aunt, Margaret of York, duchess of Burgundy. A focus for disaffected Ricardians, Margaret hated Henry and she detested the new political settlement. The house of York, she felt, could only be restored through a ‘male remnant’.
While Lincoln’s own claim to the throne was reasonable, he and Margaret knew that the claim of another living Yorkist was better still. In the weeks after Bosworth, Henry’s agents had arrested another nephew of Edward IV and immured him in the Tower of London. The last surviving Plantagenet prince descended in the male line, Edward earl of Warwick was a touchstone for Yorkist affections – people still provocatively wore his badge of the bear and ragged staff – and Lincoln understood the galvanizing effect of Warwick’s presence at the head of any uprising. Warwick, however, was twelve years old, simple-minded, and inaccessible. Unable to get his hands on him, Lincoln conjured up another Warwick, grooming another young boy to impersonate him.16
With an army of German mercenaries, Lincoln sailed to Ireland, which remained a hotbed of Yorkist support, to raise more aid. There, the boy was paraded as the earl of Warwick, newly escaped from the Tower; on 24 May, Whit Sunday, he was crowned king of England in Dublin Cathedral. The following month, Lincoln’s invasion force crossed the Irish Sea and landed on the Cumbrian coast, advancing south into the midlands, the child at its head. As England baked under a hot sun, Henry’s disciplined, battle-hardened retinues confronted the rebels outside the Nottinghamshire village of East Stoke. Outnumbered and disordered, Lincoln’s troops were massacred and Lincoln himself killed, to Henry’s frustration. With Lincoln alive, Henry felt, he would have been able to get ‘the bottom of his danger’, the root of the conspiracy.17 The young boy, though, was found. He was no earl of Warwick, said Henry’s agents, but a fake: the son of an Oxford joiner who went by the name of Lambert Simnel. After the battle, Henry set him to work in an occupation befitting his menial status, as a spit-turner in the royal kitchens.
The battle of Stoke marked an end, of sorts. With the death of Lincoln, a genuine Yorkist contender for the throne, and a decisive victory for Henry, it seemed to draw a line under the resistance of Richard III’s supporters. But old loyalties simmered, and the aftershocks of rebellion rippled on.
In late 1491, a Breton merchant-ship had docked at the southern Irish port of Cork. Among the crew that spilled onto the quayside was a handsome, blond, sixteen-year-old boy dressed, rather incongruously for a ship’s hand, in rich silks. It was here, so his confession later had it, that Perkin Warbeck, son of a boatman from the Flemish city of Tournai, was stopped by a group of renegade Yorkists who had returned to southern Ireland to try to revive the plot around the earl of Warwick. They were backed by the French king Charles VIII, who was desperate for a lever to use against an increasingly aggressive Henry – just as some six years previously he had made a show of backing Henry against Richard III. But in Warbeck, who they discovered swanning through the streets of Cork in his borrowed finery, the conspirators found something else altogether. Accosting him, they flattered him and promised to make him a Yorkist prince.
Warbeck later described how the men had tried out a number of identities on him: the earl of Warwick – Lambert Simnel, all over again – and then an illegitimate son of Richard III. Discarding both ideas, they then struck gold. They would groom him to become another kind of Yorkist: Richard duke of York, the second son of Edward IV, the younger of the princes whose disappearance into the Tower had transformed Henry’s own prospects from that of fugitive into claimant to the throne.18
The reappearance, or re-creation, of Richard duke of York was a masterstroke. The bodies of the princes had never been found. While Henry could take the earl of Warwick out of the Tower and parade him through the streets of London – the same reason that he kept Simnel to hand in the royal kitchens – he could hardly do the same with Edward IV’s young sons. Provided he looked and behaved like him, Richard duke of York’s second coming could hardly be denied. Turning the political clock back to April 1483, to a time before Richard III’s usurpation, it took a wrecking ball to the political settlement that Henry and Elizabeth’s marriage represented.
Not only would Richard duke of York be indisputably heir to the throne, but he would also have an undeniable claim on the loyalty of all those who had subsequently transferred their allegiance to his oldest sister Elizabeth and had accepted Henry’s rule. Now, they would look again at their genealogical charts and their pedigree rolls, and their loyalties would be torn. The entwined red-and-white roses would be ripped apart. The phantom duke of York’s existence, the simple ‘what if?’, attacked the foundations of everything that Henry was trying to build.
But the full impact of Warbeck, who after his grooming in Ireland had been carried off to the French court, took some time to emerge. In mid-1492, French intelligence officials, quizzing merchants from England on the impact of the ‘White Rose’, were disappointed at English indifference. Then, that autumn, Henry invaded France.
As he looked outward to Europe, and to the fluctuating dynastic power politics in which as an exile he had once been helplessly thrown about, Henry had followed with concern France’s mounting aggression in the constant struggles for domination of the northern European coast. He had been unable to prevent it from swallowing up his former ally, the duchy of Brittany. But he had slowly built an understanding with France’s perennial enemy on its eastern border, the tricksy Habsburg king, Maximilian.19
War was something the nobility expected of monarchs, and war with France was a rite of passage for English kings who were expected to lay claim to the kingdom they felt was theirs by right.20 But Henry’s abortive expedition of 1492 was a strange episode. The biggest invasion force of the century, involving fifteen thousand troops and seven hundred ships, was assembled, its mobilization had taken much of the year. By the time his armies had crossed the English Channel, however, the campaigning season was all but over. Citing all manner of excuses, from fickle allies – which, given Maximilian’s track record, was hardly unreasonable – to their surprise at Boulogne’s bristling fortifications, Henry and his counsellors quickly sealed a peace treaty with Charles VIII, who agreed to pay a massive annual pension of 50,000 French crowns. But if Henry felt he had won the peace, he was deceiving himself.
To the English soldiers that trudged back home with barely a shot fired, and then sat grumbling in taverns throughout the country, and to the commons, who continued to pay extortionate taxes for a non-existent campaign, the settlement did not feel remotely honourable. Maximilian, who had been cut out of the Anglo-French treaty and was ‘left sitting between two chairs’, as one of his commanders put it, was apoplectic with humiliated rage. Little did Henry realize, but Maximilian’s means of revenge – and, he hoped, the possibility of placing a rather more compliant English king on the throne – was already at hand.21
In the new Anglo-French detente, Warbeck, fearing extradition to England, had fled to Malines in a curious mirror-image of Henry’s own flight from Brittany to France. He had been well groomed in his role – well enough, at any rate, for the childless Margaret of Burgundy, desperate for revenge against Henry VII, to accept it wholeheartedly: ‘I believed it immediately’, she wrote to Isabella of Castile. Maximilian, who was close to the dowager-duchess, was equally enthusiastic. Early in 1493, news of the Yorkist pretender was carried ‘blazing and thundering’ into England by the merchant ships that coasted around the entrepots of the Low Countries, and spread like a cancer.
Henry scrambled to make sense of the threat. It was, he stated, beyond all logic, ‘completely absurd’, ‘the height of madness’ that people should believe that this ‘feigned lad’ was who he said he was. Diplomatic efforts with Burgundy and Maximilian were stepped up in order to secure the pretender’s extradition, but without success. Relations between England and the Low Countries deteriorated. Henry imposed economic sanctions, refusing to let English merchants trade with Flanders; Maximilian retaliated in kind. In Bruges, the headquarters of the English ‘nation’ of resident merchants was boarded up; in London, warehouses were piled high with wool and cloth ready for export, gathering dust. Riots broke out; enclaves of foreign merchants, their ships not subject to the embargo, were attacked. Political and economic discontent mingled, and rumour abounded.
Warbeck, it was widely believed, was about to invade. Cells of his supporters were scattered throughout the country. On the road, those who had good reason to travel – merchants of all kinds, pedlars, friars, musicians and performers journeying from town to town and house to house – were suspected of linking up with them, ‘artfully and subtly’. There were reported plots to assassinate Henry and his family, including a plan to daub the doorframes and handles of the royal household with a lethal poison. Flybills detailing ‘seditions and treacheries and uprisings’ were passed from hand to hand. In London, there were co-ordinated flypostings urging the city to revolt; overnight, placards would appear fixed to church doors, including those of St Paul’s itself.22
Meanwhile, Warbeck’s profile continued to grow. In the summer of 1494, Maximilian’s father, the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick, died. At his funeral in Vienna Cathedral, in front of the representatives of Europe’s foremost dynasties, Warbeck was paraded as the king of England and then brought back through the cities of the Low Countries on a triumphal progress alongside Maximilian’s teenage son and heir, Archduke Philip of Burgundy. Henry
