not Henry VII. been well served by his spies. But in the winter of 1494–1495 the traitors were themselves betrayed, and a large number of arrests were made, including not only Lord Fitzwalter and a number of well-known knights of Yorkist families, but Sir William Stanley, the king’s chamberlain, who had been rewarded with enormous gifts for his good service at Bosworth, and was reckoned one of the chief supports of the throne. Stanley and several others were beheaded, the rest hanged or imprisoned. This vigorous action on the part of the king seems to have cowed all Warbeck’s supporters on English soil. But the pretender nevertheless sailed from Flanders in July 1495 with a following of 2000 exiles and German mercenaries. He attempted to land at Deal, but his vanguard was destroyed by Kentish levies, and he drew off and made for Ireland. Suspecting that this would be his goal, King Henry had been doing his best to strengthen his hold on the Pale, whither he had sent his capable servant Sir Edward Poynings as lord deputy. Already before Warbeck’s arrival Poynings had arrested the earl of Kildare, Simnel’s old supporter, cowed some of the Irish by military force, and bought over others by promises of subsidies and pensions. But his best-remembered achievement was that he had induced the Irish parliament to pass the ordinances known as “Poynings’ Law,” by which it acknowledged that it could pass no legislation which had not been approved by the king and his council, and agreed that all statutes passed by the English parliament should be in force in Ireland. That such terms could be imposed shows the strength of Poynings’ arm, and his vigour was equally evident when Warbeck came ashore in Munster in July 1495. Few joined the impostor save the earl of Desmond, and he was repulsed from Waterford, and dared not face the army which the lord deputy put into the field against him. Thereupon, abandoning his Irish schemes, Warbeck sailed to Scotland, whose young king James IV. had just been seduced by the emperor Maximilian into declaring war on England. He promised the Scottish king Berwick and 50,000 crowns in return for the aid of an army. James took the offer, gave him the hand of his kinswoman Catherine Gordon, daughter of the earl of Huntly, and took him forth for a raid into Northumberland (1496). But a pretender backed by Scottish spears did not appeal to the sympathies of the English borderers. The expedition fell flat; not a man joined the banner of the white rose, and James became aware that he had set forth on a fool’s errand. But Warbeck soon found other allies of a most unexpected sort. The heavy taxation granted by the English parliament for the Scottish war had provoked discontent and rioting in the south-western counties. In Cornwall especially Cornish rebellion. the disorders grew to such a pitch that local demagogues called out several thousand men to resist the tax-collectors, and finally raised open rebellion, proposing to march on London and compel the king to dismiss his ministers. These spiritual heirs of Jack Cade were Flammock, a lawyer of Bodmin, and a farrier named Michael Joseph. Whether they had any communication with Warbeck it is impossible to say; there is no proof of such a connexion, but their acts served him well. A Cornish army marched straight on London, picking up some supporters in Devon and Somerset on their way, including a discontented baron, Lord Audley, whom they made their captain.
So precarious was the hold of Henry VII. on the throne that
he was in great danger from this outbreak of mere local turbulence.
The rebels swept over five counties unopposed,
and were only stopped and beaten in a hard fight on
Blackheath, when they had reached the gates of
Battle of Blackheath.
London. Audley, the farrier and the lawyer were all
captured and executed (June 18, 1497). But the crisis was not
yet at an end. Warbeck, hearing of the rising, but not of its
suppression, had left Scotland, and appeared in Devonshire in
August. He rallied the wrecks of the west country rebels, and
presently appeared before the gates of Exeter with nearly 8000
men. But the citizens held out against him, and presently the
approach of the royal army was reported. The pretender led
off his horde to meet the relieving force, but when he reached
Taunton he found that his followers were so dispirited that disaster
was certain. Thereupon he absconded by night, and took
sanctuary in the abbey of Beaulieu. He offered to confess his
imposture if he were promised his life, and the king accepted
the terms. First at Taunton and again at Westminster, Perkin
publicly recited a long narrative of his real parentage, his frauds
and his adventures. He was then consigned to not over strict
confinement in the Tower, and might have fared no worse than
Lambert Simnel if he had possessed his soul in patience. But
in the next year he corrupted his warders, broke out from his
prison, and tried to escape beyond seas. He was captured, but
the king again spared his life, though he was placed for the
future in a dungeon “where he could see neither moon nor
sun.” Even this did not tame the impostor’s mercurial temperament.
In 1499 he again planned an escape, which was to
be shared by another prisoner, the unfortunate Edward of
Clarence, earl of Warwick, whose cell was in the storey above
his own. But there were traitors among the Tower officials
whom they suborned to help them, and the king was warned of
the plot. He allowed it to proceed to the verge of execution,
and then arrested both the false and the true Plantagenet.
Execution
of Warbeck and Edward of Clarence.
Evidence of a suspicious character was produced to
show that they had planned rebellion as well as mere
escape, and both were put to death with some of their
accomplices. Warbeck deserved all that he reaped,
but the unlucky Clarence’s fate estranged many hearts
from the king. The simple and weakly young man, who had
spent fifteen of his twenty-five years in confinement, had, in all
probability, done no more than scheme for an escape from his
dungeon. But as the true male heir of the house of Plantagenet
he was too dangerous to be allowed to survive.
The turbulent portion of the reign of Henry VII. came to an
end with Blackheath Field and the siege of Exeter. From that
time forward the Tudor dynasty was no longer in
serious danger; there were still some abortive plots,
but none that had any prospect of winning popular
Establish-ment of
the Tudor dynasty.
support. The chances of Warbeck and Clarence had
vanished long before they went to the scaffold. The Yorkist
claim, after Clarence’s death, might be supposed to have passed
to his cousin Edmund, earl of Suffolk, the younger brother of that
John, earl of Lincoln, who had been declared heir to the crown
by Richard III., and had fallen at Stoke field. Fully conscious
of the danger of his position, Suffolk fled to the continent, and
lived for many years as a pensioner of the emperor Maximilian.
Apparently he dabbled in treason; it is at any rate certain that
in 1501 King Henry executed some, and imprisoned others, of his
relatives and retainers. But his plots, such as they were, seem
to have been futile. There was no substratum of popular discontent
left in England on which a dangerous insurrection
might be built up. It was to be forty years before another
outbreak of turbulence against the crown was to break
forth.
VI. The Tudor Despotism and the Beginnings of the Reformation (1497–1528)
The last twelve years of the reign of Henry VII. present in most respects a complete contrast to the earlier period, 1485–1497. There were no more rebellions, and—as we have already seen—no more plots that caused any serious danger. Nor did the king indulge his unruly subjects in foreign wars, though he was constantly engaged in negotiations with France, Scotland, Spain and the emperor, which from time to time took awkward turns. But Henry was determined to win all that he could by diplomacy, and not by force of arms. His cautious, but often unscrupulous, dealings with the rival continental powers had two main ends: the first was to keep his own position safe by playing off France against the Empire and Spain; the second was to get commercial advantages by dangling his alliance before each power in turn. Flanders was still the greatest customer of England, and it was therefore necessary above all things to keep on good terms with the archduke Philip, the son of Maximilian, who on coming of age had taken over the rule of the Netherlands from his father.
