These revels were scarcely ended, when the Wat Tyler insurrection broke out, and the King, with his mother, fled for refuge within the Tower from which he had lately so proudly emerged. The insurgents assembled on Blackheath and asked for a conference. Richard having heard mass in the chapel, sailed down the Thames to meet them, but was so frightened by their menacing looks that he precipitately fled back to the Tower. Therefore the angry mob advanced, quartered themselves in and near St. Katharine’s Hospital and invested the fortress, “hooting,” says Froissart, “as loud as if the devils were in them.” The Lord Mayor, Walworth, recommended a sally upon them, as the majority were drunk, but this was deemed too desperate, and the King declared he would meet them and hear their grievances. He had no sooner quitted the gates, than some of the insurgents, who had lain concealed, broke into the fortress, and killed some of the King’s officers.[2] But their main quarry was the Archbishop of Canterbury, the King’s Chancellor, Simon of Sudbury, whom John Ball, the Socialist priest, had furiously denounced. They made their way into the chapel where he was engaged in prayer. “Where is the traitor to the kingdom, where is the spoiler of the Commons?” they shouted, and Sudbury replied, “Here am I, my sons; your Archbishop, neither traitor nor spoiler.” They dragged him out on Tower Hill. He saw what was coming and warned them, but in vain. After he had spoken further, and given as far as in him lay absolution to John Starling of Essex, who was standing ready to behead him, he knelt down. He was horribly mutilated, not being killed till the eighth blow of the axe. Hales the treasurer and two others were slain with him, and all the heads were stuck on poles, a cap on the Archbishop’s to distinguish him, and were placed on London Bridge. Two days later Sudbury’s head gave place to Wat Tyler’s, and he was buried with great pomp in his Cathedral at Canterbury, to which he had been a great benefactor. His fine monument is still to be seen there.

How this rebellion was quelled is no part of our subject, but the troubles of King Richard were by no means ended. In 1387 he had again to fly to the Tower for security against his uncle Gloucester and the other disaffected barons. His weakness and imbecility, and the corruptness of his ministers, had exasperated the nation against him, and Gloucester seized the regal authority and placed it in the hands of commissioners. The King summoned a Parliament at Nottingham which supported him; the nobles retorted by marching on London with forty thousand men. There was much anxiety and some fighting, but Archbishop Courtenay mediated with great patience and wisdom. Richard had gone to the Tower and was in fact besieged, and in the great Council Chamber there Courtenay arranged a meeting between the nobles and the King, with the result that the mutual differences were for the time adjusted. But the King had not in the least regained the confidence either of the nobles or of the commonalty. In fact the prominent members of the Parliament which had declared in his favour were arrested. Some were fined, others banished, others confined in the Tower. Of these latter Sir Robert Tresylian, Chief Justice of the Common Pleas; Brembre, Mayor of London; Sir John Salisbury, Sir John Beauchamp and Sir James Berners were put to death at Tyburn. One of the victims calls for special mention. Sir Simon Burley had distinguished himself under the Black Prince in the French war. Edward had such a high opinion of him that he bequeathed the education of his son Richard to him. He seems to have justified the choice in the early days of the young King, and it was he who arranged his marriage with Anne of Bohemia, thereby incurring the enmity of the Lancastrian party. Although he had warned the King of his folly in the early days of his reign, he supported him in Parliament in his struggle against the barons, and in consequence he was sentenced on May 5, 1388, to be hanged, drawn and quartered, but this was commuted to beheading. We have seen that Archbishop Sudbury was executed on Tower Hill, but that was by mob violence. Burley was now condemned by law to die on the same spot. It was the first legal execution on the place which was for many years to come the regular place of execution.