Some among them, however, directed more personal criticism at Henry. William Merfield declared, at the market in the ancient hamlet of Brightling in East Sussex, that the king was ‘a natural fool and would often hold a staff in his hands with a bird on the end, playing therewith as a fool’. This must refer to some children’s toy; how Merfield came to know the fact is unclear. Harry Mase, a weaver from Ely, said that the king ‘looked more like a child than a man’ and that within a short time the ship imprinted on the coinage would be replaced by a sheep.
One of the words on the lips of Cade’s men was ‘common weal’ or ‘commonwealth’, being the grand polity of king and kingdom, lords and commons; the subject owes obedience to the king, but the king must also strive for the welfare of the subject. All the estates of the realm were, or should be, united in an association of duty and responsibility. It was this association, by implication, that was being undermined by Henry and his advisers.
The forces of the king reacted quickly enough to the threat; while Cade’s followers were encamped on Blackheath, emissaries from the king arrived on 13 June and ordered them to disperse. They also carried pardons with them. The king had wanted to go to them in person, emulating the bravery of the young Richard II seventy years before, but his advisers at first demurred. Several thousand men were gathered; 3,000 pardons, at least, were eventually issued. On the morning of 18 June Henry did advance upon Blackheath, with a large contingent of soldiers and guns, but the rebels had already dispersed under cover of the darkness of the previous night; they had been warned about the arrival of the royal army. It was a precautionary measure in another sense; to have fought against the king’s banner was manifest treason. Some of the king’s men, under the command of Sir Humphrey and Sir William Stafford, then pursued them; the rebels trapped them with an ambush, in which the Staffords were killed. The first blood had gone to the men of Kent.
The blood was soon avenged. Several lords rode into Kent where they exacted retribution, a measure of force that only provoked the rebels still further. A period of confusion followed in which the lords, faced with mounting reaction, quarrelled with one another and in which some soldiers deserted to the rebel cause. The king and his companions, together with the justices of the realm, then fled London and retreated as fast as they could to the safety of the midlands; the mayor of London had begged the king to remain in the capital, but he refused. It was another example of the king’s lack of valour.
When they heard reports of the king’s retreat, Cade and his followers reassembled on Blackheath at the end of June; on the following day they entered Southwark, and commandeered the inns and hostelries of that district. Cade himself – who had become known as ‘the Captain’ and as ‘John Amend-All’ – stayed at the White Hart Inn, along the high street, that became the headquarters for the rebellion. The white hart had of course been the emblem of Richard II.
On 3 July Cade and his men crossed London Bridge, cutting the ropes of the drawbridge so that it could not be later raised against them, and proceeded to occupy the guildhall. In that place of justice several royal servants were convicted of high crimes against the country, and summarily executed at the fountain opposite Honey Lane known as the Cheapside Standard. The sheriff of Kent, one of the most hated, was dragged to Mile End where he was beheaded. Cade retired to the White Hart, in order to formulate his plans.
The Londoners, alarmed at the scale of the riot and damage along the streets of their city, now determined to prevent Cade from entering London once more across the bridge. A force of citizens confronted the rebels and a pitched battle, or series of battles, ensued. Cade, thwarted, determined to burn down the drawbridge; the Londoners, joined also by the remainder of the king’s servants who had escaped immediate justice, managed to close the entry-gate. Many perished in the flames of Cade’s fire.
A truce among the parties, now on opposite sides of the Thames, was mediated by a group of churchmen led by the archbishops of York and Canterbury; they had remained in the Tower during the riots. It was also concluded that the rebels, having submitted their demands, would receive a royal pardon under the great seal on condition that they dispersed to their homes. The majority of them did so, gratefully enough, but Cade refused or repented his previous submission. He raised the standard of revolt once more, but he commanded too few followers to be a serious threat. He fled south, where he was pursued and cornered; he was arrested in a garden at Heathfield in Sussex and died of his wounds soon afterwards. The revolt had been put down, but not as a result of any of the king’s actions.
At this juncture the duke of York returned from his unwelcome post in Ireland. It is of some interest that Jack Cade had called himself John Mortimer, thus aligning himself with the York family name; York had inherited the Mortimer lands and title twentyfive years before, when his mother, Anne Mortimer, had died while giving birth to him. Some of Cade’s followers spread the report that he was the duke’s cousin. This relationship is most unlikely, but it was suspected at the time that York had in some indirect way helped to foment the rebellion against the king’s authority. He returned to England without the king’s permission and was immediately seen as a potential threat to Henry’s rule; it was at this time that the king appointed York’s enemy, Somerset, as the Constable of England. In a series of formal public declarations, passing between the king and York, the duke averred that he had returned in order to clear his name of any unwarranted suspicions concerning the late rebellion; he announced that he had come in order to help to reform the king’s household. Henry duly invited him to join a ‘sad [wise or serious] and substantial council’.
This did not address the real problem concerning the enmity between York and Somerset after the debacle in Normandy. They blamed each other for the misconduct of the war, when in fact it was the king himself who should have incurred much of the responsibility for its failure. While Henry VI was still childless, York was the heir presumptive; but Somerset’s supremacy in the council of the king provoked York into the fear that he was about to be disinherited.
In September 1450, York came to Westminster with 5,000 men; he called for the dismissal of Somerset as well as others whom he believed to threaten him. But he moved a step too close to anarchy and civil war; his supporters led a noisy demonstration in Westminster Hall, and an attempt was made to assassinate Somerset. The Lords and Commons then intervened by promulgating a programme of reform in the king’s household; a bill to recognize York as the heir apparent was defeated. York retired to his ancestral estates, discomfited, and Somerset was still pre-eminent.
There followed a sequence of skirmishes and confrontations in which neither side could claim victory for its cause; York exercised his power against other magnates without consulting the king, and at the beginning of 1452 denounced Somerset for the fall of Normandy and declared that his rival was about to surrender Calais to the French. York marched south with his supporters, but was forced to withdraw his challenge in the face of overwhelming numbers raised by the rest of the nobility. No large Yorkist ‘party’ was ready to fight for his cause, and the majority of the other magnates disapproved of what looked very much like armed rebellion. He was forced to submit and sue for pardon, protesting all the while that he had acted ‘for the good of England’.