“Ho! Hallo! Hallo! Give us our King; we have much to say to him.”
Some of them who were naked began to wade into the water. Salisbury glanced at the coward under the crown, spoke to the steersman, and held up a hand for silence.
“Sirs, you are not fitly clad, nor fitly mannered for the King to speak with you.”
He faced them, nostrils inflated, eyes bidding them back to the soil. The barge was edging away, and for a moment the crowd was silent. Then of a sudden it understood.
The roar that went up was the roar of a multitude that is balked of its desire. Fists shot out; men sprang into the river, felt for mud, and threw it, even as they threw curses. Hoots, yells, whistlings followed the splashing oars.
The King’s barge returned to the Tower, and the peasants to Blackheath, to tell the thousands who had tarried there how the King and his lords had refused to treat with them, but had held aloof as though they were so many lepers. Wat the Tiler, Merlin, and John Ball had no wish to see the mob in a peaceful temper. If these lords and gentlemen were to be trampled out of existence, it behoved them to keep the Great Beast to its fury, and set it to rend and slay.
The whole host poured from Blackheath, and by noon there were sixty thousand peasants in the suburbs, rushing hither and thither, breaking into religious houses, plundering the taverns, breaking down doors, and smashing fences, following any wild whim that served to lead them. They demolished the Marshalsea and set the prisoners free. Hundreds of uncouth figures came crowding to the closed gates, and howled threats at the guards upon the walls.
The cry became one long, monotonous, unchanging howl.
Walworth the Mayor spoke with them at the bridge gate, standing on the curtain wall between the towers, and looking down upon a sea of upturned faces. The rebels shook their scythes and pikes at him and threatened him with their bows. Some of them had brought up tree trunks and ladders, and shouted that they would break the gates down or storm the walls if the city did not open to them.
Walworth parleyed with the crowd, and rode straight to the Tower, where the Council was sitting without the King. Walworth’s news was desperate news, nor could he promise much for the goodwill of the city. The wealthier guilds might muster some eight thousand armed men, counting prentices and servants; Sir Robert Knollys had his six score men-at-arms, quartered about his lodging; Sir Perducas d’Albreth had some fifty more. There were in the Tower with the King his two maternal brothers, the Earls of Salisbury, Suffolk, and Warwick, the Grand Prior of the Templars, Sir Robert de Namur, the Lord of Vertain, Sir Henry de Sanselles, and a number of knights, squires, and yeomen. The Kent and Sussex rebels could count on the great mass of the common people within the city, and the easterlings and the midlanders were on the march. Walworth shrugged his shoulders and spoke of opening the gates.