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

Cholmley, the Lieutenant of the Tower of London, in ‘a frantic fury’, opened fire on the city with several guns on his ramparts. Little damage was done but at least the thunder of the salvoes made him feel better.
    The disorder continued until about three in the morning when most rioters returned home, happy with their night’s work. As they broke up into smaller parties, the apprentices were picked off by the city’s watch and detained. More than three hundred were arrested and marched off to the Tower, to Newgate and other prisons. Two hours later, reinforcements arrived in London, led by the experienced generals Thomas Howard, Earl of Surrey, and George Talbot, fourth Earl of Shrewsbury and Lord Steward of the royal household, who had speedily mustered what forces they could gather in order to suppress the revolt. The apprentices 13 ‘scattered by sudden fright, just like sheep at the sight of the wolf’ under the hooves of Surrey’s heavily armed horsemen.
    Lincoln and Beal were immediately arrested. Soon after, the second Duke of Norfolk arrived with 1,300 armed retainers from East Anglia, which he rapidly deployed at strategic street corners throughout the capital, ready to quash any fresh outbreak of civil disobedience. His soldiers, ingrained with the countryman’s traditional disdain for ‘townies’, spoke ‘many opprobrious words to the citizens, which grieved them sore’. Many in that now nervous city were convinced that Norfolk had nurtured a deep grudge against its inhabitants since one of his chaplains was murdered in Cheapside the previous year. Then he had angrily declared: ‘I pray God I may have the citizens in my danger [at my mercy].’ They feared his pitiless reprisal for their night of sweet revenge upon the foreigners in what was now being called the ‘Evil May Day’ riots.
    Norfolk issued strict proclamations that ‘no women should come together to babble and talk, but that all men should keep their wives in their houses’. Was this bizarre edict an indication of the duke’s opinion on the cause of the riots?
    Then he moved on to inflict legal retribution for the mayhem. Three hundred of the captured rioters were arraigned before an oyer and terminer trial on 4 May at the Guildhall, presided over by Norfolk, his son, and Rest, the Lord Mayor. 14 Another 224 followed them on indictment. The prisoners were herded through the hushed streets to the court, tied together by ropes, between files of halberdiers:
    Some men, some lads, some children [aged only] thirteen. There was a great mourning of fathers and friends for their children and kinsfolk. Among the prisoners were many not of the city; some were priests and some husbandmen and labourers and they were all arraigned for treason. 15
    Common law treason was a convenient, ill-defined crime in England which could involve many types of offences, grave or minor, but woven into most cases was the common thread of displeasing the monarch. The principle upon which the law rested was allegiance to the crown, due from every subject of fourteen years and above.
    Henry VIII, who could never stomach any kind of opposition, believed the apprentices had damaged the amity he enjoyed with his fellow Christian princes and therefore, according to the king, they were traitors.
    The next day, the court found thirteen guilty and ordered them to be publicly hanged, drawn and quartered - the barbaric method of execution reserved for those condemned for high treason, whereby the victim was hanged until half dead, cut down from the gallows, then castrated, his vital organs ripped from the still living body and burned before his eyes. Finally, the corpse was beheaded and chopped into four quarters by the axe-wielding headsman. Such places of execution must have resembled a gory butcher’s shop.
    Twenty-two gallows were erected in the London streets where the offences were committed: at Aldgate, Whitechapel, Gracechurch Street, 16 Leadenhall and in front of