Page:Seventeen lectures on the study of medieval and modern history and kindred subjects.djvu/362

 for seven years, with which any overt support of the Pretender would have been incompatible.

Before the truce was actually signed Perkin's career was over. In its last act the plot connects itself with the social discontent. In the January parliament a new subsidy had been voted, and this, when it came to be collected, provoked a rising in Cornwall. The men of Cornwall rose under the local hero Flammock, who, declaring the law on his side, and insisting on delivering a petition to the king, started them for London. Picking up as their leader a disaffected nobleman. Lord Audley, on the way, they pushed on to Blackheath, where they were defeated with great loss on the 22nd of June. The king's severity was somewhat arbitrary, but the effect was to quicken Perkin's movements and to point to the part of England where he was most likely to win support. He landed near Penzance in September, pushed to Taunton where he was put to flight, took sanctuary at Beaulieu, and on the 5th of October was surrendered to the king. Henry was inclined to spare him, possibly having some doubt as to his real identity; he was however imprisoned, and his escape in June 1498, his recapture, and further involvement in the plot which was made an excuse for implicating the Earl of Warwick, ended in the execution of the two in November 1499: a cruelty for which other motives and other influences besides the sense of actual danger, are probably accountable.

After the extinction of these two, the false and the true competitors, the king had only the De la Poles to doubt about. The eldest of these, Edmund, who after his brother's death at Stoke had been the head of the branch, and who after his father's death in 1491 had been allowed to surrender his estate of Duke and subside into Earl of Suffolk, quitted England with his brother Richard, in August 1501. What intelligence they may have had of the means by which Ferdinand the Catholic was likely to insure the succession of his son-in-law Arthur; or whether Edmund, who had been fairly well treated by the king, but had taken offence at a humiliation which he had, so far as it was real, brought upon himself, acted on mere impulse and carried his brother with