The War of the Roses (32 page)

Crucially, the rebellion had lacked any candidate to replace the King and so did not pose an immediate dynastic challenge to him. The best potential candidate to act had been Edmund de la Pole, Lincoln's younger brother and future Yorkist pretender; but as of 1497 he had had not broken with the King. Indeed, when he was sent a royal summons to join the army to defeat the rebels one of his friends suggested that he should join the rebels instead, and proposed to do so himself. Edmund not only refused but stole his friend's breeches and took his horse's saddle before he left, in order to hinder him from carrying out his plan.
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Nor was Warbeck able to support the rebels, as he left Scotland by sea in early July 1497 on board the ironically nicknamed
Cuckoo
, purchased for him the previous autumn by James (which may imply that James had hoped to be rid of him earlier.) Henry had mustered a large army at Newcastle under Lord Daubeny that spring, with an advance force ready in Berwick and artillery from the Tower being moved north too; if James did not abandon Warbeck an invasion was intended. If James agreed to peace, on the other hand, he could marry Henry's elder daughter, Margaret (which he eventually did in 1503). The sheer size of resources committed by England meant that it was not possible for James to help Warbeck by distracting Henry with another invasion, even if he had wished to–though that summer the surprise Cornish revolt meant that the English had to send most troops south so James briefly attacked Norham Castle.

Warbeck headed back to Cork to join his supporter Atwater and renew his campaign in Ireland. Having only one ship and no Scots recruits, weapons, or money on board, he was reliant on Irish lordly reinforcements for his next move, and these failed to materialize (again). The Earl of Desmond had changed sides to back the King since Poynings' reassertion of royal power in Dublin in 1494, Kildare had learnt his lesson and would not risk ruin, and the pro-Yorkist Sir Thomas Ormond (one of the senior Anglo-Irish lords of central Munster, from the local Butler dynasty) was killed a few days before Warbeck arrived by his dynastic rival, Sir Piers Butler. As Desmond and Kildare led a pro-royal force on Cork and royal ships from Waterford patrolled the coast, Warbeck had to leave Cork and lurked around the rugged Munster coast where Spanish ships picked him up. Their ambassador in England, Pedro de Ayala, apparently told Warbeck where to go to meet them; it would seem that the Spanish sovereigns (who used the diplomatic code for a genuine prince in their written references to him) hoped to use him as a pawn now that the Habsburgs had dropped him. But instead of sailing off to Spain Warbeck ended up in Cornwall–after a royal ship had intercepted his vessel and the captain had led his men aboard and asked the sailors if the pretender was there. They denied it, and he was unable to identify Warbeck who either pretended to be an ordinary sailor or hid in a barrel.
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The King's savage repression of the rebellion had failed to stamp out resentment or terrorize his Cornish subjects into obedience, and belatedly his surviving local detractors had thought of enlisting gentry and noble support–an essential prerequisite of any revolt attracting serious outside backing. The few gentry involved now decided to link their cause to Warbeck's and sent representatives to track him down (before or after he arrived in Ireland?) and invite him to Cornwall to lead a second rebellion. The rebel leaders named later by the government were John Nankivell of St Morgan, Walter Tripcony of St Columb, and Humphrey Cawodely of Helland, plus assorted yeomen of Cornwall and western Devon; none of any great standing.
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On 7 September Warbeck landed at Whitesand Bay near Land's End–a place as far away from the King's forces as he could find so it gave him time to raise an army, albeit a badly-armed one of local miners, farmers, and labourers.
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Even Polydore Vergil admitted that he was able by his charisma, appearance, and promises to enthuse the locals and raise a substantial force, taking Penzance and placing his wife, Katherine Gordon, in the safety of St Michael's Mount after it surrendered. (It had also been the stronghold of a pro-Tudor invader, the Earl of Oxford, in 1474.) He then moved on east to Bodmin with up to 8000 men, and had the sense to take over and fortify the ancient earthworks at Castle Canyke nearby; the Sheriff of Cornwall, Sir Piers Edgcumbe (from the main gentry dynasty in East Cornwall), arrived with up to 20,000 men but could not storm it as his troops lacked enthusiasm or military discipline. Instead they turned and fled,
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and Warbeck could march on into Devon unhindered–which would have been unlikely had Edgcumbe had the luck or determination to arrive at Bodmin first, block the road east, and challenge him to do the attacking. Edgcumbe's army was larger, and so could hold a defensive position provided that discipline held; and Warbeck's rural recruits would not have had large amounts of arrows to drive the royal forces back from a distance. Given the reliance of both armies on non-professional county levies, morale, weapons, and trust in a competent leader were vital and a strong defensive position even more so. Anybody but a professional commander with skilled and well-armed troops would have difficulty in attacking a fortified position and a popular revolt frequently ‘broke' against a defended town. In this case, the setback of desertions meant that Edgcumbe could not fall back to hold the Tamar and Warbeck was able to enter Launceston and cross the river into Devon, ignoring Plymouth and taking the more direct route north of Dartmoor to Exeter. In the meantime, Henry (at Woodstock near Oxford, centrally-placed as in 1487 and 1493) sent out orders to his principal subjects to collect troops and head south-west on 12 September; Daubeny was to command again, with his army reinforced by the Tower of London artillery.
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While the royal army assembled, the principal peer in Devon, the county's titular Earl (who had proclaimed Henry as King in Bodmin in the 1483 rebellion), took his levies to Okehampton to meet Warbeck but, fearing he was outnumbered, withdrew to the safety of walled Exeter to meet Edgcumbe and various senior loyalist Devon gentry. The ‘showdown' of the rebellion thus occurred at the county capital of Devon as Warbeck arrived on 17 September, with around 8000 badly-armed but enthusiastic rebels trying to storm a walled city full of well-armed royal levies without cannon or any officer with serious military experience. The townsmen seem to have been understandably nervous, though, and it only took a few ‘traitors' to open a gate while guards were distracted, asleep, or drunk.

Henry apparently expected the rebels to avoid attacking the city and march on, and ordered Courtenay to pursue and harass them so that they could be trapped between his Devon forces and Daubeny's army, now in Somerset advancing west. Logically, it was unlikely that the rebels could take the defended walled city and not much use if they did as they had no cannon to defend it and would only lose time and men in doing so. Instead the rebels made a first attack on Exeter from the north and east sides on the afternoon of the 17th, and in a determined second attack next morning broke in through the east gate and fought the King's men in the main street. Eventually, Courtenay in person led his men to drive them out, but the royal troops were too tired to take the offensive and a truce was agreed. The rebels, who had lost around 3–500 men in a few hours, marched off east.
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Their intention was to tackle Daubeny's advancing army–as of 20 September the King was still at Woodstock–though their losses and lack of weapons or training made it unlikely that they could prevail against a larger and better-disciplined force under an experienced commander in open battle (except by a lucky ambush). Daubeny also had a large number of nobles and gentry in his force and Courtenay had the latter; all were more used to fighting than Warbeck's army of commoners from knightly training. Warbeck managed to reach Taunton, where ironically the 1493–5 ‘plotter' Bishop Langton was the local lord of the castle, but his men were starting to desert–the King was able to allege that his advance was in reality a panicking retreat after his failure at Exeter.
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He was heading into the path of a foe he could not hope to defeat without substantial reinforcements (which a losing cause would not obtain), and some of his men may have decided that slipping away home was the safest option. How much of this desertion was propaganda by the relieved King's writers is unclear, but Warbeck was bold enough to hold a review of his men outside Taunton on the 21st.

Daubeny sent a formal challenge to battle, which was expected to take place at Glastonbury,
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but that night Warbeck deserted his army. With around sixty horsemen he headed south-east for the south coast, apparently intending to find a ship and set sail for Flanders. Polydore Vergil thought that he panicked and reckoned that he was bound to lose a battle.
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He moved fast enough to elude pursuit for two days, and was presumably heading for Southampton Water–as refugee King Charles I was to do in autumn 1647–as he ended up taking sanctuary at nearby Beaulieu Abbey.
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Most of his entourage seem to have split up, and a few hid in London. Warbeck, however, was quickly located, surrounded by royal troops, and induced to surrender a fortnight later;
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if he had not done so he would have been dragged out of the Abbey by force. The town levies of Southampton under the Mayor took him into custody and escorted him to Taunton to be interrogated by the King, who had arrived there on 30 September. Most of Warbeck's army, in fact, stayed loyally in their camp at Taunton for a few days expecting him to reappear, showing their determination, but even if their leader had stayed with them they would have been in as serious a position as the other Cornish army had been at Blackheath. Instead, the captive ‘boatman's son' had to confess his alleged fraud to Henry's court, his own wife, and in print to the whole of Europe and was taken off to London as a prisoner–initially to court for reasonable treatment but later to the Tower.

 

Could Warbeck have won?

The ranks of medieval or Renaissance era pretenders who achieved their goals are limited, particularly those who were not even plausibly the people whose identity they assumed. The only obscure pretender of dubious origins to seize a major throne by rebellion was the ‘False Dmitri' in Russia in 1605 –a probable runaway serf who claimed the identity of the last male heir of the extinct ‘House of Rurik' Prince Dmitri, killed in an apparent accident with a knife in a remote provincial town in 1591. On his elder half-brother Czar Feodor's death in 1598 the latter's powerful, capable and ruthless brother-in-law Boris Godunov secured the vacant throne, but was believed to have murdered Dmitri; only his death in 1605 saved him from overthrow by the pretender, backed by Russia's foe Poland with troops and leading an army of rebellious peasants and brigands. The pretender was then crowned, but was regarded as a Polish agent and was lynched a year later by his ambitious nobles. There are similarities between the situations of Dmitri with Edward V and Prince Richard and between Boris Godunov and Richard III, though Dmitri's death is more certain than the Princes'; and the ‘False Dmitri' was as personally ambitious and charming an opportunist as Warbeck. But would Warbeck have been as insecure on his throne as ‘Dmitri' and ended up in a similar way? Unless he had secured the throne without the 1494–5 conspiracy being detected he would have had a very narrow band of active support, and lacked any major magnates coming out openly on his side–and there would have been ‘genuine' Yorkist princes at hand who would justifiably feel that they had a better right to the throne, led by Edmund de la Pole. In Russia in 1606 the great nobles of remote but genuine Rurykid blood led the coup that removed Dmitri and one of them, Vassily Shuisky, then took the throne; once Warbeck's foreign (Flemish? German?) troops had gone home he could have faced a similar fate from his local rivals.

Warbeck had the advantages that he looked and sounded like a Yorkist prince, and in his 1496 proclamation (repeated at Exeter in September 1497) he presented himself as the restorer of the natural order in place of a usurper who had promoted greedy and presumptuous ‘caitiffs and villains of simple birth' such as Bishops Fox (of Winchester) and King (of Bath), Lord Daubeny, Sir Reginald Bray, Sir Thomas Lovell (Lord Treasurer), and the Beaufort bastard Sir Charles Somerset (Captain of the King's Guard).
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This propaganda about low-born favourites always hit a raw nerve and was used by Henry IV to denounce Richard II's ‘duketti' and other close allies in 1399 and by Warwick to denounce the Woodvilles in 1469. It was also implied in the Tudor rhyme about ‘the Rat, the Cat and Lovell our dog' against Richard III in 1485, and the Duke of Norfolk allegedly abused the low birth of Cardinal Wolsey under Henry VIII. The Duke of Buckingham then also resented low-born ministers.
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Kings had always promoted ‘new men' so this was not a special failing of Henry VII's, and indeed Warbeck's target Bishop King had been his own ‘father' Edward IV's secretary. Moreover, the practice of using upwardly-mobile clerical ministers as royal advisers was normal practice, the Church having both social mobility and literate, trained bureaucrats–the Lord Chancellor in late medieval England was normally a cleric and so was the King's secretary. Even Edward III, the admired ‘courtly' paragon of chivalric leadership for his nobles, had relied on humbly-born clerical ‘self-made man' Bishop William of Wykeham (of Winchester). Nor had Henry ennobled or enfeoffed large numbers of ‘upstarts' as Richard II had done; he only created five peerages in his twenty-four-year reign, one of them being Daubeny's. It was thus a fitting fate that Henry was to use the same propaganda weapon against Warbeck, spreading the story about him being a boatman's son from Tournai.