In vain Walworth urged the king and his royal council to act. Richard had sent to Tyler asking for a written statement of the grievances of the commons, and had been told in reply that the king must meet his commons face to face, and hear with his own ears their demands. In the evening Walworth proposed that the garrison at the Tower should be despatched against Tyler, “to fall upon these wretches who were in the streets, and amounted to 60,000, while they were asleep and drunk. They might be killed like flies,” Walworth added, “for not one in twenty had arms.” But the handful of soldiers at the Tower were in mortal terror of the peasant host, and “all had so lost heart that you would have thought them more like dead men than living.” The Earl of Salisbury checked Walworth’s rash proposals. “If we begin what we cannot carry through,” he observed, “we shall never be able to repair matters. It will be all over with us and our heirs, and England will be a desert.” An open conflict with Tyler and his 60,000 was a very hazardous proceeding. Who could be sure of escape if it came to battle? So far Tyler had only struck at the chief ministers and the lawyers, and why should others risk their lives in such a quarrel? Besides, it was said that Wat Tyler and a mad priest of Kent were for doing away with all nobles, and for making all men equal, and caution was necessary in dealing with men who held such strange opinions. England without its nobility would be a desert, and at all costs such an irreparable calamity as the loss of England’s nobility must be prevented. So Walworth got no help in his plans for resistance; and when that night a messenger from Tyler warned the king that if he refused to meet the commons of England in open conference, the people would seize the Tower, Richard sent word in reply promising to meet his subjects on the morrow at noon at Mile End, and there hear their complaints. Tyler accepted the king’s word, and after sleeping with his men hard by the Tower, at St. Catherine’s Wharf, was at Mile End betimes. Here he met Grindcobbe, and hearing that the people of Hertfordshire had trouble with the abbot at St. Albans, bade Grindcobbe return and accomplish freedom for the abbot’s tenants and serfs. Richard went to Mile End with no large retinue, and two of his companions, the Earl of Kent and Sir John Holland, left him at Whitechapel and galloped off in craven fear of the multitude that thronged the road. Richard, though he was only fifteen, displayed both courage and cunning when confronted with Tyler. He knew that the discontent in the country was directed against the government, and not against the king, and that the misrule could not fairly be laid to his charge. Besides, he was the son of the Black Prince, and the people showed no signs of hostility. His policy was to yield and to wait an opportunity for regaining power.