When Henry VII became king, Bishop Morton found himself re-established at the court in England, where in 1486 he succeeded the ancient Cardinal Bourchier as Archbishop of Canterbury. The Act of Attainder against him was reversed, and he became a member of the king’s council. In March 1486/87, by which time the Dublin King’s claim to the throne had already been made public, Bishop Morton found himself appointed Henry VII’s Chancellor of England. Given his life history and his position in the new Tudor government, there was not a shred of doubt that Morton would now do all in his power to ensure that the Dublin King was defeated. He would also do whatever was needed to ensure that ‘Edward VI’ was reduced to a figure of no consequence.
Notes
Abbreviations
CPR
Calendar of Patent Rolls
ODNB
Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
PROME
Parliament Rolls of Medieval England
1. See, for example, Ashdown-Hill, Royal Marriage Secrets, pp. 70–3.
2. Edward IV’s maternal grandmother, Joan Beaufort, Countess of Westmorland, was the sister of Margaret Beaufort’s grandfather.
3. John Morton, ODNB.
PART 3
1486–1487
10
Evidence from England
According to Adrien De But’s chronicle, on 5 October 1485, when John Morton, Bishop of Ely (who was then on his way back to England) reached Calais, he heard that the recently enthroned king, Henry VII (whom, however, De But prefers to call simply ‘the Earl of Richmond’), had been killed – together with some of his barons – by a sudden outbreak of plague:
Regarding the rightful successor of the new king, however, not a little controversy arose. Some acclaimed the son of the Duke of Clarence, as the true king – a distinguished youth, who had been rescued from slaughter carried out by his uncle, King Richard – though the present writer never heard anything of such [slaughter].1
In any case, in the end, no new English sovereign was proclaimed at this early date, since, as De But went on to say, no confirmation was ever received of the story of Henry VII’s death.
Adrien De But’s short report is very interesting in that it shows how rumours about affairs in England were rife at that time. With the benefit of hindsight, of course, we now know that, in reality, Henry VII had not died of plague within a mere two months of seizing the throne. As for Richard III, the question of whether or not he had engaged in slaughter is still very much a matter of hot dispute and debate! Even so, the evidence we have in no way suggests that Richard had ever contemplated slaughtering his nephew, the Earl of Warwick. As we saw earlier, Richard III had, in fact, promoted the little boy who was living under his protection to government posts.
At the same time it is important to recognise that Henry VII was a very new king, who had come to power as the result of an armed rebellion against his predecessor (who had been killed in the struggle). It is all too easy to assume that everyone knew that Henry would be king for a number of years. But in 1485 and 1486 there was no such certainty. In fact, many people, both in England and in other countries, were probably waiting with bated breath to see who would come forward to contest Henry VII’s recent usurpation.
That this was indeed the case is made plain by the fact that in the course of the following year (1486) the Stafford brothers – Sir Humphrey, who had taken sanctuary after Bosworth at St John’s Abbey in Colchester together with Viscount Lovell, and Humphrey’s brother, Thomas Stafford – raised a rather hopeless and ill-fated rebellion in their native Worcestershire. The Staffords’ attempt was a complete failure. However, at the same time ‘it was noticed that a number of people in Ireland were embarking on a campaign to bring in a new king, the son of the Duke of Clarence (brother of the former kings, Edward and Richard), who by right of his mother was Duke [sic] of Warwick’.2 Moreover, the Mechelen household accounts of Margaret of York, dowager Duchess of Burgundy include an interesting entry relating to the feast of the local martyr, St Rombout (Rumbold), on 24 June 1486. It appears that on the occasion of this significant local celebration Margaret paid for eight flagons of wine as a gift to ‘the son of Clarence from England’.3
This very important surviving record in the dowager duchess’s accounts makes it clear that, in the summer of 1486, a son of the Duke of Clarence – that is to say, one of Margaret’s nephews – was understood to be staying with his aunt at her palace in Mechelen. Of course, the only known son of the Duke of Clarence who was alive in June 1486 was the Earl of Warwick, therefore unless this reference is to an otherwise completely unknown bastard son of the late Duke of Clarence, it seems that it was the Earl of Warwick who was believed to be visiting his aunt in Mechelen. Incidentally, a curious coincidence, in the present context, lies in the fact that St Rumbold was reputed to have been an Irish, early Christian missionary who had been martyred in Mechelen. The Irish link of the saint was potentially prophetic, for ‘the son of Clarence’ may also have come to Mechelen from Dublin. Moreover it was almost certainly the same reputed ‘son of Clarence’ who was crowned in Ireland less than a year later.
Unlike the documents from the Low Countries, most of the surviving evidence in England dating from 1486, and relating to the existence of a Yorkist movement to remove the recently enthroned Henry VII, speaks of people other than the Earl of Warwick who were involved in the scheme. The two most important figures in the surviving English sources are the late Richard III’s close friend Francis, Lord Lovell and the Earl of Warwick’s older cousin, the Earl of Lincoln.
The lack of mention of the Earl of Warwick could possibly be due to chance regarding which writings have survived. However, the boy himself was very young. Thus the lead in planning a coup against Henry VII had necessarily to be taken by older and more experienced Yorkists – the very men who are mentioned in the surviving records. Even so, one passing English reference to Warwick does survive. It can be found in a letter written on 29 November 1486.
The letter confirms that Edward of Clarence, then aged 11 years and 9 months, and under normal circumstances probably potentially unlikely to figure in news from the English capital, had come to be seen as a figure of some importance. The precise whereabouts of the Earl of Warwick at the time of writing are not absolutely clear from the surviving missive. However, the people mentioned in the letter were certainly not all in London. One cannot therefore simply assume that the reference is to a prisoner in the Tower, or a person attending Henry VII’s royal court (that is to say, Henry VII’s official Earl of Warwick). The message may equally well relate to the alternative earl – Margaret of York’s summer guest in Mechelen – who was almost certainly still in Flanders in November 1486.
The letter in question was written by a priest called Thomas Betanson, ‘to his worshipful master Sir Robart Plomton kt’. With his spelling and grammar slightly modernised, this priest, who was then serving the church of St Sepulchre-without-Newgate, wrote:
Sir, as for tidings, here there are only a few. The king & queen are staying at Greenwich; the Lord Percy [son and heir of the fourth Earl of Northumberland] is at Winchester; the Earl of Oxford is in Essex; the Earl of Derby and his son are with the king. Also there is but little talk here of the Earl of Warwick now, but after Christmas they say there will be more talk of [him].4 Also there are many enemies on the sea, & divers ships taken, & there are many of the kings house taken for thieves.’5
In fact this letter, which apparently links the Earl of Warwick with the enemies on the ships, and which expects to hear more of the earl after Christmas, seems inherently unlikely to refer to the boy who was either at Henry VII’s court, or who was already a prisoner in the Tower of London. It is therefore probable that it refers to the other Earl of Warwick – the boy who was in Flanders at the time when the message was written. In other words, the implication would appear to be that the real Earl of Warwick was considered by Thomas Betanson to be the Mechelen ‘son of Clarence’. And, as we have already s
een, it is probable that the Mechelen ‘son of Clarence’ was that same child who, in the following year, was to be crowned as ‘King Edward VI’ – the Dublin King.
Much of the other evidence from England regarding the progress of the Yorkist movement during 1486 relates to Francis, Lord Lovell. Francis had an interesting background. As we have seen, he had been a close companion of Richard, Duke of Gloucester (the future Richard III) during his adolescence, when both of them had been under the guardianship of ‘Warwick the Kingmaker’. Lord Lovell was also connected with Eleanor Talbot. It had, of course, been the revelation of Eleanor’s secret marriage to Edward IV which changed the order of succession in the summer of 1483, and brought Richard III to the throne.
Francis, Lord Lovell had remained a faithful servant of Richard III after the latter became king, and their connection had been lampooned in the famous couplet quoted earlier. In 1485, in the face of the threatened Tudor invasion, Francis Lovell had been sent by Richard III to guard the south coast. Possibly he fought with Richard at the Battle of Bosworth, as many historians have maintained. However, it is also possible that, based as he had been in the south of England, defending the coast, Lovell had found himself unable to rejoin his king in time to take part in his last battle. At all events, unlike the king, the Duke of Norfolk,and Richard Ratcliffe, he certainly survived the defeat of August 1485. Francis then took refuge at St John’s Abbey in Colchester.
This important Benedictine abbey, which stood just outside the walls of Colchester on the southern side of the town, had been founded in 1095.6 It possessed very powerful rights of sanctuary.7 ‘There were two types of sanctuary in medieval England.’ Any church could offer some degree of protection, but ‘some abbeys and minsters had special rites of sanctuary … anyone who took refuge in such a sanctuary could remain there with impunity for life’.8 Colchester Abbey had been granted such extraordinary rights of sanctuary in 1109.9 However, these rights appear to have been contested later, because in the mid fifteenth century Abbot Ardeley had appealed to Henry VI to have them confirmed. The abbot’s request was submitted upon the grounds that during the king’s incapacity, the community at St John’s had expended much time and effort in praying for his recovery. As a result of Abbot Ardeley’s petition, on 13 May 1453 Henry VI had issued an explicit formal confirmation of the sanctuary rights of St John’s Abbey.10
Francis Lovell was not originally from the Colchester area, but from Oxfordshire. However, Colchester is close to the Essex–Suffolk border and, as we have seen, Francis had spent part of his youth in the neighbouring county of Suffolk. Thus he was probably well aware of the possible advantages of claiming sanctuary at St John’s Abbey, partly thanks to his brief period of residence in the vicinity, and also thanks to his friendship with the late Duke of Norfolk. John Howard had spent most of his life on the Suffolk–Essex border. The ancestral manor of his father’s family was at Stoke-by-Nayland, in Suffolk, but he had been constable of Colchester Castle, and owned a fine town house in Colchester (now the Red Lion in Colchester’s High Street). His role as Admiral of the Northern Seas had also often taken him to the nearby ports of Harwich and Dovercourt. Howard had himself taken sanctuary at St John’s Abbey in Colchester during the Lancastrian Readeption (1470–1), and the same abbot – Abbot Walter Stansted – who had received Howard in 1470, was still in office at the abbey in Colchester in 1485, when Viscount Lovell arrived at the impressive abbey gatehouse (which survives to this day – see plates 15 and 16) to ask for sanctuary.11
St John’s Abbey Church, Colchester, redrawn by the author from BL, Cotton MS Nero D viii, f. 345.
Francis Lovell remained at St John’s Abbey for several months. But by the spring of 1486, he was on the move again. Just across the border in Suffolk, Lovell’s former guardian – one of the late king’s sisters – had her home and power-base. Elizabeth of York and her husband, John de la Pole, the Duke and Duchess of Suffolk, had their principal residence at Wingfield Castle. However, they also had connections with many other places in the county of Suffolk. The couple are, to this day, commemorated in the surviving fifteenth-century stained glass at the church of Stratford St Mary, a mere 5 or 6 miles to the north-east of Colchester. And, of course, the eldest son of the Duke and Duchess of Suffolk was the Earl of Lincoln. Although his father was trying to be politically correct in the eyes of Henry VII, Lincoln, Richard III’s nephew, was already strongly opposed to the man who had defeated and killed his uncle. Lincoln would have had little difficulty in contacting – and possibly meeting – Francis Lovell while he was still safe in sanctuary at the abbey in Colchester.
Moreover, as we have seen, Francis was not the only Yorkist who had claimed sanctuary at St John’s Abbey in the aftermath of Bosworth. While he was there he had with him an older companion. This was Sir Humphrey Stafford of Grafton in Worcestershire (c.1426–86). Sir Humphrey had inherited his manor in Worcestershire in 1449. He had proved an enthusiastic Yorkist, and he apparently fought with Richard III at Bosworth, after which he had fled to the abbey in Colchester and claimed sanctuary. Incidentally, the fact that Stafford had apparently come to Colchester Abbey from Bosworth Field raises the possibility that Viscount Lovell may also have fought at Bosworth, and that he and Sir Humphrey Stafford may then have escaped from the battlefield together and fled south to Colchester:
Lovell and his companion in sanctuary, Humphrey Stafford of Grafton (Worcestershire), sought to stir up rebellion against the new regime: Stafford in the west midlands and Lovell in Yorkshire. But the leading northern families failed to support the rising, and by the time Henry VII entered York on 20 April Lovell’s forces had dispersed.12
A surviving letter from Warwick the Kingmaker’s sister, Margaret (Neville), Countess of Oxford,13 to John Paston III, written on 19 May 1486, tells us something of Lovell’s subsequent movements. Written at the Earl of Oxford’s estate at Lavenham in Suffolk, this letter warns that Francis Lovell is on the loose in the eastern counties, either seeking to regain sanctuary, or to find a ship to take him abroad. The countess therefore orders John Paston in the king’s name, and in his capacity as the sheriff of Norfolk and Suffolk, to keep a good look-out and do all in his power to capture Lovell.14
Towards the end of 1486, the weather on the European mainland was inclement. ‘In November and December there were many problems with wind, rain and frost … and it was rumoured that the king of England would be deposed in favour of the true heir, the Duke of Clarence’s son.’15 Despite the inclement weather, and with Adrien De But’s second point very firmly in his mind, by January 1486/87 either Lovell had already crossed the sea to Flanders, or he was about to do so.
At about this time, Lady Oxford’s correspondent, John Paston III, wrote to the Earl of Oxford16 with (as he thought) news of Lovell’s departure, naming those whom he believed were accompanying the viscount. However, it seems that the king and Lord Oxford thought they were better informed. On 24 January 1486/87 the Earl of Oxford replied to John Paston III as follows:
To my right trusty and wellbeloved counsellor John Paston, esquire.
John Paston, I commend me to you. And as for such tidings as you have sent hither, the King had knowledge thereof more than a week ago; and as for such names as you have sent, supposing them to be gone with the Lord Lovell, they are yet in England, for he is departing with 14 persons and no more. At the King’s coming to London I would advise you to see His Highness.
And Almighty God keep you.
Written at Windsor the 24th day of January.
Oxford.17
By February 1486/87, King Henry VII was well aware that plots were afoot to oust him from the throne and replace him with the Earl of Warwick. Probably he had also heard that the ‘son of Clarence’ was in Mechelen, staying with his putative aunt, a lady whom Henry called ‘the diabolicall duches’. On the Feast of Candlemas (Friday, 2 February 1486/87):
the king called a Council at Richmond … and, acting on its advice, had the real [sic] Earl of Warwic
k taken from the Tower and led through the streets of London to St Paul’s. Here the boy held a kind of audience in the church, speaking particularly to persons who it was thought might be likely to participate in the Simnel Plot (Polydore Virgil). That little effect was produced on them is pretty evident from the example of Lincoln, who, immediately after his interview with the young Earl, fled from England and betook himself to the Court of Burgundy.18
And indeed our next surviving piece of English evidence relates not to Lovell, but to the Earl of Lincoln. On 31 May 1487 an inhabitant of York, James Taite, was accused of having said on 30 March of that same year ‘that the Earl of Lincoln wold give the King’s grace a breakfast [give him what he deserved] as it was enformed him by the servant of the said Earl’s’.19 In response to the accusation levelled against him, Taite offered a rather garbled statement about his meeting with servants of the Earl of Lincoln. These servants were leading with them Lincoln’s horse – which, by chance, Taite recognised, because he had stabled that same horse during Lincoln’s most recent visit to York, as part of the entourage of Henry VII.
What emerges from Taite’s statement is that some of Lincoln’s servants were definitely in the vicinity of York in March 1486/87 in charge of their master’s horse. Moreover, it seems that they expected Lincoln himself to join them at some stage. They also knew that he was aiming to take revenge on those who had not (in his opinion) accorded him his due rights. In addition, Taite’s statement reveals that the Earl of Northumberland was not thought to be committed to Lincoln’s plans. However, some of the local gentry – and other local people – apparently were.
The Dublin King: The True Story of Lambert Simnel and the Princes in the Tower Page 15