The Road Not Taken Read online

  Many more bands joined him: large numbers of men had been mustered for the defence of the coast but had now concluded that the real enemy lay within the kingdom not outside.83 By this time Henry VI was alerted to the scale of the rebellion. Parliament, in session at Leicester, was prorogued while the king sent orders to crush the rebellion to four of his lieutenants: the Duke of Buckingham, and the Earls of Devon, Oxford and Arundel. The king then headed south and on 13 June reached his quarters at St John’s Priory in Clerkenwell. Meanwhile on 11 June Cade reached Blackheath and pitched camp at the very place Tyler had chosen in 1381. Similarly, London began to prepare for a rerun of 1381; the City gates were fortified and a strong guard set on them. An embargo was placed on arms sales to those placing orders outside the City, passwords devised and the armed bands of the elite and nobles admitted inside the City only with special warrants specifying their business.84 The mood in London was generally unhappy, for Londoners stood to suffer from double jeopardy: looting and high-handed behaviour both from royalist nobles and their armed retainers, and from Cade’s men. Nonetheless, as in 1381, there were sections of the population pleased to welcome the rebels, if only because their presence gave the opportunity to settle private scores, grudges and vendettas.85

  There was an eerie stand-off between Cade and the king until on 15 June Henry broke the logjam by sending a delegation by river to Blackheath, ordering the rebels to disband. In the delegation were the Archbishops of Canterbury and York, the Duke of Buckingham, the Bishop of Winchester and Viscount Beaumont. That Henry had no real intention of negotiating or offering terms became clear when he simultaneously sent out a scouting expedition under the Earl of Northumberland to ascertain the enemy’s military strength.86 Northumberland and his comrades Lord Scales and Lord Lisle seem to have set out with a secret hope that they could disperse the rebels by a mounted charge and then return to royal plaudits, but they took one look at the strength of Cade’s encampment and beat a hasty retreat. The delegation meanwhile returned with a predictable answer from Cade: there could be no question of dispersing until the king had made good on the original rebel manifesto, whose conditions and terms were now widely known. The ensuing two-day silence was a message Cade could read with his eyes closed: the king was preparing for a military solution. Wisely Cade decided not to engage the royal forces in a pitched battle but to retreat before them and save his strength for a more favourable moment. Foolishly, the royalists construed this as weakness or panic. Sir Humphrey Stafford and Sir William Stafford recklessly set out after Cade with a fifty-strong vanguard.87 They ran straight into a rebel ambush at Sevenoaks on 18 June and were massacred; the Staffords and forty men were left dead on the battleground. Cade’s victory showed that he was a highly talented captain, and the exploit brought many waverers to his banner, as well as depressing the royalists.88 Further recruits were added by the general alienation of the Kent populace in the days that followed. On 18 June – in what was presumably devised as a two-pronged assault in concert with the Staffords – Lords Dudley and Rivers, Sir Thomas Stanley and the detested Thomas Daniel burst into north-western Kent with a force of 2,000 desperadoes. There followed a three-day orgy of looting, plunder and mayhem as the forces of ‘law and order’ rampaged through Otford, Chipstead, Sevenoaks and Tonbridge. All this raid did was to alienate the people of Kent and bring in more recruits for Cade’s army.89

  There was an ominous development on 19 June when some of the royalist lords were heard to remark that Cade had a point and his rebels a case, that Henry really should weed out the traitors in his realm, whom – echoing the insurgents – they identified as Tresilian, Daniel, Saye, Lord Dudley and the Bishop of Salisbury. There were fears that some of the nobility and the gentry en masse might go over to Cade if something was not done. Realising that concessions would have to be made if he had any hope of suppressing the rising, Henry VI proclaimed that all ‘traitors’ should be taken into custody.90 He ordered Henry Holland, constable of the Tower of London, to detain Lord Saye in the Tower, while privately assuring him that the arrest was a mere charade. A little later he tried to engineer Saye’s escape, but Holland refused to play ball and hung on to his prisoner. Cast down by this ‘contumacious’ behaviour by his constable, Henry quit London on 25 June, heedless of all pleas that he should stay, whether from the lord mayor or his own wife Margaret. After a stopover at Berkhamsted Castle in Hertfordshire, Henry set up his court in Kenilworth Castle, Warwickshire, generally considered the most impregnable fortress in the realm.91 The contrast with Richard II’s decision to confront the rebels was glaring. Hugely buoyed by the king’s flight, Cade reformed his army and marched back to Blackheath. The rebels’ demands were now framed in the form of a petition, which was widely divulged. There was good news for the rebels from the West Country. The detested Bishop Ayscough of Salisbury had been captured in Wiltshire while he said Mass, dragged out of church, hacked to death and his remains defiled.92 The hope now was that all the rest of the traitors would meet a similar fate. On 1–2 July Cade’s men spread out and occupied Southwark, once again in a close replay of the events of 1381. It was at this stage that Cade first began to display delusions of grandeur. He began to dress in sumptuous, gaudy and colourful clothes, instituting his own version of the sumptuary laws by insisting that he alone could dress like that.93 Although an elected leader, he was showing signs of authoritarianism. He executed an under-captain named Parys for indiscipline on 29 June and gave himself regal, or at least viceregal graces. The town of Lydd sent him a porpoise, traditionally the exclusive food of the high aristocracy, and Cade accepted it as his due.94

  The occupation of Southwark can be seen as the turning of the tide of the rebellion, for the rebels cut loose and began looting, robbing and extorting. It was almost as though Cade’s real problems began once he left his heartland in the Kent countryside and ventured into the ‘great wen’, England’s capital and the traditional heart of darkness.95 Although Cade had ordained capital punishment for anyone found looting, his men seemed to disregard the prescription and Cade seemed powerless to prevent them. The situation got worse when the rebels entered London proper.96 Some say this was simply a repeat of the situation Wat Tyler had faced, others that Cade’s soldiers alienated Londoners much more severely than the men of 1381 had done. Yet others pin the blame on Cade himself and say that he failed to make clear the boundaries between carnival and serious assaults on State power, and that he compounded this confusion by his folly in donning exotic dress and his burlesquing of the ceremonial robes of London’s aldermen and dignitaries.97 3 July was another red-letter day in the rebellion, for on that day the rebels managed to cut the ropes on London Bridge (which had been drawn up) so as to bring the bridge down. Cade’s men then poured across into London, their leader at their head, dressed in a blue velvet coat trimmed with sable fur. In another histrionic gesture, which again suggested carnival rather than a serious uprising, Cade had a sword carried in front of him on a pillow. Where an ancient Roman enjoying a triumph would have a slave at his shoulder whispering into his ear to remind him that he was mortal, Cade seemed to be moving in the opposite direction, progressively losing touch with reality as the revolt waxed. Even less attention than in Southwark was paid to the ban on looting, for the rebels immediately began a systematic plundering of the house of the wealthy alderman Philip Malpas.98 Such was the hatred of the chroniclers for the rebels of 1450 that they turned the sack of the Malpas house into a kind of locus classicus, illustrating all that was wicked and depraved about the insurrectionists; in the process Malpas himself was rewritten as a hero. Cade’s attempt to co-opt the (real or legendary) shades of King Arthur and Robin Hood were treated with contempt.99

  For two days the rebels enjoyed a halcyon period of looting and execution. Cade turned a blind eye to the indiscipline and claimed to be restoring the rule of law by scrapping the hated system of oyer and terminer – widely considered a fig leaf behind which royal officialdom did precisely as it wished �
� and replacing it with a special commission to hear and condemn all who were considered traitors, exploiters or extortionists. The ambivalence felt even by elite members towards the Cade revolt is clear from the smooth transition in the machinery of justice: many of the original judges in the scrapped system, including Thomas, Lord Scales, the Lord Mayor Thomas Charlton and half a dozen others, remained to give legitimacy to the new commission.100 Warrants were issued for the arrest of Tresilian, Daniel and others, while the prize catch, Lord Saye, was taken from the Tower to the commission’s headquarters in the Guildhall. He was charged with treason, particularly for complicity in the death of the Duke of Gloucester, given a summary trial and then beheaded. Cade presided over the public degradation of Saye’s corpse, which was dragged through the streets by horses. William Crowmer, Saye’s son-in-law and sheriff of Kent, and five other elite members were also executed. For reasons of credibility (justice for all) Cade made a point of executing a notorious cut-throat and footpad named Richard Hawarden, who had previously skulked in sanctuary in St Martin-le-Grand.101 Yet Cade’s dispassionate meting out of justice and his regal airs did not impress London. Even in 1381, when the majority of the City had welcomed the rebels, there was a significant undertow of opposition, and the evidence is that even in the early stages of his occupation Cade did not enjoy the popularity that Tyler had done. Cade must be faulted for not accurately gauging the temper of the citizens, and for wasting his chances by conniving at the mass plundering of London.102 By 5 July the patience of the London elite had snapped. We cannot trace all the stages whereby they were able to make common cause with the royalist troops who still lurked in the City’s environs, but a plot was quickly hatched. The main thrust of the backlash was a scheme to retake the bridge from Cade’s guard while the bulk of the rebel army was back in its billets at Southwark. The speed and efficiency with which the counter-strike was organised underlines the egregious cowardice and lack of leadership evinced by Henry VI; his presence near the capital would have tipped the balance decisively without the need for hard fighting.103

  Just in time Cade got wind of the plan and ordered all his men back to London. This time they faced a hard fight to retake the City, and helped their cause by opening the Marshalsea Prison and encouraging the inmates to join them. The passage of London Bridge was contested, with the rebels massing on the south side of the river and the loyalists, partly troops from the Tower led by Lord Scales and Matthew Gough, and partly Londoners disillusioned with Cade, on the north bank. Ferocious fighting began around 9 p.m. on 5 July and went on all night, in Bosch-like scenes of darkness, fire and horror.104 Much of the hand-to-hand fighting took place on the bridge itself, which in the grey light of dawn looked like a charnel house, the struts and gantries on the bridge charred and blackened with smoke and the Thames choked with floating corpses beneath, like a horrific Sargasso Sea of human bodies and body parts. The battle was a close-run thing: the loyalists had the advantage of the arms and materiel from the arsenal at the Tower, but Cade’s men were superior in elan and fighting spirit. By sheer weight of numbers the loyalists eventually forced the rebels back from the northern shore and closed the City gates, but they could make no impression on Cade’s position on the south side of the bridge. In pique and frustration Cade ordered the drawbridge section of the bridge torched.105 By daybreak both sides were exhausted and agreed a truce; no exact count of the casualties was possible but the toll seems to have run into hundreds on both sides; among the fallen was Gough.106 A truce, initially for two hours, was agreed, and in this time the rebellion seems to have fallen apart with amazing suddenness, just as in 1381. The few ministers of the Crown still in London seized the opportunity to offer a general pardon and conveyed the terms to Cade and his council, using priests as go-betweens. It must have been obvious that this was a mere stalling ploy to buy time and that the ministers were not sincere; for one thing they were binding an absent king to terms which he could easily repudiate. It seems that Cade saw all this clearly enough, but the majority of his supporters were against him. Having run out of steam and uncertain of the next step, they grasped eagerly at straws. Pardons were then issued to named individuals over the course of 6–7 July for all transgressions committed before 8 July. Whether through Machiavellianism by the ministers or foolishness on Cade’s part, his supposed pardon was issued in the name of John Mortimer, which allowed the royalists to claim that ‘Jack Cade’ had never been pardoned.107

  While his men drifted away to Kent, apparently satisfied with the government’s worthless promises, Cade led a rump of diehards in an attack on Queensborough Castle near Dartford, but the advantage of numbers had now shifted to the defenders. Cade was now declared a traitor in his own name and a bounty of 1,000 marks (approx. £667) put on his head, with 500 marks reward for the capture of his chief lieutenants. Some of the Kentish men rallied at this manifest sign of government bad faith. A Faversham soapmaker named Robert Spenser tried to head a revival of the revolt, aiming to link up with Cade’s outlaw band; he was quickly caught and was hanged, drawn and quartered. Realising that the game was up, Cade fled in disguise towards Sussex. On 12 July he was intercepted by the new sheriff of Kent, Alexander Iden. In a scrimmage at Heathfield in Sussex, Cade was badly wounded. Captured and due to be conveyed to London for a traitor’s death, Cade evaded the executioner by dying of his wounds on 13 June while on the way back to the capital. His corpse was nonetheless subjected to the usual grisly ritual. He was beheaded at Newgate, his head raised aloft over London Bridge, and the quarters of his body sent to Blackheath, Norwich, Salisbury and Gloucester.108 That was not quite the end of the story. Although the Cade rebellion was largely an affair of London and the Home Counties, there had been sympathetic uprisings in Hampshire, Dorset, Somerset and Wiltshire, which was particularly badly hit by the crisis in the cloth industry and was the domain of the hated Bishop of Salisbury. Kent and Sussex were not truly pacified until the summer of 1451. There was another rising in Kent in August 1450 under William Parmynter, a blacksmith from Kent who took the title ‘Second Captain of Kent’ (Cade had been the first). Parmynter was caught and executed but then, in hydra fashion, a third captain appeared. The third man, John Smyth, who raised his banner in October, was likewise captured and executed.109 There was another five-day rebellion in Kent in April 1456 under a tailor, John Percy, who styled himself John Mortimer in imitation and memory of Cade. Unlike the Cade rising, these later insurrections featured very few rebels of gentry and yeoman rank but were overwhelmingly disturbances by skilled craftsmen and artisans: carpenters, thatchers, smiths, wheelwrights, fletchers, bakers, cloth workers.110

  The parallels between 1381 and 1450 are sometimes almost uncanny both in general features and particular details. Both revolts took place after military humiliation by the French, both were triggered by grievances over taxation and both were centred mainly in south-east England, especially Kent and Essex, though the subsidiary roles played by Yorkshire and East Anglia in 1381 were assumed by the ‘near West Country’ (Hampshire, Dorset, Somerset and Wiltshire) in 1450. In both the treasurer of England lost his head, royal favourites were dragged from the Tower, prisoners released from the Marshalsea. On both occasions the rebel hosts camped on Blackheath and on both occasions the risings collapsed suddenly and mysteriously after seeming unstoppable. On both occasions a distinction was drawn between loyalty to the king himself and an angry attack on his corrupt advisers. On both occasions we can see clearly that the State was not yet the ‘monopolist of violence’ and was indeed amazingly fragile, brittle and vulnerable. Finally, it is not without significance that both risings began in the late spring, during the Whitsun holidays, and coopted the carnival mentality abroad at that season.111 A treacherous monarch was in evidence on both occasions, for Henry VI, while lacking the courage of Richard II, proved just as capable of going back on formal promises made. Although in the immediate aftermath of the rebellion Henry began by making conciliatory noises – on 1 August he ordered a com
mission of oyer and terminer into Kent to investigate the grievances that had triggered the troubles – as soon as calm returned, he wound up this commission and sent the Duke of York to head a punitive expedition into the county. York was supposed to be heading a new commission, but what he mainly did was to hang and burn; significantly he made no distinction between rebels, and it mattered not to him whether those he seized had the worthless general pardon of 7–8 July or not.112 Almost none of those named as exploiters and extortionists in the rebel manifesto received any more than a slap on the wrist. As if to show that the spirit of corruption was still alive and well, the government visited double jeopardy on those who had originally suffered at the hands of Cade and his men. Vast amounts of gold, silver, sapphires, pearls and other precious stones and trinkets had been uplifted by the rebels. Government forces took the recovered property back to the Exchequer in London, but those who had had their property stolen had to pay a premium or ‘handling fee’ to the Exchequer to get it back. One obvious result both of government cynicism and the brutal crushing of the revolt was that when the Yorkist earls rose in 1460 in the Wars of the Roses, south-east England was with them, not as supporters of the White Rose but as helpers in a crusade for good government.113