The War of the Roses (31 page)

When did the possibility of English aid to an invasion become serious? This mattered more than the apparent flood of letters that Warbeck received from minor gentry and ex-soldiers promising to help him as their late King's son.
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Whether the full list of plotters arraigned in January 1495 had been ready for action and properly co-ordinated back in 1493 too is unknown. According to Clifford's later testimony it was in January 1493 that he first discussed Warbeck with Lord Fitzwater (who promised to raise 500 men to fight for him) and in March that he first discussed him with the sympathetic Sir William Stanley.
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At what date this trio and Kendall's ‘ecclesiastical' group of plotters linked up is unclear. But it is significant that Henry's intelligencers were ‘on top of' Yorkist activity in London well before the arrests, as well as managing to investigate ‘Prince Richard's background enough in Flanders for Henry to name his ‘real' identity as Warbeck the boatman's son that summer.
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In February 1493 London plotters Humphrey Savage (coincidentally or not, Stanley's nephew) and Sir Gilbert Debenham had to flee into sanctuary at Westminster Abbey, where they were kept under surveillance, and executions of unknown persons for treason followed that summer; another London Yorkist group who pinned up inflammatory pamphlets on church doors in February 1494 were quickly identified, chased into sanctuary at St Martin's-le-Grand, dragged out by the King's men, and tried and executed.
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Dean Worsley, Richford, Fitzwater, Radcliffe, Daubeny, Mountford, Thwaites, and Cressener were all in custody well before the arrests of January 1495. The crucial moment may have been when, according to French chronicler Molinet, three double-agent ‘Tudor defectors' who had secured places in Warbeck's entourage persuaded a large group of senior English figures to send letters under their personal seals to the ‘Prince', then seized the evidence and defected back to England with it. (The Calais records show that these men travelled back to England in October 1494.
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) They were followed in December by Clifford himself, according to Polydore Vergil of his own free will after months of bribes and threats from Henry's agents.
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Some analysts think that Clifford had been a double agent all along; he was given an official pardon on 22 December, soon after he landed, but was still being escorted around by Henry's close henchman Bray as a ‘prisoner' in January (to cover up his defection or because he could not be trusted?).
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Given all that Clifford knew, this question is important–if he was a Tudor agent all along, the King was in less danger of overthrow as Clifford should have been able to alert him of any planned immanent coup or invasion. It is, however, apparent that Warbeck kept ‘open house' for defectors at his ‘court' at Malines in 1493–4 and does not seem to have been cautious in keeping secrets to a few close and trustable allies, so the chances of Henry discovering who his court sympathizers were in time were always high.

 

(b) Invasions, 1496–7

The first armed incursion by Warbeck's motley fleet finally occurred in July 1495, over four months late; in the interim his patron Maximilian had failed to interest the Imperial Diet in loaning the expedition money to replace the hostile Henry VII with a pro-German Yorkist king. There was minimal support to be expected in England due to the arrests, though if Stanley and other senior lay figures had been at liberty undetected they might have been able to meet the rebels as they landed or raised a diversionary attack elsewhere. The only major plotter still at liberty, in the south-east Midlands, was Kendall who appears to have been equipping his tenants ready to fight but not to have done more.
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Leaving Flushing in Holland on 2 July, Warbeck's expedition arrived offshore at Deal next day; around 300 men landed to erect ‘Richard IV's banner and were assured of support by the locals. The latter invited their new king ashore, but he wisely stayed on his ship and a short time later armed loyalists who had evidently been waiting for him emerged to ambush the invaders. About half of them were killed; those who were taken captive were swiftly tried and executed, and Warbeck had no option but to head for more promising territory.
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The Kentishmen had been notorious for pro-Yorkist revolts since 1450 and had taken part in seemingly desperate (and unsuccessful) attacks on London in 1471 and 1483, but were apparently wary of involvement this time. Henry–away at Worcester so not expecting the attack to come then or there–wrote that he had not even needed to use his troops and the Kentishmen had spontaneously showed their loyalty, though the delay in attacking the landing party may indicate hesitation and ‘prodding' from loyal gentry as one commentator claimed.
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Once the attack had been driven off, it would have disheartened any hesitating partisans in England; it also seems that Maximilian's son Philip, as governor of Flanders, washed his hands of the rebels and by the autumn even Maximilian was considering an anti-French international alliance that would include Henry as a member (with a ‘get-out' clause just in case Warbeck won).
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Warbeck, shadowed by royal ships so he could not land in Devon or Cornwall away from immediate Tudor military reprisal, sailed on to Southern Ireland and joined his old ally the Earl of Desmond for an attack on Waterford. He had the backing of Cork, thanks to his ally Atwater, and assorted magnates including the northerners O'Neill of Clandeboye and O'Donnell, but the central government in Dublin had been strengthened by new Lord Lieutenant Sir Edward Poynings in 1494 so a repeat of Simnel's triumphant takeover in 1487 was not on the cards. Instead of marching on Dublin and forcing Kildare to choose sides he wasted nearly two weeks besieging the strongly-walled Waterford, was driven off and lost some of his ships, and wandered around western-central Ireland with his supporters to no good purpose for several months.
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In November he arrived in Scotland to a warmer welcome from King James IV and was recognized as king and given a high-born wife, Lady Katherine Gordon, but the resulting invasion of Northumberland in September 1496 was another fiasco. Quite apart from it arousing local antagonism to a pretender now seen as a puppet of the traditional enemy and leading to Warbeck complaining at the terrorizing of his ‘subjects', all it achieved was the usual burning, raping, and looting over a small area plus the sack of Heton Castle by King James. The Scots were only in England for four days,
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and after their return home Warbeck stayed inactive at his host's court for the best part of a year. He had been stymied in Ireland and had no obvious hope of a rising in England, but it should have been clear that James was of no practical military use to him; presumably the thrill of actually being treated as an honoured fellow-sovereign at a hospitable court made him unwilling to move on and go back to Desmond's lands around Cork or to Flanders. In either location he would have been closer to any unexpected revolt in England–though in Flanders he would probably have had difficulty in getting a ship or any troops out of Duke Philip for any more adventures. As events were to show, he was to miss his best chance of leading a large army on London by his staying in Scotland, well away from southern England.

The most serious revolt to shake Henry VII's throne since 1497 was ironically not a Yorkist conspiracy but a ‘bona fide' popular uprising in the tradition of the revolts of 1381 and 1450, seemingly unplanned, unpredicted, sparked off by a particular local incident, and reflecting the underlying grievances of people with no particular adherence to a rival candidate to the throne. Unlike in 1381 or 1450 there was no background of recent ‘misrule', fiscal oppression, social unrest, or favouritism at court to explain it, and it was made more complicated than the more usual outbursts nearer London by being centred in a notoriously independent-minded county far from London–Cornwall. The area had a distinct ethnic and cultural identity as a centre of surviving Romano-British society during the Anglo-Saxon ‘conquest', having been part of the ancient British kingdom of Dumnonia and survived under its own non-Saxon kings until conquest by the West Saxon king Egbert in 825 and final annexation by Athelstan in the 920s. It still remained a separate ‘duchy' with its own legal and administrative institutions, the title of Duke having been held by the Prince of Wales since the fourteenth century, and the fiercely autonomist Cornish tin-mining communities were largely self-governed by their own body, the ‘Stannaries', under a royally-appointed ‘Lord Warden'. It also had its own language and distinct customs, and was so far from London that it could be as promising as Northumberland as a centre for revolt if the local gentry chose to act–as Yorkist Sir Henry Bodrugan had been intending in 1486–7 until he was forced to flee. It had not been particularly involved in the struggles for the Crown since 1453 apart from a half-hearted rising in favour of Henry Tudor against the usurping Richard III in autumn 1483 and the Bodrugan plot–though the support for Henry (unknown locally) may well have indicated indignation at the usurpation and a desire for ‘justice'. Now, however, a revolt broke out in summer 1497 due to resentment at the high level of taxes demanded in the January 1497 Parliament to pay for the King's war in faraway Scotland–apparently the opinion was that the war was nothing to do with the Cornish.
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The Scots did not threaten them so they should not have to pay for it. There was a parallel with the ‘poll tax' revolt of 1381, with ‘unjust' financial demands from London as the background to popular violence directed at the court. As with the Wat Tyler revolt in Kent in 1381, a local incident sparked off a wider revolt–Michael Gof, a blacksmith at the village of St Keverne on the isolated Lizard peninsula, killed a visiting tax collector and an angry gathering of locals demanding the repeal of the war-taxes followed. Once the King's men had been attacked, retribution and executions could be expected so the chances of the fearful protesters taking things further and seeking outside support was high; a riot could thus ‘snowball' into a formidable protest, which in the absence of modern law-enforcement methods could outnumber the men who the local sheriff and gentry could collect to stop them. A lawyer who could articulate the popular demands in legal terms, Thomas Flamank, took charge of the demonstration and persuaded the rioters that they should march on the county capital, Bodmin, and more villagers joined them en route. The gentry who would normally have acted to halt such protests seem to have been taken by surprise by the size of the crowds and no doubt feared that their servants and tenants would sooner desert than fight the protesters. As a result the ‘army' of around 15,000 of the ‘commons' were able to decide to march on London and did so without hindrance. They had no obvious leaders apart from Flamank and Joseph, although they soon persuaded one local peer–James Touchet, Lord Audley, son of Richard III's Treasurer–to join them. Despite Touchet's probable Yorkism they had no apparent dynastic agenda to remove the King, though antipathy was expressed to ministers such as Cardinal Morton; the rebellion was thus in line with 1381 and 1450. Noticeably, there was no move made to intercept them by loyal nobles in the counties en route, though more local volunteers protesting at the King's taxes joined them.
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Instead, the King's senior commander, Lord Daubeny, hurried back from Newcastle with his army to London. It was later wondered why he had not marched out to intercept the rebels before they reached the vicinity. Was this just caution as he had to rest his men and had little information on the rebels' capacity, or was it potential treason?
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Henry was supposed to have been annoyed at the delay.The rebels did not head directly to the capital but swerved away east to Blackheath in western Kent, probably in the hope of attracting support from that notoriously restless county. Blackheath was also the scene of the Duke of York's encampment as he challenged Henry VI's government in 1452, and was a ‘high-profile' and well-known site, close to London, for sympathizers from south-east England or the capital to assemble to join the rebellion. Probably the leadership expected to be invited into the City by a spontaneous rising there, which would overwhelm the King's men, as had occurred in 1381 and 1450; though unlike then the government was headed by a determined adult monarch with no compunction about drastic measures.

Nor was there any obvious current network of anti-Tudor plotters at large ready to turn out with weapons and ‘White Rose' banners to divert the rebellion into Yorkist paths and argue to Flamank and Joseph that the current King would inevitably execute them but ‘Richard IV' would grant full tax-remission. The last of the Stanley group, John Kendall the national head of the Knights of St John of Jerusalem, had been detected and arrested in spring 1496. His group's centre of operations had been southern Bedfordshire (i.e. to Henry's army's ‘rear'), with his Hospitaller connections meaning that he could call on men and money from a national organization subject to the Pope not the King; if he had still been at large he would have been a major recruit to the rebel army. He had had clerical allies in London, including the Dean of St Paul's–men whom could have preached to the populace to join in the rebellion and seize the City's gates? As it turned out, the network had been broken up in 1496, thanks to the confession of Kendall's ally de Vignolles about the 1492 poison plot. The presence of a substantial and well-armed royal army in the vicinity dissuaded any large-scale reinforcements for the rebels from the south-east; and on 16 June Daubeny stormed the rebel encampment and massacred the ill-armed peasants. The inevitable round of grisly executions and exhibitions of body parts across the rebel area to dissuade future rebels followed.
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Had there been more uprisings across the south-east and Midlands against the current level of taxation, as in 1381, the King would have been less able to concentrate reinforcements in London and the rebellion might have had more chances of success. The fact that Daubeny and the main body of troops had to come from Northumberland accounts for the rebels managing to reach the vicinity of the capital easily; presumably most militarily experienced pro-Tudor gentry en route had taken their men off north to fight the Scots.