Little Arthur's history of England

by Lady Maria Callcott

Marriage of King Henry VII. and Elizabeth of York.

The king, who knew the poor young man had been forced to do what he did by other people, did not send him to prison, but made him a turnspit in his kitchen; and, as he behaved very well there, he afterwards gave him the care of his hawks.

The second disturbance was of more consequence. A young man, called Perkin Warbeck, was taught by one of King Henry’s enemies, the Duchess of Burgundy, to call himself Richard Duke of York.

He said that he was the brother to the little king killed by Richard in the Tower, and that Dighton and Forrest could not bear to kill them both, and that he had hidden himself till he could get to the duchess, who, as he said, was his aunt.

Now King Henry knew this story was not true, yet it vexed him very much. For Perkin Warbeck prevailed on several noblemen in Ireland to take his part, and he went to Scotland, and got the king to believe him, and to let him marry a beautiful young lady, named Catharine Gordon, the king’s own cousin, and to march into England with an army, where he did a great deal of mischief before King Henry’s army could drive him away. Then Perkin sailed to Cornwall, and collected a small army; but after doing just enough mischief to make everybody fear him and his people, he was taken prisoner by King Henry, who kept him some time in the Tower: at last he was hanged at Tyburn, and nobody was sorry for him but his poor wife Lady Catharine.

King Henry sent for that unfortunate lady, and took her to the queen, who treated her very kindly, and made her live with her, and did all she could to make her happy again.

England was quite quiet for the rest of King Henry’s reign; and Wales, which had been ill-treated by the Kings of England ever since Edward the First conquered it, was better treated by Henry.

As there was no fighting, the young men began to try to improve themselves in learning. Some years before that time, some clever men in Germany had found out how to print books instead of copying them in writing, so there were a great many more books, and more people could learn to read. The young men in Cambridge and Oxford began to read the good books that had been forgotten in the wars of the Roses, and they were ashamed to find that there were not half a dozen men in England who knew anything at all about Greek. I think one of those few was Grocyn, a teacher at Oxford.

But the English had soon a very good Greek teacher. A young man born at Canterbury, called Thomas Linacre, after learning all he could at the school in his own town, and at Oxford, went to travel in Italy, where the most learned men in the world lived at that time. These learned men soon found out that Thomas Linacre was very clever indeed, and so they helped him to learn everything that he desired, for the sake of improving his own country when he came back. He studied everything so carefully, that on his return to Oxford the greatest and wisest men went to him to be taught Greek, besides many other things he had learned in his travels. He was chosen to be tutor to the king’s eldest son, Prince Arthur, and he was afterwards tutor to some of the next king’s children. He was the greatest physician in England, and before he died he founded the same College of Physicians that we have now.