by Dan Jones
He should also have started to feel extremely uneasy. For there were some important absentees from the rebel ranks. As with the royal party, the rebel party was incomplete. There was no Tyler, no Ball, and no Straw.3 In fact, if Richard could have stepped out and enquired among the Mile End crowd at large, he would have found that this was by no means a representative mob. The most radical rebels were not there. Rather, they had remained in London, lingering around the Tower and keeping a keen eye out for any sign of movement within.
For the commons who had travelled to Mile End, however, this was the moment they had been waiting for. The foremost leaders of those who had made it to Mile End came before Richard, their knees bent in supplication to their king, flags of their loyalty fluttering above the crowd behind them. To them, this must undoubtedly have registered as the greatest moment of their lives. The king could be expected to remain, in the lives of all but the grandest of subjects, an enigmatic totem. So to approach him and to approach with permission to discuss freely with him their place in the world and the course of his reign, was an unimaginable honour.
Richard asked them what they wanted, what they lacked, and why they had come to London. The reply he received was straightforward and heartfelt. It was a request for a countryside charter of justice. They asked him to make them free for ever-themselves, their lands and their heirs. They asked that all the men in the realm of England be made of free condition, and that all those of future generations should live free from the yoke of servitude. They asked, specifically, for a rent limit of 4d per acre, which meant in effect a limit to the financial power of the landlords and an end to the oppressions of cash payments through rents, feudal and semi-feudal fines, through the manor courts, through the royal courts, and most recently through the tax system of royal government. Finally, they asked that no man should be compelled to work except by employment under a regularly reviewed contract.4
In the light of the violence and rising hysteria that had gripped London under the reign of the rural peasants and the rebellious City commons, this was a remarkably lucid and reasonable set of demands. There were no calls for the heads of nobles, nor for any purge of government-all that was requested of the king, in simple but intelligent terms, was a reassurance that the creeping tendency towards a legal form of serfdom should be halted, and that a legal framework protecting the rights to free labour be set up. They took issue not so much with serfdom, but with the threat of serfdom, and the whole principle of the commons of England being bullied by the royal law that ought in fact to have been protecting them. The Mile End peasants gave their king a succinct account of their grievances, and asked for reasonable, limited demands founded on their simple concept of natural justice, but pragmatic enough for consideration in the world they saw around them.
If he was surprised by what the rebels had asked-whether its boldness or its lucidity-Richard did not show it. He was at Mile End not as a true negotiator, but as a lure. Whatever the rebels had demanded Richard would that morning most likely have granted. He and his party had come to Mile End with the whole purpose of buying off a large portion of the crowd by a policy of appeasement. Though it was disconcerting that not all the rebels had vacated the City, it must still have come as a relief that he was not being pressed to agree to anything more radical, unrealistic or deranged.
To reward the commons before him, the king had the rebels arrayed in two long ranks. As they shuffled into order, Richard had it proclaimed to all that he would guarantee their freedom as they requested, and that it should be confirmed by charters secured by the royal seal. If they wanted freedom, all they needed to do was to wait in line and take their new charter of liberties.
If he had ended his Mile End speech with that, Richard would have played his hand perfectly. The revolt, which had threatened utter calamity, would be about to go out with a whimper.
But Richard did not end there. Either drunk on the calming effect his words seemed to have on the rebels, or else feeling an inexperienced negotiator’s urge to push compromise too hard, he told the commons that in addition to the charters, they were all free to go across the realm of England catching traitors, whom they should bring before him to be tried according to due process of law.
In saying this, he undid all the good work that had preceded. It was a damning indictment of the quality of his counsel that he was allowed to offer of his own volition this extraordinary and provocative promise. It was a massive blunder, and by granting the rebels the radical demands he had expected them to make, rather than the relatively conservative demands that he in fact received, he changed the whole character of the revolt. Word quickly spread among the crowd that the king had sanctioned the taking of rebel enemies. Almost instantly, companies began detaching, leaving Mile End to join the vanguard staking out Tower Hill. It was no secret where the ‘traitors’ were holed up, and with royal sanction for their arrest, there was only the Tower drawbridge to save them.
Richard, as he watched the companies detach, dissolving back into their apparent disorder and hollering around word of what had just happened, would have hoped with all his heart that Sudbury and Hales-as well as everyone else who was stuck in the Tower, a group that included his mother and his young cousin Henry of Derby-had managed to board the boats on the Thames. But in truth he had no idea. He had given the rebels a blank charter to storm the Tower; now it was only to be hoped they would find it empty. The royal party set off back for the City, towards their new base of Baynard’s Castle, and all must have prayed that they would not soon be watching the destruction of their former fortress.
THIRTEEN
THE TOWER
A little later the executioners entered crying, ‘Where is that traitor to the kingdom? Where is the despoiler of the people?’ The archbishop was not at all disturbed and replied to their shouts: ‘Good my sons, you have come; behold, I am the archbishop whom you seek, but not a traitor or a despoiler.’ On seeing him, those limbs of Satan laid their impious hands on him and tore him from the Chapel…
THOMAS WALSINGHAM
The Tower of London, Friday, 14 June, 9 a.m.
In the Chapel of St John the Evangelist, the dense scent of incense hung in the air, and the thick stonework was lit irregularly by the flicker of candlelight. Backed by the solemn song of a chorister, Archbishop Sudbury’s voice echoed around the chamber, filling it with the quick, calm patter of Latin devotion.1
This was Sudbury’s second Mass of the day; he had sung his first before the king at sunrise, and later confessed Treasurer Hales and others of the royal party. He would have been tired from a sleepless night of prayer. And he was not alone. Richard and his entourage had left the Tower in a state of profound gloom, as they headed out into the unknown to their showdown with the rebels at Mile End; those left behind faced the dangerous uncertainty of escaping a siege that seemed harder to hold with each hour that passed.
Ever since Wednesday evening, when he had sat, shocked, on the barge to Rotherhithe, looking out upon the throng that bayed for the young king’s approval in executing their archbishop, Sudbury had known that of all the royal party, it was he who faced the greatest danger. Vandalism and destruction had been wreaked on his property and palaces, from Canterbury to Southwark. His name came second only to John of Gaunt’s on the list of traitors to be executed by the rebels-and the experience of having seen it written down when messages were being exchanged with the Kent rebels at Blackheath must have been sickening. It was well known that he and Hales were blamed personally by the rebels for squandering the tax that had been raised to pursue the war with France. This, combined with some latent anticlerical feeling in the crowds that thronged through the streets and suburbs of London, and the total disregard in which they seemed to hold the sanctity of churches when hunting down their victims, must have expelled from Sudbury’s intelligent mind any hope of mercy if he were to be caught.
Now, despite the cool of the chapel, that prospect was loud and very close at hand. The sweaty, dirty,
dangerous cabal of vagabonds strutted about like peacocks on the green swell of Tower Hill, an arrow’s flight away from the place where he now stood and prayed among the wisps of waxy candle smoke. And the ringleader of these tormentors was a man with whom Sudbury was intimately acquainted: John Ball.
Sudbury would not have missed the irony of being imprisoned at Ball’s hands. Ball had dogged Sudbury’s footsteps over his distinguished career, cropping up like a virulent weed in churches, churchyards, markets and highways, travelling the country preaching his dangerous and unorthodox dogma of equality, told through the quasi-mystical language of the peasant oral tradition, which was rich with cryptic allegory and the rhythms of traditional song, and drawing his audience into his web of apostasy. No matter how hard Sudbury had tried to squash him, he had reappeared, not with the intellectual tenacity or the theological sophistication of the troublesome Oxford don John Wyclif, but with a command of popular thought and the powerful ability to aggravate social tension through bogus religious rhetoric and relentless sermonising.
In April, Sudbury had managed to imprison Ball for the third time in fifteen years, excommunicating him for the fourth time and writing to the secular authorities in outrage at Ball’s schismatic and erroneous pronouncements, his heretical depravity, and his poisonous influence as a malevolent shepherd misleading the English flock.2
But now Ball was loose and Sudbury was the quarry. Inside the Tower chapel, the archbishop solemnly finished the Mass and took Holy Communion.
Elsewhere in the Tower, the mood was just as sombre. Those left out of the Mile End party included Treasurer Hales, a number of courtiers most closely associated with Gaunt-including his son Derby-and several politically sensitive royal counsellors, including the widely loathed John Legge, who was charged by the rebels with being the author of the policy of farming out poll tax investigative commissions for the profit of royal favourites.
The composition of the group left in the Tower was informed by two considerations-first, that it would be dangerous and inflammatory for the king to take these provocative targets with him to Mile End, where the sight of their arch-enemies might incite the rebels to clash with the royal party; and second, that the best chance for Sudbury, Hales and the rest to escape was for them to hope they could use Richard’s absence from the Tower as cover for their getaway.
But as the morning had passed, and the uneasy still that Richard had left behind settled over the Tower, it became clear that escape was not an option. Queen Joan had returned from the trip to Mile End and would have reported the sorry news that the rebels were not to be herded as though they were sheep. She would have seen that while a large, ribald party had followed the king out of the Aldgate to Mile End, the most radical elements had remained by the Tower, eyeing the prizes that they knew lay inside. Tyler, Ball and Straw were, presumably, at that moment outside the Tower, heading a band composed of men from villages that had been active in the rebellion since its inception. Lookouts kept close watch on all exits from the Tower-and when movement just after dawn had been spotted on the escape jetty, an old woman with her eyes trained on the river raised such a racket that all hope of immediate escape was lost.
Without a recognised military leader among the Tower party (Salisbury, Knolles and Walworth, the three surest heads, were with the king), morale had plummeted among the 180 or so archers and guards who were left quite literally to hold the fort in the king’s absence. For the last day or so, taunting parties of rebels had camped out on Tower Hill, pointing out their mastery of the capital, and the futility of continuing to hold out against those who had achieved so much so quickly that weekend, and implying that the guards were traitors for protecting enemies of the country. Supplies had dried up, as the rebels enforced an aggressive blockade against the king’s victuals-as much to feed themselves on royal supplies as to inconvenience the defenders of the Tower. The rebels were used to breaking castles and prisons by psychological warfare, rather than with battering rams, and now it seemed that London’s great fortress, which days before had seemed the safest place in the city, was suddenly an island.
As the morning wore on, the threats from across the Tower ditch, a moat that siphoned from the Thames a broad, cold, murky wall of water, became louder and more urgent. Ball’s railing and vitriol had long since taken seed among the assembled rebels, and they could smell blood. Pressing close to the Tower drawbridge, they began to harangue the guards on the gate. Behind the mob on the moat, plumes of smoke and the occasional collapse of burning buildings in the continuing melee would have given the impression that all of London was close to lost-a rumour that was, by this stage, becoming ever more believable. The Tower’s last guards looked out on the wonder and despaired.
Their desperation undid the Tower. It could have been physically held against the rebels, but the guards’ minds were fragile, and a fatal paralysis of the spirit overcame them. When word came back from Mile End that Richard had acquiesced before the demands of the Essex rebels and given his permission for the punishment of traitors, it not only emboldened the besiegers, but broke the hearts of the besieged. The worst fears of those left in the Tower were realised: the king had forsaken them in the name of saving the City. Seemingly without even a show of resistance, the drawbridge came down.
The rebels flocked in. As they passed by the pathetic guards, the archers and war veterans who should have been holding the royal fortress until the bitter end, they tousled their hair and pulled playfully on their beards.3 Gnarled hands holding filthy sticks prodded at the hapless defenders and the gleeful rebels began to run into the bedrooms and cupboards of the Tower. They ran into rooms and bounced on the beds, joking and laughing among themselves as they did so. There was banter with the dejected soldiers, who were invited-with a cheeky smile-to be friends.
At least one party began to force locks on doors that looked as if they might conceal legal repositories; but the main object here was not more records for the bonfire, but living, breathing victims.4
Sheer terror broke out among the inhabitants, as they scrambled for safety. Henry of Derby survived only because a soldier helped conceal him from the invaders. (Derby never forgot this kindness, and years later, when he himself was king, rewarded the soldier that had saved him.) The queen mother, in the company of other ladies of the court, swooned when the ruffians broke in, and was smuggled out to a waiting barge. But others were not so lucky. Hales was found, as was Legge. Derby was fortunate to be hidden, because anyone connected to Gaunt was also captured. But as chaos reigned in the hallways of the Tower, the duty soldiers stood helpless, and the rebels rounded up their traitors with impunity.
In the chapel, Sudbury would have heard the commotion and sensed that his time had come. Yet the devotions continued. As voices echoed around the Tower’s corridors, Sudbury chanted the Commendatio, the Placebo and the Dirige – common medieval prayers for the dead. As the clattering and the thuds of knobbled staves on the thick, bolted doors of the Tower grew louder and closer, he chanted the Seven Psalms-penitential passages that called on God for forgiveness, remission of sins and protection from enemies. And as the rough laughter of the invaders mingled with the screams of those inside the Tower who had been uncovered from their hiding spots and marched out to face the wrath of the crowds assembled on Tower Hill, Sudbury sucked down still more lungfuls of the scented chapel air and began to chant the litany-the long, imploring catalogue of requests for protection, forgiveness and prayer from all the holy saints of the Church.
As he reached the end of this long stream of requests to individual saints, the chapel door flew open, and the commons burst in, accompanied by a minor official who had been intimidated into leading them to the archbishop.
Omnes sancti orate pro nobis,’ were the last words that Sudbury could muster5-‘all the holy saints, pray for us’-as the gang crossed the chapel floor and hustled him through the corridors of the Tower, some with their hands on his hood and his arms, others delivering what threats and bl
ows to his anointed person they could. He was bundled past the raucous crowds that had bullied their way into the inner sanctum of the royal fortress, and out into the daylight.
It was said afterwards that Sudbury argued with his captors-imploring them to accept that he was no traitor, and no plunderer, but their archbishop. What sin had he committed? he asked. What good could come of destroying their prelate? He told them that such a deed would bring down nothing but the wrath of God and the Pope, and would lead to an interdict over the whole of England.6
But his arguments flew up and over the rebels like dust in the morning breeze. Sudbury would have realised that his fate was sealed. His hooded head bowed, he was shoved at the head of a train of helpless victims to the top of Tower Hill. He saw Hales, Legge, and one of Gaunt’s servants lined up and ready to face the same doom.
It is just possible that Sudbury remembered Psalm 42, a popular beginning to the mass, and one that no doubt he had had cause to recite regularly, and perhaps even on that very day:
