WAT TYLER - BY DIVINE RIGHT

I started out thinking nobody could be a worse villain than that royal toady, John Bampton, Minister of Parliament and Justice of the Peace. He descended on the little Essex village of Brentwood at the end of May 1381 to collect over due taxes and delivered neither justice nor peace. Within 48 hours Bampton's ministrations had set off a riot, gotten six of his own clerks and several loyal citizens beheaded by a mob and barely escaped himself, back to London. Who could be a bigger villain than that?

The immediate answer was the arrogant royal toady Sir Simon de Burley. On Monday, 3 June, 1381, two sergeants dispatched by the villein de Burley entered the Thameside  village of Gravesend, to arrest escaped Peasant Robert Belling.  Belling must have been more than a mere peasant because he offered to buy his own freedom. But Sir de Burely demanded his rights of lordship, and had Belling thrown into the dungeon of Rochester Castle. Three days later a mob showed up outside Rochester Castle and the warden thought it better to free Belling rather than have his tiny garrison murdered. Was this rebellion really caused by the villain John Bampton, or the villain Sir Simon de Burley?  Take your pick.

Between the Black Death, which had killed over half of all English peasants during 1348-49, and the Hundred Years War with France (they were right in the middle of it) , the long suffering and few remaining peasants of England were, by 1381, fed up with having to feed , clothe and supply weapons and soldiers for their arrogant masters in the nobility  In early June 60,000 peasants from Essex in the northeast, and 40,000 from Kent in the southeast, were marching on London, determined to have their complaints heard by the King himself.

The English nobility were shocked and stunned. Because of the war in France and the never ending Scottish threat, there were few soldiers left in England. And those that were, were not trustworthy, as the warden of Rochester Castle had shown. 

And worse, the King, chosen to rule by divine right , was the 14 year old Plantagenet blue blood Richard II, a tall and gangly youth with a “white, rounded and feminine” face. He was a smart lad, but had a nasty stammer, and his noble “handlers” were not sure he could lead them out of this crises, whoever was to blame for starting it..

The nobility's first nomination for the responsible villain was the “mad priest of Kent” the heretical Father John Ball. He had often challenged the very foundations of feudalism, asking , “When Adam dug and Eve spun, where was then a gentleman?”  Ball dared to argue “all men by nature were created alike.” It was not God who chose Kings, said Ball, but “naughty men.” 

Sir Simon Sudbury, the Archbishop of Canterbury and Lord Chancellor of England, had locked up Ball in Rochester Castle (above).  As the Kent rebels moved west, they looted the Archbishop's properties in Canterbury, blaming him for the taxes piled upon them.  But this was also where a third villain joined the rebellion, who would give his name to the entire revolt: Wat Tyler. And once having reached Rochester, he freed both Berling and Father Ball.

Here was the nobility's real villain, then, and a proper villain too, being a free resident of a village. It was said Tyler was a member of the roof tiler's guild, or a blacksmith. It was said he had served in the King's army in France. And it was said a tax collector tried to strip his 13 year old daughter, to prove she was old enough to pay the 1 shilling poll tax, the third such tax in four years, laid on every person over 14. years of age. It was also said that Tyler then beat the tax collector's s brains out. 

Whatever the truth,  it is fact that on 7 June, 1381, Tyler was elected to lead the rebels up the Old Kent Road to London. And from that day the Peasant's Revolt became Wat Tyler's rebellion. Four days later, 11 June, 1381, the crowd reached the high ground at Blackheath, 3 miles southeast of London.

This “bleak site”, named for its dark soil, was a tradition camping spot, and young King Richard II's advisers had anticipated the rebels would pause there. They loaded their royal charge onto a barge, and with four barges of soldiers as escort, and set out down the Thames to overawe the “rebels” and order them to disperse. Seeing 40,000 angry peasants armed with longbows and axes, the courtiers panicked. The King did not get off the boat (above),  and the royal forces did not stop rowing until they were all locked safely behind the walls of the Tower of London. 

Caught on the outside, the Lord Mayor William Walworth ordered the gate houses at both ends of the 900 foot long London Bridge, the only crossing over the Thames River, to be closed and its drawbridge raised. This should keep the peasants on the south bank.

On Wednesday, 12 June, 1381, when Wat Tyler and his 40,000 member “mob” approached London Bridge, Walter Sybyle, a fishmonger and city alderman, ordered the gates at both ends lifted and the drawbridge lowered. Pausing only to post their own men in the gatehouses, Tyler's peasants streamed past the west door of St. Magnus-the-Matyr Cathedral and invaded the capital. 

Fleet and Newgate Prisons were raided and the prisoners were freed. Legal offices were ransacked, lawyers and clerks were butchered, and thousands of contracts, property records and mortgages were burned. The mobs also ransacked the homes of recent Flemish immigrants, and many were killed. And the Savoy Palace (above),  the ostentatious home of the arrogant and incompetent general John of Gaunt, was captured. “What could not be smashed or burned was thrown into the river. Jewelry was pulverized with hammers...” But a disciplined core of Tyler's force marched directly to Aldergate, in the eastern city wall. There the man entrusted with command by Mayor Walworth, Thomas Farington, threw that gate open as well.

Tyler's force advance a mile outside the city walls and camped in the open fields at Mile End. And there, on the following day, Thursday, 13 June, 1381, they were met by the larger force of peasants from Essex. A hundred thousand rebels, equal to London's population, had now occupied the capital, trapped the King and his ministers in the Tower, and accepted Wat Tyler as their sole leader..

The situation was unstable. Tyler must find food and water for his massive “army”. And so must the King's much smaller force in the tower. And with the daily markets disrupted, Mayor William Walworth must do the same for the city. The King's party panicked first, and asked for a meeting the next day, Friday 14 June 1381, at the rebel encampment at Mile End, to hear what Wat Tyler wanted.

Tyler wanted everything – the end to the slavery of serfdom, the right of peasants to buy the the land they worked, and to sell what they made and grew, the right to punish the royal advisers who had oppressed the people, and a general pardon for the peasant army. Grant these humble requests, said Tyler, and the peasant army would return to their villages. The King made a show of offering a few objections before agreeing to everything. It was the strategy Tyler expected, as he had no doubt Richard II meant to betray any promises. So Tyler had not waited for the King's betrayal.

While these “negotiations” were still going on,  400 rebels marched on The Tower. Again, the guards offered little more than token resistance. It was the first and last time the Tower of London fell to an invading force.

Chanting "Where is the traitor to the kingdom?” the rebels dragged their number one villain, the fat Archbishop of Canterbury, Sir Simon Sudbury,  and a dozen of other royal advisers, outside The Tower's Walls, to Tower Hill, where they were all beheaded. 

It took 8 blows to carve through Sudbury's thick neck, as his battered skull still shows (above).. When Richard II saw his adviser's head being paraded on a pike,  the King abandoned The Tower, and hurried instead to his apartments in Blackfriars, in south-west London.

That night, while the heads of the murdered royal advisers were bobbing atop the southern gatehouse of London Bridge, Mayor William Walworth came to King Richard with good news. First, a large part of the Peasant army had already started for home, trusting the King to fulfill his promises.  And second, the merchants of London had raised a militia of 5,000 armed men, whose loyalty could be trusted for the time being. In the morning, Saturday 15 June, 1381, Richard sent word he wanted to meet again with Tyler, to seal their agreement. But this time, he asked, the meeting be held at at Smithfields, where he felt safer.

For 800 years Smithfields, north west of the city walls, bordered by the Fleet River and shaded by elm trees, had been the open air livestock market for the city, and occasionally an execution place for rebels like Scotsman William Wallace. But being from out of town, Wat Tyler was probably unaware of this last purpose. Late that afternoon, Wat Tyler and a few followers crossed the Fleet River, leaving what was left of his peasant army on the eastern shore, and rode to meet the King and his 200 supporters..

Was Tyler drunk? Had he gone mad? Or did he sense, with the loss of most of his men, how this story was destined to end?  Richard II asked why the peasants had not all gone home. Tyler responded they were waiting for the promised laws to be signed by the King.  A valet named Ralph Standish then called Tyler a thief. At the insult the Kentish villain drew his only weapon, a knife.  The Mayor drew his sword. Tyler slashed out, but the Mayor was wearing armor, as was the King. Tyler was not. Whereupon Standish ran Tyler through with his sword. 

While the struggled continued the young King spurred his horse across the Fleet River, and addressed the rebels directly, calling them his friends. He invited them to follow guides to Clerkenwell Green, where they would be fed. Trusting their King, and not being able to see what was happening to Wat Tyler, the peasants followed.

It was a trap. The peasants arrived in Clerkenwell to find themselves hemmed in by run down apartment buildings and narrow streets, all escape routes guarded by the Mayor's militia.  As darkness approached, the King appeared, followed by Wat Taylor's head atop a spike.  It had been 9 days since Wat Taylor had been elected leader of the rebellion, and with his death the shrunken army of the poor lost heart.  The peasants fell to their knees and begged forgiveness. The King granted it, but withdrew his promises to end serfdom and grant freedoms. He also knighted Mayor Wentworth and Ralph Standish. He then ordered the peasants to be escorted back across London Bridge, and allowed to return home. And then he unleashed his anger..

John Ball, whose words would inspire Thomas Jefferson's Declaration of Independence, was executed at St. Albans. His final words were, addressed not to the the King who was there to witness his agony, but to his “fellow citizens”.  He advised them to “...stand firm while you may, and fear nothing for my punishment since I die in the cause of liberty.”  

He was then hung until almost dead, taken down and slowly drawn and quartered. Over the next five years around England some 5000 rebels would be hung for their uprising. The increasingly tyrannical Richard would sneered at his subjects, “Rustics you were and rustics you are still. You will remain in bondage, not as before, but incomparably harsher” But there would not be another poll tax in England, until the 20^th century.

Sir William Walworth, Lord Mayor of London, would die four years later, in December of 1385. In his will he left his wife all the income from his rents, including those of the whore houses he owned on the south shore of the Thames, rebuilt after Way Tyler's rebels had burned them down. 

Seven years after the death of Wat Tyler, the arrogant Sir Simon de Burley was impeached for treason by Parliament, and executed by beheading. 

And in the 22nd year of his reign, Richard II, King of England by divine right, would be betrayed by a cousin, and would die of starvation as a prisoner in February of 1400. His death was barely noted, and he was almost completely forgotten by both the nobles and peasants of his kingdom. So much for Divine Right.

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VIVIAN GIRDON - Moth to the FLAME

 

“I'm a lady of the evening. And while youth and beauty last, I never worry who will pay my rent. For a while I'll be in clover, And when easy days are over, I know I'll go the way that all, My predecessors went.”

Our poet, Benita Franklin, was born in Joliet, Illinois (above) in 1891.  

Her father was a strict disciplinarian, and when the young drama queen rebelled, he dispatched her to the Ladies of Loretto Convent School in nearby Wheaton, Illinois (above).  Benita was so miserable there she claimed to have tried to commit suicide, but the nuns labeled her behavior as “insubordinate”. So Benita ran away, looking for an audience who would appreciate her performance. 

And being young and beautiful,  she found a way to make her way, working as a chorus girl on the  Vaudville and nightclub circuit, and began using the name Vivian Gordon.  

Perhaps it was her need for security, or perhaps, in 1912,  she really fell in love with a dull Charlestown South Carolina accountant named Joseph E.C. Bischoff (above). Within a few months Benita went back to using her birth name, and the couple were married. Then in 1913 Benita gave birth to a girl,  Benita Frederica.

The new family moved to the Philadelphia (above) suburb of Audubon, New Jersey, and Joseph went to work as an office manager for the United States Marshal service.  Benita's new role was as a housewife and mother, raising little Frederica .  But Benita search for drama reasserted itself after Joseph secured a promotion to the D.C. Woman’s Reformatory, in Lorton, Virginia.  The money was good, but the decision not to disrupt Frederica's life by moving meant that Joseph was away from home for weeks at a time.

Eventually Benita sought out the attention of Al Marks, a lingerie salesman, from Long Branch, New Jersey.  And in 1923, while the couple was having a dramatic tryst in the seedy Langwell Hotel (above), on West 44^th street, just above Manhattan’s Time Square, Vice Patrolman Andrew J. McLaughlin dramatically burst in on them. Under pressure Al Marks confessed he had paid Benita for sex, so she could be charged with prostitution.

Even though she had been arrested in Manhattan, Benita was shuffled through the Brooklyn night court of Magistrate H. Stanley Renaud,  Of the 219 women the Brooklyn night court convicted of prostitution in 1923,  72% were , like Benita,  first time offenders, and 10% were pregnant – which should have told officials they were more likely inconvenient wives and girlfriends. Within a few hours Benita was convicted of prostitution purely  on the statements signed by Al and detective McLaughlin.

Benita must have come to the realization she had been set up when, even before she left Brooklyn, she was served with divorce papers, filed that day by her husband Joseph, who also sought custody of  Frederica.   In a stroke a decade of Benita's life was wiped out.  And even though she was a first time offender (at least in New York City), she was sentenced to three years at the Bedford Hills Correctional Facility for Women, in Westchester County.

“I'm a lady of the evening, With a morning glory's beauty. The payment for my raiment, I get in devious ways. When some big and wealthy brute, Wants to love me 'cause I'm cute, I admit that I submit, Because it pays.”

Bedford Hills (above) had been built by well intentioned do-gooders, who had designed the facility to be communal, and to emphasize reform.  The 3-400 prisoners, each between 16 and  30 years old, some along with their infants and newborns, were housed in two story cottages, each with their own kitchens.

Mornings all inmates worked on the 300 acre farm, but in the afternoon there were classes in secretarial skills and sewing.

However, time and budget cuts had converted Bedford Hills into an understaffed prison devoid of much good. Inmates were isolated and allowed only one letter a month. The last note Benita received from her daughter read, “Dear mama. I am very sorry you are sick. I hope you will be better soon. I miss you very much.”  

The pressure to be dramatic must have been overwhelming, but dramatic prisoners were reclassified as Mentally Defective, and chained to beds in what had once been the infirmary.  Their sentences were now indeterminate, meaning the doctors decided when and if to release them. Under this threat, Benita quickly became just another dull inmate. Her father would have been proud.

The woman who came out of Bedford in 1926 had a single goal, to get her daughter back. And a single name, Vivian Gordon (above). She went into the only profession now open to her, and as she noted in her poem, she was good at it. She was still beautiful and looked far younger than her age. Vivian was a "high class" hooker, and quickly branched out to blackmailing her wealthier customers. As the roaring twenties approached their end, Vivian Gordon was often seen at Manhattan speakeasies with Jack “Legs” Diamond, the gangster who ran New York City.

Vivian “loaned” Jack (above) thousands of dollars, to enlist his help.  On his advice she hired crooked lawyer John Radeloff, to get her conviction overturned.  Radeloff took her money, but all three of his  attempts to nail the dirty cop McLaughlin, failed. 

On Radeloff's advice she even hired a dope named Sam “Chowder-head” Harris (above) to kidnap her daughter in New Jersey and bring her to New York, where the judges could be bribed.  All “Chowder-head” managed to do was to terrify the 15 year old Benita. Vivian began to suspect that Radeloff was only interested in sucking her dry.  And then Vivian saw another way to win revenge on the crooked cop, and get her daughter back..

In August of 1930 State Supreme Court Justice Joseph Force Crater disappeared on West 45^th street. Press reports about the mob connections of  “the missingest man in New York” were so explosive that New York Governor Franklin Roosevelt was able to launch an independent and wide ranging investigation of graft in city government.

The man Roosevelt pushed on Mayor Walker to lead the committee was above suspicion, retired judge Samuel Seabury (above).  He was so honest he could barely get elected. Early in February of 1931 Vivian wrote to the Seabury committee (below), saying she had “some information in connection with a 'frame up' by a police officer and others which . . . will be of great aid to your committee.” 

Lead counsel Irving Cooper met with Vivian at committee offices at 80 Center Street, on Friday, 20 February,  1931.  He was impressed, and thought Vivian would make a good witness, as she was beautiful and articulate.  And she was filled with information. 

She was an intimate of Jack Diamond's.  Her story was filled with the names of her customers,  from Mayor Jimmy Walker to dozens of judges and city officials who were  "on the  take".  But Cooper wanted more.  He asked Vivian to come back with corroboration, paperwork, photos and letters, the kind of thing she used in her blackmail. And Vivian agreed to return with “the goods”.  But, of course, she still had to keep her "day job".

Shortly after eleven on the night of Wednesday,  25 February, 1931,  Vivian Gordon (above) was seen leaving her three room apartment at 156 East 37^th Street in Manhattan. She was wearing a black evening dress with white lace trim and a matching handbag, which was covered by an ankle-length mink coat and topped off with a black straw hat. On her left wrist she wore a platinum watch and on her right hand a two caret diamond ring.  Thus attired, Vivian Gordon got into a waiting Cadillac and disappeared into the night.

Nine hours later,  on Thursday morning,  an oil company employee on his way to work spotted a woman's body in a ditch (above) beside a lonely section of the Mosholu Parkway, adjacent to the golf course in the Bronx's Van Courtland Park. The body was all that remained of Vivian.

 Vivian (above) had been beaten about the head, but the cause of death was the clothesline knotted about her throat.  Her hat and one of her sued shoes were found not far away. Her coat, her watch and her pocketbook were all missing.

The New York papers lit up like the Fourth of July. A beautiful prostitute, a witness for the Seabury Commission, had been found murdered just six months after Judge Crater had gone missing.  And it turned out Vivian and Crater knew many of the same people, including Jack "Legs" Diamond and Mayor Jimmy Walker. 

All of that made her murder front page news, even in the papers out in the sticks. The reporters noted the autopsy of the “Queen of the Courtesans” (as they now called her) revealed that about 1:00am that Thursday morning Vivian had eaten sauerkraut, raisins and some egg whites – a “working girl's” dinner, heavy on the protein.  And over the course of the evening Vivian had consumed five or six stiff drinks. But that was as far as the facts could take them.  Still having a paper to fill, the reporters switch to speculation.

The cops searched Vivian's apartment (above) for the corroboration she had promised the Seabury Committee. They reported finding no photos, or hotel receipts or love letters, not even any business cards. They may have found them, they just didn't report them. What they did find and report was $50,000 in cash and Vivian Gordon's dramatic diary.  

In it she railed against Detective McLaughlin (above), who had busted her for her original prostitution rap back in 1923, and her ex-husband and all the men who had cheated her. There were also the names of 200 of New York's richest and most dishonest.

The most telling passage in her diary was when she dramatically called her own lawyer, John Radeloff,  “the only man I fear...who, if he wanted, could get (Chowder-head) Cohen (above, right) and a couple of his henchmen to do away with me.”

Those with something to hide waited for the story to fade. But just six days later, at about 4:30 pm on Tuesday 3 March, 1931, 16 year old Frederica (above)  was discovered by her stepmother, near death on the kitchen floor. 

The previous weekend, members of Benita's prep school hockey team had refused to practice with the daughter of the infamous and dead Vivian Gordon. The newspapers turned that into the headline, “Squeeler's Daughter Unable to Face Schoolmates.” 

According to her own diary, that was why Benita had turned on the gas. She died a few hours later in a Camden hospital. The story, which had been hot the week before, was white hot now.  The newspapers even followed Benita's body out of the hospital's morgue (above). A Daily News editorial screamed, “The rope that jerked tight about Vivian Gordon's neck to keep her from talking, is about to jerk the lid off a sizzling pot of scandals, frame ups, charges and counter-charges in New York's city government.”

The Seabury investigation focused on Detective McLaughlin. He had an iron clad alibi, being aboard the Cunard liner S.S. California, on a six-day cruise to Bermuda. That put him 800 miles out in the Atlantic on the night Vivian was murdered.  But investigators also discovered that over the last three years the $60 a week detective had managed to accumulate $35,800 in savings.  Andrew McLaughlin would be indicted for graft. He would escape conviction, but he was through as a New York City cop.

The local cops meanwhile zeroed in on Vivian's diaries, which showed she was no madam. The diary said attorney John Radeloff had been her pimp, while his brother Joe had been her boyfriend and partner in a stock scam, funded by Vivian's various skills.  

But the year before Vivian had turned on Joe Radeloff, testifying against him in front of a grand jury.  For some reason, the records of that grand jury had disappeared, but reporters suspected hard feelings remained between Vivian and Joe. 

Reporters also discovered that Vivian had been the owner of record for gambling houses in Queens and Brooklyn, although she never made a dime from any of them. Were they actually owned by Jack Diamond or maybe even New York City Mayor Jimmy Walker (above, center)? Vivian Gordon it seemed, had been the Donald Trump of the roaring twenties underworld.  And just when it seemed the publicity would bring down the whole rotten structure of New York city politics, the cops came up with a trio of the usual suspects,  which shut down all other investigations.

Harry Stein was a small time crook and occasional partner in Vivian's scams. In the past he had also once been accused of strangling a woman. But the primary justification for his arrest was that he sold Vivian's mink coat and ring the day after her murder, or so the police said. A few days after his arrest, his tailor Sam Greenhauser was indicted. And for a topper, the cops arrested the small time hood Harry Schlitten. In exchange for immunity, he confessed to driving the Ford coupe (above) in which Vivian had been beaten and strangled, or so said the cops.

But there was no back seat in that coupe (above), and the front seat looked far too small to fit more than two people, which meant the killer would have to drive and strangle Vivian at the same time.  And that did not even consider the effort to beat Vivian's head in. How could you do that to the person sitting beside you, with a escape right behind them?  Besides, Stein and Greenhauser both had solid alibis. 

The trial began on 18 June,  1931, just 16 weeks after Vivian's murder, and it ended two weeks later, on July 1^st . 

After just three hours of deliberation, the jury declared all the defendants “not guilty”.  And that was that.  

Nobody would ever be convicted of Vivian's brutal murder.  When the corrupt Mayor Jimmy Walker (above) returned from his California vacation,  he observed that in this case,  “There were more frames than there were pictures”.   But the ultimate judgment on Vivian, may have been delivered by Polly Adler, the most infamous "Vice Entrepreneuse" in New York City. Vivian Gordon, the infamous madam said, was “just another woman out to feather her nest quickly.”

“I'm a lady of the evening, Just like Cleopatra was. The Queen of Sheba also played my game. Though by inches I am dying, There's not any use in crying. I stay and play 'cause I'm that way, A moth that loves the flame.”

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