Losing Their Heads and Losing Their Minds – Elizabeth Fremantle tells tales from the Tower

The heroine of The Girl in the Glass Tower, Arbella Stuart, spent a number of years until her death in captivity at the Tower of London. The Tower of my title refers in part to this but also to her virtual imprisonment during her youth at Hardwick Hall, famously dubbed 'more glass than wall', by a contemporary wag. Poor Arbella was fated to live a life of almost permanent detainment, punctuated only by her increasingly dramatic attempts at escape, because she had the misfortune to be born with a claim to the English throne Alas, there would be no escape from her final detention and the Tower of London casts a long shadow over my novel.

I was invited recently to give a talk at the Tower and rather than just discuss my most recent heroine I thought it would be apt to highlight some of the many women for whom the Tower was the defining site in their lives, either as their place of execution or imprisonment. It was the advent of the Tudors, an upstart family who had to keep a tight reign on any potential usurpers, that saw a spate of women meeting their brutal ends on Tower Green.

The stories of Henry VIII's wives have proved endlessly fascinating, inspiring an apparently endless stream of novels and films. This is probably because the sheer barbarity of their treatment at the hands of a despotic husband horrifies us but also resembles the kind of dark fairy tales we were raised on. However there were few happy endings if you were inconvenient to  Henry. We all know of Anne Boleyn, committed to death on trumped up charges of adultery and incest, waiting interminable days for the arrival of the French executioner who would dispatch her with a sword rather than the more traditional axe. This was considered a merciful concession from her husband as a sword was meant to be a painless way to go.

On my way to give the talk I wandered though the cobbled lanes of the Tower after dark, the grey stone buildings looming, an air of intimidation hanging over the place, and it was brought home to me just how that young woman might have felt facing a death so sudden and unjust: one moment the feted Queen, the next a head rolling into a bucket. How might little Catherine Howard, the other of Henry's queens executed for adultery, have felt, still a teenager, when she asked for the block to be brought to her on the eve of her execution, so she could practice placing her head correctly?

It is the stuff of horror stories and we feel that kind of barbarity is far, far removed from our lives now but it is deeply shocking to remember that there are still parts of the world in which adultery is punishable by execution, or more specifically, death by stoning. When we remember a woman like Margaret Pole, one of the last true Plantagenets and deemed a threat to Tudor supremacy, it forces us to confront the reality of past practices to which we must never return, the like of which still persist in in some cultures. Margaret Pole was condemned aged sixty eight, by Henry VIII, and dispatched on Tower Green in a botch job of monstrous proportions. A horrified eye witness described her execution as being performed by ‘a wretched and blundering youth who literally hacked her head and shoulders to pieces in the most pitiful manner.’

And there is Jane Grey, the seventeen-year-old who died, becoming a poster girl for the Protestant cause. It is deeply shocking to think of her age – were she alive now she'd have been studying for her A Levels – still a child really. Reading accounts of her execution affected me profoundly, partly because my own daughter was of a similar age at the time, and provided the inspiration for the opening scenes of my 2014 novel Sisters of Treason. Jane went to the block with extraordinary poise, buoyed up by her faith, no sense of the fear that must have roiled beneath her surface. She had been the victim of her Tudor blood, pushed onto the throne in the name of scheming ambition on the part of the men around her. Her reign lasted only a few days before her cousin, Mary Tudor, raised an army, pushed her out, locked her up and executed the men behind her. But in the end she too was deemed too great a threat to be allowed to live.

Jane was not alone in discovering that Tudor blood could be more curse than blessing. She had two younger sisters, who lived in the dark shadow of her fate. The older, Katherine Grey, was to  also experience incarceration in the Tower. Katherine had committed the crime of marrying without Queen Elizabeth's permission – with royal blood this was treason. She was twenty-one years old and heavily pregnant with the child that came out of that secret marriage, when she was thrown in the Tower. Elizabeth, whose position was by no means stable at that point, moved quickly to have the marriage deemed illegal, making the son who was born soon after,  illegitimate. Elizabeth was right to be paranoid as that boy would have had a strong claim to the throne, and being male, might well have proved to be an insurmountable threat to her position.

Katherine Grey ended up, not under the flash of the executioners axe, but bringing on her own grim and painful end through self-starvation. To die through the refusal of food was not considered suicide, which perhaps explains such an action in the context of a culture bound by religious codes. It might also explain why, in a strange and morbid repetition, this was also the means by which Arbella Stuart finally brought about her own death. It was ultimately for her, in a life of attempted escapes and with her sanity wearing thin, the only possible means of escape from the Tower's menacing walls.

Elizabeth Fremantle's novels The Girl in the Glass Tower, about Arbella Stuart, and Sisters of Treason, about Jane Grey and her sisters, are published by Penguin.

STAR-CROSSED LOVE, ROYAL BLOOD AND THE TOWER by Elizabeth Fremantle

In February people’s thoughts turn to love – whether we want them to or not – so I thought I might take a brief look at some Tudor and Stuart love stories, though not the kind with happy endings.

Margaret Douglas in later years

In the mid sixteenth century with Henry VIII on the throne and no male heir, the Tudor dynasty was not secured; meaning marriages that might challenge the throne were dangerous indeed. This resulted in a number of sorry tales of star-crossed romances and the incarceration of some of the noblest lovers in the land. One such lover was Lady Margaret Douglas. Born in 1515, Margaret was the daughter of Henry VIII’s elder sister Margaret Tudor and her second husband Archibald Douglas, Earl of Angus. She lived under the watchful eye of her uncle at the English court, eventually joining Anne Boleyn’s household.

Margaret was a particularly romantic girl, being part of a group of young courtiers that wrote and exchanged love poems. The love sonnet was becoming fashionable in English court circles, as a result of Thomas Wyatt and Henry Howard’s re-workings of Plutarch. Fuelled by notions of romantic love, and also perhaps by the unusual example of the King who had recently made a love match with Anne Boleyn, the young and attractive coterie around the new Queen created a hothouse ambiance of flirtation. This was encouraged by Anne Boleyn and would later be used against her. 

Bess Throckmorton

It is probable that the king hoped to make a useful alliance by marrying Margaret into one of the European ruling houses, but while no marriage was arranged it was perhaps inevitable that Margaret’s head would be turned in this heady atmosphere. She fell for one of the Queen’s cousins: Lord Thomas Howard whose family was exceedingly powerful. She and Thomas met in secret, exchanging love tokens and eventually engaged in a secret betrothal. This was a serious commitment at a time when to make such a promise in front of a witness was a binding contract. Their betrothal remained a secret for a year, perhaps due to the fact that the King’s attentions were entirely taken up with the collapse of his second marriage, ending with the Queen, for whom he had sacrificed so much, on the scaffold. With the fall of her mother the two-year-old Elizabeth Tudor was, like her half sister Mary, deemed illegitimate, meaning that Margaret Douglas found herself second in line to the English throne, after her half-brother James V of Scotland. This made her secret betrothal to one of the powerful Howards all the more dangerous, as any male heirs from the match could potentially destabilise Henry’s position.

So when Henry, newly married to Jane Seymour, got wind of the secret romance the erstwhile couple were clapped in the Tower, where they continued to exchange gifts and poems. They were entirely oblivious to the fact that Henry was forcing a new law through parliament that deemed those of royal blood who married without consent, and those who sought to marry them, as committing treason. Thomas was condemned to death; Margaret fell seriously ill and was released into the care of the nuns at Syon Abbey. Some months later poor Thomas died of ‘an ague’ still incarcerated in the Tower. Margaret, with her beloved Thomas dead and shunted to third in line after the birth of Edward Tudor, was released and pardoned, going on to serve the next Queen, Anne of Cleves, and her successor the young and naïve Katherine Howard.

Lady Katherine Grey with her son, born in the Tower

Margaret behaved impeccably in the four years following the debacle that sent her to the Tower, but her romantic spirit had not been entirely quashed and it was yet another Howard boy, this time Charles, brother to the new queen, who caught her eye. But Katherine Howard was on the brink of a calamitous fall, due to her own amorous and adulterous behaviour, and when her household was investigated Margaret’s flirtation with Charles Howard emerged. He was banished and she was warned in no uncertain terms by the King that having ‘demeaned herself towards His Majesty, first with the Lord Thomas Howard, the second with Charles Howard’, to ‘beware the third time’. She was later happily married to the charismatic Earl of Lennox, in a political alliance that gave Henry VIII leverage over Scotland. This marriage produced two sons, one being Lord Darnley who was the second husband of Mary Queen of Scots and father of Scottish King James VI who eventually became James I of England.

Elizabeth Vernon

A few decades later, during Elizabeth’s reign, love became an increasingly dangerous business. The queen’s cousin, Lady Katherine Grey, sister of the tragic Jane, secretly married the Earl of Hertford, was imprisoned and gave birth to two sons in the Tower. The eldest, as the first boy to be born with Tudor blood for some years, would have had a strong claim to the throne, had Elizabeth not had him deemed illegitimate. Poor Lady Katherine died in captivity and her sister, Lady Mary, too, was imprisoned for an unsanctioned marriage. Elizabeth was notoriously averse to her maids-of-the-chamber getting hitched, royal blood or not, and a number of them ended up incarcerated: Anne Vavasour, who gave birth to the Earl of Oxford’s bastard in the maid’s dormitory at Whitehall Palace, and Queen’s favourites, Bess Throckmorton and Sir Walter Ralegh, were sent to the Tower. Elizabeth Vernon, who secretly married the Earl of Southampton, had a spell in the Fleet Prison. Other’s avoided prison but were banished from court, like Lettice Knollys who wed the Queen’s beloved Earl of Leicester never to be forgiven, and her daughter-in-law, Frances Walsingham, whose marriage to Lettice’s son the Earl of Essex (another of the Queen’s favourites) was cast out from court for life.

Arbella Stuart

Another sad story is that of the granddaughter of the above-mentioned Margaret Douglas. Arbella Stuart was, like her grandmother, a strong claimant to the English throne. Some championed her as Elizabeth’s heir, suggesting her claim was stronger than that of her cousin James VI of Scotland, as she’d been born on English soil; but it was James who won out. Seventy years had passed since Margaret Douglas’s incarceration, when Arbella found herself in a similar situation. Having secretly married William Seymour (grandson of the above mentioned Lady Katherine Grey) the couple were locked up: William in the Tower and she under house arrest in Highgate. The doughty couple managed to both escape, Arbella dressed as a boy. Sadly William failed to make it to their meeting place on time and Arbella was obliged to set sail without him in the hope that they would be reconciled once on the continent. But her ship was captured off Calais and she was returned to the Tower where some accounts say, she starved herself to death. William made it to the Low Countries where he spent some years as a fugitive only able to return to England after Arbella’s death.

On that note, Happy Valentine’s Day!

For Margaret Douglas and Katherine Grey’s stories see Leanda De Lisle’s Tudor: The Family Story & The Sisters who would be Queen; for the shenanigans of Elizabeth’s maids- of-the-chamber see Anna Whitelock’s Elizabeth’s Bedfellows and for Arbella Stuart’s sad tale see Sarah Gristwood’s Arbella: England’s Lost Queen.

Elizabeth Fremantle’s novel Sisters of Treason – out May 2014 – tells the tragic story of the Grey sisters. For details see Elizabethfremantle.com