rebellions

• Henry VII had to deal with both internal threats and threats from abroad.
• Viscount Lovell and the Staffords were key supporters of Richard III and attempted to raise a rebellion against the King in Easter 1486.
• The rebellions were easily put down by the King’s forces.
• Stafford was executed but Lovell escaped and his younger brother was pardoned.
• The de la Poles were a branch of the Yorkist family tree that survived Bosworth and the events that followed.
• John de la Pole, one of the de la Poles, supported the pretender Lambert Simnel, but came to a sticky end in the Battle of Stoke, 1487.
• Edmund de la Pole, known as 'The White Rose', fled to the Low countries where he was welcomed by the Burgundy court.
• Edmund de la Pole was handed over to Henry in the early 1500s as part of an Anglo-Burgundy peace treaty, and promptly imprisoned in the Tower of London, later to be executed by Henry VIII.
• Richard de la Pole, the youngest of the de la Poles, stayed abroad, but was killed at Pavia in 1525.
• Henry VII tried those who had fought for Richard on grounds of treason.
• Lambert Simnel was ‘identical’ for the Earl of Warwick, and so he claimed to be this grandson of Edward IV.
• Lambert Simnel secured the support of Margaret of Burgundy (always a supporter of Yorkist claimants) and John de la Pole.
• Lambert Simnel made his way with 2000 mercenaries to Ireland, where he was crowned King of England, and then to England.
• Lambert Simnel landed on the Lancashire coast, where the families that had supported Richard III and had suffered hardship under Henry met him.
• Perkin Warbeck claimed to be an heir to the throne of England.
• Perkin Warbeck was a Flemish man, and like Simnel had the backing of a foreign country.
• The French King, Charles VIII was eager to distract Henry away from his designs on Brittany.
• Henry showed clemency towards Warbeck, but abused this clemency and was executed in November 1499.
• Sir William Stanley, Henry’s step Uncle, was Lord Chamberlain and headed the royal household.
• The reason why Henry took these attempts so seriously at the time, and by historians, is due to the level of encouragement and actual support these pretenders got from foreign princes.
• Their heads were raised on poles on London Bridge as a warning to others who considered insurrection as a form of protest.
• The other threats were direct threats to the throne of England.
• They did not only threaten Henry VII's stability, but Henry VIII's also.
• The largest potential threat to Henry's security came from the de la Poles in exile.
• This rebellion also enabled Henry VII to get rid of the earl of Warwick who was potentially the most obvious Yorkist claimant to the throne.
• Warwick was accused of plotting with Warbeck and was beheaded in 1499.
• Warbeck fled to the south of England, and was arrested while trying to escape from the port of Southampton.
• The Cornish rebellion began in Cornwall in 1497.
• In hindsight these attempts seem laughable - that a joiner's son should be crowned King by the Irish Lords, and that a Flemish man should be accepted as the rightful heir to England at the Scottish court.
• This saw the last of the pretenders, and from this point onwards Henry ruled in relative security.
• The riot quickly grew into a rebellion as 15 000 rebels marched to Exeter, Salisbury, Winchester, and then on to Kent.
• What do you suppose these Cornishmen would have done if they had reached Henry VII, and been able to make demands on him? Henry may have lost face, and been forced to retract the tax, had the rebels had succeeded, but it is unlikely it would have led to him losing his crown.
• In 1497, Henry renewed a truce with Scotland and James was forced to abandon his Flemish pretender.
• The Cornishmen felt that it was unfair that they should be taxed to fund a campaign in Scotland, and that by tradition the northern counties should bear the brunt of this taxation.
• Even at Henry VII's death in 1509 there was a Yorkist champion alive and able at any time to act as
• In the cases of Lambert Simnel and Perkin Warbeck, they were actual challenges to the throne.
• On the 17th June, the rebels faced the King's forces at Blackheath - only a few miles away from London, and dangerously close to the royal arsenal at Greenwich.
• They did not intend to usurp the crown, and they did not have the backing of another European monarch.
• The threat to the capital was so severe that London was called to arms.
• Thousands were slain and the three ringleaders, Michael Joseph, James Touchet and Lord Audley were captured, tried and executed.