The Last White Rose (15 page)

The Duke of York did more than add legal justification for war against Poynings, he brought eleven ships. He swiftly added another, an English vessel, the
Christopher
of Plymouth, which his men had boarded and seized when it put in at the little port of Youghal, an area of miniature Cork that was controlled by Desmond. For his part, the earl had an army consisting of approximately 400 lightly armoured horsemen (riding bareback), 3,000 kern with knives and javelins, about 500 gallowglasses with long-handled battle axes and perhaps sixty to eighty men who had crossbows or primitive arquebuses.
²¹

Together, the earl and the duke decided to capture the seaport of Waterford, always a thorn in Desmond’s side. A bastion of loyalty to the English Lordship of Ireland, it had been the only place in the country that refused to recognize Lambert Simnel in 1487. On 23 July 1495 the earl and Warbeck invested the port by land and sea. But the Waterford men were accustomed
to visitations of this sort, and possessed cannon they knew how to use. Aware that Sir Edward Poynings was on his way to relieve them, they fought with the utmost determination, launching sortie after sortie. Even so, at one point, when Desmond’s wild kern were assaulting the walls and Warbeck’s flotilla sailed into the harbour, it seemed that Waterford might fall. However, after one of the ships was sunk by gunfire from the bastion known as Reginald’s Tower, the rest of the flotilla beat a hasty retreat out to sea. Then Poynings’ fleet was sighted. On 3 August the besiegers were forced to raise the siege and flee, several of their vessels being captured.

The earl retired into a remote stronghold, protected by impassable bogs and forest, but Perkin could not abandon his fleet or his followers. For a short time, he anchored in the Haven of Cork, going ashore, and the mayor – his old ally John Atwater – smuggled him inside the city for suitable entertainment. However, a lookout sighted the fleets of Poynings and the Waterford men sailing towards the Haven, whereupon the ‘Duke of York’ and his ships hastily put to sea again. Despite the ingrained Yorkism of many Irish, it had become too risky to stay in Irish waters.

In retrospect, the Yorkist invasion of England in 1495 was of course an anticlimax. It failed to stir up the widespread rising of which the Tudor king had been afraid for the last three years, while further trouble in Ireland was prevented by the redoubtable Sir Edward Poynings. Yet the episode gave Henry VII some extremely anxious moments, even after learning of his enemy’s flight from Waterford. Where, he must have wondered, was the duke now? For several days, the whereabouts of the Yorkist fleet remained a complete mystery.

8. Summer 1495: The Yorkist Invasion

1
. Hall,
op. cit
., pp. 471–2.

2
.
Ibid
., p. 462.

3
. J. Gairdner,
The History of the Life and Reign of King Richard the
Third
, Cambridge, 1898, pp. 291–2.

4
.
Ibid
., p. 292.

5
.
Memorials
,
op. cit
., pp. 393–9.

6
.
CSP Ven
, vol. I, 648.

7
.
Chronicles of London
,
op. cit
., p. 205.

8
. Hall,
op. cit
., p. 472; Vergil B, p. 80.

9
.
CSP Sp
, vol. I, 98.

10
. Vergil,
op. cit
., p. 84.

11
.
Chroniques
de Jean Molinet
,
op. cit
., vol 1, pp. 421–2.

12
.
Chronicles of London
,
op. cit
., p. 205.

13
.
Paston Letters
,
op. cit
., p. 936.

14
.
Ibid
., p. 937.

15
.
CSP Ven
,
op. cit
., vol. I, 649.

16
.
Ibid
., vol. I, 651.

17
.
Chronicles of London
,
op. cit
., p. 205.

18
. Bacon,
op. cit
., p. 119.

19
.
Ibid
., p. 124.

20
. A.M.McCormack,
The Earldom of Desmond 1463–1583
, Dublin, Four Courts Press, 2005, p. 62.

21
. L. Price, ‘Armed Forces of the Irish Chiefs in the Early Sixteenth Century’,
Journal of the Royal Society of Antiquarians of Ireland
, 62 (1932).

9

Autumn 1495–Summer 1497: The Scots and the Cornish

‘When the news [of the Cornish rising] reached King Henry, he was completely taken by surprise and greatly alarmed, since he found himself being threatened by attack on two fronts at the same time – by a foreign war and by a civil war. The danger on either front seemed equally menacing. For some time he could not make up his mind about which of them to deal with first.’

Polydore Vergil, Anglica Historia
¹

Fifteenth-century English and Scots loathed each other. The Northerners’ language, spoken or written, was largely incomprehensible to Englishmen, while the entire Border was in a state of undeclared, never-ending war, characterized on both sides by vicious raids and appalling atrocities. Although almost invariably defeated during major hostilities – as recently as 1482 the English had occupied Edinburgh – the Scots were brutally effective at hit-and-run frontier warfare. In addition there was
a constant struggle at sea between the privateers who operated from Scarborough or Leith, with captured crews being thrown overboard. Intermarriage never took place between the two countries’ royal families, while for over a hundred years Scottish troops had regularly fought for France.

Born in 1473, James IV, King of Scots, was the most personable monarch in Europe, very different from the mountebank at Vienna or the deformed dwarf at Paris. Handsome and charming, despite a nightmarish childhood during which he had been used as a pawn by the Scottish nobility against his inept father James III (murdered when his son was fifteen), he was an unusually effective ruler, popular not just with the lords but with the poor among whom he was said to wander disguised as a beggar. A portrait of him as a youth shows a cheerful, amused face of a sort that is rare in medieval portraiture.

According to the report of the Spanish envoy Don Pedro de Ayala, who met James in 1498, he had by then grown a beard and long hair he never cut, ‘which suits him very well’. He spoke six languages besides Scots, including Spanish and ‘the tongue of the savages who live in some parts of Scotland’. He adored war but was a poor soldier as he was insanely rash. ‘When he is not waging war he hunts in the mountains.’ Generous to a fault, humane and friendly, he was much loved by his people.
²
His great weakness was the sheer poverty of his kingdom, the poorest in Western Europe, with a population two-thirds less than that of England – the Scottish crown’s annual revenues amounted to
£
30,000 at most.

In regular correspondence with Margaret of Burgundy and the Yorkists, King James was also in touch with the men who fitted out Warbeck’s flotilla, as before the debacle at Deal, the Scots had taken steps to aid his invasion by supplying troops and money.
³
James now invited Perkin to Scotland. On 27 November 1496, surrounded by the Scottish nobility, James received him at Stirling Palace – probably in the new parliament hall. Escorted by a Scottish guard of honour, together
with his more respectable followers, who presumably included Sir George Neville, his chaplain William Lounde and the bankrupt London merchant John Heron, the ‘duke’ was asked to justify his cause.

He struck just the right note, between pathos and drama, in a tearfully eloquent speech that was later reconstructed by Vergil, Hall and Bacon. ‘You see before you the spectacle of a Plantagenet who has been carried from the nursery into the sanctuary, from the sanctuary into the direful prison, into the hand of the cruel tormentor,’ he began. Then Warbeck described his escape from death, and the wanderings during which he had been made to do menial jobs. He said that the defamatory rumours about him were invented by Henry Tudor, ‘calling himself King of England’, who had spent large sums of money on turning friendly courts against him, besides bribing his servants to poison him and persuading advisers like Sir Robert Clifford to abandon him.

Yet ‘the lady duchess dowager of Burgundy, my most dear aunt’ had acknowledged the truth of his claim, and lovingly assisted him. Unfortunately, with no resources other than her dowry, she had been unable to finance a full-scale expedition against the usurper in London, which was why he had come to Stirling to ask for assistance. He reminded his listeners that once upon a time Scotland had given refuge to Henry VI, and ended by imploring the King of Scots to help him recover ‘mine inheritance’. If James did so, he would be able to rely on his lasting gratitude and friendship.
⁴

The bravura performance convinced King James that this really was the son of Edward IV. Although some of his more dour courtiers remained sceptical, James decided to do everything in his power to aid the charming, dignified young man, who was exactly his own age. From now on, he treated the adventurer not only as the Duke of York but as his brother, providing him with an expensive wardrobe suitable for his rank. The duke’s new clothes included a ‘great coat’ for the Scottish winter, a
tournament coat made of white and purple damask, and even a ‘spousing gown’ to wear at his wedding.
⁵

In December King James gave ‘Prince Richard of England’ a bride. She was Lady Katharine Gordon, a daughter of the Earl of Huntley, by all accounts a beautiful, accomplished and courageous young lady, who as a great-grandaughter of James I belonged to the Scots blood royal. There could have been no stronger testimony to the king’s belief in him.