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The Death-Warrant.
George Cruikshank
November 1840
steel-engraving
11.8 cm high by 10.3 cm wide framed, facing p. 352.
Full-page illustration for the thirty-third chapter in Book Two of William Harrison Ainsworth's The Tower of London.
[Click on image to enlarge it and mouse over text for links.]
Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham.
On the evening appointed by Nightgall for the assassination of Renard, the proposed victim and the queen were alone within this chamber. The former had renewed all his arguments, and with greater force than ever, and seeing he had produced the desired impression, he placed before her the warrant for the execution of Jane and her husband.
"Your majesty will never wear your crown easily till you sign that paper," he said.
"I shall never wear it easily afterwards," sighed Mary. "Do you not remember Jane's words? She told me, I should be fortunate in my union, and my race should continue upon the throne, if I spared her husband. They seem to me prophetic. If I sign this warrant, I may destroy my own happiness."
"Your highness will be not turned from your purpose by such idle fears," rejoined Renard, in as sarcastic a tone as he dared assume. “Not only your throne may be endangered, if you suffer them to live, but the Catholic religion."
"True," replied Mary, "I will no longer hesitate."
And she attached her signature to the warrant.
Renard watched her with a look of such fiendish exultation, that an unseen person who gazed at the moment into the room, seeing a tall dark figure, dilated by the gloom, for it was deepening twilight, and a countenance from which everything human was banished, thought he beheld a demon, and, fascinated by terror, could not withdraw his eyes. At the same moment, too, the queen's favourite dog, which was couched at her feet, and for a short time previously had been uttering a low growl, now broke into a fierce bark, and sprang towards the passage-window. Mary turned to ascertain the cause of the animal's disquietude, and perceived that it had stiffened in every joint, while its barking changed to a dismal howl. Not without misgiving, she glanced towards the window — and there, at the very place whence she had often heard that the murderers had gazed upon the slumbering innocents before the bloody deed was done — there, between those bars, she beheld a hideous black mask, through the holes of which glared a pair of flashing orbs. [Book Two, Chapter XXXIII. — "How Nightgall was Bribed by De Noailles to Assassinate Simon Renard; And How Jane's Death-warrant was Signed," pp. 351-52]
Cruikshank juxtaposes a wood-engraving of the quietly furnished domestic space as it existed in 1840 (p. 350) with Ainsworth's dramatic scene involving Mary Tudor, the Spanish ambassador, Simon Renard, and the mysterious mask at the window. As the text stipulates, Mary Tudor is working on correspondence at the writing desk in the ambassador apartment in the upper storey of the Bloody Tower, receiving but not always acceding to Renard's advice regarding impending executions. She has, however, just signed the death-warrants for her cousins, Lady Jane Dudley and Lord Guildford Dudley as their continued existence poses a threat to her rule. Chesson points out that Cruikshank's wooden figures are a poor complement to the suspenseful scene in what Ainsworth terms "this mysterious chamber" (p. 350):
"Mere skeletons in farthingales," quoth "The Athenaeum" of Cruikshank's Queen Mary, Jane, and Elizabeth. To what extent defective figue-drawing diminishes the proper force of Cruikshank's designs the reader may judge by the reproduction of The Death Warrant, which is presented as a frank example of his melodramatic invention. The masked assassin peers at the Spanish Ambassador through the window of the chamber of the [Bloody] Tower where the little princes were murdered, and where the pen that has just doomed Lady Jane Dudley hovers in Queen Mary's hand. Her hound is an incarnate presentiment and the gods of old Drury [Lane Theatre, London] could have asked no more. There are, however, far finer plates in the book. [Chesson, p. 82]
Perhaps even in the steel-engraving Cruikshank fails to invest the quiet apartment with the ominous overtones appropriate to either the present scene (which smacks of the situation comedy of such Oliver Twist scenes as Mr. Claypole as he appeared when his master was out) or the tradition which holds that in this very room the Duke of Gloucester's henchman Sir James Tyrell did away with the young "Princes in the Tower" in June 1483. The discovery of their skeletons in a stone staircase on the south side of the White Tower in 1674 may have resolved their mysterious disappearance, although it failed to confirm the tradition that the sons of Edward IV died in this very room — although the Church of England has continued to refuse to allow either set of remains to be subjected to DNA analysis to identify them as the remains of the princes. Close to the writing of the novel, the draining of the Tower moat between 1830 and 1840 exposed a great many bones, some of which were attributed to the missing princes, so that the story continued to be of topical interest at the time that Ainsworth was writing the novel.
Left: The wood-engraving of the room where by tradition the sons of Edward IV were murdered by agents of the Duke of Gloucester, South Side of the Room in which the Young Princes were Murdered as it looked in 1840. Centre: North Side of the Room in which the Princes were Murdered (November 1840). Right: North Side of the Room in which the Princes were Murdered (November 1840). [Click on images to enlarge them.]
Later, Cruikshank would assert to his biographer, Laman Blanchard, that the novel's dealing principally with the tragic reign of Lady Jane Grey and her judicial murder was entirely his own conception:
Mr. Ainsworth was delighted with the idea of such a partnership, and at once acceded to the proposition; and when I told him I had a capital subject for the first work, he inquired what it was; and upon my telling him it was the Tower of London, with some incidents in the life of Lady Jane Grey, he was still more delighted, and then I told him that I had long since seen the room in the Tower where that beautiful and accomplished dear lady was imprisoned, and other parts of that fortress, to which the public were not admitted; and if he would then go with me to the Tower, I would show these places to him. He at once accepted my offer, and off we went to Hungerford Stairs, now the site of the Charing Cross Railway Station; and whilst waiting on the beach for a boat to go to London Bridge, we there met my dear friend, the late W. Jerdan, the well-known editor and part proprietor of the Literary Gazette, who inquired where we were going to. My reply was, that I was taking Mr. Ainsworth a prisoner to the Tower. With this joke we parted. I then took Mr. Ainsworth to the royal prison, and when we arrived there, I introduced him to my friend Mr. Stacey, the storekeeper, in whose department were these "Chambers of Horrors"; and then and there did Mr. Ainsworth, for the first time, see the apartment in which the dear Lady Jane was placed until the day she was beheaded, or, in other words, the day on which she was murdered! and which place I had long before made sketches of, for the purpose of introducing them in a "Life of Lady Jane Grey," and which for many years I had intended to place before the public. I have now most distinctly to state that Mr. Ainsworth wrote up to most of my suggestions and designs, although some of the subjects we jointly arranged, to introduce into the work; and I used every month to send him the tracings or outlines of the sketches or drawings from which I was making the etchings to illustrate the work, in order that he might write up to them, and that they should be accurately described."[Blanchard Jerrold, Chapter 9, "Illustrations to Harrison Ainsworth's Romances"]
Although Jerrold credits the anecdote as representing the origins of The Tower of London. A Romance, one should treat Cruikshank's account with a certain degree of skepticism as he made similar claims against Charles Dickens for the origins of The Adventures of Oliver Twist; or, The Parish Boy's Progress. Just as the tragic history of Lady Jane Grey seems to have held a certain fascination for George Cruikshank, so, too, did the fate of boys consigned to workhouses.
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Burton, Anthony. "Cruikshank as an Illustrator of Fiction." George Cruikshank: A Revaluation. Ed. Robert L. Patten. Princeton: Princeton U. P., 1974, rev., 1992. Pp. 92-128.
Carver, Stephen. Ainsworth and Friends: Essays on 19th Century Literature & The Gothic. Accessed 11 September 2017. https://ainsworthandfriends.wordpress.com/2013/01/16/william-harrison-ainsworth-the-life-and-adventures-of-the-lancashire-novelist/
Department of Environment, Great Britain. The Tower of London. London: Her Majesty's Stationery Office, 1967, rpt. 1971.
Chesson, Wilfred Hugh. George Cruikshank. The Popular Library of Art. London: Duckworth, 1908.
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Jerrold, Blanchard. The Life of George Cruikshank. In Two Epochs. Illustrated by George Cruikshank. 2 vols. London: Chatto and Windus, 1882.
Kelly, Patrick. "William Harrison Ainsworth." Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vol. 21, "Victorian Novelists Before 1885," ed. Ira Bruce Nadel and William E. Fredeman. Detroit: Gale Research, 1983. Pp. 3-9.
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Sutherland, John. "The Tower of London" in The Stanford Companion to Victorian Fiction. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 19893. P. 633.
Steig, Michael. "George Cruikshank and the Grotesque: A Psychodynamic Approach." George Cruikshank: A Revaluation. Ed. Robert L. Patten. Princeton: Princeton U. P., 1974, rev., 1992. Pp. 189-212.
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Vann, J. Don. "The Tower of London, thirteen parts in twelve monthly instalments, January-December 1840." Victorian Novels in Serial. New York: MLA, 1985. Pp. 19-20.
Last modified 27 September 2017