The War of the Roses

by Timothy Venning

  As far as the political situation appeared in early 1486, the battle of Bosworth was merely another reversal of fortunes in the perennially unstable English kingdom–which was almost unique in Europe at this period for coups among its elite and appeared to be in modern parlance a potential ‘failed state’. There was stable dynastic descent from one ruler to another, usually father to son, in France, Burgundy, and the states of the Iberian peninsula; the major and minor sub-states of the Holy Roman Empire were usually inherited by the legal heir, although they could be partitioned among brothers or cousins; and in the British Isles itself the new Stewart dynasty of Scotland from 1371 saw direct succession of father by son, even in a minority (though James III’s brother Alexander attempted to subvert this in 1482). A dynasty that ended in female succession could have problems as potential husbands for the heiress or her male relatives tried to seize power, as faced by Hungary and Poland after 1382 and by Naples after 1343 and 1414; and in these circumstances an ‘excluded’ royal cousin such as Henry VII could seize the throne. There were also coups against ‘tyrants’ or underage rulers in Italy, most notably in Milan in the late fifteenth century –though the Duchy there was a relatively new polity and not as secure as the kingdom of England. ‘Separatism’ was also a problem in some multiple dynastic states, particularly in Sweden (where resistance to the 1397 ‘Union of Kalmar’ meant that the merger of Denmark, Norway and Sweden was repeatedly challenged) and Poland-Lithuania where the nobles of the latter preferred to be ruled by their own Duke not by the absentee King of Poland. But the repeated dynastic coups in England since 1455 were only matched by the instability of the Grand Duchy of Moscow, where the weak Vassily II (ruled 1425–62) was repeatedly removed by his uncle and then his cousins in the 1430s and 1440s.

  The first plots and ‘Lambert Simnel’, 1486–7

  As of 1486, there was no guarantee that the endemic instability in England was over; and indeed even that spring there were abortive plots to raise a Yorkist rebellion in the Midlands, as arranged by the veteran Edwardian loyalist Sir Humphrey Stafford of Grafton, Warwickshire, and aided by Lord Lovell from sanctuary.14 There was some sort of plot to raise a rebellion in Yorkshire, heartland of Richard III’s estates and home of much of his ‘affinity’, where his death had been recorded with defiant written declared sorrow in the official records of the city of York.15 Henry’s local ‘strongman’, the Earl of Northumberland, seems to have been unable to secure the loyalty of his subordinates, possibly out of anger that he had betrayed his King at Bosworth. As a result the new King had to make an unexpected progress north to York, and there was a plan to assassinate him when he arrived in the city–apparently involving Lovell, who had escaped from sanctuary in Colchester without detection and headed north (possibly to Richard III’s old home, Middleham Castle). En route Henry was warned by Bray that Lovell was planning to flee sanctuary, but when he received Bray’s informant Sir Hugh Conway he discounted the story.16 It is surprising that he had not stationed men around Colchester Abbey to keep Lovell safe, as he was to do to Stafford and his brother Thomas when they fled to sanctuary a few weeks later and to ‘Perkin Warbeck’ at Beaulieu Abbey in 1497. Presumably he thought Lovell likelier to flee abroad than to launch a coup.

  The murder plot, possibly involving Lovell in person, was prevented at the last minute by the detection of the would-be assassin, either at High Mass in the Minster or later at a banquet in the Archbishop’s palace.17 Had the plot succeeded, the plotters apparently intended to proclaim Warwick as king, presumably hoping he would not be killed by the Tudor adherents as soon as the news reached the Tower of London, and the Stafford brothers would raise the tenantry of Warwick’s West Midlands estates. (Their home at Grafton was near Warwick Castle so some would have been known to them personally.) If the plan had succeeded there would have been chaos in London as Henry had no son and heir yet and his only male kinsman, his uncle Jasper Tudor (now Duke of Bedford), had no claim to the throne; presumably Margaret Beaufort would have had to defer to Elizabeth of York as the new queen sooner than split the regime’s adherents by claiming the throne. The West Midlands rising by Stafford and his brother Thomas went ahead, but was put down; they fled to sanctuary at Abingdon Abbey’s ‘cell’ at Culham near Oxford but were dragged out and tried for treason. The Abbot, John Sante, dared to speak up for them and claim that the breach of sanctuary was illegal; he was to be involved in a further Yorkist plot so he was clearly not merely defending Church rights. Humphrey was executed on 8 July and his quarters displayed in the Midlands but Thomas was pardoned on the scaffold in the first of the Tudor ‘set-pieces’ of State executions.18 The revolt in Yorkshire opened as planned, but soon disintegrated as Henry issued promises of pardon; according to his 1620s biographer Sir Francis Bacon (using the contemporary Polydore Vergil’s account) Henry had believed that the rebels were ‘left-overs’ from Bosworth and had been surprised to find them a serious threat. A riot, planned to co-ordinate with the date of the murder plot and the Stafford revolt, occurred at the same time in London as a mob displaying the heraldic badges of the Earl of Warwick assembled at Highbury but it was dispersed.19 Lovell now fled north-west to join Sir Thomas Broughton, a Yorkist stalwart, at his isolated house at Broughton-in-Furness. The latter’s participation in the Simnel plotters’ invasion (which landed nearby) a few months later implies that he and Lovell would have been planning together and that when Lovell soon fled abroad to Burgundy Broughton promised to aid an invasion.20 Lovell now joined Richard III’s sister Margaret, Dowager Duchess of Burgundy, who held her court at Malines in the Low Countries. One modern theory has linked Lovell and his ‘hideout’ at Colchester Abbey to a presumed ‘son’ of Richard III, the later Kent labourer ‘Richard Plantagenet’ who was recorded in the 1720s as having claimed to have been brought to see the King at Bosworth by an unnamed ‘lord’ (Lovell?), told that Richard was his father and would acknowledge him if he won the battle, and then to have fled into hiding and hidden his identity, training as a bricklayer. This man, who died at Eastwell (ironically, a Victorian royal residence) in 1550, may have been connected to the Abbey and have worked later at its sub-priory, Creake in Norfolk, as ‘Richard Grey’–though he is unlikely to have been Edward IV’s son Richard, as David Baldwin suggests.21 But if he was known or available to Lovell as a potential pretender in 1486–he was then about fifteen–he was not used, and the new King was to arrest Richard III’s openly acknowledged bastard John of Pontefract and to execute him in 1490.22

  The potential for ‘Richard Plantagenet’ as a focus for revolt in 1486 was thus unlikely, and in any case the adult Earl of Lincoln or the teenage captive Warwick were the acknowledged Yorkist heirs. Instead, the next conspiracy focussed on an obscure youth known to posterity as ‘Lambert Simnel’, apparently aged around ten in 1486/723–whose unusual name has led to suggestions that it was a pseudonym. The very fact of his emergence suggests the weakness of Henry’s regime and/or the determination of its opponents; Edward IV had been on the throne for eight years before he faced a serious revolt in his ‘heartland’, in 1469, though the Lancastrian remnants in Northumberland had held onto isolated strongholds in 1461–2 and had risen in revolt again several times until 1464 aided by the Scots and French. As of 1486 Henry had had no opportunity to make serious mistakes and alienate senior supporters, as Edward IV had done in 1464–5 by announcing his secret marriage to Elizabeth Woodville and then in 1465–9 by building up the power of his Queen’s relatives. ‘Simnel’, an organ-maker’s son, appears to have been trained in courtly manners and set up as a pretender by an obscure Oxford priest called Richard Symons/Symonds, whether or not with local backing, and was presented as the Earl of Warwick.24 The latter was really in the Tower, but his survival there may have been dubious to contemporary rumour considering what had happened recently to his cousins Edward V and Prince Richard. Was Symonds relying on the real Earl being dead, or was ‘Simnel’ an ‘insurance-policy’ for use in a planned rising–there was no po
int in Henry killing the real Warwick before rescue as then the pretender would assume his identity.

  The boy was now smuggled abroad to Dublin, where the weakly-supported new regime had had to keep on the loyal Yorkist partisan Gerald, Earl of Kildare–greatest feudal Anglo-Irish magnate of the ‘Pale’–as its Lord Lieutenant in 1485 despite his probable disloyalty. The attention and justice that Richard III’s father had displayed in Dublin as Lord Lieutenant in the late 1440s had paid dividends for the Yorkists ever since; York and his adherents had fled there after Queen Margaret’s attack on Ludlow in 1459 and Edward IV and Richard III had had no trouble from the island. Dublin was clearly teeming with Yorkist adherents, and Symons and his ‘Earl of Warwick’ received a warm welcome from assorted senior local lords. The news was taken to London in February 1487, just as writs had been sent to Cornwall and Devon for the arrest of several prominent local gentry headed by Sir Hugh Bodrugan. (The latter was said by local legend to have escaped capture by jumping his horse over a cliff at ‘Bodrugan’s Leap’.25) Henry had the real Warwick taken out of the Tower and paraded through London to a meeting of the Church Convocation, where assorted senior clerics (led by the Chancellor, Archbishop Morton) could vouch for his being genuine. He then spent the night with Morton at Lambeth Palace and was taken on to the royal country residence at Sheen (i.e. the later Richmond) up the Thames to be shown to the court.26 But this precaution did not stop the treachery of the Earl of Lincoln–the alternative Yorkist claimant to Warwick. Lincoln had been present at a Council meeting to discuss what to do about Simnel and had spoken to the genuine Warwick at the Convocation, so he knew that the boy was a fake; nevertheless at the end of the Council discussions on 9 March he headed home to Suffolk and immediately took ship for Duchess Margaret’s court.27 On 19 March, according to Lincoln’s attainder, he was meeting unknown persons–probably Lovell and/ or Duchess Margaret–in Flanders. Meanwhile, his servants were tracked by royal agents on an apparent mission to Hull and Yorkshire with saddlebags full of gold, no doubt recruiting more rebels.28

  The defection of Lincoln was a major blow to Henry and gave the planned rising a credible military leader as well as an alternative candidate to the throne to Warwick, should the latter be murdered or set aside as too young or barred by reason of Clarence’s 1478 attainder. Indeed, it was subsequently claimed that Lovell had come to see Lincoln during the royal visit to York, shortly before the planned attack on the King, and asked him to join in the plot but had been turned down as the attack was too risky.29 The prospect of a successful revolt would have been increased then had Lovell succeeded in attracting Lincoln’s support. It was perhaps a little odd that Lincoln should set aside his own claims to the throne in favour of an untried boy of eleven or twelve–but, like the Duke of Buckingham in 1483, he may have hoped to supersede his allies’ pretender later in the rebellion. He also knew Simnel to be a fake; but he and Lovell may have intended to supersede the Oxford youth by the real Warwick once they had rescued the latter, a twist of plan worthy of Anthony Hope’s Prisoner of Zenda. The most surprising potential ally for the plot was, however, ex-Queen Elizabeth Woodville, who suddenly had all her lands and property seized at the time of the plot’s discovery in February 1487 and was required to retire to the apartments of the Queen Dowager at Bermondsey Abbey near London for the rest of her life. The reason given was that she had betrayed the Christmas 1483 agreement with Henry by proposing to arrange marriages for her daughters (including Elizabeth of York) with Richard III;30 but Henry had known that when he took the throne and had then restored all the lands that Richard had taken from her. She had been welcomed back to court, and had been in attendance at Henry’s son Prince Arthur’s baptism at Winchester Cathedral in September 1486 as the baby’s godmother.

  Why did Henry wait until February 1487 to strip her of her lands? Some historians have argued that she was in ill-health (she was aged around fifty and died five years later) and genuinely wanted to retire from court; and she was to receive some future signs of royal goodwill such as a Christmas present of fifty marks in 1490. In November 1487 he was to propose her as a potential wife for the widowed King James III of Scotland (fifteen years her junior), which admittedly would get her out of the country for good; and in November 1489 she was summoned to court to meet a visiting French relative.31 But all these acts may have been signs of necessary political goodwill and ‘normality’ in the royal family to impress observers; the previous Queen-Mother ‘exiled’ to Bermondsey Abbey, Henry’s grandmother Catherine of Valois, had recently had her secret second marriage and children exposed and died a few months after her ‘retirement’.32 There is a strong possibility that Henry’s mother and principal adviser, Margaret Beaufort, did not get on with the ex-Queen, her successful rival for court power in the 1470s, and their rapprochement over the Henry–Elizabeth betrothal of December 1483 had been out of political necessity and mutual dislike of Richard III. There was not room for two formidable matriarchs at the Tudor court by this argument, and Margaret made sure that Henry removed his meddling mother-in-law–who may have been angry at the long delay before Henry had his wife crowned.33 It would seem illogical for Elizabeth Woodville to retaliate by planning to dethrone her son-in-law, particularly in favour of the son of the Duke of Clarence who had threatened her, her royal sons, and her husband’s position in 1477–8. (According to one theory discussed earlier, she had even been responsible for having Clarence killed.) She would hardly have believed Simnel to be the genuine Warwick, nor was she likely to have been on good terms with Richard III’s chosen heir, Lincoln–supplanter of both her royal sons (assuming they were alive) and her daughter. It has been suggested that she could have intended to have Henry murdered or forced into exile so her daughter, the Queen, could re-marry–Lincoln or the genuine Warwick?–and retain her title, with Elizabeth Woodville not Margaret Beaufort as the new ‘power behind the throne’.34 One theory even has it that Simnel was a ‘stalking-horse’ for the real Edward V, alive and hidden in exile as Elizabeth Woodville knew, and that the boy who was to land in England and lead the rebel army at Stoke Field in 1487 was not the Oxford Simnel but the older ex-King, installed in his place. The boy captured at Stoke was said to be around fifteen–older than Simnel–and some Irish rebels had said that they were fighting to ‘restore’ the King, i.e. to restore Edward V.35 But this is unlikely in the extreme; it is more probable that the ex-Queen was targeted by the suspicious Margaret Beaufort as a potential ‘kingmaker’ for Warwick (on good grounds or not) and that Henry wanted to secure her property for himself.

  Whether or not Elizabeth Woodville was hedging her bets in case Lincoln and the fake Warwick won the forthcoming conflict, the Yorkist plan now proceeded to invasion thanks to military support from Duchess Margaret. Given that Henry was an ally of France and had hired mercenaries from there in 1485, France’s rival Maximilian (sole ruler of Burgundy since his wife’s death in 1482) had no reason to interfere in Henry’s favour. On 5 May Lincoln and Lovell landed from the Low Countries in Ireland, with 2,000 Swabian and Swiss mercenaries loaned by Duchess Margaret under a professional commander, Martin Schwartz. This was equivalent to the aid that Charles VIII’s French regency had given to Henry in 1485–and unlike Henry in Wales in 1485 the invaders had a substantial body of local Anglo-‘Celtic’ nobles waiting to join them. Kildare and his allies welcomed them to Dublin, as did a body of English Yorkist refugees, including Bodrugan and the ex-commander of the Calais garrison, Thomas David. The Church under the Archbishop of Dublin recognized Simnel as the Earl of Warwick, and on 26 May (Whit Sunday) he was proclaimed as rightful king by the Bishop of Meath at Christchurch Cathedral and then crowned as ‘Edward VI’ by him with a circlet taken from a statue of the Virgin Mary at a nearby church.36 (The theory that Simnel was really Edward V does not explain why in that case he was not crowned under his real identity, avoiding muddle later.) The Archbishop of Armagh stayed away, but to all intents and purposes Simnel and his controllers were as firmly in cha
rge of Ireland as the refugee Duke of York had been in 1459–60; as in 1460, invasion of England was the next move. The last claimant to be King of England who had been crowned outside London due to a ‘usurper’ occupying the city had been the child Henry III (crowned at Gloucester) in 1216, when Prince Louis of France held London–and that had not stopped him from going on to regain the lost areas of his kingdom later. He had been re-crowned in Westminster Abbey in 1220 after winning the civil war–and possibly Simnel would have been re-crowned later in a similar manner. But the Chronicle of Calais and Polydore Vergil heard that Lincoln intended to supersede him in case of victory.37

  The Yorkist army landed in Furness in Lancashire, safely cut off from loyalist territory by the Fells and by Morecambe Bay, on 4 June. They first landed on Foulney Island off shore to occupy undefended Peel Castle, indicating caution in case of loyalists in the vicinity, and then were welcomed to the mainland by local Sir Thomas Broughton–Lincoln’s host and fellow-plotter in 1486.38 As of 8 May Henry was at Kenilworth Castle awaiting invasion, well-placed in central England as Richard III had been in 1485 but also facing a rebel force that landed in an isolated region and was able to advance across mountains to central England unopposed. The situation appeared to be one of déjà vu from 1485, or even from Warwick’s invasion of south-west England in 1470, and there was no guarantee that all the great lords would be more loyal to Henry than they had been to Edward IV and Richard III. In these circumstances, it is perhaps surprising that Henry had not summoned most of the garrison of Calais to aid him, as this compact and fully-trained body of 6–700 troops could make all the difference. Or did he fear treachery from them? Lincoln’s small army marched unopposed across the Pennines into Yorkshire, joined by the two Lord Scropes (of Bolton and Masham)–who later claimed their tenants had forced them to do so–and by Thomas Metcalfe of Knappa, Edward Franke of Knighton, Sir Robert Percy of Scotton, Sir Ralph Assheton of Fritton-in-Redesdale, and Sir Edmund Hastings of Pickering. Tenants of Jervaulx Abbey may also have been involved. They defeated a smaller Tudor loyalist force under Lord Clifford on the night of 10 June at Bramham Moor, scene of a crucial Lancastrian victory against rebel Percies in 1408, but failed to secure entry to York when the two Lords Scrope attacked a gate on the 12th. The loyalist Earl of Northumberland was nearby with his tenants, which may have stiffened resistance; but York’s civic authorities had a record of caution and in 1471 had only admitted Edward IV on his return to England when he assured them that he was only seeking his legal rights as Duke of York, not to depose the current King Henry VI.