Hello everyone and welcome to the History of England. Episode 161, Captain of Kent.

Following my newfound tactic of starting off an episode with some nasty piece of villainy,

let me take you to a few weeks later in the very year that the Duke of Suffolk had been

beheaded in a small boat for his manifest failures. We're in Heraphiture, and the very

reverend William A's Coe, Bishop of Salisbury, was celebrating mass at the prior research

of Eddington in Wiltshire.

I think strange in that you might say, but if you'd been in the congregation you might

have noticed that the good bishop looked troubled. Then you might have become aware of the

growing noise of raised and angry voices. Before suddenly, crash the church doors burst

open and incharged the mob. No doubt the bishop protested about the desecration at the House

of God, and if he did, he was ignored. The bishop was dragged from the chancel and from

the church and to the top of a nearby hill. There he was forced to kneel, and as he prayed

he was brutally beheaded. His rich clothes and vestments were torn off him and his naked

body left exposed.

Now the killing of a man of a cloth in such a religious and superstitious time is quite

remarkable, a vanishingly rare occurrence. And look at the a pro-brem that heaped on Henry

this second and Henry the fourth, when they were guilty of such things, they would admittedly

archbishop's in their cases. So what had the bishop done to deserve such treatment?

Well last time, a few weeks ago back in the midst of time, we saw poor old Suffolk

suffer the ultimate price of failure, and we saw how part of the reason for his failure

was the appearance of a court culture divorced from the commons. A relatively small circle of

magnets who surrounded the king as part of his household and council of great men, and

...