A law was now passed forbidding any one to vote at these elections unless he was a resident of the county and possessed of landed property yielding an annual income of forty shillings (S200).[1] Subsequently it was further enacted that no county candidate should be eligible unless he was a man of means and social standing.

[1] The income required by the statute was forty shillings, which, says Freeman, we may fairly call forty pounds of our present money.  See E.A.  Freeman’s “Growth of the English Constitution,” p. 97.

These two measures were blows against the free self-government of the nation, since their manifest tendency was to make the House of Commons represent the property rather than the people of the country (S319).  (See, too, Summary of Constitutional History in the Appendix, p. xiii, S14.)

298.  Cade’s Rebellion (1450).

A formidable rebellion broke out in Kent (1450), then, as now, one of the most independent and democratic counties in England.  The leader was Jack Cade, who called himself by the popular name of Mortimer (S257, note 1, and S279).  He claimed to be cousin to Richard, Duke of York, a nephew of that Edmund Mortimer, now dead, whom Henry IV had unjustly deprived of his succession to the crown.

Cade, who was a mere adventurer, was quite likely used as a tool by plotters much higher than himself.  By putting him forward they could judge whether the country was ready for a revolution and change of sovereigns.

Wat Tyler’s rebellion, seventy years before (S250), was almost purely social in its character, having for its object the emancipation of the enslaved laboring classes.  Cade’s insurrection was, on the contrary, almost wholly political.  His chief complaint was that the people were not allowed their free choice in the election of representatives, but were forced by the nobility to choose candidates they did not want.  Other grievances for which reform was demanded were excessive taxastion and the rapacity of the evil counselors who controlled the King.

Cade entered London with a body of twenty thousand men under strict discipline.  Many of the citizens sympathized with Cade’s projects of reform, and were ready to give him a welcome.  He took formal possession of the place by striking his sword on London Stone,—­a Roman monument still standing, which then marked the center of the ancient capital,—­saying, as Shakespeare reports him, “Now is Mortimer lord of this city."[1]

After three days of riot and the murder of the King’s treasurer, the rebellion came to an end through a general pardon.  Cade, however, endeavored to raise a new insurrection in the south, but was shortly after captured, and died of his wounds.