by Dan Jones
On 17 March, Henry VI summoned all the lords of parliament, including Suffolk, to his private chamber, ‘with a gable window over a cloister, within his palace of Westminster’.18 Kneeling before the assembled lords and king, Suffolk once more protested his innocence, pointing out that it would have been quite impossible for him alone to have committed the long list of crimes of which he was accused. He waived his right to trial by his peers, and threw himself on the king’s judgement. Then Henry, through the chancellor, told the lords that he did not find Suffolk guilty of any counts of treason. Rather, he said, there were several lesser charges (known as misprisions) for which the duke could be held responsible. Rather than condemning Suffolk to a traitor’s death, he banished him from the kingdom for five years. The sentence was to begin on 1 May.
Despite the lack of a formal trial by peers, it is likely that this was a judgement that had been taken with the lords, whose desire to prevent one of their number from being humiliated by the commons outweighed their desire to see all blame for the realm’s ills conveniently fall on Suffolk’s shoulders. No record exists of this news being transmitted to the commons, but it is safe to speculate that it was met with something between astonishment and rage.
On 19 March, in the dead of night, the duke was removed from London and taken to his manor of East Thorp, in the county of Suffolk. The journey was supposed to be secret, but around two thousand angry Londoners nevertheless chased the party, jostling and abusing Suffolk’s servants all the way. By removing the target of popular disgruntlement, the lords had only served to increase the thirst for blood among their countrymen. A riot broke out in London two days later, in which the leader, a vintner’s servant called John Frammesley, was heard to shout, ‘By this town, by this town, for this array the king shall lose his crown.’19 Parliament was prorogued for Easter on 30 March. By now it was clear that the situation in and around London would be too dangerous for it to continue sitting after the break.
The final session on 29 April thus opened in Leicester, one hundred miles to the north of the capital. On the first day of the new session the king was presented with yet another petition: this time calling upon him to issue an act of resumption, by which all lands originally belonging to the Crown or to the king’s private estate, the duchy of Lancaster, ‘in England, Wales, and in the marches therof, Ireland, Guînes, Calais, and in the marches thereof, the which ye have granted by your letters patent or otherwise, since the first day of your reign’ would be taken back, in an attempt to bolster the royal income. In other words, everything that had been given away by royal favour would now be taken back. It is quite likely that this had been demanded for some time, but demands were now all the louder and more persistent. The king had chosen to save his favourite. The government would therefore have to satisfy the calls for reform in some other radical way.
As the Leicester session of parliament debated the proposed act of resumption, Suffolk was on the east coast of England, in Ipswich, preparing to leave for his sentence of banishment. He and his servants set sail on 30 April in a small fleet of two ships and ‘a little spinner’ – a lighter craft, which we would now call a pinnace – heading for Calais, from where he could make his way to the duke of Burgundy’s lands. Before leaving, Suffolk swore on the sacrament that he was innocent of the charges put before him. Others, however, were not so sure.
The ships reached the straits of Dover the following day and the pinnace had gone ahead to make contact with the Calais garrison when, as one correspondent put it, they ‘met a ship called Nicholas of the Tower, with other ships waiting on them, and [from those in the pinnace] the master of the Nicholas had knowledge of the duke’s coming’. Suffolk’s ships were intercepted and the duke was persuaded or commanded to board the Nicholas, ‘and when he came, the master bade him, “Welcome Traitor”’. According to the same correspondent, Suffolk was held aboard for twenty-four hours, with the agreement of all its crew. The writer heard a rumour that the crew had set up their own tribunal to re-try the duke on the charges he had faced in parliament. What is more certain is that after a period of time aboard the Nicholas Suffolk was removed to a smaller boat with a chaplain to shrive him, ‘and there was an axe and a stoke [i.e. a chopping block], and one of the lewdest of the ship’ – later named in court as a sailor from Bosham called Richard Lenard – ‘bade him lay down his head … and took a rusty sword, and smote off his head within half a dozen strokes’. Suffolk’s servants were put ashore, robbed but unharmed, to tell their tale. Two days later the duke’s body was found dumped on Dover beach, with his head standing next to it on a pole.20
*
The news of Suffolk’s death reached parliament in Leicester on 6 May. It was the final shock that forced the royal government to accept the act of resumption (albeit with an extensive list of exemptions, which somewhat blunted its practical effect). A sense of general crisis had by this time escaped the confines of parliament. Towards the end of May 1450 men began to gather in bands across south-west Kent. The county had been in a state of some alarm for around six weeks: the military collapse in Normandy had awakened fears that once Charles VII’s soldiers reached the coast, they would cross the Channel and attack or even invade England, in which case Kent would be one of the first places to suffer. Coastal raids were bloody and terrifying experiences. On 14 April the royal government had issued a commission of array: a command to raise the county militia in every Kentish hundred (the local unit of county administration), assessing each community for its readiness to protect the realm. Men were selected to serve in a potential defence force and provided with clothing, some equipment, money and armour. A night watch of the coast would have been organised. Perhaps most importantly, constables were appointed to take command of each hundred’s militia.21
This was a perfectly reasonable notion, given the gravity of the perceived threat from across the Channel. However, at the same time as the county was being put into a state of military readiness, Suffolk’s murder triggered a panicked rumour that the king intended to hold Kent communally responsible for the death of his favourite. It was said variously that a visiting court would carry out exemplary hangings of ordinary Kentish folk and that the whole county was going to be razed and turned into royal forest. The people of Kent were therefore armed, organised, angry, frightened and ready to go to war to defend the realm from its enemies.
Unfortunately, they did not see enemies only in the spectre of plundering Frenchmen aboard landing craft. Like the parliamentary commons, they began to see the true threat to the king’s realm as the clique around him: ministers and household men like the treasurer Lord Saye, the prominent councillor and royal confessor William Aiscough, bishop of Salisbury, the diplomat John, Lord Dudley and several others. On 6 June word reached these men, and the rest of parliament assembled at Leicester, that Kent had risen in rebellion, and armed bands were assembling around Ashford, in the south-east. It was said that they had elected as their leader and the ‘captain of Kent’ a man called Jack Cade, who was going by the suggestively aristocratic name of John Mortimer – a name he may have adopted to imply an affiliation to the duke of York’s family, who in past generations had been the instigators of rebellion and dynastic plot. (See above, p. 88.) This was nothing more than fantasy, however: Cade had no contact or connection with York, who was then still in Ireland providing loyal service to the Crown.
Cade was to prove a highly effective captain and leader capable of articulating a sophisticated programme of reform that appealed to men of considerable status: his lieutenants included the Sussex gentleman Robert Poynings, the son of a peer who agreed to serve as Cade’s sword-bearer. One song that survives makes the rebels’ high intentions – a purge of government – quite clear:
God be our guide,
And then shall we speed.
Whosoever say nay,
False for their money ruleth!
Truth for his tales spoileth!
God send us a fair day!
Away,
traitors, away!22
Henry VI was sent back to London, and two separate commissions of lords were sent to Kent to try and squash the rising: one headed by the king’s cousin Humphrey Stafford, duke of Buckingham, and the other a party of decorated war veterans led by Viscount Beaumont, the constable of England.
By the time they had ridden south, the rebels had moved west: by 11 June they were encamped on Blackheath, just downriver of London. This was the camping-ground of the men who had risen in the so-called Peasants’ Revolt, during the summer of 1381. By 13 June the king was lodged in St John’s Priory in Clerkenwell, most of the important lords and bishops were in London, and Jack Cade’s men had been established just a few miles from the capital for several days.
After an uneasy stand-off, on 16 June negotiators from the government met with the rebels at Blackheath to try and establish their terms for dispersal. The king would not come in person, and after two days of fruitless discussions, on the night of 17 June the rebels retreated from Blackheath back into Kent. But this was no wilting. Sir Humphrey Stafford and William Stafford, kinsmen of the duke of Buckingham, led a force of about four hundred men into Kent to chastise the rebels. Yet when they went into battle near Tonbridge, they were ambushed and slaughtered. Both Staffords were killed.
A half-hearted attempt was made to subdue Kent, but it had little effect. Large numbers of the forces supposedly loyal to the king and his magnates lost their nerve and threatened to defect to the rebel side. Calls went up from the Crown’s own troops for the trial of so-called traitors: Saye, Dudley, Aiscough and others. On 19 June, London dissolved again into rioting, and in response to the mayhem Henry gave his permission for Lord Saye’s arrest as a traitor and imprisonment in the Tower of London. The following day word was given that further offenders would be arrested.
On 25 June Henry and his council abandoned London, leaving the defence of the city to the mayor. There was deep discomfort in the king’s household. Henry and his retinue rode north to Kenilworth in Warwickshire, where they took shelter in the splendid palace-fortress, hiding behind the moat and thick stone walls and sending urgent word to nearby counties asking for the recruitment of soldiers to guard Henry’s life.
As soon as he heard of the king’s flight, Cade immediately marched his men back to Blackheath. They arrived between Wednesday 1 July and Thursday 2 July, then moved upriver to Southwark, where they took over the local inns and taverns, effectively occupying the suburb at the foot of London Bridge. At the same time a rising in Essex saw men marching out of the countryside on the north bank of the Thames, fanning out before the city walls around the Aldgate. Just as it had been in 1381, London was besieged.
Unlike in 1381, when the demands of the rebels had been somewhat vague and jumbled, Cade’s men had a very clear idea of their political demands. The sixteenth-century antiquarian John Stow collected and transcribed a number of original documents relating to the revolt, one of which is Cade’s manifesto.23
In the first place, the ‘commons of Kent’ repeated the rumour that ‘it is openly noised that Kent should be destroyed with a royal power, and made a wild forest, for the death of the Duke of Suffolk, of which the commons of Kent were never guilty’. The manifesto went on to condemn various detestable practices in government, complaining that the king was being stirred by his minions to ‘live only on his commons, and other men to have revenues of the crown, the which hath caused poverty in his excellency and great payments of the people’. It was claimed that ‘the Lords of his royal blood have been put from his daily presence, and other mean persons of lower nature exalted and made chief of his privy council’; that purveyance – the odious practice of forcibly requisitioning goods from ordinary people to support the royal household – was ‘undoing’ the ‘poor commons of this Realm’; that the legal process for protecting land and goods and obtaining justice in the royal courts was being subverted by ‘the King’s menial servants’; that an inquiry was needed to investigate the loss of royal lands in France; that MPs in Kent were not being freely elected; that the offices of tax collectors were being distributed by bribery; and miscellaneous other local laments and grievances.
At every point in his rebellion Cade attempted to prove that he was more than simply a freewheeling lout, but rather that he spoke to and for the ‘poor commons’ both in Kent and the realm at large. This was no easy task since, like all principled popular risings, Cade’s rebellion had attracted large numbers of unscrupulous criminals who used the general mood of chaos as an excuse to burn, loot, pillage and murder. This was not just the case in London: as word of the disorder spread throughout England, violent attacks were made on all manner of hated local officials and dignitaries, including most shockingly Bishop Aiscough of Salisbury, who was robbed and murdered by a mob in Wiltshire on 29 June. All the same, in London, at the heart of the rebellion, Cade did his best to lead his men with a semblance of military order, which included beheading one of his captains on Blackheath for indiscipline.
Even this sort of exemplary justice could not keep all the rebels in check. Henry, hiding terrified in Kenilworth, played directly into Cade’s hands. When the rebel leader arrived at Southwark he received word from the king’s household that he was to be allowed to set up a ‘royal’ court to try traitors. The Crown had sunk so far into torpor and fear that its authority could now be exercised by anyone who rose up to take it. On 3 July Cade and his men advanced from Southwark to London. They were resisted by the London militia, but managed to fight their way across London Bridge, cutting the ropes of the drawbridge to ensure that it would remain open after they entered the city. Cade made proclamations around the city that order was to be kept and that robbers would be executed, then moved on to the Guildhall to set up his court for traitors.
Around twenty prisoners were brought before the court, where the mayor and aldermen were forced to sit in judgement. The unfortunate victims were led by the royal treasurer Lord Saye, who was dragged out of the Tower of London to face his fate. Saye begged for a trial before his peers, but Cade refused. The mob wanted blood. He was permitted only to see a priest before being dragged to Cheapside, where he was beheaded on a block in the centre of the street. Later his son-in-law, William Crowmer, the sheriff of Kent, was pulled out of the Fleet prison and taken outside the city gates to Mile End, where he too was hacked to death. Saye’s body was roped to Cade’s horse and paraded around the city. The treasurer’s head was stuck on a spear, and displayed at various places in the city, where it was made to ‘kiss’ Crowmer’s similarly impaled head, in a grotesque and morbid puppet show.
A number of other men were similarly slaughtered under Cade’s temporary rule. Predictably, the longer the captain kept his men in the city, the more futile his attempts to keep order became. By the evening of 5 July, the mayor and aldermen had managed to array a military force under Lord Scales and Matthew Gough, two veterans of the French wars, and were prepared to lead a counter-attack against the occupying rebels. A battle began on London Bridge at around 10 p.m. and raged through the night, concluding long after sunrise the next morning. Hundreds of men crowded onto the tight causeway across the Thames, fighting hand to hand by torchlight. Cade, in an act of desperation, had broken open the Marshalsea prison in Southwark, flooding his ranks with freed prisoners. But he could not break past Scales and Gough’s defensive lines. In a final act of reckless rage, the rebels set fire to the wooden drawbridge, choking the battle site with smoke and sending men at the heart of the fight tumbling from the bridge to drown in the cold water below. Finally, in the mayhem, the gates on the London side of the bridge were bolted shut. Hundreds of bloody and burned bodies were left outside, including that of Gough and the alderman John Sutton. The rebels had been driven back to Southwark.
The following day, 7 July, on the advice of the queen, who had – remarkably and bravely – remained during the rebellion at her manor of Greenwich, the Kentishmen were offered a chance to take charters of pardon and disperse. Many welcome
d the opportunity, but Cade refused, preferring to withdraw once again to Kent, taking with him goods and treasure that had been plundered (quite at variance with his own commands) and vowing to continue the fight. But his luck had run out. On 10 July Cade was officially denounced as a traitor and a bounty of one thousand marks was put on his head. After several days’ flight he was captured ‘in a garden’ at Heathfield in Sussex by Alexander Iden, who had replaced the unlucky Crowmer as sheriff of Kent.24 Cade fought to the last, and although he was taken alive, he died of his injuries on the road. Justice thereafter could only be symbolic: Cade’s corpse was beheaded at Newgate on 16 July, taken around the city as far as Southwark for public viewing, then returned to Newgate to be chopped into quarters. His head, rather appropriately, was put on a pole above London Bridge, lifeless eyes staring down over the scorched remains of an extraordinary urban battle site.
Cade’s revolt was over but tension smouldered throughout the summer. The king, his household and the nobles who had joined him at Kenilworth crept back towards London at the end of the month: on 28 July a service of thanksgiving was held at St Paul’s Cathedral, and a month later a high-ranking judicial commission of oyer and terminer, including Humphrey duke of Buckingham, the archbishops of Canterbury and York, and the bishop of Winchester, was sent into the country to investigate the abuses that had been decried in the rebel manifesto.