Chapter V: The Wars of the Roses (1453-1497) (2)

At the moment of King Edward's death his elder son by Elizabeth Woodville, Edward, prince of Wales, was twelve; his younger son Richard, duke of York, was nine. It was clear that there would be a long minority, and that the only possible claimants for the regency were the queen and Richard of Gloucester. Elizabeth was personally unpopular, and the rapacity and insolence of her family was well known. Hence when Richard of Gloucester seized on the person of the young king, and imprisoned Lord Rivers and Sir Richard Grey, the queen's brother and son, on the pretence that they were conspiring against him, his action was regarded with equanimity by the people. Nor did the fact that the duke took the title of "protector and defender of the realm" cause any surprise. Suspicions only became rife after Richard had seized and beheaded without any trial, Lord Hastings, the late king's most familiar friend, and had arrested at the same moment the archbishop of York, Morton, bishop of Ely, and Lord Stanley, all persons of unimpeachable loyalty to the house of Edward IV. It was not plausible to accuse such persons of plotting with the queen to overthrow the protector, and public opinion began to turn against Gloucester. Nevertheless he went on recklessly with his design, having already enlisted the support of a party of the greater peers, who were ready to follow him to any length of treason. These confidants, the duke of Buckingham, the lords Howard and Lovel, and a few more, must have known from an early date that he was aiming at the crown, though it is improbable that they suspected that his plan involved the murder of the rightful heirs as well as mere usurpation.

Richard III. crowned.

On the 16th of June, Richard, using the aged archbishop Bourchier as his tool, got the little duke of York out of his mother's hands, and sent him to join his brother in the Tower. A few days later, having packed London with his own armed retainers and those of Buckingham and his other confidants, he openly put forward his pretensions to the throne. Edward IV., as he asserted, had been privately contracted to Lady Eleanor Talbot before he ever met Queen Elizabeth. His children therefore were bastards, the offspring of a bigamous union. As to the son and daughter of the duke of Clarence, their blood had been corrupted by their father's attainder, and they could not be reckoned as heirs to the crown. He himself, therefore, was the legitimate successor of Edward IV. This preposterous theory was set forth by Buckingham, first to the mayor and corporation of London, and next day to an assembly of the estates of the realm held in St Paul's. Cowed by the show of armed force, and remembering the fate of Hastings, the two assemblies received the claim with silence which gave consent. Richard, after a hypocritical show of reluctance, allowed himself to be saluted as king, and was crowned on the 6th of July 1483. Before the coronation ceremony he had issued orders for the execution of the queen's relatives, who had been in prison since the beginning of May. He paid his adherents lavishly for their support, making Lord Howard duke of Norfolk, and giving Buckingham enormous grants of estates and offices.

Murder of the princes.

Having accomplished his _coup d'etat_ Richard started for a royal progress through the Midlands, and a few days after his departure sent back secret orders to London for the murder of his two nephews in the Tower. There is no reason to doubt that they were secretly smothered on or about the 15th of July by his agent Sir James Tyrrell, or that the bones found buried under a staircase in the fortress two hundred years after belonged to the two unhappy lads. But the business was kept dark at the time, and it was long before any one could assert with certainty that they were dead or alive. Richard never published any statement as to their end, though some easy tale of a fever, a conflagration, or an accident might have served him better than the mere silence that he employed. For while many persons believed that the princes still existed there was room for all manner of impostures and false rumours.

Buckingham's rebellion.

The usurper's reign was from the first a troubled one. Less than three months after his coronation the first insurrection broke out; it was headed--strangely enough--by the duke of Buckingham, who seems to have been shocked by the murder of the princes; he must have been one of the few who had certain information of the crime. He did not take arms in his own cause, though after the house of York the house of Buckingham had the best claim to the throne, as representing Thomas of Woodstock, the youngest son of Edward III. His plan was to unite the causes of York and Lancaster by wedding the Lady Elizabeth, the eldest sister of the murdered princes, to Henry Tudor, earl of Richmond, a young exile who represented the very doubtful claim of the Beauforts to the Lancastrian heritage. Henry was the son of Margaret Beaufort, the daughter of John, first duke of Somerset, and the niece of Edmund, second duke, who fell at St Albans. All her male kinsmen had been exterminated in the Wars of the Roses.

Execution of Buckingham.

This promising scheme was to be supported by a rising of those Yorkists who rejected the usurpation of Richard III., and by the landing on the south coast of Henry of Richmond with a body of Lancastrian exiles and foreign mercenaries. But good organization was wanting, and chance fought for the king. A number of scattered risings in the south were put down by Richard's troops, while Buckingham, who had raised his banner in Wales, was prevented from bringing aid by a week of extraordinary rains which made the Severn impassable. Finding that the rest of the plan had miscarried, Buckingham's retainers melted away from him, and he was forced to fly. A few days later he was betrayed, handed over to the king, and beheaded (Nov. 2, 1483). Meanwhile Richmond's little fleet was dispersed by the same storms that scattered Buckingham's army, and he was forced to return to Brittany without having landed in England.

Here King Richard's luck ended. Though he called a parliament early in 1484, and made all manner of gracious promises of good governance, he felt that his position was insecure. The nation was profoundly disgusted with his unscrupulous policy, and the greater part of the leaders of the late insurrection had escaped abroad and were weaving new plots. Early in the spring he lost his only son and heir, Edward, prince of Wales, and the question of the succession to the crown was opened from a new point of view. After some hesitation Richard named his nephew John de la Pole, earl of Lincoln, a son of his sister, as his heir. But he also bethought him of another and a most repulsive plan for strengthening his position. His queen, Anne Neville, the daughter of the kingmaker, was on her death-bed. With indecent haste he began to devise a scheme for marrying his niece Elizabeth, whose brothers he had murdered but a year before. Knowledge of this scheme is said to have shortened the life of the unfortunate Anne, and many did not scruple to say that her husband had made away with her.

Henry of Richmond lands at Milford.

Battle of Bosworth.

When the queen was dead, and some rumours of the king's intentions got abroad, the public indignation was so great that Richard's councillors had to warn him to disavow the projected marriage, if he wished to retain a single adherent. He yielded, and made public complaint that he had been slandered--which few believed. Meanwhile the conspirators of 1483 were busy in organizing another plan of invasion. This time it was successfully carried out, and the earl of Richmond landed at Milford Haven with many exiles, both Yorkists and Lancastrians, and 1000 mercenaries lent him by the princess regent of France. The Welsh joined him in great numbers, not forgetting that by his Tudor descent he was their own kinsman, and when he reached Shrewsbury English adherents also began to flock in to his banner, for the whole country was seething with discontent, and Richard III. had but few loyal adherents. When the rivals met at Bosworth Field (Aug. 22, 1485) the king's army was far the larger, but the greater part of it was determined not to fight. When battle was joined some left the field and many joined the pretender. Richard, however, refused to fly, and was slain, fighting to the last, along with the duke of Norfolk and a few other of his more desperate partisans. The slaughter was small, for treason, not the sword, had settled the day. The battered crown which had fallen from Richard's helmet was set on the victor's head by Lord Stanley, the chief of the Yorkist peers who had joined his standard, and his army hailed him by the new title of Henry VII.

Henry VII.

No monarch of England since William the Conqueror, not excluding Stephen and Henry IV., could show such a poor title to the throne as the first of the Tudor kings. His claim to represent the house of Lancaster was of the weakest--when Henry IV. had assented to the legitimating of his brothers the Beauforts, he had attached a clause to the act, to provide that they were given every right save that of counting in the line of succession to the throne. The true heir to the house of John of Gaunt should have been sought among the descendants of his eldest legitimate daughter, not among those of his base-born sons. The earl of Richmond had been selected by the conspirators as their figure-head mainly because he was known as a young man of ability, and because he was unmarried and could therefore take to wife the princess Elizabeth, and so absorb the Yorkist claim in his own. This had been the essential part of the bargain, and Henry was ready to carry it out, but he insisted that he should first be recognized as king in his own right, lest it might be held that he ruled merely as his destined wife's consort. He was careful to hold his first parliament and get his title acknowledged before he married the princess. When he had done so, he had the triple claim by conquest, by election and by inheritance, safely united. Yet his position was even then insecure; the vicissitudes of the last thirty years had shaken the old prestige of the name of king, and a weaker and less capable man than Henry Tudor might have failed to retain the crown that he had won. There were plenty of possible pretenders in existence; the earl of Lincoln, whom Richard III. had recognized as his heir, was still alive; the two children of the duke of Clarence might be made the tools of conspirators; and there was a widespread doubt as to whether the sons of Edward IV. had actually died in the Tower. The secrecy with which their uncle had carried out their murder was destined to be a sore hindrance to his successor.

Early years of the reign.

Insurrections and plots.

Bosworth Field is often treated as the last act of the Wars of the Roses. This is an error; they were protracted for twelve years after the accession of Henry VII., and did not really end till the time of Blackheath Field and the siege of Exeter (1497). The position of the first Tudor king is misconceived if his early years are regarded as a time of strong governance and well-established order. On the contrary he was in continual danger, and was striving with all the resources of a ready and untiring mind to rebuild foundations that were absolutely rotten. Phenomena like the Cornish revolt (which recalls Cade's insurrection) and the Yorkshire rising of 1489, which began with the death of the earl of Northumberland, show that at any moment whole counties might take arms in sheer lawlessness, or for some local grievance. Loyalty was such an uncertain thing that the king might call out great levies yet be forced to doubt whether they would fight for him--at Stoke Field it seems that a large part of Henry's army misbehaved, much as that of Richard III. had done at Bosworth. The demoralization brought about by the evil years between 1453 and 1483 could not be lived down in a day--any sort of treason was possible to the generation that had seen the career of Warwick and the usurpation of Gloucester. The survivors of that time were capable of taking arms for any cause that offered a chance of unreasonable profit, and no one's loyalty could be trusted. Did not Sir William Stanley, the best paid of those who betrayed Richard III., afterwards lose his head for a deliberate plot to betray Henry VII.? The various attempts that were made to overturn the new dynasty seem contemptible to the historian of the 20th century. They were not so contemptible at the time, because England and Ireland were full of adventurers who were ready to back any cause, and who looked on the king of the moment as no more than a successful member of their own class--a base-born Welshman who had been lucky enough to become the figurehead of the movement that had overturned an unpopular usurper. The organizing spirits of the early troubles of the reign of Henry VII. were irreconcilable Yorkists who had suffered by the change of dynasty; but their hopes of success rested less on their own strength than on the not ill-founded notion that England would tire of any ruler who had to raise taxes and reward his partisans. The position bore a curious resemblance to that of the early years of Henry IV., a king who, like Henry VII., had to vindicate a doubtful elective title to the throne by miracles of cunning and activity. The later representative of the house of Lancaster was fortunate, however, in having less formidable enemies than the earlier; the power of the baronage had been shaken by the Wars of the Roses no less than the power of the crown; so many old estates had passed rapidly from hand to hand, so many old titles were represented by upstarts destitute of local influence, that the feudal danger had become far less. Risings like that of the Percies in 1403 were not the things which the seventh Henry had to fear. He was lucky too in having no adversary of genius of the type of Owen Glendower. Welsh national spirit indeed was enlisted on his own side. Yet leaderless seditions and the plots of obvious impostors sufficed to make his throne tremble, and a ruler less resolute, less wary, and less unscrupulous might have been overthrown.

Lambert Simnel.

The first of the king's troubles was an abortive rising in the north riding of Yorkshire, the only district where Richard III. seems to have enjoyed personal popularity. It was led by Lord Lovel, Richard's chamberlain and admiral; but the insurgents dispersed when Henry marched against them with a large force (1486), and Lovel took refuge in Flanders with Margaret of York, the widow of Charles the Bold of Burgundy, whose dower towns were the refuge of all English exiles, and whose coffers were always open to subsidize plots against her niece's husband. Under the auspices of this rancorous princess the second conspiracy was hatched in the following year (1487). Its leaders were Lovel and John, earl of Lincoln, whom Richard III. had designated as his heir. But the Yorkist banner was to be raised, not in the name of Lincoln, but in that of the boy Edward of Clarence, then a prisoner in the Tower. His absence and captivity might seem a fatal hindrance, but the conspirators had prepared a "double" who was to take his name till he could be released. This was a lad named Lambert Simnel, the son of an Oxford organ-maker, who bore a personal resemblance to the young captive. The conspirators seem to have argued that Henry VII. would not proceed to murder the real Edward, but would rather exhibit him to prove the imposition; if he took the more drastic alternative Lincoln could fall back on his own claim to the crown.

Battle of Stoke.

In May 1487 Lincoln and Lovel landed in Ireland accompanied by other exiles and 2000 German mercenaries. The cause of York was popular in the Pale, and the Anglo-Irish barons seem to have conceived the notion that Henry VII. was likely to prove too strong and capable a king to suit their convenience. The invading army was welcomed by almost all the lords, and the spurious Clarence was crowned at Dublin by the name of Edward VI. A few weeks later Lincoln had recruited his army with 4000 or 5000 Irish adventurers under Thomas Fitzgerald, son of the earl of Kildare, and had taken ship for England. He landed in Lancashire, and pushed forward, hoping to gather the English Yorkists to his aid. But few had joined him when King Henry brought him to action at Stoke, near Newark, on the 17th of July. Despite the doubtful conduct of part of the royal army, and the fierce resistance of the Germans and Irish, the rebel army was routed. Lincoln and Fitzgerald were slain; Lovel disappeared in the rout; the young impostor Simnel was taken prisoner. Henry treated him with politic contempt, and made him a cook boy in his kitchen. He lived for many years after in the royal household. The Irish lords were pardoned on renewing their oaths of fealty; the king did not wish to entangle himself in costly campaigns beyond St George's Channel till he had made his position in England more stable.

Foreign alliances.

Treaty of Etaples.

The Yorkist cause was crushed for four years, till it was raised again by Margaret of Burgundy, with an imposture even more preposterous than that of Lambert Simnel. In the intervening space, however, while Henry VII. was comparatively undisturbed by domestic rebellion, he found opportunity for a first tentative experiment at interfering in European politics. He allied himself with Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain and with Maximilian of Austria, who was ruling the Netherlands in behalf of his young son, Philip, the heir of the Burgundian inheritance, for the purpose of preventing France from annexing Brittany, the last great fief of the crown which had not yet been absorbed into the Valois royal domain. This struggle, the only continental war in which the first of the Tudors risked his fortunes, was not prosecuted with any great energy, and came to a necessary end when Anne, duchess of Brittany, in whose behalf it was being waged, disappointed her allies by marrying Charles VIII. of her own free will (Dec. 1491). Henry very wisely proceeded to get out of the war on the best terms possible, and, to the disgust of Maximilian, sold peace to the French king for 600,000 crowns, as well as an additional sum representing arrears of the pension which Louis XI. had been bound to pay to Edward IV. This treaty of Etaples was, in short, a repetition of Edward's treaty of Picquigny, equally profitable and less disgraceful, for Maximilian of Austria, whom Henry thus abandoned, had given more cause of offence than had Charles of Burgundy in 1475. Domestic malcontents did not scruple to hint that the king, like his father-in-law before him, had made war on France, not with any hope of renewing the glories of Crecy or Agincourt, still less with any design of helping his allies, but purely to get first grants from his parliament, and then a war indemnity from his enemies. In any case he was wise to make peace. France was now too strong for England, and both Maximilian and Ferdinand of Spain were selfish and shifty allies. Moreover, it was known that the one dominating desire of Charles VIII. was to conquer Italy, and it was clear that his ambitions in that direction were not likely to prove dangerous to England.

Yorkist plots. Perkin Warbeck.

Cornish rebellion.

In the year of the treaty of Etaples the Yorkist conspiracies began once more to thicken, and Henry was fortunate to escape with profit from the French war before his domestic troubles recommenced. Ever since 1483 it had been rumoured that one or both of the sons of Edward IV. had escaped, not having been murdered in the Tower. Of this widespread belief the plotters now took advantage; they held that much more could be accomplished with such a claim than by using that of the unfortunate Edward of Clarence, whose chances were so severely handicapped by his being still the prisoner of Henry VII. The scheme for producing a false Plantagenet was first renewed in Ireland, where Simnel's imposture had been so easily taken up a few years before. The tool selected was one Perkin Warbeck, a handsome youth of seventeen or eighteen, the son of a citizen of Tournai, who had lived for some time in London, where Perkin had actually been born. There is a bare possibility that the young adventurer may have been an illegitimate son of Edward IV.; his likeness to the late king was much noticed. When he declared himself to be Richard of York, he obtained some support in Ireland from the earl of Desmond and other lords; but he did not risk open rebellion till he had visited Flanders, and had been acknowledged as her undoubted nephew by Duchess Margaret. Maximilian of Austria also took up his cause, as a happy means of revenging himself on Henry VII. for the treaty of Etaples. There can be small doubt that both the duchess and the German King (Maximilian had succeeded to his father's crown in 1493) were perfectly well aware that they were aiding a manifest fraud. But they made much of Perkin, who followed the imperial court for two years, while his patron was intriguing with English malcontents. The emissaries from Flanders got many promises of assistance, and a formidable rising might have taken place had not Henry VII. been well served by his spies. But in the winter of 1494-1495 the traitors were themselves betrayed, and a large number of arrests were made, including not only Lord Fitzwalter and a number of well-known knights of Yorkist families, but Sir William Stanley, the king's chamberlain, who had been rewarded with enormous gifts for his good service at Bosworth, and was reckoned one of the chief supports of the throne. Stanley and several others were beheaded, the rest hanged or imprisoned. This vigorous action on the part of the king seems to have cowed all Warbeck's supporters on English soil. But the pretender nevertheless sailed from Flanders in July 1495 with a following of 2000 exiles and German mercenaries. He attempted to land at Deal, but his vanguard was destroyed by Kentish levies, and he drew off and made for Ireland. Suspecting that this would be his goal, King Henry had been doing his best to strengthen his hold on the Pale, whither he had sent his capable servant Sir Edward Poynings as lord deputy. Already before Warbeck's arrival Poynings had arrested the earl of Kildare, Simnel's old supporter, cowed some of the Irish by military force, and bought over others by promises of subsidies and pensions. But his best-remembered achievement was that he had induced the Irish parliament to pass the ordinances known as "Poynings' Law," by which it acknowledged that it could pass no legislation which had not been approved by the king and his council, and agreed that all statutes passed by the English parliament should be in force in Ireland. That such terms could be imposed shows the strength of Poynings' arm, and his vigour was equally evident when Warbeck came ashore in Munster in July 1495. Few joined the impostor save the earl of Desmond, and he was repulsed from Waterford, and dared not face the army which the lord deputy put into the field against him. Thereupon, abandoning his Irish schemes, Warbeck sailed to Scotland, whose young king James IV. had just been seduced by the emperor Maximilian into declaring war on England. He promised the Scottish king Berwick and 50,000 crowns in return for the aid of an army. James took the offer, gave him the hand of his kinswoman Catherine Gordon, daughter of the earl of Huntly, and took him forth for a raid into Northumberland (1496). But a pretender backed by Scottish spears did not appeal to the sympathies of the English borderers. The expedition fell flat; not a man joined the banner of the white rose, and James became aware that he had set forth on a fool's errand. But Warbeck soon found other allies of a most unexpected sort. The heavy taxation granted by the English parliament for the Scottish war had provoked discontent and rioting in the south-western counties. In Cornwall especially the disorders grew to such a pitch that local demagogues called out several thousand men to resist the tax-collectors, and finally raised open rebellion, proposing to march on London and compel the king to dismiss his ministers. These spiritual heirs of Jack Cade were Flammock, a lawyer of Bodmin, and a farrier named Michael Joseph. Whether they had any communication with Warbeck it is impossible to say; there is no proof of such a connexion, but their acts served him well. A Cornish army marched straight on London, picking up some supporters in Devon and Somerset on their way, including a discontented baron, Lord Audley, whom they made their captain.

Battle of Blackheath.

Execution of Warbeck and Edward of Clarence.

So precarious was the hold of Henry VII. on the throne that he was in great danger from this outbreak of mere local turbulence. The rebels swept over five counties unopposed, and were only stopped and beaten in a hard fight on Blackheath, when they had reached the gates of London. Audley, the farrier and the lawyer were all captured and executed (June 18, 1497). But the crisis was not yet at an end. Warbeck, hearing of the rising, but not of its suppression, had left Scotland, and appeared in Devonshire in August. He rallied the wrecks of the west country rebels, and presently appeared before the gates of Exeter with nearly 8000 men. But the citizens held out against him, and presently the approach of the royal army was reported. The pretender led off his horde to meet the relieving force, but when he reached Taunton he found that his followers were so dispirited that disaster was certain. Thereupon he absconded by night, and took sanctuary in the abbey of Beaulieu. He offered to confess his imposture if he were promised his life, and the king accepted the terms. First at Taunton and again at Westminster, Perkin publicly recited a long narrative of his real parentage, his frauds and his adventures. He was then consigned to not over strict confinement in the Tower, and might have fared no worse than Lambert Simnel if he had possessed his soul in patience. But in the next year he corrupted his warders, broke out from his prison, and tried to escape beyond seas. He was captured, but the king again spared his life, though he was placed for the future in a dungeon "where he could see neither moon nor sun." Even this did not tame the impostor's mercurial temperament. In 1499 he again planned an escape, which was to be shared by another prisoner, the unfortunate Edward of Clarence, earl of Warwick, whose cell was in the storey above his own. But there were traitors among the Tower officials whom they suborned to help them, and the king was warned of the plot. He allowed it to proceed to the verge of execution, and then arrested both the false and the true Plantagenet. Evidence of a suspicious character was produced to show that they had planned rebellion as well as mere escape, and both were put to death with some of their accomplices. Warbeck deserved all that he reaped, but the unlucky Clarence's fate estranged many hearts from the king. The simple and weakly young man, who had spent fifteen of his twenty-five years in confinement, had, in all probability, done no more than scheme for an escape from his dungeon. But as the true male heir of the house of Plantagenet he was too dangerous to be allowed to survive.

Establishment of the Tudor dynasty.

The turbulent portion of the reign of Henry VII. came to an end with Blackheath Field and the siege of Exeter. From that time forward the Tudor dynasty was no longer in serious danger; there were still some abortive plots, but none that had any prospect of winning popular support. The chances of Warbeck and Clarence had vanished long before they went to the scaffold. The Yorkist claim, after Clarence's death, might be supposed to have passed to his cousin Edmund, earl of Suffolk, the younger brother of that John, earl of Lincoln, who had been declared heir to the crown by Richard III., and had fallen at Stoke field. Fully conscious of the danger of his position, Suffolk fled to the continent, and lived for many years as a pensioner of the emperor Maximilian. Apparently he dabbled in treason; it is at any rate certain that in 1501 King Henry executed some, and imprisoned others, of his relatives and retainers. But his plots, such as they were, seem to have been futile. There was no substratum of popular discontent left in England on which a dangerous insurrection might be built up. It was to be forty years before another outbreak of turbulence against the crown was to break forth.