.[41]

The peasant revolt was at bottom a social movement, fostered and fashioned
by preachers of a social democracy. Cade's rising was provoked by
misgovernment and directed at political reform. It was far less
revolutionary in purpose than the revolt that preceded it, or the rising
under Ket a hundred years later.

The discontent was general when Cade encamped on Blackheath with the
commons of Kent at the end of May, 1450. Suffolk, the best hated of Henry
VI.'s ministers, had already been put to death by the sailors of Dover, and
Lord Say-and-Sele, the Treasurer, was in the Tower under impeachment.
Ayscough, Bishop of Salisbury, another Minister, was hanged by his
infuriated flock in Wiltshire, and Bishop Moleyns, of Chichester, Keeper of
the Privy Seal, was executed in Portsmouth by a mob of sailors. Piracy
prevailed unchecked in the English Channel, and the highways inland were
haunted by robbers--soldiers back from France and broken in the wars.

The ablest statesman of the day, the Duke of York, was banished from the
royal council, and there was a wide feeling that an improvement in
government was impossible until York was recalled.

Whether Cade, who was known popularly as "Mortimer," was related to the
Duke of York, or was merely a country landowner, can never be decided. The
charges made against him after his death were not supported by a shred of
evidence, but it was necessary then for the Government to blacken the
character of the Captain of Kent for the utter discouragement of his
followers. All we _know_ of Cade is that by the Act of Attainder he must
have been a man of some property in Surrey--probably a squire or yeoman.

The army that encamped on Blackheath numbered over 40,000, and included
squires, yeomen, county gentlemen, and at least two notable ecclesiastics
from Sussex, the Abbot of Battle and the Prior of Lewes. The testimony to
Cade's character is that he was the unquestioned and warmly respected
leader of the host. The Cade depicted by his enemies--a dissolute,
disreputable ruffian--was not the kind of man to have had authority as a
chosen captain over country gentlemen and clerical landowners in the
fifteenth century.

The "Complaints" of the commons of Kent, drawn up at Blackheath and
forwarded to the King and his Parliament, then sitting at Westminster,
called attention in fifteen articles to the evils that afflicted the land.
These articles dealt with a royal threat to lay waste Kent i