The Last White Rose (8 page)

The only Yorkist leaders who escaped were Lord Lovell and Sir Thomas Broughton. Lovell was seen trying to swim his horse across the Trent: some said he drowned because the bank was too steep – the heavy armour worn by men of his rank cannot have helped him. Others suspected he got away safely, to hide in his great mansion by the Windrush. Bacon tells of a legend that he ‘lived long after in a cave or vault’,
¹²
and when part of Minster Lovell was demolished around the year 1700 (at least eighty years after Bacon was writing), a richly dressed skeleton was found in a cellar, seated at a table, giving rise to a gruesome story that, locked in for the sake of concealment, Lovell had starved to death.

In reality, both Lovell and Broughton succeeded in escaping to Scotland, where they were given refuge by James III, as his successor James IV gave them letters of safe conduct during the following year,
¹³
After this the pair disappear completely, neither being involved in later conspiracies.
¹⁴
It is not impossible that, sheltered by Yorkist supporters, Francis Lovell made his way back to die in hiding at his beautiful house. Because of his friendship with Richard III and mysterious end, he has left a sinister name, but no one can deny his courage or his loyalty. An enamelled brass plate bearing his arms (with the crest of a faithful dog) still hangs in St George’s Chapel, Windsor. It has hung there ever since he was made a Knight of the Garter by King Richard in 1484.

Henry VII rode up with the rest of his army after the battle was over. There were no important prisoners to behead and he behaved with calculated moderation. Some of the Lancashire
and Yorkist gentlemen who escaped, such as Thomas Metcalfe, Richard Middleton and Rowland Robinson, were attainted or fined. Sir Edmund Hastings received a pardon. The two Lords Scrope were imprisoned for a time and fined, but kept the bulk of their estates. When released, neither was allowed to travel north of the Trent, preventing them from returning home.

Although the king hanged a batch of less important prisoners at Lincoln, together with men found guilty of spreading rumours of his defeat, he stuck to a policy of mildness – he did not want to antagonize the North Country by overreacting as Richard III had done in the South after the Duke of Buckingham’s revolt. When he went on progress through Yorkshire and Durham, an alarmingly large number of people came to him in search of letters of pardon, which they obtained without too much difficulty. If they had not ridden with Lincoln, clearly they had been involved in the rising in some way or other – some must have come from among the Scropes’ followers or from those who had planned to take over York. Henry’s clemency reveals his fundamental insecurity.

Richard Simons, the Oxford cleric who had trained Lambert Simnel to impersonate Warwick, could not be executed because he was a priest, but disappeared into perpetual imprisonment. Henry was more merciful towards the boy. ‘Lambert is still alive today,’ wrote Polydore Vergil twenty years later. ‘He has been promoted to the post of falconer to the king, having previously been a turnspit and worked at various other menial jobs in the royal kitchens.’
¹⁵
This magnanimity was designed to demonstrate a self-confidence on Henry’s part, which, in reality, he was far from feeling.

Although the king had won at Stoke, he might just as easily have lost. Only a small part of his army were involved in the fighting, which indicates that, as at Bosworth, their leaders were awaiting the outcome. According to Vergil, Henry regretted that Lincoln had not been captured because he wanted to discover from him the full extent of the conspiracy. Before the battle,
noticing how confident the Yorkists appeared, he suspected they must have allies among the royal troops and had given orders for the earl to be taken alive. Vergil heard that these orders were disobeyed because some of Henry’s men were terrified Lincoln might incriminate them.

The king knew the earl might well have found more supporters, and that there had been a growing groundswell of support for him all over the North Country. What was so alarming was the challenge coming within less than two years of Bosworth. Still more disturbing, when rumours circulated in London that Henry Tudor had been defeated, there was a breakout by the Yorkists in sanctuary at Westminster, while mobs rioted in the streets, shouting the name he dreaded most of all – ‘Warwick! Warwick!’

Although the king could scarcely be expected to draft an Act of Parliament, the Attainder passed in November echoes the frenzied anger of Richard III on learning that the Duke of Buckingham had risen against him. It complains that:

notwithstanding the great and sovereign kindness that our sovereign liege lord that now is, at divers sundry times, continually showed to the said late earl … but the contrary to kind and natural remembrance, his faith, truth and allegiance, [he] conspired and imagined the most dolorous and lamentable murder, death and destruction of the royal person
¹⁶

Henry arranged for his wife, Elizabeth of York, to be crowned queen on 25 November, while Parliament was sitting. It was a gesture of insecurity – he wanted to remind England that his consort had Plantagenet blood. Unfortunately, there were other people with the same blood, and not just the Earl of Warwick. They included Elizabeth’s sisters, together with Lincoln’s brothers.

Most menacing of all was the Duchess Margaret in Burgundy. Bernard André, a French scholar in Henry’s service, says the king
was convinced that Lincoln had only acted as he did because of her encouragement. During the recent campaign, Henry described her to his courtiers as: ‘That stupid, brazen woman, who despite knowing perfectly well her family was destroyed by her brother Richard, hates my own family with such bitterness that, deliberately ignoring the fact that her niece is my dear wife, she remains bent on destroying myself and my children.’
¹⁷
It was only a matter of time before this implacable enemy stirred up another dangerous plot.

Bacon believed Henry felt so unsafe that he distrusted even his wife, Elizabeth – ‘he showed himself no very indulgent husband towards her, though she was beautiful, gentle and fruitful … his aversion towards the house of York was so predominant in him as it found place not only in his wars and councils, but in his chamber and bed’.
¹⁸

4. Summer 1487: ‘Stoke Field’

1
.
Rot. Parl.
, vol. VI, 397.

2
. P.L. Hughes and J.F. Larkin (eds),
Tudor Royal Proclamations
, 3 vols, New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 1964–9, vol. 1, pp. 12–13.

3
.
York House Books
,
op. cit
., vol. 2, p. 570.

4
. Bacon,
op. cit
., p. 34.

5
.
The Great Chronicle of London
, ed. A.H. Thomas and I.D. Thornley, London, G.W. Jones, 1938, p. 241.

6
. Vergil,
op. cit
., p. 22.

7
.
Great Chronicle
,
op. cit
., p. 242.

8
. J. Molinet, see G. Doutrepont and O. Jodogne (eds)
, Chroniques
de Jean Molinet
(1474–1507)
, 3 vols, Brussels, Académie royale de Belgique, 1935–7, vol. 1, pp. 362–5.

9
. Hall,
op. cit
., p. 434.

10
. J. Leland,
De Rebus Britannicis
Collectanea
, 6 vols, London, 1770, vol. IV, p. 210.

11
. A.H. Burne,
The Battlefields of England
, London, Penguin, 1996, p. 314

12
. Bacon,
op. cit
., p. 35.

13
.
J.M. Thompson, J.B. Paul and others (eds),
Registrum Magni
Sigilli Regnum Scotorum: Register of the Great Seal of Scotland
, Edinburgh, Scottish Record Society, 1882–1914, vol. 2 (1424– 1513), p. 370.

14
. D. Baldwin, ‘What Happened to Lord Lovell?’,
The Ricardian
, 89 (June 1985).

15
. Vergil,
op. cit
., p. 24.

16
.
Rot. Parl.
,
op. cit
., vol. VI, 397.

17
. B. André,
De Vita atque gestis Henrici Septimi Historia
, in
Memorials
, pp. 49–52.

18
. Bacon,
op. cit
., p. 20.

5

Winter 1489–90: The Conscience of Abbot Sant

‘The Abbot of Abingdon, a most devout monk of the order of St Benedict.’

Polydore Vergil, Anglica Historia
¹

If Henry VII did not expect any more trouble from pretenders, he made a grave mistake. It was going to seem as though insurrection was a perennial disease for the new Tudor monarchy. In Bacon’s lapidary phrase, the king suffered from ‘moles perpetually working and casting to undermine him’.
²

Too weak to punish the Irish lords, in June 1488 Henry sent Sir Richard Edgecombe over St George’s Channel, to make them swear allegiance. But when Edgecombe visited the Lord Deputy, the Earl of Kildare, at Maynooth he was left in no doubt as to who really ruled Ireland: the oath of allegiance taken by Kildare and the other lords had to be modified since, rather than give bonds for their behaviour, they threatened to ‘become Irishmen’ like those in the wild lands outside the Pale.
Still inclined to favour Yorkism, the earl bluntly declined a royal command to visit England.

At the end of 1488 the king declared war on France to preserve Breton independence and sent an army to Brittany. To pay for it, he was obliged to levy swingeing new taxes, voted by a very reluctant Parliament. The ensuing unpopularity encouraged the Yorkists and in March 1489 William Paston wrote to his brother Sir William of how Edward Heestowe [Hextall] of Dover had been accused of treason on ‘many strange points’. At first neither the king nor his counsellors were inclined to believe the accusation, but then Hextall himself confessed his guilt ‘and of many other things more’. As a result he was imprisoned in the Tower and facing death. There is no further information about his ‘treason’, which can only have been some sort of plot to release the Earl of Warwick.
³