No other way than violent resistance seemed possible to peasants and artisans in the twelfth, fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries, if their wrongs were to be mitigated and their rulers to be called to account.

Langton and Simon of Montfort had placed some check on the power of the Crown, had laid the foundations of political liberty, and marked the road to be travelled; but the lot of the labouring people remained unheeded and voiceless in the councils of the nation. What could they do but take up arms to end an intolerable oppression?

WILLIAM FITZOSBERT, CALLED LONGBEARD, 1196

The first serious protest came from the London workmen in the reign of Richard I.; and FitzOsbert, known as Longbeard, was the spokesman of the popular discontent.

The King wanted money, chiefly for his crusades in Palestine. He had no inclination to personal government, and the business of ruling England was in the hands of Hubert Walter, Archbishop of Canterbury, the justiciar or King's lieutenant. Richard left England for Normandy in 1194, and returned no more. England to him was a country where money could be raised, a subject-province to be bled by taxation. Archbishop Hubert did his best to satisfy the royal demands; and though by his inquisitions "England was reduced to poverty from one sea to the other"—it is estimated that more than L1,000,000 was sent to Richard in two years—the King was left unsatisfied. The nation generally came to hate the Archbishop's taxation, the Church suffered by his neglect, and he was finally compelled to resign the justiciarship.

It was the London rising, under FitzOsbert's leadership, that directly caused Archbishop Hubert's retirement, and FitzOsbert is notable as the first of the long line of agitators.

The political importance of the capital was seen in the reigns of Cnut and William the Conqueror. It was conspicuous on the arrival of Stephen in 1135, and its influence on national politics lasted till the middle of the nineteenth century.[33]

By its charter London had the right of raising taxes for the Crown in its own way, and in 1196 the method proposed by the Corporation provoked the outbreak. "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" (Hoveden).

The poorer citizens were voteless, and the plan of the aldermen was to levy the tallages per head, and not in proportion to the property of the inhabitants. This meant, practically, that the whole, except a very small fraction of the sum to be raised, must be paid by the working people.

Thereupon FitzOsbert protested, and the people rose in arms against the demand.

FitzOsbert was an old crusader, and he was something of a lawyer and a powerful speaker. Not a rich man by any means, FitzOsbert was yet a member of the city council when, "burning with zeal for justice and fair play, he made himself the champion of the poor." To his enemies he was a demagogue and disreputable—so Ralph de Diceto, Dean of St. Paul's at that time, described him. To others of more popular sympathies he was heroic and died a martyr's death. Across the centuries he is seen as "an agitator"—the first English agitator, the first man to stand up boldly against the oppression of the common people. This palpably unjust taxation of the poor was intolerable to FitzOsbert.

Fifteen thousand men banded themselves together in London under an oath that they would stand by each other and by their leader; and FitzOsbert, after a vain journey to Normandy to arouse Richard's attention to the wrongs of his subjects, bade open defiance to the justiciar and his tax-gatherers.

For a time the Archbishop's men were powerless, but weakness crept in amongst the citizens, and the aldermen were naturally on the side of constituted authority. FitzOsbert's success meant a readjustment of taxation quite unpalatable to the City Fathers.

In the end FitzOsbert was deserted by all but a handful of his followers and fled with them for sanctuary to the church of St. Mary-le-Bow in Cheapside. Pursued by the officers of the law, FitzOsbert climbed up into the tower of the church, and to fetch him down orders were given to set the church on fire. This was done, and the only chance of life that now remained for the rebels was to get out of the church and cut their way through the ranks of their enemies.

At the church door FitzOsbert was struck down, and his little company quickly overpowered.

Heavily chained, and badly wounded, FitzOsbert was carried off to the Tower, to be tried and sentenced to a traitor's death without delay.

A few days later—it was just before Easter—FitzOsbert was stripped naked, and dragged at the tail of a horse over the rough streets of London to Tyburn. He was dead before the place of execution was reached, but the body, broken and mangled, was hung up in chains under the gallows elm all the same; and nine of his companions were hanged with him.

The very people who had fallen away from their leader in the day of his need now counted FitzOsbert for a saint, and pieces of his gibbet and of the bloodstained earth underneath the tree were carried away and treasured as sacred relics. It was alleged that miracles were performed when these relics were touched—so wide was now the popular reverence for the dead champion of the poor.

Archbishop Hubert put a stop to this devotion by ordering sermons to be preached on FitzOsbert's iniquities; and an alleged death-bed confession, containing an account of many evil deeds, was published. It is likely enough that an old crusader had plenty of sins to answer for, but FitzOsbert's one crime before the law was that he had taught the people of London to stand up and resist by force of arms the payment of taxes—taxes levied with gross unfairness in popular judgment.

The monks of Canterbury, to whom the church of St. Mary-le-Bow in Cheapside belonged, had long had their own quarrels with Archbishop Hubert, and on this firing of their church, and the violation of sanctuary, they appealed to the King and the Pope—Innocent III.—that Hubert should give up his political work and attend exclusively to his duties as Archbishop. Both the Pope and the great barons were against him, and in 1198 Archbishop Hubert was compelled to resign the judiciarship.

THE PEASANT REVOLT AND ITS LEADERS, 1381

The great uprising of the peasants in 1381 was a very different matter from the local insurrection made by FitzOsbert. Two centuries had passed, and in those centuries the beginnings of representative government had been set up and some recognition of the rights of the peasantry had been admitted in the Great Charter.

The Peasant Revolt was national. It was carefully prepared and skilfully organised, and its leaders were men of power and ability—men of character. It was not only a definite protest against positive evils, but a vigorous attempt to create a new social order—to substitute a social democracy for feudal government.[34]

The old feudal order had been widely upset by the Black Death in 1349, and the further ravages of pestilence in 1361 and 1369. The heavy mortality left many country districts bereft of labour, and landowners were compelled to offer higher wages if agriculture was to go on. In vain Parliament passed Statutes of Labourers to prevent the peasant from securing an advance. These Acts of Parliament expressly forbade a rise in wages; the landless man or woman was "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." The scarcity of labour drove landowners to compete for the services of the labourer, in spite of Parliament.

Discontent was rife in those years of social change. The Statutes of Labourers were ineffectual; but they galled the labourers and kept serfdom alive. The tenants had their grievance because they were obliged to give labour-service to their lords. Freehold yeomen, town workmen, and shopkeepers were irritated by heavy taxation, and vexed by excessive market tolls. All the materials were at hand for open rebellion, and leaders were found as the days went by to kindle and direct the revolt.

John Ball, an itinerant priest, who came from St. Mary's, at York, and then made Colchester the centre of his wanderings, spent twenty years organising the revolt, and three times was excommunicated and imprisoned by the Archbishop of Canterbury for teaching social "errors, schisms, and scandals," but was in no wise contrite or cast down.

Chief of Ball's fellow-agitators were John Wraw, in Suffolk, Jack Straw, in Essex—both priests these—William Grindcobbe, in Hertford, and Geoffrey Litster, in Norfolk. In Kent lived Wat Tyler, of whom nothing is told till the revolt was actually afire, but who at once was acknowledged leader and captain by the rebel hosts.

From village to village went John Ball in the years that preceded the rising, organising the peasants into clubs, and stirring the people with revolutionary talk. It was the way of this vagrant priest to preach to the people on village greens, and his discourses were all on the same text—"In the beginning of the world there were no bondmen, all men were created equal."[35] Inequalities of wealth and social position were to be ended:

"Good people, things will never go well in England, so long as goods be not kept in common, and so long as there be villeins and gentlemen. By what right are they whom men call lords greater folk than we? If all come from the same father and mother, Adam and Eve, how can they say or prove that they are better than we, if it be not that they make us gain for them by our toil what they spend in their pride?

"They are clothed in velvet, and are warm in their furs and ermines, while we are covered in rags. They have wine and spices and fair bread, and we oatcake and straw, and water to drink. They have leisure and fine houses; we have pain and labour, the wind and rain in the fields. And yet it is of us and of our toil that these men hold their state.

"We are called slaves; and if we do not perform our services, we are beaten, and we have not any sovereign to whom we can complain, or who wishes to hear us and do us justice."

The poet, William Langland, in "Piers Plowman," dwelt on the social wrongs of the time; Ball was fond of quoting from Langland, and of harping on a familiar couplet:

"When Adam delved and Eve span, Who was then the gentleman?"

Besides the sermons, some of the rhymed letters that John Ball sent about the country have been preserved:

"John Ball, Priest of St. Mary's, greets well all manner of men, and bids them in the name of the Trinity, Father, Son and Holy Ghost, to stand together manfully in truth. Help truth and truth shall help you.

"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, Then is our mill mis-a-dight."

Sometimes it is under the signature of John Trueman that John Ball writes:

"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."

A more definite note was struck when it seemed to Ball and his colleagues that the time was ripe for revolution, and the word was given that appeal must be made to the boy-king—Richard was only eleven years old when he came to the throne in 1377.

"Let us go to the King, and remonstrate with him, telling him we must have it otherwise, or we ourselves shall find the remedy. 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."

In another letter John Ball greets John Nameless, John the Miller, and John Carter, and bids them stand together in God's name, and beware of guile: he 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 were accepted by willing minds. John Ball was in prison—in the jail of Archbishop Sudbury at Maidstone—in the spring of 1381, but the peasants were organised and ready to revolt. If Wat Tyler is the recognised leader of the rebel forces—"the one head"—John Ball's was the work of preparing the uprising. The vagrant priest had rung his bell to some purpose. 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."

At Whitsuntide, early in June, 1381, the great uprising began—the Hurling time of the peasants—long to be remembered with horror by the governing classes. A badly ordered poll-tax was the match that kindled the fire.

The poll-tax was first levied, in 1377, on all over fourteen years of age. Two years later it was graduated, every man and woman of the working class being rated at 4d., and dukes and archbishops at L6 13s. 4d. More money was still wanted by the Government, and early in 1381, John of Gaunt, the chief man in the realm, called Parliament together at Northampton, and demanded L160,000. Parliament agreed that L100,000 should be raised, and the clergy—owning a third of the land—promised L60,000. But the only way of raising the L100,000 that the Government could think of was by another poll-tax, and this time everybody over fifteen was required to pay 1s. Of course, the thing was impossible. In many parishes the mere returns of population were not filled in; numbers evaded payment—which spelt ruin—by leaving their homes. L22,000 was all that came to hand.

Then a man named John Legge came to the assistance of the Government, and was appointed chief commissioner, and empowered to collect the tax.

The methods of Legge and his assistants provoked hostility, and when the villagers of Fobbing, Corringham, and Stanford-le-Hope, in Essex, were summoned to meet the commissioner at Brentwood, their reply was to kill the collectors.

The Government answered this by sending down Chief Justice Belknap to punish the offenders, but the people drove the chief justice out of the place, and Belknap was glad to escape with his life.

This was on Whit-Sunday, June 2nd, and two days later the revolt had spread to Kent; Gravesend and Dartford were in tumult. In one place Sir Simon Burley, a friend of Richard II., seized a workman, claiming him as a bondservant, and refusing to let him go under a fine of L300; while at Dartford a tax-collector had made trouble by gross indecency to the wife and daughter of one John Tyler.[36]

Thereupon 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."

Now, with the fire of revolt in swift blaze, it was for the men of Kent to see that it burned under some direction. Authority and discipline were essential if the rising was not to become mob rule or mere anarchy, and if positive and intolerable wrongs were to find remedies.

At Maidstone, on June 7th—after Rochester Castle had been stormed, its prisoners set free and Sir John Newton its governor placed in safe custody—Wat Tyler was chosen captain of the rebel hosts.

History tells us nothing of the antecedents of this remarkable man. For eight days, and eight days only, he plays his part on the stage of national events: commands with authority a vast concourse of men; meets the King face to face, and wrests from sovereignty great promises of reform; orders the execution of the chief ministers of the Crown, and then, in what seems to be the hour of triumph, is struck to the ground, and goes to his death.

Under the accredited leadership of Wat Tyler the revolt at once took form. Five days were spent in Kent before the peasant army marched on London. The manor houses were attacked, and all rent rolls, legal documents, lists of tenants and serfs destroyed. The rising was not a ferocious massacre like the rising of the Jacquerie in France; there was no general massacre of landlords, or reign of terror. The lawyers who managed the landowners' estates were the enemy, and against them—against the instruments of landlord tyranny—was the anger of the peasants directed. In the same way John of Gaunt, and not the youthful King, was recognised as the evil influence in government; and while a vow was taken by the men of Kent that no man named "John" should be King of England, the popular cry was "King Richard and the Commons," and all who joined in this were accounted friends of the insurgent populace.

Blackheath was reached on the evening of June 12th, and early the following morning, which was Corpus Christi Day, John Ball—released by a thousand hands from his prison at Maidstone—preached to the multitude on the work before them:

"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. 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 wicked lords, the unjust judges, the lawyers—every man, indeed, who is dangerous to the common good. Then shall we all have peace in our time and security for the future. For when the great ones have been rooted up and cast away, all will enjoy equal freedom and nobility, rank and power shall we have in common."

Thirty-thousand men—yeomen, craftsmen, villeins, and peasants, were at Blackheath, and these were soon joined by thousands more from Surrey.

John Wraw and Grindcobbe came to consult with Wat Tyler, and then returned to Suffolk and Hertford to announce that the hour had come to strike.

The Marshalsea and King's Bench prisons, and the houses of ill-fame that clustered round London Bridge, were destroyed before Wat Tyler led his army into the city. An attempt to meet the King in conference was frustrated by the royal counsellors. Richard came down in the royal barge as far as Rotherhithe, but was dissuaded by Sir Robert Hales, and the Earls of Suffolk, Salisbury, and Warwick, from "holding speech with the shoeless ruffians."

Richard rowed back swiftly to the Tower, and Tyler and his army swept into London. The city was in the hands of the rebel captain, but the citizens welcomed the invaders, and offered bread and ale when Tyler proclaimed that death would be the instant punishment for theft.

John of Gaunt's palace at the Savoy, on the river strand, was the first place to be burnt; but Henry, Earl of Derby, John of Gaunt's son (eighteen years later to reign as Henry IV., in place of Richard), was allowed to pass out uninjured, and a wretched man caught in the act of stealing off with a silver cup was promptly executed.

The Savoy destroyed, the Temple—a hive of lawyers—was the next to be burnt, and before nightfall the Fleet Prison and Newgate had been demolished.

Again Tyler demanded conference with the King, and Richard, lying in the Tower with his counsellors, unable to prevent the work of conference, boldly decided to come out and meet the rebels. Mile End was appointed for the conference, and to Mile End Richard came with a very modest retinue. The King was only fifteen, but he was the son of the Black Prince, and he had both courage and cunning. He was fully aware that the people did not lay on him responsibility for the sins of the Government. "If we measure intellectual power by the greatest exertion it ever displays, rather than by its average results, Richard II. was a man of considerable talents. He possessed along with much dissimulation a decisive promptitude in seizing the critical moment for action."[37]

At Mile End Tyler stated the grievances of the people. But first he asked that all traitors should be put to death, and to this the King agreed.

Four positive articles of reform were put forward, and were at once assented to by the King:—

1. A free and general pardon to all concerned in the rising.

2. The total abolition of all villeinage (forced labour) 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 become leaseholders at a fixed rental of fourpence an acre for ever.

That all doubts might be removed, thirty clerks were set to work on the spot to draw up charters of manumission, and banners were presented to each county. At nightfall thousands returned home convinced that the old order was ended, and that the Royal charters were genuine assurances of freedom.

But Tyler and the bulk of the men of Kent and Surrey remained in the city. It seemed to Wat Tyler that better terms still were to be wrung from the King. It looked that night as though the insurrection had triumphed completely. Not only were the charters signed and the royal promises given, but several in high office, whom Tyler held to be "traitors," had gone to their doom. Sir Robert Hales, the Treasurer, Archbishop Sudbury, the Chancellor—a gentle and kindly old man, "lenient to heretics"—John Legge, the hated poll-tax commissioner, with Appleton, John of Gaunt's chaplain, and Richard Lyons, a thoroughly corrupt contractor of Edward III.'s reign, were all dragged out of the Tower and beheaded on Tower Hill on Friday, June 15th.

On Tyler's request for another conference with Richard on the following day, the King saw he had no choice but to yield. For the second time Wat Tyler and Richard met face to face. The conference was held at Smithfield, in the square outside St. Bartholomew's Priory. The King and two hundred retainers, with Walworth the mayor, were on the east side of the square. Tyler and his army were on the west side, opposite the Priory.

In the open space Tyler, mounted on a little horse, presented his demands; more sweeping were the reforms now asked for than those of the previous day.

"Let no law but the law of Winchester[38] prevail throughout the land, and let no man be made an outlaw by the decree of judges and lawyers. 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 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."

Richard answered that he promised readily all that was asked, "if only it be consistent with the regality of my Crown." He then bade the commons return home, since their requests had been granted.

Nobles and counsellors stood in sullen and silent anger at the King's words, but were powerless to act. Tyler, conscious of victory, called for a draught, and when his attendant brought him a mighty tankard of ale, the rebel leader drank good-humouredly to "King Richard and the Commons." A knight in the royal service, a "valet of Kent," was heard to mutter that Wat Tyler was the greatest thief and robber in all the county, and Tyler caught the abusive words, drew his dagger, and made for the man.

Mayor Walworth, as angry as the nobles at the King's surrender, shouted that he would arrest all who drew weapons in the King's presence; and on Tyler striking at him impatiently, the Mayor drew a cutlass and slashed back, wounding Tyler in the neck so that he fell from his horse. Before he could recover a footing, two knights plunged their swords into him, and Tyler, mortally wounded, could only scramble on to his little horse, ride a yard or two, call on the commons to avenge him, and then drop—a dead man.[39]

And with Wat Tyler's death the whole rebellion collapsed. Confusion fell upon the people at Smithfield. Some were for immediate attack, but when Richard, riding out into the middle of the square, claimed that he and not Tyler was their King, and bade them follow him into the fields towards Islington, the great mass, convinced that Richard was honestly their friend, obeyed. At nightfall they were scattered.

Wat Tyler's body was taken into the Priory, and his head placed on London Bridge.

Walworth hastily gathered troops together, and the leader of the rebels being dead, the nobles recovered their courage.

The rising was over; the people without leaders were as sheep for the slaughter. Jack Straw was taken in London and hanged without the formality of a trial; and on June 22nd Tresilian, the new chief justice, went on a special assize to try the rebels, and "showed mercy to none and made great havock." The King's charters and promises were declared null and void when Parliament met, and some hundreds of peasants were hanged in various parts of the country.

John Ball and Grindcobbe were hanged at St. Albans on July 15th, John Wraw and Geoffrey Litster suffered the same fate.

All that Wat Tyler and the peasants had striven for was lost; but the rising was not quite in vain. For one thing, the poll-tax was stopped, and the end of villeinage was hastened.

The great uprising was the first serious demonstration of the English people for personal liberty. "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."[40]

JACK CADE, CAPTAIN OF KENT, 1450

To understand the character and importance of the rising of the men of Kent under Jack Cade in 1450, the first thing to be done is to clear the mind of Shakespeare's travesty in King Henry VI., Part 2. In the play the name of Cade has been handed down in obloquy, and all that he and his followers aimed at caricatured out of recognition. The part that Jack Cade really played in national affairs has no likeness to the low comedy performance imagined by Shakespeare.

It was a popular rising in 1450, but it was not a peasant revolt. Men of substance in the county rallied to Cade's banner, and in many parishes in Kent the village constable was employed to enrol willing recruits in the army of disaffection.[41]

The peasant revolt was at bottom a social movement, fostered and fashioned by preachers of a social democracy. Cade's rising was provoked by misgovernment and directed at political reform. It was far less revolutionary in purpose than the revolt that preceded it, or the rising under Ket a hundred years later.

The discontent was general when Cade encamped on Blackheath with the commons of Kent at the end of May, 1450. Suffolk, the best hated of Henry VI.'s ministers, had already been put to death by the sailors of Dover, and Lord Say-and-Sele, the Treasurer, was in the Tower under impeachment. Ayscough, Bishop of Salisbury, another Minister, was hanged by his infuriated flock in Wiltshire, and Bishop Moleyns, of Chichester, Keeper of the Privy Seal, was executed in Portsmouth by a mob of sailors. Piracy prevailed unchecked in the English Channel, and the highways inland were haunted by robbers—soldiers back from France and broken in the wars.

The ablest statesman of the day, the Duke of York, was banished from the royal council, and there was a wide feeling that an improvement in government was impossible until York was recalled.

Whether Cade, who was known popularly as "Mortimer," was related to the Duke of York, or was merely a country landowner, can never be decided. The charges made against him after his death were not supported by a shred of evidence, but it was necessary then for the Government to blacken the character of the Captain of Kent for the utter discouragement of his followers. All we know of Cade is that by the Act of Attainder he must have been a man of some property in Surrey—probably a squire or yeoman.

The army that encamped on Blackheath numbered over 40,000, and included squires, yeomen, county gentlemen, and at least two notable ecclesiastics from Sussex, the Abbot of Battle and the Prior of Lewes. The testimony to Cade's character is that he was the unquestioned and warmly respected leader of the host. The Cade depicted by his enemies—a dissolute, disreputable ruffian—was not the kind of man to have had authority as a chosen captain over country gentlemen and clerical landowners in the fifteenth century.

The "Complaints" of the commons of Kent, drawn up at Blackheath and forwarded to the King and his Parliament, then sitting at Westminster, called attention in fifteen articles to the evils that afflicted the land. These articles dealt with a royal threat to lay waste Kent in revenge for the death of the Duke of Suffolk; the wasting of the royal revenue raised by heavy taxation; 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"; purveyance of goods for the royal household without payment; arrest and imprisonment on false charges of treason by 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"; interference by "the great rulers of the land" with the old right of free election of knights of the shire; the mismanagement of the war in France. A certain number of purely local grievances, chiefly concerned with the maladministration of justice, were also included in the "Complaints," and five "Requests"—including the abolition of the Statutes of Labourers—were added.

Henry and his counsellors dismissed these "Complaints" with contempt. "Such proud rebels," it was said, "should rather be suppressed and tamed with violence and force than with fair words or amicable answer." But when the royal troops moved into Kent to disperse the rising, Cade's army cut them to pieces at Sevenoaks. Henry returned to London; his nobles rode away to their country houses; and after a fruitless attempt at negotiations by the Duke of Buckingham and the Archbishop of Canterbury,[42] the King himself fled to Kenilworth—leaving London at the mercy of the Captain of Kent.

On July 2nd Cade crossed London Bridge on horseback, followed by all his army. The Corporation had already decided to offer no opposition to his entry, and one of its members, Thomas Cocke, of the Drapers' Company—later sheriff and M.P.—had gone freely between the camp at Blackheath and the city, acting as mutual friend to the rebels and the citizens. All that Cade required was that the foreign merchants in London should furnish him with a certain number of arms and horses, "and 1,000 marks of ready money"; and this was done. "So that it was found that the Captain and Kentishmen at their being in the city did no hurt to any stranger."[43]

On the old London stone, in Cannon Street, Cade laid his sword, in the presence of the Mayor and a great multitude of people, and declared proudly: "Now is Mortimer lord of this city." Then at nightfall he went back to his headquarters at the White Hart Inn in Southwark.

The following day Lord Say-and-Sele, and his son-in-law, Crowmer, Sheriff of Kent, were removed by Cade's orders from the Tower to the Guildhall, tried for "divers treasons" and "certain extortions," and quickly beheaded. Popular hatred, not content with this, placed the heads of the fallen minister and his son-in-law on poles, made them kiss in horrible embrace, and then bore them off in triumph to London Bridge.

A third man, one John Bailey, was also hanged for being a necromancer; and as Cade had promised death to all in his army convicted of theft, it fell out that certain "lawless men" paid the penalty for disobedience, and were hanged in Southwark—where the main body of the army lay.

Cade's difficulties began directly after Lord Say-and-Sele's execution. London assented willingly to the death of an unpopular statesman, but had no mind to provision an army of 50,000 men, and, indeed, had no liking for the proximity of such a host. Plunder being forbidden, and strict discipline the rule, the urgent question for the Captain of Kent was how the army was to be maintained.

Getting no voluntary help from the city. Cade decided that he must help himself. He supped with a worthy citizen named Curtis in Tower Street on July 4th, and insisted before he left that Curtis must contribute money for the support of the Kentish men. Curtis complied—how much he gave we know not—but he resented bitterly the demand, and he told the tale of his wrongs to his fellow-merchants.[44] The result was that while Cade slept in peace as usual at the White Hart, the Mayor and Corporation took counsel with Lord Scales, the Governor of the Tower, and resolved that at all costs the Captain of Kent and his forces must be kept out of the city. After the treatment of Curtis the fear was that disorder and pillage might become common.

On the evening of Sunday, July 5th, and all through the night battle waged hotly on London Bridge, which had been seized and fortified before Cade was awake, and by the morning the rebels, unsuccessful in their attack, were glad to agree to a hasty truce.

The truce gave opportunity to Cardinal Kemp, Archbishop of York, the King's Chancellor, to suggest a lasting peace to Cade. Messengers were sent speedily from the Tower, where Kemp, with Archbishop Stafford, of Canterbury, had stayed in safety, to the White Hart, urging a conference "to the end that the civil commotions and disturbances might cease and tranquillity be restored."

Cade consented, and when the two Archbishops, with William Waynfleet, Bishop of Winchester, met the Captain of Kent in the Church of St. Margaret, Southwark, and promised that Parliament should give consideration to the "Complaints" and "Requests" of the commons, and that a full pardon should be given to all who would straightway return home, the rising was at an end.

Cade hesitated, and asked for the endorsement of the pardons by Parliament; but this was plainly impossible because Parliament was not sitting. The bulk of the commons were satisfied with their pardons, and with the promise that Parliament would attend to their grievances. There was nothing to be gained, it seemed, by remaining in arms. On July 8th, the rebel army had broken up, taking the road back to the towns and villages, farms and cottages in Kent, Sussex, and Surrey. Cade, with a small band of followers, retreated to Rochester, and attempted without success, the capture of Queenborough Castle. On the news that the commons had dispersed from Southwark, the Government at once took the offensive. Alexander Iden was appointed Sheriff of Kent, and, marrying Crowmer's widow, subsequently gained considerable profit. Within a week John Cade was proclaimed by the King's writ a false traitor throughout the countryside, and Sheriff Iden was in eager pursuit—for a reward of 1,000 marks awaited the person who should take Cade, alive or dead.

Near Heathfield, in Sussex, Cade, broken and famished, was found by Iden, and fought his last fight on July 13th, preferring to die sword in hand than to perish by the hangman. He fell before the overwhelming odds of the sheriff and his troops, and the body was immediately sent off to London for identification.

The landlady of the White Hart proved the identity of the dead captain, and all that remained was to stick the head on London Bridge, and dispatch the quartered body to Blackheath, Norwich, Salisbury and Gloucester for public exhibition.

Iden got the 1,000 marks reward and, in addition, the governorship of Rochester Castle at a salary of L36 a year.

By special Act of Attainder all Cade's goods, lands and tenements were made forfeit to the Crown, and statements were published for the discrediting of Cade's life.

No allusion was made in Parliament to the "Complaints" and "Requests," and, in spite of Cardinal Kemp's pardons, a number of men were hanged at Canterbury and Rochester for their share in the rising, when Henry VI. and his justices visited Kent in January, 1451.

The revolt failed to amend the wretched misrule. It remained for civil war to drive Henry VI. from the throne, and make Edward IV. of York his successor.

THE NORFOLK RISING UNDER ROBERT KET, 1549

A century after the rising of the commons of Kent came the last great popular rebellion—the Norfolk Rising, led by Ket. This insurrection was agrarian and social, concerned neither with the fierce theological differences of the time, nor with the political rivalries of Protector Somerset and his enemies in Edward VI.'s Council.

At the beginning of the sixteenth century England was in the main a nation of small farmers, but radical changes were taking place, and these changes meant ruin to thousands of yeomen and peasants.

The enclosure, by many large landowners, of the fields which for ages past had been cultivated by the country people, the turning of arable land into pasture, were the main causes of the distress.[45] Whole parishes were evicted in some places and dwelling houses destroyed, and contemporary writers are full of the miseries caused by these clearances.

Acts of Parliament were passed in 1489 and 1515, prohibiting the "pulling down of towns," and ordering the reversion of pasture lands to tillage, but the legislation was ignored. Sir Thomas More, in his "Utopia" (1516), described very vividly what the enclosures were doing to rural England; and a royal commission, appointed by Cardinal Wolsey, reported in the following year that more than 36,000 acres had been enclosed in seven Midland counties. In some cases, waste lands only were enclosed, but landowners were ordered to make restitution within forty days where small occupiers had been dispossessed. Royal commissions and royal proclamations were no more effective than Acts of Parliament. Bad harvests drove the Norfolk peasantry to riot for food in 1527 and 1529. The dissolution of the monasteries in 1536 and 1539 abolished a great source of charity for the needy, and increased the social disorder. Finally, in 1547, came the confiscation by the Crown of the property of the guilds and brotherhoods, and the result of this enactment can only be realised by supposing the funds of friendly societies, trade unions, and co-operative societies taken by Government to-day without compensation.

All that Parliament would do in the face of the starvation and unemployment that brooded over many parts of England, was to pass penal legislation for the homeless and workless—so that it seemed to many that Government had got rid of Papal authority only to bring back slavery. The agrarian misery, the violent changes in the order of church services and social customs, the confiscation of the funds of the guilds, and the wanton spoiling of the parish churches[46]—all these things drove the people to revolt.

Early in 1549 the men of Devon and Cornwall took up arms for "the old religion," and were hanged by scores. In Norfolk that same year the rising under Ket was social, and unconcerned with religion. Lesser agrarian disturbances took place in Somerset, Lincoln, Essex, Kent, Oxford, Wilts, and Buckingham. But there was no cohesion amongst the insurgents, and no organisation of the peasants such as England had seen under John Ball and his companion in 1381.

In 1548 Somerset, the Lord Protector, made an honest attempt to check the rapacity of the landowners, but his proclamation and royal commission were no more successful than Wolsey's had been, and only earned for the Protector the hatred of the landowners.

The Norfolk Rising was the one strong movement to turn the current that was sweeping the peasants into destitution. It failed, as all popular insurrection in England has failed, and it brought its leaders to the gallows; but for six weeks hope lifted its head in the rebel camp outside Norwich, and many believed that oppression and misery were to end.

The rising began at Attleborough, on June 20th, when the people pulled down the fences and hedges set up round the common fields. On July 7th, at the annual feast in honour of St. Thomas of Canterbury, at Wymondham, a mighty concourse of people broke down the fences at Hetherset, and then appealed to Robert Ket and his brother to help them.

Both the Kets were well-known locally. They were men of old family, craftsmen, and landowners. Robert was a tanner by trade, William a butcher. Three manors—valued at 1,000 marks, with a yearly income of L50—belonged to Robert Ket: church lands mostly, leased from the Earl of Warwick.

Ket saw that only under leadership and guidance could the revolt become a revolution, and he threw himself into the cause of his poorer neighbours with whole-hearted fervour. "I am ready," he said, "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. 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."

Ket's leadership was at once acclaimed with enthusiasm by the thousand men who formed the rebel band at the beginning of the rising. The news spread quickly that Ket was leading an army to Norwich, and on July 10th, when a camp was made at Eaton Wood, every hour brought fresh recruits. It is clear from Ket's speeches, and from "The Rebels' Complaint," issued by him at this time, that the aim of the leaders of the Norfolk Rising was not merely to stop the enclosures, but to end the ascendancy of the landlord class for all time, and to set up a social democracy.

Ket's address at Eaton Wood was revolutionary:

"Now are ye overtopped and trodden down by gentlemen, and put out of possibility ever to recover foot. Rivers of riches run into the coffers of your landlords, while you are par'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.... Harmless counsels are fit for tame fools; for you who have already stirred, there is no hope but in adventuring boldly."

"The Rebels' Complaint" is equally definite and outspoken. It rehearsed the wrongs of a landless peasantry, and called on the people to end these wrongs by open rebellion. The note of social equality is struck by Ket throughout the rising.

"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.

"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.

"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.

"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."

But though the method was revolution and the goal social democracy, Ket was no anarchist. He proved himself a strong, capable leader, able to enforce discipline and maintain law and order in the rebel camp. And with all his passionate hatred against the rule of the landlord, Ket would allow neither massacre nor murder. There is no evidence that the life of a single landowner was taken while the rising lasted, though many were brought captive to Ket's judgment seat.

Ket was equally averse from civil war between the citizens of Norwich and the peasants. When the Mayor of Norwich, Thomas Cod, refused to allow Ket's army to cross the city on its way to Mousehold Heath, where the permanent camp was to be made, Ket simply led his forces round by Hailsdon and Drayton, and so reached Mousehold on July 12th without bloodshed. A week later, and 20,000 was the number enrolled under the banner of revolt—for the publication of "The Rebels' Complaint" and the ringing of bells and firing of beacons roused all the countryside to action.

On Mousehold Heath, Robert Ket, with his brother William, gave directions and administered justice under a great tree, called the Oak of Reformation. Mayor Cod, and two other respected Norwich citizens, Aldrich, an alderman, and Watson, a preacher, joined Ket's council, thinking their influence might restrain the rebels from worse doings.

Twenty-nine "Requests and Demands," signed by Ket, Cod, and Aldrich, were dispatched to the King from Mousehold, and this document gave in full the grievances of the rebels. The chief demands were the cessation of enclosures, the enactment of fair rents, the restoration of common fishing rights, the appointment of resident clergymen to preach and instruct the children, and the free election or appointment of local "commissioners" for the enforcement of the laws. There was also a request "that all bond men may be made free, for God made all free with His precious bloodshedding."

The only answer to the "Requests and Demands" was the arrival of a herald with a promise that Parliament would meet in October to consider the grievances, if the people would in the meantime quietly return to their homes.

But this Ket would by no means agree to, and for the next few weeks his authority was supreme in that part of the country. He established a rough constitution for the prevention of mere disorder, two men being chosen by their fellows from the various hundreds of the eastern half of the county. A royal messenger, bearing commissions of the peace to certain country gentlemen, falling into the hands of Ket, was relieved of his documents and dismissed. Ket then put in these commissions the names of men who had joined the rising, and declared them magistrates with authority to check all disobedience to orders.

To feed the army at Mousehold, men were sent out with a warrant from Ket for obtaining cattle and corn from the country houses, and "to beware of robbing, spoiling, and other evil demeanours." No violence or injury was to be done to "any honest or poor man." Contributions came in from the smaller yeomen "with much private good-will," but the landowners generally were stricken with panic, and let the rebels do what they liked. Those who could not escape by flight were, for the most part, brought captive to the Oak of Reformation, and thence sent to the prisons in Norwich and St. Leonard's Hill.

Relations between Ket and the Norwich authorities soon became strained to breaking point. Mayor Cod was shocked at the imprisonment of county gentlemen, and refused permission for Ket's troops to pass through the city on their foraging expeditions. Citizens and rebels were in conflict on July 21st, but "for lack of powder and want of skill in the gunners" few lives were lost, and Norwich was in the hands of Ket the following day. No reprisals followed; but a week later came William Parr, Marquis of Northampton—Henry VIII.'s brother-in-law—with 1,500 Italian mercenaries and a body of country squires, to destroy the rebels. Northampton's forces were routed utterly, and Lord Sheffield was slain, and many houses and gates were burnt in the city.

Then for three weeks longer Robert Ket remained in power, still hoping against hope that some attention would be given by the Government to his "Requests and Demands." Protector Somerset, beset by his own difficulties, could do nothing for rebellious peasants, could not countenance in any way an armed revolt, however great the miseries that provoked insurrection. The Earl of Warwick was dispatched with 14,000 troops to end the rebellion, and arrived on August 24th. For two days the issue seemed uncertain—half the city only was in Warwick's hands. The arrival of 1,400 mercenaries—"lanzknechts," Germans mostly—and a fatal decision of the rebels to leave their vantage ground at Mousehold Heath and do battle in the open valley that stretched towards the city, gave complete victory to Warwick.

The peasants poured into the meadows beyond Magdalen and Pockthorpe gates, and were cut to pieces by the professional soldiers.

When all seemed over Ket galloped away to the north, but was taken, worn out, at the village of Swannington, eight miles from Norwich.

More than 400 peasants were hanged by Warwick's orders, and their bodies left to swing on Mousehold and in the city. Robert Ket and William Ket were sent to London, and after being tried and condemned for high treason, were returned to Norwich in December for execution. Robert Ket was hanged in chains from Norwich Castle, and William suffered in similar fashion from the parish church at Wymondham—to remind all people of the fate that befall those who venture, unsuccessfully, to take up arms against the government in power.

So the Norfolk Rising ended, and with it ended all serious popular insurrection in England. Riots and mob violence have been seen even to our own time, but no great, well-organised movement to overthrow authority and establish a social democracy by force of arms has been attempted since 1549.

The characters of Robert Ket and his brother have been vindicated by time, and the rebel leader is now recognised as a disinterested, capable, high-minded man. Ket took what seemed to him the only possible course to avert the doom of a ruined peasantry, and failed. But his courage and humaneness are beyond question.[47]

The enclosures did not end with the sixteenth century, and for another one hundred years complaints are heard of the steady depopulation of rural England. In the eighteenth century came the second great series of enclosures—the enclosing of the commons and waste spaces, by Acts of Parliament. Between 1710 and 1867 no less than 7,660,439 acres were thus enclosed.

To-day the questions of land tenure and land ownership are conspicuous items in the discussion of the whole social question, for the relations of a people to its land are of very first importance in a democratic state.

* * * * *

CHAPTER IV

THE STRUGGLE RENEWED AGAINST THE CROWN

PARLIAMENT UNDER THE TUDORS

The English Parliament throughout the sixteenth century was but a servile instrument of the Crown. The great barons were dead. Henry VIII. put to death Sir Thomas More and all who questioned the royal absolutism. Elizabeth, equally despotic, had by good fortune the services of the first generation of professional statesmen that England produced. These statesmen—Burleigh, Sir Nicholas Bacon, Sir Walter Mildmay, Sir Thomas Smith, and Sir Francis Walsingham—all died in office. Burleigh was minister for forty years, Bacon and Mildmay for more than twenty, and Smith and Walsingham for eighteen years.[48]



Parliament was not only intimidated by Henry VIII. and Elizabeth, its membership was recruited by nominees of the Crown.[49] And then it is also to be borne in mind that both Henry and Elizabeth made a point of getting Parliament to do their will. They governed through Parliament, and ruled triumphantly, for it is only in the later years of Elizabeth that any discontent is heard. The Stuarts, far less tyrannical, came to grief just because they never understood the importance of Parliament in the eyes of Englishmen in the middle ranks, and attempted to rule while ignoring the House of Commons.

Elizabeth scolded her Parliaments, and more than once called the Speaker of the House of Commons to account. The business of Tudor Parliaments was to 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." Bacon 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."

Yet Elizabeth raised no objection to the theory that Parliament was the sovereign power, for her authority controlled Parliament; and so we have Sir Thomas Smith writing in 1589 that "the most high and absolute power of the realm of England consisteth in the Parliament."

In his "Ecclesiastical Polity," Book I. (1592-3), Hooker argues that "Laws human, of what kind soever are available by consent," and that "laws they are not which public approbation hath not made so"; deciding explicitly that sovereignty rests ultimately in the people.

VICTORY OF PARLIAMENT OVER THE STUARTS

When he came to the throne in 1603, James I. was prepared to govern with all the Tudor absolutism, but he had neither Elizabeth's Ministers—Cecil excepted—nor her knowledge of the English mind. The English Parliament and the English people had put up with Elizabeth's headstrong, capricious rule, because it had been a strong rule, and the nation had obviously thriven under it.[50] But it was another matter altogether when James I. was king.

"By many steps the slavish Parliament of Henry VIII. grew into the murmuring Parliament of Queen Elizabeth, the mutinous Parliament of James I., and the rebellious Parliament of Charles I."

The twenty years of James I.'s reign saw the preaching up of the doctrine of the divine right of kings by the bishops of the Established Church, and the growing resolution of the Commons to revive their earlier rights and privileges. If the Stuarts were as unfortunate in their choice of Ministers as Elizabeth had been successful, the House of Commons was equally happy in the remarkable men who became its spokesmen and leaders. In the years that preceded the Civil War—1626-42—three men are conspicuous on the Parliamentary side: Eliot, Hampden, and Pym. All three were country gentlemen, of good estate, high principle, and religious convictions[51]—men of courage and resolution, and of blameless personal character. Eliot died in prison, in the cause of good government, in 1632; Hampden fell on Chalgrove Field in 1643.

As in earlier centuries the struggle in the seventeenth century between the King and the Commons turned mainly on the questions of taxation. (At the same time an additional cause of dispute can be found in the religious differences between Charles I. and the Parliamentarians. The latter were mainly Puritan, accepting the Protestantism of the Church of England, but hating Catholicism and the high-church views of Laud. The King was in full sympathy with high Anglicanism, and, like his father, willing to relax the penal laws against Catholics.)

"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."

In these memorable words began the declaration moved by Sir John Eliot in the House of Commons on March 2nd, 1629. A royal message ordering the adjournment of the House was disregarded, the Speaker was held down in his chair, and the key of the House of Commons was turned against intrusion, while Eliot's resolutions, declaring that the privileges of the Commons must be preserved, were carried with enthusiasm.

Charles answered these resolutions by dissolving Parliament and sending Eliot to the Tower.

For eleven years no Parliament was summoned. Eliot refused altogether to make any defence for his Parliamentary conduct. "I hold that it is against the privilege of Parliament to speak of anything which is done in the House," was his reply to the Crown lawyers. So Sir John Eliot was left in prison, for nothing would induce this devoted believer in representative government to yield to the royal pressure, and three years later, at the age of forty-two, he died in the Tower.

It was for the liberties of the House of Commons that Eliot gave his life. Wasted with sickness, health and freedom were his if he would but acknowledge the right of the Crown to restrain the freedom of Parliamentary debate; but such an acknowledgment was impossible from Sir John Eliot. For him the privilege of the House of Commons in the matter of free speech was a sacred cause, to be upheld by Members of Parliament, even to the death—a cause every whit as sacred to Eliot as the divine right of kings was to the Stuart bishops.

Charles hoped to govern England through his Ministers without interference from the Commons, and only the need of money compelled him to summon Parliament.

John Hampden saw that if the King could raise money by forced loans and other exactions, the days of constitutional government were over. Hence his memorable resistance to ship-money. London and the seaports were induced to provide supplies for ships in 1634, on the pretext that piracy must be prevented. In the following year the demand was extended to the inland counties, and Hampden refused point blank to pay—though the amount was only a matter of 20s.—falling back, in justification of his refusal, on the Petition of Right—acknowledged by Charles in 1628—which declared that taxes were not to be levied without the consent of Parliament. The case was decided in 1636, and five of the twelve judges held that Hampden's objection was valid. The arguments in favour of non-payment were circulated far and wide, so that, in spite of the adverse verdict, "the judgment proved of more advantage and credit to the gentleman condemned than to the King's service."[52]

The personal rule of Charles and his Ministers, Laud and Strafford, came to an end in the autumn of 1640, when there was no choice left to the King but to summon Parliament, if money was to be obtained. Earlier in the year the "Short Parliament" had met, only to be dissolved by the folly of the King after a sitting of three weeks, because of its unwillingness to vote supplies without the redress of grievances.

The disasters of the King's campaign against the Scots, an empty treasury, and a mutinous army, compelled the calling of Parliament. But the temper of the men who came to the House of Commons in November was vastly different from the temper of the "Short Parliament."[53] For this was the famous "Long Parliament" that assembled in the dark autumn days of 1640, and it was to sit for thirteen years; to see the impeachment and execution of Laud and Strafford, the trial and execution of the King, the abolition of monarchy and the House of Lords, the establishment of the Commonwealth; and was itself to pass away finally only before Cromwell's military dictatorship.

Hampden was the great figure at the beginning of this Parliament. "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 (wrote Clarendon) 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 at 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."

Politically, neither Hampden nor Pym was Republican. Both believed in government by King, Lords, and Commons; but both were determined that the King's Ministers should be answerable to Parliament for the policy of the Crown, and that the Commons, who found the money for government, should have a definite say in the spending of that money. As for the royal claim of "Divine right," and the royal view that held passive obedience to be the duty of the King's subjects, and saw in Parliament merely a useful instrument for the raising of funds to be spent by the royal pleasure without question or criticism—these things were intolerable to Hampden, Pym, and the men of the House of Commons. The King would not govern through Parliament; the House of Commons could govern without a King. It was left to the Civil War to decide the issue between the Crown and Parliament, and make the House of Commons supreme.

Things moved quickly in the first year of the Long Parliament. The Star Chamber and High Commission Courts were abolished. Strafford was impeached for high treason, and executed on Tower Hill. Archbishop Laud lay in prison, to be executed four years later. The Grand Remonstrance of the House of Commons was presented to Charles in December, 1641. The demands of the Commons in the Remonstrance were not revolutionary, but they stated, quite frankly, the case for the Parliament. The main points were the need for securities for the administration of justice, and an insistence on the responsibility of the King's Ministers to the Houses of Parliament. The Grand Remonstrance was only carried by eleven votes in the House of Commons, 159 to 148, after wild scenes. "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." Actual violence was only prevented "by the sagacity and great calmness of Mr. Hampden, by a short speech."

Charles promised an answer to the deputation of members who waited upon him with the Grand Remonstrance, and early in the new year came the reply. The King simply demanded the surrender of five members—Pym, Hampden, Holles, Strode, and Hazlerig—and their impeachment on the charge of high treason. 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 justification over them. On the refusal of the Commons to surrender their members, Charles came in person to Westminster with 300 cavaliers to demand their arrest. But the five members, warned of the King's venture, were well out of the way, and rested safely within the City of London—for the citizens were strongly for the Parliament. "It was believed that if the King had found them there (in the House of Commons), 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, Charles could only retire "in a more discontented and angry passion than he came in." The step was utterly ill-advised. Parliament was in no mood to favour royal encroachments, and the citizens of London were at hand, with their trained bands, to protect forcibly members of the House of Commons.

War was now imminent. "The attempt to seize the five members was undoubtedly the real cause of the war. From that moment, the loyal confidence with which most of the popular party were beginning to regard the King was turned into hatred and suspicion. From that moment, the Parliament was compelled to surround itself with defensive arms. From that moment, the city assumed the appearance of a garrison.

"The transaction was illegal from beginning to end. The impeachment was illegal. The process was illegal. The service was illegal. If Charles wished to prosecute the five members for treason, a bill against them should have been sent to a grand jury. That a commoner cannot be tried for high treason by the Lords at the suit of the Crown, is part of the very alphabet of our law. That no man can be arrested by the King in person is equally clear. This was an established maxim of our jurisprudence even in the time of Edward the Fourth. 'A subject,' said Chief Justice Markham to that Prince, 'may arrest for treason; the King cannot; for, if the arrest be illegal, the party has no remedy against the King.'"[54]

Both King and Parliament broke rudely through all constitutional precedents in their preparations for hostilities.

The King levied troops by a royal commission, without any advice from Parliament, and Pym got an ordinance passed, in both Houses, appointing the Lords-Lieutenant of the counties to command the Militia without warrant from the Crown.

A last attempt at negotiations was made at York, in April, when the proposals of Parliament—nineteen propositions for curtailing the power of the Monarchy in favour of the Commons—were rejected by Charles with the words: "If I granted your demands, I should be no more than the mere phantom of a king."

By August, Charles had raised the royal standard at Nottingham, and war was begun.

Five years later and Charles was a prisoner, to die in 1649 on the scaffold. That same year monarchy and the House of Lords were abolished by law; the Established Church had already fallen before the triumphant arms of the Puritans.

Then, in 1653, the House of Commons itself fell—expelled by Cromwell; and the task of the Lord Protector was to fashion a constitution that would work.[55] What happened was the supremacy of the army. Parliament, attenuated and despised, contended in vain against the Protector. On Cromwell's death, and the failure of his son, Richard, the army declared for Charles II., and there was an end to the Commonwealth.

THE DEMOCRATIC PROTEST—LILBURNE

In all these changes the great mass of the people had neither part nor lot; and the famous leaders of the Parliamentary Party, resolute to curtail the absolutism of the Crown, were no more concerned with the welfare of the labouring people than the barons were in the time of John. The labouring people—generally—were equally indifferent to the fortunes of Roundheads and Cavaliers, though the townsmen in many places held strong enough opinions on the matters of religion that were in dispute.[56]

That the common misery of the people was not in any way lightened by Cromwell's rule we have abundant evidence, and it cannot be supposed that the substitution of the Presbyterian discipline for episcopacy in the Church, and the displacement of Presbyterians by Independents, was likely to alleviate this misery.

Taxation was heavier than it had ever been before, and in Lancashire, Westmorland, and Cumberland the distress was appalling.

Whitelocke, writing in 1649,[57] notes "that many families in Lancashire were starved." "That many in Cumberland and Westmorland died in the highways for want of bread, and divers left their habitations, travelling with their wives and children to other parts to get relief, but could find none. That the committees and Justices of the Peace of Cumberland signed a certificate, that there were 30,000 families that had neither seed nor bread-corn, nor money to buy either, and they desired a collection for them, which was made, but much too little to relieve so great a multitude."

Cromwell, occupied with high affairs of State, had neither time nor inclination to attend to social reform. Democracy had its witnesses; Lilburne and the Levellers made their protest against military rule, and were overpowered; Winstanley and his Diggers endeavoured to persuade the country that the common land should be occupied by dispossessed peasants, and were quickly suppressed.

Lilburne was concerned with the establishment of a political democracy, Winstanley with a social democracy, and in both cases the propaganda was offensive to the Protector.

Had Cromwell listened to Lilburne, and made concessions towards democracy, the reaction against Puritanism and the Commonwealth might have been averted.[58]

John Lilburne had been a brave soldier in the army of the Parliament in the early years of the Civil War, and he left the army in 1645 with the rank of Lieutenant-Colonel (and with L880 arrears of pay due to him) rather than take the covenant and subscribe to the requirements of the "new model."

The monarchy having fallen, Lilburne saw the possibilities of tyranny in the Parliamentary government, and at once spoke out. With considerable legal knowledge, a passion for liberty, clear views on democracy, an enormous capacity for work, and great skill as a pamphleteer, Lilburne was not to be ignored. The Government might have had him for a supporter; it unwisely decided to treat him as an enemy, and for ten years he was an unsparing critic, his popularity increasing with every fresh pamphlet he issued—and at every fresh imprisonment.

Lilburne urged a radical reform of Parliament and a general manhood suffrage in 1647, and the "Case for the Army," published by the Levellers in the same year, on the proposal of the Presbyterian majority in Parliament that the army should be disbanded, demanded the abolition of monopolies, freedom of trade and religion, restoration of enclosed common lands, and abolition of sinecures.

Both Cromwell and Ireton were strongly opposed to manhood suffrage, and Cromwell—to whom the immediate danger was a royalist reaction—had no patience for men who would embark on democratic experiments at such a season.

Lilburne and the Levellers were equally distrustful of Cromwell's new Council of State. "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?" So they put the question in 1648.

To Cromwell the one safety for the Commonwealth was in the loyalty of the army to the Government. To Lilburne the one guarantee for good government was in the supremacy of a Parliament elected by manhood suffrage. He saw plainly that unless steps were taken to establish democratic institutions there was no future for the Commonwealth; and he took no part in the trial of Charles I., saying openly that he doubted the wisdom of abolishing monarchy before a new constitution had been drawn up.

But Lilburne overestimated the strength of the Leveller movement in the army, and the corporals who revolted were shot by sentence of courts-martial.[59]

In vain the democratic troopers argued, "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." The Government answered by clapping Lilburne in the Tower, where, in spite of a petition signed by 80,000 for his release, he remained for three months without being brought to trial. Released on bail, Lilburne, who from prison had issued an "Agreement of the Free People," calling for annual parliaments elected by manhood suffrage and the free election of unendowed church ministers in every parish, now published an "Impeachment for High Treason against Oliver Cromwell and his son-in-law, James Ireton," and declared that monarchy was preferable to a military despotism. At last, brought to trial on the charge of "treason," Lilburne was acquitted with "a loud and unanimous shout" of popular approval.[60] "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."[61]

Lilburne was again brought to trial, in 1653, and again acquitted, with undiminished enthusiasm. But "for the peace of the nation," Cromwell refused to allow the irrepressible agitator to be at large, and for two years Lilburne, "Free-born John," was kept in prison. During those years all power in the House of Commons was broken by the rule of the Army of the Commonwealth, and Parliament stood in abject submission before the Lord Protector. Only when his health was shattered, and he had embraced Quaker principles, was Lilburne released, and granted a pension of 40s. a week. The following year, at the age of 40, Lilburne died of consumption—brought on by the close confinement he had suffered. A year later, 1658, and Cromwell, by whose side Lilburne had fought at Marston Moor, and against whose rule he had contended for so many a year, was dead, and the Commonwealth Government was doomed.

WINSTANLEY AND "THE DIGGERS"

The "Digger" movement was a shorter and much more obscure protest on behalf of the people than Lilburne's agitation for democracy; but it is notable for its social significance.

While Lilburne strove vigorously for political reforms that are still unaccomplished, Gerrard Winstanley preached a revolutionary gospel of social reform—as John Ball and Robert Ket had before him. But Winstanley's social doctrine allowed no room for violence, and included the non-resistance principles that found exposition in the Society of Friends. Hence the "Diggers," preaching agrarian revolution; but denying all right to force of arms, never endangered the Commonwealth Government as Lilburne and the Levellers did.

Free Communism was the creed of more than one Protestant sect in the sixteenth century, and the Anabaptists on the Continent had been conspicuous for their experiments in community of goods and anarchist society.

Winstanley confined his teaching and practice to common ownership of land, pleading for the cultivation of the enclosed common lands, "that all may feed upon the crops of the earth, and the burden of poverty be removed." There was 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 labour 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 labour 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."[62]

With the common ownership and cultivation of land, an end was to be made of all tyranny of man over his fellows.



"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 brow."

Winstanley's argument was quite simple:

"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."

Two objections were urged against private property in land:

"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 it." It was a prolific age for pamphlets, the seventeenth century; the land teemed with preachers and visionaries, and Winstanley's writings never attracted the sympathy that was given to the fierce controversialists on theological and political questions.

Only when Winstanley and his Diggers set to work with spade and shovel on the barren soil of St. George's Hill, in Surrey, in the spring of 1649, was the attention of the Council of State called to the strange proceedings. The matter was left to the local magistrates and landowners, and the Diggers were suppressed. A similar attempt to reclaim land near Wellingboro' was stopped at once as "seditious and tumultuous." It was quite useless for Winstanley to maintain that the English people were dispossessed of their lands by the Crown at the Norman Conquest, and that with the execution of the King the ownership of the Crown lands ought to revert to the people; Cromwell and the Council of State had no more patience with prophets of land nationalisation than with agitators of manhood suffrage. Indeed, the Commonwealth Government never took the trouble to distinguish between the different groups of disaffected people, but set them all down as "Levellers," to be punished as disturbers of the peace if they refused to obey authority.

Winstanley's last pamphlet was "True Magistracy Restored," an open letter to Oliver Cromwell, 1652, and after its publication Gerrard Winstanley and his Diggers are heard of no more.

To-day both Lilburne and Winstanley are to be recalled because the agitation for political democracy is always with us, and the question of land tenure is seen to be of profound importance in the discussion of social reform. No democratic statesman in our time can propose an improvement in the social condition of the people without reference to the land question, and no social reformer of the nineteenth century has had more influence or been more widely read and discussed than Henry George—the exponent of the Single Tax on Land Values.

Winstanley was very little heeded in his own day, but two hundred and fifty years later the civilised countries of the earth are found in deep debate over the respective rights of landowners and landless, and the relation of poverty to land ownership. State ownership, taxation of land values, peasant proprietorship, co-operative agriculture—all have their advocates to-day, but to Winstanley's question whether the earth was made "for to give ease to a few or health to all," only one answer is returned.

THE RESTORATION

Under the Commonwealth the landowners were as powerful as they had been under the monarchy. Enclosures continued. Social reform was not contemplated by Cromwell nor by Councils of State; democracy was equally outside the political vision of government. Church of England ministers were dispossessed in favour of Nonconformists, Puritanism became the established faith, Catholicism remained proscribed.

The interest in ecclesiastical and theological disputes was considerable, and Puritanism was popular with large numbers of the middle-class. But to the mass of the people Puritanism was merely the suppression of further liberties, the prohibition of old customs, the stern abolition of Christmas revels and May-day games.

Lilburne did his best to get Cromwell to allow the people some responsibility in the choice of its rulers. Winstanley proposed a remedy for the social distress. To neither of these men was any concession made, and no consideration was given to their appeals.

Hence the bulk of the nation, ignored by the Commonwealth Government, and alienated by Puritanism, accepted quite amiably—indeed, with enthusiasm—the restoration of the monarchy on the return of Charles II., and was unmoved by the royalist reaction against Parliamentary Government that followed on the Restoration.

The House of Commons itself, when Monk and his army had gone over to the side of Charles, voted, in the Convention Parliament of 1660, "that according to the ancient and fundamental laws of this Kingdom, the government is, and ought to be, by King, Lords, and Commons," and Charles II. was received in London with uproarious enthusiasm.

The army was disbanded; a royalist House of Commons restored the Church of England and ordered general acceptance of its Prayer Book. Puritanism, driven from rule, could only remain in power in the heart and conscience of its adherents.

To the old Commonwealth man it might seem, in the reaction against Puritanism, and in the popularity of the King, that all that had been striven for in the civil war had been lost, in the same way as after the death of Simon of Montfort it might have appeared that "the good cause" had perished with its great leader. In reality the House of Commons stood on stronger ground than ever, and was to show its strength when James II. attempted to override its decisions. In the main the very forms of Parliamentary procedure were settled in the seventeenth century, to remain undisturbed till the nineteenth century. "The Parliamentary procedure of 1844 was essentially the procedure on which the House of Commons conducted its business during the Long Parliament."[63]

With Charles II. on the throne the absolutism of the Crown over Parliament passed for ever from England. Cromwell had set up the supremacy of the army over the Commons: this, too, was gone, never to be restored.

Henceforth government was to be by King, Lords, and Commons; but sovereignty was to reside in Parliament. Not till a century later would democracy again be heard of, and its merits urged, as Lilburne had urged them under the Commonwealth.

* * * * *

CHAPTER V

CONSTITUTIONAL GOVERNMENT—ARISTOCRACY TRIUMPHANT

GOVERNMENT BY ARISTOCRACY

For nearly two centuries—from 1660 to 1830—England was governed by an aristocracy of landowners. Charles II. kept the throne for twenty-five years, because he had wit enough to avoid an open collision with Parliament. James II. fled the country after three years—understanding no more than his father had understood that tyranny was not possible save by consent of Parliament or by military prowess. At the Restoration the royal prerogative was dead, and nothing in Charles II.'s reign tended to diminish the power of Parliament in favour of the throne. Charles was an astute monarch who did not wish to be sent on his travels again, and consequently took care not to outrage the nation by any attempt upon the liberties of Parliament. Only by the Tudor method of using Parliament as the instrument of the royal will could James II. have accomplished the constitutional changes he had set his heart upon. In attempting to set up toleration for the Roman Catholic religion, and in openly appointing Roman Catholics to positions of importance, James II. set Parliament at defiance and ranged the forces of the Established Church against himself. The method was doomed to failure. "None have gone about to break Parliaments but in the end Parliaments have broken them."[64] In any case the notion of restoring political liberty to Catholics was a bold endeavour in 1685. Against the will of Parliament the project was folly. To overthrow the rights of corporations and of the Universities, and to attempt to bully the Church of England, after Elizabeth's fashion, at the very beginning of a pro-Catholic movement, was to provoke defeat.

Parliament decided that James II. had "abdicated," when, deserted by Churchill, he fled to France, and William and Mary came to the throne at the express invitation of Parliament. The Revolution completed the work of the Long Parliament by defining the limits of monarchy, and establishing constitutional government. It was not—this Revolution, of 1688—the first time Parliament had sanctioned the deposing of the King of England and the appointment of his successor,[65] but it was the last. Never again since the accession of William and Mary have the relations of the Crown and Parliament been strained to breaking point; never has the supremacy of Parliament been seriously threatened by the power of the throne.

The full effects of the Revolution of 1688 were seen in the course of the next fifty years. Aristocracy, then mainly Whig, was triumphant, and under its rule, while large measures of civil and religious liberty were passed, the condition of the mass of labouring people was generally wretched in the extreme. The rule of the aristocracy saw England become a great power among the nations of the world, and the British Navy supreme over the navies of Europe; but it saw also an industrial population, untaught and uncared for, sink deeper and deeper into savagery and misery. For a time in the eighteenth century the farmer and the peasant were prosperous, but by the close of that century the small farmer was a ruined man, and with the labourer was carried by the industrial revolution into the town. The worst times for the English labourer in town and country since the Norman Conquest were the reign of Edward VI. and the first quarter of the nineteenth century.

The development of our political institutions into their present form; the establishment of our Party system of government by Cabinet, and of the authority of the Prime Minister; the growth of the supreme power of the Commons, not only over the throne but over the Lords also: these were the work of the aristocracy of the eighteenth century, and were attained by steps so gradual as to be almost imperceptible. No idea of democracy guided the process; yet our modern democratic system is firm-rooted upon the principles and privileges of the Constitution as thus established. Social misery deepened, without check from the politicians; and the most enlightened statesmen of the Whig regime were very far from our present conceptions of the duties and possibilities of Parliament.

CIVIL AND RELIGIOUS LIBERTY

James II. was tumbled from the throne for his vain attempt to establish toleration for Catholics and Nonconformists without consent of Parliament. Yet the Whig aristocracy which followed, while it did nothing for Catholics, laid broad principles of civil and religious liberty for democracy to build upon.[66]

The Declaration of Right, presented by Parliament to William and Mary on their arrival in London, was turned into the Bill of Rights, and passed into law in 1689. It stands as the last of the great charters of political liberty, and states clearly both what is not permitted to the Crown, and what privileges are allowed to the people.

Under the Bill of Rights the King was denied the power of suspending or dispensing, of levying money, or maintaining a standing army without consent of Parliament. The people were assured of the right of the subject to petition the Crown, and of the free election of representatives in Parliament, and of full and free debate in Parliament. Any profession of the Catholic religion, or marriage with a Catholic, disqualified from inheritance to or possession of the throne.

So there was an end to the doctrine of the Divine Right of Kings, and four hundred non-juring clergymen—including half-a-dozen bishops—of the Church of England were deprived of their ecclesiastical appointments for refusing to accept the accomplished fact, and acknowledge William III. as the lawful King of England. By making William King, to the exclusion of the children of James II., Parliament destroyed for all future time in England the belief in the sacred character of kingship. The King was henceforth a part of the constitution, and came to the throne by authority of Parliament, on conditions laid down by Parliament.

William resented the decision of Parliament not to allow the Crown a revenue for life, but to vote an annual supply; but the decision was adhered to, and has remained in force ever since. The Mutiny Act, passed the same year, placed the army under the control of Parliament, and the annual vote for military expenses has, in like manner, remained.

The Toleration Act (1689) gave Nonconformists a legal right to worship in their own chapels, but expressly excluded Unitarians and Roman Catholics from this liberty. Life was made still harder for Roman Catholics in England by the Act of 1700, which forbade a Catholic priest, under penalty of imprisonment for life, to say mass, hear confessions, or exercise any clerical function, and denied the right of the Catholic laity to hold, buy or inherit property, or to have their children educated abroad. The objection to Roman Catholics was that their loyalty to the Pope was an allegiance to a "foreign" ruler which prevented their being good citizens at home. Against this prejudice it was useless to point to what had been done by Englishmen for their country, when all the land was Catholic, and all accepted the supremacy of the Pope. It was not till 1778 that the first Catholic Relief Bill was carried, a Bill that "shook the general prejudice against Catholics to the centre, and restored to them a thousand indescribable charities in the ordinary intercourse of social life which they had seldom experienced."

The last Roman Catholic to die for conscience' sake was Oliver Plunket, Archbishop of Armagh, who was executed at Tyburn, when Charles II. was King, in 1681. After the Revolution, Nonconformists and Catholics were no longer hanged or tortured for declining the ministrations of the Established Church, but still were penalised in many lesser ways. But the spirit of the eighteenth century made for toleration, and the Whigs were as unostentatious in their own piety as they were indifferent to the piety of others.

The killing of "witches," however, went on in Scotland and in England long after toleration had been secured for Nonconformists. As late as 1712 a woman was executed for witchcraft in England.[67]

GROWTH OF CABINET RULE

William III. began with a mixed ministry of Whigs and Tories, which included men like Danby and Godolphin, who had served under James II. But the fierce wrangling that went on over the war then being waged on the Continent was decidedly inconvenient, and by 1696 the Whigs had succeeded in driving all the Tories—who were against the war—out of office. Then for the first time a united ministry was in power, and from a Cabinet of men with common political opinions the next step was to secure that the Cabinet should represent the party with a majority in the House of Commons. Our present system of Cabinet rule, dependent on the will of the majority of the Commons, is found in full operation by the middle of the eighteenth century. The fact that William III., George I., and George II. were all foreigners necessitated the King's ministers using considerable powers. But George III. was English, and effected a revival in the personal power of the King by his determination that the choice of ministers should rest with the Crown, and not with the House of Commons. He succeeded in breaking up the long Whig ascendancy, and so accustomed became the people to the King making and unmaking ministries, that on George IV.'s accession in 1820 it was fully expected the new King would turn out the Tories and put in Whigs. William IV. in 1835 did what no sovereign has done since—dissolved Parliament against the wish of the government.