The peerage which had turned out in force for the coronation was less eager the following year, when Henry faced his first serious challenge: the appearance of a youth purporting to be Edward, Earl of Warwick (the son of Edward IV’s brother
George, Duke of Clarence, by Isabel Neville), but better known to us as Lambert Simnel. The real Earl of Warwick was a prisoner in the Tower, where he would spend virtually his entire life. In the early stages of this plot, Henry tried to take the wind out of its sails by parading Warwick through the streets of London, to prove that the pretender in Ireland was nothing but a fraud. It is possible that Simnel bore some physical resemblance to Warwick, although it is difficult to credit the Earl of Kildare, who induced the Irish Parliament to recognise the youth as their rightful king, with enough naivety to have taken this pretence seriously.
The real leader of the rebels in 1487 was John de la Pole, Earl of Lincoln. He actually had a credible claim to the throne in his own right, as the eldest son of Elizabeth (the sister of Edward IV) by the Duke of Suffolk. But he had made his peace with Henry soon after Bosworth, and was actually one of the king’s councillors when the Simnel plot began. However, while Henry was on an Easter pilgrimage in East Anglia in April, news reached him of Lincoln’s flight to Flanders, where he was raising mercenaries. Having hastened to Walsingham to make his vows at the great shrine of Our Lady, Henry rushed back to London via Cambridge, and then headed towards the Midlands to prepare against the threat of invasion. The great stronghold of Kenilworth was chosen as his base, and became the virtual seat of government for the summer. Meanwhile, Lincoln took his mercenaries to join the rebels in Dublin, and was present at Simnel’s coronation as Edward VI on 24 May. He led the Yorkist forces across the Irish Sea early in June, and faced Henry VII at Stoke (near Newark) on 16 June. Had he proven victorious he would doubtless have dealt with the wretched Simnel rather more harshly than Henry VII did, and pursued his own claim instead. But Lincoln and his henchmen fell in battle while Simnel was captured and treated with unwonted clemency for a Tudor rebel: put to work in the king’s kitchens.
After the victory at Stoke, Henry made a second royal progress, this time through the northern heartlands of Yorkist sentiment, in another attempt to defuse or deter potential opposition. He went by way of Nottingham, Pontefract and York to Durham and Newcastle, and spent a couple of weeks in the far north-east before returning to London by way of Raby Castle (the great stronghold of the Nevilles), Richmond, Ripon, Pontefract, Newark, Stamford and Leicester. His decision later that year to have his wife, Elizabeth, formally crowned as queen may have been a further attempt to garner support among old Yorkists.
The second impostor to trouble Henry’s uneasy settlement was Perkin Warbeck (‘Perkin’ was a diminutive form of ‘Peter’), who, for much of the 1490s, was to tour the capitals and courts of neighbouring countries as the figurehead for Yorkist conspiracy against the Tudors. Once again, the trouble started in the old Yorkist stronghold of the Irish Pale. Warbeck, who came from the Low Countries, was apparently selected for his role on the basis of his good looks. He had arrived in Ireland as a servant to a merchant clothier who, among other things, used him to parade his fine wares around the ports they visited - Perkin seems to have been one of history’s first recorded male models. He caught the eye of Yorkists on the look-out for a suitable mannequin, and it was decided that he should masquerade as Edward
Perkin Warbeck, the man whose claim to be Edward IV’s second son, Richard of York, plagued Henry VII for a decade. The portrait helps explain not only his early career as a male model but also the success of his pretence: there is a certain resemblance to Edward IV.
IV’s second son, Prince Richard - a part he had to learn English in order to play. The cause of the pretender was eagerly taken up by England’s enemies in 1492, first by James IV of Scotland and then by Charles VIII of France. The peace of Etaples, which brought to an end Henry’s phoney war against France in 1492, forced Perkin to abandon France for the protection of the Yorkist matriarch Margaret, Dowager Duchess of Burgundy, in the Netherlands. (It was fortunate for Henry and the Tudors that Margaret, the widow of Duke Charles the Bold, had no children of her own to challenge for the English crown.) Burgundian support for the impostor led to a trade-war between England and the Netherlands, but it is typical of Henry VII that in his supreme caution he considered no more direct action than that.
A complex web of Yorkist conspiracy and Tudor espionage was spun over the next few years, with a full tally of defections, arrests and executions - most notably of Sir William Stanley, brother-in-law of the king’s mother, a man who had fought for Henry at Bosworth. The plotting culminated in Warbeck’s attempt to land at Deal in Kent on 3 July 1495. But Henry’s effective counter-espionage had already drawn the teeth of the plan. When Warbeck’s advance party was ignominiously defeated by local levies - a defeat doubly bitter in a county which was both notoriously unstable and traditionally Yorkist - he kept to his ship and made for Ireland, where he tried in vain to take the port of Waterford. Failing there, he took refuge over winter in Scotland at the court of James IV, who treated him royally enough and arranged his marriage to a Scottish noblewoman. In the meantime, the spinning of the wheel of fortune in European affairs had made the Burgundians anxious for English friendship, which in turn caused them to cut off Warbeck’s support in the Low Countries. Despite the lack of European backing, James IV launched an invasion of England on Warbeck’s behalf. Although James soon retreated (on realising that the English troops coming to meet him were intending to greet him as an invader rather than as a liberator), Henry decided on a retaliatory expedition against Scotland. Over the winter of 1496-97 he raised loans and secured an ample grant of taxation from Parliament. A substantial force was gathered in the north, with Lord Daubeney, one of Henry’s former companions in exile, at its head.
The great invasion, however, was frustrated by events farther south. The levy of taxation for war in the north excited the resentment of the south-western counties of England, whose men saw no reason to pay for the protection of their distant compatriots in the northern Marches. Initially stirred up by the oratory of a lawyer, Thomas Flamank, and led by a blacksmith, Michael Joseph, the revolt soon spread from Cornwall into the nearby counties. A local magnate, Lord Audley, put himself at its head and led the force in a march eastwards, by way of Winchester and the pilgrims’ way to Kent. But Kent proved as unresponsive to the Cornishmen as it had to Warbeck, so the rebels camped on Blackheath, overlooking London, uncertain of their next move. Henry, having recalled Daubeney and his men from the borders, waited until he had a massive superiority in numbers before moving against them, which he did, to decisive effect, on Saturday 17 June 1497. Executing only the ringleaders, he pardoned most of the rebels, though whether out of clemency or for fear of pushing his luck is far from clear. Meanwhile, hoping to take advantage of the disorder in England, Warbeck sailed for Cornwall by way of Cork, and James once more led his troops across the border. But James was beaten back by a force raised by the Earl of Surrey, Warden of the Marches, while Warbeck, having been hounded out of Ireland, finally set foot upon English soil for the first time in Cornwall. He found that the miserably armed men who rallied to his standard were no match for the walls and guards of Exeter (a city traditionally stout in self-defence), and as the forces of Daubeney and Henry converged on the peninsula, he first took flight and then threw himself upon the king’s mercy.
The Perkin Warbeck affair was not yet over. In June 1498 he briefly slipped the leash, only to find himself, after recapture, immured more securely in the Tower of London. There he made the acquaintance of the Earl of Warwick, and the final act in his tragicomedy commenced. A conspiracy began, or so we are told, to seize control of the Tower and challenge Henry from the very citadel of his power. If not complete fiction (for revealingly few records survive of this obscure affair), then the conspiracy was at best the work of informers and agents provocateurs. The upshot was a series of show trials in November 1499, resulting in the executions of Warbeck and a handful of accomplices. More usefully, it gave Henry a welcome pretext to remove a far more threatening figure from the scene. The Earl of Warwick, foremost among his potential rivals for the throne, was beheaded for alleged involvement on 29 November 1499.