Authors: Desmond Seward

The Last White Rose (6 page)

BOOK: The Last White Rose

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Despite the counter-propaganda campaign, the king’s agents soon informed him that Lord Lovell, although still in Flanders, was in close touch with the Irish lords. This forced Henry to accept that a major conspiracy must be in the offing. It may also explain the savage way in which he turned against his mother-in-law. Edward IV’s widow, Elizabeth Woodville, was a tragic figure who epitomized the dangerous life led by those of high rank during the Wars of the Roses, even by women. She was said to have ensnared the king into marrying her by refusing to sleep with him, even when he held a dagger at her throat, although Elizabeth and her mother were also accused of effecting the marriage by ‘sorcery and witchcraft’ in an Act passed by Richard III’s Parliament. Her father, Earl Rivers, had been beheaded in 1469, her brother the second earl in 1483. Her son, Edward V, was deposed and bastardized, disappearing with his brother the Duke of York. She seemed to have embarked on a more serene life, however, when her daughter Elizabeth of York had married Henry, being lavishly provided for by the restoration of the valuable estates which formed her jointure.

Yet there was an unpleasantly opportunistic side to Elizabeth Woodville that made it reasonable to suspect her. She had made her peace with King Richard, the murderer of her sons, and in 1485 had tried to persuade the Marquess of Dorset, a son by an earlier marriage, to do the same and desert Henry Tudor.
King Henry must have thought that his mother-in-law was involved in the plot since he confiscated her entire jointure, giving the estates to her daughter Elizabeth. She was packed off to an undignified retirement on a paltry annuity at the convent at Bermondsey, where she died five years later.
¹⁰

Someone definitely involved was the elderly Robert Stillington, Bishop of Bath and Wells, who had been in such favour with King Richard that he was imprisoned after Bosworth. Despite receiving a pardon on account of his ‘great age, long infirmity and feebleness’ and officiating at Henry’s coronation, he never accepted the Tudor regime. Perhaps the real brains behind the conspirators, when he heard what had happened to the dowager queen he bolted, taking refuge at Oxford. On 7 March Henry wrote to the university, demanding Stillington be handed over. For a time the university refused, saying it was in breach of their privileges, but after some weeks they surrendered him. Because of ‘benefit of clergy’, he could not be tortured and revealed little about the plot. However, he was imprisoned at Windsor until shortly before his death in 1491.
¹¹

The council meeting and suspicions about his mother-in-law, let alone the flight of Bishop Stillington, cannot have enhanced Henry VII’s sense of security. Lovell and the Staffords had been openly Yorkist, but secret enemies were now being identified. How many more did he have? He had no means of finding out the depths of his unpopularity, although the agents he employed must have sent in worrying reports. During the previous year he had refused to believe Hugh Conway’s warning about Lovell, but he had learned his lesson. However, soon he received an even more unpleasant surprise.

Despite the danger of being denounced by an informer, John de la Pole kept his nerve, staying until the very end of the council. When he left Sheen on 9 March, he told the court he was returning to Suffolk, but when he got there, he immediately boarded a boat for Flanders. He sailed in the nick of time, lucky to have escaped detection.

Shortly after de la Pole’s departure, Henry’s secret agents learned that servants of the Earl of Lincoln, disguised as merchants, were on mysterious business in the North. One of the agents, James Tait, spotted them in Doncaster on 25 March, identifying the group as Lincoln’s men because one rode a striking grey horse that he remembered seeing in the earl’s household during the royal visit to York the previous year. Tait discovered their saddlebags were full of gold and silver coin, but could not find out why. All he was able to learn was that they were on their way to Hull and would visit Sir Thomas Mauleverer of Allerton Mauleverer (who had recently been made to hand back lands in Devon granted to him by Richard III), and then going to York where they would meet the Prior of Tynemouth at the Boar Inn. In fact, they were recruiting for the rising. On 31 March Tait sent a report on their suspicious behaviour to York, forwarded to the king the same day.
¹²

The Act of Attainder later passed by Parliament refers to a lost document that describes a crucial meeting on 19 March between Lincoln and others in Flanders, just ten days after he left Sheen. The others can only have been Lord Lovell and Margaret of Burgundy, and a representative of Maximilian, King of the Romans, who was the husband of Margaret’s stepdaughter. The meeting discussed ways of eliminating Henry Tudor. Those present resolved to exploit the Yorkist sympathies of the Irish Pale, of which they were kept informed by secret messengers from Dublin.

The Pale was the English-speaking area of Ireland, stretching 60 miles from Dundalk to Dublin and 40 miles inland, which possessed English institutions such as law courts and city corporations and its own fiercely independent parliament. The real ruler of the ‘Lordship of Ireland’ – not yet a kingdom – was the Lord Deputy, Garret Mór FitzGerald, Earl of Kildare, who owned vast tracts of land inside and outside the Pale. Like other Irishmen, he found it hard to accept the sovereignty of someone who was not a Plantagenet. By now Palesmen believed
the boy in the Tower of London must be an impostor because Margaret of York had recognized Simnel as her nephew. He was accepted as genuine by Kildare and the Irish peers, as well as by the Lord Chancellor of Ireland (Sir Thomas FitzGerald of Lackagh, Kildare’s brother), the Archbishop of Dublin, the Bishops of Meath and Kildare, the Lord Chief Justice, and the Prior of Kilmainham – head of the Irish Knights of St John.

On 5 May Lincoln and Lovell landed in Ireland, accompanied by a regiment of 2,000 Swabian and Swiss landsknechts in striped and slashed uniforms, hired with money lent by Margaret. They were commanded by a famous colonel, Martin Schwartz, origin ally a cobbler from Nuremburg, who had been ennobled by Maximilian for his distinguished services on many battlefields. Most of Schwartz’s regiment were foot soldiers armed with an eighteen-foot long pike, although some carried a huge
zweihänder
(a two-handed sword for cutting down enemy cavalry or for hewing a way through pikes), while about one in eight were crossbowmen or arquebusiers.
¹³The presence of such troops, the most professional in Western Europe, must have strengthened the Yorkist leaders’ determination.

Among the Engilsh supporters who greeted Lincoln and Lovell at Dublin were Sir Henry Bodrugan and John and John Beaumont from Cornwall, by Sir Richard Harleston, once governor of Guernsey, and Thomas David, formerly captain of the Calais garrison. They too had valuable military experience.

Although the two English leaders knew that Simnel was an impostor, as did Duchess Margaret, they made a convincing pretence of believing he was the real Earl of Warwick. On 24 May, Whit Sunday, Simnel was proclaimed King Edward VI at Christchurch Cathedral by the Bishop of Meath in a sermon, after which he was crowned with a circlet taken from a statue of the Virgin in St Mary’s church near Dame Gate. Lincoln and Lovell had been present at two coronations and no doubt gave advice on how to do it. The one notable who refused to take part
in the ceremony or give it his blessing was the Italian Archbishop of Armagh, warned by a letter from Morton that Simnel was a fraud – the infuriated Lord Lincoln had to be restrained from knocking him down. Then, so that the crowds might all see the boy, he was carried through the streets from the cathedral to Dublin Castle on the shoulders of a giant of a man called Great Darcy of Platten.

Apparently, Lincoln and Lovell meant to keep up the pretence that Lambert Simnel was Warwick – ‘Edward VI’ – until they defeated Henry. No one knows what they planned to do afterwards. Had they won, the boy might have been replaced as king by the real Warwick, but it is more likely John de la Pole was going to claime the throne – the
Chronicle of Calais
comments that Margaret of York ‘would have made him King of England’
¹⁴– and become John II. This was also what Polydore Vergil heard from those who were well informed.
¹⁵

What strategy should they use? One possibility was to lure Henry into crossing over to Ireland and attacking them. Yet if they stayed there too long, they would run out of money and be unable to pay their landsknechts. Their best chance was an immediate invasion of England. Encouragingly, the Irish raised four or five thousand troops for the expedition. Save for a handful of axe-wielding gallowglasses these were half-naked kern armed only with javelins and long knives, yet they were Kildare’s men with a tribal loyalty to him and to his brother, Sir Thomas FitzGerald of Lackagh, who was their commander.

A further reason to invade was that having advanced funds to hire the landsknechts, Margaret of Burgundy wanted a return on her investment. She now gave Lincoln still more money to hire ships for the invasion. Judging from how much a later Yorkist expedition cost her, she must have lent him something like a million gold crowns. A notoriously hard woman where money was concerned, the duchess insisted on a bond being drawn up, to ensure the earl would pay her back in full – as soon as he had conquered England.

Lincoln and Lovell calculated that they would be joined by a host of northern Englishmen. All in all, they stood a better chance of overthrowing Henry VII than the Tudor had ever had of defeating King Richard.

3. Early 1487: Margaret of York

1
. E. Hall,
The Union of the Two Noble and Illustre Families …,
London, 1809, p. 430.

2
. Vergil
op. cit
., pp. 14–16.

3
. Margaret de la Pole, daughter of Sir John de la Pole, a younger bother of William, first Duke of Suffolk – married Jean de Foix, Earl of Kendal (‘Cumbria’), whose duather Anne became the Queen of Ladislas II of Hungary.
GEC
, vol. VIII, p. 150.

4
. W.E.A. Moorhen, ‘The Career of John de la Pole, Earl of Lincoln’,
The Ricardian
,
Journal of the Richard III Society
, 13 (2003).

5
. H.T. Riley (trans.),
Ingulph’s Chronicle of the Abbey of Croyland
, 1854, pp. 513–14.

6
. L. Attreed,
York House Books
, Stroud, Alan Sutton, 1991, vol. 2, p. 54.

7
. Riley,
Ingulph’s Chronicle, op. cit
., p. 514.

8
. M. Bennett,
Lambert Simnel and the Battle of Stoke
, Gloucester, Alan Sutton, 1987.

9
. J.S. Brewer (ed.),
The Book of Howth
, in
Calendar of the Carew
Manuscripts
, 6 vols, London, Public Record Office, 1867, vol. 5, pp.188–9.

10
.
Materials
,
op. cit
., vol. 2, p. 273.

11
. W.E. Hampton, ‘The Later Career of Robert Stillington’, in J. Petre (ed.),
Richard III:
Crown and People
, London, Richard III Society, 1975–81, pp. 162–8.