by Ann Wroe
In the course of the year Henry arrested most of the prominent churchmen who supported Richard, including Worseley, Richford, Lessy, Leybourne and Sutton. Among the laymen arrested were Sir Simon Mountford (for his £30 donation), Lord Fitzwater (for his promise of armed men), Radcliffe, Thwaites, Daubeney, Thomas Cressener and Thomas Astwood, the young steward of Marton Abbey. It is not known who these men’s accusers were or, in some cases, exactly what they had done, but any contact with ‘Flanders’ would have placed them under immediate suspicion. Apparently harmless dealings with someone who had been in trouble – as slight as going up to him and wishing him good day – could also tar a man with treason.
Henry had gained his evidence about the English conspiracies largely by infiltrating Richard’s household. It was probably not difficult to do. The White Rose gave no impression of being particularly careful in his choice of councillors and friends, but seemed to take eagerly and gratefully to anyone who expressed support for him. Many of those who were close to him, such as Stephen Frion and Thomas Ward, had been Henry’s faithful servants not so long before. (John ap Howell too, the Welsh letter-carrier, may have been Henry’s man.) Even young Anthony de la Forsa, whom Richard was to praise in 1496 for serving him ‘full lovingly’ in many countries, was being rewarded by Henry as late as April 1494 for ‘divers causes us specially moving’. His reward, 10 marks or £6. 13s. 4d., was the same as another made to him the year before for some unspecified usefulness. In Vergil’s version of the first speech Richard made in Scotland, he remarked with almost childlike surprise that Henry had encouraged people to be friends with him and then, under cover of friendship, they had ‘searched through all the secret things’.
Molinet told the story of the infiltration, placing it in 1494. Three grans personnaiges d’Engleterre, he wrote, turned up one day at the court of the King of the Romans, who was then at Malines, where Richard was. They sought refuge there because Henry had banished them from England for supporting Richard’s cause, which they considered to be pressing, lawful and just. Richard received them lovingly and made them his chief counsellors, ‘so much so that nothing was done, openly or covertly, that did not pass through their hands’. These three worked so hard, by sending reports ‘and in other ways’, that the greatest men in England began to subscribe to Richard’s quarrel and promised they would help him to invade.
Molinet, possibly using Richard’s own estimates, reckoned there were more than forty of these nobles, among them ‘the great chamberlain of King Henry’, and that they pledged a total of 40,000 florins to advance his cause. As a proof of intent they sent him their seals, which Richard passed, as usual, to his confidants. At that point the confidants wrote secretly to Henry, asking him to order them home, for it was time to go. When the king’s messenger arrived, hotfoot from Calais, the three men immediately bagged up the seals, saddled their horses and ‘without taking leave of Richard’, a gross discourtesy, rode like the devil through the back-country to Béthune, Calais and England. The bag of seals was delivered to Henry, and all Richard’s most prominent supporters in England could now be identified.
Who were the three men? Not figments of Molinet’s imagination, certainly. Letters sent by Henry to Calais on October 22nd 1494 mentioned the surrender, apparently in Calais, of ‘three of our rebels that have forsaken the feigned lad and will now submit them unto us to have our grace and pardon’. They were not grans personnaiges in the king’s book, merely shipwrecked malcontents of the usual sort who resorted to Malines. Nor did Henry suggest that they were spies; but it is likely that they were, and that the man they had chiefly been working on was now about to turn.
According to Fabyan, after the best part of two years in close proximity to the young man in Flanders, Robert Clifford had ‘seen by many likelihoods that it should not be he, whom he was taken for’. A long stay with Richard had somehow disabused him. He was still there in October, when the three men decamped with the seals; indeed, he was still there in December, when he witnessed the protocols drawn up by Richard and Margaret. Very soon after that, he left Malines and fled to England. A courier ‘brought the tidings’ on December 19th, and was paid £3 for his good news.
Some thought that Clifford, too, had been a spy from the start. The rumour was rife in his own day, and there is certainly something disquieting about him in the early months of 1493: closeted with Fitzwater in Windsor, conniving with Stanley in Charing Cross, drawing the chief players one by one deep into treason. Perhaps those fervent claims to see Edward’s face in the young man had been nothing but entrapment. But Vergil did not think so. ‘It is certain,’ he wrote,
that the plot did Robert no good and did great damage to his name . . . so that afterwards he was very little in the king’s good graces, and was not free of blame. He was a very keen partisan of the House of York. From the beginning of the affair he went over to Margaret in order to hurt Henry, and it appears that he mistakenly believed that Peter was Richard, Edward’s son.
One small incident also suggested that Clifford was not Henry’s man. Sir Richard Nanfan, the deputy-lieutenant of Calais, said that when he had told the king how Clifford was spreading news of Edward’s son around the town, ‘his Highness sent me sharp writing that he would have the proof of this matter’. Most contemporaries thought that Clifford had been a true believer, and that his friends had to intercede hard with the king to purchase his pardon and restore him to grace. Only once they had succeeded did he dare to come back. Vergil took a simpler line: Clifford had been worked on with promises of a pardon and of high rewards, and so he turned. Such were the inconstant and contradictory purposes of men.
His victim’s own reaction is worth noting. In his proclamation of 1496 Richard referred to Clifford without bitterness or, indeed, characterisation at all, merely saying that he ‘and others’ had ‘verified and openly proved’ the extent of Henry’s corruption of his closest servants. The lack of condemnation perhaps implied that he still considered Clifford an ally for the future. That, as so often, was a bad misreading.
Clifford seems to have been back in London, and singing to Henry, by late December. Some of Henry’s spies had deliberately left Flanders with him to keep him under observation. His servant Richard Waltier came back too, but William Barley and the Bramptons did not. Vergil said it took Henry’s agents another two years to loosen Barley: ‘he would hear nothing of returning then, but . . . later he came to his senses’. He was attainted in 1495, and was not pardoned until July 1498. In the autumn of 1497, however, a ‘Master Barlee, the Englishman’ showed up in Scotland: still Richard’s servant in some obscure capacity, despite his son-in-law’s defection.
When Clifford himself arrived in England, the king’s private accounts show that he was arrested, and rewarded, at more or less the same time. The arrest may have been for show, but it took three men to ‘bring up Sir Robert Clifford’, as a prisoner, on January 9th 1495. The expression was doubly curious because both he and Waltier had been pardoned on December 22nd, almost as soon as they reached England. Prisoner or not, on January 20th Clifford was given ‘by the hand of Master Bray’ (Reginald Bray, already gaining infamy as one of Henry’s chief fiscal agents) the astonishing sum of £500 for services rendered.
The king, who had returned to Greenwich for Christmas, decided after the festivals to shift his court to the Tower. He did this so that those called in for questioning would think nothing amiss, but could be immediately incarcerated if necessary. There Clifford, abasing himself before Henry, told the king what he knew. He may have divulged, as Maximilian said he did as soon as he got to England, the story of Margaret and Cambrai – just possibly the reason he was disabused, if he was disabused at all. Yet Henry did not need that. What he needed was Clifford’s list of contacts, especially high contacts, in the vicinity of the English court itself.
Among those who were soon to be arrested, attainted or executed, it is not clear how many were specifically betrayed by Henry’s prize informant. The conspi
racy had already imploded, with numbers of the knightly or clerical members in custody, by the time Clifford, desperately excusing his behaviour, threw himself at Henry’s feet. But his list included many names, Vergil said; and the first among them, naturally, was Sir William Stanley’s.
By all accounts, Henry was deeply shaken to find his chamberlain involved. Here was a man closer to him than almost any other, privy to his secrets and ‘next to his body’, bound by battlefield loyalty and holy ties of marriage. Until indisputable evidence was produced, the king would not believe the accusation. Or so he made it seem. In truth, just as Stanley had dissembled his satisfaction with Henry and his rewards, so the king had dissembled his confidence in him. An anonymous informer in the next reign suggested that Henry may have known about Stanley’s dabblings two or three years before he acted. The late king, he said, ‘would handle such a cause circumspectly and with convenient diligence for inveigling, and yet not disclose it, to the party nor otherwise, by a great space after, but keep it to himself and always grope further, having ever good await and espial to the party. I am sure his Highness knew of the untrue mind and treason compassed against him by Sir William Stanley and divers other great men . . . and kept it secret, and always gathered upon them more and more.’ As he had done, indeed, and was still to do, with the feigned boy.
Stanley, even at the moment of his arrest, seems not to have taken the plunge. He was waiting for Clifford’s signal to act, which had not come. (Many other conspirators, Hall said, were waiting for it too, and were concluding from Clifford’s silence ‘that they were by a little & little dampnified and hurted’.) Stanley may well have wanted to see the young man for himself before he made a commitment. He also needed to be sure that prominent rulers, especially Maximilian, were truly behind him; hence the importance, as Henry had pointed out, of Maximilian’s return to Malines in August 1494 with Richard firmly in his company. Stanley gave no hint of his dangerous thoughts, even sitting on the commissions that indicted Thomas Bagnall’s accomplices in February 1494 and ‘English Edward’ Cyver in September.
Had he, in fact, done anything? He had made his remark about not bearing arms against Edward’s son, but Vergil judged this a sign of mala voluntas, ill-will towards Henry, rather than outright treason. (Hall thought melancholy made him say it.) He had agreed to send Clifford to Flanders. Molinet said he had also been among those who had sent their seals and promised money; André, too, said Stanley had pledged to use his ‘great heaps of money’ to defend the young man and bring him to the throne. He had not got near to taking out of storage the two brigandines, covered with cloth-of-gold, that he kept at Holt. But this was still ‘rebellion’ in Henry’s book.
Many other rebels, in London and elsewhere, were arraigned at the Guildhall at the end of January. There was no suggestion of trials. Molinet said that Henry simply showed them the incontrovertible evidence of the seals they had sent to Richard, at which, ‘bitterly ashamed and confounded’, they confessed their treasons. Radcliffe, Mountford, Daubeney, Cressener and Astwood were condemned to die. The first three were beheaded on Tower Hill on February 4th; Cressener and Astwood were spared because they were young, a popular decision with the London crowd. On the same day Thwaites and Lessy were attainted for misprision, knowledge of treasonable acts. The next day Robert Holborn, a shipman, and Hans Troys, another ‘Dutchman’, were hanged, cut down alive and beheaded, this time at Tyburn. A Breton called ‘Petty John’ was hanged there on the Friday. Molinet reported that twenty-four ‘rich merchants’ tried at this point to flee to Richard’s protection in Malines, but were seized at sea and hanged ‘shamefully’. This story, with its hints of untold wealth and the cunningly inflated idea that Richard could offer royal protection to anyone, may have come from the camp of the White Rose himself.
Assigning Stanley’s fate took a little longer. He was arraigned over two days, February 6th and 7th, before the King’s Bench in Westminster Hall, and was executed a week later. His first plea, unusually in such cases, had been not guilty, though Vergil thought he had almost proudly admitted his offence to Henry. In any event the justices overruled him, and on February 16th, at around eleven in the morning, Stanley was beheaded on Tower Hill. He died without recanting, apologising or explaining, to the bafflement of the London chroniclers. Fabyan, writing seven years later, especially marvelled that Stanley had lost his huge wealth, position, lands and fees ‘for a knave that after was hanged’; and ‘not he alone, but many other’ had fallen for the same deception.
For Henry, Stanley’s execution was the strongest possible signal of intent. He would kill anyone, no matter how close their blood or office might be to his own, who took the feigned lad’s side. Having done so, he then paid the £15. 19s. for his chamberlain’s burial at Syon. He also allotted £31 to his servants for their wages and horse-fodder, and gave £10 to Stanley himself, apparently to tip his executioner for the hoped-for mercy of a swift and single stroke. After this, moved as Bacon said by ‘the glimmering of a confiscation’, Henry seized Stanley’s treasure. At Holt the king’s commissioners missed nothing, from lead piping to old cushions and saucers in the pantry. They noted whether the sheets and carpets were ‘good’, ‘right good’ or ‘somewhat worn’, and observed where bits of gold trim had fallen off the bed-hangings. The wine cellar, disappointingly, was empty. In Stanley’s private closet they found a counting board, a crossbow, various phials of medicinal waters and a set of built-in pigeonholes for his letters and bills; in ‘the high wardrobe’ they found his scarlet Parliament robes and his Garter robes still hanging, royal rewards to him. The commissioners’ speed suggested that Henry was searching for information as well as gold; but there was nothing in Stanley’s houses to incriminate him except the Yorkist girdle-clasp, and that was broken.
The fate of John Ratcliffe, Lord Fitzwater, the only other lord involved, was curiously different. He had been arrested on February 22nd, but was not convicted of treason until October or November. Even then, Henry ‘of his most special grace’ did not have him executed. Instead, Fitzwater was committed to prison for life in the castle of Guisnes, near Calais. He was beheaded in Calais more than a year later, in November 1496, after attempting to escape by bribing his keepers. Hall said it was widely supposed that he intended to go ‘to Perkin’. His detention and beheading across the Channel were meant perhaps to deter other members of the Calais garrison, which had produced two traitors, or to show through Calais and further into France how fully Henry had crushed the conspiracy. Fitzwater, however, did not recant what he believed, and it is possible – since he was executed for other offences as well as the escape – that he had not altogether finished plotting.
If the clergy had not been able to claim their privilege, there would have been yet more executions. Worseley, Richford, Sutton, Hussey and Leybourne were sentenced on January 30th and 31st to be hanged, drawn and quartered with the rest, but naturally were fined instead. Worseley had to pay £1,000. All were eventually pardoned, though Worseley not until June and Hussey not until July. Lessy, at first sent to the Tower, was also pardoned, released, fined and placed under bond. In subsequent years, Worseley was repeatedly bound to the king for his loyalty.
The clearest image of how the conspiracy passed, like a shadow, across one life emerges from Worseley’s account rolls. The scholarly dean had kept a merry household beside St Paul’s, flowing not only with claret and ‘Roundeletts of sweet wine called Malmsey’, but with beer brought in from the landlord of the Hart’s Horn. His servants went clad, as Henry’s did, in fashionable medley and tawny cloth; Thomas Shaw’s wife kept him in freshly laundered linen; and his accounts (for ‘various things and stuff’ on ‘various sheets of paper’) evinced a certain blitheness. Then, in the roll for 1495–6, the tone abruptly changed. The wine bill plummeted, from £22. 7s. 4½d. to £3. Under ‘wages and fees’ Worseley was now paying £10 a time to Reginald Bray and Thomas Lovell, Henry’s financial enforcers, and to Simon Digby, the constable of the Tower. T
o John Heron, keeper of Henry’s privy purse, he paid £135 ‘into his hands at Westminster’ for the bond of allegiance now imposed upon him. Payments appeared for several journeys by boat up the river to Sheen, answering Henry’s orders to appear; for meat and fish ‘bought for the dean when he was in the Tower of London’, where he and his servants were kept for sixteen weeks; and for bribes and presents for the members of the King’s Council Learned in the Law, who seem to have heard his case. The next roll, in which all the fines were repeated, contained Worseley’s first recorded medical expense, a pot of ointment. It would not have been surprising if he had fallen ill. Fabyan claimed that Richford and Leybourne, despite their pardons, died shortly after their trials for sheer shame at what they had done.
Some laymen, surprisingly, escaped death. Debenham and Savage seem to have stayed in sanctuary for good, with Henry continuing to pay for their keep. Stanley’s bastard son Thomas, possibly also betrayed by Clifford, was imprisoned in the Tower. The possibility of recantation may not have been offered to anyone, although Richard in his proclamation mentioned some who had ‘dearly bought their lives’. Henry, who was often merciful, intended in this case to make harrowing examples.
In the midst of these punishments came a few last, wild tremors of conspiracy. People continued to scribble out treasonous rhymes and writings about the king and to put them up in public places. Those words ‘soon stuck in their windpipes’, Vergil said. Another group, ‘as if stripped of all fear’, openly bragged that Henry’s days as king were numbered, because from hour to hour they were waiting for the Duke of York to come. Henry hanged them, and their imitators slowly grew quiet and obedient.
Curiously, the Kendal cell stayed almost untouched. The Bishop of Winchester continued in his office. Kendal was put in bond for his loyalty for a mere £100, received a general pardon in 1496, was made a justice of the peace for Essex and Middlesex and went on writing in his dreadful Italian. The lay members, too, were not apprehended, though Thomas Tyrell had said as much, or more, to damn himself as Stanley had. It is possible that Henry spared some of the guilty, in this cell and others, in the hope that they would prove useful to him later.