On November 26th they were found guilty of high treason, their property confiscated, and they were condemned to death. On November 29th they were delivered out of the custody of the Tower to the high sheriff of Norfolk, and on December 1st the Kets were again in Norwich.
It was winter, and hope was dead. The last great rising of the English peasantry had failed, crushed without pity, and the leaders of the army of revolt, who had judged it better to give up ease and worldly honour rather than acquiesce dumbly in the enslavement of their poorer neighbours, were to die as traitors.[104] On December 7th the executions were carried out, and Robert Ket was hanged in chains outside Norwich Castle, while William Ket was taken to Wymondham (where he held the manor of Chossell—Church lands, bought years earlier from the Earl of Warwick), and there hanged in chains from the parish church.
The property of the Kets was duly taken by the servants of the crown, and the bodies of the rebel leaders swung in the wind—to remind unthinking men of the reward of rebellion, of the fate of all who challenge, without success, the arms of government.
The Norfolk Rising was the last great movement of the English people in social revolt. Riots we have known even in our times, and mob violence, but no such rising as those led by Wat Tyler, by Cade, and by Ket has England seen since the year 1549.
The country people sunk into hopeless poverty and permanent degradation under Edward VI. and Elizabeth, and with the rejection by the government of papal authority, the supremacy of the crown and of the ministers of the crown was established.
In the nineteenth century, when the working people in town and country once more bestirred themselves at the call of freedom, their wiser leaders advised political and not revolutionary methods of action, and the advice has been followed.
But if the year 1549 marks the end of organized democratic resistance to intolerable misgovernment, the coming centuries were to see the rise of the middle class with the insistent demand for the predominance of that class in the parliament of the nation, and the incurable belief that in a popularly elected House of Commons resided all the safeguards of civil and religious liberty.
Eliot, Hampden, Pym, and the Supremacy of the Commons.
1625–1643
Authorities: S. R. Gardiner—History of England, History of Great Civil War, History of Commonwealth and Protectorate; Clarendon—History of the Great Rebellion;, John Forster—Life of Sir John Eliot, Life of Hampden, Life of Pym, The Grand Remonstrance, Arrest of the Five Members; Nugent—Memorials for Life of Hampden; Calendar of State Papers; House of Commons’ Journals.