Tudor Victims


Queen Anne Boleyn

Of those buried in St. Peter ad Vicula, Anne Boleyn, Henry VIII’s second wife, condemned for misconduct, is probably the only one to have been both tried and executed in the Tower. Her execution in 1536 took place two days after that of her brother George, Viscount Rochford, implicated in her alleged crime. Instead of the axe, a heavy sword was used, wielded by a headsman from Calais, still a British possession, Anne having requested to be beheaded in the manner of French people of rank. It is said that her body was placed in a ‘common chest of elmtree, that was made to put arrows in, and was buried in the Chapel before 12 o’clock’. The Victorians restorers were quite convinced that they had found her remains, which still lie under the altar pavement today. Catherine Howard, Henry’s fifth wife, was also beheaded on the Green in 1542. Viscount Rochford’s widow, Jane, was executed on the same day for giving false evidence at her husband’s trial and for encouraging Catherine’s infidelities.


Lady Jane Grey

Two dukes buries in the sanctuary are the antagonists Somerset and Northumberland. As Edward VI was only nine when he became a king, his uncle, Edward Seymour, Duke of Somerset, virtually ruled, but soon Northumberland won control and Somerset was executed on Tower Hill in 1552. Northumberland, realizing that if the consumptive young king died his own position would become precarious under the Roman Catholic Mary, Henry’s elder daughter, married one of his sons, Guildford Dudley, to Lady Jane Grey, a grand-niece of Henry VIII, hoping thereby to alter the line of succession. On King Edward’s death in 1553 Lady Jane was proclaimed Queen, but ten days later Mary entered London with popular support. Within a year Northumberland, Guildford, Lady Jane and her father, the Duke of Suffolk, had been executed and lay in St. Peter’s. In this tragic series of events we can admire the dignified character of Lady Jane, modest and studious girl of sixteen who had been inveigled into a false position. In 1561 and 1563 the two sons of her sister, Lady Catherine Grey, were baptized in the chapel. Lady Catherine had been imprisoned in the Bell Tower because of Elizabeth I’s anger at her secret marriage to Lord Hertford, son of Somerset.

Thomas Cromwell, Earl of Essex, Henry VIII’s chief instrument in ensuring the royal supremacy and in the dissolution of the monasteries, angered Henry over foreign policy and the King’s marriage to Anne of Cleves, which he had encouraged. He was executed on Tower Hill in 1540. In 1541 the aged Margaret Pole, Countess of Salisbury, the last of the Plantagenets, and mother of Cardinal Pole, the future Archbishop of Canterbury under Mary I, was beheaded on the Green and buried near the altar.


Bishop John Fisher

Sir Thomas More, latterly Lord Chancellor, and John Fisher, Bishop of Rochester, were beheaded on Tower Hill in 1535 for refusing to acknowledge Henry VIII as supreme head of the Church of England; both were exceptional men who suffered death rather than play false to deep convictions. Fisher, the first to die, was buries in All Hallows churchyard, close by the Tower. When, fifteen days later, More was executed, Fisher was reinterred, with More, in St. Peter’s. The fact that Fisher was made a cardinal while in prison did not help matters. The Tudor chronicler Holinshed sums Fisher up with: ‘He was a prelate of great learning and a very good life. The Pope had elected him a Cardinal, and sent his hat as far as Calais. But his head was off before his hat was on, so that they met not’. Bishop Fisher was a tired, old man of seventy-six and even had to be roused from sleep an hour before his execution. Both More and Fisher were canonized by the Roman Catholic Church in 1935.


The Thomas More Memorial

We have greater details of Thomas More’s time in the Tower than of most other prisoners, as he was the subject of one of the earliest English biographies, by his son-in-low, William Roper. Dean Swift said of him that he was ‘the person of the greatest virtue that this kingdom hath ever produced’. To comfort those he was leaving, More wrote his Dialogue of Comfort against Tribulation, a most appropriate work to come from within the Tower walls. His mind was full of the next world, of which he was very certain and he wished ‘with God’s will to be hence and longed to be with Him in heaven’. More’s humour and faith remained with him to the end. On reaching the very unstable scaffold, he quipped, ‘I pray you, Master Lieutenant, see me safe up, and for my coming down let me shift for myself’. He said that he died ‘the King’s good servant, but God’s first’, and finally he tried to cheer up the reluctant executioner with, ‘Pluck up my spirit, man, and be not afraid to do thine office: my neck is very short’. St. Thomas More’s simple and dignified memorial in the crypt of the Chapel Royal was created in 1970, with a fine bust designed and made by Raphael Maklouf.

Among other at rest in the chapel is James Stuart, Duke of Monmouth, the eldest illegitimate son of Charles II, whose rising against his uncle, James II, in 1685 was defeated at Sedgemoor. He was executed on Tower Hill. His followers were harshly dealt with by the notorious Judge Jeffreys, who died four years later while in protective custody in the Bloody Tower. Jeffreys was first buried in the chapel, but his family was given permission to move his body to St. Mary, Aldermanbury, in 1692.

Near the west door in the grave shared by three Scottish peers who supported Jacobite Rebellion of 1745: the Earl of Kilmarnock, Lord Balmerino and Simon Fraser, Lord Lovat. All three were beheaded on Tower Hill. Lord Lovat, executed in 1747, was the last man to die by the axe in Britain. The lead plates which were once on their coffins are now on the west wall.