The Road Not Taken Read online

  Envoys flitted between Tyler and Richard II, now at St Paul’s, where his thirty or so clerks were acting as a kind of document factory, churning out copies of the charter of liberties granted by the king that morning at Mile End. Large numbers of the rebels began returning home, secure in their naive belief that they had now got all they fought for; this was particularly a characteristic of the Essex men. Led by Tyler, the Kent rebels were made of sterner stuff; they were determined to nail the king down to the specific commitments of the second manifesto in such a way that he could not later rescind them.34 It may have been when he finally decided that the rebels could not simply be tricked into unilateral surrender that Richard II decided to use force. Walworth, always the hard liner, had hitherto been marginalised but now he came to the fore as the king’s prime adviser. The old argument by Salisbury and others that force would precipitate a general rising in London had already been overtaken by events: London was in flames anyway. If Tyler was not stopped now, Walworth and the king reasoned, they might just as well ride away to Windsor, skulk there and await the tide of events.35 The famous cunning of the Plantagenets now came to the fore. Walworth laid secret plans for Knolles to have his London-based levies at the ready, waiting for a signal. Richard meanwhile would take 200 men-at-arms to meet the rebels at Smithfield Square, where they would all be wearing concealed weapons while pretending to be attending a peaceful parley. It was clear that the royal party had a premeditated plan to assassinate Tyler, doubtless anticipating the nineteteenth-century colonial cliché, whereby if you want to panic the natives you should first kill their leader. Smithfield, on the other hand, was an artfully chosen location. It was a big open space, which would allow large numbers of rebels to assemble there, allaying all fears of treachery. On the other hand, if fighting broke out, the fact that Smithfield was a contained space, with St Bartholomew’s hospital, the walls of Charterhouse and the waters of the river Holborn and Faggleswell Brook forming natural boundaries, made it possible for a numerically inferior force to prevail. It has been well said that Richard II and Walworth were supremely cunning and that bold, ruthless and calculating strategic planning lay behind the choice of Smithfield’.36

  On the morning of the 15th Richard II went to pray in Westminster Abbey at the shrine of Edward the Confessor, doubtless to implore the saint-king to give celestial endorsement for the egregious treachery he and Walworth planned. If Froissart is to be believed, he appeared to dither, as if uncertain what to do next, presumably to allay any suspicions from Tyler’s spies who might be watching him. He then followed an indirect and zigzag path from Westminster to Smithfield, already a meat market and a place of slaughter in general, infamous for the hanging, drawing and quartering of William Wallace nearly a hundred years earlier.37 Ostensibly meeting the rebels for peaceful negotiations, all Richard’s 200 men were secretly carrying weapons under their cloaks; Walworth and others wore armour under their finery. An overconfident Tyler approached the rendezvous with aplomb, apparently unaware that the leaders of the jacquerie had been lured to a similar parley and then slaughtered. If we, again, use Froissart as a guide, we find Tyler blithe and joking, warning his men that if there was any fighting they must take the king alive.38 He and his men were drawn up on the western side of Smithfield Square, with the king and his men on the eastern side and the middle space clear. Walworth himself acted as the royal herald and in a loud voice summoned ‘Wat Tyler of Maidstone’ to come forward. What followed is decribed only in the chronicles, all of which were violently hostile to the rebels; the verbatim dialogue sometimes quoted has therefore to be taken with a pinch of salt, but none of the reported exchanges strain credibility. Tyler rode forward with just one companion. Displaying his horsemanship, he dismounted one-handed from his charger, made a perfunctory obeisance to the king, then lunged forward and shook his hand as if he were a comrade. It seems that he half regretted the initial gesture of deference and remedied it by overfamiliarity. He then attempted to patronise the monarch, pointing out the serried ranks of his host and saying they owed him absolute obedience, all the time playing with his dagger and tossing it from one hand to the other. ‘Brother, be of good comfort, for you shall have, in a fortnight that is to come, forty thousand more commons than you have at present, and we shall be good companions.’39

  Richard ignored the boast and asked why, now that the rebels had their charters, they did not go back to their homes. Tyler replied that he had not received a satisfactory answer to the demands contained in the second manifesto. Richard answered that the rebels could have all they desired, ‘saving only the regalities of the crown’.40 Rightly reading this as an evasion, a kind of Jesuitical reservation avant la lettre, Tyler may have acted foolishly. We have to remember that the chroniclers were determined to present the events of 15 June as pure accident and not the results of a carefully laid conspiracy. At any rate, it is said that Tyler then asked for a jug of water, which he swilled around his mouth and then spat out in front of the king. He then called for a jug of ale and took a huge swig, before climbing on his horse without being dismissed by his sovereign.41 If this is what really happened, then it provided Walworth with exactly the pretext he needed. He rode forward to the king and announced that he was arresting Tyler for contumacious behaviour in the presence of his king and lord. Just to make sure Tyler took the bait, he had one of his squires cry out that Tyler was the greatest highway robber in the land, little more than a common thief.42 One version is that the squire was an old enemy of Tyler’s who had crossed swords with him before. In any event the accusation was rich coming from Walworth, who had made much of his money from brothel-keeping. Yet the provocation worked perfectly. Tyler ordered his valet to arrest the insulting miscreant. The valet pushed his horse into the royal retinue, whereat Walworth cried out that he was arresting the valet also. Infuriated, Tyler lashed out at Walworth, but his dagger was blunted by the chainmail worn by the mayor under his robe. Walworth in turn drew his sword and smote Tyler twice, on the head and shoulders.43 A royal valet, Sir Ralph Standish, presumably primed for the occasion, rode forward and finished Tyler off with a mortal blow.44 The dying Tyler wheeled his horse and galloped back towards the rebel lines but fell from his steed when just eighty yards from their ranks and collapsed in a heap in the empty space in the middle of the square. Walworth’s grand stratagem had worked perfectly.45

  This was the moment when the rebels should have taken immediate revenge and loosed a shower of arrows. Displaying genuine courage, Richard II rode forward up to the rebels and defied them to kill their king. All Tyler’s preaching about the innocence of the king as against the guilt of his counsellors now worked against his men. They hesitated, put up their bows, and seemed at a loss what to do next. Seizing the moment, Richard cried out that if they wanted justice they should follow him at once to Clerkenwell Fields, a few hundred yards to the north.46 Instead of shooting him down and then massacring his men-at-arms, the rebels acted like sheep and trooped meekly behind him. In vain the aldermen Sibley and Horne tried to dissuade them from throwing in the towel. For about an hour Richard stalled valiantly, pretending to discuss the exact wording of the charters, claiming not to understand certain clauses. Meanwhile Walworth put into action the second part of his grand plan. First he sought out the comatose Tyler, who had been carried, half-dead, into the hospital of St Bartholomew. Walworth and his men dragged the rebel leader from his deathbed and beheaded him; Tyler may already have been dead when the axe fell.47 Then Walworth raced back to London to link up with Sir Robert Knolles and the loyalist battalion he had been raising. Suddenly, as Richard continued his charade with the rebel negotiators, the insurgents were alarmed to see a large force of the king’s men approaching. Walworth completed their demoralisation by unwrapping Tyler’s severed head and rolling it in front of them. Their spirits broken and their nerves cracked as if by sorcery, the benighted rebels fell to their knees and begged for mercy from the king.48 Walworth and the hawks wanted an immediate bloodbath b
ut Richard refused, saying that his subjects, bamboozled by evil men, had acted towards him in good faith. He announced that the rebels should depart immediately to their homes. Bowed and crestfallen, they began to drift away from the scenes where they had been the masters just hours before. Soon there was a mass exodus in the direction of Kent.49 Walworth retrieved Tyler’s head and brought it to the king, who ordered that it should be set up on London Bridge to replace Sudbury’s. To show his gratitude for the day’s work, he knighted Walworth on the spot, then bestowed the same honour on the other hard liners; Brembre, Philipot and Robert Launde.50

  The collapse of the 1381 rebellion in London as though by magic was an astonishing phenomenon, to which historians have paid insufficient attention. Many questions remain without answers. Why was Tyler so over-confident and why did he go to the face-to-face meeting with the king without an adequate bodyguard? Why did he allow the king to ride just a few yards ahead of his troops while Tyler galloped across the width of Smithfield? Why did he not suspect treachery? Even if the rebels did not know about the dismal precedent for such talks in the French jacquerie, mere prudence and common sense indicated that they should have been on their guard. Most of all, why did the rebels apparently have no contingency plans in the event of Tyler’s demise, through accident or treachery? Was rebel intelligence and staffwork so bad that no one picked up on the ominous developments in London, where Knolles was rallying a large force of loyalists? We know little about rebel dispositions for dealing with a counter-attack, other than that Tyler at one point sent 200 men north to apprehend John of Gaunt. Since Gaunt commanded an entire army on the Scottish borders, this initiative seems ludicrous.51 Had the ease with which the rebels took London engendered a fatal sense that the Plantagenet regime was in general a paper tiger? Had the drift homeward of the Essex rebels on the 14th been a more serious drain on rebel manpower than usually supposed, so that the loyalists calculated they might be able to get away with their treachery? If this was the case, what can we deduce about rebel behaviour? That food shortages were much more serious than anyone has imagined, so that Tyler was left with a minimal force on the 15th? Or had there been dissension in the rebel councils, possibly over the mishandling of the first manifesto? Does the absence of any mention of Jack Straw or John Ball on the 15th mean that the rebels had already splintered into rival factions?52

  Whatever answer we give to these questions, the immediate sequel shows clearly enough the deep character of Richard II. Reacting with the viciousness that always characterises elites that have had a narrow squeak in a revolutionary situation, he gave Walworth and his acolytes (Knolles, Brembre, Philipot and Launde) quasi-dictatorial powers to seek out and punish all rebels within a seventy-mile radius of London, giving them carte blanche to behead, mutilate and torture as they saw fit. Doubtless, Richard’s anger increased as he reflected on the risks he had run, for it is observable in human beings that the true emotional reaction to brushes with death comes some time afterwards. Certainly, the king’s orders breathe cold vengeance and smack of what one observer has called ‘innate Plantagenet vindictiveness’.53 Walworth acted with notable brutality in London. Fleming survivors of the anti-foreigner pogroms, including women, were given the privilege of personally executing rebels who had beheaded their kinfolk (turning ‘an eye for an eye’ into ‘a head for a head’ as decapitation was the preferred method).54 It is reported that some rebels in London, unaware of the dramatic events in Smithfield, were still pillaging and looting when Walworth’s death squads came upon them.55 On 20 June Richard issued commissions for the punishment of rebels nationwide, and appointed Robert Tresilian, a hanging judge, as chief justice.56 The other rebel leaders were of course marked men. Jack Straw was caught and beheaded without trial while trying to escape to the north. In the case of John Ball, it was decided that a show trial would be efficacious for lancing the boil of lingering rebellion. Ball was confronted with ‘evidence’ supposedly taken from Straw just before his execution, which accused Tyler of wanting to keep the king as a captive, a tame puppet he would tote around England and use to issue decrees that would legitimate Tyler’s wishes; also on the charge sheet were Tyler’s alleged plans to seize all Church property, abolish all clergy save mendicant orders, execute all magnates and finally, when all the oligarchic dross had been cleared out, kill the king himself.57 These ‘true confessions’ were of course a tissue of nonsense, the most obvious black propaganda by the victors. Yet the elite went through the forms of law. Ball was tried before Tresilian in St Albans and condemned, but William Courtenay, Bishop of London, secured a stay of execution to see if Ball would repent of his ‘sins’. To his great credit, he refused. When Ball had been teased and tormented enough he too was executed, but this time there was no ‘merciful’ beheading such as had been visited on Straw. He was consigned to the full horrors of a traitor’s death, being hanged, drawn and quartered on 15 July.58 The two most amazing survivors of the king’s purge were Farringdon and Horne, who were imprisoned for eighteen months and then released.59

  Richard based himself on the Herts/Essex border to oversee the work of pacification. Within a week of the drama of Smithfield the Earl of Buckingham landed with his army, having been recalled urgently from Portugal; had Tyler prevailed at Smithfield, a genuine civil war would have been the result. Much of the repression in the early days of the Walworth despotism was directed against the Kent rebels (and Richard sent Thomas Holland into Kent itself for mopping-up operations), but the men of Essex soon came to repent of their hasty departure on 14 July and tried to regroup. They began by sending envoys to Richard, then at Waltham, to claim the liberties promised at Mile End and apparently confirmed at Smithfield. Richard utterly repudiated all his promises on the grounds that they had been made under duress. So hard line was the mood that his councillors wanted him to execute the envoys, but he decided to grant them the traditional rights of safe conduct granted to heralds and emissaries.60 But he did send them back with a chilling message, showing clearly that he had never meant a word of his previous pledges:

  Give this message to your colleagues from the king. Villeins you are and villeins you will remain; in permanent bondage, not as it was before, but incomparably harsher … While by God’s grace we rule over this kingdom, we shall strive … to keep you in subjection, to such a degree that the suffering of your servitude may serve as an example to posterity, and that now and in future men like you may ever have before your eyes your present misery as something to contemplate, a reason for cursing you and for fearing to perpetuate crimes like yours.61

  In despair the Essex rebels resolved to make a stand against Buckingham at Rettenden near Billericay. But this time they were up against the heavy cavalry originally destined to tear the heart out of the King of Spain. Buckingham, joined by the northern magnate Lord Thomas Percy, sent his heavy cavalry against entrenched rebel positions and breached them easily. A colossal slaughter ensued, with more than 100 rebel corpses counted after the brief battle.62

  That was effectively the end of the rising in London and the Home Counties. Meanwhile the virus of rebellion had spread elsewhere in the nation. There were insurrections also in the north-east of England, at York, Beverley and Scarborough, and in East Anglia and neighbouring counties, with Norwich, Ely, Peterborough, Cambridge, Bury St Edmunds, Yarmouth, Northampton, Dunstable and St Albans particularly to the fore. As in the English Civil War 260 years later, the nation seemed split between a pro-rebel east and a pro-loyalist west, though it is true that there were serious enough risings at Winchester and Bridgwater, albeit isolated from the rebel mainstream. These urban risings can in turn be subdivided in various ways: some being struggles of would-be boroughs against abbots who were feudal superiors, some more properly class warfare between oligarchs and have-nots; others being exclusively urban phenomena (York, Winchester, Beverley, Scarborough) contrasted with the ‘mixed’ rebellions in St Albans, Bury St Edmunds and Cambridge, where townsmen made common cause with peasants and vill
agers.63 There has always been a prevailing belief that in the fourteenth century the agrarian society of northern England was stable, immune to the ‘contagion’ of rebellion. Dubious as this proposition is, it is in any case irrelevant, for the great conflicts in Yorkshire were urban. York, Beverley and Scarborough were regarded by Richard II’s advisers as three of the five most dangerous hotspots in the north (Hull and Newcastle were the others).64 Here urban discontent was a function of populousness, size and wealth – particularly the wealth created by overseas trade. In York and Beverley much of the conflict was ‘horizontal’ – the ‘in’ members of a mercantile elite against the ‘outs’. Craft guilds played no significant part in the turbulence in these towns in 1381. Scarborough was the most interesting case, for here we can discern the few with vast fortunes pitted against the craftsmen and retailers who had not fared so well from the burgeoning foreign trade.65 Additionally, Scarborough exhibited the extreme volatility associated with a town that felt itself to be vulnerable and isolated militarily. Dominated by a royal castle, it was an obvious target for invading Scots, especially as it was the only port between the Humber and the Tyne. Laid waste by the Scots in 1378, Scarborough fused the anger it felt at lack of protection from the Plantagenet elite with a concomitant fury against illegal extortions by bailiffs and royal officials.66 Though easily enough suppressed in the aftermath of Tyler’s failure in London, the rising in Scarborough in June 1381 brought 500 men out onto the streets. It was both a very serious rising and a genuine mass movement.67