KING HENRY THE SEVENTH did not turn out to be as fine a fellow as the nobility and people hoped,in the first joy of their deliverance from Richard the Third.He was very cold,crafty,and calculating,and would do almost anything for money.He possessed considerable ability,but his chief merit appears to have been that he was not cruel when there was nothing to be got by it.
The new King had promised the nobles who had espoused his cause that he would marry the Princess Elizabeth.The first thing he did,was,to direct her to be removed from the castle of Sheriff Hutton in Yorkshire,where Richard had placed her,and restored to the care of her mother in London.The young Earl of Warwick,Edward Plantagenet,son and heir of the late Duke of Clarence,had been kept a prisoner in the same old Yorkshire Castle with her.
This boy,who was now fifteen,the new King placed in the Tower for safety.Then he came to London in great state,and gratified the people with a fine procession;on which kind of show he often very much relied for keeping them in good humour.The sports and feasts which took place were followed by a terrible fever,called the Sweating Sickness;of which great numbers of people died.Lord Mayors and Aldermen are thought to have suffered most from it;
whether,because they were in the habit of over-eating themselves,or because they were very jealous of preserving filth and nuisances in the City (as they have been since),I don't know.
The King's coronation was postponed on account of the general ill-health,and he afterwards deferred his marriage,as if he were not very anxious that it should take place:and,even after that,deferred the Queen's coronation so long that he gave offence to the York party.However,he set these things right in the end,by hanging some men and seizing on the rich possessions of others;by granting more popular pardons to the followers of the late King than could,at first,be got from him;and,by employing about his Court,some very scrupulous persons who had been employed in the previous reign.
As this reign was principally remarkable for two very curious impostures which have become famous in history,we will make those two stories its principal feature.
There was a priest at Oxford of the name of Simons,who had for a pupil a handsome boy named Lambert Simnel,the son of a baker.
Partly to gratify his own ambitious ends,and partly to carry out the designs of a secret party formed against the King,this priest declared that his pupil,the boy,was no other than the young Earl of Warwick;who (as everybody might have known)was safely locked up in the Tower of London.The priest and the boy went over to Ireland;and,at Dublin,enlisted in their cause all ranks of the people:who seem to have been generous enough,but exceedingly irrational.The Earl of Kildare,the governor of Ireland,declared that he believed the boy to be what the priest represented;and the boy,who had been well tutored by the priest,told them such things of his childhood,and gave them so many deions of the Royal Family,that they were perpetually shouting and hurrahing,and drinking his health,and making all kinds of noisy and thirsty demonstrations,to express their belief in him.Nor was this feeling confined to Ireland alone,for the Earl of Lincoln-whom the late usurper had named as his successor-went over to the young Pretender;and,after holding a secret correspondence with the Dowager Duchess of Burgundy-the sister of Edward the Fourth,who detested the present King and all his race-sailed to Dublin with two thousand German soldiers of her providing.In this promising state of the boy's fortunes,he was crowned there,with a crown taken off the head of a statue of the Virgin Mary;and was then,according to the Irish custom of those days,carried home on the shoulders of a big chieftain possessing a great deal more strength than sense.Father Simons,you may be sure,was mighty busy at the coronation.
Ten days afterwards,the Germans,and the Irish,and the priest,and the boy,and the Earl of Lincoln,all landed in Lancashire to invade England.The King,who had good intelligence of their movements,set up his standard at Nottingham,where vast numbers resorted to him every day;while the Earl of Lincoln could gain but very few.With his small force he tried to make for the town of Newark;but the King's army getting between him and that place,he had no choice but to risk a battle at Stoke.It soon ended in the complete destruction of the Pretender's forces,one half of whom were killed;among them,the Earl himself.The priest and the baker's boy were taken prisoners.The priest,after confessing the trick,was shut up in prison,where he afterwards died-suddenly perhaps.The boy was taken into the King's kitchen and made a turnspit.He was afterwards raised to the station of one of the King's falconers;and so ended this strange imposition.
There seems reason to suspect that the Dowager Queen-always a restless and busy woman-had had some share in tutoring the baker's son.The King was very angry with her,whether or no.He seized upon her property,and shut her up in a convent at Bermondsey.
One might suppose that the end of this story would have put the Irish people on their guard;but they were quite ready to receive a second impostor,as they had received the first,and that same troublesome Duchess of Burgundy soon gave them the opportunity.
All of a sudden there appeared at Cork,in a vessel arriving from Portugal,a young man of excellent abilities,of very handsome appearance and most winning manners,who declared himself to be Richard,Duke of York,the second son of King Edward the Fourth.
'O,'said some,even of those ready Irish believers,'but surely that young Prince was murdered by his uncle in the Tower!'-'It IS supposed so,'said the engaging young man;'and my brother WAS