The Perkin Warbeck Conspiracy E-Book

Ian Arthurson

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 697

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2009

Beschreibung

Perkin Warbeck, pretender to the English throne, claimed to be Richard of Shrewsbury, Duke of York & Norfolk, the younger of the two sons of Edward IV imprisoned in the Tower of London by Richard III, and whose true fate is unknown to this day. He led two attempts to claim the crown, but was captured by Henry VII and hanged at Tyburn. This book looks at who Warbeck really was, how he was used by those in power in Burgundy, France, Italy, Scotland and Ireland, and the progress of the conspiracy itself. It has often been considered to be a side issue to Henry's reign, but this book reveals how close the conspirators came to bringing about a fundamental change in European politics. Importantly, Ian Arthurson not only sets the plot within the context of what was happening in fifteenth-century Europe, but also reveals important truths about Henry's reign in England. Illustrated with a wealth of contemporary portraits, paintings, engravings and documents, The Perkin Warbeck Conspiracy will appeal to anyone with an interest in fifteenth-century history.

Leseprobe

THE

PERKIN WARBECK

CONSPIRACY 1491–1499

THE

PERKIN WARBECK

CONSPIRACY

1491–1499

IAN ARTHURSON

First published 1994

This edition published 2009

The History Press

The Mill, Brimscombe Port

Stroud, Gloucestershire, GL5 2QG

www.thehistorypress.co.uk

This ebook edition first published in 2013

All rights reserved

© Ian Arthurson 1994, 2009, 2013

The right of Ian Arthurson to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyrights, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

EPUB ISBN 978 0 7524 9563 7

Original typesetting by The History Press

Contents

List of Illustrations

Preface

Genealogical Tables

Perkin Warbeck’s Confession

Part One: To Cork

1 The Beginning and the End of the Problem

2 A World of Displaced Men

3 The Breton Wheel of Fortune

4 But to be Young

5 The Resurrection of Richard Plantagenet

Part Two: At Large

6 The Dreadful Deadman

7 A Wood of Suspicion

8 True Men

9 The Red Rose and the White

10 A War of Nerves

11 Failure

12 Success

13 Cat and Mouse

Part Three: In England

14 In the Time of Perkin

15 Capture and Recapture

16 Shaking Empty Chains

Appendices

A. Dan William Graunte

B. Perkin Warbeck’s Supporters on Deal Beach, 3 July 1495

C. Signet Letter of Henry VII, 15 February 1497

Notes

Further Reading

List of Illustrations

1

Perkin Warbeck as Richard, Duke of York

2

Anne de Beaujeu, Regent of France

3

Timbers of the

Sovreign

4

Arithmetic, in its use in commerce

5

Three large ships entering a port

6

Irish soldiers, early sixteenth century

7

Tournai, Pont des Trous – Water Gate

8

Tournai, Cathedral of Notre Dame

9

Street of cloth merchants, 1470

10

Antwerp, the Scheldt Gate, 1520

11

Bruges, the ‘Old Hall’

12

Lisbon, centre of international trade

13

Martin Behaim’s globe: the first world globe, 1492

14

The Charter Roll of the City of Waterford

15

Perkin Warbeck’s letter to Queen Isabella of Castille, 1493

16

Charles VIII, King of France

17

The Lonely Duchess: Margaret, dowager Duchess of Burgundy

18

Malines, the administrative centre of Flanders

19

Henry VII, King of England

20

Isabella of Castille, Queen of Spain

21

The Courtyard, Innsbruck Castle, 1494

22

Nuremberg in 1493

23

A petition to the Lord Chancellor of England, Cardinal John Morton

24

The Tower of London in 1550

25

A scene at court

26

Part of an inventory of Sir William Stanley’s goods

27

Maximilian I, Holy Roman Emperor

28

Gallowglass figures from Roscommon, Ireland

29

Detail of a panorama of the river Scheldt

30

Rebels being hanged

31

James IV, King of Scotland

32

Tomb of Katherine Gordon (Taken by Victoria Arthurson)

33

Philip the Fair, Duke of Burgundy

34

Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castille

35

The beginning of Bernard de Vignolles’s confession

36

Ormond Castle, Carrick-on-Suir, County Tipperary, Ireland

37

Late fifteenth-century French ship

38

Perkin Warbeck’s letter to Bernard de la Forsse, 18 October 1496

39

Robert Lord Willoughby de Broke, Callington church, Cornwall

40

Graffito of hanged man on cover of book

41

English breech-loading iron gun,

c

. 1500

42

Mons Meg. Bombard used at the siege of Norham, 1497

43

Tomb of Piers Ruadh Butler, 8th Earl of Ormond

44

Warfare at sea

45

Whitesand Bay, Cornwall

46

Taunton Castle, Somerset

47

Elizabeth of York, Queen of England

48

Fyfield Manor, near Oxford, home of Katherine Gordon (Taken by Ian Arthurson)

49

A fifteenth-century pharmacy

50

Sir Simon Digby, Lieutenant of the Tower, Coleshill church, Warwickshire

51

Brussels, l’Hôtel de Ville

52

A fifteenth-century inn

53

Astrological figures from the Opus astrolabi plani, 1488

Picture research by Vicky Arthurson and Amanda Davidge.

Preface

In the summer of 1987 I was at a conference at Winchester. Going upstairs one afternoon I was suddenly aware of a conversation above me. A well-known historian was shaking with laughter and chortling, ‘A book on Lambert Simnel! What next? One on Perkin Warbeck?’ Too embarrassed to say anything I turned onto the corridor for my room. Every Monday during my PhD research I had put off the responsibility of a new week’s research by working on the Warbeck problem, and I harboured the notion that there was an interesting story to be told. Nevertheless the conversation at Winchester is probably typical of attitudes to Warbeck. To most historians, as indeed to anyone who has heard of him, ‘Perkin Warbeck is a bit of a joke.’ The best joke about Warbeck is chapter 30 of 1066and All That, entitled ‘Lambert Simnel and Perkin Warbeck’. Here it is in its entirety.

English History has always been subject to waves of pretenders. These have usually come in small waves of about two – an Old Pretender and a Young Pretender, their object being to sow dissension in the realm, and if possible to confuse the Royal issue by pretending to be heirs to the throne.

Two Pretenders who now arose were Lambert Simnel and Perkin Warbeck, and they succeeded in confusing the issue absolutely by being so similar that some historians suggest they were really the same person (i.e. the Earl of Warbeck).

Lambert Simnel (the Young Pretender) was really (probably) himself, but cleverly pretended to be the Earl of Warbeck. Henry VII therefore ordered him to be led through the streets of London to prove that he really was.

Perkin Warbeck (the Older and more confusing Pretender) insisted that he was himself, thus causing complete dissension till Henry VII had him led through the streets of London to prove that he was really Lambert Simnel.

The punishment of these memorable Pretenders was justly similar, since Perkin Warmnel was compelled to become a blot on the King’s skitchen, while Perbeck was made an escullion. Wimneck, however, subsequently began pretending again. This time he pretended that he had been smothered in early youth and buried under a stair-rod while pretending to be one of the Little Princes in the Tower. In order to prove that he had not been murdered before, Henry was reluctantly compelled to have him really executed.

Even after his execution many people believed that he was only pretending to have been beheaded, while others declared that it was not Warmneck at all but Lamkin, and Permnel had been dead all the time really, like Queen Anne.1

1066 was published in 1930.Within five years G.W. had made the obvious connection, in Notes and Queries (1935). In an article called ‘Richard, Duke of York, and Perkin Warbeck’ he made a suggestion,

for consideration by those who are interested in the matter; viz., Let us assume for the sake of argument that the ‘strange youth’ who appeared in Ireland and impersonated York’s first cousin, Edward Earl of Warwick, was none other than Richard, Duke of York himself. Made prisoner on the field of Stoke, he was passed off as ‘Lambert Simnel,’ and became a scullion in the royal kitchen. By some means the scullion was exchanged for Perkin Warbeck, who thus took Simnel’s place, and in due course became the King’s falconer. It was this falconer, her son, who dictated to York the text of the letter written to Catherine Warbeck in October 1497, and attached his signature to it. He was ‘the menial servant’ who had persuaded the fugitive to come in from Beaulieu trusting in the King’s mercy. Extraordinary as the above suggestion may appear to be … 2

Reading the article, it is difficult to know if it is derived directly from 1066 or if it is not a forerunner of the Penket Papers.3 Alas G.W. was in earnest. He worked, nonetheless, in a tradition which flourishes. Historians still try to find in the events of 1487 the germ, if not the actual person, of the Perkin Warbeck conspiracy.4 Working on Warbeck, or merely reading the chronicle sources it becomes quickly and sharply clear that in the 1490s no one in Henry VII’s government considered his career amusing. He was, we know, the butt of many jokes, but the punishments meted out in 1495 alone clarify conclusively the threat he represented to Henry VII, whether we think this threat was real or the product of Henry’s imagination.5

Two years after Winchester, in 1989, I agreed to write a book on Warbeck. This, the resulting volume, has taken longer to finish than I anticipated when I first agreed to write it due to the usual commitments of life and work. Jaqueline Mitchell must be thanked for the way she did her job of prising a manuscript from an unwilling author, the fate of all editors. Given the international nature of the Warbeck problem, I have to thank the Richard III and Yorkist History Trust who were kind enough to make me a grant to visit to the Archives Départementales du Nord, at Lille. In Lille I met Isabelle and Willy Maufroy. Willy at that time was archivist of Valenciennes. He has been unfailing in his help over Warbeck, which extended, at Easter 1992, to driving my wife and myself to Tournai. He also unearthed the strangest manifestation of the Warbeck phenomenon that I know: Récits Historiques, cautionary tales for children, by Mlle Carpentier, in which one Perkins (sic) Warbeck figures.6 Latterly I have incurred a debt also to Janet Moore, a former colleague at Nottingham High School for Girls whose proficiency in Latin has been a saving grace to my lack.

Beyond these practical debts there are three more. The first is to Margaret Condon. Over many years we have talked about Henry Tudor. I have always benefited from her immense knowledge of the reign, her knowledge of the Public Record Office, her tact, and her sense of humour. The second is to Cliff Davies who was kind enough to offer me hospitality at Wadham College just before Christmas 1992. Over the last few years we have developed a mutual interest in certain of the odder manifestations of fifteenth-century politics and I have benefited greatly from my conversations with him. Finally it is only right to thank Professor Michael Jones of Nottingham University. Michael has responded without stint to my uninformed questions about the social history of fifteenth-century France, and on occasion has lent me books on Brittany and France difficult to obtain elsewhere with ease.

There remains the greatest debt of all: to my wife who has sustained me over a testing period of writing. More than this: she has transcribed my handwritten first draft, at times almost impenetrable and indecipher-able, and has talked over every aspect of Warbeck’s career with me, many more times than I remember. There is little in this book which would be there if not for her.

Genealogical Table 1: The House of York

Genealogical Table 2: The Werbecques of Tournai

Perkin Warbeck’s Confession

Perkin Warbeck as Richard, Duke of York

Fyrst is to be knowyn that I was born In the toun of Turney In Flaundyrs and my ffadyrs name is callid John Osbek, which said John Osbek was countroller of the said toun of Turnay, and my modyrs name is katharyn de Faro, and oon of my grauntsyris upon my ffadyrs side was namyd deryk Osbek which died, afftir whoos deth my Graunt modyr was maried unto the withyn-namyd petyr Flamme that was Receyvour of the fforenamyd toun of Turnay & dean of the botemen that Row upon the watyr, or Ryver of leyscow, and my grantsyre upon my modir side was callid petir de Faro, The which had In his kepyng the keyes of the Gate of Seynt Johnis withyn the same town of Turnay, Alsoo I had an uncle namid mastir John Stalyn dwellyng In the parysh of seynt Pyas withyn the same toun, which had maried my ffadyrs systyr whoos name was Johan or Jane with whom I dwellid a certayn season, and afftirward I was lad by my modyr to andwarp for to lern Flemysh In an howse of a cousyn of myne & officer of the said toun callid John Styenbek with whom I was the space of half a yere, and aftir that I Retournyd agayn unto Turnay by Reason of the warris that were In Flaundyrs, And withyn a yere ffoluyng I was sent with a marchaunt of the said toun of Turney namyd Berlo & his mastyrs name Alexandyr to the mart of andwerp where as I fill syke, which sykenes contynuyd upon me v monythis, and the said Berlo sett me to bourd In a skynners hows that dwellid beside the hows of the Inglysh nacion, and by hym I was from thens caried to Barow mart & lodgid at the sign of the old man where I abode the space of ij monethis, and afftir thys the said Berlo sett me wyth a marchaunt In middylbourgth to service for to lern the langage whoos name was John Strewe with whom I dwellid from Crystemesse to Estyr, and then I went Into portyngale In the company of sir Edward Bramptonys wyfe In a shypp which was callid the Quenys Shypp And when I was comyn thidyr I was put In service to a knygth that dwellid In lushborn which was callid petyr Vacz de Cogna with whom I dwellid an hool yere, which said knygth had but oon Iye, and then becawse I desirid to see other Cuntrees I took lycence of hym, and then I put my sylf In servyce with a breton callid pregent meno, the which brought me with hym Into Irland, And when we were there arryvyd In the toun of Cork, They of the toun because I was ariad with soom clothis of sylk of my said mastyrs cam unto me and threpid upon me that I shuld be the duke of Clarence sone that was beffore tyme at develyn, and ffor as mwch as I denyed It, There was browgth unto me the holy Evangelyst & the Crosse by the mayer of the toun which was callid John le wellyn and there In the presence of hym & othyr I took myne oth as the trowth was that I was not the foresiad dukis sone nothir of noon of his blood, And afftyr this cam unto me an Inglish man whoos name was Sthephan poytron with oon John watir & said to me In sweryng grete othis that they knewe well I was kyng Richardis bastard sone, To whom I answerd with lyke othis that I was nott, and then they advysid me (not) to be afferd but that I shuld take It upon me boldly, and If I wold soo do they wold ayde & assyst me with all theyr powar agayn the kyng of Engeland, and not oonly they, But they were assuryd well that therlis of desmund & kyldare shuld do the same, ffor they forsid not what party they took soo that they mygth be Revengid upon the kyng of Engeland, And soo agayn my wyll made me lern Inglysh & tawgth me what I shuld doo & saye, and afftir this they callid me duke of york the secund sone of kyng Edward the iiijth, because kyng Richardis bastard sone was In the handis of the kyng of Engeland, And upon this the said John watyr, stephan poytron, John Tyler, hubert Burgth with many othir as the fforesaid Erlys, entrid Into this fals quarell, and withyn short tyme afftyr the Frensh kyng sent unto me an ambassade Into Ireland whoos namis was loyte lucas & mastir Stephan Fryon to advertize me to come Into Fraunce, and thens I went Into Fraunce, and from thens into Flaundirs, & ffrom Flaundyrs Into Ireland, & from Ireland Into Scotland, and soo Into Engeland.

from, The Great Chronicle of London,

ed.A.H. Thomas and I.D.Thornley (London, 1938)

PART ONE: TO CORK

ONE

The Beginning and the End of the Problem

In December 1499 the curious traveller crossing London Bridge on his way to Kent could have seen displayed on poles the heads of two recently executed traitors. One only had been born a king’s subject, John Atwater of Cork. The other was a subject by adoption, Perkin Warbeck, born in Tournai, originally a subject of the Duke of Burgundy. Their execution at Tyburn Tree had been watched by a huge crowd of people drawn by the fascination of Warbeck; to hear him rehearse once again that litany of his life: who he was, who his ancestors were, what places they had lived in, what masters he had served and that he, a Tournaisian, had called himself Richard, Duke of York, second son of Edward IV, only when forced to by John Atwater, sometime Mayor of Cork. Then, and not for the first time, he asked forgiveness of the King, and of anyone else he had offended. His confession and obligatory ritual obeisances to the Crown finished, he was hanged first and then came Atwater’s turn.1

The chance meeting of these two was described by Warbeck in his confession; copies of which had circulated in every city in England, and every court in Europe, over the previous two years. Warbeck described how he and his master, a Breton merchant called Pregent Meno, had arrived in Cork. There Meno obliged Warbeck to wear some silks he was peddling. Instantly the men of Cork recognized him for who he was, Edward, Earl of Warwick, the Duke of Clarence’s son, who they recognized because they had seen him in Dublin. Perkin vehemently denied all this and called for a crucifix and Gospel to swear an oath of denial. All this was witnessed by the Mayor of Cork, John Lewellen by name, and Warbeck swore not only that he was not the duke’s son but that he was no blood relative either. However his trials were not over. He was approached by two Englishmen, of whom Atwater was one, who swore equally convincing oaths that he was in fact the bastard son of Richard III, John de Pontefract. Warbeck again countered with sincere oaths that he was not this person. But Atwater and the other man, Stephen Poytron, persisted and told Warbeck not to be afraid but to take it on him boldly, and that if he went along with them they would help him with the considerable power at their disposal, to overthrow the King of England. Help was guaranteed from the local Earls of Desmond and Kildare who like them wished for revenge on the king and so would make common cause with them. So, said Warbeck, against his will they made him learn English and taught him what to do and say; and finally, because John de Pontefract was in Henry VII’s hands, they called him Duke of York. After this the conspirators – John Taylor, John Atwater, Stephen Poytron and Hubert Burke – aided and abetted by the earls began, what Warbeck called, this false quarrel. It was a quarrel which attracted immediate international support. The King of France sent a two-man embassy to Ireland, Louis Lucas and Stephen Frion, which recognized him as Duke of York, rightful heir to the throne of England and invited him to take up residence in France. Warbeck, or Duke Richard as he now was, was received in France as the true King of England. Thereafter the King of Scotland and Maximilian, the Holy Roman Emperor, also acknowledged him to be Richard Plantagenet.2

There is nothing in Warbeck’s confession which should make us doubt its truthfulness. Whenever historians have pursued its detail, and they have done so to considerable extent, they have found evidence which substantiates it. And yet it remains tantalizingly unsatisfactory, a completely incomplete document. Why? Partisans of the House of York have suggested that it was produced under duress, a deliberately misleading document covering up the real story: Warbeck was Richard, Duke of York.3 Historians aiming at objectivity have seen its reticence as proof of Henry VII’s desire not to offend the guilty party. For, ten or so years after it had all begun, relations with the guilty had changed to such a degree that it was inadvisable to pin the blame too securely on any one person.4 Yet this is to enter into a debate with a document which had a strictly limited purpose: to circulate sufficient personal and circumstantial material about Perkin Warbeck and so end the debate about whether he was Richard Plantagenet, Richard IV, true King of England or not. Warbeck’s confession was not intended to tell the whole story, least of all to demonstrate in detail that every monarchy in Europe, bar one, had lent dignity to this conspiracy, and so pave the way for others. It was intended by Henry VII as a resolution of what was for him an unresolvable problem – that he could never completely translate his right as King of England by the victory at Bosworth, de facto, into a statement that he was rightfully, de jure, king. Henry VII’s kingship rested ultimately on a transfer of allegiance by the greater part of the political community of Yorkist England from their master, Edward IV, and his murdered son, Edward V, to him. This transfer had been worked out in the two years before Bosworth and sealed with Henry’s undertaking to marry the late king’s daughter, Elizabeth of York. That Henry VII was a Yorkist king is now part of the consensus about him among late medieval historians. What is meant by this, that Henry used Yorkist methods of government, and that there was great continuity of service between Edward IV’s government and his, is undeniable. But the ironic style of the statement and the overwhelming concentration on government and administration obliterates the motivating values of the chivalric élite who backed Henry before, and after, Bosworth.

It is the great Dutch historian Huizinga who draws our attention to the intensely personal nature of late medieval politics, so personal and so intense that the main driving force of politics in this period are loyalty to a lord and loyalty to his family, and blood; and what flowed therefrom – pursuit of his right, revenge, and the demand for justice.5 Henry and his son Henry VIII always remained vulnerable to the claims in blood of surviving members of the Plantagenet family, such as the Courtenays and the de la Poles, because of the muddle and mystery surrounding the fate of Edward IV’s sons. A sure signal of this vulnerability is given by Henry’s own propagandist historian Polydore Vergil when he starts the history of Henry’s reign with the transfer of the Duke of Clarence’s surviving son, Edward, Earl of Warwick, from prison in Sheriff Hutton to the Tower of London. He was moved here, we are told, lest he stir up civil discord, sedition.6 And indeed he had, all things considered, a better blood right to the throne than Henry.

On the continent the Burgundian historiographer Jean Molinet heard another story of the days after Bosworth; that Henry, taking the oath of allegiance in towns near to London before his coronation, proclaimed that if there were anyone of the line of King Edward who had a right to the throne, he should show himself and he, Henry, would help to crown him.7 However we read this story, at face value, or as part of a scheme to flush out immediate opposition to him in the London region, his initial vulnerability never far receded. Not after 1499 when Henry attempted to free himself from the ghost of a Yorkist comeback by executing Edward, Earl of Warwick at the same time as Perkin Warbeck; nor later in 1504, when the story that the real Richard and his brother Edward V had been murdered by Sir James Tyrrell first appeared. Even on his deathbed, if one account is to be believed, he warned his eighteen-year-old son to execute the Yorkist claimant to the throne, Edmund de la Pole, rather than leave him alive in England if he was ever obliged to leave the kingdom to fight in France.8 The people were not to be trusted as long as pretenders lived.

Had the Warbeck conspiracy never existed, or had it never taken on the strength which it did in 1493, it is possible that we would have been spared the awful final decade of Henry VII’s reign; a decade of distrust, repression, imprisonment, and execution. It was, thought Sir Thomas More, a decade of perpetual winter; a decade which prompted some to begin moves against the monarchy under the Magna Carta.9 That the Warbeck conspiracy developed well beyond its inauspicious beginnings was a tragedy for all whom it touched. But that it did so was due to its roots which ran long and deep into English and European politics. They began in the relationship beween the Wars of the Roses and European monarchs. They lay in the political method of the rising French state. They developed out of all proportion in 1492 and 1493 when Henry VII’s obsessive reactions to the dynastic problems which confronted him converted a plot of small-time losers into a viable focus for discontent. And they already existed in the psyche of the late medieval Englishman who expected the imminent return of the dead leader.

TWO

A World of Displaced Men

The Europe into which Perkin Warbeck was projected as Richard IV was at a point of departure. Everywhere there was dislocation, the same strange mixture of old and new. In the east the Turks threatened the existence of Christendom. In the west methodical Portuguese sought for the route round Africa to Asia; but dreamers like Martin Behaim and Christopher Columbus dreamed of sailing to Japan across the Atlantic. All over Europe a religion compounded of philosophy, customary beliefs and magic satisfied the majority. Yet everywhere radicals, intellectuals and heretics called for renewal – psychological, spiritual and institutional. Scientists, mathematicians and geographers redefined the limits of the material world. Yet they coexisted with alchemists, fraudsters and astrologers. And as often as not they were the same people. All over Europe the old élite founded on rural wealth jostled for power with new urban and capitalist classes; confronting, adapting and exploiting them. All over Europe armies, based on Roman and medieval ideas and facts: archers, footsoldiers and knights, were giving way to the new technologies of gunpowder and cannon. Everywhere technology was in advance; from the Fenlands where the rich and prosperous, including the King of England’s mother, drained land for profit, to the library where, in common with the upwardly mobile yeoman and gentleman, her son collected printed books rather than manuscripts.1 If the sixteenth century saw the rebirth of Europe, then the hour of its conception was the fifteenth century, and the onset of labour was in 1492.2 This was a rich, perhaps over-rich, culture waiting for that transforming event, the discovery of the New World, which would give coherence to its disparate material and spiritual patterns and harness new economic forms unleashed by a growing population. The discovery of America was the event which created a new world order. Perkin Warbeck, who might hardly seem a footnote to this process, touched and was touched by all the people who made the discovery of the New World possible: bankers, explorers, princes, charlatans, greedy men bent on disciplining a continent emerging from the chaos of civil wars.

All over Europe in the latter half of the fifteenth century civil wars had been fought, in Scotland, France, Portugal, Spain, and in the ashes of the Burgundian state. The Wars of the Roses were the English experience of a common phenomenon and there has been an enormous outpouring of published work on the subject. Families, administrations, counties and regions have been described minutely to provide an understanding to the nature of and reasons for the Wars. But with the exception of the attention given to the loss of England’s French lands, in the 1450s, because of the furore this caused within England, most of what has been written is myopically Anglocentric. In their earliest manifestation the Wars of the Roses were a consequence of Henry VI’s disastrous mishandling of foreign affairs. Yet, such was the nature of politics in the 1450s, there was little of a foreign dimension in England’s troubles except Richard, Duke of York’s retreat to Ireland, and Warwick the Kingmaker sweeping the sea before withdrawing to Calais with Edward, Earl of March. But when the dam burst and civil war broke out in England, between 1459 and 1465, Scotland and France became bases for the exiled Lancastrians. During the Readeption crisis and the renewal of the wars, between 1468 and 1471, Burgundy and Brittany became involved, the former as supporter and financier of Edward IV, the latter as home in exile for Jasper Tudor and his nephew, Henry, after Edward IV’s return to England. The Yorkist triumph meant France’s failure to install its client candidate, Richard Neville, Earl of Warwick as King’s Lieutenant in a restored Lancastrian regime.

The most complex configuration of the internationalization of the Wars occurred during the period 1483 to 1509 when no fewer than five major powers, Brittany, France, The Holy Roman Empire, England and Spain, were at loggerheads over French ambitions, first in the Burgundian Netherlands, then in Brittany and then Italy. In an effort to maintain their domestic and foreign policies each power in turn was sucked into the civil war and political instability wished on England by Richard III’s seizure of power. In 1485 the French were for once successful in having their client candidate, Henry Tudor, placed on the throne after the Battle of Bosworth. But Bosworth did not simplify the drift of European politics the complexity of which, if anything, intensified so that further interference in English politics by France and its main rivals, Spain and the Holy Roman Empire, was to be expected. In 1487 Imperial intervention in England came through Margaret of York, dowager Duchess of Burgundy. Imperial mercenaries fought, unsuccessfully against Henry VII in battle at East Stoke.3

Such intervention by powers intent on the short term neutralization of England’s military capacity had the inevitable effect of increasing contacts between man and man in what was already a cosmopolitan situation. Margaret of Anjou, unsuccessfully, used the French commander Pierre de Brézé against Edward IV in the early 1460s. In 1470 Edward lived in the home of Louis de Gruuthuse at Bruges. Once Edward was back in England he showed his gratitude to Louis by giving him an English title, Marquess of Winchester, and by showering him with gifts, some of which were his own personal belongings. Henry VII’s period of exile resulted in his penchant for employing Bretons, Frenchmen and, at times, anyone he could woo from foreign service.4

The fighting which took place during the wars has been shown by Anthony Goodman to have involved all classes of people from almost every region of England.5 But the combatants were by no means limited to Englishmen alone. The early battles may have been fought only by interested English parties, but from 1485 onwards the conflict engaged many outside the English ruling élite. Bosworth is a nice case in point. There a French-backed candidate supported by a mixture of English exiles, Scots and French troops (lent by Charles VIII), joined with native English and Welsh supporters against an English army, but one which contained observers from Spain and one of the most prominent Burgundian mercenary captains of the day, Jean Salazar. At East Stoke the position was reversed. At that battle Henry VII’s English forces fought Irish, Scottish, Swiss mercenary and English troops led by the Earl of Lincoln and Martin Swart.6 This was only one side of the coin. English kings were happy to employ mercenaries from the Netherlands, France and Switzerland in England, and they were equally happy to employ, as Edward IV did in 1471 and Henry VII did in 1492 and 1497, artillery personnel who had experience of European, particularly Flemish, warfare. The other side of the coin was the desire of European monarchs to staff their forces with England’s élite force, its archers. Charles the Bold deployed English archers in specially trained units in battle, and staffed his bodyguard with them. In 1478 Margaret of Burgundy successfully recruited men from Coventry to serve as archers in Flanders. In the 1490s the French were said to quake at the thought of English troops entering their country against them.7

Men saw service widely in Europe, a Europe that was not yet one of nation states, but rather a place of lords and men personally attached to each other, not inviolably to their ‘patria’. Political relations were peculiarly personal. Loyalty, a key concept in the period, was not given, forever, irreversibly. If loyalty was dishonoured the wounded sense of honour would dictate service elsewhere, where true, truer, loyalty was recognized. The tension between loyalty and honour is one cause of the otherwise bewildering shifts in the politics of the time, their apparent and real irrationality and lack of sequence. Thus could Louis XI offer the slighted kingmaker, Richard Neville an apanage in north-eastern France to betray Edward IV. Thus could Louis support such unlikely allies as Margaret of Anjou, George Duke of Clarence and Warwick the Kingmaker at Margaret’s court at Angers. It was a feature of the Wars of the Roses that between 1460 and 1525 England spawned a number of satellite courts, the courts of the dispossessed and exiled in European states. The internal exile of the Lancastrians began at Coventry and York in the 1450s. Thence they fled to Scotland, briefly, before settling at Angers. The House of York saw its noble progenitor forced to a self-made court in Ireland in 1459, while in 1470 his son, Edward IV, fled to Burgundy. Pensions and gifts maintained these royal guests against the day when the debt would be repaid with an attack on their native country. So, for fourteen years, Henry Tudor lived in prison and at ease in Brittany before gathering his band of exiles at Vannes. Then, caught in the welter of European politics, he crossed into France and for a brief period was established in Anjou and at Paris.8

After Bosworth the most notorious haven for English exiles was the household of the dowager Duchess Margaret of Burgundy. Margaret, the remaining politically independant member of the house of York, was the patroness for many who questioned Henry Tudor’s right to the throne of England. Prior to Bosworth it was reported that the Calais garrison firmly expected Clarence’s son to inherit the throne. When he did not inherit, over two hundred of the garrison transferred their allegiance from England to Flanders. They fought at the siege of Therouanne for the Archduke of Austria, Maximilian, in 1486.9 A similar transference of loyalty was exercised by Sir Richard Harleston in the Channel Islands and, when he was forced to surrender the Duchess Margaret’s usurped jurisdiction to Henry, he fled to her household in Malines.10 A year later he was joined by Francis, Lord Lovel and John, Earl of Lincoln. This period, in the approach to the Lambert Simnel plot marks a, perhaps the, high point in Margaret’s life. She could be confident of financial aid from Flanders and the Holy Roman Empire, as well as aid to arm and transport some of Maximilian’s beloved mercenaries to Ireland. At East Stoke this all came crashing round her ears. The core of her rebel force led by Lincoln and Lovel, including the ex-Calais garrison men was annihilated. Lincoln was killed, Lovel forced into permanent exile and political extinction – dying where and when we know not. Some loyalists remained, Harleston was one; and some stragglers from the rout at East Stoke reached her the following year.11 For them the Warbeck adventure awaited. But in 1488 her cause was all but finished. Her Irish allies, who had lent their military support at Stoke, suffered a furious onslaught from Henry who took from them massive bonds to ensure good behaviour. Future communication with the Duchess would be punished severely, as would any breach of their primary loyalty to the English, Tudor, King.12 For Margaret, worse was to happen at home in England. In May of that year, in what might have been the forerunner of an emergent policy, Henry VII allowed Edward Plantagenet, Earl of Warwick, to witness a document in Warwickshire. Was this to be the beginning of a political rehabilitation for Warwick; the beginning of restoring him, a political non-person, to his rightful place in the realm, just as Edward IV considered doing, but did not do, to Henry himself.13 It did not happen, and we will see why, but it might have.

In Flanders Margaret could no longer count on Maximilian’s automatic support against Henry. European politics had made the cooperation of England and Flanders against France a matter of necessity. Between November 1488 and February 1489 the Treaty of Dordecht was negotiated and concluded. The old friendship with Flanders was revived; the unstated aim of the treaty was to safeguard Brittany and defeat French ambitions there and in Flanders.14 For disappointed subjects of Henry VII, Malines promised less and less. In April 1489 Yorkshire rebelled against paying Henry’s taxes for a war to defend Brittany. The only politically motivated rebel, Sir John Egremont, found virtually no support in the north and his flight to Malines ended in similar disaster. He returned to England a disillusioned man.15 Malines was a political wilderness. True, Margaret kept up a desultory correspondance with James IV of Scotland: in December 1488, September 1489 and February 1490. And, true, these dates may be significant, in that the last two coincided with a new plot against Henry. But in the late eighties Henry VII enjoyed the summer of his reign: alliances with Flanders and Spain, successful war with France, and an intelligence system which stopped Margaret’s plots, if indeed they were hers, dead in their tracks.16

Exile for those who could not come to terms with Henry Tudor could be found without crossing the Channel. Following their defeat at East Stoke, Francis Lord Lovel, Sir Thomas Broughton, and others, were received within Scotland by James IV. In 1488 he granted them letters of safe conduct for a year, but they had probably been received in the previous year by his father James III. At the end of the year James also allowed his court to be used by a party of English exiles in transit from Ireland to the Duchess, Margaret of Burgundy. Their normal place of residence was in her household, for they were headed by the redoubtable Sir Richard Harleston. During 1488 Harleston had roamed the high seas as a sea rover for the Duchess Margaret. Some of these exiles went back home after brief periods in Scotland. John Broughton, for example, in exile in 1488, was pardoned by Henry VII in 1490. For others this was not so. Sir George Neville, banished to Scotland in 1491, spent the rest of his life as a wanderer.17

England, halfway between mainland Europe and Scotland, was host to displaced persons from Brittany, Burgundy and Scotland. On the death of James III a number of particularly loyal servants fled south of the border, just as Richard III’s had fled north in 1487. Among the Scots who came to Henry VII for relief was John Ramsay, the so-called Lord Bothwell. Henry gave him a pension for life and, thereafter, whether in exile or in Scotland, he acted as agent for Henry. Long-lasting loyalty, over-attachment to a lord, a possible cause of exile, could indicate the sort of behaviour which would result from speedy pardon. Hence Sir John Ross of Montgrenan was welcomed back from England by James IV within a few years of his flight.18 Brittany sent exiles to Henry’s court. Some were voluntary, men who had followed him back to England in 1485, and stayed. Others, like Master Pierre le Penec in the 1490s, had been highly placed in the Breton government, but, on the conquest of Brittany, in taking action against the French to defend their duchy, were forced to leave it. Penec became a royal councillor, was given a position in the English Church and served Henry loyally at home and abroad. Even before the duchy fell Henry had manipulated the loyalties of exiles to undermine the French. In December 1491 Henry appointed Master Oliver Coetlogon Proctor General of the Duchy of Brittany (a meaningless title), called him councillor and gave him an annuity of 1,000 gold crowns. Since this was an attempt to undermine the French, Henry also promised to indemnify him if, due to war, he lost his property in Brittany.19 Henry Tudor’s penchant was for Bretons and Frenchmen. Edward IV used Burgundians. The most recently exposed career of an exiled Burgundian is that of Stephen Frion. In many ways Frion’s career resembles that of Pannec. He began as a civil servant in Flanders and was French secretary, successively, to Edward, Richard III and Henry. Yet he acted as a spy for the Flemish court before defecting to France.20

Anne de Beaujeu, Regent of France for Charles VIII until the French annexation of Brittany in 1491

The epitome of the court which patronized exiles, and the most feared in Europe even by the Ottoman Turks, for its manipulation of faction, was France. Louis XI is well known for his manipulation of Richard Neville’s ambition, and twenty years later Charles VIII, as we will see, exploited the legitimist longings of old supporters of York in much the same way. Expanding east and west, into Flanders and Brittany, the French monarchy encouraged disappointed factions to serve France. After 1477, with the Burgundian state in terminal decline, Louis XI and Charles VIII were served by men whose parents or grandparents had left France for Burgundy a generation earlier. Pierre d’Urfé, Guillaume and Guy de Rochefort, Philippe de Crèvecoeur, Philippe de Commynes, Philippe de Savoie and Jean de Chalon all abandoned Burgundy and rose to eminence in France.21 In many cases those who defected from Burgundian service in Flanders and the Low Countries came from what is now north-east France, principally Picardy.22 The very provinces they abandoned they then conquered for France and defended with all their expertise. Nor did they have any regrets. When the wars between Flanders and France ended, in 1493, many of the exiles opposed French acceptance of the peace at the Treaty of Senlis.23

Each new political crisis brought its new defector. Nowhere was this more clearly seen than in Brittany just before its fall. At the end of its life, with a crippled economy, occupied by its Swiss, Flemish, and English allies and assaulted by the French, the Breton government was riven by faction. On a number of occasions the French accepted at their court Jean de Rieux, Marshall of Brittany who, unable to obtain the preferment he wanted there, then returned to Brittany to lead its forces against the French.24 Cases like this were not uncommon. In 1492 a disappointed Breton nobleman, Guillaume Carreau offered to transfer his loyalty to Henry VII and deliver the strategically important town of Brest to English forces. When his sense of honour was slighted by the paltry reward he was offered he opted for service with the French. They confirmed him in power in Brest and he exposed his dealings with the English and their agents in Brittany.25 The final conquest of the Duchy was made possible by one such defector. Having oscillated in his allegiance between France and Brittany for seven years Alain, Seigneur d’Albret, a councillor of the French regent Anne de Beaujeu, delivered the coup de grâce to Brittany by surrendering the key to the town of Nantes to the French army encamped outside it.26

THREE

The Breton Wheel of Fortune

The besetting preoccupation of every European power during 1490 and 1491 was whether or not Brittany had any viability as a duchy independent of France. For a while, during 1490, it appeared that this was possible. But when the diplomacy aimed at ensuring Breton independence collapsed, France used every means at her disposal to undermine the major powers – Spain, England, Burgundy, Austria – ranged against her. The Perkin Warbeck Conspiracy was one part of these schemes by which France was able to occupy Brittany in 1491. By the end of 1491 a coalition of powers had decided to declare war against France, but it was only when Warbeck appeared in Ireland, as Richard, Duke of York, that Henry VII began to lobby European powers for a grand alliance against France. In January 1492 he wrote to Ludovico Sforza:

Were we not of the opinion that the extent of the tyranny of the French and their wicked lust for aggrandising others is manifest and well known to you we should endeavour to demonstrate it at full length; but … Everyone knows by what right they harassed the Duchess and Duchy of Brittany by protracted and grievous war, and at last brought it into their power. The art and craft they employed to induce Ghent and several other towns of Flanders to revolt from the King of Romans … Who is unaware of the snares they are preparing so that they may bring all Flanders under their yoke? If we wished to give you examples nearer home, we might remind you with what perfidy they supplanted the princes of Savoy …To such an extent does this insolent licence wander in every direction and move hither and thither with impunity at will. We pass over in silence the mischief the French are contriving against us and the snares they are spreading, as we have decided to avenge our injuries not by words but by arms.1

Already, on 8 December 1491, Henry had informed the papacy, that France was encouraging the Scots to make war on England, and that they had bribed members of the Breton nobility to secure delivery of the duchy, and that ‘They have also by many promises incited certain barons in Ireland and in our kingdom to rebel against us; and to this end they hostilely invade our borders, commiting acts of plunder and conflagration.’2

To understand both Henry’s fury, and the origins of the Warbeck conspiracy it is necessary to understand the events leading up to the complex French moves against the allied powers. By the Treaty of Le Verger, 1488, France secured virtual control of Brittany, and in January 1489 she took possession of the towns of Guingamp, Concarneau, Le Conquet and Brest. This action prompted a massive allied response. Swiss, Burgundian, Spanish, and English troops poured into Brittany so that by August 1489 only Brest remained in French hands. Away in the east, on its border with Flanders, Henry VII and his new ally Archduke Maximilian threatened to roll back the twelve years work which the French had expended in pursuit of conquering Flanders, Franche Comté and Burgundy. Suddenly the French regime was faced with the harsh reality that it could not simul-taneously acquire Flanders and Brittany. In order to conquer Brittany it therefore decided to make peace with Maximilian. The peace of Frankfurt of July 1489, between Charles VIII and Maximilian, temporarily detatched Maximilian from the other countries ranged against France, and it ushered in a year and a half of diplomatic and military uncertainty.3

French diplomacy was at its height in 1489.As well as negotiating with Maximilian France also sent ambassadors to England and Brittany. In each country the French blackened the reputation of the other in an attempt to weaken the allies and allow her inevitable conquest of Brittany. By August 1489 it was widely believed war was over, so the papacy turned its mind to brokering a peace between England and France. The Pope sent Leonard Chieragato, Bishop of Concordia, to France to conduct negotiations between Henry VII and Charles VIII. Quickly a number of sticking points emerged. On the French side it was felt a true peace would, in the circumstances, take too long to negotiate. On the English side Henry VII knew that the Breton war had cost over £120,000 and that the Breton economy was so crippled that Brittany could not repay her debts. A deal was struck therefore whereby France became de facto governor of Brittany and undertook to repay Henry’s war costs. The amount of money Henry VII was demanding was colossal. Early on in negotiation he demanded the resumption of payments due to England under the Treaty of Pécquigny of 1475. Then he said he had no intention of appearing inferior to Edward IV. Edward had received 50,000 crowns annually from France; he was being offered a mere 200,000 over three years. However, after a gruelling five months of bargaining, Chieragato had negotiated a truce, a sum, and the possibility of a permanent peace with France. The most complex part of the negotiation was how to achieve a peace which recognized Brittany’s integrity as a duchy. By 16 September the intricate negotiations, which left Chieragato feeling ‘very fatigued and languid’, were over and it was agreed that there would be an independent truce between France and Brittany to last until 1 May 1491.4

It would be wrong to imagine that these negotiations succeeded because of papal arbitration alone. When the French stalled the negotiations, in the summer of 1490, Henry sent troops to raid Normandy. In July it was rumoured that they would attack the Cherbourg region. In early August twenty English ships disembarked between five and six thousand troops in the La Hague region of Normandy and set fire to the villages there. For about two weeks they pillaged and took prisoners, and burnt the town of Quettenhou.5 By the time Henry’s ships withdrew from Normandy events had developed elsewhere. On 18 November 1490 it appeared that the Duchess of Brittany, Maximilian, the Spanish, and Philip the Fair had formed an alliance of mutual defence. Despite this, which was said to have infuriated them, the French made public that the truce was to run till May 1491. However, when on 19 December 1490 it became known that Maximilian had contracted to marry Anne Duchess of Brittany it was only a matter of time before matters came to a head. Charles VIII aborted the Anglo-French negotiations and, by February, England and France were locked into a war of words. By mid-March 1491 the French chancellor let it be known that France was ‘threatened with a serious war by the three most powerful kings – of the Romans, of Castille, and of England’. The Bretons meanwhile added insult to injury by claiming, in an embassy to the French court, that they knew that Maximilian’s marriage to their duchess ‘would be most agreeable to his most Catholic Majesty by reason of his very close connection with his father in law, the king of the Romans.’6 Charles VIII it should be remembered was betrothed to Maximilian’s daughter.

The French reply to what they regarded as the betrayal of the treaties of Le Verger and Frankfurt was to prepare a comprehensive plan to annex Brittany. Supreme command of the projected army of invasion, between thirty and forty thousand men, was vested in Louis de la Trémoille. In the event it met with virtually no opposition. Brittany, wasted by war, rebellion and faction, could not defend itself. Spain, England and Flanders, on the other hand, could mount some sort of defence for Brittany. Of the three, Spain presented France with fewest problems. It was a long way from Brittany and was distracted by war against the Moors at Granada. Henry VII and Maximilian of Austria were another matter. If French plans for the invasion of Brittany were to succeed then they had to be sufficiently diverted so that they could not come to Brittany’s aid.7 France had dabbled, and more, in the politics of the Low Countries since the death of Charles the Bold in 1477. In the first phase of the war against Brittany, in 1484 and 1485, it had allied with Bruges and Ghent; both were towns jealous to protect their independence from Maximilian and thankful to find a French protector. Across the Low Countries Maximilian waged a frightful war to secure the Netherlands for his son. Fighting ceased temporarily in July 1485, but it flared up again two years later growing gradually less intense from 1489, when France abandoned its Flemish allies to concentrate on conquering Brittany. In November 1490 Bruges, the last French ally, capitulated. But the French needed a diversion to tie Maximilian down while they took Brittany, so they prolonged the war.8

That diversion was Philippe de Cleves. In the early 1480s Philippe had been Maximilian’s chamberlain but by the late 1480s the two men were estranged. Ostensibly this estrangement related to the rough justice meted out by Maximilian on rebel towns. In reality Philippe regarded Maximilian’s intrusion into the Low Countries as intolerable. Philippe accused Maximilian of wishing to annex the Low Countries to his hereditary domains and regarded Maximilian’s son Philip the Fair, alone, as heir to Burgundian Flanders. In this Philippe found wide support, until 1489. Then, denied wholehearted French support, all Maximilian’s rebels except Philippe de Cleves had made peace with him. Philippe remained loyally wedded to his chivalrous ideal of Burgundy and refused to have any dealings with Maximilian, who had stripped him of his rank and title. Under the direct protection of the French, Philippe set himself up in Sluys castle. From here he led a rebellion which killed the trade in Bruges and damaged that of Holland. He encouraged Danish pirates to use Sluys as a base from which to pillage Channel shipping. Late in 1489 he stirred up a revolt in Bruges, and in 1490 promoted political murder in Ghent. His relations with the French were close and cordial. He supplied them with intelligence from the heart of Flanders, Malines, and they began to pay him a pension of 8,000 livres per year. In May 1491 the French government decided to send troops to de Cleves and on 5 June the Sante Barbe sailed for Sluys with reinforcements for de Cleves. Four days later he declared that peace with Maximilian was impossible because the Flemish estates and de Cleves had sworn loyalty to the regime of Philip the Fair. Within a month Charles VIII of France was addressing de Cleves as his ‘faithful counsellor and chamberlain’ and, in token of his gratitude, sent him 3,000 livres to maintain his rebellion. Four French officers, Andre de Fontaines, Guillaume Bongars, Bernard Urdoulx and Jean de Bournonville were sent to help him at Sluys. More payments from France followed, as did promises, secured by France, that more Danish privateers would join de Cleves’s rebels.9 There followed a long and expensive siege into the summer of 1492 when not even the aid of English troops could shift de Cleves. Eventually Sluys was surrendered not because of any military action but because the death of Philippe de Cleves further necessitated a successful negotiation with Maximilian to save the family lands. The French had had their diversion in Flanders and had occupied Brittany for virtually a year before Sluys surrendered. Tying Maximilian down in war also produced profitable by-blows. The towns in Holland and Friesland rose in rebellion against his war taxes. This was the pattern of events to be hoped for as the French turned on that other power likely to defend Brittany, England.10

French policy toward Henry was always coloured by a backward glance at 1485. Even if Robert Gaguin, France’s ambassador to England in 1489 and 1490, never made the speech credited to him by Bacon it illustrates the point. Bacon has Gaguin say that his master, King Charles, ‘rememberith their first acquaintance at Paris with so great contentment; nay, never speaks of him, but that presently he falls into discourse of the miseries of great kings, in that they cannot converse with their equals, but with servants’.11 Henry was assured that the first thing the French desired in their dealings with him over Brittany was his good affection. In fact it was a kind of supine compliance, born of gratitude, which France was requiring. The cheapest weapon in any struggle was insincere diplomacy. At the beginning of 1491 Charles VIII sent a Herald, Champagne, to Scotland, apparently to renew the Franco-Scottish alliance. He was in Scotland at the beginning of March 1491 and he returned to France at the end of that month to deliver the news that the Scots would send an important embassy to France. For James IV this embassy was part of his search for a wife.12 For the French it was about breaking a possible English marriage alliance with Scotland and persuading James to declare war on England. By May 1491 it was said in France that Charles VIII intended sending financial aid to James just as he had done to Philippe de Cleves. When the Scots ambassadors arrived at his court Charles VIII treated them incredibly casually, sure in the knowledge that he had obtained a way ‘to make trouble in England by way of Scotland’. The ambassadors achieved next to nothing. They agreed a treaty which in due time, within a year, the French effectively tore up, and they failed to negoitiate a wife for James.13 This diplomacy masked Charles VIII’s real purpose which had been to send his personal messenger, Seigneur de Concressault, Alexander Monypeny to Scotland. Monypeny was one of those expatriate Scots, like his late father, William, and Charles’s Chamberlain Bérault Stuart, who actively intervened in the Wars of the Roses on behalf of the French.14 Monypeny’s business was to announce one of Charles VIII’s ‘great schemes’ to James IV, and the timing of his visit, which coincided with French aid to Philippe de Cleves, suggests that the great scheme was action against England. James IV in Scotland was to be one leg, Maurice FitzGerald, Earl of Desmond in Ireland was to be another, and the disaffected within England would be another. The French, as in Flanders, would supply men, arms, boats and, wherever necessary, would harry English shipping. With a convenient east and west coast, Scotland was vital to the French plan for it provided France with a safe haven from which to direct and observe the diversion in Ireland.

These preparations against England were not taken lightly by Henry VII. He organized a number of Scottish dissidents to capture James IV and his brother, the Duke of Ross, and deliver them to England. This kidnapping was financed to the tune of £266. 13s 4d