This time the prisoner avowed his humble origin, and related his whole career, cursing the ambition which had caused his imposture. After the second reading, Warbeck was shut up in the Tower, where he became the companion of the unhappy Earl of Warwick.
One year had elapsed since the attempt of Warbeck and his public humiliation. A third pretender, Ralph Wilford, had renewed the fraud of Simnel, and assumed the name of Warwick; he had been executed, and the Augustine monk who preached his, cause, had been condemned to imprisonment for life. It was in the month of July, 1499, when a rumour was spread of a plot formed by Warbeck and the real Earl of Warwick to escape together from the Tower and foment a fresh insurrection. The charm of the manners and mind of Warbeck must have been great, for he had not only seduced his companion in captivity, but he had contrived to win over all his jailors. The governor of the Tower was to be assassinated, and the freed prisoners intended to take refuge in a safe place, to proclaim King Richard IV., by summoning to their aid all the partisans of the Duke of Clarence, brother of Warwick. Such, at least, were the allegations in the indictment, for the execution of the plot had not even been begun when it was discovered. It was sufficient to explain the execution of Warbeck. He had long and cleverly played his part; but he did not retract his confessions at the supreme moment and died courageously at Tyburn, on the 23rd of November, 1499. His last attempt cost the life of the unhappy Earl of Warwick; he was accused before the peers, not only with having sought to escape, but with having plotted with Warbeck to overthrow the king. The poor prince was twenty-nine years of age, but, having been a prisoner since the age of seven years, he was as ignorant of the world as a child; he confessed all the crimes with which he was accused, and having been condemned, he was beheaded on Tower Hill on the 23rd of November. With him ended the numerous attempts against the crown of Henry VII.; all the possible heirs to the throne, real or pretended, had disappeared, and political passions began to be appeased under government regular and firm, if it was at times greedy and despotic.
Relieved of any fears of internal wars, and more tranquil abroad, Henry VII. turned his views towards the settlement of his children; he had for a long time past resolved to marry his eldest daughter, Margaret, to the King of Scotland, in order to definitively attach that sovereign to him. At the beginning of the year 1500, he sent to King James one of the most clever among the ecclesiastical negotiators formed in his service, Fox, Bishop of Durham; and this skilful negotiator contrived to lead the young monarch into asking for the hand of the princess; the marriage was celebrated in London, in the month of January, 1502, but Margaret, who was then twelve years of age, was not sent to Scotland until the end of 1505, during this interval, her elder brother, Prince Arthur, heir presumptive to the throne, had married the Princess Catherine of Aragon, daughter of the able Ferdinand and the great Isabella, but he had died almost immediately after his marriage, and King Henry mooted the question with Ferdinand and with the Pope, to know whether the princess of twenty-one years of age, and widow of the elder brother, could marry the younger brother, Henry, who was but thirteen years of age. The dispensation arrived and the betrothal was resolved upon, for King Ferdinand finding that matters dragged on at length, had claimed not only the princess, but the large sums paid for her dowry. Catherine lived at the court of her father-in-law, honoured and beloved by all, waiting for five years the celebration of a marriage which was to terminate so sadly.
Amidst the negotiations of alliances for his children, Henry VII. had also been occupied in marrying himself; the queen, his wife, had died shortly after having lost Prince Arthur, and the great preoccupation of the widowed monarch was to find a spouse rich enough to sensibly increase the treasures which he took so much pleasure in hoarding. His negotiations and hopes, however, did not prevent him from continuing to oppress his subjects. Avaricious passions grow with age; Archbishop Morton, whom the people had so often cursed, had died in 1500, but the nation gained nothing thereby; he had been replaced in his exactions by two leeches, "two shearers," as they were called, more bold and rapacious than Morton, less skilful than he in proving to the good English people that all was going on in a legal manner and that the province of the subjects in the State was limited to paying the taxes cheerfully. The two new agents, Empson and Dudley, were equally detested. Dudley was of good birth and knew how to set off the exactions in a suitable form; Empson, the son of a workman, triumphed coarsely over the unfortunate people whom he oppressed, and ridiculed their miseries. Both were lawyers, well versed in their profession; each offence, crime, or misdemeanor became in their hands a matter for a fine, and to allow none to escape, they kept spies everywhere charged to warn them, and juries composed of wretches who decided all matters at their pleasure. "They hovered thus over all England," says the chronicler, "like tame falcons for their master and savage falcons for themselves, and they amassed great riches," while filling the royal coffers.
Notwithstanding these abuses the national prosperity went on increasing; the revival of order had sufficed to give scope to the commerce which was to found in England the middle class; the great aristocracy, decimated and ruined by the wars of the Roses, driven from power by the skillful conduct of Henry VII., remained shut up in the castles, and the younger members of the noblest houses began to devote themselves to agriculture, sometimes even to commercial enterprises, instead of recognizing no other career than arms or the Church.
The English, however, had not yet attempted the great voyages beyond the seas which were soon to render their navy so famous. Christopher Columbus had applied to Henry VII., in his efforts to find a sovereign who would entrust a few vessels to him and conquer the New World; but Bartholomew Columbus, brother of the great navigator had been shipwrecked before arriving in England; when he had at length accomplished his mission to King Henry, and had returned to Spain to announce to his brother that he was summoned to London, Isabella the Catholic, had already granted the demands of Columbus, assuring to Castile the riches of the West Indies. The English therefore had no part in the discovery of the New World, and the rumour of the treasures which were found there must more than once have made King Henry VII. pale with jealousy.
The navigators whom he had sent had brought him back neither gold nor silver. John Cabot or Cabotte, of Venetian origin, established at Bristol, and his three sons Lewis, Sebastian and Sanches, had received from King Henry VII., on the 5th of March, 1496, letters patent, authorizing them to sail with five vessels in all seas, in order there to make discoveries and take possession of them in the name of England; the prudent monarch had reserved for himself one-fifth of the profits of the enterprise; it is to the first voyage of John Cabott and his son Sebastian in 1497 that we owe the discovery of Canada; in the same year, Vasco de Gama doubling the Cape of Good Hope for the first time, in his journey towards India, opened up to commerce a new route by which all the riches of the East were to flow into Europe. Notwithstanding all the overthrows and agitations which the world was yet to suffer, the time of material force, exclusive and brutal, was beginning to pass away; peaceful intelligence and activity saw a vast field of influence and effort, open up before them.
Parliament had become the docile instrument of the king, and unresistingly voted all that he was pleased to demand, but the subsidies granted in 1504 excited great murmuring among the people. The king had claimed the feudal gifts in honour of the knighthood conferred upon Prince Henry, and the marriage of Princess Margaret; the Commons offered forty thousand pounds sterling, but the king had the moderation to accept only thirty thousand. The malcontents appeared to have found a chief. Edmund de la Pole, second son of the Duke of Suffolk, and brother of the Earl of Lincoln, the protector of Simnel, who had been killed at Stoke, was an embittered and turbulent man. Henry VII. had refused to grant him his paternal inheritance, by alleging that he inherited of his brother and not of his father, and that Lord Lincoln, being declared a traitor, had had his property confiscated; Edmund had therefore been compelled to content himself with a shred of the estates of his family and the title of Earl of Suffolk. He had had the misfortune to kill a man in a quarrel; the king, still jealous of all that bore the name of Plantagenet, had taken advantage of this opportunity to accuse him of murder; Suffolk took refuge at the court of the Duchess of Burgundy; whence he hatched plots, it was said. The king caused him to be watched, charged a treacherous emissary to insinuate himself into his confidence, and according to the instructions received by this means, he suddenly caused the arrest of the men upon whom Suffolk relied most; his brother William de la Pole, Lord Courtenay, who had married one of the daughters of Queen Elizabeth Woodville, Sir James Tyrrel, accused of the murder of Edward V. and the Duke of York in the Tower, and a few other persons were secretly interrogated. Courtenay and De la Pole remained in prison, but Sir James Tyrrel confessed the crime formerly committed upon the young princes by order of Richard III., and he was executed, as well as certain accomplices of the Earl of Suffolk, although the conspiracy of the latter was in no respect proved. The murmurs which he had been accused of encouraging, were stifled, and the king, until the end of his life, dispensed henceforth with having recourse to Parliament; he contented himself with collecting taxes under the name of "benevolences," his coffers overflowed with gold, and he passed for the richest monarch of Christendom.
A favourable event happened and secured the vengeance of the king upon the Earl of Suffolk; the bad weather drove upon the coasts of England the Archduke Philip the Fair and his wife Joanna, who had become Queen of Castile by the death of her mother, Isabella the Catholic. The young sovereigns were repairing from Flanders to their new dominions; their counsellors urged them to face the tempest rather than to set foot upon English soil and thus to place themselves in the hands of the skilful Henry VII. Perhaps from curiosity, perhaps from fear, the Archduke insisted upon landing. The King of England appeared to have foreseen all; the illustrious travellers were immediately received with all the honours which were due them, and it was announced that the king was coming to meet them. Philip saw that he was caught in the trap, and being in a hurry to put an end to his compulsory visit, he hastened to anticipate Henry VII. The two monarchs met near Windsor, reciprocally lavishing the most touching marks of friendship and confidence. But the wise counsellors of the King of Castile had not been deceived; before the Spanish monarchs were able to take to the sea again, Philip had been compelled to consent to deliver up the Earl of Suffolk, who was living modestly in Flanders; to promise to the King of England the hand of his sister, the Duchess of Savoy, who was a widow and very rich, and finally to affiance his first-born son, who afterwards became the Emperor Charles V., to the little Princess Mary of England. After having besides granted great commercial advantages to the English in the Flemish markets, Philip the Fair was at length enabled to resume the journey to Spain. Suffolk being enticed to England, was thrown into prison, and one of the last orders which Henry VII. signed was that for his execution.