At the very church door Longbeard was struck down—some say by Godfrey’s son—and his little company were quickly slain or taken prisoners. Loaded with chains, the once bold advocate of the poor of London, now badly hurt, was at once haled off to the Tower. Sentence was pronounced without delay of the law, William, the son of Osbert, was to be dragged to the elms at Tyburn and there hanged in chains.
A few days later—it was just before Easter—the wounded man was stripped naked, tried to the tail of a horse and dragged over the rough stones of the streets of London. He was dead before Tyburn was reached, but the poor broken body, on whom the full vengeance of the rich and mighty had been wreaked, was strung up in chains beneath the gallows elm all the same. Bravely had Longbeard withstood the rulers of the land in the day of his strength; now, when life had passed from him, his body was swinging in common contempt. And with him were nine of his followers hanged.
So died William, called Longbeard, son of Osbert, “for asserting the truth and maintaining the cause of the poor.” And since it is held that to be faithful to such a cause makes a man a martyr, people thought he deserved to be ranked with the martyrs. For a time multitudes—the very folk who had fallen away from their champion in the hour of battle and need—flocked to pay reverence to the ghastly, bloodstained corpse that hung at Tyburn, and pieces of the gibbet and of the bloodstained earth beneath were carried off and counted as sacred relics. All the great, heroic qualities of the man were recalled. He was accounted a saint. Miracles were alleged to take place when his relics were touched.
Then the dead man’s enemies were aroused, an alleged death-bed confession was published, wherein Longbeard was made out to be a sorry criminal. Not the least of the offences laid to his charge was that a woman, who was not his wife, had stood faithfully by the rebel, even when the church was on fire.
The times were rough. It is probable that Longbeard, crusader and fighting man, had sins enough to confess before death took him. But his traducers were silent as to these sins in the man’s lifetime. They waited until no answer could be given before uttering their miserable libels against the one courageous champion of the poor.
Longbeard had roused the common working people to make a stand against obvious oppression and injustice—there was the head and front of his offending, there was his crime; earning for him not only a felon’s death, but the loss of character, and the branding for all time with the contemptuous title “Demagogue.”
Yet in the slow building up of English liberties William FitzOsbert played his part, and laid down his life in the age-long struggle for freedom, as many a better has done.
In 1198, two years after the death of Longbeard, Hubert was compelled to resign the justiciarship. His monks at Canterbury, to whom the Church of St. Mary, in Cheapside, belonged, and who had no love for their archbishop,[26] indignant at the violation of sanctuary and the burning of their church, appealed to the king and to the pope, Innocent III. to make Hubert give up his political activities and confine himself to the work of an archbishop. In the same year a great council of the nation, led by St. Hugh of Lincoln, flatly refused a royal demand for money made by Hubert.
Innocent III. was against him, the great barons were against him, and Hubert resigned. But he held the archbishopric till 1205.