by Dan Jones
Henry’s uncompromising actions ensured that the court of Charles VIII was only a temporary stop for Warbeck. He would not, however, be thwarted, and as the treaty of Étaples closed doors in France, the pretender moved on: this time making his way to the court that had become the main European focus of anti-Tudor sentiment: the circle of the arch-schemer of the Netherlands, Margaret of York, dowager duchess of Burgundy.
For Margaret to embrace Perkin Warbeck as her own nephew – surely knowing full well that he was a fraud – was a mark of her political ruthlessness and devotion to the memory of her brothers. Despite Henry VII’s marriage to her niece, Margaret would never accept that he had the right to rule, and was happy to pursue any means of discomfiting him. ‘What people commonly say is true,’ wrote Bernard André. ‘Envy never dies.’10 Certainly it never died at Mechelen, and Margaret welcomed Warbeck to her dazzling court, schooling him on his backstory from her own memories of life as a member of the house of York and introducing him to the great men in her continental circle. Chief among these was Maximilian, king of Germany, who was crowned Holy Roman Emperor in 1493 at a ceremony to which Warbeck was invited. Here was another player to whom he appeared to be a well-placed pawn. The man styling himself as Richard IV was treated with the reverence due to a real king, travelling a while with Maximilian, while Margaret made contact with dissidents in England, attempting to stir them to rebellion in the name of the pretender. Slowly but surely, the plot to promote this young man, and place him on the English throne, was gathering momentum.
None of this was in the slightest bit amusing to Henry VII. According to Vergil, ‘Henry feared that unless the deception was quickly recognised as such by all, some great upheaval would occur.’11 Most disturbingly, the king began to receive reports that the rebel circle in the Netherlands had connections in England, some perilously close to the royal household. Those rumoured to be in treasonable contact with Warbeck included the ambitious and shifty John Ratcliffe, Lord Fitzwalter, Sir Robert Clifford and William Worsley, the dean of St Paul’s. In the spring of 1493, the king learned that this lordly cabal had sent Clifford to the Low Countries to meet Warbeck, assess whether he was really Richard duke of York, and (if satisfied with what he saw) inform him to expect a warm welcome if he should decide to cross the Channel and claim his throne.
In response Henry flew into a state of high defence, lasting for nearly eighteen months, during which he sent spies to the continent to feed back information about Warbeck and the rebels, and attempted to plant undercover agents in his circle. He also placed the English ports under tight surveillance, circulated propaganda both at home and abroad to rubbish the pretender’s claims to royal stock, and imposed trade embargoes against the merchant towns of the Netherlands. Young Prince Henry’s elevation to duke of York in November 1494 was part of this strategy of undermining Warbeck: creating a legitimate princely duke of York meant there was less room for a false one.
Yet Prince Henry’s investiture as duke of York did not end Warbeck’s conspiracy. Rather, the danger seemed to creep ever closer to the crown. Late in 1494 Henry’s agents managed to ‘turn’ Sir Robert Clifford from the pretender’s cause, milking from him a huge amount of intelligence in the process. The most shocking revelation was that a supposed Yorkist sympathiser was to be found at the heart of the royal household and family: Sir William Stanley, the king’s chamberlain and step-uncle, the hero of Bosworth and brother to the kingmaker Thomas earl of Derby, had supposedly been heard to say of Warbeck that ‘he would never take up arms against the young man, if he knew for certain that he was indeed the son of Edward’.12 If Englishmen of the highest rank were prepared to believe that Richard was alive, and might return to reclaim his crown, then Henry could not afford to treat Warbeck with anything other than deadly seriousness.
Stanley’s reported wavering was a hard blow to Henry VII, but he dealt with it swiftly. Despite the risk of antagonising Derby, the king put Sir William on trial at Westminster Hall on 30 and 31 January 1495. Stanley was ‘condemned of a capital crime and put to death’ by beheading on 16 February. Meanwhile, security measures were stepped up even further, both at home – where coastal defences were sufficient to repel an attempted landing at Deal, in Kent, on 3 July – and in Ireland, where Sir Edward Poynings was sent with a mandate to impose royal discipline by severe and authoritarian means.
Still Warbeck remained at large. Following his aborted invasion of Kent, he sailed via a now hostile Ireland to the kingdom of the Scots, and sought the protection of King James IV. ‘The inhabitants there, deceived by his hints and inventions, believed him to be [ Richard IV ] and tenaciously adhered to him,’ wrote André.13 The truth was that once again he served as a tool for a greater lord’s anti-English ambition. And once again he was a failure. James IV recognised him as ‘Prince Richard of England’ and gave him shelter, men, a handsome expense account for clothes, servants and horses, and an aristocratic wife – in the form of Lady Katherine Gordon, daughter of an earl and the king’s distant cousin.14 In September 1496 the Scots invaded the north of England on Warbeck’s behalf, burning and pillaging the unfortunate villages of the border country. But the sight of the pretender’s flag provoked only apathy in the hearts of the Englishmen who saw it, and almost as soon as they had come, James and his would-be prince were scuttling back over the border, having achieved precisely nothing.
Henry’s response to Scottish backing for the irritant Warbeck was uncompromising. The parliament of January 1497 granted heavy taxation for the purpose of sending a massive military force north ‘for the proper correction of [ James IV’s] cruel and wicked deeds’. The invasion, intended for summer, never materialised, because the weight of the taxation on Henry’s English subjects provoked a tax rebellion in June of the same year, in which thousands of Cornishmen marched all the way to Blackheath and had to be routed by a military force under Giles, Lord Daubeney, Sir William Stanley’s successor as lord chamberlain. However, the seriousness of Henry’s intentions convinced James IV that Warbeck was probably more trouble than he was worth, and the young masquerader was packed off to continue his adventures elsewhere. Warbeck sailed for Cork in July 1497, and two months later he made what would be his final play for recognition, invading Cornwall at Land’s End in the rather forlorn hope of rekindling the rebellious spirit of the early summer. A few thousand restless yokels gathered beneath his banner and laid siege to Exeter, but they were easily scattered by Edward Courtenay, earl of Devon, and by the end of the month Warbeck was captured. At Taunton on 5 October he was brought before the king. At last he admitted that he was not Richard IV, and offered up a full confession of his origins, bringing a formal end to his pretensions.
Like Simnel, Warbeck was kept honourably at the royal court once he had been exposed as a fraud. His wife, Lady Katherine, joined the queen’s service and was treated extremely well ‘on account of her nobility’.15 Warbeck, however, lacked the good sense that had led Simnel to behave himself in royal service. In June 1498, while he was travelling with the royal court, he attempted to escape. He was recaptured at Sheen and – after twice being humiliatingly displayed in the stocks and made to confess his imposture again in public – he was thrown into the Tower of London for the rest of his life. As it transpired, that would not be a very long time. One of his fellow captives was Edward earl of Warwick – the man whom Simnel had impersonated. Warwick was now twenty-four and it would seem that his long imprisonment had addled his brain: Polydore Vergil wrote that he had been ‘so far removed from the sight of man and beast that he could not easily tell a chicken from a goose’.16 In the autumn of 1499 a plot was concocted between the two prisoners and a few citizens of London (possibly agents provocateurs) who planned to break them out of the Tower and put Edward on the throne in Henry’s place. Escaping – or even plotting escape – was a serious crime and the punishment could be harsh. Both men were tried in Westminster Hall before John de Vere, earl of Oxford, holding court in his capacity as lord high ste
ward. Warwick was beheaded on Tower Hill on 28 November 1499, and Warbeck was hanged at Tyburn, having been forced to confess for the final time that he was no Plantagenet, but an adventurer, an imposter and a fraud. As the century drew to a close, noble heads still rolled and traitors’ legs still kicked pathetically in the breeze beneath the hangman’s noose. If the cycle of violence that had engulfed the English crown for nearly five decades seemed finally to be coming to an end, it was only because there were so few candidates left to kill.
21 : Blanche Rose
The ships came into Plymouth harbour at three o’clock on 2 October 1501, having sailed through strong winds, huge rolling waves and the terrifying flash of lightning over a boiling sea. The fleet had taken five days to make its way from the Cantabrian port of Laredo, moving to the northern tip of Brittany before heading due north to the south coast of England. Despite the wretched weather, the valuable cargo had arrived safely: a fifteen-year-old Spanish princess, Katherine of Aragon, stepped off to receive the choreographed acclaim of the assembled crowd, who hailed her, according to one of her companions, as if ‘she had been the Saviour of the whole world’.1
She was certainly, in a way, the saviour of England. A marriage alliance with Ferdinand and Isabella, the joint rulers of Spain, had been more than twelve years in the making: as agreed in principle under the treaty of Medina del Campo of 1489, Katherine had already been married twice by proxy to Prince Arthur, but now she was here in person, to play her part in the creation of England’s new royal dynasty.
This was, in a sense, the high point of Henry VII’s kingship. For sixteen years he had fought a gruelling battle to maintain his grip on the crown that he had taken at Bosworth – seeing off pretenders and plots, decorating his realm with infinite symbols and reminders of Tudor triumph and, with his wife Elizabeth, diligently creating a new royal family. He had seen off dynastic conspiracies and a major tax rebellion. He had defended his crown on the battlefield and subsequently through the diplomatic networks of Europe. He had kept a tight hold on royal finance, directing much of the business of England’s revenue collection through his chamber, rather than through the exchequer – a strategy that demanded much of his time, but allowed him to ensure that he was in command of the detail of policy, and to avoid the criticisms that so many of his predecessors had faced concerning the financial feebleness of the English crown. He had sailed a large army to France and used it to extract a handsome pension. And now, to cap it all, he was about to celebrate both an alliance with a major continental power and a marriage that would be fruitful enough to secure Tudor rule for a second generation.
Arthur and Katherine were married at St Paul’s Cathedral on Sunday 14 November, amid high ceremony, and with the arms of the three kingdoms traditionally claimed by the house of York – England, France and Spain – prominently displayed, alongside all the other heraldic symbols of Henry’s monarchy: the Welsh dragons, the greyhounds of Richmond and the ubiquitous rose. The whole cathedral was hung with expensive arras tapestries showing ‘noble and valiant acts’ and ‘the besieging of noble cities’. Henry and Elizabeth watched from a discreet viewing gallery – ‘a closet made properly with lattice windows’, wrote one eyewitness – hidden from the sight of the congregation, so as not to distract from the splendid young couple, who were both dressed head to toe in white satin.2 Despite their restricted view of proceedings, the king and queen would have been satisfied to hear the crowds both inside and outside St Paul’s cheering ‘King Henry!’ and ‘Prince Arthur!’ A greater victory would have been harder to imagine, and the royal family celebrated appropriately. Then, following a fortnight of masques, balls, jousts and celebration, the newlyweds were packed off to the seat of Arthur’s authority: Ludlow and the marches in his principality of Wales.
Prince Arthur’s marriage was not the only step that Henry VII had taken to extend the connections of his family. Long negotiations were also underway to marry twelve-year-old Margaret to James IV of Scotland, whose appetite for raiding and burning northern England would presumably diminish if he could be drawn into a dynastic union. The treaty was concluded two months after Arthur’s wedding celebrations, and Margaret would eventually marry the Scottish king at a magnificent service of her own, held at Holyrood Palace in Edinburgh on 8 August 1503. But by that time disaster had engulfed the house of Tudor.
On 2 April 1502 Prince Arthur died at Ludlow, following a wasting disease that may have been tuberculosis, but could have been a form of cancer.3 He was only fifteen, and his wife became a widow at sixteen. Henry VII and Queen Elizabeth were devastated, and although the queen attempted to comfort her husband with words of cheer, suggesting that they were both young enough to have more children, Arthur’s death was a blow from which the king would never recover. It left all his hopes of a clean succession on the shoulders of Prince Henry, who was approaching his tenth birthday.4 Immediately, negotiations were opened by which Henry could be married to Katherine, who remained in English eyes as promising a future queen as ever. But Henry VII’s life’s experience counselled against relying on such thin hopes for the future.
Another Tudor death occurred within months of Arthur’s. The king’s quiet and reclusive uncle Owen Tudor, the monk of Westminster, died close to the age of seventy, and was buried some time before June 1502.5 But this was nothing to the misery that followed on 11 February 1503, when Queen Elizabeth also died, following the premature birth of her last child, a girl named Katherine. The king had been told by his personal astrologer that his wife would live until the grand age of eighty. In fact, she died on her thirty-seventh birthday. Her daughter Katherine survived her only by a week. The king paid around £2,800 for a vast and solemn funeral for his wife, for which every church in London was draped in black. His sorrow was deep, almost tangible. In less than eighteen months, all his plans for the future of his dynasty had collapsed.
The shadow cast by Arthur’s death was long and dark, and it changed the whole character of Henry VII’s reign. The king’s general mood shifted from celebratory to suspicious as his fears of losing everything for which he had fought suddenly seemed closer than ever to being realised. Consequently, he began to cast a paranoid eye upon many of his subjects, regarding with naked hostility all those whom he thought might have a motive for challenging his rule.
Chief among the victims of the king’s forebodings were the de la Pole family – a large brood born to John de la Pole, duke of Suffolk and his wife, Elizabeth Plantagenet, Edward IV’s sister. The eldest of these children was the earl of Lincoln who had died in rebellion at the battle of Stoke with Lambert Simnel by his side. In the years that followed Stoke, Henry had not seen fit to damn Lincoln’s siblings on account of their brother’s violent treachery. After Arthur’s death, however, young men with Yorkist connections did not need to do much to draw upon themselves the suspicions of the king. Four de la Pole men were alive at the turn of the century: Edmund, Humphrey, William and Richard. Humphrey was a monk, and thus politically neutral. The others, however, could be considered as potentially dangerous.
First among these was Edmund de la Pole, earl of Suffolk. Although loyal during the 1490s (he helped to put down the Cornish rebels at Blackheath in 1497), close to his cousin the queen and a regular attender at court parties and great state occasions, Edmund had some cause for disgruntlement, mainly stemming from his financial troubles. Too poor to maintain himself as a duke, he had been downgraded to the rank of earl when he inherited his title in 1493, yet even in this reduced state he held his noble title on such onerous conditions that most of his yearly income was diverted to the Crown, meaning that he was ‘embarrassed by very heavy debts’.6 He had been further humiliated by involvement in a legal case brought in 1498, in which he was accused of murdering a man named Thomas Crue and told to make a grovelling apology in order to receive the royal pardon. And on top of all this he was recognised by all those who remained inclined to the house of York as a senior claimant on Edward IV’s side. In debt, in pol
itical trouble, in demand by the king’s enemies and, if we believe the account of Vergil, ‘bold, impetuous and readily roused to anger’, Suffolk began to agitate against the king.
He committed his first act of defiance on 1 July 1499 when he left England without royal permission and travelled to Picardy, trying to make contact with the Yorkist doyenne Margaret of Burgundy. This caused a serious diplomatic incident. Suffolk was eventually brought home in October, made to apologise to the king and fined £1,000 – more than a year’s income, which further crippled his finances. His friends and associates were interrogated and his wife, Margaret Scrope, was placed under royal surveillance. Then, as if any further warning to would-be plotters were required, in November 1499 Edward earl of Warwick was beheaded. King Henry was making his point.
