MAISON BEAULIEUAB ÉDITIONS · CUISINE & LETTRESMAISON BEAULIEUAB ÉDITIONS · CUISINE & LETTRES« The Tower: royal seat and fortress. »The Prisons of Europe · Volumes V & VI
A night of fog and iron within the fortress of London, where the broken laughter of a queen awaited the edge of dawn.
There falls upon the Thames an accursed hour when the mist ceases to be mere vapor and thickens into a shroud. The black water, greasy with the offal and coal-dust of the City, comes beating with a dull, hollow lap against the foot of the ramparts raised of old by William the Conqueror. There yawns a low, dripping maw of stone that watermen shun like the pestilence: Traitors’ Gate. To pass beneath that vault in an open wherry, irons clanking at the ankles, was to depart the land of the living even before the royal sentence had received the Great Seal. Whosoever beheld their skiff glide beneath that portcullis, weeping with slime and weed, inhaled thenceforth nothing but the foul breath of England’s deepest oubliettes.
The warders of the Tower of London, clad in scarlet doublets and flanked by silent mastiffs, had little need to resort to wanton violence; the stone performed their office for them. The ramparts, fifteen feet thick at the White Tower, sweated a frigid saltpeter that ate into the very marrow of a prisoner’s bones. The bolts, wrought from coarse iron hammered in Southwark, turned only with an agonizing shriek, waking down the corridors the echoes of centuries of slaughter. Ever since the day William Wallace had looked upon his own entrails, consigned to the ravens of Tower Hill, the fortress had acquired an appetite for illustrious blood. It fed upon it insatiably, awaiting with every passing century its fresh hecatomb.
No prison in Europe could rival the sinister topography of this walled citadel. In the Beauchamp Tower, the stones did not merely speak: they pleaded. Prisoners carved into them, with the point of a rusty nail or a purloined bodkin, their shattered coats of arms and Latin sentences of infinite despair. Further on, beneath the worn flags of the Chapel of St. Peter ad Vincula, slumbered the suffocated secret of the sons of Edward—those little princes whom a ruthless uncle had caused to be smothered beneath feather pillows before casting them into an unhallowed pit of rubble. And in the Lantern Tower, popular imagination still fancied it heard the dreadful gurgle of that butt of Malmsey in which the Duke of Clarence had gasped out his last breath, drowned at the whim of dynastic caprice.
Sir Thomas More, that colossus of erudition and faith, had dragged his down-at-heel slippers through these passages, stripped of his books leaf by leaf by the rapacity of his keepers, reduced to writing with a scrap of charcoal snatched from the hearth. Bishop Fisher, bent beneath eighty hard winters, shivered in rags, waiting for the headsman’s blade to sever a neck that the Pope had only just graced with a cardinal’s useless hat. The Tower was never a mere house of detention; it was the anvil upon which the Tudor monarchy ruthlessly hammered flat every will that refused to bend.
On that night of May 1536, the dread reached a pitch more tragic still. In the depths of the fallen queen’s apartments—by a stroke of supreme irony, the selfsame wainscoted chambers where she had slept on the eve of her coronation—Anne Boleyn told the passing hours. Sir William Kingston, the Lieutenant of the Tower, noting down her every sigh for the cold gaze of Thomas Cromwell, could scarcely believe what he heard. At one moment the queen would weep bitterly, prostrate upon the bare stones, swearing her innocence before the Blessed Sacrament; at the next, a peal of silver, hysterical laughter would break from her pale throat, ringing out beneath the dark oak beams.
« Master Lieutenant, » said she to Kingston, with a smile that chilled the old soldier to the bone, « I have heard say the executioner was very good… and my neck is so little! »
As she spoke these words, she clasped her slender neck between her two small hands, which were still adorned with the rings the King had not yet deigned to tear from her fingers. For her, the common axe of the London butchers would not suffice. Henry VIII, in a final refinement of barbarous gallantry, had dispatched an order across the Channel for the executioner of Calais, famed for severing the most rebellious heads with a single sweep of the two-handed sword, after the French fashion. The man had arrived the previous evening aboard the passage-boat, concealing beneath his heavy mantle of homespun frieze a formidable broadsword of tempered steel, polished bright as a mirror, which now awaited its hour in the guardroom.
At daybreak on the nineteenth of May, a yellow fog frayed over the rich green turf of Tower Green. The London mob was kept well back; none were permitted to form the circle about the low scaffold, hung with black serge clammy with the morning damp, save the compliant jurors, a handful of marble-faced courtiers, and the Lord Mayor. Anne mounted the steps without a tremor. Her gown of gray damask, bordered with fur, swept across the fresh wood-shavings strewn to drink up the blood. She took off her velvet gable hood, letting fall her long, dark tresses, which her weeping gentlewomen hastened to bind beneath a cap of white linen.
She knelt upright, refusing the blindfold. The executioner of Calais understood that so long as those dark, fevered eyes remained fixed upon him, his arm might falter. Borrowing a stratagem from the slaughterhouse, he feigned to search for his weapon behind the boarding and shouted down the steps in a rough voice: « Boy! Bring me the sword! » The queen turned her head sharply to the right to see the blow approach. At that very instant, as her graceful neck grew taut, the headsman whirled the silent blade, which clove through the misty air without a cry.
The head rolled upon the black cloth; the lips still fluttered with the murmur of an unfinished prayer, while the eyes stared unblinking at the massive walls of the White Tower. A few seconds later, the mouth of a falconet boomed from the ramparts, signaling to the King, waiting at Richmond, that the place was free. Within the fortress, returned once more to its sullen silence, the jailers slid the bolts upon the corpse tossed into an ordinary elm arrow-chest, while the Thames, sullen and indifferent, rolled on, lapping against Traitors’ Gate.