The Tudor Rose Part 17

Elizabeth waved the sordid details aside with shaking hands. After all these years the names of the murderers seemed to matter so little. "How was it done?" she demanded, in a voice which croaked huskily.

"Must you know?" asked Margaret, regarding her with anxious pity.

"Yes. Yes. If they suffered it I can bear to hear it."

"This John Dighton says that they-wrapped them around with the bedcovers and smothered them. That the little King was asleep but that the younger one called out to warn him."

"And are you sure that he did not escape?"

"How could he escape; with two strong men and another waiting below?"

Elizabeth's love for d.i.c.kon was such that even then hope died hard. "Or that he was not just left for dead and crawled away somewhere afterwards? Or that one of them did not take pity on him?"

"Those butchers carried down the bodies to show to Tyrrell."

"It is only this Dighton's word."

"And Tyrrell's."

"They were master and man. They would naturally tell the same story."

For a long time there was silence in the Queen's bedroom. Sad as the flickering out of the new life which had so recently been born into it, the gloom of such a deed seemed to put out the sunshine. "And those poor innocent bodies?" asked Elizabeth presently, her voice little more than a whisper.

"It seems that the two men were frightened and buried them hastily beneath the bottom stair as Tyrrell told them. But Tyrrell says that when King Richard heard of it he was uneasy. They were Yorkists, of his own brother's blood, he said. They must be buried in sacred ground and a solemn requiem said over them. Yet he had wanted them dead. Such inconsistency taxes my credulity."

"But Richard was like that. It was as if there were two Richards: one whom you hated and one whom you-came dangerously near to loving. I can imagine that he could deliberately kill and yet worry about the shriving of his victim's soul. And his family arrogance was prodigious."

"Then perhaps it is true. You knew him better than I," said Margaret, rising with a sigh. "At any rate Will Slaughter told somebody that the following night he saw a shuffling old priest and a man m.u.f.fled to the eyes creep to the place and exhume them. And now, as you know, the priest is dead."

"And so all this renewal of agony has been to no purpose, Madam? Henry has not even their poor bones to show."

"But the public confessions of these two men have persuaded people that the Duke of York is dead."

Elizabeth lay back with closed eyes. "And I suppose that every tavern in London hums with it."

"Say rather every tavern in England!" said Margaret. "And everywhere the name of your Uncle Richard is execrated."

With the perfect timing of a man who has escaped an unpleasant half-hour with a woman, Henry came to join them. "I am sorry, Elizabeth, that you must go through all this again," he said. "But at least it will serve to kill this widespread belief that was becoming so dangerous to our dynasty."

"For the sake of our children's security I can bear it," Elizabeth a.s.sured him.

"I would not go so far as to say security," he said cautiously. "But how could I expect foreign powers to conclude marriages with them while pretenders kept digging at the foundations of my throne? Now we will invite the Spanish Amba.s.sador to dine again."

"That must be a matter for much satisfaction," said Elizabeth expressionlessly. "But who, then, is the young man in Flanders?"

"Does it matter?" shrugged Henry.

"No, I suppose it does not," agreed Elizabeth. "And will Sir James Tyrrell be given a governorship or something on the Isle of Wight too?"

"Be patient, my child!" advised Margaret, touching her gently on the shoulder.

Henry eyed his wife with uncertainty, wishing she would not speak like that. "Let Tyrrell have his day," he said, gathering up some of his everlasting doc.u.ments. "He has served my purpose. Later, you will see. I shall deal with him."

But for once Henry was over-optimistic. Belief that is based upon desire dies hard. There were many Englishmen who had cause to want back a son of Edward the Fourth. Archbishop Morton, as Chancellor of the Exchequer, had proved too clever an extortioner. Henry's trade reprisals against Flanders had hit the London merchants hard-so hard that they wrecked the rich Steelhouse wharf where foreigners from the Hanseatic towns reaped double harvest from the trade they might not enjoy. And practical as he was, the Tudor lacked the common touch which had made many a worse King better loved. So that, in spite of those hard-won and gruesome confessions, interest in the pretender grew.

It was like a cloud above the Tudors' lives. At first it had been just something which they joked about. But gradually, as the years went on and more and yet more people believed-or, for their own ends, pretended to believe-that a son of Edward's still lived, it began to darken their world-and perhaps even to cloud their own certainty. Because it affected them both it brought Henry and Elizabeth closer together. But it affected them differently. To Henry, with his poor claim to the throne, the whole affair stood for affront and fear; whereas to Elizabeth-although it brought fear for her family-it never really ceased to hold a shining element of hope. A hope which she wore herself out trying to extinguish, knowing it for the crazy thing it was.

ALTHOUGH THERE WAS LITTLE money forthcoming for the Queen to buy herself silver shoe-buckles, there always seemed to be plenty of money to pay the King's spies. Seeing that even murderers' confessions could not quench the rumour that one of the Princes had escaped, he drew carefully h.o.a.rded gold from his coffers and sent a whole posse of spies to comb the towns of Western Europe and to ferret around the household of the Dowager d.u.c.h.ess of Burgundy. They were a long time gone, and when they came back and began to piece their information together it was not very consistent. But they had at least found a name for the mysterious young man who was beginning to be known abroad as the Duke of York and sometimes-to Henry's exasperation-as Richard the Fourth of England.

It was the unromantic bourgeois name of Perkin Warbeck.

"Or was it Osbeck?" they debated.

They really did not seem very sure. But they were all agreed that he had lived in Picardy, in the prosperous town of Tournay.

"Then how is it," asked Elizabeth, who had been summoned to the King's room to hear them, "that he speaks such faultless English?"

"Jean de Warbeck, his father, being a free burgess of the town, sent him into commercial houses in Antwerp and Middlesburg, where he had much to do with English merchants," one of Henry's spies told her. "We have proof that one year he was there from Christmas until Easter."

"Not very long in which to learn a language," pointed out Sir William Stanley, sceptically.

"In order to perfect it, Sir, he was sent into Portugal in the household of Sir Edward Brampton, and remained there for months," he was told.

"But still in a foreign country," said Elizabeth, remembering for how long a time a faint French accent had clung to her husband's speech in spite of his being Welsh bred and born.

"It is possible that this young man may actually have been born in England, Madam, while his parents were on a commercial visit here," explained Archbishop Morton, who had been invaluable in a.s.sembling the varied and conflicting evidence. "Jean de Warbeck was, it seems, a converted Jew, and it has even been suggested that either for that reason or in order to encourage the Flemish trade your ill.u.s.trious father himself may have stood G.o.dfather to the child."

"Are his parents dead?" asked Lord Stanley.

"His mother, Katherine de Faro, is thought to be still alive."

"And was this Katherine de Faro particularly beautiful?" enquired Jasper Tudor with a meaning smile, joining in the conversation from the chair to which illness now confined him.

"Of that we have no evidence, milord," the informers said solemnly, surprised by his seeming irrelevance. "But probably, since the young man himself is said to have the a.s.set of good looks-"

"If you are suggesting, my good uncle, that this Warbeck child was something more than G.o.dson to my father," interrupted Elizabeth crisply, "then I think your ingenious idea is shattered by the unlikelihood of his Grace bestowing upon him the name of Peter, or any of its absurd diminutives."

"How did this Perkin turn up in Ireland in the first place?" asked Lord Stanley, returning more realistically to the matter in hand.

Archbishop Morton consulted a voluminous sheaf of papers. "For the sake of travel, or for some love of adventure which was in him, he appears to have gone there to a.s.sist a Breton merchant called Pregent Meno, who dealt in velvets and other expensive fabrics," he said.

"Then it was probably these fine fabrics bedecking his elegant person which so impressed the Irish and bedevilled them into believing that he must be some important personage!" suggested Stanley, with his rich indulgent laugh. "Well, write the whole matter down," ordered the King, who had been listening in attentive silence.

And as the Palace clerks made a great shuffling with their parchments and inkhorns milord Archbishop, who had been standing beside him, leaned closer. "It is an interesting story, Sir, and would look well in print," he suggested, his fine dark eyes glittering with lively intelligence.

"And probably more persuasive to the ma.s.ses than in ma.n.u.script," agreed Henry, making a note to write yet again to his Holiness in Rome about a Cardinal's hat for so able a Primate. "Well, milords, that should lay this bogey for ever and set the Queen's mind at rest," he added more formally, in that precise, rather high-pitched voice of his, while drawing his gown about him and rising. "I would have you know that I have already written to the Archduke acquainting him with our findings and asking him to expel this gross impostor from Flanders. So now let us leave these good people to prepare their news for the printing press while we betake ourselves to the council-chamber. There are fresh dispatches arrived from their most Christian Majesties of Spain, and we would discuss the all-important matter of the marriage of our right well-beloved son the Prince of Wales with their daughter, Princess Katherine of Aragon."

Elizabeth, taking his courteously outstretched hand and allowing him to escort her from the room, was sensible of the new lightness of his step. "So you see it turns out to be, as I told you, just another foolish pother over another tradesman's son," he said smugly, at parting. But, while agreeing with the common sense of his words, Elizabeth shared nothing of his relieved lightness. As she pa.s.sed along the gallery towards the garden with her ladies she experienced an extraordinary flatness, as if some hope held insanely in the back of her mind had once again been dispelled. So that coming upon Sir William Stanley and Sir Robert Clifford standing together beneath an archway, she felt impelled to ask, "And what do you two gentlemen make of it?"

Each of them held a doc.u.ment from which dangled the royal seal, and they had been so close in conversation and ceased speaking so abruptly at her approach that she was sure they had been still talking about Perkin Warbeck.

"In spite of all this rea.s.suring evidence, the King has very sensibly issued orders to all of us to hold ourselves and our men in armed readiness in case of trouble," replied Sir William, covering his embarra.s.sment with a statement of fact which was no answer at all.

"And what do you think, Sir Robert?" persisted Elizabeth, trying to make her voice as cold and casual as possible. "You who were at first so much impressed that you lived for several months in the pretender's entourage?"

Robert Clifford's position was a delicate one, and although he now enjoyed the King's favour the Queen's forthright way of speaking disconcerted him. "All the carefully ama.s.sed information we have just been listening to must, of course, be correct," he answered carefully. "But the backers in this business were singularly fortunate in finding a young man who so much resembles your Grace's family."

Although this was the very confirmation which Elizabeth's heart sought, her chin went up proudly and her hand went to the locket beneath her gown. "Surely your judgment must be at fault," she rebuked him, "if it ever saw anything in common between a mercer's son and my father's!"

Like a good Court Chamberlain, Sir William hastened to say the tactful word. "If either of us really believed for a moment that this Perkin Warbeck was your Grace's brother," he swore, tapping the summons he held in one hand with the back of the other, "your Grace must know that I would not lift my sword against him."

But Elizabeth left them feeling that the good man was both worried and uncertain. She wished above everything that she could see her Aunt Margaret of Burgundy and find out just how much that woman, whom she remembered with so much liking, had been activated by hatred of the Lancastrians and how much by belief in Perkin as a nephew. It must be more than ten years since Margaret Plantagenet had seen the real d.i.c.kon in England, when he was only a child of eight. After ten years, confronted by a grown man, could anyone be certain? Could she herself, who had seen him more recently? But of course her heart would cry out at sight of him and tell her. And it would all be confirmed because he would remember things-small foolish things which only the real d.i.c.kon would know. But why think about it? Why stand there with the tears in her eyes? Why keep recalling the loveableness of his personality, or the enchantment of his smile? d.i.c.kon was dead. Smothered, poor terrified precious, by Dighton's or Forest's rough, h.e.l.l-hound hands. And had not she herself dreamed of Ned's crying out to her during that long night?

To hope to see d.i.c.kon again in this world was madness. Of course Margaret of Burgundy, whatever she believed, was acting merely as the adoring sister of a dead Yorkist King. Only the previous evening Elizabeth had heard her husband dictating his letter to the young Archduke Philip and complaining that her malice was both causeless and endless. Henry could not, it seemed, rid himself of the conviction that she had been responsible, too, for all that trouble when Lambert Simnel had impersonated Warwick. "Being a woman past childbearing, she now brings forth full-grown imposters," he had written. "Can she not instead be grateful for the joys which Almighty G.o.d serves up to her in beholding her niece Elizabeth in such honour, with children to inherit the throne of England?" As usual, Henry had set forth his arguments with reasonableness and restraint, preferring to conclude with a request rather than with the threats which he was undoubtedly in a position to make. "As Charles of France discarded this impostor," he had written, "so I entreat you to do the same."

And although the fifteen-year-old Archduke-advised, no doubt, by his father the Emperor-wrote back in due course, regretting that he had no power to expel the Dowager d.u.c.h.ess or her guests from his territory, Elizabeth felt that sooner or later Henry would find means to force him into doing so.

"And where will the poor garcon of Tournay go then?" she wondered, immediately chiding herself for the thought because it did not matter at all.

But all too soon she and Henry were to know.

"The pretender has landed in England," people shouted; and some, in their excitement, so far forgot themselves as to cry aloud with love in their voices, "Duke Richard has come home!"

All London was in an uproar. For an hour or two the Court seethed with excitement. And then fresh messengers clattered in over London Bridge, bringing more exact tidings, and the thing became a sorry jest, adding to Henry's prestige and somehow filling Elizabeth with secret, painful shame. The inglorious fact was that although Perkin's little borrowed fleet lay for several hours off Kent, with the money of his Continental backers behind him and the prayers of many a Yorkist wellwisher in England awaiting him, he himself had not set foot on English soil at all. He had sent a small advance party ash.o.r.e to reconnoitre in some obscure fishing village, and the local Kentishmen, Tudor loyal, had lulled them with promises of food and adherence and then slaughtered them with whatever implements they could lay hands on, "trusting to G.o.d," as they put it, "that King Henry would come before the ships' companies landed and wreaked vengeance." But the foreign-looking ships had sent neither help nor vengeance, but sailed away, leaving their unfortunate comrades behind.

"Which proves that he is no Plantagenet!" declared Elizabeth disgustedly.

It had been such a pitiful attempt that the sudden shock of it was soon forgotten. De Puebla, the Spanish amba.s.sador, even reported that his royal master-who had hitherto shown himself much concerned about the insecurity of Henry's claim-considered all such pretenders merely food for laughter. But Henry, more hara.s.sed than any of his subjects, had all the ports watched and his own Lord Chamberlain brought to trial. Nothing worse came to light concerning him than that he had sworn that if the would-be invader could be proved to be Edward's son he would not lift his sword against him, but this was sufficient to condemn him. Elizabeth, who had heard the words spoken in their innocuous context, supposed that Sir Robert Clifford must have reported them to the King out of spite or in order to wash out his own near-defection in the past, and she would have gone straightway to her husband about it; but Archbishop Morton a.s.sured her that it was known to both of them that Sir William had promised much of his wealth to this flickering Yorkist cause. And it occurred to her, as it might also have occurred to Henry, that the invader might indeed be Edward's son, and yet no Duke of York. The people were appalled that a man like the great Lord Stanley's brother should lose his life over so small an affair, all the more so in view of the King's habitual clemency; and yet they were impressed by the fact that neither family connections nor high places could protect a man from the results of suspected treachery.

And Elizabeth, covertly watching her husband, thought that he had become more secretive than ever and noticed how he had begun to age. She knew that, whatever private evidence he might have had of Sir William's guilt, he must have found it hard to sign the death warrant of a man whose intervention had saved the day for him at Bosworth. All his natural caution must have warned him of the risk of losing his own stepfather's loyalty; and more than anything else he must have hated to bring such bitter grief into the family circle of his mother.

Why had he done this thing, Elizabeth wondered, just when he could so ill afford unpopularity? Henry was not naturally cruel. Rather, he turned from violence. But fear, sometimes, could drive a naturally clement man to cruelty. Could it be possible that when it came to this question of the succession Henry was mortally afraid? That all his pride and self-sufficiency and vaunting dragon banners were but a cloak for the pitiful sense of inferiority felt by a man who had neither the clear right nor the personal attractiveness for the heritage he had usurped? A cloak which excluded the sympathy she would so willingly have given.

For the first time the wild idea occurred to Elizabeth that perhaps Henry might half believe in the thing which he had taken such pains to disprove. That he, too, was not quite sure that Perkin was an imposter.

But, whether he did or not, life went on much as usual. Elizabeth bore Henry another daughter, who, from the first moment of her gurgling baby laughter, brought her nothing but joy. They called her Mary, and young Harry, her brother, adored her. It was good for him, their mother thought, to curb his boisterous strength sometimes and play with her gently. Elizabeth was happily occupied with all her children. Arthur was mostly away at Ludlow with his tutor, and she was proud of his scholarly prowess, although sometimes of late she had worried over his health. She tried to prepare her elder daughter for the high matrimonial place which would undoubtedly be hers and at the same time to cure her haughtiness; and not to spoil young Harry, however much she was tempted to do so because of the turbulent affection he showed her.

Happy with her family at Richmond or Greenwich, Elizabeth saw little of Henry, who seemed to be perpetually going by barge to Westminster. He worked harder than most of his subjects, improving the courts of justice, controlling the dangerous power of the great barons by limiting their liveried retinues, and increasing the country's prosperity by creating markets abroad and by encouraging the discoveries of new countries by such splendid sailors as Cabot. He was full, too, of the prestige which would accrue to England from the proposed Spanish alliance, and spent hours closeted with de Puebla, the Amba.s.sador, haggling about a handsome dowry and trying to arrange for a proxy marriage.

But the pretensions to a better Plantagenet claim which dogged Henry's reign were not to leave them in peace for long. There came a memorable evening when all their domestic activities were overshadowed by portentous news from Berwick. As they sat listening to the musicians after supper a messenger from that northern border town sought an immediate audience with the King, and hurried into the hall, dusty and exhausted, to report that Perkin Warbeck, forced at last from Flanders by the people's reactions to Henry's trade reprisals, had landed in Scotland. After two testimonies to the Tower murder and the printed pamphlets about his, Perkin's, parentage the sheer impertinence of it left the English Court breathless. True, Edinburgh was not much nearer in miles than Ireland or Flanders; but this time no protecting sea lay between.

"What are the Scots thinking of to allow it when your Grace has been to such pains to make a lasting treaty with them?" expostulated Sir Reginald Bray, who had done so much to strengthen the Tudor King financially.

But in the dispatches from the much fought-over town of Berwick it was clearly stated that Perkin Warbeck had landed by the King of Scots' invitation.

"You mean that James actually treats him as if he were royalty?" exclaimed Elizabeth.

"It would seem so," said Henry, still holding the letter between his hands. "As absurdly as Margaret of Burgundy did when I succeeded in prising him out of France."

"But James would not do so merely to annoy you?"

"One would scarcely suppose so after there has been talk of his marrying my elder daughter."

Elizabeth rose from her chair beside the fire and began to pace back and forth between the standing courtiers. "Oh no, not James!" she repeated, in sore perplexity. "In spite of all the border foraging that goes on, everyone holds James the Fourth of Scotland to be one of the most cultured men in Christendom. Bernard Andreas says he can turn a Latin phrase as fluently as he can talk French with Charles' envoys or discuss crofts and cattle with his Highlanders in their own Gaelic. His word is his bond. I have always thought he would be a son-in-law to be proud of." She stopped in front of her husband and spoke with urgent informality. "Henry, do you not see that if James acknowledges him it is because he really believes him to be my brother? This-torturing uncertainty-is coming very near home!"

All looked upon her with compa.s.sion. Even Henry could comprehend something of her distress and tried his best to rea.s.sure her. "There is no uncertainty at all after the conclusive evidence about your brothers' deaths and the facts we have now a.s.sembled about this impostor," he said. "And in any case James can never have seen the real Duke of York, so why should his opinion affect you?" Yet when the King turned to enquire of the messenger what forces Warbeck had brought with him the question sounded merely perfunctory. This wholesale deluding of sane people had gone on so long that it was becoming uncanny. It was not the material force of the young man that mattered but his personal magnetism. One could fight successfully against a stated number of ships or hors.e.m.e.n or archers, but where was the weapon with which to fight against charm? For, as the messenger admitted, the levelheaded King of Scotland, who had but recently been discussing the advantages of a marriage with the Tudor King's daughter, had received Margaret of Burgundy's protege doubtfully, questioning him again and again with true Scottish caution; and yet he-like all the rest-had been persuaded.

"Why should my wife imagine James Stuart to be any better than the rest? He only pretends to believe in him," argued Henry, alone afterwards with Morton in the privacy of his own work-closet. "This brash young merchant is like a hostage held in all sovereigns' hands save mine, and they bandy him about between them. He is something they can throw into the scales against me, in order to undermine my security when they think I am becoming too powerful. And as a trouble-maker he is nearly as valuable to them spurious as real."

"It is only Clarence's son Warwick who is real," Morton reminded him. "And he is safely in the Tower."

And so they made themselves believe until James of Scotland gave his beautiful cousin, Katherine Gordon, to the so-called Duke of York in marriage.

Most people about the Court were reduced to horrified silence by this amazing move. Only the ageing Jasper Tudor had the hardihood to sum their thoughts in words. "One might give a man a bodyguard of gentlemen as a political gambit, as Charles of France did," he said, "but not a bride of one's own blood. That is inconceivable. Unless one genuinely believed in him."

The King himself came as near to rage as Elizabeth had ever seen him, for Katherine Gordon was his cousin too. And it did not improve his temper that the suave de Puebla made some excuse to return to Spain, and that Ferdinand and Isabella let the matter of their daughter's marriage drop.

"That is what this poisonous imposter has cost me!" raged Henry, running his bony hands over his thinning hair. "For six years or more his antics have tormented me, and where will the end of it be?"

"And do you not see, Sir, that any pretender makes a cat's-paw for your enemies?" Elizabeth overheard Morton say. They are willing to take risks because if this little Flemish popinjay loses his life in some crazy venture Warwick will still be safe."

"And a thorn in my side!" said Henry thoughtfully, unaware that his wife stood within earshot. "Although he is weak-minded and his father was an attainted traitor, you think it is really Warwick whom Ferdinand and Isabella mind about most?"

The future Cardinal was easily the cleverest man in England and the only one in whom Henry ever confided. "I think," Elizabeth heard him say, "that there will be no Spanish marriage so long as Warwick lives."

Henry heaved the sigh of a very weary man. "Then it behoves me to catch the cat's-paw," he said, "and perhaps Heaven may show me how to use him myself."

THE WORDS THAT SHE had overheard meant little to Elizabeth at the time, and soon there were more urgent things to think about. In the autumn James and Perkin invaded England as everybody had expected they would; and although Henry's forces were so well prepared that the invasion extended not much farther than a border raid, its savagery was unprecedented. Perkin's foreign supporters had been added to James's troops, and the desolation of sacked villages which they left behind them was appalling. It was Perkin himself who appealed on behalf of the Northumbrians and persuaded James to turn back-partly, perhaps, through pity for people whom he claimed as his subjects, and partly because he had wit enough to realize that burning people's homes was a poor way to win their support. Such tactics might satisfy James's ambition by wresting from England the coveted town of Berwick, but they certainly would not help to smooth his own pathway to a crown.

For weeks the people of England lived in a state of tension. In northern towns there were constant outcries that the invaders were at their gates, and all over the country children were pulled into their homes at dusk with shrill cries of "The Scots will get you!" As usual Henry Tudor had set forth, if not to fight, at least to direct operations; and as usual he rode home to London triumphant. But he rode home a tired and irritated man. Besides the cruel loss of life, the invasion had cost so much money that he immediately summoned representatives from all the towns in his realm to a Great Council at Westminster, where they willingly voted him a grant of one hundred and twenty thousand pounds for defence against Scotland and-much less willingly-the promise of loans to the amount of forty thousand pounds.

"Henry always makes his wars pay!" chuckled his Uncle Jasper admiringly; which must have been almost the last joke he enjoyed before he died. And the people who were left alive found it rather a poor one, anyway, because Archbishop Morton and Sir Reginald Bray not only set their underlings to collect the promised sums from every individual, house by house, and town by town, but were so extraordinarily thorough and extortionate in their demands that they were soon suspected of having enriched the King's coffers by a sum far in excess of the agreed amount. Morton, in particular, as Chancellor of the Exchequer, produced an ingenious device by means of which he delved into people's purses either by the argument that they paid too little or that they possessed too much. Men called it "Morton's fork" and many an honest man was ruined by it, writhing for years on one or other of its merciless p.r.o.ngs.

The popularity of Morton's royal master waned alarmingly. And when the time came for the tax-collectors to take up contributions in the West of England the men of Cornwall flatly refused to pay. Remote from the rest of England and completely indifferent to what happened there, they saw no reason why their hard-working lives should be still further impoverished in order to pay for something of which they had scarcely heard-"a little stir of the Scots, soon blown over." "Why should they, who laboured below ground in the tin-mines for a pittance, be expected to pay?" they asked. "Let the leisured people pay." A lawyer called Flammock inflamed them by a.s.suring them that the levy was illegal, and a blacksmith of Bodmin called Michael Joseph sharpened their bills and sickles and led them through Devon into Somerset. From Wells Lord Audley, who had been extortionately taxed himself, led them through Salisbury and Winchester towards London, with their discontented numbers growing all the way. It was all very much like the Peasants' Revolt in Richard the Second's time, thought Elizabeth, who had recently been reading about it to Harry as part of his history lesson.

It became even more like the Peasants' Revolt when the stalwart Cornishmen encamped on Blackheath outside the very walls of London. Even Henry, whose whole attention had been centred on the army he was sending north to punish the Scots, was caught completely by surprise. But he acted promptly. He recalled the main army for the defence of London and put himself at the head of it, sending a smaller force merely for defence purposes to the Scottish border under Elizabeth's new brother-in-law, the Earl of Surrey. The Cornishmen fought valiantly; and although they had only obsolete weapons with which to oppose new Tudor cannon, they disconcerted their opponents by drawing a bow which sped an arrow long as a tailor's yard. It was a very shocking experience for the prosperous citizens of London to look down from their city walls and see an invading army gathered at their gates, and at first almost everyone believed that Perkin Warbeck was leading them. That this was the real invasion, or the return of England's King, who had promised to lighten their cruel taxes-whichever way one cared to look at it. And Elizabeth, who knew that it was only a horde of discontented West-countrymen, looked out over Blackheath too, and tried to imagine how she would have felt had it been her real brother Richard out there. Her despoiled brother battering at the walls of London and her own sons within. On whose side would she have stood? For the first time it came in full force to her understanding how the right of one must necessarily disinherit the other. And for the first time the secret hope that had always flickered in her heart became a fear. Much as she yearned after her young brother, she did not really want Perkin to be d.i.c.kon. And common sense had long ago persuaded her that he was not.

It was only afterwards that she knew how nearly the semblance of that very dilemma had come upon her. When Lord Audley had been executed on Tower Hill and Flammock and Michael Joseph hanged at Tyburn, Henry forgave the Cornishmen and sent them home, showing them none of the severity which had been used towards Perkin's followers when they landed in Kent. Indeed, as the Cornishmen themselves said, they had a sort of safety, because if the King were to hang everyone who objected to his taxations he would have no subjects left. But he could not forgo the opportunity to take some of their pitiful saving. Over and above what they owed, he fined them for their insubordination. So that as soon as they had returned to their far-off county and Perkin landed there they welcomed him as their saviour and cl.u.s.tered round him and bore him to Bodmin as their King. Three thousand strong they marched on Exeter, but Exeter-being a prosperous city which had benefited from Tudor encouragement to trade-would have none of them. Had Perkin landed a month or two earlier he might have been more fortunate; but now there was none of that first fine flood of enthusiasm which would have borne him along to the very gates of London. And Henry, hearing that the man who had caused him so many sleepless nights was in England and actually besieging one of his princ.i.p.al cities, left everything and hurried westwards with all the armed men he could raise.

Perkin, having fired the gates of Exeter and yet been repulsed, led his men on to Taunton, prepared to fight his way to London; but the Earl of Devonshire, to whom the Queen's sister Katherine was married, rose loyally for the Tudor. He called upon all the Devon Courteneys to surround Perkin's little army until the King's forces should arrive; so there was no more hope for the Yorkist pretender. With a small company of hors.e.m.e.n Perkin escaped in the night to the sanctuary of Beaulieu Abbey in Hampshire. Henry, delighted with the turn events had taken, presented his own sword to the gallant city of Exeter and promptly had Beaulieu surrounded. "Now, at last," he said to Thomas Stafford, who had ridden to Exeter with him, "the cat's-paw of Europe is in my hand!"

"Save that the ubiquitous pest is in sanctuary!" sighed the sore-tried Mayor of Exeter.

"For the peace of the realm the Pope would surely permit your Grace to drag him thence by force," pointed out Stafford.

"Your Grace could then put him to death and be rid of him for ever," the Earl of Devonshire backed him up eagerly.

"And have the truth about him go with him to the grave?" said Henry, with his tight-lipped smile. "No. Death is too easy. For six years he has cankered my life and set half Europe by the ears. He himself is nothing, yet lives and money have been poured out because of his impertinent pretensions. We do not want any more heroics about the Yorkists sung in Tudor England. I will make him confess again and again before all my loyal people and before all the poor fools whom he has deluded. By all we hear, he is a squeamish, sensitive fellow," he added more lightly, "and may as well pay for his pretty imaginings the price of ridicule. Did not my Uncle Jasper-G.o.d a.s.soil him-once say that ridicule is the surest weapon of all?"