Eltham, as they were keeping their Christmas festivities there, and that this attempt failed through the court receiving intimation of the design, and suddenly removing to Westminster; that, disappointed in this scheme, the Lollards were summoned from all quarters to march towards London, there to secure and kill all the principal clergy. They were, according to these accounts, to meet in St. Giles's Fields, on the night of the 6th of January.
The king, it is stated, being warned of this movement, gave due notice to the city, and on the day previous to the proposed meeting, the Mayor of London made various arrests of suspected persons, and amongst others of a squire of Lord Cobham's, at the sign of the "Ark," in Bishopsgate Without. The aldermen were ordered to keep strict watch each in his own ward, and at midnight Henry himself issued forth with a strong force. He is represented as being greatly alarmed for the public safety, from the popular insurrections which had lately been raging in Paris, and to which we shall presently have to draw attention. He ordered all the city gates to be closed, to keep the Lollards who were within the walls separate from those without, hastening then to the place of rendezvous.
Here again the narratives of this unaccountable affair contradict each other. One represents all the roads as being covered with the adherents of Lord Cobham, hastening to the appointed spot in St. Giles's Fields. That on asking the first overtaken who they were for, they replied by the preconcerted watchword—"For Sir John Oldcastle," and that these being seized, the rest took the alarm and fled. By other accounts there were expected to be 25,000 men collected in the same fields, but only fourscore were found there. That some of these confessed that they came there to meet Lord Cobham, but that the greater part knew nothing of any such meeting, but appeared to have been there by mere accident.
As for Lord Cobham himself, the reputed originator of this great rising, the enthusiastic advocate of Lollardism, and the practical military man, he was nowhere to be seen or heard of. Had he got wind of the king's intended visit? If so, why had he not taken prompt means to warn his followers? If he had not heard of it, where was he? Why was he not there? The whole affair bears so wild, so misty and inconsistent an aspect, that the most probable solution of it is, that the bishops, disappointed of their prey by Lord Cobham's escape, concerted this plan, and probably themselves disseminated the summonses to the meeting, in order to collect there some runaway followers of the fugitive leader, who under torture might disclose some knowledge of his retreat. If so, they failed in their main object; but they succeeded in alarming the king and the country, and giving a considerable check to Lollardism.
Henry, surprised at the non-appearance of the confidently predicted host of armed heretics, sent out detachments of his troops in all directions, and these picked up about seventy poor creatures who were tried as Lollards. Little reliance can be placed on the compulsory confessions of these prisoners. Amongst them was a silly fanatic, one William Murle, a rich brewer and maltster of Dunstable, who was said to be taken with others at Harengay Park, who had two led horses with him, trapped with gold, and a pair of gilt spurs in his bosom, expecting to be knighted by Lord Cobham in the field.
About thirty of these captives were executed on the spot of their reputed rendezvous, St. Giles's Fields, being drawn and hanged as traitors, and then burnt; amongst them Sir Thomas Acton, whose body, instead of being burnt, was buried under the gallows.
In the whole of these strange transactions there is not the slightest evidence of the presence or complicity of Lord Cobham; but the anxious object of the clergy is manifested in the proclamation which was issued on the ninth of January, offering 1,000 marks for the apprehension of Sir John Oldcastle, Lord Cobham. Sir John was nowhere to be found, for not a man would betray him; but the House of Commons had fully imbibed the intended alarm, and in their address to the king, they declared their conviction that the insurgents sought "to destroy the Christian faith, the king, the spiritual and temporal estates, and all manner of policy and law." The king would seem fully to have arrived at the same fearful conclusion; for in his proclamation he states that they meant "to destroy him, his brothers, and several of the spiritual and temporal lords, to confiscate the possessions of the Church, to secularise the religious orders, to divide the realm into confederate districts, and to appoint Sir John Oldcastle president of the commonwealth."
The singularity of this charge, and its real nature as a plea of the hierarchy which had thus early raised the cry of "the Church in danger," in order to crush the new Church which was arising out of its own corruptions and neglects, is shown most luminously by the fact that the very Parliament which joined in the cry, and was lending itself to the suppression of the Lollards, at this very time was itself vehemently bent on the very object which they thus made criminal in the Protestant body. We find in Hall, folio 35, that on the king demanding supplies, they renewed the offer which they had made to his father to seize all the ecclesiastical revenues, and convert them to the use of the crown.
The clergy were greatly alarmed by this demonstration from their own coadjutors, and feeling that the age was ripe for compelling them to disgorge a good portion of their enormous wealth, they agreed to confer upon Henry all the alien priories which depended on capital abbeys in Normandy, and had been bequeathed to those abbeys when that province continued united to England. The great originator of Church persecution in this country, the man who first planted the stake and lit the flame around the bodies of his fellow-men for Christ's sake—a deed prolific of centuries of crime and horror, of civil dissension, and disgrace to the Christian name—was now gone to his account, and his successor Chicheley, as determined a persecutor as himself, endeavoured to turn the attention of the king by recommending him to carry war into France.
Henry was himself already meditating that very step. It was the dying advice of his father not to permit his subjects to remain long in inaction; which, in an age which possessed few resources but hunting or war to sufficiently occupy the minds of the great barons, was sure to breed domestic factions, while successful war kept them about the person of their prince, and attached
