Rebellion of Jack Cade

The murder of the Duke of Suffolk had not made things better than they had been before. The ablest of the ministers, who had hitherto guided the king’s counsels, was now removed, but his place was left for a time altogether unsupplied. The men of Suffolk’s party, such as Lord Say, Viscount Beaumont, and Thomas Daniel, still remained about the king, and were nearly as unpopular as he had been. The offices formerly held by Suffolk were divided among them and their particular friends.68.2 Even if the Court had desired to call in men of greater weight, they were not then at hand. The Duke of Somerset was in France, and the Duke of York in Ireland; so that some time must have elapsed before either of them could have taken part in public affairs at home. Meanwhile it was said that the resentment of the Court for Suffolk’s murder would be visited upon the county of Kent; and the county of Kent was of opinion that it suffered abuses enough already. The exactions of the king’s officers, both in the way of taxation and purveyance, were felt to be extortionate and capricious. The collectors of the revenue were appointed by the knights of the shire, and these, instead of being freely chosen by the people, were but the nominees of a few great men who compelled their tenants to vote according to their pleasure. There were, besides, grave cases of injustice in which people were accused of treason, and kept in prison without trial, on the information of persons about the Court who had influence to obtain grants of their lands from the Crown.

Cade’s Rebellion.

Hence arose Jack Cade’s rebellion, a movement which we must not permit ourselves to look upon as a vulgar outbreak of the rabble. Whole districts of Kent, Surrey, and Sussex rose in arms, clamouring for redress of grievances; and it is certain that the insurgents met with a large amount of sympathy, even from those who did not actually take part with them.69.1 As their leader, they selected a man who called himself Mortimer, and who, besides some experience in war, was evidently possessed of no small talent for generalship. It afterwards turned out that his real name was Cade, that he was a native of Ireland, and that he had been living a year before in the household of Sir Thomas Dacre in Sussex, when he was obliged to abjure the kingdom for killing a woman who was with child. He then betook himself to France and served in the French war against England. What induced him to return does not appear, unless we may suppose, which is not unlikely, that some misdemeanour when in the service of France made the French soil fully as dangerous to him as the English. In England he seems to have assumed the name of Aylmer, and passed himself off as a physician. He married a squire’s daughter, and dressed in scarlet; and when the rebellion broke out in Kent he called himself John Mortimer, a cousin of the Duke of York.

The first disturbances took place at Whitsuntide in the latter end of May. In the second week of June70.1 a considerable army from the counties of Kent, Surrey, and Sussex encamped upon Blackheath. The king, who, on receiving news of the rising, had dissolved the parliament then sitting at Leicester, arrived in London on Saturday the 13th, and took up his quarters at the priory of St. John’s, near Smithfield. He had with him 20,000 men under arms, but for some reason or other did not set out against the rebels till the following Thursday, the 18th.70.1 They, meanwhile, had withdrawn in the night-time,70.2 and the king and his host occupied their position on Blackheath. The royal forces, however, proceeded no further. Only a detachment, under Sir Humphrey Stafford and his brother William, was sent to pursue the insurgents. An encounter took place at Sevenoaks on the 18th,70.3 in which both the Staffords were killed. Their defeat spread dismay and disaffection in the royal camp. The noblemen who had accompanied the king to Blackheath could no longer keep their men together, the latter protesting that unless justice were done on certain traitors who had misled the king, they would go over to the Captain of Kent. To satisfy them, Lord Say was arrested and sent to the Tower; but even with this concession the king did not dare presume upon their loyalty. He withdrew to Greenwich, and the whole of his army dispersed. The king himself returned to London by water, and made preparations during the next two or three days to remove to Kenilworth. The mayor and commons of the city went to him to beseech him to remain, offering to live and die with him, and pay half a year’s cost of his household. But all was to no purpose. The king had not even the manliness of Richard II. at Smithfield, and he took his departure to Kenilworth.71.1

The city, thus deserted by its sovereign, knew not for a time what to do. A party within the Common Council itself ventured to open negotiations with the insurgents, and Alderman Cooke passed to and fro under the safe-conduct of the Captain.71.2 To many it may have seemed doubtful loyalty to support the government of Lord Say and his friends against an oppressed population. On the 1st day of July71.3 the insurgents entered Southwark. On the 2nd a Common Council was called by the Lord Mayor to provide means for resisting their entry into the city; but the majority voted for their free admission, and Alderman Robert Horne, who was the leading speaker against them, was committed to prison for his boldness. The rebels enter London. That same afternoon the so-called Mortimer and his followers passed over London Bridge into the city. The Captain, after passing the drawbridge, hewed the ropes asunder with his sword. His first proceedings were marked by order and discipline. He issued proclamations in the king’s name against robbery and forced requisitions, but he rode through the different streets as if to place the capital under military government; and when he came to London Stone, he struck it with his sword, saying, ‘Now is Mortimer lord of this city.’ Finally, he gave instructions to the Lord Mayor about the order to be kept within his jurisdiction, and returned for the night to his quarters in Southwark. On the following morning, Friday the 3rd, he again entered the city, when he caused Lord Say to be sent for from the Tower. That no resistance was made to this demand by Lord Scales, who had the keeping of the fortress, may seem strange. But there was a reason for it which most of the chroniclers do not tell us. The king had been obliged to listen to the grievances of his ‘Commons’ and to withdraw his protection from his favourites. He had granted a commission ‘to certain lords and to the mayor and divers justices, to inquire of all persons that were traitors, extortioners, or oppressors of the king’s people.’72.1 Lord Say was accordingly formally arraigned at a regular sessions at the Guildhall. But when the unfortunate nobleman claimed the constitutional privilege of being tried by his peers, the pretence of law was finally laid aside. A company of the insurgents took him from the officers and hurried him off to the Standard in Cheap, where, before he was half shriven, his head was cut off and stuck upon a long pole. A son-in-law of his named Crowmer, who was then very unpopular as sheriff of Kent, met with a similar fate. He was beheaded in Cade’s presence at Mile End. Barbarity now followed violence. The lifeless heads of Say and Crowmer were carried through the streets, and made to kiss each other. At the same time one Bailey was beheaded at Whitechapel on a charge of necromancy, the real cause of his death being, as it was reported, that he was an old acquaintance of Cade’s who might have revealed something of his past history.

It may have been the expectation of inevitable exposure that induced Cade now to relax discipline, and set an example of spoliation himself. He entered and pillaged the house of Philip Malpas, an alderman known as a friend of the Court, and therefore unpopular in the city. Next day he dined at a house in the parish of St. Margaret Pattens, and then robbed his host. At each of these acts of robbery the rabble were sharers of the spoil. But, of course, such proceedings completely alienated all who had anything to lose, and the mayor and aldermen began to devise measures for expelling Cade and his followers from the city. For this end they negotiated with Lord Scales and Matthew Gough, who had then the keeping of the Tower.

For three days successively Cade had entered the city with his men, and retired in the evening to Southwark. But on Sunday, the 5th of July, he for some reason remained in Southwark all day. In the evening the mayor and citizens, with a force under Matthew Gough, came and occupied London Bridge to prevent the Kentish men again entering the city. Battle on London Bridge. The Captain called his men to arms, and attacked the citizens with such impetuosity, that he drove them back from the Southwark end of the bridge to the drawbridge in the centre. This the insurgents set on fire, after inflicting great losses on the citizens, many of whom were slain or drowned in defending it. Matthew Gough himself was among those who perished. Still, the fight was obstinately contested, the advantage being for the moment now with one party and now with the other. It continued all through the night till nine on the following morning; when at last the Kentish men began to give way, and a truce was made for a certain number of hours.

A favourable opportunity now presented itself for mediation. Although the king had retired to Kenilworth, he had left behind him in London some leading members of his council, among whom were Cardinal Kemp, Archbishop of York,73.1 then Lord Chancellor, and Waynflete, Bishop of Winchester. The former had taken refuge in the Tower, under the protection of Lord Scales; and he called to him the latter, who lay concealed at Holywell.73.2 A conference was arranged between them and the insurgents, and both the Cardinal and Bishop Waynflete73.3 with some others crossed the river and met with Cade in St. Margaret’s Church in Southwark. In the end matters were satisfactorily arranged, and the bishop produced two general pardons prepared by the Chancellor, the first for the Captain himself, and the second for his followers. The offer was embraced with eagerness. The men were by this time disgusted with their leader, and alarmed at the result of their own acts. By thousands they accepted the amnesty and began to return homewards. But Cade, who knew that his pardon would avail him little when the history of his past life came to be investigated, wisely made friends to himself after the fashion of the Unjust Steward. He broke open the gaols of the King’s Bench and Marshalsea, and formed a new company out of the liberated prisoners.74.1 He then despatched to Rochester a barge laden with the goods he had taken from Malpas and others in London, and prepared to go thither himself by land. He and his new following appear to have been still in Southwark on the 8th of July, but to have passed through Dartford to Rochester on the 9th, where they continued still in arms against the king on the 10th and 11th.74.2 An attempt they made upon the castle of Queenborough was resisted by Sir Roger Chamberlain, to whom a reward was given in the following year in acknowledgment of his services.74.3 Meanwhile a proclamation was issued offering a reward of a thousand marks for Cade’s apprehension, and ten marks for that of any of his followers; ‘for,’ says a contemporary chronicler, ‘it was openly known that his name was not Mortimer; his name was John Cade; and therefore his charter stood in no strength.’74.4

The feeble remains of the rebellion were already quarrelling about the booty Cade had conveyed out of London. Their leader now took horse and escaped in disguise towards the woody country about Lewes. He was pursued by Alexander Iden, a gentleman who had just been appointed sheriff of Kent in place of the murdered Crowmer. Capture and death of Cade. Iden overtook him in a garden at Heathfield, and made him prisoner, not without a scuffle, in which Cade was mortally wounded, so that on being conveyed to London he died on the way. It only remained to use his carcass as a terror to evil-doers. His head was cut off and placed upon London Bridge, with the face looking towards Kent. His body was drawn through the streets of London, then quartered, and the quarters sent to four different places very widely apart,—one of them to Blackheath, one to Norwich, one to Salisbury, and one to Gloucester.75.1

If the dispersion of traitors’ limbs for exhibition in many places could have effectually repressed disloyalty, the whole realm ought now to have been at rest. The quarters of another Kentish rebel, who, under the name of Bluebeard, had raised disturbances in the preceding February, were at that moment undergoing public exhibition in London, Norwich, and the Cinque Ports. Those of two others were about this time despatched by the sheriffs of London to Chichester, Rochester, Portsmouth, Colchester, Stamford, Coventry, Newbury, and Winchester. The heads of all these wretches were set upon London Bridge, which in the course of this miserable year bore no less than twenty-three such horrid ornaments.75.2

Further disturbances.

But with all this, sedition was not put down, even in the county of Kent; for I find by the evidence of authentic records that a new rising took place in August at Feversham, under one William Parminter, who, undeterred by the fate of Cade, gathered about him 400 men, and called himself the second Captain of Kent. This affair is quite unnoticed by historians, and all I know of it is derived from a pardon to one of those engaged in it.75.3 But even Parminter was not the last ‘Captain of Kent’ that made his appearance this year; for the very same title was immediately afterwards assumed by one John Smyth, for whose capture a reward of £40 was ordered to be paid to the Duke of Somerset on the 3rd of October.75.4 And the chroniclers, though they do not mention these disturbances, tell us that such things were general over all the kingdom. In Wiltshire, at the time that Cade was at Blackheath, William Ayscough, Bishop of Salisbury, had one day said mass at Edington, when he was dragged from the altar by a band of his own tenants and murdered in his alb and stole at the top of a neighbouring hill. He was the second bishop who had been murdered that year by the populace. Another insurrection in the same county in August is mentioned in a letter of James Gresham’s, the number of the insurgents being reported at nine or ten thousand men.76.1 These instances may suffice as evidence of the widespread troubles of the time.

Sir John Fastolf.

Of the degree of private suffering and misery inflicted in particular cases by these commotions we have a lively picture in Letter 126. At the time when Cade and his followers were encamped upon Blackheath, Sir John Fastolf, a noted warrior of the time, of whom we shall have much to say hereafter, was residing at his house in Southwark. He was a man who had not succeeded in standing well with his contemporaries, and the fact may have contributed not a little to the sensitiveness of a naturally irascible character. In one engagement with the French76.2 he was actually accused of cowardice, a charge which he seems afterwards satisfactorily to have disproved. For some years, however, he had given up soldiering and returned to his native country, where he served the king in a different manner as a member of his Privy Council. But in this capacity too he was unpopular. His advice should have been valuable at least in reference to the affairs of France; but it does not seem to have been taken. The warnings and counsels which he gave with reference to the maintenance of the English conquests in France he caused his secretary, William Worcester, to put in writing for his justification; but though his admonitions were neglected by those to whom they were addressed, popular rumour held him partly accountable for the loss of Normandy. Of this opinion some evidence was given in the course of Cade’s insurrection.

As a member of the King’s Council Fastolf thought it right to send a messenger to ascertain what were the demands of the insurgents. John Payn and the rebels. He therefore commanded one John Payn, who was in his service, to take a man with him and two of the best horses of his stable, and ride to Blackheath. When he arrived there, Cade ordered him to be taken prisoner. To save his master’s horses from being stolen, Payn gave them to the attendant, who galloped away with them as fast as he could, while he himself was brought before the Captain. Cade then asked him what he had come for, and why he had caused his fellow to run away with the horses. He answered that he had come to join some brothers of his wife, and other companions who were among the insurgents. On this some one called out to the Captain that he was a man of Sir John Fastolf’s, and that the two horses were Sir John’s. The Captain raised a cry of ‘Treason!’ and sent him through the camp with a herald of the Duke of Exeter before him, in the duke’s coat-of-arms. At four quarters of the field the herald proclaimed with an Oyez that Payn had been sent as a spy upon them by the greatest traitor in England or France, namely, by one Sir John Fastolf, who had diminished all the garrisons of Normandy, Le Mans, and Maine, and thereby caused the loss of all the king’s inheritance beyond sea. It was added that Sir John had garrisoned his place with the old soldiers of Normandy, to oppose the Commons when they came to Southwark; and, as the emissary of such a traitor, Payn was informed that he should lose his head.

He was brought to the Captain’s tent, where an axe and block were produced. But fortunately he had friends among the host; and Robert Poynings, Cade’s swordbearer and carver, who afterwards married John Paston’s sister Elizabeth, declared plainly that there should die a hundred or two others if Payn were put to death. He was therefore allowed to live on taking an oath that he would go to Southwark and arm himself, and return to join the Commons. He accordingly carried to Fastolf a statement of their demands, advising him at the same time to put away his old soldiers and withdraw himself into the Tower. The old warrior felt that the advice was prudent; he left but two of his servants in the place, and but for Payn the insurgents would have burned it to the ground. The faithful dependant, however, had to pay the full penalty of his master’s unpopularity. He seems to have entertained the rioters for some time at his own cost. Afterwards the Captain took from him some valuable clothes and armour, and sent men to ransack his chamber of bonds, money, and other stores. The insurgents also robbed his house in Kent, and threatened to hang his wife and children. Finally, on the night of the battle on London Bridge, Cade thrust him into the thickest of the combat, where he continued six hours unable to extricate himself, and was dangerously wounded.

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

Sidenote: Battle on London Bridge.
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