Jack Cade was a Kentishman that joined with several future Members of Parliament who identified their interests with Richard, Duke of York, in a bloody insurrection during the reign of Henry VI, a whole decade before the onset of the War of the Roses.

This was a period of many changes in the accepted order of society, and these differences were aggravated by the shaky balance between the wealth and influence of powerful landowners and the patronage prerogatives of the Monarch. King Henry V had been the heroic general of Agincourt ("We band of brothers," of Shakespeare fame, around 1415). Henry had been a strong leader that rallied support for heavy taxes and beneficial contributions by his peers to support his military conquests in France. But, the warrior king died in 1422 and left his successors to clean up his fiduciary mess.1

Large landowners had become so powerful while Henry V nearly bankrupted the Crown with his expansionist ambitions that the rich Lords could contest the very right of his son, Henry VI, to sit on the throne by questioning the ideological underpinnings of his reign: the right of bloodline succession. And, with their private armies, the contesting aristocrats decided that they could enforce their interpretation of the rules. It was a struggle between moneyed subjects of the realm that found shifting alliances and alternatingly quiescent, then allied, Lords following their immediate economic and "legalistic" interests in a time of monetary inflation and the breakdown of religious certitude, what with the festering dissatisfaction that resulted in Martin Luther's "95 Thesis" that was nailed to a church door in 1517.

Earlier in the Fifteenth Century a more "personal" religious ideology had started to take root in newly-propertied classes, along with the political confidence of a Renaissance "Middle Class" of non-Aristocratic traders, the totally new class of men and families now known as the "Gentry" of the countryside. These were more locally-oriented men of substance, who turned to rebuilding their local parish churches rather than funding the grandeur of collegiate churches that were served by a secularly-motivated ecclesiastic hierarchy, and these new men started to make"chantry endowments" that simply hired a local chaplain to sing scheduled masses on behalf of them, rather than contributing to the more remote cathedrals of the Crown, as their fathers had done. With this questioning of the connection between religion and government; between local sanctuaries and the exalted cathedrals of the hereditary Nobility; between the higher call of a personal God and the venal actions of corrupt, "secularly-motivated," churchmen and the leadership of a self-interested, "divinely ordained," aristocracy, the common folk of the outlying areas began to look to themselves for a stable moral compass. These were the artisans and burghers of the country Town that gave rise to the strain of commercially motivated tradesmen and religious zealots we, in America, know as Puritans, and, more immediately in Britain, became the shock troops of Oliver Cromwell, in the 1400s.

Richard Streter undoubtedly counted himself among the originators of this theological/intellectual tap-root of Liberty, when he threw his lot in with Cade.2

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These thoughtful men — "out-of-London" neighbors, men of business — talked over dinners and visits to each other's homes, particularly in the relatively well-to-do shire of Kent, batting around ideas of 'what is to be done?'

The King's court was dominated by a faction led by the Duke of Suffolk. Suffolk's influence was synonymous with corruption and ineffective government both on the national and local levels. Taxes were high. England was being militarily humiliated in Normandy by the French's innovative use of artillery, just across the Channel from Kent, such that a contemporary French chronicler could write without contradiction, "..never had so great a populace and soldiery, and with so little killing of people or destruction and damage to the countryside" was an army defeated.3

In May of 1450, "the people of Kent, gentry as well as commoners, rose in a rebellion against corruption and ineffectiveness in local and national government."4 Cade, an "obscure but talented"5 man, incited a popular insurrection beginning in May of that year. The rebels defeated a royal army at Sevenoaks and then entered London to execute the Lord Treasurer Saye before being forced to retreat from the city. The Duke of Suffolk was impeached and killed in 1450, as well.

These rebels were literate and legally astute men. In contrast to their Kentish and Essex bretheren of the Peasants' Revolt of 1381, the demands of Cade's followers were, from the outset, circulated amongst themselves and put forward to the Court in written broadsides. "They are long documents, with a coherent and comprehensive argument, expressed in English, sometimes of a colloquial kind," records a Cambridge historian.6 The rebels were scandalised by the "low birth of royal councillors," and pressed for the inclusion in government of the dukes of Norfolk, Exeter, and especially York.

The Rebellion was crushed in London. Cade was killed, and his partisans were forced to flee the city. However, Henry VI's fortunes continued to deteriorate in France, and England's factional strife increased following Cade's Rebellion. Many rebels were pardoned. Henry sank into nervous exhaustion in 1453, a "clinical insanity" that allowed Richard, Duke of York, to govern as Protector for a couple of years until the first battle of the internecine struggle between York and Lancaster at St Albans in 1455.

What followed was a low-grade civil strife, popularly branded much later as "The War of the Roses" by Sir Walter Scott, that encompassed five years, and eventuated the crowning of Edward IV, the son of Richard, in 1461, after York's head, adorned by a paper crown, was displayed on the gate of his town upon his defeat at the Battle of Wakefield, December, 1460.

Henry VI's then-dominant queen, Margaret, was unable to follow Richard's defeat with control of London, leaving the capital open to the entry of York's son, Edward, and the validation of his coup by a handful of peers along with the popular acclimation of assembled soldiers and London townspeople that carried the day.

Cade's Rebellion presaged the result, and suggests the first salvo in a long-simmering battle of governing ideas and personal ethics that called rulers to account for their secular actions by the governed, based upon the sanctity of the individual's connection to his God without the intervention of clergy and the Divine Right of kings and their aristocratic interlocutors.

Cade's Rebellion was the first revolutionary action of a Reformation populace. It laid the foundation for the emergence in Kent and around the new middle classes of England of the political-religious Dissenter movement; it sowed the seeds of eventual Puritan thought and independence that resulted in the flight to New England and the "City on the Hill" of Jonathan Winthrop, eight or nine generations later.

NOTES:

1. Morgan, Kenneth O., ed., The Oxford Illustrated History of Britain, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1984. p. 214.

2. Streeter, Milford B., A Genealogical History of the Descendants of Stephen and Ursula Streeter of Gloucester, Mass ...: with an account of the Streeters of Goudherst, Kent, England, E. Putnam, Salem, 1896, New York, 1929. (Insert.)

3. Morgan, op. cit. p. 203

4. Davies, C.S.L. "Government and Politics in England, 1450-1553: Problems of Succession," The Cambridge Historical Encyclopedia of Great Britain and Ireland, ed.: Christopher Haigh, Cambridge University Press, 1985. p. 109.

5. Morgan, op. cit. p. 203.

6. Davies, op. cit. p. 147.