The Last Plantagenet

by Thomas B. Costain

  For many hours thereafter a corps of tabellions from Westminster, thirty in all, labored at writing charters containing these agreements. A copy was to be provided for each district represented in the ranks of the seekers after freedom. A banner would accompany each charter, to be carried home as an earnest of agreement.

  A feeling of confidence now permeated the rebel ranks. Their demands had been met.

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  But while the youthful king conferred with the rebel leaders, and everything seemed to be moving with the speed of Mercury toward the desired ends, the city was thrown into scenes as violent as on the previous day. This may have been planned by the leaders, but the more reasonable explanation was that the rank and file were now completely out of hand and that their feelings flared into murder and rapine as soon as all restraints were removed. It is affirmed that Wat Tyler returned to the city in time to lead the new riots. This is highly improbable. There was no reason at that point to doubt the honesty of the concessions made by the king. No leader with any judgment (and Tyler had displayed plenty of that quality) would risk what they had gained by an outburst of class hatred.

  Young Richard was badly served through this crisis. The officers at the Tower, whether through carelessness or sympathy with the uprising, neglected to raise the drawbridge after the king and his party rode off to Mile End. No defense was attempted when the peasants who had been left on watch swarmed in under the portcullis, still suspended high over the gate.

  “Where are the traitors?” was the cry raised, making it clear that the archbishop and the treasurer were the chief targets of their enmity. “Where are those who plunder the people?”

  They searched the rooms of the king, even peering behind the velvet curtains and under the royal bed. Next they visited the queen mother and pried with their weapons under the bed on which she was reclining. The poor lady had already seen too much of these rough men from the fields and forests and she fainted dead away. As soon as they could, her maids dressed her and she was taken, in a state of shock, to one of the barges and rowed up the river to the Wardrobe.

  It should be explained, in passing, that although London was spoken of as small and crowded, it was in reality a city of many great palaces. The large landowners, who had acquired wealth through the wool trade, had all set up establishments in the city. The de Veres, who held the earldom of Oxford, were at St. Mary Axe, the Earls of Essex on Throgmorton Street. Between Amen Corner and Ludgate Street the high tower of the Earls of Richmond stood up against the skyline. Oddly enough the great barons seemed to prefer the center of the city, in fact, the very heart of commerce. The FitzAlans lived on Botolph Lane, which was narrow and mean and much too close to the fish market. The FitzWalters were in the Poultry and the Stafford family, the Earls of Buckingham, were on Milk Street.

  One writer claims that London contained more fine palaces than the Italian cities of Venice, Florence, Verona, and Genoa combined. Few of them, it must be said, had any pretensions to beauty (except the illfated Savoy), consisting of tall grim walls jutting up above the level of the parish churches and the two-storied huddles of lath and plaster where the townspeople lived. But they gave security, something which the Wardrobe lacked. That the queen mother chose it is strange because it shared the shadow of St. Paul’s Cross with Baynard’s Castle, which had come into the possession of the royal family and was an imposing structure. Perhaps it was felt that the insignificance of the Wardrobe would offer more protection than stone walls and tall ramparts.

  Early in the morning, when the first rays of the sun apprised the unhappy city that God’s sway was starting again, Archbishop Simon went, on the king’s urgent advice, to the Little Water-gate where a boat was ready to take him away to safety. But an old beldam saw what was happening and raised an outcry. Realizing he could not escape from the inevitable pursuit, the prelate returned to the Tower, no doubt looking up at the sun with saddened eyes and thinking this would be his last glimpse of it.

  The archbishop was saying Mass in the Tower chapel when the eruption occurred. He knew that his end was near, but his voice did not falter as he chanted the Seven Penitential Psalms and the Litany. When the door burst open and the drunken rioters (they had been drinking all night, quite clearly) filled the chapel with their shouts of “Where is the traitor?” the old man stepped forward to meet them.

  “Behold the archbishop whom ye seek,” he said in a calm voice. “No traitor, no plunderer of the Commons, he.”

  While he was speaking, his arms were pinioned from behind. He was then led up to the battlements where he could be seen by the cheering crowds now filling the courtyards, and even by those who stood without the walls.

  For the death sentence which the infuriated people were determined to see carried out on Tower Hill there was neither block nor executioner. A substitute for a block was found and finally one man, who came from Essex and was named John Starling, volunteered to wield the ax. The arms of the victim were unbound and he was given a few minutes to pray and to deliver any last message.

  “Take heed,” he said, raising his voice, “my beloved children in the Lord, what thing ye now do. For what offense is it that ye doom to death your pastor, your prelate? Oh, take heed lest for the act of this day all England be laid under the curse of the interdict.”

  His captors were beyond any fear of interdict or Pope. The old man was ordered to lay his head on the improvised block. This he did with no signs of fear.

  The nervous hand of the volunteer headsman was so lacking in precision that the first bow did no more than inflict a deep wound in the prelate’s neck. The aged man could not repress a cry of anguish.

  “Ah! Ah! Manus domini est!”

  Instinctively he raised a hand to the wound, and the ax, falling for the second time, amputated some of his fingers. The victim gave no further signs of his terrible suffering, even though it took eight blows in all to sever his head.

  Later the man Starling stalked about London, with the ax suspended around his neck, boasting loudly that his had been the hand which killed the archbishop. When, inevitably, he was brought to the gallows, he continued to exult in the part he had played.

  Blood ran freely all through the hours of this terrible day. Treasurer Hales, a Franciscan friar named William Apuldore, who served as the king’s confessor, and John Legge, collector-in-chief of the poll tax, died on Tower Hill after the venerable churchman. One hundred and fifty Flemish residents were dragged from their homes or from the churches where they had sought sanctuary and killed without mercy or delay. Many lawyers shared their fate. Houses were looted and burned.

  This was not the work exclusively of the peasants. The city had fallen into an anarchy in which people paid off grudges by killing those who had offended them or by bringing false witness against them. Some debtors killed their creditors, thinking their culpability would go undetected in these mad and bloody hours. The undisciplined apprentices took revenge in the killing of their masters. The criminals of the city were everywhere, taking the major share of the rewards from the rape of London.

  It was stated in the Anonimalle Chronicle that everything had been planned and that the peasant leaders urged the intoxicated mobs to slay and burn; and this has been solemnly affirmed by many historians. But it is inconceivable that it was part of a concerted plan. Most of the peasants asked for nothing better than the chance to get their wrongs righted in an orderly way and then march home to their families and their work in the fields as quickly as possible. It was the dregs who remained, the men who had lost sight of the issues, who led the revolt.

  It seems certain, nonetheless, that much of the madness and the destruction can be traced to the megalomania of Wat the Tyler. He and his group of leaders seem to have conducted their part of the talks at Mile End in a reasonably rational way. Perhaps he was surprised by the wide scope of the king’s concessions. Perhaps, on returning to the city, he drank with the rank and file in an exuberance of triumph. Whatever the reason, the power he
wielded went to the head of the leader. Visions of personal grandeur filled his mind as he hobnobbed with his followers, these once humble men who had been roused to assert their rights and who now saw themselves as masters of the realm.

  On this fateful Friday night, after the meeting with the king, Wat the Tyler behaved like a new-made dictator. Although the large party of the peasantry, the better part, had taken their charters and their banners and were tramping with weary feet the long road home, he continued to lord it in town among the baser elements and the more subservient of his followers.

  “I will go wherever I please,” he announced, gesturing in a grand manner. “There are twenty thousand of my stout fellows to go with me and help enforce my will. As for those who would oppose me, I shall shave their beards for them!”

  The boast won loud plaudits, for what he meant was that he would cut off the heads of those who stood in his way.

  “There will be no laws in England,” he ranted, “saving those I declare. With my own mouth shall I declare them!”

  The following day was marked by a diminishing of violence and a tendency to make excursions into territory close to the city in search of loot and victims. London still cringed, nevertheless, under the reign of terror. The shutters of all shops and homes remained bolted.

  During the afternoon an unexpected message was received by Wat from the royal council, in which it was suggested that, inasmuch as the insurgents were not sufficiently content to accept the promises of the king by departing for their homes, a further conference be held. They were invited to meet the king before nightfall.

  What sudden weakening on the part of the king’s councilors had led to this pusillanimous attitude can be no more than a matter of conjecture. It may have been due to the conditions they encountered on returning from Mile End and the fears they felt as they sat in the turrets of the Tower and looked down on the seething streets and the fires which burned in all directions. It might be their heads which would roll in the dust the following day unless the fury of the mobs could be appeased.

  And so one king had spoken to another; the delicate and dandified boy had found it necessary to approach the powerful head of the peasantry of England. He, Wat the Tyler, would go to this meeting and be much more demanding. In the meantime he spluttered and declaimed his greatness to those about him.

  No other explanation can be given for the strange turn events took on that day.

  CHAPTER XI

  “I Will Be Your Chief and Captain”

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  UNDER the wall near Aldgate stood the hospital of St. Bartholomew and a short distance farther into the open fields was the priory. The hospital was a venerable institution which had been founded by Rahere, the court jester of Henry I. The pay of royal buffoons was small enough, but they generally had the ear of the king and so had opportunities to make fortunes for themselves. Rahere had applied his perquisites to a noble purpose. Beyond these buildings that he had raised stretched the plains of Smithfield, famous for its fairs and markets. Every Friday there was a cattle sale which drew large crowds.

  This historic suburb served another purpose which drew even greater crowds. It was the place of execution. Tyburn would take that distinction from it in the following reign, but Smithfield had already witnessed many of the saddest events in English history. The end of the road for so many men, and women, was in the Elms which lay between a horse pool and Tunmill Brook. The first champion of the rights of the common people during the Norman period had died here, William FitzOsbert, popularly known as Longbeard. Most distressing of all had been the bitter day when Scotland’s peerless leader, William Wallace, was taken from the Tower and dragged at the heels of horses to Smithfield, to be hanged, drawn, and quartered, the inhuman method of execution first used in the reign of Edward I, by which the disemboweling was done while the victim still lived.

  It was reserved for Smithfield to bear the notoriety of the religious burnings, first in the reign of Henry VIII and, then, in that of his neurotic daughter, Mary. Here died an unsung martyr named John Badby, who was chained in a tun lined with tar, which burned much more fiercely than wooden faggots; here also the end came for one of the most beautiful and brave of women, gentle Anne Askew. Here the stout bishops were brought to be chained to the stake and burned for the constancy of their faith.

  The most grueling exhibition occurred in the time of that kindly ruler, Burly King Harry, when two people convicted as poisoners were boiled alive while thousands watched in fascinated horror.

  It was Smithfield that Richard had selected for his final parley with the insurgents.

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  The appointed time was the hour of vespers. Before taking to horse, the young king spent some time with a confessor and received absolution. Those who were to go with him filed through the Shrine of the Confessor for the same consolations. Then the party, 200 strong, wearing armor concealed under their cloaks and tabards, rode eastward through the city. None had any confidence they would come through this ordeal alive.

  The knights took their stations on the east side of the wide plain in front of the walls of St. Bartholomew, a venerable pile, discolored by time and lack of care. On the other side, some distance away, were such of the peasants as still remained, many thousands nonetheless. They were drawn up in some pretense of military order.

  An unwonted silence settled over the field, quite different from the usual noisiness of the place, the lowing of cattle, the loud hum of commerce, or, on tragic occasions, the agonized cries which came from the flaming stakes. The king’s men were too apprehensive to indulge in talk and far across the fields the peasants were strangely mute, waiting, no doubt, for direction from their leaders. Finally two figures on horseback detached themselves from the dull green of the rebel ranks, one riding a small hackney. This was, of course, Wat Tyler, and behind him a banner bearer. Arriving within speaking distance of the king, the leader dismounted and bowed. Then he took a liberty which caused much boiling of irate blood in the baronial ranks. He seized the royal hand and shook it vigorously.

  “Sir king,” he said, “within a fortnight you shall enjoy the thanks and loyalty of all true Commons.”

  Richard made no protest but contented himself with demanding why the peasants had not returned to their homes. “All that you have asked has been conceded,” he added.

  The leader of the insurgents answered that there were many points still to be discussed. There is much difference of opinion among contemporary historians as to the nature of the demands made during this unprecedented discussion between king and artisan, but the best authorities agree as to the sweeping nature of Tyler’s proposals. He raised a point of the relationship between lords and Commons which seems vague in the light of later examination. No one, he contended, should hold the privilege of lordship except civilly. Then he went far afield and raised issues which were later made the basis of charges against the Lollard priests, who were believed to have instilled such thoughts in the minds of the common people. The lands held by the church should be confiscated and returned to lay ownership. There should be one bishop only in the land, presumably the archbishop. One report has it that a demand was made for the abolition of the forest laws. In the end they came back to Ball’s appeal that there should be no distinction in rank and privilege among men, “save the king alone.”

  It must have been clear to the leaders of the peasantry that they were demanding the impossible, unless they had taken literally the bluster and boasting of Wat Tyler and believed themselves in a position of national mastery. It is probable the demands were made for the purpose of marking time. To disband now and go home would be to surrender the upper hand. There must be a pretext for remaining under arms and keeping control of London.

  The king replied briefly that such changes would require much thought and earnest discussion, adding that he would grant all that he had the right to concede, “saving the regalities of my crown,” a phrase which would be used on many historic occasions later when
the people of England were at odds with their rulers.

  A silence fell at this point. Tyler had spoken at considerable length and so he waited for something further from the king. When the silence became difficult, he called for a drink of ale. One of his men obliged by carrying a flagon across the open space and the leader tossed it off in thirsty gulps. Then he stared truculently around the set and angry faces of the king’s men and sprang into the saddle. His intention was to return to the far side of the plain where his followers stood in long lines, so far out of earshot that they had no means of knowing how things were progressing. The conference might very well have ended there, and what the final outcome would have been can only be surmised. But, as so often happens, a minor actor in the drama chose this moment to intrude himself.

  A voice from the ranks behind the king spoke up.

  “I recognize this fellow. He’s a notorious highwayman and robber.”

  This stung the inflamed pride of Wat the Tyler. He swung his horse around and gave the lie to his accuser. The latter repeated the charge.

  Wat kicked the flank of his mount and rode head on into the ranks about the king. Walworth acted with equal dispatch, planting his horse in the rebel’s path and crying that he was under arrest. The dagger in Wat’s hand cut a deep rent in the mayor’s tabard but slipped harmlessly off the armor plate beneath. Walworth’s sword was surer, wounding the peasant leader in the head and neck and forcing him to try blindly to escape. The hackney had galloped only a short distance into the open space when he fell out of the saddle.

  The peasants were too far away to hear, but they saw what had happened. Their ranks broke and they began to race across the fields, many of them fitting feathered bolts into the notch as they ran. “Kill! Kill!” was the shout they raised. A moment’s delay in facing the situation would have resulted in a flight of arrows and the annihilation of the king’s party.