On 30th October
1662, a party of men arrived at the Tower of London. Their leader was a short
man who was obliged to surrender his sword to the guards; unwilling to proceed
unarmed without a cloak, for a gentleman of the time was not considered to be
properly dressed without one or the other, he retreated to a nearby pub while
his servant ran home to fetch said garment. Luckily for the servant, the man
lived on Seething Lane, just to the west of Tower Hill. Once properly attired,
he proceeded into the Tower where he met with Sir Henry Bennet, the Secretary
of State. Bennet was there to give the man the King’s warrant to search the
Tower.
The man was Samuel Pepys, Clerk
of the Acts at the Navy Office, and he already knew what he had been sent to
look for. Earlier that morning he had met with his patron, the Earl of
Sandwich, who had told him that an acquaintance of theirs called Thomas Wade
had reported that a cache of gold, silver and jewels with an estimated value of
£7000 was buried somewhere in the Tower’s grounds. Sandwich had arranged for
Bennet to obtain the necessary warrant to enable Pepys to carry out a search. The
fact that he was delegated with this task can be seen as a sign of Sandwich’s increased
confidence in his abilities.
Whatever information Wade
might have had about the money’s exact location was, alas, unreliable. “We went
into several little cellars,” Pepys would later record in his diary, “and then
went out a-doors to view, and to the Coleharbour; but none did answer so well
to the marks which was given him to find it by as one arched vault. Where after
a great deal of counsel whether to set upon it now or delay for better and more
full advice, we set to it; and to digging we went to almost 8 a-clock at night
– but could find nothing.”
He was back at the Tower
two days later, along with Robert Lee (Bennet’s agent), Wade and some workmen,
“to make one triall more”. Digging, he recorded, “was now most confidently
directed; and so seriously, and upon pretended good grounds … but we missed of
all, and so we went away the second time like fools.” Later that day, Pepys met
with Wade and a Captain Evett who claimed to have been told of the location of
the treasure by a confidante of the man who had hidden it. Pepys appears to
have been convinced by Evett’s account, even though he was dealing with what
was at best third-hand information.
Unfortunately, the one man
who might have been able to state with confidence where the treasure could be
found – the man who had apparently hidden it – was dead. That man was John
Barkstead, who had been the Lieutenant of the Tower under Oliver Cromwell. As a
younger man, Pepys himself had supported the Parliamentarian cause and his
entry into what we would now call the civil service in the 1650s had been due
to the patronage of a distant cousin, Edward Montagu, who had fought for
Parliament in the Civil War and had risen to become one of Cromwell’s generals-at-sea.
In the political uncertainty following Cromwell’s death, Montagu had switched
his loyalties and played a crucial role in restoring the monarchy, for which
Charles II had rewarded him by making him the Earl of Sandwich.
Barkstead had also fought
for Parliament but he had then been a commissioner at Charles I’s trial and had
therefore been one of the signatories of the latter’s death warrant. He owed
his position at the Tower to Cromwell, who approved of his efficiency and even
knighted him in 1656. After Cromwell’s death, though, he had been dismissed
amid accusations of his having fleeced the prisoners in his care, and he had
fled the country at the time of the Restoration – only to be captured and sent
back to England along with two of his fellow-Regicides, Miles Corbet and John
Okey. Charles II may have been lenient towards some repentant ex-Parliamentarians,
but for surviving Regicides there was little mercy. All three were hanged, drawn
and quartered at Tyburn on 19th April 1662.
Barkstead, who Pepys also
refers to as Baxter, is not known to have mentioned any hidden valuables at his
former place of work following his arrest, but rumours about this started after
his execution – many doubtless remembered the accusations that he had used his
position to line his own pockets – and it is perhaps surprising that it had
taken six months for these rumours to reach someone (Sandwich) with the power to
order a proper search. Even with the treasure not yet recovered, it had already
been decided that the estimated £7000 would be split three ways: £2000 for Wade
for reporting it to the proper authorities, £2000 for Sandwich and £3000 for
the King. Pepys reckoned that he might get between £10 and £20 from his patron
for his efforts.
The Tower at the time was
in a parlous state – the structure had been neglected for some time, and
Cromwell had considered demolishing it. Some parts of it had been partially
dismantled prior to the Restoration, and one of these was the Coldharbour Tower
– what Pepys referred to as the “Coleharbour”, which stood next to the White
Tower. In many respects, Pepys and his workmen were digging for what is known
to history as Barkstead’s treasure among ruins.
One 3rd
November Pepys met with Wade and Evett again, and found that their “prime Intelligence”,
the person in whom Barkstead had apparently confided the treasure’s location,
was a woman. They resolved that the next time they tried, she would “be there
in a disguise, and confirm us in the place”. She was duly there when Pepys
returned to the Tower four days later. By this time the treasure’s estimated value
had risen to £50,000 (so Pepys records), and after the unnamed informant
pointed out the cellar in which it was apparently hidden (“in butter-ferkins”),
the digging-party once again set to work. Once again they found nothing, and by
now Pepys was starting to have his doubts. “I do believe there must be money
hid somewhere by him,” he mused, “or else he did delude this woman in hopes to
oblige her to further serving him – which I am apt to believe.” His dashed
hopes cannot have been helped by his domestic arrangements that day; he was “very
much displeased” because his wife had gone to stay with relatives while his
house was being cleaned. The next day, he compensated for this by working late.
Pepys met with Wade and
Evett again the following week (“I have great confidence that there is no cheat
in these people, but that they go on good grounds, though they have been
mistaken”) but he does not record any more attempts at searching for the treasure
until 19th December, when the workmen were set to dig “in the corner
against the Mayne-guard [Main Gate], a most unlikely place”. It being a cold
day, Pepys spent much of it inside, reading and conversing with Lee by the fire
in the Governor’s residence while the labourers toiled outside. Once again,
nothing was found, “and having wrought below the bottom of the foundation of
the wall, I bid them give over; and so all our hopes ended.”
Thus ends Samuel Pepys’s
search for buried treasure at the Tower of London, a tale that might seem to be
little more than an historical curiosity, to the extent that it is usually
edited out of the abridged versions of his famous diary. The story of
Barkstead’s treasure, though, has had a surprisingly long life, with the last
attempt to find it taking place in 1958. Whether it ever existed at all is
doubtful.
But the fact remains that
there was buried treasure beneath
Restoration London, not at the Tower but on Cheapside. In 1912, a stash of
jewels dating back to the mid-seventeenth century was found there, buried beneath
the cellar of a building that was destroyed in the Great Fire. It is not known
who put it there, but the most likely theory is that it was buried during the
Civil War. The Cheapside Hoard was exhibited at the Museum of London from
October 2013 to April 2014.
The unknown person who
buried the Cheapside Hoard certainly wasn’t the only person to have buried
valuables in seventeenth-century London. As the Great Fire took hold in early
September 1666, Pepys himself famously buried his wine and a Parmesan cheese,
and witnessed two others doing likewise (his house survived the blaze, but
whether he was able to recover these delicacies afterwards remains unknown).
The Tower had its buried
secrets too, of a much more macabre nature than some supposed ill-gotten gains.
In 1674, Charles II finally got around to ordering that some of the more
decayed parts be cleared, including a turret by the south wall of the White
Tower– not far from the ruined Coldharbour Tower where Pepys had been searching.
In the foundations of this, workmen uncovered the skeletons of two children;
no-one at the time doubted that these were the remains of the boy-king Edward V
and his brother – the Princes in the Tower who had disappeared in 1483. Pepys
had by this time ceased to keep a diary, so we do not know if he, on hearing of
this, thought about his unsuccessful treasure hunt. Four years later, Charles
II ordered that the remains be buried at Westminster Abbey, where – following
an examination in the 1930s that verified beyond reasonable doubt their
identity – they lie to this day.
Sources
Arthur Bryant, Samuel Pepys: The Man in the Making
(Granada, 1984)
Christopher Durston,
‘Barkstead, John’, p. 908, Oxford
Dictionary of National Biography (vol. 3) (OUP, 2004)
Nigel Jones, Tower: An Epic History of the Tower of
London (Windmill, 2012)
Robert Latham &
William Matthews (eds.), The Diary of
Samuel Pepys: Volume III 1662 (Harper Collins, 2000)
Steve Roud, London Lore: The Legends and Traditions of
the World’s Most Vibrant City (Random House, 2008)
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