because they were of high station; for, the King's mother, who had
to pass through their camp at Blackheath, on her way to her young
son, lying for safety in the Tower of London, had merely to kiss a
few dirty-faced rough-bearded men who were noisily fond of royalty,
and so got away in perfect safety. Next day the whole mass marched
on to London Bridge.
There was a drawbridge in the middle, which WILLIAM WALWORTH the
Mayor caused to be raised to prevent their coming into the city;
but they soon terrified the citizens into lowering it again, and
spread themselves, with great uproar, over the streets. They broke
open the prisons; they burned the papers in Lambeth Palace; they
destroyed the DUKE OF LANCASTER'S Palace, the Savoy, in the Strand,
said to be the most beautiful and splendid in England; they set
fire to the books and documents in the Temple; and made a great
riot. Many of these outrages were committed in drunkenness; since
those citizens, who had well-filled cellars, were only too glad to
throw them open to save the rest of their property; but even the
drunken rioters were very careful to steal nothing. They were so
angry with one man, who was seen to take a silver cup at the Savoy
Palace, and put it in his breast, that they drowned him in the
river, cup and all.
The young King had been taken out to treat with them before they
committed these excesses; but, he and the people about him were so
frightened by the riotous shouts, that they got back to the Tower
in the best way they could. This made the insurgents bolder; so
they went on rioting away, striking off the heads of those who did
not, at a moment's notice, declare for King Richard and the people;
and killing as many of the unpopular persons whom they supposed to
be their enemies as they could by any means lay hold of. In this
manner they passed one very violent day, and then proclamation was
made that the King would meet them at Mile-end, and grant their
requests.
The rioters went to Mile-end to the number of sixty thousand, and
the King met them there, and to the King the rioters peaceably
proposed four conditions. First, that neither they, nor their
children, nor any coming after them, should be made slaves any
more. Secondly, that the rent of land should be fixed at a certain
price in money, instead of being paid in service. Thirdly, that
they should have liberty to buy and sell in all markets and public
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places, like other free men. Fourthly, that they should be
pardoned for past offences. Heaven knows, there was nothing very
unreasonable in these proposals! The young King deceitfully
pretended to think so, and kept thirty clerks up, all night,
writing out a charter accordingly.
Now, Wat Tyler himself wanted more than this. He wanted the entire
abolition of the forest laws. He was not at Mile-end with the
rest, but, while that meeting was being held, broke into the Tower
of London and slew the archbishop and the treasurer, for whose
heads the people had cried out loudly the day before. He and his
men even thrust their swords into the bed of the Princess of Wales
while the Princess was in it, to make certain that none of their
enemies were concealed there.
So, Wat and his men still continued armed, and rode about the city.
Next morning, the King with a small train of some sixty gentlemen -
among whom was WALWORTH the Mayor - rode into Smithfield, and saw
Wat and his people at a little distance. Says Wat to his men,
'There is the King. I will go speak with him, and tell him what we
want.'
Straightway Wat rode up to him, and began to talk. 'King,' says
Wat, 'dost thou see all my men there?'
'Ah,' says the King. 'Why?'
'Because,' says Wat, 'they are all at my command, and have sworn to
do whatever I bid them.'
Some declared afterwards that as Wat said this, he laid his hand on
his own dagger. I think, myself, that he just spoke to the King
like a rough, angry man as he was, and did nothing more. At any
rate he was expecting no attack, and preparing for no resistance,
when Walworth the Mayor did the not very valiant deed of drawing a
short sword and stabbing him in the throat. He dropped from his
horse, and one of the King's people speedily finished him. So fell
Wat Tyler. Fawners and flatterers made a mighty triumph of it, and
set up a cry which will occasionally find an echo to this day. But
Wat was a hard-working man, who had suffered much, and had been
foully outraged; and it is probable that he was a man of a much
higher nature and a much braver spirit than any of the parasites
who exulted then, or have exulted since, over his defeat.
Seeing Wat down, his men immediately bent their bows to avenge his
fall. If the young King had not had presence of mind at that
dangerous moment, both he and the Mayor to boot, might have
followed Tyler pretty fast. But the King riding up to the crowd,
cried out that Tyler was a traitor, and that he would be their
leader. They were so taken by surprise, that they set up a great
shouting, and followed the boy until he was met at Islington by a
large body of soldiers.
The end of this rising was the then usual end. As soon as the King
found himself safe, he unsaid all he had said, and undid all he had
done; some fifteen hundred of the rioters were tried (mostly in
Essex) with great rigour, and executed with great cruelty. Many of
them were hanged on gibbets, and left there as a terror to the
country people; and, because their miserable friends took some of
the bodies down to bury, the King ordered the rest to be chained up
- which was the beginning of the barbarous custom of hanging in
chains. The King's falsehood in this business makes such a pitiful
figure, that I think Wat Tyler appears in history as beyond
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comparison the truer and more respectable man of the two.
Richard was now sixteen years of age, and married Anne of Bohemia,
an excellent princess, who was called 'the good Queen Anne.' She
deserved a better husband; for the King had been fawned and
flattered into a treacherous, wasteful, dissolute, bad young man.
There were two Popes at this time (as if one were not enough!), and
their quarrels involved Europe in a great deal of trouble.
Scotland was still troublesome too; and at home there was much
jealousy and distrust, and plotting and counter-plotting, because
the King feared the ambition of his relations, and particularly of
his uncle, the Duke of Lancaster, and the duke had his party
against the King, and the King had his party against the duke. Nor
were these home troubles lessened when the duke went to Castile to
urge his claim to the crown of that kingdom; for then the Duke of
Gloucester, another of Richard's uncles, o
pposed him, and
influenced the Parliament to demand the dismissal of the King's
favourite ministers. The King said in reply, that he would not for
such men dismiss the meanest servant in his kitchen. But, it had
begun to signify little what a King said when a Parliament was
determined; so Richard was at last obliged to give way, and to
agree to another Government of the kingdom, under a commission of
fourteen nobles, for a year. His uncle of Gloucester was at the
head of this commission, and, in fact, appointed everybody
composing it.
Having done all this, the King declared as soon as he saw an
opportunity that he had never meant to do it, and that it was all
illegal; and he got the judges secretly to sign a declaration to
that effect. The secret oozed out directly, and was carried to the
Duke of Gloucester. The Duke of Gloucester, at the head of forty
thousand men, met the King on his entering into London to enforce
his authority; the King was helpless against him; his favourites
and ministers were impeached and were mercilessly executed. Among
them were two men whom the people regarded with very different
feelings; one, Robert Tresilian, Chief Justice, who was hated for
having made what was called 'the bloody circuit' to try the
rioters; the other, Sir Simon Burley, an honourable knight, who had
been the dear friend of the Black Prince, and the governor and
guardian of the King. For this gentleman's life the good Queen
even begged of Gloucester on her knees; but Gloucester (with or
without reason) feared and hated him, and replied, that if she
valued her husband's crown, she had better beg no more. All this
was done under what was called by some the wonderful - and by
others, with better reason, the merciless - Parliament.
But Gloucester's power was not to last for ever. He held it for
only a year longer; in which year the famous battle of Otterbourne,
sung in the old ballad of Chevy Chase, was fought. When the year
was out, the King, turning suddenly to Gloucester, in the midst of
a great council said, 'Uncle, how old am I?' 'Your highness,'
returned the Duke, 'is in your twenty-second year.' 'Am I so
much?' said the King; 'then I will manage my own affairs! I am
much obliged to you, my good lords, for your past services, but I
need them no more.' He followed this up, by appointing a new
Chancellor and a new Treasurer, and announced to the people that he
had resumed the Government. He held it for eight years without
opposition. Through all that time, he kept his determination to
revenge himself some day upon his uncle Gloucester, in his own
breast.
At last the good Queen died, and then the King, desiring to take a
second wife, proposed to his council that he should marry Isabella,
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of France, the daughter of Charles the Sixth: who, the French
courtiers said (as the English courtiers had said of Richard), was
a marvel of beauty and wit, and quite a phenomenon - of seven years
old. The council were divided about this marriage, but it took
place. It secured peace between England and France for a quarter
of a century; but it was strongly opposed to the prejudices of the
English people. The Duke of Gloucester, who was anxious to take
the occasion of making himself popular, declaimed against it
loudly, and this at length decided the King to execute the
vengeance he had been nursing so long.
He went with a gay company to the Duke of Gloucester's house,
Pleshey Castle, in Essex, where the Duke, suspecting nothing, came
out into the court-yard to receive his royal visitor. While the
King conversed in a friendly manner with the Duchess, the Duke was
quietly seized, hurried away, shipped for Calais, and lodged in the
castle there. His friends, the Earls of Arundel and Warwick, were
taken in the same treacherous manner, and confined to their
castles. A few days after, at Nottingham, they were impeached of
high treason. The Earl of Arundel was condemned and beheaded, and
the Earl of Warwick was banished. Then, a writ was sent by a
messenger to the Governor of Calais, requiring him to send the Duke
of Gloucester over to be tried. In three days he returned an
answer that he could not do that, because the Duke of Gloucester
had died in prison. The Duke was declared a traitor, his property
was confiscated to the King, a real or pretended confession he had
made in prison to one of the Justices of the Common Pleas was
produced against him, and there was an end of the matter. How the
unfortunate duke died, very few cared to know. Whether he really
died naturally; whether he killed himself; whether, by the King's
order, he was strangled, or smothered between two beds (as a
serving-man of the Governor's named Hall, did afterwards declare),
cannot be discovered. There is not much doubt that he was killed,
somehow or other, by his nephew's orders. Among the most active
nobles in these proceedings were the King's cousin, Henry
Bolingbroke, whom the King had made Duke of Hereford to smooth down
the old family quarrels, and some others: who had in the familyplotting
times done just such acts themselves as they now condemned
in the duke. They seem to have been a corrupt set of men; but such
men were easily found about the court in such days.
The people murmured at all this, and were still very sore about the
French marriage. The nobles saw how little the King cared for law,
and how crafty he was, and began to be somewhat afraid for
themselves. The King's life was a life of continued feasting and
excess; his retinue, down to the meanest servants, were dressed in
the most costly manner, and caroused at his tables, it is related,
to the number of ten thousand persons every day. He himself,
surrounded by a body of ten thousand archers, and enriched by a
duty on wool which the Commons had granted him for life, saw no
danger of ever being otherwise than powerful and absolute, and was
as fierce and haughty as a King could be.
He had two of his old enemies left, in the persons of the Dukes of
Hereford and Norfolk. Sparing these no more than the others, he
tampered with the Duke of Hereford until he got him to declare
before the Council that the Duke of Norfolk had lately held some
treasonable talk with him, as he was riding near Brentford; and
that he had told him, among other things, that he could not believe
the King's oath - which nobody could, I should think. For this
treachery he obtained a pardon, and the Duke of Norfolk was
summoned to appear and defend himself. As he denied the charge and
said his accuser was a liar and a traitor, both noblemen, according
to the manner of those times, were held in custody, and the truth
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was ordered to be decided by wager of battle at Coventry. This
wager of battle meant that whosoever won the combat was to be
considered in
the right; which nonsense meant in effect, that no
strong man could ever be wrong. A great holiday was made; a great
crowd assembled, with much parade and show; and the two combatants
were about to rush at each other with their lances, when the King,
sitting in a pavilion to see fair, threw down the truncheon he
carried in his hand, and forbade the battle. The Duke of Hereford
was to be banished for ten years, and the Duke of Norfolk was to be
banished for life. So said the King. The Duke of Hereford went to
France, and went no farther. The Duke of Norfolk made a pilgrimage
to the Holy Land, and afterwards died at Venice of a broken heart.
Faster and fiercer, after this, the King went on in his career.
The Duke of Lancaster, who was the father of the Duke of Hereford,
died soon after the departure of his son; and, the King, although
he had solemnly granted to that son leave to inherit his father's
property, if it should come to him during his banishment,
immediately seized it all, like a robber. The judges were so
afraid of him, that they disgraced themselves by declaring this
theft to be just and lawful. His avarice knew no bounds. He
outlawed seventeen counties at once, on a frivolous pretence,
merely to raise money by way of fines for misconduct. In short, he
did as many dishonest things as he could; and cared so little for
the discontent of his subjects - though even the spaniel favourites
began to whisper to him that there was such a thing as discontent
afloat - that he took that time, of all others, for leaving England
and making an expedition against the Irish.
He was scarcely gone, leaving the DUKE OF YORK Regent in his
absence, when his cousin, Henry of Hereford, came over from France
to claim the rights of which he had been so monstrously deprived.
He was immediately joined by the two great Earls of Northumberland
and Westmoreland; and his uncle, the Regent, finding the King's
cause unpopular, and the disinclination of the army to act against
Henry, very strong, withdrew with the Royal forces towards Bristol.
Henry, at the head of an army, came from Yorkshire (where he had
landed) to London and followed him. They joined their forces - how
they brought that about, is not distinctly understood - and
proceeded to Bristol Castle, whither three noblemen had taken the
young Queen. The castle surrendering, they presently put those