The House of Tudor (7 page)

There are unconfirmed reports that part of Henry’s army - like Richard’s at Bosworth - hung back and that rumours that ‘the kyng was fled and the feeld lost’ were deliberately circulated in the ranks by certain ‘false Englisshemen’. Whatever the truth of these reports, the King could rely on two utterly loyal and experienced lieutenants in his uncle Jasper and John de Vere, Earl of Oxford, and after three anxious hours a vigorous charge by the first line of the royal troops finally settled the matter. John de la Pole was killed, but the capture of Lambert Simnel provided Henry with an opportunity to make a nicely calculated propaganda gesture by giving ‘Edward VI’ a job in the royal kitchens.

The House of Tudor had survived its first serious crisis, but the Simnel affair had demonstrated just how frighteningly thin was the crust it stood on -just how close to the surface lay the seething volcano of its rivals’ vengeful ambition. But no hint of these anxieties was allowed to appear in public - especially not at the King’s state entry into London on 3 November.

The city had made the appropriate preparations for this auspicious occasion. The streets through which the procession would pass were carefully swept and sanded, and representatives of the various craft guilds were lined up, ‘in due order’ and in their best liveries, along the route from Bishopsgate to St. Paul’s. Meanwhile, the Mayor with his sheriffs and aldermen, ‘all on horseback full well and honourably be seen’, had ridden out to meet the royal party. ‘And so at afternoon the King, as a comely and royal prince, apparelled accordingly, entered into his City well and honourably accompanied, as was fitting to his estate.’ The citizens had turned out in strength to see the show and give the King a hero’s welcome. ‘All the houses, windows and streets as he passed by were hugely replenished with people in passing great number, that made great joy and exaltation to behold his most royal person so prosperously and princely coming into his city after his late triumph and victory against his enemies.’

Among the spectators were the Queen and the King’s mother, who watched the procession from the window of a house beside St. Mary Spital at Bishopsgate. The King went on to attend an official thanksgiving service at St. Paul’s, but the ladies went quietly back to Greenwich, ‘to their beds’. Certainly Elizabeth of York had a heavy programme before her, since the date appointed for her much-postponed coronation was now less than three weeks away. This was to be another splendid state occasion, with no expense spared, no detail of pomp and ceremony omitted.

On 23 November the Queen left Greenwich by water for the Tower, accompanied, as usual, by her mother-in-law and by many other lords and ladies, all richly clad. The city fathers, too, were once more out in force in a flotilla of barges decorated with banners and streamers and the arms and badges of their crafts. One barge came in for special notice, as it contained ‘a great red Dragon spowting Flamys of Fyer into the Temmys’, and there were a number of other such gentlemanly pageants ‘well and curiously devysed to do her Highness sport and pleasure with’. On arrival at the Tower, Elizabeth was greeted by her husband in a manner which the onlookers found ‘right joyous and comfortable to behold’ and that night eleven new Knights of the Bath were created in honour of the coronation.

Next day, after dinner, came the procession to Westminster. The Queen wore a kirtle of white cloth of gold under a matching mantle furred with ermines and fastened with ‘a great lace curiously wrought of gold and silk’ - an outfit which must have suited her pale prettiness perfectly. Her fair hair hung down her back and was topped by a golden circlet studded with precious stones. The royal litter, covered with cloth of gold and provided with large pillows of down, also covered with cloth of gold, was drawn through streets hung with tapestry and, in Cheapside, with gold velvet and silk. The craft guilds were out again in their liveries to line the route from the Tower to St. Paul’s, and children, ‘some arrayed like angels and others like virgins’, had been placed at strategic intervals ready ‘to sing sweet songs as her Grace passed by’. The City always did this sort of thing very well.

The coronation ceremony in Westminster Abbey was performed by John Morton, the new Archbishop of Canterbury, and was watched by the King and his mother from a special platform erected between the pulpit and the high altar. The three days’ festivity ended with the usual banquet and good old Jasper Tudor, ‘the right high and mighty prince the Duke of Bedford’, who had been appointed Great Steward of England for the duration of the feast was much in evidence, wearing a furred gown of cloth of gold and a rich chain of office about his neck. Under his supervision, trumpets blew, minstrels played and the newly crowned Queen and her guests were served with such delicacies as Shields of Brawn in Armour, Pike in Laytmer Sauce, Carp in Foile, Mutton Royal richly garnished, pheasant, partridge, peacock and swan, capons, quails, larks and venison pasties, baked quince, March Payne Royal and ‘Castles of Jelly in Templewise made’. The torches had been lit by the time the Queen had washed and the Lord Mayor of London, Sir William Home, had served her with hippocras and spices and received a covered cup of gold as his fee. And then, says the chronicler, ‘the Queen departed with God’s blessing and to the rejoicing of many a true Englishman’s heart’.

Apart from her mother-in-law, Elizabeth of York had been supported by her sister Cecily, her aunt Elizabeth (mother of the de la Poles) and her cousin Margaret (sister of the imprisoned Warwick), but her own mother had been allowed no part in the proceedings. Elizabeth Woodville, in fact, was in disgrace. An incorrigible intriguante, she had somehow become mixed up in the plotting of the Lambert Simnel affair - or at any rate so the King believed - and as early as the previous February he had taken the precaution of transferring all her landed property to his wife and had installed the Queen Dowager as a boarder in the convent at Bermondsey, where she would have little opportunity of getting into mischief.

Christmas that year was again spent at Greenwich and was kept ‘full honourably’, the King going to Mass on Christmas Eve in a gown of purple velvet furred with sables, impressively escorted by his nobility. There was merrymaking as well as churchgoing, several plays were performed and on New Year’s Day there was ‘a goodly disguising’. Finally, on Twelfth Day, there was a state banquet with the King and Queen wearing their crowns, my lady the King’s mother with a rich coronet on her head, and everybody who was anybody present in full panoply.

St. George’s Day was observed at Windsor with more displays of goldsmiths’ work, of silk and velvet gowns, of cloth of gold and elaborate horse trappings.

Here this day St. George, patron of this place. 
Honored with the gartere cheefe of chevalrye; 
Chaplenes synging procession, keeping the same. 
With archbushopes and bushopes beseene nobly; 
Much people presente to see the King Henrye: 
Wherefore now, St. George, all we pray to thee 
To keepe our soveraine in his dignetye.

It is noticeable how quickly the political significance of the Tudors’ Welshness had receded. St. George, the English champion, had taken over from such heroes of Celtic mythology as Cadwaladr of the beautiful spear, and by the end of the 1480s Henry Tudor, prince of the Welsh royal line, had become submerged in Henry Tudor the English King.

Henry VII’s Court moved through the calendar of feasts and saints’ days in a ritual dance of pageantry. It was all part of the great illusion - the illusion of stability and security skilfully concealing the extreme fragility of the structure which lay beneath it. From what we know of Henry’s private character, he seems to have been a man of simple tastes who would probably have preferred to spend his free time quietly with his family. But this was a luxury he could not yet afford. He must continue to dress up in expensive, uncomfortable clothes and wear his crown in public, taking every opportunity of promoting an image of kingly splendour, of impressing the outside world with a sense of the power and confidence of the new dynasty, while behind the scenes he worked unremittingly at the task of turning illusion into reality.

It was just as well that he did, for at the beginning of the 1490s history began to repeat itself and Henry, as Francis Bacon put it, ‘began again to be haunted with spirits’. Once again the apparition took the form of a good-looking youth, Perkin (or Peter) Warbeck (or Osbeck), a native of the city of Tournai in Flanders. Once again the first manifestation occurred in Ireland, and once again the origins of the affair are obscure. According to Perkin himself, in a confession made six years later, he landed in Cork with his master, a Breton silk merchant, in the autumn of 1491 and was immediately mobbed by the inhabitants, who insisted that this well-dressed young man (Perkin was advertising his master’s wares on his person) was the same Earl of Warwick ‘that was before time at Dublin’ and would not accept his embarrassed denials.

Polydore Vergil, on the other hand, declares that it was all a deep-laid scheme instigated by Margaret of Burgundy, that inveterate enemy of the House of Tudor, who ‘cherished such a deep hatred of King Henry, that it seemed she would be content with nothing short of his death’. Ever since the Lambert Simnel
débâcle
, says Vergil, Margaret had been biding her time, hoping to succeed by cunning and craft where force of arms had failed. She had come across Perkin by chance and, being impressed by his appearance and his sharp mind, had kept him secretly in her household while she coached him in the family history, ‘so that afterwards he should...convince all by his performance that he sprang from the Yorkist line’. Margaret had then waited until Henry was embroiled in a dispute with France over the independence of Brittany before unleashing Perkin in Ireland, hoping that he would be successful in stirring up ‘the barbarous natives who were always most ready for new rebellions’.

Whichever of these versions is correct, the latest ‘Earl of Warwick’ had little success among the Irish - even the most barbarous of the native chieftains proved disappointingly chary of making fools of themselves a second time. Perkin’s next appearance was in France, where King Charles welcomed the ‘feigned lad’ with flattering attention, recognizing him not as Warwick but, more dramatically, as Richard Duke of York, the younger of the Princes in the Tower, miraculously saved from his brother’s assassins. The ‘Duke of York’ was made much of at the French Court, royally entertained and given a guard of honour, so that the young man from Tournai not surprisingly ‘thought himself in heaven’ - until the autumn of 1492, when a peace treaty was signed between France and England and the ploy had served its purpose. Charles would not go so far as to surrender Perkin to Henry, but he wasted no time in seeing his guest off the premises and Perkin returned, perforce, to Flanders, where he presented himself to his ‘aunt’ Margaret.

The Duchess at first appeared to doubt his claims, but after a careful interrogation she declared herself satisfied that this was indeed her nephew ‘raised from the dead’. Margaret was in transports - ‘so great was her pleasure that her happiness seemed to have disturbed the balance of her mind’ - and Perkin once more received VIP treatment. He was installed in a fine house in Antwerp, given a guard of thirty archers who flaunted the white rose badge on their uniforms, and invited to state functions by Maximilian, King of the Romans.

Perkin was encouraged to tell the story of his adventure, of how he had escaped death by a ruse and of his subsequent wanderings round Europe. The news spread rapidly and created a considerable sensation - especially in England, where rumours that one of King Edward’s sons might be alive after all ‘came blazing and thundering’ and, for a time, gained a good deal of credence, not only among the ordinary gullible public, but among some more important men ‘who considered the matter as genuine’.

The trouble was that Perkin could just have been genuine. The fate of the little princes remained something of a mystery and the King, of course, was in no position to produce the real Duke of York - a point which had not escaped the notice of his adversaries. The most worrying thing from Henry’s point of view was just how many important men did believe - or were ready to pretend to believe - in the impostor. He needed to know urgently if there was anyone in his immediate circle who was in the plot, and he made this his first priority. Fortunately his intelligence service was highly efficient and there were a number of arrests during 1494. But it was December before the King caught a really big fish in his net. This turned out to be no less a person than Sir William Stanley, who had helped to put the crown on Henry’s head at Bosworth, the Earl of Derby’s brother and his own mother’s brother-in-law.

Stanley’s somewhat inadequate motive for dabbling in treachery seems to have arisen largely out of resentment that he had not been given a peerage, and he also seems to have had some idea that the King would not dare to proceed against him. But although it undoubtedly came as a very unpleasant shock to find a traitor so close to home, once he was satisfied of Stanley’s guilt, Henry never hesitated and Sir William was tried and executed in February 1495.

After this, the English end of the conspiracy (and there is no doubt that an active and dangerous Yorkist cell had existed) began to disintegrate. Perkin attracted no more native support of any consequence and, indeed, the rest of his story is soon told. Early in July he turned up off the coast of Kent with a small fleet and a few hundred assorted followers - ‘human dregs’ according to Polydore Vergil, but Margaret of Burgundy’s resources were not inexhaustible. Perkin seems to have lacked the courage to go on shore, but some of his supporters did and were decimated by loyal Kentish men. He went on - poor wretch, he had little choice but to go on - and in November appeared in Scotland. Here he was welcomed by James IV, a brash young man looking for an opportunity to make a stir in the world and not at all reluctant to annoy his more powerful neighbour. James took Perkin up, recognized him as Richard Plantagenet and even provided him with a wife. Lady Catherine Gordon, a distant kinswoman of his own. The Scottish king organized some Border raids for the pretender’s benefit, but even the normally turbulent North showed not the slightest interest in his cause. Perkin stayed on in Scotland, half pensioner and half prisoner, for another two years, until James got tired of him and sent him packing. He ended his active career in the West Country, attempting to take advantage of some local disaffection in Cornwall, but he was now a lonely and discredited figure and although he managed to gather quite a large force, his followers had no armour, no artillery and few weapons and were cut to pieces assaulting Exeter. Perkin himself escaped, but was finally captured near Beaulieu early in October 1497.