But there were a great many who were not satisfied. An insurrection like this, whatever may be the object and design of the original movers in it, always brings out into prominence, and invests with temporary power, vast numbers of desperate and violent men, whose passions become inflamed by the excitement of movement and action, and by sympathy with each other, and who are never satisfied to stop with the attainment of the objects originally desired. Thus, in the present instance, although a great number of the rebels were satisfied with the promises made by the king at Mile-End, and so went home, multitudes still remained. Large parties went to London to join those who had already gone there in hopes of opportunities for pillage. Others remained at their encampments, doubting whether the king would really keep the promises which he had made them, and send the decrees. Then, besides, fresh parties of insurgents were continually arriving at London and its neighborhood, so that the danger seemed by no means to have passed away.
The king immediately caused the decree to be prepared. Thirty secretaries were employed at once to write the several copies required. They were all of the same form. They were written, as was customary with royal decrees in those times, in the Latin language, were engrossed carefully upon parchment, signed by the king, and sealed by his seal. The announcement that the secretaries were preparing these decrees, when the work had been commenced, tended greatly to satisfy the insurgents, and many more of them went home. Still, vast numbers remained, and the excitement among them, and their disposition for mischief, was evidently on the increase.
Such was the state of things during the night of Friday. The various parties of the insurgents were encamped in and around London, the glare of their fires flashing on the buildings and lighting up the sky, and their shouts, sometimes of merriment and sometimes of anger, filling the air. The peaceable inhabitants passed the night in great alarm. Some of them endeavored to conciliate the good-will of the insurgents by offering them food and wine. The wine, of course, excited them, and made them more noisy than ever. Their numbers, too, were all the time increasing, and no one could foresee how or when the trouble would end.
The next morning, a grand consultation among the rebels was determined upon. It was to be held in a great open space called Smithfield-a space set apart as a cattle-market, at the outskirts of London, toward the north. All the leaders who had not returned to their homes were present at the consultation. Among them, and at the head of them, indeed, was Wat Tyler.
The king that morning, it happened, having spent the night at the private house down the river where his mother had sought refuge after making her escape from the Tower, concluded to go to Westminster to attend mass. His real motive for making this excursion was probably to show the insurgents that he did not fear them, and also, perhaps, to make observations in respect to their condition and movements, without appearing to watch them.
He accordingly went to Westminster, accompanied and escorted by a suitable cortége and guard. The mayor of the city of London was with the party. After hearing mass at Westminster, the king set out on his return home; but, instead of going back through the heart of London, as he had come, he took a circuit to the northward by a road which, as it happened, led through Smithfield, where a great body of the insurgents had assembled, as has already been said. Thus the king came upon them quite unexpectedly both to himself and to them. When he saw them, he halted, and the horsemen who were with him halted too. There were about sixty horsemen in his train.
Some of his officers thought it would be better to avoid a re-encounter with so large a body of the insurgents-for there were about twenty thousand on the field-and recommended that the king's party should turn aside, and go home another way; but the king said "No; he preferred to speak to them."
He would go, he said, and ascertain what it was that they wanted more. He thought that by a friendly colloquy with them he could appease them.
While the king and his party thus halted to consider what to do, the attention of the leaders of the insurgents had been directed toward them. They knew at once that it was the king.
"It is the king," said Walter. "I am going to meet him and speak with him. All the rest of you are to remain here. You must not move from this spot until I come back, unless you see me make this signal."
So saying, Walter made a certain gesture with his hand, which was to be the signal for his men.
"When you see me make this signal," said he, "do you all rush forward and kill every man in the troop except the king. You must not hurt the king. We will take him and keep him. He is young, and we can make him do whatever we say. We will put him at the head of our company, as if he were our commander, and we were obeying his orders, and we will do every thing in his name. In this way we can go wherever we please, all over England, and do what we think best, and there will be no opposition to us."
When I say that Walter gave these orders to his men, I mean that these words were attributed to him by one of the historians of the time. As, however, all the accounts which we have of these transactions were written by persons who hated the insurgents, and wished to present their case in the most unfavorable light possible, we can not depend absolutely on the truth of their accounts, especially in cases like this, when they could not have been present to hear or see.
At any rate, Walter rode up alone to meet the king. He advanced so near to him that his horse's head touched the king's horse. While in this position, a conversation ensued between him and the king. Walter pointed to the vast concourse of men who were assembled in the field, and told the king that they were all under his orders, and that what he commanded them to do they would do. The king told him that if that were the case, he would do well to recommend them all to go to their respective homes. He had granted the petition, he said, which they had offered the day before, and had ordered decrees to be prepared emancipating them from their bondage. He asked Walter what more they required.
Walter replied that they wanted the decrees to be delivered to them.
"We are not willing to depart till we get all the decrees," said he. "There are all these men, and as many more besides in the city, and we wish you to give us all the decrees, that we may take them home ourselves to our several villages and towns."
The king said that the secretaries were preparing the decrees as fast as they could, and the men might depend that those which had not yet been delivered would be sent as soon as they were ready to the villages and towns.
"Go back to your men," he added, "and tell them that they had better return peaceably to their homes. The decrees will all arrive there in due time."
But Walter did not seem at all inclined to go. He looked around upon the king's attendants, and seeing one that he had known before, a squire, who was in immediate attendance on the king's person, he said to him,
"What! You here?"
This squire was the king's sword-bearer. In addition to the king's sword, which it was his duty to carry, he was armed with a dagger of his own.
Walter turned his horse toward the squire and said,
"Let me see that dagger that you have got."
"No," said the squire, drawing back.
"Yes," said the king, "let him take the dagger."
The king was not at all afraid of the rebel, and wished to let him see that he was not afraid of him.