Bloody Days Plot Drop ‘The Death Knell’
𝐒𝐞𝐩𝐭𝐞𝐦𝐛𝐞𝐫, 𝟏𝟓𝟓𝟗: At the tip of everyone’s tongue is the blackened name of the Lady Talbot.
It is early morning. Seditious news travels across the court, wafting with the mists and salt-airs of the Thames, on 9 September 1559 – a day which historian Alison Weir will coin, four hundred years later, as ‘one in which an almost assuredly innocent woman was put in peril of her life.’ As Lady Elizabeth Talbot, sister of the Duke of Norfolk, travels by barge to the Tower of London, a welter of dark, chilling rumors ripple across Hampton Court like the river’s turbulent, white-capped crests. Rumours mount into hearsay; hearsay twists into whispers of heresy and treason. But truth, in this haunted Tudor court, tends to be stranger than fiction…
Received by the ominous traitor gates of the White Tower, Elizabeth’s mood ricochets between anger, despair, hope, and grief – concealed beneath a facade of protested innocence. Lady Talbot had tread a dangerous course by employing her maidservant, Margery Hallows, to dispatch a letter to far flung Catholic relatives in France – her words containing ominous, but largely innocuous, predictions about the King’s life. Intercepted in Calais, Margry and three of her kinsmen – George, Arthur, and Walter Hallows – are hauled back to London, thrown into the Tower’s keep, and sentenced to death. Lady Talbot is tried in a private court before a council composed of the King’s greatest magistrates – including Lord de Vere, Lord Cecil, Sir Walsingham, Lord Wiltshire, Lady Talbot’s brother, and the Duke of Northumberland – and declared guilty. She remains lodged at the Tower, her fate held in the King’s mercurial hands.
But today, on the morning of 13 September, the King and his court will observe three men – George, Arthur, and Walter Hallows – take their final, desolate journey from Tower to the Green and beg for the King’s mercy, their faces bound in white masks. Then, as cannons shot out from the Tower’s keep honour the hour – a knell of death – the traitors will be made to place their head upon the block and die, in the presence of all the court. The ginger-bearded Boleyn King, seated on his throne, watches distractedly: behind him standing a cluster of grave-looking, richly-dressed relatives.
A dark ditty circulates across the crowds:
When the Tower is white, and another place green, Then shall be beheaded three men before the queen.
But as the September wind rages and howls, the headsman’s ax will tremble over the traitor’s necks. It will take three botched swings of the hatchet to dispatch George’s head from his shoulders; two to deliver Arthur to God’s outstretched hands, and four for Walter, afterwards held up by his long, fair hair before the shell-shocked crowd, his mouth still trembling. Gore soaks the ground; the traitor’s heads dribble onto a bed of straw; the faces of those closest to the scaffold, hungering for a spectacle, are speckled in blood. Minutes later, a hysterical Margery mercifully joins her brothers in death: a single stroke of the sword ending her life.
When all is said and done, the King and his court will migrate to a breakfast banquet held in the Great Hall of Hampton Court, where the Tudors’ mercy will openly mingle with their cruelty. They will feast to justice and triumph with wine, roasted swans dressed in their original feathers, seasonal fruits, delectable confections, and a spread of blood-red pomegranates, musicians still beating at their joyous dirges – as if the entire gruesome morning had been long forgotten.
