of adventurers who were ready to back any cause, and who
looked on the king of the moment as no more than a successful
member of their own class—a base-born Welshman who had been
lucky enough to become the figurehead of the movement that
had overturned an unpopular usurper. The organizing spirits
of the early troubles of the reign of Henry VII. were irreconcilable
Yorkists who had suffered by the change of dynasty; but
their hopes of success rested less on their own strength than on
the not ill-founded notion that England would tire of any ruler
who had to raise taxes and reward his partisans. The position
bore a curious resemblance to that of the early years of Henry IV.,
a king who, like Henry VII., had to vindicate a doubtful elective
title to the throne by miracles of cunning and activity. The
later representative of the house of Lancaster was fortunate,
however, in having less formidable enemies than the earlier; the
power of the baronage had been shaken by the Wars of the Roses
no less than the power of the crown; so many old estates had
passed rapidly from hand to hand, so many old titles were
represented by upstarts destitute of local influence, that the
feudal danger had become far less. Risings like that of the
Percies in 1403 were not the things which the seventh Henry
had to fear. He was lucky too in having no adversary of genius
of the type of Owen Glendower. Welsh national spirit indeed
was enlisted on his own side. Yet leaderless seditions and the
plots of obvious impostors sufficed to make his throne tremble,
and a ruler less resolute, less wary, and less unscrupulous might
have been overthrown.
The first of the king’s troubles was an abortive rising in the north riding of Yorkshire, the only district where Richard III. seems to have enjoyed personal popularity. It was led by Lord Lovel, Richard’s chamberlain and admiral; but the insurgents dispersed when Henry marched against them with a large force (1486), and Lovel took refuge in Flanders with Margaret of York, the widow of Charles the Bold of Burgundy, whose dower towns were the refuge of all English exiles, and whose coffers were always open to subsidize plots against her niece’s husband. Under the auspices of this rancorous princess the second conspiracy was hatched in the following year (1487). Its leaders were Lovel and John, earl of Lincoln, whom Richard III. had designated as his heir. But the Yorkist banner was to be raised, not in the name of Lincoln, but in that of the boy Edward of Clarence, then a prisoner in the Tower. His absence and captivity might seem a fatal hindrance, but the conspirators had Lambert Simnel. prepared a “double” who was to take his name till he could be released. This was a lad named Lambert Simnel, the son of an Oxford organ-maker, who bore a personal resemblance to the young captive. The conspirators seem to have argued that Henry VII. would not proceed to murder the real Edward, but would rather exhibit him to prove the imposition; if he took the more drastic alternative Lincoln could fall back on his own claim to the crown.
In May 1487 Lincoln and Lovel landed in Ireland accompanied by other exiles and 2000 German mercenaries. The cause of York was popular in the Pale, and the Anglo-Irish barons seem to have conceived the notion that Henry VII. was likely to prove too strong and capable a king to suit their convenience. The invading army was welcomed by almost all the lords, and the spurious Clarence was crowned at Dublin by the name of Edward VI. A few weeks later Lincoln had recruited his army with 4000 or 5000 Irish adventurers under Thomas Fitzgerald, son of the earl of Kildare, and had taken ship for England. He landed in Lancashire, and pushed forward, hoping to gather the English Yorkists to his aid. But few had joined him when Battle of Stoke. King Henry brought him to action at Stoke, near Newark, on the 17th of July. Despite the doubtful conduct of part of the royal army, and the fierce resistance of the Germans and Irish, the rebel army was routed. Lincoln and Fitzgerald were slain; Lovel disappeared in the rout; the young impostor Simnel was taken prisoner. Henry treated him with politic contempt, and made him a cook boy in his kitchen. He lived for many years after in the royal household. The Irish lords were pardoned on renewing their oaths of fealty; the king did not wish to entangle himself in costly campaigns beyond St George’s Channel till he had made his position in England more stable.
The Yorkist cause was crushed for four years, till it was raised again by Margaret of Burgundy, with an imposture even more preposterous than that of Lambert Simnel. In the intervening space, however, while Henry VII. was comparatively undisturbed by domestic rebellion, he Foreign alliances. found opportunity for a first tentative experiment at interfering in European politics. He allied himself with Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain and with Maximilian of Austria, who was ruling the Netherlands in behalf of his young son, Philip, the heir of the Burgundian inheritance, for the purpose of preventing France from annexing Brittany, the last great fief of the crown which had not yet been absorbed into the Valois royal domain. This struggle, the only continental war in which the first of the Tudors risked his fortunes, was not prosecuted with any great energy, and came to a necessary end when Anne, duchess of Brittany, in whose behalf it was being waged, disappointed her allies by marrying Charles VIII. of her own free will (Dec. 1491). Henry very wisely proceeded to get out of the war on the best terms possible, and, to the disgust of Maximilian, sold peace to the French king for 600,000 crowns, as well as an additional sum representing arrears of the pension which Louis XI. had Treaty of Étaples. been bound to pay to Edward IV. This treaty of Étaples was, in short, a repetition of Edward’s treaty of Picquigny, equally profitable and less disgraceful, for Maximilian of Austria, whom Henry thus abandoned, had given more cause of offence than had Charles of Burgundy in 1475. Domestic malcontents did not scruple to hint that the king, like his father-in-law before him, had made war on France, not with any hope of renewing the glories of Creçy or Agincourt, still less with any design of helping his allies, but purely to get first grants from his parliament, and then a war indemnity from his enemies. In any case he was wise to make peace. France was now too strong for England, and both Maximilian and Ferdinand of Spain were selfish and shifty allies. Moreover, it was known that the one dominating desire of Charles VIII. was to conquer Italy, and it was clear that his ambitions in that direction were not likely to prove dangerous to England.
In the year of the treaty of Étaples the Yorkist conspiracies
began once more to thicken, and Henry was fortunate to escape
with profit from the French war before his domestic
troubles recommenced. Ever since 1483 it had been
rumoured that one or both of the sons of Edward IV.
Yorkist plots.
Perkin Warbeck.
had escaped, not having been murdered in the Tower.
Of this widespread belief the plotters now took advantage;
they held that much more could be accomplished with such a
claim than by using that of the unfortunate Edward of Clarence,
whose chances were so severely handicapped by his being still
the prisoner of Henry VII. The scheme for producing a false
Plantagenet was first renewed in Ireland, where Simnel’s imposture
had been so easily taken up a few years before. The tool
selected was one Perkin Warbeck, a handsome youth of seventeen
or eighteen, the son of a citizen of Tournai, who had lived
for some time in London, where Perkin had actually been born.
There is a bare possibility that the young adventurer may have
been an illegitimate son of Edward IV.; his likeness to the late
king was much noticed. When he declared himself to be Richard
of York, he obtained some support in Ireland from the earl of
Desmond and other lords; but he did not risk open rebellion
till he had visited Flanders, and had been acknowledged as
her undoubted nephew by Duchess Margaret. Maximilian
of Austria also took up his cause, as a happy means of revenging
himself on Henry VII. for the treaty of Étaples. There can
be small doubt that both the duchess and the German King
(Maximilian had succeeded to his father’s crown in 1493) were
perfectly well aware that they were aiding a manifest fraud. But
they made much of Perkin, who followed the imperial court for
two years, while his patron was intriguing with English malcontents.
The emissaries from Flanders got many promises of
assistance, and a formidable rising might have taken place had
