From Blackheath to London marched this great rabble. The king, with his cousin Henry, Earl of Derby; the Archbishop of Canterbury, and a hundred knights and sergeants were retired for safety to the Tower, whence they issued by boat to receive the petitions of the insurgents. Ten thousand of them waited at Rotherhithe, and by their fierce yells and threatening appearance so terrified the king’s attendants that, instead of permitting him to land, they took advantage of the tide, and returned. This behaviour disappointed Tyler, who saw no hope of concessions from the king’s advisers. He and his men burst into London, and, joined by the discontented host from Essex and Hertfordshire, under the leadership of one John Rakestraw (who has come down to us through the ages as Jack Straw, and whose camping-ground on Hampstead Heath bears to this day the old inn known as “Jack Straw’s Castle”), plundered the town, burning the Palace of the Savoy and all the buildings and records of the Temple. Fear eventually led the Court party to grant the four chief demands of the people: the abolition of slavery; the reduction of the rent of land to fourpence an acre; free liberty of buying and selling in all fairs and markets; and a general pardon for past offences. Had Tyler and Rakestraw been content with these concessions, it is probable that all would have been well; but their ambition had grown with success, and they trusted to further violence for greater advantage. Rushing into the Tower at the head of four hundred men, they murdered there the Archbishop of Canterbury and five others, and, retaining no less than twenty thousand followers in the City, intercepted the king as he rode out the following morning attended only by sixty horsemen. With boorish insolence, Tyler lay hold of the king’s bridle, when Walworth, Lord Mayor of London, stabbed him in the throat. Falling from his horse, the rebel leader was despatched by an esquire. The courage and tact of the young king are historical, and the way in which he quelled the hostility of the insurgents, and drew their sympathies to himself, is well known; but the revocation of the charters of emancipation was a piece of faithlessness which makes the inquirer doubtful of the sincerity in which they were first granted, and the less inclined to blame Wat the Tiler for his excesses.
Thus tamely ended this, at one time, most formidable rebellion. The south gateway of London Bridge received its leader’s head, and the lieges who fared by that frowning archway, together with those others who felt no loyalty, were invited to look upon the head of a traitor. But some day Wat the Tiler of Dartford will have his monument, and, truly, there are few figures in our history that so well deserve one, for he was one of the first to stir a hand for the English people against the exactions of a largely alien nobility.
Blackheath witnessed no other warlike gathering for the matter of seventy years; but it was in the meanwhile the scene of many peaceful displays.
VIII
And here (says Stowe) came, in 1415, the Lord Mayor and Aldermen of London, with four hundred citizens in scarlet, and with white and red hoods, to receive Henry the Fifth on his return from the victories in France, of which that of Agincourt was the greatest. “The gates and streets of the City were garnished and apparelled with precious cloths of arras, containing the history, triumphs, and princely acts of the kings of England, his progenitors, which was done to the end that the king might understand what remembrance the people would hand to their posterity of these his great victories and triumphs. The conduits in the City ran none other but good sweet wines, and that abundantly. There were also made in the streets many towers and stages, richly adorned, and on the height of them sat small children, apparelled in semblance of angels, with sweet-tuned voices, singing praises and lauds unto God: for the victorious king would not suffer ditties to be made and sung of his history, for that he would wholly have the praise given unto God; neither would he suffer to be carried before him, nor showed unto the people, his helmet, whereupon his crown of gold was broke and deposed in the field by the violence of the enemy, and great strokes he had received, nor his other armour that in that cruel battle was so sore broke.”
CARDINAL WOLSEY
But perhaps the most remarkable meeting on Blackheath was that which assembled to escort the cardinal’s hat, designed for Wolsey. When that particularly haughty prelate learnt that the insignia of his promotion was on its way from Rome in charge only of an ordinary messenger, he deemed it essential to his importance that a more imposing method of conveyance should be provided. Previously, therefore, to the arrival of the Pope’s messenger on our shores, Wolsey caused him to be met and decked out with robes and trappings suitable to so important an occasion. That glorified pursuivant of Papal authority was, therefore, brought along the road from Dover to Blackheath with the greatest show of deference and consideration, and here, on this waste, the hat was met by great numbers of the clergy and nobility, who conducted it to London and to Westminster Abbey in great triumph.
Wolsey’s hat, however, comes out of chronological sequence. Let us then put back the clock of history again to the year 1450, when Jack Cade’s rebellion peopled Blackheath with a menacing host. These were the early days of the quarrels of the rival Roses. England was losing—whether by bad generalship or by trend of unavoidable circumstances it matters not—the provinces of France won by Henry the Fifth whose feeble son now reigned; the kinghead around whose ill-balanced kingship raged the quarrels and family jealousies of the Dukes of York, Suffolk, Somerset, and Buckingham. The king was unpopular with half his subjects, and all of them raged with wounded pride and grief at the loss of France. The name of Mortimer was a power in the land, and the head of that ancient family was the Duke of York, who had probably the greatest following of feudatory tenants in England. To take advantage both of the prevailing discontent and of the Mortimer prestige came Jack Cade, an Irish adventurer, at the head of twenty thousand followers, and encamped on Blackheath. Cade was undoubtedly the Duke of York’s catspaw, but his sudden success in gaining adherents is something of a mystery; for, although he proclaimed himself a cousin of the duke, he was an obviously ignorant clown, a fact seized upon by Shakespeare with grand effect in Henry VI, part i, act 4, where he makes Cade’s companions to be Dick the Butcher, Smith the Weaver, and others of a like humble estate, whose asides upon Cade’s proclaiming himself a Mortimer and his wife a descendant of the Lacies are very amusing. “My father was a Mortimer,” says Cade, to which Dick the Butcher rejoins, whispering behind his hand, that “he was an honest man, and a good bricklayer;” while as to his wife’s descent from the Lacies, he remarks that “she was, indeed, a pedlar’s daughter, and sold many laces”—a punning speech that, were it the work of a modern dramatist, would be received with a howl of execration.
Cade retired from Blackheath to Sevenoaks on an equal force being sent to oppose him, but there turned at bay upon his pursuers, and the Royal army dispersed, leaving London at the mercy of this rabblement. There the fickle mob wavered and Cade fled, presently to suffer the fate that befell so many in those bloody days.