Page:Seventeen lectures on the study of medieval and modern history and kindred subjects.djvu/360

 world as Edward Earl of Warwick; was received in Ireland in February 1487, crowned at Dublin in May, brought to England in June, and taken prisoner at Stoke near Newark on the 1 6th of that month. In this most extravagant imposture the Yorkist remnant was thoroughly implicated: the Duchess Margaret was represented by Martin Swart and his men; the Earl of Lincoln, the cousin of Warwick, was slain fighting for Simnel; the Lord Lovel, 'the dog' minister of Richard, disappeared on the field, and Henry's suspicions were so strongly excited against his mother-in-law that he had to send her to a nunnery, and her son Lord Dorset to the Tower. The third rising, that in Yorkshire in 1489, was not directly connected with the dynastic quarrel, but was provoked by the taxation voted in the preceding parliament: Egremont, however, the leader of the rioters who killed the Earl of Northumberland at Thirsk, was a Yorkist partisan, and found a refuge in his exile with the intransigent Duchess of Burgundy. After this we get on for three years without overt trouble. The year 149a is marked by another Yorkshire battle, that of Acworth, between the Earl of Surrey and certain rebels, whose occasion of rising is not known; and it would therefore be of little use to argue whether or no it was connected with the imminent conspiracy for Perkin Warbeck, or a result of local discontent of which there may have been other eases not recorded at all.

Next comes the grand episode or tragedy of Perkin, which covers seven years of disturbance, and connects the Yorkist intrigues with the social discontents in a way more striking than any of the previous outbursts. I will only just indicate the dates and points of contact. Perkin, whose prompters, wiser than Lambert Simnel's, identified him with a claimant who could be more easily counterfeited, and who is said to have been educated by the Duchess Margaret to appear as her nephew Richard of York, lands at Cork probably in 1491, certainly by February 1492. According to Bacon, he himself was not at first quite sure who he was, a sort of doubt that has affected the minds of his adherents ever since; but, if there was any hesitation on his part, it must have been assumed for the purpose of