A Radical History Of Britain

by Edward Vallance

  The failure of the 1431 rising and its swift and brutal repression by Duke Humfrey did not stem the flow of Lollard activity. A commission of 1440 uncovered a well-established local Lollard network centred on Odiham, Crondall and Farnham (then all in Hampshire). Meanwhile, at Selhurst in Sussex, the parish priest was found in possession of the four Gospels in English and was allegedly teaching the ‘pestiferous opinions of John Wycliff’. In Kent, on the flat coastal marshes north of Rochester where Sir John Oldcastle’s fortified manor house, Colling Castle, stood as a landmark to a seditious Lollard past, an active Lollard tradition persisted: there are references to a possible Lollard rising there in 1438. In addition, Lollards forced to make public abjuration of their beliefs in 1431 could be found in the 1440s being made to do penance once again for their heretical opinions. More importantly, names of those required to recant their beliefs in the 1430s reappear in the lists of those seeking pardon after Jack Cade’s revolt in 1450.4

  The government’s concern about the ongoing popular discontent towards its regime led to a greater scrutiny of the gossip and rumour circulating in towns and villages. The 1440s witnessed a rise in the number of people charged with seditious speech. A constant theme of the comments reported was Henry VI’s unfitness to rule. The King was spoken of as a fool, a simpleton, a child. Some claimed that he had murdered his uncle the Duke of Gloucester in 1447, that he was losing all the Crown’s wealth, that he was grasping, that he was no soldier – and, perhaps most importantly, that it was the Duke of Suffolk and the Bishop of Salisbury who really held power. It was certainly true that during the mid-fifteenth century England experienced a crisis in political leadership. By the late 1440s, power had fallen into the hands of an unscrupulous court party headed by the Duke of Suffolk, William de la Pole and a few others, notably the Bishops of Salisbury and Chichester. Their supremacy at court was secured in 1447 when the King’s great-uncle, Cardinal Beaufort, died. This clique was supported by a group of aristocratic thugs gathering around James Fiennes, Lord Saye and Sele, that included the Cornishman John Trevilian. The unpopularity of this group was reflected in vernacular rhyme:

  The Cornysshe Chowgh [Trevilian] offt with his trayne

  Hath made oure Egulle [Henry] blynde.

  Suffolk’s adherents extended their influence over the South East in a rapacious and often violent manner. In 1447, John Trevilian forcibly expelled three esquires, William Wangford, William Ludlowe and Stephen Wymbyssh, from the manor and castle of Stone in Kent, two miles east of Dartford and not far downriver from London. He held the manor for at least three years from its rightful owners. James Fiennes also used violence to extend his family’s influence in Kent and Sussex. Allegedly, in 1447 he and Stephen Slegge, Sheriff of Kent from 1448 to 1449, ruthlessly expelled a man from his 250 acres in Elmley on the marsh flats of the Isle of Sheppey and forcibly kept this land right up until July 1450.

  The grasping Slegge was as notorious as his master Fiennes for his activities when Sheriff. In 1449, the Exchequer sued him for a debt of £4078 10s 5d in unpaid revenues. That same year, with Robert Est, a gentleman from Maidstone, and a gang of some two hundred men he broke into the close of Edward Neville, Lord Abergavenny, at Singlewell, two miles south of Gravesend. They looted his granary and assaulted his servants. Men such as Est went unpunished thanks to the influence of Saye and one William Isle as magistrates. Politically, too, Saye’s circle held a monopoly, completely dominating the elections for county Members of Parliament in the 1440s, strongly indicating that they were rigged.

  By the 1440s, the counties of both Norfolk and Suffolk were in the grip of adherents of the Duke of Suffolk, who instituted a similar regime of extortion, violence and rough justice to that meted out by the creatures of Fiennes in Kent. The main villains in East Anglia were Thomas Tuddenham, John Heydon and John Ulveston. As in Kent, Suffolk’s adherents dominated county politics. The notorious Tuddenham of Oxburgh acted as MP for Suffolk in 1431 and, from then on, for Norfolk in three parliaments during the 1430s and again in 1442 and 1443–4. Heydon was MP for Norfolk from 1445 to 1446, and Ulveston was MP for Yarmouth in 1447 and 1449–50.

  The three rustled sheep, forged judicial records, helped destroy a watermill in Norwich and colluded in the appropriation of the city tolls by the Prior of Holy Trinity. Heydon was the most violent of Suffolk’s gang: on at least four occasions during the 1440s, his heavies prevented coroners from investigating various deaths. The most infamous example of his methods came in January 1449. Heydon and Lord Moleyns, Bishop of Chichester, backed by a large gang comprising several hundred armed men, incited the attack and seizure of John Paston’s manor at Gresham in Norfolk. Heydon’s men smashed gates and doors, rifled through Paston’s possessions and, with the manor taken, combed the countryside, pursuing his friends, tenants and servants in and out of houses and barns, ruthlessly stabbing at sheaves and straw after their quarry. Poor tenants of the manor were intimidated into making false complaints in the hundred courts against these associates of Paston, who naturally did not appear in public to defend themselves in court. Nor could they even obtain copies of the complaints so as to answer them by law, because the keeper of the court was also in league with Moleyns and Tuddenham. The machinery of law and order had been completely appropriated by Suffolk’s cronies, who exploited it to perform a perverse charade of justice to cover their own nefarious activities.

  The crisis for Henry VI’s government came in 1449–50, as military failures, Crown insolvency and consequent high taxation provided the catalysts for major popular rebellion. The Hundred Years War, begun in 1337, was coming to its denouement. The breakdown of peace between England and France in 1449 left the King with insufficient funds to raise an expeditionary force. Parliament refused to grant the necessary money, in part because those around the King were not trusted to make proper use of the tax revenue. The outbreak of hostilities further impoverished the Crown: an embargo on exports caused England’s cloth trade to collapse. Suffolk was widely believed (probably correctly) to have been orchestrating the end of the truce with the French behind the scenes, through the seizure of Fougères by the English mercenary François de Surienne in a mistaken bid to regain public credit after his role in the cession of Maine to the French in 1445. By the autumn of 1449, Henry VI’s government was close to collapse. The King’s debts and charges were said to be running at £320,000. On 17 September, Bishop Lumley resigned his office as Treasurer, with a balance in the Treasury of a mere £480 5s 3d, to be replaced by Lord Saye and Sele. On 11 October, the French took Gavray; by 16 October the French King Charles VII was at the gates of Rouen to confront the Earl of Somerset’s army. After a short and, as some saw it, token engagement, Somerset was persuaded by the Archbishop and citizens to negotiate with the French: on 29 October, the capital of Lancastrian France surrendered without a siege.

  When Parliament was recalled, Suffolk came under attack as a result of a failed assassination attempt upon Ralph, Lord Cromwell, perpetrated by William Tailboys, a strongman in the pay of Suffolk and Viscount Beaumont. Cromwell survived the attempt and campaigned to have Suffolk impeached by the Commons. Further bad news for the Duke came with the murder of Bishop Moleyns, who had been sent down to Portsmouth to take wages to the force awaiting shipment to Normandy. Here, he was accused of withholding the money from the troops. On 9 January 1450, a mob of furious soldiers and sailors dragged Moleyns out of his lodgings to a field where, despite his protests that it was Suffolk who was the embezzler (evidence that was later used in Suffolk’s trial), the Bishop was brutally beaten to death.

  As discontent with the conduct of Suffolk’s faction at court spilled into open violence against his associates, the first signs of a popular uprising against these courtiers emerged. Thomas Cheyne, brother of the Lollard gentleman and rebel Sir John, led a demonstration that revived the idea, used in 1381, of petitioning the King by provoking the south-eastern counties into a mass demonstration converging on London. Cheyne’s rebels gathered
somewhere between Sandwich and Dover on Saturday 24 January, with a list of royal councillors that they wanted to see beheaded, including William Aiscough, Bishop of Salisbury, William, Duke of Suffolk, James, Lord Saye, and the Abbot of Gloucester. They organised themselves into a military-style array and appointed captains under various pseudonyms – ‘King of the Fairies’, ‘Queen of the Fairies’ and ‘Robin Hood’ – a trick, as we have seen, that rebels had also employed in 1381. Thomas Cheyne himself went under the name ‘the hermit Blewbeard’. On the 26th, with the number of rebels alleged to be now in the thousands, Cheyne’s men attacked St Radegund’s Abbey hospice just outside the city walls of Canterbury. Cheyne was finally captured with the aid of the citizens of Canterbury on Saturday 31 January, just a week after the rising had begun. He was taken to Westminster to be judged and was then hanged, drawn and quartered at Tyburn. His head was sent to London Bridge and his quarters were distributed between London, Norwich and two of the Cinque Ports; although not without some difficulty, since no one was willing, for fear of their lives, to transport the dismembered corpse to its several destinations.

  In Parliament, the campaign against the Duke of Suffolk gathered pace. On 28 January, the Commons accused him of conspiring to surrender Wallingford Castle to Charles VII, a treasonable charge for which he was placed in the Tower the following day. The Commons’ impeachment proceedings could only be stopped by the intervention of the King, who on 17 March banished Suffolk from his realms with effect from 1 May, imposing a five-year exile on him. As the Duke fled the capital for his manor of Eastthorp in Suffolk, a crowd of angry Londoners gave chase and set upon his party. The Duke himself escaped. However, Henry VI’s intervention could not ultimately save him. On 1 May, the vessel transporting Suffolk across the Channel was intercepted by a ship called the Nicholas of the Tower. Its unknown master brought Suffolk aboard and, according to one report, subjected him to a mock trial before having him beheaded the following day in the name of ‘the community of the realm’. The Duke’s head was stuck on a pole and his body was flung up the high strand, washing ashore among the pebbles on Dover beach.

  Suffolk’s death sparked rumours that the King, in retribution, would turn the county of Kent into a wild forest. This was a period of high anxiety for those who lived in England’s maritime counties. Reports of Suffolk’s death had been preceded by the news of the terrible defeat of the English forces at the Battle of Formigny on 15 April, where, it was estimated, four thousand men had been killed. Rumours of imminent invasion were given substance by earlier French raids on the ports of Rye and Winchelsea and, earlier that same month, by an attack on Queensborough on the Isle of Sheppey.5 By the second half of May, rebellion was under way. From 18 May onwards, no church court sessions were held in the diocese of Rochester because of serious insurrection in Kent. Again, it appears that popular festivity was used as cover for organising the rebels and disseminating their plans for a rising. The Rochester Fair of 18–20 May was used to communicate news and opinion from all over Kent, while other towns in the area of revolt also held fairs: Heathfield in Sussex on 15–17 June and Sevenoaks in Kent on the 29th.

  These rebels were no ignorant peasants. They produced their own written manifesto, known as the ‘complaint of the poor commons of Kent’. The May rebels had at least one secretary, Henry Wilkhous, a notary from Dartford. William Petur, a notary from Strood and an associate of Wilkhous who would seek a pardon after the rebellion, may well have been another. Scribes and messengers also played a part in mobilising the county through the existing system of the muster. Church bells summoned the men of the parish, and the mustered men took oaths of allegiance to one another and to their cause.

  As in 1381, the rebels appropriated the machinery of local government for their own ends. This provided them with a ready-made system of administration for organising their rising (and one which, as a result of the invasion scares of 1449–50, had recently been refurbished). More than this, though, it gave the rebellion, via the normal mustering process for the militia, the aura of legality. It also provides some evidence of a ‘bottom-up’ conception of political power. The constables of the hundreds in charge of summoning the militia were not appointees of the King but elected by their communities. Above all, the raising of the militia provides clear evidence that the ordinary people of England regularly owned and carried arms and armour. Hugh Latimer, Bishop of Worcester under Edward VI, recalled that his father, a yeoman farmer, had owned his own armour, which he wore while fighting Cornish rebels in 1497. In the words of the historian Montgomery Bohna, in ‘twenty-first-century terms, it was as if a flak jacket, helmet and assault rifle were household items as common as the family car, and the principal natural recreations were the rifle range and assault training course’.6 At points during the rising of 1450, this peasant militia would prove more than a match for the armed retinues of the great nobles.

  By June 1450, the Kentish rebels had designated one Jack Cade as ‘the Capitayne of the [h]oste’. As with many medieval and early modern rebels, our knowledge of Cade’s background is sketchy at best. The government believed that his name was actually John Mortimer, possibly out of a conviction that the revolt was a product of machinations by the Duke of York, who had Mortimer connections. Various other stories circulated about Cade’s origins: it was suggested that he was a physician, John Aylemere, married to a squire’s daughter from Tandridge, Surrey, remembered for decking himself out in scarlet. In another tale he was a sorcerer of the black arts, capable of summoning up the Devil in animal guise; during 1449, while living in Sussex in the household of Sir Thomas Dacre, Cade was said to have murdered a pregnant woman and then fled the country. This part at least may be true. Between December 1448 and December 1449, a John Cade, yeoman, of Hurstpierpoint in mid-Sussex, did ‘abjure the realm’ (promise to go into exile), while the escheator for Surrey and Sussex confiscated twenty shillings from the profits of the sale of Cade’s horse, gown and bed. Hurstpierpoint at this time was held by Sir Thomas Dacre, the son of Lord Dacre of the North but with links among the most prominent families of the South East. (Indeed, his son-in-law was the very Sir Richard Fiennes, future 1st Lord Dacre of the South, whose uncle was the notorious Lord Saye.)

  On 8 June, Cade advanced on the western suburbs of Canterbury, with what one observer estimated to be a host of four thousand men. The rebels waited three hours in the great field that then stretched between St Michael’s Harbledown and St Dunstan’s, in the hope of some positive response from the city. Finally, they gave up and took the road to London. Meanwhile, groups nearer to London had already reached Middlesex. At Westminster, John Sawyer, a fruiterer and yeoman from St Mary Cray in north-west Kent, led a gang who attacked and took hostage a royal servant, Thomas Walter, until he paid a ransom of £10. The news of the rebellion had been sent up to Leicester on 6 June where Parliament was in session. The Commons was adjourned and the Duke of Buckingham and the Earls of Oxford, Devon and Arundel were commissioned by the King to proceed ‘against the traitors and rebels in Kent and to punish and arrest the same’. This action came too late to nip the rising in the bud. By the 11th, Cade and his rebels were already encamped on Blackheath, a fine natural vantage point south of the river looking down at the capital, and also the place that the rebels of 1381 had chosen for their camp.

  The City began to prepare for its defence: its gates were to be fortified and guarded twenty-four hours a day. The nobles’ armed retainers were to be admitted only on specific errands and were not to be quartered there; and armourers were not to sell their goods outside the City. The King had in the meantime followed his nobles south and by 13 June was staying at St John’s Priory in Clerkenwell. On the 15th he sent messengers over the river to Blackheath to order the Kentishmen to disband. Later the same day, the Earl of Northumberland, Lord Scales and Lord Lisle rode to the heath with an armed company, aiming to dispel the Kentishmen by force, but, seeing the size of the rebel encampment, they decided to retreat and seek reinforcemen
ts. Henry VI seems to have been tempted to ride out to them himself, like the young Richard II. Instead, though, he adopted the plan of sending out a prestigious delegation of nobles, including many with links to Kent, such as the Archbishops of Canterbury and York, the Duke of Buckingham, the Bishop of Winchester and Viscount Beaumont. Their mission: to persuade Cade to withdraw his men in return for the offer of a royal pardon.

  The delegation took away with them the rebels’ petition. Like the demands of 1381, it demonstrated that Cade’s followers wished to be seen as ‘loyal rebels’, supportive of the King and wishing for the reform of the kingdom. First, their captain assured Henry of his concern for his welfare and that of his peers. He suggested that Henry take back all his demesnes so that he might reign like a ‘Kyng Riall’, but asked him to rid himself of all the false progeny and affinity of the Duke of Suffolk, ‘the whiche ben opynly knowyn traitours’. These ‘traitors’ should be punished and replaced with the Dukes of York, Exeter, Buckingham and Norfolk. The petition also mentioned particular Kentish grievances: the abuse of ‘summonses of the Green Wax’, the burden of purveyance, the troublesome Statute of Labourers, and the activities of the ‘grete extorcioners’, Stephen Slegge, William Crowmer, Sheriff of Kent, plus William Isle and Robert Est.*

  In response, Henry marched out to meet the rebels on 18 June with a large and well-armed force, including carts of guns for firing lead and stone. But he was too late. The rebels, wisely, had already fled the heath, correctly taking his delay as a sign that he was preparing to crush them with violence. Cade’s men melted into the woods of the Kentish weald. A smaller posse of royal soldiers, led by Sir Humphrey and Sir William Stafford, unwisely attempted to pursue them. The Staffords and forty of their men were killed when the rebels ambushed them near Sevenoaks, offering a clear demonstration of their potency. On that same day, 18 June, the Lords Dudley and Rivers, Sir Thomas Stanley and Thomas Daniel rode into north-west Kent with a force of two thousand men and began a three-day campaign of robbery, pillage and terrorisation. They stole horses from the Archbishop of Canterbury’s park at Otford, while at Chipstead they stole silver spoons and linen sheets from one man, saffron, pepper and spice from another, and cash from both. The next day, they rampaged through Sevenoaks, and on 20 June took their mayhem to Tonbridge.