THE TUDOR KINGS—HENRY VII.
WHEN Henry Tudor, Earl of Richmond, had become Henry VII., after the battle of Bosworth, a relative calm settled over the Tower, as it did over the country generally. Not that State and ordinary prisoners ceased to enter the Tower gates, the former to die on the adjacent Hill, the latter at Tyburn, and some to be released. But we hear no more of midnight murders within its prisons, and with the baleful figure of Richard Plantagenet, such crimes ceased to cast their shadows on the scene of his many misdeeds.
The first notable State prisoner sent to the Tower by Henry VII. was Edward Plantagenet, Earl of Warwick, son of the murdered Duke of Clarence. During the reign of Richard III., Warwick had been kept under surveillance at Sheriff Hutton Castle, in Yorkshire; but Henry had him brought to the Tower for greater security. There was some reason, from Henry’s point of view, for this care; for Warwick, being descended from Clarence, the elder brother of John of Gaunt, had a better and more rightful claim to the throne than the first of the Tudors. So long as Warwick lived, Henry felt his seat insecure; and he seized the earliest opportunity for destroying him.
In 1487, Lambert Simnel, the son of an Oxford tradesman, had been declared by the Earl of Kildare and some malcontent English residents in Ireland, to be the Earl of Warwick. A conspiracy was at once formed to overthrow Henry, and a small army, partly recruited in Germany, and partly formed by Irish troops furnished by Kildare, crossed St George’s Channel. At Stoke, near Nottingham, this force encountered the Royal troops, and was completely defeated. Simnel was taken prisoner, and although the King publicly exposed his deception by showing the Earl of Warwick to the people, the Pretender was considered too insignificant for execution, and was relegated to the position of a scullion in Henry’s kitchen.
All Hallows, Barking
Warwick could in no way be considered affected by this rising, although his mere existence gave it a raison d’etre; but two years later, when Ferdinand of Spain refused to allow his daughter, Catherine of Arragon, to marry Henry’s eldest son Arthur, on the ground that the Earl of Warwick had a prior right to the crown, the King ordered a trumped-up charge to be drawn up against the unfortunate Earl, of an attempt to escape from the Tower; and on this charge he was tried, condemned, and executed on the 28th of November 1499. With him ended the line male of the House of Plantagenet.
The records of the Tower are not entirely of the sombre colour of imprisonments and executions. In the month of November 1487, we read of the pageant that took place at the coronation of Henry’s Queen, Elizabeth, the daughter of Edward IV.; their marriage united the rival factions of the White and Red Roses. A few days before her coronation at Westminster, Elizabeth had been brought to the Tower from the palace at Greenwich by water, in barges “freshely furnyshed with baners and stremers of silk, richly besene”; one barge was “a great red dragon, spowting Flamys of Fyer into the Temmys.” She landed at the Tower Wharf, where the “Kyngs Hyghnesse welcomede her in suche maner and form as was to al th’ Æstats, and other ther being present, a very good sight, and right joyous and comfortable to beholde,” as writes a chronicler of the scene. The following day the Queen, being “rially apparelde” in cloth of gold and damask, and a mantle of ermine, “her faire yelow hair hanging downe playne byhynd her Bak, with a Calle of Pypes over it, and a Serkelet of Golde richely garnyshed with precious Stonys upon her Hede,” was borne in a litter which was “coverde with Cloth of Golde of damaske, and large Pelowes of downe covered with lik Clothe of Golde,” to the Abbey, through streets hung with tapestry and lined with “the crafts in their Lyveryes,” through lines of children, “some arrayde like Angells and others lyke Vyrgyns, to singe sweete Songes as her Grace passed by” (Leland).
The most serious danger to the stability of Henry’s monarchy was the insurrection brought about by the impostor Perkin Warbeck, a man who, by some writers, is said to have been a Florentine Jew, whilst by others he is declared to have been a Fleming. Warbeck gave out that he was Richard, Duke of York, the younger son of Edward IV., and that he had not been murdered in the Tower, but had escaped. In 1491 he landed at Cork with some followers. In Ireland he was supported by Desmond, and was also assisted from Flanders by Margaret of Burgundy. Until the year 1495, when he made a descent upon England, little was heard of him. By this time Henry, owing to his avarice and tyrannical form of government, had made himself extremely unpopular, and consequently his enemies gladly availed themselves of such an opportunity, as Warbeck’s claim presented, of injuring the King. In an evil moment for himself, Sir William Stanley, who had so powerfully aided Henry in his victory at Bosworth, and who had placed the crown, taken from Richard the Third’s dead body, upon his head, and whom Henry had made his Lord Chamberlain, declared that, “if he certainly knew” Perkin Warbeck to be the son of Edward IV., he would never draw his sword or bear arms against him. He was impeached upon a charge of uttering these words, and tried by a Council summoned by the King, who was then in residence in the Tower. He was found guilty, and executed on Tower Hill.
Meanwhile Warbeck was received in Scotland as the rightful heir to the English crown, and James III. believed his story so firmly, and favoured him to such an extent, that he ordered his relative, Catherine Gordon, Lord Huntley’s daughter, to marry the Pretender. Warbeck now styled himself Richard IV., and advanced into England with an army; but at the first reverse, he fled in panic, taking refuge in Ireland. In 1497 he made a second descent upon England; but after suffering defeat, and again taking to flight, he was finally made prisoner at the Abbey of Beaulieu in the New Forest, whence he was sent to the Tower, and hanged on the 23rd November 1499.
More festivities took place in the Tower in the year 1501, when the nuptials of Henry’s eldest son, Prince Arthur, with Catherine of Arragon were solemnised there, the execution of the Earl of Warwick having at length enabled the Spanish King to give his consent to the match. The bride and bridegroom were little more than children, Arthur being fourteen, and Catherine a year older; but the marriage—that was to be so fruitful of trouble and death in the next reign—was solemnised with the greatest splendour, there being daily banquets within the walls, and daily tournaments without. In the next year, Sir James Tyrell met with his deserts for the part he had played in the murder of the little princes in the Tower, being beheaded on Tower Hill; he should have been hanged, but pleading his privilege of knighthood, he was allowed death by the axe. In 1503 Henry’s Queen gave birth to a daughter in the Tower, but soon afterwards mother and child followed each other to the grave; and when six years had passed, Henry VII. himself was taken to that stately mausoleum which he had created in the Abbey of Westminster, and Henry VIII. reigned in his stead.