The Hollow Crown: The Wars of the Roses and the Rise of the Tudors (36 page)

On Ascension Day in 1487, in Christchurch Cathedral in Dublin, a young man enjoyed a rather unexpected coronation. Besides Dublin Castle and the town’s other cathedral, dedicated to St Patrick, Christchurch was the greatest building in the city, and by extension, one of the most magnificent in all of Ireland. And on Sunday 24 May it was enjoying one of its most extraordinary moments, as a ten-year-old child, dazzlingly dressed and supported by Gerald Fitzgerald, earl of Kildare and John de la Pole, earl of Lincoln, was crowned Edward VI, king of England and France.

His name – or more likely his pseudonym – was Lambert Simnel. He could have been an orphan from Flanders or a boy called John from Oxfordshire. His father may have been a carpenter called Thomas Simnel, who specialised in fitting out the wooden components of musical organs for the colleges and churches of Oxford and its flourishing university. He may alternatively have been a baker or a cobbler. Of his mother very little is known.
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What is known is that he had turned up in Dublin the previous autumn, and since that moment had been exciting the local population with his claims about his background and personal history. He was a comely youth, with ‘courtly manners’ according to one writer, and no doubt he looked radiant in the spring light of the cathedral, when he was crowned with a small circle of gold taken from the head of a statue of the Virgin Mary, and subsequently when he was carried through the city streets on the shoulders of a local lord, to be toasted and feasted in the castle.
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The coins that were minted bearing his likeness were handsome, as was the great
seal struck for him, showing the boy enthroned, holding orb and sceptre. But this was most certainly not a king of England.

Lambert Simnel was an imposter. He claimed to be Edward earl of Warwick, the young son of George duke of Clarence, who had lived for most of his life in confinement, variously at Sheriff Hutton, Margaret Beaufort’s London palace at Coldharbour and the Tower of London – which was precisely where he was on Ascension Day 1487. Warwick had been damned by his father’s rebellion against Edward IV: he had become a political and legal nonentity at the time of his father’s execution and attainder, and was more or less ignored as first Richard duke of Gloucester and then Henry Tudor staked their claims to the crown. Were it not for Clarence’s attainder he would have been the last direct male member of the royal house of York. Instead, he had gone from being a prisoner of Richard III to a prisoner of Henry VII. Nevertheless, his impersonator had managed, in less than a year, to rally behind him a worrying degree of opposition to Henry VII’s young reign. Ominously for the real king, that support was on the verge of bringing about a full-scale invasion of England.

The earliest origins of the plot to present Simnel as ‘Edward VI’ are obscure, but he seems to have emerged in Oxfordshire under the tutelage of a priest called William Simonds and the political sponsorship of three renegades from Richard III’s reign: Francis, Viscount Lovell, Robert Stillington, bishop of Bath, and John de la Pole, earl of Lincoln, who as Richard III’s nephew had been heir presumptive at the time of the battle of Bosworth. Most importantly of all, the plot was supported by Margaret, dowager duchess of Burgundy: Richard III’s older sister, who ruled the Netherlands from the palace of Mechelen, near Antwerp, on behalf of her son Philip the Fair. Margaret was a superlative politician and a strong, hard-nosed protector of what she believed to be her family’s interests. She refused to accept Henry VII’s accession as king, and she extended the protection of her
court to exiles who shared her aim of undermining the callow Tudor monarchy from afar.

Henry VII had been aware for some time that there was a pretender at large in Ireland. His own experience must have prepared him for the fact that, having taken the crown by force, he would be tested by others seeking to do the same, and he reacted decisively. On 2 February 1487 he had tried to snuff out the plotting by parading the real Edward from the Tower through the streets of London. Subsequently he had commanded that Elizabeth Woodville should be stripped of her estates and sent summarily to begin a luxurious retirement at Bermondsey Abbey, while her eldest son, the marquess of Dorset, should be imprisoned in the Tower. There is nothing really to suggest that either was involved: Elizabeth, as the mother of the queen, had very little motivation for plotting to overthrow the crown, still less in the name of Clarence’s son. Dorset was temperamentally unreliable and had not been trusted to join the Bosworth campaign, but there is nothing really to suggest that he was scheming against the king. Nevertheless, Henry VII was not willing to take risks. And his caution was to prove absolutely correct. For on 4 June 1487 an army of fifteen hundred German mercenaries and four thousand Irish peasants landed at Furness on the Cumbrian coast in the far north-west of England. They were led by Simnel and his puppet master John earl of Lincoln and marshalled by the fearsome Swiss captain Martin Schwartz, a man ‘admirably skilled in the art of war’.
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They marched rapidly across the lower Cumbrian mountains and the Pennines to Wensleydale, then skirted past York to Doncaster, and on down in the direction of Newark. They kept up a terrific pace, and by 15 June they were approaching the river Trent, the traditional dividing line between the north and south of England. There could be no hesitation on the king’s part. This was a full-scale invasion, at least as severe as that which Henry
himself had mounted two summers previously. The flames of beacons would have licked the air to publicise the presence of the hordes marching down the spine of England. The crown would once again be placed in jeopardy on the battlefield.

Henry was at Kenilworth, in the east midlands, when Simnel and Lincoln landed. He threw his realm immediately into a state of martial readiness. As a royal army was assembled, Jasper duke of Bedford and John earl of Oxford were detailed to high command. The Stanleys were given an independent commission to defend their area of authority. Other loyal nobles, including Lord Lisle, Lord Scales, Sir Rhys ap Thomas and the earls of Shrewsbury and Devon, were also summoned to serve at the fore. Proclamations demanding that public order be kept were sent around the country. The king himself rode to Coventry and on to Leicester, mustering his troops and readying himself for the assault. In Leicester, Richard III’s corpse, not long in its rough grave at the church of the Greyfriars, must have reminded the king of fortune’s fickleness. Henry did not stay long in the city. By the time Simnel and Lincoln’s army had reached the Trent, he had amassed a large force of his own – perhaps twice the size of the invaders’ – which camped in the shadow of Nottingham Castle. It was the festival weekend of Corpus Christi – normally a time for processions, pageants and mystery plays. But with foreign mercenaries on the rampage in the English midlands, there was no thought for anything but beating back the enemy. ‘Like doves before a black storm,’ wrote Bernard André, quoting Virgil’s
Aeneid
, ‘the men at once seized their weapons. Now the royal army advanced to meet the throngs of barbarians.’
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The armies collided slightly south-east of Newark, near the lower bank of the meandering Trent, where the old Roman road cut a path directly from Leicester towards its end-point at Lincoln. On Friday 15 June the rebel army had camped overnight near the village of East Stoke – around eight thousand in total,
made up of a band of highly trained foreign sell-swords carrying halberds, crossbows and long, primitive rifles known as arquebuses (or hackbuts), along with half-naked Irish backwoodsmen with spears in their hands and the various bands of northern English archers, horsemen and gunners whom the rebel leaders had managed to rally to their cause on their long march south. The royal army, packed with veterans of Bosworth and large noble retinues, overnighted around Radcliffe, several miles away in the direction of Nottingham. Henry’s scouts, sent out at first light, hastened back to the camp to inform the king that they had seen rebel troops lined up in readiness to fight on the brow of a hill near East Stoke (a place that locals simply called Stoke).

The long mornings of early June meant that even with a short march, Henry’s men reached the field by around 9 a.m. As they arrayed in battle formation facing Simnel’s far smaller force, Henry gave a speech. André later put a fancifully poetic version into the king’s mouth, but the sentiment – that Lincoln had ‘brazenly’ taken up his cause in alliance with ‘a trifling and shameless woman’, Margaret of Burgundy, and that the king now trusted ‘the same God who made us victors’ at Bosworth to ‘give us triumph’ – may well have been correct.
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The fight was begun by the rebels, with a swarm of crossbow bolts buzzing towards the royal lines. Fire was returned with interest by Henry VII’s archers. Since many of the rank and file in Simnel and Lincoln’s army were unarmoured and vulnerable Irish fighters, better used to fighting hand to hand than withstanding volleys of arrows, the result was something close to a massacre.

Rather than stand and suffer annihilation from long range, the rebels charged, and a violent mêlée at close quarters began. This suited both the sophisticated continental mercenaries and the fierce men from rural Ireland. The close fighting lasted for around an hour, but eventually Henry’s superior numbers
prevailed and the enemy began to disintegrate. Both armies suffered severe losses, but it was on the rebel side that the most hideous carnage was wreaked. Perhaps four thousand of Simnel and Lincoln’s fighters were killed, many from arrow wounds, their blood pooling in great puddles about the field and running deep into a wooded hollow afterwards known as the Red Gutter. By the end, almost all of the rebel commanders and captains, including Lincoln, Martin Schwartz and Lord Lovell, lay dead. Lambert Simnel was captured and taken to the Tower, where he was treated chivalrously and eventually put to work in the king’s service. (Over the years he would work his way up from the kitchen staff to a post in falconry.) Meanwhile, Henry VII paraded from the battlefield for the second time in as many years, and took his army to the city of Lincoln to celebrate by gorging on pike, capons, sheep and ox-flesh and hanging a few of the Irish and English rank and file who had dared to rebel. News of the victory was sent across the country, being particularly well received by Henry’s supporters in London, where rumours circulated that the king had been defeated and killed. Far from it. Henry had trusted his reign to Providence, and Providence had once again appeared to vindicate his kingship. In retrospect, the battle of Stoke would take on great significance. For it was the last battle that Henry, or any other king of his dynasty, would ever have to fight to save the crown.

Yet if the last clash of armies had taken place, the danger was not quite over. For almost as soon as Simnel had been captured, another pretender was produced, who would trouble the Tudor king for many years to come.

Late in 1491 a Breton merchant by the name of Pregent Meno set sail from Lisbon to Ireland to sell silks. He washed up in Cork, on the rugged south-eastern tail of the country: a marshy town
that spread out across several islands, in which shops and houses stood higgledy-piggledy beside one another in a grid of warren-like streets. Here walked exiles and plotters: dissidents who had reason to hate the regime of the English king across the sea, and who were constantly on the watch for ways in which they could harm him.

Accompanying Meno on his silk-selling mission was a young man from northern France by the name of Pierrechon de Werbecque. Around seventeen years old, Pierrechon (his full name was mockingly part-anglicised by his enemies to ‘Perkin Warbeck’) had been born in Tournai, in the borderlands between France and the Netherlands, in about 1474. He had, said Vergil, a ‘sharp and artful mind’ and spoke English as well as several other languages.
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He had been apprenticed by his parents to other merchants and from the age of about ten had lived an itinerant life in the trading towns of western Europe, from Antwerp to Lisbon, where he met Meno. Finally he arrived in Ireland and came to the attention of the former mayor of Cork, John Atwater, a central figure in the network of Yorkist sympathisers in the town. Whether they saw in Warbeck a likeness to another famous young man, or whether they simply found him an enterprising lad who could be bent to their purposes – or both – they took him into their confidence and convinced him to join them in a plot. Just as Lambert Simnel had been set up as an imposter, so too would Warbeck be. Only this time, rather than impersonating Edward earl of Warwick, the subject of the pretence would be the younger of the Princes in the Tower, Richard duke of York.

Richard, had he been alive in late 1491, would have been seventeen, like Warbeck, and of the perfect age to assume the crown. It was a matter of general agreement that he was dead – Henry VII’s first parliament had condemned Richard III for ‘shedding infants’ blood, with many other wrongs, odious offences and abominations against God and man’.
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But since a body had never
been found nor a murderer brought to justice, it was still possible for those who wished to convince themselves that Richard had escaped the Tower to do so.
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This was precisely the wilful gullibility on which the rebels of Cork depended when they set up Warbeck to impersonate the lost prince.

Once he was established as ‘Richard’, Warbeck was shown to the earl of Desmond, who responded with enthusiastic support. Then he was effectively hawked around western Europe to anyone who wished to annoy and harass the Tudor king.

The first to make use of him was the twenty-one-year-old Charles VIII of France, whose initial great project as king was to marry – more or less illegally – Anne of Brittany, four years old and the heir to her ailing father Francis II’s duchy. By marrying Anne, Charles intended to annex Brittany to France and strike down forever its independence from the French crown. Henry VII was long acquainted with Duke Francis from his years in exile and was understandably inclined to offer his support to the Bretons. Charles thus followed a well-trodden path in international diplomacy. Since the outbreak of the English civil wars in the 1450s, foreign rulers had understood the value of holding or sheltering alternative claimants to the English crown. (Most recently, Francis II had harboured Henry Tudor, while the dukes of Burgundy had supported Edward IV, and Margaret of Anjou had set up her renegade Lancastrian court during the 1460s under the protection of Louis XI of France.) Most credible claimants to the crown had been killed, but that inconvenient fact aside, the policy was still a sensible one. Thus from March 1492 Perkin Warbeck was put up by the French court.