by Ann Wroe
As for what you say, that the King of England complains greatly because we have written letters to him who calls himself the Duke of York, who is in Flanders, from which much favour has come to him, tell him that we assure him that we have never written such letters. Once, a long time ago, when we were in Barcelona, he wrote us a letter and the Dowager Duchess Margaret wrote us another, asking us to hear the facts of his case and thereby recommending him, and we never replied to him, not one thing, and we wrote to her explaining that there were such doubts about him . . . and we never wrote any more to her about him nor to anyone else. Because we believe that business is a joke and we won’t favour such a thing in any way at all, especially since it hurts the King of England . . . If the King of the Romans or the archduke his son help him in any way, we will help our cousin the king against him.
Fine words; yet Henry, though he once said they were the only princes in Christendom he trusted, did not trust them. He complained to de Puebla that the Spanish sovereigns were up to their necks in the business of ‘him of York’. They snapped back that this remark was ‘like everything else that comes out of France’: false, in other words. ‘You can swear to him and assure him,’ they told their ambassador, ‘that we don’t know a thing about him and we take no pleasure in him . . . This business is a joke, as we really believe it is, and as you know it is, and as you heard us say when you were here. About this matter there is nothing more to say.’
Yet, having said that, their resolution wavered. As de Puebla wrote to them in July 1495, ‘if the King of the Romans clings on to York, it will really make it hard to achieve what your highnesses desire’. At around the same time, a less dismissive message about York was sent from their highnesses to Gutierre Gomez de Fuensalida, their ambassador in Germany:
We were rather displeased that [the King of the Romans] has tried to do so much for the Duke of York. Although we don’t believe he has done it with the intention of causing us trouble by it, it certainly has caused us trouble, because it’s on account of the Duke of York that we don’t have the King of England [on our side] against the King of France, and the King of the Romans doesn’t have him either. And for that reason he should stand back from him . . .
So the Duke of York hovered at the edge of their calculations, another title and another claim: sometimes with his ass’s ears, but as often vaguely crowned and intimidating. As he became more dangerous to Henry, he gained in authenticity. He became ‘he who calls himself the son of King Edward’, or, as their letter to Fuensalida showed, ‘the Duke of York’ proper. He was also entered as the Duke of York in their list of cipher codes for ‘the pope, the emperor, kings, and other persons of the blood royal’. He was DCCCCVII, 907, between Margaret of York and King Alfonso of Naples. Though they mocked him publicly, in secret they gave him the status he accorded himself, at least provisionally.
This was not a sign that they thought he was authentic. Since the name that rulers and envoys were calling him by was a royal one – and since, despite Henry’s discoveries, no other name was in circulation – his natural place was among the crowned heads. The Duke of Milan was in the same quandary. In the mid-1490s, his ambassadors in England were writing to him only of the Duke of York, and he was reduced at one point to asking Maximilian whose side he should take in this struggle of English princes. Yet Soncino said he himself had also told him, several times, ‘that this movement was thought puerile by everyone’. York was a joke; but his very name made Henry afraid, and could induce him to do what other princes wanted.
De Puebla told the Spanish sovereigns this, and described how conversations touching on ‘the boy who calls himself Plantagenet’ called forth from Henry his most emotional outbursts and his wildest suspicions of other people’s motives, including theirs. The Spanish sovereigns were in the middle of protracted negotiations with Henry about the marriage of Prince Arthur with their daughter Katherine, another means to limit and frustrate the King of France. Discussion of Katherine’s dowry was especially difficult; the English king was demanding too much. If his position suddenly looked less secure and his claim less legitimate, Spain would have the stronger hand. The ‘joke’ was clearly no joke to Henry. ‘By the faith of his heart’, as he cried to de Puebla, he was ‘mortally sorry’ for the plots that were being woven round this boy. ‘Although he argued that he was make-believe,’ wrote Zurita, ‘he was terribly worried about him.’
The sovereigns of Spain never shared Maximilian’s personal interest in the Duke of York. They were thus far honest in their dealings with Henry, that they never made contact with DCCCCVII directly. It was true enough that they did not answer his letter to Isabella, filing it away instead with a sceptical remark (‘from Richard, he who calls himself the Duke of York’) scribbled on the back. But they began to understand the lure of him, and play with it, while at the same time assuring Henry that his interests were their only care.
At the bottom of it all, they badly wanted Henry to prevail. But in the mid-1490s, despite almost ten years of wise and shrewd rule since Bosworth, neither he, nor they, believed that his throne was secure. For years, they had nagged him on that score. In July 1488, their commissioners had remarked that it was surprising they should consider giving Henry their daughter at all, ‘bearing in mind what happens every day to the Kings of England’. At least the greatness and prosperity of Spain, they went on, ‘would do much to make impossible what has happened so often, and still happens, to the Kings of England’. They would not let it drop. Moreover, for several years afterwards, Ferdinand and Isabella continued to think that way.
They were far from alone. As Philippe de Commines so constantly said, the disposal of events, and especially of battles, was out of men’s hands. Fortune misled men, and God ordained what would befall them, according to criteria that no man could understand. This was just what the Spanish sovereigns had been hinting at: Fortune, blind or careless, whirring her wheel between Henry and the boy, letting the silly joke ride perhaps to the summit, while the anointed King of England – like so many just before him – teetered, tripped and fell.
iv
By the summer of 1493, the king’s suspicions and fears were being fanned almost daily. Indemnities owed to Scotland by the terms of a truce had not been paid, and on July 6th Henry remarked that ‘plain and express war’ might break out if the money was not sent ‘in all haste possible’. On the 9th he fretted to his treasurer that his ambassadors to the King of France, Thomas Ward and Matthew Baker, ‘have been far longer time with our cousin . . . than was thought’ and asked him to forward Ward another 100 marks. He may have suspected that Ward was slipping from his grasp, about to flee to Flanders. His ‘express mind’, as he put it, was to try to bind him to his service. Both in the north and from the south, his enemies seemed to be regrouping. Henry’s uncharacteristic use of ‘express’ in both these warrants showed how close to panic he was.
Most of all, as his letter to Gilbert Talbot of the 20th showed, he expected invasion from Flanders: ‘captains of estrange nations’ descending on England, whipped up by Margaret’s malice and her promises, to claim estates there and to put her feigned lad on the throne. He asked Talbot to be ready to go to war at a day’s notice, ‘upon any our sudden warning’. Typically, many others would have received the same letter at the same time. Henry was also sending knights and carefully picked troops to guard the coasts, the ports ‘and all roads and footpaths’, taking no chances. Talbot was to get eighty mounted men ready, ‘as many spears, with their custrells and demi-lances, well horsed, as ye can furnish, and the remainder to be archers and bills’. As he wrote, the king was at Kenilworth, a favourite summer hunting palace in Warwickshire, with twelve gunners in attendance.
Two days later Henry commanded all the ships of war under the east-coast naval captains to be coppered and victualled at Orwell, on the Suffolk coast, and sent to sea. He also wanted ‘due search’ made of the Thames, Sandwich, Ipswich and ports between, to see what vessels were there and wheth
er they should be made ready. Five ships, including the Bonaventura and the Mary Walsingham, had already been rigged forth to do ‘service of war’ for six weeks, ‘forasmuch as we be determined with God’s grace to advance unto the sea in all haste’. The other warships were to follow. Orwell was particularly important because it lay between Flanders and Scotland, a good place ‘to rancontre [engage] our rebels and their complices in their sailings to and fro’. The letter ended with a plea to his treasurer and under-treasurer ‘to advertise us with all speed in every behalf’.
This peril did not go away; indeed, it grew. The trade embargo imposed a few months later made Henry no more secure, for these desperate policies hurt England as much as they hurt the Burgundian cloth-towns. Meanwhile, the boy was increasingly fêted there. But Henry’s private terrors were not for public display. As the king gave Richmond his instructions in August 1494, he brushed the danger off. Charles had sent letters to warn Henry that Maximilian was determined to help the boy who said he was Edward’s son ‘with people, favour and all he possibly can’, and to that end ‘had arrived in Flanders with a considerable force’. Charles offered Henry all the help he could think of against this imminent danger, but Henry waved his offer away. The boy was no threat to anyone. The abusion was manifest and evident, ‘just like the other one the Duchess of Burgundy concocted, when she sent Martin Swart [Simnel’s German troop-captain] to England’. There was no lord or man of standing in the kingdom of England who did not know that perfectly well. It was notorious. There was no doubt at all that his subjects held the boy en tresgrand desrizion, ‘and not without cause’. Besides, England was in ‘as good and peaceful obedience as it has ever been in the memory of man’.
Henry already knew, from his spies at home, that most of this was untrue. Despite his cautiousness he had a habit, when excited or panicky, of overstating his case. Ambassadors were surprised, at times, to find him almost giddy with happiness or gratitude when he received them: constantly taking his hat off, making extravagant shows of devotion. Whenever Henry was afraid he would not be believed, he multiplied his claims. (‘This really happened, Most Blessed Father, and if we hadn’t been certain of it we wouldn’t have written to you.’) As later events made clear, he was never as certain of the Tournai story as he said.
Moreover, beneath his bluster, he took the threat of invasion seriously. He had already sent out warning letters on July 21st to all the east-coast ports. The town officers of Grimsby, on the Humber, kept the one they received:
HR
Trusty and well beloved, we greet you well. And so it is as we be credibly informed that our cousin the King of Romans is come to Malines, or else shall be there; wherefore, as it is said, our Rebels take courage, and do prate and say that within this our Realm be certain persons which will not long tarry from them, but go unto them in haste, upon knowledge of the coming of the [King of] Romans foresaid; and inasmuch as, be it so or not so as it is before written, good policy adjudgeth we should provide for the worst; Therefore we will and charge you that ye have sure and continual await upon all manner of vessels within your offices, and in especial within the creeks and in other small rivers able to pass crayers or boats to the sea, that no manner suspect person be suffered to pass, but that he be attached, and thereupon with the demeaning and ground of his suspection be safely sent unto us . . .
Yet Henry told Richmond to inform Charles that he was perfectly confident and calm. He was grateful for the French king’s ‘honourable offers’ to get Breton and Norman ships ready, under orders to leave immediately if Henry wished it, ‘because the business could be sudden’; he was glad, too, that Charles was turning down requests from his subjects to join the boy’s invasion force (and, the damaged document seems to say, promising to kill those who did so). He took these offers as the fruit of ‘good and cordial love’. On the other hand, they were not really necessary. ‘The business of the garçon is of so little worth and value,’ he told Richmond, ‘that the king does not intend to put the subjects of his brother and cousin to any pain or labour on that account or to give them that trouble . . . He would do so if he needed to.’ As for the idea that Maximilian would help this boatman’s boy invade England, ‘the king can’t believe at all that he or any other prince would want to do such a thing’.
Four months on, in the instructions given to Richmond in December, Henry’s bravado continued unchecked. ‘Thanks be to God, the king . . . is in good health and prosperity of body, and is also as well loved and obeyed in his kingdom as ever a king has been in England.’ Even Ireland was looking better: ‘Affairs there are progressing as well as he could wish for.’ As for the feigned boy, ‘It appears each day more than the last, to every person, where the said boy comes from and who he is.’ Small flickers of unease showed only in the secret page of Richmond’s instructions, or what now remains of it:
Then in case the king’s good brother and cousin . . . those being around him . . . should give any impression in words about the King of the Romans . . . and the boy who is in Flanders, the said Richmond may reply as he did on the other trip. And he will say that the king fears them not, because he knows that they are incapable of hurting him or doing him injury.
Henry knew well that they were not incapable of hurting him. Yet by that stage, at the end of 1494, the king’s defiance was better founded. The difference was made by his agents, who laboured constantly behind the scenes to undo the English hopes of the young man in Flanders. The apparent discovery of who he was had little effect, since Henry – for reasons best known to himself – gave this almost no publicity until his tormentor was captured. But the other prong of Henry’s undercover work proved devastating. His spies, working both in London and inside the court in Malines, eventually destroyed the conspiracies in England. By the time the king gave Richmond his instructions that December, his enemies at home were on the brink of elimination.
The first cracks in the English conspiracy appeared very early. By April 1493, barely two months after the cell had been formed, Humphrey Savage and Gilbert Debenham ‘and other our rebels and traitors’ had fled to sanctuary at Westminster. They had almost certainly been fingered by John ap Howell, who had brought them the letter from Richard in February and received Henry’s pardon in March.
Although Savage and Debenham were apparently still free to come, go and recruit – two monks of the abbey were in the circle by May – Henry had his eye on them, and was perhaps merely playing with them to glean more information. (William Graunt, one of the monks, had been charged by the king with feeding them.) It seems these plotters had not yet done anything, since a warrant of April 20th spoke only of ‘murders robberies and other such inconveniences as would by likelihood ensue’ if they remained unrestricted. For this reason, the king invoked papal bulls allowing him to keep them ‘more straightly’ in sanctuary. He became, in effect, their jailer, paying 10 shillings a week for each man’s keep to the archdeacon and the ‘kitchener’ of the abbey. If Savage and Debenham were still conspiring, they were fools; and yet they were doing so, by all accounts.
Executions of conspirators occurred as early as that May, when ‘four men, all fastened upon an hurdle’ were drawn from the Marshalsea to Tyburn and hanged. The London chronicler did not say what this was for, but Fabyan called it treason. Sometime that summer – that season of high nerves at Kenilworth – Henry had issued letters, with the advice of his council, covering him for all necessary acts against traitors. In the autumn, when crowds of apprentices attacked the Hanseatic merchants’ headquarters at the Steelyard in London to protest against Hansa profiteering during the trade embargo, Henry seemed to think this had treasonous colours too. The mayor and brethren of the city were asked to make diligent enquiries of the ‘rebels’ – a word used specifically for those opposing the king – and to take their information to the king’s council, ‘that the king might thereof sufficiently be informed’.
In February 1494, barely a week after nailing their ballads and rhymes to the chur
ch doors, Thomas Bagnall and his circle were caught. They managed to flee to the sanctuary of St Martin’s le Grand beside St Paul’s where, on the 12th, ‘Sampson Norton, knight, Simon Digby [the constable of the Tower] and Henry Winslow, knights, and others came with swords, bows and arrows’ and dragged them out, save Bagnall, who protested. His desperate statement, in an untidy scrawl on a small piece of paper, survives with the indictment:
he sayeth that [he] is a sanctuary man of St Martin’s [interlined] / the sanctuary place beside Chepe / and was taken out of St Martin’s against his [‘my’ deleted] / will / [interlined] by master Sampson and other and Master Digby being present / and prayeth thereto to be restored [‘permitted’ deleted] and acknowledgeth the treason whereof he is arraigned
After the dean and chapter had interceded for him, citing the inviolability of sanctuary, Bagnall was committed to the Tower. The others, though they pleaded not guilty, were hanged on February 26th. Two more men were hanged that day, Robert Bulkeley and ‘a Dutchman’ who was probably one of Richard’s agents. Bulkeley’s uncovering had been sudden. As late as February 3rd he had been one of Henry’s ‘well-beloved servants’, about to share with two others a reward of £12 for his services; by the 24th, ‘it is now that the said Bulkeley is unpaid of his part of the said sum . . . by reason of his rebellion’. His hanging and beheading two days later would have been Savage’s and Debenham’s fate too, if they had not fled to sanctuary.