Tales From the Tower of London (6 page)

At around five o’clock in the afternoon on Saturday 15 June, King Richard and a retinue of two hundred knights, soldiers, pages and the Lord Mayor arrived at Smithfield, where Wat Tyler and about twenty thousand rebels were waiting. This left nearly forty thousand of the mob still in London. Finally, to all intents and purposes, Wat Tyler now believed he had control of London, the government and the king. It was (according to Froissart) Tyler’s plan to kill the king’s men and the Lord Mayor and take Richard prisoner to parade around England as their mascot. With this grand plan in mind, all respect for the monarchy had vanished from Tyler’s mind.

According to Froissart, and several other contemporary accounts, the meeting at Smithfield unfolded something like this: Tyler had commandeered a horse so he could approach the king at eye level and to make certain his followers could see him. Riding directly up to the king and brandishing a dagger in his left hand, Tyler reached out, took Richard’s hand and shook it ‘forcibly and roughly’, saying, ‘Brother, be of good comfort and joyful . . . and we shall be good companions’. Continuing in this well-rehearsed and intimidating manner, Tyler went on, ‘Sir King, seest thou all yonder people?. . . they be at my commandment and have sworn to me faith and truth, to do all that I will have them.’

Trying to make the best of an obviously bad situation, Richard reiterated his promises of the day before, but believing himself now firmly in control this was no longer enough for Tyler. He insisted that all nobility, with the exception of the king, should be stripped of rank, title and possessions. All property belonging to the church, be it gold, land or buildings, would be confiscated and handed over to him and his followers. All bishops would be stripped of their titles and power. The list of wild, outrageous demands went on and on. When he finished, Tyler called for a mug of beer to wash out his mouth. Having done so, he spat the beer on the ground in front of the king.

Obviously frightened, King Richard remembered the words of the Earl of Salisbury at Friday’s council meeting: ‘Sir, if you appease the mob with fair words, that would be better; grant them all they ask . . .’. Calm negotiation was the only way he would save his own life and buy time to think of something. Consequently, Richard agreed to everything. It was all too easy. Tyler probably knew how outrageous his demands were and the king’s easy compliance did not fool him. Of course, if Richard was telling the truth, he had literally surrendered his power to the mob and Tyler was king in all but name. To test the limits of his power, Tyler turned to the king’s personal page and demanded that he hand over the Great Sword of State. ‘“I will not.” The page shouted back, “It is the King’s sword and you are not fit to hold it. You are only a villein.* If you and I were alone here, you durst not have spoken like that. . . .”‘ Swollen with his own sense of self-importance, Tyler was furious. Rising in his saddle and waving his dagger wildly, he shouted, ‘By my faith, I shall never eat [again] till I have thy head!’ The situation was on the verge of collapse.

Realising his king was in imminent danger, Lord Mayor Walworth spurred his horse forward, drove it between Tyler and the king and shouted that Tyler was a ‘stinking wretch’. Furious, Tyler drove his dagger into the mayor’s belly. Unknown to him, beneath his flowing gown of office Walworth had strapped on an armoured breastplate, and the knife glanced harmlessly to one side. The single moment of shock was all that Walworth needed. He drew his sword, striking the distracted Tyler across the forehead with the pommel and along the neck with the blade. When Tyler leaned back in the saddle, grabbing at his bleeding neck, he left himself open for the next blow. Walworth’s blade drove deep into his stomach. Wheeling his horse around to pull himself free of the blade, Tyler rode only a few paces towards his men before tumbling to the ground, bleeding and writhing in agony.

This may have taken care of Wat Tyler, but the sight of their mortally wounded leader infuriated his thousands of followers. They drew their weapons; those who had bows cocked arrows into the string and drew. Seeing this shift in the mood of the crowd, the king’s soldiers drew their swords, lowered their lances and prepared for an all-out fight. In the face of imminent death, it is to the young king’s endless credit that he told his men to hold their positions and rode forward, alone, to face the angry rebels. ‘Sirs’, he said to them, ‘would you shoot your king? I am your rightful captain. I will be your leader. Let him who loves me follow me.’ With that, he turned his horse, exposing his back to the crowd, and rode slowly north, away from London. The now leaderless peasants lowered their weapons and, except for a few who remained behind to carry their fallen leader to nearby St Bartholomew’s hospital, followed him.

* Villein was the medieval English word for anyone from a small village. It indicated a crude, ill-bred person and is the word from which the modern’villain’ is derived.

As soon as the king, and the mob, was out of sight, Sir Robert Knollys raced to London where he gathered his personal archers and soldiers and then returned to rescue the king. They found him, and the rebels, at Clerkenwell Fields, calmly talking, explaining their positions to each other. While Knollys had been gone, Walworth had despatched a group of men to retrieve the dying Wat Tyler from St Bartholomew’s. By the time Knollys and his men had surrounded the rebels, Walworth had caught up with him. With the king rescued, Tyler was dragged on to the field and unceremoniously beheaded in full view of his former followers. Within hours, his head had replaced that of Archbishop Sudbury on London Bridge.

A week after the incident at Smithfield, a group of peasants returned to the burned-out shell of London, carrying the king’s letters of pardon, and asking for the charters to end serfdom that he had promised them. Furious at the rebels’ betrayal of his trust, Richard told them that because his promises had been extracted by force and deceit, they were not binding, ending with the terse condemnation, ‘Serfs and villeins ye are and serfs and villeins ye shall remain’.

Many of the rebels, particularly those from Essex who disbanded after the first meeting at Mile End, did receive the pardons they had been promised, although they were made to pay 20 shillings apiece to have them ratified with the king’s seal. Elsewhere, the uprisings continued for nearly two weeks, the last of them being put down on 25 June in Norwich. In retribution for the uprising, many of the rebels who could be identified were arrested and hanged. The exact number is unknown, but the figure of one hundred and fifty is generally accepted. Considering the extent of the uprising and the damage and murder it caused in London, by medieval standards the rebels got off remarkably easily.

The incident did, however, have long-lasting repercussions. There has never again been a poll tax successfully levied in England and within a century the institution of serfdom had been dismantled. Wat Tyler’s rebellion was the first popular revolt in England and the only time in its thousand-year history that the Tower was taken by force. The murder of Archbishop Simon Sudbury and his three companions was the first time anyone had been taken from the Tower and publicly executed on Tower Hill. It set a precedent that would continue, under the auspices of the law, for the next three hundred and seventy years.

Few figures in history are more controversial than England’s King Richard III. To some he is a nasty little hunchback who allowed nothing to stand between him and the throne; to others, he is a tragically maligned man surrounded by enemies. Richard’s most vicious detractor was none other than William Shakespeare, who transformed him from a tough yet attractive man into a club-footed hunchback with a withered arm whose mind was as bent and twisted as his body. In light of the popular concept of Richard, it is worth mentioning that contemporary records mention no physical deformities. Years later, the Countess of Desmond remembered him as ‘the handsomest man in the room, except [for] his brother Edward, and [he] was very well made’. From surviving accounts, we know that Richard was shorter than average, slim, delicately featured, with a pale complexion and black hair. These descriptions, combined with his record as a capable soldier, make it highly unlikely that he was in any way handicapped. But the most gnawing question surrounding Richard is the fate of his nephews, who disappeared while being kept in the Tower under his protection.

England’s Wars of the Roses (1455–85) were a brutal dynastic struggle for the crown carried out between two great families, the House of York and the House of Lancaster. Over several decades control of the kingdom shifted back and forth between the two. The struggle for the throne claimed the lives of more than two-thirds of the nobility in the kingdom.

In 1461, Henry VI, a Lancastrian, was forced to abdicate his throne by Edward IV, a Yorkist. For ten years Henry lived in exile while Edward tried to hold together a fractious, coalition government only marginally stabilised by his marriage to Elizabeth Woodville, a member of a powerful Lancastrian family. Edward set up his court in the Tower of London. The ancient fortress ensured his safety and its location in the centre of London kept him in close proximity to the citizens of the capital, whose support he desperately needed if he was to keep his tenuous hold on power. To nearly everyone’s surprise Edward ruled wisely, if not comfortably. He set the monarchy on a stable financial footing for the first time, enacted protectionist taxes on imported goods and encouraged England’s export trade.

Then, in 1471, Henry VI’s queen, Margaret of Anjou, took up her husband’s cause and again challenged the Yorkists. The two armies met at the Battle of Tewkesbury. King Henry’s son, the Prince of Wales, led the Lancastrians while King Edward and his brother Richard, Duke of Gloucester, led the Yorkists. The result was a disaster for the Lancastrians. The heir to the throne was killed and days later, while Edward was celebrating his victory with a great feast, the imprisoned King Henry was murdered in the Tower.

Throughout these troubled years, Edward was unswervingly supported, both on the field of battle and in the council chamber, by his brother Richard. Created Duke of Gloucester in 1461 when his brother first seized the throne, Richard was also made Constable of England following his outstanding performance at Tewkesbury. In 1480 Edward granted him the additional title of Lieutenant in the North, and sent him to York to oversee the northern half of the kingdom. Although York had long been a Lancastrian stronghold, records show that Richard’s cautious and scrupulously fair administration made him popular with nobles and commoners alike.

Despite the inauspicious start to Edward IV’s reign, everything seemed to be going in his favour until early April 1483, when he contracted pneumonia and died a few days later. The crown now passed to the eldest of his two sons, twelve-year-old Edward, Prince of Wales. Edward and his ten-year-old brother, Prince Richard, were evidently both precociously bright boys who had spent most of their young lives in the care of their mother, Elizabeth (Woodville), who also had two daughters by King Edward and three older children by her first husband. Tragically, like so many children of the Middle Ages, young Edward was known to be sickly.

The suddenness of the king’s death sent his allies, including his brother Richard, into a panic. With the king dead and his heirs under the control of their Lancastrian mother, it was likely that the tenuous coalition government would unravel and the House of Lancaster would again try to seize power – this time, through the child who now wore the crown. The only rallying point the Yorkists had left was Richard of Gloucester, who had been named in his late brother’s will to serve as regent for the young king until he was old enough to wield power for himself.

Almost immediately, the rival factions began to square off. Queen Elizabeth quickly arranged for her son, now King Edward V, to be moved from the Welsh border town of Ludlow, where they were living, to London for his coronation. Travelling with him would be a small escort led by his half-brother Lord Richard Grey; his grandfather, the Earl Rivers; Sir Thomas Vaughan, who served as personal servant to both boys; and assorted soldiers loyal to the Woodville family. She also sent an urgent letter to her eldest son, half-brother to the young king, who was serving as the Constable of the Tower. Acting on the authority of his mother, the Constable smuggled a large part of the royal treasury out of London to be distributed among the Woodvilles and other staunch Lancastrians.

Moving almost as quickly, Richard of Gloucester travelled south from York with a band of heavily armed soldiers and an apparently new political ally, Henry Stafford, the Duke of Buckingham. Near the village of Stony Stratford, Richard and his men caught up with the new king’s entourage. Dismounting, Richard knelt in front of his nephew, swore allegiance to him as his sovereign and proceeded to tell him there was a plot against the crown. Apparently no names were mentioned, but to anyone present it was obvious he was alluding to the Woodvilles. Before Rivers and his men realised what was happening, Richard drove them off, taking the new king under his own protection. Deserted by his family and friends and surrounded by a band of frightening soldiers and an uncle he hardly knew, the twelve-year-old king broke down in tears. In the tension of the moment, it is unlikely that Richard found time to offer the boy much comfort.

On 4 May Richard and King Edward arrived in London, where they were received with wild cheering and celebration. The new king, blond and fair, and his guardian, who was not much taller than his nephew, paraded through the streets on their way to the Tower. After receiving the keys to the Tower, Richard led the king to the palace of John Morton, Bishop of London, where he would be cared for until his coronation; now scheduled for Sunday 22 June.

By the time her son and brother-in-law arrived in London word of the incident at Stony Stratford had reached the queen mother. Terrified that the Yorkists were plotting to eliminate the Woodvilles and their allies, Elizabeth packed up her youngest son, Prince Richard, along with her three daughters, and headed to London, where she demanded sanctuary at Westminster Abbey.