The Last White Rose, page 14
7. Chronicles of London, op. cit., p. 223.
8. CSP Sp, op. cit., vol. I, 198.
9. Ibid., 221.
10. Vergil, op. cit., p. 116.
11. Chronicles of London, op. cit., p. 225.
12. Hall, op. cit., p. 491.
13. CSP Sp, op. cit., vol. I, 221.
14. CSP Milan,. vol I, 799.
15. CSP Ven, op. cit., vol. V, 575.
16. Bacon, op. cit., p. 160.
17. Arthurson, ‘Espionage and Intelligence’, Nottingham Medieval Studies, 1991, pp. 202–18.
18. Plumpton Corr, op. cit., p. 141.
19. Chroniques de Jean Molinet, op. cit., vol. 2, p. 467.
20. LP Hen VII, op. cit., p. 1.
21. Bacon, op. cit., p. 160.
22. Chronicles of London, op. cit., pp. 227–8.
23. Vergil, op. cit., p. 118.
13
Autumn 1499: Edmund de la Pole, Earl of Suffolk
‘Edmund [de la] Pole, Earl of Suffolk, son to John, Duke of Suffolk and Lady Elizabeth, sister to King Edward IV, being stout and bold of courage, and of wit rash and heady, was indicted of homicide and murder, for slaying of a mean person in his rage and fury … [and] fled to Flanders, without any licence or safe conduct given to him by the king, to the Lady Margaret, his aunt on his mother’s side.’
Edward Hall, The Union of the two Noble and Illustre Famelies of Lancaste and Yorke [1548]1
If Warwick’s killing brought a curse it wasted no time in striking and Henry VII soon suffered a shattering series of bereavements. In 1500 his third son, Edmund, Duke of Bedford died, not yet a year old. In 1502 Arthur, Prince of Wales died at only seventeen, so that the young Prince Henry was now the only male Tudor other than the king. In 1503 Elizabeth of York died in childbirth.
Thomas More wrote ‘A Rueful Lamentation on the Death of Queen Elizabeth’. For contemporaries, two of its lines had a hidden meaning.
‘Was I not born of old worthy lineage
Was not my mother queen, my father king?’2
There is nothing to suggest that More was a Yorkist – not yet, at any rate – but everyone knew that Henry Tudor had not been born of ‘old worthy lineage’.
The story of a curse on the Tudors was not going to fade away. Years later, Bacon heard that when Henry VIII announced his intention to divorce her, Queen Katherine declared that it was God’s judgement because her first marriage had been ‘made in blood, meaning that of the Earl of Warwick’. During the reign of Henry VIII many people thought that the curse must be responsible for the eerie proneness of Tudor males to die in childhood.
Henry VII’s own health was collapsing. He may already have contracted tuberculosis. (In 1508 he was rumoured to be in the last stages of consumption.) Whatever the reason, he had become an old man by his forties. There is no written evidence of his decline, but a portrait painted in 1505 by the Baltic artist Michael Sittow (now in the National Portrait Gallery, London) tells us a lot. This was commissioned by Emperor Maximilian’s agent, for his master to send to his widowed daughter Margaret, whom he wanted the king to marry. It is hard to believe that the bleary-eyed, thin-lipped, exhausted old face leering out of the portrait is the same person as the young gallant sketched twenty years earlier. Torrigiano’s portrait bust of about the same date shows a very different face, but it was designed to flatter. Some artists paint what they see, however, which is what Sittow seems to have done – perhaps he was given the commission because of the realism of his work. Other portraits by him are thoroughly convincing, such as that of the youthful Katherine of Aragon.
Although the calamities he experienced did not unbalance Henry’s statecraft, they did little for his mental equilibrium. It is scarcely surprising that he grew ever more suspicious of the nobility, and continued to live in dread of the White Rose. There were strong hints that his mind was unbalanced in the way he dealt with the Earl of Suffolk.
‘England has never been so tranquil and obedient as it is at present,’ reported the Spanish ambassador in January 1500. ‘There were pretenders to the English crown, but now Perkin and the Duke of Clarence’s son are executed, not a drop of doubtful Royal blood can remain, the sole Royal blood being the true blood of the King.’3 He believed there was no one left who could challenge Henry VII, and perhaps the king himself thought so, if only for a short time.
Yet Henry’s astrologer had been justified in warning him that there were two parties in his kingdom, one of which questioned his right to the throne. The ballad ‘The White Rose’, dating from about 1500 – probably to be sung as a three-part ‘carol’ – shows that nostalgia for the House of York was still flourishing at this date. There were Englishmen who continued to regard the Tudor as a usurper, and were outraged at the Earl of Warwick’s murder. He and Perkin might be dead, but the White Rose still bloomed, its new embodiment being Edmund de la Pole, Earl of Suffolk. Many must have recalled that less than twenty years earlier, John de la Pole, Earl of Lincoln – later killed at Stoke – had been named heir to the throne by Richard III. After the death of Warbeck and Warwick, Lincoln’s younger brother, Suffolk, was the obvious Yorkist claimant as Richard’s senior nephew.
Born about 1473, Edmund had showed no sign of disaffection, playing his role on ceremonial occasions and admired for his prowess at jousting – the great spectator sport of the age. A herald’s account gives us a clourful glimpse of him at the tournament held at Westminster in 1494 to celebrate Prince Henry’s investiture as Duke of York. He led the competitors as they rode out of Westminster Hall, his red silken banner bearing his motto, ‘For to accumplisshe’, while the crest on his tilting helm was a golden lion. During the tournament, he broke his sword on Sir Edward a Borough ‘furiously and notably’, and performed no less effectively in breaking his lance when charging his opponent. After supper, the five-year-old Princess Margaret, King Henry’s eldest daughter, awarded the prize to ‘the right noble lord, the Earl of Suffolk’, a ring of gold with a diamond.
When the tournament was resumed a few days later, again he ‘gave such a stroke to Sir Edward a Borough that his sword was almost out of his hand and bruised his gauntlet’. His opponent lost control of his horse so that many people thought that his aim had been damaged, but he recovered and managed to give Suffolk a light tap on the helmet with his own sword. This time it was Sir Edward who was given the tourney prize, another diamond ring. The earl was still only twenty-one, while the other competitors were all seasoned veterans.4
After campaigning against the French in 1492, when he took part in the siege of Boulogne, Suffolk was made a Knight of the Garter. In September 1495 the king paid him the supreme royal compliment of visiting his Oxfordshire house, Ewelme.
But Suffolk was his own worst enemy. He was haughty, not terribly intelligent, a nobleman ‘of an hasty and choleric disposition’ who had an uncontrollable temper, and Vergil calls him. ‘bold, impetuous, readily roused to anger’.5 Despite having been at Oxford, he was more or less illiterate, to judge from his few surviving letters. It has been suggested he felt close to his first cousin, Queen Elizabeth, which was why he stayed loyal to her husband for some years.6 Yet there is no evidence for such affection other than his frequent attendance at court. In reality, he nursed a grievance. When his father, the Duke of Suffolk, had died in 1491 the de la Pole lands became forfeit to the crown under Lincoln’s attainder as a traitor. The king allowed Edmund to inherit them, but only on payment (in instalments) of £5,000, which forced him to mortgage a large proportion of his heritage. He was then reduced to the rank of earl on the pretext that his estates were so diminished and impoverished that he could not afford to be a duke.
In consequence, Edmund had been plunged into debt, besides feeling insulted by his ‘degradation’. At the same time he was very conscious of his royal blood, having been treated as a close kinsman by Edward IV and Richard III. There is no reason to think he had designs on the throne while Warbeck and Warwick were alive but, given his royal background and his brother Lincoln’s rebellion, it was understandable that Henry should wish to keep a close eye on him.
The earl’s loyalty was pushed to breaking point during the autumn of 1499. After dining in London with his kinsman Lord William Courtenay and other friends, near the Tower, in a fit of rage he killed a ‘mean person’ named Thomas Crue. Indicted for murder, he had to ‘plead’ in the law courts before being pardoned by Henry VII, and, as ‘a prince of blood royal’, he felt resentful that he had been tried at all. The fact that his victim was a plaintiff in a case under investigation by the King’s Council made him fear he might be charged again. On 1 July 1499 he fled the country. The date suggests he was implicated in the plot to rescue Warbeck and Warwick from the Tower – we know he believed that Warbeck really was Edward IV’s son.
On hearing that Edmund had left England secretly – like his brother Lincoln before him – the king assumed he was on his way to Margaret of Burgundy. The previous year she had sent Henry an apology for any wrong she might have done him, but he was convinced that as soon as the earl reached Malines she would make her nephew claim the throne – if he had not done so already. This new threat emerged just as the Warbeck– Warwick business was reaching a crisis.
On 20 August Henry sent writs to the sheriffs of Kent, Norfolk, Suffolk and Essex, and to the wardens of the Cinque Ports, ordering them to prevent anyone from leaving the kingdom without royal permission, in case they planned to join the earl. The principal Tudor henchman in East Anglia, Lord Oxford, was clearly following royal orders when, on the same day, he asked Sir John Paston to find out who had left the area with Suffolk: Paston was also told to arrest those who had escorted him to the coast but stayed behind, as well as anybody else who had known of his flight. The letter’s clumsy prose obscures the sophistication of the security machine it set in motion – information gathering and close surveillance of the region by a wide network of experienced agents, accompanied by systematic interrogation of suspects.
Edmund had not gone to his aunt Margaret as the king supposed, but to Guisnes, one of the two castles guarding Calais, as a guest of its captain, Sir James Tyrell, once a loyal henchman of the House of York. He soon left English territory for St Omer, across the border in Burgundian Artois, where he begged its governor to give him refuge. Henry reacted by sending the comptroller of his household, Sir Richard Guildford, and an experienced diplomat, Richard Hatton, to Brussels to see Archduke Philip, who was the Duke of Burgundy. Having made it plain to Archduke Philip that there would be another full-scale trade war if he did not help, they then went to see Suffolk at St Omer.
They told Suffolk that every European sovereign was bound by treaty to repatriate English rebels, and that if he became a mercenary fighting for another country he would commit treason, and never see England again. Should he return, however, his escapade would be forgiven. He gave in and went home,7 and was able to produce such a convincing excuse for his behaviour that the king pardoned him.8
Even so, Edmund was fined £1,000. Still more damaging from his point of view, King Henry rehabilitated the Howard family – out of favour since 1485 – and helped them to build up their power in East Anglia at the expense of the de la Poles. Distrusted by the king, growing poorer every day and losing local influence, he was being driven further and further down the social scale.
13. Autumn 1499: Edmund de la Pole, Earl of Suffolk
1. Hall, op. cit., p. 495.
2. Sir Thomas More, ‘A Rueful Lamentation on the Death of Queen Elizabeth’, in R.S.Sylvester (ed.), The Complete Works of St Thomas More, Yale, Yale University Press, vol. 1, p. 9.
3. CSP Sp, op. cit., vol. I, 249.
4. LP Hen VII, op. cit., vol. I, pp. 397, 400–1.
5. Vergil, op. cit., p. 127.
6. Cunningham, Henry VII, pp. 187–8.
7. LP Hen VII, op. cit., vol. I, pp. 131–4.
8. Vergil, op. cit., p. 123.
14
Summer 1501: White Rose and White King
‘Solicited, allured and provoked by that old, venomous serpent the Duchess of Burgoyne, ever being the sower of sedition and beginner of rebellion against the King of England, or else stimulate [d] and pricked with envy … with his brother Richard [he] fled again.’
Edward Hall, The Union of the two Noble and Illustre Famelies of Lancaste and Yorke1
In 1501 an English courtier in the service of Emperor Maximilian told him England was tired of the ‘murders and tyrannies’ of Henry VII – a reference to Warbeck and Warwick – and argued Edmund’s claim to the throne. Maximilian replied that he would be only too willing to help ‘one of King Edward’s blood’ regain the crown of England and was ready to spend an entire year’s revenue on doing so. The courtier, a friend of Suffolk, immediately sent word to him.2
The courtier was Sir Robert Curzon, a figure who could only have existed in the late Middle Ages, a professional soldier, jousting hero and self-proclaimed knight errant. When Captain of Hammes, one of the fortresses guarding Calais, despite his duties, Curzon had often been at court and with Suffolk had taken part in the tournament held to celebrate Prince Henry’s investiture as Duke of York. Vergil says he was of humble origin and owed his career to being knighted by the king, but in fact he was of impeccable gentry stock, a Curzon of Kedleston. After repeated requests, Henry had allowed him to resign his captaincy and go on crusade, which he performed by fighting for Maximilian against the Turks in the Balkans, so gallantly that he was created a Reichsfreiherr (Baron of the Empire) and in England was often referred to as ‘My Lord Curzon’.
Suffolk received Curzon’s message shortly before the marriage of Prince Arthur and Katherine of Aragon. No doubt he had learned that he was expected to play a major role in the customary tournaments, which would involve expenses and further financial troubles. By now he had grown to hate Henry. While Vergil says that a need to escape from heavy debts played a part in Edmund’s decision, he makes it clear that ‘party feeling’ was the key factor. This means the earl was in touch with diehard Yorkists – and that there were more than a few of them.3 In July or August 1501, shortly before the royal wedding, Suffolk again took ship secretly, with his younger brother Richard de la Pole. This time, he made up his mind to claim the throne of England. Once more, the Yorkist cause had a leader with a better right to the throne than Henry Tudor and who possessed at least some experience of soldiering.
It was learned that a week earlier Edmund had ‘banqueted’ in London with the Marquess of Dorset, the Earl of Essex and Lord William Courtenay, who all fell under suspicion. (A banquet was not a dinner but a selection of exotic sweetmeats eaten in a luxurious setting – a celebration rather than a meal.) It was also learned that before he sailed Edmund had dined with Courtenay – son and heir of the Earl of Devon, the saviour of Exeter from the ‘Duke of York’. Courtenay was even suspected of advising Edmund to land in the West Country when he launched his invasion.4
Whatever the chronicler Hall may say, Margaret of Burgundy had nothing to do with Edmund’s defection. Although at the beginning King Henry was convinced she was behind it, because of her long record of support for the White Rose and hatred of the Tudors, there is not the slightest hint that Edmund ever tried to contact her. While she may have welcomed the news of his flight, she made no effort to help him. By now she was a disillusioned old woman, who had given up all hope of seeing any of her nephews on the English throne.
Instead of making for Malines, the earl – calling himself ‘The White Rose, Duke of Suffolk’ – made his way to Maximilian’s court at Imst in the Tyrol. The emperor, an impressive-looking man with an eagle’s nose and a lanthorn jaw, not only disliked Henry for more than once outwitting him in diplomatic matters, but also regarded the Tudor as an upstart: like many others in Europe, he had been shocked at the news of the execution of the Earl of Warwick and of Warbeck whom he was still inclined to see as the younger Prince in the Tower. Edmund’s adoption of the title ‘The White Rose’, once used by Warbeck, may have appealed to a man who, as King of the Romans, sometimes called himself ‘The White King’. Edmund denounced Henry VII as a murderer, adding that the king wanted to kill both him and his brother. He then declared he was the rightful King of England, asking Maximilian to help him overthrow the Tudor usurper. He was supported by Sir Robert Curzon, who either fled with him or met him at Imst.
Welcoming Suffolk as a ‘kinsman’ (which meant he recognized him as a fellow sovereign), the emperor explained that for the moment he was unable to help because of his son’s treaty with England. Even so, he gave him a safe conduct to travel anywhere in the empire, while promising to find a way of assisting him. He invited the earl to stay at Imst and after six weeks wrote a letter to Edmund in which he offered to supply him with up to 5,000 troops under a German captain and to find ships for them.
The earl found himself a player on the international stage, recognized as a king in exile. Maximilian sent him to Aix-la-Chapelle with letters of introduction to the city fathers, promising that the ships he needed would be hired in Denmark. It seemed there was every chance of a full-scale Yorkist invasion, especially when Suffolk found another supporter in John, King of Denmark, Norway and Sweden.
His steward, Thomas Killingworth, went to Brunecken in the Tyrol to inform the emperor that Heinrich, Count of Ardek, had offered to find the troops, with his son as their commander, together with the necessary funds which would be made available on St George’s Day (23 April) 1502, when the force would go to Denmark to embark on ships provided by King John.5 But then the emperor – one of the most inept soldiers in Europe – decided he must take a hand. His meddling was so infuriating that Ardek withdrew his offer, thus putting an end to the latest Yorkist invasion.
