But perhaps the most remarkable meeting on Blackheath was that which assembled to escort the cardinal's hat, designed for Wolsey. When that particularly haughty prelate learnt that the insignia of his promotion was on its way from Rome in charge only of an ordinary messenger, he deemed it essential to his importance that a more imposing method of conveyance should be provided. Previously, therefore, to the arrival of the Pope's messenger on our shores, Wolsey caused him to be met and decked out with robes and trappings suitable to so important an occasion. That glorified pursuivant of Papal authority was, therefore, brought along the road from Dover to Blackheath with the greatest show of deference and consideration, and here, on this waste, the _hat_ was met by great numbers of the clergy and nobility, who conducted it to London and to Westminster Abbey in great triumph. Wolsey's hat, however, comes out of chronological sequence. Let us then put back the clock of history again to the year 1450, when Jack Cade's rebellion peopled Blackheath with a menacing host. These were the early days of the quarrels of the rival Roses. England was losing--whether by bad generalship or by trend of unavoidable circumstances it matters not--the provinces of France won by Henry the Fifth whose feeble son now reigned; the kinghead around whose ill-balanced kingship raged the quarrels and family jealousies of the Dukes of York, Suffolk, Somerset, and Buckingham. The king was unpopular with half his subjects, and all of them raged with wounded pride and grief at the loss of France. The name of Mortimer was a power in the land, and the head of that ancient family was the Duke of York, who had probably the greatest following of feudatory tenants in England. To take advantage both of the prevailing discontent and of the Mortimer prestige came Jack Cade, an Irish adventurer, at the head of twenty thousand followers, and encamped on Blackheath. Cade was undoubtedly the Duke of York's catspaw, but his sudden success in gaining adherents is something of a mystery; for, although he proclaimed himself a cousin of the duke, he was an obviously ignorant clown, a fact seized upon by Shakespeare with grand effect in _Henry VI_, part i, act 4, where he makes Cade's companions to be Dick the Butcher, Smith the Weaver, and others of a like humble estate, whose asides upon Cade's proclaiming himself a Mortimer and his wife a descendant of the Lacies are very amusing. "My father was a Mortimer," says Cade, to which Dick the Butcher rejoins, whispering behind his hand, that "he was an honest man, and a good bricklayer;" while as to his wife's descent from the Lacies, he remarks that "she was, indeed, a pedlar's daughter, and sold many laces"--a punning speech that, were it the work of a modern dramatist, would be received with a howl of execration.