by Jones, Nigel
In the heart of the Tower, the Royal Council spent the short summer night in anxious session. It was split between hawks and doves. The hardliners, led by London’s tough-minded lord mayor, William Walworth, were all for taking the Tower’s garrison out on a sortie and scattering their ill-armed besiegers while they were dead to the world. Although the peasants were numerous, Walworth argued, few had weapons, many were too drunk to stand, and the rest would be sleeping off their bloody binge. Even outnumbered by some fifty to one, the Tower’s professional soldiers would easily defeat this scum of the earth.
The doves were represented by the old Earl of Salisbury, the council’s senior member. He advised the king to appease the mob ‘with fine words’, and buy time by pretending to grant their requests. Richard, wise beyond his fourteen years, decided to adopt this course. He would ride out to confront the mob – but only to draw them out of London so that the hated ministers, quivering inside the Tower, could escape. Any promises extracted from him under duress would be empty words. The urgent thing was to get the peasant mob out of London, disperse them – then deal with them at leisure.
At daybreak on Friday 14 June, after hearing morning Mass, the king went up to a perch on the Tower’s eastern wall. Shouting over the cacophony of yells from the slowly stirring rebel host, he agreed to meet them – so long as they promised to go home afterwards. In the meantime, added Richard, he was issuing a general pardon ‘for all manner of trespasses and misprisions and felonies done up to this hour’. To match his words, Richard flourished a parchment with the promised pardon and affixed the royal seal to the document in full sight of the mob. A few minutes later, the great gates of the Tower swung open and the king, with a knot of his more courageous courtiers, rode out. It was an indisputably brave thing for the boy to have done – the desperate and still-drunken mob could have torn him to pieces on the spot. But, miraculously, they did not.
Awestruck, most of the mob followed the slight figure of the king as he rode eastwards out of the city to the fields known as Mile End. The courtiers around Richard were jeered all the way through the city wall at Aldgate to the open country beyond. But some of Tyler’s followers – probably including Wat himself, along with Ball and Straw – hung back. As the Tower’s guards attempted to close the fortress’s heavy gates after readmitting Joan, the queen mother – who had tried to accompany her son in a wagon, but turned back because of the sheer press of people in the streets – the peasants swept the sentries aside and stormed into the fortress. Their hoarse cries of triumph as they insolently ruffled the hair and tugged the beards of the bewildered sentries echoed around the ancient walls. For the first time since its construction four centuries before, London’s pre-eminent castle and royal palace was in hostile hands.
The rebels rampaged through the Tower, smashing locked doors, helping themselves to food and drink, wrecking and looting as they went. Then, on the first floor of the White Tower, ignoring the sanctuary of the church, they burst into the Romanesque splendour of St John’s Chapel. Here they found the most hated men in the kingdom huddled in prayer. Anticipating their likely fate as they heard the raucous cries of the approaching mob, Archbishop Simon Sudbury had held a short service, shriving the sins of his terrified companions. Then the chapel door burst open, and their ragged enemies, stinking of blood, sweat and drink, were upon them.
With chilling roars of vengeance, the peasants made good the threats they had uttered to Sudbury’s monks at Canterbury. The archbishop just had time to gasp the brief prayer ‘Omnes sancti orate pro nobis’ (‘All the Holy saints protest us’). Then the old man – along with the equally detested treasurer Sir John Hales, tax commissioner John Legge, and William Appleton, personal physician to John of Gaunt – was roughly dragged out of the chapel, borne in savage triumph through the Tower’s gates and up the slope of Tower Hill. Luckily for him, the detested John of Gaunt’s eldest son and heir, young Henry Bolingbroke, Earl of Derby, and a cousin and almost exact contemporary of King Richard, who was also in the Tower, was hidden by one of his father’s retainers, John Ferrour of Southwark – an act of mercy that would have momentous if unintended consequences for the future Henry IV and English history, – and dire ones for Richard himself.
A log was laid on Tower Hill – and the luckless quartet from the chapel became the first of 125 people to be executed in the Tower’s shadow over the next 400 years. Archbishop Sudbury was first to suffer. With Christian charity he forgave the amateur executioner before stretching his neck on the block. Nervous and inexperienced, his killer bungled the blow. ‘Aha!’ cried the stricken archbishop, his hand rising instinctively to the gaping wound on his neck. ‘It is the hand of God.’ Without waiting for the cleric to remove his hand, the swordsman struck again, severing Sudbury’s fingers. Still the archbishop lived, collapsing on the ground. It took a total of eight clumsy strokes delivered to his head, neck and shoulders before death mercifully ensued and the archbishop’s head rolled free. Their bloodlust unslaked, the murderers took the mangled head, nailed it inside his clerical mitre, stuck it on a pole and set it up on London Bridge – the traditional display case for traitors’ skulls. After watching this horrifying spectacle, Hales, Legge and Appleton were brutally dispatched in their turn.
Meanwhile, similar scenes of horror continued inside the Tower. In the royal palace, the king’s bedchamber was vandalised and then, in an inner sanctum, the mob discovered the king’s mother: Joan, the first Princess of Wales, once a beauty so alluring that she was known as the Fair Maid of Kent, but now grown so obese that she waddled rather than walked. Reputed to be the damsel whose dropped garter inspired her father-in-law Edward III to found the noblest order of chivalry, Joan at fifty-one, despite her corpulence, was still the embodiment of refinement and female delicacy.
Not that this deterred Wat’s army of drunken peasants. They crowded into the chamber where Joan lay in bed surrounded by her terrified and weeping ladies. Tapestries were torn from the walls, coverlets were stripped from the queen mother’s bed, and lewd threats were uttered. One of Joan’s ladies was raped, and the same fate appeared to await Joan herself. The peasants, however, contented themselves with a few forced snatched kisses. Their beery breath and rough embraces made the queen mother faint away, before they trailed out of the room. For fear that they would return, Joan, still swooning, was disguised in rough commoners’ clothes, hustled out of the Tower and into a barge which rowed her upriver to the safety of Baynard’s Castle.
Knowing nothing of these bloody events unfolding back at the Tower, Richard spent the day haggling with the peasants, granting demand after demand for an amelioration of their conditions – a freeze on rents, an end to court fines for rent arrears, properly negotiated work contracts – with a show of reluctance, stringing out the negotiations in the hope that the crowds would weary and go home. Finally, some 40,000 rebels – mainly Essex men – turned homewards, some carrying the pardons which the king had granted them. A weary but relieved Richard and his courtiers headed back towards the Tower. They were halfway there when they were met by a herald who blurted out the terrible news of the murders and mayhem that had taken place in their absence. The messenger did not know what had become of the king’s mother, but it was clear that the Tower was an unsafe destination. They made instead for the Royal Wardrobe office at Blackfriars which was still in loyal hands.
Arriving there, Richard was relieved to learn that his mother was alive. Hearing the details of her near-death experience, and the confirmation that his senior ministers had been brutally murdered, he hardened his resolve to deal with their murderers in the only language they understood. Having seen that his appeasement had merely led to more bloody anarchy, the young king was now ready to listen to the hard-line William Walworth. Richard’s attempts to kill the revolt by kindness had failed, Walworth argued. More concessions would merely whet the rebels’ thirst for blood. If they carried on like this, they too would share the fate of the victims at the Tower. It was time f
or resolute action.
Richard and his courtiers again agreed to parley with Tyler the next day. This time the meeting place was to be Smithfield, the open space north of London where horses were traded and cattle penned and slaughtered. Smithfield had also witnessed the bloody evisceration of ‘traitors’ like William Wallace: it was an appropriate setting for the climactic act of violence in the Peasants’ Revolt. Saturday 15 June dawned hot and sultry. The king waited until the heat of the day had passed at 5 p.m. before riding out again to meet the mob, pausing en route to say his prayers at Westminster Abbey. He was accompanied by a retinue of around 200 knights, pages and foot soldiers, led by a grimly determined Walworth. Richard, his slight figure disappearing inside a long gown trimmed with ermine, arrived at Smithfield where Tyler and around 20,000 followers awaited him.
Tyler’s two days as uncrowned king of London had swelled him to foolish arrogance. In his sweaty pomp he rode up alone to confront Richard. Brandishing a dagger, he grabbed the monarch’s hand, insolently addressing him as ‘Brother King’. Tyler reeled off a list of new demands, each more outrageous than the last. They included the abolition of all ranks of nobility; the stripping from the former lords of their lands and goods; the confiscation of Church land and property, and the reduction of bishops from princes of the Church to the status of poor, wandering priests like John Ball. It was a redprint for social revolution. In Tyler’s primitive communist state, only Richard would be left as titular king, while real power would lie with Wat and his men. Richard replied quietly that all reasonable demands would be granted – providing the peasants now returned to their villages.
There followed a tense pause, as brooding as the torrid afternoon. Tyler demanded a jug of beer. He quaffed a mouthful, before coarsely spitting it on the ground in front of the king – itself an act of unpardonable lese-majesty in the eyes of the horrified courtiers. Then the tension suddenly snapped. Turning to the king’s personal page, the peasant leader demanded that he hand over the ceremonial Great Sword of State that he carried, since in future he, Wat Tyler, would be wielding the state’s power. Boldly, the page indignantly refused: the sword was the king’s property, he declared, and Tyler was not fit to hold it since he was ‘only a villein’. Enraged, Tyler stood in his stirrups and, waving his dagger over his head, vowed that he would not eat until he had the page’s head on a platter. This was the moment that the lord mayor had been waiting for. Walworth spurred his horse forward.
Shouting that Tyler was a ‘stinking wretch’, Walworth pushed between the peasant chief and the king. Tyler aimed his dagger at the mayor’s chest. The blow was deflected with a clang, since under his robes Walworth had taken the precaution of donning a breastplate. Now it was his turn to strike. Drawing his short sword, the mayor hit Tyler full in the forehead with the pommel, following up with a slashing blow across the rebel’s neck. Dropping his dagger, Tyler reeled back, grabbing instinctively at his bleeding neck. Seizing the moment, another courtier, Sir Ralph Standish, rode up and drove his sword deep into Tyler’s guts. Groaning, the peasant lord slid from his horse and collapsed in a bloody heap.
This was the moment of supreme danger for Richard. At the sight of their leader writhing on the ground, the peasants started forward with a collective roar of rage, clearly intent on killing the king and all who rode with him. Richard was equal to the peril. He fearlessly forced his horse forward, piping out, ‘Sirs, would you kill your king? I am your rightful captain, and I will be your leader. Let all those who love me, follow me.’ Quite alone, Richard rode up to and through the mob, which parted like the biblical Red Sea before the small figure in his royal robe. The king led them north into the open countryside called Clerkenwell Fields, and there, after again promising to pardon their rebellion and address their grievances, he left them – returning to the Tower where Walworth was already rallying a small contingent of troops and frightened Londoners. Returning to Smithfield with this armed following, Walworth’s first concern was to ensure that Tyler was dead. To his horror, he learned that the ruffian still lived. Tyler had been taken to the hospital of the nearby Priory of St Bartholemew. Mercilessly, Walworth had the dying man dragged from his bed, taken out to Smithfield, and beheaded.
Miraculously, this bloody climax marked the end of the uprising. Wat Tyler’s dream of a peasants’ paradise died with him. Without their charismatic leader, the fearsome host of peasants meekly returned to their homes and villages to await the inevitable royal retribution. It was not long in coming. In contrast to his honeyed words and the promises made at Mile End and Smithfield, Richard now proclaimed to the peasants, ‘Serfs ye are, and serfs ye shall remain.’ Tyler’s head replaced that of Sudbury on the spikes topping London Bridge. Some 150 other rebels, including Ball and Straw, were hunted down and paid the full penalty for their revolt. The social order of king, lords and commons which had been so briefly and brutally turned topsy-turvy was restored. But the fallibility of monarchy – in the form of the frail young monarch himself – had been rudely paraded for all to see, and neither peasant nor king would ever forget it.
Sadly, the courage and maturity displayed by Richard in the face of the revolting peasants deserted him on the short journey from adolescence to adulthood. Only seven years separated the uprising from the second great crisis of Richard’s reign – the Lords Appellant revolt – but this time the wisdom and bravery that the young king had shown towards his humblest subjects was replaced by purblind arrogance and vicious spite towards his own noble near-equals. Only the king’s cunning and deceit remained as his hallmark. And once again, as in the third climactic crisis of the reign – Richard’s forced abdication – the crisis played out at the Tower of London.
In 1382, the year after the Peasants’ Revolt, Richard married Anne of Bohemia, a daughter of the Holy Roman Emperor Charles. Anne was a gentle, fragile creature described by one observer as ‘a little scrap of humanity’. The young couple, despite being married for twelve years, never procreated, and there were rumours that the effete Richard shared the sexual tastes of his great-grandfather Edward II. The couple divided their time between the royal residences at Westminster and Windsor, the palaces of Eltham and Sheen, and the Tower, where Richard spared no expense in refurbishing the royal apartments after the damage caused by the invading peasants.
He installed 105 square feet of expensive stained glass in the Tower’s palace, each pane painted with the royal coat of arms and the fleur-de-lys symbol which Edward III had adopted from France after his victory at Crécy. Richard had floor tiles laid depicting heraldic leopards – probably inspired by the animals in the Tower’s menagerie – and his own favourite emblem, the white hart, with murals of popinjays worked in gold and vermilion. Certainly, there was more of the arty than the hearty in Richard’s kingship.
After the skill he had shown in turning the tables on the peasants, at first there were few to restrain Richard when he began to display the familiar narcissistic qualities of a bad king: from overspending on costly clothes and furniture, to heaping favours on his chosen favourites and ignoring the advice of wiser heads. His own head turned by his success in outwitting the peasants, Richard nurtured furious resentments against his ageing uncles, John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster, and Thomas of Woodstock, Duke of Gloucester, who ruled as de facto regents during his minority. The king began to build a younger faction of his own led by Robert de Vere, Earl of Oxford.
By 1386, resentment of this upstart clique had called forth the organised opposition of five senior peers dubbed the Lords Appellant. They included Richard’s cousin and contemporary Henry Bolingbroke, Earl of Derby, son of John of Gaunt. The other appellants were the king’s uncle, the Duke of Gloucester; Thomas Beauchamp, Earl of Warwick; Thomas Mowbray, Earl of Nottingham, and Richard FitzAlan, Earl of Arundel.
In November 1387 the appellants accused five royal favourites of high treason. Four of them fled in fear of their lives, but the fifth – Robert de Vere – escaped to his own estates in the royalist coun
ty of Cheshire, where he gathered an army of 5,000 men. De Vere marched south in mid-December, but the appellants, led by Gloucester and Bolingbroke, trapped him at Radcote Bridge, west of Oxford, on 20 December. Throwing off his armour, de Vere escaped, leaving his adoring king defenceless in London. Richard made for the fortress that had given him sanctuary from the marauding peasants: the Tower. He celebrated Christmas there, while the appellants mustered their forces outside the city, and crowds of hostile Londoners, sensing the royal weakness, gathered on Tower Hill just as the peasants had done in 1381.
In January 1388 Richard was compelled to meet the triumphant Lords Appellant in the newly refurbished throne room of his palace in the Tower. Mistrusting their deceitful monarch, the lords insisted that he send them the Tower’s keys ahead of the meeting, lest he try and trap them inside. Eventually, Richard received them in ‘a pavilion richly arrayed’. The angry shouts of the crowd outside demanding the dismissal of the hated favourites could be clearly heard even through those thick walls, uncomfortably reminding the king of the humiliating peasant siege he had suffered here seven years before. Richard was again presented with a stark choice: either agree to the appellants’ demands or be deposed. As in 1381, he played for time, awaiting the right moment to strike back at his enemies.
Richard’s friends paid the price. A special session of parliament convened by Gloucester became known as the ‘Merciless Parliament’ for the savage sentences meted out to the king’s closest associates. The most prominent victims were Sir Robert Tresilian, the king’s Chief Justice; and Sir Nicholas Brembre, Lord Mayor of London, who were both executed. But the one closest to Richard’s heart was Sir Simon de Burley, his beloved boyhood tutor who had carried Richard on his shoulders at his coronation. The low-born Burley had excited the nobles’ resentment when he was made constable of the great castles of Windsor and Dover as a mark of Richard’s favour.
