oratory as strongly as his worst enemies could have desired. Payn was actually brought up to the block, when his head was saved by a threat from a powerful quarter that “a hundred or two” of Kentish heads should fall for this one. Cade did not forget the man; but when the rebels reached Southwark had Payn arrested again at the White Hart, and despoiled of his array—a velvet gown furred with fine beavers, armour covered with blue velvet and adorned with gilt nails, and a purse with line gold rings, besides some valuable bonds. Once more “he would have smitten off” Payn’s head; and when again threatened with the consequences, he watched his opportunity and thrust the man out into the fight on London Bridge, where he was wounded as intended. During the struggle this poor fellow was paraded four times through Kent and Sussex, to stimulate the malcontents: and when he arrived near his home his dwelling was pillaged, his wife being left half-clothed, and an attempt was made to hang her and five of her children. There is no occasion to suppose that Cade was cognisant of these last transactions: but the imputation of plundering his lodgings in Southwark on his own account has been charged upon him from that day to this.
Of such particular allegations we can never know whether they are true or not. We are more concerned with his course as an agitator; and in this we find the permanent characteristics of the career. Cade probably supposed himself aware of what he was about when he led his thousands of followers to Black heath, and encamped them there. He had fifteen articles written out fair, and was clear, and evidently eloquent on the grievances of the people. But he was foiled as soon as he met men in authority face to face. His force lay for several weeks at Blackheath, the city of London being favourable to the rising: but, with all these advantages. Cade did nothing effective, except defeating one detachment of the King’s soldiers, without result. When the gates were opened to him by friendly citizens, he rode into London, struck London stone with his sword, and called himself Lord of the city; he paraded his blue velvet gown, and his gilt helmet, and, worst taste of all, a pair of gilt spurs, as if he had been a knight. This is too like Rienzi: But Cade did not attempt Rienzi’s reforms. His demand to the Lord Mayor and justices was that Lord Say should be delivered up to him. Lord Say demanded to be tried by his peers: and Cade’s men seized him and beheaded him, “at the Standard, in Cheap,” without any trial at all. Murder and plunder were sufficient proof that Cade was not the man to lead a political reform; and the citizens turned him out. Then happened the battle on Loudon Bridge, followed by a truce, on a promise of a general pardon sent by the Archbishop of Canterbury. From this amnesty Cade was excepted; and he lied to hide himself in the Sussex woods. The Sheriff of Kent caught him there, and brought him to London in a cart,—dead on the way. The bill brought in to the King for the expenses of exposing the body in London-streets, fixing up his head on London Bridge, and forwarding the quarters to four provincial magistracies, reveals a weighty fact. The bill was a costly one; and the excuse for the high charges is the extreme difficulty of engaging anybody to take In disposing of the body. “Scarcely any persons durst or would, for doubt of their lives.” The memory of the Captain of Kent was held dear, it is evident. Yet, with all this support, sympathy, and wealth of means, he was imbecile when the moment for action arrived, and failed in his errand without any apparent reason for failure. His cause was good and sufficient; and he was backed by an army of citizens who believed it to be so.
There is probably no more complete an embodiment of the revolutionary spirit of any special period than we see in Lafayette, who considered himself, and has been generally accepted as, the representative of the era of 1789. Born noble, and early left an orphan and uncontrolled, he was not favourably placed in regard to training for coming events. His father had been killed at the battle of Minden before the child’s birth. He had little education, and never endeavoured to supply the defect. He married at sixteen, and at nineteen went to America to fight on the side of independence,—without more than a very crude notion of the principles involved in that, or any other political strife of his day. His early career exhibits that inability to brook restraint, and those unreasoning impulses on behalf of recalcitrants generally, which are in all ages confounded with the disinterestedness, benevolence, and generosity which often accompany them. Lafayette was as disinterested, generous, devoted, and sincere as any patriot ever was; but he was not an able, nor an enlightened man; and he therefore exhibited very conspicuously the constant features of the revolutionists’ career. When he organised the National Guard at Paris, and made a cockade for them of the royal lily white, joined with the colours of the commune, blue and red, he was as unaware as the humblest of the guard of the import of what he was doing in instituting the tricolor. From that time forward his life was not a career, as he had meant that it should be. It was a succession of scenes of vain protest against events which other men foresaw,—of gallant soldierly efforts to protect the Royal family amidst dangers which he had not power or skill to avert,—and of remonstrance or sympathy which were always too late for the occasion. He differed from most other political agitators in having a small following or none. But for his birth, and the early proof of civic virtue which it enabled him to afford, he would have presently disappeared from public notice. As it was, he was before men’s eyes, and conspicuous for failure to the end of his life. He suffered on all hands. The Court distrusted him, of course. The republican party despised him as the founder of a club for the formation of a constitutional monarchy on a popular basis. The Legislative Assembly turned Jacobin while he was making his appeals to it; and he found it necessary to leave Paris, where he was paraded and burnt in effigy as soon as his back was turned. When he attempted to retire to a neutral country, his military services on behalf of the revolutionary government rose up against him, and he was captured and imprisoned by the Austrians. He lay in prison at Olmütz for
