On 12 June 1381, the king and his ministers left the Tower by barge, sailing eastward to Greenwich, where they planned to disembark and walk the mile and a half to Blackheath. Even before they approached the mooring site, they could hear the shouting multitude. Tyler and the Kent contingent had come to Greenwich to meet them. Despite the king’s efforts to land and open a dialogue, the crowd only screamed and taunted him and his ministers. According to Froissart, ‘And when they saw the king’s barge coming, they began to shout, and made such a cry, as though the devils of hell had been among them. . . . And when the king and his lords saw the demeanour of the people, the best assured of them were in dread.’
In fact, Richard tried repeatedly to speak with the mob, shouting ‘I have come to speak with you – tell me what you want’, but his words were drowned out by shouts and insults. Left to his own devices, Richard might have continued his efforts, but Chancellor Sudbury, Warwick and Suffolk all knew they were in serious personal danger and urged the king to return to London and the safety of the Tower. Reluctantly, Richard agreed. But when the barges turned to leave, the action enticed the crowd to follow.
Moving faster than the rebels, the royal barges made it to the Tower before the mob hit the city walls where, as luck would have it, nearly sixty thousand screaming peasants from Essex joined them. When the guards at London Bridge refused to open the gates to Tyler and his followers, they threatened to burn down the surrounding suburbs and take the city by storm. To prove how serious they were, they rampaged through ultra-fashionable Fleet Street, which lay just outside the safety of the city walls, looting and burning the shops and homes of the merchants.
Whether this incident alone was sufficient cause for the gates of the city to be opened to the howling mob is unknown. What we do know is that thousands of apprentices, day labourers and servants in the city supported the rebels and it may have been their rearguard attack on London Bridge that finally opened the gates and unleashed a wave of discontent that engulfed the city. By the time the swarm from Kent crossed London Bridge, the Essex men had successfully stormed the gate at Aldgate. Simultaneously, nearly one hundred thousand angry, hungry peasants surged through the narrow streets and lanes of London, sacking and burning everything they could not eat or steal in an orgy of looting, murder and destruction.
Desperate to save their lives, homes and property, terrified Londoners offered them food, beer and wine. But the more the mob drank, the more uncontrollable they became. Froissart wrote that the rebels ‘rush[ed] into the houses that were the best provisioned . . . [where] they fell on the food and drink that they found. In the hope of appeasing them, nothing was refused them . . . and in their going they beat down abbeys and . . . diverse fair houses.’ Any home that suggested a prosperous owner was subjected to the same treatment. In their rampage, the mob attacked and destroyed the Fleet and Marshalsea prisons, setting the prisoners free and inviting them to join in wreaking vengeance on the city.
In the New Temple, the district housing the law courts and residences of most of the city’s lawyers and judges, they sacked and burned everything they could get their hands on, including the home of the hated Lord Treasurer, Sir Robert Hales. Everywhere, books, tapestries and clothes were torn to shreds, tossed from windows and set alight in the streets. When a house was completely vandalised, it too was either pulled down or torched. At Lambeth Palace, London home of the Archbishop of Canterbury, several of the buildings were burnt and all the tax records from the Chancery Office were thrown into the fire. Froissart records that a similar fate was meted out to John of Gaunt’s Savoy Palace: ‘And when they entered [Gaunt’s house] they slew the keepers thereof and robbed and pill[ag]ed the house, and when they had so done, they set fire on it and clean destroyed and burnt it. And when they had done that outrage, they . . . went straight to the fair hospital of the [Knights of] Rhodes, called St John’s, and there they burnt house, hospital, Minster and all.’
Their anger spent and the day waning, the mobs converged on the Tower at Tower Hill and St Catherine’s Square. Here, they took up the less strenuous sports of hard drinking and taunting the young king and his ministers who they knew were trapped inside. They screamed alternately for the Chancellor, the Lord Treasurer, or anyone else involved in levying the hated poll tax, all the while insisting that, as Froissart put it ‘. . . they would never depart thence till they had the king at their pleasure’.
Now prisoners in their own fortress, Richard and his council gathered on the parapets of the Tower more than 100 feet above the seething, drunken mob. From there, in the eerie, orange half-light of more than thirty fires burning out of control across the city, the fourteen-year-old king and his frightened ministers looked down on a scene that could have been snatched straight from the mouth of hell. The resilient Tower was completely cut off from the outside world; the rioters had all the supplies of London to sustain them and the rioting continued into the night, punctuated by a chorus of cries and screams as hundreds of innocent citizens were murdered or roasted alive in their burning houses.
The sense of fear that had clutched at the ministers for two days was now replaced by galloping panic. Earlier that morning, while Richard and his ministers tried to talk to Tyler’s people at Greenwich, a messenger had arrived at the Tower with news that the rebellion was spreading through every county south and east of London. There were also reports of riots in Cambridgeshire and Huntingdonshire. In some areas the rebels were in effective control of entire cities. If something was not done soon, the country would collapse. Lord Mayor Walworth and the more resolute members of council insisted they would make a fight of it. In the Tower alone there were more than six hundred men at arms and at least as many archers. Sir Robert Knollys had about one hundred men at his fortified manor and nearly four hundred of John of Gaunt’s soldiers were still somewhere in the city. With luck a complement of nearly two thousand men could be raised and, although they were outnumbered nearly fifty to one, only a tiny fraction of the mob was armed, all of them were exhausted and most were now too drunk to stand. A well-trained force should be able to kill them off like flies.
The Earl of Salisbury, the oldest and most experienced of Richard’s councillors adamantly disagreed, advising the king, ‘Sir, if you appease the mob with fair words, that would be better; grant them all they ask, for if we begin something we cannot finish, nothing will ever be recovered, for us or for our heirs, and England will be a desert.’ It would take a lot more courage to face Wat Tyler and his screaming cut-throats than to turn the army loose on them, but even at fourteen years of age, Richard knew it was the wisest course of action. The trick was to arrange a meeting in such a way that it would draw the rebels out of London and provide Archbishop Sudbury, Treasurer Hales and John Legge a chance to escape from the Tower before they were torn to pieces.
The next morning, 14 June, both King Richard and Wat Tyler were ready. When, according to Froissart ‘on the Friday in the morning the people . . . began to . . . cry and shout, and said, without the king would come out and speak with them, they would assail the Tower and take it by force, and slay all them that were within’, Richard was ready to put his plan into action. Shouting down from the parapets he told the crowd he would meet with them and discuss their grievances if they would then disperse peacefully. As insurance against reprisals, the king signed a blanket pardon, there on the Tower wall, and sealed it in full sight of the mob. Handing it to two of his knights, he ordered it to be taken to the gates of the Tower and read aloud in public. The offer fell short of its mark; many of the rebels shouted down the heralds and went back to drinking and looting. Most, including Tyler, a few of his followers from Kent and the majority of the Essex men, agreed to meet the king at the place he suggested, a meadow known as Mile End, located well outside the city walls.
Later that day, accompanied only by a few dozen bodyguards, pages and the Lord Mayor, young Richard II rode out to confront more than sixty thousand of his angry subjects. It was his hope that with so much of the rabble drawn out of the city, the ministers would be able to escape by barge down the Thames. Proceeding out of London through Bulwark Gate, Richard and his party met the rebels at Mile End – near the site of the burned-out Hospital of St John – at the appointed time. Amazingly, for all their ferocity of the previous days, the mob greeted the king with respect, kneeling and swearing that they respected him both as their king and as the son of their hero, Edward the Black Prince. With this apparent gesture of goodwill, Richard agreed to rescind the poll tax and work towards the abolition of serfdom. Serfs would become tenant farmers, free to stay on their land, or leave, as they chose. He also reiterated his promise of a full pardon, saying, according to Froissart ‘“and also I pardon everything that ye have done hitherto, so that ye . . . return to your houses [immediately]” . . . and then the king ordained more than thirty clerks the same Friday, to write with all diligence letters patent and sealed with the king’s seal.’
Tyler now insisted that those to whom he referred as ‘traitors’, meaning the Archbishop, Legge, Hales and others complicit in devising the poll tax be put on trial. Although Richard promised to look into the matter and deal with the men ‘as could be provided by law’, it did not satisfy Tyler. While Richard remained immersed in negotiations and attempts to placate the crowd, Wat Tyler slipped away and headed back to the city and the more than forty thousand rebels, mostly his Kentish contingent, who were still there.
While Richard and the rebels had been working through their differences, the Archbishop, Chancellor Hales and John Legge had attempted to row out of the Tower’s watergate and slip downriver. It was a good plan, but it didn’t work. As soon as their boat emerged from the Tower gate the crowd on Tower Hill recognised the men. Within minutes they were forced back to the Tower. By the time Wat Tyler returned to his followers, they had surrounded the Tower and were howling for the council’s blood. Thoroughly convinced that he could bend the king to his will, Tyler whipped his men into a fury, saying that if they could get rid of the hated ministers they would control all England within a week.
Exactly how the Kentish rebels got through the gates of the Tower will probably never be known. One gate may have been knocked down, it may have been opened by an ‘inside man’ or simply unlocked by a terrified guard. What is certain is that once inside the Tower complex, the mob poured through alleyways, halls and passages destroying everything they could find; scattering ministers, servants, soldiers and courtiers in all directions. In the royal armouries they grabbed weapons of every description to facilitate their rampage. The Queen Mother was caught in her bedroom where her ladies-in-waiting tried desperately to protect her as the rioters tore down bed hangings and tapestries and ripped them to shreds. Although Queen Joan escaped with no more than a few forced kisses, one of her ladies was brutally raped in front of her terrified companions. As the mob moved off in search of new plunder, the queen was rescued by her pages who disguised her as a servant and hustled her to the watergate, commandeered a small boat and rowed her to the safety of Baynard’s Castle a few miles down the Thames.
When the rioters smashed through the doors of St John’s Chapel, they found what they had been looking for. With a grim sense of fatalism, Sir Robert Hales, John Legge and John of Gaunt’s personal physician had gathered with the Archbishop of Canterbury to receive the last rites. Not even allowing Sudbury to finish shriving the terrified men, the mob stormed the altar, knocked the communion cup from the archbishop’s hand and dragged the four men and a monk named William Appelton down the stairs, through the Tower and out on to Tower Hill where a huge crowd was still milling around, howling for blood.
Archbishop Sudbury was thrown across a log as a man with a broadsword stepped forward. The first blow struck the archbishop’s neck, slicing it open. When Sudbury cried out in pain and automatically raised his hand to the gushing wound, his executioner struck again, hacking off his fingers. Writhing in pain and bleeding profusely, the archbishop thrashed on the ground as his tormentor continued hacking at him. His skull was split open, as was his shoulder. After at least eight more strokes, the mangled corpse of Simon Sudbury, Archbishop of Canterbury and Chancellor of England, lay dead on Tower Hill. His bloody head was severed from his shoulders and his bishop’s mitre nailed to the head, which was then stuck on a pike and paraded through the streets of London, along with those of his four companions, before being displayed on London Bridge.
While the Tower was being ransacked, his mother molested and his ministers murdered, King Richard was still earnestly trying to negotiate with the rebels at Mile End. To the boy’s credit, more than forty thousand of the rebels, primarily those from Essex, agreed to the terms he had laid out and left Mile End carrying the letters of pardon he had offered to them earlier in the day. As the crowd began to disperse early in the evening, Richard and his party prepared to return to London. Before they had gone more than a mile, however, they met a herald who had slipped out of London with news of the assault on the Tower and the murders on Tower Hill. No one knew if the king’s mother was alive or dead. Realising he could not return to London, the king’s guards persuaded him to ride to Baynard’s Castle. Once there, the fourteen-year-old king was reunited with his mother, cleaned up, fed and taken immediately to an emergency meeting of those few of the government who had made their way to Baynard’s.
Despite all that had happened, Richard was still determined to stop the horrible, senseless violence and sent a page to war-torn London to find Wat Tyler and arrange for a meeting the next day at the Smithfield horse market, north of London. The scene that greeted the page on his return to the city had not improved. With few houses of the rich still standing, the mob had turned its vengeance on London’s immigrant population. According to Geoffrey Chaucer, who witnessed the scene, ‘there was a very great massacre of Flemings, and in one heap there were laying about forty headless bodies of persons who had been dragged forth from the churches and their houses; and hardly was there a street in the City in which there were not bodies laying of those who had been slain.’