Eventually they reached a compromise.
The commons agreed to grant £100,000, one third of which was to be paid by the clergy. The clergy wouldn’t like it, reasoned Parliament, but they could afford it, and they were less likely to be difficult about finding the money than the lay folk in the countryside. Moreover, the commons must have known that this particular solution would find favour with the Crown-Gaunt and Buckingham were both known to harbour some sympathy for the radical theologian John Wyclif, who had been railing against the wealth and corruption of the English Church for years. They would not shirk from siphoning a little episcopal wealth in the name of national defence. The bishops and abbots in Parliament huffed and puffed and protested that Parliament was a wholly inappropriate institution to be extorting money from them, but their complaints were ignored.
Meanwhile, the labourers, on whom the principal burden would still fall, had no voice at all. They would bear the bulk of the cost of defending the realm, and contributing a greater share than ever before to the war effort.
By early December, the form of the tax had been thrashed out in full and formal terms. Two-thirds was to be collected from the common people immediately, with a further third to be collected by the summer. Mirror arrangements would be carried out to take an equivalent levy from the clerics.
If all went according to plan, and the tax-collecting commissions did their jobs, then by June 1381 the country would be safe, secure and peaceable once again. The next parliament-likely to be in a year’s time-would be able to assemble back in London, and with any luck would not be plagued by the rain. A new and lucrative source of income would have been established, tapping into the wealth of the English lower orders.
Everything was looking up.
During this crisis, the commons held the peaceful duke of Lancaster as their most hated enemy of all mortal men and would certainly have destroyed him immediately if they had found him …
HENRY KNIGHTON
As the Northampton parliament progressed, it would have occurred to many who sat throughout the days of financial wrangling that one man, and one man alone, was to blame for Parliament’s strange location outside its usual home of Westminster. That man was John of Gaunt, the duke of Lancaster, and it was because of his long and significant feud with the City of London, its common people and citizens, that Parliament had moved.
There had been little love between the duke and the City for many years. The common people thought him a tyrant, and the great merchants who controlled the City’s politics and trade saw him as a dangerous enemy of their influence. They disliked Gaunt, and resented his blunt meddling in City affairs. Inevitably, given the shadow he cast over government, he received a disproportionate share of personal blame for the disastrous conduct of the Continental wars and the resulting threat to sea trading routes on the Continent and around the English coast. The hatred percolated through the orders of City folk, and the common multitude regarded the duke with suspicion and contempt, and took any chance to rise against him. Gaunt, for his part, lacked the common touch to win over the mob, resented the merchant oligarchs’ close relationships with the king and despised the royal reliance on their finances.
During the decline and death of Edward III, and the infancy of the present King Richard II, relations had reached a woeful state. Gaunt had no firm power base in the City, yet could not resist dabbling in its politics. For all his smooth charm in the international arena, when it came to domestic politics Gaunt seems to have found it pathologically impossible to ignore an opportunity for trampling on his lessers. The result was a skein of disastrous instability in City governance, and a series of riots and risings leading up to the summer of 1381. The stunning palace of the Savoy, built on the wealthy riverside strip of affluent suburbia, had come to serve as a locus of discontent for hostile citizens and the urban mob.
One of the major sources of friction in London was Gaunt’s unsubtle support for John Wyclif, the outspoken advocate of Church reform, who was regarded by many as a dangerous heretic. In February 1377 Gaunt had prompted rioting across the City by interfering in Wyclif’s trial for heresy at St Paul’s. William Courtenay, bishop of London, and a hugely influential figure across the well-steepled City, in which stood ninety-nine churches within the square mile of its walls, had been presiding over Wyclif’s interrogation, and Gaunt had appeared in the cathedral in support of his protégé. The case drew enormous interest from the common populace, who were roughly split in their opinions of Wyclif, but who were united in their suspicion of the duke, not least because he was widely believed to be considering the appointment of a royal captain to govern the City, in place of a popularly elected mayor.
The case before a packed and turbulent St Paul’s soon descended into a slanging match between duke and bishop, who raged at one another over an issue as trivial as whether Wyclif should stand or sit while the charges were read. And it erupted into chaos when Gaunt threatened to drag the indignant bishop out of the cathedral and all the way to Windsor by his hair.
Gaunt’s arrogance prompted total outrage and the trial quickly dissolved into violence. After a day’s protest a furious mob baying for Gaunt’s head thronged out of the City walls at Ludgate, made their way for two miles along Fleet Street and the Strand and attacked the Savoy. Gaunt had the good sense to leave home before the mob appeared on his doorstep and had fled downriver so the Londoners had contented themselves with turning upside down Gaunt’s coat of arms-the mark of a traitor. It was left to the humiliated Bishop Courtenay to bring the City to order.
Having thus offended London’s clerical population, excited her common folk and united both sides against him on a generally divisive issue, Gaunt had the very next year contrived to involve himself in another, even more serious incident, which had a similarly grievous effect on City morale and stability. There had been another major conflagration, as the controversial knight Sir Ralph Ferrers had burst into Westminster Abbey during Mass, violated sanctuary and murdered both a sacristan and a squire, Robert Hawley, who had sought refuge there following his escape from the Tower of London. Ferrers was thought-wrongly-to be connected with, or under orders from, Gaunt, and though the duke was, in fact, in Brittany at the time of the outrage, he waded into the debate on his return, choosing to defend Ferrers’ plainly appalling behaviour. Once again, he had inflamed tensions in London for the sake of imposing his own authority.
Yet again, there were protests, but Gaunt continued to meddle, and with his connivance, statutes were passed at the Gloucester parliament of 1378, stripping the fishmongers-one of the leading groups of merchants in London-of their trade monopolies and roles in national government: the richest and most powerful fishmonger, William Walworth, was removed from his position as war treasurer; the same treatment was afforded to the leading grocer in the City, John Philipot, who had contributed handsomely to the war effort not only via loans to the Crown, but also by chartering a private fleet of warships to protect the coast from Scottish pirates; and the earl of Buckingham had made a vehement speech attacking Nicholas Brembre, another of the greatest merchants in London and a close associate of Walworth and Philipot.
By summer 1379, the City had begun to develop something of a persecution complex. Rumour had started to spread of a plot, led by Gaunt, to strike still harder against London’s ruling elites. It was said that the Genoan ambassador to England, Janus Imperial, was in negotiations with the Crown not just to secure favourable trading terms, but to move England’s primary point of trade away from London. Speculation was rife that Southampton was to be made the new trading capital of the country, and that Gaunt and the Genoans were on the verge of brokering a deal that would break the London merchant oligarchs for good. In August, the merchants struck back: Imperial was brutally stabbed to death on the doorstep of his lodgings in St Nicholas Acon Street. John Kirkby and John Algor, a pair of small-time hoodlums selected from London’s native trading guilds, were sent to pick a fight with the ambassador’s servants, during the course of which Kirkby had stabbed the unfortunate ambassador twice in the head, killing