All through the night those who were awake in the city heard the rebels
howling in the suburbs outside the walls. They had ransacked wood lodges
and pulled down palings, and made great fires in the streets and open
places, so that a yellow glare streamed up into the sky. At low tide
some of them had swum the river and waded about on the mud under the
water gate of the Tower, hooting and shouting, and jeering at the guards
on the walls. At one time there were so many of them in the water that
they looked like a swarm of big black rats whom fire had driven out of a
merchant’s warehouse.
The King’s Council, sitting soon after dawn, realised its own
helplessness and the danger of rousing a more ugly temper in the mob,
for the Tiler and the leaders had threatened to burn the suburbs if the
gates of the city were not opened. William Walworth himself rode out to
see it done, but the news had spread before him, shouted hither and
thither from Aldgate to Black Friars. The meaner folk had put on holiday
clothes, and were swarming in the streets, making a motley of many
colours, with the women, in clean wimples, and the young wenches with
ribbons in their hair. Some of them broke into the churches and rang the
bells, so that the whole city was a jangle of exultation. The wealthier
folk, the brethren of the richer guilds and companies, kept close in
their houses with doors barred and shutters up, all the able men in
harness, and with arms ready to hand.
On London Bridge a crowd had gathered to see the bridge gate opened, and
the river below was crowded with boats. Walworth and his men had trouble
to push through. Horns and trumpets were blown, handbells rung, drums
beaten, and from beyond the gate came the answering roar of the
peasants. The gates were to be opened, and all these savage, simple
souls took it for a surrender, the throwing wide of a new and spacious
season, the beginning of the end of long tyrannies and oppressions. No
more forced work upon roads and bridges, no more forced hewing of my
lord’s wood, of ploughing his land and harvesting his corn; no more
gross manor rights, no heriots, no fines, no reliefs, no dishonouring of
brides; no more takes, no more arbitrary statutes, no more grindings at
the lord’s mill. All men were to be free to give service for a free
wage. All men and women were to wear the clothes they pleased, to go
whither they pleased, to serve whom they pleased. The gates were to be
opened. The great lords had surrendered!
The people on the bridge cheered Walworth the Mayor, for their hearts
were with the men of Kent. The sun shone, the bells jangled. It was like
May Day, and a new season was coming in.
A certain soldierly orderliness marked the marching of the peasants over
London Bridge, and Walworth, who saw them cross, turned and spoke to the
City Fathers who were with him.
“These sheep are not without shepherds. We shall have news to hear
before nightfall.”
John Ball and Wat the Tiler headed the multitude, riding side by side,
the priest carrying a wooden cross, the Tiler a naked sword. Five
hundred bowmen in one company followed them, marching in step, their
caps set jauntily, their belts stuck full of arrows. A wagon rumbled
behind these bow-bearers, drawn along by a crowd of men who shouted and
pointed their fingers at things allegorical.
Father Merlin sat in the front of the wagon, holding a steelyard on a
staff, and the crowd called him Father Justice. Behind him, on two
stools, were Isoult and Guy the Stallion, each clad in scarlet and
white, the swashbuckler wearing a pasteboard crown, Isoult a garland of
white roses. King Jack and Queen Jill were their pageant names, and it
was said that they symbolised the right of the people to rule.
Isoult had no smiles for the crowd, but her partner was in royal fettle.
The red tusks of his beard bristled with arrogance, and he turned his
head from side to side like a haughty and staring puppet. Now and again
he presented his poleaxe, which served as a sceptre, for the crowd to
kiss, nodding his head at them and declaiming his titles.
“By cock, I am King Jack—King of the Commons! Let the lords and gentles
shrive themselves, for assuredly I shall crack their skulls. I am King
Jack, the King of all honest fellows.”
They went at a snail’s pace over the bridge. The roadway between the
houses with their painted signs and plaster work and their carved,
overhanging gables, shook with the tramp of feet. The bowmen put their
caps on their bows and shouted together, and from the boats on the river
came the braying of trumpets and the beating of drums.
Isoult’s heart was out of the crowd. She was conscious of scorn, of an
utter lack of kinship with these rustics who crowded in their thousands
over the bridge. The walls of the White Tower rose against the blue,
speaking to the pride in her, a pride that had blood in the mortar
between its stones. Yet she owned to a vague curiosity, a desire to
foresee the end of all this storm and bluster. Was it possible that her
own perverse but discarded dreams were to come true, that she was to
behold King Jack crowned and throned on the seats of the mighty? She
felt someone nudging her, and found the swashbuckler thrusting at her
with the handle of his poleaxe.
“Look alive, wife; grin at them, bob your head. By cock, we are very
great people, you and I!”
Certainly his greatness had expanded. His eyes flared, and his beard
looked even redder than usual. The allegory had got into his head.
“You are fine enough to serve for both!”
“What, no heart for adventure? We are great people, I say. Listen to the
bells, and the drums, and the fine bellowing voices.”
“They bellow loud enough, even for your fancy.”
“Well, Queen Jill, I shall sit in the King’s chair at Westminster. But
spur and saddle’s the word, when we have done with all this mummery.
We’ll show these lordings how to handle a spear.”
Isoult returned to her own mute inner self, and left this stuffed figure
and the crowd on the far edge of her consciousness. She saw things
without seeing them, heard sounds without hearing them. Her thoughts
were back in the forest with its green and secret ways, in the wild
fern, in the singing of birds at dawn, in the smell of the torn blossom,
in the strong arms of a man. She was weary of being tossed along on the
foam of this mill-race. It would carry her under the wheel, no doubt,
and leave her broken in the still waters of the days beyond. She tried
to keep in the past and not to think of the future. What did anything
matter, unless the strangest of strange things happened?
The day’s happenings were to be spread out before her like some pageant
or wild miracle play, for the wagon went with the multitude, carried
along by it like a barge on a muddy stream. The peasants poured through
the city, past Paul’s, and through Ludgate towards John of Gaunt’s
palace of the Savoy. This great and noble house was the first thing to
feel the mob’s wrath, and since they could not lay hands on the master,
they were determined to wreck his house instead.
The wagon was left standing in the street, and Isoult saw all that
happened. King Jack had joined the crowd; but Merlin remained in the
wagon, holding his emblem of justice. The mob broke down the gates of
the Savoy, slew the porters, and threw their bodies out into the street.
A torrent of fury poured through into the courtyard till the great
palace was as crowded as a beehive, and the uproar within never ceased.
Men began to straggle out, carrying in their arms all manner of rich
gear, plate, and jewels, and beautiful hangings, tapestries, furniture,
armour, glass cups, mazer bowls, salts, clothes, dorsers, chalices, gold
candlesticks, caskets, and mosaics. Everything was hurled down in the
street beside the wagon where Merlin sat, until there was a pyramid of
tangled magnificence lying in the roadway. When they had emptied the
palace Merlin stood at his full height and waved long arms.
“Destroy, destroy, let nothing be left!”
They fell upon the pile, crushing the jewels to powder with hammers,
battering the cups into shapeless lumps, hacking the gold and silver
dishes to pieces, tearing the silks, embroideries, and tapestries to
ribbons. A hundred armourers might have been at work in the street, by
the clangour of axes and hammers. The air was full of dust and of silken
shreds floating iridescent in the sunlight. A red stream came trickling
out of the gateway into the street, for the mob had rolled all the wine
barrels into the courtyard and staved them in, letting muscadel and
pyment and hypocrasse gush over the stones.
Merlin looked at Isoult with his ironical eyes.
“We trample pride into the dust, but we do not steal it. See now, what a
watch-fire they are kindling.”
Blue ribbons of smoke were uncurling themselves from the windows, and in
a few minutes it began to rise in black masses from the turrets and the
great lantern of the hall. The mob had set the palace on fire, after
hacking the wainscoting to pieces, and piling it up to make a blaze. The
river of wine still ran through the gateway, soaking into the mass of
gorgeous rubbish that had been trampled like litter in a cow-yard. As
the windows reddened, the last of the mob came pouring out, sweating,
shouting, exultant. Soon the heat became so great, and the smoke so
thick, that Merlin’s wagon had to be dragged away, and the greater part
of the multitude followed it back into the city.
The Hospital of St. John shared the fate of the palace of the Savoy,
being sacked and set on fire. Merlin’s wagon rolled through the streets
with wild faces round it. They passed John Ball running like a madman
through West Cheap, waving a crucifix, and shouting, “Let Nineveh be
destroyed!” All the shops were shut; a sudden terror had seized the
city; the May Day mood of the morning had gone with the dew. The mob’s
blood was up, and its head taking in strong drink, for the tavern
keepers had to keep open house and dared not ask for payment. The houses
of the wealthier citizens looked shut up and deserted, but through
cracks in the shutters many an eye peered and men handled their weapons
behind barred doors.
Isoult saw Richard Lyon, Wat the Tiler’s enemy, murdered in West Cheap.
Later she saw Flemings dragged from their houses and butchered before
their doors, their bodies hacked in pieces and thrown into the gutters.
Very few Flemings escaped that day, for these men of Kent had no pity on
them. The Lombards shared the fate of the Flemings. The mob had smelt
and tasted blood, and its face became smeared and hideous.
Isoult went through the day, mute, wide-eyed, possessed by a sense of
her utter helplessness. She was conscious of anger and scorn, and of a
deepening disgust that hardened her face and pinched her nostrils. The
dust, the sweat, the butchery, the odour of burnt wood, the flat smell
of spent ale, the screams, the shouts, curses, and laughter, the
blundering violence, the stupid, ruthless faces. She had a feeling that
nothing could stop the mad rush of this multitude, that nothing could
master it. The lords and great ones, the castles and richer houses, the
whole proud scheme of things would go down before it and be left buried
under mud and wreckage.
Merlin was watching her, and her loathing was too great to be
dissembled.
“Lord of Foul Beasts, are you proud of the day?”
“No fire without smoke, Isoult. These fellows are as quiet as lambs in
their own fields, but the wrath of God is in them.”
“The wrath of God may prove stronger than your wisdom.”
“Let them but shout and drink, and let a little blood, and they will be
the more easily ruled when they are weary.”
“This blood lust is useful to you!”
“It shall purge the pride of the oppressor.”
“Assuredly it is a marvellous thing that we should be Christians.”
Towards evening the mob gathered in the square of St. Catharine’s by the
Tower, and fixed their quarters there for the night. Here was the very
heart of the kingdom, the castle of all castles, and the sight of its
walls and towers roused these peasants to the very top of their frenzy.
They crowded close to the walls, hooting and howling, and singing songs,
boasting of the day’s happenings, and promising themselves nobler things
on the morrow. In yonder were great lords whom they hated, and Simon of
Sudbury, the archbishop, whom many of them had sworn to kill. The King
should come out to them and grant all that they desired, or they would
break in and take him out of the hands of men who were their enemies.
Merlin’s wagon had been drawn into the square of St. Catharine’s, and
from it John Ball and Wat the Tiler spoke to the crowd. Fulk, lodged in
a little upper room above the King’s chamber in the White Tower, could
stand at the window and look down at the crowd about the wagon. One of
the figures in it was that of a woman in a red robe, a mere red line set
among the other little figures that stormed and waved their arms like
dolls on a puppet stage. Isoult was too far away for Fulk to recognise
her, nor did she guess that he was in the Tower.