Thomas Penn: Winter King: Henry VII and the Dawn of Tudor England

Henry, it seems, always knew the child would be a son. Invoking the mythical British king from whom both Lancaster and York had liked to trace their descent – the prophet Merlin, no less, had described King Arthur as the fruit of the union of a red king and a white queen – Henry would call his son Arthur, and he would be born in Winchester, the legendary seat of Camelot. 12In Winchester Castle, at 1 a.m. on 20 September 1486, a squally, windswept night, Elizabeth gave birth. Her son was a month premature – but he was healthy. A Te Deum was sung, bonfires were lit in the streets, and yeomen of the crown galloped hard into the provinces with printed proclamations to be read aloud and affixed to church doors up and down the country.

The baby Arthur was the new dynasty incorporated. ‘Joyed may we be’, minstrels sang, ‘Our prince to see, and roses three’: red for Lancaster, white for York, and a new rose in which the two colours were intermingled, a rose both red and white. 13

As the dynasty took its first, uncertain steps, conspiracy had already seeded itself. The signs of instability had come soon after Henry’s arrival in London. That September, the sweating sickness, a strange and virulent disease causing ‘pain as never was suffered before’ – and brought, it was widely believed, by the new king’s army – had decimated the city’s population. Rumour and ill portents were rife. As one correspondent, writing to his master from court in the wake of Henry’s first parliament, noted anxiously, there was ‘much running among the lords, but no-one knows what it is. It is said that all is not well among them.’ 14In spring 1486, news came from the heartlands of the old king’s support in the north – ‘whence all evil spreads’, noted a Woodvillite chronicler with a southerner’s mixture of contempt and fear – and of noble retinues assembling and arming. But as the caravan of the royal household progressed north, the rebels melted away in the face of overwhelming royal force. It was to be in the following year that Richard III’s loyalists found their figurehead. 15

John de la Pole, earl of Lincoln, was a Plantagenet. His mother was sister to both Edward IV and Richard III, and Richard had apparently named him his heir – and then Bosworth happened. Lincoln remained unreconciled to the new regime. Early in 1487, he fled to the Low Countries, to the Flemish town of Malines and the court of his aunt, Margaret of York, duchess of Burgundy. A focus for disaffected Ricardians, Margaret hated Henry and she detested the new political settlement. The house of York, she felt, could only be restored through a ‘male remnant’.

While Lincoln’s own claim to the throne was reasonable, he and Margaret knew that the claim of another living Yorkist was better still. In the weeks after Bosworth, Henry’s agents had arrested another nephew of Edward IV and immured him in the Tower of London. The last surviving Plantagenet prince descended in the male line, Edward earl of Warwick was a touchstone for Yorkist affections – people still provocatively wore his badge of the bear and ragged staff – and Lincoln understood the galvanizing effect of Warwick’s presence at the head of any uprising. Warwick, however, was twelve years old, simple-minded, and inaccessible. Unable to get his hands on him, Lincoln conjured up another Warwick, grooming another young boy to impersonate him. 16

With an army of German mercenaries, Lincoln sailed to Ireland, which remained a hotbed of Yorkist support, to raise more aid. There, the boy was paraded as the earl of Warwick, newly escaped from the Tower; on 24 May, Whit Sunday, he was crowned king of England in Dublin Cathedral. The following month, Lincoln’s invasion force crossed the Irish Sea and landed on the Cumbrian coast, advancing south into the midlands, the child at its head. As England baked under a hot sun, Henry’s disciplined, battle-hardened retinues confronted the rebels outside the Nottinghamshire village of East Stoke. Outnumbered and disordered, Lincoln’s troops were massacred and Lincoln himself killed, to Henry’s frustration. With Lincoln alive, Henry felt, he would have been able to get ‘the bottom of his danger’, the root of the conspiracy. 17The young boy, though, was found. He was no earl of Warwick, said Henry’s agents, but a fake: the son of an Oxford joiner who went by the name of Lambert Simnel. After the battle, Henry set him to work in an occupation befitting his menial status, as a spit-turner in the royal kitchens.

The battle of Stoke marked an end, of sorts. With the death of Lincoln, a genuine Yorkist contender for the throne, and a decisive victory for Henry, it seemed to draw a line under the resistance of Richard III’s supporters. But old loyalties simmered, and the aftershocks of rebellion rippled on.

In late 1491, a Breton merchant-ship had docked at the southern Irish port of Cork. Among the crew that spilled onto the quayside was a handsome, blond, sixteen-year-old boy dressed, rather incongruously for a ship’s hand, in rich silks. It was here, so his confession later had it, that Perkin Warbeck, son of a boatman from the Flemish city of Tournai, was stopped by a group of renegade Yorkists who had returned to southern Ireland to try to revive the plot around the earl of Warwick. They were backed by the French king Charles VIII, who was desperate for a lever to use against an increasingly aggressive Henry – just as some six years previously he had made a show of backing Henry against Richard III. But in Warbeck, who they discovered swanning through the streets of Cork in his borrowed finery, the conspirators found something else altogether. Accosting him, they flattered him and promised to make him a Yorkist prince.

Warbeck later described how the men had tried out a number of identities on him: the earl of Warwick – Lambert Simnel, all over again – and then an illegitimate son of Richard III. Discarding both ideas, they then struck gold. They would groom him to become another kind of Yorkist: Richard duke of York, the second son of Edward IV, the younger of the princes whose disappearance into the Tower had transformed Henry’s own prospects from that of fugitive into claimant to the throne. 18

The reappearance, or re-creation, of Richard duke of York was a masterstroke. The bodies of the princes had never been found. While Henry could take the earl of Warwick out of the Tower and parade him through the streets of London – the same reason that he kept Simnel to hand in the royal kitchens – he could hardly do the same with Edward IV’s young sons. Provided he looked and behaved like him, Richard duke of York’s second coming could hardly be denied. Turning the political clock back to April 1483, to a time before Richard III’s usurpation, it took a wrecking ball to the political settlement that Henry and Elizabeth’s marriage represented.

Not only would Richard duke of York be indisputably heir to the throne, but he would also have an undeniable claim on the loyalty of all those who had subsequently transferred their allegiance to his oldest sister Elizabeth and had accepted Henry’s rule. Now, they would look again at their genealogical charts and their pedigree rolls, and their loyalties would be torn. The entwined red-and-white roses would be ripped apart. The phantom duke of York’s existence, the simple ‘what if?’, attacked the foundations of everything that Henry was trying to build.

But the full impact of Warbeck, who after his grooming in Ireland had been carried off to the French court, took some time to emerge. In mid-1492, French intelligence officials, quizzing merchants from England on the impact of the ‘White Rose’, were disappointed at English indifference. Then, that autumn, Henry invaded France.

As he looked outward to Europe, and to the fluctuating dynastic power politics in which as an exile he had once been helplessly thrown about, Henry had followed with concern France’s mounting aggression in the constant struggles for domination of the northern European coast. He had been unable to prevent it from swallowing up his former ally, the duchy of Brittany. But he had slowly built an understanding with France’s perennial enemy on its eastern border, the tricksy Habsburg king, Maximilian. 19