CHAPTER IX
1
THE queen mother came creaking in her red and gilt carriage across London Bridge and into the Tower well ahead of the peasants. The report she gave was a terrifying one: the countryside inundated with invaders, men without hats, with glaring eyes, with heavy beards, men who talked a strange lingo and who laughed and sang strange songs. They had followed close on her heels and would soon be pounding on London’s gates for admittance. The young king and his advisers heard her story with pale, set faces. The danger was more imminent than they had supposed. What was to be done?
It is hard to understand why the group about the king had neglected to take any vigorous steps to meet this crisis. And yet perhaps not; they were, it must be said, a weak lot. The royal uncles were all away: John of Gaunt in Scotland, Edmund of Cambridge with the fleet on a mission to Portugal (which proved a futile one), and Thomas of Woodstock on some business or other in the Marcher country. Not that they were missed particularly; none had the judgment and force of character to control this situation with a firm hand. The group also included Simon of Sudbury in his dual capacity as archbishop and chancellor, and Hales, the treasurer, who was blamed for the poll tax. Richard’s half brothers on the Holland side were there, neither of whom had the right kind of heart or mind, a proud, quarrelsome, swaggering pair. The king’s cousin, Henry of Bolingbroke, was in the group. He was to play a leading part in the tragedy of Richard’s life; but at this stage he was a fast-growing stripling of fifteen years. Three members of the baronage completed the number: the youthful Earl of Oxford and two veteran earls of the French campaigns, Warwick and Salisbury. All of them heard the queen mother’s story without volunteering any opinion.
The aging archbishop was the first to make a move. He placed the Great Seal of England on the table and begged to be allowed to retire at once from public office. It was not from fear that he acted but because he did not feel himself capable of coping with the situation. The others stared at him with stony eyes, but did not move. Ordinarily there was not a man in England who would not have welcomed the chance to take the seals of office, but under the circumstances not a soul in the room wanted to assume the responsibility.
There were two men in London with enough vigor and decision to break through this inertia in official circles. One was Mayor William Walworth, who did not want to see the city fall into destructive hands. The other was Sir Robert Knowles, who had been counted in the French wars as second only to that amazing soldier Old John Hawkwood as a leader of the condottiere. Knowles had a mansion in London large enough to house the garrison of 120 trained soldiers he still kept about him. If the royal council, that inept and fumbling lot, had seen fit to transfer all authority to the old soldier, he would have handled the situation with vigor and decision.
Walworth had already taken one step. As soon as the queen mother’s conveyance had crossed London Bridge, he had raised the drawbridge between two of the central piers and so made it impossible for the rebels to take the only easy way into London. When summoned to appear before the palefaced group about the king, he declared he could arm and throw into action a force of 6000 men. The members of the council looked at him with doubt in their eyes. Was he certain the Trained Bands would follow him? Walworth, the type of man who was always sure, said yes, they could be depended on to serve under him. He had a high opinion of the importance of his office, this Mayor Walworth. Once the Sergeants of the Coif had tried to seat ahead of him at a public dinner a member of the nobility below the rank of earl, which was against the recognized rules of procedure. His eyes blazing above his forked beard, Walworth had stamped out of the hall. But he failed to convince this solemn and almost impotent group. They were very doubtful of London’s loyalty.
With the best of reasons, it may be said. The criminal population of the city would support the rebels, from the Upright Man at the top to the lowest sack-law cuffin. The apprentices were lively and pugnacious and opposed to all authority. When the storm broke, there would be cries of “Clubs! Up, Clubs!” and the apprentices would swarm out of shops and warehouses, every man jack of them armed and panting for action. But it would not be to help enforce the feeble edicts of the royal circle but to take sides with the men from Kent. Among the solid citizens, the owners of property and of guild memberships, there was a definite feeling of discontent. It was even whispered, and with good reason, that some of the aldermen were infected with the same fever for change which had aroused the peasantry to active rebellion.
One step was decided upon, a feeble measure. A committe of aldermen would be sent to Blackheath for the purpose of issuing a warning to the rebels. Three were chosen: Adam Carlisle, John Fresch, and John Horne. The first two followed out their instructions, even going a step further and warning the army of disorder to return to their homes at once. Horne had other ideas. During the trials which followed the revolt, it was stated that, while Carlisle and Fresch harangued the mobs who crowded about them, Horne took Wat Tyler and several of the other leaders aside.
“Pay no heed to these who came with me,” he whispered. “They speak with crooked tongues. Listen to me and believe. You have your cause won, for the whole of London is ready to rise. Cause a tumult around the gates and at the Bridge and you’ll find the city ready for you. I speak for those who know their minds and don’t change sides twice a day.”
Accordingly, three of Tyler’s most trusty men accompanied the alderman back to the city and were present at a secret meeting of disaffected citizens in the house of one Thomas Farringdon. They all favored forced entry the following morning. Plans of the city were poured over and the black forefinger of a rebel traced the line of the river to a spot on the north shore, somewhere between Ludgate and Westminster, where there apparently stood a place of considerable importance.
“And this?” he asked.
He was told it was the Savoy, the great palace packed with untold treasures, from the cellars to the tops of the crenelated walls, which belonged to the wealthy, discriminating, and thoroughly hated John of Gaunt.
No comment was made beyond perhaps an “ah!” from the men who had come to spy out the land.
It later came out at the trials that Home went to Mayor Walworth immediately after and assured him the mission of the aldermen had been successful. They had found the rebels honestly anxious for a peaceful settlement.
“I’ll wager my head,” he is reported to have said, “that they won’t do any damage if they’re allowed inside the walls.”
Homrn, very clearly, was confident that the court faction was going to be overturned.
2
The next step was taken by the royal council on the urgent insistence of the young king himself. Sir John Newton, who had commanded the garrison of Rochester Castle and had been held as a hostage, came to the Tower with a message from the rebels. He first assured the official group that he was acting under duress and under oath, moreover, to convey the wishes of the peasants exactly as they had been expressed to him.
“They profess loyalty to the king,” he declared. “They want a chance to lay before him the grievances they hold against his councilors and his ministers of state. Even against other members of the royal family. All these, they hold, have been mismanaging the land.”
Richard, no doubt, had never forgotten the impression he made when he was taken to the House of Commons before the old king died. He recalled that the members had been so impressed that they had demanded he be declared heir to the throne at once and that he be allowed the titles his father had held. This triumph had sunk deep into his juvenile mind. Would not these ill-born and unlettered hordes be equally impressed if they had a chance to see him? Was he not four years older now? Every day during those four years he had listened to his praises being sounded.
Whether or not this had any part in his decision, he announced to his reluctant councilors that he intended to meet the rebels. After it had been decided to act on his wish, Newton was sent back to tell the peasants the king would come down the river the next morning as far as Greenwich and would listen to what they had to say.
Early the following day the state barge started out, with most of the royal councilors grouped anxiously about the royal minor. Four other barges followed. The weather was warm and fine and the sun was climbing in a cloudless sky. What better augury could there be for the success of this daring move?
The river banks about Greenwich were black with the peasant hordes, and to the nervous eyes on the barges it was only too clear that this was a mob completely lacking in order and discipline. Some cheers were raised for the gaily dressed king standing on the prow, but most of the voices were clamoring loudly for the heads of his unpopular ministers. Froissart says they were brandishing their weapons and “shrieking like men possessed.” It was an awesome spectacle, without a doubt. Not waiting for orders, the men in charge of the barges brought them to a standstill a considerable distance from the shore.
Still confident of his power to control the situation, the boy king stepped close to the rail of the royal barge.
“Sirs,” he cried, in a voice which adolescence made shrill and high, “I have come to listen. What want ye?”
The rebels did not leave it to their leaders to answer. They began to cry out that they could not talk with him unless he came ashore. The noise was so great that Richard had no chance to make himself heard again.
It is not on record that the king made any further efforts, but the men about him would not have permitted him to go ashore. It would be the height of folly, so ran their minds, to deliver him thus into their hands to be held as a hostage. The Earl of Salisbury called out that an audience was impossible under these circumstances. It is even said he protested that the noisy petitioners were not suitably dressed to face the king, but this, surely, is beyond belief.
They swung the barges about and began the return trip. The oars dipped and swayed and the backs of the rowers strained at the task, while the men about the youthful king watched the crowded shores with apprehensive eyes. They knew that a single discharge of arrows from the longbows that many of the peasants carried over their shoulders would sweep the barges like a lethal hail.
But not a bow was bent nor a single bolt launched against the cloudless sky. It was clear that the peasants were sincere in their devotion to the youthful king.
3
The effort to confer with Richard having failed, the men from Kent began to march in angry haste toward London Bridge. Another disaffected alderman comes into the story at this point, Walter Sibley, whose district was Billingsgate. He was posted on the bridge with a small company of men, and his instructions were to prevent the lowering of the drawbridge. Whether from fear or because he was in accord with the plans drawn up the previous night, he took one look at the multitudes assembling at the southern end and threw up his hands.
“We can’t hold out,” he said to his supporters.
Signaling to drop the bridge, he turned and led his company from behind in an exit from the great stone bridge.
If a pause is permissible at this stage, something should be said about London Bridge. This miracle in stone (for in the eyes of all men it was nothing short of miraculous) had been started in 1176 by Peter of Colechurch, a charity priest. It had been built to stand for all time. Starting at the foot of Fish Street by the church of St. Magnus the Martyr, it stretched to the far shore. It was carried by twenty stone piers about which the daily tides and freshets of Father Thames roiled and protested in vain. It was no less than forty feet wide, and the citizens of London Town had quickly availed themselves of the possibilities of this broad highway, building shops and houses and even chapels on both sides. Life on the bridge had many advantages. A man in trade was afforded the chance to attract the eye of a visitor before he reached the city, and in no part of town were the apprentices more vociferous in their chorus of “What lack ye?” “Come, sir, a bolt of the best cloth?” “A pair of shoes?” “A gaud for your lady?” The mere householder enjoyed a vista of ever changing excitement: the wool barges coming down the river, the heavily weighted tin boats, the foreign ships sailing as far up the estuary as their tonnage allowed, the arrival and departure of notables. By dropping a bucket on a rope they could scoop in a quick supply of fresh water or a piece of ice in the spring.
They probably did not count it a disadvantage that over their homes on elevated pikes were the heads of men who had died at the block, staring up the river with empty sockets (for the crows found the human eye a delectable morsel), the flesh rotting and falling off in reeking strips. It needed the elevation of a new head to win the attention of the bridge dwellers.
Close by the central arch, which formed the drawbridge, was a chapel in which lay the bones of Peter of Colechurch. It is conceivable that he turned in his grave on this warm June morning, for never before had his great bridge witnessed anything like the passing of the peasants. Without so much as a pause at the toll booths, they came in perfect order. The leaders rode on horseback, followed by three swaying banners of the insurrection (with slogans coined, no doubt, by John Ball), and after them an endless parade of ragged and determined men, gathered into companies according to the county or town from which they came, on their now ragged tunics the medals of pilgrimage which they had purchased for themselves in Canterbury. They marched four abreast, the tramp of their feet sounding without any cessation hour after hour.
John Horne’s promises were borne out. The peasant army met with no opposition. The apprentices were out to welcome them, waving their clubs and screeching loudly. The brothers of the salamon (a term much in use in the cant of the crooks) had slunk out from their cellars and the dark corners of deserted mews, ready to bear a hand in breaking open the prisons and in pillaging the houses of wealthy citizens. The substantial burghers, anxious to make the best of it, offered food to these hungry seekers of justice. The peasants partook of their hospitality with voracious appetites, and it is said that a few of them paid for their meals!
An extraordinary occasion, indeed, a day long to be remembered: June 13, when the embattled tillers of the soil took over the city of London without opposition of any kind. Not a blow struck, not a head broken.
4
With well-filled stomachs, the invaders turned to the pleasing prospect of revenge. They knew that John of Gaunt was away, but down the Thames stood his great palace. “To the Savoy!” was the almost unanimous cry.
The leaders were still in control and strict orders were issued that there must be no thievery and no killing. Any man who tried to benefit from the loot of this royal structure must suffer as Achan did; Achan, the son of Israel who secreted gold and silver after the walls of Jericho fell and who was taken out on Joshua’s orders and stoned to death.
At first these strict injunctions were obeyed. The household at the palace was permitted to leave, even Gaunt’s beautiful mistress and future wife, Katharine Swynford, who had been left there in possession with her children. The walls of the Great Hall were stripped of priceless tapestries and silver sconces, the prayer rugs from the East and the rare weapons and relics. The State Chambers were ransacked, and the Privy Suite where the duke’s red velvet bed stood. In the Avalon Chamber was the marble mantel which had taken two years to carve, the most beautiful possession of all. The mantel was hacked to pieces with furious picks. The bancas of oriental woods (a special form of bench) were carried out to the courtyard and thrown into the bonfires already blazing high. The gold and silver plate was hacked into small pieces, so small that each bit could be carried off under a belt as a souvenir of the day. One man disregarded the stern orders which had been issued. He secreted a silver goblet of rare design under his jerkin. Still conscious of the need for sobriety and honesty, and remembering the fate meted out to Achan, the rioters took this miscreant and drowned him in the river.
Others were more successful. A group of men from Rochester got their hands on the duke’s strongbox which contained a veritable fortune, £1000 no less. They managed to smuggle it out of the grounds and vanished across the river in the direction of Southwark.
During the looting, a ceremonial cloak belonging to Duke John was found in the Privy Suite, a handsome thing of Lancastrian blue with pearls sewn in the sleeve embroideries. This was stretched around the trunk of a tree and those who had their bows with them proceeded to fill it with arrows. No other incident was as significant of the depth of personal hatred the common people had conceived for this glossy son of the old king.
As soon as the hatred of the mob had been thus vented in the destruction of the execrated duke’s treasures, they exploded some barrels of gunpowder and sent the building up in flames. By nightfall nothing was left of the magnificence which the duke had gathered about him. The fire trapped some members of the mob who had broken into the cellars and ensconced themselves before the pipes of rare wines. Their cries were not heard until the fire was out of control, and they were burned alive.
It should be made clear that the loot of the Savoy was not the work exclusively of the peasants. Many of the lower orders of the citizenry joined in the work of destruction and were much less scrupulous in their handling of the costly contents. Many a cutpurse had rings and precious stones hidden away in secret pockets under belts. Many apprentices thereafter flaunted belts of Spanish leather and purses of velvet.
Having thus cast discretion and sobriety to the winds, the men who had marched to London to demand justice and had turned to license proceeded to burn the Temple to the ground. They turned out the archives and threw all the state and legal papers into the bonfires. The lawyers, the Black Robes, had departed long before, being shrewd enough to know that the mobs could not be held in check, and thereby had saved their skins.
The alien residents were less fortunate. A lust for blood had risen with the flames. Many aliens from Flanders, merchants and dealers in wool and cloth, had fled to sanctuary, but the mob paid no heed to the rules of the church. They dragged these unfortunate and innocent men out from the church shadows where they cowered and butchered them in the streets.
The prisons of the Fleet and Newgate were then broken open, and the exultant brothers of the salamon welcomed their fellows who had been lying there in irons, some with limbs limp from the rack and with the mark of the white-hot branding iron on cheeks and forehead. It was a wild and desperate night in London. The citizens put up their shutters, bolted them tight, and huddled behind them, trembling for the safety of their families, while bands of drunken rioters paraded the streets, carrying the dripping heads of victims on the ends of pikes.
The final stage was to march on the Tower and to encamp in a tight circle about it. Here, they knew, were the men whom they sought, in particular, Simon of Sudbury and treasurer Hales, who was called Hobbe the Robber in the rhyming letters of John Ball. No one inside the great Norman keep must be allowed to escape.
And so the peasants slept in the fields about the Tower, while their sentries kept close watch outside the walls. The frightened group about the king, who had not yet decided on any sound course of action, kept vigil on the battlements, watching the fires of the Savoy and the Temple slowly die down, hearing the drunken uproar in the streets, and wondering what the morning would bring.