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Updated: June 19, 2025
Cade the stationer, to direct him what to do with my two copies of Mr. Holland's books which he is to bind, and after supplying myself with several things of him, I returned to my office, and so home to supper and to bed. 19th. Up and by appointment with Mr.
Pickering and I, W. Howe, Pim, and my boy, to Scheveling, where we took coach, and so to the Hague, where walking, intending to find one that might show us the King incognito, I met with Captn. At dinner in came Dr. Cade, a merry mad parson of the King's. Then we kissed his, and the Duke of York's, and the Princess Royal's hands.
He is associated alike with the unsettled times of Kings John and Richard, with Henry V. and with Jack Cade, but so much mystery surrounds all reports of him that some do not hesitate to declare Robin Hood a myth. But whoever he was, his memory and exploits live in many a ballad sung along the banks of the Trent and in the towns and villages of Sherwood Forest.
"One Tory Minister said he spoke 'with customary inaccuracy. Another Minister talked about 'his habitual incapacity for being accurate. Another said he was 'setting class against class. The Times, using the language of the gentleman in opposition to-night, said he was 'forgetting what was due to his dignity and responsibility as a Cabinet Minister. He was compared by the leader of the House to 'Jack Cade. Another called him 'an unscrupulous demagogue. Another said he was 'weeping crocodile tears for electioneering purposes. I seem to recognize some of these epithets.
For the outside world, however, Sir John Fogge is not Ashford's greatest son. This honour belongs surely to Jack Cade whom Shakespeare speaks of as the "headstrong Kentish man John Cade of Ashford," and who, according to the poet, if headstrong, proved in the end so feeble- minded that in Shakespeare's play we might seem to have a picture of one suffering from general paralysis of the insane.
Twenty thousand men of Kent, under the command of Jack Cade, an Anglo-Irishman, who had given himself out as a son of the last Earl of March, who died in the Irish government twenty-five years before, marched upon London. They defeated a royal force at Sevenoaks, and the city opened its gate at the summons of Cade.
In the insurrection of Cade he has delineated the conduct of a popular demagogue, the fearful ludicrousness of the anarchical tumult of the people, with such convincing truth, that one would believe he was an eye-witness of many of the events of our age, which, from ignorance of history, have been considered as without example.
These insurgents were certainly the majority of the inhabitants of the counties in which they resided; and Cade, Ket, and Straw, at the head of their national guards, and fomented by certain traitors of high rank, did no more than exert, according to the doctrines of ours and the Parisian societies, the sovereign power inherent in the majority. We call the time of those events a dark age.
The rising under Jack Cade, in the reign of Henry VI., was rather political than industrial. The demands of the insurgents, political reform and freedom of suffrage, show that progress had been made in the condition and aspirations of the labouring class.
Why is the story of Jack Cade any more "human" than the tragedy of the three Vermont boys, Stott, Scott and Wilson, hanged in the Tonto Basin for horses they did not steal in order that their assassins might pocket $5,000 of money which the young fellows had brought out from the East with them?
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