She had need to feed them on words, for by reason of her own meanness and procrastination the poor wretches had empty stomachs, or would have had if the citizens of London had not loyally come to the assistance of their soldiers. In any case Elizabeth’s exertion was quite unnecessary, for the winds and the waves had conspired to do for England what the Queen’s niggardliness might easily have prevented our brave fellows from doing. An earlier and no less interesting drama was enacted at Tilbury and Gravesend in the reign of Richard II. Close in the train of that national calamity, the Black Death, came in not unnatural consequence the outbreak known as the Peasants’ Revolt. Just a short way east of Tilbury, at a little village called Fobbing, broke out Jack Straw’s rising; and almost simultaneously came the outburst of Wat Tyler, when the Kentish insurgents marched on Canterbury, plundered the Palace, and dragged John Ball from his prison; then moved rapidly across Kent, wrecking and burning. At Tilbury and Gravesend these two insurgent armies met, and thence issued their summons to the King to meet them. He, brave lad of fifteen, entered his barge with sundry counsellors, and made his way downstream. How he met the disreputable rabble, and how the peasants were enraged because he was not permitted to land and come among them, is a well-known story, as is the furious onslaught on London which resulted from the refusal. Thus far up the River came the Dutch in those terrible days of which we read in our last chapter. They sailed upstream on the day of their arrival, firing guns so that the sound was heard in the streets of London, but they came to a halt slightly below the point where the barricade, running down into the water from the Essex shore, largely closed up the waterway, and where the little Fort frowned down on the intruders. No attempt was made to stay them; indeed, none could have been made, for while the little blockhouse was well provided with guns, it was practically without powder; and the invaders could have proceeded right into the Pool of London without hindrance had they but known it. However, they were content for the time being with merely frightening the countryside with their terrible noise. As Evelyn says in his “Diary” (June 10): “The alarm was so great that it put both country and city into a panic, fear and consternation, such as I hope I shall never see more; everybody was flying, none knew why or whither.” Having done this, the Dutch passed downstream to Sheerness, where their companions were engaged in destroying the fortifications. How long they stayed in these parts may be judged by this other extract from Evelyn, dated seven weeks after (July 29): “I went to Gravesend, the Dutch fleet still at anchor before the river, where I saw five of His Majesty’s men-of-war encounter above twenty of the Dutch, in the bottom of the Hope, chasing them with many broadsides given and returned