The Plantagenets (72 page)

During all this, Richard II was at Westminster, surrounded by his household advisers, several earls and merchants, and a number of his family members, including his mother Joan, his half-brothers Thomas and John Holland and his cousin, John of Gaunt’s young son Henry Bolingbroke. During the early stages of the rebellion the king’s advisers sent men-at-arms into the shires to attempt to bully the rebels into submission. They were chased away and some of them were killed. Belatedly, the government realized the scale of what it faced. Archbishop Sudbury panicked and resigned his position as chancellor, giving back the great seal. The royal party moved to the Tower of London for their own safety. They sent word to the rebels to meet them. On Wednesday 12 June the Kent rebels reached Blackheath, where they camped overnight. At one point on that evening Richard sailed for a conference with his people at Rotherhithe; but his advisers panicked when they saw the size of the crowds on the riverbank and the party turned back.

This infuriated Tyler and his men, who claimed to rise in loyalty to their king and to purge his court of evil counsellors. ‘The commons had a watchword among themselves in English,’ wrote the Anonimalle chronicler. ‘[It was,] “with whom hold you?” and the response was, “With king Richard and the true commons,” and those who could not
or would not so answer were beheaded …’ Denied their moment to parley with their adored monarch, the rebels flew into a rage and burned Southwark that evening. The next day, Thursday 13 June, they convinced sympathizers in London to lower the drawbridge at London Bridge. They piled, howling with delight, into the city, parading through it and out down the Strand – the moneyed suburb that lay between London and Westminster, which was dotted with palaces and mansions. The finest of all was the Savoy, which was John of Gaunt’s magnificent London residence. The rebels piled over the walls, set fire to the outbuildings and set about destroying the palace. Rebels ran through the building, smashing everything they could, and dragging fine possessions out to a bonfire in the street. The palace was destroyed with barrels of gunpowder found in the cellars.

The same day the Temple was ransacked by Londoners; piles of legal records burned in the street. Prisons were sprung across the city, while notorious crooks who had been living at liberty were hunted down and beheaded by kangaroo courts. Flames licked the evening sky as a day of targeted rioting ended in debauchery and drunkenness, with pillaged wine barrels rolled into the street and broken open.

On the first night that the rebels came to London, Richard, aged just fourteen, stood dolefully on a turret in the Tower and gazed down at the ragtag army of his subjects who had camped out on the fields below the fortress walls. As London burned, he and his advisers were effectively terrified prisoners in the Tower. Although there had been similar risings in Europe during the second half of the fourteenth century – the Jacquerie in France in 1358 is the worst example – the king’s advisers had still been caught quite by surprise at the ferocity with which the ordinary people of London and the south-east had risen. And the rioting was spreading. There was disorder as far afield as York and Somerset, with some of the worst taking place in Cambridgeshire, Hertfordshire, Suffolk and Norfolk. England, which had only four years ago risen almost as one to acclaim its new king, seemed now to be descending into a godless anarchy.

What had driven the ordinary people of England to such paroxysms of rage? On one level, it was very easy to say. Three poll taxes had
been levied between 1377 and 1381 – a revolutionary experiment in taxing the wealth of communities who had never been taxed directly before. At first the taxes had provoked disgruntlement, but this swiftly turned to outright fury as commissioners appointed to investigate widespread evasion were accused of heavy-handed tactics.

But the poll taxes tapped a deeper root of resentment that had been building in England’s towns and villages since the middle of the century. As great swathes of men and women were killed by the Black Death and the subsequent plague epidemics of the 1360s, the entire structure of medieval society had begun to creak and change. Labour, once abundant in an overpopulated realm, became scarce and expensive. To combat the threat to landowners, Edward III’s government had passed restrictive labour legislation, setting limits to wages and punishing anyone who took or received more than the legal day-rate for anything from mowing fields and reaping crops to mending roofs and shoeing horses.

These laws were enforced by local legal commissioners, many of whom were drawn from the same ranks of wealthy county gentry who benefited from the labour laws. They punished the better-off peasants who paid their neighbours to work, as well as the workers whom they convicted of taking illegal wages. There was abundant work for lawyers and Crown officials in ensuring that county elites retained their privileged position. Men who served on labour commissions would often also serve as sheriffs, MPs and justices of the peace. There was a real sense that a whole, corrupt, political class was oppressing ordinary Englishmen. Serfdom was dying out as an institution in the late fourteenth century, but it seemed to many of those who rebelled in 1381 that it was giving way to a new and equally oppressive system, by which lawyers and justices kept the rural poor in just as deep a misery as they had suffered when they were bonded to the land.

Poll taxes that hit the poor hardest; labour legislation that prevented them from earning a reasonable wage; a miserably failing war, in which Essex and Kent men saw at close hand the dangers of French pirate fleets patrolling the Channel; general fear that the young king who was supposed to be England’s saviour was being corrupted by
evildoers in his household: this was all sufficient in 1381 to kindle a rebellion that shook England to its foundations. Quite how much of the root causes of the rebellion Richard comprehended as he stood in the Tower of London and watched England burn we cannot know. He did, however, feel himself spurred into action: as a king, and a Plantagenet king, at that.

The dispersal of the Peasants’ Revolt showed that in Richard, a pale-faced boy of fourteen, there was a streak of great personal courage and an appetite for leadership. It also scarred him for the rest of his life.

The events were almost impossibly dramatic. On the morning of Friday 14 June, Richard convinced a large deputation of rebels to leave London and go to the fields of Mile End, where he promised he would meet them to discuss their demands. Once they did so, a royal procession made its way through the still-tumultuous city to a conference. Richard rode out accompanied by his Holland half-brothers, his young uncle Thomas of Woodstock, now earl of Buckingham, the earls of Warwick and Oxford, William Walworth, mayor of London, the veteran soldier Sir Robert Knolles and various others. His mother, Joan of Kent, rode behind them in a whirligig. All around them sounded shouts and cries from agitated rebels and townsmen; but the royal party pushed steadily on to Mile End. Behind them in the Tower they left Archbishop Sudbury, Treasurer Hales and several royal servants whom they were aware the rebels wished to kill. The plan was to use the royal absence as a diversion, and allow the particularly marked men a window to escape by river.

The plan failed. At Mile End, Richard granted the rebels everything they asked. He commanded that charters be distributed guaranteeing that there would be no return to serfdom, and that labour would be free, and that every man could rent land for a maximum of 4 pence per acre. He also naïvely agreed that Tyler and his men could be free to hunt down all the traitors they desired, and bring them to him for judgement.

This sealed Sudbury and Hales’s deaths. Having failed to escape from the Tower, they were dragged out and murdered when the mob
broke in. Their heads were put up on poles and paraded around London before being stuck up on London Bridge, where for several days they perched above the entrance to the city, Sudbury’s red bishop’s mitre nailed crudely onto his skull. Eight others died in the same way, including John of Gaunt’s personal physician and John Legge, a member of Richard II’s personal bodyguard. Gaunt’s son Henry of Bolingbroke, who was also in the Tower, only escaped capture and death at the rebels’ hands when a resourceful soldier hid him in a cupboard. The sound made by the mob, wrote the chronicler Thomas Walsingham, was not ‘like the clamour normally produced by men, but of a sort which enormously exceeded all human noise and which could only be compared to the wailings of the inhabitants of hell’.

After the fall of the Tower, London descended into chaos. On Cheapside, where just a few years ago the street had run with wine, now a wooden chopping block was set up, and the ground was soaked with congealing blood of men and women murdered. In St-Martin’s-in-the-Vintry, the bodies of more than 100 Flemish traders were piled lifeless in the streets. They had been dragged from sanctuary in a church and murdered by a mob. All around there was a general orgy of murder, looting and rapine. Targeted disorder became general rioting. ‘This went on throughout the day and the following night, with hideous cries and horrible tumult,’ wrote the Anonimalle chronicler.

By Saturday it was clear that drastic measures were required. The holiest part of the Plantagenet mausoleum, St Edward the Confessor’s shrine at Westminster Abbey, had already been violated, when a group of rebels dragged out the disreputable warden of the Marshalsea prison from his hiding place there, and took him as a prisoner to Cheapside, where he was beheaded. A rumour had started that Wat Tyler and John Ball intended to burn the whole of London down, capture the king and make him the figurehead of their new order in which there would be no lordship but theirs.

The king and his shrunken pool of advisers, by now taking refuge at the Wardrobe in Blackfriars – a well-stocked arms store – concocted another, last, desperate plan. As charters of manumission continued to be pumped out by scribes at Chancery, word was sent to the rebels
in London that the king would meet them again at the tournament fields beyond the city at Smithfield.

Richard steeled himself for the most dangerous moment in his young life with prayer at the Confessor’s shrine where, hours earlier, rebel hands had pawed at another victim. When he arrived at Smithfield, in mid-afternoon, he had Walworth, the mayor of London, close by his side. Walworth and Knolles had put word out to the loyal men of the city that they would be required at some point soon. A battle was anticipated.

Richard came face to face with Wat Tyler in one of the most bizarre meetings in Plantagenet history. The rebel leader appears to have been drunk on success after a weekend of lordship over all of London, and by extension the realm. He surprised Richard by shaking him roughly by the hand and telling him to ‘be of good comfort and joyful, for within the next fortnight you shall have 40,000 more of the commons than you have now, and we shall be good companions’.

These were startling words to a boy who had been anointed as king by an archbishop now dead at the command of this ruffian. But Richard kept his composure. According to the chronicle sources, he conducted negotiations with Tyler in person. ‘The king asked him what were the points he wanted,’ recalled the Anonimalle chronicler. ‘And then Wat … asked that there should be no law but the law of Winchester [a demand for a return to central policing as it had operated under Edward I, rather than by local gentry sitting as JPs, as developed under Edward III], and that there should be henceforth no outlawry … and no lord should have any lordship … and that the only lordship should be that of the king; and that the goods of the Holy Church should … be divided among the parishioners; and no bishop in England save one … and he demanded that there should be no more bondmen in England, no serfdom or villeinage, but that all should be free and of one condition.’

It was an extraordinary set of demands: a manifesto so revolutionary that it verged on madness. But Richard, attempting to appease Tyler as he had done at Mile End, again agreed ‘that [Tyler] should have all that could be fairly granted, saving to himself the regality of
the Crown. And then he commanded him to go back home without further delay. And all this time that the king was speaking, no lord nor any other of his council dared nor wished to give any answer to the commons in any place except the king himself.’ It was Richard, showing composure well beyond his years, who led the negotiations.

But this time, unlike Mile End, there was an endgame in place. When Tyler demanded a flagon of water and spat rudely at the king’s feet, it prompted one of the royal party to insult the rebel leader. A fight broke out, and in the melee, William Walworth drew his dagger and thrust it deep into Tyler’s side, mortally wounding him. Then the mayor left the scene to rouse the city militia under Knolles.

Now came Richard’s crowning moment. Although Tyler’s army was arrayed on the other side of Smithfield from the negotiations, it was clear to them that something had gone badly wrong. After Walworth stabbed him, Tyler had mounted his little horse and rode back towards his men, crying treachery. As he fell to the ground before them, half-dead, they realized that they had been tricked. ‘They began to bend their bows and shoot,’ wrote the chronicler. Richard, realizing that something had to be done, shocked his own party by spurring his horse and riding straight out to the rebels, declaring that he was their captain and their leader, and that they should follow him.

It was a moment of astonishing courage and quick thinking, worthy of Edward III, the Black Prince, or any of Richard’s most illustrious forebears. The rebels bowed to their king, literally overwhelmed by his majesty. As he distracted them, the city militia began to arrive. They surrounded the rebels at Smithfield and herded them out of London with minimal bloodshed. The day was saved, and to a very large degree it was the fourteen-year-old Richard who had saved it. Revolution had been averted, if only for a while.

Return to Crisis

The king’s stand against his rebellious subjects at Smithfield was as fine a moment of kingship as anything that had been demonstrated by his ancestors. Richard at fourteen had shown the mettle of a king.