as the embodiment of purity, devotedness, and discipline. This citizen, whoever he was, plunged his dagger into Rienzi’s breast. Others rushed upon the victim, and his dead body was drawn through the mud, and then cast into the flames. Though there was no hope of his ever answering to popular expectation, if he had lived to old age, such a close to a second probation of four months brought to men’s minds the wonderful reforms he had once achieved, as well as the heart-stirring promises he had made them: and they at length softened so far as to allow their descendants to hear of him as a patriot who delivered his country.
If Rienzi has been regarded as the very Prince of Political Agitators, from his qualifications and his command of success, Jack Cade—or John Mend-All as his army called him—has been despised as the very meanest of the order. The two lived within a hundred years of each other: there were circumstances of strong resemblance in their respective positions: and it is possible, that the distance between them, intellectually and politically, was not altogether what unthinking readers of Gibbon and Shakspere might assume.
There were “barons” in the latter case as in the former—insolent and grasping nobles who stood between the people and good government, and betrayed the honour of their country, and afflicted their humble neighbours by grievous oppression. John Cade, the Irishman, who believed himself to be one of the royal Mortimers, and saw that the imbecile king (Henry VI.) was mere sport for his barons, had as much reason for his political agitation as Rienzi or any other of the order could show; and there seems to be no evidence that he was particularly ignorant, or afraid that other men should be knowing, though it suited Shakspere’s purposes to show him up in a comic dress. He was living in the marked and trying period of transition from the feudal to the constitutional form of society; and, as usually happens in transition periods, the order which is passing away made itself more odious as its desperation increased. The nobles had lost for us our French provinces of which we were so proud, and which were of such value to us! So the people believed: so John Cade insisted: and his force marched from Kent upon London to know the reason why. The agitation was not new. Since the peace with France there had been popular discontent everywhere, expressed by risings as well as menaces. In Norfolk, piratical foreigners were perpetually landing, carrying off men from Cromer and Yarmouth, and demanding heavy ransom for them. In the “Paston Letters,” we find mention of the Flemings coming by hundreds into parishes near the coast, and of strangers playing their games on Caister sands as if they were at home. While such intrusions were galling the people, the agents of noblemen were teasing tenants and townsfolk with exactions and interference, and the nobles themselves were overbearing in the elections, trusting to the weakness of the King for impunity. We gain an interesting glimpse of the ways of the time when we read in the “Paston Letters” of the stir there was at Swaffham about three local magnates—the friends of the unpopular great men offering 2000l. (a vast sum then) for the favour of a still greater man, and their accusers planning that the Swaffham men shall take horse and meet his lordship with the bill of accusation, while the common people, and especially the women, shall crowd the streets, and, as instructed, cry out upon the accused as extortioners, and stop my lord’s way with petitions “that he will do sharp execution upon them.” “The mayor also, and all the aldermen,” were to be stirred “to cry on my lord that they may have justice of these men that be indicted, and that my lord will speak to the King thereof;” and that in every part of the town where my lord is likely to pass there should be “many portions of commoners” kept ready to din the names of the accused into my lord’s ears, and cry out for their punishment. Such were the times in which John Cade, for one, uplifted his voice and collected his neighbours for a march upon London, to see what could be done to restrain and punish the hated nobles for “the great dishonours and losses that be come to this full noble realm of England, by the false means of some persons that have taken on them over great authority in this realm.” “The loss of two so noble duchies as Normandy and Guienne, that be well worth a great realm, coming by successions of fathers and mothers to the Crown,” sat heavy on the heart of England; and those who had signed them away could hardly show their faces with safety at the time of Cade’s rising. Thus there were reasons for a great popular effort at a juncture when the people must assert their rights or lose all the political ground they had hitherto gained. As for the form in which Cade made his protest, it may be a proof of his ignorance of the resources of the two parties; but it should be remembered that the “English Chronicle” states that the retainers of some of the lords would not fight against those who laboured to amend the common weal. It should be remembered that, four months before Cade’s march to London, the detested Duke of Suffolk had petitioned the Lords of Parliament to allow him” to make his declaration of the great infamy and defamation which was laid upon him by many of the people of this land.” Cade’s rising was not the freak of a single man or a discontented neighbourhood, but an expression of the disaffection of a whole people, and of their claim for extended rights. When we take a look into the camp at Blackheath, however, we see reason to doubt whether the leader was worthy of his cause.
Sir John Fastolf sent one of his men (J. Payn) with two of his best horses to Cade’s camp, to learn what the “articles” of the insurgents were; what they came for, in fact. “The Captain of Kent” had him seized on his arrival, and questioned him. Payn protested that he came only for a gossip with his brothers-in-law and friends; but he was sworn to as a servant of Sir J. Fastolf. Cade had him exposed at the four corners of the camp, and proclaimed a traitor and spy. This was a matter of course: but the strain of denunciation of the man’s master as one who had weakened the garrisons of our lost French towns, and caused their lapse to France, and as having garrisoned his own house with foreigners to destroy the men of Kent, smacks of demagoguic