The Last White Rose (4 page)

Yet the king was not too alarmed. In the words of Francis Bacon (echoing Vergil), Henry thought the rising was ‘but a rag
or remnant of Bosworth Field, and had nothing in it of the main party of the House of York’. Vergil and Bacon stress that Henry was not so much nervous about these particular rebels as worried he might not be able to raise a dependable force in northern England if a really serious rising broke out in the region, ‘for that he was in a core of people, whose affections he suspected’.
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It was impossible to estimate how much pro-Yorkist feeling had been stirred up.

Shrewdly judged promises of pardon caused the rebellion to disintegrate everywhere else in Yorkshire. Giving up hope, Lord Lovell fled across the Pennines by night, taking refuge on the coast of what was then northern Lancashire but is now Cumbria. There he found temporary shelter at the house of Sir Thomas Broughton of Broughton Tower – a peel tower built as a defence against Scottish raids – on Furness Fells in Broughton-Furness. Sir Thomas had been given confiscated estates in Devon and Cornwall by King Richard in 1484, but was forced by the new king to return them to their owners. He was another Yorkist diehard who remained loyal to Richard’s memory, had been involved in the recent revolt and, with his Cumberland neighbour Sir John Huddleston, had held out for some time.

In the meantime, Sir Humphrey had set to work in Worcestershire. He overcame the problem of having been outlawed in the recent Parliament by claiming King Henry had pardoned him, producing forged ‘letters patent’ that rescinded his attainder. Clearly, he had plenty of friends in Worcestershire, such as Richard Oseney, to whom he sent a message, asking to meet him – presumably well armed – at Kidderminster in the north-west of the county. Another friend was Ralph Botery, who in his indictment was later to be accused, among other charges, of giving Stafford a brace of pheasants ‘on account of the love that he then bore towards him’. Humphrey’s bastard son, John Stafford, joined in the rising with enthusiasm, stealing horses from the king’s close at Upton-on-Severn.

Humphrey assembled several hundred men, with whom he stormed into Worcester, raising the cry ‘A Warwick! A Warwick!’, and briefly took over the city. Later, the municipal authorities were charged with failing to post a proper guard at the gates, the implication being that they had been deliberately negligent. Stafford quickly put about inflammatory rumours – Henry Tudor had been captured by Lord Lovell in Yorkshire, while the Earl of Warwick had been freed from captivity on the isle of Guernsey and, having crossed to England, was riding north to join Lovell. The rising spread into neighbouring Warwickshire and Herefordshire – at the small towns of Warwick and Birmingham Stafford’s supporters ran through the streets shouting ‘A Warwick!’ Obviously, there was plenty of grass-roots support for the Earl in the West Midlands.

Meanwhile, riots broke out in London, culminating with a rally at Westminster on 5 May. Most of the emblems on the mob’s banners were ploughs, rooks, shoes and woolsacks, but one bore the Bear and Ragged Staff – Warwick’s badge. Carrying weapons, they marched to Highbury in Islington where they clashed with the ‘king’s lieges’ sent to disperse them.
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Although they were demonstrating in support of the Plantagenet in the Tower, prompted by reports of the risings by Lord Lovell and the Staffords, no one was tried for treason because nobody of importance was involved and Henry’s policy was one of leniency for the masses – his regime was too fragile for him to risk butchering ordinary folk.

News came of Lovell’s failure, however, and the Worcestershire rising collapsed, forcing the Staffords to flee for their lives. Their first hiding place, an area of deep woodland near Bewdley, was soon surrounded by 400 men led by Thomas Cokesey, who had a commission from the king to arrest them. However, although he searched the woods thoroughly, he had to report that ‘as yet we cannot get him nor hear where he is’. In fact, the brothers had been warned of Cokesey’s approach by a neighbour, Sir
Richard Burdett, who was afterwards charged with aiding and abetting their escape.

Despite Henry’s pretence of being unconcerned, the best informed chronicler of the period, Polydore Vergil, heard that he had been badly scared. He used carefully calculated leniency in dealing with the Midlands rebels, after twenty were tried and found guilty at Warwick and Birmingham, to the extent of intervening in the process of the law.

John Colard of Feckenham in Worcestershire had been indicted for treason, his lands, goods and chattels being granted to his accuser, Thomas Tolhoth. Petitioning the king for a pardon on 14 May, Colard said that while visiting Bromsgrove on market day, he had happened to meet ‘Humphrey Stafford, now your rebel, which long before that time was no good master nor well-willer unto him’, and because of rumours that Stafford had obtained a royal pardon, and because everybody else was doing so, ‘more for dread than love’ he had welcomed him, before going home. Although blameless, he had then been accused of treason ‘by certain persons of malice and evil will’. Henry granted the petition, despite a protest by Tolhoth that ‘sinister labour’ had been used to persuade the authorities of Colard’s innocence.
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After ‘lurking for a time with Sir Thomas Broughton’, as Bacon puts it, in May Lord Lovell made his way south. A hunted man, to avoid attention he must have ridden along lonely paths, often by night, avoiding towns. Once again, the former Lord Chamberlain hoped to find a boat across the sea. On 19 May 1486 the Countess of Oxford, the wife of one of Henry’s right-hand men, wrote to John Paston, warning him that ‘I am credibly informed that Francis, late Lord Lovell, is now of late resorted into the Isle of Ely, to the intent by all likelihood, to find the ways and means to get him shipping and passages in your coasts, or else to resort again to sanctuary.’
¹³

Big rewards must have been offered for his capture and rigorous searches made, but the authorities were unable to lay hands on Lovell. They did not realize he had moved from
Cambridgeshire into Suffolk, almost certainly given shelter by the de la Poles. The head of the family, the Duke of Suffolk, was married to Richard III’s sister Elizabeth Plantagenet, whose sympathies lay with the fugitive.

The Staffords were not so lucky. Avoiding capture, they had fled from Worcestershire to Culham in Berkshire, ‘a certain obscure sanctuary betwixt Oxford and Abingdon’.
¹⁴
Here, the abbey of Abingdon, two miles to the north, possessed a church with long established sanctuary rights. Why the Staffords chose this particular place for a refuge only became apparent much later on, but they arrived there on 11 May. The king was taking no chances, however, and two days later they were forcibly removed at night by sixty armed men under Sir John Savage. No doubt there were protests from the monk in charge, and as soon as the abbot heard of it he sent a written complaint to the authorities about this outrageous infringement of his abbey’s ancient privilege.

On 20 June Sir Humphrey appeared before the court of King’s Bench, pleading that he had every right to be returned to sanctuary. Accordingly, he was assigned counsel and much to the king’s displeasure the case was adjourned for eight days, so that the Abbot of Abingdon, Dan (as monks were styled then) John Sant, could be summoned to give evidence. Before the trial could resume, Henry tried to make the judges give him their opinion on whether or not Stafford had a good case. They refused. ‘It is not good for us to argue the matter and give our opinions before it has come before us judicially,’ was their answer. The king was so concerned that Chief Justice Hussey had to go before him and personally beseech his forgiveness. Even so, Henry had to wait.
¹⁵

When the case came up again, Abbot Sant argued eloquently that the prisoners should be returned to Culham. He had a fairly good case in law, being able to cite charters in the abbey’s possession by which an eighth-century king of Mercia had bestowed on fugitives from justice the inalienable right to seek
refuge in the parish church. Although these charters were in fact thirteenth-century forgeries, they were accepted as genuine by the lawyers of the day.

Regardless of Sant’s evidence, however, the judges decided that sanctuary could no longer be pleaded in cases of high treason, and on 5 July Sir Humphrey was condemned to the statutory death of a traitor. Three days later he was hanged but cut down before he was dead, then castrated and disembowelled while still alive, his guts being burned in front of him, after which he was beheaded and quartered. His head was tarred and set up on a spike over London Bridge, his body receiving similar treatment, although the tarred quarters were displayed at towns where he was well known – presumably in the West Midlands. Thomas Stafford was pardoned, on the grounds that he had been misled by his elder brother, but lost most of his property. It was still less than a year since Bosworth.

Yet even after Henry’s countermeasures, Sir Thomas Broughton and Sir John Huddleston of Millom still held out in the North Country with other men who had fought for King Richard at Bosworth. Broughton was especially dangerous. Not only did he own very large estates, but he had unusually widespread influence all over Lancashire and Cumberland, and could rely on help from many important friends. He was hard to keep under surveillance as he was able to hide behind the separate legal jurisdiction of the Duchy of Lancaster, administered by neighbours who were well-disposed towards him.

The king cut his way through this legal jungle with a proclamation in July 1486 that accused Sir Thomas, with other northern gentlemen and yeomen, of ‘great rebellions and grave offences … against the most royal person of our sovereign lord Henry VII’, of hiding in secret places and ignoring numerous royal letters and commands. It ordered those named to present themselves in person to the king within forty days: otherwise they would be proclaimed ‘great rebels, enemies and traitors, and so forfeit their lives, lands and goods at the pleasure of our
sovereign lord’.
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They came to heel, presenting themselves within the time stipulated and taking an oath of allegiance, after which they received letters of pardon. Yet neither their submission nor their oath meant that they were reconciled to the new regime.

The proclamation excluded five people from any hope of pardon: Geoffrey Franke, Edward (or Edmund) Franke, John Ward, Thomas Oter and Richard Middylton ‘otherwise called Dyk Middylton’. All had fought for King Richard at Bosworth. Their exclusion meant they had been identified as irreconcilable diehards.

Another Lancashireman whose loyalty was very suspect was Sir James Harrington of Hornby Castle. For the moment, however, it was not quite clear whether his unruliness was due to Yorkist principles or a long-running feud with the Stanley family who coveted his estates. What made him especially dangerous was the sheer number of his kindred – there were well-endowed Harringtons all over the county.

As Thomas Betanson had predicted in his letter to Sir Robert Plumpton, some sort of Yorkist rebellion had also broken out in Wales, although no details survive. We do know, however, that Jasper Tudor, Duke of Bedford, had been sent there in February 1486, presumably to guard against a rising. The other evidence is that in October Thomas Acton was rewarded with a substantial property in Herefordshire, confiscated from a Thomas Hunteley because of ‘his adherence to the rebels in Wales’.
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In January 1487, Lord Lovell at last found a boat whose skipper was ready to take him secretly across the North Sea, a vessel no doubt provided by the de la Poles. It was not the safest time of year for such a voyage, but he succeeded in reaching ‘Burgundy’. Here, at Malines, as the late king’s most loyal friend, he received a warm welcome from the Dowager Duchess of Burgundy, who was Richard III’s sister. Henry Tudor’s implacable enemy, Margaret of York was delighted to learn from Lovell that there was opposition to the new regime in many
parts of England and Wales. No doubt he told her that all that was needed to overthrow the usurper was to unite the Yorkists.

In consequence, Henry VII found himself threatened by something much worse than the makeshift plot at Easter. On 29 November 1486 Thomas Betanson, who seems to have been good at picking up well-informed rumours in the capital, had written from London to Sir Robert Plumpton, that ‘here is but little speech of the Earl of Warwick now, but after Christmas, they say, there will be more speech of [him]’.
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This is infuriatingly discreet, but it seems that Betanson expected Sir Robert to read between the lines. Somehow, he must have heard that further trouble was coming, and on a more serious scale than anything Henry had faced since Bosworth.

2. Easter 1486: Lord Lovell and the Stafford Brothers

1
. Bacon, p. 65.

2
.
The Plumpton Correspondence
, OS Old Series (21), London, 1839, p. 48.

3
.
Ibid.
, p. 48.

4
.
Material for a History of the Reign of Henry VII
, 2 vols, Rolls Series, 1873–7, vol. I, p. 143.