Leaders of the People: Studies in Democratic History

by Joseph Clayton

Fifty thousand men followed Tyler in London, and the city was now at the mercy of the peasant army. Walworth, who had no want of spirit, declared to the king and his council in the Tower that 6,000 soldiers could be raised in the city, but “fear had so fallen upon the soldiery that they seemed half dead with fright.” Sir Robert Knolles with 600 men-at-arms guarded the Tower.

It was now that Wat Tyler’s great qualities of leadership and the good discipline of his army were seen. With London in his hands, he warned his followers that death would be the instant punishment for theft; and proclaimed to the citizens, “We are indeed zealots for truth and justice, but we are not thieves and robbers.” Every respect was to be shown to the persons and property of the people of London, and wrath was only to fall on John of Gaunt and the ministers of the crown, and the lawyers—the enemies, as it seemed to Tyler, of the good estate of England. In return, the citizens offered bread and ale freely to the invaders, and London artisans joined their ranks in large numbers.

The archbishop’s palace at Lambeth was soon stormed, and all the records it contained were destroyed; the building itself was left uninjured.

At four o’clock in the afternoon the Savoy Palace of John of Gaunt, by the Strand, was in flames; and all its wealth of treasure, rich tapestries and costly furniture, rare vessels of gold and silver, precious stones, and art work of priceless value, heaped up on a bonfire or ground to powder. The Duke of Lancaster’s jewelled coat, covered with gems, was set up as a target and riddled with arrows, before it was cut into a thousand pieces and pounded to dust. One wretched man was caught attempting to sneak off with a silver cup; and being taken in the act, was put to death as Tyler had decreed. The Savoy was burnt to the ground, but no one interfered with its inhabitants; and Henry, Earl of Derby, John of Gaunt’s son (who was to reign in Richard’s stead as Henry IV.), passed out with all his servants unmolested. The wine-cellar proved fatal to certain of the host, who, drinking freely, perished, buried under the fallen building.

From the Savoy the army of destruction passed to the Temple, the head-quarters of the Knights Hospitallers, of whom Sir Robert Hales was president, and a hive of lawyers. The Temple was burnt, but no lives were lost; for the lawyers, “even the most aged and infirm of them, scrambled off with the agility of rats or evil spirits.”

At nightfall the priory of the Hospitallers at Clerkenwell, the prisons at the Fleet and at Newgate, and the Manor House at Highbury, had all been demolished; and the men of Essex, led by Thomas Faringdon, a London baker, were at Mile End; while William Grindcobbe, with a body of men from St. Albans, lay at Highbury.

In vain Walworth urged the king and his royal council to act. Richard had sent to Tyler asking for a written statement of the grievances of the commons, and had been told in reply that the king must meet his commons face to face, and hear with his own ears their demands. In the evening Walworth proposed that the garrison at the Tower should be despatched against Tyler, “to fall upon these wretches who were in the streets, and amounted to 60,000, while they were asleep and drunk. They might be killed like flies,” Walworth added, “for not one in twenty had arms.”

But the handful of soldiers at the Tower were in mortal terror of the peasant host, and “all had so lost heart that you would have thought them more like dead men than living.”

The Earl of Salisbury checked Walworth’s rash proposals. “If we begin what we cannot carry through,” he observed, “we shall never be able to repair matters. It will be all over with us and our heirs, and England will be a desert.”

An open conflict with Tyler and his 60,000 was a very hazardous proceeding. Who could be sure of escape if it came to battle? So far Tyler had only struck at the chief ministers and the lawyers, and why should others risk their lives in such a quarrel? Besides, it was said that Wat Tyler and a mad priest of Kent were for doing away with all nobles, and for making all men equal, and caution was necessary in dealing with men who held such strange opinions. England without its nobility would be a desert, and at all costs such an irreparable calamity as the loss of England’s nobility must be prevented.