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Home Lancaster and York The Break-up of the Yorkist Power; Part 2 |
The Break-up of the Yorkist Power; Part 2This vile deed eclipsed anything done before by either side. Not Clifford at Wakefield, nor Margaret at St. Albans, nor Montagu at Hexham, nor Edward at Tewkesbury, nor even Tiptoft Earl of Worcester, the "great butcher of England", who tortured his prisoners ere he slew them, had ever matched this. Henceforth Richard had no friends save the cowards who feared to desert him, or the obscure men whom he promoted. One after another, plots were made. First his former ally the Duke of Buckingham, aided by the Courtenays and other westerners, plotted to put Henry of Richmond, son of Margaret Beaufort, on the throne. The stars in their courses fought against Buckingham. Storms prevented Richmond from landing, while a huge flood of rain so swelled the Severn into what was long remembered as "Buckingham's great water" that the Duke was cut off from his friends, captured and beheaded. Richard's ferocious treatment of Buckingham had only made one more section of Yorkists into Lancastrians. His next wild scheme was to divorce his wife Anne Neville (She saved him the trouble by dying (March, 1485)), and marry his niece Elizabeth of York, daughter to Edward IV. In universal horror all who still held by the cause of York resolved that it were better to have a Lancastrian on the throne than Richard III.Thus in 1485 Henry Tudor, Earl of Richmond, now allied with the Queen's faction of the Woodvilles, and under a promise to marry Elizabeth of York, landed in Wales to win a final victory for Lancaster. Welshmen joined a man with a Welsh name. The Lancastrian houses of the Marches joined him; yet he seemed to have but a puny chance when at Bosworth, with 5000 men, he met Richard with more than double his number. But when Oxford led the Lancastrian attack, half Richard's men hung back, while the Stanleys turned traitors and fell on Richard's flank. The battle was won at a cost of a bare hundred men, and even the defeated side lost but few more. Yet one life counted many hundred. Richard himself, pierced with many wounds, lay dead on the field. The battle of Bosworth, and the accession of Henry VII is held to end this troubled time. The union of the two roses, Henry the Red with Elizabeth the White Rose of York, brings the chapter to an end with a touch of romantic completeness. We are tempted to think of the fairy prince, after many persecutions by robbers and demons, killing the ogre in single combat, wedding the princess, and living happily ever afterwards. The comparison is singularly false. There was nothing of the fairy prince about the astute, relentless, money-getting character of Henry VII. Nor did disorder die as suddenly as Richard III; it did not perish on Bosworth Field. It revived in Level's insurrection, when Lambert Simnel was put up to personate the heir of George of Clarence, and when a mixed array of Yorkists, German mercenaries, and levies from Ireland, where the cause of York had always been strong, fought one more fight at Stoke and lost it. Stoke is the last battle of the Wars of the Roses. Yet for eleven years more Henry was pestered with another Yorkist pretender, Perkin Warbeck, who pretended to be the younger of the princes murdered in the Tower. Perkin made the round of Henry's foes. He harboured in Burgundy with the Yorkist Duchess Margaret; he risked a landing in Kent; he intrigued in Ireland; he deceived James IV of Scotland into treating him as a royal prince, and won the Scottish king's cousin in marriage; he hovered like a thundercloud that will neither burst nor disperse. At length he landed in Devonshire, and was made prisoner. Even in prison the mischief he did was not ended. He inveigled his fellow prisoner Edward of Clarence into a plot to escape; and Henry VII's patience being at an end, both of them were executed. Warbeck deserved little sympathy; but it was hard measure for the young Clarence, who had been sixteen years in prison, first Richard Ill's captive, and then Henry VII's. The change of dynasty had brought him no relief; he was dangerous to both sides. Henry no doubt felt as Essex felt about Strafford, that "stone dead hath no fellow". There were no more plots. |
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