Chapter XV.

The Tudors.

Re-establishment Of The Regular Government.

Henry VII. (1485 — 1509).

The new sovereign of England was destined to render important services to her; he was not, however, a great man. Amidst the general disorder, in view of the growing desire for peace and order, he was enabled to display a prudence and moderation which caused him to avoid the great faults, and preserved him from the terrible reverses which had attended his predecessors; but his character and his acts rarely excite our admiration or respect. His first care, on the morrow of the victory which had placed him upon the throne, was to transfer from the castle of Sheriffe-Sutton to the Tower of London, Edward Plantagenet, earl of Warwick, son of the unhappy Duke of Clarence, a child of fifteen years, who had grown up in prison since the death of his father, and who was destined there to pass the remainder of his life. He had had since a short time previously, as a companion in his captivity, Princess Elizabeth, confined at Sheriffe-Sutton, by her uncle, King Richard III., when he had been compelled to relinquish his scheme of marrying her. The Earl of Warwick was sent to the Tower, an abode fatal to the princes of his race. Lady Elizabeth was, on the contrary, loaded with honours and brought back, with a numerous retinue, to her mother, Queen Elizabeth Woodville, already willing to hail the new sovereign for and against whom she had plotted, and who at length promised her the satisfaction of her ambition.

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These precautions being taken, Henry VII. made his entry into London, on the 27th of August, 1485 with much pomp, and laid upon the high altar of St. Paul's church, the three standards under which he had marched to victory, the image of St. George, the Red Dragon, and, it is not known why, a brown Cow.

The people made merry in the streets, but already among the poor a distemper manifested itself, which soon spread into all classes of society, and made great ravages. It was a species of sweating disease, which does not appear to have been known hitherto, and the attacks of which were, it is said, almost always fatal. It was necessary to wait for the amelioration of the public health before proceeding with the coronation of the new king. On the occasion of the ceremony, which took place on the 30th of October, by the Cardinal-Archbishop Bourchier, the same who, two years before, had proclaimed Richard III., the new sovereign raised his uncle, the Earl of Pembroke, to the rank of Duke of Bedford; his father-in-law, Lord Stanley, was created Earl of Derby, and Sir Edward Courtenay became Earl of Devonshire. The king at the same time took care to surround his person with a guard of robust archers; this innovation astonished and discontented the people, but Henry VII., nevertheless, kept his guard; he knew by experience the small value of moral guarantees in a time of disorder and corruption.

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Parliament assembled at Westminster, on the 7th of November. The accession of King Henry VII. to the throne was due to the discontent of the nation under the sanguinary yoke of Richard III. and to the hopes which were founded upon the projected union between the two rival Houses of York and Lancaster. Henry himself attributed it to his valour upon the battle-field of Bosworth, from which he always dated the commencement of his reign; but the national weariness and the royal conquest were not sufficiently secure bases upon which to solidly found a throne, and in the speech of Henry VII. to the reassembled Commons, he urged his hereditary rights at the same time as the favour of the Most High, who had given the victory to his sword. This last clause excited some uneasiness among the great noblemen who held all their titles and property from the fallen monarch. Henry hastened to reassure them, declaring that each should retain "his estates and inheritances, with the exception of the persons whom the present Parliament should think proper to punish for their offences." Scrupulous persons for a moment experienced an agitation when they perceived that the majority of the members of the House of Commons had formerly been outlawed by the Kings Edward IV. and Richard III.; the very sovereign who had convoked this Parliament, found himself in the same position. Had the Houses the right to sit? The judges were consulted, and declared that the crown removes all disqualifications, and that the king, in ascending the throne, was, by that fact alone, relieved of all the sentences passed upon him; the members of the House of Commons being outlawed, were obliged to defer taking their seats until a law should revoke their condemnation; the act was immediately voted, and the Lancastrians, excluded by the policy of the sovereigns of the House of York, re-entered Parliament; all were weary of the struggle and the great noblemen easily obtained special ordinances which re-established them in all their rights and honours.

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Such was not, however, the will of the king in all respects, he was not bloodthirsty, and did not seek to avenge himself by the execution of his enemies, but he was greedy, he wanted money, and confiscations were an easy means of enriching himself without oppressing or exasperating the people. Henry VII. therefore presented to Parliament, a law which antedated by a single day his accession to the throne, namely, the 21st of August, the eve of the battle of Bosworth; the new sovereign, who then in reality was but the Earl of Richmond, thus found himself in a position to accuse of high treason all those who had fought against him, beginning with Richard III., whom he called the Duke of Gloucester, and of whom he enumerated with good reason all the tyrannies and crimes. Richard was dead, as well as the greater number of the partisans who had remained faithful to him; others had exiled themselves; but if the Duke of Norfolk had fallen at Bosworth, if Lord Lovel had taken refuge in a church, their visible property, the riches accumulated in their castles, had not disappeared with them, and the act meekly voted by Parliament, permitted the king to seize their lands and treasures. He was not sparing of them; no sanguinary vengeance sullied the beginning of the new reign; Henry VII. contented himself with filling his coffers.

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It was still to Parliament, discredited as it was by the servility which it had for so many years manifested towards the rival sovereigns who had succeeded each other upon the throne, that belonged the right of constituting the new dynasty. The provident wisdom of King Henry VII. did not seek in this solemn act to lean upon long genealogies, nor upon the Divine favour manifested by the victory; he contented himself with causing the revocation of all the acts passed in the Yorkist Parliaments against the House of Lancaster, avoiding with care any allusion to the Princess Elizabeth and her family; he simply relieved her of the stain of illegitimacy, which Richard III. had inflicted upon her to justify his usurpation; the Parliament contented itself with declaring that the inheritance and succession to the crown "should be, remain, and rest forever the portion of the royal person of the sovereign Lord, King Henry VII., and of his legitimate descendants, for ever, by the grace of God." The rights of the House of York to the throne were passed over in silence, mention was not made of the projected union with the Princess Elizabeth; Henry VII. was unwilling that it should be said that he owed the crown to a woman.

The nation, however, had not forgotten its past misfortunes; it hoped to enjoy a little peace only through the alliance of the two rival houses, and the delay of the king in celebrating his marriage, the affectation which he made of not speaking of it, caused uneasiness, not only to his Yorkist enemies, but to the whole people. When the commons came and solemnly offered the king the duties upon ships and upon woolens, now conceded for life, they accompanied their liberality by a peremptory request, asking him to take for his wife and spouse the Princess Elizabeth "which marriage," it was added, "the Lord would deign to bless with a posterity of the race of kings." {122} The Lords spiritual and temporal supported the petition of the Commons. Henry VII. understood that he had delayed enough, and on the 18th of January 1486, the two Roses were at length united upon the same stem; the hatreds and rivalries, which had cost so much blood to England, were definitely appeased by the marriage of King Henry VII., the descendant of the House of Lancaster through his ancestor, John of Gaunt, and the Princess Elizabeth, daughter of King Edward IV., the direct heiress of the rights and pretensions of the House of York. All the gifts accorded by the sovereigns who had succeeded each other upon the throne of England since the thirty-fourth year of the reign of Henry VI., the period at which the war had begun to assume the character of a revolt, were revoked by Parliament; an amnesty act was proclaimed for all those who were willing to submit to the royal mercy and take the oath of allegiance; the king reinstated in his property and honours the son of the Duke of Buckingham, the last victim of the cruelty of Richard III., he loaded with favours the friends who had helped him to ascend the throne, Chandos, Sir Giles Dunbury, Sir Robert Willoughby, the Marquis of Dorset, Sir John Bourchier; he caused his authority to be confirmed by a bull of Pope Innocent III., which proclaimed all the hereditary rights of the new sovereign, wisely omitted from the English Act of Parliament, granted to Henry VII. the necessary dispensation for his marriage with the Princess Elizabeth, of whom he was a relative, then confirmed the elevation of the king to the throne, freely interpreting the Act of Parliament, and declaring that in the event that the queen should happen to die without children, or after having lost them, the crown should belong by right to the posterity of Henry VII. by a second marriage. {123} All precautions being wisely taken, and his authority solidly established, the king pronounced the dissolution of his Parliament, and began a royal tour through the northern counties, in order to secure the good will of that portion of the kingdom still attached to the House of York.

The customary prudence of the king had failed him on one point. Jealous of the supreme power, he had kept in the shade the princess whom he had been compelled to wed, and had not taken her with him upon his journey through his kingdom; discontent was everywhere manifested upon this point in the north, but the pregnancy of the queen served as an excuse for her absence; the royal journey did not proceed, however, without disquieting incidents. On the 17th of April the king was at Pontecraft, when he learnt that Lord Lovel had quitted the sanctuary at Colchester and cut off his passage with considerable forces. The nobility of the counties which Henry VII. had recently passed through assembled around him; he advanced against the rebels; Lord Lovel fled, concealed himself, and soon repaired to Flanders; his friends Humphrey and Thomas Stafford, who had prepared an insurrection in Worcestershire, took refuge in Colesham Church, near Abington; they were dragged therefrom, and the elder, Humphrey, perished on the scaffold; the younger received his pardon; and the king, on the 26th of April, entered York, one of the rare spots in England where tho memory of King Richard III. was affectionately preserved.

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We have said that Henry VII. was greedy; but he could contrive, when necessary, to relax his greed; he lavished gifts and honours, reduced the fines of the City of York, caused festivals to be celebrated, and thus conquered the favour of the people, who cried in the streets, "God save King Henry! God preserve that handsome and sweet countenance!" When he resumed his march towards the south-east, Henry VII. continued, from town to town, the practice which he had established at York. He attended regularly at divine service; but after mass, every Sunday and holiday, one of the bishops who accompanied him read and expounded to the faithful the papal bull, threatening with eternal punishment all the enemies of the monarch, whose rights to the throne were therein so carefully developed. The king arrived in London, in the month of June, and received an embassy from James IV., King of Scotland, with whom he concluded a treaty of alliance, promising to cement it later on by a union between the two families; peace and mutual good feeling were equally important to the two kings, surrounded by enemies, whom they dreaded to see take refuge in the neighbouring kingdom. The little prince, whose hand Henry VII. had already promised, was born on the 20th of September, at Winchester, and was named Arthur, in memory of the hero of the old romances of King Arthur of the Round Table, whose death tradition still denied.

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Usurpations engender conspiracies; no reign was to be more constantly agitated by them than that of Henry VII.; he had occupied the throne for fifteen months only, when, in the month of November, 1486, a priest and a youth of most charming countenance disembarked at Dublin. The priest announced that his young companion was no other than Edward Plantagenent, Earl of Warwick, escaped by a miracle from the Tower of London. By degrees, partisans gathered around the young man; he was handsome, intellectual, his manners were noble, he had been carefully instructed in his part, and did not experience much difficulty in deceiving minds prejudiced by hereditary attachment to the father and grandfather of the Earl of Warwick, who had both contrived to render themselves popular in their government of Ireland. Edward Plantagenet had even been born in that country, and thus possessed additional claims to the attachment of that nation. The great noblemen who might have shown themselves to be more clearsighted were, in general, little in favour of the state of affairs recently established in England, and the Earl of Kildare, Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, received the Sham Warwick with open arms, presenting him to all his friends as the legitimate heir to the throne in the character of the only male descendant of Richard of York; on all sides the pretender was saluted with the title of king; messengers had already borne the news to Flanders, where the Dowager Duchess of Burgundy, sister of Edward IV., held her court, and received into her good graces all the enemies of the new King of England, when the latter learnt, in London, the danger that threatened him. He immediately convoked his Council; the discontent was general, the amnesty had been ill-observed, a mass of restrictions had hindered the application of it, and the real Earl of Warwick was not the only inhabitant of the prison of the Tower. {126} The first care of the prudent king wad to proclaim a fresh amnesty, more complete and earnest than the first, and, at the same time, to produce in public, in all parts of London, the real Edward Plantagenet, Earl of Warwick, who had not for a single instant left his prison. The third measure of the king appeared at variance with the clemency manifested by the amnesty; the Dowager Queen, Elizabeth Woodville, was arrested under the frivolous pretext that she had formerly broken faith with the Earl of Richmond, now King of England, because, after having promised him her daughter in marriage she had consigned her into the hands of the usurper Richard III., who wished to marry her. The real motive of the disfavour which thus suddenly attacked the intriguing widow of Edward IV. has never been known; it has been supposed that she had been compromised in the conspiracy which had caused a new pretender to the throne to spring up in Ireland; it has been said that she alone could have instructed the young man or his tutor in the private details which he related about the royal family; but these assertions remain at least doubtful; what is certain is the confiscation of the property of Elizabeth Woodville and her imprisonment in a convent near Bermondsey.

Meanwhile, the young pretender had received an unexpected support. The Earl of Lincoln, son of John de la Pole, duke of Suffolk, and of Elizabeth, sister of the kings Edward IV. and Richard III., formerly designated by his uncle Richard to succeed him upon the throne, had quitted England and repaired to the residence of his aunt, the Duchess of Burgundy. She had furnished him with money and troops, and Lincoln had embarked for Ireland with Lord Lovel. {127} He could not be deceived about the imposture; he knew the Earl of Warwick, but it suited his views to adopt the cause of the pretender, and he caused him to be crowned in Dublin Cathedral. The golden crown from a statue of the Virgin was borrowed to represent the royal diadem, and the young man, being proclaimed under the name of Edward VI., was carried in triumph upon the shoulders of his new subjects, while King Henry VII. was raising troops and quietly riding about in his kingdom, selecting by preference for his visits the counties where the influence of the Earl of Lincoln was especially exercised.

The queen and the little prince were already established in the fortress of Kenilworth, when the pretender and his partisans landed at Fouldrey, at the southern extremity of Furness. A few friends of Lincoln and Lovel joined him, but the population did not rise in their favour, and the hopes of the rebels were growing faint, when, on the 16th of June, 1487, they encountered the advanced guard of the king at Stoke; the Earl of Oxford, who commanded it, carried off a brilliant victory, notwithstanding the desperate courage of the assailants. His Majesty Edward VI., or, simply, Lambert Simnel, the son of an humble baker, was made a prisoner, with his tutor, the priest Simon; but the noblemen who had embraced his cause, nearly all died upon the field of battle, the Earl of Lincoln at their head. Lord Lovel alone disappeared; but this time he concealed himself so well that, two hundred years later, the skeleton of a man was discovered in a vault in his castle of Minster-Lovel, in Oxfordshire; it is supposed that the unhappy master of the house had taken refuge therein and had there perished by some accident.

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Very few executions followed the revolt and the victory, but the harvest of confiscations was abundant; the priest Simon was imprisoned, and none heard speak of him any more, "the king being fond of concealing his own dangers," says a chronicler, "Lambert Simnel was placed in the royal kitchens, ignominiously turning the spit, after having worn a crown;" he became eventually one of the falconers of the king. Henry VII. had recently made a pilgrimage to deposit his victorious banner upon the altar of Our Lady of Walsingham.

The king had too much sense and sagacity to refuse to understand the symptoms of discontent which had manifested themselves by this revolt; he knew that he had incensed the Yorkists by the jealous obscurity in which he kept the queen, and he resolved to grant her the honour of coronation, which had hitherto in vain been claimed for her; on the 20th of November, Elizabeth of York was solemnly crowned at Westminster, while her husband, hidden behind a carved screen, contemplated the ceremony at which he was not willing to be present.

For more than two years past. King Henry VII. had concentrated all his efforts upon the internal pacification of his kingdom, without making himself uneasy about the troubles of the Continent; but scarcely had he gained the victory of Stoke, when he saw an embassy arrive in England from the King of France, Charles VIII. While Henry VII. had been repulsing the pretentions to the throne of an impostor supported by rebels, his old protector, the King of France, had attacked a still older friend of his, the Duke Francis of Brittany, who had given shelter to the Duke of Orleans, subsequently Louis XII., accused of having conspired against his cousin. {129} The French army had entered Brittany, summoned by a certain number of Breton noblemen dissatisfied with the influence which the Duke of Orleans had assumed over their duke, and it had reaped important advantages, when the ambassadors of Charles VIII., fearing an English intervention in favour of the Duke of Brittany, came to expound to the wise Henry VII. the legitimacy of a war which they qualified as defensive. None made allusion to the probable annexation of the duchy of Brittany to France, either by conquest or by the marriage of the young king with the heiress of the Duke Francis; Henry VII. asked no indiscreet questions, and when the Bretons appeared, in their turn, at his court, begging assistance in men and money, the King of England piously offered his mediation "in order to acquit himself before God and men of all his duties of gratitude towards the king and the duke, for whom he was even disposed to go upon a pilgrimage." The French asked for nothing more, their army pursued the course of its victories, but the coming and going of the English negotiators from London to Paris and from Paris to Rennes, did not satisfy the Bretons, who saw themselves closely pressed. Sir Edward Woodville, one of the uncles of the queen, attempted, at his risk and peril, a little expedition in favour of the Duke Francis; but King Henry forbade any demonstration of this kind. His envoys who were then in Paris, were in great danger, it was said, at the news of the succour sent to the Bretons by the English.

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The cause of Brittany was popular in England, and decided though he was not to wage war, the king took advantage of this feeling to cause Parliament to vote considerable subsidies; at the same time he secretly warned the court of France that he should perhaps be compelled to send reinforcements to the Bretons. The warning was profited by to push measures with vigour; all the factions of Bretons had now united against the common enemy; the forces of the duke were supported by the troops sent by the King of the Romans, Maximilian, and by the Count d'Albert, as well as the Englishmen of Sir Edward Woodville. The Duke Francis and his allies were defeated, however, on the 20th of July, 1488, by the Sire de la Trémoille, commander of the French army, at Saint Aubin-du-Cormier; the Duke of Orleans was made a prisoner, and the English were cut to pieces; before the public voice had been raised in England to demand vengeance, the French had taken Dinan and Saint Malo, and were threatening the Duke of Brittany as far as in Rennes; the unhappy prince had no resource other than to sign a treaty by which he undertook to summon no assistance from abroad, and never to marry his daughters without the consent of France. One month after having suffered this humiliation, he died broken hearted, and the little Duchess Anne, a child twelve years of age, remained alone with her council of regency in the presence of her enemies.

The King of France claimed the guardianship of the unhappy princess, and her barons had not yet had time to reply to this pretension, which was equivalent to the surrender of the duchy, when the French army again entered Brittany and took possession of several towns. {131} This time all the prudence of Henry VII. could not suffice to repress the indignation of his people at the aspect of this unequal war; perhaps the growth of the power of France also made him uneasy, in his policy; the King of England formed an alliance with the great sovereigns of Europe to arrest the conquests of Charles VIII. Maximilian, King of the Romans, who claimed the hand of the little Duchess Anne, and his son the Archduke Philip, the King of Spain, and the King of Portugal undertook to enter France to turn aside the forces furious for the ruin of Brittany. Henry VII. demanded fresh subsidies from Parliament to continue the war.

Well supplied with money, notwithstanding the reduction which the Commons had imposed upon his requests, Henry VII., holding two ports upon the coast of Brittany, at length sent to the assistance of the duchess six thousand archers in the spring of 1489; at the same time, a Spanish army was crossing the defile of Roncevaux, which allowed the English, under the orders of Lord Willoughby de Broke, to hold in check the French troops remaining in Brittany; another English corps seconded the attempts of the King of the Romans upon the north, and distinguished itself at the capture of Saint Omer; a treaty of peace was concluded at the end of the year without much glory for either party. The rigour with which the officers of the King of England exacted the subsidies excited an insurrection in the northern counties, and notwithstanding the prompt repression of the disturbances, the new taxes produced only the sum of twenty-five thousand pounds sterling, instead of seventy-five thousand pounds voted by Parliament; Henry VII. took advantage of it to claim, of the Duchess of Brittany, the reimbursement of all the expenditure which he had incurred to help her.

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While preparations were being made for renewing the hostilities, and Parliament was voting a tax of the tenth and the fifteenth denier to support the war, one of the allies of King Henry, Maximilian, by negotiating secretly with the counsellors of the Duchess of Brittany, obtained the promise of her hand, and mysteriously married her at Rennes, through his ambassador, the Prince of Orange, in the month of April, 1491; he would have acted more wisely by going in person for the heiress of such large dominions, sought by so many suitors. Scarcely had the Sire d'Albret, a disappointed pretender, who had at one time attempted the abduction of the young princess, been assured of the object of the mission of the Prince of Orange, when he gave warning to the court of France of it, at the same time surrendering to the French, the town of Nantes. In vain did the duchess, who took the title of Queen of the Romans, demand assistance of her new spouse; he was absorbed in a revolt of his Flemish subjects: Brittany again found itself alone, confronting the whole strength of France.

But the views of the court of France towards Brittany had changed. Charles VIII. was now of age, he had shaken off the yoke of his sister, the Dame de Beaujeu; he had released from prison his cousin the Duke of Orleans, and he secretly laid claim to the hand of the Duchess Anne. Betrothed in infancy to the Princess Elizabeth of York, now Queen of England, afterwards designed by his father King Louis XI. to become the husband of Margaret of Austria, "Margot, the gentle damsel," daughter of Margaret of Burgundy, he had seen his little affianced bride, who was then eleven years of age, brought up at his court, and he still publicly announced his intention of wedding her as soon as she should be of age. {133} He carried on negotiations, however, with the lords and ladies who surrounded Anne of Brittany, and when he thought himself assured of a sufficient party among them, he frankly declared his purpose, notwithstanding the engagement with the Princess Margaret, as well as the more sacred bonds which bound the Duchess Anne to Maximilian, the father of the affianced bride of Charles VIII. All these obstacles did not arrest the King of France, and his victorious arms were a powerful argument in his favour. Maximilian did not send assistance to his wife, although the French threatened to besiege Rennes. The question lay, with Anne, between captivity and marriage: she concluded a treaty with Charles VIII., declared void the union which she had contracted with the King of the Romans, and definitively assured Brittany to the crown of France, by wedding, on the 6th of December, 1491, King Charles, in the castle of Langeais, in Touraine. The long struggles of England and France, upon Breton territory, were now forever ended.

In England the anger was great; perhaps Henry VII. had in fact been deceived: he proclaimed it very loudly, declaring that Charles VIII., disturbed the Christian world, and that in future he would no longer hesitate to march to the conquest of France, his legitimate and natural inheritance; at the same time he talked loudly of the alliances which he had concluded, and he obtained fresh subsidies from Parliament, the usual result of the warlike protestations of Henry VII. {134} The raising of troops proceeded rapidly; the names of Crecy, Agincourt, Poictiers, Verneuil, were in all mouths; the noblemen pawned their property, reserving only their horses and swords; they thought themselves certain of acquiring beautiful estates in France; an army of twenty-five thousand foot soldiers and sixteen hundred horses embarked in the month of October, 1492. It was a question of the conquest of the whole of France, an undertaking which could not fail to be long, and winter quarters could be taken up at Calais. Siege was immediately laid to Boulogne, without any attempt at resistance from the French; all the plan of the campaign was known beforehand between the two monarchs, and peace had been concluded before the commencement of the war. Eight days only had been passed before the town, without an assault being made, when letters began to circulate in the camp destroying all hope of the co-operation of the King of Spain or the King of the Romans; Henry VII. thereupon assembled his council, and submitted for its deliberation the grave question of peace with France. All the favourites of the king had been bought over in advance with French gold, and they solemnly decided for the conclusion of peace. The treaties, long since prepared, were signed at the beginning of November; by the public conditions the two kings undertook always to live in peace; mutual understanding was even to subsist for one year after the death of whichever of the sovereigns should survive the other; by the secret treaty, Charles VIII. bound himself to pay by degrees to the King of England, the sum of a hundred and forty-nine thousand pounds sterling, in discharge of all his claims upon the duchy of Brittany, and in payment of the tribute due to King Edward IV. It was thus that Henry VII. knew how to sell war to his subjects and peace to his enemies. Charles VIII. found himself at liberty to proceed with his undertakings against the kingdom of Naples, and the King of England could concentrate all his attention upon his internal affairs, which threatened to give him fresh and grave cares.

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A second pretender had in fact arisen for the crown. This time, it was no longer a question, as with Lambert Simnel, of a living prince, easy to be confronted with the imposter; the new rival who had been raised up against King Henry VII. was none other, it was said, than the Duke of York, brother of the unhappy Edward V., escaped from the Tower by a miracle, wandering about the world for seven years past, and now determined to reclaim his crown. He at first presented himself in Ireland, and soon contrived to form a party there, notwithstanding the recent remembrance of Lambert Simnel. But the Earl of Kildare hesitated, and the young pretender turned his steps to France. Soldier and chivalrous as he was, Charles VIII. was not destitute of the cunning natural to the son of Louis XI. It was before the war with England, and he was well pleased to frighten Henry VII.: he received the adventurer, recognized his rights, and admitted him to his court. He was soon surrounded there by a guard of English exiles. While the treaties had remained unsigned at Etaples, Charles VIII. looked with favour upon the pretender; the peace with Henry VII. being once proclaimed, the self-styled Duke of York was compelled to quit the court of France and to take refuge beside the Duchess of Burgundy, the usual resource of the enemies of Henry VII. {136} The latter had demanded that the pretender should be delivered up to him; but Charles VIII. refused this act of treachery as unworthy of his honour. Meanwhile, the Duchess of Burgundy hesitated, or pretended to hesitate, to recognize her nephew. She interrogated him, and caused him to undergo a minute examination upon the secrets of the family. Finally, she solemnly proclaimed that he was really the Duke of York, son of her brother King Edward IV., the White Rose of England; she gave him at her court the state of a prince, furnished him with a guard, and wrote everywhere to her friends in England and on the Continent to announce the miracle which had restored her nephew. The English malcontents, and they were numerous, joyfully embraced this new hope. A delegate was secretly despatched to the court of the Duchess, to verify the pretensions of the prince; he came back as convinced as the Duchess herself. It was really, he said, the Duke of York, the legitimate heir to the crown of England, the amiable and intellectual child whose loss had been mourned. The conspiracy began to spread and to organize.

King Henry meanwhile had not remained inactive; he also had sent secret emissaries to Ireland, who asserted that the pretended Duke of York was no other than Perkin Warbeck, the son of a merchant of Tournay, a converted Jew; that he had much frequented the society of English merchants in Flanders, then had travelled in Europe in the suite of Lady Brompton, wife of an exile. Upon the faith of these instructions Henry demanded of the Archduke Philip, son of Maximilian and Mary of Burgundy, to deliver up or, at least, to drive from his states this audacious impostor. Philip lavished assurances of his devotion, promised to refuse all support to the pretender; but the Duchess Margaret was sovereign in her states, and none could compel her to send Perkin Warbeck away. {137} Henry VII. interdicted to his subjects all commerce with Flanders, and he had recourse to deceit to obtain that which diplomacy refused him. Sir Robert Clifford, being bribed, gave up the names of the conspirators; they were all arrested: Sir Simon Montford, Sir Robert Ratcliffe and William Daubeney were immediately executed. Among those who received their pardon "few men survived long," says the chronicler; Lord Fitzwalter, amongst others, having attempted to escape from his prison at Calais, was beheaded without any more ado. One greater than he was shortly going to pay with his life for the same suspicions.

Sir William Stanley, brother of the Lord Stanley, now Earl of Derby, who had placed Henry VII. upon the throne, and who had himself saved the life of the king at Bosworth, was accused by Clifford of having been concerned in the conspiracy. The king refused at first to believe it; but when he interrogated his chamberlain, Sir William was embarrassed in his answers, and ended by confessing to a certain degree of complicity. The judges of Westminster held the crime to be sufficient and Stanley was condemned to death. All reckoned upon his pardon; the king's aversion to blood was remembered, as well as the services which the family of the guilty man had rendered him; but the large fortune of Sir William was forgotten and he was executed and all his property was confiscated. Terror began to seize the conspirators; they distrusted each other. The position of Warbeck became difficult in Flanders; the merchants complained of the cessation of the English commerce. {138} The adventurer resolved to land unexpectedly in England, hoping that an insurrection in his favour would take place. He arrived near Deal on the 3rd of July, 1495, while the king had gone to pay a visit to his mother, in Lancashire. He was accompanied by about five hundred men, all English exiles and of desperate courage; but the population rose _against_ the impostor, and not _for_ him: the peasants of Kent fought with their sticks and pitchforks. The assailants were killed or made prisoners; a small number succeeded in reaching the vessels: Warbeck was at the head of these latter. The captives were all conducted to London, their hands tied together, like a flock of sheep, and they were executed in a mass in the same manner. Henry VII. lavished praises and promises upon the brave countrymen who had repulsed the enemy; he, at the same time, concluded a treaty with the Flemings, promising to restore the freedom of commerce, if the Duke Philip would undertake to prevent the Duchess Margaret from receiving Warbeck and his partisans. The adventurer was therefore compelled to quit Flanders; he presented himself in Ireland, where he was coldly received; it was to Scotland that he went to seek refuge. The king of Scotland was discontented with Henry VII.; he willingly received the pretender.

Notwithstanding numerous treaties and projects of alliance so many times concluded between the courts of England and Scotland, Henry VII. had always been concerned in the conspiracies against James III. The brother of the King of Scotland, Albany, was dead; but the barons had not become subdued; the malcontents had rallied around the young Duke of Rothsay, the eldest son of the monarch, and this unnatural war, after alternations of successes and reverses, had been terminated, on the 18th of June, 1488, by a sanguinary combat at Little Canglar, a wild heath about one league from Stirling. {139} The king had been carried off by his horse; he had fallen in a swoon. Some peasants had lifted him up without knowing him; but amidst the tumult a man approached the unhappy prince, and leaning towards him as though to succor him, he struck him two blows with a dagger. James III. was only thirty-five years of age, and his death excited in the heart of the son, who had fought and almost dethroned him, a remorse which ended only with his life. The example of revolt which he had set bore, moreover, its fruits; he lived in the midst of conspiracies and internal struggles, finding at times in his embarrassments traces of the influence of Henry VII., more often being ignorant of his complicity, but convinced, notwithstanding, that the King of England was a perfidious ally with whom it was necessary to arrive at an open rupture. Perkin Warbeck furnished him with the opportunity for it. James did not look very closely into the truth of his story; he was duped, or feigned to be so, and, shortly after the arrival of his "good cousin of York" in Scotland, amidst tournaments and rejoicings which he lavished, the King of Scotland married the adventurer, Perkin Warbeck, to Lady Catharine Gordon, the charming daughter of the Earl of Huntley, and through her mother, a near relative of the royal house.

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So many favours caused uneasiness to the King of England, who kept spies amongst the great Scottish noblemen, and was thus informed exactly of the movements of Warbeck. The barons of Scotland were less favourable to him than the king, some because they had been gained over by Henry, others because they foresaw the disasters of a war undertaken in his favour. Meanwhile, the Duchess of Burgundy had caused men and money to arrive; the court of France, discontented at the obstacles which Henry VII. placed to the attempts of King Charles upon Italy, urged Warbeck to attempt an invasion of England. Henry had caused an offer to be made to the King of Scotland of a hundred thousand crowns of gold if he would deliver up the pretender to him. James IV. had rejected the proposal with indignation. "I have melted up my plate for him," he had said. "I will not betray him." Warbeck had recently published a document, skilfully conceived, in which he related his escape from the Tower and his wandering life, dwelt upon the tyranny of Henry VII., upon the exactions with which he burdened his people, and summoned the English to rise and rally round him. The King of Scotland accompanied him, solely through friendship, he said, and would retire as soon as an English army should be on foot. It was with these declarations that Warbeck crossed the frontier and entered England in 1497.

The northern counties did not trust to the disinterestedness of the Scotch, and nobody came to meet the pretender; all the cattle had been led away, the grain and fodder had been hidden, and when the Scottish troops began to pillage to compensate themselves for the cold reception which the population gave them, the self-styled Duke of York in vain sought to restrain them, saying that he would prefer to lose the throne rather than to owe it to the sufferings of the English. {141} The soldiers were dying of hunger and did not fail to take advantage of any excess. The peasants began to arm themselves. The army of invasion found itself compelled to recross the frontiers without having fought, without having even awaited the English army, as had been announced by the clever spy of Henry VII., Ramsey, Lord Bothwell, formerly a favourite of James.

The King of England meanwhile was suffering from the grave consequences of the war and the avidity which always led him to profit by it to oppress his subjects. He had obtained of Parliament a gift of two-tenths and two-fifteenths, but the people were determined not to pay taxes so oppressive. The insurrection commenced in Cornwall; the people demanded the head of Morton, archbishop of Canterbury, prime minister and friend of Henry VII., accused of having advised the new taxes. Sixteen thousand rebels entered Devonshire; they were soon joined by numerous adherents, at the head of whom marched Lord Audley and other noblemen. Each county which they traversed furnished reinforcements; they presented a formidable aspect when they arrived, on a fine day in June, at Blackheath, near London. The army of the King awaited them; the agitation was great in the city; but Lord Daubeney and the Earl of Oxford advanced against the rebels. Henry VII., had prudently remained in the rear with the reserve; he had commanded that Saturday should be awaited to give battle; it was his lucky day, he said. The 22nd of June, 1499, made no exception to the rule. The insurgents fought valiantly; but they had no cavalry nor artillery, nor experienced chiefs; a great slaughter resulted, and many of their number were made prisoners, among others Lord Audley, a lawyer named Flammock, and Joseph, a blacksmith, who had greatly contributed to excite the revolt by the violence of his speeches against the king and the archbishop. {142} They all three perished, but they perished alone; the mass of peasants were soon released. The king had caused the execution of all the desperate men captured at Deal in the following of Perkin Warbeck, because neither repentance nor gratitude could be expected of them; he amnested the rebels of Cornwall, and thus re-established tranquility in the insurrectionary provinces. Henry VII. was as wise as he was provident; he was neither vindictive nor sanguinary, and there was nothing to confiscate of the poor peasants. He had, however, flattered himself too much in reckoning upon the gratitude of the county of Cornwall. Perkin Warbeck had quitted Scotland in consequence of the treaty of peace concluded between James IV. and Henry VII. through the efforts of Don Pedro Ayala, the Spanish ambassador; the delicate cares and kindnesses of the Scottish monarch had followed him up to his embarkation. The Duke and Duchess of York, as they were still called, had put in, in the first instance, at Cork, in Ireland; but Warbeck in vain sought to urge the Irish to insurrection. He then conceived the project of disembarking in Cornwall, of which he had received favourable accounts; and on the 7th of September he landed at Whitsand Bay. His forces did not amount to a hundred and fifty men; but soon the relatives and friends of the men killed at Blackheath came and joined him. Warbeck was at the head of an army, when he appeared, on the 17th of September, before the city of Exeter, having solemnly taken the title of King of England and France, under the name of Richard IV. {143} The queen had taken refuge, for greater security, in the fortress of St. Michael. Whether prince or imposter, the pretender had contrived to gain the heart of his wife; she was devoted to his fortunes, and she awaited with anxiety the result of the campaign. Exeter was defended by the Earl of Devonshire, supported by the gentlemen and citizens. The insurgents had neither artillery nor besieging machines; they sought in vain to burst open the portal, but the cannons of the ramparts swept them down without mercy. The peasants of Devonshire were beginning to retreat in small detachments, but the men of Cornwall remained firm, and promised to die to the last man for the king whom they had chosen. An advance was made as far as Taunton. There it was necessary to confront the royal army. Warbeck reviewed his rustic troops, urging them to fight well on the morrow; but during the night he selected his fleetest horse and fled without warning any one. When the insurgents found themselves without a chief they did not try the fortune of arms, but placed themselves at the mercy of the king, who caused the leaders to be hanged, and sent back the others, half naked and dying of hunger. The best runners of the army were in pursuit of Warbeck; but he had forestalled them and took refuge in the church at Beaulieu, in the heart of the New Forest, before he could be reached. The king had caused men-at-arms to be despatched to arrest Lady Catherine Gordon, whose beauty and whose tears touched him; he confided her to the care of Queen Elizabeth, who treated her captive with much kindness.

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The royal troops surrounded Beaulieu church; but Henry hesitated to violate the sanctuary; he employed about Warbeck skillful agents, who persuaded the adventurer to accept the pardon which they were commissioned to offer to him. The self-styled Duke of York therefore quitted his refuge, without having seen the king, who had privately contemplated him, being curious to examine the features of the audacious impostor. When Henry VII. re-entered London, Warbeck formed part of his retinue; he had not been ill-treated, but he had been made to pass slowly through the principal streets of the city, in order to satisfy the curiosity of the people. He was conducted as far as the Tower, and the spectators thought to have seen him for the last time; but at the end of a few hours he reappeared, still accompanied by his guards, and took the road to Westminster. There he came to the court, apparently free, but closely watched. Far from being degraded into service, like Simnel, he was surrounded with considerations and certain honours. He was several times interrogated before the secret council, but his avowals remained a mystery, "so much so that men, disappointed at that which they heard, came to imagine it was not known what, and found themselves more perplexed than ever: but the king rather preferred to mystify the curious than to light the braziers."

The conduct of King Henry VII. remained an enigma to his contemporaries, and time has not divulged the secret of it. Perkin Warbeck had lived for eight months at the court, when he contrived to escape therefrom. Being immediately pursued, he took refuge in the priory of Sheen, near Richmond. The prior obtained his pardon of the king before consenting to deliver him up, but the honours which had been assigned to him had vanished: he was placed in the stocks before the gate of Westminster, a document in hand, compelled to read his confession to the people and to suffer their insults all day.

[Image] Confession Of Peter Warbeck.

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This time the prisoner avowed his humble origin, and related his whole career, cursing the ambition which had caused his imposture. After the second reading, Warbeck was shut up in the Tower, where he became the companion of the unhappy Earl of Warwick.

One year had elapsed since the attempt of Warbeck and his public humiliation. A third pretender, Ralph Wilford, had renewed the fraud of Simnel, and assumed the name of Warwick; he had been executed, and the Augustine monk who preached his, cause, had been condemned to imprisonment for life. It was in the month of July, 1499, when a rumour was spread of a plot formed by Warbeck and the real Earl of Warwick to escape together from the Tower and foment a fresh insurrection. The charm of the manners and mind of Warbeck must have been great, for he had not only seduced his companion in captivity, but he had contrived to win over all his jailors. The governor of the Tower was to be assassinated, and the freed prisoners intended to take refuge in a safe place, to proclaim King Richard IV., by summoning to their aid all the partisans of the Duke of Clarence, brother of Warwick. Such, at least, were the allegations in the indictment, for the execution of the plot had not even been begun when it was discovered. It was sufficient to explain the execution of Warbeck. He had long and cleverly played his part; but he did not retract his confessions at the supreme moment and died courageously at Tyburn, on the 23rd of November, 1499. {146} His last attempt cost the life of the unhappy Earl of Warwick; he was accused before the peers, not only with having sought to escape, but with having plotted with Warbeck to overthrow the king. The poor prince was twenty-nine years of age, but, having been a prisoner since the age of seven years, he was as ignorant of the world as a child; he confessed all the crimes with which he was accused, and having been condemned, he was beheaded on Tower Hill on the 23rd of November. With him ended the numerous attempts against the crown of Henry VII.; all the possible heirs to the throne, real or pretended, had disappeared, and political passions began to be appeased under government regular and firm, if it was at times greedy and despotic.

Relieved of any fears of internal wars, and more tranquil abroad, Henry VII. turned his views towards the settlement of his children; he had for a long time past resolved to marry his eldest daughter, Margaret, to the King of Scotland, in order to definitively attach that sovereign to him. At the beginning of the year 1500, he sent to King James one of the most clever among the ecclesiastical negotiators formed in his service, Fox, Bishop of Durham; and this skilful negotiator contrived to lead the young monarch into asking for the hand of the princess; the marriage was celebrated in London, in the month of January, 1502, but Margaret, who was then twelve years of age, was not sent to Scotland until the end of 1505, during this interval, her elder brother, Prince Arthur, heir presumptive to the throne, had married the Princess Catherine of Aragon, daughter of the able Ferdinand and the great Isabella, but he had died almost immediately after his marriage, and King Henry mooted the question with Ferdinand and with the Pope, to know whether the princess of twenty-one years of age, and widow of the elder brother, could marry the younger brother, Henry, who was but thirteen years of age. {147} The dispensation arrived and the betrothal was resolved upon, for King Ferdinand finding that matters dragged on at length, had claimed not only the princess, but the large sums paid for her dowry. Catherine lived at the court of her father-in-law, honoured and beloved by all, waiting for five years the celebration of a marriage which was to terminate so sadly.

Amidst the negotiations of alliances for his children, Henry VII. had also been occupied in marrying himself; the queen, his wife, had died shortly after having lost Prince Arthur, and the great preoccupation of the widowed monarch was to find a spouse rich enough to sensibly increase the treasures which he took so much pleasure in hoarding. His negotiations and hopes, however, did not prevent him from continuing to oppress his subjects. Avaricious passions grow with age; Archbishop Morton, whom the people had so often cursed, had died in 1500, but the nation gained nothing thereby; he had been replaced in his exactions by two leeches, "two shearers," as they were called, more bold and rapacious than Morton, less skilful than he in proving to the good English people that all was going on in a legal manner and that the province of the subjects in the State was limited to paying the taxes cheerfully. The two new agents, Empson and Dudley, were equally detested. Dudley was of good birth and knew how to set off the exactions in a suitable form; Empson, the son of a workman, triumphed coarsely over the unfortunate people whom he oppressed, and ridiculed their miseries. {148} Both were lawyers, well versed in their profession; each offence, crime, or misdemeanor became in their hands a matter for a fine, and to allow none to escape, they kept spies everywhere charged to warn them, and juries composed of wretches who decided all matters at their pleasure. "They hovered thus over all England," says the chronicler, "like tame falcons for their master and savage falcons for themselves, and they amassed great riches," while filling the royal coffers.

Notwithstanding these abuses the national prosperity went on increasing; the revival of order had sufficed to give scope to the commerce which was to found in England the middle class; the great aristocracy, decimated and ruined by the wars of the Roses, driven from power by the skillful conduct of Henry VII., remained shut up in the castles, and the younger members of the noblest houses began to devote themselves to agriculture, sometimes even to commercial enterprises, instead of recognizing no other career than arms or the Church.

The English, however, had not yet attempted the great voyages beyond the seas which were soon to render their navy so famous. Christopher Columbus had applied to Henry VII., in his efforts to find a sovereign who would entrust a few vessels to him and conquer the New World; but Bartholomew Columbus, brother of the great navigator had been shipwrecked before arriving in England; when he had at length accomplished his mission to King Henry, and had returned to Spain to announce to his brother that he was summoned to London, Isabella the Catholic, had already granted the demands of Columbus, assuring to Castile the riches of the West Indies. The English therefore had no part in the discovery of the New World, and the rumour of the treasures which were found there must more than once have made King Henry VII. pale with jealousy.

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The navigators whom he had sent had brought him back neither gold nor silver. John Cabot or Cabotte, of Venetian origin, established at Bristol, and his three sons Lewis, Sebastian and Sanches, had received from King Henry VII., on the 5th of March, 1496, letters patent, authorizing them to sail with five vessels in all seas, in order there to make discoveries and take possession of them in the name of England; the prudent monarch had reserved for himself one-fifth of the profits of the enterprise; it is to the first voyage of John Cabott and his son Sebastian in 1497 that we owe the discovery of Canada; in the same year, Vasco de Gama doubling the Cape of Good Hope for the first time, in his journey towards India, opened up to commerce a new route by which all the riches of the East were to flow into Europe. Notwithstanding all the overthrows and agitations which the world was yet to suffer, the time of material force, exclusive and brutal, was beginning to pass away; peaceful intelligence and activity saw a vast field of influence and effort, open up before them.

Parliament had become the docile instrument of the king, and unresistingly voted all that he was pleased to demand, but the subsidies granted in 1504 excited great murmuring among the people. The king had claimed the feudal gifts in honour of the knighthood conferred upon Prince Henry, and the marriage of Princess Margaret; the Commons offered forty thousand pounds sterling, but the king had the moderation to accept only thirty thousand. {150} The malcontents appeared to have found a chief. Edmund de la Pole, second son of the Duke of Suffolk, and brother of the Earl of Lincoln, the protector of Simnel, who had been killed at Stoke, was an embittered and turbulent man. Henry VII. had refused to grant him his paternal inheritance, by alleging that he inherited of his brother and not of his father, and that Lord Lincoln, being declared a traitor, had had his property confiscated; Edmund had therefore been compelled to content himself with a shred of the estates of his family and the title of Earl of Suffolk. He had had the misfortune to kill a man in a quarrel; the king, still jealous of all that bore the name of Plantagenet, had taken advantage of this opportunity to accuse him of murder; Suffolk took refuge at the court of the Duchess of Burgundy; whence he hatched plots, it was said. The king caused him to be watched, charged a treacherous emissary to insinuate himself into his confidence, and according to the instructions received by this means, he suddenly caused the arrest of the men upon whom Suffolk relied most; his brother William de la Pole, Lord Courtenay, who had married one of the daughters of Queen Elizabeth Woodville, Sir James Tyrrel, accused of the murder of Edward V. and the Duke of York in the Tower, and a few other persons were secretly interrogated. Courtenay and De la Pole remained in prison, but Sir James Tyrrel confessed the crime formerly committed upon the young princes by order of Richard III., and he was executed, as well as certain accomplices of the Earl of Suffolk, although the conspiracy of the latter was in no respect proved. {151} The murmurs which he had been accused of encouraging, were stifled, and the king, until the end of his life, dispensed henceforth with having recourse to Parliament; he contented himself with collecting taxes under the name of "benevolences," his coffers overflowed with gold, and he passed for the richest monarch of Christendom.

A favourable event happened and secured the vengeance of the king upon the Earl of Suffolk; the bad weather drove upon the coasts of England the Archduke Philip the Fair and his wife Joanna, who had become Queen of Castile by the death of her mother, Isabella the Catholic. The young sovereigns were repairing from Flanders to their new dominions; their counsellors urged them to face the tempest rather than to set foot upon English soil and thus to place themselves in the hands of the skilful Henry VII. Perhaps from curiosity, perhaps from fear, the Archduke insisted upon landing. The King of England appeared to have foreseen all; the illustrious travellers were immediately received with all the honours which were due them, and it was announced that the king was coming to meet them. Philip saw that he was caught in the trap, and being in a hurry to put an end to his compulsory visit, he hastened to anticipate Henry VII. The two monarchs met near Windsor, reciprocally lavishing the most touching marks of friendship and confidence. But the wise counsellors of the King of Castile had not been deceived; before the Spanish monarchs were able to take to the sea again, Philip had been compelled to consent to deliver up the Earl of Suffolk, who was living modestly in Flanders; to promise to the King of England the hand of his sister, the Duchess of Savoy, who was a widow and very rich, and finally to affiance his first-born son, who afterwards became the Emperor Charles V., to the little Princess Mary of England. {152} After having besides granted great commercial advantages to the English in the Flemish markets, Philip the Fair was at length enabled to resume the journey to Spain. Suffolk being enticed to England, was thrown into prison, and one of the last orders which Henry VII. signed was that for his execution.

Before the negotiations for the marriage with the Duchess of Savoy were ended, Philip the Fair had died in Spain, and King Henry cast his eyes upon his widow, whom he supposed to be richer than her sister-in-law. Unfortunately Joanna was insane, hopelessly insane with grief. The health of the King of England grew more and more impaired, and it became evident to all those who approached him that it was time for him to think of death and not of marriage.

Amidst his exactions, of the harshness of which he had given proof, and the perfidy of his intrigues, Henry VII. was a religious prince, preoccupied with the future life and the salvation of his soul; the weakening of his powers warned him to think of his end, and he multiplied his alms; his complaint increasing in 1508, he for the first time lent ear to the cries of his subjects, ruined by the exactions and malversations of Empson and Dudley. The king wished to render justice, he said, and a sincere remorse for all the crimes which he had permitted appeared to have taken possession of his soul; "but Empson and Dudley, although they knew the scruples of the king, continued their practices as furiously as in the past, as though the soul of the king and his money had belonged to different places," says the chronicler.

[Image] Chapel And Tomb Of Henry VII.

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The health of the king had momentarily improved, his conscience had been somewhat quieted, and the treasures which he himself held locked up in his manor of Richmond regained all their charm in his eyes. When in the springtime of 1509, a return of his cough brought him to the threshold of the tomb, he had time to make his will, recommending his successor to repair the wrongs which he had done and to restore that which he had unjustly taken. He died at Richmond in the night of the 21st of April, 1509, at the age of fifty-two. He had reigned twenty-three years over a kingdom upset by internal dissensions, impoverished by wars, and a prey to the most frightful disorder: he had gradually calmed men's passions, repressed or stifled insurrections and conspiracies, favoured commerce and industry; but he had oppressed his subjects to wrest from them the money of which he was greedy, he had lowered the authority of the Parliaments, he had struck severe blows at the great aristocracy, and he had above all shrouded his policy in so many subterfuges, and pursued his ends through so many intrigues and falsehoods, that even time has not been able to throw light upon the truth; the real and only excuse of King Henry VII. is that he belonged to the age of Louis XI., and that he had to treat with Ferdinand of Aragon.

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