On the 7th February, Simon Renard wrote to Charles V that, ‘it is believed that to-morrow Wyatt will be a prisoner in the Queen’s hands, and that the tumult will have calmed down.’ (1) He would not have known as he wrote those words that they would actually happen.
According to the author of ‘The Chronicle of Queen Jane’ the news that Wyatt and his army had reached Charing Cross made the court ‘wonderfully affrighted’ and that the Queen had thought about going to the Tower of London but decided to stand her ground and await the outcome of events. There was fighting between Wyatt’s men and the Lord Chamberlain’s men and in all the confusion, it was thought that the Earl of Pembroke had joined Wyatt and ‘there should ye have seene running and cryenge of ladyes and gentyll women, shyting of dores, and such scryking and noyse as yt was wonderful to here.’ (2)
Wyatt and his troops reached Ludgate but found it closed against them and after further fighting they were defeated and the leaders taken to the Tower.
Sources
1.’Spain: February 1554, 6-10′, in Calendar of State Papers, Spain, Volume 12, 1554, ed. Royall Tyler (London, 1949), pp. 82-93. British History Online http://www.british-history.ac.uk/cal-state-papers/spain/vol12/pp82-93 [accessed 6 February 2022].
2.Nichols, J. G (ed) (1850) The Chronicle of Queen Jane and of Two Years of Queen Mary and Especially of the Rebellion of Sir Thomas Wyatt, Written by a Resident in the Tower of London, Llanerch Publishers, p.48-51
