… a shower of arrows fell round King Harold, and he himself was pierced in the eye. A crowd of horsemen now burst in, and the King, already wounded, was slain.
Archdeacon Henry of Huntingdon in
Historia Anglorum (1154).
Look along the length of the Bayeux Tapestry and pause at section 29 and there you’ll find him. Hic dederunt Haroldo corona Regis (Here they give Harold the king’s crown), reads the heading caption, describing how the Witangemot (assembly of nobles) offers to Harold Godwineson the diadem that makes him Harold II, King of the English. Harold (b. c. 1022) was crowned on 6 January 1066 at Westminster Abbey, in the full knowledge that on the death of his brother-in-law Edward the Confessor (d. 4 January 1066), said French sources, William, Duke of Normandy would be recognised as heir instead of Edward’s grandson Edgar the Aetheling. Harold had already paid homage to William in this connection. So Harold’s action precipitated the most famous battle on English soil at Senlac Hill, north of Hastings, on 14 October 1066.
The 70m long Bayeux Tapestry, often known as ‘Queen Matilda’s Tapestry’, is purported to have been commissioned some ten years after the battle by William the Conqueror’s half-brother Odo de Conteville, Bishop of Bayeux. Its embroidery, tradition tells us, was carried out by Matilda, Queen of England, Duchess of Normandy, and her ladies; its length depicting her husband William’s exploits and the events of the battle.
On 25 September 1066 at Stamford Bridge, Harold defeated the combined forces of his traitorous exiled brother Tostig, Earl of Northumberland and Harald Hardrada of Norway, bent on seizing the realm. By this time William and his Norman army had landed at Pevensey and Harold prepared to confront the invaders. The details of the Battle of Hastings are well known; William won the day and the kingdom, but Harold’s death is still a matter of historical contention. Section 57 of the Bayeux Tapestry bears the caption: Hic Harold Rex interfectus est (Here King Harold dies). The panel shows a knight pulling an arrow out of his head; next to him is a mounted soldier hacking at a falling knight. But which figure is Harold? Are they both Harold? Certainly the first figure gives rise to the famous story of Harold being killed by an arrow in the eye. If it is accepted that the Bayeux Tapestry is a piece of Norman propaganda to boost William’s exploits, as the tapestry says (panel 58) Hic Franci pugnant et ceciderunt quierant cum Haraldo (Here the French fight and Harold’s followers succumb), the arrow in the eye might be a medieval metaphor for a punishment for Harold for reneging on his oath to William. So the second figure may be Harold too being finally slain by the mounted knight. This would back up what Henry of Huntingdon wrote. Interestingly, Professor David Bernstein in Morillo’s The Battle of Hastings notes that he saw a line of small holes in the fabric ‘leading to the fallen figure’s forehead …’ Was there once another arrow here, removed by the embroiderers? Berstein thinks that this is proof of Harold’s infamy being underlined, as blindness was the medieval metaphor for divine punishment.
Here stood the oak tree in which an arrow shot by Sir Walter Tyrell [sic] at a stag glanced and struck King William the Second, surnamed Rufus, on the breast of which he died instantly on the second day of August anno 1100.
Rufus Stone set up in the New Forest by
Lord John Delaware, 1745.
William II, by-named ‘Rufus’ because of his ruddy cheeks and red hair, son of William the Conqueror and his wife Queen Matilda of Flanders, was born in Normandy around 1057. Although his father’s favourite son, William had a bad press mostly because of his heavy hand with the Church. Here’s what the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle says about him after his death:
In his days, therefore righteousness declined and evil of every kind towards God and man put up its head. He oppressed the Church of God … I may be delaying too long over all these matters, but everything that was hateful to God and to righteous men was the daily practice in this land during his reign. Therefore he was hated by almost all his people and abhorrent to God. This his end testified, for he died in the midst of his sins without repentence or any atonement for his evil deeds.
Today it is difficult to obtain an objective assessment of William Rufus. Contemporary chronicles – written by monks – were prejudiced against him. They pointed out that he was opinionated, arrogant, irascible, irreligious, and avaricious. This was the opinion, too, of historians into the nineteenth century, but more recent scholars have moderated the view of William Rufus. It is true that he had powerful enemies among his barons, family conflicts added to opposition and there were those who, because he never married, smeared him further as a homosexual. William of Malmesbury stated that William’s court was effeminate with young men who ‘rival women in delicacy of person, to mince their gait, to walk with loose gestures and half naked’. Nevertheless William seems to have been a competent soldier and was an able and capable king, who achieved working relationships with Malcolm III of Scots and the Welsh princes. Yet his temperament and pretensions annoyed both prelate and noble. All of this led to the speculation as to the manner of William Rufus’s death.
On the first evening of August 1100 William Rufus and a party of seven, including his brother Count Henry Beauclerc, William de Breteuil, Robert FitzHamon and Walter Tirel, Lord of Poix in Normandy, slept at a hunting lodge near Brokenhurst in the New Forest. The next afternoon they set off for the chase. Assisted by huntsmen the party took up their positions in groups. William Rufus and Tirel placed themselves, waiting for the huntsmen to drive the game towards them. A deer broke cover as the sun was sinking, and William Rufus fired an arrow which wounded the beast, but not fatally. As William Rufus watched the deer’s movements and the sun dazzled over the forest, another deer came into view and this time Tirel loosed an arrow, but hit the king instead. Breaking off the arrow William Rufus fell from his horse, falling onto the broken arrow shaft which penetrated deeper and hastened his end. Tirel dismounted, examined the unconscious king and then, to future historians’ puzzlement, leapt on his horse and galloped away. The contemporary accounts of what actually happened are confusing. Immediately it was proclaimed an accident, with Tirel identified as the unfortunate perpetrator. But was William Rufus deliberately slain?
Historians have gathered to present theory after conspiracy theory concerning William Rufus’s death. For instance, Duncan Grinnell-Milne, in his The Killing of William Rufus believes that the death was part of a plan by William Rufus’s brother, Count Henry Beauclerc, to attain the throne; he was crowned King of England at Westminster on 6 August 1100. If this were so, Henry had to move fast. William Rufus’s chosen heir, his brother Robert, Duke of Normandy, was due back from crusade with a wife and legitimate son. So Henry had a motive for murder to clear the throne before Robert’s return. In the king’s hunting party were men loyal to Henry and a hunt was a good opportunity to make murder look like an accident. Henry was a ruthless character who was, as biographer James Chambers commented, ‘at least capable of contemplating [murder]’. On the evening of that fateful day, Henry left the New Forest at a gallop to secure the royal treasury.
It is interesting to note that Tirel was married to Alice de Clare, whose brothers Gilbert de Clare, Earl of Tunbridge, and Roger de Clare, were Henry’s men and were present in the hunting party that day. It is thought that Tirel’s rapid flight from the scene was assisted by the de Clares; Tirel did not know the terrain for a rapid escape and a ship was conveniently waiting to take him to France. It cannot be proved that Henry played an active part in his brother’s death, although he had a strong motive to be so involved. As Emma Mason has pointed out in her biography of William Rufus, Henry ‘seemed well prepared for the eventuality [of his brother’s death] and assured of powerful backers in his bid for the throne’. Certainly the de Clares did well out of Henry’s rise, with gifts of land and prominent positions in church preferment and at court. Did Tirel sacrifice himself for the de Clares advantage? He lived in exile but his lands in England and France were never confiscated as one would have expected had he been deemed guilty of murder.
The official verdict of accidental death was never officially challenged, although Tirel did always swear that he was innocent of murder. There was no official investigation. William Rufus’s body was hastily conveyed onto a charcoal-burner’s cart from the New Forest to Winchester for burial. His bones were not to be given eternal rest. In 1107 the great tower of Winchester Cathedral collapsed. William of Malmesbury noted that people gossiped that the tower’s collapse, smashing William Rufus’s tomb, was ‘divine disapproval’ of his character. William Rufus was reburied at more than one site in the cathedral until his bones were placed in a tomb chest above the screen on the north side of the presbytery. During the English Civil War these mortuary chests were hauled down by Cromwell’s troops and the bones of William Rufus, King Cnut, Queen Emma and their son King Harthacnut (and others) were used as missiles to smash the cathedral windows. Later the bones were collected up and mixed up in the mortuary chests where they remain today.
What miserable drones and traitors have I nourished and promoted in my household, who let their lord be treated with such shameful contempt by a low-born clerk.
Henry II expressing his anger at Thomas Becket as quoted by the archbishop’s biographer and witness of his murder Edward Grim (fl.1170–77).
On 29 December 1170, Thomas Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury, was murdered in his cathedral of Christ Church, Canterbury. The perpetrators were four Norman knights – close associates of King Henry II – Reginald FitzUrse, Hugh de Morville, William de Tracy and Richard le Breton.
The story of Thomas Becket’s martyrdom is perhaps the most famous ecclesiastical murder of all time, the power of his personality transcending almost nine centuries. He has been the subject of countless biographies and internationally acclaimed plays by such as T.S. Eliot (Murder in the Cathedral, 1935) and Jean Anouilh (Becket, 1961). Born around 1118, the son of a Norman merchant, he was educated by the Augustinians at Merton Priory, London and Paris to become a notary and entered the service of Archbishop Theobald of Canterbury. Against a background of royal turmoil when various contenders were claiming the English throne, Thomas studied canon law at Auxerre and Bologna. In the year Henry Curtmantle was crowned Henry II, Thomas was appointed to the important archdeaconship of Canterbury in the Church that was still the repository of most of the learning and much of the law that applied to Christendom in general and England in particular.
Thomas Becket’s talents were impressive and in 1155 Henry II made him Chancellor of England, a role Thomas threw himself into with great vigour and enthusiasm. An extraordinary intimacy sprang up between them and Thomas pursued Henry’s policies with relish. Thomas even devised taxes (which fell heavily on the Church) to pay for Henry’s expedition against Toulouse in 1159. In 1161 Archbishop Theobald died and Henry saw a wonderful opportunity to subjugate the Church to the State. He would make his own man Thomas Becket Archbishop of Canterbury. It took Thomas a year to accept; in 1162 he became archbishop but refused to remain Chancellor. On the appointment a change came over him, and herein for historians lies the enigma of Thomas Becket.
Despite the fact that he engendered a tax that had been hard on the Church in 1159 – as one chronicler put it, ‘Having in his hand the sword of state, he plunged it into the bosom of the church, his mother’ – as archbishop did he now feel he owed a greater loyalty to the church ‘his mother’ rather than the king? Or did he see himself now as more powerful than when he was Chancellor? Whatever Thomas now believed his quarrels with the king became stormy and regular. In 1163 he successfully defied the king on a point of taxation at the council at Woodstock; the first time this had ever happened in English history. Their quarrels reverberated across Europe. Thomas endeavoured to reclaim Church property from the Crown; he prohibited the marriage of Henry II’s brother William of Anjou to the Countess de Warenne; he opposed royal jurisdiction over ‘criminous clerks in holy orders’ and these activities went on and on until Thomas was forced to flee to France. Even in exile he called the king’s authority into question. Thus, he became a thorn in Henry II’s side.
Thomas remained in exile for six years but returned on 1 December 1170 following a reconciliation with Henry, however, he had no intention of knuckling down to the royal will or to the English bishops whom he had also thwarted and excommunicated. Henry flew into one of his rages when in France he heard of Thomas’s latest rulings. Henry’s fury ended with the frenzied question: Was there no one in his entourage who would protect him from this low-born priest? Four of his knights slipped away and crossed the Channel in great secrecy. The rapidity of their departure begs the question: Were they anxious to act before Henry withdrew his words? After all, it had happened many times before; Henry was free with his statements often regretting them afterwards. But even so, his words on Thomas could not normally be interpreted as a licence to murder.
So that is how Thomas Becket came to be murdered and strangely the outcome was a victory for both Thomas and Henry. On 21 February 1173 Pope Alexander III canonised Thomas, and he entered history as a Christian martyr. His shrine remained a focus for pilgrims until in 1538 Henry VIII declared that Thomas was murdered as a defender of ‘his usurped authority, and a bearer of the iniquity of the clergy’. In death Thomas had secured the Church’s independence from the Crown under the law which remained until the Reformation.
As for Henry II he was rid of the most serious challenge to his kingship, although overall he had set in motion a political blunder. His rash words had been a catalyst for Thomas’s murder and, apart from being under ecclesiastical censure, none in England pointed a finger at Henry as having ordered Thomas Becket’s death. Even John of Salisbury, later Bishop of Chartres, who was with Thomas at the time of the murder, makes no mention of the king’s possible culpability in his chronicles. Yet, William of Sens, also later Bishop of Chartres, said that ‘the King admitted … that he had provided the cause of Thomas’s death and had in effect killed him’. Somewhat tardy in his efforts at exoneration, eventually in 1174 Henry did public penance at Thomas’s tomb in Canterbury Cathedral, where he was scourged at the hands of the monks of Christ Church.
She-wolf of France, with unrelenting fangs,
That tear’st the bowels of thy mangled mate.
‘The Bard’ (1757) by Thomas Gray (1716–71).
Set out on the chessboard the queen is a formidable piece; no more trenchant Queen of England ever played in the game of medieval chess between England and France than the beautiful ‘she-wolf’ Isabella, daughter of the Capetian Philip IV – Philippe Le Bel – of France and his wife Johanna I of Navarre. On 25 January 1308 at the cathedral church of Notre Dame at Boulogne, the 12-year-old Isabella married by papal dispensation Edward II (b.1284), King of England for six months since the death of his father Edward I, ‘Longshanks’. As Elizabeth Longford noted, she ‘is probably the most vilified of England’s queens’.
Edward II’s reign has received scathing analysis, for instance, T.F. Tout in Edward I (1890) identified him as ‘a coward and a trifler’. Edward spent the bulk of his reign opposing his barons not on great issues, but to defend his favourites: the Gascon Piers Gaveston, with whom he had fallen in love as a teenager, and Hugh le Despencer.
Although Edward seemed captivated by his new wife, from her landing at Dover on 2 February 1308, Isabella realised that Piers Gaveston, now Earl of Cornwall, would appear the greater in Edward’s affections than she did. At Edward’s coronation on 25 February, Gaveston not Isabella was guest of honour. It was a grave insult to France and on that day Edward sowed the seeds of his ultimate fate.
From the first too, Edward was mean to Isabella: she was given no dower lands, patronage nor finances to run her household. As a consequence Isabella’s father encouraged England’s rebel barons to rise up against Edward. The king now tried to mollify France; Isabella was granted title to the English estates in France, and she was given greater honour at court. Nevertheless, her hatred of Gaveston, now exiled with honour as Regent in Ireland, simmered intensely.
Slowly Isabella’s influence and wealth increased as Edward loosened the purse strings. All the while Edward was threatened by his barons, and on the borders with Scotland, King Robert I, the Bruce, loomed hostile with guerrilla raids. On 19 May 1312 the barons caught up with the hated Gaveston, long returned from Ireland, and he was executed as a traitor. Edward was devastated. More seriously the country teetered on civil war.
The birth of Isabella’s first child in 1312 proved to be another friction with France; Edward had to concede to the barons that the child should not be called Louis (after Isabella’s great-grandfather), and thus was born the future Edward III. Crises continued in Scotland. By 1313 the English overlordship hammered home by Edward I was reduced to one castle, Stirling, now under siege by King Robert’s brother. Edward was forced to send troops to support Stirling’s governor Sir Philip de Mowbray. Outnumbered two to one the Scots still trounced the English at the Battle of Bannockburn on 24 June 1314 and Edward’s reputation was at its nadir.
For the next ten years Edward struggled with opposing factions in his realm which descended into anarchy. He listened only to his court favourites (the Despencers), an attachment that caused Isabella’s ultimate alienation from Edward. A truce was finally agreed with Scotland in 1323, but in Wales the most powerful marcher, Lord Roger Mortimer, saw the Despencers as meddlers in his domain. Urged on by the Despencers, Edward rode against Mortimer who was captured and imprisoned in the Tower. Although she bore Edward four children, Edward, John of Eltham, Eleanor and Joan, Isabella became more and more distant from Edward. In fact, Geoffrey le Baker (fl.1350) in his Chronicle (c.1341) noted that Isabella worked out ‘the perfect murder’ in collusion with Mortimer and the Bishop of Hereford. Isabella had now formed a close acquaintanceship with Mortimer which led to her falling in love with him. As the Tower was also a palace as well as a prison Isabella had early contact with Mortimer. Again relations with France deteriorated and Isabella suggested that she try to negotiate with her brother Charles IV. She went to France and there she was joined by Mortimer whose escape from the Tower she had engineered. They now dwelt openly in France as lovers. Thus wrote Elizabeth Longford, ‘she was the only medieval queen known to have been an adulteress’.
Isabella and Mortimer raised an army to depose Edward and replace him with her son; she now led the revolution that sealed her husband’s fate. Her army landed at Harwich in September 1326 and eventually Edward was captured in Wales and taken to Kenilworth Castle.
On 25 January 1327 Edward II abdicated in favour of his son and was taken to Berkley Castle, Gloucestershire. An attempt to rescue him failed. He must not be allowed to escape and make a resurgence, said his enemies, so Roger Mortimer made arrangements for his death. It is too incredible to believe that Isabella did not know the murder plans. Historians believe that both Isabella and Edward expected the other to seek their murder. Edward cannot be said to have been a loving husband. In the Chartulary of Winchester Cathedral is this comment (1334) by the then Bishop of Winchester: ‘The king carried a knife in his hose to kill queen Isabella, and [Edward] said that if he had no other weapon he would crush her with his teeth.’
The death of Edward would have to appear natural. Starvation did not work, neither did exposing him to the rotting carcasses of his dead subjects, so said Augustinian friar John Capgrave (1393–1464) in his Chronicle:
Edward [was] slain with a hot spit put into his body [i.e. his anus] which could not be spied when he was dead for they put a horn into his tewhel [rectum] and the spit through the horn that there should be no burning appear outside. This was by the ordinance as was said of Sir John Maltravers [Edward’s jailer] and Thomas Gournay, which laid a great door upon him while they did their work.
Edward II was buried at Gloucester Cathedral. Edward’s death was not avenged until 1330. Roger Mortimer was tried and executed at Tyburn; Isabella was confined under house arrest at Castle Rising, Norfolk. Some chroniclers say that she became unhinged at Mortimer’s execution. She died on 22 August 1358 and was buried at Greyfriar’s church, Newgate, London. Hypocritically, historians note she was buried with Edward’s heart on her chest.
… But after Easter [1484] much whispering was among the people that the king [Richard III] had put the children of King Edward to death.
The Great Chronicle of London (1504).
In 1951 the Scottish novelist and playwright Josephine Tey (Elizabeth Mackintosh, 1897–1955) produced her book The Daughter of Time in which she explored the historical murder story of the ‘Princes in the Tower’. She opens the story by having her lead character Inspector Grant stuck in hospital and bored. He is brought a selection of photographs to entertain him, one of which is of King Richard III taken from his portrait in the National Gallery. At first Grant assumes that the portrait is of a judge, or at least someone in great authority. He is staggered to learn that it is of the ‘hunchback who murdered his nephews’ as depicted by William Shakespeare. Spurred on he re-examines the evidence and decides Richard was vilified in a Tudor plot. Josephine Tey brought the puzzle once more into the public domain; but was her conclusion of Richard III’s innocence of murder plausible?
On May Day 1464 at Grafton Regis, Northampton, Edward IV of the House of York, then 22, married in secret the widow of Sir John Gray called Elizabeth Woodville, daughter of the 1st Lord Rivers; she already had two children. Once the marriage was announced there was consternation. It was rumoured that Edward was already married to Lady Eleanor Butler, daughter of the Earl of Shrewsbury.
By Elizabeth, Edward had ten children, of whom many considered all to be illegitimate. Edward IV died at the Palace of Westminster, 9 April 1483, to be succeeded by his son and fourth child as Edward V, aged 13. He and his brother Richard, Duke of York, became the famous ‘Princes in the Tower’. Young Edward grew up in a court circle riven with hostility between Edward IV and his brothers, George, Duke of Clarence (executed in 1478, traditionally drowned in a butt of malmsey wine) and Richard, Duke of Gloucester. On Edward IV’s death Gloucester engineered events to become Lord High Protector, a step in his plan to take the throne. He managed to install the youngsters Edward and Richard in the Tower, at that time still a royal residence. Gloucester then took steps to have his nephews accepted as illegitimate, and Edward was deposed as king on 25 June 1483. Gloucester assumed the throne the next day as Richard III. After this, the young boys seem to have vanished from public sight. Down the centuries what happened to them is a matter of conjecture.
A study of contemporary ‘evidence’, like that found in the Croyland Chronicle, supplies only gossip, hearsay and rumour. An Italian clerk called Dominic Mancini wrote in 1483 an account of his stay in England. He left one of the few contemporary comments about what people were saying about the princes’ fate:
He [Edward V] … and his brother were withdrawn into the inner apartments of the Tower proper, and day by day began to be seen more rarely behind the bars and windows, till at length they ceased to appear altogether. A Strasbourg doctor, the last of his attendants whose services the King enjoyed, reported that the young King, like a victim prepared for sacrifice, sought remission of his sins by daily confession and penance, because he believed that death was facing him.
Mancini also repeated the rumour:
… that the sons of King Edward had died a violent death, but it was uncertain how.
Documentation only shows one ‘outright accusation of murder’. It records a speech made before the Estates General by the French Chancellor de Rochford, dated January 1484. The Chancellor asks delegates to remember and pray for the two children of Edward IV ‘whose massacre went unpunished, while the assassin was crowned by popular assent’.
Had the two boys died of natural causes? If so, why did Richard not make this known? Others believe that the boys lived on to be murdered on the orders of Richard III’s successor, Henry VII, after the Battle of Bosworth Field. The whole fate of the boys remained so secret that the pretenders Lambert Simnel and Perkin Warbeck were able to achieve some credibility as the lost boys.
In 1647 the remains of two young children were found buried in an elm chest on a staircase in the Tower. From the location of the box in the White Tower and the approximate ages of the skeletons they were treated as the bones of the two princes and reburied in Westminster Abbey. The burial urn’s Latin epitaph boldly states that Richard III had them ‘smothered … with pillows’. In 1933 the bones were subjected to forensic examination by anatomist Professor William Wright and Lawrence Tanner. From their study of the bone formation and the development of the teeth it was suggested that the skeletons were of boys aged about 12 and 10. Such ages would tally with the ages of the two princes at the time of their disappearance in 1483. Further research on the skeletons in the early 1960s seemed to confirm the original assessment. The identity of the bones remains inconclusive. Thus the supposed murder of the princes has long been laid at the door of Richard III, but all the evidence is circumstantial, the historical waters muddied by Tudor propagandists Polydore Vergil in Anglicae Historiae and Sir Thomas More’s History of Richard III. Although written in 1513, some thirty years after the events, More’s account of the supposed murders by Richard III had a great influence on what people thought about the princes’ deaths, and more boldly, declared Richard as ordering their murder:
And forasmuch as [Richard’s] mind gave him that, his nephews living, men would not reckon that he could have right to the realm, he thought therefore without delay to rid them, as though the killing of his kinsmen could amend his cause and make him kindly King. Whereupon he sent one John Green, whom he specially trusted, unto Sir Robert Brackenbury, constable of the Tower, with a letter and credence also that the same Sir Robert should in any wise put the two children to death.
Brackenbury refused to carry out the killing, but Richard, said More, selected Sir James Tyrell, Master of the Horse, to carry out his orders. Tyrell recruited a known murderer Miles Forest and stableman John Dighton to murder the boys. More averred that Sir James had confessed his complicity in the murder; he was executed for treason in 1502. The supposed confession of Tyrell lacks credibility. Every so often a book appears in an endeavour to exonerate Richard III, and his innocence is regularly attested by such as the Richard III Society. Nevertheless, taken even at its lowest value, the circumstantial evidence does show that Richard III committed regicide of one boy and murder of the other.
Popular opinion inclines to the view that [Queen Mary’s subtitle of Bloody] is attributable to her partiality for the executions of persons she disliked, and particularly to her passionate desire to exterminate the leaders of the Protestant Church …
Lord Chief Justice Patrick Hastings (1880–1952),
Famous and Infamous Cases (1950).
Born at Greenwich Palace, London, on 18 February 1516, Mary Tudor was the only surviving daughter of Henry VIII by his wife Catherine of Aragon. She was crowned at Westminster Abbey by Stephen Gardiner, Bishop of Winchester, on 1 October 1553, three months after her accession.
Mary had a troubled childhood. At first she was adored and cherished by her parents, then, as a consequence of her father’s divorce from Catherine of Aragon, her loving father turned into a distant, frightening tyrant, intolerant of her defence of her mother. Mary pursued a rumbustious and violent relationship with her new stepmother Anne Boleyn. In 1533 Mary was declared a bastard, unfit to inherit her father’s throne, and was made to wait on her baby half-sister Elizabeth, whom Anne Boleyn had given birth to at Greenwich on 7 September. Mary was treated with humiliating cruelty, with Anne Boleyn often urging King Henry to have Mary put to death. Mary never acknowledged Anne Boleyn as queen.
In 1536 Catherine of Aragon died of cancer and Anne Boleyn was executed for adultery and plotting regicide, but Henry’s new wife Jane Seymour begged that Mary be allowed to return to court. Henry would only agree if Mary attested to a document that declared that her mother’s marriage was incestuous and unlawful. Mary baulked, but pressured by her father and her cousin Charles V, the Holy Roman Emperor, she signed the document. She never forgave herself for betraying her mother, which was another poisonous stress in her mind. Mary remained in court circles through her father and brother’s reigns, to become, as the Imperial ambassador Eustache Chapuys said, ‘universally adored’ by the king’s subjects.
Mary was well-educated, a keen musician and was deemed a possessor of courage, steadfastness and compassion. Yet she was rigid in her devotion to her Roman Catholic faith which would, in the end, warp her underlying natural kind and affectionate nature. Her declared illegitimacy made it difficult to marry her off to various European princes; she entered spinsterhood, she said, as ‘the most unhappy lady in Christendom’. She retreated more into her faith. She despised the Reformed faith gaining strength in England and considered the Protestant faith a threat to ‘the traditional concept of an ordered world’. Such a threat she believed must be countered in every possible way; she believed that God wanted all of the ‘true faith’ to ruthlessly stamp out Protestant ‘heresies’.
Mary had red hair, a pale complexion and was of small stature, but her thin lips and piercing stare (caused by poor eyesight) often gave her a sinister expression. As she grew into adulthood she was beset by illness and a longing for marriage and children led her to bouts of frustration. At length she did marry, but her union in July 1554 to the widowed Roman Catholic Philip of Spain, was extremely unpopular in England. Politico-religious opposition to her grew manifest in the insurrection of Sir Thomas Wyatt and Sir James Crofts; the intended coup was badly planned and many of the ringleaders were executed. The failure of the insurrection was a turning point in Mary’s reign and marked the beginning of Mary’s ‘reign of terror’ for Protestants and religious Dissenters that would earn her the reputation of ‘bloody’.
In 1554 the papal legate Cardinal Reginald Pole (whose attainder under Henry VIII was reversed by Mary), announced England’s reconciliation with Rome. Protestantism would be crushed and a papal requirement stated that all heretics be burned at the stake. The re-enactment of the Statute De Heretico Comburendo led to the burning of bishops like Hugh Latimer of Worcester and Nicholas Ridley of London. The series of pitiful recantations and the courageous death in March 1556 of the aged, frail Thomas Cranmer, Archbishop of Canterbury was a step too far. It is said: ‘Cranmer’s martyrdom was the death-blow of Catholicism in England.’ The dioceses of Canterbury and London saw the most victims of Mary’s fanaticism wherein about 300 suffered horrific martyrdom. Generations thereafter learned of Mary’s bloody deeds and the sombre tales of Protestant martyrdom from John Foxe’s (d.1587) The Book of Martyrs. For centuries its volume of gruesome illustrations of hangings, burnings and garottings took its place alongside the Bible as the two books even the uneducated knew. The book has been decried as ‘that huge dunghill of your stinking martyrs, full of a thousand lies’. Nevertheless, it is the only record of the horrors of Marian fanaticism and an important volume in the history of perverted religious dogma.
Ultimately the Marian persecutions failed, and Mary’s last years were miserable. Although in love with her husband, he found her repellent, largely because of her syphilitic rhinitis. He went back to Spain in 1557 never to return. A phantom pregnancy led Mary to depression and her belief that her reign was a total failure was underlined in 1558 when the Duke of Guise captured Calais, England’s last possession in France. Mary’s dream of a Roman Catholic Europe with England as a jewel alongside the Catholic Empire of the Habsburgs came to nothing. Mary died at St James’s Palace, 17 November 1558 as a consequence of influenza, to be buried in a tomb in the north aisle of Henry VII’s Chapel, Westminster Abbey.
Revisionist historians have endeavoured to show that Mary was ‘not by nature a cruel or vindictive woman’. The fires of Smithfield, however, were a consequence of her religious bigotry and have assured that the name ‘Bloody Mary’ has stuck down the centuries.
There are more than two hundred men of all ages who, at the instigation of the Jesuits, conspire to kill me.
Queen Elizabeth I to the French ambassador,
December 1583.
During her reign of forty-five years Queen Elizabeth I had a number of personal ‘alarums’. In October 1583 the clearly insane Roman Catholic John Somerville from Warwickshire, stirred up by anti-Elizabeth Jesuit propaganda, set out with a pistol to assassinate the queen; he hoped, he said, ‘to see her head on a pole, for she was a serpent and a viper’. Somerville was arrested, found guilty and condemned to death. Before the hangman could carry out the sentence, Somerville hanged himself in his cell at the Tower of London.
In 1584 a Welsh MP, Dr William Parry, secreted himself in the queen’s garden at Richmond Palace, intent on murdering her. On her arrival with her ladies, Parry was ‘so daunted with the majesty of her presence in which he saw the image of her father, King Henry VIII’ he could not carry out the deed. The reason for Parry’s assassination attempt is obscure. He was known to be a spy for William Cecil, Lord Burley, and purported to act as a regicide ‘in order to infiltrate papist circles’. This was enough to win him a pension from the queen. Yet there were others who believed he acted with papal blessing on behalf of Mary, Queen of Scots and Parry did boast that he would assassinate the queen if the occasion arose. Whatever the truth was, Parry paid the price for his activities and loose tongue on the gallows.
Again, one day when Queen Elizabeth’s barge was plying the Thames, a shot was fired from the shore. One of her bargemen was wounded and the queen handed him her handkerchief to staunch the blood. ‘Be of good cheer,’ she told him, ‘for you will never want. For the bullet was meant for me.’
Plots and intrigues against Elizabeth were everyday fodder for the Elizabethan secret service in London, headed by Sir Francis Walsingham (c.1530–90) who rose to be Secretary of State. Three plots stand out as the most dangerous to Elizabeth. All were Roman Catholic inspired, for in 1570 Pope Pius V issued the Bull Regnans in Excelsis of Excommunication and Deposition against Elizabeth, thus giving Catholics a free hand to oppose her. In 1571 strong penal statutes were passed against Roman Catholics.
Intention: To assassinate Elizabeth. To marry Mary, Queen of Scots to Thomas Howard, 4th Duke of Norfolk (1536–72) and thereafter Catholic soldiers would invade England and put Mary, Queen of Scots on the English throne with Norfolk. Philip of Spain and the Pope backed the move in principle.
The plot was named after a Florentine banker and papal agent called Roberto Ridolfi who acted as go-between for Norfolk and the Spanish. Ridolfi had funded the proposed rebellion of the Roman Catholic northern magnates, headed by the earls of Northumberland and Westmoreland. Ridolfi naively believed that a vast number of Roman Catholics would support the venture. William Cecil, Lord Burleigh’s agent, got wind of the plot, which collapsed while Ridolfi was abroad. Norfolk was executed in 1572 and Mary, Queen of Scots was greatly discredited.
Intention: To assassinate Elizabeth. Supplant her with Mary, Queen of Scots with the help of Spain.
Francis Throgmorton (1554–84), a zealous Roman Catholic, was the player in numerous plots abroad against Elizabeth’s government. While organising communications between Mary, Queen of Scots, her agent Thomas Morgan and Spanish ambassador Don Bernardino de Mendoza, Throgmorton was arrested and under torture revealed plans for an invasion from the Spanish Netherlands under the Duke of Guise. The plans were thus thwarted; Mendoza was sent back to Spain and Throgmorton was executed at Tyburn.
Intention: To assassinate Elizabeth. The stimulation of a Roman Catholic rising in England in favour of Mary, Queen of Scots, who would be placed on the English throne.
The conspiracy was headed by Anthony Babington (1561–86), one-time page to Mary, Queen of Scots. He formed a secret society to aid and protect Jesuit infiltrators to England and linked up with the Scots queen’s emissaries on the Continent. The plot was instigated by the Jesuit priest John Ballard, with Babington as leader and the Pope’s blessing. The plot was discovered by Walsingham; Ballard was arrested, racked and executed. Babington tried to save his skin by offering information and fled in disguise; he was captured, held in the Tower of London, indicted and executed in September 1586. A special court found Mary, Queen of Scots, then in English captivity, guilty of treason and she was beheaded at Fotheringay Castle, 8 February 1587.
There was such a groan by the thousands then present, as I never heard before and desire I may never hear again.
Contemporary diarist Philip Henry commenting on the crowd’s reaction on being shown the
severed head of Charles I.
Charles Stuart was crowned King of England at Westminster Abbey on 2 February 1626 and King of Scotland at Holyrood Abbey on 8 June 1633. Like his grandmother, Mary, Queen of Scots, he met his end on the block, being executed at Whitehall Palace, London, on 30 January 1649.
From the first parliament of Charles I’s reign in 1625, there began a slow and steady opposition to royal power, both religious and constitutional. It is said that Charles ‘hated the very name of Parliament’ and he ruled without one for eleven years, 1629–40. Among other things to thwart Parliament, Charles raised money without their leave and ruled with an absolute authority in all matters which he believed was his divine right. When the Civil War of 1642–46 broke out between Charles and Parliament, the death of the monarch was not an original aim. Yet, there was an inevitability about Charles’s dire fate as he clashed with MPs over financial, religious and political issues. Relations irretrievably soured when on 4 January 1642 Charles entered the House of Commons with an armed guard to arrest five members. The members had already fled, and civil war became inevitable. The war advances swayed between Royalists and Parliamentarians, until disaster for Charles at the Battle of Naseby, 1645. By 1646 Charles surrendered to the Scots Army who handed him over to the English and Charles was imprisoned.
At length Charles was brought to trial in Westminster Hall, before a tribunal of 135 judges. By the laws of the land the tribunal was illegal and unrepresentative. Charles refused to acknowledge the jurisdiction of the court and refused to enter a plea. Charles was accused of treason by levying war against Parliament. In reality Parliament was as responsible for the Civil War as Charles. Only 53 out of the 135 members of the tribunal attended the court. Charles was found guilty and only 59 of the tribunal members signed the sentence of death. Charles’s execution was greeted with a general feeling of public horror. Charles met his end with dignity and courage. Contrary to the stated aims of the Parliamentarians they made Charles into a martyr. Charles’s comment that he was going ‘from a corruptible to an incorruptible crown’ assured his saintly status.
Lucy Hutchinson, wife of the Parliamentarian Governor of Nottingham, Col John Hutchinson, wrote, ‘Men wondered that so good a man [as Charles I] should be so bad a king’. She brought into focus for many Puritans the marked differences between Charles’s undoubted virtues and his failure in politics. Something of the mindset of Charles I can be seen in Eikon Basilike: The Pourtraicture of His Sacred Majestie in His Solitudes and Sufferings compiled, it is thought, by John Gauden (d.1662), Bishop of Worcester. It purported to be the meditations of Charles I based on his own papers. Published in the year of his execution it showed how Charles wanted the world to see him. What Charles emphasised was that, although a sinner who made mistakes, he was answerable only to God and not his subjects. He further emphasised that it was his duty to preserve ‘the true doctrine of the Christian faith’ as set out by the Church of England. Consequently he was against the denominations of Roman Catholicism and Presbyterianism. For these two tenets Charles was prepared to die. The book became a bestseller with thirty reprints in one year.
Charles had a great love for his family, particularly his wife Henrietta Maria, and possessed great charm, modesty and politeness. He insisted on proper ceremonial and court etiquette, not for his own vanity but for the dignity of his position. Devoutly religious, but not bookish, Charles was described as intellectually weak and lacking in intelligence; certainly the latter was shown in his decisions on political matters. Charles lacked tact and imagination, he was prone to vacillate – promising one thing to one and another to another but never following through – and he was out of touch with public opinion. He also pursued secret plots and intrigues, and tried to be all things to all men. In the end he could have saved his throne and his head if he had agreed to be a ‘limited monarch’ (as his successor Charles II), with his powers restricted to the will of parliament.
Still today, the anniversary of the execution of Charles I is kept alive by those who believe that Parliament had no right to chop off his head. One, the Royal Martyr Church Union, made up of distant descendants of the Cavaliers, hold a service at St Mary’s Episcopal Cathedral, Edinburgh, to mourn his violent death. The liturgy is taken from the King Charles prayer book. Several of their members hope for the return of his bloodline and for the subjugation of Parliament to the Crown. In London the king’s execution is remembered by the Society of King Charles the Martyr.
If Englishmen may beat their wives,
It plainly may be seen,
They must not take the liberty
To strike the British Queen.
Pearson Collection of Nineteenth-Century Ballads.
Despite the regular huffing and puffing by republican groups, Irish agitators, anti-monarchists sheltering within the Liberal Party and the Cromwellian legatees of radical politics, there were eight main attacks and assassination attempts on Queen Victoria during her long reign of sixty-four years.
When Queen Victoria came to the throne in 1837 royal security was at a minimum. Even sixty years later only one policeman was provided for her safety, for instance, when she visited Balmoral. The first attempt on her life occurred at 6 o’clock on the evening of 10 June 1840. Prince Albert and a pregnant Queen Victoria were driving in a low carriage up London’s Constitution Hill, after visiting the queen’s mother the Duchess of Kent, when the attack occurred. Prince Albert sent this account of the incident to his brother Prince Ernest of Saxe-Coburg:
12 June 1840: I saw a small disagreeable looking man leaning against the rail of Green Park only six paces from us, holding something towards us. Before I could see what it was, a shot cracked out. It was so dreadfully loud that we were both quite stunned. Victoria, who had been looking to the left, towards a rider, did not know the cause of the noise. My first thought was that, in her present state, the fright might harm her. I put both arms around her and asked her how she felt, but she only laughed. Then I turned round to look at the man (the horses were frightened and the carriage stopped). The man stood there in a theatrical position, a pistol in each hand. It seemed ridiculous. Suddenly he stooped, put a pistol on his arm, aimed at us and fired, the bullet must have gone over our heads judging by the hole made where it hit the garden wall.
The attacker was a feeble-minded youngster called Edward Oxford. He was grabbed and held until the police arrested him. A crowd gathered around the royal couple cheering enthusiastically at their escape; it was a miracle that Oxford had missed at such close range. A group of gentlemen on horseback escorted the royal couple back to Buckingham Palace. Oxford was imprisoned at Newgate and tried on a charge of high treason at the Central Criminal Court before Lord Chief Justice Thomas Denman. Defended by Sidney Taylor, Oxford was found ‘Guilty but Insane’; he was removed to Bethlehem Hospital for the insane at Moorfields. After thirty-five years he was released and went, under surveillance, to Australia.
In spite of this attack no extra precautions were instituted for Queen Victoria’s public or private safety. On Sunday 30 May 1842 a second attack occurred. This time Queen Victoria and Prince Albert were driving along the Mall from the Chapel Royal towards Buckingham Palace. Albert, writing to his father later, said: ‘[I] saw a man step out from the crowd and present a pistol fully at me. He was some two paces from us …’ Queen Victoria, looking the other way, saw nothing, but Albert heard the trigger click; the shot misfired and the perpetrator disappeared into the crowd.
Behind closed palace doors it was decided to try to identify the culprit by giving him a second chance. It was a curiously foolhardy scheme sanctioned by Prime Minister Robert Peel. The royal couple set off on that Sunday afternoon with Col Charles Arbuthnot and Lt Col William Wylde as outrider equerries. On the return drive from Hampstead, the assassin struck again. As the carriage sped past him the assassin’s shot missed and the man was arrested. He was identified as John Francis, a 20-year-old cabinetmaker. Committed to Newgate, he was tried for high treason and found guilty; he was sentenced to be hung, drawn and quartered. On Queen Victoria’s authority the sentence was commuted to transportation for life to Norfolk Island. Francis was ultimately released on ‘ticket-of-leave’ in 1867.
Although she was anxious to have her security increased, on Sunday 3 July 1842, while driving down the Mall from the Chapel Royal with King Leopold I of the Belgians, the 16-year-old John William Bean made to fire a pistol at the carriage. The weapon was knocked from the boy’s hand, but he too disappeared into the crowd. The pistol was found to contain a curious mixture of paper, tobacco and gunpowder. The police gathered a description of the boy, who had a noticeable spinal deformity. All males of similar age, who were described as ‘hunchbacked’, were arrested until Bean was found. Bean was sentenced to eighteen months in prison.
This third attempt on Victoria’s life caused the law to be changed. Oxford, Francis and Bean had not been political assassins, but deranged publicity seekers. So the new law backed by Robert Peel provided for ‘the further protection and security of her Majesty’s person’. It was not now high treason to attack the monarch but a ‘high misdemeanour’ punishable by up to seven years’ transportation or imprisonment, with the options of hard labour and a birching.
On 19 May 1849 Queen Victoria’s life was threatened again by a mentally ill Irishman called William Hamilton. His intention was to ‘frighten the English Queen with a home-made pistol’. Changing his mind he borrowed a functioning pistol from his landlady and fired a charge at Queen Victoria as she drove down Constitution Hill. The pistol was found to have no bullet in it. Hamilton was transported for seven years.
Robert Pate was bent not on assassination but punishment. On 27 July 1850 the retired lieutenant of the 10th Hussars struck Queen Victoria over the head with a cane as she drove home after visiting her dying uncle Prince Adolphus of Cambridge. As the carriage carrying the queen, the Prince of Wales, Prince Alfred and Princess Alice and lady-in-waiting Fanny Jocelyn, slowed to enter a gate, the escorting equerry was pushed aside by the crowd who had gathered to see the royal party. Pate took his chance. He struck, but was seized by the crowd. Queen Victoria was knocked unconscious, but soon revived to suffer shock, bruising and a headache. Pate too was sentenced to seven years’ transportation.
Queen Victoria was informed of a curious threat to her life. On 26 May 1872 a young telegraph clerk called Albert Young appeared before High Court Judge Henry Charles Lopes. Young had sent a letter threatening the life of the queen unless she sent £40 each to some fifty Irish folk who had been dispossessed by their landlords. Young was tried on a charge of intimidation and the bench took a serious view of Young’s intent; his sentence after the guilty verdict was ten years’ penal servitude.
A weak-minded youth called Arthur O’Connor, nephew of the Chartist leader, the late Fergus O’Connor, took it into his addled head to frighten the queen into authorising the release of Irish Fenian men, then in custody. Towards this end, on 28 February 1872, O’Connor pointed a pistol at her while her carriage paused at the Garden Gate of Buckingham Palace. Prince Arthur jumped out of the carriage to grab the man but was beaten to it by her Highland servant John Brown. Brown was rewarded with a gold medal and a £25 annuity. Prince Arthur received a gold pin in thanks (much to the Prince of Wales’s disgust at so paltry a reward when Brown was better favoured). O’Connor was sentenced to a year in prison. Afraid that O’Connor would try to assassinate her on his release Queen Victoria pressed Prime Minister Gladstone to have him deported. In the event O’Connor agreed to a voluntary exile.
As Queen Victoria’s carriage stood outside Windsor railway station on 2 March 1882, Roderick McLean fired a pistol at Queen Victoria. Not quite sure what had happened, Queen Victoria was informed by John Brown, who had been riding as postilion, that ‘that man fired at Your Majesty’s carriage’. Two Eton boys in the crowd ran forward and repeatedly struck McLean with their umbrellas until he was seized by Superintendent George Hayes of the Windsor Police. The Eton boys became the heroes of the hour, and a few days later Queen Victoria ‘received 900 Eton boys in the Quadrangle’ of their school to thank the two boys personally.
This last attempt on Queen Victoria’s life was undoubtedly the most dangerous of all, as McLean’s pistol was loaded with six bullets; another firing and McLean might not have missed. McLean was tried at Reading Assizes where he stated that his intent to kill the monarch was to draw public attention to his poverty. He had been awarded the official 6d [3p] a week poor relief but demanded that he should get 10s [50p]; it was all the queen’s fault that he had not been paid, he said. McLean was declared by the court not fit to be responsible for his actions and he was sent for treatment at asylums in Weston-Super-Mare and Wells. He was released ‘cured’ in 1884.
With one exception, none of Queen Victoria’s assailants was of mature years, and all showed signs of mental illness. Roderick McLean was declared insane as well as Robert Pate and Edward Oxford; the others were more of the ‘half-baked loner’ variety than raving lunatics. Had one of them succeeded, the accelerated reign of Edward VII might have completely altered the structure of British monarchy and perhaps the descent into the First World War.
The King’s life is moving peacefully towards its close.
Bulletin drafted by royal doctor Lord Dawson at Sandringham, 1936.
‘My dearest husband … passed away on Jan 20th at 5 minutes before midnight.’ So wrote Queen Mary as a final postscript to George V’s holograph diary which he had kept since 3 May 1880. The nation entered a period of mourning unaware that a royal secret had formed at Sandringham which would have horrified the thirties generation.
This secret was revealed to the public in 1986 when biographer Francis Watson disclosed that physician-in-ordinary Bernard Edward Dawson, Viscount Dawson of Penn (1864–1945), administered a lethal dose of morphine and cocaine into George V’s jugular vein at 11.55 p.m. on Monday 20 January 1936. The surrounding publicity of Watson’s biography of Dawson caused some controversy: ‘Was George V’s death treason?’ asked the Independent. Dawson’s reasons for acting the way he did, according to an incredible statement, were so that news of the king’s death and his obituaries would be first carried by ‘quality’ newspapers like The Times rather than in the evening or by more downmarket papers. Some historians have averred that Dawson’s actions were murder.
Just like her husband, the death of Queen Mary, at 10.35 p.m. on Tuesday 24 March 1953, has been described as a ‘mercy killing’. The reason? So that her approaching death would not disrupt the coronation on 2 June of her granddaughter Queen Elizabeth II. Queen Mary’s death ten weeks before the coronation assured that the coronation was outside the official mourning period, and so had no need to be postponed. Uncorroborated comment suggests that royal doctors Dawson of Penn and Sir John Weir had discussed the matter with Queen Mary who agreed that her death should not interfere with the coronation plans.
The idea that monarchs were ‘bumped off’ by royal doctors is not new. Some such instances were moved by politico-religious reasons. On Saturday 7 June 1594, Dr Roderigo Lopez was hung, drawn and quartered at Tyburn Fields after he had been convicted at London’s Guildhall of plotting to poison Queen Elizabeth I. While Lopez was a player in the Roman Catholic plots to murder Queen Elizabeth, other doctors were more subtle or cack-handed in ending their monarch’s lives.
Charles II died of uraemia, chronic nephritis and syphilis. That’s how his death certificate might have read, but in medical history Charles is said to have been murdered by ‘iatrogenic regicide’. On Sunday 1 February 1685, the king retired to his chambers with a sore foot to be attended by his physician Sir Edmund King; shortly afterwards the king was struck with an apoplexy. Sir Edmund drew off ‘sixteen ounces of blood’, risking his own death for treason by not first obtaining the permission of the Privy Council for the bloodletting. Thereafter, as Charles was laid on what would be his deathbed, historian Thomas Babington Macaulay noted that the king was ‘tortured like an Indian at the stake’. A total of a dozen doctors now circled Charles’s bed. They drew off ‘toxic humours’ from the king, bled and purged him, shaved his head, applied cantharides plasters and red-hot irons to the skin. For five days, in full view of family, government ministers and hangers-on, Charles was dosed with enemas of rock salt and syrup of buckthorn and an ‘orange infusion of metals in white wine’. The king was treated with a horrific cocktail of lethal potions: white hellebore root, Peruvian bark, white vitriol in paeony water, distillation of cowslip flowers, sal ammoniac, julep of black cherry water, oriental bezoar stone from the stomach of a goat and boiled spirits from a human skull. Despite all this the king retained a sense of humour and said to his physicians: ‘I am sorry, gentlemen, for being such an unconscionable time a-dying.’ Charles’s treatment was topped off with ‘heart tonics’, but to no avail; exhausted, his body raw and aching with the burns and inflammation caused by his doctors, the king lapsed into a coma and died at noon on 7 February 1685.
Queen Anne was a woman of many ills. After her death at Kensington Palace on 1 August 1714, her physician Sir David Hamilton was accused at the autopsy of her body of hastening her death by not spotting, or ignoring, the queen’s supposed condition of dropsy. He was not accused of murdering the monarch, but a later sovereign’s death was considered to have been ‘manipulated’.
Queen Victoria’s uncle William IV had a full death certificate of suffering from bronchopneumonia, aortic and mitral valvular disease, myocarditis and syphilis. The king knew he was dying and as Benjamin Disreali reported, ‘The King dies like an old Lion’. Following the king’s death on Tuesday 20 June 1837, a controversy raged in the medical profession concerning the royal doctors’ handling of the king’s last days. Each day as the king moved slowly to death medical bulletins were issued. Contemporary doctors considered that royal physicians like Dr William Chambers and Drs James Johnson and William Macmichael had issued bulletins that were mendacious. In them the king was declared not to be terminally ill, and they gave them an optimistic spin. There were those who believed that political pressure had been put on the doctors to play down imminent death. An accusing finger was pointed at William Lamb, Lord Melbourne, the Liberal Prime Minister. Melbourne’s cabinet was divided; a general election was due and Melbourne wanted no popular sympathy for the king to be reflected in an increased Tory vote. In the event Melbourne won with a reduced majority. Could future medical bulletins on royal health be trusted again?
INTRUDER AT THE QUEEN’S BEDSIDE
She kept him talking for 10 minutes … then a footman came to her aid.
Daily Express, Friday 9 July 1982.
Since the increased incidence of possible terrorist attacks, new state-of-the-art CCTV cameras and alarms have been installed at Buckingham Palace and the number of armed officers have been increased. A new royal security coordinator post was created for royal palaces when in 2003 comedian Aaron Barschak gatecrashed Prince William’s 21st birthday party at Windsor Castle, and newspaper reporter from the Daily Mirror Ryan Parry obtained a job as a footman. A series of notorious incidences of intruders at royal palaces have occurred in modern times. For instance, in July 1982, Michael Fagan obtained access to the queen’s bedroom, but probably the most incredible Buckingham Palace intruder was during the early years of Queen Victoria’s reign.
Around 5 o’clock on the morning of 14 December 1838, gentleman porter at Buckingham Palace, George Cox, was going about his duties when he came across a begrimed boy wandering the corridors. On being challenged the boy fled, but was soon arrested in the Marble Hall. He appeared before Magistrate White. Although he gave his name as Edward Cotton, the 15-year-old was really one Edward Jones, whose father Henry Jones was a tailor in Bell Yard, York Street, Westminster, who had thrown him out for bad behaviour. Jones had worked for a time as a builder’s apprentice. His intention in breaching the wall of Buckingham Palace, wherein he had successfully avoided the numerous gentlemen porters, duty constables of the A Division and foot guards, was to see Queen Victoria at close quarters, sketch the palace’s grand staircase, and attend a Privy Council meeting. All this he had done over a period of eleven months, successfully secreting himself in cupboards and empty rooms. He told the magistrate: ‘I was obliged to wash my shirt, now and again,’ and he lived off ‘victuals in the kitchen’. Jones appeared before the magistrate twice on remand for further investigations and was finally to appear at Westminster Sessions on 28 December 1838. His defence lawyer, Mr Prendergast, convinced the jury that Jones’s actions were no more than a ‘boyish prank’ and he was found Not Guilty of a malicious intent to harm the queen.
Edward Jones became something of a celebrity; he was dubbed ‘In-I-Go’ Jones by the poet Samuel Rogers and was offered a job as a ‘turn’ on the theatrical stage. Jones turned down the offer.
His thirst for exploring the mysteries of the royal household brought him once more into the public eye. Just after midnight on Thursday 3 December 1840, Queen Victoria’s nurse Mrs Lilly was awoken by a noise in the queen’s dressing room. She summoned the page Mr Kinnaird and with Queen Victoria’s old governess Baroness Lehzen, they discovered Edward Jones under a sofa. This time proceedings against Jones were conducted in private by the Privy Council, who discovered that he had scaled the walls of Buckingham Palace somewhere up Constitution Hill and had entered by a window. He said he had enjoyed sitting in Queen Victoria’s throne. Jones was committed to the House of Correction for three months as ‘a rogue and a vagabond’. Jones’s new case was made much of in the comic papers The Age, The Satirist and Punch. Edward Jones, however, was not finished with his palace escapades.
Jones was given a further three months’ detention in March 1841 for planning a new entry to Buckingham Palace. On his release Jones was again arrested; this time he was found in the royal apartments ‘enjoying a hearty meal of cold meat and potatoes’.
The newspaper-reading public were amused at Jones’s battle of wits with the palace authorities, who had increased security. The Privy Council took the view that the ease in which Jones entered the palace might tempt an assassin to emulate the boy. Jones was given a further three-month sentence, this time with hard labour.
Jones’s escapades became a political football to annoy Prime Minister Lord Melbourne. Something had to be done about Jones once and for all. In the end, after official bungling in order to get him a berth, Edward Jones was ‘sent to sea’ and nothing more was heard of him.