Henry VII

by S B Chrimes

  This startling triumph of the ‘Home Rule’ lords of Ireland was perhaps more than York could have viewed with equanimity if he had himself become king of England and lord of Ireland, but when the turn of events in England brought his son to the throne and with him the merging of the whole Mortimer inheritance in Ireland and Wales with the crown, there was little Edward IV could do to undo what had been done. Not even the ruthless intervention of John Tiptoft, earl of Worcester, as king’s lieutenant in March 1470, could achieve much more than procure the execution of the greatest of the Anglo-Irish exponents of statecraft, Thomas Fitzgerald, earl of Desmond, and to antagonize those Irish lords who did not rejoice at the loss of one of their number.

  Dominance in Ireland soon passed for many years to Thomas Fitzgerald, seventh earl of Kildare, and from 1478, with intermissions, to his son and heir Gerald, eighth earl. Gerald became the real king of Ireland, and had behind him almost all the Anglo-Irish, except the Butlers, and wielded a sway over the Celtic-Irish that had been beyond the reach of any of the Anglo-Irish before him. Richard III’s short reign could not achieve anything in Ireland, and the Kildares continued to rule as deputies no matter who was king’s lieutenant in absentia, whether Richard III’s baby son, Edward, or John de la Pole, earl of Lincoln, or from 11 March 1486, Jasper Tudor.

  The change of dynasty in England after Bosworth brought to Kildare and the ‘Home Rule’ lords the prospect that they could not indefinitely rule Ireland in the name of the Yorkist regime with the connivance of the new dynasty in England. They must either abandon Yorkist associations and support the Tudor regime, whatever the political consequences might be, or they must at all costs hold on to the Yorkist pretensions and defy the Tudor, if possible to the point of overthrowing him. It was the latter course that they chose, for a time. When, therefore, Lambert Simnel appeared in Dublin, suitably trained beforehand, the Irish lords had no difficulty in deciding that he was the earl of Warwick, the very son of George, duke of Clarence, who had been born in Dublin in 1449, and who, with his alleged son, could be regarded as in some sense an ‘Irish’ prince. The chance of getting a king of their own was too great for the Irish lords; and in their eagerness they went so far as to allege that the boy in the Tower of London was the real imposter foisted upon the people by Henry VII to deprive the lawful inheritor – the good duke of Clarence – their ‘countryman and protector’. Hence Lambert Simnel found himself crowned with a circlet of gold filched from a nearby statue of the Blessed Virgin Mary and proclaimed King Edward VI in Dublin on 24 May 1487.

  How long it took for Richard Simons, a priest of twenty-eight years, to train Lambert Simnel sufficiently to make him into a plausible Yorkist imposter is not known.1 It can hardly be supposed that Simons acted on his own initiative alone, and probably John, earl of Lincoln, had some share in the plot at an early date. It is possible that rumours began to circulate by the end of November 1486, but there is no evidence that Henry VII had any intimation of the nature of the plot until early 1487. By the end of January, steps were taken against a few suspects,1 but the continued presence of the earl of Lincoln at the council meeting at Sheen on 2 February,2 at which measures to combat the plot were considered, suggests that even then Henry did not realize that the leading Yorkist himself was implicated. Possibly enough suspicion, however, had fallen upon the queen dowager to induce Henry to deprive her of her widow’s jointure, which was transferred to Queen Elizabeth, and to remove her to the convent at Bermondsey on an annual pension. But it is very doubtful if the reason for this action was suspicion at all.3

  The subsequent flight of the earl of Lincoln to Flanders, where he joined Viscount Lovel, must have startled Henry into a fuller realization of the gravity of the conspiracy.4 The ever-ready sympathy and support of Margaret of Burgundy for such purposes was quickly extended to Lincoln and Lovel, and with her aid and money they were able to land in Ireland on 5 May, backed by some two thousand German mercenaries led by the redoubtable soldier of fortune Martin Schwartz. The arrival of this potentially formidable support contributed to the decision of the Irish lords not only to recognize Lambert Simnel – for reasons indicated above – but also to proceed to a coronation of him as Edward VI on 24 May. Doubtfully reinforced by a number of ill-equipped Irishmen, the conspirators set out to try their luck at another Bosworth, and made a landing at Furness on the Lancashire coast on 4 June.

  Henry meantime had taken precautions, caused likely coasts to be guarded, and as information received pointed to the probability of an invasion from Ireland, gradually moved himself westwards and by 8 May fixed his headquarters at Kenilworth. On receipt of news of the landing, he moved towards Newark, and near Stoke encountered the rebels on 16 June.

  Little reliable information from contemporary sources exists as to what happened at the battle of Stoke, and we have to rely largely on what Polydore Vergil said some thirty years later.1 It seems that the fighting was stubborn, and no easy victory was obtained by Henry’s forces. The German mercenaries led by Martin Schwartz, experienced and hardy soldiers, fought pertinaciously; the Irish showed spirit and courage, though weakened by lack of body-armour, and suffered heavy losses, but the battle continued without much advantage to either side for some time (the actual time is not stated), and Vergil specifically states that only the ‘first line’ of the king’s forces was committed to the fray and sustained the combat. Why only a part of the royal forces participated is a matter for speculation, but it is hardly justified to suppose that the other parts ‘dragged their feet’ awaiting a crucial moment to intervene on one side or the other, after the style of the Stanleys at Bosworth. In fact, it seems, the final charge of the first line alone proved decisive and provoked a rout of the rebels. Complete disaster for them was the outcome. John, earl of Lincoln, Martin Schwartz, Thomas Broughton, Thomas Geraldine, the Irish leader, were all slain; Viscount Lovel was either killed or fled and disappeared for ever. Lambert Simnel and his tutor Richard Simons were captured. Simnel was to be found a place in the royal kitchens, and later to be promoted to king’s falconer, and was still alive when Vergil wrote.2 Simons, as a priest, was destined for life imprisonment.

  Whether the plot ‘came near to shaking Henry’s throne’ is doubtful.3 The rebel invaders failed to attract any appreciable recruits even in the Lancashire districts where Thomas Broughton held sway and which had been chosen as a favourable landing place. Without the German and Irish soldiery no battle could have been staged, and the incursion of these in itself was not likely to evoke much enthusiasm even among the pro-Yorkist elements. But the fact that a battle had to be fought within two years of Bosworth must have given Henry VII much food for anxious thought. The risks from his personal participation were too great, for his own death or capture on the field would certainly bring the dynasty to a sudden end. There were to be no more Bosworths or Stokes, in fact, but Henry VII’s wary diplomacy would be exerted to the full in the years to come to avoid the chances of any repetition of a similar military threat, whether on behalf of another imposter or any more genuine Yorkist pretender. As has, very rightly, been remarked, ‘Henry VII was a man who had learned in years of precarious exile to abhor needless risks’.1

  Two measures Henry had to take as soon as possible. He must attaint the principal rebels and try to strengthen the executive. He must try, so far as he could, to deal with the chief source of the recent threat – Ireland.

  His second parliament met on 9 November, the first with Morton as chancellor, and was dissolved by 18 December.2 The inevitable act of attainder was passed, and twenty-eight of the rebels were brought within its scope.3 Some of the king’s councillors were given statutory powers to deal with certain kinds of offences especially likely to undermine law and order – by the wrongly so-called ‘Star Chamber’ act.4 A notable additional provision was an act authorizing a jury of the king’s Household to enquire whether any member of it below the rank of a peer had conspired to murder the king, or any lord or member of the King’s Council, or
the steward, treasurer, or controller, and making any such offence a felony. Before the short parliament was over, and with the principal Yorkist claimant killed at Stoke, Henry could proceed to stage the coronation of his queen,5 who by then had been the mother of his son and heir Arthur, for more than a year.

  It was less easy to deal with Ireland. There could be no hope of any major moves as yet to restore the legal position in Anglo-Irish relations that had existed before 1460, but steps had to be taken to recall the Irish lords to their allegiances. As early as 5 July 1487 Henry VII wrote to the pope6 asking for the excommunication of the Irish bishops who had participated in the coronation of Simnel, which request was complied with in a bull of January 1488. The town of Waterford had stood out for Henry VII and had suffered a six weeks’ siege by the Desmonds, and in October 1487 was sent a communication from the king commending their loyalty and giving it letters of marque to act against the earl of Kildare and Dublin.1 But it was not until May 1488 that Sir Richard Edgecombe, a counsellor and comptroller of the Household, was commissioned to go over to Ireland, with power to treat for ‘the sound rule of peace, armed with pardons for those who would submit, and to administer oaths of fealty and allegiance, and to imprison rebels and traitors’.2 Landing at Kinsale on 27 June, Edgecombe with five hundred men proceeded by way of Waterford to Dublin, but it was not until 21 July that the lords assembled took the oath of allegiance, and thereupon received their pardons. The earl of Kildare and some forty others who had supported Simnel now made their peace with the king, enabling Edgecombe to leave Ireland by 30 July. His mission can hardly have made any great impression upon the Irish ‘Home Rule’ lords of the might of King Henry, but at least they were reminded of the existence of the lord of Ireland and of their legal relationship to him. At the time no doubt it was as much as Henry VII could undertake to do. Six years were to elapse before a more formidable visitation, in the person of Sir Edward Poynings, was to be staged. Before then the second imposter, Perkin Warbeck, was to appear, without however receiving much comfort in Ireland; and international entanglements in Brittany, France, the Netherlands, and Scotland were to preoccupy Henry VII. In the meantime, Gerald, eighth earl of Kildare, remained deputy in Ireland.

  In 1491 Perkin Warbeck raised the internal security problem again in a new form. But in the meantime Franco-Breton relations reached a climax, and obliged Henry to take some sort of stand, reluctant though he was to commit himself too far on either side. The embarrassment of the situation, from his point of view, was acute. He owed his early preservation from Yorkist designs to Duke Francis II, and he owed his successful expedition in 1485 and therefore his throne to Anne of Beaujeu’s regime on behalf of Charles VIII. It was not to England’s interest to acquiesce too readily in the overrunning of Brittany by France and the consequential expansion of the influence of the French monarchy to the Breton coast and ports. But he could not dismiss the possibility that France, if provoked, might support a rival claimant to the throne of England, just as it had assisted him to overthrow Richard III. He could not, in any case, aid one side without incurring charges of ingratitude from the other. His military resources were slender; he could not afford a very active intervention, and, although there was some pro-Breton and anti-French feeling among his subjects, some of them did not stop short of a murderous insurrection in order to evade contribution to a tax for war purposes, the collection of which generally fell far below the total sum authorized.1 The murder of Henry Percy, earl of Northumberland, at Topcliffe in Yorkshire on 28 April 1489, was an ugly incident, induced partly by opposition to his collection of the tax voted in the parliament of January of that year and partly also by his personal unpopularity. The death of the equivocal earl who had failed to show his hand at Bosworth may have been viewed with mixed feelings by Henry VII, but the insurrectionary assassination of the warden-general of the East and Middle Marches towards Scotland who was also sheriff of Northumberland called for swift action. One of the leaders of the rising, John à Chambre, was captured and executed, but another, Sir John Egremont, fled to Margaret of York’s court.2 It is not surprising, therefore, that Henry VII’s first considerable involvement in foreign affairs did not bring any manifest lustre to the crown, but the Franco-Breton problem did bring him squarely into the framework of international diplomacy and into foreign commitments, in which he was either deserted or outsmarted by his allies. Notwithstanding his undertaking after the death of Duke Francis on 9 September 1488, to aid Anne, the twelve-year-old heiress of Brittany, at Breton cost by the terms of the Treaty of Redon, February 1489; and notwithstanding his negotiation of a coalition with Maximilian, ‘whose will to injure France was as constant as his inability to achieve his purpose’,3 and with Spain (Treaty of Medina del Campo, 27 March 1489), the Breton cause was irretrievably lost well before the time when, on 6 December 1491, Duchess Anne was married to the king of France.4

  The Treaty of Medina del Campo,5 the first substantial alliance into which Henry VII entered, apart from its somewhat delusive provisions aimed at France, not only foreshadowed the later marriage between his son and heir and a Spanish princess, but also included a reciprocal undertaking that neither sovereign would harbour or aid any rebels against the other. To Henry this was probably the most important point at the time. For before the year was over, fresh plots against him were being weaved, and in October or November 1491, Perkin Warbeck made his first public appearance at Cork, and soon Henry had to reckon with a Yorkist ghost that could not be easily laid, for now it was that of Richard, duke of York, whose demise in the Tower of London was generally assumed, but could not be proved. From now on, the recognition or otherwise by foreign powers of Warbeck as the son and heir of Edward IV became a major consideration in Henry VII’s framing of policy.

  The precise origins of the plot that brought Perkin Warbeck into the arena as a Yorkist pretender remain obscure and uncertain.1 Whatever the earlier stages may have been,2 it seems clear that his appearance at Cork in the autumn of 1491 and his acceptance as a pretender was no unpremeditated accident but was the first overt action in the unfolding of the plan; it seems equally clear that, whether Margaret of York had been a party to the plot at this stage, or not,3 Charles VIII was implicated1 and intended to use Warbeck as a threat to Henry VII should his participation in Franco-Breton politics become too inconvenient.

  At first, it seems, the intention was to pass Warbeck off as another Warwick. Apparently Warbeck himself declined this role, and no doubt it would have been too much for the Irish lords to be expected to swallow another impersonation of the prisoner in the Tower. Nor was there any virtue in the suggestion that he was a bastard son of Richard III. Far better for the newcomer to figure as one of the princes who had disappeared into the Tower and of whose demise no one could offer positive proof. Warbeck was therefore very quickly acclaimed, not indeed as Edward V–he would have been a little too old perhaps, and certainly too embarrassing a personage, as a previously proclaimed king, to impersonate. But his younger brother Richard, duke of York, offered an excellent target for the purpose, and Warbeck henceforth assumed the guise of the younger prince, and could at convenient times by some of the powers involved be designated King Richard IV, even though he was never to obtain a coronation by anyone.

  His reception in Ireland in 1491, however, was no more than cool. He did receive some welcome and support from important men of the town of Cork, which was within the domain of the earl of Desmond, who extended him some aid. Probably the earl of Kildare was also implicated, even though two years later he asserted in a letter to the earl of Ormond that he had not countenanced ‘the French lad’.2 Clearly, however, Warbeck was not going to secure the acclaim from the Irish lords that Simnel had received in 1487, and by early 1492 he was making overtures elsewhere. Early that year he wrote, supported by Desmond, to James IV of Scotland seeking aid.3 More immediate even if short-lived prospects were opened up by Charles VIII, who invited him to France, and received him as a prince with appropria
te honours.4 But Henry VII’s military intervention in defence of Anne of Brittany in October rapidly turned itself into a diplomatic negotiation which ended on 3 November in the Treaty of Ëtaples, and one item included in that agreement was that Charles VIII would not aid any of Henry VII’s rebels.1 Warbeck’s French holiday was therefore abruptly terminated, and he now turned to Margaret of York, who made no difficulty about ‘recognizing’ him as her nephew, even though she herself had been out of England for twenty-five years, except for a short visit in 1480, when her real nephew was aged about seven years. Now indeed Margaret could train Warbeck and prime him with recollections of Edward IV’s court and Yorkist family memoirs. Warbeck soon found himself under the protection of the Archduke Philip and his father Maximilian, who at this time was on bad terms with Henry VII and eager to patronize Yorkist exiles.