Usurpations engender conspiracies; no reign was to be more constantly agitated by them than that of Henry VII.; he had occupied the throne for fifteen months only, when, in the month of November, 1486, a priest and a youth of most charming countenance disembarked at Dublin. The priest announced that his young companion was no other than Edward Plantagenent, Earl of Warwick, escaped by a miracle from the Tower of London. By degrees, partisans gathered around the young man; he was handsome, intellectual, his manners were noble, he had been carefully instructed in his part, and did not experience much difficulty in deceiving minds prejudiced by hereditary attachment to the father and grandfather of the Earl of Warwick, who had both contrived to render themselves popular in their government of Ireland. Edward Plantagenet had even been born in that country, and thus possessed additional claims to the attachment of that nation. The great noblemen who might have shown themselves to be more clearsighted were, in general, little in favour of the state of affairs recently established in England, and the Earl of Kildare, Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, received the Sham Warwick with open arms, presenting him to all his friends as the legitimate heir to the throne in the character of the only male descendant of Richard of York; on all sides the pretender was saluted with the title of king; messengers had already borne the news to Flanders, where the Dowager Duchess of Burgundy, sister of Edward IV., held her court, and received into her good graces all the enemies of the new King of England, when the latter learnt, in London, the danger that threatened him. He immediately convoked his Council; the discontent was general, the amnesty had been ill-observed, a mass of restrictions had hindered the application of it, and the real Earl of Warwick was not the only inhabitant of the prison of the Tower. The first care of the prudent king wad to proclaim a fresh amnesty, more complete and earnest than the first, and, at the same time, to produce in public, in all parts of London, the real Edward Plantagenet, Earl of Warwick, who had not for a single instant left his prison. The third measure of the king appeared at variance with the clemency manifested by the amnesty; the Dowager Queen, Elizabeth Woodville, was arrested under the frivolous pretext that she had formerly broken faith with the Earl of Richmond, now King of England, because, after having promised him her daughter in marriage she had consigned her into the hands of the usurper Richard III., who wished to marry her. The real motive of the disfavour which thus suddenly attacked the intriguing widow of Edward IV. has never been known; it has been supposed that she had been compromised in the conspiracy which had caused a new pretender to the throne to spring up in Ireland; it has been said that she alone could have instructed the young man or his tutor in the private details which he related about the royal family; but these assertions remain at least doubtful; what is certain is the confiscation of the property of Elizabeth Woodville and her imprisonment in a convent near Bermondsey.
Meanwhile, the young pretender had received an unexpected support. The Earl of Lincoln, son of John de la Pole, duke of Suffolk, and of Elizabeth, sister of the kings Edward IV. and Richard III., formerly designated by his uncle Richard to succeed him upon the throne, had quitted England and repaired to the residence of his aunt, the Duchess of Burgundy. She had furnished him with money and troops, and Lincoln had embarked for Ireland with Lord Lovel. He could not be deceived about the imposture; he knew the Earl of Warwick, but it suited his views to adopt the cause of the pretender, and he caused him to be crowned in Dublin Cathedral. The golden crown from a statue of the Virgin was borrowed to represent the royal diadem, and the young man, being proclaimed under the name of Edward VI., was carried in triumph upon the shoulders of his new subjects, while King Henry VII. was raising troops and quietly riding about in his kingdom, selecting by preference for his visits the counties where the influence of the Earl of Lincoln was especially exercised.
The queen and the little prince were already established in the fortress of Kenilworth, when the pretender and his partisans landed at Fouldrey, at the southern extremity of Furness. A few friends of Lincoln and Lovel joined him, but the population did not rise in their favour, and the hopes of the rebels were growing faint, when, on the 16th of June, 1487, they encountered the advanced guard of the king at Stoke; the Earl of Oxford, who commanded it, carried off a brilliant victory, notwithstanding the desperate courage of the assailants. His Majesty Edward VI., or, simply, Lambert Simnel, the son of an humble baker, was made a prisoner, with his tutor, the priest Simon; but the noblemen who had embraced his cause, nearly all died upon the field of battle, the Earl of Lincoln at their head. Lord Lovel alone disappeared; but this time he concealed himself so well that, two hundred years later, the skeleton of a man was discovered in a vault in his castle of Minster-Lovel, in Oxfordshire; it is supposed that the unhappy master of the house had taken refuge therein and had there perished by some accident.
Very few executions followed the revolt and the victory, but the harvest of confiscations was abundant; the priest Simon was imprisoned, and none heard speak of him any more, "the king being fond of concealing his own dangers," says a chronicler, "Lambert Simnel was placed in the royal kitchens, ignominiously turning the spit, after having worn a crown;" he became eventually one of the falconers of the king. Henry VII. had recently made a pilgrimage to deposit his victorious banner upon the altar of Our Lady of Walsingham.
The king had too much sense and sagacity to refuse to understand the symptoms of discontent which had manifested themselves by this revolt; he knew that he had incensed the Yorkists by the jealous obscurity in which he kept the queen, and he resolved to grant her the honour of coronation, which had hitherto in vain been claimed for her; on the 20th of November, Elizabeth of York was solemnly crowned at Westminster, while her husband, hidden behind a carved screen, contemplated the ceremony at which he was not willing to be present.
For more than two years past. King Henry VII. had concentrated all his efforts upon the internal pacification of his kingdom, without making himself uneasy about the troubles of the Continent; but scarcely had he gained the victory of Stoke, when he saw an embassy arrive in England from the King of France, Charles VIII. While Henry VII. had been repulsing the pretentions to the throne of an impostor supported by rebels, his old protector, the King of France, had attacked a still older friend of his, the Duke Francis of Brittany, who had given shelter to the Duke of Orleans, subsequently Louis XII., accused of having conspired against his cousin. The French army had entered Brittany, summoned by a certain number of Breton noblemen dissatisfied with the influence which the Duke of Orleans had assumed over their duke, and it had reaped important advantages, when the ambassadors of Charles VIII., fearing an English intervention in favour of the Duke of Brittany, came to expound to the wise Henry VII. the legitimacy of a war which they qualified as defensive. None made allusion to the probable annexation of the duchy of Brittany to France, either by conquest or by the marriage of the young king with the heiress of the Duke Francis; Henry VII. asked no indiscreet questions, and when the Bretons appeared, in their turn, at his court, begging assistance in men and money, the King of England piously offered his mediation "in order to acquit himself before God and men of all his duties of gratitude towards the king and the duke, for whom he was even disposed to go upon a pilgrimage." The French asked for nothing more, their army pursued the course of its victories, but the coming and going of the English negotiators from London to Paris and from Paris to Rennes, did not satisfy the Bretons, who saw themselves closely pressed. Sir Edward Woodville, one of the uncles of the queen, attempted, at his risk and peril, a little expedition in favour of the Duke Francis; but King Henry forbade any demonstration of this kind. His envoys who were then in Paris, were in great danger, it was said, at the news of the succour sent to the Bretons by the English.
The cause of Brittany was popular in England, and decided though he was not to wage war, the king took advantage of this feeling to cause Parliament to vote considerable subsidies; at the same time he secretly warned the court of France that he should perhaps be compelled to send reinforcements to the Bretons. The warning was profited by to push measures with vigour; all the factions of Bretons had now united against the common enemy; the forces of the duke were supported by the troops sent by the King of the Romans, Maximilian, and by the Count d'Albert, as well as the Englishmen of Sir Edward Woodville. The Duke Francis and his allies were defeated, however, on the 20th of July, 1488, by the Sire de la Trémoille, commander of the French army, at Saint Aubin-du-Cormier; the Duke of Orleans was made a prisoner, and the English were cut to pieces; before the public voice had been raised in England to demand vengeance, the French had taken Dinan and Saint Malo, and were threatening the Duke of Brittany as far as in Rennes; the unhappy prince had no resource other than to sign a treaty by which he undertook to summon no assistance from abroad, and never to marry his daughters without the consent of France. One month after having suffered this humiliation, he died broken hearted, and the little Duchess Anne, a child twelve years of age, remained alone with her council of regency in the presence of her enemies.
The King of France claimed the guardianship of the unhappy princess, and her barons had not yet had time to reply to this pretension, which was equivalent to the surrender of the duchy, when the French army again entered Brittany and took possession of several towns. This time all the prudence of Henry VII. could not suffice to repress the indignation of his people at the aspect of this unequal war; perhaps the growth of the power of France also made him uneasy, in his policy; the King of England formed an alliance with the great sovereigns of Europe to arrest the conquests of Charles VIII. Maximilian, King of the Romans, who claimed the hand of the little Duchess Anne, and his son the Archduke Philip, the King of Spain, and the King of Portugal undertook to enter France to turn aside the forces furious for the ruin of Brittany. Henry VII. demanded fresh subsidies from Parliament to continue the war.