Chapter II: A Criticism of Mr. Herbert Spencer (2)

“If the dogmas of political economy are really exact, if the laws of the struggle for life and the survival of the fittest must really be applied to human society, as well as to plants and animals, then let us at once admit that Christianity, which gives assistance to the poor and needy, and which stretches out a hand to the sinner, is a mere folly; and let us at once abandon a belief which influences neither our political institutions nor our social arrangements, and which _ought_ not to influence them. If Christ was right, then our present Christianity is wrong, and if sociology really contains scientific truth, then Jesus of Nazareth spoke and acted in vain, or rather He rebelled against the immutable laws of nature.” (Tauchnitz edition, p. 252.)

Mr. William Graham, in his “Creed of Science” (p. 278), writes as follows:—

“This great and far-reaching controversy, the most important in the history of our species, which is probably as old as human society itself, and certainly as old as the ‘Republic’ of Plato, in which it is discussed, or as Christianity, which began with a communistic form of society, had yet only within the past half-century come to be felt as a controversy involving real and living issues of a momentous character, and not utopias only remotely bordering upon the possible.”

I think it may be proved that this so-called “doctrine of science” is contrary to facts, and is, consequently, not scientific; whereas the creed of Christianity is in keeping with both present facts and ideal humanity.

Darwin borrowed his ideal of the struggle for existence and the survival of the fittest from Malthus, from whom he also drew his theories of evolution and of transformism; but no naturalist ever dreamt of applying either of these laws to human society. It has been reserved to sociology to attempt this, because it has accepted, blindfolded, from the hands of economists, this most erroneous principle: that society is governed by natural laws, and that it suffices to give them free scope for the greatest possible happiness and prosperity to reign. It is manifestly true that, as human society is comprehended in what we call Nature, it must obey her laws; but the laws and institutions, in all their different forms, which decree as to the acquisition and transmission of property or possessions, and hereditary succession, in a word, all civil and penal laws, emanate from men’s will, and from the decisions of legislators; and if experience, or a higher conception of justice, shows us that these laws are bad, or in any way lacking, we are free to change them. As far as the Darwinian laws are concerned, it would be perfectly impossible to apply them to existing society without more radically destroying all established institutions than the most avowed Nihilist would wish to do.

If it be really advisable that the law of the “survival of the fittest” should be established amongst us, the first step to be taken would be the abolition of all laws which punish theft and murder. Animals provide themselves with food by physical activity and the use of their muscles. Among men, in consequence of successive institutions, such as slavery, servitude, and revenue, numbers of people now live in plenty on their income, and do nothing at all. If Mr. Herbert Spencer is really desirous to see the supreme principle, “reward in proportion to desert,” in force amongst us, he must obtain, first of all, the suppression of the existing regulations as to property. In the animal world, the destiny of each is decided by its aptitudes. Among ourselves, the destiny of each is determined by the advantages obtained or inherited from parents, and the heir to, or owner of, a large estate is sure to be well received everywhere. We see then, that before Darwinian laws can become established, family succession must be abolished. Animals, like plants, obey the instincts of nature, and reproduce themselves rapidly; but incessant carnage prevents their too excessive multiplication! As men become more civilized, peace becomes more general; they talk of their fellow-men as their brothers, and some philosophers even dream—the madmen!—of arbitration supplanting war! The equilibrium between the births and the deaths is thus upset! To balance it again, let us glorify battles, and exclaim, with General Moltke, that the idea of suppressing them is a mischievous utopia; let us impose silence on those dangerous fanatics who repeat incessantly, “Peace on earth, good-will towards men.”

In the very heart of nature reigns seeming injustice; or, as M. Renan puts it more strongly, nature is the embodiment of injustice. A falling stone crushes both the honest man and the scamp! A bird goes out to find food for its young, and after long search is returning to its nest with its well-earned gains, when an eagle, the despot of the air, swoops down and steals the food; we think this iniquitous and odious, and would not tolerate such an instance amongst us. Vigorous Cain kills gentle Abel. Right and justice protest. They should not do so, for it is the mere putting in practice “of the purifying process by which nature weeds out the least powerful and prevents the vitiation of the race by the multiplication of its inferior samples.” Helvetius admirably defines, for its condemnation, this Darwinian law which Herbert Spencer would have society accept:—

“The savage says to those who are weaker than himself: Look up to the skies and you see the eagle swooping down on the dove; cast your eyes on the earth and you see the lion tearing to pieces the stag or the antelope; while in the depths of the ocean small fishes are destroyed by sharks. The whole of nature announces that the weak must be the prey of the strong. Strength is a gift of the gods. Through it I become possessor of all it is in my power to capture.”

(“De l’Homme,” iv. 8.)

The constant effort of moralists and legislators has been to replace the reign of might by a reign of justice. As Bacon says, _In societate aut vis aut lex viget._ The object is to subject men’s actions more and more to the empire of the law, and that the law should be more and more in conformity with equity. Society has ever been, and still is, to a great extent, too much a reflection of nature. Violations of justice are numerous, and, if these are to be put a stop to, we must oppose ourselves still more to the laws of nature, instead of contemplating their re-establishment.

This is why Christianity, which is an ardent aspiration after justice, is in real accordance with true science. In the book of Job the problem is tragically proposed. The unjust are equally happy with the just, and, as in nature, the strong live at the cost of the weak. Right protests against this, and the voice of the poor is raised against their oppressors. Listen. What deep thought is contained in the following passage!—“Wherefore do the wicked live, become old, yea, are mighty in power? Their seed is established in their sight with them, and their offspring before their eyes. Their houses are safe from fear, neither is the rod of God upon them” (Job xxi. 7-9). “Some remove land-marks; they violently take away flocks and feed thereof. They cause him to go naked without clothing, and they take away the sheaf from the hungry; which make oil within their walls, and tread their wine-presses, and suffer thirst” (Job xxiv. 2, 10, 11).

The prophets of Israel raised an eloquent protest against the evils then reigning in society, and announced that a time should come when justice would be established upon the earth. These hopes of a Messiah were expressed in such precise terms that they may serve as a programme of the reforms which yet remain to be accomplished. “He shall judge the poor of the people, He shall save the children of the needy, and shall break in pieces the oppressor. He shall spare the poor and needy, and shall save the souls of the needy. There shall be an handful of corn in the earth upon the top of the mountains” (Psalm lxxii. 4, 13, 16). “And the work of righteousness shall be peace; and the effect of righteousness, quietness and assurance for ever” (Isaiah xxxii. 17). “Surely I will no more give thy corn to be meat for thine enemies, and the sons of the stranger shall not drink thy wine, for the which thou hast labored; but they that have gathered it shall eat it, and praise the Lord; and they that have brought it together shall drink it in the courts of My holiness” (Isaiah lxii. 8, 9). In the New Jerusalem “there shall be no more sorrow nor crying,” “They shall not build, and another inhabit; they shall not plant, and another eat; for as the days of a tree are the days of My people, and Mine elect shall long enjoy the work of their hands” (Isaiah lxv. 21, 22).

The prophet thus raises his voice in favor of the poor, in the name of justice, not of charity and mercy. “The Lord will enter into judgment with the ancients of His people and the princes thereof: for ye have eaten up the vineyard; the spoil of the poor is in your houses. What mean ye that ye beat My people to pieces, and grind the faces of the poor? saith the Lord God of hosts” (Isaiah iii. 14, 15). “Woe unto them that join house to house, that lay field to field, till there be no place, that they may be placed alone in the midst of the earth” (Isaiah v. 8). In the future society property will be ensured to all, and every one will “sit under his vine and under his fig-tree” (Micah iv. 4).

The ideal of the prophets comprehends, then, in the first place, the triumph of justice, which will bring liberty to the oppressed, consolation to the outcast, and the produce of their labors to the workers; and secondly, and chiefly, it will bring the glorification and domination of the elect people—Israel.

The ideal of the Gospel makes less of this second consideration of national grandeur and pre-eminence, and places in the foreground the radical transformation of the social order. The Gospel is the “good tidings of great joy,” the Εὐαγγέλιον, carried to the poor, the approach of the Kingdom of God—that is to say, of the reign of justice. “The last shall be first;” therefore the pretended “natural order” will be reversed!

Who will possess the earth? Not the mightiest, as in the animal creation, and as Darwinian laws decree; not the rich, “for it is easier for a camel to go through a needle’s eye than for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of God.” Lazarus is received into Abraham’s bosom, while Dives is cast into the place of torment, “where there is weeping and gnashing of teeth.” The first of biological precepts, the one respecting the survival of the fittest, as it immolates others for personal benefit, is essentially selfish, which is a vice incessantly reprobated in the New Testament. “Look not every man on his own things, but every man also on the things of others” (Philippians ii. 4). The chief of all Christian virtues is charity; it is the very essence of the Gospel. “Seek ye first the Kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all these things shall be added unto you” (St. Matthew vi. 33).

How very true is the economic doctrine that, with equitable laws, each should enjoy the integral produce of his labor, and that, were this the case, personal activity would attain its highest degree. Nothing is more adverse to the prosperity of a nation than unjust laws; and this is precisely what the prophets and Christ teach us.

If Darwinian laws were applied to human society, the utility of history, considered as a moral lesson for both kings and people, would be destroyed. The history of man might then be looked upon as a mere zoological strife between nations, and a simple lengthening out of natural history. What moral instruction can possibly be drawn from the study of the animal world, where the strong devour or destroy the weak. No spectacle could be more odious or more demoralizing!

The incomparable sublimity of the Gospel, which is, alas! only too often misinterpreted, consists in an ardent longing for perfection, in that aspiration for an ideal of justice which urged Jesus and His earliest disciples to condemn the world as it then was. Thence sprang the hatred of evil in its many various forms, the desire for better things, for reforms and progress! Why do Mahometans stand still in the march of civilization, while Christian countries advance ever more and more rapidly? Because the first are resigned to evil, whereas the second combat and endeavor to extirpate it. The stoicism—the elevated character of which can hardly be sufficiently admired—the austerity, and purity of such ancients as Marcus Aurelius, nevertheless, bowed before absolute facts, looking upon them as the inevitable results of the actual and natural order of things. Like modern evolutionists, they glorified the laws of nature, considering them perfect. Their optimism led them so far as to adore the cosmos as a divinity. “All that thou wilt, O Cosmos,” says Marcus Aurelius, “is my will; nothing is too early or too late for me, if it be at the hour thou decidest upon. My fruit is such as thy seasons bring, O Nature! From thee comes all. Thou art all. All go towards thee. If the gods be essentially good and just, they must have permitted nothing, in the arrangement of the world, contrary to right and justice.” What a contrast between this serene satisfaction and the complaints of Job, of the prophets, and of Christ Himself! The true Christian, in direct opposition to stoics and to Mr. Herbert Spencer, holds that the world is completely infected with evil; he avoids it carefully, and lives in the hope of a general cataclysm, which will reduce our globe to ashes, and make place for a new and purified heaven and earth! The belief of stoics and of evolutionary sociologists logically advocates inaction, for it respects the present order of things as attributable to natural laws. The Christian’s belief leads him to ardently desire reform and progress, but also, when he is deceived and reduced to despair, it occasionally culminates in revolutionary violence and in Nihilism.

Not only Jesus, but all great religious reformers, such as Buddha, Mahomet, Luther, and the great philosophers, especially Socrates and Plato, and the great law-givers, from Solon and Lycurgus to the legislators of the French Revolution—all the elect of humanity, in fact—are struck with the evils under which our race is forced to suffer, and have imagined and revealed an ideal social order more in conformity with the ideal of justice; and in their writings they place this Utopia in contrast with the existing order. The more Christianity becomes despoiled of dogmas, and the more the ideas of moral and social reform, contained in Christ’s teachings, are brought forward as the chief aim, the more Mr. Herbert Spencer’s principles will be shunned and avoided. In the splendid development of Roman law, which lasted fifteen hundred years, a similar evolution took place. In the beginning, in the laws of the twelve tables, many traces of the hard law in favor of the mighty may be found. This is symbolized by the lance (_quir_), which gave its name to the quiritarian right. The father was allowed to sell or destroy his children, as they were his possession. He had absolute power over his slaves, who were his “things”. The creditor might throw his debtor in prison, or even cause him to be cut in pieces—_in partes secanto_. The wife was entirely in her husband’s power—_in manu_. Little by little, as centuries rolled on, eminent lawgivers succeeded each other, and gradual changes were made, so that, finally, just and humanitarian principles penetrated the entire Roman code, and the Darwinian law, which glorifies might, gave place to the Christian law, which extols justice.

This movement will most assuredly continue, in spite of all the abuse it may receive from Mr. Herbert Spencer, and from others who think as he does. It is a result of the advance of civilization from the commencement of Christianity, and even from the time of the prophets of Israel. It will manifest itself, not as it did in the middle ages, by works of mercy, but, under the control of economic science, by the intervention of the State in favor of the disinherited, and by measures such as Mr. Shaw Lefevre approves of, so that each and all should be placed in a position to be able to command reward in proportion to the amount of useful labor accomplished.

Darwinian laws, generally admitted in the domain of natural history and in the animal kingdom, will never be applied to human societies, until the sentiments of charity and justice, which Christianity engraves on our hearts, are completely eradicated.—_Contemporary Review._

THE TRUE STORY OF WAT TYLER.

BY S. G. G.

One of the most noteworthy objects in the great pageant that passed through the crowds of London on the 10th of last November was an effigy of Wat Tyler, upon a lofty platform, lying prostrate, as if slain, at the feet of Walworth, the Mayor, who stood with drawn sword beside the seeming corpse. The suggestion was that of hero and miscreant—rebellion defeated—the City saved! Many there were in the line of procession who showed, by unexpected hisses and groans, that they did not so read history; and it seems worth while to ask, especially while the greatest contemporary of the Mayor and the Tyler is freshly brought to our remembrance by the Wycliffe quincentenary commemoration, what that scene in Smithfield really meant and what was its issue.

In reading the old chronicles we have to remember the fable of the Lion and the Man. Monks like Knighton of Leicester, and Walsingham of St. Albans, or courtiers like Jean Froissart, with great simplicity betray their bias, and we must often “read between the lines.” It is useful also to recollect that the distinction between a rebellion and a revolution turns very much upon the fact of success. Had Wat Tyler won the day, and secured the charter which seemed so nearly within the people’s reach, his name would have come down to us in better company than that of Jack Cade and other vulgar insurgents and rioters. A second Magna Charta would have become memorable in English history, and its chief promoter might have been known to posterity as Sir Walter Tyler, or perhaps the Earl of Kent.

We all know the story of the poll-tax—that intolerable impost[4] which followed the “glorious wars” and the sumptuous extravagance of Edward III., and which awakened such bitter resistance in the early days of Richard II. The monkish historians themselves tell us how harshly and brutally the tax was levied, especially by one John Legg, the farmer of the tax for Essex and Kent; and if this part of the history stood alone we might pause before we wholly condemned the hasty blow by which the Dartford bricklayer or “tiler” avenged the insulted modesty of his child.[5] Why should we give all our admiration to William Tell—with his _second_ arrow for the heart of Gessler had his first sped too fatally[6]—and not recognise in this man of Kent also the honorable indignation of an outraged father? But this may pass, as it is plainly impossible that the great insurrection could have been wholly due to such a cause. Sixty thousand men from Kent, Essex, Sussex, Bedford, would never have been roused to revolt even by the news of this Dartford tragedy. The deed, no doubt, gave impulse to the movement; but the causes of disaffection had been at work long before the levy of the poll-tax; and the “peasant revolt” becomes most deeply interesting, as well as important, when regarded as the first passionate claim of the “lower classes” in England for freedom and their rights as men.

[4] A shilling a head from every person above fourteen years old.

[5] Tyler, “being at work in the same town tyling of an house, when he heard” of the insult offered to his daughter, “caught his lathing staff in his hand and ran reaking home; when reasoning with the collector who made him so bold, the collector answered with stout words and strake at the tylar; whereupon the tylar, avoiding the blow, smote the collector with the lathing staff that the brains flew out of his head. Wherethrough great noise arose in the street, and the poor people being glad, every one prepared to support the said John Tylar.”—_Stowe’s “Chronicle.”_

[6] Some will say that this is legend; but the illustration nevertheless may stand.

The courtly Froissart informs us that there was in the county of Kent[7] “a crazy priest,” one John Ball, who had long been testifying against the serfdom in which the peasantry were held, “Why,” he asked, “should we be slaves? Are we not all descended from Adam and Eve? By what title do our masters hold us in bondage?” Froissart declares that Ball preached absolute communism, but there is no evidence that he went beyond the vigorous assertion of the equal right of all to freedom. “Every Sunday after mass,” writes the chronicler, “as the people came out of church, he would preach to them in the market-place (he had been excommunicated), and assemble a crowd round him ... and he was much beloved by the people.” As a consequence “the evil-disposed in these districts began to rise, saying they were too severely oppressed, that at the beginning of the world there were no slaves, and that no one ought to be treated as such, unless he had committed treason against his lord, as Lucifer had done against God; but they had done no such thing, for they were neither angels nor spirits, but men, formed after the same likeness with their lords, who treated them as beasts. This they would no longer bear, but had determined to be free, and if they labored or did any other work for their lords they would be paid for it.”

[7] Other authorities make _Essex_ the chief scene of Ball’s ministrations. See “Lives of English Popular Leaders,” 2nd Series, by C.E. Maurice, 1875.

Such words of the “crazy priest” and his “evil-disposed” hearers seem to us reasonable enough. Their chief fault, perhaps, is that they belong to the nineteenth century, rather than to the fourteenth. Never was a man more emphatically before his time than this same John Ball. The usual result followed. For these and the like “foolish words” he was arrested and imprisoned by Sudbury, Archbishop of Canterbury. But those words could not die, although the first attempt to realise them in deed was—like many a first effort for justice, truth and freedom—premature and a little blind.

At the beginning of 1831, then, John Ball was lying in the archbishop’s prison at Maidstone. Yet it was not in Kent that the rising actually began. Five thousand men of Essex, according to Walsingham, took the first step to revolt. The monkish chronicler makes merry with their equipment. “Sticks, rusty swords, hatchets, smoke-dried bows the color of old ivory, some with but an arrow apiece, and many arrows with but one feather!” “Think of this ragged regiment,” he contemptuously writes, “aspiring to become masters of the realm!”

Placards and flysheets of a quaint and grotesque rather than of an inflammatory character, called upon the people to assert their rights. Knighton of Leicester gives some remarkable specimens, transcribed from the old black-letter manuscripts, purporting to be issued by “Jack the Miller,” “Jack the Carter,” “Jack Trueman,” and “Jack Straw.”[8] For the most part they are written in a kind of doggerel rhyme, as in the Miller’s appeal: “With right and with might; with skill and with will; let might help right, and skill before will; and might before right, then goeth our mill aright.” “In the rude jingle of these lines,” writes the late Mr. Green, “began for England the literature of political controversy. They are the first predecessors of the pamphlets of Milton and Burke. Rough as they are, they express clearly enough the mingled passions which met in the revolt of the peasants; their longing for a right rule, for plain and simple justice; the scorn of the immorality of the nobles, and the infamy of the Court; their resentment at the perversion of the law to the cause of oppression.”

[8] The contemporary poet, Gower, has described one aspect of the rebellion in some Latin verses which amusingly indicate the names most common among the populace:—

_Watte_ vocat, cui _Thome_ venit, neque _Symme_ retardat,
_Bette_ que, _Gibbe_ simul, _Hykke_ venire jubet,
_Colle_ furit, quem _Gibbe_ juvat, nocumenta parantes,
Cum quibus ad damnum _Wille_ coire vovet,
_Grigge_ rapit, dum _Davve_ strepit, comes est quibus _Hobbe_,
_Larkin_ et in medio non minor esse putat,
_Hudde_ ferit, quos _Judde_ terit, dum _Tebbe_ juvatur,
_Jakke_ domos virosque vellit, et ense necat.

Some of the chroniclers represent “Jack Straw” as only an _alias_ of Wat Tyler, but they were evidently two different persons.

A leader of this motley band was one Baker, of Fobbing, in Essex, of whom a story is told similar to that of the Dartford Tyler. The Essex men sent messengers to Kent, and a great company, doubtless of John Ball’s hearers, speedily assembled. They roamed the country. Broke open the archbishop’s prison at Maidstone, and liberated the popular champion. They stopped several companies of Canterbury pilgrims on their way to the shrine of Becket, not to maltreat or to pillage them, but to impose an oath “to be loyal to King Richard, to accept no king of the name of John”—a clause aimed at the deservedly hated John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster—“and, for the rest, to stir up their fellow-citizens to resist all taxes except the ‘fifteenths,’ which their fathers and predecessors had acknowledged and paid.” Wat Tyler of Maidstone—a different person evidently from the man who had slain the tax-collector at Dartford—was chosen as their leader. Hollinshed, after Walsingham, describes him as “a verie craftie fellow and indued with much wit[9] (if he had well applied it).”

[9] “Vir versutus et magno sensu præditus.”—Walsingham, i. 463.

A march upon London was now planned, for the purpose of meeting King Richard face to face, and demanding a redress of the people’s grievances. Sir John Newton, one of the king’s knights, was led, by persuasion or force, to act as envoy for the insurgents. The king shut himself up in the Tower of his Court, but was invited to meet the peasant army, now mustered at Blackheath. Perhaps had he done so, much that followed might have been avoided; but the messengers sent to reconnoitre dissuaded him. His majesty had taken boat and had descended the Thames to Rotherhithe, a detachment from Blackheath having come to the riverside to meet him. At this point Richard was advised by Sudbury the archbishop, and Robert Hales the treasurer, to hold no parley. “Have nothing to do,” they said, “with a set of shoeless ribalds.” For a little time, the royal lad—he was but sixteen—was rowed up and down the river in his barge, pitiably irresolute; but at last he returned to the Tower, and an advance upon the City was resolved upon by the peasant army, after a sermon by Ball, on Blackheath, from the text—

“When Adam dalf and Eve span,
Wo was thanne a gentilman?”

The mayor and aldermen were for shutting the City gates, but the mass of the citizens effectually protested against excluding those whom they owned as “friends and neighbors.” The gates were accordingly left open all night, and an immense multitude went in and out, as yet comparatively orderly, and certainly honest. They stole nothing, not even food; everything they took they paid for at a fair price; any robber amongst them they put to death on the spot. As far as in them lay, these rude undisciplined masses wished to make fair war on those whom they regarded as their oppressors.[10] The Duke of Lancaster was the first object of their animosity. His sumptuous palace in the Savoy was ruthlessly destroyed, but the chronicler is careful to relate that the rioters did not appropriate the spoils. His jewels and other valuables he flung into the river, and one man detected in secreting a silver cup was thrown in after it. The records of the kingdom and other State papers were burned, the peasantry in some dim confused way connecting these documents with the oppressions to which they had been subject. Other acts of violence followed, notably the destruction of great part of the Temple, of which Robert Hales was Master. The insurgents, to whom drink had been freely served by many of the citizens, soon became infuriated and uncontrollable. A wild, half-drunken mob raged through the City, and deplorable excesses were committed.

[10] “It was said that the insurgents as they went along were killing all the lawyers and jurymen; that every criminal who feared punishment for his offences had joined himself to them; that masters of grammar-schools had been compelled to forswear their profession, and that even the possession of an inkhorn was dangerous to its owner. Most of the rumors were, no doubt, the mere inventions of the excited imaginations of the chroniclers or their informants. The orderly conduct of the army of Tyler when it was first admitted into London, and the definiteness of the demands which formed the basis of the charter granted by Richard, make the atrocities and absurdities of these acts alike improbable.”—C. E. Maurice, p. 164.

In this way the Thursday was passed—Corpus Christi Day, June 13, 1381. The City was panic stricken. Walworth, the mayor, proposed, according to Froissart, that an onslaught should be made upon the insurgents during the night, when many of them, lying in drunken sleep, could easily be killed “like flies.” But the atrocious counsel was rejected, and on the Friday morning the king came to parley, chiefly, as it appears, with the Essex contingent, gathered at Mile End, “in a fair meadow,” writes Froissart, “where in the summer time people go to amuse themselves.” The interview was a peaceful one. Nothing could be more simple and reasonable than the demand of the people: “We wish that thou wouldst make us free forever, us, our heirs, and our lands, and that we should no longer be called slaves, nor held in bondage.” Richard II. at once acceded to the petition, promised four things: first, that they and their children after them should be free; secondly that they should not be attached to the soil for service, but should be at liberty to rent lands of their own at a moderate fixed price; thirdly, that they should have access, free of toll, to all markets and fairs, cities, burghs, and mercantile towns, to buy and sell; and, fourthly, that they should be forgiven for the present insurrection. The king further prepared to send letters to every town confirming these articles of agreement. Two persons from each locality were to remain to carry back these precious documents; “thirty secretaries” were instantly set to work; and the multitude cheerfully dispersed.

But the men of Kent had meanwhile enacted a terrible scene at the Tower. Taking forcible possession of the place and frightening the six hundred yeomen on guard almost out of their wits in a way which the chroniclers graphically describe, they sought out the archbishop and treasurer who had called them “shoeless ribalds,” with Richard Lyons the merchant, chief commissioner for levying the poll-tax, and John Legg, the man who had taken the most prominent part in the collection of the impot, also two of Legg’s satellites and an obnoxious friar. These men they beheaded, carrying their heads on long pikes through the streets of London. It was a terrible revenge, and must have steeled the hearts of well-meaning citizens at once against the movement. The King’s mother (the Princess Joan, widow of the Black Prince) was in the Tower, half dead with terror. Some of the insurgents had penetrated into her room and thrust their swords into the mattress of her bed in search for the “traitors,” but beyond the murder of the archbishop and his companions they seemed to have committed no outrage. The princess herself, on being recognised, was treated with honor, and was conveyed to the Wardrobe, Carter Lane, in the vicinity of Blackfriars, where the king found her when his business at Mile End was done—a royal day’s work that might have been one of the best and brightest in the annals of England!

The next morning Richard heard mass in Westminster Abbey, and, on his return with sixty knights, encountered Wat Tyler and his men in Smithfield “before the Abbey of St. Bartholomew.” As it appears, Tyler had some further demands to make, not being altogether satisfied with the charter of Mile End.[11] Sir John Newton rode up to invite him to approach the king. According to some accounts the knight was received insolently. “I shall come,” said Tyler, “when I please. If you are in a hurry you can go back to your master now!” Another narrator tells us that Wat began to abuse Sir John Newton for coming to him on horseback, being met with the courteous reply, “You are mounted, why should not I be so likewise?” In a third chronicle we read that Tyler was approaching Richard covered, and was ordered by Walworth, the mayor, to remove his cap, but roughly refused. There was, at any rate, a brief dialogue between Richard II. and the peasant leader, in which the latter insisted on the immediate issue of letters of manumission to all, and added his new demand, to the effect that “all warrens, waters, parks, and woods should be common, so that the poor as well as the rich might freely fish in all waters, hunt the deer in forests and parks, and the hare in the field.” This cry for the repeal of the game and forest laws went to the heart of one of the chief grievances of the people. What reply the king gave is not recorded, nor is it easy to disentangle from the conflicting accounts any clear details. One chronicler says that Tyler came too near the king’s horse, as if intending some mischief against his majesty; others that he was simply insolent, tossing his dagger from hand to hand as he parleyed; others that blows were actually interchanged between Wat and Sir John Newton. This much at any rate is clear, that the Mayor Walworth—_John_ Walworth, as Knighton calls him; _William_, as in the other authorities—aimed a sudden blow at the bold demagogue, who fell at once from his horse, and was dispatched by one of the king’s squires, named Sandwich or Cavendish.

[11] It is possible that some of the points above mentioned were among these reserved demands. If so, the king conceded them to Tyler, verbally, before the catastrophe. But this is uncertain. The concessions are enumerated in Rymer’s “Fœdera,” vol. vii. p. 317.

With Wat Tyler died also the insurrection, and the hopes of English liberty for many a dreary year. “As he fell from his horse to the earth,” writes Walsingham, “he first gave hope to the English soldiery, who had been half dead, that the Commons could be resisted.” There was, no doubt, a touch of chivalry in the first words of the young king, “Follow me!” he cried to the people infuriated by their leader’s assassination; “I will be your captain!” They were startled, and obeyed, the king preceding them to Islington, where he was met by a large body of soldiers. There was no conflict, and the multitude slowly dispersed, being threatened with death if found in the streets after nightfall.

As soon as the king was safe it was found that his pledges had meant nothing. The promises of enfranchisement, the “letters” about which the “thirty secretaries” had been busy all the night of that memorable fourteenth of June, were treated as void. “Villeins you are,” said the king, when asked by the men of Essex to confirm his promises, “and villeins you shall remain. You shall remain in bondage, not such as you have hitherto been subjected to, but incomparably viler. For so long as we live and rule by God’s grace over this kingdom, we shall use our sense, our strength and our property, so to treat you that your slavery may be an example to posterity, and that those who live now and hereafter, who may be like you, may always have before their eyes, and as it were in a glass, your misery and reasons for cursing you, and the fear of doing things like those which you have done.” In the spirit of this royal message, commissions were sent into the country to bring those who had taken part in the insurrection to condign punishment. John Ball, the preacher, Jack Straw with the Millers, Truemans, and a host of others, were mercilessly put to death; and in that terrible autumn the scaffold and the gallows had no fewer than seven thousand victims![12] Nothing could more clearly show the panic into which this wild rough outcry for freedom had thrown the constituted authorities in Church and State. One good result, however, of the insurrection was in the vanishing of the poll-tax. Of that impost, at least, we do not hear again. And more—the people had learned their power, a lesson which in the darkest times was never forgotten.

[12] Green’s “History of the English People,” vol. 1. p. 475.

We believe in freedom now. Almost all that John Ball and Wat Tyler demanded is the heritage of every Englishman. They might have sought it, perhaps, by “constitutional methods.” Yet we must remember their times. They did but imitate in their rough way during those three days of terror the course which their masters pursued for more than three hundred years! The stroke that laid Wat Tyler low—and made Richard II., that worthless lad, the master of the situation—whatever it was, was not a blow for liberty!

Some partisan writers have associated the teachings of John Ball with the principles maintained by Wycliffe, especially in his treatise “On Dominion.” The dates, however, are against this. Ball is said to have been a preacher for more than twenty years before the insurrection. This carries us back to about 1360, an earlier date than we can assign to Wycliffe’s treatise, or to his institution of “Poor Preachers.” In fact, the chronicler Knighton takes a diametrically opposite view, and regards Ball as a _forerunner_ of Wycliffe—the John the Baptist to this false Messiah! In his fervid imagination the Leicester canon sees the apocalyptic visions fulfilled—the catastrophe of the last days! Such events can mean nothing else than the end of the world! “Much has happened since then,” and the signs of the times may perhaps be read as fallaciously by seers of to-day. There can, however, be no doubt that before the insurrection, Ball had been an adherent of Wycliffe. The demand for spiritual freedom fell in, at least, with the thoughts and impulses that had prompted the serfs of their wild irregular cry for social and political rights.

“In memory of Sir William Walworth’s valor,” writes Thomas Fuller in his “Church History of Great Britain,” “the arms of London, formerly a plain cross, were augmented by the addition of a dagger, to make the coat in all points complete.” This is still a popular mistake. That dagger, or short sword, has nothing whatever to do with Walworth, or Tyler, or Richard II., or any of the personages, good or evil, of that era. In fact, it was a relic or “survival” of the sword in the hand of the Apostle Paul, formerly engraven on the City seal.[13] St. Paul anciently figured as patron saint of London, and when in Reformation times his effigy disappeared from the City arms his sword remained. We know that in Christian art, from about the tenth century, the sword was a familiar symbol of St. Paul, the primary intention no doubt being to denote the Sword of the Spirit, which is the Word of God.

[13] For this information we are indebted to Mr. Overall, the courteous Librarian of the Guildhall Library.