The Last White Rose, page 6
The king linked the rising with the Hextall case, suspecting another Yorkist plot, and one of the motives for Northumberland’s murder had undoubtedly been his betrayal of Richard III at Bosworth.5 ‘Divers affirm that the Northmen bare against the earl continual grudge sith the death of King Richard, whom they entirely loved and highly favoured,’ was what Hall heard fifty years later.6 Nor were the king’s fears soothed when he learned that Egremont had taken refuge with Margaret of York. While Henry’s eyes were fixed on Flanders, Northern England and Ireland, the next conspiracy emerged in the South, from a most unlikely personage.
A mitred abbot who had a seat in the House of Lords, ‘Dan’ John Sant, was as rich and powerful as many temporal peers. Abingdon Abbey was one of the oldest and wealthiest monasteries in England, dominating its beautiful little town amid the lush meadows of northern Berkshire. A fine bridge had recently been built over the Thames here, and during Lent the abbey’s kitchener levied a toll of a hundred fish from every boat passing beneath. The monks’ lands stretched in a block from Eynsham to Dorchester, with outlying properties as far south as Welford in the Lambourn valley.
The thirty or so ‘black monks’ of Abingdon (so called from the colour of their habits) lived a distinctly relaxed interpretation of the Benedictine rule. Instead of sleeping in a dormitory, each monk had his own cubicle, while wine was served at meals on not less than eighty feast days. As in other large monasteries, they employed a staff of at least a hundred servants (who were popularly known as ‘abbey lubbers’) to look after them. Resembling a combination of cathedral and Oxford college, the great abbey must have been an extraordinary sight in such a small town. Stuffed with treasures – jewelled reliquaries, gemencrusted vestments, gold and silver plate – it also had a fine library. Although the imposing church and most of the buildings were torn down during the Dissolution of the Monasteries, the gatehouse (built during Sant’s abbacy) still stands to give us some idea of the grandeur of the place.
Abbot Sant mixed with Berkshire’s leading gentry and merchants, entertaining them at his palatial lodging, in panelled rooms with stained-glass windows. It is likely that he had also been host to the Earl of Lincoln and Lord Lovell, who belonged to Abingdon’s Fraternity of the Holy Cross. (Minsters Lovell and Ewelme were within a day’s ride.) A member of the House of Lords, he was often in London, on excellent terms with the black monks of Westminster since he owned a large house nearby, The Mote in King Street. William Caxton had recently set up shop in Westminster Hall, not far from the abbey, and in 1476 Sant had commissioned the first English printed document from him – a papal indulgence that encouraged the faithful to go on crusade against the Turk.
The abbot of Abingdon must have been familiar with up-to-date political gossip. He had met Henry VII fairly often as the king had stayed at his monastery (twice in July 1488) on journeys to Kenilworth and back to Windsor,7 and entrusted him with important diplomatic missions: during 1488 Sant was one of the ambassadors sent to France to negotiate with Charles VIII. He had also been the papal nuncio in England, Wales and Ireland. Vergil refers to him approvingly,8 unaware of his later behaviour.
One has the impression, then, of a bland, smooth-talking, worldy cleric whose loyalty to the new regime seemed beyond question. Yet the king may have wondered why the Stafford brothers had taken refuge in a dependency of Abingdon, his suspicions perhaps further aroused by Sant’s fury at the infringement of Culham’s sanctuary rights: on 21 May 1486, eight days after the seizure of the Staffords, Sant was bound over for the huge sum of £800. Since then, however, it looks as if the abbot had completely exonerated himself – no doubt he held lengthy conversations with Henry when the king used Abingdon as a staging post and also when being briefed for his mission to France.
His brethren had elected Sant as abbot in 1468, presumably because he possessed the managerial skills needed to run the abbey’s estates. In consequence, he had spent the best years of his life in a position of authority during Edward IV’s second reign, the golden age of Yorkism: perhaps significantly, he was one of the two abbots who officiated at Edward’s funeral. He remained unconvinced by Henry Tudor’s tenuous claim to be the heir of Lancaster. Privately, he believed that the crown belonged to the Plantagenets and that the Earl of Warwick had been robbed of his inheritance and was ready to help anyone who was prepared to do something about it.
We only know of what is sometimes (wrongly) called ‘Abbot Sant’s conspiracy’ from an indictment for treason dated January 1490. A certain John Mayne of Abingdon had been arrested, presumably after being betrayed by an informer and put to the ‘question’ – stretched on the rack or having his feet roasted. He admitted that three years earlier, he and Christopher Swanne, ‘yeoman’, of the same town, had met, ‘falsely and traitorously [en]compassing, conspiring and imagining the destruction of the King’.
They had been collecting donations from Yorkist supporters to finance the Earl of Lincoln’s expedition. (Interestingly, the indictment states that the abbot ‘gave to the said John Mayne a certain sum of money’, and as the date when Mayne and Swanne met was 1 January 1487, this means the earl had been planning a rebellion well before his flight.) A substantial amount of cash was no doubt collected, since he had so many friends in the area. The only study of Sant’s conspiracy suggests that the Berkshire Yorkists were just a handful of monks in contact with one or two like-minded churchmen at Oxford, but its author does not appreciate that the De La Poles were such big local landowners, or that a large number of Abingdon townsmen may have met the earl.9
Undeterred by Lincoln’s failure, on 1 December 1489 Mayne and a London priest called Thomas Rothwell (otherwise Thomas Even) met in the capital and plotted to release the Earl of Warwick, with the object of starting a ‘war against the King, our said Sovereign Lord, to the intent to have destroyed his most royal person, and utterly to put this whole realm in confusion’. They then went to the house of Henry Davy where they found not only Davy but Edward Franke.
Franke, that veteran Yorkist irreconcilable, had been captured after the battle at Stoke and committed to the Tower, but had managed to escape. His unshakeable attachment to the former regime has already been demonstrated. Henry Davy, like Franke a gentleman, was another diehard Ricardian, faithful to the memory of a king who had made him his sergeant-tailor. With Franke, he had been ruined by Bosworth.
The plotters agreed on a plan, or at any rate on the outline of a plan. They decided to ask the Abbot of Abingdon for his advice. That they did so shows they were convinced he would give them a sympathetic hearing. It is likely that Franke had already met the abbot since he had been ‘pricked’ – chosen – as Sheriff of Oxfordshire and Berkshire in 1484, when he had farmed the manors of Bray and Cookham in the latter county. Clearly, the abbot was someone whom they were all convinced could be relied on not to betray their conspiracy to the authorities, and who might even consider joining them.
Mayne then travelled up to Abingdon and gave Sant an outline of what they had in mind, adding that Rothwell would come soon in order to explain the plan to him in more detail. The ‘said Abbot was joyous and bade the said John Mayne choose what he would drink’ (one has the impression of Sant gesturing towards a fifteenth-century drinks cupboard). At the same time, the abbot warned Mayne that the attempt was going to need extremely careful planning. He suggested that while Warwick was being rescued, a letter addressed to him should be dropped as if by accident so that it might be picked up by ‘some good fellow’: the letter would tell the earl to join the plotters at Colchester, presumably to put his pursuers off the scent after he had been released from the Tower.
But when Rothwell arrived Sant grew less enthusiastic, realizing that the man was half-crazy – ‘light-witted’. Even so, he wanted the scheme to go ahead, promising he would talk about it with Edward Franke when he next visited London. Mayne, Rothwell and Christopher Swanne met in Abingdon on 20 December, for further discussions. (Swayne was more than a mere yeomen, being the town’s bailiff – which was tantamount to mayor – and a person of some substance.) Franke remained in London, however. A monk of the abbey, Dan Myles Salley, brought the three a sum of money from Sant that would enable them to finance the conspiracy.10 However, the plot never got off the ground. Within the next few days all the conspirators were arrested, together with the abbot, and charged with treason.
Little is known about Henry VII’s ‘secret service’, but it had its successes and stamping out the Abingdon plot was one of them. Many of the agents seem to have been clerics. Understandably, no identifiable records were kept – although one or two reports have survived – but it is clear that informers were paid bounty money, sometimes on a regular basis: the regime had so many hidden enemies that it could not have survived without them. A number of otherwise inexplicable arrests can only be attributed to their activities. It was undercover spies of this sort who brought Mayne to the authorities’ attention.11
He was swiftly tried and convicted. There was no need for a trial in the case of Edward Franke, who was soon hunted down: having been attainted after Stoke he was already a proscribed traitor whose life was forfeit. According to a contemporary herald’s account, within a matter of days four men suffered on Tower Hill because of their involvement – Mayne, Franke, Davy and another, unnamed man.12 The monk Myles Salley, who had brought the abbot’s money to the conspirators, was also found guilty but eventually pardoned, as was Christopher Swanne, the Bailiff of Abingdon.
John Sant was found guilty, too, but being a cleric he escaped the death penalty. He appears to have been kept in prison until September 1490 when he was bound over and ordered to pay the enormous fine of £1,000 in instalments, besides forfeiting all his lands and goods, although these were restored to him in 1493. In any case, as they consisted of manors in Berkshire and Oxfordshire, they belonged to the abbey. In the same year he bequeathed all his movable goods – personal possessions – to King Henry, ‘in token of all the grace shown to him … praying God for a good continuation of the king’s royal estate’.13 He remained Abbot of Abingdon until his death in 1496.
Yet it is plain that Abbot Sant was no fool. What is so interesting is that he and his friends among the Abingdon townsmen believed that a plot to release Warwick and make him king in Henry Tudor’s place stood a fair chance of winning widespread support. They had been confident enough to risk their lives.
There is some evidence that Henry was seriously alarmed by the conspiracy. When riots broke out among the traders of Abingdon in spring 1492 and a large number were arrested, he stopped the proceedings and ordered their release – it seems that he was keeping an eye on the area, anxious to win support among the locals. It may not be a coincidence that in January 1494, when there was a distinct possibility of a rising in favour of Perkin Warbeck, the king went on progress through Berkshire.
5. Winter 1489–90: The Conscience of Abbot Sant
1. Vergil, op. cit., p. 32.
2. Bacon, op. cit., p. 201.
3. Paston Letters, op. cit., p. 1032.
4. Paston Letters, op. cit., p. 1037.
5. M.A. Hicks, ‘Dynastic Change and Northern Society: The Career of the Fourth Earl of Northumberland’, Northern Society 14 (1978), pp. 78–107.
6. Hall, op. cit., p. 443.
7. Materials, op. cit., vol. II, pp. 337 and 339.
8. Vergil, op. cit., p. 32.
9. D. Luckett, ‘The Thames Valley Conspiracies against Henry VII’, Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research, 68 (1995), pp. 164–72.
10. Rot. Parl., op. cit., vol. VI, p. 436.
11. I. Arthurson, ‘Espionage and Intelligence from the Wars of the Roses to the Reformation’, Nottingham Medieval Studies, 35 (1991), pp. 145–6.
12. Plumpton Corr, op. cit., letter lxxi; Leland, Collectanea, vol. IV, p. 257.
13. Calendar of the Close Rolls, Henry VII (1485–1500), 2 vols, London, H.M.S.O., 1955–63, vol. 1, 672, pp. 196–7.
6
Winter 1491–Autumn 1494: One of the Princes in the Tower?
‘At this time the King began again to be haunted with spirits, by the magic and curious arts of the lady Margaret, who raised up the ghost of Richard duke of York, second son to King Edward the fourth, to walk and vex the King.’
Sir Francis Bacon, The History of the Reign of King Henry VII1
Perkin Warbeck’s arrival on the scene came as a profound shock to the king, who at first wondered whether this really was one of the Princes in the Tower, returned from the dead – Edward IV’s son, the Duke of York. For at the start of his career Perkin seemed most convincing. Quoting people who had met him, the chronicler Hall says, ‘he kept such a princely countenance and so counterfeit a majesty royal that all men did firmly believe that he was extracted of the noble house and family of the Dukes of York’.2 Should this be true, he was infinitely more dangerous than the Earl of Warwick – and Henry was well aware that all too many of his subjects wanted it to be true.
In 1490 there had been yet another abortive plot to rescue Warwick, by Yorkists hoping to exploit the war with France. In February the king acknowledged a letter from the Bishop of Durham reporting the capture of Sir Robert Chamberlain (a former Knight of the Body to Richard III), his two sons and a group of friends at Hartlepool, who had been trying to leave the country for France. Henry asked for ‘these rebels and traitors’ to be sent to him urgently.3
An attainder of October 1491 explains why the king was so keen to lay hands on them. Chamberlain and Richard White, a Norfolk gentleman, had planned to kill him and start a civil war: they had been financed by Charles VIII of France, the ‘ancient enemy to our said sovereign lord’. Their plot must have have hinged on a scheme to replace Henry with Warwick.4 White was charged on 23 August 1490 with engaging in conspiracy and Chamberlain on 17 January 1491, which suggests that both had been under close surveillance for some time. Sir Robert was beheaded on Tower Hill within a month of his arrest but White received a pardon as he stood on the scaffold under the hangman’s rope. (Dramatic reprieves were a feature of fifteenth-century justice, staged to show the king’s merciful nature.)
The French then decided to send an expedition to Ireland in support of Warwick. The brains behind it were those of a Yorkist exile, John Taylor – ‘the elder’ as he signed himself – a middle-aged cloth merchant and former customs officer from Devon. On 15 September 1491 Taylor wrote from Rouen to John Hayes ‘late of Tiverton, Devon’, whom he appears to have met recently during a secret visit. A priest-bureaucrat who had also been in the Duke of Clarence’s service, but was now a receiver of rents at Exeter and Dartmouth for many of the West Country’s leading landowners, Hayes had confided in Taylor that he still felt a secret loyalty to Clarence’s son Warwick.
Coloured by an exile’s nostalgia, Taylor’s letter reminded Hayes of ‘words we spake together in St Peter’s church of Exeter, and at the Black Friars when ye were at your breakfast’. Telling him how to get in touch, Taylor recommends Thomas Gale of Dartmouth:
ye may speak with him by the same token that he and I communed together at matters touching your master’s son in Stockingham Park when Sir John Halliwell hunted therin, and be you not afeared to show all your mind unto him for he is trusty … the token between you and me is that such as I shall send unto shall take you by the thumb.
(Gale was another staunch Yorkist. Once Clerk of the King’s Ships for Richard III, he had lost his job as a consequence of the new regime. Living at Dartmouth, where he had been both the MP and the mayor, he was the ideal man to help an invasion force.)
The real message of Taylor’s letter was that Charles VIII had been advised by his council to help Warwick, ‘your master’s son’. If the earl and his supporters could reach France, then King Charles would provide troops, ships and money. Those who arrived penniless would get financial assistance ‘if they be known for true men for the quarrel’. Taylor adds that help was coming from two other places outside England, by which he must mean Flanders and Ireland. It is likely he hoped to recruit his old friend because he envisaged a Yorkist expedition landing in the West Country and seizing Exeter.
After reading this exceptionally dangerous document, which reached him on 26 November, Hayes threw it into the fire, but it was saved and handed to the authorities, and he was arrested, the letter being copied in his attainder as a traitor in 1492 – the only reason for its survival.5 When the king read it, he must have smiled grimly at one sentence in particular. ‘The [French] king and his council say they will ask nothing in recompense, but … do it for the wrong he did in making Henry King of England.’ John Taylor the Elder would bitterly regret that he had ever put pen to paper.
Instead of landing in the West Country, the French went to Ireland, a mere 120 troops on board two small ships. Disguised as Englishmen, wearing surcoats with the Cross of St George and flying the English flag, they landed somewhere near Cork at the end of November 1491. Taylor, who accompanied them, quickly became aware that after the disastrous episode with Lambert Simnel there was little enthusiasm for taking up arms for Warwick – everyone knew he was locked up in the Tower of London.
