Volume III Part 14 (1/2)
Twelve more, the Abbot of Barlings, one of his monks, and others who had been concerned in the murder of the chancellor, were then brought to the bar in the Guildhall. They had no claim to mercy; and they found none.
They were hung on gibbets, at various towns, in their own county, as signs and warnings. Lord Hussey was tried by the peers. He was guilty obviously of having fled from a post which he was bound to defend. He had obstructed good subjects, who would have done their duty, had he allowed them; and he had held communication with the rebels. His indictment[250] charges him with acts of more direct complicity, the evidence of which I have not discovered. But wherever a comparison has been possible, I have found the articles of accusation in so strict accordance with the depositions of witnesses, that the absent link may be presumed to have existed. The construction may be violent; the fact is always true. He, too, was found guilty, and executed.[251]
With Lord Hussey the Lincolns.h.i.+re list was closed. Out of fifty or sixty thousand persons who had been in armed rebellion, the government was satisfied with the punishment of twenty. The mercy was perhaps in part dictated by prudence.
[Sidenote: May. The second trials.]
[Sidenote: The government find a difficulty in obtaining the verdicts.
One of the prisoners is acquitted. A list of the grand jury is sent to London.]
The turn of the northern men came next. There were three sections of them:--Sir Francis BiG.o.d, George Lumley, and those who had risen in January in the East Riding; Sir Thomas Percy, the Abbot of Fountains, the Abbot of Jervaulx, Sir John and Lady Bulmer, Sir Ralph Bulmer, and Sir Stephen Hamarton, who had been concerned in the separate commotions since suppressed by the Duke of Norfolk; and, finally, Aske, Constable, and Lord Darcy, with their adherents. In this instance the proceedings were less simple than in the former, and in some respects unusual. The inferior offenders were first tried at York. The indictments were sent in to the grand jury; and in the important case of Levening, the special confederate of Aske and Darcy, whose guilt was identical with theirs, no bill was found. The king, in high displeasure, required Norfolk to take some severe notice of this obstruction of justice. Norfolk remonstrated; and was requested, in sharper language, to send up a list of the jurors,[252] and unravel, if possible, the cause of the acquittal. The names were forwarded. The panel was composed of fifty gentlemen, relatives, most of them, of one or other of the accused persons, and many among whom had formed part of the insurgent council at Pomfret.[253] Levening's escape was explained; and yet it could not be remedied. The crown was forced to continue its prosecutions, apparently with the same difficulty, and under the same uncertainty of the issue.
When the trials of the higher offenders were opened in London, true bills had first to be found against them in their own counties; and the foremen of the two grand juries (for the fifty were divided into two bodies of twenty-five each) were Sir James Strangways and Sir Christopher Danby, noted, both of them, on the list which was forwarded to the crown, as relatives of Lord Darcy, Sir Francis BiG.o.d, and Sir John Bulmer.[254]
[Sidenote: May 9. True bills found against Darcy and fifteen others.]
On the 9th of May, however, either through intimidation or the force of evidence, the sixteen prisoners who were in the Tower, Lord Darcy, Robert Aske, Sir Robert Constable, and thirteen more, were delivered over for their trials. In the six preceding weeks they had been cross-examined again and again. Of the many strange scenes which must have taken place on these occasions, one picture, but a striking one, is all which I have found. It occurred at the house of the lord chancellor, in the presence of the Privy Council and a crowded audience. Darcy was the subject of examination. Careless of life, and with the prophetic insight of dying men, he turned, when pressed with questions, to the lord privy seal:--
[Sidenote: Lord Darcy prophesies the death of Cromwell.]
”Cromwell,” he said, ”it is thou that art the very special and chief causer of all this rebellion and mischief, and art likewise causer of the apprehension of us that be ----,[255] and dost daily earnestly travel to bring us to our ends, and to strike off our heads. I trust that ere thou die, though thou wouldest procure all the n.o.blemen's heads within the realm to be stricken off, yet shall there one head remain that shall strike off thy head.”[256]
[Sidenote: Aske's servant dies for sorrow.]
Of Aske, too, we catch glimpses which show that he was something more than a remarkable insurgent leader: a short entry tells us that, six or seven days after his arrest, ”his servant, Robert Wall (let his name be remembered), did cast himself upon his bed and cried, 'Oh, my master!
Oh, my master! they will draw him, and hang him and quarter him;' and therewith he did die for sorrow.”[257] Aske had lost a friend when friends were needed. In a letter which he wrote to Cromwell, he said that he had been sent up in haste without clothes or money, that no one of his relations would help him, and that unless the king would be his good and gracious lord, he knew not how he would live.[258] His confessions during his imprisonment were free and ample. He asked for his life, yet with a dignity which would stoop to no falsehood, and pretend to no repentance beyond a general regret that he should have offended the king. Then, as throughout, he showed himself a brave, simple, n.o.ble-minded man.
[Sidenote: May 16. Trials and sentences in Westminster Hall.]
But it was in vain; and fate was hungry for its victims. The bills being found, Darcy was arraigned before twenty-two peers, and was condemned, Cromwell undertaking to intercede for his life.[259] The intercession, if made, was not effectual. The fifteen commoners, on the same day, were tried before a special commission in Westminster Hall. Percy, Hamarton, Sir John and Lady Bulmer pleaded guilty. The prosecution against Sir Ralph Bulmer was dropped: a verdict was given without difficulty against Aske, Constable, BiG.o.d, Lumley, and seven more. Sixteen knights, n.o.bles, and gentlemen, who a few months before were dictating terms to the Duke of Norfolk, and threatening to turn the tide of the Reformation, were condemned criminals waiting for death.
The executions were delayed from a doubt whether London or York should be the scene of the closing tragedy. There remain some fragments written by Darcy and Aske in the interval after their sentence. Darcy must have been nearly eighty years old; but neither the matter nor the broad, large, powerful handwriting of the following words show signs of agitation:--
”After judgment given, the pet.i.tion of Thomas Lord Darcy to the King's Grace, by my Lord Privy Seal.
[Sidenote: Lord Darcy's last pet.i.tion.]
”First to have confession; and at a ma.s.s to receive my Maker, that I may depart like a Christian man out of this vale of misery.
”Second, that incontinent after my death my whole body may be buried with my late wife, the Lady Neville, in the Freers at Greenwich.
”Third, that the straitness of my judgment may be mitigated after the king's mercy and pleasure.
”Fourth, that my debts may be paid according to a schedule enclosed.”[260]
[Sidenote: Last pet.i.tion of Aske.]
Aske, in a few lines addressed also to Cromwell, spoke of his debts, and begged that some provision might be made for his family. ”They,” he said, ”never offended the King's Grace, nor were with me in council in no act during all this time, but fled into woods and houses. Good my Lord, extend your pity herein. And I most humbly ask the King's Highness, and all his council and lords, lowly forgiveness for any mine offences or words attempted or said against his Grace or any of them any time of my life; and that his Grace would save my life, if it be his pleasure, to be his bedesman--or else--to let me be full dead or that I be dismembered, that I may piously give my spirit to G.o.d without more pain; and that I desire for the honour of G.o.d and for charity.”[261]
[Sidenote: Provision made for the families of the sufferers.]
[Sidenote: Properties not forfeited.]