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

seducing an Englishman’s wife and, what’s more, stealing his plate. Laughing coarsely, the Lombards boasted that now ‘if they had the mayor’s wife, they would keep her’. Some English merchants were within earshot and the crude jests piqued them. One angry mercer, William Bolt, stalked over to the group and snarled: ‘Well, you whore’s son Lombards, you [may] rejoice and laugh, [but] by the Mass, we will one day [have you], come when it will.’ 10
    Tempers were up and it was time for vengeance on the streets.
    A few days later, on 28 April, foreigners were attacked in the city by apprentices and other young men - ‘some were struck, some buffeted and some thrown into the canal’ - but the Lord Mayor, John Rest, quickly arrested some of the ringleaders and threw them into prison.
    He hoped he had contained the unrest but this was merely the harbinger of worse violence to come.
    Dark rumours quickly spread across London that the whole city would rise up as one on May Day and that all aliens found within the walls would be cruelly slaughtered. Word of the uprising reached Cardinal Thomas Wolsey, the Lord Chancellor, and he ordered the city authorities on 1 May to ban people from the streets from nine o’clock in the evening until seven the next morning and to increase patrols by the watch.
    That night, as Alderman John Moody was hurrying home, he found apprentices playing the game of ‘Bucklers’ 11 - a mock fight with wooden swords and shields - in Eastcheap, watched by ‘a great company of young men’. It was after the new curfew, although admittedly word of its imposition ‘was scarce known’. He ordered the crowd of youths to disperse immediately but when one young man impertinently questioned his instruction, the alderman caught his arm and told him menacingly: ‘You will know.’ With that, he started to march him off to the nearest jail.
    But his companions quickly tore him away and they shouted out a rallying cry: ‘’Prentices and clubs . . . ’prentices and clubs!’
    It must have been a pre-arranged signal for commotion. Instantly, the doors of houses along Eastcheap opened and angry young men poured out, armed with wooden cudgels. The alderman ran to save his municipally corpulent carcase and the disturbance rapidly spread west throughout the city:
    More people arose out of every quarter and out came serving men, watermen . . . and by eleven of the clock, there were in Cheap[side] six or seven hundred.
    Out of [St] Paul’s [Cathedral] churchyard came three hundred and so of all places they gathered and broke [open] the counters [prisons] and took out the prisoners.
    The mayor and sheriffs were there present and made proclamation in the king’s name - but nothing was obeyed.
    The people of St. Martin’s [le Grand] threw stones and bats [wooden sticks] and hurt many honest persons that were persuading the riotous people to cease and they bade them hold their hands, but still they threw out bricks and hot water.
    Then all the misruled persons ran to the doors and windows of St. Martin’s [le Grand church] and spoiled all they found [there] and cast it into the streets and left few houses unspoiled. 12
    The mob ran back eastwards, headlong into Cornhill and Leadenhall streets, and broke into the house of a French merchant called Meutas, who was particularly loathed by the Londoners. If the rioters had found him ‘in their fury, they would have struck off his head’ but they had to be content with murdering his servants. Houses were set alight and watermen raided foreigners’ homes at Whitechapel and threw their boots and shoes into the Thames. Sir Thomas Parr galloped through the violent, noisy streets, west out of the city, to Wolsey’s home at York Place in Westminster, to warn him that the commotion was getting out of hand. The Lord Chancellor summoned help from the nobles living around the capital and prudently fortified his home, drafting in extra troops and artillery. Sir Richard