# Cassell's Illustrated History of England/Volume 2/Chapter 6

CHAPTER VI.
REIGN OF HENRY VII.—(continued).
Henry was now bent, according to all appearance, on war. He was too clear-sighted not to perceive the immense advantage France had obtained over him in securing Brittany, and how the political foresight and sagacity on which he prided himself had suffered from the paltry promptings of his avarice. Mean as he was, the contempt which his subjects expressed for his neglect of his allies, and of the interests of his country, could not but make a strong impression; and the indignation everywhere felt at his private appropriation of the money which should have succoured Brittany and maintained the national fame, alarmed him lest he should have weakened his means of getting fresh supplies. He therefore put on a most belligerent attitude. He summoned a Parliament at Westminster, and addressed it in the most heroic strain. He commented on the insolence of France, elated with the success of her late perfidy, and on what he no doubt felt more deeply than anything else, her refusal to pay what he called the tribute agreed by Louis XI. to be paid to Edward IV., and hitherto continued to himself.
The address was worthy of the most generous and war-like monarch that ever sat on the throne of England, and wanted only one thing to revive all the ancient enthusiasm of the people—faith in the man who spoke it. To obviate the national fears on the score of expense, he assured them that France was now grown rich, and that he would soon make the war maintain itself.
Those who took a prudent and dispassionate view of affairs, not only distrusted, or rather disbelieved, the promises of the king, but they also recognised in France a far more powerful antagonist than she was formerly. England had lately suffered much from the civil wars; she could not yet be said to be free from widely-spread, if recent, discontent. She had lately seen a claimant of the crown only put down by a severe battle, and the bloodshed of many eminent men. Other clouds were already forming on the horizon, and the relations with Scotland were anything but settled. The turbulent nobles of that country had murdered their king, and his successor, James IV., was said to be strongly attached to the French interests; while France itself was wonderfully invigorated by the constructive policy of her late sovereigns. She had united all the great fiefs to the crown: all those provinces which formerly brought her weakness and even attack, now were united in one union of unprecedented power. We had no longer open highways into the very heart of that kingdom, but one compact and complete frontier, presenting its armed barriers to our approach. And our allies, what were they? Maximilian had already failed us—he was ambitious but poor; and the politic Ferdinand, at the moment he was threatening war, was sure to be found secretly treating for peace.
These were the sentiments of the more reflective portion of the nation; but Parliament and the nobility were roused by the royal claptrap, as though they had been listening, not to a Tudor, but a Plantagenet—to the Fifth, not to the Seventh Henry. Two-fifteenths were at once granted him, and the nobility were on fire with the anticipation of realising all the glories and the plunder of the past ages. To enable them to raise the necessary funds, an Act was passed empowering them to alienate their estates without paying any fines: an Act, in other words, to make ruin easy to the aristocracy for the enrichment of the avaricious king, who had no more idea of going to war than he had of refunding the various taxes raised on similar pretences, and still sleeping in his chests. The barons and knights, led away by the king's empty flourishes of speech, were in all haste to sell and mortgage, flattering themselves with nothing less than marching in triumph to the gates of Paris, placing their boastful monarch on the French throne, and returning laden with wealth, or staying to rule over the towns and provinces of the subjugated country. Henry all the while watched the enthusiasm, and calculated what it would exactly make in current coin.
He availed himself of the paroxysm of the moment, not only to gather in and garner the two-fifteenths newly granted, but the remains of the benevolence voted last session. Whilst the fresh tax fell on the nation generally, this fell on the monied and commercial capitalists. London alone furnished £10,000 of it or £100,000 of our money. The wily old archbishop, Morton, instructed the commissioners to employ this dilemma, which was called Morton's fork. They were to urge upon people who lived in a modest and careful way, that they must be rich in consequence of their parsimony; on those who indulged in expensive abodes and styles of living, that they must be opulent, because they had so much to expend. To afford ample time for harvesting these riches, Henry found perpetual causes for delaying his expedition. The nobles ​were already crowding to his standard with their vassals, and impatient to set out, but Henry had always some plausible excuse for lingering. At one time it was the unsafe state of Scotland, and four months were occupied in negotiating an extension of the truce; then it was the necessity of contracting for fresh levies of troops. These troops, however, were ready in June and July, but still they were not allowed to move. "The truth was," says Bacon, "that though the king showed great forwardness for a war, not only to his Parliament and Court, but to his Privy Council, except the two bishops (Fox and Morton), and a few more, yet, nevertheless, in his secret intentions, he had no purpose to go through with any war upon France. But the truth was, that he did but traffic with that war to make money."
Remains of Bermondsey Abbey in which Queen Elizabeth Wydville was confined. From a Drawing made before its Demolition.
At length, in the beginning of October, 1492, he landed at Calais, with a fine army of 25,000 foot, and 1,600 horse, which he gave in command to the Duke of Bedford and the Earl of Oxford. This was a force capable of striking an alarming blow; but what appeared extraordinary was, that the French made no efforts to prepare against it. The country was as quiet and as defenceless as if not a hostile soldier was in it. There was no excitement, no muster of troops; there was scarcely a regiment on the whole way from Calais to Paris. This convinced those of any reflection that, after all, there would be no war, that nothing less was meant by Henry, or expected by Charles, and rumours to this effect began to pervade the English camp. It was said that it was now time to go into winter quarters, and, therefore, an actual campaign had never been contemplated. But Henry replied that the very lateness of the season, on the contrary, showed that he was in earnest. His object, he said, was the total conquest of France, and the appendage of it to the English crown, and that was not likely to be the work of a single summer. At what season he commenced this great enterprise was, therefore of no consequence whatever. He had Calais for his winter quarters, and was at once as much at home as in England, and yet, ready at a moment to seize on all opportunities. To show them what he meant to do, he ordered a march upon Bologne. The siege of Bologne lasted two months, but nothing whatever was done, except Sir John Savage, an English captain, being killed by a shot as he was reconnoitring the walls.
An Old English Merrymaking. 15th Century
After having thus assumed all this pretence to exonerate himself from censure, Henry signed a peace on the following terms:—Charles was to retain Brittany for ever, and he was to pay Henry 620,000 crowns in gold for the money advanced by Henry on account of Brittany and his present expenses, and 125,000 crowns in gold as arrears of the pension paid to Edward IV. by Louis XI. He was also to continue this pension of 25,000 crowns to Henry and his heirs. The whole amount which Henry sacked was 745,000 crowns, equal to £400,000 of our present money. The members of his council, who openly acted the part of petitioners of this peace, are said not only to have been instructed by Henry to perform this obnoxious duty, but to have been gained by the bribes of the French king, who was anxious to make short work of it, that he might proceed on an expedition which he had set his mind upon against Naples. They went about declaring that it was the most glorious peace that any king of England ever made with France, and that if Henry's subjects presumed to censure it, they were ready to take all the blame upon themselves.
Having used all these precautions to ward off the reproaches of his subjects, Henry ratified the peace on the 6th of November, and led back his army to England. There, though he had the money safely in his chests, the disappointment and indignation of the people were extreme, and tended to diminish his sordid satisfaction. The people protested that he had been trading on the honour of the nation, and had sold its interests and reputation for his own vile gain, and his enemies did not neglect to avail themselves of his unpopularity. During the past year, a young man had landed in Cork, of a singularly fascinating exterior and insinuating address. He represented himself to be no other than the Duke of York, the younger of the two princes who were supposed to have been murdered in the Tower. He was a fine young man, apparently exactly of the age of the Duke of York, and bearing a striking likeness to Edward IV. "Such a mercurial," says Bacon, "as the like hath seldom been known; and he had such a crafty and bewitching fashion, both to move pity and induce belief, as was like a kind of fascination or enchantment." If he were an impostor, he was so admirably qualified to act his part that he might scorn created for the purpose; and so well did he act it, that it remains a moot point to the present day whether he were the true prince or not. For our own part, we can have little doubt as to the matter. It was the age of impostors. Lambert Simnel had been only recently played off, and that but clumsily. He had been originally designed to support this character; but had, for reasons best known to the conspirators, been made to assume that of the Earl of Warwick. As we have surmised, probably as the queen-dowager was concerned in it, that plot had not meant to do more than alarm Henry, and induce him to act more favourably towards the queen and the party of York. Transparent as was the delusion, it had actually shaken Henry on his throne, and led to a sanguinary conflict. This plot, more adapted to the increased resentment of the Yorkists, appeared to have a deeper and deadlier aim. The queen-dowager did not appear in it; and it therefore struck more ruthlessly at the very existence of the king and his whole line. It was in the highest degree-artful in its construction, and widely supported by high and influential men. It had in it all the marks of proceeding from that manufactory of treason against Henry—the Court of the Duchess-Dowager of Burgundy. This princess, the sister of Edward IV., with all her virtues, was a deadly enemy of Henry Tudor. She hated him as the overturner of her own family; she hated him still more intensely for his insult to her house in his treatment of the queen and her mother, and his settled repugnance to the whole party of York. There can be little doubt, therefore, that this scheme, as well as that of Simnel, was concocted at her Court. That the present pretender could not possibly be the real Duke of York is sufficiently clear to our minds for these two reasons:—When Richard III. determined to murder the two princes, it was to exterminate the male offspring of Edward IV., and it is not likely that he would have suffered one of the two to escape. Had he done so, he had better have done nothing; for to stain his hands, in the blood of the older would have been utterly useless while the younger remained. If the Duke of York, therefore, had really escaped, we do not believe that he would have murdered the Prince of Wales. So long as the Duke of York was with his mother in the sanctuary, she, and every one, felt that the Prince of Wales was safe, even in the Tower. But once in the Tower together, their doom was sealed.
The only possibility of escape must have been in the fact of the hired assassins turning pitiful, and allowing the intended victims to escape. But would they murder one and save the other? Such a thing is contrary to nature. If they resolved to spare one they would spare both. But the discovery of the bones of the two boys long afterwards, buried precisely where it might be expected that they lay, in one coffin or chest, and tallying in every circumstance of age and relative size, sufficiently proves that they spared neither. Henry himself, as we shall see, was anxious to discover these remains, as a positive evidence of the actual death of both the boys, but could not. That discovery was reserved to a much later period, and was the result of accident, rendering the result the more conclusive, as there could then be no suspicion even that Henry had these skeletons first buried and then found. The whole of the evidence compels us to regard the present pretended Duke of York as thoroughly an impostor as Simnel himself. What would appear to have been the real story of this remarkable pretender, so far as we can gather from the records of the time, is this:—
Margaret, the Duchess-Dowager of Burgundy, having played off Lambert Simnel, devised this scheme, or was supplied with it by the Yorkist refugees at her Court, who had immediate and constant communion with the heads of the York faction in England. A young man was industriously sought after who should well represent the Duke of York, though she knew him to be dead. Such a youth was found in the son, or reputed son, of one John Osbeck, ​or Warbeck, a renegade Jew of Tournaye. This Warbeck had lived and carried on business in the time of Edward IV., and had dealings with the king, who was so free with him that the Jew prevailed on him to become godfather to his child, who was called Peter, and whose name became converted into the diminutive Peterkin or Perkin. Others assert that Warbeck's wife had been amongst the numerous favourites of Edward, and that this Perkin was really his son—whence the striking resemblance, the cleverness and liveliness of his character. Warbeck had returned to Flanders, and there, in course of time, his son had attracted the attention of the Yorkist conspirators as the very youth, in all respects, for their purpose. He was introduced to the duchess, who found him already familiar with the whole story of Edward's Court from the past affairs and position there of his parents.
The duchess was enraptured with the discovery. She formed the most sanguine expectations of success, from the beauty of the youth, the gracefulness or comeliness of his address, the quickness of his intellect, and the gentle suavity of his manners. She taught him to personate the Duke of York, and it is probable he assumed the character with the more facility from a belief that he was indeed a son of King Edward, and, therefore, the legitimate heir being removed, in some sense a fair claimant of the crown. So soon as he appeared duly indoctrinated and accomplished for his part, to prevent any premature discovery, he was sent to Portugal, in the suite of Lady Brompton, the wife of one of the exiles. Whilst he was concealed there, the indefatigable duchess gave it out that the Duke of York was alive, and would not fail in due time to appear and assert his right.
The scheme being now matured and the chief actor ready, they only waited for the true moment for his appearance. That came in the prospect of Henry being involved in war with France. As soon as this seemed inevitable, the pretended Duke of York landed in Ireland. The York faction was still strong in that country, and, spite of the failure of the former pretender, Simnel, the Irish were ready, to a certain extent, to embrace another claimant of Henry's crown. He landed at Cork, where the mayor and others of that city received him as the true Richard Plantagenet, as, no doubt, they had previously agreed to do. Many of the credulous people flocked after him, but the more prudent stood aloof. He wrote to the Earls of Desmond and Kildare, inviting them to join his standard, but those powerful noblemen kept a cautious distance. Kildare had been disgraced by Henry for his reception of Simnel, and dreaded his more deadly vengeance in case of a second failure. But Warbeck, undismayed, spread everywhere the exciting story of his escape from the cruelty of his uncle Richard, and was gradually making an impression on the imaginative mind of Ireland, when a summons came to a new scene.
Charles VIII. of France was now menaced by Henry with invasion. He knew the man too well to doubt the real object of his menace, and the power of money to avert it, but it was of consequence to reduce the bribe as much as possible; and every instrument which promised to assist in effecting that was most valuable. Such an instrument was this soi-disant Duke of York, who had suddenly appeared in Ireland. The watchful Duchess of Burgundy is said to have adroitly turned Charles's attention to this mysterious individual through the agency of one Frion, a man who had been a secretary of Henry, but who had been won over by his enemies. Charles caught at the idea; an invitation was instantly dispatched to Perkin Warbeck to hasten to the French Court, where he was "to hear of something to his advantage," and he was received by the king as the undoubted Duke of York and the real monarch of England. Perkin's person, talents, and address, being worthy of a real prince, won him the admiration of all who approached him; and not only the Court and capital, but the whole of France soon rang with praise of the accomplishments, the adventures, and the unmerited misfortunes of this last of the Plantagonets. The king settled upon him a princely income; a magnificent abode was assigned him, and a body-guard befitting a royal personage was conferred upon him, of which the Lord of Concressault was made captain.
The news of this cordial reception of the reputed Duke of York by the French Court flew to England, and Sir George Neville, Sir John Taylor, and above a hundred gentlemen hastened to Paris, and offered to him their devoted services. This decided and rapidly-growing demonstration had the effect which Charles contemplated. Henry was greatly alarmed, and hastened to close the negotiations for peace. These once signed, the puppet had done its work in France. Henry made earnest demands to have Warbeck handed over to him, but Charles, who, no doubt, was bound by agreement with the Duchess of Burgundy to refuse any such surrender, declared that to do so would be contrary to his honour; but he gave the pretender a hint to quit the kingdom, and he retired to the Court of Burgundy.
There all was conducted with consummate art. Warbeck was made to throw himself upon the protection of the duchess as though he were an entire stranger to her person and Court. He declared himself to be her nephew, the unfortunate Duke of York, whose life had been sought by Richard III., and whose throne was usurped by Henry Tudor. He craved her assistance as the most kind and powerful asserter of the claims of his house, and offered to lay before her the most convincing proofs of his birth and history. The duchess acted her part with the utmost ability. She repelled him roughly as an impostor. She said she had been already imposed upon by one impostor, and that was enough: she would not become the dupe of another. The youth affected to be greatly grieved by this reception from so near and influential a relative, and the duchess bade him lay before her his pretences, and she engaged to prove him an impostor before all the world. When he had made his statements, she questioned and scrutinised them with the utmost minuteness and severity. She put a variety of questions to him regarding her brother. King Edward, his queen, and family, and appeared gradually giving way to astonishment at his answers. At length, after a long and searching scrutiny, she appeared overwhelmed by amazement, burst into tears, and embracing the young man with a transport of emotion, exclaimed, "I have found my long-lost nephew: he is indeed the Duke of York!"
The duchess now heaped on Perkin all the marks of affection and the honours which she would have deemed due to her own nephew. She ordered every one to give him the ​homage belonging to a real king: she appointed him a guard of thirty halberdiers, and styled him the "White Rose of England." On all occasions her conduct towards him was that of an affectionate aunt, who regarded him as the head of her family, and the heir of the brightest crown in Europe.
This full acknowledgment by the duchess of the claims of the pretended prince produced the most wonderful effect on the English in Flanders, and excited a corresponding sensation in England. Not merely the common people, but men of the highest rank, who hated Henry, showed a powerful inclination to favour the pretensions of Warbeck.
Lord Fitzwater, Sir Simon Montfort, and Sir Thomas Thwaites were avowed partisans. Sir Robert Clifford and William Barley hastened over to Brussels to satisfy themselves of the real merits of the case. They were admitted by the duchess to converse with Perkin at their utmost liberty; and the result was that Sir Robert wrote to England that, as his friends there knew, he was well acquainted with the person of the Duke of York, and, after full and satisfactory examination, he was perfectly certain that this was the very prince, and that there could not be a doubt upon the subject. Information of so positive a character, from a man of so distinguished a position and reputation, produced the profoundest effect in England. The conspiracy grew amain, and an active correspondence was kept up betwixt the malcontents in Flanders and at home, for the dethronement of Henry and the restoration of the house of York.
It is not to be supposed that the tempest which was gathering around Henry had escaped his attention. On the contrary, he was aware of all that was passing, and with the caution and concealment of his character, he was at work to counteract the operations of his enemies. The first object with him was to convince the public that the real Duke of York had perished at the same time as his brother, Edward V. Nothing, he concluded, would be so effectual for this purpose as the evidence of those who had always been hold to be concerned in the death of the young princes. Of five implicated, according to universal belief, two only now survived, namely, Sir James Tyrrel—who had taken the place of Sir Robert Brackenbury, Lieutenant of the Tower, during the night of the murder—and John Dighton, one of the actual assassins. These two were secured and interrogated, and their evidence was precisely that which we have stated when relating the murder of the princes. The bodies, therefore, were sought for, but as the chaplain was dead who was supposed to have witnessed their removal, according to the order of Richard III., they could not then be found and produced. The testimony of Tyrrel and Dighton, however, was published and circulated as widely as possible, and these two miscreants, after their full and frank avowal of the perpetration of this diabolical murder, were, to the disgrace of the king and of public justice, again allowed to go free. Every one, however, must perceive at once how important it was to Henry that the real witnesses of that murder should exist, and be forth-coming to confound any one pretending to be either of these princes.
Henry next applied to the Archduke Philip, the son of Maximilian and Mary of Burgundy, and now sovereign of the Netherlands in his own right, to deliver up to him the impostor, Warbeck, who, he contended, was entertained in his dominions contrary to the existing treaties, and the amity betwixt the two sovereigns. But Margaret had the influence to render his application abortive. Philip professed to have every desire to oblige his great ally, Henry of England, but he pleaded that Margaret was sole ruler in her own states, and, though he might advise her in this matter, he could not control her. Henry resented the polite evasion by stopping all commercial intercourse between England and the Low Countries, by banishing all Flemings from his dominions, and recalling his own subjects from Flanders; and Philip retaliated by issuing similar edicts.
Henry, resolved to undermine and explode the whole conspiracy, dispatched his spies in all directions among the Yorkists. He sent over gentlemen of rank and position to Brussels, where Margaret held her court, to pretend adhesion to Perkin Warbeck, and thus to insinuate themselves into the confidence of the leaders of the party. These gentlemen Henry pretended to regard as the most vile traitors; he denounced them as outlaws, and had them publicly excommunicated with every sign of resentment and show of contumely. Regarded, therefore, as martyrs to the cause of Warbeck, they were all the more patronised by that adventurer and Margaret, and soon made themselves masters of the whole of their plot, and the list of their accomplices in England. They succeeded in bringing over Sir Robert Clifford and his associate, William Barley, if, indeed, Clifford had not been in Henry's pay from the first, for he was a Lancastrian, and a son of that Clifford who so ruthlessly slew the young Earl of Rutland at Wakefield. Clifford, who stood high in the favour of Margaret and Warbeck was consequently a most dangerous enemy.
Prepared with a catalogue of all the secret supporters of the plot in England, Henry suddenly arrested, on a charge of high treason, the Lord Fitzwater, Sir Simon Montfort, Sir Thomas Thwaites, Robert Ratcliffe, William Daubeney, Thomas Cressemer, and Thomas Astwood. Besides these, various clergymen were also seized; amongst them, Sir William Richeford, Doctor of Divinity, and Sir Thomas Poynes, both of them friars of St. Dominick's order; Dr. William Button; Sir William Worseley, Dean of St. Paul's; Sir Richard Lessey; and Robert Layborne. All these were arraigned, convicted, and condemned for high treason, as aiders and encouragers of Perkin Warbeck. Fitzwater, Ratcliffe, Montfort, and Daubeney were executed; Fitzwater not in the first instance, but, having been consigned to prison in Calais, he was soon convicted of endeavouring to bribe his keeper in order to his escape, and was then put to death. Those of the clerical order were reprimanded, and set at liberty; but, says the chronicler, few of them lived long after.
This seizure of so many who were engaged in this conspiracy, struck terror through all who were guilty. They saw that they were betrayed; they could not tell who were the traitors, and numbers of them fled instantly into the nearest sanctuaries.
But there remained a conspirator far higher than any who had yet been unveiled—a conspirator where it was least expected, in the immediate vicinity of the throne, and in the person who more than all others, perhaps, ​had contributed to place Henry upon it. His name stood in the secret list of traitors furnished by Clifford, but he had been left for a more striking and dramatic discovery, for a denouement calculated to produce the most startling and profound impression.
After the festivities of Christmas the king took up his residence in the Tower, where he held his council on the 7th of January, 1495. If there was one man more distinguished than another by the royal favour in that august circle, he was Stanley, Lord Chamberlain. Sir William Stanley had burst upon Richard III. at Bosworth Field, at the critical moment, slain his standard-bearer, and, by his followers, killed the tyrant. His brother, Lord Stanley, had put the crown of the fallen monarch on Henry's head. For this he had been created Earl of Derby, and had been allowed to ally himself to the throne by the marriage of Henry's mother, the Countess of Richmond. Sir William had been made lord chamberlain, and both brothers had been glutted, as it were, with the wealth and estates of proscribed families. There were no men—not even Fox and Morton—who were supposed to stand so high, not merely in the favour, but in the friendship of Henry.
In the midst of the council the outlawed traitor Clifford, who was supposed at this moment to be at the Court of Margaret of Burgundy, was announced, to the terror and astonishment of the lords of the council; for he was known now, or violently suspected to be, at the bottom of all the late arrests. He prayed admission on the plea that he not only craved the king's pardon for past offences, but bore information essential to the king's safety. He was admitted, and falling on his knees, he made the humblest confession of his treasons against the king, and implored the royal clemency. All this was undoubtedly preconcerted by Henry, and for this reason he had taken up his quarters in the Tower; yet he affected to be as much astonished at the apparition of Clifford as anybody, and told the traitor that the only means by which he could hope for pardon was by revealing the very bottom of the Warbeck conspiracy. Thereupon Clifford named Sir William Stanley as the very soul of the treason, and the main hope of the traitors. The king, starting in well-assumed horror, declared the thing impossible. But this was only to render necessary a full revelation of all the charges against Sir William, and the proofs of them. Clifford declared himself ready to produce the gravest charges, the strongest proofs, and the king bade Sir William keep his private room in the square tower, and that the whole case should be heard in the morning.
Accordingly, Clifford, appearing before the council the next day, charged Sir William Stanley with being the chief instigator and abettor of himself and others. He was declared to be in secret correspondence with Warbeck and Margaret of Burgundy, and to have supplied money for the carrying out of the rebellion. Clifford stated that he had entertained himself, though a proclaimed traitor and outlaw, at his castle of Holt in Wales, last year at Easter, and had then declared that "if he were sure that that young man, meaning Warbeck, were King Edward's son, he would never bear arms against him." Clifford reminded the king that Sir William, through the reigns of Henry VI., Edward IV., and Richard III., had shifted with the times, and always contrived to take the side of the new claimant. He reminded Henry how at Bosworth to the very last moment, he, and his brother Derby, had waited to see which side was likely to win, and then, rushing on, had borne away the credit of the victory.
In reply, Stanley seems to have been so satisfied that Henry had planned his downfall, that he admitted a certain degree of complicity, and throw himself on the mercy of the king. Probably, neither he nor any of the council expected that Henry would proceed to extremities with so distinguished a favourite, especially considering the near relation of his brother to the royal house. But, if so, they were mistaken. The crafty Henry had resolved to make an example which should strike terror through the hearts of all the disaffected, and convince them that no secrecy would screen from discovery, and no circumstances save them from his vengeance. But, besides this, there was his vast wealth. Sir William was regarded as the richest subject of the time. By his attainder, money and plate to the amount of 40,000 marks, besides jewels and other property of great value, would all go into the king's coffers, and an estate of £3,000 per annum, old rent, would fall to the crown. The writers of the time seem to regard the possession of such tempting affluence as the fatal item against him in Henry's eyes, and, accordingly, he was condemned and executed on Tower Hill on the 15th of February, 1498. The traitor Clifford received a reward of £500 for his base services, but Henry never again trusted him, and he slunk away into ignominious obscurity.
The fall of Stanley was a paralysing blow to the partisans of Warbeck. They saw that even that great nobleman, while apparently living in the very centre and blaze of royal favour, had been surrounded by spies who watched all his actions, heard his most secret communications, and carried them all to the king. No man who was in any degree implicated felt himself safe. Henry's cautious and severe temper, while it made him hated, made him proportionately feared. Assured by the success which had attended all his measures, Henry every day displayed more and more the grasping avarice of his disposition, and accusations and heavy fines fell thickly around. He fined Sir William Capel, Alderman of London, for some offence, £2,743; and, though he failed to secure the whole, he obtained £l,615. Encouraged by this, he repeated the like attempts; and, while he depressed the nobility, he especially countenanced unprincipled lawyers, as the ready tools of his rapacity. Whilst this conduct, however, kept alive the rancour of many influential people, it rendered the common people passive; for they escaped the oppressions of many petty tyrants, who were kept in check by the one great one. Warbeck's party, therefore, was greatly disabled. It was now three years since he made his appearance, but, with the exception of his brief visit to Ireland, he had attempted nothing in Henry's dominions. But the Flemings, who were smarting under the restrictions put upon their trade with England, began to murmur loudly, and the Archduke Charles to remonstrate warmly with Margaret on account of the countenance given to the English insurgents.
Under these circumstances it was necessary for Warbeck and his adherents to make an effort of some kind. Taking advantage, therefore, of the absence of ​Henry on a visit to his mother at Latham House, in Lancashire, Warbeck and a few hundred followers made a descent in July on the coast of Kent, near Deal. It was hoped that Henry's severity would have made numbers ready to join them. The people, indeed, assembled under the guidance of some gentlemen of property, and, professing to favour Warbeck, invited him to come on shore. But he, or those about him, observing that the forces collected had nothing of that tumultuous impetuosity about them which usually characterises insurgents in earnest, kept aloof, and the men of Kent perceiving that they could not draw Warbeck into the snare, fell on his followers already on land, and, besides killing many of them, took 169 prisoners. The rest managed to get on board again, and Warbeck, seeing what sort of a reception England gave him, sailed back with all speed to Flanders. The prisoners were tied together like teams of cattle, and driven to London, where they were all condemned and executed to a man, in various places, some at London and Wapping, some on the coasts of Kent, Sussex, Essex, and Norfolk, where they were gibbeted, as a warning to any fresh adventurers who might appear on those shores.
Flanders was now become no durable place of sojourn for Perkin and his party. The Flemings would no longer submit to the interruption of their trade; and the archduke entered into a treaty with Henry, which contained a stipulation that Philip should restrain the Duchess Margaret from harbouring any of the king's enemies, and that the two princes should expel from their territories all the enemies of each other. This treaty was ratified on the 24th of February, 1496, and thereupon Warbeck betook himself to Ireland. But there he found a sensible change had taken place since his former visit. The king had sent over Sir Edward Poynings as lord-deputy, who had taken such measures that the people were much satisfied. The Earls of Desmond and Kildare had been pardoned, and the same grace had been accorded to all the other malcontents, except Lord Barry and O'Water. On landing at Cork, therefore, the Irish refused to recognise their late idol, and from Cork he sailed away to Scotland. There a new and surprising turn of fortune awaited him. For a long time his interest had been on the decline. In Flanders the public had grown weary of him; in England they had endeavoured to entrap him; from Ireland they had repulsed him. He is said to have presented letters of recommendation from Charles VIII. of France, and from his great patroness the Duchess-Dowager of Burgundy; and James IV. of Scotland received him with open arms.
To understand this enthusiastic reception in Scotland we must take a short review of events there. We have already seen the position in which James III. and his nobility stood to each other. The attachment of James to men of letters and of artistic taste, and his undisguised contempt of the rude and ignorant nobles of his time, had led to revolt, and to the hanging of Cochrane and his other ministers over the bridge of Lauder in 1482. Since that time James, taught wisdom by these events, had roused himself to more exertion in the affairs of his kingdom. He had attached to his interests some of the wisest of the dignified clergy, and won over some of the most powerful of his nobles. He had put down the faction of Albany and Douglas, and knit up a strong bond of union with France, Flanders, and the northern courts of Europe. He was seeking to unite himself closely with Henry of England by marrying the queen-dowager, and securing for two of his sons two of her daughters. But this very wisdom and sound policy, as they were rapidly augmenting his power, alarmed those who had formerly risen against him; and to prevent falling into his hands, they exerted themselves, as had frequently been the case in Scotland before, to secure the interest of the heir-apparent, and turn him as their instrument against his father.
James, his eldest son, the Duke of Rothsay, was a youth of only fifteen at the time, and they succeeded in inflaming his mind against his father, and flattering him by the hope of placing him immediately on the seat of supreme power. The marriage of the king with the English princess had been delayed by his refusing to comply with Henry's demand that the surrender of Berwick should make an item of the contract; and it is supposed that the disaffected barons had found in Henry a willing listener to their views.
In 1487 the barons, with Prince James at their head, took arms against their king, and Henry of England, vexed at the resistance of James III. to the surrender of Berwick, did not hesitate to treat with them, and with the revolted son as King of Scots, and to give passports to their ambassadors to his Court. James took the field against the rebels with an army of 30,000 men; and had he proceeded with the firmness of an indignant monarch rather than the tenderness of a father, he would speedily have dispersed and destroyed his enemies. But, like another David with another Absalom, he was more anxious to treat and to forgive than to fight and subdue. Having succeeded, as he supposed, in coming to terms with the rebellious son and subjects, the unwary king disbanded his army and returned to Edinburgh. But the ungrateful insurgents kept their forces together, and the abused king found himself obliged again to draw out against them near Stirling, one mile only from the celebrated field of Bannockburn, at a place called Little Canglar.
The king was mounted on a large grey charger which had been presented to him by Lord Lindsay of the Byres, with these ominous words, "If your grace will only sit well, his speed will outdo all I have ever seen, either to flee or follow."
LONDON IN THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY.
[From an Illumination in Royal MS. 16 F. 2, representing the Captivity of the Duke of Orleans.]
​cottage by the inhabitants, and such stimulants as they had—probably-whisky—were applied to recall his consciousness. On learning who the sufferer was, the woman ran out, calling for assistance for the king, and especially for a priest. A soldier from the prince's army, catching at the word "king," declared that he was a priest, and entering, pretended to stoop over him to administer ghostly consolation, but instead of that, stabbed him to the heart. Some historians assert this to have been a priest of the rebel army, of the name of Borthwick; but though James IV. afterwards offered a large reward for the discovery of the villain, no one was ever brought to justice.
By such means did James IV. succeed to the throne of Scotland in 1488. He is said to have issued a proclamation just before the battle forbidding any one, under the severest penalties, laying hands on the king. He was a youth of an ardent and impetuous temperament, and, no doubt, had been induced to believe, by the refractory barons, that it was necessary for the good of the country to oppose and control the king, who, they represented most falsely, was ready to surrender the independence of the realm to the King of England. But no pleas can excuse his conduct, which was unnatural and ungrateful, nor could his own conscience afterwards justify him.
Knight in complete Armour. 15th Century. Harl. MSS. 4,579-80.
James IV. of Scotland, though, to his perpetual regret, his ascent of the throne had been thus culpable, was a brave, generous, and patriotic monarch. As he came to reflect seriously on the part he had taken against the king his father, he was not slow to perceive that he had been made the instrument of the factious nobles, and that Henry VII. of England had not neglected to secretly foment the Scottish troubles. When Henry afterwards offered him his daughter Margaret, he, therefore, unceremoniously rejected the offer. The disposition which Henry was said to have shown to encourage his subjects, during the truce, to molest the Scottish merchantmen at the very mouth of the Forth, was highly resented by James, who supported his admiral, Wood, of Largo, in severely chastising the pirates, and did not fail to warn Henry that such practices must not be repeated. The dislike which James entertained for the insidious character of Henry, who began that system of bribing the nobles around the throne of Scotland which was never discontinued so long as a Tudor reigned, and which ended in the destruction of Mary, Queen of Scots, was violently aggravated by a base attempt of Henry in 1490. This was no other than a scheme to seize and carry off James to England.
Ramsay, Lord Bothwell, the favourite of the late king, who had fled to England, the Earl of Buchan, recently pardoned, and Sir Thomas Tod, a Scottish gentleman, entered into agreement with Henry VII. to seize the King of Scotland and his brother the Duke of Boss, and deliver them into the hands of the English monarch. Henry advanced them the sum of ₤266 to enable them to carry out this base enterprise; but, with his unconquerable regard for his money, binding them to repay it by a certain day, in case of failure. To ensure this, Tod delivered his son as a hostage. The original contract, drawn up at Greenwich, for this diabolical deed, still exists, and intimates that various other persons besides Bothwell, Buchan, and Tod were concerned in the affair. So unconscious was James of this treason meditated against his person, that at the very moment he was sending the Archbishop of St. Andrew's to meet the commissioners of Henry, for the adjustment of all border differences, and for the promotion of the general peace of the two kingdoms. Though this plot failed, another was soon after concocted by Henry with the malcontent Earl of Angus, of which James received due notice, and on the return of Angus ordered him into restraint in his castle of Tantallan, and deprived him of his lands and lordships of Liddisdale, and the strong fortress of Hermitage. These treacherous proceedings of King Henry sank deep into the mind of James, and he was anxious to break with England and carry some retributive trouble into Henry's own kingdom.
In this temper of the Scottish King, nothing could come more opportunely than such a person as Perkin Warbeck. James had, from the first moment of mounting his throne, been careful to strengthen his alliances with the whole European continent. With France, Spain, Portugal, Denmark, and Flanders, his intercourse, both official and mercantile, was active and constant. Of course, James was kept in full information of all that was agitating as it regarded England. With the Duchess of Burgundy, the inveterate enemy of Henry, it is clearly provable that James was in secret correspondence only five months after his accession. In 1488, even, there were busy messengers and heralds passing to and fro betwixt Flanders, Ireland, and Scotland. In that year Margaret of Burgundy sent Sir Richard Hardelman and Richard Ludelay to Dublin, and thence to Edinburgh on a secret mission. This intercourse continued and grew in activity. James sent his newly-created Earl of Bothwell to the Court of France while Warbeck was there. Monipenny, the Sieur de Concressault, a Scotchman by descent, was at that time captain of the guard of Warbeck, and soon after was sent as ambassador to James's Court. In 1491, when Warbeck was in Ireland, this intercourse was more ​open. Warbeck, after being received by Desmond and Kildare, sent Edward Ormond as his envoy to the Scottish Court, where he was cordially received by James; and in 1494 the Duchess of Burgundy announced to James that the Prince of England was about to visit Scotland, and James made preparations for his reception in Stirling.
From all these circumstances, which are attested by the "Treasurer's Accounts," and other records of Scotland, it is manifest that James was intimately informed of everything which could be known about Warbeck. There could be no mistake made by James in his reception of that personage, when, in November 1495, he presented himself at the palace of Stirling. Whatever James did he did with his eyes wide open and his mind fully made up. Yet from the very first he received him apparently with the most undoubting faith as to his being the true Plantagenet.
Events, indeed, had recently occurred which might have cooled a less sincere or less incensed man than James. Henry VII. had undoubtedly been kept well informed by his emissaries of what was passing both at the Scottish and Burgundian Courts. In Scotland, Henry had nobles in pay; in Brussels, besides others, the banished Lord Ramsay of Bothwell was his fee'd agent, and Clifford had proceeded to England and revealed the whole plot. It was probably the policy of the Yorkists to astonish and overwhelm Henry by a simultaneous rising in England, Scotland, and Ireland. For this purpose, in 1494, O'Donnel, Prince of Tyrconnol, one of the most powerful chiefs of Ireland, had gone over to the Scottish Court. But Clifford's treason disconcerted the whole scheme, and instead of James marching down upon England in the north while Warbeck invaded it in the south, and Ireland was ready to succour either force, the adventurer was repulsed both from England and Ireland, and came rather like a hopeless fugitive than a rising prince to Scotland. Yet not the less did James welcome him with all the honours of royalty, or the warmth of a zealous partisan.
Warbeck was welcomed into Scotland with much state and rejoicing as the veritable Duke of York. James addressed him as "cousin," and celebrated tournaments and other courtly gaieties in his honour. The reputed prince, by his noble appearance, the simple dignity of his manners, and the romance of his story and supposed misfortunes, everywhere excited the highest admiration. James made a grand progress with him through his dominions, and beheld him wherever he appeared produce the most favourable impression. If James did not himself really believe Warbeck to be the Duke of York before he came to Scotland, his conduct during his abode there seems to have convinced him of it. At no time was he known to express a doubt of it, and on all occasions he spoke and acted as if morally certain of it. Nothing could be more convincing than his giving him to wife one of the most beautiful and high-born women of Scotland, the Lady Catherine Gordon, daughter of the Earl of Huntly, and grand-daughter of James I.
James now mustered his forces for the grand expedition which he hoped would drive Henry from the throne of England, and establish there the son of Edward IV., in the person of Warbeck. He was accompanied by this extraordinary pretender, who seemed to have united in him all the graces and accomplishments of a true prince. As the army was about to march there arrived a supply of arms, harness, crossbows, and military stores from the Duchess of Burgundy; and from Charles of France came the Count do Concressault, an old and intimate friend of Warbeck's, as ambassador. Publicly, Concressault professed to exert himself, by command of his master, to promote peace betwixt James and Henry; privately, he urged zealously the invasion of England, to counteract the subtle proceedings of Henry, who had knit up a confederacy betwixt Spain, Flanders, and some of the Italian states, to held in check the French designs beyond the Alps.
These apparently auspicious circumstances wore rendered more flattering by the arrival at the Scottish camp, as adherents of the reputed Duke of York, of numbers of the chiefs from the English side of the borders; Nevilles, Dacres, Skeltons, Levels, Herons, &c. The appearance of these barons inspired the most exhilarating persuasion that Warbeck had only to show himself in England to be universally supported.
Meantime, Henry VII was diligently at work at his favourite plans of bribing and undermining. He had an active agent in Ramsay Lord Bothwell, whom James had weakly permitted to return to Scotland. By his means Henry had won over the king's brothers, the Duke of Ross, the Earl of Buchan, and the Bishop of Moray. These traitors engaged to do everything in their power to defeat the expedition. The Duke of Ross promised to put himself under the protection of the King of England the moment his brother crossed the borders. Nor did the plot stop there. Again there was a scheme to seize James at night in his tent, suggested by Henry, and entered into by Bothwell, Buchan, and Wyat, an English emissary. This disgraceful plot was defeated by the vigilance of the royal guard, but not the less actively did the paid spies of Henry Tudor, including some of the most powerful barons in Scotland, labour to defeat the success of the enterprise. They accompanied the army only with the hope of betraying it, while their efforts were essentially aided by the remonstrances of more honest counsellors, who doubted the wisdom of the expedition, and did all they could to dissuade James from it.
But James, burning with resentment at the base and insidious attempts of Henry to disturb the security of his government, and to seize upon his person, and coveting the glory of restoring the last noble scion of a great race to the throne of his ancestors, was deaf alike to warnings of secret treason or more public danger. He made his last muster of his forces at Ellam Kirk, near the English border, and, proclaiming war on Henry, marched forward. Warbeck, as Richard Duke of York, at the same time issued a proclamation calling upon all true Englishmen to assemble beneath the banner of the time inheritor of the crown. He denounced Henry Tudor as a usurper, and the murderer of Sir William Stanley, Sir Simon Montfort, and others of the ancient nobility; of having invaded the liberties and the franchises of both church and people; and of having plundered the subjects by heavy and illegal impositions. He pledged himself to remedy all those abuses; to restore and defend the rights and privileges of the church, the nobles, the corporations, ​and the commerce and manufactures of the country. He related the dangers through which he had passed since his escape from the Tower to this moment, and he set a price of a thousand pounds in money, and land to the value of a hundred marks per annum, for the capture or destruction of Henry Tudor.
But however judiciously the proclamation was drawn up, James was confounded as he advanced to see that it produced not the slightest effect. In vain had it been protested in the proclamation that James came only as the friend of the rightful King of England; that he sought no advantage to himself—though he had really bargained for the restoration of Berwick, and was to be paid 1,000 marks for the expenses of the war—and that he would retire the moment a sufficient English force appeared in the field. No such force was likely to present itself. If Warbeck had met with no success when supported by Englishmen, it was not to be expected when followed by an army of the hereditary foes of the kingdom—Scots and French, backed by Germans, Flemings, and other foreigners.
When James saw that, instead of being welcomed as deliverers, they were avoided, and that the expedition was altogether hopeless, he gave way to his wrath, and began to plunder the country, or to permit his troops to do it. Warbeck remonstrated against the devastation committed on the English with all the ardour of a true prince, declaring that he would rather lose the throne than gain it by the sufferings of his people. But James replied that his cousin of York was too considerate of the welfare of a nation that hesitated to acknowledge him either as king or subject. All this time the diligent Bothwell was duly informing Henry of the state of the Scottish camp, and of everything said and done in it. He now assured him that the Scottish army would soon beat a retreat, for that the inhabitants, in expectation of the visit, had driven off all their cattle, and removed their stores; so that the army was on the point of starvation. This was soon verified. The Scots, finding no supporters, about the end of the year retreated into their own country.
The invasion from Scotland afforded Henry another pretext for raising more money. He summoned a Parliament in the February of 1497, to which he uttered bitter complaints of the inroad and devastation of the Scots; of the troubles created by the impostor, and the manifold insults to the crown and nation. All this was now apparently blown over; but Parliament gratified the king by voting £120,000, together with two-fifteenths. Happy in the prospect of such supplies, Henry recked little of Warbeck or the Scots; but the tax roused the especial wrath of the Cornish people, who, knowing that the king only wanted to add their money to his already immense and useless hoards, wanted to know what they had to do with inroads of the Scots, who were never likely to come near them, and who had retired of themselves without so much as waiting for the sight of an army. This excitement of the brave and industrious, but hard-living Cornish men was fanned into a flame by Michael Joseph, a farrier of Bodmin, and one Thomas Flammock, an attorney, who assured the people that the tax was totally illegal, though voted by Parliament; for that the northern countries were bound by the tenures of their estates to defend that frontier; and that if they submitted to the avarice of Henry and his ministers there would be no end to it.
Flammock told them that they must deliver the king a petition, seconded by such numbers as to give it authority; but at the same time he assured them that to procure the concurrence of the rest of the kingdom they must conduct themselves with all order, and refrain from committing any injuries to person or property, demonstrating that they had only the public good in view. Armed with bills, bows, axes, and other country weapons that they could command, they marched into Devonshire 16,000 strong, and called on the people to accompany them, and demand the heads of Archbishop Morton and Sir Reginald Bray, who were declared to be the advisers of the obnoxious impost. At Taunton they made an example of an insolent and overbearing commissioner of the tax of the name of Perin. At Wells they wore joined by Thomas Touchet, Lord Audley, a man of an ancient family, but said to be of a vain and ambitious character.
Bowmen of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries.
Proud of having a nobleman at their head, they marched through Salisbury and Winchester into Surrey, and thence to Kent, the people of which, Flammock told them, had in all ages been noted for their independence and patriotism, and were sure to join them. They pitched their camp on Blackheath, near Eltham, but not a man joined them. The people of Kent had their causes of complaint; but they had lately shown what was their spirit by repelling Perkin Warbeck, and they were too enlightened to join in any such ill-advised expedition.
Henry had now received the new levies raised to oppose any further motion of the Scots, and he sent them forward to attack and disperse the rebels. He always regarded Saturday as his fortunate day; therefore, on Saturday, the 22nd of June, 1497, he gave the order for the attack. He divided his forces into three divisions. The first, under Lord Daubeney, pushed forward to attack the insurgents in front; the second, under the Earl of Oxford, was to take a compass, and assail them in the rear; and the king himself took post with the third division in St. George's Fields, to secure the city. To throw the insurgents off their guard, he had given out that he should not take the field for some days; and to give probability to this notion, he did not send out his advanced forces till the latter part of the day. Lord Daubeney beat an advanced guard of the rebels from Deptford Bridge, and before the main body was prepared ​to receive him, he charged them with fury. Though they were brave men, and 16,000 strong, thus taken at advantage, and naturally ill-disciplined, ill-armed, and destitute of cavalry and artillery, they were soon broken and compelled to fly. Two thousand of them were slain, and 1,500 made prisoners. The prisoners Henry gave up to the captors, who allowed them to ransom themselves for a few shillings each.
Lord Audley, Flammock, and Joseph only were executed. The peer was beheaded, the commoners were hanged; and Joseph seemed to glory in the distinction, saying he should figure in history. Henry on this occasion displayed great clemency, which some have ascribed to his desire to make a good impression on the Cornish people; others for joy that Lord Daubeney had escaped, for at one time he was surrounded by the enemy but was soon rescued. But the most probable reason was that assigned by Lord Bacon:—"That the harmless behaviour of this people that came from the west of England to the coast, without mischief almost, or spoil of the country, did somewhat mollify him, and move him to compassion; or, lastly, that he made a great difference between people that did rebel upon wantonness, and them that did rebel upon want."
James of Scotland seized on the opportunity created by the Cornish insurrection to make a fresh inroad into England. He laid siege to the castle of Norham, and plundered the country round. Henry dispatched the Earl of Surrey, with an army of 20,000 men, to drive back the Scots, and punish them by carrying the war of devastation into their country. As Surrey advanced, James retired, and Surrey, following him across the Tweed, took and demolished the little castle of Ayton, ravaged the borders, and returned to Berwick. These useless and worse than useless raids, with no hope of permanent advantage on either side, but only of mischief to the unoffending inhabitants on both, were worthy only of the most savage and unenlightened times. The spies of Henry, however, soon informed him that James was really sick of the war, and he repeated the offer made before of the hand of his daughter Margaret. This he made through the Spanish ambassador, Don Pedro d'Ayala, who came forward as a friendly mediator, thus sparing both kings the humiliation of making the first move. D'Ayala found James quite disposed for peace, but in a somewhat cavalier humour as to the terms. Henry demanded first of all that Perkin Warbeck should be given up to him, but this James resented as an attack upon his honour, and refused. He had even melted down his plate and sold the gold chain from his neck to assist Perkin, and he now spurned the idea of betraying him; but there is little doubt that he signified his assent to his departure from Scotland. Henry then called for compensation for the ravages committed in the late inroads; but the Scotch commissioners replied that Henry had already taken his revenge. Again, Henry proposed that the two monarchs should meet at Newcastle, and settle all matters between them; but as Newcastle was in England, James proudly replied that though he was ready to treat for peace, he was not going a-begging for it. By the advice of D'Ayala, Henry conceded these points, and commissioners were appointed to meet at Ayton, where, under the management of Fox, Bishop of Durham, on the part of England, a truce was agreed upon to last for the lives of the two kings, and a year after the death of the longer liver. Though agreed upon, this important truce was not ratified for some years afterwards.
Meantime, James privately admonished Warbeck to quit the kingdom, as he could no longer assist him, and his presence would only tend to endanger the truce. Warbeck is said to have received this intimation with much true dignity and good feeling. He thanked the king for the great effort he had made on his account, for all the honours and favours that he had conferred upon him, and for which he declared he should over remain deeply grateful. A vessel was prepared for his departure at Ayr, and every comfort was provided for his accommodation which James could have offered to the true prince. His beautiful and accomplished wife would not be left behind—a proof that she was really attached to him, whatever she might think of his pretensions. She quitted rank, fortune, a high position in the Scottish Court, to embrace with him a homeless life and a dark prospect. Flanders was closed to Perkin by the fresh league betwixt that country and England. Ireland was a more than dubious resort, yet thither he turned his prow, and landed at Cork on the 30th of July, 1197, with about 100 followers. The attempt to rouse again the enthusiasm of Ireland was vain; but at this juncture the last gleam of Warbeck's waning fortune seemed to fall upon him.
The Cornish rebels, let off so easily by Henry, had returned to their own county, proclaiming by the way that the king had not dared to put them to death because the whole of his subjects were in the same state of discontent. The people of Cornwall and Devon, reassured by this, again took up arms against the commissioners, who were still collecting the tax with great severity, and, it is said, dispatched a message to Warbeck to come over and head them. On the 7th of September, 1407, he accordingly landed at Whitsand Bay, with four or five small barques, and his 100 fighting men. Being joined by 3,000 of the insurgents at Bodmin, he issued a proclamation similar to his former one. Bodmin was the native place of Michael Joseph, their great orator and leader, and the people there were burning to revenge his death. Warbeck set out on his march towards Devonshire, and thousands of those who had lost friends and relations in the bloody battle of Blackheath, joined him on the way. He sent his wife to Mount St. Michael for security, and directing his course towards Exeter, he invested that city on the 17th of September with a rude, wild force of about 10,000 men. He announced himself as Richard IV. of England, and called on the inhabitants to surrender; but, having sent notification of his approach to King Henry, they determined to defend themselves, if needful, till succour arrived.
Warbeck had no artillery or engines of any kind to carry on a siege, he therefore attempted to break down the gates. At the one he was repulsed with considerable loss, the other he managed to burn down, but the citizens availed themselves of the fire, feeding it as it failed, till they had dug a deep trench behind the flames. When, the next morning, Warbeck returned to force a passage by that gate, the citizens received him with such spirit that ​they slew 200 of his men, and daunted the rest. Assistance was now also flowing in from the country to the city, and Warbeck was in danger of being attacked both in front and rear. Seeing this, he demanded a suspension of hostilities, and, depressed by this failure, his Devonshire followers began rapidly to fall away, and steal home as quickly as they could. His Cornish adherents, however, more intrepid, encouraged him to persevere, and vowed that they would perish in his cause. In this state of desperation the pretender marched on towards Taunton, where he arrived on the 20th of September. The country people on their way, smarting under the infliction of the hated tax, wished them success, but did not attempt to help them.
At Taunton, instead of any encouragement, they met the vanguard of the royal army, under the command of Lord Daubeney, the lord chamberlain, and Lord Broke, the steward of the household. The Duke of Buckingham was just behind with a second division, and Henry was declared to be following with a still larger force. The brave Cornish men, scarcely clothed, and still worse armed, shrunk not a moment from the hopeless combat. They vowed to perish to a man in behalf of their newly-adopted king, and Warbeck, with an air as if he would lead them into battle in the morning, rode along their lines encouraging them, and made all ready for the attack.
But Warbeck, who had never shown any want of courage, perceived the utter madness of contending with his undisciplined followers against such overwhelming odds, and in the night he mounted a fleet steed and rode off. In the morning the Cornish men, seeing themselves without a leader, submitted to the king, and, with the exception of a few of the ringleaders, they were dismissed and returned homewards as best they might. Meanwhile, Lord Daubeney dispatched 500 horsemen in pursuit of Warbeck, to prevent, if possible, his entrance into sanctuary; but the fugitive succeeded in reaching the monastery of Beaulieu, in the New Forest.
Beaulieu Abby, where Perkin Warbeck took Sanctuary.
Henry sent a number of horsemen, in all haste, to St. Michael's Mount, in Cornwall, to obtain possession of the Lady Catherine Gordon, the wife of Warbeck. This they easily accomplished, and brought her to the king, on entering whose presence she blushed and burst into tears. Henry received her kindly—touched, for once in his life, with tenderness, by beauty in distress; or, probably, bearing in mind that the lady was the near kinswoman of the King of Scots, with whom he was desirous to stand well. He sent her to the queen, by whom she was most cordially received, and in whose court she remained attached to her service. She was still called the White Rose of Scotland, on account of her beauty. Lady Gordon was afterwards, it appears, three times married, but lies buried by the side of her second husband, Sir Matthew Cradock, in Swansea church.
Henry proceeded to Exeter, where he had the ringleaders of the Cornish insurrection brought in procession before him, with halters round their necks. Some of them he hanged, the rest he pardoned; but he, at the same time, appointed commissioners to proceed into the country through which Perkin had passed, and to fine all such people of property as had furnished him with aid or refreshment. They did not confine their scrutiny to those who had assisted Perkin in his march, but extended it to all who had relieved the famishing fugitives; "so that," says Bacon, "their severity did much obscure the king's mercy in sparing of blood, with the bleeding of so much treasure." They extorted altogether £10,000.
The next business was to get Warbeck out of his sanctuary and into the hands of the king. Beaulieu was surrounded by an armed force, and all attempts at escape made impossible. Some of Henry's council urged him to omit all ceremony, and take the pretender from the sanctuary by force; but this he declined, preferring to lure him thence by fair promises. After hesitating for some time, Warbeck at length threw himself upon the king's mercy. Henry then set out to London with his captive in his train. Warbeck rode in the king's suite ​through the city, along Cheapside, Cornhill, and to the Tower, and thence to Westminster. As the king had promised him his life, he kept his word, he was repeatedly examined by the Privy Council, but it seems as if something had transpired there which Henry deemed better concealed, for a profound silence was preserved on the subject of these disclosures. So far from even being
Henry VII. at the Dispatch of Business.
degraded, like Lambert Simnel, to some menial occupation, Warbeck was suffered to enjoy a certain degree of liberty, and was treated as a gentleman. The probability is, that the king satisfied himself that this mysterious personage was in reality a son of Edward IV., by the handsome Jewess, Catherine de Faro, his birth being in Flanders, and agreeing exactly with the time of Edward's exile there. This might account for his admirable support of the character of a prince—for his confidence in his assertion of it for so many years, and the power he had of winning the strong attachment of persons of the highest rank and education. If this were true, he was, moreover, the queen's brother, though an illegitimate one, and might win the interest of herself and sisters by his resemblance in person, and in spirit and ambition, to her father.
But however this might be, he was too dangerous a person to be allowed to get loose again. He lived at Court under a strict surveillance, and he grew so weary of it, that he contrived to make his escape on the 8th of June, 1498. The alarm was instantly given; numbers of persons were out in pursuit of him; every road by which he might escape to sea was vigilantly beset, and the unhappy man, finding himself pressed on all sides, ​surrendered himself to the Prior of Shene, near Richmond. The prior exercised the right of sanctuary possessed by the house, and refused to give him up to the king, except under pledge that his life should be spared. Henry agreed, but he confirmed the public opinion, which, excited by the mystery of the Court, fully believed Warbeck a son of Edward's, by now endeavouring to degrade him, and to fix upon him the old story. For this purpose he compelled him to sit in the stocks two whole days, on the 14th of June at Westminster Hall, and on the 15th in Cheapside, and there to read aloud to the people a confession made up of the account of him published in Henry's former proclamation, but with some very contradictory additions. This confession was then printed and circulated amongst the people, but failed entirely to satisfy any one. When this bitter purgatory had been passed through, the bitterest conceivable to a man of Warbeck's character, pretensions, and superior mind, he was committed to the Tower.
Warbeck had not been long in the Tower when there was an attempt to liberate the Earl of Warwick, who was still in confinement there; and it failed only through the conspirators not having properly informed themselves of the real quarter in which he was kept. Soon after that a fresh plot was set on foot for the same object. In this the King of France was said to be concerned. He was reported to have declared his regret for ever having countenanced the usurpation of Henry Tudor, and that he offered money, ships, and even troops, to the friends of Warwick to enable them to release him, and place him on the throne. The Yorkist malcontents were once more active. They wrote to the retainers of the late Duke of Clarence, the father of Warwick, and to Lady Warwick, to come forward and see justice done to the oppressed prince; and an invitation was sent from the Court of France to a distinguished leader of the house of York, to go over to that country and assume the command of the expedition. This also failing, a report was then spread of the death of the Earl of Warwick; then it was said that he had escaped, and a person of the name of Ralph Wulford, or Wilford, the son of a shoemaker in Sussex, was taught by one Patrick, an Augustinian friar, to personate the earl.
Whether the Yorkists were determined to give Henry no repose, but to haunt and harass him with a perpetual succession of impostors, or whether Henry himself planned this latter improbable scheme as a pretext for getting rid of the Earl of Warwick altogether, seems never to have been satisfactorily cleared up. All that is known is, that Wulford and the friar were speedily arrested, Wulford put to death, and the friar consigned to prison for life.
Scarcely had this blown over, when it was reported that Warbeck and Warwick had endeavoured to escape from the Tower together. Warbeck must have been permitted to have free access to Warwick after he was sent to the Tower—a circumstance not likely to have been permitted by the cautious and vigilant Henry VII. had he not had some ulterior purpose in it. Once together, however, Warbeck won the favour of the simple and inexperienced Warwick, who was as ignorant of the world as a child, having passed nearly all his life in prison. Warbeck, however, exercised the same fascination over the highest and most intelligent persons whenever he had access to them. To the Tower he carried his active spirit of intrigue and adventure, and we soon find him in the enjoyment of extraordinary liberty and range in that state prison for so dangerous a character. He had not only completely won over the Earl of Warwick, but their keepers, Strangways, Astwood, Long Roger, and Blewet. These men engaged to murder their master, Sir John Digby, the Governor of the Tower, to get possession of the keys, and to conduct Warbeck and Warwick to the Yorkist partisans, by whom Warbeck was to be proclaimed King Richard IV., and Warwick to be restored to his titles and estates.
This plot, it is said, was discovered in time; and this was another circumstance which caused the public to suspect that the whole thing had been of the contriving, or, at least, of the permission of Henry, to rid him of these troublesome aspirants. The two offenders were immediately confined in separate cells. The servants of the governor were brought to trial, and Blewet and Astwood were condemned and hanged. On the 16th of November, Warbeck was arraigned in Westminster Hall for sundry acts of high treason, since as a foreigner he had come into these kingdoms. They were, in fact, the attempts on the crown which we have related. He was condemned and hanged at Tyburn on the 23rd of the month, with O'Water, the mayor of Cork, who had been the first to join him in Ireland. On the scaffold his confession was read, and he declared it, on the word of a dying man, to be wholly true. Both he and O'Water asked pardon of the king for their attempts against him. Such was the end of this extraordinary adventurer. Bacon describes his enterprise as "one of the largest plays of the kind that hath been in memory; and might, perhaps, have had another end if he had not met with a king both wise, stout, and fortunate."
On the 21st of November, the Earl of Warwick was brought to trial before the peers, though he had been attainted from his birth, and had never taken his oath and seat as a peer of the realm. The charge against him was his conspiracy with Warbeck to dethrone the king. The poor youth pleaded guilty, either as weary of a life which had been but one long injury and wrong, in consequence of his birth, or because he was destitute, from his perpetual confinement, of the activity of mind to comprehend his situation. Probably he imagined that if he confessed himself guilty, he would be pardoned, and returned to his cell. But Henry had no such intention. The Earl of Oxford, as lord steward, pronounced judgment, and three days afterwards he was beheaded on Tower Hill. Thus perished the last legitimate descendant of the Plantagenets who could alarm the fears of Henry Tudor.
There are many cases of royal oppression in history more bloodily atrocious, but none more criminal than this of Henry VII. For fourteen years he had kept this innocent youth in close confinement, for no other cause than that he was of royal blood. Though there is no reason to believe him an idiot, as some have pretended, yet his mind appeared to have suffered by his constant confinement and exclusion from society, till it was too feeble and ill-informed to be capable of real mischief. The partisans of the cause, however, were not inclined to ​rest, and for that reason Henry determined to destroy his captive. It was a judicial murder of a kind which excited in the public mind a just and deep abhorrence; and Henry, with his usual trick of cunning, endeavoured to shift the odium to other shoulders. Henry was negotiating for the marriage of his son Prince Arthur and Catherine, the daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain, and he circulated a report that Ferdinand would not consent to the alliance so long as the Earl of Warwick lived. Nay, he would appear to have got the King of Spain to write so for this end. "For," says Bacon, "these two kings understanding each other at half a word, so it was that there were letters showed out of Spain, whereby in the passages concerning the treaty of marriage, Ferdinand had written to the king in plain terms, that he saw no assurance of his succession so long as the Earl of Warwick lived, and that he was loath to send his daughter to troubles and dangers.
"But hereby," adds Bacon, "as the king did in some part remove the envy from himself, so he did not observe that he did withal bring a kind of malediction and in-fausting on the marriage, as an ill prognostic, which in event so far proved true, as both Prince Arthur enjoyed a very small time after the marriage, and the Lady Catherine herself, a sad and religious woman, long after, when King Henry VIII.'s resolution of divorce from her was first made known to her, used some words—' That she had not offended: but it was a judgment of God, for that her former marriage was made in blood' —meaning that of the Earl of Warwick."
With the execution of these two rivals, Henry VII. put an end to the long catalogue of pretenders to the crown, but for many a long year was the story of the lives and deaths of Warbeck and the young Warwick discussed at thousands of English hearths, with strange comments and significant looks. The one was a narrative of harsh injustice to a princely youth scarcely less exciting than that of the murder of his two still younger cousins in the Tower. The other was that of a strange, daring, and able adventurer, sanctioned by kings, and by princesses of the house of York nearest in blood to the throne, adorned with all princely qualities and graces, and surrounded by mysteries which not all the arts and the prepared confessions of the Tudor had availed to dissipate.
A few months after these tragic events, a plague broke out in London, which the people considered as a direct judgment from Heaven for such wicked bloodshed. Henry got out of town, but not feeling himself safe, after several changes of residence, he went over to Calais, and whilst there he had an interview with the Archduke Philip of Burgundy. Henry invited the archduke to take up his quarters in Calais, but it is a proof of the distrust which even his own allies entertained of the politic Henry, that the archduke declined putting himself into his power, and agreed to meet him at St. Pierre, near that city. What the archduke was particularly anxious to see Henry for, was to excite his jealousy of France, and secure his co-operation in counteracting its ambition.
Charles VIII. of France, as we have seen, had made a grand expedition into Italy to seize on the two Sicilies, having contrived to make out a claim upon them, which, though empty in itself, was good enough for an excuse for conquest. He had passed over the Alps with an army of upwards of 30,000 men. At first all gave way before him, but an extensive league was soon formed against the French encroachment, including Ferdinand of Spain, Maximilian, the King of the Romans, the father of Philip, the Duke of Milan, and the Doge of Venice. Charles, who had led a most dissipated life, died suddenly in 1498 at the Castle of Amboise, and the Duke of Orleans succeeded as Louis XII. Louis was as fully bent as Charles had been to prosecute the conquest of Naples and Sicily, and in 1499 marched with a fresh army into the south of Italy.
It was to secure Henry's assistance in the league against the aggression of France, which alarmed all Europe, that Philip used his most eloquent persuasives but the only persuasives with him were moneys, and these Louis had already extended. He renewed the peace of Estaples, paid up the arrears of Henry's pension, and secured the interest of the Pope, with whom Henry was desirous to stand well, by paying him 20,000 ducats for a dispensation enabling him to divorce his wife, and marry Anne of Brittany, the widow of Charles VIII., and an old flame of his. He had also made over the Valentinois, in Dauphiny, with a pension of 20,000 livres, to the Pope's son, the vile Cæsar Borgia. The Pope, moreover, was coquoting with Henry, inviting him, by an express nuncio, to join a league for an imaginary crusade to the Holy Land, which Henry was ready to do for the cession of some real ports in Italy as places for the retreat and security of his fleet in those seas.
It was not likely that Philip of Burgundy would make much progress with Henry, except so far as he could serve him by keeping certain matters, well known at the Courts of Burgundy and Flanders, concerning the real history of Perkin Warbeck, secret; and his anxiety on this head more and more convinced people that Warbeck was something more than the son of a Jew.
Henry VII. having succeeded in ridding himself of all the pretenders to his crown, now set himself to complete the marriages of his children, and to make money with redoubled ardour. Negotiations had been going on with James of Scotland for the marriage of Henry's eldest daughter, Margaret. In 1490 James, who had previously declined the match, now in communication with Fox, Bishop of Durham, offered to enter into that contract. Henry gladly assented, and, when some of his council suggested that in case of the failure of the male line in England, a Scottish prince, born of this marriage, would become the heir, and England a mere appendage of Scotland, "No," replied Henry, "Scotland will become an appendage of England, for the smaller must follow the larger kingdom." And, no doubt, this idea had from the first actuated the calculating mind of the Tudor. That he was right the event has shown, for, though ultimately the failure of the male line in England took place, and James VI. of Scotland, the descendant of this very marriage, became King of England, yet England became the leading state. In fact, this marriage was by far the most beneficial act of the reign of Henry VII. next to his own marriage with the heiress of York. That marriage united the two rival houses; this united the two kingdoms, the most auspicious event for both countries which ​is conceivable, converting the whole British island into one integral empire, and the people of each section of it into possessors of the privileges and advantages of both.
But in the accomplishment of this great national end the miserably penurious character of Henry showed most contemptibly. With his coffers crammed with millions of useless gold, he could only find in his heart to bestow upon his eldest daughter, in making her Queen of Scotland, the paltry sum of 30,000 nobles, and that to be paid in three annual instalments.
The White Rose of Scotland.
It might have been supposed that the poor king was getting a good interest for his money, instead of hoarding it in barren chests, or that he had to scrape it up, year by year, from his reluctant subjects. James of Scotland agreed to settle upon his wife £3,000 a year in lands; but instead of paying that amount of income during his life, he contracted to defray her household expenses, and allow her for her private expenditure 500 marks. On the 29th of January, 1502, the parties were solemnly affianced in the queen's chamber, the Earl of Bothwell having come to London as proxy for James. Tournaments were celebrated for two days in honour of the marriage. Twelve hogsheads of claret were tapped in the streets for the gratification of the populace, and twelve bonfires kindled. And never did the people rejoice on a more genuine occasion; for this union was, in fact, the termination of centuries of those bloody and barbarous wars betwixt the two kingdoms, which, however they had shown the martial spirit of both races, had been productive of little other benefit, and of infinite mischief and misery to the inhabitants on both sides the Borders.
Margaret, at the time of this affiancing, was but just turned twelve years of age, and it was agreed that she should remain twenty months longer under the roof of her parents. Accordingly, it was not till the 8th of July, 1503, that she set out on her journey to Scotland. She quitted on that day the palace of her grandmother at Colliweston, attended by a long and brilliant train of the ​ladies and gentlemen of the Court, who, at the end of a mile, kissed her, and returned. Here the Earl of Kent, the Lords Strange, Hastings, and Willoughhy, escorted her as far as York. She rode on a palfrey, attended by four footmen; and on approaching any town, she alighted, and rode in a magnificent litter through the place. A company of actors and numbers of minstrels attended to divert her and her friends on the way. At York she was received by the mayor, corporation, and people with great honour, and the Earls of Northumberland and Surrey conveyed her thence to Lamberton kirk, where they met the Scottish deputation of nobles, who proceeded on the way to Edinburgh with her. James repeatedly visited his bride on her journey, and on the 7th of August she made her entry into Edinburgh, James riding before her on her palfrey. The marriage ceremony was performed on the 8th by the Archbishop of Glasgow, and the English nobles took their leave and returned home. In this marriage treaty, Henry, not forgetting the past, took care that there should be a clause binding both monarchs not to harbour or receive the revolted subjects one of the other.
Simultaneously had been proceeding the negotiations with the Spanish Court for the marriage betwixt Henry's eldest son, Arthur, and Catherine, the daughter of Ferdinand, King of Castile and Arragon. The negotiations for this marriage had commenced so early as 1492, the very year in which Christopher Columbus, under the patronage of Ferdinand and Isabella, discovered the New World. In 1496 a further step was taken; and Ferdinand then promised to give the princess a portion of 200,000 crowns, and Henry engaged that his son should endow her with one-third of his present income, and the same of the income of the crown, if he should live to be king. It was stipulated that so soon as Prince Arthur reached his twelfth year, a dispensation should be obtained to empower him to make the contract; and, accordingly, the marriage was performed by proxy, the Spanish ambassador assuming this part, in the chapel of the prince's manor of Bewdley.
These two children, who were at this period, the one ten, and the other eleven years of age, were educated in the highest possible degree by their respective parents: and at the time of their actual marriage, in 1501, when Arthur was fifteen, and Catherine nearly sixteen, they were perhaps the two most learned persons in the two kingdoms of Spain and England of their years. Arthur had been educated in the castle of Ludlow under the most accomplished masters, and was well read in Greek and Latin authors. The mother of Catherine, the celebrated Isabella, who was not only one of the ablest monarchs, but the most learned woman of the age, had herself superintended her education, assisted by the most eminent professors. Catherine, whose real name was Catalina—Catherine being unknown in Spain, except in Latin writings—read and wrote Latin in her very childhood. She had attended her parents in their conquest of Granada, and had made her home in the magnificent Alhambra and the Generaiffe. It was from these memories that she introduced the pomegranate (pomagranada) into the ornaments of Tudor architecture.
On the 2nd of October this truly illustrious princess landed at Plymouth, after a stormy and difficult passage from Corunna. Child as she was of their Most Catholic Majesties, and a rigid Catholic herself, little could anyone have predicted that her arrival in England was destined to overturn the Romish Church there, and to introduce Protestantism with all its consequences. She appears to have remained at Plymouth some weeks, whither Lord Broke proceeded by command of the king to "purvey and provide" for her. The Duchess of Norfolk and the Earl of Surrey were also sent to attend upon her, and the nobility and gentry of the country round Plymouth hastened to pay their homage, and everything was done to refresh her after her voyage. The king set out on the 4th of November from Shene to meet her, and was joined by the prince at East Hampstead, who had come from Ludlow.
As the king and prince approached Dogmersfield they learned that the princess had arrived there some hours before them, but they were met by a cavalcade of solemn Spanish grandees, who had come forward to inform them that, according to Spanish custom, neither the king nor prince could be introduced to the princess till they met at the altar. Ceremonious as Henry was himself, according to the frank notions of his subjects., this excess of formality was too much for him. He summoned around him on the open field such members of his privy council as were in his train, and asked them, "What they thought of it?" They replied, "That the Spanish infanta was now in His Majesty's own dominions, where he, and not the King of Spain, was master, and that he might look at the princess if he liked." On this Henry rode forward to Dogmersfield, and, presenting himself at Catherine's lodgings, demanded to be admitted to her presence. This peremptory conduct threw the whole of the Spanish embassage into the most terrible confusion. The prothonotary of Spain, an archbishop, a bishop, and a host of dignitaries, assured him that such a thing was impossible, for "the lady infanta had retired to her chamber." Not at all disturbed by this intelligence, Henry coolly assured them that "if she were even in her bed, he meant to see and speak with her, for that was his mind, and the whole intent of his coming."
Spanish etiquette being obliged by English bluffness to give way, the king was admitted to her third chamber, and there, though neither of them could speak a syllable of any common tongue, they made signs of much joy on seeing one another. Soon after arrived the prince, and was also admitted, and the two betrothed lovers managed to talk, as they had long corresponded, in Latin. They were then betrothed anew; and after a pleasant evening—during which the princess, who seems quickly to have thrown off her Spanish stiffness, entertained them with some of her country dances, and the prince, not to be behindhand with his bride, danced an English dance with Lady Guildford, the governess of his sister—they set forward the next day for London. At Kingston-on-Thames Catherine was met by the Duke of Buckingham, and a train of 400 noblemen, gentlemen, and clergy, and conducted to Kennington, whence, on the 17th of November, she was conducted by a great concourse of lords and ladies into the city to the bishop's palace, where she was to remain till the nuptials. On this occasion the Duke of York, afterwards her second husband and Henry VIII., rode on her right hand, and the Pope's legate on her left.
​The appearance of that Spanish procession must have been a new sight in London. The princess rode on a large mule, Spanish fashion. She wore a large hat like a cardinal's hat, tied with a lace of gold which kept it upon her head. Under the hat she had a coif, whence the hair, of a rich auburn, streamed over her shoulders. Near her rode her duenna, the Donna Elvira, dressed all in black, with a kerchief on her head and black cloth hanging down beside her cheeks, like a religious woman. The princess's saddle is described as resembling an armchair richly ornamented. Four Spanish ladies followed in broad hats like their mistress, and their mules were led by as many English ladies mounted on palfreys, and clad in cloth of gold. Unluckily, the English and Spanish ladies rode on different sides, so that they went back to back, as if they had quarrelled—a circumstance afterwards remembered as ominous.
On the 14th of November, 1501, the marriage was celebrated at St. Paul's, Arthur's younger brother and her future husband, Henry Duke of York, conducting her from the bishop's palace to the church. On coming out, at the door of the cathedral, and before all the people, Arthur endowed her with one-third of his property. The king, for once, opened his heart, and spent a considerable sum of money in tournaments, maskings, and other festivities. No doubt he meant the Spanish grandees to carry a good account of the magnificence of the reception to their own Court and country. The nobility vied with him in expense; so much so, that many of them ruined themselves. In the quaint masques and pageants, Arthur was complimented for his descent from King Arthur of old renown, and Catherine from John of Gaunt. At these fêtes Catherine wore the Spanish farthingale, and thus introduced into England the hooped petticoat.
The festivities over, Arthur retired to his castle of Ludlow with his bride, and there kept a Court modelled on that of the king. Great hopes and auguries were drawn from this marriage, and wonderful futures to them and their descendants were promised them by the astrologers. But little more than five months sufficed to falsify all the earthly predictions; for the young prince fell suddenly ill and died. Various reasons for his death are assigned by different authorities. Some assert that he died of consumption; others declare that he was perfectly sound and robust, and that he died of some epidemic—the sweating sickness, or, as the Spanish historian says, the plague. Great sickness of some kind was prevailing in the neighbourhood, so that at Worcester the funeral, according to the Spanish herald, was but thinly attended. Prince Arthur died on the 2nd of April, 1502. So far as the extreme youth of Arthur permitted a judgment, he was a prince of great promise, and the beauty of his person, the sweetness of his manner, and his great accomplishments, had won him universal favour, which was equally shared by his young bride.
Lingard has quoted a passage from the "Excerpta Historica," shewing that Henry condoled kindly with the queen in this severe and unexpected loss, which makes it probable that, however cold he had been towards her in the commencement of their marriage, he was now grown more attached to her. He also instances, from the MS. of Andre and the "Herald's Journal," his frequent presents to her of "money, jewels, frontlets, and other ornaments," as well as of his paying her debts.
The death of Arthur was a shock to the political arrangements, as well as to the affections of the royal parties on both sides. Ferdinand was anxious to retain a close alliance with England, as a counterpoise to the ascendancy of France. He therefore proposed to Henry that Catherine should be affianced to Henry Duke of York, Prince Arthur's younger brother. This was a very legitimate project according to the Jewish law, but not so much in accordance with the practice of the Christian world. Henry VII. appeared to hesitate—it may safely be surmised with no intention of allowing the young princess, and her dower of 200,000 crowns, to escape him; but rather, it may be supposed, with a design to exact something more. To hasten his decision, however, the Spanish monarch announced as the alternative, that Catherine must be immediately restored to her parents, with the half of the marriage portion already paid. This had a decisive effect on the deliberations of Henry. He showed himself ready to assent, if there were an additional incentive added in the shape of an additional sum. Ferdinand and Isabella were firm. They declared themselves ready to pay the remaining 100,000 crowns on the contract of the marriage, which should take effect two months after the receipt of a dispensation from the Pope. Henry tried every art to extort a larger sum, and it was not till June, 1503, that this proposition was finally accepted. The solemnisation of the marriage was to take place on the young Prince Henry completing his fourteenth year.
But the difficulties were not yet over. The two monarchs continued, like two skilful players, to try every move which might delay the payment of the money, or compel it with an augmentation. Ferdinand, on the receipt of the dispensation, and the signing of the contract, still did not remit the stipulated 100,000 crowns, and Henry, having the princess in his possession, made himself sure of the ultimate payment, and on the watch for further advantage. A strange means towards this end was resorted to. Henry, the young prince, on arriving at fourteen years of age, the time at which the marriage was to have taken place, appeared in the Court of the Bishop of Winchester, and stated that he was now at or upon the age of puberty; in fact, he would complete his fourteenth year on the 28th of June, 1503, and he made this statement the day previous. He then alluded to the contract of marriage with Catherine of Arragon, which had been entered into by his parents whilst he was below the age, and declared that it had been made without his consent, and that he did now revoke that contract, lest his silence might seem to confirm it, and held himself free from it, and at liberty to marry any other person. By this means it became optional with Henry VII. to proceed with this marriage or not, and it was plain that he did not mean to proceed till he had the cash in hand, and as little meant to let the princess escape him. In this state the matter remained till 1504, when Henry and Catherine, on the 25th of June, were betrothed, but still not married, at the house of the Bishop of Salisbury, in Fleet Street.
Nothing can be conceived more miserable than the condition of Catherine, now Dowager Princess of Wales, ​in England. Henry VII. resolved to force the payment of the remainder of her dowry, and not succeeding, resolved to revenge himself by keeping Catherine in the most severe destitution, so that she might complain to her father of her sufferings for want of money, and thus move him to send the delayed dowry. Betwixt two such cunning, selfish kings—Ferdinand, guided by the still more crafty counsels of Cardinal Ximenes, and Henry by those of his monstrous avarice—the poor princess was in a miserable plight.
Thomas Stanley, first Earl of Derby. (Died 1504.) From a Picture in the possession of the present Earl of Derby.
The death of the queen, Elizabeth of York, which took place immediately after the birth of another daughter, February 11th, 1503, only aggravated this condition, for the queen had been kind and consolatory to her. This was followed by a worse calamity, the death of her own mother, the famous Isabella of Castillo, which took place November 26th, 1504. Had Isabella lived, nothing but the iron grasp of Henry VII. on her person and on her 100,000 crowns, would have prevented the cancelling of the contract of Catherine's marriage, and her return to Spain. Catherine had written to her mother piteous accounts of her condition, and of her decided aversion to a second marriage in England. Isabella, uneasy at the small prospect of happiness for her daughter in any connection with the Court of the crowned miser, Henry VII., had sent to Home, earnestly entreating for a copy of the bull of dispensation permitting her daughter's marriage, declaring she could not die easy without seeing it. But Isabella died; and her unfortunate daughter was left in the hands of three of the most extraordinary diplomatists that ever exerted their wits for the accomplishment of their own selfish ends which the world ever saw—Henry, Ferdinand of Spain, and his minister Ximenes. With them, human feelings, or the happiness of any individual, went for nothing in the scale with political intrigue; but the story of Catherine's sorrows, which is a long one, we must interrupt, to trace other passing events.
Scarcely had the eves of Elizabeth of York closed, at ​the early age of thirty-seven, than Henry was on the look-out for another wife, for it was another opportunity of making a profit. His eyes glanced over the courts and courtly dames of Europe; and the lady who struck him as the most attractive in the world was the widow of the late King of Naples—for the deceased monarch had bequeathed her an immense property. Her ducats were charms that told on the gold-loving heart of Henry most ravishingly. He posted off three private gentlemen, well skilled in such delicate inquiries, to Naples, to learn from real sources whether all was safe as to this grand dowry. Poor Catherine was even made to play a part in this notable scheme of courtship, by furnishing the emissaries with a letter to her relative, the queen-dowager. The gentlemen reported in the most glowing terms the charms of the queen-dowager's person, the sweetness of her disposition, and the brilliant endowments of her mind; but they were obliged to add that, though the lady's fortune was in justice as large as fame reported it, the present king refused to carry out the will by which it was conferred. This one unlucky fact at once blotted out all the rest, and Henry, giving not another thought to the Dowager-Queen of Naples, turned his attention to the Dowager-Duchess of Savoy, who was also reported to be rich; and a circumstance which we shall speedily have to relate seemed to put this lady almost entirely in his power.
While Henry, however, was traversing Europe with his thoughts to add to his ever-growing hoards, he was equally diligent at home in prosecuting every art by which he could add another mark to his heap. He sought out and kept in his pay clever and unprincipled lawyers to search the old statute-books for laws grown obsolete, but which had never been formally repealed; and he had another set of spies in correspondence with them, who went to and fro throughout the whole kingdom to make out all such persons of property as had transgressed these slumbering laws. Gentlemen, on refusing to pay the demands made upon them on these grounds, were arrested and cast into prison, where, instead of being duly brought to trial, they were kept in a state of constant alarm by reports carried to them of the grievous punishments preparing for them. This was done to extort large sums from them by way of compromise. When this failed, the unhappy men were brought to trial—not in the regular courts of justice, but before courts of commissioners appointed by the king, where there were juries of equally venal and abandoned character ready to condemn them. Even the very show of juries was in a while abandoned. The king, having concluded treaties with the monarchs abroad, especially those of France, Spain, and Scotland, and having put down and destroyed all his enemies at home, carried matters as he pleased; and all his efforts were directed to the single end of sucking up fresh streams of gold to gratify—but not satisfy, for that was insatiable—his thirsty dropsy of avarice. He soon ceased to proceed against his victims by indictment, but arrested them by precept, and tried them within the closed door of his Star Chamber, or in the private houses of his arbitrary commissioners.
Such a state of things could never have been tolerated in any former reign; but the wars of the Roses had cut off all the chief nobility, and the House of Commons, terrified by the summary proceedings against offenders, had become utterly cowed, and trembled at the mere word of this imperious monarch. Never, therefore, was the English people at any time so completely prostrated beneath the talons of a royal vampire as at this period. The rich merchants of London found themselves accused of mal-practices in the discharge of their civic offices, and were subjected to the same process of squeezing in Henry's universal press. We have noticed the seizure of Capel, the Lord Mayor of London, and his long imprisonment to extract a fine, grounded on such a charge, of £2,700, and ultimately compounded for £1,600. Another lord mayor, Thomas Knesworth, and his two sheriffs were imprisoned on similar charges, and lay for a long time in prison, till they submitted to pay £1,400.Hawis, a mercer and alderman, was harassed by these harpies of the crown till, not being able to satisfy their demands, he died of a broken heart; and Sir Lawrence Alemore and his two sheriffs were fined £1,000, and did not escape from prison whilst Henry lived. Had the grasping Tudor had a corporation as rich as the present metropolitan one, what a gold mine the city would have been to him!
To drain the coffers of the landed aristocracy, Henry's agents brought up against them all the old obsolete feudal charges of wardships, aids, liveries, premier seizins, and scutages. Their estates had long been held under a different tenure, obtained from former monarchs. No matter: all those marked out for legal bleeding were brought into the private inquisition of the king's commissioners, and compelled to pay whatever was demanded, or to suffer worse inconveniences. Even his own friends were not exempted from the ever-watchful eyes and schemes of this money-making king. The law which he had enacted against the practice of "maintenance" was a prolific source of emolument. A striking example of this species of royal sharp-practice was given in the case of John de Vere, Earl of Oxford. If there was one man who had done more than another for the house of Lancaster, it was Oxford. He had shared in all the losses and expatriation consequent on their defeat. He had been seized, and had suffered a long imprisonment from Richard III. in the castle of Hams. Thence, making his escape, he joined Henry VII. when himself an exile in Brittany and France. He had come over with him on his enterprise to seize the crown of England, had commanded the van of his army at Bosworth, and since against the rebels of Cornwall. This nobleman having entertained the king on one occasion for several days magnificently at his castle of Henningham, to do the utmost honour to him at his departure, summoned all his friends and retainers, arrayed in all their livery coats and cognisances, and ranged them in two rows leading from the reception rooms to the royal carriage. Henry's eye was instantly struck with this prodigious display of wealth and of men, and his mind as suddenly leapt to a felicitous conclusion. There was money to be made out of it.
"My lord," he said, stopping short, and addressing the earl, "I have heard much of your hospitality, but I see it is greater than the speech. These handsome gentlemen and yeomen which I see on both sides of me, are surely your menial servants." The earl smiled, and said, "If it ​may please your grace, that were not for mine ease: they are most of them my retainers, that are come to do me service at such a time as this, and chiefly to see your grace."
The king started a little, and said: "By my faith, my lord, I thank you for your good cheer, but I may not endure to have my laws thus broken in my sight: my attorney must speak to you." The earl was prosecuted for thus seeking to flatter the vanity of his master, and compelled to gratify his avarice by a fine of 15,000 marks.
Whilst the king himself set so notable an example of extortion, we may be sure that his commissioners, spies, and tools of all sorts were not slack in this business of ferreting out and putting through the torture of their secret courts the unhappy subjects of every corner of the kingdom who had any substance to prey upon. The two ringleaders of this set of legalised robbers were a couple of the vilest fellows which pollute the annals of England, and are scarcely matched by the horrid lists of Italian or Spanish inquisitors. "The king," says Bacon, "had gotten for his purpose, or beyond his purpose, two instruments, Empson and Dudley, whom the people esteemed as his horse-leeches and shearers: bold men, and careless of fame, and that took toll of their master's grist. Dudley was of a good family, eloquent, and one that could put hateful business into good language. But Empson, that was the son of a sieve-maker, triumphed always upon the deed done, putting off all other respects whatsoever."
Both these vile fellows were lawyers, and skilled in all the quirks and contrivances of oppression. There was no villany which they could not represent as legal if not right. "They turned," adds Bacon, "law and justice into wormwood and rapine." By the active vigilance of these bloodsuckers, every part of the kingdom, and every rank and class of people in it, were put upon the rack of an unexampled extortion. Where they could not by their ingenuity find an old offence, they invented new offences, so that they might levy fines. "These, and other courses," continues Bacon, "fitter to be buried in oblivion than repeated, they had of preying upon the people, both like tame hawks for their master, and like wild hawks for themselves; insomuch as they grew to great riches and substance." When, in the reign of Queen Elizabeth, we shall be astonished at the daring deeds of her great favourite, Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, we have only to remember his grandfather, Dudley, the extortioner of this time, in order to get rid of any astonishment.
To so low a degree of slavish prostration was the House of Commons fallen in 1504, that it chose this Dudley, the king's pincers, for its speaker; and, as might be expected, it passed any Acts that Henry chose. Amongst others, he demanded the aids which used to be paid in feudal times on the knighting of the king's eldest son, and marrying his eldest daughter. Henry had married his eldest daughter in 1502 to the King of Scots, and he had knighted his eldest son Arthur before his marriage, in 1501; and on these old occurrences he demanded a contribution from Parliament, and obtained £30,000, which was so arranged that £40,000 should be voted, and that he should remit £10,000—matters out of doors assuming an aspect which forced even from him some show of moderation.
The cruel and incessant oppressions of Henry's commissioners had now roused a deep spirit of resentment in the public mind. Everywhere there were murmurings and discontent. That Henry was well aware of all that his agents were doing, has been clearly shown by Bacon. Henry examined the accounts of Dudley and Empson with all the minute interest of a usurer. "I remember," says Bacon, "to have seen a book of accounts of Empson that had the king's hand almost to every leaf by way of signing, and was in some places postilled in the margin with the king's hand likewise, where was this remembrance:—' Item:Received from such a one five marks for a pardon to be procured, and if the pardon do not pass, the money to be repaid, except the party be some otherways satisfied.' And near against this memorandum, in the king's own hand, 'otherways satisfied.'" Such are the proofs that Henry was fully cognisant, and therefore fully guilty, of all that was being done.
Confident as Henry was that he could crush any resistance at home, there was an individual abroad on whom his jealous eyes were fixed with some degree of anxiety. This was Edmund de la Pole, the Earl of Suffolk. He was the son of the late Duke of Suffolk, and younger brother of the Earl of Lincoln, who fell at the battle of Stoke. On the death of the Earl of Lincoln, Edmund de la Pole claimed the family honours and estates, as the next heir of his father; but Henry replied that he inherited from his brother, who died attainted; and that, therefore, those lands were forfeited. It was clear that Edmund inherited from his father, through the decease of his brother without issue, but Henry would not have it so, and compelled the young man to content himself with a fragment of the estate, and the minor title of earl, the rank of his brother. Besides grasping at the forfeited estates, Henry undoubtedly took pleasure in reducing this Yorkist family, and the young man's mind appears to have been embittered by the injury. He had the misfortune to kill a man who had excited his anger, and Henry seized the opportunity to further humiliate him. He was arraigned as a murderer in the Court of King's Bench, and commanded to plead the king's pardon. Suffolk, disdaining to do this, fled to the Continent in 1449, and took refuge in the dangerous Court of his aunt, the Duchess-Dowager of Burgundy. To draw him from that focus of antagonism, Henry after a time permitted Suffolk to return, and at the marriage of Prince Arthur, like many others of the nobility, he involved himself in debt by his extravagant display, and soon after, again accompanied by his youngest brother, Richard de la Pole, he once more escaped to the Court of his intriguing aunt.
Henry now suspected something more in this resort to the Court of Burgundy than a mere escape from debt, and he employed his old scheme of coming at the truth. As he had done in Warbeck's case, he now sent over a spy, in the person of a gentleman. Then it had been Sir Robert Clifford, now it was Sir Robert Curson. Curson pursued the very same plan that Clifford had done. He professed to have excited the deadly enmity of the king, and the king completed the deception by causing the Pope's bull of excommunication, with all its curses on the rebels, to be read against the Earl of Suffolk and Sir ​Robert Curson. The stratagem once more took effect. Curson was received into the confidence of Suffolk and his party, and as fast as he wormed out the names of their accomplices in England he sent them off to Henry. In consequence of these treacherous revelations, in May,1502, Henry arrested William de la Pole, another brother of Suffolk; Lord Courtenay, who married Catherine Wydville, a sister of Henry's late queen; Sir William Wyndham, and some others of less note.
Against the Lord Courtenay and William de la Pole nothing could, however, be proved, beyond their relationship and friendly intercourse with Suffolk, and their connection with the house of York, yet De la Pole was retained in custody for a considerable time; and the Lord Courtenay was consigned to the Tower, where he remained during the king's reign. Tyrrel and Wyndham were condemned and executed; but, strangely enough, not on a charge of any present conspiracy, which Henry politically ignored, but on that of aiding the first escape of Suffolk in 1499, nearly three years ago. Tyrrel had, as we have seen, previously confessed his concern in the murder of the two princes in the Tower with impunity, and was now dispatched, not for his real crime, but on a charge vague and frivolous. All this dirty work being done, and those gentlemen and others put to death on his evidence, whatever it was, Curson returned to England, and into the royal favour, with shameless impudence, equally disgraceful to himself and his employer, and to the lively indignation of the people. As for the 1499 of Suffolk, he found it necessary to retire from the Court of his aunt, and to seek a wandering security wherever he could in the Netherlands, Germany, or France. Wherever he went, the eyes of Henry followed him; and in 1506 an event occurred, which promised Henry the chance of not only getting him into his hands, but of securing a variety of other advantages.
The tempestuous weather of January, 1506, which brought to others the disastrous news of vessels wrecked and lives lost, brought to Henry VII. tidings of a most exciting and elating kind. It was no other than that amongst the foreign vessels driven into the port of Weymouth, were some containing the Archduke Philip of Flanders and his wife Juana, the elder sister of Catherine of Arragon, his daughter-in-law, and daughter of his friend and ally Ferdinand of Spain. Henry was delighted to find these distinguished allies and near connections within his realm; but his delight arose, not from the same source as the really generous and hospitable might suppose, not from the opportunity thus afforded him of showing his friends the kindness and the welcome of a great king, but from the ogre's exultation that he had them in his power, and could suck their very life's blood. In other words, he could coin them into a mint of money, which was the blood of life to Henry Tudor.
The Archduke Philip knew his man; and at their meeting near Calais, in 1500, though he attempted to hold Henry's stirrup, and heaped upon him the titles of his father and protector, he took good care to keep out of his clutches; nothing would induce him to enter the city. But now circumstances were greatly changed; and the archduke and his wife Juana would be a much more valuable prize. The mother of Juana, the Queen Isabella of Spain, was dead, and Juana was, in her own right, Queen of Castille, and Philip, by hers, king. There was a number of things, any one of which Henry would have been only too happy to extort from Philip; and we shall soon see that he forgot none of them. The matter did not take the calculating monarch at all by surprise. He had been watching the precious pair of royalties from the moment they contemplated sailing for Spain to take possession of their rights. His ships had watched them down the Channel, and, from the state of the weather, the crafty king had even anticipated that they might be driven into one of his ports, and had stationed guards along the coast with full instructions how to act should they chance to land. Fortune seemed determined to co-operate with the selfish king. When they had been tossed about for a fortnight—from the 10th to the 26th of January—the unlucky couple were compelled to make Weymouth, their provisions being exhausted. The king and queen were so sick of the sea that they could not resist the temptation to go quietly for a little while on shore. In vain their prudent council warned them against the rash experiment: they stepped on land; and instantly Sir Thomas Tronchard and Sir John Cary, attended by a body of soldiers, marched up to their hotel, and with much politeness welcomed their majesties to England, and invited them to accept the hospitality of their houses. Philip would fain excuse himself; but the gentlemen, well instructed, intimated to them that their sovereign was already apprised of the honour done to his kingdom by their presence, and could not allow them to depart without first paying his respects to them. Philip must have heartily wished himself once more at the mercy of the sea rather than that of his old ally. But it was too late, and he was obliged to put a fair face on it.
Presently the Earl of Arundel arrived in great state at the head of 300 horse, and, for more effect, making his approach by torch-light. He bore the king's welcome and congratulations, and announced that Henry was intending in all haste to visit them himself. Philip, who foresaw a long delay if he waited for the king's ceremonious travelling, and desirous to cut his visit as short as possible, at once resolved to set out for Windsor, leaving his queen to follow at her leisure. Henry met the Castillian king on Elworth Common, two miles from Windsor. Ho had taken care to array himself with royal magnificence, which contrasted the more advantageously with the costume of Philip, who was in deep mourning for the deceased Isabella. Henry wore a gown of purple velvet, with a hood of the same, and a gold chain with a George of diamonds. His horse was richly adorned with embroidered caparison, and his suite, in brave apparel, rode splendid steeds covered profusely with goldsmith's work, with cloths of tissue velvet, embellished with dragons and roses, with tassels, gilt bells, and precious stones. Philip, on the other hand, was ill-mounted on a horse which the king had sent him, with a design, as it would seem, of not adding too much to the effect of his personal appearance. He was clad entirely in black, as were his followers, with cloaks of tawny and black.
The two kings saluted each other with all show of affection, but Philip, whilst endeavouring to be courteous, could not help betraying what was passing in his thoughts, for he declared that he was now punished for not going into Calais when they last met. Henry replied that walls ​and seas were nothing when hearts were open—a thing true enough, in more than one sense, which, no doubt, Philip thought to himself. Philip found himself received with much magnificence at the castle of Windsor; but he was not suffered to remain long without feeling that he was in the hands of a man who would have his full advantage out of him. The insatiable old miser went to work and propounded his demands, and there was nothing for it but for Philip to comply, if he ever meant to see Spain. First, Henry informed him that he was intending to marry, and that Philip's sister, the Dowager-Duchess of Savoy, was the woman of his choice. He demanded with her the sum of 300,000 crowns, of which 100,000 should be paid in August—it was already the 10th of March—and the remainder in six years by equal instalments. Besides this, Margaret, the duchess, was in the annual receipt of two dowries; one as the widow of John, Prince of Spain, and the other as widow of Philibert, Duke of Savoy, for she had been twice married already. This income Henry stipulated should be settled upon himself—poor man! as if he were so destitute of income already—and the princess was to receive instead an income as queen of England. That meant that Henry would have an income certain, and give her one most uncertain, for at this very time Catherine, the widow of his son Arthur, and betrothed bride of his son Henry, was kept by him in a condition of the most shameful destitution.
Philip consented—for what could he do?—and that point settled, Henry informed Philip that he had also a son, whom he, Henry, proposed to marry to his youngest daughter, Mary. This must have been a still more bitter draught for the poor Spanish monarch than the former. Henry had already made this very proposal, and it had been at once rejected. This son of Philip, the future celebrated Emperor Charles V., was now a child of six years of age, and the little Princess Mary was just three! Philip, however much he might inwardly rebel, and however differently he had planned the destiny of his son, was in the miser's vice, and the thing was done.
Henry next proceeded to dictate a new treaty of commerce betwixt England and Flanders, reversing the advantages which Flanders had before enjoyed, and placing them on the side of England. This change the Flemish denounced bitterly when it became known. They had called their old treaty with England the intercursus magnus—the great treaty—but this they dubbed the intercursus malus—the bad treaty. These matters being settled, Henry consented to lend Philip £138,000 on good and profitable securities, to assist him in his enterprise of obtaining his wife's throne in Spain; and then demanded that he should put into his hands the unfortunate Earl of Suffolk, who was now in the Netherlands. At this demand Philip recoiled in disgust. It was a direct attack upon his honour, and if Henry had had one spark of feeling himself he would have called to mind his own ideas when Richard III. demanded his surrender from the Duke of Brittany. But Philip must either yield or remain an actual captive himself at Windsor; he therefore consented, on the strict condition that the life of the earl should be spared. This being conceded, Philip wrote to assure the earl that he might safely venture to return to England. Suffolk returned, to enable Philip, his benefactor, to escape from the clutches of Henry, and on the earl's surrender, Philip was permitted to take his leave. Henry thirsted for the blood of Suffolk, but, fearful of offending Philip, he refrained from putting the earl to death; he kept him shut up in the Tower, and left at his death a strict order that his successor should have him executed.
The visit which Juana made to Windsor, during these extraordinary proceedings, was studiedly short. She arrived on the 10th of February, and left again on the 12th, thus remaining little more than a day, after the long journey from Weymouth in the winter, though her husband was at Windsor with her. But there were reasons sufficiently strong why Juana should not have too much opportunity for speech with her sister Catherine, the Princess of Wales. Catherine, as we have said, was kept by Henry in a condition of poverty and insult which would have created a great sensation in Spain if it became known, and which was likely to stir uneasily the heart of a sister. The miserable king, angry at not receiving the remainder of her dower—for since her mother's death the state of Castillo had refused to pay it, and Ferdinand was, therefore, unable to remit it—revenged himself by taunting her with the non-payment of the money. When she assured him that her father was certain to discharge it at one time or another, he replied churlishly, "that was yet to see," and that "he did not know that." Nor did he confine himself to taunts: he refused to pay her allotted income as Dowager-Princess of Wales. The endowing her by Prince Arthur with one-third of his property at the church door was a cruel farce: she had nothing. The residences assigned to her were such as lay low—as Durham House, in the Strand, or Arragon House, at Twickenham—and the great change from the warm, dry air of Spain fixed on her an obstinate intermittent fever, of which she was suffering for more than a year. In this condition she was not blessed with a penny. She complains in her letters to her father that she was in debt in London for herself and household—not for extravagance, but simply for food. She implores her father with tears to prevail on the King of England to discharge her debts. "My lord," she says, "I am in the greatest trouble and anguish in the world, on the one part seeing all my people that they are ready to ask alms; on the other, the debts that I have in London. About my own person I have nothing for chemises, wherefore, by your highness's life, I have now sold some bracelets to get a dress of black velvet; for since I departed from Spain, I have had nothing but two new dresses, for till now those I brought have lasted me, although now I have got nothing but dresses of brocade."
The death of her husband, Prince Arthur, and of her mother, had compelled her to get these two only new dresses, as mourning. But there was also a dispute going on betwixt Henry and Ferdinand, the brunt of which fell on the princess. Ferdinand contended that Catherine's jewels, amounting in value to 33,000 crowns, were meant as a part of the 200,000 crowns of dowry, but this Henry would not admit, but insisted on the payment in full.
Such was the situation of this unfortunate princess with this most miserable of royal misers. She was longing to get away to her own country again. She was strongly opposed to the second marriage with ​Prince Henry—who was a mere boy—and, therefore, took no pains to learn the English language. But fresh events added fresh complications to her dreary case. Philip of Flanders, or, as he was oftener called, Philip the Fair of Austria, was but an invalid when he set out on his unlucky voyage to Spain. His detention in England during the three most trying months of its trying climate, January, February, and March, added to the vexation of the engagement forced upon him by the relentless Henry, are said to have completely broken his constitution; he sank and died in about six months. No sooner did King Henry hear this news, than, throwing aside all further thoughts of the Duchess of Savoy, he applied for the hand of Juana, the widow of Philip. "With Juana, Queen of Castille, and Charles, her son, the heir of all Spain, the Netherlands, and Austria, married to his daughter Mary, what visions of greatness and empire must have swum before the keen eyes of Henry, and excited his intense passion of acquisitiveness! Ferdinand returned for answer, that the proposal would have been well pleasing to him, but that Queen Juana, from violent grief for the loss of her husband, was become thoroughly and permanently insane. This answer, which would have been all-sufficient for most men, was treated as a mere trifle by Henry, who replied that he knew the queen, having seen her in England; that her derangement of mind was not the effect of grief, but of the harsh treatment of Philip; that she would soon be all right, and that he was quite ready to marry her. Ferdinand reiterated the certainty of the lady's fixed madness, and Henry rejoined that if he was not allowed to marry her, the king's other daughter, Catherine, should never marry his son.
The Port of Weymouth.(See page 112.)
There is no doubt that, could Henry have secured the hand of Juana, "the Mad Queen," as she came to be called, he would have broken off the contract betwixt Henry, his son, and Catherine, and kept her and her dower in England nevertheless. But the marriage of Henry VII. with Juana being an impossibility, Ferdinand promised to remit the remaining half of Catherine's dower by instalments, and Henry consented that the marriage of the two young people should take place as soon as the money was paid. Catherine, whose letters to her father had, for the most part, been intercepted and detained by Henry, at length gave up her opposition also to the wedding, declaring, in one of these letters, that it was better for her to marry the prince than remain in the woeful condition of destitution and dependence in which her father-in-law kept her—a condition vastly aggravated by the fact that Henry had corrupted the Spanish minister at his Court, Dr. Peubla, and made of him one of the most oppressive of his tools against his own princess and countrywoman. The remainder of the dower, however, was never paid up during Henry's time, and therefore the marriage did not take place till after his death.
Interior of Henry the Seventh's Chapel in Westminster Abbey.
But nothing shows more curiously how such long-practised criminals juggle with their own souls than his behaviour regarding Dudley and Empson, the instruments of his perpetual robberies of the people. When the sickness was strong upon him he ordered them to cease their villanies; as he got worse he commanded them even to make restitution to those they had pillaged and imprisoned; but as he grew better again, he instructed them that it was only necessary to recompense such as had not been dealt with according to the regular forms of law—so that, as these vultures generally tore their victims in a legal fashion, and as they themselves were made the judges of the necessary restitution, very little was done. The terrors of death, however, drew nearer; and the struggles of the wretched man clinging to the earth and to his useless gold, and recoiling from the pains of purgatory, if not of something worse, appear in a vivid manner in his will.
This singular document was signed at Richmond on the last day of March, 1509, just three weeks before his death. In this he directs his executors to cause 2,000 masses to be said for his soul within a month after his decease, at the rate of sixpence a piece. He orders them, also, to distribute £2,000 to prisoners and poor people, on condition that they also pray for his soul by name—for even in death Henry Tudor must have his quid pro quo. "And in this partie," he says, "we hertily desire our executores to thinke and considere how necessarie, behoofful, and how profitable it is to dede folks to be praied for." He had some time before made formal contracts with the clergy of all the cathedrals, conventual and collegiate churches in the kingdom, to say a certain number of masses and prayers, for certain sums of money, and he now granted them by his will fresh sums to engage them to say their masses with increased fervency, and their prayers with greater zeal. Such are the confessions which Death, the great master, forces even from the bosoms of kings, which have been wrapt in the splendour of gold and the softness of ermine, and have looked to the simple spectator so noble and so serene.
Henry VII. died at his palace of Richmond on the 21st of April, 1509, in the fifty-fourth year of his age and the twenty-fourth of his reign. With all the vices of his character he was fortunate as a monarch, and by his very mean and parsimonious nature benefited the nation. In passing judgment upon him it is necessary to separate our estimate of the monarch from that of the man. As a man he was essentially a mean one; as a monarch he had nothing great and magnanimous about him; but he appeared in times when repose was essentially necessary to the nation, and he gave it that, because he could not find it in his heart to spend his money in war. Thus his sordid nature, which was otherwise contemptible, became almost virtuous, as it secured the realm from foreign expenses, which would further have exhausted it. He plundered his subjects by his commissioners, but they were not dragged so often to the battle-field, nor had their harvests trodden down and their houses burnt by contending parties. The peace which he gave them was salutary, though it might be ignominious; and Henry had this virtue for a monarch—he was a man of business. He attended to his own affairs; and while he locked his motives and his plans inviolably in his own breast, he set his ministers and subordinates their work, and he saw that it was done. Though he was not wide in his mental horizon, and was utterly incapable of a truly great design, he pondered well what he meant to do, and did it so completely, that that grovelling cunning of his was lauded by his contemporaries as profound wisdom, and they called him the Solomon of the age. But then it was an age unexampled in a race of unprincipled and perfidious princes. Louis of France, Ferdinand of Spain, the Pope Alexander VI., his detestable son, Cæsar Borgia, and our Henry, have been well said "to have acted in blood and treachery all that Machiavelli afterwards wrote."
There is one measure for which Henry has received a degree of admiration which is not his due; that is, for putting down the power of the great baron were extinguished by a process which might be called the suicide of almost an entire class—they exterminated each other in the civil wars. But Henry having them down, had the just merit of keeping them there. He had not the fatal vanity of surrounding his throne with a fresh creation of the dangerous caste, and though he seemed thereby to unduly strengthen the crown, he eventually strengthened the people, for, unharassed by the perpetual squabbles and demands of the feudal barons, ​the people from this period made rapid progress, so that in little more than another century they began to speak wonderful things to their governors. At the accession of Henry there were only left twenty-seven temporal peers in England.
In estimating the man we cannot do it more justly than in the words of the historian Henry:—"The great defects of the character of this prince proceeded not from the weakness of his head, but the hardness of his heart, which was exceedingly selfish and unfeeling; little susceptible of the impressions of love, friendship, pity, or any generous benevolent affection. He was an unkind husband to an amiable consort; never had a friend, and seldom forgave an enemy. As a son, he treated his venerable mother with formal respect, but allowed her no influence; as a father, he was careful, but not affectionate; as a master, he was far from being generous. An inordinate love of money, and an unrelenting hatred to the house of York, were his ruling passions, and the chief source of all his vices and troubles."
By his want of enterprise and his dread of expense, he missed the glory of sending Columbus on his grand voyage of discovery, which revealed the New World. Worn out by his neglect and repulse at the Court of Spain, Columbus sent his brother Bartholomew to London, to explain to Henry his views, and to pray his co-operation. But while Henry hesitated, though he was greatly excited by the proposal, Ferdinand and Isabella took up the cause, and Spain won the fame of that incalculably eventful enterprise. Roused, however, by Columbus's success, Henry sent out Sebastian Cabot in 1498, who discovered the mainland of America and the island of Newfoundland. As Henry, therefore, departed from the world, it was widening its horizon beyond all former experience. Discovery was on the eve of giving it new and immense regions, the progress of inquiry was preparing a new birth in religion, and commerce, art, science, government, literature, and civilisation were beginning a new career, which, marvellous as it has already proved, appears yet more marvellous in its promise of the boundless future.
Amongst the merits of Henry should not be forgotten that, unenterprising as he was by nature, he yet promoted the enterprise of discovery, and expended £14,000, at that time a great sum, in building a ship called the Great Harry, which may properly be termed the first ship of a distinctive English navy, for before, our monarchs generally borrowed vessels from the merchants.
Henry left three children, his son and successor Henry, and two daughters—Margaret, married to James IV. of Scotland, and Mary, afterwards married to Louis XII. of France.