Bridge. After a hot battle, lasting the whole of one night, Cade deemed it prudent to accept the offer of a free pardon to all who would go home made on behalf of the government by the archbishops of Canterbury and York and the bishop of Winchester.⁶  Formal charters of pardon being made out for ‘John Mortimer ‘and some 1,500 or 2,000 men from Sussex, Surrey, Essex and Kent, the levies began in quite orderly fashion to disband. Then, to his dismay, Cade was informed that his pardon was invalid as it had been made out not to John Cade, but to John Mortimer, and there was no such person. On 8 July, therefore, he fled to Dartford with a handful of followers. The next day he was at Rochester,⁷ only to find that a proclamation had appeared offering 1,000 marks for his body ‘quick or dead.’ On the 11th he left Rochester and, after an ineffectual attempt to seize Queenborough Castle, made for the Weald of Sussex. In a lane near Heathfield he was captured by Alexander Eden, the new Sheriff of Kent, and mortally wounded in the scuffle. His body was quartered, and his head set up on London Bridge.
   Further steps were then taken against those who had remained with Cade after 8 July; and on 1 August a commission was issued to the two archbishops and other dignitaries directing them to try offenders in the county of Kent. They sat at Canterbury and elsewhere. The king apparently was present, and condemned eight men to death. They were at Rochester on 11 September.⁹  Before the summer was out a second ‘captain of Kent’ had arisen at Faversham, one William Parmynter, a smith, who was not apprehended till the winter.¹⁰  Another imitator, John Smith, then came forward, and a reward of £40 was offered by the Duke of Somerset for his capture. But though the county continued disaffected, the later leaders had not Cade’s ability, and the rebellion gradually flickered out. At Christmas 1450, the Duke of York himself was sent to attend the king on a commission of oyer and terminer to try offenders in Kent, and greater severity was shown than on the former occasion. Twenty-nine men in all suffered death, eight of them at Canterbury about the time of Candlemas, when the king was there. The people in Kent called it the "harvyste of hedys.’ On his way back to London on 23 February" the king was met at Blackheath by a pitiful band of two hundred rebels who had levied war on the king under William Parmenter at Appledore and elsewhere in Kent. They knelt down by the roadside naked to the waist with ropes round their necks to beg for mercy, which was granted. The same clemency was not shown elsewhere, for on arriving at London Bridge the king found it decorated with nine heads sent up from Rochester.¹²
   The Paston Letters, with a few vivid touches, give the best contemporary idea of the state of affairs in the county in 1450. John Swan, writing to John Paston, after describing the losses and dangers he incurred at the hands of the rebels at Blackheath, where he had been sent by Sir John Fastolf to fetch certain articles for him, tells him that ‘In Kent, where as my wyfe dwellyd, they toke awey all oure godes mevabyll that we had, and there wold have hongyd my wife
   ⁶ J. Stow, Anna/es, 392. William of Worcester, op. cit. (Rolls Ser.), 472.
   ⁷  Rot. Parl. v, 224.
   ⁸  Paston Letters, i, 139. R. Fabian, Chron. 625.
   ⁹  Rymer, Faedera.
  ¹⁰ Paston Letters, i, cxlvii.
  ¹¹ Chief Justice Prisot and others were in attendance on the king in Kent for 25 days.
  ¹²  J.  Stow, Anna/es, 392; Cal. Pat. 1446-52, p. 497.