House Of Treason: The Rise And Fall Of A Tudor Dynasty by Robert Hutchinson

stinking streets and lanes of London.
    Add rampant xenophobia, envy and the pain of declining wages all together and you have a heady recipe for civil disorder. The chronicler Richard Grafton described how, by 1517, French, Genoese and other foreign merchants had flocked to London, attracted by the rich pickings offered by Henry VIII ’s free-spending and glittering court. ‘The multitude of strangers was so great . . . that the poor English artificers could scarce get any living. Most of all, the strangers were so proud that they disdained, mocked and oppressed the Englishmen,’ he reported.
    In early April that year, a carpenter called Williamson bought two stock doves 2 at a stall in London’s Eastcheap. As he paid with a few coins from the purse at his belt, a passing Frenchman snatched the birds out of his hand and told him that they were too grand a dish for such a low-born tradesman. Despite his angry protests, the Frenchman insisted the birds would make a perfect meal for his master, the French ambassador Pierre de la Guiche, 3 and carried them off - but not before he had called Williamson a ‘knave’. 4 Diplomatic complaints followed about the carpenter’s manners and he ended up in prison, with the envoy declaring ‘by the Body of God, that the English knave should lose his life, for no Englishman should deny what a Frenchman required’.
    Meantime, another Frenchman was banished from the realm for killing a man and had a cross branded on his right hand to identify him as a malefactor. As one of the city constables led him away, they were jostled and shoved by the Frenchman’s friends who taunted the officer: ‘Sir, is this cross the price to kill an Englishman?’ Another shouted: ‘On that price, we would all be banished, by the Mass!’
    Rumours spread of more incidents involving foreigners, which fanned the smouldering fires of resentment burning in Londoners’ hearts. John Lincoln, a broker, 5 who was ‘sore grudged’ by the foreigners’ behaviour, consulted a Dr Beal (alias Bell), a monk from the Augustinian priory and hospital of St Mary Spitalfields, 6 just outside the city walls, and told him: ‘You were born in London and see the oppression by the strangers and the great misery of your own native country. Exhort the citizens to [unite] against these strangers, ravagers and destroyers . . .’
    Easter sermons at the priory were renowned throughout the city and were delivered from an outdoor pulpit, or preaching cross, within an enclosure near its churchyard. Immediately opposite was a small, two-storey building in which the Lord Mayor and aldermen of London gathered to hear the pious words. 7 On the Tuesday after Easter, Beal mounted the pulpit and urged his congregation:
    Take compassion over the poor people, your neighbours, and also of the great hurts, losses and hindrances . . . [and] the extreme poverty [of ] all the king’s subjects that inhabit this city . . . The aliens and strangers eat the bread from the poor fatherless children and take the living from the artificers and the [business] from all merchants, whereby poverty is much increased [and now] every man bewails the misery of another, for craftsmen are brought to beggary and merchants to need... 8
    As the monk warmed to his theme, his voice became edged with righteous anger:
    This land was given to Englishmen. As birds defend their nest, so ought Englishmen cherish and defend themselves and hurt and grieve [the] aliens for the common good.
    He turned to his text for that day - pugna pro patria (‘Fight for your country’) 9 -and emphasised that under God’s law this was wholly legitimate. Beal then ‘subtly moved the people to rebel against the foreigners and break the king’s peace’.
    The following Sunday, in the king’s gallery at Greenwich Palace, the courtier Sir Thomas Palmer was chatting to some Lombardy merchants, among them Francis de Bard, who was enjoying considerable notoriety for successfully enticing and