A Popular History of England, From the Earliest Times to the Reign of Queen Victoria; Vol. I

by François Guizot

On the morning of the 14th of June a proclamation was spread throughout London, recommending the crowd which surrounded the Tower and demanded the heads of the chancellor and treasurer, to retreat towards Mile End. The king promised there to come to them and to grant their requests. A portion of the mob obeyed; when Richard arrived with a weak retinue at the meeting-place (his brothers, the Earl of Kent and Lord John Holland, had quitted him on the road), he saw himself surrounded by sixty thousand peasants. Their tone was respectful, and their requests, which then appeared monstrous, do not create the same impression at the present day. They demanded the definitive abolition of servitude; the power to sell and purchase in all markets; and a general amnesty for the past. To this they added a strange claim to fix the amount of rental on lands. The king promised all that they wished, and immediately caused to be made a large number of copies of the charter which he had thus granted. These were distributed among the insurgents; the men of Essex and Hertford retired in a body; but the malcontents of Kent had remained in the capital, and had not appeared at the meeting-place in Mile End. Scarcely had the king retired when these dangerous foes attacked the Tower, beheading the councillors who had taken refuge therein, the Archbishop of Canterbury, the treasurer, Sir Thomas Hale, and several others. The Princess of Wales, while yet in bed, saw a furious mob spring into her chamber. No injury was done to her, and her attendants were enabled to throw her, fainting with fright, into a little boat; she was conveyed to a house in the city belonging to the king, who there came and joined her when he had learnt the sad news of the massacre at the Tower.

In the morning, Richard issued forth with a small escort, and advanced fearlessly towards Smithfield. The multitude thronged the streets and squares. The king drew up at St. Bartholomew's Priory. "I will go no further," he said, "without having pacified the insurgents." Wat Tyler had perceived him, and urging his horse towards him, "There is the king: I go to speak to him," he cried to his supporters; "do not move a hand or foot unless I give you the signal." The horse of the popular chief touched heads with that of the king. "Sir king," said Wat Tyler, "do you see those men yonder?" "Yes," replied the young prince without stirring. "They are at my disposal, and ready to do as I bid them." And he toyed with his dagger, holding the bridle of the royal courser; then, perceiving behind Richard an esquire who had displeased him, "Ah, you here?" he said, "give me your sword." The esquire refused; Wat Tyler made a motion to take possession of it; the followers of the king were roused. The Lord Mayor of London, William Walworth, urged forward his horse, and advancing towards the rebel, struck him a blow with a dagger; the horse reared. Tyler endeavored to return to his followers; an esquire of the king thrust his sword through his body; he fell, beating the air with his hands. The mob became agitated. "Our captain is slain," was the cry, and the bowstrings began to vibrate. Richard advanced alone towards the crowd. "What do you, my friends?" he exclaimed. "Tyler was a traitor; it is I who am your captain and your guide." And he drew after him this irresolute mob, deprived of their chief, and who marched without knowing whither they were bound. They arrived in the fields near Islington. The friends of the king had rallied round him. One of the chiefs of his free bands, Sir Robert Knowles, brought a body of men-at-arms. The insurgents took alarm, threw down their bows, and cried "Mercy!" The king would not suffer them to be slaughtered in a mass, to the great exasperation of Sir Robert Knowles. "He said that he would be even with them on another occasion," says Froissart; "in which he did not fail."

The insurrections subsided everywhere. The Bishop of Norwich had armed his household and his friends, and hastening to throw himself upon the peasants, he had easily defeated these confused masses, little accustomed to arms. He had himself drawn up their indictment and pronounced their sentence; then resuming his clerical costume, he had exhorted them, received their confession, absolved them, and finally accompanied them to the gallows. The king was at the head of a small army, and had marched against the remainder of the insurgents of Essex. It was no longer a question of charters; the courts of commission were everywhere assembling to try the guilty.

Death of Wat Tyler.

The two priests, Jack Straw and John Ball, were hanged. Lester and Wistbroom, who had assumed the title of "Kings of the Commons" in the counties of Norfolk and Suffolk, suffered the same fate. About fifteen hundred rioters were executed. It was found necessary to fix them to the gibbet with iron chains; their friends came by night to carry off their bodies.

The Parliament had assembled, publicly approving of the abolition of the concessions granted to the villeins during the struggle. "We would never have consented to them," said the barons, "even had we all been compelled to perish on the same day." For the moment, there was some talk of abolishing servitude; but the opposition was so strenuous, the proprietors of fiefs declared so loudly that their serfs belonged to them by right, and that they could not be deprived of them without their consent, that the idea was immediately abandoned, and the high treason law was voted, condemning "riots, disturbances, and other analogous things," in terms as dangerous as they were vague. The king demanded money, the commons claimed a complete amnesty; neither would begin to make concessions. The Parliament at length yielded; the tax upon wool and leather was prolonged for five years, and the king proclaimed the amnesty; he was about to wed Anne of Bohemia, soon known throughout the whole of her kingdom as "the good queen." The Bishop of Norwich was fighting in Flanders, in support of the citizens of Ghent hard pressed by their count, recently a victor at the battle of Rosebecque, where Philip van Arteveldt had been killed; and the uncles of the king contended with each other for the authority in England. The Earl of Cambridge had been made Duke of York, and the Earl of Buckingham Duke of Gloucester. Henry Bolingbroke, son of the Duke of Lancaster, had become Earl of Derby; at the same time, the king had made Earl of Suffolk and Duke of Ireland, his favorites Michael de la Pole and Robert de Vere, obscure persons, whom the Princess of Wales had placed beside her son, by reason of her jealousy towards his uncles; and who contributed, by their influence, to the struggles and disputes of the government. The princess had recently died, having succumbed beneath the weight of the anxieties caused by one of her sons, Lord John Holland; he had recently assassinated one of the servants of the king, and was unable to quit the church in which he had taken refuge. Plot succeeded plot—denunciation to denunciation. At length, the Duke of Lancaster started out for Spain, in order to sustain the pretensions of his wife to the throne of Castile; and he contrived, after two campaigns, to marry his eldest daughter to the heir of Henry of Transtamare, thus assuring the crown to her children. The Scots had crossed the frontier, and King Richard entered Scotland. France was preparing a great armament.

Amidst these external preoccupations, the Duke of Gloucester had seized the reins of government; and, when the young king threatened to dissolve a Parliament devoted to his uncle, the Commons brought forward the Act which had deposed Edward II. A council of barons for a while governed the kingdom, under the presidency of Gloucester. Blood flowed everywhere; the duke avenged himself upon the favorites of the king, who were as odious to him as to the English people. He had impeached them before the Parliament: the innocent were involved in the ruin of the guilty. Gloucester did not even spare Sir Simon Burley, formerly the tutor of the king, the friend of Edward III. and the Black Prince, and who had conducted the negotiations for the marriage of Richard. The queen in vain threw herself at his feet asking for mercy; in vain did Henry Bolingbroke, who had seconded his uncle in all his undertakings, claim as a right the pardon of the condemned man: Burley was executed, and Bolingbroke became definitively at variance with Gloucester.

The disorder which prevailed in England did not prevent constant hostilities upon the frontiers of Scotland; it was on August 15th, 1388, that there took place at Otterbourn, the famous battle celebrated in the ballads under the name of Chevy Chase, between the Earl of Douglas and Lord Henry Percy, the Hotspur of Shakespeare. Douglas was slain, but the English ended by being repulsed from the battle-field. Hotspur and his brother were prisoners. The king was beginning to weary of the yoke which he had so long borne. He was subject to gleams of resolution and courage, which soon disappeared in a long spell of indolence, and which took by surprise those who calculated upon his habitual apathy. A council was being held in the month of May, 1389; the king suddenly addressed the Duke of Gloucester. "How old do you suppose I am, uncle?" he asked. "Your highness is in your twenty-second year," replied the duke, much surprised. "Then," replied the king, "I am at an age when I should govern my own affairs. Nobody in my kingdom has been so long held under tutelage. I thank you for your services, my lord, but I no longer require them." And he immediately caused the great seal and the keys of the treasury to be given up to himself, compelling the Duke of Gloucester to leave the council, and announcing publicly to the nation that he had henceforth assumed the direction of the government. But his fleeting energy had already abandoned him. The Duke of York and Henry Bolingbroke were his masters, instead of the Duke of Gloucester.