by Ann Wroe
But others imagined it. In the days after Bosworth there were rumours of plans to make Warwick king, which explained why Henry put him under closer ward and, perhaps, why special spies and inspectors were stationed at the largest ports to check on what, or who, was being taken from the kingdom. In April 1486 Humphrey Stafford hatched a plot on the rumour that Warwick had been set free in Guernsey and taken to Flanders, and his followers were indicted for shouting Warwick battle-cries. A wild gathering in May in Highbury, near London, featured a standard with a ragged staff, Warwick’s badge. Then, later that year, a boy of about ten appeared in Ireland who was said to be Warwick himself, escaped from the Tower.
As it emerged, though the story was cloudy, the boy had been trained by an Oxford priest. Two Yorkist lords, Francis, Viscount Lovell and the Earl of Lincoln, had given him their backing. According to Vergil, his instructor had thought for a while that he might pass him off as Richard, Duke of York, also escaped from the Tower (some said) and in concealment in England. But in 1486 Prince Richard’s death, so much more likely than his survival, still seemed to hang too heavily over the idea of reviving him. Although Henry had Warwick in his own prison and could easily disprove a counterfeit, Clarence’s son still made a more plausible focus for conspiracy.
The false Warwick was taken to Ireland and crowned in Dublin on Whit Sunday, allegedly with a diadem that was borrowed from a statue of Our Lady. That done, the Mayor of Dublin carried him round the city in his arms. The Earl of Kildare promoted him, and an impressive roster of bishops, abbots, lords and officers of the Irish Pale gave him their support. Coins were struck in his name at the mints of Dublin and Waterford. The child-king, called Edward VI – since Edward V, though never crowned, was deemed to have reigned for two months or so – issued edicts through his keepers, Lovell and Lincoln, and in June 1487 the trio invaded England with a force of Irishmen and German mercenaries. At Stoke, near Nottingham, they took the field against Henry. Lincoln, the possessor of a genuine claim to the throne, was killed; Lovell, at first supposed drowned while trying to swim the Trent, fled away to Flanders. The boy, named as Lambert Simnel – whether or not he was – was captured and packed off to the king’s kitchens, later to rise to the position of falconer.
In the annals of imagined kings, this boy advanced further than Richard Plantagenet ever did. He felt the holy chrism on his forehead; the Milanese ambassador reported in 1497 that Henry, out of respect for the sacred unction, thought he might make a priest of him. He wore a crown, even if a borrowed one, and faced his enemy on the battlefield. Yet the materials out of which this prince had been made seemed deeply unpromising. Simnel was pronounced to be the son of an artisan, variously a barber, a joiner, a tailor, a baker or an organ-maker. His background was provincial England. It was said that he looked the part, with a certain natural elegance, and he had been trained for a while. Yet his presumption worked mostly because he was required to be nothing but a puppet, a boy carried aloft, spoken for and acted for by lords at the forefront of his cause; and because his supporters, especially in Ireland, would have flocked to a Yorkist figurehead if it had been painted on a board, immobile and mute, as the real Warwick often was.
As proof of this, they continued to embrace the false Warwick even after Henry had produced the real earl from custody. He was eleven. He was brought out of the Tower in February 1487 and made to walk to St Paul’s, perhaps the longest walk he had done in some years, to hear Mass. There, as he had been instructed, he showed himself praying. After the service, he talked to people in the nave of the church. Yet when news of this display reached Ireland, Simnel’s supporters insisted that the boy in St Paul’s had been a fake. Though their own imagination might be ‘spurious and empty’, as Vergil mocked, it was also hard to break that imagination down.
The defeat at Stoke did not change this. Nor did a second public display of Warwick in London, this time walking beside Simnel, on Relic Sunday in July. A Yorkist prince loitered now in many people’s heads, dangerously recreated. Whoever he was (the fantasies shifting as necessary), he gave hope of a restoration. Molinet, writing in Burgundy about the plots of 1486, described how the House of York had been tall, splendid, built in such majesty that its glory shone through the seven climates of the world. But it had toppled so suddenly that hardly a wall or pillar still stood from which it could be raised again en royale convalescence. All that remained was one curling sprig of foliage from the royal stock, a tiny plant creeping among the ruined stones. But sprigs could grow. Branches would begin to form, then buds, until eventually the mended stones would make a triumphal arch hung thick with roses, shining, barbed and white.
Henry, too, sensed this continued movement of the ground. He was said to have ordered at Stoke that the Earl of Lincoln should not be killed, for through him ‘he might have known the bottom of his danger’. In the parliament held five months after the battle, a court was set up to inquire into ‘compassings, conspiracies and imaginings’ to murder the king within the royal household itself. He wrote also to the pope, asking Innocent VIII to censure the Irish prelates who had sanctioned Simnel, so that others would not ‘attack us thus flagitiously for the future’. Irishmen swearing allegiance to Henry in 1488 were enjoined to let him know of such dangers ‘without delay or feigning’. And all this time the king’s spies and agents went back and forth between England and Portugal.
The story Henry was trying to counter, of fatherless princes surviving in secret, was very like his own. He had been born in 1457, at Pembroke Castle in Wales, to a mother of fourteen whose husband, Edmund Tudor, had died three months before. From both father and mother he had received a portion, no more, of royal blood. His mother, Margaret Beaufort, was descended from John of Gaunt, Edward III’s third son, by an illegitimate line; his father’s mother had been Queen Catherine of France, the widow of Henry V. For fourteen years Henry had remained in Wales, obscurely enough, bound perhaps for a local marriage and modest estates. But as the Yorkist dynasty came to power in England, and the Lancastrian line was slowly extinguished, he had become the sole remaining male heir of his house. The Yorkist ghosts he now faced, whoever they were, were political replicas of his own child-self, both as vulnerable and as dangerous.
Hounded overseas in 1471, after Edward IV’s victory at Tewkesbury, Henry had taken refuge with his uncle Jasper Tudor at the court of Duke Francis of Brittany. He was treated kindly there, but his exile dragged on for years, becoming increasingly hazardous as the Yorkist kings, well aware of him, tried to winkle him out. As Brittany grew more unstable with the duke’s illness and madness, Henry was forced to appeal to the French king’s pity too. Only this, and the unpopularity of Richard III, emboldened him to invade England. His long banishment had left marks on him: caution, suspicion, pragmatism, a self-sufficiency that bordered on friendlessness, and a lasting preference for the French language and French style of kingship. This made him, to some degree, a reserved foreigner in his own kingdom, where his Yorkist-Plantagenet rivals seemed to display, spuriously or not, an idealised native purity and openness and grace.
His mother, despite her misgivings, had agreed that he should be sent abroad but covertly kept in touch with him; so mothers, too, required watching. During the Simnel uprising, Elizabeth Woodville had been sent to a convent and her estates confiscated in the apparent belief that she was sending, or might send, financial help to some shadow-prince beyond Simnel. If that shadow-prince was Richard of York, there was peril here for Henry. Before the end of 1485 he had reversed Richard III’s bastardisation of Edward’s children in order to take the princes’ eldest sister, Elizabeth, as his wife. The language was uncompromising. He had overturned Richard’s ‘false and malicious imaginations’; he desired that the statute should be taken off the rolls, annulled, cancelled, burned and utterly destroyed, and that the matter should remain ‘for ever out of remembrance and also forgot’. By this act, suppressing one memory and awakening another, Henry himself had contributed to the revival of Ric
hard of York. He knew as much; his new act was not to be construed as ‘in any way hurtful or prejudicial to the act of stablishment of the Crown of England to the king and to the heirs of his body begotten’. Yet it was. Instead of the wraith-like bastard boy, there was now a ghost with a claim: crowned, ermined, waiting, like his image in the Canterbury glass.
The spring of 1489 brought a rash of vague scares and stirrings, besides a serious revolt in Yorkshire for which Henry was forced to raise levies up and down the country. The grievance appeared to be taxation, but Henry could never be sure that more secret efforts were not afoot. Feigned, contrived and forged tales, as he described them, dogged him constantly. Henry did not say what these stories were, as Richard III never had; people knew. Yet their focus was shifting. Interest was moving away from Warwick, who was easily accounted for, to Richard of York, long lost sight of and still feared.
In January 1491 Sir Robert Chamberlain and Richard White colluded at Barking to levy war against Henry and adhere traitorously, as their attainder said, to Charles VIII of France. Chamberlain, a strong Yorkist, had been with Edward IV on the ship that had brought him back from exile in 1471; for some years he had been under house arrest and under bond for his loyalty. White was described as a ‘gentleman’ from Norfolk. These two and several others, though apparently conspiring for Charles, were tracked down to Hartlepool in the north-east, a leaping-off point not for France but for Flanders, where Richard of York was now rumoured to be.
Henry, desperate to know where they were going and why, sent Sir Edward Pickering with more than 100 horsemen to extract the rebels from St Cuthbert’s sanctuary, where they had taken refuge. He also told the Bishop of Durham, who had protested faintly about this breach of privilege, that he wished to be ‘certified particularly and by parcels of all such writings and goods as shall be found in their caskets, males, trunks, or in other their carriages’. The bishop himself was not to be trusted, for he had been greatly favoured by the Yorkist kings and had been an associate, too, of John Argentine, the princes’ doctor, who possibly knew what had become of them. The Hartlepool operation was expensive: Pickering spent £140 6s. 8d. on it, though the king had advanced him only £40. But Henry found all he needed, for Chamberlain and eighteen accomplices, including his two sons, were safely brought to London and attainted without trial. Chamberlain was beheaded in March, though the rest were pardoned.
What Chamberlain had been plotting was not clear, but there was ‘talking in secret wise’ in London that he had been trying to slip away to Richard, Duke of York, preserved by Edward IV’s sister, Margaret of York, the Dowager Duchess of Burgundy. Her protégé would later confirm it; in 1496, Richard claimed Chamberlain as one of the men who had died for him. The attempted journey from Hartlepool to the duchess’s court at Malines, in Brabant, pointed to another inventor, reviver or protector of Richard, Duke of York; and not merely one among several but, in the king’s view and most others’, the first and foremost. Only a year after Richard’s reappearance, Vergil said, Henry knew that it was Margaret who had raised him from the dead.
Margaret had been born in 1446 at Fotheringhay, the third daughter of the previous Richard, Duke of York. Her four brothers, two of them kings, had predeceased her; her husband, Charles the Bold of Burgundy, who had taken her as his third wife, had been killed by the Swiss in the winter of 1477 as he foolishly besieged the town of Nancy. He left in jeopardy, and in unaccustomed misery, a swathe of territory that contained some of the most prosperous cities of Europe – Antwerp, Ghent, Brussels, Bruges – and stretched from the Somme in the west to the Rhine in the east. It covered Brabant, Limburg, Friesland, Zeeland, Hainault and Luxembourg, as well as Flanders; but ‘Flanders’ was where Henry and his officers imagined Margaret to be, and the place from which his troubles came.
After Charles’s death, Margaret was the chief support of her step-daughter Mary of Burgundy, fighting to keep Mary’s rich inheritance out of the hands of the King of France. After 1482, when Mary – who had married Maximilian – died in a riding accident, Margaret devotedly fulfilled her duties as godmother and protector to her children. She had dowry properties to keep up at Malines, Binche, Rupelmonde and elsewhere; she pastured cattle, shipped wool, rebuilt palaces, sent charity to prisoners and the poor, and lent her patronage both to new religious movements and to the new art of printing. Beyond all this she had the usual diplomatic headaches of a widow, without much freedom of action, in a half-foreign land surrounded by predatory powers; and, many said, a penchant for political schemes she should have left alone.
In particular, she longed openly for the restoration of the House of York to the throne of England. On its face, there was little dynastic logic to this. A Yorkist princess, her niece Elizabeth, was now Henry’s wife and (after two years’ delay) the properly crowned Queen of England. By raising up male claimants, Margaret was endangering what little prestige and glory her family still had there. Yet she herself suggested that Elizabeth’s status did not count. Her family, she told Isabella of Spain in 1493, had ‘fallen from the royal summit’. Their only hope lay in a ‘male remnant’ who could recover the throne ‘usurped by this most iniquitous invader and tyrant’ and could restore, without dilution, the name of York again.
Bernard André, Henry’s poet laureate, repeated frequently the current court opinion that Margaret spent her time thinking up ‘new and unheard-of outrages’ to damage the king. Like Juno hurling storms at Aeneas, she lashed and railed against him. ‘Spite never dies,’ André wrote of her in his high-heroic History of the Life and Deeds of Henry VII; ‘a woman’s anger is eternal.’ In the original, the words quia aeterna est mulieris ira were underlined (the only underlining in the work), and the word Nota was written in the margin. It was not Henry’s writing, but it would have been his thought. In a letter to Gilbert Talbot of 1493, his first surviving mention of the conspiracy of the resurrected Richard, he blamed Margaret from the opening sentence for ‘contriving’ and maliciously setting ‘another feigned lad’ on him. Henry may have blamed Taylor and Atwater for the first staging in Ireland; the conception and birth, sometimes in those terms explicitly, he blamed on Margaret, and continued to do so even after the confession produced another story. ‘It is well known how the thing was done,’ said André, needing to say no more.
She was an easy scapegoat, as all women were. Hate and spite were presumed to be their only weapons, and few could decorously defend themselves. Yet, to judge by Margaret’s own words, there was no scapegoating in this case. Her loathing of Henry was manifest, as was her approval of any movement that might dethrone him. She had helped Simnel in 1487 with money and men and, immediately before, had given shelter at her court to Lovell and Lincoln, his promoters. When they failed, it was natural for her to try a better instrument. Vergil caught the hint of alchemical creation, saying that she had ‘made a man’ through whom her hatred could express itself. Edward Hall, embellishing Vergil, caught it too: Margaret, ‘intending to cast white sulphur to the new-kindled fire, determined clearly to arm and set forward pretty Perkin against the king of England with spear and shield, might and main’.
In Margaret’s case, the imagining of princes had a particular poignancy. She longed for children, but produced none. Before her marriage to Charles in 1468, her husband-to-be had announced to the magistrates of Valenciennes that she was ‘ideally shaped to bear a prince’. But she was not, and Charles moved on to other projects. Two years into their marriage, in June 1470, the couple were so rarely together that suppers à deux caused surprise to the keeper of her household accounts. In 1473 they were together twice, from January 24th to the 28th and on April 12th. While Charles, with his insatiable desire for glory, engaged eternally in wars (as Philippe de Commines put it), Margaret dedicated herself to the saints who could help to set in her womb the tiny figure of an heir of Burgundy. She prayed to St Waudru, whose belt protected women in pregnancy, and to St Anne, whose three marriages had surrounded her with a glowing crowd of childre
n. Offerings were made to St Colette, the patron of miraculous births, who had also raised a dead child to life, and to St Margaret of Antioch, who protected women in labour. On four occasions between 1472 and 1476 she made a pilgrimage to the shrine of Our Lady at Hal, whose intercessions were supposed to quicken the barren. Nothing helped her.
Her mother had been gloriously fertile, bearing twelve children. Her brother Edward and his wife had filled the English court with pretty babies. Margaret’s child remained all that was hoped and desired of her while her husband lived, and she too was depicted in her prayer-books in the fashionable shape of the time, with the swelling girdle of a mother-to-be. Possibly there were miscarriages; possibly, too, a child was born dead. The Burgundian records show no sign that she ever ‘took her chamber’, or ceremonially withdrew from public life in the last weeks of pregnancy. But for some reason, in mid-February 1473, Margaret went away alone to the little palace-cum-hospice of St Josse-ten-Noode, at the edge of the forest of Soignes outside Brussels. Her habit in those years, when she had charge of her step-daughter Mary, was to stay with her continuously, usually in Ghent, with rare trips of a week or two to Brussels or Malines to catch up with administration. Her journeys to shrines to pray for a child would take a day or two, at most. Yet she stayed at St Josse for two months, not returning until April 12th, and on her return Charles came to meet her, exceptional though this was.
Ten-Noode means ‘need’ or ‘affliction’. Philip the Good, Charles’s father, had built this maison de plaisance among the vineyards mostly as a place for rest or recuperation from illness. Both the local wines and the waters that flowed there, near the source of the Maelbeek, were supposed to have curative properties. Our Lady, too, had appeared more than once in the forest among the tall stands of beeches, leaving the sweetest perfume behind her, and hermits had been drawn to pray there alone. Margaret followed them, as far as a duchess could. Though she had been ‘faring well’ in early February, in Sir John Paston’s opinion, all was not well now. Something traumatic had happened to her, needing exceptional treatment and a long recovery, and it is not unlikely that it was the loss of a child. A dead child born perfect, however, would still have been acknowledged and baptised. This baby – if baby there was – was perhaps unformed still, and the accident kept quiet. One later rumour suggested the birth, around this time, of a secret love-child. But Margaret would never have borne a living child, especially a son, while Charles was alive, and concealed him.