by Linda Porter
If it should happen that the French king, or any great personages of his Council, should make any question or enquiry how the king and the king of Scotland accord, seeing that the latter supports and entertains the garçon [Warbeck] in his kingdom … he may reply that … the king cares nothing about it and that it is the least of his troubles. For the said king of Scotland is unable to injure him in any manner whatever, except, perhaps, in making him spend his money in vain.9
This was not an analysis of the situation that would have appealed to James IV, who did not like to be set at nought in the international reckoning. Six months later things looked very different. In the late summer of 1496, when James and the Scottish host crossed the river Tweed into Northumberland, they had Perkin Warbeck, now calling himself ‘Richard IV’, in tow. It was James’s most public gesture of support for the pretender, though he was fast losing interest. Spoiling for a fight, eager to display the personal valour that he had learned as a young, rebellious prince, James wanted to do damage in the Borders, to raid, attack fortifications and, above all, to see if he could regain for Scotland the town of Berwick. If the north of England rose for ‘Richard IV’, that would be a bonus but he does not seem to have been surprised when no such support materialized or particularly dismayed when Perkin, who did not share his delight in arms, left the army after just one day in England. For James, the fight was only just beginning.
The proclamation that preceded Perkin’s inglorious withdrawal, in which he described himself as ‘Richard, by the grace of God, King of England, Lord of Ireland, Prince of Wales’, boasted that Henry VII was preparing to flee and put a price of £1,000 on Henry Tudor’s head. This piece of rhetoric, describing Henry as ‘our mortal enemy [who], agreeable to the meanness of his birth, hath trodden under foot the honour of this nation, selling our best confederates for money, and making merchandise of the blood, estates and fortunes of our peers and subjects by feigned wars and dishonourable peace, only to enrich his coffers’ is eloquent witness of the delusions of Perkin Warbeck’s Yorkist backers and that their assertion that the King of Scots’ support had come without any strings attached, ‘without any pact or promise, or so much as a demand of anything that may prejudice our crown or subjects’, was either grossly naïve or an outright lie.10
Henry VII had initially required the northern lords to defend the border with Scotland themselves, reasoning that they had a very strong incentive to do so as they would suffer James IV’s depredations first. Spies kept the English king informed but their information on the level of disaffection in the north-west turned out to be more alarmist than was justified. As Ian Arthurson pointed out in his fine account of the Warbeck conspiracy, ‘old memories died quickly in the harsh climate of border defence.’ Henry was also being fed information from a pro-English traitor at the Scottish court, John Ramsay, formerly earl of Bothwell, a disgruntled supporter of James III who had seen his lands confiscated and his title passed to the Hepburns in 1488. Ramsay raised the tantalizing possibility that the duke of Ross, James IV’s brother, might be won over to the English side.11 Ramsay was, however, inclined to paint far too rosy a picture of the internal opposition to a war within Scotland itself. His view of James’s own reckless desire for confrontation is probably more accurate: ‘The young adventurousness of the king,’ Ramsay wrote, ‘will jeopardize himself, the boy [Perkin] and all his people … I find him as far out of reason, and so little inclined to goodness, but all to trouble and cruelty without [unless] his will be fulfilled in all points…’
Ramsay’s resentment towards James IV is evident but his depiction of the king’s strong will rings true. Others commented on the Scottish king’s relish for personal danger. The newly arrived ambassador from Spain, Pedro de Ayala, who became a considerable admirer of James IV, reluctantly accompanied the 1496 invasion of Northumberland, remarking that the king was ‘courageous, even more so than a king should be. I am a good witness of it. I have seen him often undertake most dangerous things in the last wars. I sometimes clung to his skirts and succeeded in keeping him back. On such occasions he did not take the least care of himself.’12 James told Ayala that because it was the duty of his subjects to follow him without question whatever the justness of the cause, he felt that he must lead from the front.
James was undeterred by Perkin’s departure. He was not for turning back. He destroyed five fortified houses in the valleys of the rivers Tweed and Till and laid siege to Heton Castle. How long he would have stayed is open to doubt. By now it was late September and the end of the campaigning season was fast approaching. The chance to show the world his bravery, embarrass Henry VII and try out his artillery (James was keenly interested in new military developments) all spurred him to continue for a while. But his plans did not include full-scale confrontation. In the event, the decision to raise the siege and return to Scotland was made for him, when he learned on the night of 25–6 September that an English army, commanded by the earl of Surrey, had left Newcastle that day. James did not delay. He abandoned the siege and took his entire army back across the Tweed into Scotland in the space of eight hours. It had scarcely been a war – more of a classic raid in the Borders, in time-honoured fashion. Henry VII, though, did not see it that way. If James IV wanted a war, he would give him one.
Angered by this display of Stewart bravado, Henry prepared for a serious fight. While James went hunting in the autumn, the English king sought the financial backing that would enable him to wage a full-scale war, on land and sea, with his Scottish rival. By January 1497, parliament had ratified a grant of £120,000, a huge sum by late fifteenth-century standards, equivalent to about £64 million today. This was twenty times the annual revenue of James IV and gives a sobering indication of the very differing financial resources of the two kings. It also showed that Henry’s thoughts of revenge were on a disproportionate scale to the insult he had received. James IV may not have known the full scale of English preparations but his anxiety grew. Though no one expected fighting before the summer, the Stewart king spent Christmas 1496 at Melrose Abbey, only ten miles from the English border. Throughout the winter months he continued with his own preparations, including a pre-emptive strike in February which was perhaps intended to test out English strength in the Borders but did little other than to annoy Henry VII even more. By Easter, when he had originally intended to call the muster of his lieges to bring together his army, the Scottish king’s artillery was being prepared for action. The famous gun Mons Meg, given to his grandfather, James II, was readied for action. She had not been used since 1489 and was the most deadly offensive weapon in the British Isles, able to fire an eighteen-inch stone ball more than a mile and a half. By providing her with new wooden wheels, James, who may have known by then considerably more about the extent of the preparations by Henry VII, and therefore the odds he faced, was making a statement of intent. He would not sit idly by and wait but take the attack to the English. A further, brief flurry of diplomatic activity in May 1497, when Henry again demanded that Perkin Warbeck be handed over, came to nothing. For though James’s support of Perkin had lessened, and the pretender does not seem to have been at the Scottish court for many months, he had not yet entirely abandoned him as he believed Perkin might still be a useful tool in a struggle of uneven strength. James did not back down. The army was summoned to meet in the Borders in early June and the Scottish king continued as bold as ever, summoning his falconers and musicians to meet him and preparing to ride to war in a new green coat. This, he believed, was what kings should do. It is a highly arresting image of a fearless, energetic young man prepared to confront a formidable foe. But for the full-scale conflict, the cut and thrust of sword and the chance to gain new territory, he would have, once again, to wait.
* * *
HENRY VII had good reason to fear Perkin Warbeck, an impostor who, despite numerous setbacks, had still not gone away. But, in the summer of 1497, it was not the Flemish boy who halted the Scottish war in its tracks. Instead, the danger
came from the far west of England, where the men of Devon and Cornwall rose in revolt against the king. Originally led out of Cornwall by a local blacksmith who soon found many sympathizers in his objection to the exorbitantly high taxes being raised by Henry’s government to fund the war, the rebels gathered support from the local gentry as they moved east towards London and also sent messages to Warbeck in Scotland offering to help him. By the start of June the rebel army, now led by a West Country nobleman, Lord Audley (who had been expected to participate in the northern campaign but was still a Yorkist at heart), camped outside the cathedral town of Wells in Somerset, its numbers swelling all the time. As the rebel forces split in two, still moving quickly towards London, Henry VII faced one of the greatest crises of his reign. A force variously reckoned at between fifteen and forty thousand men was bearing down on him. Fearing an assault on the capital and with significant parts of his army already dispersed in preparation for war in the north, Henry moved his wife and family into the Tower of London for their own protection. The battle of Blackheath, fought on 17 June 1497, has been called the defining moment of his reign. Yet though he won a decisive victory, this was largely thanks to the expertise of his most durable supporter, the earl of Oxford, and the bravery of his chamberlain, Giles Daubeney, a Somerset man himself, whose loyalty was put to a severe test. The Spanish ambassador to the Flemish and imperial courts conveyed the uncertainty that engulfed England and perfectly captured the scale of the threat to the Tudors when he described ‘a time when the whole kingdom was against the king, and when Perequin [Perkin] had entered the country calling himself king, and the king of Scotland was coming in by another way, and the whole country was in rebellion, and the men of Cornwall were giving battle at a short distance from London; when, had the king lost the battle, he would have been finished off and beheaded.’13 No wonder de Ayala, writing the following year to Ferdinand and Isabella in Spain, remarked that ‘the king looks old for his years, but young for the sorrowful life he has led.’14
Blackheath was a decisive victory in military terms, crushing the rebels and leading to the summary execution of their leaders. But it did not mean the end of discontent in the south-west of England, nor did it immediately solve the problem of Perkin Warbeck. In fact, the pretender would make one last attempt to exploit the situation in England and to add to Henry Tudor’s discomfiture. It is hard to say how much encouragement he was given to leave Scotland – the Spanish later took credit for having brokered his departure – but in the second week of July 1497, Perkin and his Scottish wife set sail from Ayr, on the west coast, in a Breton ship appropriately named the Cuckoo. James had been compelled to spend £150, more than Perkin’s monthly pension, to provision his voyage, so even getting rid of him was costly.
On 7 September, having stopped for a while in Ireland, Perkin finally set foot on the soil of the kingdom he claimed as his. Landing at Whitesands Bay on the western tip of Cornwall, he moved on to Bodmin and pressed east with a growing force of men. Ten days after his arrival he was at the gates of Exeter with an army of ten thousand but found, after a day of fighting, that the citizens were even less inclined to support him than they were the Cornishmen earlier in the year. It was at Taunton in Somerset that the king’s forces finally caught up with him. With John Taylor, who had started him on his amazing career of deception six years earlier, Warbeck and a few close followers tried to make their escape. Abandoning those who had risen for them, they took refuge in Beaulieu Abbey in Hampshire, still hoping, presumably, to get away yet again by sea. But the abbot alerted the authorities and Warbeck was captured.
Perkin was taken back to Taunton, where Henry awaited him. His life would be spared, but he must make and sign a full confession. For a year he was allowed to live at court under supervision but an attempt to escape from his locked quarters brought him public humiliation in the stocks and then far stricter captivity in the Tower of London. Despite these setbacks, the cause of the ‘duke of the York’ was not quite defeated and a further plot in the last year of the fifteenth century cost Perkin and the innocent earl of Warwick, his fellow prisoner in the Tower, their lives. Only then was the Yorkist threat seriously diminished, though far from destroyed. It rumbled on for years. The disaffected west of England also suffered, feeling Henry’s displeasure for much of the rest of his reign. But there was one notable survivor of the Warbeck conspiracy. Lady Katherine Gordon was treated as befitted her rank and attached to the household of Queen Elizabeth. She lived on well into the reign of Henry VIII, marrying three more times. If the opportunity to return to Scotland was given when her husband was put to death, Katherine did not take it. She adapted well to her new life and it is doubtful, given all that had happened to her, that she would have wanted to go back.
Yet if she had done, it would have been to a less warlike Scotland. For unknown to Perkin and Lady Katherine, two days before they arrived in England a seven-year truce had been signed by Scottish and English diplomats at Ayton in Berwickshire. It followed a brief flurry of military activity in the previous month, in which James had besieged Norham Castle, the stronghold of the bishop of Durham, and the earl of Surrey had attacked Ayton Castle, a property of the Hume family. But this kind of Border skirmishing could hardly be viewed as a war and neither side had the will or the means to turn it into one. James IV’s invitation to the earl to settle the fate of Berwick in hand-to-hand conflict was a fine chivalric flourish, typical of the king, though unfair to Surrey, who was more than fifty years old, whereas James was only twenty-four. It was never going to happen and Surrey politely declined, thanking the Scottish king ‘that he would put him to so much honour that he being a king anointed would fight hand to hand with so poor a man as he [referring to himself in the third person]’, though he went on to add, more forthrightly, that ‘his commission was to do the King of Scots all the harm he could and so he had done and would do’.15 In 1497, James IV had no concept of just how much harm Surrey might one day do him. But for now, Henry VII urgently wanted peace and James was running out of men and money. A brighter prospect beckoned. Instead of remaining Henry Tudor’s rival, James Stewart would join the family. His future lay, not as an enemy, but as Henry’s son-in-law.
CHAPTER FIVE
A Summer Wedding
‘Now fair, fairest of every fair,
Princess most pleasant and preclare,
The lustiest one alive that been
Welcome of Scotland to be queen.’
Verses attributed to the poet William Dunbar, welcoming the new queen to Scotland
‘I would I were with your grace now and many times more.’
Margaret Tudor, Queen of Scots, betrays the homesickness of a thirteen-year-old bride to her father, Henry VII
THE GIRL WHO WOULD become Scotland’s queen was ten years old at the time of Perkin Warbeck’s execution. The second child and eldest daughter of Henry VII and Elizabeth of York, the princess had been born at Westminster Palace on 28 November 1489 and named after her paternal grandmother, Margaret Beaufort. Her early years were spent in the royal nursery at the palace of Sheen, on the banks of the Thames, with a growing band of brothers and sisters, though only three other children, Arthur, Henry and a younger sister, Mary, would survive infancy. In 1497 a serious fire at Christmas time destroyed much of Sheen and the royal children were moved to Eltham. Set in beautiful grounds and well away from the unhealthy air of London, Eltham had been popular with the English royal family since the early fourteenth century and Margaret’s grandfather, Edward IV, added a splendid great hall, which can still be seen today.
Margaret grew up in an affectionate family setting, surrounded by privilege and luxury unimaginable to the vast bulk of her father’s subjects. Though affairs of state inevitably meant that the princess spent more time with her mother and grandmother than her father, Henry VII seems to have been genuinely fond of his children and was an indulgent parent, showering them with gifts. The information that survives about Margaret’s upbringing and educati
on shows that she was well prepared for the role that would inevitably be hers: that of the wife of a European prince or king. For while her father faced down constant threats to his fledgling dynasty and lived daily with the chronic insecurity this engendered, Margaret’s preparation for queenship continued tranquilly in safe surroundings. It is often asserted that she was less studious than her brothers and her rather shaky signature on the voluminous correspondence that emanated from her in later life suggests that writing was not her strong point. But ladies of high birth were accustomed to dictating their letters, sometimes adding brief comments in their own hand at the end, and there was, besides, no need for Margaret to receive an education comparable to that of her brothers, or so contemporaries would have thought.
She was certainly not neglected and among her tutors were the foremost English scholars of the day, Thomas Linacre, John Colet and William Grocyn. With these men, she studied Latin and learned to speak French, essential accomplishments for a Renaissance princess. Perhaps more to her taste were her lessons in archery and dancing, as well as her music. Like all the Tudors, Margaret was very musical and she could play the lute and clavichord. Her love of fine clothes and rich jewellery was another Tudor trait, though it was also a statement of rank and expected of royalty at the time. All these facets of her character and training combined to make her an attractive prospect on the European marriage scene, once she reached the required age of twelve years. Until that time, she was rarely seen in public, though she did present a gold and diamond ring to Edmund de la Pole at the jousts to celebrate the creation of her brother, Henry, as duke of York in 1494.1
