The Last Plantagenets (10 page)

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.

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.

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.

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.