The Hollow Crown: The Wars of the Roses and the Rise of the Tudors (37 page)

Henry treated Warbeck’s accommodation in France as though it were an outright declaration of war. The previous year parliament had voted him a substantial grant of taxation to send troops to assist with the defence of Brittany. Now the money was turned to a more aggressive purpose. During the summer English ships
were sent to harass the Normandy coast. In September, although it was late in the year and a dangerous time for campaigning, Henry himself took ship on the south coast, heading to Calais with a very large army of perhaps fifteen thousand men at his back. They spent a few days in camp before marching twenty miles down the coast to the nearest French city of significance, which happened to be the port town of Boulogne. Four columns of English troops descended on the town and laid siege to it. According to Vergil, ‘There was a resolute garrison in the town, which energetically defended it. But before there was a recourse to hard fighting, behold suddenly a rumour spread through the camp that peace had been arranged.’
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So it had. Charles’s aim was to annex Brittany, not to involve himself in a resuscitated version of the Hundred Years War, and he was quite happy to pay Henry to accept his wishes. The result was the treaty of Étaples, sealed on November 1492, by which Henry stood down his invasion and withdrew from Breton matters, and Charles agreed to pay the English a vast indemnity for their war expenses, along with the promise of a very generous pension of fifty thousand gold crowns a year for the following fifteen years. Crucially, he also agreed to stop assisting pretenders to Henry’s throne. After three months of campaigning and virtually no bloodshed (save for the death of a rather overzealous knight by the name of John Savage, who was ambushed by French soldiers in front of Boulogne, fought back rather too lustily rather than submitting and was killed), Henry took his army back across the Channel in a sort of triumph.

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.’
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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.’
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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’.
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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.
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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.
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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’.
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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’.
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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 steward. 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.

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’.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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’.
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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 political 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.

If all this was intended to force Suffolk into obedience, however, it had precisely the opposite effect. In November 1501, as Arthur and Katherine of Aragon’s wedding was being celebrated, he once again slipped out of England, taking with him his youngest brother, Richard de la Pole, and made his way across Europe to the court of the Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian at Imst. He had been assured that he would find support there for the cause that he would now openly trumpet for the next five years: his claim that he, and not a member of the Tudor family, was the rightful king of England.

When he heard of Edmund’s defection Henry’s first step was to round up and punish all those whom he could connect with
the White Rose, as Suffolk’s supporters had begun to call him. Richard de la Pole had fled to the continent with Edmund. But their brother Sir William de la Pole had not. Therefore he was arrested and thrown into the Tower indefinitely. (He would eventually die there in the 1530s.) Then William, Lord Courtenay, the heir to the earldom of Devon who had married the queen’s younger sister Catherine, was also imprisoned and remained locked up for nearly a decade. Previously loyal knights including Sir James Tyrell, Sir John Wyndham and several others connected – however weakly – to the White Rose were executed. Tyrell was conveniently induced to confess to having murdered the Princes in the Tower before he died, which was one effective means of Henry reminding his subjects that Edward IV’s boys really were dead, and their cause no longer worth heralding. Beyond these grand men, dozens of other yeomen, royal servants and ordinary tradesmen were rounded up, interrogated and in many cases put miserably to death. Henry once more set to work planting spies and informants in a network fanning out across Europe. There was some good news in 1503, when the king’s most vehement foreign opponent, Margaret of Burgundy, died at Mechelen on 23 November. The same year Maximilian yielded to sustained diplomatic pressure and agreed to end his financial support for the de la Poles. Still, though, Henry could not secure Suffolk’s person. He attempted to arrange his assassination via royal agents in Calais – again to no avail.
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The English parliament of January 1504 convicted the de la Poles of ‘falsely and traitorously plotting and conspiring the death and destruction of the king our sovereign lord, and the overthrow of this his realm’, and attainted them in absentia.
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Still none of it resulted in de la Pole’s death or return, but by 1505 Henry had succeeded in squeezing the White Rose cause so hard that virtually no court or officer in Europe would proffer any financial aid. From March 1504 Richard de la Pole was locked up in Aachen as a hostage to
secure debts that the family had incurred there, and only escaped in 1506. Suffolk, meanwhile, was reduced to wandering the Low Countries with an increasingly tiny group of aides and supporters, living on debt, dressed in rags and pawning his possessions for food. At home, the violent persecution of suspected White Rose sympathisers continued. By October 1505 the pathetic Suffolk was in Namur, in the custody of Maximilian’s eldest son, Philip the Fair, duke of Burgundy, and was readying himself to try and make peace with Henry VII, end his dismal penury and return home in whatever grace he could, praying that his life, at least, would be spared. But events would overtake him.

In the middle of January 1506 Philip archduke of Burgundy and his wife Joanna set sail from Flanders for Spain, where Philip was to seize possession of the crown of Castile.
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But midwinter was a bad time to be braving the northern seas. As the couple sailed, ‘an evil storm suddenly arose’. It was one of the fiercest ever known, which one London chronicler remembered as having blown ‘with such sternness that it turned over weak houses and trees’, taking the thatch and tiles from rooftops, flooding the countryside and blowing the weathercock from the top of St Paul’s Cathedral.
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(It crashed into a tavern called the Black Eagle and caused considerable damage.)

Out at sea Philip and Joanna were lucky not to be drowned. Their ships were blown into port at Weymouth, where Philip, ‘little accustomed to the ocean waves’ and ‘exhausted in both body and mind’, was delighted to disembark his battered craft.
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But delight did not last long. The couple were given a splendid welcome as guests of the English king, but beneath the finery and the hospitality lay a stark political reality. Philip and Joanna were now effectively Henry’s prisoners. The terms of their release were twofold: a trade deal loaded heavily in favour of English merchants and an agreement to return Edmund de la Pole.
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By the end of March, Suffolk had been collected by English
officers at Calais and transferred across the now calm Channel. On his return, Philip and Joanna were allowed to go on their way. Despite Henry’s promises that he would pardon the fugitive and return him to his former estate, Suffolk was thrown into the Tower of London. The White Rose would never see the outside world again.

The burdens and disappointments of middle age brought about a sorry decline in Henry VII. He was forty-nine when Edmund de la Pole was finally returned to his grasp, and as his sight failed and his health began to stutter, he became increasingly withdrawn, suspicious and tyrannical. His most trusted servants and counsellors began to die. His uncle Jasper Tudor, duke of Bedford, had died in 1495, having retreated from public life since his sixtieth birthday, around four years previously. Cardinal John Morton, who had served as a faithful and diligent archbishop of Canterbury from the beginning of the reign, died in 1500. Sir Reginald Bray, chancellor of the duchy of Lancaster, who had been a loyal servant since long before Bosworth, expired in 1503. The king’s stepfather Thomas Stanley, earl of Derby, died in 1504. The circle of trust around the king tightened yearly. In response, Henry’s approach to government, which had always relied on heavy personal oversight, particularly with regard to financial matters, now degenerated into more or less rule by extortion. Henry came to see all external power as threatening to his own. He began to employ an extensive system of bonds and recognisances, by which wealthy and influential individuals were forced to agree to pay the king exorbitant sums in the event of his displeasure, as a means of guaranteeing their good behaviour. The system, used on a grand and virtually unprecedented scale, was associated most closely with two determined and ruthless young officers of the crown: Sir Richard Empson and Edmund Dudley,
whose rule over the realm was generally loathed, and whose names were synonymous with the perversions to normal governance that afflicted the king’s final years. Henry was growing sicker, his kingdom was becoming ever more badly ruled. And by the end, he was clinging on, employing methods that had not been seen in England since the darkest days before the deposition of Richard II in 1399. During the early years of his reign Henry had proven himself an extremely successful and self-consciously majestic king, even if he had never possessed the easy bonhomie that had characterised the rule of the man he claimed to succeed, Edward IV. But by the end, he governed by fear, fortunate that the best alternative candidates for kingship were either dead, exiled or locked away in his prisons.