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

Brother to Lady Margaret Beaufort’s husband Lord Stanley, Sir William and his men had turned the tide for Henry at Bosworth. But he was a former loyalist of Edward IV and for him, as for so many, questions of allegiance and self-interest mingled. Moreover, despite the recognition he had received under Henry, Sir William had never felt entirely settled in his favour. For his own part, Henry was all too aware of the Stanleys’ history of changing sides, while their family retinues, who provided his military backbone, tended to arrive late to the party – as indeed they had done at Bosworth and Stoke. When Sir William was arrested and brought before the king in the first days of 1495, Henry’s display of wounded astonishment masked the fact that, as both men knew, he had been watching Stanley’s retainers for well over a year. Stanley was tried and beheaded. When Henry’s men arrived to take possession of his castle of Holt, among the stuff they inventoried was a Yorkist livery collar studded with white roses and sunbursts, and £10,000 in cash: enough to bankroll an army. 26

As the Stanley plot unfolded, the royal household became more rigorously controlled. Officials carrying lists of servants receiving ‘bouge of court’ – wages and board – carried out identity checks; at night, heavily armed yeomen paced the household’s galleries and chambers with extra vigilance. The king, hedged about by security, became more distant, more remote. People were increasingly afraid to talk openly, looking over their shoulders, lowering their voices. Henry’s relationship with his leading subjects began to change.

Warbeck was still at large. The next years saw him flitting around England’s borders, moth-like, never settling. In June 1495, his invasion force, backed by Maximilian, finally materialized off the coast of east Kent. Henry’s men were waiting, hidden in the sand dunes of Deal Beach, and an advance party of Warbeck’s soldiers, lured ashore, were massacred in the shallows. But the pretender himself stayed on board ship and Henry’s grasp closed around thin air. 27

For several months his trail went cold. Neither his sponsors nor Henry, whose ships ceaselessly patrolled the western reaches of the Channel and the Irish Sea, knew of his whereabouts. Then, late in the year, he resurfaced at the court of James IV of Scotland. At twenty-two, a year older than Warbeck, James was ambitious and adventurous, desperate to impose himself and his nation on the European stage – and he had plans for the pretender. Lavishing on him attention, gifts and a wife – Katherine Gordon, the beautiful young daughter of a Scottish nobleman, whom Warbeck married with all the splendour of a royal wedding – James set him up as the king of England and, in September 1496, the men moved southwards at the head of an army, crossing the border together. But the incursion into England was neither the triumphal progress of a returning Yorkist prince nor a Scottish invasion – though to English eyes, the burning, plundering and pillaging made it look suspiciously like the latter. Encountering resolute resistance, it petered out after six days. Henry, however, was on the warpath. His prolonged and excessive response would result in the biggest crisis of his reign to date.

The following month, his council started drawing up meticulous plans for a military offensive and authorized a loan of £120,000, to be repaid by general taxation, a decision ratified by an anxious parliament. 28Meanwhile, border garrisons were bolstered and martial law declared, arms dumps overhauled and, in the fertile recruiting grounds of Flanders, Henry’s agents indentured battalions of Swiss and German mercenaries. Out at the firing ranges of Mile End, east of London, expert Dutch gunners put the latest European artillery and handguns through their paces. In the late spring of 1497 columns of men, horses, carts and munitions streamed north towards the Scottish border. All the while, Henry’s tax collectors continued to work zealously, in the face of widespread resentment, and nowhere more so than in the deep southwest of England in the small Cornish parish of St Keverne, where Michael Joseph – known locally as An Gof, the Blacksmith – rounded on one of the king’s tax collectors, accusing him of corruption and refusing to pay.

Headed by An Gof and Thomas Flamank, a local lawyer, rebellion exploded out of Cornwall, just as retinues loyal to Henry were heading north. Thousands strong, the insurgents moved through southern England with frightening speed. London, terrified by reports of the ravaging Cornishmen, bolstered its defences; Queen Elizabeth, Lady Margaret and the royal children were moved into the Tower. Skirting the city to the southeast, the rebels made their camp at Blackheath, the time-honoured ground of popular rebellion, and prepared for a final assault. The whole kingdom was in chaos, reported one ambassador: if the king had lost, he would have been ‘finished off and beheaded’. 29

But London clung on. Royal troops frantically recalled from their northern deployment arrived. Torn between confrontation and negotiation the rebels hesitated, and their cause was lost. An Gof and Flamank were hanged, drawn and quartered. Their heads, boiled and tarred, were jammed on spikes on London Bridge; their body parts were dismembered, some nailed to the city gates, others sent southwest to be displayed in towns of dubious loyalty. 30

That summer, James and Warbeck planned another assault. This time, Warbeck would sail from Scotland to the southwest of England to capitalize on inflamed Cornish resentments; James, meanwhile, would co-ordinate his attack with another cross-border invasion. But James’s military campaign, menaced by an English army sent north to confront him, hit the buffers. As Soncino and Trevisano arrived at Woodstock, the Scots and English diplomats were seated round the negotiating table. Warbeck was on his own.

In the end, it was no contest. Although sympathies still lingered and Warbeck, amassing Cornish support, swept out of the peninsula, Henry’s vastly superior forces were prepared. Outside Taunton, the pretender’s army scattered, and he fled to sanctuary at Beaulieu on the south coast, from where he was extracted. Finally, Henry had the ‘feigned lad’ in his hands. But while Warbeck had failed to bring down the dynasty, he had, inadvertently, succeeded in transforming its nature.

That autumn, the Italian ambassadors settled into a comfortable life in London. In a stream of confidential dispatches, they painted a picture of a kingdom that was calm and tranquil. Henry, Soncino wrote, had been extraordinarily merciful. His dealings with Warbeck bespoke a regal confidence. Rather than lock him up, Henry put the pretender on display at court, a curio, a plaything for people to marvel and point at, and make fun of: levissimus , the least of men. 31

Further acquaintance with the king and his court only impressed the visitors more. He was surrounded by finely dressed nobles and intellectual, politically sophisticated advisers whose knowledge of foreign affairs was so impressive that, Soncino wrote, ‘I fancy myself in Rome’. Henry cultivated Italian merchant-bankers – the Florentines, in particular, ‘never stop giving the king advices’ – and loved to employ foreigners, from high-ranking Italian diplomats and Dutch craftsmen to the French and Breton servants who hovered around him, much to the ‘diabolical’ envy of the English. 32Then there was the other talking-point that autumn, besides Warbeck. Sailing west into uncharted seas with a group of Bristol merchants, the Venetian fugitive-adventurer Zoane Caboto, John Cabot, had returned to England with reports of a New Found Land, a discovery that, as Henry hoped – and as the Spanish feared, writing agitated dispatches to Columbus himself about the arrival in London of ‘ uno como Colon ’ – would rival recent Spanish discoveries of a New World. At court, Cabot rustled about in silks, armed with rolls of maps, followed by a trail of admirers who ‘run after him like mad’. Henry had plans for Cabot. He would fund a fleet of ships and pack them with ‘all the malefactors’ in English prisons. Then, they would cross the Atlantic and form a colony. 33