by Ann Wroe
The fleet sailed out of Vlissingen on July 2nd, a Friday. The sun was at the mid-point of Cancer, a good time for journeys by water; the day was hot, and the voyage was a short one by Richard’s standards. Vergil said the young man did not know which part of England he was aiming for, drifting where the wind took him. But they made progress and, the next day, dropped anchor in the Downs off Deal, in Kent. The pebble shore was shelving and open to the sea, inviting for invasion. Caesar was said to have landed there, if that gave any encouragement.
It is unclear how much the would-be King of England knew of the people on shore. Judging by those who were captured, few of his recruits were Kentings. The county had a reputation for rebelliousness and a tendency to be Yorkist; but Richard, prudently, did not assume that they would welcome him. André said the Kentings were feeling chastened because, not long before, many of them had fallen for a story put about by charlatans that Christ and his apostles had returned to earth. The deceivers had been punished, and the Kentings rendered unreceptive to saviours. This new one, therefore, stayed at a safe distance. Molinet reported that Richard sent about 300 foot-soldiers, in small boats, ‘to spread the message and do a bit of pillaging’; Vergil said he allowed one small party to go, then another, to test the feelings of the local people. Many of those he sent were English yeomen and labourers: a sensible strategy, as if they had come to rescue their country rather than invade it.
These soldiers, by Molinet’s account, got a little way inland and planted three standards of the White Rose in ‘the villages’, probably not much more than fishermen’s huts behind a bank of stones. As soon as the standards were displayed, a man-at-arms, very well accoutred, rode up to the soldiers and asked whose men they were.
‘The Duke of York’s,’ they told him.
The man on the horse was ecstatic. ‘We ask for no other lord in the world!’ he cried. ‘We wish to live and die with him! Make him disembark with his company! We will do him all the honour, help and favour we possibly can, with our hearts, our bodies and our goods.’ Meanwhile, since they must be thirsty, he would order up a couple of jugs of beer for them.
The soldiers, overjoyed, felt victory was theirs already, and sent word to Richard of their wonderful good fortune. But the prince and his noble advisers, ‘fearing that he was being tricked’ and suspicious of the slow deliberations on shore, refused to disembark. This proved wise. As soon as the man-at-arms had gone a little distance, riding into the sandhills behind the beach, armed troops ‘rained down’ on the foot-soldiers from all sides. The invaders put up a fight, but in a short time were hopelessly outnumbered. Around 150 were killed on the beach, riddled with arrows and ‘mutilated by slicing swords’ as they tried to regain their boats. English sources thought most of them had died by drowning. Only one casualty, Thomas Grigge, ‘sore hurt’, was mentioned on the other side. The London Chronicle summed it up with understated accuracy: ‘They could have no comfort of the country.’
Those of the landing troops who had not been killed were captured and taken to London, stumbling in chains like robbers or roped like horses in harness, with the wounded drawn in carts. A royal letter mentions 163 rebels sent ‘from the sea side’ at Sandwich, some by sea and some by road. The sheriff of Kent, John Petch, brought a crowd of mostly Dutchmen and Germans to London Bridge on July 12th, where they were handed over to be conveyed to Newgate or the Tower. On July 18th a commission was set up at the White Hall to interrogate the English-speaking rebels and pass sentence on them. Hugh Standish, a notary, was paid 40 shillings for his labour and diligence in taking down ‘in various books’, long since lost, the rebels’ depositions and confessions. However lowly, these men might have first-hand knowledge of the feigned boy, his plans and the nature of his network in the entrails of England.
Eight captains were also captured, according to de Puebla, though only six – Mountford, Richard White, John Corbet, John Belt (a truly ‘diabolical’ name, André thought), Quintin, a Spaniard, and Genyn, a Frenchman – were named in the chronicles. In Norfolk, up the coast, the Pastons heard of them when the bailiff of Yarmouth told Sir John that a Yarmouth man, Robert Albon, had met the ‘English captains of the king’s rebels’ at Canterbury. The captains had planned to take ‘a town of strength, for they would have had Sandwich, and the country had not resisted them’. Albon talked to ‘Captain’ Belt, a yeoman from Guildford, and found him still defiant: ‘he wist well that he [Albon] was but a dead man, and for as much as he wist that he was of Yarmouth, he showed him that they will have Yarmouth, or they shall die for it’.
Nine particular prisoners, those closest to the boy’s counsel, were sent to Henry at Fotheringhay for special interrogations. By September 4th, the king had sent them back to London to be beheaded. Not all, however, were executed. Sir Thomas Lovell, who was in charge, ‘respited’ some, and sent Henry a list of the reasons why. One who escaped was Captain Mountford, spared perhaps for his ‘good and commendable’ service to the king not many years before – though he alone was named in Henry’s subsequent letter about the invasion, as if the king felt his treachery more keenly than that of the rest. Another was Captain Corbet, who died in the Tower ‘of God’s Visitation and the occasion of the great hurts and wounds which he Received in time of his first taking’. He had refused to let plasters be put upon his wounds. His martyrdom, like Belt’s defiance, showed how fiercely the cause of Richard burned in some hearts; but not in enough.
The forty-odd English labourers and yeomen who had come to join Richard, and had been taken, were all drawn and hanged. (‘The animals got their veins squeezed for their trouble,’ André said.) The bodies of four particular Flemings were left hanged in chains at Wapping on the Thames, on the ‘wash’ or ooze where pirates were routinely executed. At every full sea, the water flowed over them. Others were left ‘for sea-marks or light-houses’ on the coasts of Norfolk, Essex, Sussex and Kent, mouldering towards Flanders.
The richer and better-connected survived, since they had stayed on board with their prince. Among those declared traitors after the invasion were Neville, Keating, Harliston, John Heron, Edward Skelton, John Brampton and Taylor the younger, the established inner circle. All had long since left the country. They were attainted ‘by what name soever or names they or any of them be called’, standard form in such indictments, but especially apt for the servants of a counterfeit master. Other absentee traitors came from York, Chester, Cumberland and Lincoln, from one end to the other of the country. Presumably some took the chance to drop the cause, while others fled with their prince.
The king exulted in this victory, ordering beacons to be built on the Kentish shore as both warning and celebration. He also sent Sir Richard Guildford to commend the Kentings for their actions. Those actions, he insisted, had been quite spontaneous. Not a single royal soldier had been called upon to intervene. Henry himself had been at Worcester on the 4th and was still there on the 9th, unperturbed and trusting in his subjects. The invaders, he told Philip’s counsellors in a furiously sarcastic letter written that day,
intended to do us all the damage and displeasure they could well do, little as that was. But, thanks be to God, it was not in their power or capability. They were roughly rebuffed (rudement Reboutez) by the villagers of the sea-coast of Kent by themselves, who made great efforts to defend it. And while we were hunting at one end of our Kingdom, a great part of these men were killed and many of them were drowned when they tried to get back to their ships, and their principal captains, like Mountford and others, were taken. And we advise you that if they had all wanted to disembark and wait for the arrival and attack of the said villagers, scarcely one of them would have got away, and you can be very sure there would have been no need to call on other people besides the said villagers to defeat them.
That hunting image was nicely done: the debonair king riding in the distant woods, while the invaders were hunted and slaughtered on the shore. The verb ‘to defeat’, défaire, applied both to beating enemies and t
o ceremonially butchering the animals killed in the chase. Had Henry not been so angry, this was almost sport.
The Spanish ambassador faithfully repeated the king’s story, with extra details that may have come from Henry too. All the villagers, he wrote, said that ‘the king should come’ – proof that there was no sign of anyone resembling a king there already – and that ‘that fellow should go back to his father and his mother, who are living and are known in France’. ‘They hold it as fact,’ de Puebla went on, ‘as in pure truth it is, that this business is like that of the other Duke of Clarence whom they crowned as a king in Ireland, and afterwards it was found that he was a barber’s son . . . The doctor grieves greatly for these madnesses [locuras], for so they are judged by those who take any notice of them.’
As usual, Henry told the story he wished Spain to hear. The real picture was not quite so clear. Henry was still deeply worried by the pathetic young man who had been told to go home to his mother. In April he had tried to forestall the invasion, and from Worcester on July 5th and 6th letters had been sent out to every port in England, alerting them to keep watch. Moreover, the Kentings – having wavered at first, Vergil said – had in fact needed something of a nudge to start fighting the invader. The lord chancellor, already usefully stationed in the county and in constant touch with the king, seems to have ensured that they did so. The town accounts of New Romney, southwards from Deal down the coast, mention payment for beer ‘given to the men of Lydd, when they went forth upon the expedition of our Lord the King when our enemies were in the Downs’. The Canterbury accounts list payment for drink for 300 armed men going off ‘to fight Peter Warbeck and his men, enemies of our lord the King of England’. Canterbury later received a letter from the king, praising the city and its citizens for their ‘resistance’.
The Exchequer rolls also show a certain amount of scrambling, some of it after the event, to make the Kent and Sussex coasts secure. At some point that July, Stephen Bull, Henry’s top naval captain, was sent to Sandwich. William Fourness, the clerk of the king’s ordnance, endeavoured to supply him ‘in all goodly haste’ by sea, packing a small craft with iron and lead shot and crossbow strings, while chests of bows and arrows went by road. (Henry, ever economical, had exhorted Fourness to buy these supplies ‘at as little price so the stuff be good and able as ye can’.) At around the same time Nicholas Haynes, Henry’s chief messenger between Worcester and the south-east, rode with royal letters to the chief churchmen of Sussex and all along the sea-coast, searching for stragglers left behind.
Most Englishmen were unmoved and uninterested in this would-be king who was hovering round their shores, but many were also waiting to see how events turned out. London, though Yorkist by inclination, seems to have generally found the Flanders plots mysterious. When the invading ships appeared, the London Chronicle reported at first that they just contained ‘divers rebels of the king’. Only later did it report that the captured rebels ‘affirmed to be their head captain the second son of King Edward iiijth, which was in one of the said Ships’. London seemed not to have heard of this possibility before, as if the conspirators of Charing Cross and Holborn had never left their tiny fervent circles. The news of Edward’s son caused no frisson on the Thames; on July 24th the city heard that ‘the Captain of the said persons’, whoever he was, was in Ireland with the residue of his men.
One Star Chamber document provides a picture of a party of Londoners on invasion day, out hunting bucks that Saturday in the fields beyond Aldgate. The mayor sent an officer to tell them to get ready ‘to array [themselves] towards the same Perkin to resist him’. The Londoners, relaxed, supped that evening in Holborn with no preparations made. They would probably have fought this Perkin, had he shown up. But since he made no appearance on that long summer evening, they enjoyed themselves and discounted him. The ships rode at anchor, soldiers drowned in the sea, and five Londoners followed the bounding deer on an otherwise ordinary day.
Matters looked very different from the other side. Defeat had been total. Molinet, probably receiving his information from a Yorkist source at Malines, did not doubt that Richard’s force had fallen into a trap set by Henry. The impressive armour and equipment of the defenders showed they were not unprepared. Possibly the king’s progress north had been a trap in itself, luring Richard across. If so, it had worked, and the magnitude of the defeat had not gone unobserved by the owner of the standards. Molinet was keen to stress how Richard and his men, bobbing on the sea, had watched the armed troops burst into view and set about the slaughter. It was over very quickly; and then ‘Richard, seeing this calamity, slipped away’.
Although his fleet did not seem to be chased, it scattered and disintegrated. At least two ships were blown off course. Sir John Paston heard of ‘an hoy of Dordrecht’ (a small passenger vessel, used for short hauls) brought into Wallrens, in Normandy, ‘with eight horses, with many saddles and bridles’. The surviving crew, mostly ‘Dutchmen’, included eight or nine Englishmen, who disappeared into the back country. The ship itself was seized for the king, and the Dutchmen imprisoned. As for the ships with the rebels and their prince still on them, ‘they be forth out of Camber westwards; whither they be, they cannot say’.
Vergil thought the spurned invader fled back to ‘Aunt Margaret’ for one last council of war. De Puebla, however, was certain that he could not show his face at her court now, ‘since that whole land is destroyed by his sojourn there’, and his backers across the Channel had no idea where he was. Maximilian was so impatient to hear his news that he insisted that any despatches sent to Malines (to Margaret, always the first destination) should be forwarded immediately to Worms, where he was holding the Diet. From there, his view heavily obscured by misinformation, he tried to follow his prince’s progress.
On July 11th, a week after the invasion, Maximilian knew that ‘the Prince of York was already at sea on his way to his country’, and expressed the hope that ‘should he establish his right to the kingdom of England, he will be one of the colleagues and confederates of the league with his Majesty’. On July 17th, he heard from Malines ‘that they are of the opinion that the Duke of York . . . has reached England, and been received by some of his adherents, whereat his Majesty rejoiced greatly’. Two days later, Maximilian was hoping aloud that York, having won England, would ‘immediately start a war against the King of France, as the duke has most certainly promised us’.
From that point, the news became harder to follow. On July 25th, three weeks after Richard had sailed, Ludovico Bruno reported to the assembled ambassadors that there had been a hitch:
The Duke of York, the kinsman of his highness, had arrived with his fleet in the neighbourhood of London; and, not having found the population well disposed towards him at the spot where he was most anxious to land and attack the hostile army, he had removed to another part of the island; though it is hoped that his affairs will prosper.
Wilfully, the King of the Romans clung on to him; just as wilfully, his ‘new King of England’ stoked the dream that victory remained within his grasp. He had made straight for London, Henry’s very heart; and though ‘a hostile army’ waited for him, he was ‘most anxious’ to take it on. On August 16th, Maximilian was ‘still waiting for the result of the Duke of York’s expedition, which will be known in a few days’. Eventually, however, the bold invader had to admit defeat. Maximilian’s account in the Weisskunig may reflect the tale he was told. ‘The New King [Henry VII, in this case] awaited there with a great number of men, and when they went ashore he accepted battle with them, as he had about three times as many men as they had, and he killed nearly all of them.’ The implication was that Richard had gone ashore and bravely challenged Henry in person: an echo of the lie Maximilian had heard and repeated in late July. But he had not won.
At the time of the invasion, a secret message was sent from Maximilian to Henry. It has not survived, but it was clearly not polite. Henry’s letter of July 9th described how the letters had arrived,
>
brought to us by a person who said he was [the King of the Romans’] shieldbearer. We found them extremely strange [fort etranges] and would never have believed they had been written by him, had they not been signed with his hand, sealed with his seal and countersigned by Lalaing, his secretary. [The letters] requested us to make reply to the various things [he demanded] by the same carrier, and though it displeases us to make answer in the way we are doing, this matter so closely touches our honour that we feel we have to do it.
Maximilian’s message no doubt contained the same cocksure defiance that was being heard from both him and his prince in the days before the fleet sailed. It was not heard again.
By August 16th, the King of the Romans was already resigned to the thought that York ‘might be defeated’. The Milanese, the Florentines and especially the Spaniards were nagging him constantly to agree that Henry should be admitted to the Holy League against France. Maximilian explained that he was delaying because, if York succeeded, he should be the one admitted to it. Only if York failed would he agree that Henry should join. The outcome, he insisted, was still uncertain. But by September 5th, as the Venetian ambassadors reported, he knew the worst.
Having audience of his Majesty the King of the Romans, the Neapolitan ambassador read to him in our presence an extract from letters written by a colleague of his, also a Neapolitan, and accredited to the King of England, whereby he informed him how the Duke of York was in Ireland with but a few troops, and that the King [of England] had made great preparations, meaning to send in pursuit of him . . . His Majesty listened without making reply.
The attack on Deal was the moment when Richard of York had at last been put in serious play, and it had failed. He was shown to lack substance not so much in himself – though a braver man might have tried to rescue his troops – as in the loyalty, or even the interest, he could command in England. This changed the picture. It was now much clearer in Europe, as it had been clear from the start to those not determined to cause trouble, that Henry was the established king in England, to whom all requests should be directed and all negotiators sent. Pitting claimants against him, whether false or true, would henceforth be even riskier than it had been before.