Page:Cassell's Illustrated History of England vol 2.djvu/95

] the enemies of the Lancastrian line. His treatment of his queen, and her friends and party, whatever may be the opinions of some modern writers, had left them greatly mortified and discontented. He had maintained a constantly cold and repressive mien towards the Yorkist party, who, on his marriage with Elizabeth, naturally expected bygones to be bygones, and that they should be admitted to their share of power and office. So far from this, he refused them every benefit and courtesy. They had seen with resentment his selfish attention to the securing of his own claims on the throne, and his silent rejection of those of the Princess of York. They had watched indignantly his long delay before completing his marriage with her; and to this day, though she had brought an heir to the throne, uniting the interests and hopes of both lines, not a movement had been made towards her coronation. This was a position in which no queen-consort had ever been permitted to remain; and the insult was proportionably felt.

But the Yorkist party, though roused to disturb the quiet of the haughty prince, prepared their measures of annoyance with a lack of acumen which was more likely to irritate than overturn. Perhaps they did not want to dethrone him, because that would overturn also the head, and most popular representative of their own party—Elizabeth; especially as she was now the mother of a legitimate prince, capable of uniting all interests. Perhaps they wished rather to show the cold and unforgiving monarch that he was more at their mercy than he supposed, and that they could embitter, if they did not proceed to terminate, his reign. Such, in fact, whether this was their purpose or not, was the character and tendency of the plots and impostures which, for so many years, kept Henry in disquiet and anxiety.

The first attempt was to bring forward a youth as the Earl of Warwick, the son of Clarence, whom Henry was keeping confined in the Tower. So little depth was there in this plot, that at first it was evidently the plan to bring the impostor forward as the Duke of York, the younger of the two princes supposed to be murdered in the Tower. It was given out that though his elder brother had been murdered, the younger had been allowed to escape. Had this story been adhered to, and well acted, it might have raised a most formidable rebellion; but, for some unknown reason, it was as speedily abandoned as adopted, and the Earl of Warwick pitched upon as the preferable impersonation. Nothing, however, could be more absurd, for the true earl being really alive, Henry could at any moment bring him forward. Probably the conspirators might calculate on that, and with the object of compelling Henry to do this, by which they hoped to burden him with the odium of keeping in captivity that innocent victim of his selfishness. This would appear the more credible, because we shall soon find that the queen-dowager herself was mixed up with this plot, who, though she had her own deep reasons for hating Henry, was not so short-sighted a woman as to wish to depose her own daughter and grandson. Hence the original idea was speedily changed, the Earl of Warwick was adopted as the person to be fictitiously brought forward, and the Duke of York was withdrawn to a future occasion, when he was made to appear on the scene with an effect immensely diminished in consequence of his first temporary rôle.

Towards the close of the year 1486, there appeared at the castle of Dublin a priest of Oxford named Richard Simons, attended by a boy of about fifteen years of age. The boy was of a peculiarly handsome and interesting appearance; and Simons, who was a total stranger in Ireland, presented him to the lord-deputy, the Earl of Kildare, as Edward Plantagenet, Earl of Warwick, who, he represented, had fortunately escaped from his dungeon in the Tower of London, and had come to throw himself under the protection of the earl and his friends. Thomas Fitzgerald, Earl of Kildare, was a zealous Yorkist; his brother was chancellor, and almost all the bishops and officers in the Irish Government had been appointed by Edward IV. or Richard. It is most likely that the lord-deputy and the party were already cognisant of the whole scheme of this agitation; for it is neither likely that Simons the priest should have originated so daring and arduous an enterprise as that of presenting a new claimant for the throne in opposition to the astute and determined Henry Tudor, nor that he should have so particularly singled out Ireland as the opening ground of his operations, and the lord-deputy as his patron and co-adjutor. This very selection implied a nice knowledge of political circumstances and parties. Ireland was the weak point in Henry VII.'s administration. Either because he had been too much engaged by his affairs and antagonists at home, or that he feared giving additional and deep-seated offence to the Yorkist party, he had left Ireland and its government very much in the hands in which he found them. This circumstance was thus seized upon, and it was far more likely by the keen eye of a body of influential conspirators than that of an obscure individual.

What sufficiently proved this was, that simultaneously the Earl of Lincoln, of whom we have lately made mention, son to the eldest sister of the two late kings, had disappeared from England and gone over to his aunt Margaret, Duchess-Dowager of Burgundy, Henry's most inveterate enemy. This satisfied the king that the plot which showed itself in Ireland was produced in England, and was fomented by the Yorkist party at large. It was soon found that Simons had been diligently instructing the young pretender, before he produced him in public, in all the arcana of the character he had to support. As we have said, the first pretence was that he was the Duke of York; that was abandoned for causes which, no doubt, appeared sufficient to the secret movers of the machinery. The boy, who was really the son of one Thomas Simnel, a joiner of Oxford, was taught to play his part as a prince, and he soon acquired an address which seemed to testify the nobility of his descent. He could tell a good and plausible story of his life at Sheriff Hutton, his captivity in the Tower, and of the mode of his escape. All this was sufficiently captivating to the lovers of the marvellous, and was zealously fostered by those who had their own objects.

The loyalty of the lord-deputy had been already questionable. Henry had sent him a summons to attend in London, but he evaded that by a petition from the spiritual and temporal peers of Ireland, stating strongly the absolute necessity of his presence there. No sooner did Simons present his protégé to Kildare, than that nobleman received him without any apparent reluctance