23. The Collegiate Church of St. Katherine, looking west.
From an engraving by J. Carter, 1780.
24. The Collegiate Church of St. Katherine, looking east.
From an engraving by B. T. Pouncey, 1779.
There was yet another victim to Warbeck’s imposture. Sir William Stanley, who had turned the scale in King Henry’s favour at Bosworth Field, was, in 1495, impeached as having been heard to say that “if he were sure that the young man called Perkin was really the son of Edward IV, he would never draw sword against him.” For this he was sent to the Tower, tried in its Council Hall, and beheaded on Tower Hill, February 16, 1495.
Edmund de la Pole, Earl of Suffolk, was the son of Elizabeth, sister of Edward IV. His plottings against Henry VII, encouraged by Maximilian, failed, and he fled the kingdom, and remained abroad several years. But Philip, King of Castile, who had given him shelter, visiting Henry in 1506, persuaded him to spare the fugitive’s life on his surrender, and Suffolk was committed to the Tower. Here he remained until 1513, when he was beheaded by order of Henry VIII on a charge of plotting. But he had involved two men in his ruin; Sir James Tyrrell, the same who had assisted at the murder of the two princes, and Sir John Wyndham, who had been knighted for his good service against Perkin Warbeck, were both executed on Tower Hill for their share in Suffolk’s treason. Tragedies enough, these, for one reign; yet we have hardly come to the end of them. The marriage of Prince Arthur with Katharine of Aragon took place in St. Paul’s Cathedral on November 14, 1501, and the rejoicings took the form of a succession of tournaments and feasts within the Tower walls. There were great pageants to emphasize the descent of the bridegroom from his namesake the British hero whose fabulous exploits fill the pages of Geoffrey of Monmouth. But they could not alter the fact that he was a poor sickly child of fifteen, and five months later he died. The calamity was a terrible blow to his mother, Elizabeth, of York, whose health appears to have failed from that time. On February 2, 1503, she gave birth to a daughter, Katharine, in the Tower, and died nine days later, on her birthday, aged thirty-eight. An amiable and beautiful woman, according to all accounts; “brilliant, witty, and pious,” so says Erasmus. Six years later her husband was buried by her side in the Abbey.