e rising was more against the
enclosure of open lands than against the reformed religion), the popular
leader was a man named ROBERT KET, a tanner of Wymondham. The mob were,
in the first instance, excited against the tanner by one JOHN FLOWERDEW,
a gentleman who owed him a grudge: but the tanner was more than a match
for the gentleman, since he soon got the people on his side, and
established himself near Norwich with quite an army. There was a large
oak-tree in that place, on a spot called Moushold Hill, which Ket named
the Tree of Reformation; and under its green boughs, he and his men sat,
in the midsummer weather, holding courts of justice, and debating affairs
of state. They were even impartial enough to allow some rather tiresome
public speakers to get up into this Tree of Reformation, and point out
their errors to them, in long discourses, while they lay listening (not
always without some grumbling and growling) in the shade below. At last,
one sunny July day, a herald appeared below the tree, and proclaimed Ket
and all his men traitors, unless from that moment they dispersed and went
home: in which case they were to receive a pardon. But, Ket and his men
made light of the herald and became stronger than ever, until the Earl of
Warwick went after them with a sufficient force, and cut them all to
pieces. A few were hanged, drawn, and quartered, as traitors, and their
limbs were sent into various country places to be a terror to the people.
Nine of them were hanged upon nine green branches of the Oak of
Reformation; and so, for the time, that tree may be said to have withered
away.

The Protector, though a haughty man, had compassion for the real
distresses of the common people, and a sincere desire to help them. But
he was too proud and too high in degree to hold even their favour
steadily; and many of the nobles always envied and hated him, because
they were as proud and not as high as he. He was at this time building a
great Palace in the Strand: to get the stone for which he blew up church
steeples with gunpowder, and pulled down bishops' houses: thus making
himself still more disliked. At length, his principal enemy, the Earl of
Warwick--Dudley by name, and the son of that Dudley who had made himself
so odious with Empson, in the reign of Henry the Seventh--joined with
seven other members of the Council against him, formed a separate
Council; and, becoming stronger in a few days, sent him to the Tower