The Great Revolt, page 5
‘What happens now, Father?’ asked Tilda. Seeing the vast city had made her anxious. ‘We’ve got to go there, haven’t we?’
Thomas took her arm. ‘Come on, back to the crowd. We don’t want to miss anything.’ They arrived on the fringe to see the radical preacher John Ball in full flow. He was a distant figure, standing on a wooden cart, surrounded by thousands of people. And even though he was shouting at the top of his voice, and the crowd were maintaining a respectful silence, it was difficult to hear him. Even when people in such a large crowd are silent, they still make a sound, in their shuffling and scratching.
But the words they could hear were reassuring. Ball told the rebels they were not traitors but ‘with King Richard and the True Commons of England’. They were not there to overthrow the government. They were loyal Englishmen. A message had been sent to Richard, Ball told them, reassuring the king that the rebellion was not against him, but the traitors that surrounded him at court. When Ball finished, the crowd cheered him like a hero. Tilda was struck by the sense and reasonableness in his words. This world they lived in, with kings and dukes and lords and ladies, it wasn’t there in the Garden of Eden. The way they lived now was plainly against God’s will.
While they waited on the heath for others to speak to them, word went around the crowd that Richard had sent messengers telling the arrivals to go home. This seemed to increase the indignation of the people and their determination to be heard. Tilda heard one of the king’s heralds had been driven off with a hail of stones. Another, she heard, had been set upon and beaten. But it was difficult to know what was true and what was hearsay.
Then Wat Tyler stepped up on to the cart. ‘It’s him,’ cried Tilda. ‘We saw him in Aylesford!’
Thomas hushed her and they both strained to hear his words.
At first he said much the same thing as John Ball. ‘Remember, we come not as thieves and robbers. We come seeking justice.’
Tyler again called for the end to serfdom and the right to move at will around the country in search for well-paid work. But more worryingly he also had a list of the king’s most important advisors and demanded that they be handed over to the protestors for punishment. Thomas shook his head and Tilda could clearly see her father was uneasy. But he did not call out to disagree. They could both sense the mood of the crowd and it was vengeful.
Thomas quietly confided in his daughter. He could not hide his indignation. ‘This is not going to happen,’ he said. ‘The king will never hand over the chancellor, the treasurer, the keeper of the privy seal, and all those judges Tyler mentioned. He just won’t do it. I’m sure half of them are related to him in some way. And if he did, the lords and ladies of the court would rise up against him.’ He lowered his voice and whispered, ‘I feel this will be our undoing, Tilda. We are being led by a fool.’
Tilda was not so sure. ‘But these are the men who have advised the king to tax us all so unfairly. Isn’t that what this uprising’s all about – getting rid of people like that?’ she said.
When Tyler stepped down, the great crowd cheered. Now, everyone was ready to push on to London. ‘This is it, Tilda,’ said Thomas. ‘Whatever the king has got in store for us, we’ll find out later today or tomorrow.’
‘What do you mean?’ asked Tilda. Her father had made her feel anxious again.
‘So far, all the way from Aylesford, we have not once been in fear of our lives,’ said Thomas. ‘We have rebelled – merrily committed treason – and no one has come to punish us. Somewhere along the way we will be meeting soldiers loyal to their king. Surely they will try to catch us before we reach the city. We are out in the open here. Easy prey to a trained army. I’m surprised they have not been waiting for us here…’
‘Maybe Richard is reassured by what the leaders have said,’ said Tilda hopefully.
‘Maybe,’ says Thomas, eying the horizon. ‘We shall have to see.’
Their discussion was interrupted by men in the crowd pealing small hand bells and calling for silence. Tyler was back on top of the wooden cart. ‘We have received word that King Richard himself will meet us at Greenwich. We must all head down to the river.’
Everyone turned across the heath, and poured down the hill. More rumours swept through the crowd. The Earl of Buckingham had joined the rebels with his own army. The king’s own mother, Joan of Kent, had given her blessing to the rebellion. Tilda wanted to be comforted by these wonderful things she was hearing. But she realised she could say anything to her companions here and it would spread through the crowd like wildfire. She had to suppress a mischievous urge to tell them that John of Gaunt had returned with his army and sworn allegiance to the rebel cause.
Within half an hour, thousands of peasants and townfolk were waiting expectantly by the river, eyeing the Thames for the first sign of a royal barge. Tilda and Thomas were right there on the river’s edge, so close Tilda wanted to jump in and cool herself down. But the river flowed fast and she was no swimmer. Still, she was excited. She had never seen a king or queen before. This moment was so extraordinary she entirely forgot the fear that had gripped her earlier.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Guy De Clare had been awaiting this moment with great trepidation. Yesterday’s journey from Windsor to Westminster and then the Tower of London had passed without incident. But when they got to the Tower the mood was sombre and Richard and his entourage had been told the rebels were already arriving at Blackheath. But Richard stayed true to his decision. ‘We shall head there tomorrow morning and see for ourselves.’
Just as they were preparing to leave, a messenger came running up to the riverside. ‘My lords,’ he called out to the royal barge, which had already slipped its moorings. ‘The rebels say they are with King Richard and the Commons of England.’
Richard looked quizzical. ‘Are they indeed? We shall go and see for ourselves what these knaves are demanding.’
Even as they sailed downriver, his chief advisors Sudbury and Hales were counselling the king to turn back and send a heavily armed cohort of soldiers instead. The Lord High Treasurer, Robert Hales, declared, ‘I will go to talk to these vermin and bring back the head of their leader.’
Richard looked on him with a slight degree of scorn. ‘Lord High Treasurer,’ he said. ‘Your loyalty and courage cannot be faulted, but I should be most displeased if it were your head they took instead. Caution and cunning are what is required in these circumstances.’
Richard’s advisors all murmured their assent. Guy de Clare looked on this haughty boy with fresh admiring eyes, fascinated to hear what he might say next. He had this total belief in himself. Guy had never seen it in anyone else. This complete sense that he was here to do God’s will, and that God’s will was that he, Richard, should sit upon the throne and rule over his subjects. Guy supposed that his coronation in Westminster Abbey and its extraordinary display of colour and ceremony, with hundreds of trumpets and the sound of thousands of Londoners in the cheering crowds that lined the processional route, would have made anyone think that. There was an undeniable power in such certainty. He hoped Richard never lost that – it would be the end of him.
But as the barge turned along Limehouse Reach and the great bend down to Deptford and Greenwich, a frisson of fear ran through the king’s men. There in the distance they could see thousands of people lining the riverbank at Greenwich. As they grew nearer, the jeering and shouting became more intense. And this group of upstarts were all waving weapons. Some had swords and spears but many others carried the sort of implements a villein would use to tend the land. Not that it mattered. Guy had heard it was a scythe that had killed his uncle. An implement like that could kill a man just as surely as it could cut grass. He shuddered as he remembered the woodcut engraving he had seen; a scythe was the very implement the grim reaper employed to harvest souls.
The royal barge came to a halt within hailing distance of the riverbank, and drifted uncertainly in the current. Richard stared across the water at the people who had come to protest against his government.
‘My lord, we must not get too close,’ said Chancellor Sudbury. ‘There is a great risk of injury if the villeins on the riverbank employ bows and arrows. They may even have crossbows.’
Richard nodded but said nothing. He went to the cabin at the stern of the barge and emerged shortly afterwards in full regal splendour. His crown glistened in the summer sun and his ermine robes looked magnificent. He stood boldly at the front of the barge and the oarsmen manoeuvred it around so the bow of the boat was facing head on to the south bank of the river.
He raised an arm and the crowd fell silent. Richard called out to them in his reedy fourteen-year-old voice. ‘I am your king. What brings you here to my city?’
An unintelligible cacophony erupted from the thousands that lined the riverbank. Guy could see someone in the crowd trying to quieten everyone. He assumed it was so their leader could speak in one voice for them all, but it was impossible. Everyone was shouting and no one could hear a thing.
The lords Sudbury and Hales went to stand in front of Richard in a magnanimous gesture of protection. Guy, who was standing nearby, felt obliged to stand with them and covered his eyes against the sun to scan the crowd for crossbow men. He wondered if he could spot a speeding crossbow bolt if it came towards him. He heard the chief advisors tell their king this situation was too dangerous. ‘Look how angry they are,’ said Hales. ‘Even if the great majority mean you no harm, it only takes one villein with a crossbow to slay the King of England.’
Richard put a hand to his ear in a strangely theatrical gesture. ‘This does not sound like anger, my lords. But it is certainly anarchy. They all speak at once. I cannot converse with a many-headed monster.’
Sudbury said, ‘We must retire at once, Your Majesty. This situation cannot be to our advantage. Only the rebels’. If you go ashore to talk with them, nothing good will come of it. They will kill you or hold you to ransom.’
Richard was unsure. ‘But my lord Sudbury,’ he said. ‘We cannot send men against them. We have too few to fight such a mob. There are only six hundred men at the Tower. That is our entire strength. The advantage is entirely with the mob. We must do what we can by reason.’
The crowd grew distinctly more hostile. The jeers overcame the more plaintive pleas for reason.
Richard looked over to the mob. One or two had begun to hurl their spears in anger at the barge, although they were landing harmlessly a safe distance away. ‘Your Majesty, it is only a matter of moments before the bowmen begin to employ their weapons,’ said the Lord Chancellor. ‘We must turn around at once.’
Richard sensed caution was required and made a small gesture to the helmsman. The barge pulled away and as it gathered speed with the incoming tide up the river, a few arrows splashed into the water behind it.
*
They had not long arrived back at the Tower when messengers appeared. Guy heard a breathless herald, clearly distressed and exhausted from his journey, telling Richard and his advisors that the rebels had refused to disperse. Guy looked at Richard, expecting him to say something sarcastic – clearly this man had no idea that the king had just returned from his own encounter with the mob. But Richard stayed silent and nodded his understanding. Guy noticed the herald was covered in bruises, and blood had soaked some of his uniform. Clearly Richard had some compassion in his regal soul.
There was further alarming news too. The rebels were demanding that the king’s most important advisors should be handed over to them. And they had a list of names.
Guy could see the effect this had on the king’s entourage. Treasurer Hales and Chancellor Sudbury seemed especially alarmed. Guy wondered if they had ever thought through the consequences of their ideas. Perhaps they had thought the peasantry too ignorant to attach this poll tax to their particular names. If so, they had miscalculated mightily.
Then another thought occurred to him. These same men of the council had made other terrible mistakes too – it was they who had approved the war with France, a war that had cost the country a quarter of a million pounds with no victories and no territory gained. Money like that could have rebuilt half the kingdom. People didn’t mind being taxed for wars that they won – everyone from the lowest milkmaid and butcher’s boy, to the dukes and earls, liked a military victory. But stalemate and defeat bought pleasure to no one.
When Guy was home in Gloucester, and still played and feasted with his childhood friends, there were even rumours that money supposedly gathered for the king’s campaigns in France had gone instead to the pockets of the chief councillors. It did no one any good to stir that much hate against them. But looking at these grand advisors, as they clustered around the king, Guy could sense their own invulnerability slipping away. They, like Richard, had allowed themselves to think that God had ordained their power and position and they were untouchable. He now seriously doubted this was so.
CHAPTER NINE
Tilda watched the barge disappear down the river with a mixture of awe and disappointment. She had actually seen the King of England with her own eyes. The king! The man God himself had ordained to rule the country. She felt privileged. If she had children, she realised, she would tell them, and her grandchildren, about the day she saw the King of England. ‘What was he like?’ they might ask with wide-eyed wonder. And she would say, ‘I only saw him from a distance, but even then, he seemed incredibly clean. He had blond hair and a smooth face beneath a golden crown which glinted in the sun.’
But there was something all too human about this boy-king. She had expected him to have a voice like thunder rather than the reedy peal of a boy on the edge of manhood. Or that there would be some sort of heavenly glow around him. But he was just a boy – no more and no less than the spotty youths who teased her about her skill with a slingshot. For one traitorous moment she wondered if she could have hit the king with a stone from where she stood on the riverbank. That would indeed be an extraordinary story to tell – the day I killed the King of England.
But the whole meeting had been a disappointment. Tilda had enjoyed being part of this mighty gang of angry people – knitted together by a righteous cause. But when the king had hailed them, they had all bellowed their needs at once, like the unruly mob they were. If they had the power to resist the soldiers that were sure to be sent against them, then they would have to behave like a proper army. To obey the commands of their officers. Tilda pictured Wat Tyler, impotently yelling at the crowd to be silent so he alone could converse with the king. Tyler had bellowed himself hoarse. It was almost comical. This was a chance they had missed. Who knew when they would have another one.
By now it was late afternoon and the crowd were weary. They began to settle on the hill away from the river, some eating the last of the provisions they had pillaged on their way. Others combing the crowd were begging plaintively for scraps of food. Tomorrow, the word went round, they would march on London.
Tilda and Thomas both felt exhausted. ‘Let us rest a while, daughter,’ he said and they lay down in the lush grass of the hill that rose above the riverbank. Tilda watched small clouds drift lazily across the great blue sky and her own thoughts began to drift too.
She thought especially about what the future held in store. All her life she had been told that her fate was to marry a silly, swaggering Aylesford boy. Sometimes girls her age got married. She thought that was awful. Marriage, she knew, meant coupling. Her friend Cecily had told her about that. And coupling meant babies, unless you were lucky and never had any children. But then that wasn’t really lucky either. Married couples who had no children were sometimes told to remarry by the lord of the manor. He wanted bodies to work on his land and boys and girls to sell along with his fields and animals if he ever decided to move away from the area.
Tilda had seen that with a kind couple who had looked after her when her mother had died. Joseph and Rose, they were called. The two of them were told to marry other people, as ten years of wedlock had produced no children. They pleaded with Lord Laybourne and told him they loved each other. But he was unmoved. Tilda realised how much she hated him when she heard that Rose was often beaten black and blue by her new husband Jeffery – a brute from Ditton, a nearby village Laybourne also owned. Joseph had fought with him because of it and Jeffery had beaten him almost half to death. The next day Joseph had disappeared and no one knew, even to this day, whether he had killed himself from shame or run away to another part of the country. Rose too had fared badly from this arrangement. Her belly had indeed swollen up with child but she and the newborn had both died when she gave birth. Tilda well remembered that night. Poor Rose had gone to her mother’s to have the child and her screams could be heard throughout the village.
So motherhood, or at least the process of it, terrified her. She loved little babies as much as the next village girl. They all gathered to coo at any new arrival in the village, but Tilda knew more than anyone her age how dangerous it was to have a child. Her dead mother still haunted her dreams.
Tilda thought about the other girls and women in the village. Some of them had had six or seven children by the time they were twenty-five. Not all of those children had lived though. As well as the awful danger of having a child there was the heartache of raising a little baby only to have it die.
Thomas stirred from his rest and interrupted her train of thought. ‘Tilda, my dearing, we’ll not stay here tonight. My brother John lives a mere two hours away. Will your feet carry you?’
Tilda considered it. True she was sore from the days walking behind her, but the prospect of spending a night indoors, with relatives who might offer a hot meal, was a very good reason to make a last effort. And she was intrigued to meet this branch of the family. Her father often spoke of his brother, who had moved to London to become a housebuilder.
