Leaders of the People: Studies in Democratic History

by Joseph Clayton

To this day we are still in the dark as to the real name and family of the Captain of Kent. He was known popularly as “Mortimer,” and was so described in the “pardon” he received. He was a man of some property, or he would not have been attainted by special act of parliament, nor have enjoyed the confidence of the men of substance who accepted his generalship. He was known as an Irishman and as a soldier in the French wars, and it is likely enough that he served under the Duke of York both in France and Ireland. His strong advocacy of the claims of York favours the notion of kinsmanship; but, on the other hand, York was by far the ablest statesman of the day, and to demand his recall to the king’s council was no guarantee of family motives.

There was some talk at the time that Cade was called John Aylesmere, and that he was married to the daughter of a Surrey squire at Taundede. But there is no more evidence for these things than for the charges made against him in the warrant for his arrest, that he had once killed a woman in Sussex and had then fled to France and fought with the French arms.

The undisputed high character of Cade’s followers is all against the portrait painted by the government after his death; when, anxious to blacken the good name of so resolute a leader, it was made out that he was merely a disreputable ruffian. The landowners of Kent and Sussex would never have accepted for their captain a mere swashbuckling blackguard. They rallied to him as a Mortimer, seeing in him a likeness to Richard, Duke of York.[72] If his real name was Cade, then he was probably a squire or yeoman, for Cade was no uncommon name round Mayfield and Heathfield in Sussex, and Cades were landed proprietors near Reigate as late as the seventeenth century.

It was enough that, chosen Captain of Kent, Cade, or Mortimer, was known and trusted as a brave, upright man of good character and ability.[73] Whether descended from nobles or of good Sussex stock was a small matter to men in earnest for the changes and reforms the country needed.

Ashford was the heart of the rising, and from Ashford the host marched to Blackheath, where, at the beginning of June, the camp was fixed. The army, estimated at 46,000, included 18 esquires, 74 county gentlemen, and some five clerks in holy orders, who were presently joined by the Abbot of Battle, the Prior of Lewes, and twenty-three county gentlemen from Sussex.

Cade at once explained that they must deal directly with the king if they were to get relief from their present burdens, and then set to work to draw up the bill of “the complaint and requests” of the commons of Kent, while the rank and file laboured “to dyke and stake the camp all about, as it had been in the land of war.”

But war had not yet been declared, and for the present discipline was loose in the camp at Blackheath.[74] “As good was Jack Robin as John at the Noke, for all were as high as pig’s feet; until the time that they should come and speak with such states and messengers as were sent unto them. Then they put all their power into the man that was named captain of all their host.”

On June 7th the king was at Smithfield with 20,000 soldiers, and messengers were promptly despatched to Blackheath to know the meaning of the insurrection. Cade answered by showing the petition he had drawn up, and mentioned that they had assembled “to redress and reform the wrongs that were done in the realm, and to withstand the malice of them that were destroyers of the common profit, and to correct and amend the defaults of them that were the king’s chief counsellors.” He then sent off the “bill of complaints” to the king and to the parliament then sitting at Westminster, “and requested to have answer thereof again, but answer he had none.” The “complaint” was received with contempt, and the opinion of the king’s counsellors was that “such proud rebels should rather be suppressed and tamed with violence and force than with fair words or amicable answer.”

Yet “the complaint,” which consisted of fifteen articles, was no revolutionary document. It contained protests against the royal threat to lay waste Kent in revenge for the death of the Duke of Suffolk; the diversion of the royal revenue raised by heavy taxation to “other men”; the banishment of the Duke of York “to make room for unworthy ministers who would not do justice by law, but demanded bribes and gifts”; the purveyance of goods for the royal household without payment; the arrest and imprisonment on false charges of treason of persons whose goods and lands were subsequently seized by the king’s servants, who then “either compassed their deaths or kept them in prison while they got possession of their property by royal grant”; the interference with the old right of free election of knights of the shire by “the great rulers of the country sending letters to enforce their tenants and other people to choose other persons than the common will is to elect”; the misconduct of the war in France, demanding inquiry and the punishment by law of those found guilty. Complaint was also made of various local grievances—the insecurity of property, the arbitrary conduct of the lords of the seaports, the extortion in taxation owing to sheriffs and under-sheriffs farming their offices, the fines exacted by sheriffs for non-compliance with the orders of the court of exchequer (whose writs were sealed with green wax) when no summons or warning had been given, and the “sore expense” incurred by there being only one Court of Sessions in the whole county.

Five “requests” were added to the bill of complaints. These expressed the desire of the commons that the king should reign “like a king royal”; that “all the false progeny and affinity of the Duke of Suffolk” should be banished from the king’s presence and brought to trial, and the Duke of York and his friends included in the royal council; that punishment should be meted out to those responsible for the death of the Duke of Gloucester; that the extortions practised daily by the king’s servants in the taking of goods from the people should cease; that the old Statute of Labourers for keeping down wages should be abolished; and that the “false traitors” and “great extortioners,” Lord Say and Crowmer, the sheriff of Kent, should be brought low.