He stood before them, an ageing, thoughtful and reserved Suffolk-born theologian, with all the burden of the troubled kingdom on his shoulders, and explained that the earl of Buckingham, the king’s twenty-five-year-old uncle was, despite his military inexperience, now the leading general of the troops in France. He was there at that moment, together with a large number of ‘other great lords, knights, squires, archers and other good men of the kingdom’.2
The king had assigned to Buckingham all the resources granted to him at the last parliament, and much of his own money, explained Sudbury. Furthermore, because of debts Richard had incurred for the expedition to Scotland and the defence of royal subjects in the disputed territories of Gascony, not to mention the money due to the earl of March for the defence of Ireland, the council had pledged away most of Richard’s royal jewels in security for vast and unserviceable cash loans, including many from wealthy merchants in the City of London. The ancient Plantagenet heirlooms and symbols of royal splendour were in danger of being lost.
There was worse, too. Sudbury went on to explain that owing to a rising in Flanders, the wool tax that creamed a reliable profit from merchants trading on the London cloth market was gone. The armies had been promised the advance of another six months’ pay, and reinforcements of men and horses; the coasts of the southeast required massive and immediate investment to protect them against the relentless raids by Franco-Spanish fleets; the wages of soldiers in Calais, Brest and Cherbourg were more than nine months in arrears, to the point where the men were talking of desertion.
In short, warned Sudbury, this was going to be expensive. Though parliamentary protocol demanded that he asked the commons to ‘advise’ the king and to show him ‘how and by what means you think these expenses may be best met with the least discomfort to yourselves’,3 it was clear that this was not a polite request for money, nor even a terse demand-it was a desperate plea for a lot of money, fast, and the devil care at what price.
Listening to Sudbury’s speech was Sir John Gildesburgh, knight, war veteran and politician, and a man who had been at the heart of the Hundred Years War for as long as he could remember. War had shaped his life and earned him his fortune. He had fought alongside Prince Edward at Crécy in 1346, when he was fifteen and the prince only a year older. Gildesburgh’s whole youth and young manhood were typical of a generation of landowning military gentlemen, whose lives had been absorbed by the brutal and bloody campaigns that dominated the years before Bretigny. Like many others, young Gildesburgh had won through his loyal service the grant of a manor, a lucrative marriage in Essex, and friendship with the county aristocracy.
In Parliament at Northampton now, twenty years after Bretigny, Sir John was learning to live by a different kind of sword. Here, Sir John did political battle in his role as parliamentary speaker-which he had performed at the last parliament-interpreting and voicing all of the commons’ demands and opinions to the lords and to the king.
After Sudbury had made his opening remarks, Gildesburgh led the commons aside for a frank discussion. Like many of his fellows, he was torn in two directions. Gildesburgh was a knight of the shire, but he was also an ally of Buckingham. For many years he had shared personal interests with the other landowners in the commons, on whom the burden of regular taxation fell most frequently. But he also realised the gravity of the crisis, and the urgent need for a huge grant of taxation to keep the war afloat. To refuse the Crown’s request for funds outright would almost certainly lead, before long, to a full-scale invasion by the French, which would bring devastating consequences to every man in Parliament-possibly heralding upheaval for landowners on a scale unseen since the Norman Conquest, when, within a generation, William the Conqueror’s invaders had virtually eradicated the old Saxon landholding nobility, seizing their land for themselves.
Yet the commons felt unable to sustain a burden of taxation that weighed uncharitably heavy on their shoulders. True enough, at the previous parliament some of the burden of tax had been alleviated from the landowners in favour of milking the close relationship between the Crown and the powerful merchants of London. The city’s super-rich merchants had bolstered a moderately heavy general property tax with vast loans set against the Crown jewels. In exchange, these merchant tycoons and leading London politicians such as William Walworth and John Philipot had secured for themselves posts on the panel that administered the money that poured into the treasury. Unfortunately, during the months that intervened, John of Gaunt had ridden roughshod over that agreement. So this time around Gildesburgh knew as he addressed the damp and travel-weary parliamentary commons that Gaunt, with his remarkable capacity to offend and upset potential allies, had dashed any hope of repeating the last parliament’s deal.
In the eyes of the parliamentary commons, there remained one class that was virgin territory, relatively untouched by tax: the labourers.
Even given the parlous state of royal finances, when the government revealed to the parliamentary commons just how much it needed to keep the war effort alive, the amount was astounding. The knights and burgesses had filed back from their dormitory to the dining room expecting a stiff demand, but they could not have anticipated the insane ransom that Sudbury demanded. The sum that was deemed fit to keep the country afloat was a staggering £160,000. It was eight times the sum that had been raised by the last major tax, in 1379.
It was, said the commons, completely ‘outrageous’, and utterly impossible. Now it was the turn of the lords and the Crown to deliberate. And, like the commons, the lords looked to the lower orders, a class that they saw every day on their estates becoming richer and more aware of the monetary value of their labour. Unsurprisingly, the same solution crept into their minds. This time, agreed the lords, the country might be able to spread the burden of paying for the war effort. If the parliamentary commons didn’t want to pay for the whole effort themselves, then they could grant another poll tax.
Though there had been two poll taxes in the previous four years, neither had been imposed in the form that the November parliament conceived it. In 1378 every person in England aged over fourteen had been charged a groat (4d) – about a day’s wages for a skilled craftsman, or two days’ pay for a farmhand. This was not especially onerous. The net amount paid by most families was scarcely provocative and certainly not crippling. Communities were assessed en masse and generally left to divide the tax burden between themselves-which generally meant according to their means.
The second poll tax had taken this principle of the bill varying according to income and written it into law. There was a long, graduated list of rates for every estate of man, from dukes to farmhands.
Now, though, the lords asked for a flat, universal tax to be levied of four or five groats (16d–20d) per person. They must have realised that even with the relatively new affluence of some parts of the English lower orders, this was a grotesque hike. The earlier poll taxes had been innovative, net-widening and moderately set. This was heavy, crude and blatantly devised to shift the burden of war funding away from the landed classes. However communities tried to spread the burden of payment, a poll tax at this level would cripple the weak and poor. It stood the ideal of Christian charity on its head, and even when the lords suggested that the tax be made fairer with a commitment to compel the strong to help the weak, it was, at this level, simply not fair.
The commons dug in their heels. At five groats per head, the lords’ suggestion was downright scandalous; £160,000 was just too much, they said, presumably thinking of the stormy reaction they themselves would receive back home if appointed as tax collectors. Asking even the relatively wealthy ordinary folk of the south-east to pay a week’s wages for every adult member of their family invited resistance; if they were going to go out into the countryside and start emptying the pockets of the peasants, then they had to know some limits.
Negotiations reached an impasse. The commons went back to their chambers, and argued for days about the best way to proceed. There was no doubt of the urgency of the situation, and it was troublesome to consider the ire that would rain down in private on men like Gildesburgh and all those like