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Title: Leaders of the People - Studies in Democratic History
Author: Clayton, Joseph
Language: English
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[Illustration: _John Hampden._
_From a print by J. Houbraken 1740._]
LEADERS OF THE PEOPLE
Studies in Democratic History
by
JOSEPH CLAYTON ❦ ❦
With a Frontispiece in Photogravure
and Numerous Other Illustrations
New York: Mitchell Kennerley
Two East Twenty-Ninth Street · MCMXI
To the Memory of
FREDERICK YORK POWELL
Regius Professor of Modern History
at the University of Oxford
1894–1904
“I loved him in life and I love him
none the less in death: for what
I loved in him is not dead.”
CONTENTS
_Page_
PREFACE xi
I. ARCHBISHOP ANSELM AND NORMAN AUTOCRACY, 1093–1130 3
II. THOMAS OF CANTERBURY, THE DEFENDER OF THE POOR, 1162–1170 33
III. WILLIAM FITZOSBERT, THE FIRST ENGLISH AGITATOR, 1188–1189 69
IV. STEPHEN LANGTON AND THE GREAT CHARTER, 1207–1215 81
V. BISHOP GROSSETESTE, THE REFORMER, 1235–1253 99
VI. SIMON OF MONTFORT AND THE ENGLISH PARLIAMENT, 1258–1265 117
VII. WAT TYLER AND THE PEASANT REVOLT, 1381 141
VIII. JACK CADE, THE CAPTAIN OF KENT, 1450 173
IX. SIR THOMAS MORE AND FREEDOM OF CONSCIENCE, 1529–1535 193
X. ROBERT KET AND THE NORFOLK RISING, 1549 217
XI. ELIOT, HAMPDEN, AND PYM AND THE SUPREMACY OF THE COMMONS,
1626–1643 245
XII. JOHN LILBURNE AND THE LEVELLERS, 1647–1653 277
XIII. WINSTANLEY THE DIGGER, 1649–1650 293
XIV. MAJOR CARTWRIGHT, THE FATHER OF REFORM, 1776–1820 307
XV. ERNEST JONES AND CHARTISM, 1838–1868 319
CONCLUSION 335
INDEX 339
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
JOHN HAMPDEN
_From the Engraving by Jacob Houbraken_ _Frontispiece_
facing p.
ARCHBISHOP ANSELM
_From an Old French Engraving in the British Museum_ 3
THOMAS À BECKET
_From an Engraving after Van Eyck_ 33
KING RICHARD II.
_From the Panel Painting in the Sanctuary in Westminster Abbey_ 141
SIR THOMAS MORE
_From the Drawing by Hans Holbein_ 193
SIR JOHN ELIOT
_From a Steel Engraving by William Holl_ 245
JOHN PYM
_From the Engraving by Jacob Houbraken_ 257
MAJOR CARTWRIGHT
_From a Contemporary Drawing_ 307
PREFACE
“_Let us now praise famous men, and our fathers who begat us._”
The names of the seventeen men, here named “Leaders of the People,” are
for the most part familiar in our mouths as household words. Those who
triumphed, like Anselm and Stephen Langton; or whose cause triumphed,
like Simon of Montfort, Eliot, Pym and Hampden, are beyond any loss of
fame. Those who in high place quitted themselves like men and died game
(if the phrase may be permitted), as did Thomas Becket and Sir Thomas
More, have, for all time, deservedly their reward. The unsuccessful
rebels, FitzOsbert (called Longbeard), Wat Tyler, Jack Cade and Robert
Ket, are hard put to get rid of the obloquy heaped upon them by
contemporary authority; while the later rebels, equally unsuccessful,
Lilburne, Winstanley, Major Cartwright and Ernest Jones, relying on
the pen rather than the sword, escaped the hangman, and in so doing
narrowly escaped oblivion. Good Bishop Grosseteste, living out his long
life, thwarted often, but unmartyred, enjoys the reputation commonly
awarded to conscientious public servants who die in harness.
On the whole, re-perusing the records of these seventeen men, who would
altogether reverse the verdicts of time? The obloquy may be removed
when the work of the rebels is fairly seen, and it may be judged that
they deserved better of the State than appeared when they troubled its
peace. The rebels of the pen, too, should be worthy of recollection
in this age, for they wrought manfully with the weapon now at once so
powerful and so popular. The greater men of our series stand out higher
as the distance increases. So far readjusted, the awards of history may
be accepted.
But with all the differences of character, one common quality binds
these men whose stories are here retold--a resolute hatred of
oppression. And one common work, successful or unsuccessful, was
theirs--to labour for the liberties of England and the health of its
people. The value of each man’s work can only be stated approximately:
it is difficult to make full allowance for the vastly different parts
our heroes, statesmen and rebels alike, were called to play. The great
thing is, that whatever the part, they played it faithfully, as they
read it, to the end. We may admit the degrees of service given: it is
impossible to do otherwise. Some of these Leaders shone as great orbs
of light in their day and generation, lighting not only England, but
all western Europe--and still their light burns true and clear across
the centuries. Others were but flickering rush-lights--long extinct
now. But none were will-o’-the-wisps, for all helped to show the road
to be travelled by English men and women seeking freedom, and moving
ever towards democracy. At the least, we--enjoying an inheritance won
at a great price, and only to be retained on terms no easier--can
keep the memory green of some few valiant servants of our liberties.
What is wanted is a real history of the growth of the idea of freedom
and of popular liberty in this country; and these rough biographical
sketches may be accepted as a contribution to the materials for such a
book. “Biography is a department of history, and stands to it as the
life-history of a plant or an animal does to general biology.”
I have gone back to all the original sources to get once more at the
lives of these “Leaders of the People,” and to see them as they were
seen by their contemporaries; but I have also done my best to read
what the historians of our own day have written concerning them, and
in mentioning my authorities I have, in each case, given a list of the
modern books that seem to me valuable.
J. C.
_September, 1910._
Archbishop Anselm and Norman Autocracy
1093–1109
AUTHORITIES: Eadmer--_Historia Novorum_ and _Life of Anselm_; Orderic
of St. Evroul; _The English Chronicle_; Florence of Worcester; William
of Malmesbury; (Rolls Series); Sir Francis Palgrave--_England and
Normandy_; Freeman--_Norman Conquest_, Vol. V., _Reign of William
Rufus_; Dean Church--_St. Anselm_.
[Illustration: ARCHBISHOP ANSELM
(_From an old French Engraving in the British Museum._)]
ARCHBISHOP ANSELM AND NORMAN AUTOCRACY
1093–1109.
The first real check to the absolutism of Norman rule in England was
given by Anselm, Archbishop of Canterbury.
The turbulent ambition of Norman barons threatened the sovereignity of
William the Conqueror and of his son, the Red King, often enough, but
these outbreaks promised no liberty for England. The fires of English
revolt were stamped out utterly five years after Senlac, and the great
Conqueror at his death left England crushed; but he left it under the
discipline of religion, and he left it loyal to the authority of the
crown, grateful for the one protection against the lawless rule of the
barons.
The English Chronicler, writing as “one who knew him and once lived at
his court,” summed up the character of the Conqueror’s life and work in
words that have been freely quoted through the centuries:--
“King William was wiser and mightier than any of his forerunners. He
built many minsters, and was gentle to God’s servants, though stern
beyond all measure to those who withstood his will.... So stark and
fierce was he that none dared resist his will. Earls that did aught
against his bidding he put in bonds, and bishops he set off their
bishoprics, and abbots off their abbacies, and thanes he cast into
prison. He spared not his own brother, called Odo, who was the chief
man next to the king, but set him in prison. So just was he that the
good peace he made in this land cannot be forgotten. For he made it so
that a man might fare alone over his realm with his bosom full of gold,
unhurt; and no man durst slay another man whatsoever the evil he hath
done him; and if any man harmed a woman he was punished accordingly. He
ruled over England, and surveyed the land with such skill that there
was not one hide but that he knew who held it, and what it was worth,
and these things he set in a written book. So mighty was he that he
held Normandy and Brittany, won England and Maine, brought Scotland and
Wales to bow to him, and would, had he lived two years longer, have
won Ireland by his renown, without need of weapons. Yet surely in his
time men had much travail and very many sorrows; and poor men he made
to toil hard for the castles he had built. He fell on covetousness, and
the love of gold; and took by right and by unright many marks of gold
and more hundred pounds of silver of his people, and for little need.
He made great deer-parks, and ordered that whoso slew hart or hind, him
men should blind; and forbade men to slay deer or boar, and made the
hare go free; he loved the big game as if he were their father. And the
poor men that were oppressed he recked nought of. All must follow the
king’s will if they would live, or have land, or even a quiet life.”
But now, in September, 1087, the great King William was dead, with
his life-work done; and from the tyranny of a strong and just ruler,
England passed to the despotism of his fearless son, William the Red,
who was “terrible and mighty over his land and his men and towards all
his neighbours;” in whose reign “all that was loathsome in the eyes of
God and righteous men was of common use; wherefore he was loathed by
well-nigh all his people, and hateful to God as his end showed.”
There was much of the later Puritan in William I. in the steadfastness
of purpose, the suppression of “malignants,” and determination to have
justice done, no less than in the sincerity for Church reform, and
the deep respect for the ordinances of religion. No king of England
worked more harmoniously with a strong archbishop than William I. with
Lanfranc--save, perhaps, Charles I. with Laud.
Then on the death of William I., followed less than two years later
by Lanfranc’s, came the reaction in Church and State from the efforts
after law, religion, and social decency under the Conqueror’s rule.
The Red King had all his father’s sternness and strength, but was
without any of that belief in justice, that faith in the Sovereign
Power of a Living God, that desire for law and order, and that grave
austerity in morals, which saved the Conqueror from baseness in his
tyranny.
William II., unmarried, made the wildest and most brutish profligacy
fashionable at court. To pay for his debaucheries and extravagances
he plundered all who could pay, in especial the Church, enjoying the
revenues of all vacant sees and abbeys, and declining to fill up the
vacancies so that this enjoyment might remain. After Lanfranc, as the
king’s chief adviser, came Ranulf (nicknamed the Torch, or Firebrand),
a coarse, unscrupulous bully, with the wit of a criminal lawyer. This
man was made Bishop of Durham, and Justiciar. For him government
meant nothing but the art of getting money for his royal master, and
silencing all opposition.
For over three years there was no Archbishop of Canterbury, and the
Red King refused to fill up the vacancy caused by Lanfranc’s death,
preferring to enjoy the revenues and possessions of the see; a thing
that was shocking to all lovers of religion, and scandalous to those
who cared for public decency and the good estate of the country.
Eadmer, a contemporary, describes the condition of England in those
early years of William II.:--
“The king seized the church at Canterbury, the mother of all England,
Scotland, and Ireland, and the neighbouring isles; he bade his officers
to make an inventory of all that belonged to it, within and without;
and after he had fixed an allowance for the support of the monks who
served God in that place, he ordered the remainder to be disposed of
at a rent and brought under his domain. So he put up the Church of
Christ to sale; giving the power of lordship over it to anyone who,
however hurtful he might be, would bid the highest price. Every year,
in wretched succession, a new rent was set; for the king would allow no
bargain to remain settled, and whoever promised more ousted him who was
paying less, unless the former tenant, giving up his original bargain,
came up of his own accord to the offer of the later bidder: and every
day might be seen, besides, the most abandoned of men on their business
of collecting money for the king, marching about the cloisters of the
monastery, heedless of the religious rule of God’s servants, and with
fierce and savage looks giving their orders on all sides; uttering
threats, lording it over every one, and showing their power to the
utmost. What scandals and quarrels and irregularities arose from this
I hate to remember. Some of the monks of the church were dispersed at
the coming of this misfortune, and sent to other houses, and those who
remained suffered many tribulations and indignities. What shall I say
of the church tenants, ground down by such wasting and misery, that one
might doubt, but that worse followed, whether escaping with bare life
they could have been more cruelly oppressed. Nor did all this happen
only at Canterbury. The same savage cruelty raged in all her daughter
churches in England, which, when bishop or abbot died, at that time
fell into widowhood. And this king, too, was the first who ordered this
woeful oppression against the churches of God; he had inherited nothing
of this sort from his father, but was alone in keeping the vacant
churches in his own hands. And thus, wherever you looked, there was
wretchedness before your eyes; and this distress lasted for nearly five
years over the Church of Canterbury, always increasing, always, as time
went on, growing more cruel and evil.”
There is no word of exaggeration in this pitiful lament of Eadmer’s.
England under William II. was at the mercy of a Norman whose notion
of absolute monarchy was to bleed the land as a subject province.
Courageous in battle he was, and skilful in arms, but utterly heedless
of the welfare of the people he ruled. It was enough for the Red King
if his demands for money were met. There was no one strong enough to
gainsay his will, or stand before him as the prophets of old stood
before the kings of Israel, until Anselm came to Canterbury. It is only
in the utterances of men like Eadmer we learn something of the misery
of the nation.[1]
The king was with his court at Gloucester at Christmas, 1092, and
Anselm, then abbot of the famous monastery of Bec in Normandy, was
in England at that time; partly to comfort his friend, Earl Hugh of
Chester, who was sick, and partly to attend to the English affairs of
his monastery.
Anselm was known as the friend of Lanfranc. He had been a welcome guest
at the court of the Conqueror and in the cloisters at Canterbury. His
character stood high above all contemporaries in England or Normandy.
Anselm was surely the right man to be made archbishop, and so put
an end to a state of things which even to the turbulent barons was
discreditable to the country.
The Red King bade Anselm come to his court, and received him with great
display of honour. Then came a private interview, and Anselm at once
told the king how men spoke ill of his misrule: “Openly or secretly
things were daily said of him by nearly all the men of his realm which
were not seemly for the king’s dignity.” They parted, and Anselm was
busy for some time in England. When the abbot wished to return to Bec
William refused him leave to quit the country.
At the beginning of Lent, March, 1093, the king was lying sick at
Gloucester. It was believed the sickness was mortal. Certainly the king
thought himself dying. Anselm was summoned to minister to him, and on
his arrival bade the king “make a clean confession of all that he knows
that he has done against God, and promise that, should he recover, he
will without pretence amend in all things. The king at once agreed to
this, and with sorrow of heart engaged to do all that Anselm required,
and to keep justice and mercy all his life long. To this he pledged his
faith, and made his bishops witnesses between himself and God, sending
persons in his stead to promise his word to God on the altar. An Edict
was written and sealed with the king’s seal that all prisoners should
be set free in all his dominions, all debts forgiven, all offences
heretofore committed pardoned and forgotten for ever. Further, good and
holy laws were promised to the whole people, and the sacred upholding
of right and such solemn inquest into wrongdoing as may deter others.”
Thus Eadmer.
Florence of Worcester puts the matter more briefly. “When the king
thought himself about to die he vowed to God, as his barons advised
him, to amend his life, to sell no more churches nor farm them out,
but to defend them by his kingly might, and to end all bad laws and to
establish just laws.”
There was still the vacant archbishopric to be filled, and the king
named Anselm for Canterbury.
In vain Anselm pleaded that he was an old man--he was then sixty--and
unfit for so great a responsibility, that he was a monk and had shunned
the business of the world.
The bishops assembled round the sick king’s bed would not hear the
refusal. Here was religion well nigh destroyed in England, and evil
rampant, and the Church of God stricken almost to death, and at such a
time was Anselm to prefer his own ease and quiet to the call to deliver
Canterbury from its bondage? By main force they placed a pastoral staff
within his hands, and while the crowd shouted “Long live the bishop!”
he was “carried rather than led to a neighbouring church.” The king
at once ordered that Anselm should be invested with all the temporal
rights of the see, as Lanfranc had held them, and in September, 1093,
Anselm was enthroned at Canterbury, and in December he was consecrated.
Anselm warned the bishops and nobles when they forced the archbishopric
upon him that they were making a mistake. “You have yoked to the plough
a poor weak sheep with a wild bull,” he said. “This plough is the
Church of God, and in England it has been drawn by two strong oxen, the
king and the Archbishop of Canterbury, one to do justice and to hold
power in the things of this world, the other to teach and govern in the
things eternal. Now Lanfranc is dead, and with his untamed companion
you have joined an old and feeble sheep.”
That the king and the archbishop were unevenly yoked was manifest on
William’s recovery, but it was no poor sheep with whom Rufus had to
deal, but a man as brave and steadfast as he was gentle and wise.
Trouble began at once when William rose from his sick-bed. Anselm was
now enthroned and no attempt was made to revoke the appointment. But
the king’s promises of public amendment were broken without hesitation.
The pardoned prisoners were seized, the cancelled debts redemanded and
the proceedings against offenders revived.
“Then was there so great misery and suffering through the whole realm
that no one can remember to have seen its like in England. All the evil
which the king had wrought before he was sick seemed good by the side
of the wrong which he did when he was returned to health.”
The king wanting money for his expedition against his brother, Robert
of Normandy, tried to persuade Anselm to allow the Church lands,
bestowed since Lanfranc’s death on vassals of the crown on tenure of
military service, to remain with their holders. He was answered by
steady refusal. Had Anselm yielded, he would have been a party to the
alienation of lands, that, as part of the property of the see, he was
bound to administer for the common good; he would have been a party not
only to the spoiling of the Church, but to the robbery of the poor and
needy, whose claims, in those days, to temporal assistance from Church
estates were not disputed. Any subsequent restitution of such lands
was impossible, he foresaw, if it was shown that the archbishop had
confirmed what the king had done.
Then came the question of a present of money to the king. Anselm
brought five hundred marks, and, but for his counsellors and men of
arms, who told him the archbishop ought to have given twice as much,
William would have taken the gift gladly enough. As it was, to show
his dissatisfaction, the money was returned. Anselm went boldly to the
king and warned him that money freely given was better than a forced
tribute. To this frank rebuke of the extortion practised by the king’s
servants, William answered that he wanted neither his money, nor his
preaching, nor his company. Anselm retired not altogether displeased at
the refusal, for too many of the clergy bought church offices by these
free gifts after they were instituted. In vain his friends urged him to
seek the king’s favour by increasing his present, Anselm gave the five
hundred marks to the poor, and shook his head at the idea of buying the
king’s favour.
But if Anselm declined to walk in the path of corruption to oblige the
king, William was equally resolute to make the path of righteousness a
hard road for the archbishop.
In February, 1094, when the Red King was at Hastings waiting to cross
to Normandy, Anselm appealed to him to sanction a council of bishops,
whose decisions approved by the crown should have the authority of law.
There were two things for such a council to do: (1) stop the open vice
and profligacy which ravaged the land; (2) find abbots for the many
monasteries then without heads. In Anselm’s words, the council was “to
restore the Christian religion which was well-nigh dead in so many.”
William treated the request with angry contempt, and when Anselm sent
bishops to him asking why the king refused him friendship, an evasive
answer was returned.
“Give him money,” said the bishops again to Anselm, “if you want peace
with him. Give him the five hundred marks, and promise him as much
more, and you will have the royal friendship. This, it seems to us, is
the only way out of the difficulty.”
But it was not Anselm’s way. He would not even offer what had been
rejected. “Besides, the greater part of it was spent on the poor.”
William burst out into wrathful speech when he was told of this reply.
“Never will I hold him as my father and archbishop, and ever shall I
hate him with bitter hatred. I hated him much yesterday, and to-day I
hate him still more.”
A year later (March, 1095) at a great council of bishops and nobles,
held at the castle of Rockingham, the king’s hatred had full vent.
From the first the Archbishop of Canterbury received from the Pope a
_pallium_, the white woollen stole with four crosses, which was “the
badge of his office and dignity,”[2] and Anselm was anxious to journey
to Rome to obtain his pallium from Pope Urban. William objected to this
on the ground that there was another claimant to the papacy, and that
until he had decided who was the rightful pope no one in England had a
right to do so. In vain Anselm pointed out that he, with all Normandy,
had acknowledged Urban before he had become archbishop. William
retorted angrily that Anselm could only keep his faith to the Apostolic
See by breaking his faith to the king.
The council of Rockingham met to settle the question--not the question
of the supremacy of Rome in Western Christendom[3]--but the question
whether, in England, there was any higher authority than the crown.
William did not pretend to dispute the papal supremacy in the Church.
His claim was that the king alone must first acknowledge the pope
before any of his subjects could do so. In reality the king’s one
desire was “to take from Anselm all authority for maintaining the
Christian religion. For as long as any one in all the land was said
to hold any power except through him, even in the things of God, it
seemed to him that the royal dignity was diminished.” (Eadmer.) William
acknowledged Pope Urban readily enough, but he would have Archbishop
Anselm understand that the papacy must be acknowledged by permission
of the king of England. That was the real ground of contention between
these two men: was there any power on earth higher in England than the
English crown? According to William, to appeal to Rome was to dispute
the absolutism of the crown. Anselm maintained that in all things of
God he must render obedience to the Chief Shepherd and Prince of the
Church, to the Vicar of St. Peter; and in matters of earthly dignity
he must render counsel and service to his lord the king.
The bishops at Rockingham were the king’s men. Many of them had bought
their bishoprics, all were afraid of the royal displeasure. The stand
made by Anselm, unsupported though he was, did something to inspire
a better courage in the ranks of the clergy[4]; but in that Lent of
1095 there was no sign of support for the archbishop. William only
wanted to break the will of this resolute old man, the one man in all
the kingdom who dared to have a mind and utterance of his own, and the
mitred creatures of the king supported their lord even to the point
of recommending the forcible deposition of Anselm from his see, or
at least of depriving him of the staff and ring of office. With one
consent the bishops accepted the king’s suggestion of renouncing all
obedience to Anselm.
But the barons were not so craven. To the king’s threat, “No man shall
be mine, who will be his” (Anselm’s), the nobles said bluntly that not
having taken any oath of fealty to the archbishop they could not abjure
it. And Anselm was their archbishop. “It is his work to govern the
Christian religion in this land, and we who are Christians cannot deny
his guidance while we live here.”
The three days’ conference at Rockingham ended in disappointment to the
hopes of William of absolute autocracy, and in general contempt for the
prelates whose abject servility had availed nothing.
Anselm alone stood higher in the eyes of the men of England, and
greater was the ill-will of William. For another two years Anselm held
his ground against the king. The pallium was brought from Rome by
Walter, Bishop of Albano, and placed on the altar at Canterbury, and
Anselm was content to take it from the altar. William had written in
vain to Pope Urban praying for the deposition of Anselm, and promising
a large annual tribute to Rome if his prayer was granted. The pope, of
course, declined to do anything of the sort, and William had to make
the best of the situation. He wanted money for his own purposes, and
his barons were now against him in his quarrel with the archbishop.
For a time William adopted a semblance of peace with Anselm, but his
anger soon blazed out again. The ground of complaint this time was that
the soldiers whom the archbishop had sent to the king for his military
expedition against Wales were inadequate--without proper equipment, and
unfit for service. The archbishop was summoned to appear before the
King’s Court to “do the king right.”
From the time of his acceptance of the archbishopric, Anselm had been
hoping against hope that the king would support him, as the Conqueror
had supported Lanfranc, in the building up of the Christian religion
in England--this summons to the King’s Court was the death-blow to all
these hopes. The defendant in the King’s Court was at the mercy of
the king, who could pronounce whatever judgment he pleased.[5] Anselm
returned no answer to the summons, but his mind was made up.
“Having knowledge that the king’s word ruled all judgment in the King’s
Court, where nothing was listened to except what the king willed, it
seemed to Anselm unbecoming that he should contend, as if disputing, as
litigants do, about a matter of words, and should submit the justice
of his cause to the judgment of a court where neither law, nor equity,
nor reason prevailed. So he held his peace, and gave no answer to the
messenger.” (Eadmer.)
From the despotism of the Red King Anselm would turn for justice to the
centre of Christendom. In England he was impotent to stem the evil that
flowed from the savage absolutism of the throne. All that one man could
do to resist the royal tyranny Anselm had done, and now this summons to
the King’s Court was the final answer to all his efforts to restrain
a lawless king, and to promote the Christian religion in England. He
would not go through the farce of pleading in the King’s Court, where
judgment was settled by the unbridled caprice of the king, self-respect
forbade the archbishop from that; he would appeal to the only court on
earth higher than the courts of kings--the court whose head, in those
days, was the head of Christendom.[6]
William dropped the summons to the King’s Court, and for a time refused
permission to Anselm to leave the country. Bishops and barons now urged
Anselm not to persist in his appeal to Rome. But the archbishop was
resolute, and in the autumn of 1097 the king yielded, and Anselm left
the country.[7]
The first campaign against despotism in England was over--the battle
was to be renewed when Henry I. wore the crown.
At Rome Pope Urban, with all the goodwill in the world, and with a
very real affection and regard for Anselm, could do nothing against
the Red King except rebuke his envoys, and do honour to the much-tried
archbishop. Anselm himself prevented the excommunication of William
when it was proposed at the Council of Bari, October, 1098.
But Pope Urban would not allow Anselm to resign his archbishopric, and
this in spite of all Anselm’s entreaties.
In the spring of 1099 came a General Council at Rome--at which Anselm
assisted--a council remarkable for its decision against allowing clergy
to receive investiture of churches from the hands of laymen, and by
so doing to become the vassals of temporal lords. Excommunication
was declared to be the penalty for all who gave or received Church
appointments on such conditions.
It was at the close of this council that an outspoken Bishop of Lucca
called attention to Anselm’s case. “One sits amongst us in silence and
meekness who has come from the far ends of the earth. His very silence
cries aloud. His humility and patience, so gentle and so deep, as they
rise to God should set us on fire. This one man has come here, wronged
and afflicted, seeking judgment and justice of the Apostolic See. And
now this is the second year, and what help has he found?”
Pope Urban answered that attention should be given, but nothing further
was done.
Anselm left Rome and went to Lyons, remaining in France until the
death of William in August, 1100. Henry was at once chosen king in his
room, and crowned at Westminster three days after his brother’s death.
Six weeks later, at Henry’s earnest request--he prayed him “to come
back like a father to his son Henry and the English people”--Anselm
landed at Dover and returned to take up the task allotted to him on his
consecration as archbishop.
Henry at the outset of his reign promised “God and all the people” that
the old scandals of selling and farming out the Church lands should
be stopped, and “to put down all unrighteousness that had been in his
brother’s time, and to hold the best laws that ever stood in any king’s
day before him.” That this charter was of value may be taken from the
verdict on the king by the Chronicler of the time. “Good man he was and
great awe there was of him. No man durst misdo against another in his
day. He made peace for man and beast. Whoso carried a burden of gold
and silver no man durst do him wrong.”
Two evils that pressed very hardly on the mass of hard-working people,
the devastation that attended the king’s progress through the land[8],
and the coining of false money, were at Anselm’s instigation checked by
the king.
But with all Henry’s desire for the restoration of religion and law
in the land, he was the Conqueror’s son, and for Anselm the struggle
against absolutism in government was not yet over. Only now the battle
was not with a fierce, untamed despot like the Red King, but with an
autocrat of an even more formidable type, a stern man of business, in
whose person alone must be found the source of all law and order, and
who would brook no questioning of the royal will.
At the beginning of his reign Henry found the archbishop’s loyalty and
good sense invaluable. As Lanfranc had stood by the Conqueror in a
marriage which was objectionable from the point of view of Church law,
so Anselm stood by his son when he sought the hand of Edith, daughter
of the sainted Queen Margaret of Scotland. Here the objection to the
marriage was not on the grounds of affinity or consanguinity, but in
the fact that Edith was an inmate of the convent at Romsey, and, it
was alleged, a professed nun. Edith insisted that she had but taken
refuge in the convent to obtain the protection of her aunt Christina,
the abbess, and she had worn the habit of a nun as a safeguard against
the brutal passions of the Red King and his courtiers. The fear of
violence at the hands of the Normans had driven women to take the veil,
and Lanfranc had been known to grant release from vows taken under such
mortal pressure. Anselm was not the man to exalt the letter of the law
above the spirit of liberty. He was content that a council of the great
men in Church and State should hold an inquiry, and on their verdict
declaring Edith free of her vows, the archbishop gave his blessing on
the marriage.
The same great qualities of loyalty and good sense made Anselm stand
by the king when the Norman lords, pricked on by Ranulf the Torch, the
rascally Bishop of Durham (who had escaped from imprisonment in the
Tower by making his gaolers drunk), and hating Henry for “his English
ways,” proposed to back up Robert of Normandy in his attempts to seize
the crown. According to Eadmer, but for Anselm’s faithfulness and
labours, which turned the scale when so many were wavering, King Henry
would have lost the sovereignty of the realm of England at that time.
But Anselm’s services to the king are of small account by the side of
his services to English liberty, and Anselm’s resistance to Henry’s
demands for an absolute monarchy was of lasting influence in the
centuries that followed.[9]
The struggle began when Henry called upon Anselm for a new declaration
of homage to the crown, and required him to receive the archbishopric
afresh by a new act of investiture. This was a claim that had never
been made before. “It imported that on the death of the sovereign the
archbishop’s commission expired, that his office was subordinate and
derivative, and the dignity therefore reverted to the crown.” (Sir F.
Palgrave.)
Anselm met the demand with the answer that such a course was
impossible. Nay, the very ecclesiastical “customs” which for some time
past had given the appointment of bishops and abbots to the crown, and
had made the bishops “the king’s men” by obliging them to do homage and
to receive investiture of their office with ring and staff at the royal
hands, were now impossible for Anselm. The Council at the Lateran, at
which Anselm had been present, had forbidden the bishops of the Church
to become the vassals of the kings of the earth, and Anselm was not the
man to question this decision. He had seen only too much, under William
the Red, of the curse of royal supremacy in the Church. He had stood
up alone against the iniquities of misrule, just because the bishops,
who should have been pastors and overseers of a Christian people, were
the sworn creatures of the king. Henceforth it was forbidden by the
authority that rested in the seat of St. Peter at Rome for a bishop to
receive consecration as a king’s vassal.
But if Anselm would be no party to what had become an intolerable evil,
Henry would not give up the rights his father had exercised without
a contest. He was willing to do his best for the Church, but it must
be in his own way. “Pledging himself in his own heart and mind not to
abate a jot of his supremacy over the clergy, he would exercise his
authority in Church affairs somewhat more decently than his father,
and a great deal more than his brother; but that was all.” (Sir F.
Palgrave.)
Both Henry and Anselm recognized the gravity of the issue. Were the
bishops and abbots to continue to receive investiture from the king
they were “his men,” and his autocracy was established over all. Stop
the investiture and the bishops were first and chiefly the servants of
the Most High, acknowledging a sovereignty higher than that exercised
by the princes of this world, and preferring loyalty to the Church
Catholic and its Father at Rome, to blind obedience to the crown.
In brief, the question in dispute really was--Was there, or was there
not, any power on earth greater than the English crown?--a question
which no English king before Henry VIII. answered successfully in the
negative. In contending for the freedom of the bishops of the Church
from vassalage to the crown, Anselm was contending for the existence
of an authority to which even kings should pay allegiance. It was
not the rights of the clergy that were at stake, for the terrors of
excommunication did not prevent bishops from receiving consecration
on Henry’s terms, and Anselm stood alone now, as in the days of the
Red King, in the resistance to despotism. It was the feeling and the
knowledge, which Anselm shared with the best churchmen of his day, that
great as the power of the king must be, it was a bad thing for such
power to exist unchecked, and that it were well for the world that its
mightiest monarchs should know there was a spiritual dominion given to
the successor of St. Peter, and to his children, a dominion of divine
foundation that claimed obedience even from kings.
Anselm put it to the king that the canons of the Church, and the
decrees of a great council had forbidden the “customs” of investiture
which the king claimed; and he pleaded that he was an old man, and that
unless he could work with the king on the acceptance of the Church
canons, it was no use his remaining in England, “for he could not
hold communion with those who broke these laws”: Henry, for his part,
was much disturbed. It was a grave matter to lose the investiture of
churches, and the homage of prelates; it was a grave matter, too, to
let Anselm leave the country while he himself was hardly established
in the kingdom. “On the one side it seemed to him that he should be
losing, as it were, half of his kingdom; on the other, he feared lest
Anselm should make his brother Robert King of England,”--for Robert
might easily be brought to submit to the Apostolic See if he could be
made king on such terms.
Henry suggested an appeal to the pope on the question of the right
of the crown to “invest” the bishops, and Anselm, who all along was
anxious for peace--if peace could be obtained without acknowledgment
of royal absolutism--at once agreed.
The pope, of course, could not grant Henry’s request. To allow the high
offices of the Church to be disposed of at the caprice of kings and
princes, without any recognition of the sacredness of these offices,
to admit that the chief ministers of religion were first and foremost
“the king’s men,” seemed to Pope Paschal, as it seemed to Anselm,
a concession to evil, and the establishment of a principle which
experience had proved thoroughly vicious and mischievous.
Then for nearly three years a correspondence dragged on between
Henry and the pope, neither wishing for an open rupture, and in the
meantime, Henry, backed by most of the bishops and nobles in setting at
nought the canons which had forbidden investiture, proposed to go on
appointing and investing new bishops as before.
Finally, the king appealed to Anselm to go to Rome “and try what he
could do with the pope, lest the king by losing the rights of his
predecessors should be disgraced.”
Anselm was now (1103) an old man of seventy, but he agreed to go; only
“he could do nothing to the prejudice of the liberty of the Church or
his own honour.” What Henry hoped for was that the pope would grant
some personal dispensation in the matter of the royal “customs,” and
he had tried to persuade Anselm that such dispensation was sure to be
granted. Anselm did not believe the dispensation possible or desirable,
but left the decision with the acknowledged head of Christendom at
Rome; and though for another three years Henry urged his suit, no
dispensation could be wrung from the pope. All that the pope would
grant was that the bishops might do “homage” to the crown for their
temporal rights.
At last, in April, 1106, Anselm returned to England. The bishops
themselves, who had sided with the king against him, implored him to
return, so wretched had become the state of religion in England in his
absence. They promised to do his commands and to fight with him the
battle of the Lord.
Henry, fresh from the conquest of Normandy, sent word of his good-will,
and of his desire for the archbishop’s presence. The long drawn-out
battle was over, and the king had to be content with “homage,” and to
resign the claim to investiture.
“On August 1st (1107) an assembly of bishops, abbots, and chief men of
the realm, was held in London, in the king’s palace, and for three days
the matter of the investiture of churches was fully discussed between
the king and the bishops in Anselm’s absence. Then, in the presence of
Anselm and before the whole multitude, the king granted and decreed
that henceforth and for ever no one should be invested in England with
bishopric or abbey by staff and ring, either by the king or the hand
of any layman; while Anselm allowed that no one chosen for a bishopric
should be refused consecration for having done homage to the king. This
having been settled, the king, by the counsel of Anselm and the chief
men of the realm, appointed priests in nearly all those churches in
England which had long been widowed of their pastors.” (Eadmer.)
Victory rested with Anselm. The old archbishop had done his best for
the liberty of religion, and by contending for this liberty he had
wrought for common freedom.[10] Later ages and struggles were to bring
out more clearly that some measure of political and social liberty
must follow the demand for freedom in religion. “Religious forces,
and religious forces alone, have had sufficient influence to ensure
practical realisation for political ideas.” (Figgis, _Studies of
Political Thought_.)
Anselm’s life was nearly over, his work was accomplished, a
philosophical treatise “Concerning the agreement of Foreknowledge,
Predestination and the Grace of God with Free Will” was written with
difficulty in the last years. Then his appetite failed him, and all
food became loathsome. At last he was persuaded to take to his bed, and
on April 21st, 1109--the Wednesday of Holy Week--at daybreak Anselm
passed away.
Anselm’s name has long been enrolled in the calendar of the saints
of the Church Catholic, no less is it to be cherished by all who
love liberty. Well may it be said of him, “he was ever a close
follower of Truth, and walked in noble companionship with Pity and
Courage.” Anselm’s plain good sense and charity were conspicuous in
his benediction of the marriage of Henry and Edith, but these great
qualities were earlier displayed when Lanfranc consulted him as to the
claims of the English Archbishop Ælphege to be canonised as a martyr.
Ælphege had been slain by the Danes for refusing to ransom his life at
the expense of his tenants; and Anselm replied to Lanfranc that he who
would die rather than oppress his tenants dies for justice’ sake, and
he who dies for justice dies a martyr for Christ.
His sympathy and humaneness shone out a thousand times. There is the
story Eadmer tells of an abbot, who came to Anselm at Bec, and deplored
that he could do no good with the boys at his monastery. “In spite
of all we do they are perverse and incorrigible,” said the abbot,
despondently. “We are always beating them, but they only get worse:
and though we constrain them in every way we can, it’s all of no use.”
“_Constrain_ them!” answered Anselm. “Tell me, my lord abbot, when
you plant a tree in your garden, do you so tie it up that it cannot
stretch forth its branches? And if you did so, what sort of tree would
it become a few years hence when you released it? But this is just
what you do with your boys. You cramp them in with terrors and threats
and blows, so that it is quite impossible for them to grow or enjoy
any freedom. And kept down in this way their temper is spoilt by evil
thoughts of hatred and suspicion against you, and they put down all you
do to ill-nature and dislike. Why are you so harsh with them? Are they
not human beings of the same nature as yourself? How would you like to
be treated as you treat them?” The abbot was finally persuaded that
he had been all wrong. “We have wandered,” he said, “from the way of
truth, and the light of discretion hath not shone on us.”
There is another story which gives Anselm’s pity and feeling of
kinship with the whole animal creation. It was when he was archbishop,
and was riding one day from Windsor to Hayes that a hare chased by the
dogs of some of his company took refuge under the feet of his horse.
Anselm at once pulled up and forebade the hare to be molested, and
when his escort laughed gleefully at the capture, the archbishop said:
“You may laugh, but it is no laughing matter for this poor unhappy
creature, which is like the soul of a departing man pursued by evil
spirits. Mortal enemies attack it, and it flies to us for its life: and
while it turns to us for safety we laugh.” He rode on, and in a loud
voice forbade the dogs to touch the hare; which, glad to be at liberty,
darted off to the fields and woods.
That Anselm never wavered in his tenderness for the weak and oppressed
may be learnt from the great Church Synod held at Westminster in
1102--a council summoned on the strong request of the archbishop. The
slave trade was specially denounced at this council as a “wicked trade
used hitherto in England, by which men are sold like brute animals,”
and a canon was drawn up to that effect.
Anselm’s enduring courage and desire for truth are conspicuous all
his life. He fought single-handed against both William and Henry,
and no weight of numbers, no world-wise talk from other prelates
could make him budge. If he withstood the Red King and his court at
Rockingham, equally firm was he in withstanding the Norman barons who
were inclined to break away from their sworn allegiance to Henry. No
Englishman by birth or blood was Anselm, for he was born at Aosta, and
spent the greater part of his life on the Continent, but he brought
to England the finest gifts of life, and gave them freely in service
to England’s liberty. He withstood an absolutism that threatened the
total enslavement of the nation, and the witness he bore to liberty
was taken up and renewed in the centuries that followed. “Anselm
was truly a great man. So good that he was held a saint in his very
lifetime, so meek that even his enemies honoured him, so wise that he
was the foremost thinker of his day, and the forerunner of the greatest
philosophers of ours.” (F. York Powell.)
Thomas of Canterbury
The Defender of the Poor
1162–1170
AUTHORITIES: Benedict of Peterborough; Garnier; William FitzStephen;
John of Salisbury; Herbert of Bosham; Alan of Tewkesbury; Edward
Grim; Roger of Pontigny; William of Canterbury; Robert of
Cricklade--_Materials for the History of Thomas Becket_, 7 vols.;
_Thomas Saga_ (Icelandic), translated by Magnusson; Giraldus
Cambrensis; Gervase of Canterbury; William of Newburgh; Roger of
Hoveden, III.; Ralph Diceto (Rolls Series); Froude, R. H.--_Remains_,
Vol. 3; _Life of Becket_, by Canon J. C. Robertson; _Life of St. Thomas
Becket_, by John Morris, S.J.; Stubbs--_Constitutional History_, Vol.
I; Freeman--_Historical Essays_, 1st Series; W. H. Hutton--_English
History by Contemporary Writers_--_St. Thomas of Canterbury_.
[Illustration: THOMAS A BECKET
(_From an old Engraving after Van Eyck._)]
THOMAS OF CANTERBURY THE DEFENDER OF THE POOR
1162–1170
Fifty years after the death of Anselm the struggle with absolute
monarchy had to be renewed in England, and again the Archbishop of
Canterbury was the antagonist of the crown, standing alone for the most
part, as Anselm stood, in his resistance to autocracy.
The contrast is great between the upbringing and character of Anselm
and of Thomas; but both men gave valiant service in the cause of
liberty in England, and both are placed in the calendar of the saints.
For Thomas and Anselm alike the choice was between the favour of
the King of England, the safe broad road of passive obedience, and
the following of the call of conscience on the craggy way of royal
displeasure; and to the everlasting honour of these two men, and of the
religion they professed, they chose the steep and narrow path with no
faltering step, and followed the gleam, heedless of this world’s glory,
heedless of life itself.
Thomas was no monk as Anselm was, when the king nominated him for
the archbishopric of Canterbury. His early life was not spent in the
cloister but in the employment of a wealthy London sheriff, in the
office of Archbishop Theobald, at Lambeth, and as Chancellor of England.
The son of gentle parents--his father Gilbert sometime
sheriff--“London citizens of the middle class, not usurers nor engaged
in business, but living well on their own income,” according to
FitzStephen, Thomas was the first Englishman to be made archbishop.
His gifts marked him out for high office. Theobald had sent him abroad
to study law at the great school at Bologna, and at the age of 36 made
him archdeacon of Canterbury, at that time “the dignity in the Church
of England next after the bishops and abbots, and which brought him an
hundred pounds of silver.” A year later, 1155, the young newly crowned
king, Henry II., on the advice of old Archbishop Theobald, made Thomas
the Chancellor. Theobald, anxious about the present, and apprehensive
for the future--for the king was very young, and those about him were
known to be hostile to the freedom of the Church and willing to treat
England as a conquered land--sought to prevent the evils which seemed
to be at hand by making Thomas a partner of the King’s counsels. He
could say, after ten years’ experience, that Thomas was high-principled
and prudent, wisely zealous for justice, and whole-hearted for the
freedom of the Church, and he held forth to the king on the wisdom,
the courage and the faithfulness of his archdeacon, “and the admirable
sweetness of his manners.”
The appointment was made, nor could anyone say that it was ill done, or
that Theobald in his recommendation, or Henry II. in his acceptance, of
Thomas for the chancellorship could have done better for England.
The chancellor was magnificent, and his dignity was accounted second
from the king. Nobles sent their children to Thomas to be trained in
his service. The king commended to him his son, the heir to the throne.
Barons and knights did homage to him. On his embassy to the French king
never had been seen such a retinue of followers, and such a lavish
display of the wealth and grandeur of England. The proud and mighty he
treated with harshness and violence. Yet it was said, by those who knew
him intimately, that he was lowly in his own eyes, and gentle and meek
to those who were humble in heart. And in the courts of kings, where
chastity is never commonly extolled, or purity of life the fashion,
Thomas, the chancellor, was known for his cleanness of living and his
unblemished honour. Many enemies he had, many who hated him for his
power; but never was breath of scandal uttered against the chancellor’s
private life, or suggestion made that the carnal lusts and appetites
which, unbridled, play havoc with men great and small, could claim
Thomas for their subject.
He might be reproached by a monk for that he, being an archdeacon,
lived so secular a life, wearing the dress of a courtier, and charging
on the field with knights in France, but it could not be alleged that
church or realm suffered neglect from the chancellor. “By divine
inspiration and the counsel of Thomas, the lord king did not long
retain vacant bishoprics and abbacies, so that the patrimony of the
Crucified might be brought into the treasury, as was afterwards
done, but bestowed them with little delay on honourable persons, and
according to God’s law.” (W. FitzStephen.)
The close friendship and warm affection of the king for his chancellor
were known to all. When the day’s business was done “they would play
together like boys of the same age.” They sat together in church and
hall and rode out together. “Never in Christian times were there two
men more of one mind or better friends.” It was natural on the death of
Archbishop Theobald, in 1161, that people should point to Thomas as his
successor, though the chancellor shrank, as Anselm had done, from the
post.
“I know three poor priests in England any one of whom I would rather
see advanced to the archbishopric than myself,” he declared earnestly,
when his friend the prior of Leicester (who also remonstrated with him
for his unclerical dress) told him the rumours of the court. “For as
for me, if I was appointed, I know the king so through and through that
I should be forced either to lose his favour or, which God forbid, to
lay aside the service of God.”
Thomas uttered the same warning to Henry when the king proposed the
primacy to him. “I know certainly,” he said, “that if God should so
dispose that this happen, you would soon turn away your love, and the
favour which is now between us would be changed into bitterest hate. I
know that you would demand many things in Church matters, for already
you have demanded them, which I could never bear quietly, and the
envious would take occasion to provoke an endless strife between us.”
But Henry’s mind was made up. Residing largely in France, he would
have Thomas, Archbishop of Canterbury and Chancellor, to rule England
as his vice-regent. Six years had Thomas been the king’s friend and
chancellor, but the king did not know at all the real character of
his man, or rather it was inconceivable to the royal mind that
Thomas, whom the king had raised from a mere nobody, from Archdeacon
of Canterbury, an important ecclesiastic at best, to the chief man in
the realm, should ever dare set himself at variance with the king’s
will. Henry, with his untiring energy, was earnest enough for good
government in Church and State under an absolute monarchy, and he
counted on greater co-operation with Thomas in carrying out his plans,
were the latter archbishop. Hitherto, more than once the chancellor
had succeeded in moderating the king’s outbursts of wrath against some
hapless offender, but he had never shown himself a partisan of the
clergy at the expense of the commonwealth,[11] and his lack of pride in
his order had even incurred rebuke, so little of the ecclesiastic did
this statesman appear.
Thomas understood the king better than the king understood his
chancellor. But his protests were in vain. He was as surely marked for
the archbishopric as Anselm had been. Bishops of the province approved
and the monks of Canterbury duly voted for the king’s chancellor in
common consent, Gilbert Foliot, the Bishop of Hereford, and afterwards
of London, and the archbishop’s enemy to the end, alone opposing the
election.
“Then the archbishop-elect was by the king’s authority declared free of
all debts to the crown and given free to the Church of England, and in
that freedom he was received by the Church with the customary hymns and
words of praise.” (Herbert of Bosham.)
On June 2nd, 1162, the Saturday after Whit Sunday, Thomas was
ordained priest and on the following day consecrated bishop. (The new
archbishop instituted the festival of Trinity Sunday to commemorate
his consecration, and some 200 years later the festival was made of
general observance in the Catholic Church.) The king realised the
mistake he had made within a year of the consecration. The brilliant
chancellor was no sooner archbishop than he turned from all the
gaieties of the world, and while no less a statesman, adopted the life
of his monks--though never himself a monk--at Canterbury. Henceforth
Archbishop Thomas was the unflinching champion of the poor and them
that had no helper, the resolute defender of the liberties of the
Church against all who would make religion subject to the autocracy of
the king of England.
Thomas was forty-four years old, in the full strength of his manhood,
when he was made archbishop, and for eight years he did battle with the
crown, only laying down his charge at the call of martyrdom.
The first disappointment to Henry was the resignation of the
chancellor’s seal.[12] It was clear to Thomas that he could no longer
serve the crown and do the work of a Christian bishop at the same
time, and he had accepted with full sense of responsibility the see of
Canterbury. There was no room for the egotism that loves power, the
vaulting ambition that o’erleaps itself, or even the self-deception
that persuades a man holding to high position at sacrifice of principle
that his motive is disinterested, in St. Thomas of Canterbury. More
than once England was to see in later years men who strove vainly to
serve with equal respect the Christian religion and the royal will--the
service always ended in the triumph of the latter. Thomas was far too
clearly-sighted to imagine such joint service possible, and for him,
elected and consecrated to the primacy of the English Church, there was
no longer any choice. As chancellor, keeping his conscience clear, he
had done the best he could for law and order as the king’s right hand
man. As Archbishop of Canterbury his duty, first and foremost, was to
maintain the Christian religion and defend the cause of the poor and
needy.
But to Henry the resignation of the chancellorship was an act of
desertion, a declared challenge to the royal supremacy. Henry II.
was no more the man than his grandfather Henry I. had been to brook
anything that threatened resistance to the king’s rule.
Courtiers who hated Thomas were always at hand to poison the ears
of the king by defaming the archbishop, and this, says William
FitzStephen, was the first cause of the trouble. Another cause was the
hatred of the king for the clergy of England, hatred provoked by the
notoriously disreputable lives of more than one clerk in holy orders.
The battle between Henry and Thomas began on this matter of criminous
clerks.
William the Conqueror and Lanfranc recognizing that the Church,
strong and well ordered, made for national well-being, had set up
ecclesiastical courts wherein all matters affecting church law and
discipline were to be dealt with by the clergy, to the end that the
clergy should not be mixed up in lawsuits and should be excluded from
the lay courts. Henry II. was not satisfied that criminous clerks
were adequately dealt with in these ecclesiastical courts, where no
penalty involving bloodshed might be inflicted, and where the savage
punishments of mutilation had no place. Thomas was as anxious as the
king for the Church to be purged of abuses, but he was resolved not
to hand over offenders to the secular arm. The archbishop was an
ardent reformer. “He plucked up, pulled down, scattered and rooted
out whatever he found amiss in the vineyard of the Lord,” wrote a
contemporary; but he would shelter his flock as far as he could by the
canon law from the hideous cruelties of the King’s Courts.[13] It was
not for the protection of the clergy alone the archbishop was fighting
in the councils summoned by the king at Westminster in 1163, and at
Clarendon in 1164.
“Ecclesiastical privileges were not so exclusively priestly privileges
as we sometimes fancy. They sheltered not only ordained ministers,
but all ecclesiastical officers of every kind; the Church Courts also
claimed jurisdiction in the causes of widows and orphans. In short,
the privileges for which Thomas contended transferred a large part of
the people, and that the most helpless part, from the bloody grasp of
the King’s Courts to the milder jurisdiction of the bishop.” (Freeman,
_Historical Essay_, First Series.)
Before the climax of the dispute between Henry and Thomas was reached
at Clarendon, the archbishop had resisted the king in a matter of
arbitrary taxation--“the earliest recorded instance of resistance to
the royal will in a matter of taxation”[14]--and had fallen still
further in the king’s disfavour.
Henry was at Woodstock, on July 1st, 1163, with the archbishop and the
great men of the land, and among other matters a question was raised
concerning the payment of a two shillings land tax on every hide of
land. This was an old tax dating from Saxon times, which William the
Conqueror had increased. It was paid to the sheriffs, who in return
undertook the defence of the county, and may be compared with the
county rates of our own day. The king declared this tax should in
future be collected for the crown, and added to the royal revenue; and
no one dared to question this decision until Archbishop Thomas arose
and told the king to his face that the tax was not to be exacted as
revenue, but was a voluntary offering to be paid to the sheriffs only
“so long as they shall serve us fitly and maintain and defend our
dependants.” It was not a tax that could be enforced by law.
Henry, bursting with anger, swore, “By God’s Eyes” it should be given
as revenue, and enscrolled as a king’s tax.
The archbishop replied with quiet determination, “aware lest by his
sufferance a custom should come in to the hurt of his successors,”
that, “by the reverence of those Eyes,” by which the king had sworn,
not one penny should be paid from his lands, or from the rights of
the Church. The king was silenced, no answer was forthcoming to the
objector, and the tax was paid as before to the sheriffs. But “the
indignation of the king was not set at rest,” and in October came the
Council of Westminster.
The king at once demanded that criminous clerks should not only
be punished in the Church Courts by the sentence of deprivation,
but should further be handed over to the King’s Courts for greater
penalties, alleging that those who were not restrained from crime by
the remembrance of their holy orders would care little for the loss of
such orders.
The archbishop replied quietly that this proposed new discipline was
contrary to the religious liberty of the land, and that he would never
agree to it. The Church was the one sanctuary against the barbarities
of the law, and Thomas to the end would maintain the security it
offered. More important it seemed to him that clerical offenders should
escape the king’s justice, than that all petty felons who could claim
the protection of the Church should be given over to mutilation by the
king’s officers. The bishops silently supported the primate in this
matter, though they told him plainly, “Better the liberties of the
Church perish than that we perish ourselves. Much must be yielded to
the malice of the times.”
Thomas answered this pitiful plea by admitting the times were bad.
“But,” he added, “are we to heap sin upon sin? It is when the Church is
in trouble, and not merely when the times are peaceful, that a bishop
must cleave to the right. No greater merit was there to the bishops of
old who gave their blood for the Church than there is now to those who
die in defence of her liberties.”
But the bishops were wavering, fearful of defying the king’s will. And
when Henry, defeated for the moment by the archbishop’s stand, angrily
called upon them to take an oath to observe in future “the royal
customs” of the realm as settled by his grandfather, Henry I., they all
agreed to do so, adding the clause “saving the rights of their order.”
The king objected, calling for the promise to be made “absolutely and
without qualifications,” until Thomas reminded him that the fealty the
bishops swore to give the crown “in life and limb and earthly honour”
was sworn “_salvo ordine suo_,” and that the “earthly honour” promise,
which included all the royal “customs” of Henry I., was not to be given
by bishops in any other way.
It was now late at night, and the king broke up the council in anger,
leaving the bishops to retire as they would.
Henry was resolved to abolish the Church Courts and destroy the
protection they afforded. He would have all brought under the severity
of his law, in spite of the archbishop. He knew the bishops were
wavering and were fearful of the royal displeasure. Thomas Becket, and
Thomas Becket alone, was the obstruction to the king’s schemes, and
firm as Becket might stand, the king would break down his opposition.
The very day after Westminster the king demanded the resignation of all
the fortresses and honours Thomas had held under the crown since he had
been made chancellor, and these were surrendered at once.
Then Henry tried a personal appeal, and once more the two met together
in a field near Northampton. Henry began by reminding Thomas of all he
had done for him.
“Have I not raised you from a mean and lowly state to height of honour
and dignity? How is it after so many benefits and so many proofs of my
affection, which all have seen, you have forgotten these things, and
are now not only ungrateful, but my opponent in everything?”
The archbishop answered: “Far be it from me, my lord. I am not
forgetful of the favours which God has conferred upon me at your
hands. Far be it from me to be so ungrateful as to resist your will
in anything so long as it is in accord with God’s will.” St. Thomas,
enlarging on the necessity of obedience to God rather than to men,
should the will of man clash with the will of God, the king at last
interrupted him impatiently with the intimation that he did not want a
sermon just then.
“Are you not my man, the son of one of my servants?”
“In truth,” the archbishop answered, “I am not sprung from a race of
kings. Neither was blessed Peter, the prince of the apostles, to whom
was committed the leadership of the Church.”
“And in truth Peter died for his Lord,” said the king.
“I too will die for my Lord when the time comes,” replied the
archbishop.
“You trust too much to the ladder you have mounted by,” said the king.
But the archbishop answered: “I trust in God, for cursed is the man
that putteth his trust in man.” Then the archbishop went on to remind
Henry of the proofs he had given of his fidelity in the years when he
was chancellor, and warned him that he would have done well to have
taken counsel with his archbishop concerning spiritual things than with
those who had kindled the flame of envy and vengeance against one who
had done them no wrong.
The only reply the king gave was to urge that the Archbishop should
drop the words “saving their order” in promising to obey the royal
customs.
The archbishop refused to yield, and so they parted.[15]
At the close of the year the archbishop’s difficulties had been
increased by appeals on all sides to yield to the king. The bishops
were for peace at any price, and the Pope, Alexander III., threatened
by an anti-pope, and anxious for the good will of the king of England,
sent an abbot to Thomas urging him to give way, on the ground that
Henry only wanted a formal assent to the “customs” for the sake of his
dignity, and had no intention of doing anything harmful to the Church.
Under these circumstances Thomas decided to yield. He went to the king
at Woodstock and declared that the obnoxious phrase, “saving our
order,” should be omitted from the promise to observe the “customs.”
Without delay the king ordered his justiciar, Richard of Lucy, and his
clerk, Jocelin of Balliol, to draw up a list of the old “customs” and
liberties of his grandfather Henry I., and on the 29th of January,
1164, a great council was held at Clarendon to ratify the agreement
between the bishops and the king.
Sixteen constitutions or articles were drawn up, and Thomas,
over-persuaded by the prayers of the bishops and the desire for peace,
gave his promise unconditionally to observe them. But no sooner had he
done so, and the articles were placed before him in black and white,
than he repented.
The very first article declared that all disputes about Church
patronage were to be tried in the King’s Court, and was intolerable,
because while the State held it was a question of the rights of
property, the Church view was that the main point was the care of
souls, a spiritual matter for churchmen, not lawyers, to decide.
The other articles which Thomas objected to, and which the pope
subsequently refused to ratify, decreed: (1) That clerks were to be
tried in the King’s Courts for offences of common law. (2) That neither
archbishops, bishops, nor beneficed clerks were to leave the kingdom
without the king’s license. (This, said St. Thomas, would stop all
pilgrimages and attendance at councils at Rome, and turn England into a
vast prison. “It was right enough to apply for the king’s leave before
the departure, but to bind one’s-self by an oath not to go without it
was against religion and was evil.”) (3) That no member of the king’s
household was to be excommunicated without the king’s permission.
(4) That no appeals should be taken beyond the archbishop’s court,
except to be brought before the king. (This was a definite attempt to
prohibit appeals to Rome, and Thomas pointed out that the archbishop on
receiving the pallium swore expressly not to hinder such appeals. The
acceptance of this article left the king absolute master.)
The last article, declaring that serfs or sons of villeins were not to
be ordained without the consent of the lord on whose land they were
born, was not opposed by the pope, and the only contemporary objection
seems to have been raised by Garnier, a French monk and a biographer of
Thomas Becket.[16]
Thomas had promised obedience to these constitutions, but he would not
put his seal to them. It seemed to him that it was not only the old
“customs” that had been drawn up, but rather a new interpretation of
these customs. The great Council of Clarendon was over. Thomas received
a copy of the constitutions and rode off, and the king had to be
content for the time with the promises delivered.
In abject remorse Thomas wrote to the pope confessing his assent to
the Constitutions of Clarendon, and for forty days he abstained from
celebrating the mass. The pope, still anxious to prevent any open
rupture between the king and the archbishop, wrote in reply that
“Almighty God watches not the deed, but considers rather the intention
and judges the will,” and that Thomas was absolved by apostolic
authority. All the same, Pope Alexander III., without in any way
censuring Thomas, throughout the long struggle with Henry never stands
up roundly for the archbishop.
Neither Henry nor Thomas could rest satisfied with Clarendon. The
archbishop had compromised for the sake of peace, but his quick
revulsion had provoked a keener hostility in the king. To Henry
it seemed the time had come to drive Thomas out of public life by
compelling him to resign the see of Canterbury. With Thomas out of the
way Henry could carry out his plans for a strong central government,
for bringing all under the pitiless arm of the law. Thomas was the
one man in the kingdom who dared offer resistance, and if Thomas was
no longer archbishop and some supple creature of the king was in his
place, the royal power would be absolute, for there seemed no fear of
any interference from Pope Alexander III.
There were plenty of the archbishop’s enemies among the nobles at the
court ready to fan the king’s anger against Thomas, and by October,
1164, Henry was ready to crush the primate.
Another council was summoned to meet at Northampton, and now Archbishop
Thomas was to learn the full significance of the Constitutions of
Clarendon.
The first charge against Thomas was that he had refused justice to
John, the Treasurer-Marshal, who had taken up some land under the see
of Canterbury. John had taken his suit to the King’s Court, and Thomas
was further charged with contempt of the majesty of the crown for not
putting in a personal appearance at this court. The king now pressed
for judgment against the archbishop for this contempt, and the council
ordered that he should be condemned to the loss of all his moveable
property, and 500 pounds of silver was accepted as an equivalent fine.
“It seemed to all that, considering the reverence due to the king
and by the obligation of the oath of homage, which the archbishop
had taken, and by the fealty to the king’s earthly honour which he
had sworn, he was in no way to be excused, because when summoned by
the king he had neither come himself, nor pleaded infirmity, or the
necessary work of his ecclesiastical office.” (W. FitzStephen).
It was not easy to get the sentence pronounced against Thomas. Barons
and bishops were willing enough to stand well with the king, and they
agreed without contradiction to the fine. But the barons declined to
act as judge on a spiritual peer, and insisted that one of the bishops
must do this business. Henry, Bishop of Winchester, at last, on the
king’s order, pronounced the sentence.
Thomas protested. “If I were silent at such a sentence posterity would
not be. This is a new form of sentence, no doubt in accordance with
the new laws of Clarendon. Never has it been heard before in England
that an Archbishop of Canterbury has been tried in the King’s Court
for such a cause. The dignity of the Church, the authority of his
person, the fact that he is the spiritual father of the king and of
all his subjects, require that he should be reverenced by all.” For
an archbishop to be judged by his suffragans was, he declared, for a
father to be judged by his sons.
The bishops implored him to bow to the decree of the council, and
Thomas yielded, “not being willing that a mere matter of money should
cause strife between the king and himself.”
The next day, Friday, October 9th, the king pressed Thomas more
fiercely, calling upon him to give account for large sums spent during
his chancellorship, and for various revenues of vacant churches during
that period. The total amount was 30,000 marks.
In vain the archbishop urged that this demand was totally unexpected;
that he had not been summoned to Northampton to render such an account;
and that the justiciar, Richard, had declared that he was free of
all claims when he laid down the chancellorship. The king demanded
sureties, “and from that day barons and knights kept away from the
archbishop’s house--for they understood the mind of the king.”
All Saturday Thomas was in consultation with the bishops, most of whom
expressed themselves strongly on the king’s side. Henry of Winchester
suggested the present of 2,000 marks to the king as a peace-offering,
and this was done. But the king would not have it. Hilary, of
Chichester, said, addressing the archbishop, “You ought to know the
king better than we do, for you lived with him in close companionship
and friendship when you were chancellor. Who is there who could be
your surety for all this money? The king has declared, so it is said,
that he and you cannot both remain in England as king and archbishop.
It would be much safer to resign everything and submit to his mercy.
God forbid lest he arrest you over these moneys of the chancellorship,
or lay hands on you.” One or two less craven urged the archbishop to
stand firm, as his predecessors had done, in the face of persecution.
“Oh, that you were no longer archbishop and were only Thomas,” said
Hilary, putting the matter briefly.
All Sunday was spent in consultations. On Monday the archbishop was
too ill to attend the council, but on Tuesday his mind was made up,
and when he entered the council it was with the full dignity of an
archbishop, carrying the cross of the archbishop in his hand.
The bishops were in despair. There were all sorts of rumours in the
air. It was known the king was full of anger, and it was said that the
archbishop’s life was in danger. The bishops implored him to resign,
or else to promise complete submission to the councils of Clarendon.
They said he would certainly be tried and condemned for high treason
for disobedience to the king, and asked him what was the use of being
archbishop when he had the king’s hatred.
Gilbert Foliot, Bishop of London, declared contemptuously of Thomas,
when someone asked him why he did not carry the archbishop’s cross for
him, “He always was a fool, and always will be.”
Thomas had now only one answer to the bishops. He forbad them to take
any part in the proceedings against him, announced that he had appealed
to “our Mother, the Church of Rome, refuge of all the oppressed,” to
prevent any of them taking part, and ordered them to excommunicate any
who should dare lay secular hands upon the primate.
Then, holding his cross, the archbishop took his usual place in the
council-chamber, while the king sat in an inner room.
In the face of personal danger all the strength and courage of Thomas
Becket were aroused. He had yielded at Clarendon for the sake of peace,
and no good had come of it. He had submitted to be fined rather than be
involved in a miserable dispute about money, and now he was threatened
with demands for money which were beyond his resources. There was
nothing to prevent the king piling up greater and greater sums against
him, till hopeless ruin had been reached. He was powerless to withstand
such an onslaught. To Rome, “the refuge of all the oppressed,” would
Thomas appeal, and then, if it seemed well to the pope, he would retire
from Canterbury. But he would not surrender his post, however great
the wrath of the king, unless it were for the welfare of the Christian
Church.
In the council-chamber Thomas sat alone, with one or two clergy
attending him, including Herbert of Bosham and William FitzStephen,
while the bishops went in to the king’s chamber. Among the nobles the
cry was going up that the archbishop was a perjurer and a traitor,
because, after signing at Clarendon, he now, in violation of those
constitutions, forbad bishops to give judgment in a case that did not
involve bloodshed, and had further made appeal to Rome.
Then the king sent to know whether the archbishop refused to be bound
by the Constitutions of Clarendon, and whether he would find sureties
to abide by the sentence of the court regarding the accounts of his
chancellorship.
Thomas again pointed out that he had not been called there to give
an account of his chancellorship, that on his appointment to the
archbishopric he had been declared by the king free of all secular
claims, and that he had forbidden the bishops to take part in any
judgment against him, and had appealed to Rome, “placing his person and
the church of Canterbury under the protection of God and the pope.”
At the end of this speech the barons returned in silence to the king,
pondering the archbishop’s words.
But hostile murmuring soon broke the silence, and Thomas could overhear
the barons grumbling that, “King William, who conquered England, knew
how to tame his clerks. He had put his own brother Odo in prison, and
thrown Stigand, Archbishop of Canterbury, into a dungeon.”
The bishops renewed their pitiful chorus. Thomas had placed them
between the hammer and the anvil by his prohibition: of disobedience to
Canterbury on the one hand, and of the king’s anger on the other. They
had given their word at Clarendon, and now they were being forced to
go against the promises they had made. They, too, would appeal to Rome
against his prohibition, “lest you injure us still more.”
All that Thomas could say was that the Constitutions of Clarendon had
been sent to the pope for confirmation, and had been returned, rather
condemned than approved. “This example has been given for our learning,
that we should do likewise, and be ready to receive what he receives
at Rome, and reject what he rejects. If we fell at Clarendon, through
weakness of the flesh, the more ought we to take courage now, and in
the might of the Holy Ghost contend against the old enemy of man.”[17]
So bishops and nobles came and went between the king and the
archbishop, and the day drew on. Henry allowed the bishops to stand
apart from the judgment, and demanded sentence from the barons, and
Earl Robert of Leicester advanced as the spokesman of the council
to where the archbishop was sitting. The earl began to speak of the
judgment of the court, when Thomas rose and refused to hear him.
“What is this you would do?” he cried. “Would you pass sentence on
me? Neither law nor reason permit children to pass sentence on their
father. You are nobles of the palace, and I am your spiritual father.
I will not hear this sentence of the king, or any judgment of yours.
For, under God, I will be judged by the pope alone, to whom before you
all here I appeal, placing the church of Canterbury with all thereto
belonging under God’s protection and the protection of the pope.” Then
he turned to the bishops. “And you, my brethren, who have served man
rather than God, I summon to the presence of the pope; and now, guarded
by the authority of the Catholic Church and the Holy See, I go hence.”
So he passed out of the hall, no one gainsaying his passage, though
some plucked rushes from the floor and threw at him. There were shouts
of anger, and again the cries of “traitor” and “perjurer” were raised.
The archbishop turned on Earl Hamelin, the king’s brother, and Randulf
of Brok, who were calling “traitor,” and said sternly: “If I were not
a priest, my own arms should quickly prove your lie. And you, Randulf,
look at home (his cousin had lately been hanged for felony) before you
accuse the guiltless!”
His horses were at the gate, and a great crowd that were afraid lest
the archbishop had been killed. St. Thomas mounted, and accompanied by
Herbert of Bosham, rode back to the monastery of St. Andrew, where he
had been lodging. The crowd thronged him and prayed for his blessing
all the way until the monastery was reached, and then he would have
the multitude come in to the refectory and dine with him. Of his own
retinue of forty who had come with him to Northampton, scarce six
remained; and so the places of those who had thought it safer to desert
their lord were filled by the hungry multitude. It was the archbishop’s
farewell banquet, and he, the constant champion of the poor, had those
whom he loved for his guests that day.
At nightfall, after compline had been sung and the monks dispersed to
their cells, the archbishop, with three other men in the dress of lay
brothers, rode out from Northampton by the north gate, and at dawn were
at Grantham. Three weeks later Thomas had reached Flanders, and the
exile had begun which was only to end six years later when death was at
hand.
It was useless to remain in England, hopeless as Thomas was of any
support from the bishops. He could but appeal, as Anselm had appealed,
to the one court that alone was recognised as owning a higher authority
than that of the kings of this world, the court of Rome.
But Pope Alexander, still harassed by an anti-pope set up by the
Emperor Frederick, could do as little for Thomas as his predecessor
had done for Anselm, though he refused to allow him to resign the
archbishopric. Unlike Anselm, Thomas vigorously carried on his contest
with the king from the friendly shelter of King Louis of France, and
Henry retaliated without hesitation, driving out of England all the
friends and kinsmen of Thomas, to the number of four hundred, and
threatening a like banishment to the Cistercian monks, because Thomas
had taken refuge in their monastery at Pontigny.
The fear that the pope would allow the archbishop to pronounce an
interdict against England, and a sentence of personal excommunication
against its king, drove Henry in 1166 to appeal himself to the pope.
“Thus by a strange fate it happened that the king, while striving for
those ‘ancient customs,’ by which he endeavoured to prevent any right
of appeal (to the pope), was doomed to confirm the right of appeal for
his own safety.” (John of Salisbury.)
Months and years passed in correspondence. More than once Henry and
Thomas met at the court of Louis, but neither would yield. The pope,
without blaming the archbishop, and without sanctioning any extreme
step against Henry, did what he could to make peace between them.
At last, in the summer of 1170, the king really was disturbed by the
fear of an interdict, for his last act against Archbishop Thomas had
been to have his son crowned by the Archbishop of York, in defiance of
all the rights and privileges of the see of Canterbury. Besides this,
Louis was threatening war because his daughter, who was married to the
young King Henry, had not been crowned with her husband. Henry hastened
over to France and made friends with Thomas, and the reconciliation
took place at Freteral. The king solemnly promised that the archbishop
should enjoy all the possessions and rights of which he had been
deprived in his exile, and that his friends and kinsmen should all be
allowed to return home. He even apologised for the coronation of his
son. It seemed as if the old friendship had been revived. “We conversed
together until the evening as familiarly as in the days of our ancient
friendship. And it was agreed I should arrange my affairs and then make
some stay with the king before embarking for England; that the world
might know how thoroughly we are restored to his favour and intimacy.
We are not afraid that the king will not fulfil his promises, unless
he is misled by evil counsellors.” So Thomas wrote to the pope in
July, 1170. Yet there were many--including King Louis--who doubted the
sincerity of the reconciliation, for Henry was not willing to give the
kiss of peace to his archbishop.
On December 1st Thomas landed at Sandwich, and went at once to
Canterbury. The townspeople and the poor of the land welcomed him with
enthusiastic devotion. “Small and great, old and young, ran together,
some throwing themselves in his way, others crying and exclaiming,
‘Blessed is he that cometh in the name of the Lord.’ In the same manner
the clergy and their parishioners met him in procession, saluting
their father and begging his blessing.... And when all things in the
cathedral was solemnly ended, the archbishop went to his palace, and so
ended that joyful and solemn day.” (Herbert of Bosham.)
But against the affection and goodwill of his own people at Canterbury,
and a similar demonstration of rejoicing by multitudes of clergy
and people in London, Thomas had to face the fact that the bishops
generally hated his return, that the young Prince Henry, recently
crowned, who had been his pupil, refused to see him and ordered his
return to Canterbury, and that the nobles openly spoke of him as a
traitor to the king. “This is a peace for us which is no peace, but
rather war,” said the archbishop bitterly.
The end was not far off. Thomas, as zealous for good discipline in the
Church as Henry was for strong authority in the State, was no sooner
returned than he was asked to withdraw the sentence of excommunication
against the Archbishop of York and the Bishops of London and Salisbury.
He promised to do this if the bishops on their part would promise to
submit to the decision of the pope on the matter. London and Salisbury
were moved to receive absolution on these terms, but Roger, of York,
who had always been against Becket, dissuaded them, urging them to
throw themselves on the protection of the king, and threatening Thomas
“with marvellous and terrible things at the hands of the king” unless
he relented. Naturally, these threats left the archbishop undisturbed,
and Roger of York, with Gilbert Foliot of London and Jocelin of
Salisbury, at once hastened over to France to lay their case before the
king.
These bishops were not the only men who troubled Thomas in these last
days. Randulf de Broc, with others of his family, and certain knights,
all known as strong “king’s men,” “sought every means to entangle him
in a quarrel,” and did not stop from robbing a ship belonging to the
archbishop and from seizing a number of horses, and mutilating one of
them. Thomas replied by excommunicating Randulf and Robert de Broc, the
boldest of these offenders.
At Christmas more than one of the archbishop’s followers warned him
that his life was in danger, and Thomas seems to have realised that his
position was hazardous. But he would not fly.
Already his murderers were at hand.
The excommunicated bishops had reached the king at Bur, near Bayeux,
had told their story, and had coloured it with a fanciful description
of Thomas making a circuit of England at the head of a large body of
men.[18] Someone had said, “My lord, as long as Thomas lives, you will
have neither peace nor quiet in your kingdom, nor will you ever see
good days;” and at this Henry had burst out into a terrible rage of
bitterness and passion, for such fits at times took possession of him,
“Here is a man,” he cried out, “who came to my court a sorry clerk,
who owes all he has to me, and insults my kingdom and lifts his heel
against me. And not one of the cowardly sluggish knaves, whom I feed
and pay so well, but suffers this, nor has the heart to avenge me!”
The words were spoken, and four of the king’s knights--Reginald
FitzUrse, William of Tracy, Hugh of Morville, and Richard the
Breton--hearing what was said, and that Roger of York had declared “as
soon as Thomas is dead all this trouble will be ended, and not before,”
at once departed. They sailed from different ports and met together at
Saltwood, the castle of the Brocs, on December 28th. The following day
they rode on to Canterbury, taking with them twelve of Randulf’s men
and Hugh of Horsea, who was called the Evil Deacon.
The king, on finding the four knights had left the court, gave
orders to have them stopped, but it was too late. They were then at
Canterbury, and entering the hospitable doors of the palace had made
direct for the archbishop’s private chamber.
It was four o’clock. Dinner had been at three, and Thomas was sitting
on his bed talking to John of Salisbury, Edward Grim, and a few other
friends. When the knights entered, Thomas recognized Reginald, William,
and Hugh, for they had served under him years before, and waited for
them to speak.
Reginald FitzUrse was the spokesman. He declared they had come from
the king, that Thomas must take an oath of fealty to the newly-crowned
prince, and must absolve the excommunicated bishops. Thomas answered
that the bishops might have been absolved on their willingness to obey
the judgments of the Church, and that the king had sanctioned what had
been done at their reconciliation.
Reginald denied there had been any reconciliation, and swore that
Thomas was imputing treachery to the king in saying such a thing.
The archbishop pointed out that the reconciliation had taken place in
public, and that Reginald himself had been present.
Reginald swore he had never been there, and had not heard of it. And
at this the other knights broke in, swearing again and again, by God’s
wounds, that they had borne with him far too long already.
Then Thomas reminded them of the insults and losses he had endured,
especially at the hands of the De Brocs, since his return.
Hugh of Morville answered him that he had his remedy in the King’s
Courts, and ought not to excommunicate men on his own authority.
“I shall wait for no man’s leave to do justice on any that wrong the
Church and will not give satisfaction,” Thomas replied.
“What do you threaten us! Threats are too much!” cried Reginald
FitzUrse.
Then the knights bit their gloves and angrily defied the archbishop.
Thomas told them that they could not intimidate him. “Once I went away
like a timid priest; now I have returned, and I will never leave again.
If I may do my office in peace, it is well: if I may not, God’s will be
done.” Then he turned to remind them they had once sworn fealty to him
when he was chancellor.
“We are the king’s men,” they shouted out, “and owe fealty to no one
against the king!”
Bidding his servants keep the archbishop within the precincts on peril
of their lives, the knights withdrew.
“It is easy to keep me,” said Thomas, “for I shall not go away. I will
not fly for the king or for any living man.”
“Why did you not take counsel with us and give milder answer to your
enemies?” said John of Salisbury. “You are ready to die, but we are
not. Think of our peril!”
“We must all die,” the archbishop answered, “and the fear of death must
not turn us from doing justice.”
Word was quickly brought in that the knights were putting on their
armour in the courtyard, and the monks, frightened at the sight of
these men with drawn swords entering the orchard to the west of the
cathedral, rushed to the archbishop and implored him to fly to the
cathedral. Thomas smiled at their terror, saying, “All you monks are
too cowardly, it seems to me.” And not till vespers had begun would he
leave for the minster. The knights broke into the cloisters after him,
and reaching St. Benet’s chapel began to hammer at the door, which for
safety the monks had barred behind them.
Thomas at once ordered the door to be unbolted, saying, “God’s house
shall not be made a fortress on my account.” He slipped back the iron
bar himself, and the angry knights rushed in with cries of “Where is
the traitor? Where is the archbishop?”
It was five o’clock and a dark winter’s night. Had Thomas chosen, he
could easily have escaped death by concealing himself in the crypt or
in one of the many hiding places in the cathedral. But he felt his
hour had come and met it without faltering. John of Salisbury and the
rest of the monks and clerks vanished away and hid themselves, leaving
only Edward Grim, Robert of Merton and William FitzStephen with the
archbishop. Soon only Grim was left, when the archbishop came out
boldly, and standing by a great pillar near the altar of St. Benedict,
answered his accusers. “Here I am: no traitor, Reginald, but your
archbishop.”
They tried to drag him from the church, but he clung to the great
pillar, with Edward Grim by his side. For the last time Reginald called
on him to come out of the church. “I am ready to die, but let my people
go, and do not hurt them,” was the archbishop’s answer. William Tracy
seized hold of him, but Thomas hurled him back. Upon that FitzUrse
shouted, “Strike! strike!” And Tracy cut savagely at the head of the
archbishop. Grim sprang forward and the blow fell on his arm, and he
fell back badly wounded.
Then Thomas commended his cause and that of the Church to St. Denis and
the patron saints of the cathedral, and his soul to God, and without
flinching bowed his head to his murderers. FitzUrse, Tracy and Richard
the Breton struck the archbishop down, and Hugh the Evil Deacon mangled
in brutal fashion the head of St. Thomas before calling out to the
others: “Let us go now; he will never rise again!”
Then they all rushed from the church, and shouting, “King’s knights!
King’s knights!” proceeded to plunder the palace. They fled north that
night to the castle of Hugh of Morville at Knaresborough, where for
a time they lived in close retirement. Tracy subsequently went on a
pilgrimage to Rome and Palestine, but all four “within two years of the
murder were living at court on familiar terms with the king.”[19]
Henry and all his court were horrified when the news was brought
of the archbishop’s martyrdom, for all the people proclaimed the
murdered prelate a saint and a martyr, and “a martyr he clearly
was, not merely to the privileges of the Church or to the rights of
the see of Canterbury, but to the general cause of law and order as
opposed to violence.”[20] Had St. Thomas yielded in the matter of the
excommunicated bishops, and sought favour with the king at the expense
of the liberties and discipline of the Church, and had he given way
to the savage, lawless turbulence of the king’s knights, he would not
only have escaped a violent death, but might have lived long in the
sunshine of the royal pleasure. He chose the rougher, steeper road,
daring all to save the Church and the mass of the English people from
being brought under the iron heel of a king’s absolute rule, and he
paid the penalty, pouring out his blood on the stones of the minster at
Canterbury to seal the vows he had taken when he first entered the city
as archbishop.
In his dying St. Thomas was even stronger than in his life. Henry
hastened to beg the forgiveness of Rome for his rash words that had
provoked the murder, and in the presence of the pope’s legates in
Normandy promised to give up the Constitutions of Clarendon and to
stand by the papacy against the emperor. Nor did he make any further
attempt in his reign to bring the Church under the subjection of the
crown, but built up a great system of legal administration, which in
substance exists to-day.
St. Thomas was canonised four years after his death. “There was no
shadow of doubt in men’s minds that here was one who was a martyr as
fully as any martyr of the catacombs and the Roman persecutions.” (R.
H. Benson, _St. Thomas of Canterbury_.) Countless miracles were alleged
to prove the sanctity of the dead hero, and pilgrims from all parts
made their way to the shrine of the “blessful martyr” at Canterbury.
Not only in England, but in France and Flanders, and particularly in
Ireland was there an outburst of devotion to St. Thomas.
The shrine at Canterbury was destroyed by Henry VIII., who after a mock
trial of the archbishop slain more than 300 years earlier, declared
that “Thomas, sometime Archbishop of Canterbury, had been guilty of
contumacy, treason and rebellion,” and “was no saint, but rather a
rebel and traitor to his prince.”
But though Thomas, canonised by the pope on the prayers of the people
of England, could be struck out of the calendar of the Church of
England by the arbitrary will of King Henry VIII., as an enemy of
princes, and his shrine destroyed, it is beyond the power of a king
to reverse the sentence of history or to blast for ever the fame of
a great and courageous champion of the poor of this land. Time makes
little of the insults of Henry VIII. Thomas of Canterbury died for the
religion that in his day protected the people against the despotism of
the crown. “He was always a hater of liars and slanderers and a kind
friend to dumb beasts (hence his rage with De Broc for mutilating a
horse) and all poor and helpless folk.” (F. York Powell.)
That Henry II. strove to make law predominant in the spirit of a great
statesman is as true as that Thomas strove to mitigate the harshness of
the law. As a writer of the twelfth century put it: “Nothing is more
certain than that both strove earnestly to do the will of God, one for
the sake of his realm, the other on behalf of his Church. But whether
of the two was zealous in wisdom is not plain to man, who is so easily
mistaken, but to the Lord, who will judge between them at the last
day.”
William FitzOsbert, called Longbeard
The First English Agitator
1196
AUTHORITIES: Roger of Hoveden; William of Newburgh; Gervase of
Canterbury; Matthew Paris; Ralph Diceto; (Rolls Series); _Rotuli Curiæ
Regis_ (Sir F. Palgrave. Vol. I.).
WILLIAM FITZOSBERT CALLED LONGBEARD, THE FIRST ENGLISH AGITATOR
1196
When Richard I., on his accession, picked out Hubert Walter, Bishop
of Salisbury, to be Archbishop of Canterbury, he chose a prelate whom
he could rely upon as his representative. Hubert had been a crusader;
he was the nephew of Ralph Glanville--who sold the justiciarship to
William Longchamp, Bishop of Ely, for £3,000, and followed Richard to
Palestine, dying of the plague at Acre in 1191--and though a man of
little learning he was a capital lawyer, a strong administrator and
expert at raising money for the king.[21] Hubert was no champion of
the poor as St. Thomas had been, no preacher of righteousness like St.
Anselm, no stickler for the rights of the Church or the liberties of
the people; he was “the king’s man,” and “forasmuch as he was neither
gifted with a knowledge of letters nor endued with the grace of lively
religion, so in his days the Church of England was stifled under the
yoke of bondage.” (Geraldus Cambrensis.)
Richard Cœur de Lion, occupied with the crusades, had no mind for the
personal government of England. He depended on his ministers for money
to pay for his military expeditions to Palestine. England was to him
nothing more than a subject province to be bled by taxation. Both
William Longchamp and Hubert Walter--to whom Richard committed the
realm when he left England for good in 1194--did all that could be done
to meet the king’s demands. Government offices, earldoms and bishoprics
were sold to the highest bidder.[22] Judges bought their seats on the
bench and cities bought their charters. Crown lands already granted to
tenants were again taken up by the king’s authority, and the occupier
compelled to pay for readmission to his holding. Tournaments were
revived, because everyone taking part was obliged to take a royal
license. Even the great seal was broken by the justiciar’s authority,
and all documents signed by it had to be reissued, with the payment
of the usual fees (or stamp duties) for new contracts. “By these and
similar inquisitions England was reduced to poverty from one sea to the
other,” for more than £1,000,000 was sent to Richard by Hubert in the
first two years of his justiciarship.
The only protest against the general distress came from London, and not
from the aldermen or burghers, but from the voteless labouring people
upon whom the whole burden of raising the city’s taxes had been thrown.
Against this monstrous injustice William Longbeard FitzOsbert stood
out as the spokesman of the poor of London, and died a martyr for
their cause.
London’s political importance had been seen in the struggles against
King Cnut and William the Conqueror. Its remarkable influence in
national politics (an influence that endured to the middle of the
nineteenth century) was manifest when London acclaimed Stephen as King
of England in 1135. At the close of the twelfth century, London, with
the civic charter it had just obtained from Richard, with its thirteen
convent churches and more than a hundred parish churches within its
boundaries, with its great cattle market at Smithfield and its growing
riverside trade, was already prosperous and overcrowded. “The city was
blessed with the healthiness of the air and the nature of its site, in
the Christian religion, in the strength of its towers, the honour of
its citizens and the purity of its women; it was happy in its sports
and fruitful of high spirited men.” It had its darker side, but at that
time “the only plagues were the intemperate drinking of foolish people
and the frequent fires.”
Richard’s charter left to the citizens the business of assessing their
own taxes, and in 1196 there was trouble over this matter; for in
that year the city fathers decided that the large sums required by
Archbishop Hubert for the king’s needs should be paid in full by the
poorer craftsmen and labourers, who had no say in the matter.[23]
“And when the aldermen assembled according to usage in full hustings
for the purpose of assessing the taxes, the rulers endeavoured to spare
their own purses and to levy the whole from the poor.” (Roger of
Hoveden.)
Whereupon up rose William Longbeard, the son of Osbert, and made his
memorable protest against these rascally proceedings, to go down to
history as the first popular agitator in England.
An exceptional man was this Longbeard, a man of commanding stature and
great strength, ready witted, something of an orator and a lawyer, who
“burning with zeal for righteousness and fair play made himself the
champion of the poor,” holding that every man, rich or poor, should pay
his share of the city’s burdens according to his means.
Longbeard was not of the labouring people himself. He was a member of
the city council, though by no means a rich man. He had distinguished
himself as a crusader in 1190, making the journey to Portugal against
the Moors; and a vision of St. Thomas Becket had appeared to him and
his fellow Londoners when their ship was beset by storms off the coast
of Spain.
Longbeard was known to the king, and he was already hateful to the
ruling class because he had declared that Richard was being defrauded
by financial corruption of the money raised for the crown. He had also
accused his brother of treason in 1194, but the case was not proved.
Richard was in Normandy in 1196, and Longbeard having banded together
15,000 men in London, under an oath that they would stick by him and
each other, went to the king and laid their grievances before him.
Richard heard the appeal sympathetically enough, for after all, as
long as the money was forthcoming, he had no particular desire that
the pockets of rich burghers should be spared at the expense of the
poor, but left matters in the hands of Archbishop Hubert the justiciar.
Longbeard returned to London, and with his 15,000[24] workmen in
revolt, bid an open defiance to the justiciar.
Only a fragment of one of Longbeard’s speeches has been preserved, a
solitary specimen of popular oratory in the twelfth century.[25]
Taking a passage from the prophet Isaiah for his text: “Therefore with
joy shall ye draw water from the wells of the Saviour” (Isaiah xii, 3),
the agitator delivers his message.
“I am,” he saith, “the saviour of the poor. You the poor, who have
endured the hard hands of the rich, draw ye from my wells the waters of
sound doctrine, and this with joy, for the time of your visitation is
at hand. For I will divide the waters from the waters, and the People
are the waters. I will divide the humble and faithful from such as are
proud and froward. I will divide the just from the unjust, even as
light from darkness.”
For a time Longbeard was too strong for the justiciar. Archbishop
Hubert had no force at his disposal for the invasion of London, for a
battle with Longbeard and his league.
At a great gathering of citizens, held in St. Paul’s Churchyard, the
justiciar’s men sent to arrest Longbeard had been driven out of the
city with violence. All that Hubert could do was to give orders for
the arrest of any lesser citizens found outside London, and two small
traders from the city actually were taken into custody at the town of
Stamford on Mid-Lent Sunday, 1196, under this authority.
But the aldermen grew more and more frightened at Longbeard’s bold
speeches and his big public meetings, and weakness and cowardice began
to demoralise the league. The people, who had risen for “liberty and
freedom,” fell away from their leader, and FitzOsbert was left with a
comparatively small band to face the anger of the justiciar.
Backed up by the city fathers, Hubert’s officers again attempted to
seize the agitator. Longbeard, hardly pressed, snatched an axe from
one of his assailants--a citizen named Godfrey--and slew him; and then
retreated, overwhelmed by numbers, to take refuge in the church of
St. Mary-le-Bow in Cheapside. There was a right of sanctuary in this
church, a right not to be denied to the commonest felon.
But what were rights of sanctuary to the justiciar--bent on hunting his
prey to the death? He commanded Longbeard “to come out and abide by the
law,” and gave orders to his men that, failing instant obedience, he
was to be dragged out.
Longbeard’s answer was to climb up into the church tower, and thereupon
Hubert ordered the tower to be set on fire, and this was done. And now
the only chance of life for William Longbeard and his followers was to
cut their way through the host of their enemies and make a bold rush
for safety. It was a remote chance at the best, but sooner that than to
perish in the burning tower.
At the very church door Longbeard was struck down--some say by
Godfrey’s son--and his little company were quickly slain or taken
prisoners. Loaded with chains, the once bold advocate of the poor of
London, now badly hurt, was at once haled off to the Tower. Sentence
was pronounced without delay of the law, William, the son of Osbert,
was to be dragged to the elms at Tyburn and there hanged in chains.
A few days later--it was just before Easter--the wounded man was
stripped naked, tried to the tail of a horse and dragged over the rough
stones of the streets of London. He was dead before Tyburn was reached,
but the poor broken body, on whom the full vengeance of the rich and
mighty had been wreaked, was strung up in chains beneath the gallows
elm all the same. Bravely had Longbeard withstood the rulers of the
land in the day of his strength; now, when life had passed from him,
his body was swinging in common contempt. And with him were nine of his
followers hanged.
So died William, called Longbeard, son of Osbert, “for asserting the
truth and maintaining the cause of the poor.” And since it is held that
to be faithful to such a cause makes a man a martyr, people thought he
deserved to be ranked with the martyrs. For a time multitudes--the very
folk who had fallen away from their champion in the hour of battle and
need--flocked to pay reverence to the ghastly, bloodstained corpse that
hung at Tyburn, and pieces of the gibbet and of the bloodstained earth
beneath were carried off and counted as sacred relics. All the great,
heroic qualities of the man were recalled. He was accounted a saint.
Miracles were alleged to take place when his relics were touched.
Then the dead man’s enemies were aroused, an alleged death-bed
confession was published, wherein Longbeard was made out to be a sorry
criminal. Not the least of the offences laid to his charge was that a
woman, who was not his wife, had stood faithfully by the rebel, even
when the church was on fire.
The times were rough. It is probable that Longbeard, crusader and
fighting man, had sins enough to confess before death took him. But
his traducers were silent as to these sins in the man’s lifetime. They
waited until no answer could be given before uttering their miserable
libels against the one courageous champion of the poor.
Longbeard had roused the common working people to make a stand against
obvious oppression and injustice--there was the head and front of his
offending, there was his crime; earning for him not only a felon’s
death, but the loss of character, and the branding for all time with
the contemptuous title “Demagogue.”
Yet in the slow building up of English liberties William FitzOsbert
played his part, and laid down his life in the age-long struggle for
freedom, as many a better has done.
In 1198, two years after the death of Longbeard, Hubert was compelled
to resign the justiciarship. His monks at Canterbury, to whom the
Church of St. Mary, in Cheapside, belonged, and who had no love for
their archbishop,[26] indignant at the violation of sanctuary and the
burning of their church, appealed to the king and to the pope, Innocent
III. to make Hubert give up his political activities and confine
himself to the work of an archbishop. In the same year a great council
of the nation, led by St. Hugh of Lincoln, flatly refused a royal
demand for money made by Hubert.
Innocent III. was against him, the great barons were against him, and
Hubert resigned. But he held the archbishopric till 1205.
Stephen Langton and the Great Charter
1207–1228
AUTHORITIES: Roger of Wendover and Matthew Paris; Walter of Coventry;
Ralph of Coggeshall (Rolls Series); _Letters of Innocent III._; Rymer’s
_Fœdera_; K. Norgate--_John Lackland_; Stubbs--_Select Charters_;
Mark Pattison--_Stephen Langton_ (Lives of the English Saints); C. E.
Maurice--_Stephen Langton_.
STEPHEN LANGTON AND THE GREAT CHARTER
1207–1228
When Hubert Walter, Archbishop of Canterbury--the old Justiciar of
Richard I.--ended his long life of public service on July 12th, A.D.
1205, King John exclaimed, with frank satisfaction, “Now for the first
time I am King of England!” As long as Hubert was alive there was one
man strong enough to restrain the king, and the primate and William
the Marshall together had done something to guard England against the
foulest and most ruthless tyranny of all its kings. To the end William
the Marshall was a brave and patriotic statesman, but he served the
crown rather than the people.
On Hubert’s death John meant to have for archbishop a creature of
his will, and he was defeated by Pope Innocent III., who, dismissing
the appeal of the monks of Canterbury for Reginald, their subprior,
and John’s appeal for his nominee, John de Gray, Bishop of Norwich,
proposed the English-born Cardinal, Stephen Langton, “than whom there
was no man greater in the Roman court, nor was there any equal to
him in character and in learning.” The monks consented to Stephen’s
appointment, but John’s reply was a flat refusal, and when on June
7th, 1207, Pope Innocent proceeded to consecrate Stephen Langton
Archbishop of Canterbury, the king’s rage broke out. Innocent’s wise
judgment gave England one of its noblest and greatest archbishops, and
the service wrought by Langton for the liberties of England’s people
was of deep and lasting value. But the immediate price to be paid for
later profit was heavy.
John met Langton’s consecration by seizing the estates of Canterbury,
driving the chapter into exile, and proclaiming that anyone who
acknowledged Stephen as archbishop should be accounted a public enemy.
The remonstrances and warnings of the pope were disregarded, and in
March, 1208, all England was laid under an interdict, and there was
an end to the public ministrations of religion in the country for six
years--to the bitter distress of the common people.
Immediately the interdict came into force, John declared all the
property of the clergy, secular or monastic, to be confiscated, and
there was no one to stay his hand from speedy spoliation. For the
barons were willing enough to see the clergy robbed and the king’s
treasury filled at the expense of the Church, and of the bishops only
two were left in England--Peter des Roches, of Winchester, and John
de Gray, of Norwich--and both these were willing tools of the king.
Never did John enjoy his royal will and pleasure with such unhindered
ferocity as in that year 1209. Had the barons stood by the Church they
might have saved England unspeakable miseries, and as it was the laity
were soon in as sorry a plight as the clergy, “and it seemed as though
the king was courting the hatred of every class of his subjects, so
burdensome was he to both rich and poor.”[27]
In 1211 came Pandulf from Pope Innocent with suggestions for peace. Let
the king restore the property of the clergy, and receive Archbishop
Langton, with his kinsmen and friends, and the other exiled bishops
“fairly and in peace” and the interdict should be withdrawn. John
declined to receive Langton as archbishop, and Pandulf, in the presence
of the whole council, pronounced the papal sentence of excommunication
on the king, absolving all his subjects from allegiance, and commanding
their obedience to whomsoever should be sent as John’s successor.
John treated the excommunication with cheerful contempt, and pursued
the evil tenour of his way. But his position was precarious, for the
barons--especially the northern barons--were plotting his overthrow,
and the pope had decided that Philip of France should depose John and
reign in his stead. John was driven to capitulate to the pope at the
end of 1212, and in May, 1213, Pandulf arrived, and the invasion by
Philip was stopped, to the exceeding annoyance of the French king.
John met the papal legate at Ewell, near Dover, and in the presence
of “the great men of the realm,” swore to carry out all Innocent’s
demands, promising that Stephen should be received and recompense paid
to the clergy for their losses. Then the King of England formally
surrendered “to God and to the Holy Mother Church of Rome, and to Pope
Innocent and his Catholic successors,” the whole realm of England and
Ireland, “with all rights thereunto appertaining, to receive them back
and hold them thenceforth as a feudatory of God and the Roman Church.”
He swore fealty to the pope for both realms, and added that he would
send a yearly tribute of 1,000 marks. At the same time John declared
that the act of homage was voluntary, done, “not at the driving of
force nor the compulsion of fear, but of our own good free will and by
the common counsel of our barons.”
There is no evidence that the pope asked for this abject submission,
but there are good reasons why John desired that political protection
of the papacy which he obtained by the act of homage.[28] (Matthew
Paris has a story that John was willing to pay homage and tribute to
the Mohammedan Emir of Morocco in order to effect an alliance with some
foreign power.)
The barons themselves appealed to the pope two years later to take
their part against John, on the ground that it was only by their
compulsion the king had been brought to pay homage to Rome, and
though they were then to curse the papal overlordship they had helped
procure, and England was to come to regard John’s surrender to the
pope as “a thing to be detested for all time,” in that year 1213 the
protection of the pope was invaluable to John and, as some thought, to
the country. “For matters were in such a strait, and so great was the
fear on all sides, that there was no more ready way of avoiding the
imminent peril--perhaps no other way at all. For when once he had put
himself under apostolical protection and made his realms a part of the
patrimony of St. Peter, there was not in the Roman world a sovereign
who durst attack him or would invade his lands, in such awe was Pope
Innocent held above all his predecessors for many years past.” (Walter
of Coventry.)
The long war being at an end Stephen Langton and four of the exiled
bishops landed in June, and Stephen was now to do the work of
archbishop, the work he had been solemnly consecrated to six years
before.
John met the primate at Winchester, and swore on the gospels in
the cathedral “that he would cherish, defend and maintain the holy
Church and her ordained ministers; that he would restore the good
laws of his forefathers, especially St. Edward’s, rendering to all
men their rights; and that before the next Easter he would make full
restitution of all property which had been taken away in connection
with the interdict.” Then Stephen formally absolved the king from
excommunication and gave him the kiss of peace, to the general
rejoicing.
And now England was to see what sort of archbishop it was Pope Innocent
had sent to Canterbury. With a king as cruel as he was vigorous, and
as astute as he was unscrupulous, with barons who knew neither loyalty
nor patriotism. Archbishop Stephen, out of such materials, was to win
for his native land the Great Charter, and to have it written in black
and white that all who would might read the several duties of king and
people. In August Langton, in St. Paul’s Cathedral, read to the barons
the old coronation charter of Henry I., and reminded them that the
liberties promised in that document were to be recovered. “With very
great joy the barons swore they would fight for these liberties, even
unto death if it were needful, and the archbishop promised that he
would help with all his might.” Thus within three months of his setting
foot in England Langton had started the movement for the Great Charter.
But not with king and barons only had the archbishop to deal. There
were endless difficulties with the clergy concerning the restitution
of their property, and the payment of compensation to be settled. And
above all there was Nicholas, the papal legate, in England, usurping
the primate’s functions, filling up vacant bishoprics and churches,
regardless of the rights of the Church and of the archbishop. Nicholas
was recalled to Rome when the interdict was finally removed, and
in November, 1214, John made a public proclamation that free and
undisturbed election to all the churches in his realm should be allowed
henceforth. This was an attempt on the king’s part to have the Church
on his side against the barons, for the battle was beginning between
John and the barons which was to be fought to a bitter end.
John’s last campaign to recover the lost Angevine provinces for the
English crown ended in disaster, and he returned to England in 1214
to face the full discontent of the barons whom he had harassed and
insulted from the day he came to the throne, and of a country suffering
from “the evil customs which the king’s father and brother had raised
up for the oppression of the Church and realm, together with the abuses
which the king himself had added thereto.”
The national grievances were enormous and intolerable. The whole
administration of justice was corrupt, and no one could be sure how
the arbitrary decisions of the king’s officers would be carried out.
Liberty of the person was a farce when free men could be arrested,
evicted from their lands, exiled and outlawed without legal warrant
or a fair trial. “In a word, the entire system of government and
administration set up under the Norman kings, and developed under Henry
and Richard, had been converted by the ingenuity of John into a most
subtle and effective engine of royal extortion, oppression and tyranny
over all classes of the nation, from earl to villein.”[29]
Here and there the barons had struck against some act of personal
injury, and the northern barons had been conspicuous in their
resentment, refusing to follow John as their liege lord in his
expeditions to France. But there was neither cohesion nor any sense
of national injury amongst the barons until Stephen Langton, with a
full sense of the responsibility laid on the successor of Lanfranc
and Anselm, of Theobald and Thomas, took the lead, and by strong,
courageous effort sought to end for all time in England such tyranny as
the country had endured under John’s rule. To Langton this was no mere
struggle between a despotic king and a set of turbulent nobles. It was
a struggle to win recognition of law for _all_ men, and to restore some
measure of justice and the enjoyment of fair liberty throughout the
land. The people had neither spokesman nor champion, and no man heeded
their wrongs save Langton. More than 150 years were to pass before
John Ball and Wat Tyler would appear at the head of a peasant army in
revolt. In the reign of John, yeomen, peasant and artizan were dumb. It
was Langton who saw that the barons fighting for their own rights could
be made to fight for all England.
In November the barons came together at St. Edmundsbury, and in the
abbey church “they swore on the high altar that if the king sought to
evade their demand for the laws and liberties of the charter of King
Henry I., they would make war upon him and withdraw from fealty to him
till he should by a charter furnished with his seal confirm to them all
that they demanded. They also agreed that after Christmas they would
go all together to the king and ask him for a confirmation of these
liberties, and that meanwhile they would so provide themselves with
horses and arms that if the king should seek to break his oath, they
might, by seizing his castles, compel him to make satisfaction. And
when these things were done every man returned to his own home.” (Roger
of Wendover.)
John kept Christmas at Worcester, but his court was very small, and he
realised that he stood alone. All through the years of the interdict
the pope’s ban had not kept the nobles from attendance on the king; it
was now when he stood reconciled to the Church that John found himself
deserted. He moved to London at the new year, and there on the Epiphany
came the confederate barons, making display of arms, and praying that
the laws and liberties of Edward the Confessor written in the charter
of Henry I. might be confirmed. John urged that the question was
too big and too difficult to be settled off hand, and asked that it
should be put off till Easter. This was agreed to on condition that
the king pledged himself by three sureties to fulfil his promises.
Archbishop Stephen, William the Marshall and the Bishop of Ely were
accepted as sureties, and in accepting the post Langton proved his
great statesmanship. There was no question of going over to the king’s
side. The barons knew the archbishop as their chief ally, but John knew
that Langton was to be trusted as implicitly as he trusted William
the Marshall. Langton’s one desire was to see the written enactment
granting constitutional liberties, and ending the worst of the royal
abuses.
John did not waste the time allotted to him, but worked his hardest to
gain friends and supporters against the barons, and to break up the
confederacy. It was all to no purpose. His commissioners to the County
Courts--in the southern and midland shires, sent to explain the king’s
cause--met with no success. Nobles and churchmen alike stood aloof,
and all John could do was to write to the knights at Poitou to send
him mercenaries, and to appeal to his liege lord, the pope, against
his rebellious subjects. Finally, he took the cross, hoping for the
favours awarded to a crusader. These efforts were all of no avail. The
mercenaries were inadequate. The pope’s letters of rebuke to the barons
for their conspiracies and conjurations were unheeded, and at Easter,
John (whom the pope had warned to harken to “just petitions”) was
driven to send the primate and the Marshall for a definite statement of
the laws and liberties demanded.
The barons, who were assembled at Brackley, presented “a certain
schedule,” probably compiled with Langton’s assistance, and this was
read to the king by the primate. “They might as well ask for my kingdom
at once,” was John’s reply to the various items, and he swore he
would never grant liberties that would mean his own enslavement. Both
Langton and the Marshall strove to persuade the king to yield, but to
no purpose; and all that remained was to return to the barons and to
state that the king refused their demands. Then the barons, on hearing
this, flew to arms, formally renounced their homage and fealty to the
king, and chose a military leader for themselves--Robert Fitz-Walter.
London welcomed the insurgents on May 24th, and John, with a handful
of mercenaries, had the whole baronage against him. Capitulation was
inevitable. From Windsor John sent envoys to the barons in London,
promising, for the sake of peace and for the welfare and honour of his
realm, to concede the laws and liberties demanded, and advising the
appointment of time and place for a meeting for “the settlement of all
these things.” The barons at once fixed the meeting for June 15th, in
a meadow called Runnymead, between Staines and Windsor, and there, in
the presence of well-nigh all the baronage of England, of Archbishop
Stephen, and seven bishops, and “a multitude of most illustrious
knights,” the Great Charter was signed. It was the work of Langton.[30]
It was he who had inspired the movement, had framed the articles, and
had brought the struggle to a successful issue.
“One copy of the Great Charter still remains in the British Museum,
injured by age and fire, but with the royal seal still hanging from the
brown, shrivelled parchment. It is impossible to gaze without reverence
on the earliest monument of English freedom which we can see with our
own eyes and touch with our own hands, the Great Charter to which from
age to age patriots have looked back as the basis of English liberty.”
(J. R. Green.)
Yet the Charter itself was in the main but the old charter of Henry I.
writ large. It set up no new rights and conferred no new privileges.
It sanctioned no constitutional changes, and proclaimed no new
liberties. Its real importance is in the fact that it was a _written_
document--“this great table of laws, won by the people of England from
a tyrannous king, was the first great act which laid down in black and
white the main points of the constitution and the several rights and
duties of king and people.” (F. York Powell.)
“The bonds of unwritten custom, which the older grants did little
more than recognize, had proved too weak to hold Angevins; and the
baronage now threw them aside for the restraints of written law. It is
in this way that the Great Charter marks the transition from the age
of traditional rights, preserved in the nation’s memory and officially
declared by the primate, to the age of written legislation, of
parliaments and statutes, which was soon to come.” (J. R. Green.)
The first article of the Charter guaranteed the freedom of the English
Church, and, in especial, the freedom of elections, “which was reputed
most requisite.”
By the Great Charter the feudal rights of the king over his vassals
were defined and settled, and the tenants of the barons were protected
in similar way from the lawless exactions of their lords.
No scutage or aid was to be levied by the crown, “save by the common
council of the realm”--except the three customary feudal aids for
the ransoming of the king, the knighting of his eldest son, and the
marriage of his eldest daughter. This common council, consisting of
bishops, abbots, earls, and greater barons, was to be summoned by
special writ. The free rights of London and the other chartered towns
were fully admitted.
The Court of Common Pleas (cases between subjects) was to sit at
Westminster (and not to follow the king in his wanderings), and judges
of assize were to go on circuit four times a year.
No free man was to be seized, imprisoned, ousted of his land, outlawed,
banished, or in any way brought to ruin, save by the legal judgment of
his peers or by the law of the land.
To no man was justice to be sold, denied, or postponed by the king.
The free right of Englishmen and foreigners to pass in and out of the
country in time of peace was granted.
The king’s mercenaries, “all the gang that came with horses and arms to
the hurt of the realm,” were to be sent out of England.
Finally, by a supplementary document, the barons present at Runnymead
were to choose out of the whole baronage twenty-five sworn guardians of
the Charter, who, in the event of any violation of its articles, were
not to hesitate from making war on the king till the matter had been
put right.
Well might John exclaim, in a wild burst of rage, when the Charter was
signed, and he was alone with his foreign troops, “They have given me
five-and-twenty over-kings!”
The twenty-five were to ensure the king’s obedience to the Charter,
but who was to ensure the obedience of the twenty-five?--all of whom
were of the party of revolt against the king. A safeguard was obviously
necessary, and a second court of barons, thirty-eight in number, was
chosen--(which included William the Marshall)--and these first swore
obedience to the twenty-five, and then a second oath to enforce on king
and barons mutual respect.[31]
The Great Charter was signed, and within a week it was published
throughout all England. But the “sort of peace” patched up between John
and the barons was not to last. None of the barons believed that the
king would abide by the oaths he had sworn, and they, for their part,
prepared for war.[32]
To the Continent John looked for aid, “seeking to be revenged upon
his enemies by two swords, the sword of the spirit and the sword of
the flesh, so that if one failed he could count upon the other for
success.” He had appealed to the pope in May, and Innocent’s reply had
been a general condemnation of all disturbers of the peace. Pandulf,
the papal legate, was at Runnymead, and in August, when the barons
were openly making ready for hostilities, he and Peter des Roches, of
Winchester, called on Stephen Langton to enforce the papal sentence
of excommunication against certain of the barons. Langton, who was
about to set out to Rome for a general council, declined to do this
until he had seen the pope and discussed the whole question with
him. He believed the sentence had been drawn up by the pope under a
misunderstanding. Thereupon Pandulf and Peter des Roches, by virtue of
their authority, declared Stephen disobedient to the papal mandate, and
pronounced his suspension from his office of archbishop.
Langton made no protest against the sentence but went to Rome, and
was present at the general council in November. His chiefest work for
England was done when the Charter was signed at Runnymead. With the
king and the barons at civil war, the country ravaged by John’s foreign
bands of merciless savages, and the barons praying Louis, the son of
Philip of France, to take the English crown, what could Archbishop
Stephen accomplish? Pope Innocent had declared the Charter annulled on
the ground that both king and barons had made the pope the over-lord
of England, and that in consequence nothing in the government and
constitution of the country could be altered without his knowledge and
sanction. But as the legate, the primate, and the bishops had all left
for Rome, the pope’s disallowing of the Charter never got published in
England at all, though it was known that he had sent letters.
The sentence of suspension was removed from Langton in February, 1216.
A few months later the great pope, Innocent III., passed away, and in
October John was dead.
In 1217 Stephen Langton was back again at Canterbury, to remain for
eleven more years the primate of England. With William the Marshall and
Hubert de Burgh, Stephen worked for the preservation of public peace
during those early years of Henry III. We find him in 1223 demanding
a fresh confirmation of the Charter in the council at Oxford, and two
years later its solemn proclamation is required by the archbishop
and the barons as the price of a new subsidy. Equally resolute is
Archbishop Stephen for public order, threatening with all the pains
and penalties of excommunication the barons, who (in spite of Hubert
de Burgh’s letters from the pope declaring Henry to be of age) were
anxious to keep the royal castles in their own hands. “At a time when
constitutional freedom was hardly known, when insurrection seemed the
only possible means of checking despotism, he (Langton) organized and
established a movement for freedom which by every act and word of his
life he showed to be in opposition to mere anarchy.” (C. E. Maurice.)
Stephen Langton was never canonized, though application was made to
Rome to that end shortly after his death in 1228. His learning had made
him famous in Paris before Pope Innocent summoned him to Rome to become
cardinal priest of St. Chrysogonus. His wise statesmanship was proved
by the victory he won for England’s liberties over so energetic and
ruthless a despot as John, and with such material as the barons. His
strength of character and disinterested patriotism were impaired by no
taint of baseness or self seeking. If Stephen Langton is not numbered
with the saints, he ranks high in the great list of England’s primates,
serving religion as faithfully as he served justice and social order,
and his name is resplendent for all time in the charters of English
liberty.
Bishop Grosseteste, the Reformer
1235–1253
AUTHORITIES: _Letters of Robert Grosseteste_, edited by Luard;
_Monumenta Franciscana_; _Letters of Adam of March and Eccleston on the
coming of the Friars_, edited by Brewer; _Annales Monastici_--Burton
and Dunstable; Matthew Paris (Rolls’ Series); Samuel Pegge--_Life
of Robert Grosseteste_, 1793; F. S. Stevenson, M.P.--_Robert
Grosseteste, Bishop of Lincoln_; M. M. C. Calthrop--_Victoria County
History--Lincolnshire_; Gasquet--_Henry III. and the Church_.
BISHOP GROSSETESTE THE REFORMER
1235–1253
The story of Robert Grosseteste’s bishophood is the record of eighteen
years’ unflinching battle with abuses in Church and State. From his
enthronement as Bishop of Lincoln in 1235 till his death in 1253
Grosseteste is conspicuous as a reformer. Now it is the slackness of
the clergy he is combatting, enforcing discipline on men and women
who, vowed to religion, preferred an easier way of life. At another
time he is maintaining the laws and liberties of the nation against
Henry III., who with all his piety knew neither honesty nor truth in
his sovereignty. Right on till the last year of his life Grosseteste
is as vigorous in resisting papal encroachments on the English Church
as he is in dealing with his clergy or with the king. As a reformer
his work is threefold:--(1) The correction of current abuses in the
Church. (2) Maintenance of justice under the misrule of Henry III. (3)
Resistance to the aggressive claims of the papacy. With all this work,
fighting enemies of England at home and abroad, Grosseteste is busy
administering his enormous diocese of Lincoln--then the largest in
the country, including as it did the counties of Lincoln, Leicester,
Buckingham, Huntingdon, Northampton, Oxford and Bedford (Oxford and
Peterborough were afterwards carved out of Lincoln)--and is found
writing to and advising all manner of men, kings, nobles and peasants.
Here is the character of Bishop Grosseteste as his contemporary,
Matthew Paris, saw it, and Matthew was a monk, and the champion of the
monks, and hated Grosseteste’s stern interference with monastic life:--
“He was an open confuter of both pope and king, the corrector of monks,
the director of priests, the instructor of clerks, the support of
scholars, a preacher to the people, a persecutor of the incontinent,
the tireless student of the Scriptures, the hammer and despiser of the
Romans. At the table of bodily refreshment he was hospitable, eloquent,
courteous, pleasant and affable. At the spiritual table devout, tearful
and contrite. In his episcopal office he was sedulous, venerable and
indefatigable.”
Six hundred years later the whirligig of time leaves this verdict
of old Matthew Paris unreversed, and finds Grosseteste’s reputation
enhanced.
“There is scarcely a character in English history whose fame has been
more constant, both during and after his life, than Robert Grosseteste,
Bishop of Lincoln from 1235 to 1253. As we find his advice sought
universally during his lifetime, and his example spoken of as that
which almost all the other prelates of his day followed, so was it
also after his death. If threats from Rome and excommunications from
Canterbury fell harmlessly upon him while alive, his example nerved
others in subsequent years--as in the case of Sewal, Archbishop of
York--to bear even worse attacks without giving way. And probably no
one has had a greater influence upon English thought and English
literature for the two centuries which followed his time; few books
will be found that do not contain some quotations from Lincolniensis,
‘the great clerk, Grostest.’”[33]
A Suffolk man was Grosseteste, and born of humble parents. Sent to
Oxford by his friends he becomes master of the schools and chancellor
of the university--the foremost scholar of his day--receives various
ecclesiastical preferments, and at the age of sixty is freely elected
by the chapter of Lincoln as their bishop. If the canons of Lincoln
believed that Grosseteste’s age would ensure comparative quiet for
the diocese and a continuance of the loose order of his immediate
predecessors, they were speedily undeceived.
Grosseteste brought into Lincoln an energy for religion that disturbed
the easy-going monks, with their comfortable common-room life, and
altogether upset the secular clergy with their illegal marriages
and their parochial revellings. In the first year of his authority
Grosseteste’s letter to his archdeacons, followed by his diocesan
constitutions, shows the hand of the reformer. He calls attention to
the neglect of the canonical hours of prayer--certain clergy “fearing
not God nor regarding man, either do not say the canonical hours or
say them in mutilated fashion, and that without any sign of devotion,
or at an hour more suitable to their own desires than convenient to
their parishioners”--to the private marriages of many priests, to the
strife and bloodshed and desecration caused by the miracle plays in
churchyards, and to the drunkenness and gluttony attendant on funeral
feasts. Grosseteste also complains that the parochial clergy oppose
the preaching friars, “maliciously hindering the people from hearing
the sermons of the friars, and permitting those to preach who make
a trade of it, and who only preach such things as may draw money.”
Incidentally, and with a curiously modern touch, Grosseteste urges
his archdeacons to warn mothers and nurses against overlaying their
children at night, for it seems many infants were suffocated in this
way.
Grosseteste relied on the friars, Franciscan and Dominican, to revive
religion in his diocese. From their first coming to England he had
befriended the little brothers of St. Francis and St. Dominic’s order
of preachers, and at Oxford had been conspicuously their rector. He
writes to Pope Gregory IX. in the highest praise of the Franciscans:
“Inestimable benefits have been wrought in my diocese by the friars.
They enlighten our whole land with the bright light of their preaching
and learning.”
The secular clergy and the monks generally by no means shared
Grosseteste’s appreciation of the preachers of poverty, and when the
Bishop of Lincoln began to rout up the monasteries in his diocese
with visitations and enquiries the dismay was considerable. The
Benedictine monks in England were good, easy men in the thirteenth
century--Grosseteste finds no grave faults against morality to rebuke
in them--fond of their pleasant social life, and enjoying the comfort
of an existence that had few temporal cares beyond finding money for
pope and king. At the worst their sloth was culpable. Grosseteste
charged upon them with his preaching friars, calling for amendment and
the fulfilment of duties, attacking old abuses sanctioned by custom,
and showing no tolerant sympathy for the infirmities and shortcomings
of middle-aged clerks.[34] Respect him they must, for the learning
and high character of the bishop were conspicuous in the land, but
the dislike of all this strenuous exhortation was not concealed. The
very chapter of Lincoln, which had elected him bishop, refused to
admit Grosseteste as their visitor, or to acknowledge his jurisdiction
over their proceedings, and only after six years of controversy and
litigation was the case finally decided at Rome (1245) wholly in the
bishop’s favour. A sentence of excommunication pronounced upon him by
the monks at Canterbury during the vacancy of the see was of course
entirely ignored by Grosseteste. If the clergy resented Grosseteste’s
call to arms, it is to be remembered that they had suffered
considerably from the tyranny of the times, and had been reduced under
the general oppression to a feeble and sluggish timidity. The old “Song
of the Church”[35] tells how low they had fallen:
Free and held in high esteem the clergy used to be,
None were better cherished: or loved more heartily.
Slaves are they now: despised, brought low,
Betrayed (as all deplore)
By those from whom: their help should come;
I can no more.
King and pope alike in this: to one purpose hold.
How to make the clergy yield their silver and their gold.
Truth to say: the pope gives way,
Far too much to the king
Our tithes he grants: for the crown’s wants
To his liking.
To check the rapacity of the king, and to stop the seizure of Church
revenues for Italian clerics, and thereby to raise the English clergy
from their state of sluggish despondency was Grosseteste’s work for
England. We find him conspicuous at the council summoned by the king
to meet at Westminster in 1244. In vain Henry III. appealed for
money, bishops and nobles reminded him that the money so frequently
granted had done no good either to the king or the country, and that
a justiciar and chancellor must be appointed for the strengthening of
the state. Henry demurred, tried postponements and delays, and these
failing, summoned the bishops alone, and confronted them with a letter
from Pope Innocent IV. exhorting them to give liberally to the king.
Even this failed to move the prelates. After much discussion, however,
some were for “a mild answer,” for many of the prelates “fearing the
king’s instability and the pusillanimity of the royal counsellors,”
were unwilling to deny the pope’s request. Grosseteste clinched the
matter by declaring they must all stand together with the barons:[36]
“We may not be divided from the common counsel. For it is written if we
be divided we shall all perish forthwith,” The next day Henry tried to
get at each of the bishops separately--an old device. “But they with
wary heed would not be so entrapped, and by departing early in the
morning escaped the net in which they had once been caught; and so the
council broke up to the king’s discontent.” (Matthew Paris.)
Again in 1252 Henry summoned the bishops, and tried to coerce them into
giving him money by producing a papal mandate, authorising the payment
of a full tithe of all Church revenues to the king for the space of
three years. To make matters worse, “payment was not to be made on the
old assessment, but on a new assessment conducted with strict inquiry,
at the will and judgment of the royal agents and extortioners, who
would seek their own profit before the king’s.” The excuse was that the
king was about to start on a pilgrimage. Grosseteste was then an old
man, but he blazed out at this monstrous demand, especially when the
king’s messengers went on to explain that the tithe for two years might
be paid at once, and that the third year’s tithe could also be raised
before the king actually started. “By our Lady,” said the sturdy bishop
of Lincoln, “what does all this mean? You assume that we shall agree to
this damnable levy, and go on arguing from premises that have not been
admitted. God forbid that we should thus bend our knee to Baal.”
The king’s half-brother, Ethelmar, bishop-elect of Winchester,
deprecated resistance to the will of pope and king, and urged that the
French had consented to pay a similar demand. “Yes,” said the Bishop
of Ely, “and it brought their king no good.” “For the very reason the
French have yielded must we resist,” replied Grosseteste. “To do a
thing twice makes it a custom, and if we pay too, we shall have no
peace. For my own part, I say plainly that I will not pay this evil
demand, lest the king himself as well as us should incur the heavy
wrath of God.” The other bishops followed Grosseteste’s lead, and the
old man went on to advise them to pray the king to think of his eternal
salvation, and to restrain his rash impulses. Henry naturally declined
to send an independent remonstrance to the pope against the mandate,
and the bishops decided they could do nothing in the way of granting
this special tithe. But they were hard put to it, “between the pulling
of the king and the pushing of the pope.”
All Grosseteste’s dealings with the king show the same firm resolution
to stop the royal extortion, and to insist on the fulfilment of the
charters of liberties obtained from the crown. He carries on the work
of Stephen Langton, always backing up the unsuccessful efforts of the
good St. Edmund Rich (Archbishop of Canterbury, 1234–1240) to keep
Henry faithful to his word, and prepares the way for the great campaign
of his friend Simon of Montfort.[37] The very worst period of Henry’s
long reign is covered by Grosseteste’s episcopal life. Hubert de
Burgh’s wise rule was over by 1232, and Peter des Roches and the horde
of aliens were fleecing the country for the next twenty years. It is
not till after Grosseteste’s death that the barons dealt with Henry’s
misrule to any purpose.
At the great council held in London in 1248, at which Grosseteste was
present, a full list of the national grievances is given: the lavish
waste of the wealth of the country on foreigners, the ruin of trade by
the arbitrary seizure of goods by the king and his agents, the robbery
of poor fishermen by royal authority, “so that they think it safer to
trust themselves to the stormy waves and seek a further shore,” and the
keeping bishoprics and abbacies vacant so that the crown may enjoy the
revenues therefrom, are the chief causes of complaint. They were not
new grievances, for the most part, and they were not to die with Henry
III., all charters and royal promises notwithstanding.
Added to the common wrongs of Henry’s wretched misrule were the papal
extortions, directly encouraged by the king. In return for papal
mandates directing churchmen to supply the king with money, what could
Henry--himself the most devoted servant of the papacy--do but help
the pope to get what he could out of England? The wealth of England
was held to be of fabulous amount at Rome, and popes beset by fierce
ungodly emperors naturally turned to it in their need as to a treasury.
But the thing was intolerable to Grosseteste. He had studied in Paris,
he welcomed Dominican and Franciscan friars from the continent as no
other prelate did, and had no objection to foreigners _per se_. But
the pope claimed the revenues of church livings for boys and presented
illiterates to benefices--to the obvious degradation of the Church in
England. Grosseteste was always willing enough to raise what money he
could for the holy see, but appoint unworthy and incompetent clerks to
livings in his diocese, that he would not do--not for any pope.
The country groaned under the biting avarice of the Roman see, as it
bled under the vampire politics of Peter des Roches and his needy,
greedy crew of Bretons and Poitevins.
What it all meant to England Matthew Paris has told us in his
description of things in 1237:
“Now was simony practised without shame and usurers on various pleas
openly extorted money from the common people and lesser folk; charity
expired, the liberty of the Church withered away, religion was trampled
to the dust. Daily did illiterate persons of the lowest class, armed
with bulls from Rome, burst forth into threats; and, in spite of the
privileges handed down to us from good men of old, they feared not
to plunder the revenues consecrated by our holy forefathers for the
service of religion, the support of the poor, and the nourishment of
strangers, but thundering out their excommunications they quickly and
violently carried off what they demanded. And if those who were wronged
and robbed sought refuge by appealing or pleading their privileges,
they were at once suspended and excommunicated by a papal writ. Thus
mourning and lamentation were heard on all sides, and many exclaimed
with heart-rending sobs, ‘It were better to die than to behold the
sufferings of our country and its saints. Woe to England, once the
chief of provinces, the mistress of nations, the mirror of the Church,
the exemplar of religion, and now brought under tribute,--trampled on
by worthless men, and the prey of men of low degree.’”
The arrival of Otho, in 1237, a papal legate (on the request of Henry),
far from remedying, increased the contemporary distress. For though
Otho was a discreet man, he was more eager to get money for Rome than
to deal with the oppression that plagued England, and when he did give
advice it was spurned by those who saw his grasping hands. Archbishop
Edmund was particularly vexed at having a papal legate set over him,
and what with one disappointment and another finally gave up in despair
the task of guiding the English Church, and in 1240 went to die at
Pontigny, where his predecessors Anselm and Thomas had lived in exile.
Grosseteste stuck to his post, and the Franciscans and Dominicans,
whom he aided, poured in oil and wine on the wounds of the Church folk,
and revived religion in the country.
Grosseteste fought the extortionate papal demands for Church revenues
all the time. In 1239, with his fellow bishops, he tells Otho plainly
that the Church is drained dry by the grasping importunity of Rome.
Otho left in 1241, and that same year saw Boniface of Savoy, a
handsome, soldierly man appointed to Canterbury as St. Edmund’s
successor. The following year came a new extortioner from Rome, named
Martin, an altogether inferior person to Otho, but with all the
legate’s powers of suspension and excommunication. His confiscations
and rapacity provoked a remonstrance to the pope even from Henry.
Martin at last, in 1245, had to fly for his life from England, and
when Grosseteste subsequently had a calculation made of the English
Church revenues enjoyed by foreigners, it was found that the incomes
of foreign clerks appointed by Pope Innocent IV. amounted to more than
70,000 marks--more than treble the king’s income. And all this was done
in spite of refusals by Grosseteste to appoint illiterates or allow
boys to hold benefices.
The barons sided with the Church against Martin, and drew up a long
protest which they sent to the pope at the council of Lyons in 1245. In
this they complained:--That the pope, not content with Peter’s Pence,
which had been paid cheerfully from old times, wrung money from the
Church against the law of the realm, without the king’s permission; and
that the pope wrongfully put ignorant, covetous, or absentee Italians
into English livings notwithstanding his own promises, the rights of
patrons, and the privileges of the English clergy. A year later the
protest was repeated with another item objecting to the pope’s claim to
recall former charters.
Innocent IV.’s answer to this was to threaten to dethrone Henry as
he had dethroned his brother-in-law, the Emperor Frederick. The king
weakly said no more, the barons, without a leader, were equally silent,
and the Church continued “to sate the greed of Rome.”
But in Grosseteste there was no spirit of surrender. In 1253, the
very last year of his life, he was called upon by the pope to
provide a nephew of his with a canonry at Lincoln, and the bishop’s
letter of refusal is, perhaps, the only well remembered thing of all
Grosseteste’s writings. This letter was not, as commonly stated, sent
to the pope but to his representative who was also named Innocent.[38]
“The pope has power to build up,” wrote Grosseteste, “but not to pull
down. These appointments tend to destruction, not edification, being of
man’s device and not according to the words of the Apostles or the will
of Christ. By my very love and obedience to the Holy See I must refuse
obedience in things altogether opposed to the sanctity of the Apostolic
See and contrary to Catholic unity. As a son and a servant I decline to
obey, and this refusal must not be taken as rebellion, for it is done
in reverence to divine commands.”
(This letter is quoted by Matthew Paris and in the _Burton Annals_. It
can be read in full in the _Epistles_, No. 128.)
When the pope heard of this answer he talked angrily of “the old
madman” who dared to sit in judgment on him, and blustered about the
king of England being his vassal. The cardinals, however, said frankly
that Grosseteste had spoken the truth, and that he was far too good a
man to be condemned. “He is Catholic,” they declared, “and of deepest
holiness. More religious, and more saintly than we are, and of better
life. They say that among all the bishops there is no one his equal,
still less his superior. All the clergy of France and England know
this. Besides, he is considered a great philosopher, thoroughly learned
in Latin and Greek; and he is zealous for justice, and a man who deals
in theology, a preacher to the people, a lover of chastity, and a
persecutor of those who practise simony.” So they extolled him. And it
is to the everlasting credit of the cardinals of the Roman See in that
year 1253 that they could discern the sincerity and the great qualities
of the brave old bishop who defied the pope’s unrighteous commands.
There was no question at Rome of any disloyalty on Grosseteste’s part
to the Holy See, no suggestion of any failing as a good Catholic.[39]
And Pope Innocent IV. wisely let the matter drop, when the cardinals
assured him it would never do to interfere with Grosseteste.
Before he died Grosseteste made a last appeal “to the nobles of
England, the citizens of London and the community of the whole realm”
on behalf of the Rights of the English Church, making a careful list of
the ills to be redressed. He also solemnly charged his friend Simon of
Montfort, never, as he valued his immortal soul, to forsake the cause
of the English people, but to stand up even to the death, if needs be,
for a true and just government, and with prophetic foresight spoke of
the heavier troubles coming on the land.
On October 9th, 1253, the long life and the magnificent battling with
odds were over, and the great bishop passed away. He was buried in
Lincoln Cathedral, and in 1307, King Edward I. and the dean and chapter
of St. Paul’s made application for his canonization, but without
success. Fifty years later and Edward III.’s Statutes of Provisors,
1351, and Praemunire, 1353, by their prohibition of papal bulls and of
the appointment of papal nominees to English benefices, may be accepted
as the real acknowledgment of Grosseteste’s political work.
“I confidently assert (wrote Matthew Paris) that his virtues pleased
God more than his failings displeased Him.”
Simon of Montfort and the English Parliament
1258–1265
AUTHORITIES: Matthew Paris; William of Rishanger; Thomas of Wykes;
Adam of Marsh--_Monumenta Frascescana_, _Burton Annals_, _Annales
Monastici_; Robert of Gloucester--_Royal letters of Henry III._
(Rolls Series); _Political Songs_ (Camden Society, 1839); _Chronicle
of Melrose_; Stubbs--_Constitutional History_, vol. ii; and _Select
Charters_; W. H. Blaauw--_The Barons’ War_; Dr. Pauli--_Simon of
Montfort_ (translated by Una M. Goodwin); G. W. Prothero--_Simon of
Montfort_; Dr. Shirley in _Quarterly Review_, cxix. 57.
SIMON OF MONTFORT AND THE ENGLISH PARLIAMENT
1258–1265
“In the year of our Lord 1238, which was the twenty-second of his
reign, King Henry held his court in London at Westminster, and there
on the day after Epiphany, which was a Thursday, Simon de Montfort
solemnly espoused Eleanor, daughter of King John, sister of Henry III.,
and widow of William Marshall, Earl of Pembroke. The king himself gave
away the bride to the said Simon, Earl of Leicester, who received her
gratefully by reason of his disinterested love for her, her own beauty,
the rich honours that were attached to her, and the distinguished and
royal descent of the lady, for she was the legitimate daughter of a
king and queen, and furthermore was sister of a king, of an empress
(the wife of Frederic II.), and of a queen (Joan, wife of Alexander II.
of Scotland). Our lord the pope, too, gave him a dispensation to marry
this noble lady.”
Thus Matthew Paris, when Earl Simon, then a man about thirty-seven,
and “tall and handsome,” enjoyed the royal favour and stood godfather
to the infant Prince Edward. Simon had only done homage as Earl of
Leicester in 1232; his boyhood was passed in France, and his father was
the great soldier who led the French crusade against the Albigenses.
Earl Richard of Cornwall, Henry’s brother--soon to become King of the
Romans--objected to the marriage, regarding it as one more victory for
the foreigners whom Henry nourished at the expense of England. But
Simon was no real alien. His grandmother had been sister and heiress of
the Earl of Leicester, and Simon’s French training no more made him a
stranger in England than did Stephen Langton’s years of study in Paris
and Rome unfit him for the primacy of the English Church.
Henry’s favour was short-lived. Earl Simon made friends with Earl
Richard and left for the crusades, disgusted with the king’s want of
honesty. So much wisdom did he show in Palestine, and so great was his
prowess, that Simon might have stayed in the east as regent for the
young King of Jerusalem. But he had work to do in England, and came
home with Richard in 1242.
Here against all the disorder of misrule and the royal and papal
extortions Simon laboured with his friend Bishop Grosseteste, and he is
conspicuous at the Parliament of Westminster in 1244, and in drawing up
the great protest to the pope a year later.
Then for five years (1248–53) Simon was in Gascony contending with
a body of nobles whom neither Henry II. nor Richard I. had been
able to make good subjects, and whose only object in making formal
acknowledgment of Henry III. was to escape the rule of Louis of France.
Henry gave Simon neither men nor money, and lent a willing ear to all
the complaints of Simon’s enemies in Gascony and in England.[40] At
his own expense the Earl of Leicester saved Gascony for the English
crown, and brought peace and law and trade to that province. Henry’s
return was to make Simon answer trumped-up charges of robbery, cruelty
and treason brought by Gascons in 1252. The charges were not proved,
although Henry sent his own commissioner to Gascony to make enquiry.
Earl Richard and other nobles who knew the country were convinced
of Simon’s justice, and Simon, who was in England trying to raise
supplies, turned sharply on the king, reminding him of unfulfilled
promises. “Keep thy agreement with me,” he went on, “or pay me the
money I have spent in thy service; for it is well known I have
impoverished my earldom beyond recovery for the honour of the king.”
“There is no shame in breaking my word to a traitor,” the king answered
angrily. At this Simon in open wrath declared the king a liar, only
saved by the shelter of royalty from the penalty of his speech. “Call
thyself a Christian?” said the earl. “Dost thou ever confess thy sins?”
“Yes,” said the king, “I do.” “Thy confession is useless without
repentance and atonement.” said the earl. The king, more angry than
ever, retorted, “I repent of one thing, and that is that I made thee an
earl in England, to wax fat and kick against me. Get thee to Gascony,
thou who lovest strife, and take thy fill there and meet thy father’s
fate.” “I go willingly, my lord,” came the answer. “And, ungrateful as
thou art, I will not return till I have made these rebels thy subjects
and thy enemies thy footstool.”
Simon returned to Gascony, and though Henry again undermined his
authority, he kept his word, only giving up his command when the work
was done.
Adam of Marsh, a Franciscan friar, the friend and correspondent of
Grosseteste, often writes to Simon in those days, encouraging and
advising him. “Better is patience in a man than force,” says Adam,
“and better he who rules his own passions than he who storms a city.”
He prays this strong upright soldier-statesman to find comfort in
the frequent reading of the Holy Scriptures, “breaking through as
far as you can the cares and distractions of storm and trouble,”
and recommends the 29th, 30th and 31st chapters of the book of Job,
“together with the delightful commentaries of St. Gregory.”
Once more back in England, the time soon came when Simon was the
recognised leader of the barons in their struggle with the king. And
this leadership gave England its first representative parliament.
Henry was in greater financial difficulties than ever in 1257. The
mad scheme of accepting the crown of Sicily for his second son Edmund
from the pope, on condition that the cost of driving out Manfred, the
Emperor Frederick’s son, undertaken by the pope, was to be paid for
by England, had been adopted by Henry in spite of the opposition of
bishops and nobles. Henry pledged his kingdom with the pope as security
for the expenditure in Sicily,[41] and at last in the parliament of
1257 had to confess his indebtedness. Fourteen thousand marks were
owing to Pope Alexander, and this wretched debt, in addition to the
general contempt for law and justice by the king’s judges, sheriffs and
foreign favourites, drove matters to a climax. The wet summer of 1257,
followed by a failure at harvest, brought famine in the winter.
The barons insisted that the time had come for constitutional
amendment. “The king’s mistakes call for special treatment,” said
Richard, Earl of Gloucester, at a parliament early in 1258, and Simon,
closely related to the royal house as he was, agreed. The swarm of
royal parasites from Poitou raised objections to any interference
with Henry’s prerogative, but were swept aside. “If the king can’t do
without us in war he must listen to us in peace. And what sort of peace
is this when the king is led astray by bad counsellors and the land is
filled with foreign tyrants who grind down native-born Englishmen?” So
the barons argued.[42]
To Henry’s threat, “I will send reapers and reap your fields for you,”
Hugh Bigod of Norfolk had retorted briskly, “And I will send you back
the heads of your reapers.”
Parliament met again in June that year at Oxford--the “Mad Parliament”
it was called--and the barons came fully armed, for civil war seemed
imminent. But the barons led by Richard of Gloucester and Earl Simon
carried all before them and the war was postponed for five years.
The work of this parliament, well known as the Provisions of Oxford,
was one more attempt to get the Great Charter honestly observed. Under
this constitution:--
The king was to have a standing council of fifteen, by whose advice he
was to act, and to whom the justiciar, chancellor and treasurer were to
be accountable.
Parliament was to meet three times a year--February, June and
October. Four knights were to be chosen by the king’s lesser freehold
tenant-knights in each county.
To save expense twelve commissioners were to be chosen to represent
the baronage--“and the commonalty shall hold as established that which
these twelve shall do.”[43] The fifteen counsellors consisted of six
of the king’s party, and nine of the barons’--the most conspicuous of
the latter were Simon of Montfort, Richard of Gloucester, and Bishop
Cantilupe, of Worcester.
Then the oath was taken, “that neither for life nor death, for hatred
or love, or for any cause whatever, would they be bent or weakened in
their purpose to regain praiseworthy laws, and to cleanse the kingdom
from foreigners.”
Henry and Prince Edward, his eldest son, took the oath willingly
enough--though the latter soon began “to draw back from it so far as he
could.” The king’s half-brothers and the rest of the aliens not only
refused the oath, but swore that as long as they had breath they would
never surrender their castles, revenues, or wardships.[44] Simon, who
on the ground of his foreign birth had at once yielded his castles
of Kenilworth and Odiham, without recompense, turned to William de
Valence--who was blustering more than the rest--and said sharply, “To a
certainty you shall either surrender your castles or lose your head.”
The barons made it plain that they were in agreement with this, and
then were the Poitevins afraid, not knowing what to do; “for if they
hid themselves in their castles they would be starved out; for all
the people would besiege them and utterly destroy their castles.” The
aliens fled to the continent, and the new constitution was proclaimed
in every county--in Latin, French, and English.[45]
Twenty years had passed since Henry had blessed Simon’s marriage with
his sister Eleanor, and Simon had stood godfather to Prince Edward,
and now after the Parliament at Oxford, meeting the Earl of Leicester
in the Bishop of Durham’s palace on the Thames bank, the king cannot
conceal his fear of the one man who held up the good cause--“like
a pillar that cannot be moved.” The king had taken refuge from a
thunderstorm, and to Simon’s assurance that the storm was passing,
and was no longer to be feared, answered grimly, “I fear thunder and
lightning a good deal, Lord Simon, but by the Head of God, I fear you
more than all the thunder and lightning in the world.”
“Everyone suspected that these astounding words broke from the king
because the Earl of Leicester manfully and boldly persevered in
carrying out the provisions, compelling the king and all the enemies of
these provisions to assent to them, and utterly banishing his brothers,
who were corrupting the whole kingdom.” (Matthew Paris.)
Manfully as the great earl might strive, he could not accomplish the
carrying out of the Provisions of Oxford. Henry was quickly at his
old work, obtaining from Rome a dispensation from his old promises on
the ground they had been obtained by compulsion, and bringing back
his foreign supporters. The barons neither held together nor made any
serious effort to promote good government.
Richard of Gloucester, jealous of Simon, fell away from the national
cause before his death in 1262.[46]
Prince Edward stood by his oath, but did nothing to prevent the
break-up of the provisional government, and soon openly supported his
father.
In spite of all this the Provisions, modified at Westminster in 1259,
endured for five years, and then it seemed as if nothing could save
the country from civil war. As a last resource appeal was made by both
sides to King Louis of France to arbitrate concerning the fulfilment of
the Provisions, and at Amiens, in January, 1264, the award was given.
Louis solemnly gave sentence for the king against the barons, entirely
annulling the Statutes and Provisions of Oxford, and in particular
declaring the king free to appoint his own ministers, councils, and
sheriffs, and to employ aliens. But by the award--the mise--of Amiens
the earlier charters given by the crown were to remain, and all
disputes arising out of the Parliament of Oxford were to be suppressed.
Louis gave as a reason for annulling the provisions that the pope had
already annulled them.
The appellants had turned to Louis hoping for peace. The award was the
signal for war. Many of the bishops and barons at once withdrew from
Simon, who answered the deserters by declaring, “Though all should
forsake us, I and my four sons will fight to the death in the righteous
cause I have sworn to uphold, to the honour of the Church and the good
of the realm. Many lands have I travelled, heathen and Christian, but
nowhere have I seen such bad faith and falsehood as in England.”
London was enthusiastic in its support of the barons, and the Cinque
Ports, the scholars of Oxford, and the Dominican and Franciscan friars
were all on the side of reform. Chief among Simon’s supporters were
Bishop Cantilupe, of Worcester, Gilbert, the young Earl of Gloucester,
Hugh le Despenser, the justiciar, and Roger Bigod.
War began in March, when Prince Edward captured Gloucester, joined
Henry at Oxford, and then seized Nottingham and Northampton, while
Simon and the citizens of London attacked Rochester. Henry turned
south, and encamped in full force near Lewes.
Again Simon laboured for peace, and in his own name and the name of
Gilbert of Gloucester, the Bishops of Worcester and London went as
ambassadors to Henry. Simon offered £30,000 to the king if he would
make peace and keep to the Provisions of Oxford, and assured him that
he had taken up arms not against Henry but against those who were “not
only our enemies, but yours, and those of the whole kingdom.”
The king treated the proposal with scorn, and Prince Edward added an
additional message of contempt.
On the 14th of May the battle of Lewes was fought and won by Simon,
“through a singular conjunction of skill and craft on the one side, and
rashness and panic on the other.”[47]
The Earl of Leicester went into the battle fighting for his country and
his oath, and with the exhortation to his men “to pray God, if this our
undertaking be pleasing in His sight, to give us might to fulfil the
same, serving Him as good knights.”
The stout old Bishop of Worcester blessed the troops, “who had among
them all but one faith, one will in all things, one love towards God
and their neighbour, so that they feared neither to offend the king
nor even to die for the sake of justice, rather than violate their
oaths.” (Matthew of Westminster.)
At the end of the day the defeat of the royalists was complete, and the
king, Prince Edward and his kinsmen were prisoners.
Then peace was made, Henry once more swearing to keep the charters
and articles of Oxford, to employ no aliens, to submit the Provisions
to arbitration again, to live thriftily till his debts were paid,
and to give his son Edward and his nephew Henry as hostages for good
behaviour till a permanent reform in the constitution was made. Early
in June these terms of peace were proclaimed in London, to the general
satisfaction, and on all sides the people shouted their thankfulness to
Simon.
God’s blessing on Earl Simon, his sons and followers light!
Who put their lives in jeopardy and fought a desperate fight,
Because their hearts were moved to hear their English brethren groan
Beneath the hard taskmasters’ rods, making a grievous moan,
Like Israel under Pharaoh’s yoke, in thraldom and in dread,
Their freedom gone, their lives scarce spared, so evilly they sped.
But at the last the Lord looked down and saw His people’s pain,
And sent a second Mattathias to break their bonds in twain;
Who with his sons so full of zeal for the law and for the right,
Will never flinch a single inch before the tyrant’s might.
To Simon’s faith and faithfulness alone our peace we owe,
He raised the weak and hopeless and made the proud to bow,
He set the realm at one again and brought the mighty low.[48]
And now in the summer of 1264 Earl Simon was to show what he could do
for England, for the victory of Lewes had placed power in his hands,
and he stood indisputably the foremost man in the realm. For one short
year his counsel was to guide the destinies of England and to make that
year memorable for all time by the creation of the first representative
Parliament.
A new scheme of government was at once drawn up. Three electors chosen
by the barons were to appoint a council of nine for the guidance of
the king, and Simon of Montfort, Gilbert of Gloucester, and Stephen
Berksted, Bishop of Chichester, were speedily chosen as the three
electors. Hugh le Despenser remained justiciar, and Thomas Cantilupe,
the bishop’s nephew, became chancellor. (This Thomas subsequently
became Bishop of Hereford, died in Italy, and was canonized.)
Then in December came the issue of writs for Simon of Montfort’s
famous Full Parliament of 1265. Two knights are to be returned
from each shire, and for the first time from each city and borough
the burgesses are to send two representatives. Hitherto Parliament
had consisted of barons and clergy, and knights sent by the king’s
tenants, and the representation of the townspeople was unknown.
Simon’s earlier policy at Oxford had done nothing to extend the basis
of government or create a national responsibility for the laws. “The
provisions of 1258 restricted, the constitutions of 1264 extended the
limits of parliament.... Either Simon’s views of a constitution had
rapidly developed, or the influence which had checked them in 1258
were removed. Anyhow, he had had genius to interpret the mind of the
nation and to anticipate the line which was taken by later progress.”
(Stubbs.)
This development of Simon’s views may fairly be traced to his close
and intimate connection with the Dominican friars.[49] Simon’s father,
the warrior of the Albigensian wars, had been the warm friend of St.
Dominic. Simon himself was equally the friend of Bishop Grosseteste,
the champion of the friars. As far back as 1245 Simon had founded a
Dominican priory at Leicester. In 1263 he had been present at a General
Chapter of the Dominican Order in Holborn, London, and the Parliament
of Oxford had met in a Dominican priory in that city. All along the
friars had supported the popular movement.[50]
Now the peculiarity of the Dominican Order of Friars is its
representative form of government. Each priory sends two
representatives to its provincial chapter, and each province sends two
representatives to the general chapter of the order.
Simon of Montfort, when the opportunity came to him for striking out
a reform in the English Parliament, adopted the plan which he had
studied and seen at work amongst the Preaching Friars. “The idea of
representative government had ripened in his hand,” and his genius
interpreted the mind of the nation. In spite of all the scorn that
has been poured on popular elections and the Houses of Parliament,
in spite of all the imperfections that necessarily are attached to
any constitutional system devised by the wit of man, the idea of
representative government has become the inspiration of the nations
of the world. The failings of democracy are obvious, the weak spots
in popular electoral systems glaring; but mankind, once grasping the
idea of freedom in politics, clamours eagerly for responsibility in
law-making and the administration of justice, and refuses to rest
satisfied under any despotism or bureaucracy, benevolent or malevolent.
Suppressed by dictators, perverted by demagogues, abused by the
unscrupulous in power, there still seems nothing better in politics
for mankind than self-government. “Better is he who rules his own
temper than he who storms a city,” wrote Friar Adam of Marsh to Simon
of Montfort. “Better self-government for a people than world-wide
conquest,” the average man declares, and the opinion slowly moulds
the destinies of nations, till “patriotism” becomes the word for good
service in politics.
The verse of the thirteenth century chronicler:--
The king that tries without advice to seek his people’s will,
Must often fail, he cannot know the woes and wants they feel,
gets re-expression in the nineteenth century in Abraham Lincoln’s:
“Government of the people, by the people, for the people.” Always
threatened by the personal ambition of man, often overthrown when
ambition held the sword of power, contemptible to the wise and prudent
because of the simplicity and innocence of “the people,” denounced as
dangerous by the professional expert in bureaucracy because of the
ignorance of “the people,” its inadequacy the common theme of the
disappointed--representative government survives its enemies, defies
its critics, and with its blemishes unconcealed, finds the company of
its lovers ever increasing and recruiting in its behalf. For since
that first Full Parliament of Earl Simon’s in 1265 it has never been
possible to get rid of the notion that representative government was
a key to the portals of freedom; and though the wider the freedom the
greater the responsibility, to the credit of the race at all times men
and women have pressed forward, not rejecting responsibility.
Simon’s parliament sat from January to March. Its chief business was
the confirmation of the treaty of peace at Lewes, and Henry swore as
usual to maintain the new constitution, the charters and provisions.
The government was short-lived. Danger from France, where the queen
and Archbishop Boniface of Canterbury and all Henry’s alien courtiers
planned invasion with an army collected in Holland, had passed away
at the close of the previous summer. There had been a great muster of
troops for national defence near Dover, bad weather had incapacitated
the queen’s fleet, and Louis of France agreed to negotiations in place
of war. The Cinque Ports mariners refused a landing to the pope’s
legate, who was ready to excommunicate the new government, and flung
his papal bull in the sea.[51]
Not from abroad but from within came the foes who overthrew Simon’s
government and murdered the great statesman. Earl Gilbert, of
Gloucester, like his father, grew jealous of Simon’s leadership, and
disputed his authority as to the ransom of some of the prisoners of
Lewes, and Simon’s sons added fuel to the flame by their pride and
overbearing insolence. Roger Mortimer and some of the nobles of the
Welsh marches rose for King Henry in the spring of 1265, and Gilbert
deserted the barons for the king.[52] William of Valence landed in
South Wales with a body of crossbowmen in May, and when Simon reached
Hereford to put down the rebellion, Prince Edward, who, with the king,
had been in Simon’s custody, made his escape to Mortimer and the
marches.
Edward quickly raised troops, and joined Gilbert at Ludlow, where he
took an oath to obey the laws and charters of the realm. Simon, in some
danger of being cut off by this movement on his rear, sent word to his
second son--Simon--to go to Kenilworth and join him at Evesham, and
then turned back from Wales.
The younger Simon was surprised at Kenilworth by a sudden raid by
Edward. His camp was broken up, his banners taken, and he was driven
back into the castle. Edward, fully aware that Earl Simon had only a
small force with him, hurried off to Evesham to attack him, before
young Simon could rally his scattered troops and come to his father’s
help.
On the morning of August 4th Earl Simon halted at Evesham, and at
the king’s request, for Henry was still his captive, heard mass and
dined. His son’s army, now on its way, halted for the same purpose at
Alcester. “He was now only ten miles distant and the junction of father
and son seemed secure.”[53] But Prince Edward was already between them.
“As the morning broke his army lay across the road that led northward
from Evesham to Alcester. Ere three hours had passed the corpse of the
great earl lay mangled amid a ring of faithful knights, and the ‘murder
of Evesham, for battle none it was,’ was over.”
At first Simon thought the advancing army was his son’s, for Edward
displayed the captured banners of Kenilworth, but when he saw the
standards of the prince and of Gloucester, and the well-known banner of
Mortimer, the truth was clear.
“By the arm of St. James,” cried the earl, “they come on skilfully, for
they have turned my lessons against me. God have mercy on our souls,
for our bodies are theirs! Though if Simon were to come up we might
hope yet.” He turned to his eldest son, and pointing to the banner of
Gloucester said, “See, Henry, what your pride has done.”
In vain Henry urged his father to fly while escape was possible. “I
had as lief die here in a good cause as in the Holy Land,” said the
earl, and the barons and knights standing round were equally resolute
to fight to the end--though they had but two men to every seven of
the enemy. The good Bishop of Worcester blessed the little army as he
had done at Lewes, and then the battle began. The Welsh footsoldiers
quickly lost heart and fled from Simon and the field, and the barons
were soon hemmed in. One by one they fell--Henry of Montfort, Hugh le
Despenser, the wise and upright justiciar, and Simon himself, wounded
and unhorsed, “fought on to the last like a giant for the liberties of
England.” A soldier stabbed him in the back under the mail he wore, and
then he was borne down and slain, overwhelmed by numbers rather than
conquered. “So a death full of honour ended the chivalry and prowess,
ennobled by so many deeds in so many lands.” “Thus lamentably fell
the flower of knighthood, leaving to others an example of steadfast
courage. Who can prevent the treachery of friends? Those who had eaten
his bread had raised their heels against him. Those who had spoken
words of love to him with their lips lied in their throats, for their
hearts were not right with him, and they betrayed him in his hour of
need.” (W. Rishanger.)
For nearly three hours the unequal battle was fought, in the midst of
storm and darkness. So dark was it that King Henry, who had been forced
to remain with Simon’s knights, had difficulty in saving his life, and
was actually wounded by a javelin before he was recognized by Edward’s
soldiers.
The monks of Evesham carried the bodies of some of the barons into the
abbey for burial, and after horrible mutilations by the victors the
remains of the great earl were reverently interred by the side of Hugh
le Despenser, before the high altar.
“Those who knew Simon praise his piety, admire his learning, and extol
his prowess as a knight and skill as a general. They tell of his simple
fare and plain russet dress, bearing witness to his kindly speech and
firm friendship to all good men, describe his angry scorn for liars and
unjust men, and marvel at his zeal for truth and right, which was such
that neither pleasure nor threats nor promises could turn him aside
from keeping the oath he swore at Oxford; for he held up the good cause
‘like a pillar that cannot be moved, and like a second Josiah esteemed
righteousness the very healing of his soul.’ As a statesman he wished
to bind the king to rule according to law, and to make the king’s
ministers responsible to a full Parliament; and though he did not live
to see the success of his policy, he had pointed out the way by which
future statesmen might bring it about.” (F. York Powell.)
The news of Simon’s death was received with general mourning as it
spread over the land. He was acclaimed by the people as a saint and
martyr, and miracles were said to be worked by his relics.[54] The
Franciscan friars drew up a service in his honour--“consisting of
lessons, responses, verses, hymns, and other matter appertaining to
the honour and respect due to a martyr.”[55] But the pope who had
excommunicated Simon was not likely to hear of canonization, and “as
long as Edward lives the service compiled in Simon’s honour cannot gain
acceptance to be chanted within the church of God, which was hoped
for.”[56]
The “Lament of Earl Simon,”[57] compared the mighty statesman with
Thomas of Canterbury:
For by his death Earl Simon hath
In sooth the victory won,
Like Canterbury’s martyr he
There to the death was done.
Thomas the good, that never would
Let holy church be tried;
Like him he fought, and flinching not,
The good earl like him died.
_Refrain:_
Now low there lies the flower of price
That knew so much of war;
The Earl Montfort, whose luckless sort,
The land shall long deplore.
Death did they face to keep in place
Both righteousness and peace;
Wherefore the saint from sin and taint
Shall give their souls release.
They faced the grave that they might save
The people of this land;
For so his will they did fulfill
As we do understand.
_Refrain._
Sir Simon now, that knight so true,
With all his company,
Are gone above to joy and love
In life that cannot die;
But may our Lord that died on rood
And God send succour yet
To them that lie in misery,
Fast in hard prison set.
_Refrain._
The good cause for which Simon had fought might well have seemed lost,
when Edward’s knights were hacking the dead body of the great earl to
pieces at Evesham. But it was not exactly a “Royalist victory,” for the
very men who stood victors over the mangled corpse of Earl Simon were
men as resolute as he was to enforce the Great Charter and its results
against the king.[58]
In the hour of triumph Henry struck hard, and a mad reaction of terror
ensued. But the movement Simon had led could not be turned back, and
the very savage extravagance of the royalist party defeated its own
ends. A general sentence of disinheritance against all who had fought
with Simon drove the disinherited barons to keep up the fight. The
siege of Kenilworth, where Sir Henry of Hastings defied the whole
royal army, lasted from June to December, 1266, and was only ended by
Parliament insisting on the king appointing a board of twelve, who made
a just award concerning the disinherited. By this award, called the Ban
of Kenilworth:--
The royal obligation to keep the charters was required.
The acts of Simon were annulled, and the full prerogatives of the crown
declared.
The freedom of the Church was demanded.
Justice was to be done according to the laws and customs of the realm.
The adherents of Simon were to be punished by fine and not by
disinheritance, so that the king could repay those who had served him
faithfully without giving occasion for fresh war.
Simon was not to be proclaimed a saint (seeing he died under the
excommunication of the Church), and those who spread idle tales of
miracles done at his tomb were to be punished.
A complete indemnity was promised to all who accepted the ban within
forty days.
For a time the ban was rejected, and it was not till the summer of 1267
that the struggle was finally over. Peace was assured by the Parliament
of Marlborough in November, 1267, which re-enacted the Provisions of
Westminster (1259) as a statute.
The lasting value of Simon’s work was seen in 1295, when Edward I.
summoned his great representative parliament on the professed principle
that “that which touches all shall be approved by all.” This assembly,
by that very principle, served as “a pattern for all future assemblies
of the nation.” (Stubbs.)
Had Simon of Montfort received canonization by the Church he would
surely have been the patron saint of all workers in the world of
politics, and of all who honestly and courageously engage in public
work.
Wat Tyler and the Peasant Revolt
1381
AUTHORITIES: Walsingham; Knyghton--(Rolls Series); Wright’s _Political
Songs_--(Rolls Series); Froissart; Professor Oman--_Great Revolt of
1381_, containing translation of a chronicle of the rising in the
Stow MSS., first published in _English Historical Review_, 1895;
André Réville--_Le Soulèvement des Travailleurs_ (1898); Dr. G.
Kriehn--_American Review_, 1902; Edgar Powell--_Rising of 1381 in East
Anglia_; Dr. James Gairdner--_Lollardy and the Reformation_; G. M.
Trevelyan--_England in the Age of Wycliff_; J. Clayton--_Wat Tyler and
the Great Uprising_.
[Illustration: KING RICHARD II.
(_From the Panel Painting in the Sanctuary at Westminster Abbey._)]
WAT TYLER AND THE PEASANT REVOLT
1381
The Peasant Revolt of 1381, led by Wat Tyler, was not only the first
great national movement towards democracy, it was the first uprising
of the English people in opposition to all their hitherto recognised
rulers in Church and State, and it was the first outburst in this land
against social injustice.[59]
The Black Death in 1349 and the pestilence that ravaged the country
in 1361 and 1369 upset the old feudal order. The land was in many
places utterly bereft of labour, and neither king nor parliament could
restore the former state of things. Landowners, driven by the scarcity
of labour, went in for sheep farming in place of agriculture, and were
compelled to offer an increase of wages in spite of the Statutes of
Labourers (1351–1353) which expressly forbade the same:--
“Every man or woman of whatsoever condition, free or bond, able in
body, and within the age of three-score years, and not having of his
own whereof he may live, nor land of his own about the tillage of which
he may occupy himself, and not serving any other, shall be bound to
serve the employer who shall require him to do so, and take only the
wages which were accustomed to be taken in the neighbourhood two years
before the pestilence.”
This act remained the law until the fifth year of Elizabeth.
“Free” labourers, landless men but not serfs, wandered away to the
towns or turned outlaws in the forests. Serfs--only a small number of
the population, for the Church had always recommended their liberation,
even while abbots and priors retained them on Church estates, and
Edward III. had encouraged granting freedom in return for payment in
money--escaped to those incorporated towns that promised freedom after
eighteen months’ residence. Villeins and lesser tenants commuted the
service due from them to their landlords by money payments, and so
began the leasehold system of land tenure.
For thirty years preceding the Peasant Revolt the social changes had
bred discontent, and discontent rather than misery is always the parent
of revolt.
An early statute of Richard II., framed for the perpetual bondage of
the serfs, heightened the discontent.
“No bondman or bondwoman shall place their children at school, as has
been done, so as to advance their children in the world by their going
into the Church.”
This same act made equal prohibition against apprenticeship in the town.
The free labourer had his grievance against the Statute of Labourers.
Villeins and cottar tenants had no sure protection against being
compelled to give labour service to their lords; and they, with the
freehold yeomen and the town workmen and shopkeepers, hated the heavy
taxation, the oppressive market tolls and the general misgovernment.
To unite all these forces of social discontent into one great army,
which should destroy the oppression and establish freedom and
brotherhood, was the work John Ball--an itinerant priest who came at
first from St. Mary’s at York, and then made Colchester the centre of
his journeyings--devoted himself to for twenty years.
Ball preached a social revolution, and his gospel was that all men
were brothers, and that serfdom and lordship were incompatible with
brotherhood. In our times such teaching is common enough, but in the
fourteenth century, with its sumptuary laws and its feudal ranks,
only in religion was this principle accepted.[60] John Ball became
the moving spirit in the agitation set on foot by his teaching. He
had his colleagues and lieutenants, John Wraw in Suffolk and Jack
Straw in Essex--both priests like himself--William Grindcobbe in
Hertford and Geoffrey Litster in Norfolk. The peasants were organised
into clubs, and letters were sent by Ball far and wide to stir up
revolt. In Kent and the eastern counties lay the main strength of the
revolutionaries--it was in Kent that Ball was particularly active just
before the rising--but Sussex, Hampshire, Lincolnshire, Warwickshire,
Yorkshire and Somerset were all affected, so grave and so general was
the dissatisfaction, and so hopeful to the labouring people was the
message delivered by John Ball.
Of course Ball did not escape censure and the penalty of law during his
missionary years. He was excommunicated and cast into prison by three
Archbishops of Canterbury, Islip, Simon Langham, and Simon Sudbury, for
teaching “errors, schisms, and scandals against the popes, archbishops,
bishops, and clergy,” and he was only released from prison, from
Archbishop Sudbury’s gaol at Maidstone, by the rough hands of the men
of Kent when the rising had begun. The “errors” of John Ball were
civil and social rather than theological. The notion that Ball and his
fellow socialists of the fourteenth century were mixed up with Wycliff
and the Lollards has really no foundation in fact.[61] Wycliff’s
unorthodox views on the sacraments and his attacks on the habits of
the clergy were of no interest to the social revolutionists, and John
of Gaunt, the steady friend of Wycliff, was hated above all other men
in the realm by the leaders of the revolt. Wycliff expressed as little
sympathy with the Peasant Revolt of his day as Luther later in Germany
did with the Peasant War, or Cranmer with the Norfolk rising under Ket
in 1549.
John Ball’s sermons were all on one text--“In the beginning of the
world there were no bondmen, all men were created equal. Servitude of
man to man is contrary to God’s will.” He declared that “things will
never go well in England so long as goods are not kept in common, and
so long as there are villeins and gentlefolks.” He harped on the
social inequalities of his age, quoting freely from Langland’s _Piers
the Plowman_, and enlarging on the famous couplet:
When Adam delved and Eve span,
Who was then the gentleman?
As years went by and the time grew ripe for revolt, there is a definite
call to rise in Ball’s letters and speeches. “Let us go to the king,
and remonstrate with him,” he declares, “telling him we must have it
otherwise, or we ourselves shall find the remedy.”
Richard II. was but eleven when he came to the throne in 1377. “He is
young. If we wait on him in a body, all those who come under the name
of serf or are held in bondage will follow us, in the hope of being
free. When the king shall see us we shall obtain a favourable answer,
or we must then ourselves seek to amend our condition.”
Some of the rhymed letters Ball sent out, bidding his hearers “stand
together manfully in the truth,” urge preparation for the coming
conflict:
John Ball greeteth you all,
And doth to understand he hath rung your bell.
Now with right and might, will and skill,
God speed every dell.
John the miller asketh help to turn his mill right:
He hath ground small, small,
The King’s Son of Heaven will pay for it all,
Look thy mill go right, with its four sails dight.
With right and with might, with skill and with will,
And let the post stand in steadfastness,
Let right help might, and skill go before will,
Then shall our mill go aright.
But if might go before right, and will go before skill,
This is our mill mis-a-dight.
Beware ere ye be woe,
Know your friend from your foe,
Take enough and cry ‘Ho!’
And do well and better and flee from sin,
And seek out peace and dwell therein,
So biddeth John Trueman and all his fellows.
In other letters he greets John Nameless, John the Miller, and John
Carter, and bids them stand together in God’s name; and bids Piers
Plowman “go to his work and chastise well Hob the Robber (Sir Robert
Hales, the king’s treasurer); and take with you John Trueman and all
his fellows, and look that you choose one head and no more.”
These letters and the preaching did their work; the peasants were
organised; men of marked courage and ability were found in various
counties; and “the one head and no more” was ready in Kent to lead the
army of revolt to the king when the signal should be given. Litster,
Grindcobbe, and Wraw were at their posts. In every county from Somerset
to York the peasants flocked together, “some armed with clubs, rusty
swords, axes, with old bows reddened by the smoke of the chimney
corner, and odd arrows with only one feather.”
John Ball had rung his bell, and at Whitsuntide, at the end of May,
1381, came the great uprising, the “Hurling-Time of the Peasants.” The
fire was all ready to be kindled, and a poll-tax, badly ordered, set
the country ablaze.
The poll-tax was first levied, in 1377, on all over fourteen years of
age. Two years later it was graduated, from 4d. on every man and woman
of the working class to £6 13s. 4d. on a duke or archbishop. Even this
with a further tax on wool was found insufficient.
So early in 1381 John of Gaunt called the parliament together at
Northampton, and declared that £160,000 must be raised. Parliament
refused to find more than £100,000, and the clergy, owning at that
time one-third of the land, promised £60,000. Again a poll-tax was
demanded. This time everybody over fifteen was required to pay 1s., but
in districts where wealthy folks lived it was held sufficient that the
amount collected in every parish averaged 1s. per head; only the rich
were not to pay less than £1 per household, nor the poor less than 8d.
In parishes where all were needy the full shilling was demanded without
exception. It soon appeared that the money was not to be raised. In
many parts the returns as to the population liable to the tax were
not even filled in with any attempt at accuracy, and numbers avoided
liability by leaving their homes--to escape a tribute, which to the
struggling peasant meant ruin. Of the £100,000 required only £22,000
was forthcoming.
Then one John Legge undertook to supply the deficit, if he had the
authority of the crown to act as special commissioner to collect the
tax. The appointment was made, with the result that the methods of
the tax-collectors provoked revolt, and Legge lost his life over the
business.
The rising began in Essex, when the villagers of Fobbing, Corringham,
and Stanford-le-Hope were summoned to meet the tax-commissioner at
Brentwood. Unable to pay, they fell upon the collectors and killed
them. The government met this assault by sending down Chief Justice
Belknap to punish the offenders. But as the judge merely had for escort
a certain number of legal functionaries, and as the blood of the
people was up, Belknap was received with open contempt, and, forced to
swear on the Bible that he would hold no other session in the place,
was glad to escape from the town without injury. And with this defiance
and overpowering of the king’s officers the signal was given, the
beacon of revolt well lighted.
It was June 2nd, Whit Sunday, when the Chief Justice was driven out of
Brentwood; two days later Kent had risen at Gravesend and Dartford.
At Gravesend Sir Simon Burley, the friend of Richard II., seized a
workman in the town, claiming him as a bondsman of his estate, and
clapped him in Rochester Castle, refusing to hear of release unless
£300 was paid.
At the same time word went about that the tax-collector at Dartford was
insulting the women, and that, in especial, the wife and daughter of
one John Tyler had been abused with gross indecency.
Whereupon this John Tyler, “being at work in the same town tyling of an
house, when he heard thereof, caught his lathing staff in his hand, and
ran reaking home; where, reasoning with the collector, who made him so
bold, the collector answered with stout words, and strake at the tyler;
whereupon the tyler, avoiding the blow, smote the collector with his
lathing staff, so that the brains flew out of his head. Wherethrough
great noise arose in the streets, and the poor people being glad,
everyone prepared to support the said John Tyler.”[62]
Robert Cave, a master baker of Dartford, led the people straight off
to Rochester; and the castle having been stormed, and all its prisoners
released, Sir John Newton, the governor of the castle, was retained in
safe custody.
And now the time had come for good generalship and discipline in
the ranks, if the fire of revolt was to burn aright. Accordingly at
Maidstone, on June 7th, Wat Tyler is chosen captain of the host; and
proof is quickly given that the rising is not for mob rule or general
anarchy, but to redress positive and intolerable wrongs. (Five Tylers
are mentioned in the records of the Peasant Revolt: Wat Tyler, of
Maidstone; John Tyler, of Dartford, who slays the tax-collector, and is
not heard of again; Walter Tyler, of Essex; and two Tylers of the City
of London--William, of Stone Street, and Simon, of Cripplegate.)
In every respect was this Wat Tyler a man of remarkable gifts. Chosen
as leader by the voice of his neighbours in Kent, his authority is at
once obeyed without dispute, and his influence is seen to extend beyond
the borders of his own county. Jack Straw acts as his lieutenant; John
Wraw, of Suffolk, and William Grindcobbe, of St. Albans, come to him
for advice; and it is not till Tyler moves on London with his army that
the rising becomes national. He is plainly marked out as a great leader
of masses of men. Skilful, courageous, humane, Wat Tyler is proved to
be; firm, clear-headed, downright in manner, and yet large-hearted,
jovial and brotherly--equally at home with king or beggar. There is
nothing of the fanatical doctrinaire about this first great leader of
the English people. He could order the execution of “traitors,” but
he is not the man for bloodshed in England if the revolution he and
John Ball aimed at can be accomplished by peaceful means. After more
than 500 years the reputation of Wat Tyler stands out untarnished and
unshaken.[63]
Yet for eight days--and eight days only--does history allow us to
follow the career of this remarkable man. On June 7th Wat Tyler was
chosen by the men of Kent to lead the revolt; on June 15th he was
dead. Of his antecedents we know nothing. Parentage, birth-place, age,
height, and personal appearance, are all unrecorded. His trade alone we
can infer, and we know that his contemporaries trusted him to the full:
for no suggestion has been made of any kind of rivalry or jealousy
amongst the leaders, or of criticism or grumbling amongst the rank and
file.
Wat Tyler emerges from the obscurity of history to become a strong
democratic leader. For eight days he commands a vast army of men;
he confronts the king as an equal; orders the execution of the
chief ministers of the crown; and wrests from the king promises of
fundamental social importance. Then, in the very hour of victory, an
unexpected blow from an enemy strikes him down, and death follows.
Surely to few men is it awarded to achieve an immortal reputation in so
brief a public life.
No sooner is Tyler acclaimed as leader at Maidstone than the commons
of Kent are flocking to the standard of revolt. The cry is for “King
Richard and the Commons,” and it goes hard with any who refuse to take
the oath. John of Gaunt is the enemy. John of Gaunt is held to be
responsible for all the mischief wrought on the coast towns of Kent by
the privateer fleets of the Scots and the French, for the raiding of
Rye and Winchelsea. (Only in the previous year these fleets had invaded
the Thames as far as Gravesend.) John of Gaunt is the head and front
of the misrule that bled the land with poll-taxes. John of Gaunt is
the incarnation of the landlord rule that would keep the labourer in
bondage for ever. So bitter is the feeling against John of Gaunt, and
so acute the fear that he is aiming at the crown, that a vow is taken
by the men of Kent that no man named “John” shall be King of England.
John of Gaunt was the common enemy. But John of Gaunt was far away on
the Scottish border, and there were enemies near at hand to be dealt
with. The manor-houses of Kent were attacked; in a few cases, where
their owners were notoriously bad landlords, were burnt. The main
thing, however, was to obtain the rent-rolls, the lists of tenants and
serfs, and all the documents of the lawyers. These papers were seized
and destroyed by the peasants, for no assurance of freedom was possible
while such evidence of service could be produced. These documents were
the legal instruments of landlord rule; and as the people had risen to
end this rule, a beginning had to be made by destroying the machinery.
There was no general reign of terror in the country; there was nothing
of the ferocity of the Jacquerie in France; no slaughter of landlords;
and no common destruction of property.
The nobility seemed to expect judgment at the hands of the people,
and those who were at Plymouth making preparation for their invasion
of France put to sea as quickly as possible when news came of the
rising.[64] But the people had risen not for blind vengeance or for
civil war, and the class who suffered badly at the rising were the
lawyers rather than the landlords. It was the lawyer’s hand that the
peasants saw and felt, and not the mailed fist, for the lawyer was not
only the land agent of the lord of the manor, he was also the judge in
matters of dispute between landlord and tenant, and it was he who kept
the lists of villeins and serfs, and in the service of his lord did not
scruple to manipulate those lists.
In those first days of the rising, when yeomen and more than one
landholder joined the army of revolt,[65] and all who were willing to
cry “King Richard and the Commons” were counted as supporters, the
worst that the landlord suffered (except in extreme cases) was the loss
of his papers, but the lawyer who clung to his office was often hanged
without mercy, as a scourge to the commonwealth.
Tyler was at Canterbury on Monday, June 10th, and here Archbishop
Sudbury’s palace was ransacked for papers, and his tenant-rolls burnt.
Beyond this, and a rough exhortation to the monks to prepare to elect a
new archbishop, no injury was done. The following day Tyler was back at
Maidstone, and his men burst open the archbishop’s prison and released
John Ball, with all others who had incurred ecclesiastical displeasure.
This accomplished, with John Ball, the people’s poor priest, in the
midst of them, 30,000 men of Kent--yeomen, craftsmen, villeins and
peasants--set out for London under Wat Tyler’s command.
Blackheath was reached at nightfall on Wednesday, June 12th, and a camp
fixed; but a few indefatigable rebels hastened on to Southwark that
same night to burst open the Marshalsea and King’s Bench prisons. John
Wraw was at Blackheath, and after a short conference with Wat Tyler,
hastened back to Suffolk to announce that the hour of rising had struck.
Near Eltham Tyler had overtaken the young king’s mother, the widow of
the Black Prince, returning from a pilgrimage, and had promised that
no harm should befall her or her women from his host. Reassured, the
princess and her company went on their way in safety to the Tower of
London, where Richard and his council were assembled, and told of the
great uprising.
Judges had already been despatched into Kent at the first news of the
disorders, but had turned back before reaching Canterbury, not liking
the look of things.
Early on Thursday morning, June 13th, the camp at Blackheath was astir.
It was Corpus Christi day and a solemn festival. After mass had been
said before all the people, John Ball preached on his old theme of
equality and brotherhood. “For if God had intended some to be serfs
and others lords He would have made a distinction between them at the
beginning.” He went on to speak of the work to be taken in hand at once.
“Now is the opportunity given to Englishmen, if they do but choose to
take it, of casting off the yoke they have borne so long, of winning
the freedom they have always desired. Wherefore let us take good
courage and behave like the wise husbandman of scripture, who gathered
the wheat into his barn, but uprooted and burned the tares that had
half-choked the good grain. Now the tares of England are her oppressive
rulers, and the time of harvest has come. Ours it is to pluck up these
tares and make away with them all--the evil lords, the unjust judges,
the lawyers, every man indeed who is dangerous to the common good. Then
should we all have peace for the present and security for the future.
For when the great ones have been rooted up and cast away, all will
enjoy equal freedom, all will have common nobility, rank and power.”
The sermon was received with bursts of cheers, and the people shouted
that John Ball should be archbishop, “for that the present archbishop
and chancellor, Simon Sudbury, was but a traitor.”
Later that morning Sir John Newton arrived at the Tower with a message
from Tyler, asking for an audience with the king. All along it was the
belief of the commons that the king had but to hear the tale of their
wrongs and redress would be speedily obtained.
“Hold no speech with the shoeless ruffians,” was the advice of Sir
Robert Hales, the treasurer. But Richard agreed to an interview,
and presently rowed down the Thames in the royal barge as far as
Rotherhithe with the Earl of Suffolk (President of the Council), and
the Earls of Salisbury and Warwick.
The river bank was crowded with the commons of Kent, and Wat Tyler and
John Ball urged the king to land and listen to the message his subjects
brought. They were promptly rebuked by the Earl of Salisbury[66] for
their boldness:
“Gentlemen, you are not properly dressed, nor are you in a fit
condition for the king to talk to you.”
Instead of landing, Richard listened to the counsels of fear and pride,
and the royal barge was turned and rowed back swiftly to the Tower.
Wat Tyler and the men of Kent, with thousands more from Surrey, at
once marched on to London Bridge, where they destroyed the houses of
ill-fame that clustered round the south side of the bridge. The prisons
had been pulled down the night before, and now the brothels were burnt
to the ground and their inmates dismissed--that the new City of God
of John Ball’s vision might be cleansed of its old foulness. These
places of infamy, rented by Flemish women, were the property of William
Walworth, the Mayor of London; and their destruction filled him with
rage against the invaders.
Walworth made some attempt to fortify London Bridge by placing iron
chains across the bridge; and he gave orders for the drawbridge to be
pulled up, in order that a passage might be prevented. But on Tyler’s
threat that he would burn the bridge if a way was not quickly made for
him, Alderman Sibley (who, with Aldermen Horne and Tonge, supported
the claims of the revolutionaries on the City Corporation) had the
chains removed and the draw-bridge lowered, and Alderman Horne met
Tyler at the city gate and bade him welcome.
Fifty thousand men followed Tyler in London, and the city was now at
the mercy of the peasant army. Walworth, who had no want of spirit,
declared to the king and his council in the Tower that 6,000 soldiers
could be raised in the city, but “fear had so fallen upon the soldiery
that they seemed half dead with fright.” Sir Robert Knolles with 600
men-at-arms guarded the Tower.
It was now that Wat Tyler’s great qualities of leadership and the good
discipline of his army were seen. With London in his hands, he warned
his followers that death would be the instant punishment for theft;
and proclaimed to the citizens, “We are indeed zealots for truth and
justice, but we are not thieves and robbers.” Every respect was to be
shown to the persons and property of the people of London, and wrath
was only to fall on John of Gaunt and the ministers of the crown, and
the lawyers--the enemies, as it seemed to Tyler, of the good estate of
England. In return, the citizens offered bread and ale freely to the
invaders, and London artisans joined their ranks in large numbers.
The archbishop’s palace at Lambeth was soon stormed, and all the
records it contained were destroyed; the building itself was left
uninjured.
At four o’clock in the afternoon the Savoy Palace of John of Gaunt,
by the Strand, was in flames; and all its wealth of treasure, rich
tapestries and costly furniture, rare vessels of gold and silver,
precious stones, and art work of priceless value, heaped up on a
bonfire or ground to powder. The Duke of Lancaster’s jewelled coat,
covered with gems, was set up as a target and riddled with arrows,
before it was cut into a thousand pieces and pounded to dust. One
wretched man was caught attempting to sneak off with a silver cup;
and being taken in the act, was put to death as Tyler had decreed.
The Savoy was burnt to the ground, but no one interfered with its
inhabitants; and Henry, Earl of Derby, John of Gaunt’s son (who was
to reign in Richard’s stead as Henry IV.), passed out with all his
servants unmolested. The wine-cellar proved fatal to certain of the
host, who, drinking freely, perished, buried under the fallen building.
From the Savoy the army of destruction passed to the Temple, the
head-quarters of the Knights Hospitallers, of whom Sir Robert Hales was
president, and a hive of lawyers. The Temple was burnt, but no lives
were lost; for the lawyers, “even the most aged and infirm of them,
scrambled off with the agility of rats or evil spirits.”
At nightfall the priory of the Hospitallers at Clerkenwell, the prisons
at the Fleet and at Newgate, and the Manor House at Highbury, had all
been demolished; and the men of Essex, led by Thomas Faringdon, a
London baker, were at Mile End; while William Grindcobbe, with a body
of men from St. Albans, lay at Highbury.
In vain Walworth urged the king and his royal council to act. Richard
had sent to Tyler asking for a written statement of the grievances of
the commons, and had been told in reply that the king must meet his
commons face to face, and hear with his own ears their demands. In the
evening Walworth proposed that the garrison at the Tower should be
despatched against Tyler, “to fall upon these wretches who were in the
streets, and amounted to 60,000, while they were asleep and drunk. They
might be killed like flies,” Walworth added, “for not one in twenty had
arms.”
But the handful of soldiers at the Tower were in mortal terror of the
peasant host, and “all had so lost heart that you would have thought
them more like dead men than living.”
The Earl of Salisbury checked Walworth’s rash proposals. “If we begin
what we cannot carry through,” he observed, “we shall never be able to
repair matters. It will be all over with us and our heirs, and England
will be a desert.”
An open conflict with Tyler and his 60,000 was a very hazardous
proceeding. Who could be sure of escape if it came to battle? So far
Tyler had only struck at the chief ministers and the lawyers, and why
should others risk their lives in such a quarrel? Besides, it was
said that Wat Tyler and a mad priest of Kent were for doing away with
all nobles, and for making all men equal, and caution was necessary
in dealing with men who held such strange opinions. England without
its nobility would be a desert, and at all costs such an irreparable
calamity as the loss of England’s nobility must be prevented.
So Walworth got no help in his plans for resistance; and when that
night a messenger from Tyler warned the king that if he refused to meet
the commons of England in open conference, the people would seize the
Tower, Richard sent word in reply promising to meet his subjects on
the morrow at noon at Mile End, and there hear their complaints.
Tyler accepted the king’s word, and after sleeping with his men hard
by the Tower, at St. Catherine’s Wharf, was at Mile End betimes.
Here he met Grindcobbe, and hearing that the people of Hertfordshire
had trouble with the abbot at St. Albans, bade Grindcobbe return and
accomplish freedom for the abbot’s tenants and serfs.
Richard went to Mile End with no large retinue, and two of his
companions, the Earl of Kent and Sir John Holland, left him at
Whitechapel and galloped off in craven fear of the multitude that
thronged the road. Richard, though he was only fifteen, displayed
both courage and cunning when confronted with Tyler. He knew that the
discontent in the country was directed against the government, and not
against the king, and that the misrule could not fairly be laid to his
charge. Besides, he was the son of the Black Prince, and the people
showed no signs of hostility. His policy was to yield and to wait an
opportunity for regaining power.
The conference at Mile End began with a request from Richard to know
what was required of him. Tyler answered that first all traitors should
be executed, and to this demand the king agreed. Then four definite
proposals were put forward by Wat Tyler:
1. A free and general pardon to all concerned in the rising.
2. The total abolition of all villeinage and serfdom.
3. An end to all tolls and market dues,--“freedom to buy and sell in
all cities, burghs, mercantile towns, and other places within our
kingdom of England.”
4. All customary tenants to be turned into lease-holders whose rent
should be fixed at 4d. an acre for ever.
Richard at once assented to these requests, and to prevent any
uncertainty and remove all doubt or suspicion of good faith, thirty
clerks were set to work on the spot to draw up charters of manumission,
and to present banners to each county represented.
Then Richard bade the people return home in peace, bearing the king’s
banner in token that the king had granted the request of his subjects.
One or two from each village remained to carry the charters of freedom
signed and sealed by royal warrant.
Richard was taken at his word. Thousands of the peasants dispersed
that day believing their cause had triumphed. Nothing could be plainer
than the charters of manumission:--“Know that of our special grace
we have manumitted all our liege and singular subjects and others of
the county of Hertford, freed each and all of their old bondage, and
made them quit by these presents; pardon them all felonies, treasons,
transgressions, and extortions committed by any and all of them, and
assure them of our _summa pax_.”
So ran the document which the peasants of Hertford bore, and similar
charters were given to the counties of Bedford, Essex, Kent, and Surrey.
Richard was also taken at his word concerning the execution of
traitors, and by the authority of Wat Tyler, Archbishop Sudbury, the
chancellor, Sir Robert Hales, the treasurer, and John Legge, the
poll-tax commissioner, were dragged out of the Tower and beheaded on
Tower Hill. When Richard returned from Mile End the heads of these
three men were on the gate of London Bridge.
Simon Sudbury, Archbishop of Canterbury, deserved a better fate, for
he was an amiable and gentle priest, and “lenient to heretics.” As
chancellor he shared the punishment of a government deservedly hated,
but there were many who deplored his death.
The soldiers at the Tower offered no resistance, but joked and
fraternised with the people.
(John of Gaunt’s chaplain, William Appleton, some of Legge’s
subordinates, and Richard Lyons also perished that day on Tower Hill.
Of these, Richard Lyons was a thoroughly corrupt person, who five
years earlier had been convicted of gross usury and of fraudulently
“forestalling” in the wool trade, and had escaped the penalty of the
law on being sentenced to pay a heavy fine and suffer imprisonment. At
one time he had been a member of Edward III.’s council, and in that
capacity had enriched himself and his friends at the expense of the
nation.)
A cry was raised in London that night against the Flemings, and many
of these industrious aliens, whose only offence was the employment of
cheap labour, were put to death, denied even the right of sanctuary
when they fled to the altar of the church of the Austin Friars. The
houses of certain unpopular citizens were also fired, and it went hard
with all who refused to shout for “King Richard and the Commons.”
But Tyler gave no sanction to the attack on the Flemings, and though
the London mob took the law into its own hands and dealt roughly
with those whom it disliked, there is no evidence of general rioting
and disorder. To the end the peasant folk in London remembered the
brotherhood John Ball had proclaimed, and respected their fellows, and
their good order is a lasting tribute to their leaders.
Tyler, with the bulk of the men of Kent and Surrey, remained in the
city, and the king hearing of what had happened at the Tower, decided
to pass the night at the Wardrobe, by St. Paul’s, whither his mother
had gone when the Tower was invaded.
Tyler, in spite of all that had been obtained at Mile End, was not
satisfied. The peasants and serfs had been freed by royal warrant, but
the landlords remained in possession of power, and there was no promise
of better government, no word as to the restoration of the old common
rights in the land, or the repeal of the savage forest laws. Reforms
had been won, but the changes were not strong enough to ensure a social
revolution.
Once more, on the Saturday, June 15th, Richard was invited to meet his
subjects, and again he declared his willingness, summoning his commons
by proclamation to meet him that afternoon at Smithfield, in the square
outside St. Bartholomew’s Priory.
It seemed on the morning of June 15th as though the rising had
succeeded triumphantly. The peasants had their charters of manumission,
the nobles were thoroughly alarmed and cowed, the soldiery powerless,
and Wat Tyler and his men still held the City of London.
Holding such an advantage, Tyler determined to make the king decree
further reforms, and when the two met at Smithfield, the confidence of
victory could be seen in the peasant leader’s bearing.
Richard, with two hundred retainers, and with Henry, Earl of Derby, the
Earls of Suffolk and Salisbury, Sir Simon Burley, and Walworth, the
mayor, were on the east side of the square, the great priory at their
back.
Tyler and his army drew up on the west side, and when Walworth opened
the proceedings by calling on Wat Tyler to speak with the king, Tyler,
seated on a little horse, rode out into the middle of the square with a
single attendant. There he dismounted, dropped on one knee before the
king, and shook him heartily by the hand. He bade Richard be of good
cheer, and declared that within a fortnight he should have even more
thanks from the commons than he had won already. “You and I shall be
good comrades yet,” Tyler added.
Richard, in some embarrassment, enquired why the commons did not return
home, and Tyler answered with a great and solemn oath that no one
should leave the city until they had got a further redressing of all
their grievances. “And much the worse will it be for the lords of this
realm if this charter be refused,” he concluded.
Then Richard bade Tyler say what charter it was the commons demanded.
“First, then,” said Tyler, “let no law but the law of Winchester
prevail throughout the land, and let no man be made an outlaw by
the decree of judges and lawyers.[67] Grant also that no lord shall
henceforth exercise lordship over the commons; and since we are
oppressed by so vast a horde of bishops and clerks, let there be but
one bishop in England; and let the property and goods of the holy
Church be divided fairly according to the needs of the people in each
parish, after in justice making suitable provision for the present
clergy and monks. Finally, let there be no more villeins in England,
but grant us all to be free and of one condition.”
“All that you have asked for I promise readily,” Richard answered, “if
only it be consistent with the regality of my crown. And now let the
commons return home since their requests have been granted.”
In the presence of his nobles and the hearing of his people the king
had promised that the demands of his subjects should be granted.
For Wat Tyler the victory seemed complete, and now that the battle was
won he called out that he was thirsty, and complained of a parched
throat. The days had been strenuous, and Tyler longed for a draught of
the good home-brewed beer of his native county. His attendant brought
him water, and Tyler rinsed out his mouth with it, to the disgust of
the king’s courtiers. Then beer was brought in a mighty tankard, and
Tyler drank a deep draught to the health of “King Richard and the
Commons.” He remounted his little horse, while the nobles stood by in
silent and sullen anger, “for no lord or counsellor dared to open his
mouth and give an answer to the commons in such a situation.” Had they
not heard it proclaimed that henceforth all were to be free and equal
in the land?
A “valet of Kent,” some knight in the royal service, broke silence,
muttering loudly his opinion that Wat Tyler was the greatest thief and
robber in all Kent.
Tyler caught the abusive words, and immediately ordered his attendant
to cut down the man who had spoken in this insulting fashion.
The “valet” edged back within the ranks of the king’s party, and Tyler
drew his dagger. Walworth, sharing to the full the rage of the nobles
at the capitulation of the king, and yet anxious to avoid a conflict,
shouted that he would arrest all those who drew weapons in the royal
presence. Tyler struck impatiently at Walworth, but the blow was
harmless, for the mayor had armour on beneath his jerkin.
Before Tyler could defend himself the mayor retaliated. Drawing a short
cutlass he slashed at Tyler, wounding him in the neck so that he fell
from his horse. And with the fall of their leader fell all the promised
liberties of the peasants, and the rising collapsed.
Two knights, Ralph Standish and another, plunged their swords into him
while he was on the ground. Still, mortally wounded though he was,
Tyler managed to scramble on to his little horse. He rode a yard or
two, gave a last call on the commons to avenge his death, and then
dropped to the ground to rise no more.
Had the commons at once attacked the king’s party, they would have
conquered. But confusion fell upon the people, and there was no one
ready to take command. “Let us stand together,” “We will die with our
captain or avenge him,” “Shoot, lads, shoot,”--the various cries went
up, and the bowmen looked to their weapons.
But Richard, with the presence of mind that marked his dealings with
the people at Mile End, turned the doubt and uncertainty to his own
advantage. He rode out boldly into the middle of the square, reminded
the people that he, and not Tyler, was their king, and bade them follow
him into the fields and receive their charters.
There was no reason to refuse obedience, no reason to mistrust
the king. Tyler had always spoken well of Richard, and the people
themselves had seen him only yesterday sign their charters, and had
heard him in Tyler’s presence, only a few minutes ago, promise to do
the will of the commons. It was not by the king’s hand that their
leader had been slain.
A small band carried Tyler’s body into the Priory of St. Bartholomew,
while the rest of the peasants followed Richard into the fields that
stretched from Clerkenwell to Islington. Here he held them until Sir
Robert Knolles arrived with 700 soldiers, for Walworth had lost no
time in spreading the news that Tyler was dead, and in raising a troop
for the king. By Richard’s orders the commons were dispersed when the
soldiery arrived, the men of Kent, now broken and dispirited, being
marched through the city, and left to take their way home.
That very night Walworth and Standish were knighted for what they had
done, and in the morning Wat Tyler’s head stared horribly from London
Bridge.
“My son, what sorrow I have suffered for thee this day,” cried the
king’s mother, when Richard came to the Wardrobe.
“I know it well, madam,” answered the king; “but rejoice with me now,
and thank God that I have this day won back my heritage of England, so
nearly lost.”
The great uprising was over. Wat Tyler had fallen, as it seemed, in the
very hour of victory.
By Walworth’s orders, Jack Straw and two prominent men of Kent were
hanged on the night of June 15th, without the formality of trial. Jack
Straw, an itinerant priest sharing John Ball’s views, it is said,
explained before he died what had been in the minds of the leaders of
the revolt. They had meant to get rid of the supremacy of the landlords
altogether, and to substitute for the established clergy a voluntary
ministry of mendicant friars; the boy-king was to be enlisted in the
cause of the revolution before the monarchy was finally abolished;
and in place of parliament and royal council each county was to enjoy
self-government.[68]
No longer in the presence of danger, the king and his ministers struck
fiercely at the rebels.
On June 18th a general proclamation was issued ordering the arrest of
all malefactors and the dispersal of all unruly gatherings. On June
22nd, Chief Justice Sir Robert Tressilian went on assize, and “showed
mercy to none and made great havock.” John Ball was taken at Coventry
and, with Grindcobbe, hanged at St. Albans on July 15th.
The Earl of Suffolk went down to Suffolk with 500 lances on June 23rd,
and John Wraw, with twenty others, including four beneficed clergy, was
quickly taken and hanged. Henry Despenser, Bishop of Norwich, grandson
of Edward III.’s minister, suppressed the rising in Norfolk, and walked
beside Litster to the gallows.
At least a thousand peasant lives were sacrificed to the law under
Tressilian’s sentence.
At Waltham a deputation came to Richard to ask if it were true that the
royal promises and charters were annulled, and the king’s answer left
no room for doubt, for it breathed all the hatred and contempt of the
commons that Tyler had striven to end:
“O vile and odious by land and sea, you who are not worthy to live when
compared with the lords whom ye have attacked; you should be forthwith
punished with the vilest deaths were it not for the office ye bear.
Go back to your comrades and bear the king’s answer. You were and are
rustics, and shall remain in bondage, not that of old, but in one
infinitely worse. For as long as we live, and by God’s help rule over
this realm, we will attempt by all our faculties, powers, and means to
make you such an example of offence to the heirs of your servitude as
that they may have you before their eyes, and you may supply them with
a perpetual ground for cursing and fearing you.”
In despair at this rough ending to all their cherished hopes of
freedom, the Essex peasants made a last attempt to fight for liberty,
and on June 28th, at Great Baddow and Billericay, more than 500 fell
before the king’s soldiery.
On July 2nd all the charters of manumission and royal pardons were
declared formally annulled, and sheriffs were strictly forbidden to
release any prisoners. It was not till August 30th an amnesty was
granted to those suspected of taking part in the rising. In the autumn
parliament refused to ratify the charters, and the lawyers declared
that without the consent of parliament the charters were illegal.
So there was an end to all Wat Tyler and the peasants had risen to
obtain, and well might it seem that the rising had been in vain.[69]
Yet it was not altogether in vain that John Ball had rung his bell and
died for his faith, that Wat Tyler had led the peasant folk of Kent
to do battle for freedom. The poll-tax was stopped for one thing. And
villeinage was doomed. “The landlords gave up the practice of demanding
base services; they let their lands to leasehold tenants, and accepted
money payments in lieu of labour; they ceased to recall the emancipated
labourer into serfdom or to oppose his assertion of right in the courts
of the manor and the county.” (W. Stubbs.)
The great uprising brought out the desire for personal liberty in
the labouring people of England that has never since been utterly
quenched. It was the first insistence that peasants and serfs were men
of England. “It taught the king’s officers and gentle folks that they
must treat the peasants like men if they wished them to behave quietly,
and it led most landlords to set free their bondsmen, and to take fixed
money payments instead of uncertain services from their customary
tenants, so that in a hundred years’ time there were very few bondsmen
left in England.” (F. York Powell.)
If Wat Tyler died as a man should for the cause he loves, few of those
who trampled on the cause of the peasants were to know the paths of
peace in later years.
Richard died in prison at the hands of Henry Bolingbroke, John of
Gaunt’s son, whom Tyler had let depart in safety when the Savoy was in
flames. The Earls of Suffolk and Warwick died exiled fugitives. The
Earl of Salisbury, fleeing from Henry V., was hanged in the streets of
Cirencester. Chief Justice Tressilian was hanged for a traitor in 1387,
and Sir Simon Burley was beheaded.
This worldly wealth is nought perseverant
Nor ever abides it in stabilitie.
Jack Cade, the Captain of Kent
1450
AUTHORITIES: William of Worcester, Gregory, Mayor of London, 1451–2;
_Collections of a London Citizen_; _an English Chronicle_; _Three
Fifteenth Century Chronicles_ (Camden Society); Fabyan--_Ellis
Letters_ (second series), _Issue Rolls, Devon, Rolls of Parliament,
Paston Letters_, vol. i, with introduction by Dr. Gairdner;
Orridge--_Illustrations of Jack Cade’s Rebellion_; Durrant
Cooper--_John Cade’s Followers in Kent and Sussex_; J. Clayton--_True
Story of Jack Cade_; Dr. G. Kriehn--_The English Rising in 1450_,
Strasburg, 1892.
JACK CADE, THE CAPTAIN OF KENT
1450
The rising of the commons of Kent in 1450 under their captain, Jack
Cade, was the protest of people--sick of the misrule at home and of
the mismanagement of affairs abroad--driven to take up arms against an
incapable government that would not heed gentler measures.
It was not such a peasant revolt as Wat Tyler had led, this rising of
the fifteenth century. It was largely the work of men of some local
importance, and country squires were active in enrolling men, employing
the parish constable for that purpose in a good many parishes.[70]
For years discontent had been rife. Henry VI., a weak, religious
man, more fit for the cloister than the throne, had lost the great
statesmen of the early years of his reign. The Duke of Bedford, good
Duke Humphrey of Gloucester, and Cardinal Beaufort were all dead, and
Richard, Duke of York, by far the ablest man left among the nobles,
had been banished to the government of Ireland. The Duke of Suffolk
became the chief minister of the crown in 1445, and all the disasters
of the war in France and of corrupt maladministration in England were
laid at his door. Suffolk was responsible for the king’s marriage
with the penniless princess, Margaret of Anjou, who, ambitious and
self-willed, proved the worst possible counsellor for Henry. And the
price of this marriage was the territories of Anjou and Maine, which
were ceded to Margaret’s father, besides a heavy tax of one-fifteenth
of all incomes demanded by Suffolk in payment for his expenses in
arranging and carrying out the undesirable wedding. The years of
Suffolk’s ministry saw nothing but defeat and disgrace as the hundred
years’ war with France drew to its end. The victories of Edward III.
and Henry V., and all the wealth of life and treasure poured out so
lavishly by England, had come to nothing, and by 1451 all France save
Calais was lost. Popular discontent turned to action early in 1450
against Suffolk and his fellow ministers. At the opening of parliament
Suffolk was impeached as a traitor, along with Lord Say-and-Sele, the
treasurer, and Ayscough, Bishop of Salisbury; and Suffolk, without even
demanding a trial by his peers, threw himself on the king’s mercy.
Henry was satisfied with the banishment of his fallen minister for five
years; but when Suffolk went on board, the sailors of the vessel that
was to take him across seas decreed a capital sentence, and after a
rough court-martial trial the Duke of Suffolk was beheaded on May 2nd
in a small boat off the coast of Dover, and his body left on the sands.
Four months earlier, Moleyns, Bishop of Chichester, who had only just
resigned the keepership of the Privy Seal, and was known as a supporter
of Suffolk’s, had been slain by the sailors of Portsmouth, when he
arrived at that town with arrears of pay long overdue to the troops.
Ayscough, Bishop of Salisbury, survived till the end of June, and then,
at the time when Cade was marching on London, he was dragged away from
the very altar of Erdington Church, in Wiltshire, when he had said
mass, and put to death on a hill there by the infuriated people of his
diocese.[71]
Widespread as the discontent was in 1450, there was no general movement
throughout the land as in the days when John Ball and his companions
bound the peasants together by village clubs. Kent, “impatient in
wrongs, disdaining of too much oppression, and ever desirous of new
change and new fangleness,” was well organised for revolt, and the
men of Surrey and Sussex were ready to bear arms with Cade. Outside
these counties no one is found to have taken the lead against the
government. Kent and Sussex had their own reasons for revolt, for
piracy swept the English Channel unchecked, and the highways were
infested with robbers--soldiers broken in the war; and they had their
leader--Mortimer, whom some called “John Mendall” and others, later,
Jack Cade. So by the end of May a full list of grievances and necessary
reforms was drawn up, and the commons of Kent had, for the second time
in history, risen in arms and encamped on Blackheath, resolute to get
redress from the king for their injuries.
The success of democratic revolt depends largely on the clear courage
of its leaders and the complete confidence of the people in those
they elect for their captains. In 1450 Jack Cade proved himself
both clear-headed and brave, and the men of Kent followed him
whole-heartedly.
To this day we are still in the dark as to the real name and family of
the Captain of Kent. He was known popularly as “Mortimer,” and was so
described in the “pardon” he received. He was a man of some property,
or he would not have been attainted by special act of parliament, nor
have enjoyed the confidence of the men of substance who accepted his
generalship. He was known as an Irishman and as a soldier in the French
wars, and it is likely enough that he served under the Duke of York
both in France and Ireland. His strong advocacy of the claims of York
favours the notion of kinsmanship; but, on the other hand, York was by
far the ablest statesman of the day, and to demand his recall to the
king’s council was no guarantee of family motives.
There was some talk at the time that Cade was called John Aylesmere,
and that he was married to the daughter of a Surrey squire at Taundede.
But there is no more evidence for these things than for the charges
made against him in the warrant for his arrest, that he had once killed
a woman in Sussex and had then fled to France and fought with the
French arms.
The undisputed high character of Cade’s followers is all against the
portrait painted by the government after his death; when, anxious to
blacken the good name of so resolute a leader, it was made out that he
was merely a disreputable ruffian. The landowners of Kent and Sussex
would never have accepted for their captain a mere swashbuckling
blackguard. They rallied to him as a Mortimer, seeing in him a
likeness to Richard, Duke of York.[72] If his real name was Cade, then
he was probably a squire or yeoman, for Cade was no uncommon name round
Mayfield and Heathfield in Sussex, and Cades were landed proprietors
near Reigate as late as the seventeenth century.
It was enough that, chosen Captain of Kent, Cade, or Mortimer, was
known and trusted as a brave, upright man of good character and
ability.[73] Whether descended from nobles or of good Sussex stock
was a small matter to men in earnest for the changes and reforms the
country needed.
Ashford was the heart of the rising, and from Ashford the host marched
to Blackheath, where, at the beginning of June, the camp was fixed. The
army, estimated at 46,000, included 18 esquires, 74 county gentlemen,
and some five clerks in holy orders, who were presently joined by the
Abbot of Battle, the Prior of Lewes, and twenty-three county gentlemen
from Sussex.
Cade at once explained that they must deal directly with the king if
they were to get relief from their present burdens, and then set to
work to draw up the bill of “the complaint and requests” of the commons
of Kent, while the rank and file laboured “to dyke and stake the camp
all about, as it had been in the land of war.”
But war had not yet been declared, and for the present discipline was
loose in the camp at Blackheath.[74] “As good was Jack Robin as John at
the Noke, for all were as high as pig’s feet; until the time that they
should come and speak with such states and messengers as were sent unto
them. Then they put all their power into the man that was named captain
of all their host.”
On June 7th the king was at Smithfield with 20,000 soldiers, and
messengers were promptly despatched to Blackheath to know the meaning
of the insurrection. Cade answered by showing the petition he had drawn
up, and mentioned that they had assembled “to redress and reform the
wrongs that were done in the realm, and to withstand the malice of them
that were destroyers of the common profit, and to correct and amend the
defaults of them that were the king’s chief counsellors.” He then sent
off the “bill of complaints” to the king and to the parliament then
sitting at Westminster, “and requested to have answer thereof again,
but answer he had none.” The “complaint” was received with contempt,
and the opinion of the king’s counsellors was that “such proud rebels
should rather be suppressed and tamed with violence and force than with
fair words or amicable answer.”
Yet “the complaint,” which consisted of fifteen articles, was no
revolutionary document. It contained protests against the royal threat
to lay waste Kent in revenge for the death of the Duke of Suffolk;
the diversion of the royal revenue raised by heavy taxation to “other
men”; the banishment of the Duke of York “to make room for unworthy
ministers who would not do justice by law, but demanded bribes and
gifts”; the purveyance of goods for the royal household without
payment; the arrest and imprisonment on false charges of treason of
persons whose goods and lands were subsequently seized by the king’s
servants, who then “either compassed their deaths or kept them in
prison while they got possession of their property by royal grant”;
the interference with the old right of free election of knights of the
shire by “the great rulers of the country sending letters to enforce
their tenants and other people to choose other persons than the common
will is to elect”; the misconduct of the war in France, demanding
inquiry and the punishment by law of those found guilty. Complaint was
also made of various local grievances--the insecurity of property,
the arbitrary conduct of the lords of the seaports, the extortion in
taxation owing to sheriffs and under-sheriffs farming their offices,
the fines exacted by sheriffs for non-compliance with the orders of the
court of exchequer (whose writs were sealed with green wax) when no
summons or warning had been given, and the “sore expense” incurred by
there being only one Court of Sessions in the whole county.
Five “requests” were added to the bill of complaints. These expressed
the desire of the commons that the king should reign “like a king
royal”; that “all the false progeny and affinity of the Duke of
Suffolk” should be banished from the king’s presence and brought to
trial, and the Duke of York and his friends included in the royal
council; that punishment should be meted out to those responsible for
the death of the Duke of Gloucester; that the extortions practised
daily by the king’s servants in the taking of goods from the people
should cease; that the old Statute of Labourers for keeping down
wages should be abolished; and that the “false traitors” and “great
extortioners,” Lord Say and Crowmer, the sheriff of Kent, should be
brought low.
In brief, the charter of the commons of Kent demanded the total
expulsion of all Suffolk’s ministers and relatives from public service,
the return of the Duke of York and his party to power, the suppression
of the bribery, corruption, and extortion practised by the sheriffs and
government servants, and the repeal of the Statute of Labourers.
It would have been well if Henry had heeded these complaints and
requests. As it was he pushed on to Blackheath, in spite of murmuring
in his army, and Cade, unwilling to risk a battle, and knowing that
disaffection was at work in London, quietly withdrew to Sevenoaks.
There was no spirit in the royal troops to suppress the rising, and
many favoured the Captain of Kent. But two knights, Sir Humfrey
Stafford and Sir William Stafford, kinsmen of the Duke of Buckingham
and the Archbishop of Canterbury, and men of some military repute,
decided to pursue the rebels and advanced to Sevenoaks with a small
picked body of soldiers. Their defeat was complete. Both knights were
slain, and those of their men who were not cut to pieces fled from the
battle, or joined Cade’s host.
The result of this disaster to the royal plans was that Henry returned
to London with an army that soon melted away, or broke into open
disorder. Many of the nobles, who on receipt of the petition of the
commons of Kent had called for violent measures against the rebels,
now left the king, and, with their retainers, rode to their country
estates. Henry, to appease the clamour of some of his own followers,
ordered the arrest of Lord Say-and-Sele, the king’s treasurer, and of
Sheriff Crowmer, and bade officers take them to the Tower. Parliament
was dissolved, and Cade was busy in Kent gathering reinforcements, and
doing what he could to repair locally the mischief of Suffolk’s rule
before proceeding to London.[75]
As a last resource, Henry decided to treat with Cade by ambassadors,
and on June 29th, when the commons were again encamped on Blackheath,
came the Duke of Buckingham, and Stafford, Archbishop of Canterbury,
for many years the king’s chancellor--a gentle old man, who, if he
had made no stand against the misgovernment himself, was hardly to be
blamed--to arrange, if possible, a peaceful settlement.
The conference came to nothing, for neither Buckingham nor the
archbishop could promise Cade any positive redress of grievances, or
the interview he sought with the king.
“These lords found him sober in talk, wise in reasoning, arrogant in
heart, and stiff in opinions; one who that by no means would dissolve
his army, except the king in person would come to him, and assent to
the things he would require” (Holinshed.)
The failure of the mission was reported, and Henry, after appointing
Lord Scales as guardian of the prisoners in the Tower, hastily fled
to Kenilworth, although the lord mayor and citizens of London promised
to stand by him if he would remain in the city. There was little of
sovereignty in Henry VI., son of Henry V., the conqueror of Agincourt.
Quiet he loved, and in religious exercises he found the satisfaction
that others found in war and statecraft.
On the first of July the way was open for the commons to enter London.
Suffolk, Bishop Moleyns, and Bishop Ayscough had all been summarily
executed. Lord Say, the treasurer, alone remained of the discredited
ministers. No opposition was offered to Cade by the citizens of London.
The Common Council had discussed the rising, and at the Guildhall only
one dissentient voice had been raised to the admission of the Captain
of Kent to the city. One Horne, a stockfishmonger and alderman, alone
objected to any recognition of the unlawful assembly of the commons,
and he was sent to Newgate prison for safety, and on Cade’s entry fined
500 marks for his daring speech.
Negotiations had been opened between the City Council and the commons
while the latter were at Blackheath, and Thomas Cocke (or Cooke),[76]
a past warden of the Drapers’ Company, acted as the mutual friend of
both parties. From Cocke the corporation learnt of Cade’s purposes, and
that the city stood in no danger from the rising; and it was Cocke
who carried instructions from Cade to the wealthy foreign merchants,
requiring them to furnish horses, arms and money for his army.
“Ye shall charge all Lombards and strangers, being merchants, Genoese,
Venetians, Florentines and others this day to draw them together: and
to ordain for us, the captain, twelve [sets of] harness complete, of
the best fashion, twenty-four brigandines, twelve battle-axes, twelve
glaves, six horses with saddle and bridle completely harnessed, and
1,000 marks of ready money.”
So ran the summons, which was duly obeyed.[77] For Cade had added the
stern warning that “if this demand be not observed and done, we shall
have the heads of as many as we can get of them.”
The corporation had really no choice but to welcome Cade. Kings and
nobles had fled, and here was the Captain of Kent with 50,000 men come
to do justice at their gates. London had suffered as badly as any place
from the misgovernment of the country, and it was plain the commons
of Kent were no army of maurauders, for no complaint had been heard
of their ill doing in Kent, and their captain had treated with full
civility the Duke of Buckingham and Archbishop Stafford.
So the keys of the city were presented to Cade, and at five o’clock
on the 2nd of July the Captain of Kent, mounted on a good horse, rode
across London Bridge, followed by all his army. In Cannon Street, in
the presence of Sir John Chalton, the Lord Mayor, and a great multitude
of people, Cade laid down his sword on the old London Stone and
declared proudly, “Now is Mortimer lord of this city.” At nightfall
he returned to his headquarters, the White Hart, a famous inn in
Southwark, and next morning was betimes in the city. That day sentence
was passed on Lord Say-and-Sele and on his son-in-law, Sheriff Crowmer.
They were removed from the Tower by Cade’s orders, taken to the
Guildhall, tried and condemned for “divers treasons,” and for “certain
extortions,” and executed forthwith. Say was beheaded at the standard
in Cheapside, and Crowmer at Mile End, and so bitter was the public
feeling against these two men, and so fierce the popular hatred, that
their heads were carried on poles through the city, and made to kiss in
ghastly embrace before being placed on London Bridge.
These, with a third man named John Bailey, who was hanged with Cade’s
permission for being a necromancer and a dabbler in magic and the black
arts, were the only persons put to death while Mortimer was lord of
the city. At Southwark, where the commons were now encamped, as at
Blackheath, theft in the popular army was treated as a capital offence,
and two or three “lawless men” were hanged. It was inevitable if
discipline and good order were to be obtained in so vast a company that
punishment should follow sharp and swift on all who brought discredit
on the rising.
Lord Say and Sheriff Crowmer being dead, the city fathers saw no
further purpose in Cade’s lordship, and they dreaded being called upon
to contribute to the support of his army, for they knew that Cade
needed money for his men. To the everlasting credit of the commons no
charge was laid against them of riot or disorder. The city was in
their hands for three days, yet no harm befell the citizens. On their
captain alone has blame fallen for the events of those days in July.
The difficulties of the man were immense. He had rendered no mean
service to the state by calling attention to the ills that plagued
the country, and proposing remedies. He had roused a large body of
Englishmen to demand a better government, and by the sharp method of
the times he had got rid of a bad minister and a corrupt sheriff, so
that public life was at least the healthier for the deliverance from
two of its oppressors. And now he had this army of 50,000 men, all
needing food and shelter--an orderly, well-disciplined body, no mob
of mercenaries--and the city of London, with all its wealth, gave him
nothing.
Cade had to get supplies. The commons of Kent could not live on the
good will of the London people. Their captain was forced to levy toll
where he could. At present all he had received was the tribute from the
foreign merchants and 500 marks from the fishmonger Horne.
On July 3rd, the night of Say’s execution, Cade supped with Philip
Malpas, Cocke’s father-in-law. Malpas was one of Suffolk’s party, a
King Henry’s man, unpopular in the city, and though an alderman and a
draper, an expelled member of the city council. Warned by Cocke, Malpas
got rid of his valuables before Cade arrived. But the Captain of Kent
found certain jewels belonging to the Duke of York in the house, and
these he carried off.[78]
The following night Cade supped with a merchant named Curtis (Ghirstis
according to Fabyan, Girste according to Stow) in the parish of St.
Margaret Pattens and before he left insisted on a contribution to the
war chest. Curtis paid, but he resented bitterly the abuse of his
hospitality. It seemed to him, as it seemed to his fellow merchants to
whom he told the tale of his wrongs, sheer robbery, and the following
morning (Sunday, July 5th), while Cade rested quietly at the White Hart
in Southwark, the city fathers were busy shaking their heads over the
business, and grave anxiety filled their minds. This might be but the
beginning of pillage; there were always materials in London for a riot,
apart from Cade’s army.
“And for this the hearts of the citizens fell from him, and every
thrifty man was afraid to be served in like wise, for there was many a
man in London that awaited and would fain have seen a common robbery”
(Stow.)[79]
In the course of the day mayor and corporation were in consultation
with Lord Scales, the Governor of the Tower, with the result that
decision was made to prevent Cade and the commons from re-entering the
city. London Bridge was at once seized and fortified by the citizens,
and Matthew Gough, a distinguished soldier in the French wars, was
placed in command.
Cade, knowing nothing of the hostility he had created, took his ease
that day--it was the last peaceful Sabbath he was to know. Towards
evening he gave orders for the King’s Bench and Marshalsea prisons to
be opened, and their inmates--for the most part victims of official
extortion and injustice--to be released. This was done, and certain
“lawless men” convicted of disobedience were haled off to be hanged; to
the end there was no relaxing of discipline.
Then came word that the passage of London Bridge was stopped, and the
right of entry to the city barred against the commons as against a
foe. Cade took this as a declaration of war, of the civil war he had
done his best to prevent, and sallied out to force an entrance. At
nine o’clock the battle began on the bridge, and all through the short
summer night it raged, neither side effecting victory. “For some time
the Londoners were beat back to the stulpes at St. Magnus corner, and
suddenly again the rebels were repulsed and driven back to the stulpes
at Southwark.” It was not till nine o’clock on Monday morning that the
commons, wearied and disheartened, fell back from the fray, and Cade
understood that the attack had failed, and that for the first time
since the assembling of the people on Blackheath, at the end of May,
a check had been given to the democratic movement. A hasty truce was
settled between Cade and the mayor, that while the truce lasted the
commons should not cross into London nor the citizens into Southwark.
Cardinal Kemp, Archbishop of York, the king’s chancellor, who with old
Archbishop Stafford had been left undisturbed in the Tower since the
king’s ignominious flight, immediately decided that the time had come
to arrange a settlement with the Captain of Kent.
Kemp sent messengers that day to the White Hart, asking Cade to meet
the representatives of the king, “to the end that the civil commotions
and disturbances might cease and tranquility be restored,” and Cade
consented.
Kemp, who had himself presided at the trial and condemnation of
Suffolk, brought to the conference, which was held in the church of St.
Margaret, Southwark,[80] on July 7th, Archbishop Stafford and William
Waynfleet, Bishop of Winchester. The chancellor, bent on making peace,
also brought pardons to all concerned, duly signed and sealed. He
listened courteously to Cade’s “complaints” and “requests,” received
the petition, promised it should have the full consideration of
parliament, and then announced a full pardon to all who should return
home.
The proposals of the bishops won the general approval of the commons.
There was nothing to be gained, it seemed, by remaining in arms, now
they had won a promise that their charter should come before parliament.
Cade alone hesitated. What if parliament should disavow these
“pardons,” and the commons be treated as the peasants were treated when
they trusted a king’s word? He asked for the endorsement of his own
pardon, and the pardons of his followers, by parliament before his army
dispersed. Chancellor Kemp explained that this was impossible, because
parliament was dissolved. The people were satisfied with the cardinal’s
word. The rising was at an end.
The following day the bulk of the commons departed from Southwark for
their farms and cottages in Kent and Surrey and Sussex. Cade watched
them go. His own mind was made up. Not till parliament should give him
a pardon of indisputable legality would he lay down his arms. With a
small band of followers he set off for Rochester, sending what goods
and provisions he had by water.
The rising was at an end, and nothing more was heard in parliament, or
elsewhere, of the famous charter of “complaints” and “requests.”
With the break-up of the insurgent army, the government woke to
activity. Alexander Iden was appointed sheriff of Kent, and marrying
Crowmer’s widow, subsequently gained considerable profit. Within a week
the king’s writ and proclamation, declaring John Cade a false traitor,
was posted throughout the countryside, and Cade, defeated in an attempt
to get possession of Queenborough Castle, was a fugitive with the
reward of 1,000 marks on his head, alive or dead, and with Sheriff Iden
in hot pursuit.
Near Heathfield, in Sussex, Iden came up with his prey, early on
Monday, July 13th.
Cade died fighting. A broken man, worn and famished, friendless and
alone, he still had his sword. The spirit of Mortimer, Captain of
Kent, flickered up in the presence of his enemies--it were better to
die sword in hand fighting for freedom than to perish basely by the
hangman. So Cade fought his last fight in the Sussex garden, and fell
mortally wounded, overpowered by the sheriff and his men.
In all haste Iden sent off the dead body to London; it was identified
by the hostess of the White Hart, and three days later the head was
stuck on London Bridge. The body was quartered and portions sent to
Blackheath, Norwich, Salisbury, and Gloucester, for public exposure.
The sheriffs of London, upon whom the gruesome task fell of despatching
these remains, complained bitterly of the cost of this proceeding,
“because that hardly any persons durst nor would take upon them the
carriage for doubt of their lives.”[81]
Iden got his 1,000 marks reward, besides getting the governorship of
Rochester Castle, at a salary of £36 per annum.
Cade was “attainted of treason” by act of parliament, and all his
goods, lands, and tenements made forfeit to the crown. A year later
another act of parliament made void all that had been done by Cade’s
authority during the rising.
In January, 1451, Henry VI. went into Kent with his justices, and this
royal visitation was known as the harvest of heads; for in spite of
Cardinal Kemp’s pardons, twenty-six men of Canterbury and Rochester
implicated in the rising were hanged.
So the last echoes of the rising died away, and corruption and
misgovernment remained. But the commons of Kent and their captain had
done what they could, and in the only way that seemed possible, to get
justice done, and their failure was without dishonour.
Sir Thomas More and the Freedom of Conscience
1529–1535
AUTHORITIES: William Roper--_Life of Sir Thomas More_, 1626;
Harpsfield--_Life of More_ (Harleian MSS.); Stapleton--_Ires Thomæ_,
1588; Cresacre More--_Life of More_, 1627; Erasmus--_Epistolae_
(Leyden, 1706); Sir James Mackintosh--_Life of More_, 1844;
Campbell--_Lives of the Chancellors_; Foss--_Lives of the Judges_;
_Calendar of State Papers--Henry VIII._, edited by Dr. Brewer and Dr.
Gairdner (Rolls Series); _More’s English Works_, edited by William
Rastell; Rev. T. E. Bridgett--_Life of Blessed John Fisher_, and _Life
and Writings of Sir Thomas More_, 1891.
[Illustration: SIR THOMAS MORE
(_From the Drawing by Hans Holbein._)]
SIR THOMAS MORE AND THE FREEDOM OF CONSCIENCE
1529–1535.
“Did Nature ever frame a sweeter, happier character than that of
More?”--so Erasmus wrote in 1498, when Thomas More was twenty, and
Erasmus, recently come to England, some ten years older. It was at the
beginning of their friendship, a friendship that was to last unbroken
till death,[82] and More had then passed from the household of Cardinal
Morton to Oxford, and from Oxford to Lincoln’s Inn, to take up his
father’s calling and follow the law as a barrister.
Twenty years later Erasmus, writing at length to Ulrich von Hutten,
gives us a portrait of More in full manhood. Temperance, simplicity,
human affection, good humour, independence of mind--these qualities are
conspicuous.
“I never saw anyone so indifferent about food. Until he was a young
man he delighted in drinking water, but that was natural to him. Yet,
that he might not seem to be singular or unsociable, he would conceal
his temperance from his guests by drinking the lightest beer, or often
pure water, out of a pewter vessel.”
“He prefers milk diet and fruits, and is especially fond of eggs. He
would rather eat corned beef and coarse bread than what are called
delicacies.”
“He likes a simple dress, using neither silk nor purple nor chains of
gold--except on state occasions. It is wonderful how careless he is of
all that ceremony which most men identify with politeness. He neither
requires it from others nor is anxious to use it himself, though when
it is necessary, at interviews or banquets, he knows how to employ it.
But he thinks it unmanly to waste time over such trifles.”
“He seems born and fashioned for friendship, and is a most faithful and
enduring friend. He is easy of access to all; but if he chances to get
familiar with one whose vices will not brook correction, rather than
a sudden breaking off, he gradually relaxes the intimacy and quietly
drops it. He abhors games of tennis, dice, cards, and the like, by
which most gentlemen kill time. Though he is rather too negligent of
his own interests, no one is more diligent in behalf of his friends.
So polite, and so sweet-mannered is he in company, that no one is
too melancholy to be cheered by him. Since boyhood he has always so
delighted in merriment that it seems to be part of his nature; yet his
merriment is never turned into buffoonery.”
“No one is less led by the opinions of the crowd, yet no one is less
eccentric.”
The friendship of More and Erasmus had ripened in those twenty
years. In More’s house, and at his instigation, Erasmus had written
the _Praise of Folly_,[83] and the great scholar watched with warm
interest the famous career and the brilliant character of the man he
loved so heartily.
More was already high in Henry VIII.’s favour when Erasmus could write
that no one was less led by the opinions of the crowd, and more than
once his independence and courage of mind had been proved in the twenty
years that had passed.
Drawn at first to the monastic life, More had spent four years
(1500–1504) with the Carthusians in Smithfield, “frequenting daily
their spiritual exercises, but without any vow.” Then it is plain to
him that his vocation is not the priesthood, but marriage and public
life, and he leaves the Charterhouse, and in 1505 is married and in
Parliament.[84] But all his life the devotion to religion, and to
the services of the Church, remain in More, and he is ascetic in the
mortifications of the body till the spirit and the will ride supreme.
In the House of Commons More stood out against the exactions of Henry
VII., and at once fell under the king’s displeasure.
More’s son-in-law, Roper, tells the story:
“In the time of King Henry the Seventh, More was made a burgess of the
Parliament wherein was demanded by the king (as I have heard reported)
about three-fifteenths, for the marriage of his eldest daughter,
that then should be Scottish Queen; at the last debating whereof he
made such arguments and reasons against, that the king’s demands were
thereby overthrown. So that one of the king’s privy chamber being
present thereat, brought word to the king out of the Parliament house
that a beardless boy had disappointed all his purpose. Whereupon the
king, conceiving great indignation towards him, could not be satisfied
until he had some way revenged it. And forasmuch as he, nothing have,
nothing could lose, his Grace devised a causeless quarrel against his
father, keeping him in the Tower till he had made him pay a hundred
pounds fine.... Had not the king soon after died, Sir Thomas More was
determined to have gone over sea, thinking that being in the king’s
indignation, he could not live in England without great danger.”
The grant from parliament to the king was reduced from £113,000 to
£30,000 by More’s action; and if this action brought royal anger, it
won for More the confidence of his fellow-citizens in London, so that
we see him in the second year of Henry VIII. under-sheriff for the
city, and according to Erasmus and Roper, the most popular lawyer of
the day. With all his legal business, and good income, More is never
anxious after money. “While he was still dependent on his fees, he gave
to all true and friendly counsel, considering their interests rather
than his own; he persuaded many to settle with their opponents as the
cheaper course. If he could not induce them to act in that manner--for
some men delight in litigation--he would still indicate the method that
was least expensive.”[85]
More’s rising reputation was bound to attract the notice of Henry
VIII., for the king was alert in the early years of his reign to
get good men at the court, and Wolsey, who had become chancellor on
Archbishop Warham’s retirement in 1515, was anxious to enlist More in
the royal service. The court had no attractions for More, his embassies
to Flanders and Calais, to settle trade disputes and difficulties
with France, wearied him, and in 1516 he was engaged in finishing
his _Utopia_. According to Roper, it was More’s independence of mind
that made the king force office at court upon him. A ship belonging
to the pope, which had put into Southampton, was claimed by Henry as
a forfeiture. More argued the case so clearly that the commissioners
decided in the pope’s favour, and the king at once declared he must
have More in his service.
Then for the next twelve years Sir Thomas More enjoyed the royal
favour and friendship. His promotion was rapid. Secretary of state,
master of requests when the king was travelling, privy councilor,
under-treasurer, or chancellor of the exchequer--all these offices were
filled. In 1521 More was knighted, in 1523 he was speaker of the House
of Commons, and in 1525 chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster.
Erasmus writes to Ulrich von Hutten in 1519 in praise of More’s public
work: “In serious matters no man’s advice is more prized, and when the
king wishes for recreation no man’s conversation is more entertaining.
Often there are matters deep and involved that demand a grave and
prudent judge, and More unravels these questions in a way that gives
satisfaction to both sides. Yet no one has ever prevailed on him to
receive a gift for his decision. Happy that commonwealth where kings
appoint such officials! No pride has come to him with his high estate.
With all the weight of state affairs he remembers his old friends,
and returns from time to time to the books he loves so well. Whatever
influence has come to him with his high office, whatever favour he
enjoys with his wealthy king, he uses all for the good of the state and
for the assistance of his friends. Ever fond of conferring benefits and
wonderfully prone to pity, his disposition has grown with his power of
indulging it. Some he helps with money, to others he gives protection,
and others he recommends for promotion. When he can help in no other
way he does it by his advice: no one is sent away dejected. You
might well say that he had been appointed the public guardian of the
distressed and needy.”
If the cares of state did not cut off Sir Thomas More from assisting
old acquaintances, they made great inroads into the home life he loved
so well. He had married again on the death of his first wife, and
his letters to his children, especially to his “most dear daughter,
Margaret”--Roper’s wife--are full of tenderness. He is anxious about
the education of his children, and rejoices that his daughter shares
his love for books. We find him writing to Margaret Roper just after
her marriage in 1522:--
“I am therefore delighted to read that you have made up your mind
to give yourself diligently to philosophy, and to make up by your
earnestness in future for what you have lost in the past by neglect.
My darling Margaret, I indeed have never found you idling, and your
unusual learning in almost every kind of literature shows that you
have been making active progress. So I take your words as an example
of the great modesty that makes you prefer to accuse yourself falsely
of sloth rather than to boast of your diligence, unless your meaning
is that you will give yourself so earnestly to study that your past
history will seem like indolence by comparison.... Though I earnestly
hope that you will devote the rest of your life to medical science and
sacred literature, so that you may be well furnished for the whole
scope of human life, which is to have a healthy soul in a healthy body,
and I know that you have already laid the foundations of these studies,
and there will be always opportunity to continue the building; yet I am
of opinion that you may with great advantage give some years of your
yet flourishing youth to humane letters and liberal studies.... It
would be a delight, my dear Margaret, to me to converse long with you
on these matters, but I have just been interrupted and called away by
the servants, who have brought in supper. I must have regard to others,
else to sup is not so sweet as to talk with you.”[86]
The close friend of Erasmus and Dean Colet, an accepted champion of the
New Learning, More was naturally enthusiastic for education--for girls
as for boys. He had written to Gunnell, for a time the tutor of his
family:--
“Though I prefer learning, joined with virtue, to all the treasures
of kings, yet renown for learning, when it is not united with a good
life, is nothing else than splendid and notorious infamy: this would be
especially the case in a woman.... Since erudition in woman is a new
thing and a reproach to the sloth of men, many will gladly assail it
and impute to literature what is really the fault of nature, thinking
from the vices of the learned to get their own ignorance esteemed as
virtue. On the other hand if a woman (and this I desire and hope with
you as the teacher for all my daughters) to eminent virtue should add
an outwork of even moderate skill in literature, I think she will have
more real profit than if she had obtained the riches of Crœsus and the
beauty of Helen.”
In this letter More goes on to speak of the profit of learning and the
happiness of those who give themselves to it--“possessing solid joy
they will neither be puffed up by the empty praises of men nor dejected
by evil tongues.”
“These I consider the genuine fruits of learning, and though I admit
that all literary men do not possess them, I would maintain that those
who give themselves to study with such views (avoiding the precipices
of pride and haughtiness, walking in the pleasant meadows of modesty,
not dazzled at the sight of gold) will easily attain their end and
become perfect. Nor do I think that the harvest will be much affected
whether it is a man or a woman who sows the field. They both have the
same human nature, which reason differentiates from those of beasts;
both therefore are equally suited for those studies for which reason is
perfectioned, and becomes fruitful like a ploughed land on which the
seed of good lessons has been sown.”
This strong love for wise learning, laying emphasis on a complete
education--the training in virtue no less than the knowledge of
letters--had its roots in More’s character. The “genuine fruits of
learning” ripen in his life and death. His wide toleration, which will
blame no man for not taking the path he trod to martyrdom, is coupled
inextricably with a refinement of conscience that cannot be sullied by
a denial of his faith. The freedom of conscience Thomas More claimed
for himself he most willingly allows to others. Just as the education
he valued for himself he extends to all his children.
Standing largely aloof from the violent controversies Luther had
started, hating the bitter intolerance and savage abuse of theological
strife, refusing to be drawn into the deadly discussion of Henry
VIII.’s divorce, Sir Thomas More is content to live in loyal devotion
to his religion and to the service of the state, if haply he may. And
when this is denied him he is content to die, retaining his tolerant
good-humour and the love of his kind to the end, and without resentment
at his fate.
The courage of the sage never failed Sir Thomas More in his public
work. As “a beardless boy” he had resisted in parliament the king’s
extortions, as speaker of the House of Commons he protected the
privileges of the commons. Wolsey had come down to the House with all
his train to command a subsidy, but no word was uttered in reply to his
address. In vain Wolsey appealed for an answer, Sir Thomas More could
only declare that the speaker, then the mouthpiece of the commons, had
nothing to say till he had heard the opinion of the House. “Whereupon,
the cardinal, displeased with Sir Thomas More that had not in this
parliament in all things satisfied his desire, suddenly arose and
departed.”
High as More stood at that time in the affection of Henry, Sir
Thomas knew the king, and the nature of the favour of princes. Roper
relates that when he offered his congratulations, at the time of the
appointment to the chancellorship of the Duchy of Lancaster, More
answered, “I may tell thee I have no cause to be proud thereof, for
if my head would win him a castle in France (for then was there war
betwixt us) it should not fail to go.”
Aware of Henry’s character, More yet had no choice but to accept the
lord chancellorship from the king on Wolsey’s fall in 1529. It was
no matter for personal satisfaction, and More’s reply to the Duke of
Norfolk was substantially the same as his previous answer to Roper:
“Considering how wise and honourable a prelate had lately before taken
so great a fall, he had no cause to rejoice in his new dignity.”
Erasmus wrote, “I do not at all congratulate More, nor literature; but
I do indeed congratulate England, for a better or holier judge could
not have been appointed.”
On November 3rd, 1529, Sir Thomas More, as chancellor, opened
parliament, and in a long speech declared that “the cause of its
assembly was to reform such things as had been used or permitted by
inadvertence, or by changes of time had become inexpedient.” It was the
opening of the seven years’ parliament, and before six years should
run, this same parliament would, at the king’s order, condemn Sir
Thomas More by act of attainder.
The position of the new chancellor was dangerous from the first. Wolsey
had fallen because he had failed to help Henry to a divorce from his
queen, Catherine of Aragon, and More had been made his successor
because the king had counted on him to accomplish the “great matter.”
All that Sir Thomas could hope for was that he might be allowed to do
his work as chancellor without being mixed up with divorce proceedings.
As long as he was not called upon to declare publicly that the divorce
was right, he had no wish to interfere in the matter. First to last
no word of approval came from More’s lips to encourage Henry in the
divorce, but he was not the man to express judgment on a case that he
did not wish brought before him.[87] In the end the chancellor’s very
silence turned Henry’s disappointment to active displeasure, and More’s
life was taken in savage revenge for non-compliance with the royal will.
Henry’s divorce dates the beginning of the Protestant Reformation in
England--of that ecclesiastical revolution in which the supremacy of
Rome was rejected, the crown superseded the pope as supreme head of
the Church of England, and England was detached from the rest of Roman
Catholic Christendom. In the reigns of Edward VI. and Elizabeth the
revolution proceeded still further, and Catholic rites and doctrines,
service books and ceremonies were rigorously cast out of the Church
of England, and all who adhered to the old order in religion were
punished by law. But those days were far off as yet.
More, at the outset of this revolution, declines to follow the king in
the rejection of the old allegiance to Rome. All he asks for is freedom
of conscience to remain in the faith of his fathers, to worship as
Christians in England had worshipped since the coming of Augustine. To
escape death by giving up this freedom is impossible for Sir Thomas
More.
The divorce from Queen Catherine is the turning point in More’s worldly
fortunes as well as in ecclesiastical affairs in England.
Eighteen years passed from the day of Henry’s marriage to Catherine,
on his accession to the throne, before the divorce was mooted. The
scruple was that Catherine had been formerly betrothed to his dead
brother Arthur; the moving force of Henry’s petition for divorce was
the desire to marry Anne Boleyn. Unable to get the marriage annulled at
Rome, or to get a favourable opinion from the universities, Henry fell
back on Archbishop Cranmer to decree the divorce, and finally this was
done in 1533, all appeals to Rome being henceforth forbidden. Henry
had already, in 1531, called upon the clergy to acknowledge him as the
supreme head of the Church of England, and the following year they were
required to surrender the ancient right to meet and enact canons.[88]
In these four years the chancellor had kept out of political life as
far as he could, and had given his attention to his judicial work. But
in May, 1532, he resigned the great seal into the king’s hands, “seeing
that affairs were going badly, and likely to be worse, and that if he
retained his office he would be obliged to act against his conscience,
or incur the king’s displeasure as he had already begun to do, for
refusing to take his part against the clergy. His excuse was that his
salary was too small, and that he was not equal to the work. Everyone
is concerned, for there never was a better man in the office.”[89]
Nothing is known of Sir Thomas More’s work in the chancery except his
integrity and his despatch. “When More took the office there were
causes that had remained undecided for twenty years. He presided so
dexterously and successfully that once after taking his seat and
deciding a case, when the next case was called, it was found that
there was no second case for trial. Such a thing is said never to have
happened before or since.” (Stapleton.)
For nearly two years More lived unmolested after his resignation of
the chancellorship; but he had incurred the enmity of the king and the
hatred of Anne Boleyn, and Henry was swiftly driving at certain changes
in religion that were to bring Sir Thomas More to the Tower and the
block, and many another honest Christian to the prison and the gallows
of Tyburn.
In June, 1533, after Cranmer had duly pronounced Henry’s marriage with
Catherine void, came the coronation of Anne Boleyn, and Sir Thomas More
declined an invitation from some of the bishops to be present at the
celebration. He knew that his absence would be marked unfavourably by
the king, and was ready to pay the penalty; but his care in avoiding
the expression of any disapproval of Henry’s proceedings required an
equal care that no approval should be expressed. To have been present
at the coronation of Anne would have been, for More, to condone the
divorce.
In the autumn came an attempt to include More, with Bishop Fisher
and certain monks and friars, in the treason of the “Holy Maid of
Kent,”--Elizabeth Barton, a Canterbury nun. The “treason” amounted to
this, that the nun, who was given to prophesying, declared that God had
revealed to her to speak against Henry’s divorce, and it was sufficient
to bring her to Tyburn. But against Sir Thomas More no shred of
evidence could be procured, for none existed. He had seen the nun, and
talked with her, and “held her in great estimation,” but would neither
commit himself to a belief in her visions, nor permit any discussion on
the king’s doings; but wrote to the nun a letter which could not have
been more prudent, as he exhorted her “to attend to devotion, and not
meddle in the affairs of princes.”
The name of Sir Thomas More was struck out of the bill of attainder,
but the days of his liberty were already numbered.
The Act of Succession, passed in March, 1534, made Mary, the daughter
of Henry and Catherine, illegitimate, and Elizabeth, Anne’s child,
the heir to the throne. The act also declared that “all the nobles of
the realm, spiritual and temporal, and all other subjects arrived at
full age, should be obliged to take corporal oath, in the presence
of the king or his commissioners, to observe and maintain the whole
effect and contents of the act,” under the penalties for treason for
refusal. The words of the oath were not inserted in the act, and the
commissioners drew up a formula, requiring all persons to affirm in
addition that the marriage with Catherine was invalid, and the marriage
with Anne valid, and further to recall and repudiate allegiance to any
foreign authority, prince, or potentate. This was a much larger demand
than parliament had authorised, for it contained a denial of the papal
supremacy, while all that the act had required was an acknowledgment
of the succession to the crown. The pope had only just given his final
decision on Henry’s appeal for divorce (March, 1534), and the decision
had been against the king and in favour of the marriage. The oath now
administered was in direct opposition to the supremacy of Rome, and
as such was impossible to the consciences of men like Sir Thomas More
and Bishop Fisher, though the great bulk of the clergy took it without
giving any trouble.
More was quite prepared to swear to the succession of Elizabeth.
Parliament had, in his eyes, a plain right to decide who should wear
the crown, and the doctrine of divine hereditary kingship does not
come in till the Stuarts. But this mere willingness to comply with
the letter of the law was not sufficient. More’s silent want of
sympathy with the divorce, and with the breach it involved with Rome,
was intolerable to Henry, who had counted More amongst his dearest
friends; for friend or foe, in Henry’s power, could only live by abject
agreement with the royal pleasure. No king had three more faithful
servants than Henry VIII. had in Thomas Wolsey, Thomas More, and
Thomas Cromwell, and no king destroyed his ministers with such fierce
caprice.
Sir Thomas More, unable to take the oath, was sent to the Tower in
April, 1534, Bishop Fisher having already been lodged there. In
November parliament met again, and passed the Act of Supremacy, making
Henry VIII. “the supreme head of the Church of England,” and declaring
that on and after the first of February, 1535, it was high treason
“to deprive the king’s most royal person, the queen’s, or their heirs
apparent of their dignity, title or name of their royal estates, or
slanderously and maliciously publish or pronounce, by express writing
or words, that the king, our sovereign lord, should be heretic,
schismatic, tyrant, infidel, etc.” Under this act Sir Thomas More was
to be assailed and to die. That the martyrdom was a “judicial murder”
is plain--to Lord Campbell it was “the blackest crime that ever has
been perpetrated in England under the form of law.”[90]
The indictment was for treason, and on July 1st, a week after Bishop
Fisher’s execution, Sir Thomas More was brought before the judges.
To the charge of having refused the king, “maliciously, falsely, and
traitorously, his title of supreme head of the Church of England,”
More answered that the statute had been passed while he was in prison,
and that he was dead to the world, and had not cared about such
things--“your statute cannot condemn me to death for such silence, for
neither your statute nor any laws in the world punish people except for
words and deeds--surely not for keeping silence.”
“To this the king’s proctor replied that such silence was a certain
proof of malice intended against the statute, especially as every
faithful subject, on being questioned about the statute, was obliged
to answer categorically that the statute was good and wholesome.”
“Surely,” replied More, “if common law is true, and he who is silent
seems to consent, my silence should rather be taken as approval than
contempt of your statute.”
To the first article charging him with having always maliciously
opposed the king’s second marriage, More had answered that anything
he had said had been according to his conscience, and that for “this
error,” he had already suffered fifteen months’ imprisonment, and the
confiscation of his property.
The trial was soon over, for the king had decided on More’s death
when Fisher was executed, ordering the preachers to set forth to the
people the treasons of the late Bishop of Rochester and of Sir Thomas
More; “joining them together though the later was still untried.”[91]
The jury, after a quarter of an hour’s absence, declared him guilty
of death for maliciously contravening the statute, and sentence was
pronounced by the chancellor “according to the tenour of the new law.”
Death being now in sight, and faith having been kept with his
conscience, More has no longer any reason to observe silence. To the
usual question whether he has anything to say against the sentence, he
replied, that for the seven years he had studied the matter he could
not find that supremacy in a church belonged to a layman, or to any but
the see of Rome, as granted personally by our Lord when on earth to
St. Peter and his successors; and that, as the city of London could not
make a law against the laws of the realm of England, so England could
not make a law contrary to the general law of Christ’s Catholic Church;
and that the Magna Charta of England said that “the English Church
should be free to enjoy all its rights,” as the king had sworn at his
consecration. Interrupted by the chancellor with the inquiry whether
he wished to be considered wiser and better than all the bishops
and nobles of the realm who had sworn to the king’s supremacy, More
retorted, “For one bishop of your opinion, my lord, I have a hundred
saints of mine; and for one parliament of yours, and God knows of what
kind, I have all the general councils for a thousand years.” The Duke
of Norfolk said that now his malice was clear.
On the sixth of July, 1535, Sir Thomas More was beheaded on Tower Hill,
for the king remitted the ferocious mutilations that accompanied the
executions for treason at Tyburn. “The scaffold was very unsteady, and
putting his feet on the ladder, he said, merrily, to the lieutenant of
the Tower: “I pray thee see me safe up, and for my coming down let me
shift for myself.”[92]
Then, with a simple request to the people standing round to pray for
him, and to bear witness that he died a Catholic for the faith of
the Catholic Church, a friendly word to the executioner, and a last
prayer--the 51st Psalm--the axe fell, and More was dead.
Beyond More’s scholarship and wit, and his affection for his family
and friends, stands out his great, unflinching quality of loyalty to
conscience. When the power was in his hands as lord chancellor, no one
was put to death by Sir Thomas More for heresy in England, though he
did what he could by his pen to check the innovations of Luther, which
he hated,--not only because they broke up the unity of Christendom,
but because, it seemed to him, they struck at all social morality and
decency.[93] The violence of Luther’s outbreak, the determination
of the Lutherans--sure of their own possession of the truth--to
allow no liberty to Catholics, and the antinomian communism of the
anabaptists--all these things made Protestantism detestable to men like
Sir Thomas More and Erasmus, and made More declare that dogmatising
heretics ought to be repressed by the state as breeders of strife and
contention. But his own record is clear: “And of all that ever came in
my hand for heresy, as help me God, saving (as I said) the sure keeping
of them, had never any of them any stripe or stroke given them, so much
as a fillip on the forehead.”[94]
“What other controversialist can be named, who, having the power
to crush antagonists whom he viewed as the disturbers of the quiet
of his own declining years, the destroyers of all the hopes which
he had cherished for mankind, contented himself with severity of
language?”[95]
The author of the _Utopia_ was a critic, as Colet and Erasmus were,
of abuses in the Church; but like his friends he lived and died a
Catholic. He saw Lutheranism as the source of a thousand ills, and with
Erasmus opposed it; but though heretics were anti-social and factious,
he would not put one to death for error.
It is all through Sir Thomas More’s character--this respect for
conscience. There is no going back on the wide toleration of his early
manhood, and high office and responsibilities of state no more cramp or
belittle his faith than they destroy his playfulness or the warmth of
his affections.
He died a martyr for the religion of his life, for the simple right to
abide in the old Catholic paths of his fellow-countrymen.
As Sir Thomas More was not the first of the Catholic martyrs at the
Reformation, for he had seen his old friends, the Carthusian monks,
carried to Tyburn, so he was not the last. For the next fifty years
of Henry and Elizabeth, English men and women were to suffer for
the old faith of England, and in Mary’s reign to die as bravely for
Protestantism.
In spite of monasteries and priories destroyed, and parish churches
stripped and plundered, in spite of penal laws which banned its
priesthood and proscribed its worship, the Catholicism More died for
has endured in England. All that parliament could do to exterminate
the belief in papal supremacy has been done; all that panic and
prejudice could accomplish by “popish plots” to the same end has been
accomplished. These things have been no more successful than the
mad “no popery” riots of Lord George Gordon in crushing the faith
of the Roman Catholic minority. The penal laws have gone, Catholic
emancipation has been obtained, a Catholic hierarchy has been set up,
and to-day in England the freedom of conscience that was refused to Sir
Thomas More is the accepted liberty of all.
In 1887 Sir Thomas More, with Bishop Fisher and the Carthusian martyrs,
were beatified by Pope Leo XIII. Serving their religion in life and
death, they served the cause of human liberty, withstanding Henry as
Anselm withstood the Red King, and as Langton withstood John.
Robert Ket and The Norfolk Rising
1549
AUTHORITIES: _The Commotion in Norfolk_, by Nicholas Sotherton,
1576 (Harleian MS.); _De Furoribus Norfolciensum_, by Nevylle, 1575
(Translated into English by Wood, 1615); Holinshed--_Chronicle_;
Sir John Hayward--_Life of Edward VI._; Strype--_Memorials_;
Blomefield--_History of Norfolk_; F. W. Russell--_Kett’s Rebellion_; W.
Rye; _Victoria County History--Norfolk_.
ROBERT KET AND THE NORFOLK RISING.
1549.
The Norfolk Rising of the sixteenth century was a land war, caused
directly by the enclosing of the common fields of the peasants, and the
break up of the accustomed rural life.
The landowners finding greater profit in breeding sheep and cattle
than in the small holdings of peasants, began, about 1470, to seize
the fields which from time immemorial had been cultivated by the
country people in common, and to evict whole parishes by pulling down
all the dwelling places. For eighty years these clearances were going
on. Acts of Parliament were passed in 1489 and 1515 to prohibit the
“pulling down of towns” and to order the rebuilding of such towns, and
the restoration of pasture lands to tillage, but both acts were quite
inoperative. In 1517, Cardinal Wolsey’s Royal Commission on Enclosures
reported on the defiance of the law in seven Midland counties, where
more than 36,000 acres had been enclosed; but legal proceedings against
the landowners were stayed on the latter promising to make restitution.
Thomas More, in the first part of his _Utopia_, in 1516, described for
all time what the enclosures he witnessed meant for England.
“For look in what parts of the realm doth grow the finest and therefore
dearest wool, there noblemen and gentlemen, yea, and certain
abbots, holy men no doubt, not contenting themselves with the yearly
revenues and profits that were wont to grow to their forefathers and
predecessors of their lands, nor being content that they live in
rest and pleasure--nothing profiting, yea, much annoying the public
weal--leave no ground for tillage, they inclose all into pastures;
they throw down houses; they pluck down towns and leave nothing
standing but only the church to be made a sheep fold.... They turn all
dwelling-places and all glebe land into desolation and wilderness.
Therefore, that one covetous and insatiable comorant may compass about
and inclose many thousand acres of ground together within one pale or
hedge, the husbandmen be thrust out of their own, or else either by
cunning and fraud, or by violent oppression, or by wrongs and injuries
they be so wearied, that they be compelled to sell all. By one means
therefore or another, either by hook or by crook they must needs depart
away, men, women, husbands, wives, fatherless children, widows, mothers
with their young babies, and their whole household small in substance
and large in number, as husbandry requireth many hands. Away they
trudge, I say, out of their known and accustomed houses, finding no
place to rest in.... And when they have wandered abroad till the little
they have be spent, what can they then else do but steal, and then
justly be hanged, or else go about a begging. And yet then also they
be cast in prison as vagabonds, because they go about and work not:
whom no man will set a work, though they never so willingly proffer
themselves thereto. For one shepherd or herdsman is enough to eat up
that ground with cattle, to the occupying whereof about husbandry many
hands were requisite.”
This was social England in the early years of Henry VIII., and every
year saw things grow worse for the rural folk, in spite of further
royal proclamations against enclosures in 1526. A series of bad
harvests drove a starving population to riot in Norfolk in 1527 and
1529. In 1536 came the suppression of 376 lesser monasteries, followed
two years later by the dissolution of all remaining monasteries and
priories, and in 1547 by the royal confiscation of the property of the
religious guilds and brotherhoods.
The landowners having established a starving unemployed class by the
simple process of depriving people of access to the land, and the
crown having removed the only source of relief to the unemployed by
destroying the monasteries, it remained for parliament to deal with the
“social problem” thus created by declaring poverty a crime, and the
unemployed person a felon. The lash and the gallows were to solve the
problem.
In 1531, an act of parliament granted licences to the impotent beggar,
and ordered a whipping for all other mendicants. Five years later
stronger measures were adopted, and whipping was only permitted to
first offenders: mutilation and hanging were the subsequent penalties
on conviction, and thousands of unemployed men and women suffered under
this act. But still the unemployed existed, for the enclosures had not
been stopped; and so the first year of Edward VI. saw an act passed
declaring the convicted unemployed “a slave.” (As it seemed to many
that parliament had got rid of papal authority only to bring back
slavery in England, this act was repealed in two years, and the act of
1531 revived.)
The bitterness of the agrarian misery, the violent destruction of all
the old religious customs and habits of the people, the confiscation
of the funds of the guilds, the open despoiling of the parish churches
of the people[96]--all these things plunged the country into confusion
and despair. The general rising in Lincolnshire and the north in 1536
(known as the “Pilgrimage of Grace”) against the suppressions of the
monasteries, and the rising in Cornwall and Devon in 1549 against
Edward’s VI.’s new Book of Common Prayer were strong manifestations of
the popular dislike of the changes made in religion by Henry VIII. and
the ministers of Edward VI.
In Norfolk, in 1537, the people made an insurrection against the
suppression of the monasteries; but the later risings of 1540 (at
Griston, when one John Walker “exhorted the people to destroy the
gentry”), and in 1549, under Ket, were not concerned with the religious
troubles of the times, but were frankly agrarian. The Norfolk rising,
which Ket led, was no more connected with Protestantism than the
Peasant Revolt of 1381 was with Lollardy. Agrarian disturbances took
place in a number of counties in 1549. In May the peasants of Somerset
and Lincoln were in revolt, and in July there were tumults in Essex,
Kent, Wiltshire, Buckinghamshire, and Oxfordshire. A rude Cambridge
ballad of the time extols the pulling down of enclosures:
Cast hedge and ditch in the lake,
Fixed with many a stake;
Though they be never so fast,
Yet asunder they are wrest.
Sir, I think that this work
Is as good as to build a kirk.
In 1548 Protector Somerset had followed Wolsey’s footsteps in issuing
a proclamation for a royal commission to inquire and report concerning
enclosures, and to give the names of all who kept more than two
thousand sheep or who had “taken from any other their commons.”[97]
The commissioners were also “to reform” any cases of the enclosing of
commons and highways, “without due recompense,” which they might find;
“and to the intent your doings may proceed without all suspicion, and
the people conceive some good hope of reformation at your hands, we
would that as many of you as be in any of the cases to be reformed, do
first, for example’s sake, begin to the reformation of yourselves.”
Somerset’s ingenuous suggestion was naturally disregarded by the
commissioners, and beyond making inquiries and publishing a report--to
the effect that in the counties of Suffolk, Essex, Hertford, Kent, and
Worcester nearly all the common lands[98] had been enclosed, while in
Norfolk and Northampton large enclosures had been made--the commission
of 1548 was as fruitless as its predecessors. Somerset, however, got
some reputation by it as an enemy to the enclosures, and certainly
incurred the dislike of the landowners. But where Wolsey, in the
hey-day of power, had failed, there was small chance of success for
Somerset, with the country in a state of anarchy, and the nation rent
and distracted by a violent revolution in the Church.
The only strong movement to prevent the utter downfall of the
country-people was the Norfolk Rising, which Robert Ket directed in
the summer of 1549. It failed in the end, but for more than six weeks
the power of the landlords was broken round Norwich, their enclosures
were stopped, and the hope of better things filled the hearts of the
peasants.
The rising began at Attleborough on 20th June when Squire Green, of
Wylby, set up fences and hedges round the common lands at Harpham and
Attleborough, and the people, excited by news that in Kent similar
fences had been destroyed, proceeded to pull them down. For the next
fortnight the revolt had neither leaders nor organization. “There were
secret meetings of men running hither and thither, and then withdrawing
themselves for secret conferences, but at length they all began to
deal tumultuously and to rage openly.” On July 7th the annual feast at
Wymondham, in honour of the translation of St. Thomas of Canterbury,
brought the country folk together from miles round; and at the close
of the fair they all set off to break down the fences set up round the
common lands at Hetherset by one Sergeant Flowerdew.[99]
Flowerdew, unable to save his fences, proposed a diversion. The Kets at
Wymondham had made enclosures, why shouldn’t the rioters deal with them
in similar fashion? Flowerdew actually paid over 40d. to encourage an
attack on the Kets.
Robert Ket and his brother were well-known men. Both were craftsmen,
Robert, a tanner, and William, a butcher. They were landowners besides,
and men of substance and of old family, for it was said the Kets had
been in the land since the Norman Conquest. Robert Ket held three
manors from the Earl of Warwick; his yearly income was put down at £50,
and his property valued at 1,000 marks. Like other landowners, the Kets
had made enclosures, but on the arrival of the people from Hetherset
they at once declared themselves willing to stand by the movement for
freeing the land. Robert Ket felt the misery of his neighbours. He
saw that if the revolt was to be anything more than a local riot it
must have necessary guidance, and his sympathies were entirely on the
democratic side. And so from that time forward he gave up the quiet of
a country gentleman’s life at Wymondham for the strenuous movement of
an insurgent camp.
To the appeal of the people for help, Ket answered passionately, “I
am ready, and will be ready at all times, to do whatever, not only to
repress, but to subdue the power of great men. Whatsoever lands I have
enclosed shall again be made common unto ye and all men, and my own
hands shall first perform it.”
Then Robert Ket went on to commit himself body and soul to the
movement, resolved that the peasants should not be left unaided in the
struggle they had begun, and willing to take upon himself the burden
and responsibility of leadership.
“You shall have me, if you will, not only as a companion, but as a
captain; and in the doing of the so great a work before us, not only as
a fellow, but for a leader, author and principal.”
If the ambition which clutches at sovereignty and rule is despicable,
even more despicable is the weakness which refuses to take command at
times of peril.
To Robert Ket and his brother there was no promise of the world’s
honour and glory should the rising be successful. At the best would
be the satisfaction of a battle fought and won for the deliverance of
long-suffering peasants. At the worst the laying down of life in a good
cause, as Geoffrey Litster and many a Norfolk man had done in bygone
days.
Robert Ket’s leadership was acclaimed with enthusiasm, nor was it ever
disputed throughout the rising. In this, the last of the great popular
risings in England, the Norfolk men were as loyal to their leader as
the men of Kent were to Wat Tyler and Jack Cade. And in each case that
loyalty had ample justification.
There were but a thousand men involved when the rising began, but under
Ket’s command the movement passed rapidly from the fluid “running
hither and thither” condition of the first fortnight, and became the
march of an organized army.
On July 10th, two days after Ket took command, this army was on the
road to Norwich, and after crossing the river at Cringleford, lay
encamped at Eaton Wood.
It is plain from Ket’s speeches to his men, and from “The Rebels’
Complaint,” which he published at this time, that to Robert Ket the
rising was not only to put down enclosures, its aim was rather to
strike at the root of the evil and to put an end to the ascendancy of
the landlord class, and make England a free commonwealth. Either the
people must put down landlords, or very soon the landlords would have
the whole land in their possession, and the people would be in hopeless
and helpless subjection. Had not an act of parliament been actually
passed making “slaves” of the landless men, dispossessed by enclosures?
When parliament was establishing slavery it was time for honest men to
be up and doing, rousing the people to action.
Ket’s speech at Eaton Wood is a fierce attack on the landlords, and a
reminder that having ventured so far, the peasants must advance yet
further:
Now are ye overtopped and trodden down by gentlemen, and put
out of possibility ever to recover foot. Rivers of riches ran
into the coffers of your landlords, while you are pair’d to the
quick, and fed upon pease and oats like beasts. You are fleeced
by these landlords for their private benefit, and as well kept
under by the public burdens of State wherein while the richer
sort favour themselves, ye are gnawn to the very bones. Your
tyrannous masters often implead, arrest, and cast you into
prison, so that they may the more terrify and torture you in
your minds, and wind your necks more surely under their arms.
And then they palliate these pilleries with the fair pretence
of law and authority! Fine workmen, I warrant you, are this law
and authority, who can do their dealings so closely that men
can only discover them for your undoing. Harmless counsels are
fit for tame fools; for you who have already stirred there is
no hope but in adventuring boldly.
In “The Rebels’ Complaint,” the same note is struck. Only by taking
up arms, and mixing Heaven and earth together, can the intolerable
oppression of the landlords be ended.
The pride of great men is now intolerable, but our condition
miserable.
These abound in delights; and compassed with the fullness of
all things, and consumed with vain pleasures, thirst only after
gain, inflamed with the burning delights of their desires.
But ourselves, almost killed with labour and watching, do
nothing all our life long but sweat, mourn, hunger, and thirst.
Which things, though they seem miserable and base (as they are
indeed most miserable), yet might be borne howsoever, if they
which are drowned in the boiling seas of evil delights did not
pursue the calamities and miseries of other men with too much
insolent hatred. But now both we and our miserable condition
is a laughing stock to these most proud and insolent men--who
are consumed with ease and idleness. Which thing (as it may)
grieveth us so sore and inflicteth such a stain of evil report,
so that nothing is more grievous for us to remember, nor more
unjust to suffer.
The present condition of possessing land seemeth miserable
and slavish--holding it all at the pleasure of great men; not
freely, but by prescription, and, as it were, at the will and
pleasure of the lord. For as soon as any man offend any of
these gorgeous gentlemen, he is put out, deprived, and thrust
from all his goods.
How long shall we suffer so great oppression to go unrevenged?
For so far as they, the gentlemen, now gone in cruelty and
covetousness, that they are not content only to take all by
violence away from us, and to consume in riot and effeminate
delights what they get by force and villainy, but they must
also suck in a manner our blood and marrow out of our veins and
bones.
The common pastures left by our predecessors for our relief and
our children are taken away.
The lands which in the memory of our fathers were common,
those are ditched and hedged in and made several; the pastures
are enclosed, and we shut out. Whatsoever fowls of the air or
fishes of the water, and increase of the earth--all these do
they devour, consume, and swallow up; yea, nature doth not
suffice to satisfy their lusts, but they seek out new devices,
and, as it were, forms of pleasures to embalm and perfume
themselves, to abound in pleasant smells, to pour in sweet
things to sweet things. Finally, they seek from all places all
things for their desire and the provocation of lust. While
we in the meantime eat herbs and roots, and languish with
continual labour, and yet are envied that we live, breathe, and
enjoy common air!
Shall they, as they have brought hedges about common pastures,
enclose with their intolerable lusts also all the commodities
and pleasures of this life, which Nature, the parent of us all,
would have common, and bringeth forth every day, for us, as
well as for them?
We can no longer bear so much, so great, and so cruel injury;
neither can we with quiet minds behold so great covetousness,
excess, and pride of the nobility. We will rather take arms,
and mix Heaven and earth together, than endure so great cruelty.
Nature hath provided for us, as well as for them; hath given us
a body and a soul, and hath not envied us other things. While
we have the same form, and the same condition of birth together
with them, why should they have a life so unlike unto ours, and
differ so far from us in calling?
We see that things have now come to extremities, and we will
prove the extremity. We will rend down hedges, fill up ditches,
and make a way for every man into the common pasture. Finally,
we will lay all even with the ground, which they, no less
wickedly than cruelly and covetously, have enclosed. Neither
will we suffer ourselves any more to be pressed with such
burdens against our wills, nor endure so great shame, since
living out our days under such inconveniences we should leave
the commonwealth unto our posterity--mourning, and miserable,
and much worse than we received it of our fathers.
Wherefore we will try all means; neither will we ever rest
until we have brought things to our own liking.
We desire liberty and an indifferent (or equal) use of all
things. This will we have. Otherwise these tumults and our
lives shall only be ended together.
Revolutionary as this manifesto is, Robert Ket is seen all through the
rising exerting his authority on behalf of law and good order, curbing
anarchy and checking ferocity in the rebel camp.
Only one day was spent at Eaton Wood. Ket’s plan was to advance to
Mousehold, a wide stretch of high, well-wooded ground to the east of
Norwich. Here the camp was fixed on July 12th, the river having been
crossed at Hailsdon, and a night’s halt called at Drayton--for the
mayor of Norwich, Thomas Cod, positively refused to allow the rebels to
pass through the city. Ket, anxious to unite citizens and peasants in
a common cause, willingly avoided altercation, and Cod, alarmed at the
rising, and unable to dissuade the insurgents from their enterprise,
was careful to refrain from all hostile demonstrations. Cod’s one
purpose was to exclude Ket’s army from the city, and to accomplish
this he kept on friendly terms with Ket, even while appealing to the
government to send down troops to suppress the rising. Ket’s purpose
was to break down landlord rule in Norfolk, extend the area of revolt,
and to get the king to attend to the complaints of his subjects.
Ket’s company at Mousehold numbered no more than 2,600 on July 12th;
but the ringing of bells and the firing of beacons brought in thousands
of homeless men. At the end of a week 20,000 men were enrolled under
the banner of revolt, and now Ket had all his work to do in maintaining
discipline and in arranging for provisions for the camp.
It is clear Robert Ket was the right man for a leader.[100] The
people trusted him and obeyed his orders. Cod and two other
reputable citizens of Norwich--Aldrich, an alderman, and Watson, a
preacher--attended the camp daily, and along with Ket and his brother
William sat under a great tree, known as the Oak of Reformation, and
administered justice. The 20,000 hungry, disinherited men carried out
in as orderly way as they could the instructions they received.
Ket’s first business was to send to the king a plain statement of
“Requests and Demands.” He knew what was wanted for rural England, and
refused to admit that his purpose was disloyal or that his conduct was
rebellion.
The “Requests” were twenty-nine, and they contained a full statement
of the grievances of the country folk. The chief requests were for the
stoppage of enclosures, the enactment of fair rents, the restoration
of common fishing rights in sea and river, the appointment of resident
clergymen in every parish to preach and instruct the children, and
the free election or official appointment of local “commissioners”
for the enforcement of the laws. One significant prayer was “that all
bond men may be made free, for God made all free with His precious
bloodshedding.”
This document, which was signed by Ket, Cod and Aldrich,[101] was
answered by the arrival of a herald from the king with a promise that
parliament should meet in October to consider their complaints, and
that something should be done to redress their grievances, if in the
meantime they would quietly disperse to their homes.
All this was too vague and uncertain for Ket. Not till some definite
step was taken by king or parliament to end the present distress was
he willing to lay down his arms and bid his followers disperse. He had
put his hand to the plough, and no turning back was possible while the
evils he had risen against flourished unchecked.
So Ket put his house in order on Mousehold Heath. The Oak of
Reformation was boarded over “with rafters,” and to this place
of summary justice landowners were brought and tried for making
enclosures. Two men were chosen by the commons from every hundred to
assist in the work of administration, and all the people were strictly
admonished “to beware of robbing, spoiling and other evil demeanours.”
As the army had to be victualled, Ket sent out men armed with his
official warrant requiring the country houses to provide cattle and
corn, “so that no violence or injury be done to any honest or poor
man,” and this requisition brought in guns, gunpowder and money, in
addition to “all kinds of victual.” The smaller farmers sent their
contributions “with much private good will,” while on the landowners a
great fear had fallen, and it seemed that the day of their might was
passed.
A royal messenger bearing commissions of the peace to various country
gentlemen falling into the hands of Ket, he was at once deprived of
these documents and sent on his way. Ket filled in the names of men who
had joined the rising on these commissions, and these new magistrates
gave assistance in maintaining order.
Cod and Aldrich were shocked at the arrest of landowners.
“Notwithstanding were divers gentlemen taken and brought to prison,
some in Norwich Prison, some in Norwich Castle and some in Surrey
Place.”--St. Leonard’s Hill.
In every case the lives of the landowners were spared. Stern and
unmoved by respect of persons was Robert Ket, but there was no taint
of cruelty, meanness or bloodthirstiness in his rule. It was not his
purpose to raise civil war or leave a festering sore of hatred by
putting his neighbours to death. To destroy the power of the landlords
and ensure the right of an evicted people to live on the land was the
aim of the Norfolk Rising.
At the end of the first week relations became strained between Cod and
the army on Mousehold.
It was the custom to have prayers every day under the Oak, and Dr.
Conyers, vicar of St. Martin’s, Norwich, acted as chaplain. “Grave
persons and good divines” would come out from the city and preach under
the Oak, and on one occasion Dr. Matthew Parker, a Norwich man, who
had been chaplain to Anne Boleyn, and who was to become Archbishop of
Canterbury under Elizabeth, filled the pulpit. Parker’s sermon, full of
rebukes on the rising and praise of Edward VI., was so obnoxious, for
“he touched them for their living so near that they went near to touch
him for his life,” that Conyers only prevented a riot by striking up
the “Te Deum” in English, and during the singing Parker withdrew “to
sing his part at home.”
Matthew Parker was a great man in Norwich (his brother Thomas
became mayor), and the incivility he had received at Mousehold gave
great offence. Cod and the aldermen sent off Leonard Sutherton, a
respectable burgess, to report to the king’s council the doings in
Norfolk, and Sutherton brought back from London a royal herald, who
went out to Mousehold and promised the king’s pardon to all that would
depart quietly to their homes.
The people cheered and shouted “God save the king’s majesty,” but to
Ket this talk of pardon was altogether beside the mark. With some
dignity he informed the herald that “kings and princes are wont to
pardon wicked persons, not innocent and just men,” and added, “I trust
I have done nothing but what belongs to the duty of a true subject.”
The herald then called on John Petibone, the sword-bearer of Norwich,
who with other civic notables was standing by, to arrest Robert Ket.
But the thing was impossible. Ket had 20,000 men at his back, and the
sword-bearer was supported by half-a-dozen elderly members of the town
council. All that could be done was to escort the herald into the city,
leaving Ket to his own devices.
There was no more peace between the camp at Mousehold and the city of
Norwich after this. Hitherto Mayor Cod had retained the keys of the
city, and his authority had been respected by Ket. At the same time
Ket’s men had gone freely to and fro throughout the city without let
or hindrance. Now all was changed. First the landowners were being
arrested and despoiled, then the learned doctor, Matthew Parker (was he
not master of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge?) had been interrupted
and hooted, and now a king’s herald was contemned! Cod ordered the city
gates to be made fast, commanded Ket’s prisoners to be released, and
placed the city’s ordnance in the meadows by the river. This amounted
to a declaration of war, and Ket replied by bringing up his guns.
The night of July 21st was spent “in fearful shot on both sides,” but
little injury was done. For Ket’s guns brought “more fear than hurt to
the city,” and “the city ordnance did not much annoy the enemy.”
In the morning Ket sought to renew peace by asking permission for the
transport of victuals through the city, “as the custom was of late,”
and warning the mayor that refusal would provoke fire and sword.
Cod refused permission, and Ket opened fire on the city gates. But “for
lack of powder and want of skill in the gunners the ordnance was spent
to small and little purpose.” A desperate encounter followed, with
bows and arrows for the chief weapons of offence. Boys from Mousehold,
“naked and unarmed, would pluck the arrows from their bodies and hand
them to the rebels to fire at the city.” At Bishopsgate a number of men
swam the river and forced their way into the city, and on the night of
July 22nd Norwich was in the hands of Robert Ket.
No reprisals followed. The herald made a last attempt to induce
the insurgents to disperse by promising pardons, and was greeted
derisively. “Depart with a plague on thee!” they cried. “To the devil
with these idle promises. We shall only be oppressed afterwards.”
Forthwith the herald did depart, with eight pounds of gold in his
pocket from the mayor.
Ket retired to Mousehold, the passage through the city having been
secured, and Cod accompanied him, leaving a deputy, Augustine Steward,
who lived in the big house in Tombland, opposite Erfingham Gate, to act
as mayor.
Judgment went on as before under the Oak of Reformation, and people
clamoured for the landowners to be hanged. “So hated at this time
was the name of worship or gentleman, that the basest of the people,
burning with more than hostile hatred, desired to extinguish, and
utterly cut off, not only the gentry themselves, but if it were
possible, all the offspring and hope of them.” (Nevylle.)
But Ket was as strong in his mercy as in his resistance to the land
enclosers. The gentry were imprisoned, and made to pay tribute:
their fences were pulled down, but their lives were spared, and no
hurt befell them. In the city Steward, no friend to Ket, was left
undisturbed in authority.
At the end of July came William Parr, Marquis of Northampton, with
1,500 soldiers, mostly Italian mercenaries, and a number of country
squires with their retainers, to put down the rising. Steward at
once admitted him to the city; but Northampton--Henry VIII.’s
brother-in-law--was neither a soldier nor statesman, and after two
days’ hard fighting he fled from Norwich, utterly defeated.
Ket’s men were badly armed, but they had numbers on their side, and
they fought for freedom and for very life. They swam the river, as
before, and forced an entrance. “Half dead, drowned in their own and
other men’s blood, they would not give over; but till the last gasp,
when their hands could scarce hold their weapons, would strike at their
adversaries.”
Lord Sheffield fell in the fight on August 1st, killed by a stalwart
rebel--one Fulke, a butcher and carpenter by trade--and some hundred of
Ket’s men lay dead. The city suffered. Several houses and city gates
were fired, and only a heavy rain prevented the flames from spreading.
(This same rain drove many of the rebels to take refuge in the
cathedral, much to the annoyance of the dean and chapter.)
And now for three weeks Ket had to take charge of Norwich as well as
of Mousehold camp, for it was impossible to trust Steward. Many of the
wealthier townsmen hastened away to Cambridge and London, leaving their
wives and families behind. Trade was at an end.
The state of the city began to be in most miserable case, so
that all men looked for utter destruction, both of life and
goods. Then the remnant that feared God, seeing the plague
thus of sorrow increasing, fell to prayer and holy life, and
wished but to see the day that after they might talk thereover,
looking never to recover help again, nor to see their city
prosper.
The women resorted twice a day to prayer, and the servants
(except what must needs stay at home) did the same. When Ket’s
ambassadors were sent to any private house they were fain
to bake or brew or do any work for the camp, else they were
carried as traitors to the Oak. As for trading, there was none
in the city, people being forced to hide up their choicest
goods, and happy were they that had the faithfullest servants.
They that did keep open their shops were robbed and spoiled,
and their goods were measured by the arm’s length and dispersed
among the rebels; their children they set away for fear of
fire. I, the writer (who was then above twenty-two years of
age, and an eye-witness) was present after prayer during this
dolorous state, when people met and bewailed the miserable
state they were in. (Sutherton.)
But for all their misery the tradesmen of Norwich were in no fear for
their lives. The city had done its best to thwart the rising, but Ket
treated it generously, allowing neither pillage nor bloodshed--though
he did not scruple to take what goods were necessary for his army.[102]
It was beyond the power of man to prevent all thieving during those
first few weeks of August, for the civic magistracy was gone, and Ket
had large responsibilities on his hands.
The hope that the rising would become general turned to disappointment
in the weeks that passed after the flight of Northampton. In Suffolk
a number of men rose at Ket’s call, and made an unsuccessful attempt
to take Yarmouth. A small camp set up at Rising Chase was dispersed,
but for a fortnight the peasants gathered at Watton, and stopped the
passages of the river at Thetford and Brandon Ferry. For want of
leadership they then came on to Mousehold. At Hingham a rising was
put down by Sir Edmund Knyvett. And while Ket waited, hoping against
hope for better news, the fugitive citizens from Norwich had already
persuaded Somerset to send down an army to crush the revolt.
On August 21st the Earl of Warwick, with 14,000 troops, reached
Cambridge, and three days later was at Norwich.
Warwick, Henry VIII.’s high chamberlain, the son of Dudley, Henry
VII.’s minister, was a man of war and resolution. Sent down to suppress
the rising he did his work, but not till he had tried an appeal to the
peasants to disperse without further trouble.
Halting outside the city, Warwick sent a herald to proclaim pardon to
all who should now return to their homes, and, as before, the people
shouted, “God save King Edward!” Ket himself talked with the herald on
the high ground near Bishop’s Gate.
Negotiations ended abruptly. Some ill-mannered boy gave an indecent
and offensive salute to the herald, and was shot dead by an arrow from
the herald’s escort. At once the cry of “treachery” was raised by the
people, and all talk of peace was at an end. While the herald tried
to persuade Ket to come to the Earl of Warwick under a flag of truce,
the rebels gathered round their leader and besought him not to forsake
them. To Ket there could be sure reliance on royal promises of pardon,
and no surrender of the charge he had undertaken. His reply to the
herald was to retire on Mousehold and prepare for battle.
Warwick at once entered the city, and began the business of
pacification by promptly hanging sixty men in the Market Place,
by Norwich Castle, “without hearing the cause”; and by issuing a
proclamation that all who were out of doors would receive similar
treatment. Then came a mishap, for the greater part of Warwick’s
artillery fell into Ket’s hands. The drivers of the gun-carriages,
entering the city after the soldiers, by St. Bennet’s Gate on the west,
and ignorant of the way, actually passed out at Bishop’s Gate on the
east on the very road towards Mousehold, and were quickly taken. Ket
had now the advantage in ordnance, and there was fighting in the city
all Sunday, August 25th. So uncertain was the issue that the burgesses
feared Warwick would suffer Northampton’s fate, and prayed him to
depart without further loss. But Warwick, waiting for reinforcements,
and knowing that 1,400 German mercenaries were close at hand, was not
the man to beat an ignominious retreat.
The hireling “lanznechts” arrived next day, and on Tuesday, August
27th, came the fatal battle.
Instead of remaining at Mousehold, where a strong resistance might have
been made, the rebels decided to march out boldly from their camp and
meet the king’s army in the open country that lay between Mousehold
Heath and the city. An old song was recalled, which, it seemed,
foretold victory in such a case:
The country gnoffes (churls), Hob, Dick, and Rick,
With clubs and clouted shoon,
Shall fill the vale
Of Dussindale
With slaughtered bodies soon.
But the country churls were to be the slaughtered, and not the
slaughterers.
Warwick marched out by the north-east gate of St. Martin-at-the-Oak,
and for the last time a herald promised pardon to all who would
surrender. But the hangings in the market place had destroyed all
confidence in such proclamations, and the answer to the herald was that
they “perceived this pardon to be nothing else but a cask full of ropes
and halters.”
Ket’s judgment failed him utterly on that last day of the rising. On
the strength of an irrelevant old song he allowed his army to go to its
doom unchecked, and at the very time when good generalship was wanted
above all other things, Robert Ket seems to have lost his nerve, and to
have been struck by some paralysis of the will, as though conscious of
impending ruin.
The peasants poured down into the valley, and into the meadows beyond
Magdalen and Pockthorp Gates, and fought with desperate courage,
but they were simply cut to pieces by the professional soldiery. At
four o’clock in the afternoon it was all over, the defeat utter and
complete, and Robert Ket and his brother were in flight.
The remains of the rebel army laid down their arms, when Warwick
himself offered pardon in the king’s name to those who would surrender.
The rising was at an end. The foreign mercenaries of the crown had
triumphed over English peasants. Robert Ket was taken the same night
at Swannington, eight miles north of Norwich. He had ridden away from
the battle when the field was lost, but horse and rider were too tired
to proceed further. Taking refuge in a barn, he was recognized by some
men unloading a wagon of corn and seized. The farmer’s wife “rated him
for his conduct, but he only prayed her to be quiet, and to give him
meat.” That same night William Ket was taken, and the two brothers were
delivered to the lord lieutenant of the county, and by him carried to
London to be tried for their lives.
At Mousehold Warwick proved the worth of the pardons he had given
by first having nine of the bravest of the peasants hanged, drawn,
and quartered under the Oak of Reformation, and distributing their
bodies in the city; and then by hanging 300 prisoners on trees, and
then forty-nine more at the Market Cross in Norwich. The country
gentlemen of Norfolk, backed by their wealthier citizens, called for
more executions, till Warwick turned with disgust from the vindictive
clamour of these bloodthirsty civilians, and pointed out in impatient
reproof that no one would be left “to plough and harrow over the lands”
if all the peasants were massacred.
And now the king’s authority having been re-established, a public
service of thanksgiving was held in the church of St. Peter, Mancroft,
and August 27th was ordered to be observed henceforth as “Thanksgiving
Day” in Norwich. (This was done by prayers and sermon until 1667.
In the grammar school, during Elizabeth’s reign, an account of the
rising--_De Furoribus Norfolciensum_, written in Latin by Nevylle, and
violently anti-popular in expression--was ordered to be used as a text
book in place of the usual classics, and was so used for some years.)
On September 7th Warwick returned to London.[103] In November Robert
and William Ket, after lying in the Tower for two months, were brought
to trial. They offered no defence for what they had done: for having
borne arms without the king’s permission, and for having striven to
stop the robbery and oppression of the peasant without the authority of
king and parliament.
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_.
[Illustration: SIR JOHN ELIOT
(_From a Steel Engraving by William Holl._)]
ELIOT, HAMPDEN, PYM, AND THE SUPREMACY OF THE COMMONS.
1625–1643
John Eliot, John Hampden, John Pym--by the work of these men comes the
supremacy of the House of Commons in the government of England.
All three are country gentlemen of good estate, of high principle
and of some learning.[105] They are men of religious convictions, of
courage and resolution, and of blameless personal character. Two of
them--Eliot and Hampden--are content to die for the cause of good
government.
The strong rule of Elizabeth left a difficult legacy of government to
James I. The despotism of the queen had been forgiven in the success
of her State policy; and if she had no high opinion of parliament,
Elizabeth had ministers who fairly represented the mind of the English
middle class. Elizabeth’s absolutism in Church and State was the direct
following of Henry VIII., and only at the very close of her reign was
it threatened by the discontent of parliament. With a shrewd instinct
for popularity Elizabeth at once yielded. Like her father, she saw the
importance of retaining parliament on the side of the crown and making
it the instrument of the royal will. There was no idea in the Tudor
mind of parliament sharing the government with the crown. The business
of the House of Commons of Elizabeth was to express its opinion and
then decree the proposals of the crown. “Liberty of speech was granted
in respect of the aye or no, but not that everybody should speak what
he listed.” (1592.)
In religion Elizabeth had done her worst to exterminate the Roman
Catholic faith, and by the fierceness of her persecution had kindled
undying enthusiasm for the old beliefs and worship. But forty years
of repression did their work, and a generation arose which only
knew Catholicism as the faith of a proscribed and unpatriotic sect,
who denied the absolute sovereignty of the crown and had another
sovereign at Rome--the religion of Spain--popery, in short: a
faith worse than Mahomedanism or heathenism--the scarlet woman of
the Apocalypse--according to the fierce Puritan expounders of the
Bible, and not to be counted as Christianity. That this very Roman
Catholicism--so hateful because the penal laws kept it hidden and
unknown, and because it was the religion of Spain, then the national
enemy--had been the religion of all England for centuries, and that
under it the earliest charters of public liberty had been wrung
from the crown, and the principle of a representative parliament
established, were facts uncontemplated.
But Elizabeth, while persecuting Roman Catholics, had left in the Book
of Common Prayer of the Church of England a sanction for ceremonial
and for episcopal ordination, and a body of doctrine which were to be
interpreted under the Stuarts by certain Anglican divines as witnesses
to Catholicism. Such interpretation was to be found in Elizabeth’s
reign as a pious opinion. With Laud it was an active principle, and
it brought him to the scaffold. The Elizabethan bishops in the main
were thoroughly Protestant, the queen was the head of the Church of
England, and the ritual of the Church prescribed by her was reduced to
a simplicity that average Protestants could accept.
If Elizabeth burnt anabaptists and hanged other nonconformists, her
excuse was that the Church of England was sufficiently Protestant
to include all well-affected persons. The extreme Puritans whom she
persecuted had this in common with the Roman Catholics, that neither
accepted the absolute supremacy of the crown, and the best Puritan
teaching in England, even when it counselled conformity to the
Established Church, was creating a mind and temper that only found
expression in the Commonwealth.
James I. came to the throne in 1603 prepared to carry on the Tudor
absolutism. He failed because he had neither Elizabeth’s ministers nor
her knowledge of the English country landowners. James never realised
that Spain was the popular enemy, that a discontent had suddenly grown
up in parliament in the last years of Elizabeth’s reign, and that the
English landowners--in many cases from their inherited possession of
the old Church lands--were generally bitterly hostile to the Roman
Catholic religion. James was tolerant in religion, and not inclined to
press Elizabeth’s penal laws against Roman Catholics, and this very
toleration brought him under the dislike of the country party. He
thought he could disregard the opinion of parliament and he found that
while a House of Commons submitted to a despotism when the country was
governed by a strong queen, it would not put up with the follies and
extravagance of the Duke of Buckingham.
James died before the strength of the growing movement for
parliamentary government was seen. Charles who was no more tyrannical
than his father, but even more blind to the signs of the times, fell
before that parliamentary movement--a movement which outraged all
the traditions of Tudor government--and with his fall brought down
the throne, the House of Lords, and the Established Church. By his
inability to understand the House of Commons, by his support of the
Anglican movement towards Catholicism in the Church of England, and
by the mistakes of his ministers, Charles ripened the desire for
constitutional monarchy till the desire was irresistible.
John Eliot gave forcible utterance to this desire, and died in prison
for his speech. John Pym carried on the work till the sword of civil
war was drawn. John Hampden, “the noblest type of parliamentary
opposition,” was content to back Pym as he had earlier backed Eliot,
and to die on Chalgrove Field. Brought up to regard as an alien creed
the old belief in papal supremacy in religion, unable to accept the new
doctrine of the Church of England that the king was supreme by divine
right (a doctrine begotten by the Tudors and dying with the Stuarts),
Eliot, Hampden, and Pym were all of the same Puritan type which found
its authority in the individual conscience.
Eliot was less afflicted than his colleagues by the theological
Protestantism of the age.[106] First and last he was the
straightforward country gentleman, with exalted views on the sacred
responsibility of civil government, and a high standard of personal
honour. For Eliot there was no nobler sphere of work for an Englishman
than the House of Commons, and his example has not been without
followers. Seneca and Cicero are on his lips, as the later Puritans
had the Bible on theirs, and his eloquence marks the beginning of
parliamentary oratory. With a strong and clear view of constitutional
government, Eliot was no republican; he held to the notion that the
king must depend on the decisions of parliament. Time was to show that
this notion, in the event of a collision between king and parliament,
was to make parliament the predominant partner.
On his first entry into the House of Commons as member for St. Germans,
in 1614, Eliot was the friend of Buckingham--whom he had met as a youth
abroad--and on Buckingham’s rise to the lord high admiralship Eliot was
knighted and became vice-admiral of Devon.
The fidelity of his service to the State as vice-admiral brought an
unpleasant experience of the will of princes. Grappling with the
scourge of piracy which afflicted the seaports and shipping trade
of the West of England, Eliot accomplished the arrest of Nutt, a
notorious sea-robber. But Nutt had friends in high places, and Eliot
found himself lodged in the Marshalsea prison over the business. He was
released on Buckingham’s return from the continent, for the charges
were absurd, and in 1624 returned to the House of Commons as member for
Newport. Two years later Eliot was estranged from Buckingham--convinced
that the favourite of the king was an evil counsellor--and had become
the recognized leader of the House of Commons. Once assured in his
mind that Buckingham was responsible for the policy of the king,
Eliot became his implacable opponent. For the policy of the crown in
not making war upon Spain, in relaxing the penal laws against Roman
Catholics, and for the mismanagement of the war on the continent in
support of the Protestants, Eliot held Buckingham responsible. In
answer to the demand of Charles for money in 1626, Eliot insisted
that an inquiry into past disasters should precede supply, and that
Buckingham should be impeached. Not the king but his minister is to
blame, Eliot maintained, for all that was wrong in the State, and
this very speech strikes the note of the campaign that was beginning.
Buckingham was not responsible to Charles alone, in the eyes of Eliot
and his friends, but also to parliament.[107]
Charles, quite unable to fathom the depth of the parliamentary
discontent, or to note the strength of the current against absolutism,
fell back upon the old Tudor doctrine of sovereignty, the doctrine of
the high Anglican party in the Church of England, that the king was
responsible for his acts to God alone. “Parliaments are altogether in
my calling,” he replies to the House of Commons.
Only twenty-five years had passed since Bacon had declared, “the Queen
hath both enlarging and restraining power: she may set at liberty
things restrained by Statute, and may restrain things which be at
liberty.” Twenty-three years more were to see monarchy abolished and
the king beheaded. Eliot, standing midway between Bacon and Bradshaw,
cleaves to the theory of constitutional government and persists in the
impeachment of a minister in whom parliament had no confidence.
The prologue of impeachment declared in the plainest language the
responsibility of the king’s ministers to parliament, and the
responsibility of parliament to the nation: “The laws of England
have taught us that kings cannot command ill or unlawful things, and
whatsoever ill event succeed, the executioners of such designs must
answer for them.”
And now the issue was fairly set, and the battle begun between Charles
and the House of Commons. In that year, 1626, no man in England could
foretell the result.
Charles, ill-advised to the end, believed he could overawe the Commons
by a display of might, and was beaten. Twice he had Eliot arrested
before the final imprisonment which ended Eliot’s life.
The loyalty of the House of Commons to its leader compelled Charles
to release Eliot, after sending him to the Tower for his attack on
Buckingham. Then dissolving parliament in June, 1626, and falling back
on a forced loan, the king was met by wide refusals, and Eliot, with
Hampden and others, suffered imprisonment over this. Eliot was also
deprived of his vice-admiralship and struck off the roll of justices of
the peace.
Driven to call a parliament for the third time in 1628, the king was
faced by a stronger opposition than ever.
Eliot, now member for Cornwall, throughout the session continued the
attack on arbitrary taxation, and with the lawyers Seldon and Coke
carried the Petition of Right to stop the illegal imprisonments, the
enforced billeting of soldiers, and forced loans. Buckingham, slain
at Portsmouth, no longer troubled the commonwealth; but Wentworth,
ambitious to use his powers in the service of the government, had left
the popular side for the king; while Laud, and Weston, the chancellor
of the exchequer, were daily preaching to Charles the divine right of
kings and to his subjects the duty of passive obedience.
The following year both Eliot and Pym attacked the ecclesiastical
policy of Laud. To them the established religion of England, settled
on the Protestant basis by Elizabeth, was being definitely changed
in a Catholic direction without the sanction of parliament, and in
the very teeth of the opposition of the House of Commons. High-church
clergymen, like Montague and Mainwaring, holding to the full a Catholic
interpretation of the Book of Common Prayer, were only censured by the
House of Commons to be promoted by the crown. Laud preaching a royal
supremacy undreamt of by the great archbishops before Henry VIII.,
combined with it a doctrine of ecclesiastical independence, owning no
allegiance to Rome, equally novel.
Eliot, stoical in his beliefs, and Pym, whose Calvinism was tempered
by common sense, regarded with horror the revival in the Church of
England of Catholic doctrines concerning the sacraments and the
priesthood. They had done what they could to check any indulgence to
Roman Catholics in England, and it was monstrous to them that the
Church of England, whose formularies and ritual had been defined by
parliament for the maintenance of Protestantism, should be expanded to
reintroduce doctrines and practices essentially Catholic. But for the
time the House of Commons was powerless in the matter, and only sixteen
years later was Laud to expiate on the scaffold his Anglo-Catholicism,
dying a veritable martyr for the high Anglican doctrine. “None have
gone about to break parliaments but in the end parliaments have broken
them,” declared Eliot on March 2nd, 1629, and Laud, no less than
Charles and Wentworth, was to prove the truth of the warning.
If parliament could do nothing in that year, 1629, to stop Laud’s
policy, it could at least defend the privileges of its members. The
goods of John Rolle, M.P., had been seized by the king’s officers
because their owner had refused to pay tonnage and poundage on demand,
and at once Eliot was up in arms in defence of the privileges of his
fellow member, whose liberties had been interfered with.
Pym was for a wider view of the matter--objecting to the question
being narrowed down to a breach of privilege. “The liberties of this
House,” he argued, “are inferior to the liberties of this kingdom. To
determine the privilege of this House is but a mean matter, and the
main end is to establish possession of the subjects, and to take off
the commission and records and orders that are against us.” With Pym it
was not Rolle, the member, who had been ill-used, but Rolle the British
subject, and it was for the liberties of the subject he strove, holding
the freedom of parliament as but a means to that end.
Eliot, a House of Commons man, through and through, saw in the welfare
of parliament the welfare of the nation, and stuck to his point,
carrying the House with him, that the privileges of a member extended
to his goods. To this Charles sent word that what had been done had
been done by his authority. The only question now was, how long would
it be before the king dissolved parliament.
On the second of March, when the House met, the speaker’s first
word was that the king had ordered an adjournment till the tenth,
and that no business could be transacted. Eliot insisted on moving
his resolutions, and the speaker was held down in his chair. Then
the serjeant-at-arms attempted to remove the mace, and was promptly
stopped, while the key of the House was turned from within.
Eliot moved his declaration, beginning with the famous words: “By the
ancient laws and liberties of England, it is the known birthright and
inheritance of the subject, that no tax, tallage, or other charge shall
be levied or imposed but by common consent in England; and that the
subsidies of tonnage and poundage are no way due or payable but by a
free gift and special act of parliament.”
The resolutions were carried with loud shouts of assent, two members
guarding the speaker, and the door was flung open; the sitting was over.
A royal proclamation for dissolving parliament followed on the fourth
of March, and Eliot, with eight other members, was summoned to appear
before the Privy Council.
From the hour of that summons John Eliot’s liberty was over, and not
for eleven years was England to have another parliament.
For the fourth time Eliot was a prisoner. He declined altogether to
give an account of what he had said in parliament, or to acknowledge
any right of interference with the proceedings in parliament. To the
crown lawyers his reply was to stand on the privileges of a member of
the House of Commons. “I refuse to answer,” he said, “because I hold
that it is against the privilege of parliament to speak of anything
which is done in the House.” He insisted that he was accountable to
the House alone, and that no other power existed with a constitutional
right to inquire into his conduct there.
At the end of October Eliot was removed from the Tower to the
Marshalsea, and then in January, 1630, he was charged in the King’s
Bench with two other members, Holles and Valentine, with conspiring to
resist the king’s lawful order, to calumniate ministers of the crown,
and to assault the speaker. Again Eliot refused to acknowledge the
jurisdiction. He was fined £2,000, and sent back to the Tower.
To the last Eliot’s loyalty to the House of Commons remained unshaken.
He had but to acknowledge that he had done wrong, to admit that he had
offended, and the prison doors would have opened to him. But to make
this acknowledgment was to deny the sacred liberty of parliament,
to admit wrong was to betray the House of Commons. To John Eliot the
welfare of the House of Commons was a national cause--dearer than life.
To betray its honour was to betray the State. The loyalty of John Eliot
to the House of Commons was interwoven with his devotion to the State,
but it was something England had never seen before, and never saw
again. “He learned to believe, as no other man believed before or after
him, in the representatives of the nation.” (Gardiner.)
The character and temperament of Eliot must be taken into account
in understanding this passionate belief in the House of Commons. It
was not as a great thinker but as a great orator he had risen to the
leadership of the House of Commons. He saw in his mind, as no other man
saw at the time, a perfectly balanced constitution of king, lords, and
commons. In parliament was the best wisdom of the country placed at the
service of the crown. In the crown was the appointed ruler who, with
his ministers, had but to come to parliament for advice and counsel.
So it seemed to John Eliot; and single-minded himself, he could not
realise that in the House of Commons were plenty of men of but passing
honesty, and that Charles and Laud and Wentworth were fundamentally
opposed to his views of constitutional government, and bitterly hostile
to the growing powers of the commons.[108]
[Illustration: JOHN PYM
(_From an Engraving by Jacob Houbraken._)]
Months passed, and John Eliot’s health gave way in the confinement in
the Tower, but his steadfastness was unchanged. He corresponded with
his friend John Hampden, wrote his treatise on the _Monarchy of Man_,
and calmly awaited his end. An application on behalf of his friends
and his son for Eliot’s release was made in October, 1622, on the
ground that “the doctors were of opinion he could never recover of his
consumption until such time as he might breathe in purer air.” The
reply of Chief Justice Richardson was “that, although Sir John were
brought low in body, yet was he as high and lofty in mind as ever; for
he would neither submit to the king nor to the justice of that court.”
On November 27th, 1632, the spirit of John Eliot, unbroken by
captivity, passed from the body his gaolers had deprived of life. A
last appeal from his son to the king for the removal of his father’s
body into Cornwall, there to lie with those of his ancestors at Port
Eliot, received the curt refusal, “Let Sir John Eliot’s body be buried
in the church of the parish where he died.” And so he was buried in the
Tower, and no stone marks the spot where he lies.
John Eliot was but forty-two when he laid down his life for the
principle of parliamentary government.
Any satisfaction that might have been felt by Charles and Laud at the
death of the foremost antagonist to their policy of absolutism was
fleeting. For if Eliot was dead, the cause he had championed with such
conspicuous sincerity and courage was alive, and John Hampden and John
Pym were at hand to carry on the fight till Cromwell and his Ironsides
were ready to end the battle.
Charles was determined that, until the commons should be more
submissive, he would call no parliament, but would govern through his
ministers alone. The difficulty was to find money.
In 1634 London and the seaports were persuaded to furnish supplies
for ships on the pretext that piracy must be prevented. A year later
and the demand was extended to the inland counties, and John Hampden,
taking his stand on the Petition of Right which Charles had granted
in 1628, declined to pay. Ten out of twelve of the king’s judges had
decided that ship-money might be enforced if the kingdom appeared to
be in danger, but against this declared legality there was the decree
of parliament forbidding forced loans or taxes without parliamentary
sanction.
On this resistance of the ship-money Hampden’s fame has been chiefly
built up. The amount was small--only a matter of some twenty
shillings--the issue was of a first importance. It was clear to Hampden
that if the king could raise money by such methods, what need would
there be in the royal mind for the calling of parliament at all? The
question was forced upon him: Was parliament an essential part of the
constitution? The judges had declared ship-money was legal, other
taxation and forced loans could easily find justification on the
judicial bench, and thus the crown obtain its revenue, and England
ruled without any let or hindrance from its citizens. To admit the
position was to see the work of centuries undone, and the old contest
in the land for liberties in return for taxes abandoned.
Hampden’s refusal to pay ship-money was a declaration for parliamentary
government. No more a republican than Eliot or Pym, Hampden could see
that either crown or parliament must be supreme in the affairs of
the nation.[109] The constitution was not to be balanced so evenly
as Eliot had believed. Eliot himself had been deprived of life for
maintaining, not the supremacy but the liberty of parliament. For John
Hampden the evils of royal supremacy were obvious and present: misrule,
the restoration of a religion banished by authority of crown and
parliament, and disliked and feared by the majority of serious-minded
people in the country, and the imprisonment of all who claimed the old
freedom of parliament.
The case was decided against him in the law courts, but five of the
twelve judges supported Hampden’s contention that the resistance to
payment was valid, and the arguments for his defence were published
far and wide. “The judgment proved of more advantage and credit to the
gentleman condemned than to the king’s service.”[110]
Three years later, and Charles was forced to summon parliament to get
money for his war in Scotland--the “Bishop’s War,” perhaps the most
hopeless of all his ventures.
Parliament met in April, and its temper was so unfavourable to the
desires of the king, for the forcible conversion of the Scots to
episcopacy, that it was dissolved in three weeks. John Pym was notable
in that “Short Parliament” as the spokesman of the aggrieved country
party, and the commons decided that the grievances of the nation
must be considered before supplies were voted. The Scotch war was
intolerable to Pym and Hampden. They had no objection to episcopacy as
long as bishops were men of Protestant convictions. It was Laud the
“Anglo-Catholic,” Laud the preacher of the divine right of kings, not
Laud the Archbishop of Canterbury, whom they detested, and they had no
relish for the expenditure of English life and treasure in the forcing
of Laudian doctrine on Protestant Scotland.
In the long eleven years of silence from the utterance of parliament
things had been going steadily from bad to worse in England, Pym
made out. Naturally conservative in mind, seeing in the constitution
of king and parliament an admirable instrument of government, and
in the Established Church of England an excellent expression of the
Protestant religion, Pym had found that with parliament suspended the
Protestantism of the Established Church had been steadily undermined by
Laud’s policy, and the revival of some estranged Catholic doctrines and
practices had proceeded apace. Without parliament there was no security
for national well-being. “Powers of parliament are to the body politic
as rational faculties of the soul to man,” he declares in April, 1640.
Pym had entered the House of Commons with Eliot in 1614, and had
been imprisoned in that year for his boldness. In 1620 he had been
one of the “twelve ambassadors” to James I., for whom that king had
ordered chairs to be set in Whitehall. With Eliot and Hampden he
had pressed for Buckingham’s impeachment and for the Petition of
Right. Now in 1640, John Pym, in his fifty-sixth year, was about to
become the accredited leader of the parliamentary party, to be called
“King Pym” by his enemies at the court, and to pass away when the
long constitutional struggle was being settled on the field of civil
war. Unimaginative, and averse from new ideas, Pym had a quite clear
perception of the business of the House of Commons, and of the fitting
relations of king and parliament. The crown, the lords, the commons
were all recognized and necessary elements in the constitution, but
their importance was not equal. The collective assembly of parliament
had prevailed over the crown more than once; to Pym, the Laudian
“divine right” was a novelty, and nonsense at that. Parliament could do
much of its work with or without royal approval, and of the two Houses,
if the Lords were unwilling to work with the lower House, the Commons
could “save the kingdom alone.”
In the autumn Charles was driven again to appeal to parliament, and
in November, 1640, the “Long Parliament” met, only to be dissolved
thirteen years later by the arms of Cromwell. To the eleven years
of “personal government” by Charles succeed thirteen years of
parliamentary government, and then the House of Commons, now too
enfeebled to endure, itself goes down before a military dictatorship.
Pym anticipated the coming struggle by riding over England on the eve
of the elections to the Long Parliament and urging the electors to
return men to the House of Commons resolute and alive to the crisis.
The response was unmistakable. Parliament assembled to find some remedy
for the distresses of the country before voting any money for the
purposes of the crown. Enormous numbers of petitions were presented,
and the House of Commons appointed its committees to attend to and
report on the complaints.[111]
Before the year closed the House of Commons had struck at the power of
Laud and Wentworth (now the Earl of Strafford), and the two ministers
lay in prison impeached for high treason. Windebank, Charles’s
secretary of state, and Finch, the chancellor, were already fled over
seas.
It was Pym who went to the bar of the House of Lords to summon
Strafford to surrender, and it was Pym who opened the charge of
impeachment the following March. As in Eliot’s time, Hampden is content
to be overshadowed by his friend, though his was the greater influence
in the House.
Clarendon has given us his view of Hampden at the opening of the Long
Parliament:
When this parliament began the eyes of all men were fixed upon
him, as their _patriae pater_, and the pilot that must steer
the vessel through the tempests and rocks which threatened it.
I am persuaded his power and interest at that time were greater
to do good or hurt than any man’s in the kingdom, or than any
man of his rank hath had in any time; for his reputation of
honesty was universal, and his affections seemed so publicly
guided, that no corrupt or private ends could bias them.
Baxter, it may be recalled, had written in the _Saints’ Rest_ that
one of the pleasures which he hoped to enjoy in heaven was the society
of John Hampden. The name of Hampden was blotted out in the copies
published after the Restoration. “But,” wrote Baxter, “I must tell
the reader that I did blot it out, not as changing my opinion of the
person.”
The work of Pym and Hampden is conspicuous at the beginning of the Long
Parliament. The Star Chamber and High Commission Courts are abolished.
Ship-money and all enforced taxation unauthorised by parliament are
declared illegal. Oliver Cromwell’s motion for annual parliaments is
amended into an act for triennial parliaments to be called with or
without royal summons. Strafford--the only strong minister Charles
had--perished on Tower Hill in May, both Pym and Hampden supporting
impeachment instead of attainder, and voting for the fallen minister
to be allowed the use of counsel at his trial. That Strafford was a
criminal and a traitor ready to use his Irish army for the suppression
of the English parliament Pym had no doubt.
Still Charles would not admit the position lost, and still struggled
to govern, not through parliament, but by personal rule. The death of
Strafford, though approved by all supporters of the House of Commons,
rallied the king’s friends. The House of Lords was no longer quite at
one with the Commons in the contest. In the House of Commons a royalist
party emerges to oppose Pym, and the beginning of party government
is seen. Overtures are made by Pym to the queen--to be disregarded,
of course; though the tide is setting towards revolution, yet Pym
and Hampden are far from revolutionaries. They are willing to end
the political power of the bishops by turning them out of the House
of Lords, but have only moderate sympathy with the root-and-branch
Puritans who would abolish episcopacy.
In the Grand Remonstrance which Pym laid before the House of Commons in
November, 1641, the case for the Parliament was stated with frankness,
but the demands were not revolutionary. The main points were securities
for the administration of justice, and insistence on the responsibility
of the king’s ministers to parliament. The royalists fought the
Remonstrance vigorously, and in the end it was only carried by a
majority of eleven, 159 to 148. At the end of the debate the excitement
was intense: “some waved their hats over their heads, and others took
their swords in their scabbards out of their belts, and held them by
the pummels in their hands, setting the lower part on the ground.”
Violence seemed inevitable, “had not the sagacity and great calmness of
Mr. Hampden, by a short speech, prevented it.”
On the 1st of December the Remonstrance, with a petition for the
removal of grievances, especially in matters of religion, was presented
to the king at Hampton Court. “Charles had now a last chance of
regaining the affection of his people. If he could have resolved to
give his confidence to the leaders of the moderate party in the House
of Commons, and to regulate his proceedings by their advice, he might
have been, not, indeed, as he had been, a despot, but the powerful and
respected king of a free people. The nation might have enjoyed liberty
and repose under a government with Falkland at its head, checked by
a constitutional opposition under the conduct of Hampden. It was
not necessary that, in order to accomplish this happy end, the king
should sacrifice any part of his lawful prerogative, or submit to any
conditions inconsistent with his dignity.” So Macaulay wrote. But the
days of “governments” and “constitutional oppositions” were far off in
1641, and only the germ of party government is seen in the division of
the House of Commons. To “submit to any conditions” from parliament was
inconsistent with the king’s notions of royal dignity, fostered by Laud
to reject all criticisms as denials of the absolutism of the crown.
Charles promised an answer to the deputation which waited on him,
and the answer was seen on January 3, 1642, when the king’s attorney
appeared at the bar of the Lords, impeached Pym, Hampden, Holles,
Strode, and Hazlerig of high treason, in having corresponded with the
Scots for the invasion of England, and demanded the surrender of the
five members. “All constitutional law was set aside by a charge which
proceeded personally from the king, which deprived the accused of their
legal right to a trial by their peers, and summoned them before a
tribunal which had no pretence to a jurisdiction over them.”
The House of Commons simply declined to surrender their members, but
promised to take the matter into consideration.
Then Charles, with some three hundred cavaliers, went to Westminster,
and entered the House of Commons to demand the accused. But the five
members, warned of his coming, were out of the way and safe within the
city of London. “It was believed that if the king had found them there,
and called in his guards to have seized them, the members of the House
would have endeavoured the defence of them, which might have proved a
very unhappy and sad business.” As it was, the king could only retire
discomfited, with some words about respecting the laws of the realm and
the privileges of parliament, and “in a more discontented and angry
passion than he came in.”
The invasion of the Commons was the worst move Charles could have made,
for parliament was in no temper favourable to royal encroachments, and
it had a large population at hand ready to give substantial support.
The city of London at once declared for the House of Commons, ignored
the king’s writs for the arrest of the five members, and answered the
royal proclamation declaring them “traitors” by calling out the trained
bands for the escort of the members back to Westminster, and for the
protection of the House of Commons.
Falkland and the royalist members turned for the moment from Charles at
his unexpected attack on the House, the cavaliers of Whitehall, menaced
by the trained bands from Southwark and the city, fled, and Charles,
standing alone, left London.
War was now imminent. Pym and Hampden at once prepared for the struggle.
Pym secured the arsenals of Portsmouth and Hull for the parliament,
but his efforts to obtain the control of the militia in the counties
were frustrated for a time by the king’s natural refusal to consent to
the Militia Bill, which would have placed troops under the orders of
country gentlemen of the parliamentary party.
Both king and parliament had to break through all constitutional
precedent. The king levied troops by a royal commission, and Pym
got an ordinance of both Houses of Parliament passed appointing the
lords-lieutenant to command the militia, and thereby published the
supremacy of parliament over the crown. In April the king appeared at
Hull to obtain arms, and was refused admission to the town by Sir John
Hotham, the governor. Parliament expressed its approval of Hotham’s
act, the royalists gathered round Charles at York, and the final
proposals of parliament for ending absolute monarchy were rejected by
the king in June with the words, “If I granted your demands I should be
no more than the mere phantom of a king.”[112]
With this refusal all negotiations were broken off. Essex was appointed
commander of the parliamentary army, and in August Charles raised the
royal standard at Nottingham, and war was begun.
Hampden threw himself vigorously into the campaign. From his native
county of Buckingham, the county which made him its representative in
parliament in 1640, he raised a regiment of infantry. “His neighbours
eagerly enlisted under his command. His men were known by their green
uniform, and by their standard, which bore on one side the watchword
of the parliament, ‘God with us,’ and on the other the device of
Hampden, ‘_Vestigia nulla retrorsum_.’” In the first stages of the war,
before any decisive blow had been struck, Hampden was busy passing and
repassing between the army and the parliament. Clarendon praises his
courage and ability on the field.
A skirmish at Chalgrove, on June 18th, 1643, between bodies of horse
commanded by Rupert and by Hampden, ended in victory for the royalists.
Hampden was seen riding off the field, “before the action was done,
which he never used to do, and with his head hanging down, and resting
his hands upon the neck of his horse.” He was mortally wounded, for two
carbine balls were lodged in his shoulder, and reached Thame only to
die six days later.
The death of Hampden--at the age of 49--came at a dark hour in the
early fortunes of the parliamentary army, and deepened the gloom.
“The loss of Colonel Hampden goeth near the heart of every man that
loves the good of his king and country, and makes some conceive little
content to be at the army now that he is gone.” But Pym remained, and
Cromwell and Vane, and many another resolute House of Commons man.
Pym’s health was already broken when Hampden fell, but he lived to
accomplish the alliance of the English Puritans and the Scotch army,
and, as the price of this alliance, the abolition of episcopacy and
the adoption of Presbyterianism in the Church of England. The Solemn
League and Covenant was accepted by parliament, and imposed on the
nation in September. Henceforth the parliamentary army was pledged to
extirpate “Popery, prelacy, superstition, schism and profaneness”;
to bring “the Churches of God in the three kingdoms to the nearest
conjunction and uniformity in religion”; to “preserve the rights and
privileges of the parliament and the liberties of the kingdom; and to
unite the two kingdoms in a firm peace and union to all posterity.”
The taking of the covenant--a political necessity--was John Pym’s
last work. He was ten years older than Hampden, and his character
was ruggeder and sterner and without the charm of the younger man.
But Pym’s was the greater genius in politics, and his scheme of
constitutional government was to be fulfilled in England at a later
season.
John Pym died on December 8th, 1643, and his body was buried in
Westminster Abbey--only to be turned out at the Restoration and removed
to St. Margaret’s churchyard.
With Pym and Hampden gone, henceforth the conduct of parliament was in
other hands, and the day of moderate statesmanship had passed.
The war undertaken to preserve the liberties and establish the
supremacy of the House of Commons was to bring in its train not only
the abolition of monarchy and the House of Lords, but the suppression
of the House of Commons itself.
Important to the nation as the issues at stake were, most people in
England took hardly any more part or interest in the great civil war
than they had done in the Wars of the Roses. “A very large number of
persons regarded the struggle with indifference.... In one case, the
inhabitants of an entire county pledged themselves to remain neutral.
Many quietly changed with the times (as people changed with the varying
fortunes of York and Lancaster). That this sentiment of neutrality
was common to the greater mass of the working classes is obvious from
the simultaneous appearance of the club men in different parts of the
country, with their motto, ‘If you take our cattle, we will give you
battle.’”[113]
How could it be otherwise? Supremacy of King, or supremacy of
Commons,--seed time and harvest remain, and the labourer and the
artizan must needs do their day’s work.
Not till the deposing of the Stuarts--forty-five years after John
Hampden’s death--is the supremacy of parliament over the crown arrived
at by general consent, to become a recognized and settled thing in
British politics. By the middle of the nineteenth century the House of
Commons is unmistakably the ruling power in the constitution, and the
labours of Eliot, Hampden and Pym are vindicated.
In our own day changes in the balance of constitutional power may be
noted. The supremacy of the House of Commons is quietly disappearing
before the growing popularity of the crown, the reawakened activity of
the House of Lords, and the steady gathering of the reins of power into
the hands of the Cabinet and Executive. As the crown in the last twenty
years has increased in popular esteem, so the influence and importance
of the Commons has waned in the country; and this waning influence of
the Lower House has been further diminished by the frequent rejection
and revision of its measures by the House of Lords.
The power of the Executive has also been obtained at the expense of the
power of the Commons. The Cabinet, rather than the House of Commons,
holds the supremacy to-day, and the direction of foreign policy, and
the making of international treaties are no more within the authority
of the House of Commons than are the administration of Egypt and India.
Pym and Hampden fought and gave their lives for the right of the House
of Commons to control the ministers of the crown and to order the
policy of these ministers. By its own consent, and not from pressure
from without, the House of Commons has silently surrendered this right,
and has agreed that the policy of its Foreign Minister for the time
being--whether he be Liberal or Conservative--must not be subject to
reproof, still less to correction. In home affairs administrative order
steadily supersedes statute law.
In theory ministers are still subject to the House of Commons. In
actual practice they can rely on not being interfered with as long as
their party has a majority in the House. When the price of effective
interference with the conduct of affairs is a defeat of the Cabinet
and a consequent dissolution, the payment is more than members of
parliament are prepared to make.
Given the sense of security of social order and of the administration
of justice, the nation, generally, no more heeds the passing of the
supremacy from the House of Commons, than it heeded the winning of
that supremacy.
The Laudian doctrine in the Church of England, revived at the
Restoration, disappeared with the passing of the non-jurors at the
close of the seventeenth century. But its Anglo-Catholic teaching was
renewed by the Oxford Movement, early in Queen Victoria’s reign, and
has largely changed the whole appearance of the Church of England. The
modern high Anglican, claiming, as Laud claimed, the right to interpret
the Book of Common Prayer as a Catholic document, but no longer the
advocate of any theory of divine right of kings, or the champion of any
particular political creed, has travelled indeed far beyond Laud’s very
limited success in winning support for Catholic doctrine and ritual in
the Church of England. Laud was beaten by the opposition of parliament;
his present day successors in the Church of England have prospered in
spite of that opposition, and have triumphed over acts of parliaments,
adverse judicial sentences, privations and imprisonments. But with Laud
the movement was directed by bishops and approved by the king, the
modern Laudian movement was banned by bishops and disfavoured by all in
high authority.
To-day nearly every Catholic doctrine, save papal supremacy, has its
expounders and defenders in the Church of England, and Catholic rites
and ceremonies are freely practised.
Laud, dying on the scaffold in 1645 at the hands of parliament,
is amply avenged in the twentieth century by the victorious
high-churchman. The Laudian clergy of the Established Church can now
maintain their Anglo-Catholic faith and practice, without any fear
of parliamentary interference. For generally they enjoy a popularity
and respect that the House of Commons does not willingly venture to
assail.
John Lilburne and the Levellers
1647–1653
AUTHORITIES: Lilburne’s Pamphlets; _Calendar of State Papers_; _Charles
I. and the Commonwealth_; _State Trials_; _House of Commons’ Journals_;
Whitelocke--_Memorials of English Affairs_; Clarendon--_History
of the Rebellion_; W. Godwin--_History of the Commonwealth_; S.
R. Gardiner--_History of the Great Civil War_; _History of the
Commonwealth and Protectorate_; G. P. Gooch--_History of Democratic
Ideas in the Seventeenth Century_.
JOHN LILBURNE AND THE LEVELLERS
1647–1653.
From his coming of age in 1637 till the near approach of death, when he
turned, a dying man, to the peaceful tenets of the Quakers, the life of
John Lilburne is a record of twenty years of strife and battle with the
rulers of the land.
He came of pugnacious stock, for John Lilburne’s father, a well-to-do
Durham squire, was the last man to demand the settlement of a lawsuit
by the ordeal of battle, and came into court armed accordingly--only
to be disappointed by an order from the crown, forbidding the proposed
return to such ancient and obsolete methods of deciding the differences
of neighbours.
Apprenticed to a wholesale cloth-merchant in London, John Lilburne
soon became acquainted with Bastwick and Prynne, then busy over
anti-episcopal pamphlets, and, keeping such company, naturally fell
into the clutches of the Star Chamber. The charge against him was that
he had helped to print and circulate unlicensed books, in particular,
Prynne’s _News from Ipswich_; and though Lilburne declared the charge
to be false, on his refusal to take the usual oath to answer truly all
questions put to him, the Star Chamber adjudged him guilty, and passed
sentence--Lilburne was to be whipped from the Fleet to Westminster, to
stand in the pillory, and to be kept in prison.
The sentence was carried out on February 13th, 1638, but Lilburne was
not cowed, for he scattered some of Bastwick’s offending pamphlets
on the road, and was gagged in the pillory to reduce him to silence.
In prison things went hardly with Lilburne, for the authorities had
him placed in irons and kept in solitary confinement, and only the
compassion of fellow prisoners saved him from actual starvation in the
two years and nine months of his imprisonment.
It was a rough beginning, and John Lilburne was henceforth an agitator
and a rebel.
At the end of 1640 one of the first things done by the Long Parliament
was to order Lilburne’s release, and in the following May the sentence
was pronounced “illegal and against the liberties of the subject.” But
illegal or not, the punishment had been inflicted, and with unbroken
spirit, passionately resenting the tyranny that could so wrong men,
Lilburne flew quickly to the attack on the authors of the injustice.
At Edgehill Lilburne held a captain’s commission, and at Brentford he
was taken prisoner by the royalists. Only the threat of swift reprisals
by the parliamentary army saved him from being shot as “a traitor,” and
the following year he was again at liberty on an exchange of prisoners.
Again, after fighting at Marston Moor, he fell into the hands of the
royalists, and, shot through the arm, was kept in prison at Oxford for
six months.
Brave soldier as Lilburne was, he left the army in 1645 (with the rank
of Lieutenant-Colonel and with £880 arrears of pay owing to him)
rather than take the covenant and subscribe to the requirements of
Cromwell’s “new model.”
And now monarchy having fallen from its high estate, Lilburne at once
saw elements of tyranny in the Parliamentary government, and did not
hesitate to say so. Courageous and intrepid, with considerable legal
knowledge, a passion for liberty, and clear views on democracy, John
Lilburne might have given invaluable service to the commonwealth. He
had shown skill and daring in the war, his character for fearless
endurance had been proved, his ability as a pamphleteer was
considerable, and his capacity for work enormous; the government had
either to treat Lilburne as a friend or foe--he was not to be ignored.
The government, unwisely, decided Lilburne was an enemy, and for the
next ten years he fought the rule of parliament and the army, his
popularity increasing with every new pamphlet he produced. The price
the commonwealth government paid for its opposition to Lilburne was to
be seen on the death of Cromwell.[114]
From 1645 to 1649 Lilburne’s vigorous criticisms of the men in power
provoked retaliation, and brought him to Newgate. But in prison or out
of prison Lilburne went on hammering away to establish a democratic
constitution. The time was to come when Cromwell would find the Long
Parliament had outlived its usefulness and would end it by main force.
Lilburne was anxious in 1647 for a radical reform of parliament and a
general manhood suffrage. His proposals were popular in the army, and
had Cromwell supported him the whole future of English politics would
have been changed.
When the Presbyterian majority in parliament proposed the disbandment
of the army in 1647, the regiments chose their agitators, and, refusing
to disband, drew up the “Agreement of the People” and the “Case for the
Army.” These documents give the political standpoint of the Levellers
and the particular grievances to be remedied.
The distribution of parliamentary seats according to the number of
inhabitants was the chief proposal in the “Agreement of the People,”
and the principles maintained are that “no man is bound to a government
under which he has not put himself,” and that “all inhabitants who have
not lost their birthright should have an equal voice in elections.”
The particular demands in the “Case for the Army” were the abolition
of monopolies, freedom of trade and religion, restoration of enclosed
common lands, and abolition of sinecures.
While Cromwell and Ireton were both bitterly against manhood suffrage,
the council of officers to whom the Levellers appealed agreed to
support it, without approving the rest of the programme.
Cromwell, relying on the army to prevent a royalist reaction--for
Charles was plotting from Carisbrooke for aid from Scotland, and
the royalists in the House of Commons were anxious to effect a
reconciliation--would give neither time nor patience to the demands of
Lilburne and the Levellers.
In vain the Levellers exclaimed, in 1648, “We were ruled before
by King, Lords, and Commons, now by a General, Court Martial, and
Commons: and, we pray you, what is the difference?” Cromwell, at all
costs, was determined to preserve the discipline of the army, and to
suppress mutiny with an iron hand. For him the army which had beaten
the cavaliers was the one safeguard against the return of the old
order in Church and State. Lilburne and the Levellers, with the “Fifth
Monarchy” men, had been the strength, the very life of the army that
had conquered at Marston Moor and Naseby. The petition of the Fifth
Monarchy men for the reign of Christ and His saints (which, according
to prophecy, was to supersede the four monarchies of the ancient
world) had no terrors for Cromwell; in other words, they demanded
government exclusively by the godly, Independents and Presbyterians
combining to elect all representatives, “and to determine all things
by the Word.” “Such a proposal might attract fanatics; it could not
attract the multitude. The Levellers who stood up for an exaggeration
of the doctrine of parliamentary supremacy were likely to be far more
numerous.”[115] To Cromwell the immediate thing was the royalist
danger; it was no season for embarking on democratic experiments
with which he had no sympathy. The breach between Cromwell and the
Levellers widened, and as Cromwell became more and more impatient
of their agitation, distrust and suspicion of Cromwell and of the
newly-appointed Council of State ripened, in 1649, into revolt.[116]
It is the perennial misunderstanding between the statesman and the
agitator. The one weighted by responsibility can rarely travel at
the pace of the other, untrammelled by office, and as the distance
between the two lengthens, it seems they are not even pursuing the same
course--as, indeed, very often they are not.
Lilburne had none of Cromwell’s anxieties as to a possible royalist
reaction; for him the danger could not come from the dethroned king
and his defeated cavaliers, but from a parliamentary oligarchy or
a military dictatorship. But he overestimated the strength of the
Leveller movement in the army. With the presentation of the “Agreement
of the People” the bulk of the discontent in the army diminished, and
while the Levellers who remained became in several regiments openly
mutinous, the movement generally died down, so that when the revolt
came, it was suppressed without difficulty.[117]
Lilburne was out of prison at the beginning of 1649. He took no part in
the trial of Charles I., and let it be known that he doubted the wisdom
of abolishing monarchy before a new constitution had been drawn up.
As neither the remnant of the Long Parliament nor Cromwell and Fairfax
were doing anything to set up this new constitution, Lilburne proceeded
to lay a remonstrance before parliament, and to follow this up by his
two pamphlets on “England’s New Chains.” He now urged that “committees
of short continuance” should supersede the Council of State, that the
Self-denying Ordinance should be put in force, “seeing how dangerous it
was for one and the same persons to be continued long in the highest
commands of a military power,”[118] that a new parliament should be
elected, and the “Agreement of the People” proceeded with heartily.
At the same time he called for army reform by a reconstruction of the
General Council and the election of agitators.
The expulsion of five troopers from the army for directly petitioning
parliament provoked another pamphlet--“The Hunting of the Foxes from
Newmarket to Whitehall by five small beagles late of the army.” The
argument here was that Cromwell, Ireton, and Harrison ruled the council
of officers, and that the council of officers ruled parliament and the
nation. “The old king’s person and the old lords are but removed, and a
new king and new lords with the commons are in one House, and so we are
under a more absolute arbitrary monarchy than before.”
There was only one answer to be made to Lilburne’s pen, and that was
to arrest the man who held it, for the commonwealth had no one on its
side who could reply to him. At the end of March Lilburne and three
of his supporters, Walwyn, Prince, and Richard Overton were arrested
as traitors, “England’s New Chains” having been voted by parliament
seditious and destructive of the government, and were committed to the
Tower to await trial.
At once a petition was got up and signed by 80,000 persons for
Lilburne’s release, and a fortnight later--April 18th--another petition
was taken to the bar of the House of Commons to the same effect.
Parliament promised that the prisoners should have a legal trial, but
declared the course of justice must not be interfered with. A large
deputation of women also appeared at Westminster on April 23rd with a
similar petition; but these were forbidden to enter the House, and,
admonished by members to “go home and wash their dishes,” answered they
would soon have no dishes to wash.[119]
Lilburne was not brought to trial till October, and in the six months’
interval, though the output of democratic pamphlets continued from
the Tower, the Leveller movement in the army ended in open mutiny and
defeat.
Carlyle tells the story accurately enough of the mutiny in Whalley’s
regiment in Bishopsgate, London, on April 25th:
They want this and that; they seize their colours from the
cornet, who is lodged at the “Bull” there; the general
(Fairfax) and lieutenant-general (Cromwell) have to hasten
thither, quell them, pack them forth on their march, seizing
fifteen of them first to be tried by court-martial. Tried by
instant court-martial, five of them are found guilty, doomed
to die, but pardoned; and one of them, Trooper Lockyer, is
doomed and not pardoned.[120] Trooper Lockyer is shot in
Paul’s Churchyard on the morrow. A very brave young man, they
say; though but three-and-twenty. “He has served seven years
in these wars,” ever since the wars began. “Religious,” too,
“of excellent parts and much beloved”; but with hot notions
as to human freedom, and the rate at which the milleniums are
attainable. Poor Lockyer! He falls shot in Paul’s Churchyard
on Friday, amid the tears of men and women. Lockyer’s corpse
is watched and wept over, not without prayer, in the eastern
regions of the city, till a new week come; and on Monday, this
is what we see advancing westward by way of funeral to him:
About one thousand went before the corpse, five or six in a
file; the corpse was then brought, with six trumpets sounding
a soldier’s knell, then the trooper’s horse came, clothed all
over in mourning, and led by a footman. The corpse was adorned
with bundles of rosemary, one half stained in blood, and the
sword of the deceased along with them. Some thousands followed
in ranks and files, all had sea-green and black ribbon tied on
their hats and to their breasts, and the women brought up the
rear.
At the new churchyard at Westminster some thousands more of the
better sort met them, who thought not fit to march through the
city. Many looked upon this funeral as an affront to parliament
and the army; others called these people “Levellers”; but they
took no notice of any of them.[121]
In May one Corporal William Thompson rallied a body of Levellers at
Banbury, published a manifesto called “England’s Standard Advanced,”
and inveighed against the tyranny of courts-martial. Overwhelmed by
force of numbers, Thompson escaped, and later died fighting alone near
Wellingborough. Some twenty of his followers joined the mutineers of
Scrope’s regiment at Salisbury. Numbering some 1,200, these Levellers
made their way by Marlborough and Wantage to Burford. Here Cromwell
came up with the mutineers, and surprised them at midnight. Resistance
was hopeless, and the majority at once surrendered. All were pardoned
except Cornet Thompson (brother to William), and two corporals--Church
and Perkins--who showed neither fear nor admitted any wrong on their
part. These three men were shot in Burford churchyard on May 15th,[122]
and with their deaths the Leveller movement was at an end.
But Lilburne was unsubdued. His new “Agreement of the Free People,”
published on May 1st, called for annual parliaments elected by manhood
suffrage--pensioners, militant royalists, and lawyers excluded--and
for the free election of unendowed church ministers in each parish.
At the same time he disclaimed all connection with Winstanley’s
“Diggers”--political reform was Lilburne’s demand.[123]
Released on bail in July, Lilburne issued in August an “Impeachment for
High Treason against Oliver Cromwell and his son-in-law, James Ireton.”
In this his hatred of government by the army compels the admission that
monarchy is preferable to a military despotism: “If we must have a
king, I for my part would rather have the prince than any man in the
world.... For the present army to set up the pretended Saint Oliver or
any other as their elected king, there will be nothing thereby from the
beginning of the chapter to the end thereof but wars and the cutting
of throats year after year; yea, and the absolute keeping up of a
perpetual army under which the people are absolute and perfect slaves.”
Thereupon, instead of bringing him to trial, the government merely
issued a warrant for Lilburne’s arrest. The agitator met this by
a stronger manifesto, “An Outcry of the Young Men and Apprentices
of London,” calling on the army to rise in support of a democratic
parliament and to vindicate the men executed at Burford. Some response
came from the garrison at Oxford, who summoned their officers to join
in the demand for a free parliament, but no success attended this step.
At last in October Lilburne was brought to trial at the Guildhall,
not on the charge for which he had been first committed to the Tower
in March, but for the “treason” of his later pamphlets. The trial is
memorable for Lilburne’s demand that counsel should be assigned to
him in the event of legal technicalities arising, and for his bidding
the jury remember they were judges of law as well as of fact. His
real defence lay in the question he had put so often: Was England to
be governed by the sword and a mock parliament, or by duly elected
representatives of the People? The jury understood that Lilburne was on
trial for putting that question, and, agreeing with him, they acquitted
him. The verdict was received with tremendous applause, and “a loud and
unanimous shout” of triumph went up from the citizens of London in the
Guildhall.[124]
In December Lilburne was elected to the common council of the city,
but parliament promptly declared the election void. “Fiercely as
Lilburne attacked Cromwell, there was at times considerable liking
between the two men, and they met on friendly terms before Cromwell
went to Scotland in 1650. Cromwell assured Lilburne of his desire
to make England enjoy the real fruit of all the army’s promises and
declarations,” and friendly relations lasted till Cromwell’s return.
But, in Cromwell’s absence, Lilburne charged Hazlerigg with corruption
in the administration of justice concerning a disputed colliery lease
in Durham, and parliament took up the matter. In January, 1652, it
declared Lilburne’s petition for redress a libel, and imposed a fine of
£7,000 with a sentence of banishment for life.
This proceeding by parliament revived the methods of the Star Chamber
in imposing a conviction and a sentence without trial, but the House of
Commons was determined to stop Lilburne’s activities at all cost.
Cromwell made no effort to hinder the conviction, and Lilburne insisted
that Cromwell’s professions of friendship were hypocritical, and that
the general himself was responsible for the sentence.
For the time Lilburne retired to Holland, where he discussed favourably
the chances of a royalist restoration. But on the expulsion of the
Rump of the Long Parliament the agitator at once wrote off to Cromwell
for permission to return to England, and getting no answer crossed
to London in June, 1653, and settled in lodgings in Moorfields. He
petitioned Cromwell and the Council of State for leave to remain
unmolested, promising to live peacefully, but Cromwell, with the whole
government on his shoulders, had no willingness to incur the risk
Lilburne and his doctrine of popular rights involved to the safety of
the State.
Lilburne was promptly arrested by Cromwell’s order and brought to trial
at the Old Bailey on July 13th. The government case was that he had
returned to England knowing that a sentence of death was decreed by
parliament if he broke his exile.
Lilburne’s defence, in the main, was that the parliament which had
passed sentence was dead, and that if Cromwell had acted justly in
dissolving it, then its unjust actions ought not to be maintained; if
Cromwell had acted unjustly, why was he not punished?
Again the jury acquitted him, and again the people of London expressed
their satisfaction at the verdict, “the very soldiers sent to guard the
court joining in the shouts, and beating their drums and sounding their
trumpets as they passed along the streets to their quarters.”
But “for the peace of the nation” Cromwell would not let Lilburne be at
large. Back in the Tower, then at Guernsey, and then in Dover Castle
for more than two years Lilburne was a prisoner.
His health was broken in 1656, and consumption had set in. Death was
near, and for John Lilburne the days of “carnal sword-fighting and
fleshly hustlings and contests” were over. He wrote to Cromwell from
Dover Castle telling the Lord Protector of his conversion to Quakerism,
and Cromwell, assured that there was to be no more agitation from
“Free-Born John,” granted his release, and a pension of 40s. a week.
The battle was over for John Lilburne, liberty could not stay the
hand of death. The many imprisonments and close confinements had done
their work, and rapid consumption marked down the man who had stood up
against the whole might of Cromwell’s government.
John Lilburne died at Eltham in August, 1657, at the age of forty. A
year later, and his old antagonist, and older comrade-in-arms, Oliver
Cromwell, Lord Protector, was dead, and the Commonwealth government
which had contemned the agitation for democracy was doomed.
Winstanley the Digger
1649–1650
AUTHORITIES: Winstanley’s Pamphlets; Whitelocke--_Memorial of English
Affairs_; Clarke Papers; L. H. Berens--_Digger Movement in the days of
the Commonwealth_.
WINSTANLEY THE DIGGER
1649–1650.
In the spring of 1649, the “Digger” movement revealed a strange
and unexpected manifestation of the democratic spirit in England.
Free communism had been the creed of more than one Protestant sect
on the continent in the sixteenth century, and the Anabaptists had
been conspicuously identified with the proposal. But in England John
Lilburne and the Levellers were attacking the parliamentary government
in the name of political democracy, and social agitation had been
unknown since the Norfolk Rising of 1549, save for a riot against land
enclosures at the beginning of James I.’s reign.
Gerrard Winstanley was the leader at the sudden outbreak of social
discontent, and his “Digger” movement was to end this discontent and
all other miseries of the time by getting rid of enclosures of common
lands, and allowing people to plough these common lands and waste
spaces, “that all may feed upon the crops of the earth, and the burden
of poverty be removed.”
Little is known of Winstanley, and the movement is shortlived. The
“Diggers” never threatened the safety of the Commonwealth government
as Lilburne and the Levellers did, for Winstanley’s social doctrine
included the non-resistance principles that later found exponents
in the Society of Friends, and the agrarian revolution he preached
could hardly be accomplished without force of arms. What is notable
about Winstanley is his witness to the fact that a social question
existed--that he saw beyond the Civil War, and the strife for political
liberties, a great mass of poverty unheeded; and seeing the miseries of
his fellows resolutely thought out some cure for their distress, and
did his best, as it seemed to him, to get this cure adopted.
Neither the Council of State nor the republican army had time or
patience for Winstanley’s schemes, and the “Diggers” were dispersed
with little trouble; but Winstanley’s religious teaching was to
exercise considerable influence in the world when George Fox became its
preacher, and his social teaching on the land question has thousands of
disciples in Great Britain to-day.
Gerrard Winstanley was born in Lancashire in 1609.[125] He seems to
have settled in London as a small trader and to have lost what money he
had in business--cheated he says, “in the thieving art of buying and
selling, and by the burdens of and for the soldiery in the beginning
of the war”--so that he was obliged “to accept of the good-will of
friends to live a country life.” In the country Winstanley ponders the
source of the ills around him, and, having some considerable gift of
expression, gives utterance, in a number of pamphlets, to a cry for
reform, and gathers followers.
In December, 1648, Winstanley (or one of his friends) issued the
earliest of the Digger publications under the title of “Light Shining
in Buckinghamshire--A Discovery of the Main Ground, Original Cause
of all the Slavery of the World, but chiefly in England. Presented
by way of a Declaration of many of the Well-affected in that County,
to all their poor oppressed Countrymen in England. And also to the
consideration of the present army under the conduct of the Lord
Fairfax.”
A month later and Winstanley publishes his “New Law of Righteousness:
Budding forth to restore the whole Creation from the Bondage of the
Curse. Or a glimpse of the new Heaven and the new Earth, wherein dwells
Righteousness.” Here, with a good deal of mystical religious phrasing
(the author explains that when he was in a trance the message came
to him), Winstanley proclaims his calling and unfolds his agrarian
proposals:
And when the Lord doth show unto me the place and manner, how
He will have us that are called common people manure and work
upon the common lands, I will then go forth and declare it by
my action, to eat my bread by the sweat of my brow, without
either giving or taking hire, looking upon the land as freely
mine as another’s.
There is to be no forcible expropriation of landlords:
If the rich still hold fast to this propriety of Mine and
Thine, let them labour their own lands with their own hands.
And let the common people, that say the earth is _ours_, not
_mine_, let them labor together, and eat bread together upon
the commons, mountains, and hills.
For as the enclosures are called such a man’s land, and
such a man’s land, so the Commons and Heath are called the
common people’s. And let the world see who labor the earth in
righteousness, and those to whom the Lord gives the blessing,
let them be the people that shall inherit the earth.
None can say that their right is taken from them. For let the
rich work alone by themselves; and let the poor work together
by themselves. The rich in their enclosures, saying, _This is
mine_; and the poor upon the commons, saying, _This is ours,
the earth and its fruits are common_. And who can be offended
at the poor for doing this? None but covetous, proud, idle,
pampered flesh, that would have the poor work still for this
devil (particular interest) to maintain his greatness that he
may live at ease.
Was the earth made for to preserve a few covetous, proud men
to live at ease, and for them to bag and barn up the treasures
of the earth from others, that these may beg or starve in a
fruitful land: or was it made to preserve all her children? Let
Reason and the Prophets’ and Apostles’ writings be judge....
For the earth is the Lord’s; that is the spreading Power of
Righteousness, not the inheritance of covetous proud flesh that
dies. If any man can say that he makes corn or cattle, he may
say, _That is mine_. But if the Lord made these for the use of
His creation, surely then the earth was made by the Lord to be
a Common Treasury for all, not a particular treasury for some.
Leave off dominion and lordship one over another; for the
whole bulk of mankind are but one living earth. Leave off
imprisoning, whipping, and killing, which are but the actings
of the curse. Let those that have hitherto had no land, and
have been forced to rob and steal through poverty; henceforth
let them quietly enjoy land to work upon, that everyone may
enjoy the benefit of his creation, and eat his own bread
with the sweat of his own brows. For surely this particular
propriety of mine and thine hath brought in all misery upon
people. First it hath occasioned people to steal from one
another. Secondly it hath made laws to hang those that did
steal. It tempts people to do an evil action, and then kills
them for doing of it. Let all judge whether this be not a great
evil.
In April, 1649, the time was ripe--so Winstanley and his friends
judged--for making a start to get rid of this evil.
The Council of State, but a few months old, and much occupied with
dangers in Scotland and Ireland, and with mutinous Levellers in
the army, was suddenly informed of the strange activities of “a
disorderly and tumultuous sort of people” by one Henry Sanders, of
Walton-upon-Thames.
Sanders’ testimony affirmed that “there was one Everard, once of the
army but was cashiered, who termeth himself a prophet, one Stewer and
Colten, and two more, all living at Cobham, came to St. George’s Hill
in Surrey, and began to dig on that side the hill next to Camp Close,
and sowed the ground with parsnips, carrots, and beans. On Monday
following they were there again, being increased in their number, and
on the next day they fired the heath, and burned at least forty rood of
heath, which is a very great prejudice to the town. On Friday last they
came again, between twenty and thirty, and wrought all day at digging.
They did then intend to have two or three ploughs at work, but they had
not furnished themselves with seed-corn, which they did on Saturday
at Kingston. They invite all to come in and help them, and promise
them meat, drink, and clothes. They do threaten to pull down and level
all park pales, and lay open, and intend to plant there very shortly.
They give out they will be four or five thousand within ten days, and
threaten the neighbouring people there, that they will make them all
come up to the hills and work: and forewarn them suffering their cattle
to come near the plantation; if they do, they will cut their legs off.
It is feared they have some design in hand.”[126]
The date of this information was April 16th, and Bradshaw, the
President of the Council, at once asked General Fairfax “to disperse
the people so met, and to prevent the like for the future, that a
malignant and disaffected party may not under colour of such ridiculous
people have any opportunity to rendezvous themselves in order to do a
greater mischief.”
Fairfax sent Captain John Gladman to attend to the matter, and Gladman
reports three days later that Mr. Winstanley and Mr. Everard are the
chief men responsible, that he “cannot hear that there have been above
twenty of them together since they first undertook the business,” and
that Mr. Winstanley and Mr. Everard will wait upon Lord Fairfax. He
adds; “I believe you will be glad to be rid of them again, especially
Everard, who is no other than a mad man. I intend to go with two or
three men to St. George’s Hill this day and persuade these people to
leave this employment if I can, and if then I see no more danger than
now I do I shall march back again to London to-morrow.” Gladman’s
opinion is that “the business is not worth the writing nor yet taking
notice of.”
The interview between Fairfax and Winstanley and Everard took place
on April 20, and Everard explained that the Diggers “did not intend
to meddle with any man’s property nor to break down any pales or
enclosures, but only to meddle with what was common and untilled, and
to make it fruitful for the use of man: that they will not defend
themselves by arms, but will submit unto authority; that as their
forefathers lived in tents, so it would be suitable to their condition
now to live in the same.”
Fairfax evidently decided that the movement was not so alarming as
the Council of State had represented, for Winstanley and his Diggers
resumed their work, and at the end of May, Fairfax, with the officers
of the army, paid a visit to St. George’s Hill. Winstanley returned
“sober answers” to the inquiries of Fairfax, “though they gave little
satisfaction (if any at all) in regard of the strangeness of their
action.” Winstanley’s argument, often enlarged in his pamphlets, was
that the people were dispossessed of their lands by the crown at the
Norman Conquest, and that “the king who possessed them by the Norman
Conquest being dead, they were returned again, being Crown Lands, to
the Common People of England.”
This was not conclusive to their visitors, and “some officers wished
they had no further plot in what they did, and that no more was
intended than what they did pretend.” To the objection that the ground
was too poor to repay cultivation, “the Diggers answered they would use
their endeavours and leave the success to God, who had promised to make
the barren ground fruitful.” Public opinion gave out that the Diggers
were “sober, honest men,” and that “the ground will probably in a short
time yield them some fruit of their labour, how contemptible soever
they do yet appear to be.”
Encouraged by Fairfax’s “kindness and moderation,” Winstanley appeals
to him in June against the interference of the local landowners, and
getting no response (for Fairfax had said that the Diggers were to
be left to “the Gentlemen of the County and the Law of the Land”),
publishes an appeal to the House of Commons against his arrest for
trespass by the Lords of Manors in Surrey. The House of Commons,
occupied with State matters, turned an indifferent ear to Winstanley’s
complaint, and the leader of the Diggers sent a “Watchword to the City
of London and the Army,” telling the wrongs the Diggers suffered at the
hands of the law for “digging upon the barren common”--how they were
mulcted in damages at £10 a man, with costs at twenty-nine shillings
and a penny, and taken in execution, and how their cows were seized by
the bailiffs. At the end of November the very huts they had built were
pulled down, and it was a hard winter for the little colony still left
on St. George’s Hill.
Winstanley does not merely relate his injuries in these publications,
he is all the time urging that his plan for setting people upon the
common lands is the needful thing in England, that a common ownership
of land is God’s will, and that the crown lands taken by the Normans
must revert to the people on the execution of the king.
In the spring of 1650 an attempt was made to extend the digging
propaganda--for the planting of St. George’s Hill was doomed--and
some of Winstanley’s disciples made a tour through the counties of
Middlesex, Bedford, Hertford, Huntingdon, and Northampton, settling
down at last on some waste ground near Wellingborough. Here they were
very soon arrested by a local justice of the peace, the Council of
State ordered their prosecution, and the movement was suppressed.
To the Council of State these Diggers were “Levellers,”[127] “intruders
upon other men’s properties,” “seditious and tumultuous,” against whom
the public peace must be preserved.
Of Winstanley’s future, when the days of the digging were over, nothing
seems to be known. Only one pamphlet is issued by him after 1650--“The
Law of Freedom in a Platform; or, True Magistracy Restored”--an open
letter to Oliver Cromwell, February, 1652. With this final manifesto
on the land question, and on the whole social question, as he saw
it, Gerrard Winstanley disappears from history. In the multitude of
prophets and preachers, visionaries and practical reformers of the
Commonwealth, Winstanley is little heeded by his contemporaries. The
importance of his mission is seen more clearly to-day, when statesmen,
politicians, and philanthropists all urge agrarian changes and the
excellence of land culture.
As to Winstanley’s claim on behalf of the people to the common lands,
the advantage of possession of these lands was realized by the
landowners in the eighteenth century, and from 1760 to 1830 more than a
thousand acts of parliament were passed for enclosing these lands.[128]
In “The Diggers Song,” (of unknown authorship[129]), the outlook of
Winstanley and his followers is expressed in popular form:
You noble Diggers all, stand up now, stand up now,
You noble Diggers all, stand up now,
The waste land to maintain, seeing Cavaliers by name,
Your digging do disdain; and persons all defame.
Stand up now, stand up now.
Your houses they pull down, stand up now, stand up now,
Your houses they pull down, stand up now;
Your houses they pull down to fright poor men in town,
But the Gentry must come down, and the poor shall wear the crown.
Stand up now, Diggers all!
With spades, and hoes, and plowes, stand up now, stand up now,
With spades, and hoes, and plowes, stand up now;
Your freedom to uphold, seeing Cavaliers are bold
To kill you if they could, and rights from you withhold.
Stand up now, Diggers all!
Their self-will is their law, stand up now, stand up now,
Their self-will is their law, stand up now;
Since tyranny came in, they count it now no sin
To make a gaol a gin, to starve poor men therein.
Stand up now, stand up now.
The Gentry are all round, stand up now, stand up now,
The Gentry are all round, stand up now;
The Gentry are all round, on each side they are found,
Their wisdoms so profound to cheat us of our ground.
Stand up now, stand up now.
The Lawyers they conjoin, stand up now, stand up now,
The Lawyers they conjoin, stand up now;
To arrest you they advise, such fury they devise,
The devil in them lies, and hath blinded both their eyes.
Stand up now, stand up now.
The Clergy they come in, stand up now, stand up now,
The Clergy they come in, stand up now;
The Clergy they come in, and say it is a sin
That we should now begin our freedom for to win.
Stand up now, Diggers all!
The tithes they yet will have, stand up now, stand up now,
The tithes they yet will have, stand up now;
The tithes they yet will have, and Lawyers their fees crave,
And this they say is brave, to make the poor their slave.
Stand up now, Diggers all!
’Gainst Lawyers and ’gainst Priests, stand up now, stand up now,
’Gainst Lawyers and ’gainst Priests, stand up now;
For tyrants they are both, even flat against their oath,
To grant us they are loath, free meat, and drink and cloth.
Stand up now, Diggers all!
The club is all their law, stand up now, stand up now,
The club is all their law, stand up now;
The club is all their law, to keep poor men in awe,
But they no vision saw, to maintain such a law.
Stand up now, Diggers all!
The Cavaliers are foes, stand up now, stand up now,
The Cavaliers are foes, stand up now;
The Cavaliers are foes, themselves they do disclose
By verses, not in prose, to please the singing boys.
Stand up now, Diggers all!
To conquer them by love, come in now, come in now,
To conquer them by love, come in now;
To conquer them by love, as it does you behove,
For He is King above, no Power is like to Love.
Glory here, Diggers all.
Major Cartwright
“The Father of Reform”
1775–1824
AUTHORITIES: _Life and Correspondence of Major Cartwright_, edited by
his Niece, 1826; _A Memoir of John Cartwright the Reformer_, 1831; _The
Times_, September 25th, 1824; Graham Wallas--_Francis Place_.
[Illustration: MAJOR CARTWRIGHT
(_From a Contemporary Drawing._)]
MAJOR CARTWRIGHT “THE FATHER OF REFORM”
1775–1824.
The substance of Major Cartwright’s life is told on the pedestal
beneath his statue in the dingy garden of Burton Crescent, to the south
of Euston Road, in London.
JOHN CARTWRIGHT,
Born 28th September, 1740. Died 23rd September, 1824.
The Firm, Consistent and Persevering Advocate of _Universal
Suffrage_, Equal Representation, Vote by Ballot and Annual
Parliaments.
He was the first English Writer who openly maintained the
Independence of the United States of America, and although his
distinguished merits as a Naval Officer in 1776 presented the
most flattering Prospects of Professional Advancement, yet he
nobly refused to draw his Sword against the Rising Liberties of
an oppressed and struggling People.
In Grateful Commemoration of his inflexible integrity, exalted
Patriotism, “profound Constitutional Knowledge,” and in sincere
admiration of the unblemished Virtues of his Private Life,
THIS STATUE
was erected by Public Subscription near the spot where he
closed his useful and meritorious career.
There is nothing false or exaggerated in this epitaph. Fox, in the
House of Commons, testified to Cartwright’s “profound constitutional
knowledge.” Hazlitt, who never met Cartwright, classed him with the
men of one idea (and lingered over the subject), but the charge is
ill-founded. It is true that for nearly fifty years, in season and out
of season, Cartwright, a pupil of Locke in politics, contended publicly
for annual parliaments and manhood suffrage, claiming personality and
not property as the ground for enfranchisement, and insisting that
while the right of the rich and the poor to the vote was equal, the
need of the latter was far greater. But this agitation was by no means
the limit either of his ideas or his activities.
Entering the navy at eighteen, John Cartwright, who came of an old
Nottingham family, devised improvements in the gun service, and, made a
lieutenant, was marked for high promotion. The revolt of the American
colonies cut short his professional career. An innate love of liberty
compelled the young naval officer to side with the colonists, and
he writes in 1776 that it is a mistaken notion that the planting of
colonies and the extending of empire are necessarily the same things.
Self-governing colonies, he declares, bound to England only by “the
ties of blood and mutual interests, by sincere love and friendship,
which abhors dependence, and by every other cementing principle which
hath power to take hold of the human heart,” are to be desired.
Lord Howe put Cartwright’s principles to the test by inviting him to
join the expedition against the Americans, and Cartwright, who was
“passionately attached to the navy,” and had an immense admiration for
Howe, could only answer that he was unable to take part in a war he
thought unjust. With this refusal his naval services were ended, in
spite of Howe’s quiet and dignified reply that “opinions in politics
are to be treated like opinions in religion.” (No word of reproach came
from Howe, no taunt of want of courage or lack of patriotism.)
Cartwright never condemned all war. He urged in a letter to a nephew in
the army that the answer to the question of the justice or injustice
of a war decided whether justifiable homicide or wilful murder was
committed by those engaged in battle. He hated standing armies and
barracks and barrack life, and all the pomp and glory of militarism, as
heartily as he hated the attempt to coerce the colonists. But no sooner
was he out of the navy than, with a major’s commission, he at once
set to work to train the Nottinghamshire militia, only retiring from
this post in 1791 when the government cancelled his appointment for
attending a meeting called to celebrate the fall of the Bastille.
The militia in Cartwright’s view was strictly a citizen army for home
defence. “The militia,” he wrote, “by its institution is not intended
to spread the dominion or to vindicate in war the honour of the crown,
but it is to preserve our laws and liberties, and therein to secure the
existence of the State.” Thirteen years before the fall of the Bastille
Major Cartwright had the cap of liberty displayed on the banners and
engraved on the buttons of the Nottinghamshire Militia. A greater
service than providing symbols of liberty was rendered to the army by
Cartwright in the matter of better clothing for the men. The misery
endured by ill-clad sentries aroused his compassion and indignation,
and Cartwright worried the government until it provided great-coats for
all private soldiers.
The humaner courage is as conspicuous in John Cartwright’s long life as
his political enthusiasm.
Four times he risked his life to save others from drowning, rescuing
two men from the Trent, a naval officer at sea, and, in late
middle-life, a small boy who had fallen into the New River, near
London. In the year 1800, hearing of a riot planned at Sheffield,
Cartwright made his way alone to the barn where the conspirators were
assembled, and stayed all night, reasoning with them against their
project. In the morning the confederates, dissuaded from violence,
quietly dispersed, and the riot was prevented.
An untiring advocacy of democratic politics earned for Cartwright,
justly, the title of “The Father of Reform.” He was the real founder
of that movement for political reform, which in the nineteenth
century swept away rotten boroughs, gave representation to all towns
of importance, and extended the franchise to the great bulk of male
householders in town and country; which to-day presses towards a
general suffrage for men and women.
Major Cartwright began his speeches and pamphlets on behalf of
political reform in 1776, just after his retirement from the navy, and
his acceptance of the commission in the militia.
The ideas of the French Encyclopædists, the writings of Rousseau, and
the revolt of the American colonists, had aroused a belief in social
equality, and the “natural” rights of man, and this belief Cartwright
championed till his death. His early pamphlets, beginning with
“Legislative Rights of the Commonalty Vindicated,” (1777) are heavy
reading to-day, but in them Cartwright argued for all the famous “six
points” of the People’s Charter of fifty years later--Universal Manhood
Suffrage, Annual Parliaments, Vote by Ballot, Abolition of Property
Qualification for Parliamentary Candidates, Payment of Members, and
Equal Electoral Districts. He even uses the modern phrase in urging
“one man one vote.”
Unlike Thomas Paine, and many of the “Radical Reformers,” Cartwright
pleads for political democracy as the natural outcome of the Christian
faith, maintaining that “No man can have a right sense and belief
of Christianity who denies the equality of all conditions of men.”
Incidentally, challenged on the point of why not Votes for Women?
Cartwright could only fall back on certain passages in the Bible to
justify his objection to Women’s Enfranchisement. Nothing was more
abhorrent to his mind than the notion that government was a matter
for “experts,” an exclusive affair for persons with specially trained
intelligences. “Of all the errors to which mankind have ever submitted
their understandings,” he wrote, “there is no one to be more lamented
than that of conceiving the business of civil government to be above
the comprehension of ordinary capacities.”
The poor, because of their very poverty, had a need for the vote and
for parliamentary representation which the man of property could not
experience. This Cartwright emphasised in a petition he presented to
the House of Commons as late as 1820:
And when your Honourable House shall further consider that the
humblest mortal on earth is equally a co-heir of an immortality
with the most exalted who now wears stars, or coronets, or
crowns, your petitioner hopes that your Honourable House
will rise superior to the mean thoughts and vulgar prejudices
of the uncharitable among the wealthy, the ignorant, the
interested, the vain, and the proud; and will acknowledge
that, in reference to the respective claims of legislative
representation by the poor and the rich, the poor have equal
right but far more need.
Enthusiasm and an entirely disinterested zeal for democracy kept
the spirit of youth in Cartwright, and carried him at the age of
80 over a trial for sedition undisturbed. His zeal was not to be
quenched. “Moderation in practice may be commendable,” he declared,
“but moderation in principle is detestable. Can we trust a man who is
moderately honest, or esteem a woman who is moderately virtuous?”
This very allegiance to principle had its drawbacks in the world of
practical politics, of corruption and compromise. Three times Major
Cartwright stood for parliament: for the county of Nottingham in 1780,
for Boston in 1806 and 1807; and on each occasion he was at the bottom
of the poll. His nominations for Westminster in 1818 and 1819 received
no serious support at all. The old major was no more distressed by any
feeling of personal disappointment at these defeats than he was cast
down at seeing no signs of the triumph of political democracy in his
lifetime. At eighty-four we find him writing cheerfully, “To despair in
a good cause is to approach towards atheism.”
Cartwright did not live to see the passage of the great Reform Bill of
1832. Wilkes’ motion for reform in 1776 had been negatived in the House
of Commons without a division. In 1780 the Duke of Richmond’s motion
in the House of Lords for manhood suffrage and annual parliaments was
mocked by the outbreak of the Gordon (“No Popery”) Riots in London on
the very day the motion was made. Pitt’s third and last effort for
parliamentary reform was rejected in 1785. The French Revolution turned
men’s minds in Great Britain towards democracy, but reaction followed
hard on the Terror in Paris, and for a time a government terror crushed
every expression in favour of political liberty in England. Sir Francis
Burdett became the parliamentary leader of the “radical reformers”
early in the nineteenth century, and in 1809 found fifteen supporters
in the House of Commons. Ten years later the government, in the face
of a strong working-class movement for political reform, brought
out the military against the people at a peaceful meeting held at
Peterloo, near Manchester, and followed this up by six repressive acts
of parliament, and a general prosecution of the leaders of the reform
agitation.
Cartwright was eighty when, with several friends, he was charged “with
being a malicious, seditious, evil-minded person, and with unlawfully
and maliciously intending and designing to raise disaffection and
discontent in the minds of his majesty’s subjects.”
All England knew that Major Cartwright was a single-minded and
high-principled man, in whose heart was neither guile nor malice, a
man who had proved his loyalty and patriotism over and over again,
and was no more seditious than he was evil-minded or disaffected.
Apart from his advocacy of political reform and his services to the
militia, Cartwright had done much for farming and agriculture, he had
helped Clarkson and Wilberforce in their anti-slavery work, and he had
called the attention of the government, as loudly as he could, to the
defenceless state of the east coast against foreign invasion. Yet in
1820 a British jury, obedient to the orders of a political judge, found
John Cartwright guilty of “maliciously intending and designing to raise
disaffection and discontent,” and a fine of £100 was inflicted.
Francis Place, the radical tailor of Charing Cross, in whose shop the
later Chartists and Reformers were to be found, gives his impression of
Major Cartwright as he knew him in old age:
“When he was in town he used frequently to sup with me, eating some
raisins he brought in his pocket, and drinking weak gin and water.
He was cheerful, agreeable, and full of curious anecdote. He was,
however, in political matters exceedingly troublesome and sometimes as
exceedingly absurd. He had read but little, or to little purpose, and
knew nothing of general principles. He entertained a vague and absurd
notion of the political arrangements of the Anglo-Saxons, and sincerely
believed that these semi-barbarians were not only a political people,
but that their ‘twofold polity,’ arms-bearing and representation, were
universal and perfect.”[130]
To Place, chief political wire-puller of his age, industrious and
persistent in getting things done, with a typical cockney politician’s
scorn of disinterested enthusiasm, Major Cartwright appeared
“troublesome” and “absurd”--Francis Place had quite an honest liking
for the “old gentleman,” as he called him, all the same. By the
government Cartwright stood convicted as a “seditious, evil-minded
person.” Posterity is content to know John Cartwright by the title his
contemporaries conferred upon him--the Father of Reform--and to rank
him as the foremost man in England in the eighteenth century to raise
the standard of Political Democracy.
Ernest Jones and Chartism
1838–1854
AUTHORITIES: R. G. Gamage--_History of the Chartist Movement_; Thos.
Frost--_Forty Years’ Recollections_; Ernest Charles Jones--_Songs
of Democracy_; Graham Wallas--_Life of Francis Place_; J. A.
Hobson--_Ernest Jones_, in _Dictionary of National Biography_; _The
Times_, Jan. 27, 29; Mar. 31, 1869.
ERNEST JONES AND CHARTISM
1838–1854.
The Chartist agitation was at once the largest, the most revolutionary,
and the least successful of all the serious political movements of
the first half of the nineteenth century. For ten years, with varying
fortune, it threatened the authority of parliament, and then slowly
expired--destroyed by its own internal weakness and the quarrels of its
leaders rather than by the repression of the government.
The failure of the great Reform Act of 1832 to accomplish any
particular improvement in the lot of the mass of working people brought
the Chartist movement to life,[131] and roused the politically minded
leaders of the workmen to agitate for changes in the constitution that
would place political power in the hands of the whole people.
The six points of the Charter, embodied in the “People’s Charter” drawn
up by Francis Place and Lovett in 1838, revived the old programme
of Major Cartwright and, in substance, the earlier demands of John
Lilburne and the Levellers. Universal manhood suffrage, the ballot,
payment of members of parliament, equal electoral districts, abolition
of property qualification for members, and annual parliaments, these
were the “six points” of the Charter, the platform of its advocates,
and for ten years the hope of multitudes of earnest and devoted men and
women.
Francis Place and the Working-Men’s Association which gave Chartism
its name and programme never had any considerable voice in its
direction.[132]
Feargus O’Connor, who had sat in parliament from 1832 to 1835 for an
Irish constituency, was from the first the real leader of the movement.
His personality and his rhetorical powers roused the manufacturing
districts in the North and the Midlands to form political unions for
the Charter in 1838, and his presence dominated the first Convention,
held in London, with Lovett for its secretary. Later, O’Connor’s
obvious weaknesses, his vanity and egotism, his want of self-control
and that “one fatal disqualification for a leader of revolt--the fear
of the police”[133]--left leadership in his hands, but left him a
leader without followers.
Next to O’Connor stood another Irish orator, James Bronterre O’Brien, a
man of finer character, and clearer head, but smaller gifts of command.
South Wales, the manufacturing districts of Lancashire and Yorkshire,
and towns like Birmingham, Leicester, and Northampton, were the
strongholds of Chartism, and “in the dark days of the late thirties and
early forties it was a real and dangerous power.”[134] Feargus O’Connor
never advocated an armed rising, and advised the abandonment of the
huge torchlight processions; but pikes were being fashioned and men
were being drilled in preparation for a revolution that was to end the
Whig rule, and give the working classes the reins of government. The
circulation of the _Northern Star_, O’Connor’s weekly paper, stood at
50,000 in those days.
Riots at Newport (Monmouth) and Birmingham in 1839, followed by several
arrests and imprisonments of the Chartist leaders the following year,
ended for the time all notions of a successful revolution. Lord John
Russell declared strongly against manhood suffrage when the question
was raised in the House of Commons, and on a division in the House the
petition for the Charter was rejected by 237 to 48 votes.
The outbreak at Birmingham, provoked, in the first place, by the
interference of a body of London police with an orderly meeting in
the Bull Ring, was put down in two days by the soldiers; but not till
many houses had been attacked and a considerable amount of property
destroyed. No robberies or petty thefts accompanied the riot.
At Newport the harsh prison treatment of Vincent, a Chartist advocate,
convicted for what was held to be a political offence, brought a crowd
of 10,000 men, led by Frost, William, and Jones, to demand his release.
The insurgents had a few rifles and pikes, but were generally unarmed,
and the fire of the military soon overpowered them. But lives were lost
on both sides, and Frost and his two lieutenants were sentenced to
death, though the sentence was at once reduced to transportation for
life, and some years later to simple banishment from British dominions.
Feargus O’Connor, Bronterre O’Brien, and all the chief speakers of the
movement were brought to trial for seditious utterance in 1840, and in
most cases sent to prison either for twelve months or two years.
With these imprisonments and the general election of 1841 came the
first serious disintegration of the Chartist movement.[135] O’Brien and
O’Connor differed vigorously on the question of election policy, and
before they were released from prison were expressing their opinions
in the _Northern Star_. O’Connor, full of wrath at the repressive
treatment meted out to Chartists by the Whig Government, was for
attacking the Whigs at the election, and O’Brien objected to this as a
pro-Tory policy.[136]
The decision to run independent Chartist candidates for parliament in
certain constituencies, and the failure of these candidates to get
returned on the limited franchise of 1832, increased disunion in the
Chartist ranks and brought demoralisation.
To make matters worse for the movement, several prominent Chartists
left prison with fresh notions and ideas of reform, which had come to
them in their long hours of solitude and reflection. Lovett, imprisoned
in connection with the Birmingham riot, though he was entirely innocent
of giving any encouragement to violence, on his release was full of
vast plans for national education, convinced that education must
precede political democracy. Vincent had become a strong temperance
advocate, and henceforth must give himself to the work of a teetotal
lecturer. Other men were for bringing in religion by “Chartist
Churches.”[137] Antagonism to the anti-corn law league of Cobden and
Bright, and later his own “National Land Company” experiments, withdrew
Feargus O’Connor from actual Chartist propaganda.
The movement languished. But in spite of government repression, the
indifference of parliament, the hostility of the wealthier classes, and
its own jarring elements of discord, Chartism was not dead.[138]
The misery of the English people kept it from death. With one in
every eleven of the industrial population a pauper in 1842, general
satisfaction with the state of government was impossible for men of
strong social sympathies. Some exerted themselves, like Sadler and
Oastler, in following Lord Shaftesbury’s entirely disinterested and
successful crusade against the horrors of factory oppression. Others
supported the Free Trade agitation.
To one man, Ernest Jones, it seemed, in 1845, that before all else
must come political enfranchisement, that the social miseries and
discontents of England were not to be cured save by the people of
England. The evils might be mitigated by ameliorative legislation, but
it was not enough that the decencies of life--then very far beyond the
reach of the mass of town and country labourers--should be secured for
people; the main thing was that people should have freedom to work out
their own industrial salvation.
So in 1846, Ernest Jones plunged boldly into Chartism. He quickly
became a leader, and his reputation has endured: for Ernest Jones was
the most respected, single-minded, and steadfast of the many who sat in
Chartist conventions. Chartism for him was the cry of the uncared-for,
because voteless, multitudes, and Ernest Jones was ready to give his
life that the cry should move the rulers of the nation.
It was a bad time for England in 1846, that was plain,[139] and
Ernest Jones, believing with the average Englishman that in politics
lay the key to necessary change, was henceforth a Chartist advocate
and till his death the faithful preacher of democracy. Without
becoming a socialist, Ernest Jones, in his “Songs of Democracy” and
in his speeches and newspaper writings, is clear that political
enfranchisement was but the high road to social and economic reform,
that the Charter was to bring a better distribution of wealth as the
consequence of a better distribution of political power.[140]
Ernest Jones was twenty-seven when he joined the Chartist movement.
The son of an army officer--who had been equerry to the Duke of
Cumberland--and educated on the continent, Ernest Jones came to England
when he was nineteen, and was duly presented to Queen Victoria (as
Robert Owen had been) by Lord Melbourne in 1841. He married a Miss
Atherley, of Cumberland, and settled down in London, writing novels,
verses, and newspaper articles. In 1844 he was called to the Bar, and
two years later took the step which separated him from the friends
and acquaintances of his social order, and placed him on the hard and
strenuous road of the political agitator.
Averse from faction, realising the fatal folly of internal jealousies
and strife, and alive to the importance of discipline in the army
of revolt, Ernest Jones did his best to work with O’Connor--and was
naturally charged with cowardice by the Chartists who hated O’Connor’s
supremacy. In 1847 he began writing in the _Northern Star_, and was
joint editor with O’Connor of _The Labourer_. His “Songs of Democracy”
were to the Chartists what Ebenezer Elliott’s “Corn-Law Rhymes” were to
the Free Traders, and his “Song of the Lower Classes” has retained a
place in the song-books of social democrats to our own day.
At the general election of 1847, when, to everybody’s astonishment,
Feargus O’Connor was elected member for Nottingham, Ernest Jones stood
for Halifax, but though immensely popular at the hustings, he only
polled 280 votes.
1848, the memorable year of revolutions abroad, saw Chartism once
more a formidable movement in England. An enormous petition was again
prepared for parliament, and the Chartists decided to carry the
petition to the House of Commons after a mass meeting on Kennington
Common on April 10th. Lord John Russell and his Whig government became
thoroughly alarmed. The Duke of Wellington, as commander-in-chief,
undertook to guard the safety of London, and garrisoned the city with
troops, and protected the bridges, while 70,000 special constables
(of whom Prince Louis Napoleon was one) were quickly enrolled. But on
the government prohibition of any procession to Westminster, Feargus
O’Connor at once decided against any collision between the people and
the authorities. The mass meeting was held, some 50,000 persons were
present, and O’Connor and Ernest Jones made speeches. Then the petition
was sent off in a cab to parliament, and all was over.
O’Connor had boasted that the monster petition contained 5,000,000
signatures, but on investigation it was found that the signatures only
amounted to 1,975,496, and many of these were duplicates and forgeries.
Anti-Chartists had signed in several places, using ridiculous names,
like “Pugnose,” “Punch,” and “Fubbs,” or boldly signing as “Queen
Victoria” and “Duke of Wellington.”[141] Parliament gladly took
advantage of O’Connor’s characteristic exaggeration to discredit the
whole movement. At the same time the government hastily prepared a
bill to suppress the renewed agitation, and the “Treason Felony” bill
was passed, making “open and advised speaking with seditious intent”
a crime. This clause in the act only remained on the statute book for
two years, but it was sufficient for securing the conviction of all
prominent Chartist speakers.
Ernest Jones, unlike Feargus O’Connor, believed that the people
should arm, and that a display of force was necessary for carrying
the Charter. The failure of April 10th strengthened this belief, and
for the next two months he was busy speaking in England and Scotland,
urging the necessity for enrolling a national guard and forming a
provisional government.
But in spite of great public meetings the movement was already breaking
up. The Chartist Convention, which met in London on May 1st, dissolved
on May 13th in hopeless disagreement, and Ernest Jones, who had
attended as a member of the executive committee, exclaimed that “amid
the desertion of friends, and the invasion of enemies, the fusee had
been trampled out, and the elements of their energy were scattered to
the winds of heaven.” Still he tried to rally the broken ranks, and the
government decided that the time had come to put the movement down by
means of the new “Treason Felony” Act. Feargus O’Connor, now a member,
was no longer dangerous to the authorities. His attendance in the House
kept him from the agitation in the country, and Ernest Jones was the
man to be struck at.
On May 29th and 30th Ernest Jones addressed great, but quite orderly,
meetings in London, on Clerkenwell Green and Bishop Bonner’s Fields,
and then proceeded to Manchester. Here he was arrested and put on trial
with five other Chartists--Fussell, Sharpe, Williams, Vernon, and
Looney. The judge had little patience for the prisoners, and Ernest
Jones was frequently interrupted in his defence. In the end, he and his
fellows were all found guilty of seditious speech, and Ernest Jones was
sentenced to two years’ imprisonment, to find sureties, himself in £200
and two persons in £150, and to keep the peace for five years.
A number of police spies procured many more arrests and convictions by
gaining admission to Chartist meetings, joining Chartist unions and
inciting the members to violent speech and an armed conspiracy. By
these means at the end of the year 1848 the government had succeeded in
getting the prominent Chartists into prison, as it had done in 1840.
That Ernest Jones exhorted his followers to learn to bear arms is
indisputable; that the success of the revolutionary movements on the
continent encouraged the belief amongst a certain number of Chartists
that an armed rising was desirable and could be successful in England
is equally true. But as no serious attempt was made in 1848 by the
“physical force” Chartists to organize such a rising, no rising took
place, and “the conspiracy,” as it was called, was chiefly the work of
the government’s police spies.
The riots at Newport and Birmingham gave some excuse to the government
for repression in 1839–40; in 1848 no outbreaks were even threatened
to justify the sentences on Ernest Jones and other Chartist speakers.
The government’s chief concern was to end the agitation, even if this
could only be accomplished by means of a special act of parliament, and
the unsavoury methods of _agents provocateurs_. Lord John Russell and
his Whig colleagues were not the men to be kept from their purpose by
any nice discrimination in the choice of weapons. It was not the time,
when crowns were falling on the continent, to hesitate about crushing
a movement which seemed to menace public safety in England. That the
strength of Chartism was in the sober, law-abiding character of most
of its adherents the government knew no more than they knew that the
movement was already doomed for want of cohesion.
The bitter hostility of the government pursued Ernest Jones in prison,
and left him to be treated as a common felon. Ordered to pick oakum he
refused, and was put on a diet of bread and water. The struggle between
the prisoner and his gaolers was at last brought before the House of
Commons,[142] and in the end Ernest Jones was allowed to purchase
exemption from the allotted prison tasks by a small payment of money.
On his release from prison the Chartist movement was flickering out. It
was impossible to work with O’Connor, who, now looking favourably on
household suffrage, was already failing in health and showing signs
of the insanity which possessed him two years later. The trade-union
movement and the co-operative store were attracting the attention of
intelligent workmen, to whom for the time political enfranchisement
seemed a lost cause. Contesting Halifax in 1852, Ernest Jones only
polled 52 votes, and the _People’s Paper_, which he started in that
year and edited, never had the success of the _Northern Star_.
Feargus O’Connor was led away from the House of Commons hopelessly
insane, to die in 1855, and Chartism utterly disintegrated could not
be revived by Ernest Jones. In 1854 the movement was extinct, and from
that time till his death Ernest Jones gave his political support to
the advanced Radicals. He contested Nottingham in 1853 and 1857, but
without success, returned to his old practice at the Bar, and wrote
novels and poems. In 1868, the year of household suffrage in the
towns, he was adopted by the Radicals as parliamentary candidate for
Manchester, and then on January 26, 1869, came a sudden failure of the
heart, and death ended all earthly hopes and plans for Ernest Jones.
He was just fifty when he died, and though Chartism had passed away,
Ernest Jones had not outlived his usefulness or his popularity with all
those who believed in the ultimate triumph of democracy, and he had
gained the respect of many earlier foes.
The People’s Charter remains unfulfilled, but two of its points
have long been granted--the ballot, and the abolition of a property
qualification for members of parliament. Annual parliaments are no
longer desired by any section of political reformers, the extension of
the franchise to the agricultural labourer in 1884 brought manhood
suffrage appreciably nearer, equal electoral districts were never more
than a plan of quite reasonable political theorists, and the demand for
payment of members, never altogether dropped by Radicals, is once more
heard in the land.
The great contention of Ernest Jones and the Chartists that political
liberty should precede the granting of reforms by parliament, that the
people should have the power to control and direct the deliberations of
parliaments still has its advocates; but government is passing--almost
unnoticed--once more into the hands of an executive, for that “eternal
vigilance” which is the price of political liberty is oftentimes
relaxed.
Conclusion
CONCLUSION
Two political movements may be noted to-day in Great Britain by all
who are interested in such things: the Labour movement and the Women’s
movement for political enfranchisement.
The efforts of the past twenty-five years to establish a separate
socialist party in parliament have not been directly successful, but
the Labour Party has managed to return a group of some thirty workmen
to the House of Commons, and these men are the responsible and trusted
leaders of the trade-unions and the Independent Labour Party. Without
requiring any formal acknowledgment of socialist belief, the Labour
Party is largely inspired by socialist teaching, and its goal is
the conquest of government by the labouring people, and a more even
distribution of wealth by the gradual expropriation of the landlord and
the capitalist. While adhering strictly to constitutional methods of
agitation, giving full respect to the procedure of parliament and the
legal conduct of elections, the leaders of the Labour Party, in their
speeches at public meetings, use much of the old revolutionary talk
of John Ball and Robert Ket, and the arguments of Winstanley for the
popular ownership of the land. To the Labour Party as to the Chartists
democratic politics are but a stepping-stone to social reform, and as
in the days of the Chartists the strength of the Labour Party is in
the industrial districts of the North of England, and in South Wales.
The Women’s movement, on the other hand, while demanding nothing but
the right to the franchise, and claiming this right to a voice in
the affairs of the State on the old constitutional ground of Pym and
Hampden--that those who pay direct taxation to the government must have
some political control of the expenditure--boldly avows in the face of
government refusal the necessity for revolutionary methods to acquire
the franchise. More than 600 women have gone to prison in the last four
years in the cause of Women’s Suffrage, and the methods adopted have
startled the public, created an enthusiasm, and generally aroused the
attention of a formerly indifferent parliament to the claim of women to
political enfranchisement.
Mary Wollstonecraft, in her _Vindication of the Rights of Women_,
published in 1792, struck the first note of this movement. In the
latter half of the nineteenth century it received the support of John
Stuart Mill and a certain number of parliamentary radicals, and Women’s
Suffrage societies were formed. Then, five years ago, the Women’s
Social and Political Union was started at Manchester by Mrs. Pankhurst
and her daughter Miss Christabel Pankhurst, and the extraordinary
energy and activity of this union and the daring and resource of its
members have made the women’s demand for the vote a vital question in
politics.
Both these movements--the agitation of the Labour Party for a fuller
and more abundant life for wage-earners, and the agitation of the
women for political enfranchisement are proceeding in our midst--a
guarantee that the centuries of struggle for freedom are not fruitless.
“The battle of freedom is never done and the field never quiet,” and
while ever sun and moon endure and man seeks to dominate his neighbour,
so long in England shall men and women be found to resist such
dominance. For “to meet such troubles and overcome them, or to die in
strife with them--this is a great part of a man’s life.”
THE END.
FOOTNOTES
[1] “By the mouth of the clergy spoke the voice of the helpless,
defenceless multitudes who shared with them in the misery of living in
a time when law was the feeblest and most untrustworthy stay of right,
and men held everything at the mercy of masters, who had many desires
and less scruples, were quickly and fiercely quarrelsome, impatient
of control, superiority and quiet, and simply indifferent to the
suffering, the fear, the waste that make bitter the days when society
is enslaved to the terrible fascination of the sword.”--Church, _Saint
Anselm_.
“Unrestrained by religion, by principle or by policy, with no family
interests to limit his greed, extravagance and hatred of his kind, a
foul incarnation of selfishness in its most abhorrent form, the enemy
of God and man, William Rufus gave to England and Christendom a pattern
of absolutism.”--Stubbs, _Constitutional History_. Vol. I.
[2] No Archbishop of Canterbury has received the pallium since Cranmer,
but the sign of it remains in the archiepiscopal arms of Canterbury.
[3] “No one in those days imagined Christianity without Christendom,
and Christendom without a Pope: and all these bishops understood
exactly as Anselm did the favourite papal text, ‘Thou art Peter, and
on this rock I will build my Church.’ Nobody in those days doubted the
divine authority of the Pope.”--Church, _Saint Anselm_.
[4] “The boldness of Anselm’s attitude not only broke the tradition of
ecclesiastical servitude, but infused through the nation at large a new
spirit of independence.”--J. R. Green.
[5] “When in Anglo-Norman times you speak of the ‘King’s Court,’ it is
only a phrase for the king’s despotism.”--Sir F. Palgrave, _History of
Normandy and England_.
[6] “The see of St. Peter was the acknowledged constitutional centre
of spiritual law in the West.... It was looked upon as the guide and
regulator of teaching, the tribunal and court from which issued the
oracles of right and discipline, the judgment seat to which an appeal
was open to all, and which gave sentence on wrong and vice without
fear or favour, without respect of persons, even the highest and
the mightiest.... If ever there was a time when the popes honestly
endeavoured to carry out the idea of their office, it was just at this
period of the Middle Ages. They attempted to erect an independent
throne of truth and justice above the passions and the force which
reigned in the world around.”--Church, _Saint Anselm_.
“Under the rule of William the Red, law had become unlaw, and in
appealing from him to the apostolic throne Anselm might deem he was
appealing from mere force and fraud to the only shadow of right that
was still left on earth.”--Freeman, _Norman Conquest_, Vol. V.
[7] “In England Anselm had stood only for right and liberty; he, the
chief witness for religion and righteousness, saw all round him vice
rampant, men spoiled of what was their own--justice, decency, honour
trampled under foot. Law was unknown, except to ensnare and oppress.
The King’s Court was the instrument of one man’s selfish and cruel
will, and of the devices of a cunning and greedy minister. The natural
remedies of wrong were destroyed and corrupted; the king’s peace, the
king’s law, the king’s justice, to which men in those days looked for
help, could only be thought of in mocking contrast to the reality.
Against this energetic reign of misrule and injustice, a resistance
as energetic was wanted; and to resist it was felt to be the call and
bounden duty of a man in Anselm’s place. He resisted, as was the way
in those days, man to man, person to person, in outright fashion and
plain-spoken words. He resisted lawlessness, wickedness, oppression,
corruption. When others acquiesced in the evil state, he refused; and
further, he taught a lesson which England has since largely learned,
though in a very different way. He taught his generation to appeal from
force and arbitrary will to law. It was idle to talk of appealing to
law in England; its time had not yet come.”--Church, _Saint Anselm_.
[8] “No discipline restrained them (the king’s attendants); they
plundered, they devastated, they destroyed. What they found in the
houses which they invaded and could not consume, they took to market to
sell for themselves or they burnt it. If it was liquor they would bathe
the feet of their horses in it or pour it on the ground. It shames
me to recall the cruelties they inflicted on the fathers of families
and the insults on their wives and daughters. And so, whenever the
king’s coming was known beforehand, people fled from their houses and
hid themselves and their goods, as far as they could, in the woods or
wherever safety might be found.”--Eadmer.
[9] “If the Church had continued to buttress the thrones of the king’s
whom it annointed, or if the struggle had terminated in an undivided
victory, all Europe would have sunk down under a Byzantine or Muscovite
despotism.”--Acton, _History of Freedom in Christianity_.
[10] “By the surrender of the significant ceremony of delivering the
bishopric by the emblematic staff and ring, it was emphatically put
on record that the spiritual powers of the bishop were not the king’s
to give; the prescription of feudalism was broken.”--Church, _Saint
Anselm_.
[11] “With regard to Thomas’ dealings with the Church, if one thing
is clear it is this--that he was not in the least a man who pushed
his Order at the expense of his loyalty. More than once he refused to
listen to an ecclesiastical claim against the king, even when his old
friend Theobald was behind it: he was perfectly impartial: he taxed
churchmen as he taxed laymen, and in fact, so loyal and reasonable
was he that Henry, when he made him archbishop, seems to have thought
that he was wholly on his side. There were innumerable questions to be
decided between Church and State. Again and again small points came up
as to the appointment of this man or the other, as to the infliction
or remission of a fine; and again and again Thomas decided the cause
and advised the king on the merits of the case.... He was as zealous
now for the State as he was for the Church afterwards. There he stood
Chancellor of England; his business was to administer the laws, and he
knew and did his business.”--R. H. Benson, _St. Thomas of Canterbury_.
[12] “The only instance which has occurred of the chancellorship being
voluntarily resigned either by layman or ecclesiastic.”--Campbell,
_Lives of the Chancellors_.
[13] “It must be held in mind that the archbisholp had on his side the
Church or _Canon Law_, which he had sworn to obey, and certainly the
law courts erred as much on the side of harshness and cruelty as those
of the Church on that of foolish pity towards evil-doers.”--F. York
Powell.
“We have to take ourselves back to a state of society in which a
judicial trial was a tournament, and the ordeal an approved substitute
for evidence, to realise what civilization owes to the Canon Law
and the canonists, with their elaborate system of written law,
their judicial evidence, and their written procedure.”--Rashdall,
_Universities of Europe during the Middle Ages_.
[14] W. H. Hutton.
[15] This conversation is reported by Roger of Pontigny, who ministered
to St. Thomas when the latter was in exile at that place.
[16] Garnier was a poet, and he protests passionately against this law,
maintaining that God has called us all to His service. Much more worth
is the villein’s son who is honourable than a nobleman’s son who is
false.
[17] W. FitzStephen.
[18] W. FitzStephen.
[19] Dean Stanley.
[20] Freeman, _Historical Essays_. First series.
[21] “Hubert was very gracious in the eyes of all the host that lay
before Acre, and in warlike things so magnificent that he was admired
even by King Richard. He was in stature tall, in council prudent, and
though not having the gift of eloquence, he was an able and shrewd wit.
His mind was more on human than divine things, and he knew all the laws
of the realm.”--Gervase.
[22] It is notable that in our day only peerages and knighthoods are
sold, and these by political leaders to their partisans. Government
offices, the judicial bench and bishoprics are still fortunately not in
the market, though frequently allotted for partisan reasons.
[23] “Owing to the craft of the richer citizens the main part of the
burden fell on the poor.”--Matthew Paris.
[24] Some writers say 50,000.
[25] William of Newburgh.
[26] “Hubert, Archbishop of Canterbury, was a shrewd financier, and
an honourable, conscientious statesman; but as a prelate he is noted
chiefly for his quarrels with his chapter.”--W. H. Hutton, _Social
England_.
[27] Matthew Paris.
[28] “If he was to give up all for which he had been fighting, and
fighting successfully, against the pope and the Church for the past six
years, he must make quite sure of gaining such an advantage as would be
worth the sacrifice. Mere release from excommunication and interdict
was certainly, in his eyes, not worth any sacrifice at all. To change
the pope from an enemy into a political friend was worth it, but--from
John’s point of view--only if the friendship could be made something
much more close and indissoluble than the ordinary official relation
between the pope and every Christian sovereign. He must bind the pope
to his personal interest by some special tie of such a nature that the
interest of the papacy itself would prevent Innocent from casting it
off or breaking it.... To outward personal humiliation of any kind John
was absolutely indifferent, when there was any advantage to be gained
by undergoing it. To any humiliation which the crown or the nation
might suffer in his person, he was indifferent under all circumstances.
His plighted faith he had never had a moment’s hesitation in breaking,
whether it were sworn to his father, his brother, his allies or his
people, and he would break it with equal facility when sworn to the
supreme pontiff.... There seems, in short, to be good reason for
believing that John’s homage to the pope was offered without any
pressure from Rome and on grounds of deliberate policy.”--K. Norgate,
_John Lackland_.
[29] K. Norgate, _John Lackland_.
[30] “By the intervention of the Archbishop of Canterbury, with several
of his bishops and some barons, a sort of peace (_quasi pax_) was made
between the king and the barons.”--Ralph of Coggeshall.
[31] Matthew Paris, _Greater Chronicle_, quoted by K. Norgate.
[32] “The Charter was a treaty between two powers neither of
which trusted, or even pretended to trust, the other.”--Stubbs,
_Constitutional History_. Vol. II.
[33] Luard. Preface to _Grosseteste’s Letters_. Rolls’ Series. 1861.
[34] A well-known passage in Matthew Paris, vol. v, gives the monk’s
point of view of Grosseteste, the reformer:--“At this time the Bishop
of Lincoln made a visitation of the religious houses in the diocese.
If one were to tell all the acts of tyranny he committed therein, the
bishop would seem not merely unfeeling but inhuman in his severity.
For amongst other things when he came to Ramsey he went round the
whole place, examined each one of the monks’ beds in the dormitory,
scrutinized everything, and if he found anything locked up destroyed
it. He broke open the monks’ coffers as a thief would, and if he found
any cups wrought with decoration and with feet to stand on he broke
them to pieces, though it would have been wiser to have demanded them
unbroken for the poor. He also heaped the terrible curses of Moses on
the heads of those who disobeyed his injunctions and the blessings
of Moses on those who should observe the same.... And it is believed
all this he hath done to restrain from sin those over whom he hath
authority, and for whose souls he must give account.” This was written
in 1251, when Grosseteste had been sixteen years at Lincoln.
[35] Wright, _Political Songs_. Camden Society, 1839.
[36] Grosseteste had been unable to get his way with the barons on
the question of legitimacy of children before legal wedlock. By the
old church law marriage made such children legitimate, and at the
council of Merton, in 1236, Grosseteste, with the bishops, tried to
bring the common law into union with the church view on this matter.
He was defeated, and to this day these children are illegitimate. “It
would indeed have been better if the independence exhibited by the
majority who opposed the prelates at Merton had been reserved for
another occasion; for it cannot be deemed that the perpetuation of a
law contrary to that which prevails on the subject in almost every
European country, and which still differentiates Scotland from England
by abroad, though unintelligible line of demarcation, has been open
to grave objection on grounds of public convenience, apart from any
inherent merits or demerits it may possess.”--F. S. Stevenson, _Robert
Grosseteste_.
[37] “Grosseteste, then, may be regarded in a threefold aspect; first,
as a reformer who sought to reform the Church from within and not
from without, by the removal of existing abuses, by the encouragement
he gave to the great religious revival of the early part of the 13th
century, and by the example of unflinching fearlessness and rectitude
which he set in his performance of the episcopal office; secondly,
as the teacher who guided the rising fortunes of the University of
Oxford; and thirdly, as the statesman who, applying to new conditions
the policy associated with the name of Stephen Langton, endeavoured to
combine into one effort the struggle of the clergy for the liberties
of the Church with the struggle of the laity for the liberties of
the nation, imbued Simon de Montfort with principles of ‘truth and
justice’ which went far beyond the mere maintenance of the privileges
of his own order, and at the same time, by his effort to reconcile him
with his sovereign, and by the whole tenour of his actions, showed
that had he lived a few years longer, his influence would have been
directed to the task of achieving by peaceful means the constitutional
advance brought about by those who, taking the sword, perished by the
sword.”--Stevenson, _Robert Grosseteste, Bishop of Lincoln_.
[38] See recent article on “Grosseteste” in _Catholic Encyclopædia_.
[39] Yet out of this letter and out of his great knowledge and love
of the Scriptures a notion has been current that Grosseteste was a
forerunner of Protestantism, and “a harbinger of the Reformation.” “If
this implies that he had any tendency towards the doctrinal changes
brought about in the Church at the Reformation, or that he evidenced
any idea of a separation of the Church of England from that of Rome, a
more utterly mistaken statement has never been made.”--Luard, Preface
to _Grosseteste’s Letters_. (Rolls Series.)
As for Grosseteste’s Scriptural knowledge, “The thorough familiarity
with the Old Testament is, perhaps, only what we might expect; but the
use which is made of the actions of all the characters of Scripture,
and the forced and sometimes outrageous way in which they are
introduced to illustrate his argument, show how thoroughly ‘biblical’
the age was, and how completely the Old Testament history was regarded
rather as the guide of men’s conduct in Christian times, than as a mere
historical record of past events.”--_Ibid._
[40] “The king acted as if he had sent him abroad simply to ruin his
fortunes and wreck his reputation.”--Stubbs.
[41] Matthew Paris.
[42] Rishanger, the chronicler for St. Albans, puts the case for the
national party:--
“The king that tries without advice to seek his people’s weal
Must often fail, he cannot know the wants and woes they feel.
The Parliament must tell the king how he may serve them best,
And he must see their wants fulfilled and injuries redressed.
A king should seek his people’s good and not his own sweet will,
Nor think himself a slave because men hold him back from ill.
For they that keep the king from sin serve him the best of all,
Making him free that else would be to sin a wretched thrall.
True king is he, and truly free, who rules himself aright,
And chooses freely what he knows will ease his people’s plight.
Think not it is the king’s goodwill that makes the law to be,
For law is steadfast, and a king has no stability.
No! law stands high above the king, for law is that true light
Without whose ray the king would stray and wander from the right.
When a king strays he ought to be called back into the way
By those he rules, who lawfully his will may disobey
Until he seeks the path, but when his wandering is o’er,
They ought to help and succour him and love him as before.”
(Translated by F. York Powell.)
[43] “The new form of government bears evidence of its origin; it is
intended rather to fetter the king than to extend or develop the action
of the community at large. The baronial council clearly regards itself
as competent to act on behalf of all the estates of the realm, and the
expedient of reducing the national deliberations to three sessions
of select committees, betrays a desire to abridge the frequent and
somewhat irksome duty of attendance in parliament rather than to share
the central legislative and deliberative power with the whole body of
the people. It must however be remembered that the scheme makes a very
indistinct claim to the character of a final arrangement.”--Stubbs.
[44] A board of twenty-four--half chosen by the king and half by the
barons--had laid a body of resolutions before the Oxford Parliament,
and the first of these resolutions declared that all castles and
estates alienated from the crown should be at once resumed.
[45] “The first time, as far as we know, English was used in any public
document.”--Blaauw, _The Barons’ War_.
[46]
“End, O Earl of Gloster, what thou hast begun!
Save thou end it fitly, we are all undone.
Play the man, we pray thee, as thou hast promised,
Cherish steadfastly the cause of which thou wast the head.
He that takes the Lord’s work up, and lays it down again,
Shamed and cursed may he be, and all shall say Amen.
Earl Simon, thou of Montfort, so powerful and brave,
Bring up thy strong companies thy country now to save,
Have thou no fear of menaces or terrors of the grave,
Defend with might the nation’s cause, naught else thine own
needs crave.”
--Rishanger, _Political Songs_.
[47] Stubbs.
[48] “The Song of Lewes”--_Political Songs_.
[49] I am indebted to my friend Fr. Bede Jarrett, O.P., for this
interesting and, I believe, hitherto unpublished suggestion.
[50] It was to a Dominican Convent at Montargis that Simon’s widow, the
Princess Eleanor, retired after the fatal battle of Evesham.
[51] An appeal was lodged at Rome by several English bishops against
the threatened excommunication, but the papal legate himself became
pope early in 1265, and, as Pope Clement V., was the strongest enemy of
Simon and the national cause. It was only after Evesham and the death
of Simon that Clement urged a wise policy of mercy on Henry and the
royalists.
[52] “In this year, while Edward, the king’s son, was still held in
ward in the Castle of Hereford, dissension arose between Simon, Earl of
Leicester, and Gilbert, Earl of Gloucester....
“For which cause the old friendship was turned into hate, so much so
that neither the consideration of his oath nor former devotion could
thenceforth pacify the said Gilbert.... An endeavour was made by
certain prelates to restore the Earls of Leicester and Gloucester to
their former union; but they could in no wise succeed.”--W. Rishanger.
[53] J. R. Green, “The Ban of Kenilworth,” _Historical Studies_.
[54] “The triumph over Earl Simon had been a triumph over the religious
sentiment of the time, and religion avenged itself in its own way.
Everywhere the earl’s death was viewed as a martyrdom, and monk and
friar, however they might quarrel on other points, united in praying
for the souls of the dead as for ‘soldiers of Christ.’”--J. R. Green,
“The Ban of Kenilworth,” _Historical Studies_.
[55] _Chronicles of Melrose._
[56] _Ibid._
[57] Wright, _Political Songs_.
[58] See J. R. Green, “Annals of Osney and Wykes,” _Historical Studies_.
[59] “The project was clearly to set up a new order of things
founded on social equality--a theory which in the whole history of
the Middle Ages appears for the first time in connection with this
movement.”--Gairdner.
[60] It may be said that to-day the idea of political and social
equality is generally accepted and that of brotherhood denied. In
the fourteenth century brotherhood was esteemed, but equality was a
strange, intruding notion.
[61] “The bias of Wyclif in theory and practice is secular, and
aristocratic, and royalist: it is not really socialistic or politically
revolutionary,”--Figgis, _Studies of Political Thought_. Nevertheless,
many writers have tried to discredit Lollardy by associating it with
social revolt, just as others have tried to discredit John Ball by
making him out a “heretic,” and a follower of Wycliff.
[62] Froissart seems to be mainly responsible for the belief that this
John Tyler became the great leader of the movement, confusing him with
Wat Tyler, of Maidstone, the real leader. Several writers allege the
indecency of the tax-collectors.
[63] “Tyler, according to Walsingham, was a man of ready ability and
good sense. Save in some excesses, which, perhaps, were politic,
possibly unavoidable, and certainly exaggerated, the rebels under him
are admitted to have kept good order, and to have readily submitted to
discipline.”--Thorold Rogers. To Froissart Tyler appears merely as “a
bad man, and a great enemy of the nobility.”
[64] “Fearful lest their voyage should be prevented, or that the
populace should attack them, they heaved their anchors and with some
difficulty left the harbour, for the wind was against them, and put to
sea, when they cast anchor for a wind.”--Froissart.
[65] Two names at least have been preserved--Squire Bertram Wilmington
of Wye and John Corehurst of Lamberhurst.
[66] Seven years later this Earl of Salisbury, fleeing from Henry
Bolingbroke, was hanged in the streets of Cirencester at the hands of
the people.
[67] This law of Winchester was the statute of Edward I., 1285, which
authorised local authorities to appoint constables and preserve the
peace. Tyler’s aim was to strengthen local government in the counties,
making them as far as possible self-governing communes.
[68] “It was in the preaching of John Ball that England first listened
to the knell of feudalism, and the declaration of the rights of
man.”--J. R. Green.
[69] “Observe how fortunate matters turned out, for had the rebels
succeeded in their intentions they would have destroyed the whole
nobility of England, and after their success other countries would have
rebelled.”--Froissart.
[70] See Durrant Cooper--_John Cade’s Followers in Kent_.
[71] “These two bishops were wonder covetous men, evil beloved among
the common people and holden suspect of many defaults; assenting and
willing to the death of the Duke of Gloucester, as it were said.”--(_A
Chronicle of Henry VI_). According to Gasgoigne--_Loci e Libro
Veritatum_--the people said of Ayscough: “He always kept with the king
and was his confessor, and did not reside in his own diocese of Sarum
with us, nor maintain hospitality.”
[72] “He himself asserted that he had been a captain under the Duke
of York, and that his real name was Mortimer, which may possibly have
been true, for there were several illegitimate branches of the house of
March.”--Professor Oman, _Political History of England_.
[73] “A young man of a godly nature and right pregnant of
wit.”--Holinshed. Shakspeare’s farcical account of the rising in _King
Henry VI._, Part II., is, of course, entirely misleading.--See the
author’s _True Story of Jack Cade_.
[74] See the letter of John Payn in the _Paston Letters_. But Payn
wrote fifteen years afterwards, and seems to have been a person of no
very scrupulous honesty.
[75] A special act of parliament was passed in 1452 to cancel all that
Cade had accomplished.
[76] Cocke was a well-known supporter of Henry VI. and a man of note.
He was sheriff of London 1453, alderman in 1456, and mayor and M.P.
1462–3. Knighted by Henry in 1465, he fell from his high estate when
Edward IV. was king, and languished in prison on a charge of high
treason, only escaping with his life on payment of £8,000.
[77] “What answer to this demand was returned I find not, but like
it is the same was granted and performed; for I find not the said
captain and Kentishmen at their being in the city to have hurt any
stranger.”--Stow.
[78] When, by order of the Privy Council, the Exchequer seized all
Cade’s goods, these jewels were sold with the rest. They fetched £114,
and a payment of £86 7s. was subsequently made to the Duke of York.
So the crown made some profit on the transaction, but Malpas was
unrecompensed.--See Devon’s _Exchequer Rolls_.
[79] “Whereof he lost the people’s favour and hearts. For it was to be
thought if he had not executed that robbery he might have gone far and
brought his purpose to good effect.”--Fabyan.
[80] This church has long been pulled down. It was absorbed into St.
Saviour’s parish the following year. St. Margaret’s Hill is now part of
High Street, Borough, and the present St. George’s Church stands near
the site of old St. Margaret’s Church.
[81] _Acts of Privy Council_, 1451.
[82] “In the interests of truth, I must declare at the outset that
I cannot find the very slightest foundation for the assertion of
Stapleton, copied by Cresacre More and many others, that in the course
of time their friendship cooled. Abundant proofs of the contrary will
appear.”--Rev. T. E. Bridgett, _Life and Writings of Sir Thomas More_.
[83] “Indeed, it was he who pushed me to write the _Praise of Folly_,
that is to say, he made a camel frisk.”--Erasmus to Ulrich von Hutten,
1519.
[84] “He had a purpose to be a priest, yet God had allotted him for
another estate, not to live solitary, but that he might be a pattern
to married men: how they should carefully bring up their children,
how dearly they should love their wives, how they should employ their
endeavour wholly for the good of their country, yet excellently perform
the virtues of religious men, as piety, charity, humility, obedience
and conjugal chastity.”--Cresacre More.
[85] Erasmus to Ulrich von Hutten.
[86] “It is clear that Sir Thomas had a little Utopia of his own in his
family. He was making an experiment in education, and he was delighted
with its success. The fame of his learned daughters became European
through the praises of Erasmus, and was so great in England that in
1529, when they were all married ladies, they were invited by the
king to hold a kind of philosophical tournament in his presence....
More will ever stand foremost in the ranks of the defenders of female
culture.”--Rev. T. E. Bridgett, _Life and Writings of Sir Thomas More_.
[87] “He most warily retired from every opposition but that which
conscience absolutely required. He displayed that very peculiar
excellence of his character, which, as it showed his submission to be
the fruit of sense of duty, gave dignity to that which in others is apt
to seem to be slavish.”--Sir James Mackintosh, _Life of More_.
[88] “Parliament is discussing the revocation of all synods and other
constitutions of the English clergy, and the prohibition of holding
synods without express license of the king. This is a strange thing.
Churchmen will be of less account than shoemakers, who have the power
of assembling and making their own statutes.”--Chapuys, _Letters and
Papers of Henry VIII._ (Rolls Series).
[89] Chapuys, _Letters and Papers of Henry VIII._ (Rolls Series).
[90] _Lives of the Chancellors._
[91] _Letters and Papers of Henry VIII._ (Rolls Series).
[92] Roper.
[93] “To More a heretic was neither a simple man erring by ignorance,
nor a learned man using his freedom in doubtful points: he was a man
whose heart was ‘proud, poisoned, and obstinate,’ because he denied
the Divine guidance of the Church while he claimed special Divine
inspiration for himself.”--Rev. T. E. Bridgett.
[94] More’s _English Works--Apology_. It is only thirty years after his
death that Foxe suggests More as a persecutor. All the evidence is in
the opposite direction.
[95] Sir James Mackintosh, _Life of More_.
[96] See Dr. Jessop, _The Great Pillage_.
[97] _See State Papers, Domestic, Edward VI._
[98] The common lands engrossed in the 15th and 16th centuries were the
farm lands cultivated in common by the peasants. The enclosure of the
commons was left to a later date, and took place between 1760 and 1830.
[99] This Flowerdew had distinguished himself at the destruction of
the abbey at Wymondham by Henry VIII., by tearing off the lead from
the roof of the church and pulling down the choir, for the sake of the
stones, after the people had raised a large sum of money for the king
in order to save the church.
[100] “By bearing a confident countenance in all his actions the
vulgars took him (Ket) to be both valiant and wise and a fit man to be
their commander.”--Sir John Hayward, _Life of Edward VI._
“This Ket was a proper person to be a ringleader of mischief, for he
was of a bold, haughty spirit, and of a cankered mind against the
Government.”--John Strype, _Ecclesiastical Memorials_.
[101] These two “were partly fain to agree, lest they being out of
favour and place, others might come to bring all out of frame that
now might partly be well framed, and the rather they assented to keep
the people in better order during answer from the prince.”--Nicholas
Sutherton.
[102] “That a populous and wealthy city like Norwich should have been
for three weeks in the hands of 20,000 rebels, and should have escaped
utter pillage and ruin speaks highly for the rebel leaders.”--W. Rye,
_Victoria County History of Norfolk_.
[103] A few years later, and John Dudley, Earl of Warwick, now
Duke of Northumberland, again visited East Anglia to proclaim his
daughter-in-law, Lady Jane Grey, Queen of England. No one rose at his
call. Neither peasant nor landowner responded to the proclamation;
and John Dudley, Earl of Warwick and Duke of Northumberland, died, as
his father before him had died, convicted of treason, beheaded by the
executioner’s axe on Tower Hill. It was August 22nd, 1553, just four
years after the suppression of the peasants’ rising in Norfolk when
Northumberland was put to death.
[104] “Robert Ket was not a mere craftsman: he was a man of substance,
the owner of several manors: his conduct throughout was marked by
considerable generosity: nor can the name of patriot be denied to him
who deserted the class to which he might have belonged or aspired, and
cast in his lot with the suffering people.”--Canon Dixon, _History of
the Church of England_.
In 1588 a grandson of Robert Ket was burnt as a Nonconformist heretic
by order of Elizabeth.
[105] The three were Oxford men. Sir John Eliot was at Exeter (1607),
Hampden at Magdalen (1609) and Pym at Broadgate Hall, afterwards called
Pembroke (1599).
[106] “In Eliot’s composition there was nothing of the dogmatic
orthodoxy of Calvinism, nothing of the painful introspection of the
later Puritans. His creed, as it shines clearly out from the work of
his prison hours, as death was stealing upon him--_The Monarchy of
Man_--was the old heathen philosophic creed, mellowed and spiritualised
by Christianity. Between such a creed and Rome there was a great gulf
fixed. Individual culture and the nearest approach to individual
perfection for the sake of the State and the Church, formed a common
ground on which Eliot could stand with the narrowest Puritan.”--S. R.
Gardiner.
[107] Eliot’s argument “was a claim to render ministerial
responsibility once more a reality, and thereby indirectly to make
parliament supreme.”--S. R. Gardiner.
[108] “He (Eliot) was to the bottom of his heart an idealist. To him
the parliament was scarcely a collection of fallible men, just as the
king was hardly a being who could by any possibility go deliberately
astray. If he who wore the crown had wandered from the right path, he
had but to listen to those who formed, in more than a rhetorical sense,
the collective wisdom of the nation.”--S. R. Gardiner.
[109] “His (Hampden’s) distinction lay in his power of disentangling
the essential part from the non-essential. In the previous
constitutional struggle he had seen that the one thing necessary was to
establish the supremacy of the House of Commons.”--S. R. Gardiner.
[110] Clarendon.
[111] “The same men who, six months before, were observed to be of very
moderate tempers, and to wish that gentle remedies might be applied,
talked now in another dialect both of kings and persons; and said
that they must now be of another temper than they were in the last
parliament.”--Clarendon.
[112] The Nineteen Propositions fairly express the views of Pym
and Hampden at this time on the supremacy of the Commons. The main
proposals were the authority of parliament: in the _sole_ choice of
the ministers of the crown, in the regulation of state policy, in the
management of the militia, in the education of the royal children, in
the remodeling of the discipline of the Church of England; and the
guardianship by parliament of all forts and castles. It was of first
importance in Pym’s mind that parliament should have the control in
military matters. Without the power of the sword the House of Commons
could not ensure the personal safety of its members or the privileges
of free debate against the enmity of the king. To command the army was
to govern the country.
[113] See G. P. Gooch, _History of Democratic Ideas in the Seventeenth
Century_.
[114] “By its injudicious treatment of the most popular man in England,
parliament was arraying against itself a force which only awaited an
opportunity to sweep it away.”--G. P. Gooch, _History of Democratic
Ideas in the Seventeenth Century_.
[115] “Advocating direct government by a democratic Parliament and
the fullest development of individual liberty, the Levellers looked
with suspicion on the Council of State as a body which might possibly
be converted into an executive authority independent of parliament,
and thoroughly distrusted Cromwell as aiming at military despotism.
Well-intentioned and patriotic as they were, they were absolutely
destitute of political tact, and had no sense of the real difficulties
of the situation, and, above all, of the impossibility of rousing the
popular sympathy on behalf of abstract reasonings.”--S. R. Gardiner,
_History of the Commonwealth and Protectorate_.
[116] S. R. Gardiner.
[117] The movement “had sprung into existence in response to a widely
spread apprehension that the victory of the people might be rendered
fruitless. Its call had found an echo in the ranks of the army, and by
its admirable organization it had insisted that the leaders should hear
what it had to say. It had powerfully influenced their conduct and had
introduced a radical element into their programme. When this had been
done, the soldiers felt that its _raison d’être_ as a separate party
had come to an end. The battle had been fought, and the victory, at
least for the time, had fallen to Ireton.”--G. P. Gooch, _History of
Democratic Ideas in the Seventeenth Century_.
[118] “In other words, not only Cromwell and Ireton, but also Fairfax,
who had recently been elected a member of the House, were to be
summarily cashiered.”--S. R. Gardiner, _History of the Commonwealth_.
[119] See the pamphlet “A Petition of Well-affected Women,” 1649. There
is something curiously familiar in the exhortation to the women.
[120] “Unfortunately his friends, in petitioning for his release,
rested their case on the ground that all sentences given by a
court-martial were made illegal by the Petition of Right and the law
of the land. Such a doctrine would have dissolved the army into chaos,
and when Lilburne and Overton wrote to Fairfax, threatening him with
the fate of Joab and Strafford, all chance of pardon was at an end.
Lockyer firmly believed himself to be a martyr to the cause of right
and justice.”--S. R. Gardiner, _History of the Commonwealth_.
[121] See Whitelocke’s _Memorials_, “The Army’s Martyr,” “A True
Narrative,” and “The Moderate” (1649).
[122] “So die the Leveller corporals. Strong they, after their sort,
for the liberties of England; resolute to the very death.”--Carlyle.
[123] Lilburne’s attitude to Winstanley’s propaganda was similar to
the attitude of the political Chartists in the 19th century to Robert
Owen’s socialism.
[124] “Then ensued a scene, the like of which had in all probability
never been witnessed in an English court of justice, and was never
again to be witnessed till the seven bishops were freed by the verdict
of a jury from the rage of James II.”--S. R. Gardiner.
“In a revolution, where others argued about the respective rights of
king and parliament, he spoke always of the rights of the people. His
dauntless courage and his power of speech made him the idol of the
mob.”--Professor C. H. Firth, “Lilburne,” _Dictionary of National
Biography_.
[125] See L. A. Berens, _Digger Movement in the Days of the
Commonwealth_.
[126] _Clarke Papers_, vol. ii.
[127] Government rarely distinguishes between different schools of
agitators.
[128] Between 1710 and 1867 the number of acres so enclosed was
7,660,439.
[129] _Clarke Papers_, vol. ii.
[130] See Graham Wallas, _Life of Francis Place_.
[131] “Disappointment bitter and wide-spread was following closely upon
the inevitable failure of the extravagant expectations and overheated
hopes which the agitation for parliamentary reform had kindled.”--F.
York Powell, _The Queen’s Reign: a Survey_.
[132] See Graham Wallas, _Life of Francis Place_.
[133] Herbert Paul, _History of Modern England_.
[134] _Ibid._
[135] “Want of leaders and organization, and the great difference in
objects among the Chartists themselves, led to their failure. For a
while Chartism was stayed.”--Professor T. F. Tout, _England from 1689_.
[136] The differences between the two became more acute when Feargus
O’Connor started his land colonization schemes a few years later.
O’Brien opposed these schemes, which all ended in heavy financial
losses, and urged sticking to political reform. From 1842 O’Brien was
practically outside the Chartist movement, though it was not till 1848
he formally retired. He died in poverty in 1864, after giving some help
to the middle-class radical movement for household suffrage.
[137] A similar impulse fifty years later brought “Labour Churches”
into existence.
[138] “The ministers had met the Chartist outbreaks with strong,
repressive measures, and here they had the concurrence of parliament,
which had no sympathy with the movement. The House of Commons,
indeed, had little understanding of the processes that were maturing
outside its walls. The industrial and the social evolution went on
almost unnoticed by statesmen and politicians absorbed in the party
controversy.”--Sidney Low and Lloyd Sanders, _Political History of
England_, 1837–1901. See also Hansard’s _Parliamentary Debates_ for
these years.
[139] “The least satisfactory feature of English life in 1846 was the
condition of the labouring classes. Politically they were dumb, for
they had no parliamentary votes. Socially they were depressed, though
their lot had been considerably improved by an increased demand for
labour and by the removal of taxes in Peel’s great Budget of 1842. That
was the year in which the misery of the English proletariat reached its
lowest depth.”--Herbert Paul, _History of Modern England_.
[140] Stephens, a “hot-headed” Chartist preacher, put the case as
he, a typical agitator of the day, saw it in 1839: “The principle of
the People’s Charter is the right of every man to have his home, his
hearth, and his happiness. The question of universal suffrage is after
all a knife-and-fork question. It means that every workman has a right
to have a good hat and coat, a good roof, a good dinner, no more work
than will keep him in health, and as much wages as will keep him in
plenty.”--See R. G. Gamage, _History of the Chartist Movement_.
[141] Charles Kingsley, who is said to have signed the petition, gives
his view of April 10th in _Alton Locke_.
[142] See Hansard, June, 1849.
INDEX
Adam of Marsh, Franciscan friar, friend of Grosseteste and
de Montfort, 120, 130
Aldrich, an Alderman of Norwich, 229, 231
Alexander III., Pope, 45, 56
Anselm, Abbot of Bec, 8;
called to court of William II., 8;
appointed Archbishop of Canterbury, 9;
refuses to give up church lands, 11;
firm attitude at Council of Rockingham, 15;
semblance of peace with the king, 16;
leaves England, 18;
returns at request of Henry I., 19;
his services to the king, 21;
dispute with the king, 23;
reconciliation, 26;
his death and character, 27–30;
his birthplace, 30
Appleton, William, 161
Ayscough, Bishop of Salisbury, impeached for treason, 174;
murdered at Erdington, 175
Bailey, John, hanged by Cade, 184
Ball, John, itinerant priest from York, preaches social
revolution, 143;
released from Maidstone prison by Wat Tyler, 153;
preaches to Tyler’s followers at Blackheath, 153;
hanged as a rebel, 167
Barton, Elizabeth, “Holy Maid of Kent,” 206
Becket, Thomas, his parentage, 33;
early years, 34;
appointed Chancellor of Canterbury, 34;
ordained priest and appointed to Archbishopric, 38;
dispute with the king, 41–45;
yields to king’s demands at Council of Clarendon, 47;
refutes charges at Council of Northampton, 49;
leaves England and appeals to the pope, 55;
reconciliation with the king, 57;
lands at Sandwich, 57;
ill-will of the bishops, 58;
Henry’s sudden rage, 59;
his murder, 63;
his canonisation, 64
Belknap, Chief Justice, 147, 148
Berksted, Stephen, Bishop of Chichester, 128
Bigod, Hugh of Norfolk, 121
Bigod, Roger, 126
Boniface of Savoy, Archbishop of Canterbury, 110, 131
Bradshaw, John, 297
Buckingham, Duke of, 249, 250, 251, 252
Burdett, Sir Francis, 313
Burley, Sir Simon, 148, 163
Cade, Jack, leader of the revolt of Kentish commons, 1450, 173;
uncertainty as to real name and family, 176;
marches to Blackheath at head of 46,000 followers, 177;
draws up and presents petition to Henry VI., 178;
no answer returned, 178;
withdraws to Sevenoaks and defeats small body of Henry’s
troops, 180;
gathers reinforcements in Kent, 181;
Henry VI. treats with him fruitlessly, 181;
enters London without opposition, 182;
preserves strict discipline in his force, 184;
forced to levy toll for support of his followers, 185;
after first good reception London turns against him, 187;
unsuccessful fight for London Bridge, 187;
treats with Henry’s representatives, 188;
many of his adherents return to their homes, 189;
refuses to lay down arms till parliament issues legal pardon, 189;
proclaimed a traitor, 189;
defeated at Queenborough, 189;
dies fighting as a fugitive, in Sussex, 189;
head exposed on London Bridge, 190
Cartwright, John, enters Navy and begins promising career, 308;
it is cut short by his siding with the Americans at outbreak of
war, 1776, 308;
trains the Nottinghamshire Militia, 309;
pioneer of political reform, 310;
writes and speaks on the subject, 310;
unsuccessful efforts to enter parliament, 312;
at age of 80 charged with sedition and fined, 313;
known as “Father of Reform,” 315
Catherine of Aragon, 203
Cantilupe, Bishop of Worcester, 122, 126, 133
Cantilupe, Thomas, Chancellor, 128
Cave, Robert, 148
Chalton, Sir John, Lord Mayor of London, 183
Charles I., 250 _et seq._, 280, 282
Church, Corporal, 286
Clarendon, Earl of (quoted), 262
Clarendon, Council of, 46
Clarkson, Thomas, 313
Cocke (or Cooke) Thomas, friend to both Henry VI. and Cade, 182
Cod, Thomas, Mayor of Norwich, 228, 229, 231, 232, 233
Coke, Lord Justice, 252
Colet, Dean of St. Paul’s, 199, 212
Conyers, Dr., Vicar of St. Martin, Norwich, 231
Cranmer, Archbishop, 204
Cromwell, Oliver, 279 _et seq._
Cromwell, Thomas, 208
Crowmer, Sheriff of Kent, 180;
arrested and sent to Tower, 181;
beheaded by Cade’s orders, 184
Curtis (Girste, or Ghirstis) City Merchant, 186
De Burgh, Hubert, 95, 107
De Gray, John, Bishop of Norwich, 81, 82
De Morville, Hugh, 59–63
Derby, Henry, Earl of (afterwards Henry IV.), 157, 163, 170
Despenser, Henry, Bishop of Norwich, 168
Des Roches, Peter, Bishop of Winchester, 82, 94, 107, 108
De Tracy, William, 59–63
De Valence, William, 123, 132
Eadmer (quoted), 6, 7, 14, 17, 26
Edward, Prince, son of Henry III., afterwards King-Edward I.;
takes oath of reform to barons, 123;
takes Gloucester in civil war, 126;
taken prisoner at Battle of Lewes, 127;
escapes to Welsh marshes, 132;
intercepts de Montfort’s relief force at Evesham, 133
Eliot, John, enters parliament as member for St. Germans, 249;
knighted and becomes Vice-Admiral of Devon, 249;
captures the pirate Nutt, but eventually finds himself in Marshalsea
prison over the affair, 250;
released and is returned for Newport, 1624, 250;
quarrels with Buckingham and insists upon his impeachment, 251;
imprisoned in Tower in connection therewith, but soon released, 251;
refuses forced loan and again imprisoned and deprived of
Vice-Admiralship, 252;
carries Petition of Right, 252;
attacks policy of Laud, 252;
supports John Rolle in refusing payment of taxes, 253;
summoned before Privy Council, imprisoned for fourth time,
and fined, 255;
remains passionately loyal to House of Commons, 256;
health gives way in confinement, 257;
dies in the Tower, 1632, 257;
his son’s appeal for his burial at Port Eliot, Cornwall,
refused, 257
Erasmus, 193, 194, 197, 202, 211, 212
Essex, Earl of, 267
Ethelmar, half-brother to Henry III., 106
Everard, 297, 298
Fairfax, General, 298, 299
Falkland, Lord, 265, 266
Finch, Chief Justice, 262
Fisher, Bishop of Rochester, 206, 207, 208
FitzOsbert, William, called Longbeard; his early life, 72;
lays his grievances before Richard I., 72;
defies Archbishop Hubert, 73;
his arrest and death, 75
FitzStephen, W. (quoted), 35, 49, 53, 59
FitzUrse, Reginald, 59–63
Flowerdew, Sergeant, 222, 223
Frost, 321
Fulke, follower of Ket, 235
Fussell, 328
Gilbert, Earl of Gloucester, 126, 128, 131, 132
Gough, Matthew, 186
Green, J. R. (quoted), 91, 92
Green, Squire of Wylby, 222
Gregory IX., Pope, letter to, from Grosseteste, 102
Grindcobbe, William, supporter of John Ball in Hertford, 143, 146;
follows Wat Tyler, 149;
at Mile End, 159;
hanged at St. Albans, 167
Grosseteste, Bishop of Lincoln, born in Suffolk of humble parentage,
goes to Oxford, rises to foremost honours there, and becomes
bishop, at sixty, 101;
institutes reforms at Oxford, 102;
befriends Dominican and Franciscan friars, 102;
withstands Henry III.’s rapacity, 104;
attends council in London, recites grievances of Henry III.’s
misrule, 107;
resists seizure of English Church revenues by Innocent IV., 108–111;
refuses canonry of Lincoln to pope’s nephew, 111;
Cardinals uphold Grosseteste against Innocent IV., 112;
makes appeal to whole realm on behalf of rights of English
Church, 113;
dies, 1235, and is buried in Lincoln Cathedral, 113;
Edward I.’s application for canonization refused, 113
Gunnell, Tutor in Sir Thomas More’s family, 199
Hales, Sir Robert, Treasurer to Richard II., 146;
advises no conference with Tyler’s followers, 154;
beheaded on Tower Hill, 160
Hampden, John, refuses to pay ship-money, 258;
case decided against him, 259;
acts with Eliot against Buckingham, 261;
strong influence in House of Commons, 262;
prominent work in Long Parliament, 263;
impeached for high treason, 265;
takes refuge from Charles in city, 266;
prepares for war, 266;
raises regiment of infantry in Bucks, 267;
mortally wounded at Chalgrove, 268
Hazlerig, 265, 288
Henry I., 19–26
Henry II.; appoints Thomas Becket Chancellor of England, 34;
their close friendship, 35;
determines to appoint Thomas to the archbishopric, 36;
his dispute with Thomas, and its cause, 41;
draws up the Constitutions of Clarendon, 46;
his dissatisfaction with the result, 48;
charges Thomas with corrupt practices, 48–54;
his sudden rage and hasty words, resulting in the murder of the
archbishop, 63
Henry III.; appeals for money at Council of Westminster, 1244, 104;
confronts bishops with Innocent IV.’s letter exhorting them to give
liberally, 104;
bishops evade coercion, 105;
king again tries in 1252, 106;
bishops, led by Grosseteste, refuse, 106;
his miserable misrule, 108;
dealings with Simon of Montfort in Gascony, 118–120;
his financial difficulties reach climax, 1257, 120;
continued quarrels with barons, 122;
obtains dispensation from promises to barons, 124;
civil war is declared, 126;
defeated by Simon of Montfort, and peace made, 1264, 127;
war again breaks out, 132;
is victorious, 137
Henry VIII., 197, 201, 202, 203, 207, 208
Holland, Sir John, 159
Holles, 265
Horne, Alderman, 182
Horne, Alderman, supports Tyler, and welcomes him to London, 156
Hotham, Sir John, 267
Howe, Lord, 308
Hugh of Lincoln, 77
Herbert of Bosham (quoted), 38, 58
Iden, Alexander, 189, 190
Innocent III., Pope, 77, 81, 83, 95
Innocent IV., Pope, 104, 106, 110, 111, 113
Ireton, General, 280, 286
Islip, Archbishop of Canterbury, 144
John, King, refuses to acknowledge Stephen Langton’s appointment to
archbishopric, 81;
seizes estates of Canterbury, and drives chapter into exile, 82;
is excommunicated, 83;
meets primate at Winchester and is formally absolved, 85;
strife with barons, 86;
his campaign to recover lost Angevine provinces, 87;
capitulation to the barons, 90;
signs the Great Charter, 91;
his death, 95
John of Gaunt, calls parliament at Northampton, 147;
his unpopularity with the people, 151;
his palace of the Savoy and its valuable contents destroyed, 157
John of Salisbury (quoted), 56
Jones, Ernest, 324;
joins Chartist movement at 27, 325;
son of an officer and educated abroad, 325;
works with Feargus O’Connor, 325;
attends Chartist convention, 327;
addresses large meetings in London, 328;
arrested, tried, found guilty of seditious speech and
imprisoned, 328;
on his release Chartist movement declining, 329;
contests Halifax unsuccessfully, 330;
gives support to advanced radicals, 330;
stands twice unsuccessfully for Nottingham, 330;
dies suddenly at the age of 50, 330
Kemp, Cardinal, Archbishop of York, Chancellor to Henry VI.,
187, 188, 190
Kent, Earl of, 159
Ket, Robert, landowner in Norfolk, a tanner by trade, 223;
sympathies on the side of the people, 223;
offers to lead the movement against enclosures of land, 224;
he is eagerly accepted as captain, and leads large army towards
Norwich, 224;
issues manifesto attacking landlords, 225;
advances to Mousehold, and his force increases to 20,000, 228;
sends statement to Edward VI., 229;
king replies by herald, 229;
sets about organising and victualling his followers, as he is not
content with vague promises, 230;
arrests landowners, 231;
repudiates king’s “pardon” as being a just and innocent man, 232;
his arrest ordered by king’s messenger, but impossible in the
presence of his followers, 232;
friction arises between Norwich authorities and the rebels, 232;
fight ensues, Norwich in his hands, 233;
unsuccessfully opposed by Marquis of Northampton, 234;
commands in Norwich for three weeks, 235;
disappointed at rising not becoming general, 236;
negotiates with Earl of Warwick, sent to suppress revolt, 237;
abrupt conclusion, and battle follows, 238;
his mistaken tactics and defeat, 239;
his followers surrender to Warwick, 239;
his flight and capture, 239;
tried, found guilty of high treason and condemned to death, 241;
hanged in chains in Norwich, 241
Ket, William, 223, 239, 240, 241
Knolles, Sir Robert, 156
Knyvett, Sir Edmund, 236
Langham, Simon, Archbishop of Canterbury, 144
Langland, Robert, 145
Langton, Stephen, appointed to archbishopric of Canterbury against
King John’s wishes by Innocent III., 81, 82;
is driven into exile by the king, 82;
returns six years later, 85;
starts the movement for the Great Charter, 86;
frames articles for the Charter, 90;
disagreement with papal legate, 94;
works for preservation of peace during early years of Henry
III.’s reign, 95;
his character and place in history, 96
Laud, Archbishop, 252, 253, 256, 257, 260, 262, 272
Legge, John, 147, 160
le Despenser, Hugh, Justiciar, 126, 128, 134
Lilburne, John, apprenticed to a cloth merchant in London and becomes
friend of Prynne, 278;
charged before Star Chamber with circulating unlicensed books, and
sentenced to be whipped, pilloried, and imprisoned, 278;
released by order of Long Parliament, 278;
fights at Edgehill and Marston Moor, where he is taken
prisoner, 278;
leaves army in 1645 rather than take the Covenant, 279;
resists the tyranny of parliamentary government, 279;
heads the party in the army called the Levellers, 281;
again imprisoned and released in 1649, 282;
writes pamphlets against the government and is again
imprisoned, 284;
petition presented to parliament for his release, 284;
tried for treasonable writings, 287;
fined and banished, 288;
goes to Holland, and returns, without permission, to London,
in 1653, 289;
arrested and acquitted, 289;
again imprisoned by Cromwell for two years, 290;
converted to Quakerism, 290;
released and pensioned, 290;
dies at Eltham, 290
Litster, Geoffrey, follower of John Ball in Norfolk, 143, 146;
his death, 168, 217
Looney, 328
Lovett, 319, 322
Luard (quoted), 101–2
Lyons, Richard, 161
Macaulay, Lord (quoted), 264
Malpas, Philip, 185
Martin, Papal Legate, 110
Matthew of Westminster (quoted), 127
Maurice, C. E. (quoted), 95
Mendall, John, a name by which Jack Cade was known, 175
Moleyns, Bishop of Chichester, supporter of Duke of Suffolk, killed at
Portsmouth, 174
Montfort, Henry of, eldest son of Earl of Leicester, 133, 134
Montfort, Simon of, second son of Earl of Leicester, 132, 133
Montfort, Simon of, Earl of Leicester, son of first Earl of Leicester,
marries Eleanor, sister of Henry III., and widow of Earl of
Pembroke, 117;
boyhood passed in France, 117;
leaves for crusades, distinguished career in Palestine, 118;
returns in 1242, 118;
works with Grosseteste in his reforms, 118;
goes to Gascony for five years (1248–53) and deals with turbulent
nobles, 118;
saves Gascony for English crown, and restores order in the
province, 119;
Henry III.’s ingratitude, 119;
recognized leader of the barons on his return to England, 120;
successful in “Mad Parliament,” 1258, 122;
as “foreigner” yields castles of Kenilworth and Odiham, 123;
fresh difficulties with Henry III. in carrying out Provisions of
Oxford, 124;
civil war imminent, 1264;
and many bishops and barons desert Simon, 125;
offers £30,000 to king to make peace and adhere to Provisions of
Oxford--proposal rejected, 126;
Battle of Lewes won by Simon, 126;
peace made, 127;
draws up new scheme of reform, the precursor of later representative
government, 129;
fresh disturbances and defections, followed by renewal of war, 132;
Battle of Evesham, and death of Simon, 134;
interred in Evesham Abbey, 134
More, Sir Thomas, born 1478, member of Cardinal Morton’s household,
leaves there for Oxford, and later studies law in Lincoln’s
Inn, 193;
friendship with Erasmus, 194;
spends four years with Carthusians, 195;
leaves Charterhouse, marries and enters parliament, 195;
opposes Henry VII.’s exactions, 195;
Under-Sheriff for the City, 196;
embassies to Flanders and Calais, 197;
enters Henry VIII.’s service, and rises rapidly to highest offices
of State, 197;
happy domestic life, 198;
withholds support from king on his divorce from Catherine of
Aragon, 203;
resigns chancellorship, 205;
declines to be present at Anne Boleyn’s coronation, 206;
unsuccessful attempt to implicate him in the “treason” of Holy Maid
of Kent, 206;
finds himself unable to take oath denying papal supremacy, and is
sent to Tower, 207;
indicted for treason, 208;
sentenced to death, 209;
beheaded on Tower Hill, 210;
beatified, 213
Mortimer, name by which Jack Cade was popularly known, 176
Mortimer, Roger, 132
Newton, Sir John, Governor of Rochester Castle, taken prisoner
by Tyler, 149;
sent with message from Tyler to the king, 154
Nicholas, papal legate, 86
Norfolk, Duke of, 202
Northampton, Council of, 48
Northampton, Marquis of (William Parr), 234
Oastler, 323
O’Brien, James Bronterre, 320, 321, 322
O’Connor, Feargus, 320, 323, 329, 330
Otho, papal legate, 109, 110
Overton, Richard, 284
Palgrave, Sir Francis (quoted), 22, 23
Pandulf, papal legate, 83, 94
Pankhurst, Mrs., 336
Pankhurst, Christabel, 336
Paris, Matthew (quoted), 100, 105, 108, 113, 117, 124
Parker, Matthew, afterwards Archbishop of Canterbury, 231, 232
Perkins, Corporal, 286
Petibone, John, 232
Place, Francis, 314, 319, 320
Powell, Professor York (quoted), 30, 65, 91, 121, 135
Prince, 284
Pym, John, enters House of Commons, 1614, 260;
conspicuous in “Short Parliament,” 260;
supports Eliot in Buckingham’s impeachment, 261;
becomes leader of parliamentary party, 261;
canvasses England on horseback before “Long Parliament,” 261;
opens charge of impeachment against Strafford, 262;
active work in parliament, 263, 264;
makes overtures to the queen, 263;
impeached for high treason, 265;
takes refuge in city from Charles, 266;
secures Portsmouth and Hull for the parliament, 266;
his “solemn league and covenant” accepted by parliament, 269;
dies, 1643, and buried in Westminster Abbey, 269
Rich, Edmund, Archbishop of Canterbury, 106;
retires to Pontigny, 1240, and dies, 109
Richard II., agrees to interview with Tyler, 154;
allows himself to be dissuaded, 155;
sends to Tyler for written statement of grievances, 157;
agrees to a meeting at Mile End, 159;
assents to Tyler’s requests, 160;
second meeting at Smithfield, 162;
again agrees to Tyler’s demands, 164;
after Tyler’s death personally disperses his followers, 166;
the danger passed, rebels fiercely punished, 167;
formally annuls charters granted to Tyler, 168;
his death, 170
Richard the Breton, 59–63
Richard, Earl of Cornwall, half brother to Henry III., became King of
the Romans, 118
Richard, Earl of Gloucester, 121, 122, 124
Rishanger, Chronicler for St. Albans (quoted), 121, 134
Rockingham, Council of, 13, 15
Roger of Wendover (quoted), 88
Roper, William, son-in-law to Sir Thomas More, 195, 196, 202
Roper, Margaret (his wife), 198
Russell, Lord John, 321, 326, 329
Sadler, 323
Salisbury, Earl of, counsels Richard II. not to interview Tyler, 155;
at Smithfield, 163;
his death, 170
Sanders, Henry, 297
Say-and-Sele, Lord, treasurer to Henry VI., impeached for
treason, 174;
arrested and taken to Tower, 181;
beheaded by Cade’s order, 184
Scales, Lord, guardian of prisoners in Tower, 182;
in conjunction with mayor and corporation opposes Cade, 186
Seldon, 252
Shaftesbury, Lord, 323
Sharpe, 328
Sheffield, Lord, 234
Sibley, Alderman, 156
Somerset, Protector, 221, 236
Stafford, Archbishop of Canterbury, Chancellor to Henry VI.,
181, 187, 188
Stafford, Sir Humfrey, 180
Stafford, Sir William, 180
Standish, Ralph, 165, 166
Steward, Augustine, 234, 235
Strafford, Earl of, 252, 256, 262, 263
Straw, Jack, priest in Essex, follower of John Ball, 143;
acts as lieutenant to Wat Tyler, 149;
hanged without trial, 167
Strode, 265
Sudbury, Simon, Archbishop of Canterbury, 144;
his palace at Canterbury ransacked by Tyler, 152;
Lambeth palace stormed by Tyler and records destroyed, but building
uninjured, 156;
beheaded by Tyler, on Tower Hill, 161
Suffolk, Duke of, chief minister to Henry VI., 173;
impeached as a traitor, 174;
beheaded, 174
Suffolk, Earl of, President of Richard II.’s council, 155,
163, 167, 170
Sutherton, Leonard, 232
Tonge, Alderman, 156
Theobald, Archbishop, 33, 34, 36
Thompson, Corporal William, 285
Thompson, Cornet, 286
Tressilian, Sir Robert, 167, 170
Tyler, John, 148, 149
Tyler, Wat, chosen captain of peasants at Maidstone, 149;
his recorded history can be followed for eight days only, 150;
his followers at first moderate, 151;
at Canterbury, 152;
bursts open gaol at Maidstone and releases Ball and other
prisoners, 153;
sets out for London at head of 30,000 men, 153;
encamps at Blackheath, 153;
sends Sir John Newton with message to Richard II., 154;
interview refused, 155;
he marches on London Bridge, and destroys adjacent property, 155;
keeps his followers under strict discipline, 156;
demands interview with the king, 158;
conference at Mile End, 159, 160;
invites king to meet him again, at Smithfield, 162;
his demands agreed to, 164;
in sudden scuffle draws dagger, strikes Walworth, and is mortally
wounded in return, 165;
his head exposed on London Bridge, 166
Urban, Pope, 18, 19
Vernon, 328
Vincent, 321
Von Hutten, Ulrich, 193
Warwick, Earl of, High Chamberlain to Henry VIII., 236–240
Walter, Hubert, Bishop of Salisbury, afterwards Archbishop of
Canterbury, 69, 70, 73, 76, 77, 81
Walter of Coventry (quoted), 85
Walworth, William, Mayor of London, owns London houses of
ill-fame, 155;
the same destroyed by Tyler, 155;
attempts to fortify London Bridge, 155;
urges king and council to action, 157;
at Smithfield, 163;
wounds Tyler mortally, 165;
knighted by Richard, 166
Walwyn, 283
Warham, Archbishop, 197
Watson, a Norwich preacher, 229
Waynfleet, William, Bishop of Winchester, 188
Wellington, Duke of, 326
Wentworth (see Strafford, Earl of).
Weston, Chancellor of the Exchequer, 252
Wilberforce, William, 313
William I., his character, 3;
condition of country under, 3–5;
death, 5
William II., his character, 5;
condition of England under, 6;
appoints Anselm to Archbishopric of Canterbury, 10;
his quarrel with Anselm, 11–13, _et seq._;
his death, 19
Williams, 328
Windebank, 262
Winstanley, Gerrard, 286;
leader of the “Digger” movement, 293;
born in Lancashire, but settled in London as a trader, 294;
fails, and retires to the country, 294;
publishes pamphlets, social and religious, 295;
first action of the “Diggers,” 297–8;
appeals to General Fairfax against interference, 299;
receives little notice, 300;
makes further active efforts, 300;
movement suppressed, 300;
little known of him later, 301
Wollstonecraft, Mary, 336
Wolsey, Cardinal, 197, 201, 202, 203, 208, 217, 222
Wraw, John, supporter of Ball in Suffolk, 143, 146;
follows Wat Tyler, 149;
at Blackheath, 153;
returns to Suffolk to announce rising, 153;
is hanged as rebel, 167
_The Westminster Press (Gerrards Ltd.), Harrow Road, London, W._
Transcriber’s note:
Punctuation, hyphenation, and spelling were made consistent when a
predominant preference was found in the original book; otherwise they
were not changed.
Simple typographical errors were corrected; unpaired quotation
marks were remedied when the change was obvious, and otherwise left
unpaired.
Illustrations in this eBook have been positioned between paragraphs
and outside quotations. In versions of this eBook that support
hyperlinks, the page references in the List of Illustrations lead to
the corresponding illustrations.
Footnotes, originally at the bottoms of pages, have been collected and
placed just before the Index of this eBook.
The index was not checked for proper alphabetization or correct page
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