Prison beneath the Wakefield Tower.
Sir Henry had the faithful cat portrayed with a pigeon in its claws offering it through the grated bars of his prison window. There is a similar story of a cat befriending Lord Southampton when a prisoner in the Tower in the reign of Elizabeth.
CHAPTER VII
THE TUDOR KINGS—HENRY VII.
When Henry Tudor, Earl of Richmond, had become Henry VII., after the battle of Bosworth, a relative calm settled over the Tower, as it did over the country generally. Not that State and ordinary prisoners ceased to enter the Tower gates, the former to die on the adjacent Hill, the latter at Tyburn, and some to be released. But we hear no more of midnight murders within its prisons, and with the baleful figure of Richard Plantagenet, such crimes ceased to cast their shadows on the scene of his many misdeeds.
The first notable State prisoner sent to the Tower by Henry VII. was Edward Plantagenet, Earl of Warwick, son of the murdered Duke of Clarence. During the reign of Richard III., Warwick had been kept under surveillance at Sheriff Hutton Castle, in Yorkshire; but Henry had him brought to the Tower for greater security. There was some reason, from Henry’s point of view, for this care; for Warwick, being descended from Clarence, the elder brother of John of Gaunt, had a better and more rightful claim to the throne than the first of the Tudors. So long as Warwick lived, Henry felt his seat insecure; and he seized the earliest opportunity for destroying him.
In 1487, Lambert Simnel, the son of an Oxford tradesman, had been declared by the Earl of Kildare and some malcontent English residents in Ireland, to be the Earl of Warwick. A conspiracy was at once formed to overthrow Henry, and a small army, partly recruited in Germany, and partly formed by Irish troops furnished by Kildare, crossed St George’s Channel. At Stoke, near Nottingham, this force encountered the Royal troops, and was completely defeated. Simnel was taken prisoner, and although the King publicly exposed his deception by showing the Earl of Warwick to the people, the Pretender was considered too insignificant for execution, and was relegated to the position of a scullion in Henry’s kitchen.
All Hallows, Barking