A Radical History Of Britain

by Edward Vallance

  The King’s campaign seemed to embolden the Kentish rebels and perhaps encouraged others in neighbouring counties to join them. In a striking development, on 19 June some of the King’s own retainers and lords encamped on Blackheath were heard to suggest that Cade had a legitimate cause, and threatened to go over to the rebels’ side unless something was done about Lord Saye and his circle. The King appeared to realise that he could not hope to suppress the rebellion without acting against these ministers. An order was given to Henry Holland to detain James Fiennes, Lord Saye, in the Tower, and it was proclaimed that all the named ‘traitors’ should be taken, wherever they might be found. Yet it was clear that the King had made this proclamation under duress. Shortly afterwards, Henry attempted to engineer Saye’s escape, but Holland, as constable of the Tower, refused to release his prisoner. Following this open defiance of the royal will, Henry decided to leave London, setting out on 25 June, in spite of desperate pleas from the Lord Mayor to stay. Abandoning his wife Margaret of Anjou, Henry called first at Berkhamsted Castle in Hertfordshire and from there went on to Kenilworth in Warwickshire, the safest remaining royal castle. His capital and his queen were left to their fate.

  Elsewhere in the South of England, the campaign against the ‘traitors’ about the King continued. On 29 June the rebels captured William Aiscough, Bishop of Salisbury, at Edington in Wiltshire, while he celebrated mass in the local church. The Bishop was deeply disliked: he was widely held responsible for the unpopular marriage of Henry to Margaret. He was dragged to a hill, hacked to death and his corpse defiled. It was probably at this time that Cade reappeared on Blackheath, accompanied, it was reported, by a ‘gret Power of Men of Armes and Archiers Arraised’. Some of his men were on horseback. Sir John Falstof’s servant John Payn rode out to the rebels, with instructions to obtain a copy of their articles of petition.

  Payn would have been killed as a traitor – the rebels viewed his master as partly responsible for the military failure in France – but for the intervention of Robert Poynings, sword-bearer and carver to Cade. The petition that Payn took away with him was, in the words of Jack Cade’s foremost historian Isabel Harvey, ‘couched in the language … of reasonable, responsible men, not rebels’.7 The petitioners expressed their concern about the King’s relationship with his commons and the manner in which this relationship had been destroyed by the circle of ‘false traytours’. The King needed to come to his senses, ‘ffor his lordez ern lost, his marchundize is lost, his comyns destroyed, the see is lost, frraunse [France] is lost, himself so pore that he may not [pay] for his mete or drynk; he oweth more than evur dyd kynge in Inglond’.8 Cade was now being fêted like a noble himself. The town of Lydd on the Kent coast sent him an entire porpoise, the food of aristocrats and worth as much as a brace of swans.

  When July came, Cade led his men into Southwark, where they took up lodgings in inns and hostelries and quite possibly in private houses too. Then the rebels began looting. John Payn had been abandoned in Southwark when his master fled to the Tower. Although the servant managed to prevent the rebels from burning down Falstof’s house, he was unable to save his own belongings. The brigandine and the gown he was wearing were torn from his back and his chest ransacked of its valuables. As their numbers swelled, Cade struggled to keep control of his men. He had already had to have one of his under-captains, a man called Parys, executed at Blackheath for disciplinary reasons. In Southwark Cade’s followers also robbed one Lawrence Hope, a yeoman from Molasshe in Kent, as well as an unidentified Southwark man from whom they took two horses worth a hundred shillings, and a bag of money.

  On 3 July, having first threatened to torch the whole bridge (and the rest of the City too), Cade cut the ropes of the drawbridge on London Bridge’s southern end so that it might not be drawn up again and acquired the keys of the gate that blocked his path beyond the drawbridge. Bedecked in improvised regalia of gilt spurs and a blue velvet coat furred with sable (stripped from one of the slain Staffords), a drawn sword in his hand and with another borne before him in noble fashion, he then led his men into the City, riding at the head of his army across the bridge from Southwark. Orders issued by Cade demanding discipline from his men did little good, as the rebels set about looting the house of Philip Malpas, a London alderman. Nonetheless, a semblance of justice was restored. On 4 July Cade and his followers took over the sessions of oyer and terminer – the system whereby judges were instructed to ‘hear and determine’ particular offences – at the Guildhall, replacing them with a commission to indict and condemn those they judged traitors and extortioners. Some of the original justices, including Thomas, Lord Scales, the Mayor Thomas Charlton and six others, remained to preside over the proceedings. Those indicted included the notorious courtiers John Say, John Trevilian and Thomas Daniel. Lord Saye was taken from the Tower to the Guildhall and, charged with various treasons, including collusion in the death of the Duke of Gloucester.

  Cade waited at the Standard in the Cheap, where Saye was brought next. There he saw him not only beheaded but despoiled and publicly degraded, his naked corpse dragged by a horse through the streets. Also executed that day was William Crowmer, Saye’s son-in-law. The rebels showed their keenness to restore a broader justice by also executing a man named Hawarden, a common thief and murderer who had lived for a long time in the sanctuary of St Martin le Grand.

  By Sunday 5 July, Cade’s men had been loose in the City for two days that had seen uncontrolled pillaging and the execution of at least five men, there and in the suburbs. Ordinary Londoners now attempted to rid themselves of the rebel scourge, planning to wait until they had returned to their Southwark lodgings for the night, then attack Cade’s men guarding the bridge and bar it against their re-entry. Cade caught wind of the plan and mustered all his men, calling on them to make an armed assault on the City. Again as in 1381, he further swelled the rebel ranks by opening the Marshalsea Prison so that its inmates might assist him. An armed confrontation became inevitable as Cade’s men massed on the south bank, while Londoners and royal troops from the Tower, led by Lord Scales, the veteran royal captain Matthew Gough and several aldermen, gathered on the bridge.

  Fighting began around nine o’clock in the evening and did not end until daybreak. The length of the battle again demonstrated the military proficiency of the rebel host, especially given that the Londoners had access to the Tower’s mighty arsenal. The latter managed to close the bridge gates but they could not keep Cade’s men off its southern section. Failing to force his way across, Cade set the drawbridge section alight. As the sun rose, it must have made a dismal sight, charred and smoking, littered with dead bodies and with more corpses adrift in the water below. Matthew Gough was among the casualties. A truce of a few hours was agreed, during which time the few remaining Crown representatives negotiated with the rebels about a general withdrawal.

  Large numbers of Cade’s followers took up the offer, made on 6 and 7 July, of a royal pardon. It extended to all transgressions committed prior to 8 July 1450 and guaranteed that anyone holding such a pardon would go unmolested by the King’s justices, escheators, sheriffs, coroners and bailiffs. Cade had been enrolled on 6 July under the name of John Mortimer, and was granted pardon at the request of the Queen – in the absence of her husband, Margaret of Anjou had played a crucial role in the negotiations. The fact that Cade was registered under another name later allowed the Crown to claim that the pardon was invalid. Cade himself showed little trust in it, setting off quickly for north Kent with a good portion of loot and a small band of supporters. He continued his rebellious activities, attempting to take Queensborough Castle near Dartford, but was unable to overcome its defenders. His supporters continued to demonstrate on Blackheath, at Rochester and near Gravesend. On 10 July a Faversham soapmaker, Robert Spenser, was one of the main figures in a demonstration of support for Cade that took place at Rochester, for which he was later hanged and quartered.

  On the same day, the Exchequer sent out a writ statin
g that Cade was a traitor who ‘laboureth now of newe to assemble the Kings people againe’. A reward of a thousand marks was put on his head, five hundred for any of his captains and ten for his followers. Cade was now on the run in earnest. Alexander Iden, the new Sheriff of Kent, was harrying his supporters westwards towards the Sussex border. On 12 July he caught up with Cade at Heathfield in Sussex, capturing and badly injuring the rebel leader. Cade did not survive the journey back to London, dying en route, probably on 13 July. His corpse was given the usual treatment reserved for traitors. His head was then displayed on a spike atop London Bridge, and the quarters of his body sent out to Blackheath, Norwich, Salisbury and Gloucester. (In Norwich, sympathisers with the rebels later stole the quarter from its position on the city gate.)9

  The recovery of goods from Cade’s men showed the scale of their plunder. On 21 July, an indenture was delivered to the Exchequer itemising the jewels and the money taken from Cade and his followers in Kent when they retreated from Southwark. Included were silver dishes and spoons, purses, girdles, a gold salver garnished with sapphires and pearls, silver pots, silver saltcellars and precious stones: in total, more than 115 items plus over a hundred pounds in ready cash. Though Iden collected his thousand marks (raised from the profits of the sale of the goods) for capturing Cade, those who had been robbed had to go to the Exchequer. There all they received was first preference in buying back their belongings at a small discount.

  As in 1381, Cade’s rebellion was not quelled simply by the death of its leading captain. Revolts continued to flare up after July 1450, and beyond the counties of Kent and Sussex. Depositions taken in 1453 alleged that there had been disturbances in Suffolk since March 1450. A group of Suffolk men were accused of composing ballads and rhymes claiming that the King, influenced by his evil courtiers, had sold the realm of England and its French possessions and that soon the King of France would be monarch in England. In the Norfolk town of Melton, later a centre of disturbances during Kett’s rebellion of 1549, a vicar was attacked and robbed in early July. A petition from him told of how ‘in the grete trobull tyme’ he was assaulted at night by a large gang of parishioners, ‘desciples and of the affynte [affinity] of the grete traytor John Cade’, who would have beheaded him had he not fled. There were reports also of trouble in Beccles, east Suffolk, formerly an area of Lollard activity, in June 1450. Disturbances continued when, later in the summer, one of Cade’s quarters was carted through Suffolk. On 4 August in the village of Alderton, set among the flat Suffolk fields between the North Sea and the estuary of the Deben, John Squyer, the local parson and, fatally, former chaplain to the Duke of Suffolk, was murdered by his own parishioners, helped by men from the neighbouring villages of Ramsholt and Sutton.

  In Kent and Sussex, other men emerged, ready to lead further risings. A smith from Faversham, William Parmynter, came forward calling himself the ‘second captain of Kent’. His rising on 30 August 1450 covered a broad band of north and mid-Kent from Teynham, Faversham, Canterbury and Ospringe westwards to Marden, Sevenoaks, Otford, Hawkhurst and Appledore. Parmynter’s support extended across the Weald to Mountfield in Sussex and down through Hailsham, Willingdon and Jevington to the coast at Eastbourne, where there was a further rising in September. The Eastbourne rising was instigated by a gentleman, William Howell, who again co-opted the mechanisms of the militia for the purposes of raising an insurrection.10 Although Parmynter was eventually rounded up by a squire of the Duke of Somerset and sentenced to death, another Kent captain, an individual calling himself John Smyth, appeared soon after and evaded capture until early 1451. Apart from county risings, there was also large-scale poaching (later a feature of the 1549 rebellions). In October 1450 at Penshurst, a hundred men from Sussex and the Kentish Weald undertook a massive poaching raid on the park of Humphrey, Duke of Buckingham.

  The ongoing risings in the southern counties and the evident public support for some of the rebel grievances initially forced the King to be conciliatory, even after Cade’s death. On 1 August, Henry sent a commission of oyer and terminer into Kent to inquire into all miscarriages of justice, extortions, trepasses and oppressions in an attempt to address the rebels’ complaints about the corrupt nature of local government.

  By December 1450, however, as order was gradually restored, Henry had clearly decided that the time to investigate the commons’ grievances was over. He appointed the Duke of York to head a new commission to do justice on those rebels and traitors who had risen in Kent and Sussex since 8 July. But the commission bore only the trappings of a legal investigation. Its true purpose was punitive. The commissioners paid little regard to whether the convicted rebels had been in arms before or after the issuing of the general pardon, and hanged thirty men whom they found guilty of having risen with Cade or of having declared their disdain for the King and their preference for the Duke of York. At the end of February 1451, as Henry made his way back to London through north Kent, a host of unpunished rebels some three thousand strong awaited him on Blackheath to plead for mercy, shirtless and lying prostrate before him with cords about their necks. Though these men were pardoned, the King’s judicial progress through Kent came to be known as the ‘harvest of heads’.

  Cade’s revolt, like that of 1381, has been viewed as essentially a failure, and one whose impact was largely negative in that it provoked further royal oppression. Very few of the ‘great extortioners’ identified by the Kentish rebels were dealt with, and some, such as Est and Slegge, continued in the same ruthless vein as they had before 1450. It has been suggested that the main impact of the revolt was to create a base of support for the Yorkists in southern England, as a reaction to the harsh repression visited upon these counties by Henry VI and his commissioners. Cade’s revolt has, in any case, traditionally been distinguished from both the Peasants’ Revolt and the ‘commotion time’ of 1549 as a rebellion really concerned with ephemeral political matters, especially with punishing the Earl of Suffolk and his supporters.

  However, as with 1381 and 1549, there is strong evidence that there was a social impetus to the rebellion as well. The 1440s were years of rising rents and falling prices. This left many people both unable to afford goods at market and unable to sell their own surplus produce to supplement incomes that had been heavily eroded by rent payments. An element of class antagonism was particularly evident in some of the later risings. In November 1450 at Hastings, would-be insurgents (including stone-roofers, a mason, a dyer, a husbandman, a tailor and a thatcher) allegedly sought the heads of certain gentry, and ‘especially of those who were against Jack Cade’. Villeinage remained common in late medieval Sussex and the rejection of its burdens was one part of the rebellion of 1450. In Battle, Sussex, the customary tax levied in the autumn of 1450 upon ‘aliens’ (those born outside the town’s jurisdiction) could not be collected until late March 1451, and even then, confiscations to take care of arrears were being challenged in the courts. There is some evidence that this resistance to paying customary fines was successful. In Chiddingly in 1458–9, existing customary tenure – with its accompanying dues and services – was replaced with a simple money rent. Elsewhere, tenants successfully negotiated their rents downward.11

  Later risings also displayed greater political radicalism, moving on from criticising specific councillors to attacking the King directly. One indictment reported that the Sussex yeomen John and William Merford had said on 26 July 1450 that ‘the Kyng was a natell fooll and wold ofte tymes hold a staff in his hands with a brid [bird] on the ende playing therewith as a fooll and that anoder kyng must be ordered to rule the land, saying that the king was no person able to rule the land’. In October of that year, John Merford was accused of saying in an alehouse that ‘they wolde leve no gentilman alyve but such as thym list to have’.12 Even the more moderate ‘Complaint of the Commons of Kent’ made it clear that it was not only the King’s councillors who were responsible for the dire state of the kingdom. In the opening lines, its authors said that they regarde
d Henry as bound by and accountable to English law – if this was not the case he should not have sworn his coronation oath.

  In the written petitions that Cade’s followers presented to the King, they betrayed the fact that this was not a rebellion instigated by the illiterate peasantry. Even historians whose overall perspectives differ agree that the key leaders of the rebellion were not ‘masterless men’ but individuals who themselves shouldered considerable responsibilities at local level. The pardon roll of 1450 reveals the names of tax collectors, jurors for the hundred courts and constables. Some members of the gentry also took part in the rising – Cade’s carver and sword-bearer, Robert Poynings, was the son of Lord Poynings – although they do not appear to have played a significant role in leading it. It was led by men whose own day-to-day responsibilities had given them a sense of what good government was, a government that was constituted as much by the community as by the will of a king, if not more so. The sense of community and of customary rights was further reinforced by an awareness of the legacy of the Peasants’ Revolt. Just as Tyler’s men had gathered at Blackheath, so had Cade’s, and so would rebel armies in 1471 and 1497. Names too were reused, ‘Jack Straw’ emerging as a rebel leader in Kent in 1452 and again in a northern rising of 1485.13