With Wat Tyler died also the insurrection, and the hopes of English liberty for many a dreary year. “As he fell from his horse to the earth,” writes Walsingham, “he first gave hope to the English soldiery, who had been half dead, that the Commons could be resisted.” There was, no doubt, a touch of chivalry in the first words of the young king, “Follow me!” he cried to the people infuriated by their leader’s assassination; “I will be your captain!” They were startled, and obeyed, the king preceding them to Islington, where he was met by a large body of soldiers. There was no conflict, and the multitude slowly dispersed, being threatened with death if found in the streets after nightfall. As soon as the king was safe it was found that his pledges had meant nothing. The promises of enfranchisement, the “letters” about which the “thirty secretaries” had been busy all the night of that memorable fourteenth of June, were treated as void. “Villeins you are,” said the king, when asked by the men of Essex to confirm his promises, “and villeins you shall remain. You shall remain in bondage, not such as you have hitherto been subjected to, but incomparably viler. For so long as we live and rule by God’s grace over this kingdom, we shall use our sense, our strength and our property, so to treat you that your slavery may be an example to posterity, and that those who live now and hereafter, who may be like you, may always have before their eyes, and as it were in a glass, your misery and reasons for cursing you, and the fear of doing things like those which you have done.” In the spirit of this royal message, commissions were sent into the country to bring those who had taken part in the insurrection to condign punishment. John Ball, the preacher, Jack Straw with the Millers, Truemans, and a host of others, were mercilessly put to death; and in that terrible autumn the scaffold and the gallows had no fewer than seven thousand victims![12] Nothing could more clearly show the panic into which this wild rough outcry for freedom had thrown the constituted authorities in Church and State. One good result, however, of the insurrection was in the vanishing of the poll-tax. Of that impost, at least, we do not hear again. And more—the people had learned their power, a lesson which in the darkest times was never forgotten. [12] Green’s “History of the English People,” vol. 1. p. 475. We believe in freedom now. Almost all that John Ball and Wat Tyler demanded is the heritage of every Englishman. They might have sought it, perhaps, by “constitutional methods.” Yet we must remember their times. They did but imitate in their rough way during those three days of terror the course which their masters pursued for more than three hundred years! The stroke that laid Wat Tyler low—and made Richard II., that worthless lad, the master of the situation—whatever it was, was not a blow for liberty!