Isoult, seated on a bundle of straw in the bottom of a wagon, saw stretching for more than a mile behind her an undulating mass of marching men, a veritable river of humanity oozing with mud-brown eddies through the green of the June fields. The oxen harnessed to the wagon went at a stolid walk, and the wagon itself, with its creaking wheels, seemed to float on this river of bobbing heads and swinging legs. On a plank laid across the side rails sat John Ball and Merlin the Franciscan, each holding a wooden cross above the dust and the smell and the heat of all these herding peasants. Isoult could watch the faces of those who marched on either side of the wagon—the coarse, weather-stained faces of workers in the fields, all straining forward with fanatical and greedy eyes staring at something a long way off. Pikes, scythe-blades fastened to poles, pitchforks, bows, flails, axes, and old swords were carried on the shoulders of this marching multitude.
For the most part these peasants plodded along in silence, a silence that licked its lips and thought of the morrow. Thousands of feet hammered the road, and an indescribable, harsh roar, blended of many sounds, suggested the rushing of water over a weir. Now and again a man would throw up his head like a dog baying the moon, and howl out some catch-cry.
“Death to all clerks and lordings!” “King Richard and Goodman Jack!”
The single howl would be caught up, and carried in a roar, like a foaming freshet along the surface of this flowing multitude. The sound was stunning, elemental, horrible, the bellowing of some huge monster, the reverberations of whose belly made the whole land tremble.
Isoult, sitting on her straw, with a face that looked straight over the tailboard of the wagon, felt that she had sat all day close to a great water-wheel that rushed round and round and never slackened. The June day was a blur of sweat, and dust, and movement. She had ceased to notice things very vividly. Sometimes a big man on a white horse would ride up to the wagon—a man with a square black beard and teeth that showed between hot, red lips. She knew him to be Wat the Tiler, the master beast of the sweating herd, for the men roared his name whenever his face swam near above the dust of the tramping feet.
More than once he dropped behind, and rode at the tail of the wagon, and Isoult felt his round eyes fixed on her. Hers had met his but once, and the gloating curiosity in them had seemed part of the sour smell of the cattle who kicked up the white dust on the highway. Sometimes Merlin spoke to her, glancing back over a bony shoulder, and his sneering voice was full of an ironical fatherliness.
“Courage, my daughter. In three days you shall sing to King Richard.”
She did not trouble to answer him, but let herself be carried along on the tide of all this rage and exultation. A sense of the immensity of all that was happening round her made her feel that she was but a blown leaf being hurried along with thousands of other leaves. What did it matter what happened to her, that she was alive, being kept like a bird in a cage at Merlin’s pleasure? She knew in her heart of hearts what all these men desired, and what they purposed, and that her pride would be torn from her even as many a fine cloak would be torn from the shoulders of the rich. Yet somehow she did not care. The savage eagerness of this plodding multitude, the noise, the sweat and dust, the roar of their voices when they cheered, made her feel that she was watching the workings of an inevitable doom. What could stand against this brown flood of men, this whole people that had risen to smother the hated few? She knew that the whole land was moving on London, that these Kent and Sussex men might be but one multitude among many. It was like all the forests of the land plucking themselves up by the roots and rushing to fall on the few woodmen who had ruled with the edge of the axe. Who could stop them? And as for their being fooled by promises, the men who led them were too shrewd and desperate to be tricked by promises.
Of Fulk she thought vaguely with a distant tenderness that looked back at a fragment of the past, and asked nothing of the future. What had become of him? Did he believe her dead? Or had he guessed that she had lied to save him, and pretended that she had come by her death wound when an arrow had done no more than pierce the flesh of her flank? She could not have run with that arrow in her side, and Fulk would have been taken with her had she not acted a lie. What had become of him? What part would he play in this savage overthrow that threatened a kingdom? What could a thousand such men do to stay it? The valour of a prince’s bastard seemed to her a mere thread of steel set to bear the blows of a thousand bludgeons.
The day’s march ended upon Blackheath, and the peasants of Kent and Sussex camped there to the number of some sixty thousand men. The oxen were unyoked and the wagon left standing on some high ground close to the road, and so placed that Isoult looked northward towards where the great city hung upon the silver thread of the river. The sun was low in the west, and through the haze of a June evening she fancied she could see a distant glimmer of vanes and steeples, a something that looked like a forest touched by the long yellow rays of the setting sun.
Fifty yards away, John Ball, mounted on a barrel, was preaching to the people. The crowd was very silent, and his voice came to her with the sound of bells ringing in the distance. She saw his arms waving exultantly as he flared like a torch burning in a wind. Hundreds of intent, hairy, and fresh-coloured faces looked up at him, open-mouthed, with eyes that glittered. And away yonder lay the great city, dim in the yellow light, like a dream on the uttermost edge of sleep.
Isoult heard a man’s laughter, and, turning about, saw a face with a forked red beard look at her over the tailboard of the wagon. It was Guy the Stallion, gorgeous in a red camlet coat with a silver baldric over his shoulder, his bassinet polished till the pits of rust had been rubbed away. He rested his elbows on the tailboard of the wagon, and cleaning his teeth with the point of his tongue, stared at Isoult with an insolent relish that made his red-brown eyes look like points of hot metal.
“Ha, Madame Isoult, it has been a great day, surely!”
She felt all her pent-up scorn flash up at the sight of this absurd boaster’s arrogant face.
“A great day indeed for the cattle who go to the shambles.”
He opened his mouth wide and cawed like a bird.
“Tell me, fair one, where now is the gentleman? Our great barons have fled out of the kingdom, to make war on Spaniards, since it is safer. We shall march down yonder, and eat up all the King’s creatures, all the fat merchants and clerks and moneylenders. John Ball will be our archbishop, Wat our Lord Marshal, Merlin our Chief Councillor.”
“And you, Master Chanticleer?”
He spread his shoulders.
“I shall be a great captain. I shall march to and fro, hanging the gentry and storming their castles. I have seen more war than any lord in England. Yes, I shall be a great captain, with ten thousand bows and bills at my back.”
The fellow might be contemptible, but it was such as he that led the Blatant Beast by the nose, and it is always possible to learn something, even from a Welshman with a red beard.
“Will it be so easy to eat up all the nobles and their people?”
He was very ready to prove to her how the kingdom would be won.
“See now, how can one knight in full harness fight a hundred ploughmen? Why, they have only to tumble him over, and beat him with hammers like any old pot. I know what I am saying; the lord on the high horse is only good to fight his peers. We have only to hamstring their horses, pull them down like big beetles, and then use the knife. I have seen it done in the French wars. Besides, half the lords are out of the country, and the rest shivering in their skins. The King’s but a boy, and most of the Londoners are with us. The whole country’s up, and we mean to have the King in our hands and to use him. By cock, what can a few hundred lobsters in steel coats do against so many?”
He pulled his beard, and looked at her with half-closed eyes, convinced that he was a devil of a fellow, and ready to challenge her to pose him with her questions. And for once his swagger had a fierce reality behind it. Even his boasting seemed to fall short of the truth.
“No doubt you will be a great captain,” she said; “and, my God, what a country it will be to live in!”
“We honest fellows are as good, and better, than the fops and squirelings.”
“Better—oh, far better.”
She spoke half in a whisper, and with an irony that went over his head.
“When are we to be in London, great captain?”
“In three days.”
“So soon?”
“We want to be in, and to have the glory, and some of the pickings, before the easterlings and the midlanders come up.”
“To be sure.”
She smiled at him as she might have smiled at some extravagantly bitter jest. He leant over the tailboard, and his eyes leered.
“Isoult, you shall be a great lady.”
“I shall be nothing, my friend, just nothing.”
“Wait till some of us have our castles and our lands.”
“What, some of you mean to be lords in the places of—these gentlemen?”
He gave an inimitable shrug of the shoulders.
“Bah! these sheep! One must let them bleat. But the shepherds know whither they are going.”
She rested her chin on her hands and stared at him till he began to blink.
“You are not such a fool, then, lord Guy! You have caught the twist of Merlin’s tongue. Oh, these honest firebrands! Always the sheep—always the sheep!”
She saw the sun go down behind the swashbuckler’s head, so that it haloed him and the red tusks of his hair that stuck out so jauntily. He frothed for a while and then took himself off, kissing the blade of his sword to her as though he were to carry her favour in the lists.
Isoult smiled bitterly, glimpsing her own helplessness.
“To have to listen to such a jay! Where is the hawk that should tear the heart out of such creatures? Friend Fulk, if you were King—ah, things might happen!”
Dusk fell, and the heath became one great uproar, a kind of huge playing field for all these rough men of the fields. They sang and hooted and hammered on pots and pans, danced, wrestled, rolled over each other, played leap-frog, giving each other huge smacks and buffets.
All their elemental grossness seemed minded to express itself in an orgy of physical delirium. They mocked Nature, and made a jest of her, and the close June night was full of the sound of their horse-play.
Isoult sat and listened, her hood pulled down over her face. These cattle! They whinneyed, squealed, grunted, blew wind between blubbering lips, pranced, butted each other. And in the midst of all this obscene clowning there were three faces that haunted her—Wat the Tiler’s, Guy’s, and the face of Merlin the Priest. She had seen the same elemental hunger in the eyes of these three men, a lust that watched and waited to seize on the thing that it desired. A sudden loathing of her own body rose in her, a loathing of a thing that might be carrion, to judge by the crows that watched and waited. And mingled with this loathing was all the horror of helplessness that overtakes one in the midst of an evil dream.
The window was full of the deep blue gloom of a summer night, with stars shining like the feathers of silver arrows shot into a target. A black curtain shut off the window recess from the King’s council chamber within, where candles burnt in sconces on the walls.
In this window recess in the south wall of the White Tower two men stood talking in whispers—great lords both of them, the Earls of Salisbury and Warwick. The shorter of the two had opened one of the lattices, and was kneeling with one knee on the padded seat. He rapped with his fingers on the stone sill, and watched the sentinels going to and fro upon the walls, and the river sliding smoothly under the stars. The night was very still—so still that they could hear the stream plashing along the walls by the water-gate. Hardly a sound came from the city, and the very muteness of the night seemed ominous and strange.
A clashing of arms, sudden and sharp, in the courtyard below, and the tramp of feet, told of the changing of the guard. A voice shouted orders. From beyond the curtain came a queer, whimpering sound as of a girl hiding her head in her cloak and weeping.
The man who knelt on the cushions turned sharply, and his lips were drawn back over his teeth.
“Psst—listen to that! Such snivelling when the kingdom’s turned upside down!”
“Not too loud!”
“What will happen when he hears the wolves howling under the walls! And Walworth could promise——?”
“But little. Eight thousand burghers skulking in their houses behind closed doors; and thirty thousand ready to shout for the gates to be opened.”
Warwick turned fiercely and glanced up into Salisbury’s face—a massive, stolid, cautious face, in no hurry to betray emotion.
“What’s to be done? Are we to let this herd of swine root up the whole kingdom?”
“Ring their snouts, my friend.”
“And who’s to do the ringing? That—that—in yonder!”
They turned by some common impulse and stared at the black curtain that hid them from the council chamber.
“The lad has no more heart in him than a hare!”
“He is what he is.”
“A snivelling girl! Thunder of heaven, if we could but have the sire back in his stead! Why, look you, if these rebels can but get him into their hands, they’ll have no more to do but to pull ugly faces. He will run and hide his face in his mother’s bosom, and let them hang every gentleman and friend in the kingdom.”
Salisbury nodded his head.
“Weak King—no kingdom. I am wondering how many of us will keep our heads on our shoulders.”
“Hallo, who’s this?”
Footsteps came towards them. The curtain was plucked aside, jerked back again, and a third man stood with them in the window recess. It was Robert Knollys, with the face of a ship’s captain, looking straight into the thick of a storm.
He laid a hand on Salisbury’s shoulder, and spoke in a harsh whisper.
“Look in yonder; it is enough to make the heart of a strong man sick.”
He drew the curtain slightly to one side, so that they could see into the great council chamber lit by the candles set in sconces upon the walls. Half a dozen knights and gentlemen had withdrawn to the far end of the chamber and were standing there like men discomfited, knowing not whether to stay or to go. At the lower end of the council table sat Simon of Sudbury, clad in a plain violet-coloured cassock with a small gold cross at his breast. He had a richly-bound missal open on the table before him, and he made a pretence of turning the pages. Now and again he raised his eyes from the book with binding of scarlet and gold, and looked at the Princess, who sat in a great carved chair set upon a low daïs in the centre of the chamber.
For this woman’s face was a tragedy in itself, struggling to mask pity, shame, anger, and a kind of incredulous scorn. She was dressed in some golden stuff that caught the light of the candles, so that her figure seemed to draw the light to it from every corner of the great room. A cap of silver tissue covered her black hair, and her face had a fine and spirited comeliness that strove not to be humiliated by the thing that lay upon her knees.
For on her knees lay the head of a King—her son. Her hands covered it, hands wearing many rings that sent out from their whiteness sparkles of red and of blue, of green and of purple. Richard was kneeling before her, his hands clasping the arms of the chair—frail, delicate hands, tapering towards the nails. Two thin ankles and feet shod in shoes of gilded leather were thrust out from under the folds of a robe of blue and white silk. His shoulders were twitching, and as they twitched the heels of his gilden shoes smote together.
Knollys dropped the curtain and blotted out the room.
“God help the lad; he should have been born a girl.”
They stood close together, morose, grim, baffled.
“How can one put blood into the boy?”
“Ask me some other riddle, my friend! He has been like that ever since Newtown came to him to-day from the mob upon Blackheath. Newtown babbled too much—a pity they did not hang him.”
“And we have promised that he shall parley with them to-morrow.”
“Yes; and he swears that he will not go.”
Warwick struck the wall with his fist.
“Go; he shall go! By God, are we going to be brought to perdition because the lad’s a coward! He has come to a man’s state. Thunder of heaven! Think of what the sire was at his age, and the grandsire before him. Some tricksy devil must have got into the marriage bed.”
Knollys stroked his chin, and his eyes fell into a hard stare.
“Sirs, I have something to say to you.”
And to such purpose did he tell his tale that the murmur of their voices continued behind the curtain for more than an hour.
The next dawn was that of Corpus Christi Day, and Richard the King and his lords and gentlemen heard Mass in the Tower chapel. Those who knew what to fear saw that the King’s face was like the face of a sickly girl, and that his thighs shook under him as he knelt on his crimson cushion. When Mass was over he returned to his chamber with the Princess, his mother, meaning to robe himself to meet these rebel peasants. They were to send their leaders to the southern bank near Rotherhithe, and the King was to go in his barge and listen to their grievances.
What passed in Richard’s chamber no one but his mother knew, for she served as confessor, squire, and page, and the door was closed on them for more than an hour. She gave him strong wine to drink, and used the lash of her scorn, so that there was some colour in his cheeks when he went down with his lords and gentlemen to the water-gate where the barge was waiting. Trumpets blew, and the lad’s chin went up as though his manhood crowed an answer to the trumpets. Salisbury, who walked at his side, watched him narrowly, knowing how much hung upon this youngster’s wit and courage.
The barge swung out into the river with a steady sweep of the long oars, and headed towards Rotherhithe, with the King’s banner flying at the stern. Salisbury, Warwick, and Suffolk, and certain knights and gentlemen were in the barge, and all wore armour under their robes. The rowers were men who could shoot straight if needs be, and bows were ready under the thwarts. Towards London Bridge many boats were lying, full of people in red and green hoods and many coloured doublets, so that they looked like great painted birds upon the water. These London boats stayed by the bridge, none of them putting out to follow the King, for Knollys had rowed up with two sergeant-at-arms and had it proclaimed that no boat should venture past the Tower.
In the King’s barge all men were silent, and avoided each other’s eyes as though fearing to see what each man felt to be too urgent in his own. Richard sat stiff as a wooden figure in the stern, an earl on either side of him. He wore his crown and robes of state, and the royal sword lay sheathed upon his knees. Warwick, who sat at his right elbow, kept pouring a whisper of words into his ear; but Richard never opened his lips, nor did he seem to hear. His eyes threw out uncertain, flickering glances that wavered from side to side. He watched the blades of the oars churning up foam, and since his lips were dry, he kept moistening them with his tongue.
As they drew towards Rotherhithe, a knight who was standing in the bow of the barge uttered a “Grace of God,” and shaded his eyes with his hand.
“My lord, look yonder!”
Salisbury stood up, to see what should have been a green meadow sloping to the river, turned brown by a great swarm of men. Thousands of peasants were crowded along the southern bank, and they were silent with a strange, hungry silence, waiting for the coming of the King.
“By the Virgin, they have sent ten thousand men instead of ten score.”
Then, quite suddenly, as though from some crack in the earth, a huge, rolling shout went up from the southern bank. They had seen the King’s banner at the stern of the barge, and the whole brown multitude bayed, and jostled, and jumped on each other’s shoulders to get a view. The clamour had a ragged and ferocious edge to its exultation. It was like the uproar among caged beasts when the keeper appears with red meat on an iron spit.
The lad wearing the crown sat rigid, and went white to the eyes. The two earls looked at each other over his head, and drew closer to him as though to warm him with the heat of their manhood. He was cold in the sun, and his teeth were chattering.
“Courage, Sire.”
“They shout for the joy of seeing you.”
Salisbury spoke sharply to the steersman, and the barge ran on, the crowd along the bank unfolding itself like a grotesque tapestry upon a wall. Every sort of face seemed there—hairy, smooth, red, sallow, old, young, round, lean, some like screaming birds, others like neighing horses, all hooting, bellowing, and howling so that each open mouth was a red hole spouting sound. The uproar made the ears sing. Some of the men had stripped off their clothes, and danced with a kind of obscene bravado. Caps were waved, fists shaken at the nobles.
Salisbury, who was standing up, very white and fierce and calm, signed to the rowers to rest on their oars and let the barge glide along about thirty yards from the bank. A storm of cries swept across the water.
“Land—land.”
“Come ashore!”
“Death to the lords!”
“Come ashore, King Dick; we honest men would speak with you.”
“Wow, wow, wow!”
“Father Adam’s come to court.”
“Sit you down, big belly. Up with the King.”
The two earls sat close to Richard, half holding him with the pressure of their bodies.
“Courage, Sire.”
He shut his eyes and broke into a voiceless chatter.
“No nearer, sir, I charge you. I—I am your King. Bid them row farther off.”
“They mean you no harm, Sire.”
“By the soul of your father, open your eyes, and look at them as you would look at a herd of swine.”
“No nearer. Row farther out, I say. I’ll not speak to these beasts.”
The barge turned, and then began to row to and fro at a fair distance from the bank. For a while the crowd grew quieter, as though it were puzzled, and waiting to see what those in the barge would do.
Then the shouts broke out again.
“Come to land.”
“Curse you, lords! They are making a mock of us and of our King!”
“Ho! Hallo! Hallo! Give us our King; we have much to say to him.”
Some of them who were naked began to wade into the water. Salisbury glanced at the coward under the crown, spoke to the steersman, and held up a hand for silence.
The crowd suffered him to speak.
“Sirs, you are not fitly clad, nor fitly mannered for the King to speak with you.”
He faced them, nostrils inflated, eyes bidding them back to the soil. The barge was edging away, and for a moment the crowd was silent. Then of a sudden it understood.
The roar that went up was the roar of a multitude that is balked of its desire. Fists shot out; men sprang into the river, felt for mud, and threw it, even as they threw curses. Hoots, yells, whistlings followed the splashing oars.
The King’s barge returned to the Tower, and the peasants to Blackheath, to tell the thousands who had tarried there how the King and his lords had refused to treat with them, but had held aloof as though they were so many lepers. Wat the Tiler, Merlin, and John Ball had no wish to see the mob in a peaceful temper. If these lords and gentlemen were to be trampled out of existence, it behoved them to keep the Great Beast to its fury, and set it to rend and slay.
The whole host poured from Blackheath, and by noon there were sixty thousand peasants in the suburbs, rushing hither and thither, breaking into religious houses, plundering the taverns, breaking down doors, and smashing fences, following any wild whim that served to lead them. They demolished the Marshalsea and set the prisoners free. Hundreds of uncouth figures came crowding to the closed gates, and howled threats at the guards upon the walls.
“Open the gates! Open the gates!”
The cry became one long, monotonous, unchanging howl.
Walworth the Mayor spoke with them at the bridge gate, standing on the curtain wall between the towers, and looking down upon a sea of upturned faces. The rebels shook their scythes and pikes at him and threatened him with their bows. Some of them had brought up tree trunks and ladders, and shouted that they would break the gates down or storm the walls if the city did not open to them.
Walworth parleyed with the crowd, and rode straight to the Tower, where the Council was sitting without the King. Walworth’s news was desperate news, nor could he promise much for the goodwill of the city. The wealthier guilds might muster some eight thousand armed men, counting prentices and servants; Sir Robert Knollys had his six score men-at-arms, quartered about his lodging; Sir Perducas d’Albreth had some fifty more. There were in the Tower with the King his two maternal brothers, the Earls of Salisbury, Suffolk, and Warwick, the Grand Prior of the Templars, Sir Robert de Namur, the Lord of Vertain, Sir Henry de Sanselles, and a number of knights, squires, and yeomen. The Kent and Sussex rebels could count on the great mass of the common people within the city, and the easterlings and the midlanders were on the march. Walworth shrugged his shoulders and spoke of opening the gates.
“I tell you, sirs, there is nothing for it but to keep these gentry in a good temper. The King alone can shepherd them. They will listen to no one else. Yet if they are met bravely and with fair words——”
The lords looked at each other across the council table. It was as though Walworth mocked them, bidding them send out a white pigeon to coo to all these ravens. There was some quarrelling before the Council broke up, having come to no judgment in the matter; but Salisbury and Knollys drew Walworth aside and spoke with him apart in a window. Warwick and the archbishop joined them, and they debated for a long while in undertones.
It was Salisbury who pressed the issue.
“Walworth speaks the truth. We are in the last ditch, sirs, and something must be risked by desperate men. Let Knollys bring this marvel in.”
“But the Princess? Is she the lady to suffer her son——?”
“Let us all go to her together. She is a woman of sense and spirit. Come, gentlemen; we have no time to lose.”
This “woman of sense and spirit” heard them with so much patience that Knollys rode to his lodgings as dusk fell, and climbed the stairs to Fulk’s attic. The last edge of a red sunset showed through the window, and Fulk was standing and leaning his arms on the sill. For days he had been cooped up in this upper room, seeing no one but Knollys’ old squire and trusted comrade in arms, who brought him food and drink, and stared him in the face as though he were Edward the Black Prince risen from the dead. For hours together Fulk had stood at the window watching the smoke rising, the pigeons on the roofs, and the swifts circling high above the steeples whose vanes glittered in the sunlight. Isoult’s beauty was still burning in him, making his restlessness a consuming fire.
He turned sharply as Knollys entered, and his profile showed clear against the sunset. The very cock of his head was for adventure.
Knollys closed the door. He had a green cloak and hood, and a grey scarf over his right arm.
“The King behind the King!”
He gave a short laugh and tossed the things upon the bed.
“It’s like the smell of the sea when the ships put off for France. On with the cloak, lad, and wrap the scarf over your face. It will be dark enough in the streets.”
Two strides brought Fulk into the middle of the attic.
“I was ready to knock my head against the wall. What news?”
“Leave that for an hour. We must get through while the streets are open. The mob may break in before you can sing an Ave.”
Fulk put on the cloak, and covered his face with the scarf, so that nothing but his eyes showed.
“What lodging for to-night?”
“The Tower, lad, the Tower!”
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.