The fact that the head of Suffolk had been found near Dover, and that the shipmen involved in the execution were men of Kent, inevitably placed that independent and sometimes recalcitrant shire under suspicion. The king’s representative there threatened that the whole county would be laid to waste and turned into a deer park; but the men of Kent already had cause for complaint. The unsuccessful war against France had severely affected the maritime trade on which their prosperity relied. The coast was attacked with impunity by corsairs from France and Brittany. Agnes Paston wrote that a friend of the family ‘had been taken with enemies, walking by the sea side’. She went on to pray that ‘God give grace that the sea be better kept than it is now, or else it shall be perilous dwelling by the sea-coast’.
The beleaguered men of Kent rallied at Calehill Heath in the neighbourhood of Ashford at the end of May 1450; they gathered at a meeting place that had been employed for many hundreds of years. The old spirit of place asserted itself in times of uncertainty and danger. On this heath they elected as their leader and representative Jack Cade, and under his guidance they marched towards London; by 11 June they were encamped on Blackheath within sight of the capital. In their declaration they averred that ‘they call us risers and traitors and the king’s enemies, but we shall be found to be his true liege men’. Instead they attacked his advisers or, as they were commonly known, the ‘evil counsellors’; as a result of their machinations, ‘his lordship is lost, his merchandise is lost, his commons destroyed, the sea is lost, France is lost, himself so poor that he cannot afford his meat or drink’. They knew, by whispers or by rumours, the parlous state of his finances. The rebels also denounced the manifest perversions of local justice and the oppressions of local magnates, exposing indirectly the confused state of the entire realm.
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.
