by David Field
‘No doubt you are already considering which of the princes of Europe she shall be married off to?’ she said, wryly.
‘You do me wrong, Mother,’ Henry choked back, ‘as ever. These are the tears of a father, not a king. As for the matter of my ingratitude towards those who assisted me to the crown, was it not you yourself who strove for all those years to persuade me to tilt for it? Why should you be so critical, now that I have achieved your ambition?’
Margaret leaned forward over Henry’s shoulder, and as he lifted the child towards her, she kissed it on the forehead. ‘See that you also fulfil the ambitions of your wife and children.’
Henry was back at Westminster the following week, when he had much to occupy his attention, thanks again to the agents of Richard Foxe who were busily monitoring events in Edinburgh. After a year of financing the rich lifestyle of the young couple residing at his Court, who were now expecting their second child, James IV of Scotland decided that the time was ripe to test England’s northern borders. Throughout the Summer of 1496, it was obvious to anyone who kept their eyes and ears open along the Lawnmarket, at the foot of the Castle, or on the greens before Holyrood Abbey, in the shade of Salisbury Crags, that an army of some size was being assembled. When it marched south with banners flying on 15th September, Foxe’s advisers assured him that it would not even reach Newcastle with the supplies it had. They were proved right shortly after Warbeck’s army crossed the Tweed at Coldstream to discover that the only ones waiting for them were soldiers commanded by Lord Neville, sent north from Newcastle by the Earl of Surrey. The intended Scottish invasion troops marched back into Edinburgh with more speed than they had left it, and James IV was sufficiently embarrassed to finance a journey across the Irish Sea for his former guest, while seeking humiliating peace terms with his English neighbours.
Foxe realised that James IV would be seeking to save face for having backed the wrong horse, and that he would lose a good deal of this if he negotiated directly with England in order to buy off the troops that were straining at their leash at his southern border, awaiting the order to settle some very old scores with their noisome northern neighbours. Foxe therefore engaged the good offices of the Spanish ambassador Don Pedro de Ayala, who was also an accredited ambassador at the English Court, and could travel backwards and forwards between the two nations’ capitals without attracting any undue attention, at the same time reporting back to his masters Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile. On this occasion, Foxe was able to employ, as his hidden go-between, the young and ambitious confessor to the Governor of Calais, Father Thomas Wolsey, who was eager for royal preferment.
Don Pedro had already proved invaluable in brokering the marriage contract between the Infanta Katarina de Aragon, now aged eleven, and Arthur, Prince of Wales, who had just celebrated his tenth birthday when Don Pedro succeeded in persuading James IV to sign the Treaty of Ayton, promising perpetual peace between England and Scotland, cemented with a marriage contract between the Scots king himself and the young English Princess Margaret, who was approaching seven years of age. Her mother and grandmother were appalled, and protested strongly at the arranged marriage of such a young girl to a supposed barbarian who was already in his mid-twenties, but Henry pacified them with assurances that she would not be handed over until she was of an age at which she could safely bear children.
It was a relatively joyous Christmas in 1486, with all the traditional feasting, pageantry and exchanges of gifts that had been severely banned by ‘Her Lady the King’s Mother’ the previous year, when in mourning for the passing of Jasper Tudor. In consequence, the merrymaking was enjoyed with even more enthusiasm than before, and it was early in January 1497 before anyone was in either the mood, or the bodily condition, to get back to the business of running the nation. At the head of the agenda for every Great Council meeting for the first half of the following year was the mounting threat from Cornwall.
Henry, through Foxe, had been kept well abreast of the plotting and planning that had been taking place in small tin-mining communities such as St. Keverne, but thought nothing of any of it, since the Londoners to whom the Cornishmen had looked for support were now too busy refilling their warehouses and commissioning vessels to cross to the Low Countries. However, when it was reported that over fifteen thousand Cornishmen had marched into neighbouring Devon, gathering support like a crudely armed snowball as they rolled east, action was clearly called for. Since the Scots had come to heel the previous year, the massive army that Giles Daubney had been granted, at public expense, was instructed to turn its eyes to the west and watch for insurgents on the march.
While they were looking westwards, the rebels sneaked past them to the south, convinced that the men of Kent — the birthplace of uprisings such as those of Wat Tyler and Jack Cade over a century in the past — would honour their treasonous traditions and join the tax protesters. When they not only failed to do so, but actually formed local militias to drive them back, the Cornish freedom fighters fell back on Guildford, while the royal family took their Archbishop of Canterbury with them behind the walls of the Tower, which were ringed with Yeomen of the Royal Bodyguard for several weeks. Elsewhere in the city itself, those who the previous year might have welcomed the treasonous tin-miners now boarded up their houses and fled for safety to relatives in the countryside to the east, while those of their neighbours who had nowhere to run to spoke in terms of manning the western city walls and making a last stand of it.
The royal army under Daubney gathered around their various battle banners on Hounslow Heath, to the west of the city, where their catering needs were met by a grateful Mayor and Corporation of the City of London, who sent wagonloads of food and wine to sustain them while they awaited the expected onslaught.
When it failed to materialise, Daubney sent out a scouting party of some five hundred mounted spearmen, who routed a force estimated as four times greater than theirs so badly that it opted to move around the north of the city, and leer down at it from Blackheath. Yet again the advantage of a hilltop position proved illusory, and on 17th June a royal army of some twenty-five thousand succeeded in surrounding the poorly commanded Cornish rebels and cutting them to pieces.
The leaders of the rebellion were either killed in the battle, or hanged at Tyburn ten days later, while Henry’s subsequent taxation policies left the residents of Cornwall in little doubt of what he thought of their misplaced loyalties. Cornwall remained an under-privileged area of the country for several generations, the royal coffers swelled considerably from the forced sale of more than one forfeited estate, and several well-remembered heads remained on spikes along London Bridge until the crows had picked them clean.
At this point the ever-optimistic — and poorly advised — Perkin Warbeck grew tired of skulking in Ireland, and answered the call of a few remaining diehard Cornish dissidents who had added the slaughter of many of their friends and relatives to the original taxation grievance. Warbeck landed at Land’s End on 7th September 1487, and promised immediate tax reform once he was King. He led some six thousand noisy supporters into Exeter, before marching on Taunton. When Warbeck learned that Daubeney’s royal army was at Glastonbury, heading in his direction, he concluded that discretion was the better form of kingship, and deserted his men in order to seek sanctuary in Beaulieu Abbey. He was headed off before he could reach it, and it was a jubilant Henry in person who learned of his capture, and accepted the formal surrender of Warbeck’s deserted army at Taunton.
After a few weeks cooling his heels in the Tower, Warbeck indicated that he was prepared to make a full confession to being an imposter. Anxious that his Queen should also hear it, Henry commanded that Warbeck be brought into Westminster Palace under armed guard, hooted and derided during his horseback procession through the mean streets of the city that had only months previously been deserted at the prospect of a Cornish incursion. Warbeck was led into the White Chamber, where Henry sat with Elizabeth at his side on a double raised t
hrone dais to receive his formal confession.
As Warbeck was led in, manacled at the wrists and ankles, Henry sensed Elizabeth stiffening in shock. He could well understand her reaction as he looked down at the most convincing piece of Plantagenet youth he had beheld in years. His mind went back to the day of his face-to-face encounter with Richard of Gloucester, and once again it was like looking into a mirror. Whoever this youth was, he was obviously a scion of Plantagenet from somewhere in its murky past.
‘You may unchain the boy, and give him a seat before us,’ Henry commanded, adding, ‘but if he makes any move to leave that seat, you have my order to run him through. Now then, young man, tell us your story. The real story, that is.’
‘I am not knowing it,’ the youth replied in broken English with a heavy Flemish accent. ‘I remember a castle somewhere, but that was many years ago, and in a dream of the night, perhaps? I am living in a house in Tournai, in Flanders, where a man I am told is my father is always working with books. Then the lady my mother is taking me to Antwerp, and then I am working for a merchant in Brittany, who takes me to Ireland, where they say I am the King of England. The rest is known to you, I think.’
‘They tell me you are married, and you have two children. Is this correct?’
‘Yes,’ Warbeck replied. ‘They say she will be here to see me today,’ he added as he turned round to survey those standing around the walls. A tall lady with luxuriantly long auburn hair and enormous blue eyes stepped forward to address the throne.
‘I am she, Your Majesty. Catherine Warbeck, formerly Lady Catherine Gordon, daughter of the Earl of Huntly.’
‘And your children?’ Elizabeth enquired.
‘A boy and a girl, my lady. The boy is nearly two, and the girl still a babe in arms. They are lodged at Deptford, with friends of my father.’
‘And yet you risked coming to this Court, simply in order to see your husband, when there was a risk that you also would be arrested?’ Elizabeth asked.
‘I love him, my lady,’ Catherine replied, as a tear rolled down her cheek.
Elizabeth whispered to Henry, ‘I must have her in my household, with her children, whatever you do to her husband.’
‘Do not take me for the tyrant that others accuse me of being,’ Henry whispered back. ‘He has obviously been the dupe of others, and I have already killed the only Yorkist who deserved it.’ He raised his voice as he looked back at Warbeck. ‘I will not have it said of me around the courts of Europe that I am without mercy. You — whoever you are — will be received at this Court as befits your birth, and your wife will become one of my dear Queen’s Ladies. However, you must live separate lives.’
There was an agonised squeal from Catherine Gordon, and Warbeck looked back up at Henry.
‘I would rather that you take me back to the Tower and have me executed before I will live freely, but be separated from the woman I love.’
‘That is my decision,’ Henry replied. ‘And I am bound to observe that your English has suddenly improved. Take him away, and let us have some music to darken the gloom of this Autumn afternoon,’ he ordered the guard, who began re-securing Warbeck’s wrists and ankles while the stifled sobs of Katherine Gordon could be heard above the rattling of the chains.
For the next year and a half, Warbeck was supplied with a ‘secure chamber’ in Westminster Palace, in which he was well treated, and occasionally allowed to attend royal banquets, in order to publicly demonstrate Henry’s mercy. Among the few hardships that the former pretender suffered were the daily visits from Richard Foxe and one of his clerks, a young lawyer in the employ of John Morton called Thomas More, to whom he dictated a full confession of how he had been cruelly misled by others, ending with the line ‘I hereby, on my solemn oath, disclaim any right to the throne of England on behalf of myself, my heirs and assigns for all time coming.’ Henry smiled when he was shown it, and he advised Morton that he would do well to promote the career of the bright young lawyer who had drafted it.
Warbeck’s other hardship was being separated from his wife and children, a joint punishment also constantly bemoaned by Catherine Gordon in her many conversations with Queen Elizabeth, as they grew closer, particularly when Catherine remained in the lying-in chamber, holding Elizabeth’s hand and wiping her brow, during the birth of the next royal prince, Edmund, created Duke of Somerset on his birth in February 1499.
To avoid any chance contact between Catherine and her husband, and to Elizabeth’s obvious distress, Catherine was not allowed to accompany the Queen while she was at Westminster, but became her Senior Lady at Richmond, where her children were occasionally allowed into the royal nursery in order to play with the Princess Mary, under the superior gaze of her older sister Margaret, who was being groomed to be a queen herself, albeit a Scottish one.
This somewhat strained arrangement might have continued indefinitely, had Warbeck not sought to escape in order to leave the country with his wife and children. Letters were discovered in his chamber from a minor Scottish noble with connections to the Huntly family in Aberdeen, who promised to arrange for a vessel to moor in Rotherhithe, in which Warbeck could be reunited with his family and then sail up the east coast back to Leith, near Edinburgh. Henry’s reaction was to have Warbeck committed to the Tower, ‘for the safety of the realm’, as he justified it to Elizabeth, although he gave in to her pleas that Catherine be allowed to retain her position at Richmond after being convinced that she had played no part in the plot.
Initially Warbeck was held in solitary confinement, then Foxe suggested that he be placed in the same cell as Edward, Earl of Warwick, now aged in his mid-twenties, who had spent his formative years, since the age of ten, in the Tower to which he had been consigned by Henry upon his accession, since the young earl, as the son of Clarence of York, was a potential claimant to the English throne. However, he was no longer in any mental condition to be any threat to Henry other than a symbolic one, and a potential icon to others who might seek to use him as a figurehead in any future rebellion against what was rapidly becoming Henry’s miserly grip on the nation’s finances.
Years later, it would occur to Henry that Foxe had probably contrived, not only the joint incarceration of the two young men of approximately the same age in the same cell, but also the promise given to them by Tower guards that they would assist their joint escape. Contrived or not, their attempt failed dismally before they had even managed to cross Tower Green, and on 23rd November 1499, they were taken to Tyburn to be hanged alongside each other, after Warbeck had been obliged, under promise that his wife and children would be kindly treated, to read out loud the renunciation he had dictated to Thomas More.
Queen Elizabeth took to her private chamber at Richmond, and refused to share a bed with Henry for a whole month, such was her outrage and genuine remorse over the public execution of the husband of her heartbroken Lady who now had to bring up two fatherless young children. But there were no more pretenders to the throne of England.
X
As the bells welcomed in 1500, Henry was entering his fifteenth year on the throne of England. During that time he had learned many valuable lessons. The first was that maintaining a royal army was an expensive business for which he required taxation from Parliament that was increasingly unpopular with the people. As the recent uprising in Cornwall had demonstrated beyond doubt, a heavily taxed populace could rise in rebellion, even if there were no Yorkist figurehead left to use as an excuse. It was therefore necessary to obtain royal finance from other sources than by taxing the people, and expensive armies would not be needed if foreign affairs could be conducted by way of treaty.
The net result of all this was the need to have men about him who could generate finance, negotiate treaties, and demonstrate unswerving loyalty. And the final lesson that Henry had learned was that such loyalty was not to be found among the nobility, but from men who Henry had raised up personally from humble positions — men who had skills in matters financial and legal. His grea
t officers of State had all been rescued by him from potential obscurity after they had fallen from favour under Richard III, or had been in exile with Henry in Flanders or France. But the years of experience that they had been able to bring to the service of the young Henry Tudor meant that they were much older than the man they served, and would not live forever.
The first confirmation of this was the death of John Morton in September 1500. Henry was then in urgent need of both a Chancellor and an Archbishop of Canterbury, and someone who could guide his hand in the meetings of the Great Council. In his final year or two, Morton’s had been the still small voice of calm whenever Henry was in danger of excess, whether in the raising of more royal revenue or international policies that might require an army of invasion to cross the Channel at public expense.
It proved easier to find another Archbishop of Canterbury, although even in this Henry experienced some frustration. His first choice was the Bishop of Winchester, Thomas Langton, but in what might have been taken as a sign from God that Henry’s judgment was failing, Langton died of the Plague five days after being advised of his appointment. Henry appointed his second choice, Henry Deane.
The death, at the tender age of fifteen months, of the third royal prince, Edmund, in June 1500, forced Henry, the following year, to divert his attention from the state of the royal finances to dynastic matters. It was time to cash in on the Treaty of Medina del Campo. The heir to the throne, fourteen-year-old Arthur, Prince of Wales, was now a prepossessing young man of above average height, slim, with reddish hair that betrayed his Angevin ancestry, his father’s small eyes and a high-bridged nose that suggested high intellect and gentle breeding. He had been raised like a delicate hothouse bloom with his own household inside Westminster Palace, with tutors of the quality of John Rede, formerly headmaster of Winchester College, and Thomas Linacre, a former royal physician. In addition to his intellectual accomplishments he was, like his younger brother Henry, a good dancer and a sturdy archer.