The Last Plantagenets (13 page)

In the meantime a small group had gathered about the body of Wat the Tyler. Although he was not dead, it seemed certain he had been mortally wounded. They carried him to the hospital. Later in the evening, when darkness had fallen and the peasantry had left the plains, Mayor Walworth returned to find that their leader had died. He had the head severed from the body to replace that of Archbishop Simon above London Bridge.

Thus died Wat the Tyler who had proven himself a man of considerable parts. He had been a king for three days.

The shades of approaching night made it difficult to see clearly across the plain. The relatively few knights grouped about the recumbent form of Wat the Tyler could tell that the king had been engulfed in a mass of excited peasants and led away to the far side. Should they launch an attack to rescue him? But to begin open warfare might result in the death of Richard. Rightly or not, they made no move.

Walworth, always the man of action, rode back to the city at top speed and sent criers about the streets to let the citizens know that the king had fallen into the hands of the rebels. The response was instantaneous. From all sections the solid citizens issued out with weapons in their hands and rushed with mounting excitement in the direction of the Aldgate. The number who responded was later computed at a figure in excess of 5000.

The control of this hastily improvised army was put in the hands of Sir Robert Knowles, and that soldier of wide experience succeeded in establishing some degree of order. With his own trained men in the van, stout Sir Robert, recognizable in the shadows by his heavy frown and split upper lip, led the way out to the plain. The peasants had begun to disperse, but many still stood about the king, arguing excitedly about their demands. They made off with great dispatch, apparently, when they perceived that the open space was filling rapidly with armed men. During the hours of the night which followed they melted away. Most of them drifted back into the city and crossed over London Bridge to the southern shore. By morning the occupation of London had come to an end.

The attitude of the king was what might be expected of a boy of fourteen who knew that he had met a crisis with amazing coolness and courage. He assured his rescuers that he had been in no real danger. The peasants had not blamed him for the killing of Wat Tyler and had treated him with the respect due his rank. Knowing that his mother had left the Tower, he proceeded at once to see her at the Wardrobe.

The queen mother was almost hysterical in her relief at finding him free and unharmed. Her eyes filling with tears, she cried: “My son, my son! I have been so fearful for you!”

The boy was understandably boastful in his response.

“Rejoice and praise God,” he said. “For I have recovered this day my heritage, which was lost, and the realm of England!”

S
ANGUINARY as the revolt had been, the measures which followed were infinitely more terrible. The uprisings in scattered counties burst like balloons when word came of the finish at London. The Bishop of Norwich, with sword in hand like the palatine churchmen of Norman days, fell on the undisciplined mob which followed Litster, the King of the Commons, and scattered it like chaff, thus relieving the highborn hostages who had been serving him as scullions; and Master Litster returned no more to his vats.

At Bury St. Edmunds the monks took heart and returned to their cloisters. In Yorkshire the disturbances subsided. At St. Albans those who had led the attack on the abbey were tried and convicted. William Grindecobbe, who had been in London and had returned jubilantly with a charter and a banner, was promised his life if he would persuade the people to return the charters they had taken. His answer was given in words which should never be forgotten. “If I die,” he said, addressing those about him who also stood in peril of their lives, “I shall die for the cause of the freedom we have won, counting myself happy to end my life by such a martyrdom.”

The chronicles of the period were so bitterly opposed to the cause of the peasants, that it is difficult to arrive at any conclusion on the part Richard played after the last of the marchers had returned home and the echo of the last cheer had died away. It is a matter of record that on June 22 Sir Robert Tresilian was made chief justice and proceeded to exact the full rigors of the law. During July, Richard annulled the charters he had issued. But when Parliament met in November he brought in a report of the course he had followed. He had issued the charters under restraint, he pointed out, knowing them to be contrary
to the law, but seeing no other course open to him. “If,” the statement went on, “you desire to enfranchise and set at liberty the said serfs by your common assent, as the king has been informed some of you desire, he will consent to your prayer.” There is more than a hint here that he would have liked to see his charters validated. The House decided that it was proper to revoke the rights he had granted. They asked, however, for some measures of reform and deplored the severe measures taken to stamp out the rebellion.

It is perhaps reasonable to grant Richard the benefit of the doubt and assume that he allowed himself to be dictated to by the royal uncles and the great landowners who had seen their wealth and privileges threatened. Those who write of him as a hypocrite and a perjurer should picture what undoubtedly happened after the uncles and the baronage came riding in, full of bluster and fury and with plenty of armed men at their backs. Conceive of a boy of fourteen beset by the combined strength of the powerful men of the kingdom, all of them raging at him for giving away
their
rights of villeinage,
their
advantages from
corvée, their serfs
, filling the chancellery with their threats and demands and then, red-faced and angry, gathering in their various palaces to settle upon a course of action. They had not been on hand to face the music of insurrection with him; in fact, they did not seem to have exerted themselves to come to his assistance. If his juvenile intentions had been of the purest, he would be unable to ride out a storm as bitter as this.

It is quite possible, of course, that the boy felt himself a victim of the violence of these uncouth men from the fields and was easily persuaded to acts of repression. Certainly he is reported to have said, in a message directed to the peasantry: “Villeins you were and villeins you are. In bondage you shall abide.”

The blackest mark against him is found in one report where clearly there has been gross exaggeration. It is said that in early autumn he marched through the eastern counties with an army of 40,000 men, ravaging the land with fire and sword. The first exaggeration is in the size of the army. It would have been an impossibility to raise such a force and absurdly fantastic (reverting again to the laws of logistics) to think of moving such numbers. To recruit an army many times in excess of the forces which won the historic victories in France would be tantamount to invoking a whirlwind to extinguish a candle. The country had settled down by that time and the men who had marched courageously to London had now sought the shelter of their poor wattled homes and were trembling at the blast of retribution blowing through the land. A few thousand men would have been ample and it may be assumed that such
was the force which took the hangman’s trail and followed the young king to St. Albans.

Sir Robert Tresilian, with the complete disregard for justice which would in a later century characterize the Bloody Assizes and brand with infamy the name of Judge Jeffreys, sat first at Chelmsford and then proceeded to St. Albans. When a first jury refused to find against the peasant leaders, he selected a second and then a third. The jurors served under threat of death if they failed to act according to the will of the black and beetling judge. Tresilian made it clear that every man who came before him would be found guilty and punished by the severest penalties of the law. The trees began to sprout the grimmest fruit, the bodies of men swinging in the breezes. The cleavers of the executioners were never idle.

King Richard sat on the bench beside Tresilian and watched the trial of John Ball. The hedge priest, who had been responsible more than any other for the outburst, had fled into the Midlands when he perceived that the cause was lost. He was captured at Coventry, hiding in a ruin, according to Froissart, and was brought in chains to St. Albans.

Even those who see him as no better than a mad rabble rouser concede that he conducted himself with calmness and dignity. Permitted to speak, a privilege not accorded to others, he again expressed his belief that the equality of man was what God had planned and that all feudal laws must some day be abolished. He was condemned to be hanged, drawn, and quartered.

This was a sorry end for the man who for more than twenty years had preached against the evil of the existing customs and laws, who had wandered over the country, footsore and weary, facing pain and labor, the rain and the wind in the fields. But it was inevitable.

It was Tresilian’s way to send the prisoners straight from his presence to block or gallows, but John Ball was granted two days’ respite. It is said that the stay was at the demand of Courtenay, who had succeeded Simon of Sudbury as Archbishop of Canterbury and had later been persuaded to act as chancellor also. Now Courtenay was not one to stand in the way of the most rigid exercise of the law. He was a cousin, several times removed, of the Black Prince, and the eye with which he regarded the uprising had nothing of understanding in it. Perhaps, however, in this moment he was overtaken by a sense of history and saw in John Ball a man of vision and courage. Perhaps also he had been asked to exercise the authority of his office on behalf of the courageous priest, a request from someone higher than himself. This, of course, is pure conjecture. And yet no other explanation seems as reasonable.

After the forty-eight hours expired, the sentence was carried out and
John Ball experienced death in its most horrible form. The desire of vicious authority to make a victim suffer excruciatingly to the last moment of consciousness had never been served more effectively than in the method of death devised for traitors. One story has been told of an executioner pausing, after having removed the stomach and intestines of a condemned man, to ask if he desired a cup of wine. The victim still had enough life left in him to whisper No. There was no place left, he said, to put it.

Yes, they killed John Ball by this inhuman method. And, according to some computations, they hanged 6999 others.

It seemed at first that the revolt of the peasantry had done nothing but intensify the will of the landowners to hold them in the chains of feudalism. There was no mistaking the furious intent of the baronage. The king, they declared, could not take their goods from them but by their own consent. “And this consent,” they affirmed in Parliament, “we have never given and never will give, were we all to die.” They proceeded to pass legislation of the most severe nature. No child born on the land was to be allowed to be apprenticed in a town nor were any to be sent to school “because this would give them the opportunity of advancement in the world by going into the church.” Never before had there been such a grinding of the tusks of authority.

But the effect of these savage restrictions was not to be felt for long. The peasants had shown their strength, and the fear of another such demonstration was never lifted. The high stone walls of feudal castles were no longer an adequate defense. Drawbridges were seldom lowered. The new laws could not be rigidly enforced and in course of time, although they remained on the statute books, they were forgotten.

A century after Judge Tresilian sat in black majesty on the bench and sentenced the yeomen of England to ignoble deaths, there was practically no trace of villeinage left in the land. The tenant farmer and the small landowner had replaced the serf. The baronage, as stubbornly opposed as they had always been to social advance, could not hold back the tide. The men of 1381 had suffered for their courageous efforts, but they had planted the seed of a rich harvest.

John Ball and Wat the Tyler and William Grindecobbe, and the hundreds and thousands of unnamed men, had not died in vain.

R
ICHARD resembled his grandfather most particularly in two respects. He was madly extravagant and he loved the royal castle of Shene where Edward III had lived out his last years and where he had died in neglect. Perhaps Shene reminded the young king of his early boyhood in Bordeaux where the royal palace was spacious and wide open to the sun and the warm breezes. When he married, as will be told later, his charming little wife, Anne of Bohemia, shared his liking for Shene, and so they made it their summer residence. Here they seem to have held high revel, for it is stated that they sometimes entertained as many as 10,000 guests in a single day. This figure, of course, is one of the worst exaggerations of an age which dealt in superlatives and hyperbole. Still, the royal household was an extravagant one and to this can be attributed the early criticism of the young king. It will be recalled that even the poor peasants had included the luxuries of the court in their bill of grievances.

Edward I, who was a model king in so many respects, kept careful accounts of all court expenditures and so made it possible to reach reasonably accurate estimates of the money raised and the money spent. Edward III was the exact opposite. That great warrior king not only spent everything he could get his hands on, either through the usual revenues (customs, escheats, profits on coinage, levies from clergy and laity) or by dipping lavishly into the national wool profits. Never having enough money, he borrowed right and left, raising huge loans from Lombardy bankers as well as from his own subjects, and seldom paying back. As he used the money to win victories and bolster the national ego, he was forgiven.