COURTENAY SUDDENLY realized how cold it was as they broke free of the crowd and walked to the space at the top of the hill. He was breathing heavily and sweating slightly—the hill was steeper than it looked from a distance—but even so he wrapped his cloak tighter about him.
Wat Tyler turned from the man he was speaking to, and stopped still, staring as Courtenay approached. He nodded, half to Courtenay as greeting, half to himself as acknowledgment of another marker reached. “Well met, Robert,” Wat Tyler said.
Courtenay nodded his own greeting, remembering the uncomfortable meal shared at Halstow Hall the day Tyler had arrived with John Wycliffe and two Lollard priests.
He suddenly realized that there was a waiting silence, and that the man whom Tyler had been speaking with now stood at Tyler’s shoulder, staring at him belligerently. Courtenay blinked, recognizing John Ball.
“Bolingbroke asked me to come to you,” Courtenay said, looking back to Tyler. “He has a request.”
“What?” Tyler said. “That I go home?”
“Nay.” Courtenay stared at Tyler’s face, wondering what was in the man that had made him lead the rebel army to almost certain ruin. “It concerns my master, Thomas Neville.”
“Aye?”
“Neville is being held in Blackfriars—”
Tyler laughed, a sound of genuine amusement. “What? Did Thorseby manage to catch Tom at last?”
Courtenay fought to stop his jaw from clenching. “—and Thorseby is working in concert with the Chief Justice and Richard to not only hang Neville, but to hang Boling-broke through Neville.”
“And so Bolingbroke wants Tom’s life saved in order to save his own?”
“Nay. He told me to tell you that Neville must not be allowed to die for his own sake.”
“Then Bolingbroke shouldn’t have allowed Tom to be taken in the first instance!”
“Wat, please, listen to what I say! You are Neville’s only hope. If you enter London—”
“If? You think there’s a possibility we might just turn about and go home to our plowshares as soon as dawn lights the sky?”
“When you enter London, Bolingbroke asks that you take advantage of your numbers,”
Courtenay glanced at the crowd beneath them, “to free Neville.”
Wat slowly shook his head. “I can’t believe that Bolingbroke thinks I will jump to his every wish.”
“Bolingbroke told me to tell you,” said Courtenay, “that it is better that Neville be die battlefield than the Maid of France.”
Wat stared at him, his thoughts in turmoil. It was patently obvious that Courtenay had no idea what the message meant, but Wat knew Bolingbroke’s meaning only too well.
If Neville died, then the angels would probably move their battlefield to Joan of Arc, and it was very, very unlikely that Joan would choose any way other than that of the angels.
“He further told me to tell you,” Courtenay continued softly, “that you do this for love of Neville, if not for love of Bolingbroke.”
Tyler abruptly turned away then, after a moment, looked back to Courtenay, who was stunned to see tears in Wat’s eyes.
“I will do this for love of Bolingbroke” Wat said. “Not for Neville.”
“Neville has changed,” Courtenay said, relieved that Wat had agreed to help, but needing to speak on Neville’s behalf.
“Changed? How so?”
“He has become a gentler man.”
Wat laughed harshly. “Gentler? The word does not marry well with ‘Neville.’Tell me, Courtenay, how does he treat his wife, Margaret?”
“With love and respect. When I saw Neville last Tuesday—the first time any of his household or family had seen him in the two months of his imprisonment—his first words were for Margaret, and when I told him of the approach of this,” Courtenay waved his hand across the masses below, “his first thoughts were for her.”
Wat shrugged. “Whatever, I care little for Neville.” His eyes shot to Courtenay’s. “But I do care for his wife, as also for Bolingbroke, whatever chasms lie between us.”
“Then I thank you.”
Wat started to say something else, when John Ball, still waiting behind him, made an impatient sound and stepped forward.
“Wat,” he said, “we must begin.”
Wat nodded. “Aye. Courtenay, do you remember this man?”
Courtenay nodded, regarding Ball with some measure of disrespect, for he was ill-clothed and unmannerly in his appearance. Still, that was hardly unusual behavior for a Lollard.
Wat grinned at Courtenay’s appraisal. “Poor looks or not, what John will say tonight shall set the world afire.”
Jack Straw, who had hitherto been standing a few paces down the hill to give Tyler and Courtenay some privacy, now indicated that Courtenay should stand with him.
As Courtenay moved to join Straw, Wat suddenly leaned close and whispered in his ear,
“Stay close after Ball has finished, for there is something I need to give you.”
Then Tyler moved away, and stood on the grass a few feet away from Ball.
THE RAGGED, wild priest held up his arms and the crowd, who had been murmuring and shifting, quieted.
“Ah, good men,” John Ball cried, and Courtenay knew that the man’s clear voice would carry over most of this crowd.
“Good men! Things have not gone well in England for generations, and they will not go well until the wealth of this wondrous realm is shared among all its people!”
The crowd roared, and Ball had to spend long minutes waving them back into silence.
“You are held in thrall by those who call themselves noble,” Ball eventually continued, “but by what right do they so hold you in bondage? What have they done, to be called ‘great lords’?
Why do they deserve their place over us? And how is it that they say they have the right to hold us in servitude?”
Courtenay glanced about him. Everyone was staring at Ball, and in their eyes glowed a strange light… the light of freedom, Courtenay realized.
“Do we not all come from the same mother and father?” said John Ball. “Are not we all children of Adam and Eve? So how is it these ‘lords,’ ” Ball spat out the word with the utmost contempt, “say that they are better men than us? They are clad in velvet and silk trimmed with squirrel-fur, and we are clad in poor cloth. They have wines, and spices, and good white bread, and we have rye bread, and remnants, and straw, and we drink water. They have good homes and fine manors, and we have pain and toil, and till the fields in the rain and wind, and it is from us and our labor that must come the wherewithal to maintain their estate.
We are called serfs and beaten if we do not, at once, do their service.”
Ball halted, breathing deeply, allowing the silence to deepen before he spoke again.
“When Adam delved and Eve span,” he whispered, and that whisper carried deep into the heart and soul of every man present, “who then was the gentleman?”
There was a silence, and then …
“No one!” screamed a voice from far back in the assembly. “No one was the gentleman!”
“Nay,” said John Ball, and Courtenay was as stunned to see tears in the renegade priest’s eyes as he had been amazed to see them earlier in Tyler’s. “No one was the gentleman then, as no one now should be any more the ‘gentleman’ above his neighbor. No one should own more than his neighbor, and no one should call his neighbor his servant.
“And no one now should ever look at you and call you or your sons bondsmen and serfs!”
My God, thought Courtenay. There’ll be nothing but death awaiting them if they march up to Richard and say that.
And then his heart felt as if it had stopped, for he remembered his conversation with Whittington and realized the further implications.
If Richard trod these men into the mud whence they had struggled, then he would in turn be dashed down.
MANY HOURS later, when the crowd had dispersed to campfires and a hurried meal, Tyler sought out Courtenay.
“You must leave us,” he said, “and return to Bolingbroke.”
“No, I—”
“Wait. Hear me out. I will do what I can for Neville, but I need you to go back to Bolingbroke.”
Courtenay hesitated, then nodded. “You said you had something to give me.” “Aye.” Tyler reached into a pocket and withdrew a key. “Take this. Give it to Bolingbroke and no other.
Bolingbroke should have had the key a long time ago.” He grinned wryly. “His subtle plans will be nothing without it.” Courtenay did not ask what the key was for. He pocketed it, hesitated, then spoke.
“You will die if you lead that mob into London speaking words of peasants made lords and lords made peasants.”
“I know,” Tyler said, “but only death can remake the world. Isn’t that what Christ’s death taught us?”
CHAPTER VII
Prime on the Saturday within
the Octave of Corpus Christi
In the second year of the reign of Richard II