Tudor_Passion. Manipulation. Murder. the Story of England's Most Notorious Royal Family

by Leanda de Lisle

  It was not long before the shadowy figures behind this conspiracy of the pretender emerged. The first was Edward IV’s nephew, John de la Pole, Earl of Lincoln: the eldest of three brothers who would trouble the Tudor dynasty well into the reign of Henry VIII. Richard III was believed to have named Lincoln as his heir, and his aunt, Margaret, Duchess of Burgundy, had raised an army of Swiss and German mercenaries to place at his disposal. Madame la Grande, as the duchess was known in Burgundy, was the widow of Charles the Bold of Burgundy to whom she had been married in 1468.18 The duchy which now gives its name to a mere province of France was, at the time of her marriage, then a great power, stretching across not only what remains under that name, but also most of north-west France, Belgium and the Netherlands. Charles the Bold had provided his brother-in-law, Edward IV, with part of the army with which he had overthrown the re-established Henry VI in 1471. There was no reason to suppose that this ‘renewed’ Lancastrian dynasty, the Tudors, could not be similarly overthrown.

  In April 1487 Lincoln sailed with his army from Burgundy to Ireland to join the pretender. His grandfather had been Lord Lieutenant of the country and he had no shortage of friends awaiting him there. Henry, by contrast, angered the most powerful figure in Ireland, Gerald Fitzgerald, Earl of Kildare, by refusing to confirm his role as deputy Lord Lieutenant. As soon as Lincoln landed in Ireland he was welcomed with open arms by Kildare. He promptly recognised the pretender as the ‘real’ Edward Plantagenet and on 24 May the boy was crowned in Dublin as ‘Edward VI’, with a gold circlet taken from a statue of the Virgin Mary. The following month, with Kildare’s backing, Lincoln launched the first, and last, Irish invasion of England with ‘Edward VI’ at its head.

  According to Tudor accounts the pretender’s real name was Lambert Simnel, the son of an artisan in Oxford who had been groomed for his role by a local priest.19 Lincoln, who had property near Oxford, is assumed to have paid for the necessary education. In public, however, he and the other commanders had to treat the child as their ‘king’. Disembarking at Furness in Lancashire, the rebels moved rapidly eastwards, crossing the Pennines into Wensleydale, gathering recruits under the banner of Edward VI, before pressing south. They included a core of Yorkists, their new English recruits, 4,000 Irishmen and the 1,500 German mercenaries, known as Landsknecht, who had been provided by Margaret of Burgundy. These latter were a fearsome sight. Their brightly coloured clothes were taken from fallen opponents, and since they didn’t always fit properly, they slashed and tied them; while their hats were similarly decorated with bright and gaudy feathers. It inspired fashionable dress at many of the courts of Europe – minus the bloodstains of the fallen enemies that befouled the mercenaries’ costumes and added to the terror of the spectacle of their advance.

  The scale of Lincoln’s army was similar to Henry’s invasion force in 1485, and the fragility of the Tudor king’s grip on the throne was evident in London where rumours of a rebel victory saw people take to the streets on behalf of ‘Edward VI’. Henry was well prepared for the confrontation, however. He had prayed at the famous English shrine to the Virgin at Walsingham, and as he awaited news of the rebel advance in the Midlands, he had twice the rebel numbers at his command. They included ‘a great host of the Earl of Derby’s folks’ – his stepfather Thomas Stanley’s men. When the news came Henry bid farewell to ‘our dearest wife and . . . our dearest mother’ and headed north from Kenilworth Castle in Warwickshire with Jasper Tudor to face the rebels.

  The armies met on a hillside near the village of East Stoke in Nottinghamshire. ‘Both sides fought with the bitterest energy,’ Polydore Vergil records, ‘the Germans, so practised in warfare, were in the forefront of the battle and yielded little to the English . . . but the Irish, though they fought most spiritedly, were nevertheless (in the tradition of their country) unprotected by body armour and [they] suffered heavy casualties, their slaughter striking no little terror into the other combatants.’ As the Irish fell in their hundreds Lincoln was killed, and ‘the lad’ Simnel, whom the ‘rebels called King Edward’, was captured.20

  Margaret Beaufort greeted news of her son’s victory with a celebratory note in her Book of Hours. A prayer, copied in, also fervently beseeched ‘Almighty God’ for his favour in sustaining ‘our King Henry to govern the realm and increase in glory’.21 Henry, she knew, still faced the major problem of how to re-engage Yorkist loyalties. He began work on this immediately with a northern progress through the Yorkist heartlands and the announcement of his wife’s imminent coronation. It took place that November and was preceded by the first river pageant ever to take place on the eve of a queen’s coronation.22 It proved a splendid occasion. Crowds cheered the tall and lovely Elizabeth of York as she was rowed in a great barge decorated with tapestries followed by other barges filled with the nobility. Yet even here violence lurked close to the surface. The procession to Westminster Abbey, where she was crowned that Sunday, degenerated into a bloody farce as the crowds fought furiously over the ray cloth laid for her to walk on from Westminster Hall. There was a tradition that once a coronation procession had passed, people could keep whatever they grabbed of the cloth, but the free-for-all got so frenzied that ‘in the [queen’s] presence certain persons were slain’.23

  The banquet that night proved more decorous with Margaret Beaufort and the king watching the festivities through a latticed window. Twenty-three dishes were served for the first course and twenty-nine for the second, from pheasant and perch to a ‘castle of jelly wisely made’. The ten-year-old Lambert Simnel was soon to be found working in the royal kitchens turning the spit for occasions such as this. Henry believed humiliation would be more effective than death in erasing the aura of kingship in Simnel who, whatever his orgins, had been anointed with Holy Chrism – and it worked. Simnel was eventually promoted to trainer of the king’s hawks, surviving well into the next century.24 Yet the successful conclusion to the conspiracy, and Elizabeth of York’s magnificent coronation, had done little to make Henry more secure.

  There is a story that Lincoln and the other rebel commanders at East Stoke had been buried with green willow staves plunged into their hearts, to prevent them rising up once more to trouble the living.25 There were no stakes, however, for the vanished brothers of Elizabeth of York. Not only were their bodies lost, but the fate of their souls had also seemingly been abandoned. Research for this book has uncovered no references to public prayers or Masses being said for the dead princes.26 Henry may not have wanted chantries – which were endowments that paid for Masses for the souls of loved ones – since the churches where they were established could have become a centre for the kind of cult that he wanted to avoid. But their absence would have struck people as very strange.

  Praying for the dead was a crucial part of medieval religion. In December 1485, when Henry issued a special charter refounding his favourite religious order, the ascetic Observant Friars at Greenwich, he noted that offering Masses for the dead was ‘the greatest work of piety and mercy, for through it souls would be purged’.27 It was unthinkable not to help the souls of your loved ones pass from purgatory to heaven with prayers and Masses. On the other hand, it was akin to a curse to say a requiem for a living person – you were effectively praying for their death. The obvious question posed by the lack of prayers for the princes was, were they still alive? And, as Vergil recalled, only four years later there appeared as if ‘raised from the dead one of the sons of King Edward . . . a youth by the name of Richard’.28 It was to have a devastating effect on Henry as a man, and as a king.

  11

  THE LOST PRINCE

  ACCORDING TO THE TALE THAT REACHED THE ENGLISH COURT, THE assassin sent in 1483 to murder the ten-year-old Richard, Duke of York could not bring himself to kill ‘so little a child’. Instead he had helped the boy to flee the Tower to Europe, telling him never to reveal his identity. Remembered as ‘joyful and witty’, Richard was recognised only when he appeared in Ireland in 1491 as an attractive eighteen-year-o
ld with a lazy eye, working in the cloth business. Three marks on his body were said to confirm his identity, although the detective work done for Henry concluded that the man modelling his master’s silks was, in fact, born in Tournai, Burgundy. There he was known as ‘little Peter the orphan’, in Dutch ‘Pierrekin Wezebecque’, a name anglicised to Perkin Warbeck. The silks he modelled were as princely as he got.

  There is no account of how Elizabeth Woodville, in her convent, reacted to the news of her son ‘Richard’ supposedly being alive. We do know, however, that Henry had been treating her well: by 1490 she was receiving an annuity to compensate for the lands she had lost to her daughter, and even after Perkin appeared, the king gave a Christmas gift of fifty marks to ‘our most dear Queen Elizabeth mother to our own dear wife’.1 Yet when she died in July 1492 she was buried ‘privily . . . without any solemn dirge done for her obit’, indeed ‘nothing was done solemnly for her’ except the provision of a hearse, ‘such as they use for common people’. It has been suggested that this may reflect her dying wishes to be buried ‘without pomp’, but while Henry V had eschewed any ‘damnable superfluities’ for his funeral, and Henry VII would seek to avoid undue ‘pomp’ at his, they still expected, and got, amongst the most stately funerals of the Middle Ages.2 Elizabeth Woodville most emphatically had not, and this caused negative comment at the time. Henry remained anxious not to encourage nostalgia for the past glories of the House of York.

  In common with Lambert Simnel, Perkin had a powerful foreign backer – in his case Charles VIII of France, and it was to France that Perkin travelled from Ireland under his new name of Richard, Duke of York. Charles had been irritated by Henry’s support for the independence of Brittany and now hoped to overthrow the king he had backed against Richard III in 1485. Henry, who believed in using maximum aggression against any perceived threat, promptly laid siege to Boulogne with an army of 15,000 men. Owen Tudor’s son, Sir David Owen, was made a knight bannaret for his courage in the field and the siege was successfully concluded with a treaty in which Henry gave up his support for the independence of Brittany, while Henry achieved the two things he most wanted: a pension to pay for his future security, and Perkin’s expulsion from France.

  Unhappily for Henry, Perkin was still free and he fled on to Burgundy where Edward IV’s sister Margaret, Duchess of Burgundy, greeted him as her long-lost nephew. The two opposing Margarets in Henry’s life – his devoted mother and the duchess – had met in 1480 during the duchess’ last visit to King Edward’s court.3 Tall, like Edward IV, the duchess towered over Margaret Beaufort, who later sniffed about the huge hands the women of Burgundy seemed to have. She also had a formidable presence, with a stiff-backed carriage, a reserved manner, unsmiling, grey eyes, and ‘an air of intelligence and will’. The firm belief that women were prisoners of their emotions saw the duchess’ motives in backing Perkin ascribed in England to a hysterical desire to avenge Richard III. Polydore Vergil wrote of her ‘insatiable hatred’ for Henry, and the chronicler Edward Hall of her ‘frantic mood’ as she worked ‘to suck his blood and compass his destruction’. In fact, the duchess acted solely in the interests of Burgundy and worked closely with her step-family.

  On the death of the duchess’ beloved stepdaughter Marie in 1482, the Duchy of Burgundy had been inherited by Marie’s son, Philip the Fair. The old duchess had since worked closely with Philip’s father, Maximilian von Hapsburg, who became Holy Roman Emperor in 1493, and was to be regent of Burgundy until Philip was sixteen in 1494. The family were concerned by Henry’s rapprochement with their French enemy. But they also had possible ambitions to take England from Henry, just as he had taken it from Richard III. Maximilian was descended from John of Gaunt in a legitimate bloodline, and once Perkin had been used to oust Henry, Maximilian commented icily, ‘he would dispose of this duke ad libitum suum’ – that is, as he saw fit.4

  Henry might have solved the Perkin problem by proving Perkin was not who he claimed to be. But he had left it rather late to start looking for the bodies of the princes in the Tower. Rather than risk finding at least one body missing, Henry hit upon a means of advertising the death of the little Richard, Duke of York, without mentioning the princes at all. He would bestow the boy’s title on his second son.5

  Henry’s decision must have been a painful one for Elizabeth of York, who had loved her brother. Even nineteen years after he had disappeared she was still giving gifts to his old nurse.6 But dutifully she joined the celebrations when her three-year-old son, ‘Lord Harry, Duke of York’, was invested with her brother’s title in November 1494. It was an occasion the future Henry VIII would never forget. There were three days of tournaments and banquets, with Lord Harry dressed for his parade in a miniature suit of armour, while his five-year-old sister, the princess Margaret, awarded the prizes after the tournaments.

  But their father was aware there were traitors at the feasts. An English conspirator ‘turned’ by Henry’s spies in Burgundy had revealed a plan to assassinate him before an invasion was launched.7 Henry’s children were to be disinherited – or killed – in favour of ‘Richard, Duke of York’. And at least one traitor was very close to the Tudor family: Henry’s step-uncle, Sir William Stanley.8 Henry had lavished his favour on Sir William since his forces had won the battle of Bosworth for the king in 1485, and he was reputedly the richest commoner in England. Yet Sir William was reported as having said that if Richard, Duke of York, were alive he would never stand against him. Over the next few weeks Henry watched and waited.

  The Christmas celebrations were as lavishly celebrated as ever. The previous year Sir William had spent Twelfth Night with the royal family at Westminster. The entertainments had included ‘St George’ and a beautiful maiden leading a fire-spitting dragon through the hall, before the singing and dancing began with a procession of twelve masked men and women. As the music played the men danced and leapt so that spangles of gold fell from their costumes and scattered over the floor, while the ladies, moving as one in their long dresses, seemed to be gliding. Afterwards there were wines, ales and fine food spread over a tablecloth that glittered and sparkled in the candlelight. The entertainment went on until dawn.9 On 7 January 1495, however, the new day brought Sir William’s downfall. A spy was prompted to ‘reveal’ all to Henry, who ordered Sir William’s arrest.

  Sir William believed his offence – merely saying that he would not stand against Richard, Duke of York – was small enough to earn the king’s forgiveness. But, Vergil recorded, ‘Henry feared such leniency to be dangerous to himself – others would be encouraged by William’s avoidance of punishment and would undertake similar acts of folly’. The man who had saved Henry’s life at Bosworth was executed in February 1495. Henry’s last acknowledgment of the red coats of Sir William’s men riding to his rescue at Bosworth was the £10 he gave to the executioner to make the death as quick and painless as possible. Betrayal by such a man had made the threat of assassination more frightening and Henry withdrew to his chambers as his suspicions bred. It was yet one more example of treachery by a king’s close kin and friends: Edward IV by his brother Clarence, Edward V by his uncle Richard III, Richard III by his ally the Duke of Buckingham.

  Determined to survive, Henry’s desire to control his kingdom now intensified. The nobility were sidelined in favour of officials from lowly origins who owed him everything, and he did not create many new nobles from their ranks. There had been fifty-five nobles at his accession, but by the time of his death there were only forty-two.10 Rather than ruling with the elite, as Kings of England always had, Henry kept them in fear. He imposed fines for offences, real and imagined, and obliged them to sign bonds for their good behaviour. Henry asked to be paid back only a little each year – so long as they retained his favour. Otherwise they would be ruined. Henry was ruling at the edge of the law, pushing his private rights to preserve his public position, and as the money rolled in the royal accounts were annotated minutely in Henry’s own hand. But the more powerful he be
came the less regal he appeared. In Burgundy, Perkin, by contrast, resembled the young Henry of 1485, the ‘fair unknown’, awaiting his opportunity.

  Perkin had his own court in exile, and by July 1495 he was ready to take ‘his’ throne, setting sail from Burgundy with fourteen ships and an invasion force of 6,000 men.11 Perkin had assumed all the charm expected of a prince, but he had none of the battle training. When he reached Deal in Kent his advance guard of 163 were slaughtered on the shore and Perkin ran away with his army, sailing on to Ireland and then Scotland, where at last he found refuge at the court of the twenty-two-year-old James IV. The Scottish king was happy at least to pretend that he believed Perkin was Richard – annoying Kings of England was a pleasurable and traditional pastime for Scottish monarchs.12 He had Perkin married to a beautiful young lady of the court, Lady Catherine Gordon, and agreed to take part in an invasion of England.

  Perkin prepared a manifesto, which he hoped would prompt spontaneous uprisings in his favour as soon as the invasion began. It described Henry as the son of ‘Owen Tudor of low birth in the country of Wales’, a usurper, who had cruelly raised taxes, stopped valuable trade with Burgundy, undermined God’s order by replacing the nobility with commoners, and persecuted them with his financial bonds.13 Perkin promised to end this wickedness and return to the ‘good governance’ of his ‘father’ Edward IV. From the perspective of his host, King James, if Perkin ended up on the throne all well and good: James was more interested, however, in the benefits of a popular strike against Scotland’s hated neighbour, and large-scale pillaging. As soon as the invasion began James IV and his Scots ‘laid waste the fields, pillaged and then burnt the houses and villages. The men who resisted he cruelly killed.’14 This destroyed any chance of the northern English rising for Perkin and he retreated, aghast, back to Scotland to consider his next move.