To have passed through all this was surely a severe enough trial; yet after that commotion he had further trouble to endure. He was impeached by the Bishop of Rochester, and thrown into the Marshalsea by command of the queen. He was also threatened to be hanged, drawn, and quartered, in order that he might accuse his master Fastolf of treason; but in the end his friends succeeded in procuring for him a charter of pardon. To earn this, however, as we find from the document itself, he had to appear before the king in person, during a progress which he made in Kent the year after the rebellion, and, amid a crowd of other supplicants whose bodies were stripped naked down to their legs, humbly to beg for mercy.[78.1]
[68.2] See No. 123. William Worcester says Lord Beauchamp was made treasurer, and Lord Cromwell the king’s chamberlain. Lord Beauchamp’s appointment is on the Patent Rolls. See Calendarium Rot. Patent, p. 294.
[69.1] The late Mr. Durrant Cooper, in an interesting paper read before a meeting of the Kent Archæological Society, examined the long list of names given on the Patent Roll of 28 Henry VI., and proved from them that the insurrection was by no means of a very plebeian or disorderly character. ‘In several hundreds,’ he says, ‘the constables duly, and as if legally, summoned the men; and many parishes, particularly Marden, Penshurst, Hawkhurst, Northfleet, Boughton-Malherbe, Smarden, and Pluckley, furnished as many men as could be found in our day fit for arms.’
[70.1] These dates were given differently in previous issues of this Introduction. For a rectification of the chronology of the rebellion I am indebted to Kriehn’s English Rising in 1450, pp. 125 and following.
[70.2] According to No. 119 of our collection this retreat would appear to have been on the 22nd June, but that date is certainly an error.
[70.3] The 18th June is given as the date of Sir Humphrey Stafford’s death in Inquis. post mortem, 28 Henry VI. No. 7.
[71.1] W. Worc.—Three Fifteenth Century Chronicles (edited by me for the Camden Soc.), 67.—Chronicle in MS. Cott. Vitell. A. xvi.
[71.2] Holinshed, iii. 632.
[71.3] I leave this part of the story as it was originally written, though here, too, the chronology seems to require rectification, especially from sources since published, for which the reader may consult Kriehn’s work, p. 129.
[72.1] MS. Vitellius A. xvi. fol. 107, quoted by Kriehn, p. 92.