Foundation (History of England Vol 1) (68 page)

Henry was growing sick, perhaps with frustration and fear. The bills of his various apothecaries were seven times larger than before. He made a treaty with Charles VIII, who was himself eager to avoid war over the matter of Brittany; one of the clauses of the treaty stipulated that Charles would not harbour any of Henry’s enemies. Warbeck then promptly crossed the border and made his way to the court of Margaret of Burgundy at Malines. ‘I recognized him,’ she wrote, ‘as easily as if I had last seen him yesterday.’ Others from the old court of Edward IV also claimed to know him, almost by instinct. He was now being called by Margaret of Burgundy the White Rose, the pure and fragrant emblem of the Yorkists.

The duchess also ensured that he acquired wealthy and influential allies. He was sent to the funeral of the Holy Roman Emperor, Frederick III, in Vienna where he met the great and the good; among them was Frederick’s son, Maximilian, who now had command of the entire Habsburg Empire. Maximilian and the White Rose became fast friends. The pretender was soon coining silver groats in his own name; his armed guard was dressed in red and blue.

But Henry had not been idle. The danger was too acute for that. He applied trade sanctions against the Burgundian territories, where Warbeck was being sheltered. English goods, and in particular English cloth, were in turn barred from the Netherlands and elsewhere. The financial consequences were severe for merchants and workers on both sides, but the dynastic struggle took priority over economic affairs. Henry had also spent much money in trying to learn of Perkin Warbeck’s real origins, and his envoys in Europe were now busily retailing the facts of his supposedly baseborn family.

The king feared that an invasion was imminent; he sent as many ships as he could find to patrol the seas along the Suffolk coast and ordered troops to guard the principal ports of the realm. He asked his supporters to supply men-at-arms who would be ready to fight at a day’s notice.

He had spies in Warbeck’s entourage also, listening to every conversation. It was said of the king that he handled every case ‘circumspectly and with convenient diligence for inveigling, and yet not disclose it to the party . . . but keep it to himself and always grope further’. It was discovered that small clusters of Yorkist supporters, in Calais and Suffolk and elsewhere, were ready to rise on behalf of the claims of ‘Richard Plantagenet’. Some of them were still working at Henry’s court and in Henry’s household. This was the moment to arrest and imprison them.

The most senior conspirator turned out to be in fact Henry’s chamberlain, Sir William Stanley, the man who had engineered the king’s victory at Bosworth. At his subsequent trial he was alleged to have said that ‘if he knew for sure that the young man were King Edward’s son, he would never bear arms against him’. Under other circumstances these would be unexceptionable sentiments but, in Henry’s reign, the words meant a traitor’s death.

On 3 July 1495, the White Rose and his mercenary army landed at Deal in Kent; but the invasion proved abortive. The forces of the pretender were overwhelmed, and Warbeck retreated to the relative safety of the seas. His captured soldiers were marched to Newgate or the Tower. Henry could draw even more comfort from the fact that the English had not rallied to Warbeck’s banner; they had remained unexcited by his landing and unwilling to support him.

Warbeck had been rebuffed, but he sailed on to the old Yorkist haven of Ireland. He made the unlucky choice of Waterford as his point of entry, where the citizens actively resisted any attempt to enlist them into his war. For a few months he wandered through Ireland, a putative king without a kingdom, living in secrecy and fear. His fortune changed once again, however, when he was invited or invited himself to the court of James IV in Edinburgh. The young king of Scotland – approximately Warbeck’s own age – was happy to take up any opportunity of embarrassing and weakening the old enemy of England. Warbeck provided the occasion. He arrived in the winter of 1495 and was greeted by the Scots as a conquering hero. He received more than promises, however; he obtained a bride. A close relative of the Scottish king, Katherine Gordon, was betrothed to him. She was not exactly a princess, but she was the next best thing.

So the White Rose and the Scottish king, now cousins by marriage, set about the invasion of England. James IV may have had in mind one of the border wars by which Anglo-Scottish hostilities were conducted, with the assumption that the English would then rise up in support of young Richard IV. Henry himself could not be sure of the outcome. He prepared to muster a force of 20,000 men, and launch a navy of seventy ships against the Scots; to widespread and furious resentment, he levied taxes and forced loans to pay for the proposed expedition. In the event the invasion proved to be a fiasco, and the White Rose professed himself to be horrified by the bloody depredations of the Scottish troops before they fled back over the border. Once again he was seen to be an unlucky prince.

He lingered in Scotland for a few more months, feeling increasingly unwelcome at the court of James IV, before venturing everything on another English assault. With his wife and a few supporters he sailed to Cornwall by way of Ireland. He had been informed that an army of Cornish rebels was waiting to greet him in the south-west of England, the men of Cornwall having marched a few months before towards London in protest against what they considered to be unjust taxation. They had been joined by men from the other western counties, all of them refusing to pay for the war against the Scots. Why should they finance a distant struggle in which they had no part? Like many such rebels, however, they marched as far as Blackheath before their leaders were cut down. Another opportunity now presented itself. They believed that they had found a leader of royal blood.

Once more Warbeck was singularly unsuccessful; some men from Devon and Somerset joined him, but the town of Exeter refused him entry. His followers, tired and hungry, began to desert his army; the king sent messengers among them, promising them pardons if they laid down their arms. Warbeck, sensing defeat, fled for sanctuary to the abbey at Beaulieu. Henry surrounded the church, and the pretender was persuaded to surrender. He came out of sanctuary dressed in cloth of gold, but his pride was soon extinguished. He was taken back to London, a trumpeter riding before him to blow mock flourishes into the air, where his confession was published. It is likely to have been written by the king’s
councillors, and to have borne as little relation to the truth as his original claim. Several versions of his life were soon circulating in England and in Europe. No one really knew the facts of his origin or his upbringing; it is possible that he was chosen for his role at an early age, and then brought up in the court of Margaret of Burgundy herself. It was said at the time that he was in fact an illegitimate son of Edward IV. Henry himself professed to believe that he was the illegitimate child of Margaret and a local bishop. Perkin is still wrapped in mist.

His end was in plain sight, however. He escaped from his guards at the palace of Westminster, where he seems to have been living as the king’s confined guest, but was recaptured. He was then consigned to the Tower, the guest of the king in a more oppressive sense, where he lingered for more than a year. Yet the fears and the suspicions of the king still surrounded him. He was accused of plotting treason with another prisoner, none other than the young earl of Warwick who had been impersonated by Lambert Simnel. The king now took the convenient opportunity of killing the two young men who threatened his throne. Warbeck was hanged, and Warwick beheaded.

The earl of Warwick had been imprisoned, and killed, for the sole offence of being the Yorkist heir. He was an innocent and, in detention for fifteen years, it was said that he ‘could not discern a goose from a capon’. He had to die all the same. A happier postscript may be found in the welcome provided to Perkin’s young wife; Katherine Gordon settled down in the English court, and eventually remarried.

Henry was now believed to be securely placed upon the throne. ‘This present state,’ the Milanese ambassador reported, ‘is most stable even for the king’s descendants, since there is no one who aspires to the crown . . . His Majesty can stand like one at the top of a tower looking on what is passing in the plain.’ The view from the tower is, of course, different from the view on the plain where there may be discordance and resentment. Two Spanish envoys suggested as much when they concluded that the king ‘has established good order in England, and keeps the people in such subjection as has never been the case before’.

Yet Henry fell sick in the month after the executions; he
recovered, but his health was now gravely damaged. He was as devout as he was superstitious. He attended Mass each day but he also consulted astrologers and soothsayers. He listened eagerly to prophecies concerning the crown and the kingdom, at a time when he was pursued by private misfortunes. In the spring of 1502 his eldest son and heir, Arthur, died from disease or illness. On his death his strong and intelligent younger brother, Henry, became the heir. Six months before Arthur had married Catherine of Aragon, thus binding together the English and Spanish thrones, but Henry was now in turn betrothed to her. The king continually postponed any marriage, however, in the hope that a better prospect for his son might emerge. The young Spanish lady was caught in the middle of international events, starved of money and of affection.

In the year after the death of her eldest son, Elizabeth of York, the queen of England, suffered a miscarriage and succumbed to a post-partum infection. Henry was severely affected by this fresh sorrow, and it was said that he ‘privily departed to a solitary place and would no man should resort unto him’. Elizabeth lay in state in the Tower, and was then given a ceremonial funeral in Westminster Abbey. Two years later the king sought another bride. He pursued the queen of Naples for her dowry as well as for her presumed attractions. He despatched envoys to Italy with the following questions. ‘Whether she be painted, and whether her visage be fat or lean; whether there appeared to be any hair about her lips; whether she wore high slippers to increase her stature; whether her breath was sweet; whether she be a great feeder or drinker?’ He then pursued Joanna of Castile, in the hope of governing that country as regent, even though the lady herself was known to be insane. The courtships came to nothing, and Henry never married again.

He did enjoy some success, the most prominent being the marriage of his eldest daughter to the king of Scotland. The wedding of James IV and Margaret Tudor in 1502 was the balm upon the wound inflicted by the advocacy of Warbeck. By his engineering of dynastic marriages, in fact, Henry did manage to consolidate the position of England among the ruling families of Europe. In so doing he abandoned the aggressive and expansionist
policies of the Plantagenet kings. We may interpret that as a victory of his ‘foreign policy’. In any case war was expensive; it also required taxation that stirred up the people.

Despite the brief interruption in the commerce between England and the Low Countries, as a result of Margaret’s welcome for Warbeck, Henry did his best to foster the market in unfinished wool and finished cloth; they were now the principal exports, and the king wished to expedite the trade. He promoted English commerce in other areas, also, and there was scarcely a country in Europe with which he did not enter trade relations; Iceland, and Portugal, and the Baltic states, all came within his purview.

He was by no means a statesman striving for the common good; he was eager only to enjoy the fruits of the increase in customs revenue that went straight into his coffers. He traded on his own account, too, and in one year earned £15,000 from the import of alum used in the manufacture of soap. This was in theory a papal monopoly, but he considered the risk of excommunication less important than the making of profit. The figure of the king in ‘Sing a Song of Sixpence’ – in the counting house counting out his money – is likely to have been based on Henry VII.

The possibility of profit also promoted him to support the expedition of Bristol merchants over the seas to the ‘isle of Brazil’, better known as Newfoundland, where they found immense fishing grounds. He also gave John Cabot and his three sons a licence for a voyage of discovery in the western oceans, thus beginning the story of English exploration. Cabot touched down on the coast of North America, while all the time believing that he had reached Asia, and the colonial flag was raised. Hakluyt relates that the Bristol merchants brought back three native Americans from Newfoundland to Henry’s court; they were ‘clothed in beasts’ skins and ate raw flesh, and were in their demeanour like to brute beasts’. Henry made sure that they were furnished with suitable lodgings in Westminster and, within two years, they were ‘clothed like Englishmen and could not be discerned from Englishmen’. Hakluyt adds that ‘as for speech, I heard none of them utter one word’. By the time that Sebastian Cabot reached Hudson Bay, on a subsequent voyage, the king was dead.

In his last years his suspiciousness intensified, to the extent that
at the time of his death he was considered by many to be the tyrant of England. He had withdrawn further into the private world of majesty. Disturbed by the knowledge that senior members of his household had colluded with Perkin Warbeck, in an attempt to restore the Yorkist dynasty, the king decided to set himself apart from those who had customarily surrounded him. He created a Privy Chamber to which only his intimates had access. He lived and worked in a private set of chambers, secluded from the more open reception rooms of the Great Chamber and the Presence Chamber; now he could truly maintain his distance and, of course, keep his secrets. The royal household of the medieval period, established largely upon the retinue of men-at-arms surrounding the king and sharing his activities, was finally supplanted by the idea of a private court administered by servants and royal officials. In the last thirteen years of his reign he summoned only one parliament, in 1504.