat of the day. At any rate,
turning without further parley, he made his way back to the Bel Savage
Inn, and there “awhile stayed, and, as some say, rested him upon a
seat.” Sitting there, trapped by his enemies, in “the shirt of mail,
with sleeves very fair, velvet cassock, and the fair hat of velvet with
broad bone-work lace” he had worn that day, he may have looked on and
seen the future bounded by a scaffold. Then, rousing himself, he rose,
and returned by the way he had come, until Temple Bar was reached.
Though the combat was there renewed, all must have known that further
resistance was vain, and at length, yielding to a remonstrance at the
shedding of useless blood, Wyatt consented to acknowledge his defeat
and to yield himself a prisoner to Sir Maurice Berkeley. He had fought
the battle of many men who had taken no weapon in hand to support him.
When false hopes had at one time been entertained of his success “many
hollow hearts rejoiced in London at the same.” But scant sympathy will
have been shown to the vanquished.
It remained to consign the captives to the universal house of
detention. By five o’clock in the afternoon, as the spring day was
closing in, Wyatt and five of his comrades had been conducted to the
Tower by Jerningham. They arrived by water, and were met at the
bulwark by Sir Philip Denny, who greeted the prisoners with words of
fierce upbraiding.
“Go, traitor,” he said, as Wyatt passed by, “there was never such a
traitor in England.”
Wyatt turned upon him.
“I am no traitor,” he answered. “I would thou should well know thou art
more traitor than I; and it is not the part of an honest man to call me
so.”
He was right; but courtesy to the defeated was no article of the code
of the day. At the Tower Gate Sir John Bridges, the Lieutenant, stood,
likewise ready to receive and to revile his prisoners. To each in turn
he addressed some varied form of abuse, taking Wyatt, who came last, by
the collar “in very rigorous manner,” and shaking him.
“‘Thou villain and unhappy traitor,’ he cried, ... ‘if it were not that
the law must justly pass upon thee, I would strike thee through with my
dagger.’
“To whom Wyatt made no answer, but, holding his arms under his side,
and looking grievously with a grim look upon the said Lieutenant, said,
‘It is no mastery now,’ and so they passed on.”
Thus ended Wyatt’s rebellion. Together with her father’s treason, it
had sealed Lady Jane’s fate, and that of the boy-husband who shared her
captivity.