Sunday, April 18, 2010

Heiry Situations

Soon enough a threat arose to Henry's precarious throne seat. A 10 yo boy claiming to be Edward, Earl of Warwick, Clarence's son, was crowned in Dublin as King of England & an nice invasion planned on his behalf.

Henry was gobsmacked b/c he'd made sure to swoop up Clarence's kids & plonk them in the Tower so they couldn't be used for any plots, & he promptly paraded little Edward around London to prove the kid in Ireland was a pretender & reminded peeps about that whole attainder thing. Nevertheless, this got the support of Richard's sister Margaret of Burgundy & his heir, John of Lincoln, who spearheaded a nice rebellion against the Tudor.

Margaret of York, Duchess of Burgundy

This was known as the battle of Stoke, which Henry didn't even bother to attend pffft. Lincoln was kilt & the alleged boy king brought to the Tower, where it was discovered he was a supposed baker's boy called Lambert Simnel who'd been used as a puppet. Henry pardoned the lad & put him to work in his kitchens!  This kid actually grew up to be a royal falconer.

Whilst Elizabeth was kept breeding little Tudors & MB queened it round the court, EW got bored & started plotting things again. She was like that.

A teenager presented himself to the court of Margaret of Burgundy as Richard of Shrewsbury, Duke of York & the rightful king of England now that TR had been repealed & they were all legit. This would be the younger of the PITT & he had a nice tale of how poor bro Edward had demised (o Edward supposedly was suffering from a constant pain in the jaw when he left Ludlow, so tis theorized he may have died from something as simple as an abcessed tooth) but he got smuggled out of the Tower to be secreted by some peeps in Flanders & now felt he was old enough to claim his throne. Margaret was always eager to make trouble for Lancastrians & welcomed him as her nephew. Henry started to get a little nervous.

Perkin Warbeck
AKA Richard, Duke of York

This alleged Duke of York AKA Richard IV was not only officially recognized by meddling Auntie Margaret, but by the King of France & the Holy Roman Emperor, too. Henry frantically levied trade sanctions & such but it didn't have the desired effect & he was all OMG O SHIT when an invasion force sallied forth again. Perkin Warbeck never even got off the boat alas, as his peeps' tentative foray was repulsed by the Tudor coast guard peeps. He then went to Ireland for a while, where they also enjoyed Tudor tweaking, & from there to Scotland.

Now Henry was REALLY getting nervous b/c the blue peeps had no love for England no matter who was on the throne & the young Scots king, James IV, also acknowledged this new pretender as the real deal. In fact, they got along like houses & James even offered him his kinswoman, Catherine Gordon, as a wife. Henry did some fancy diplomatic dancing & betrothed his eldest daughter, Margaret (named for Mummy natch), to James (who was twice her age), contingent on him kicking out Warbeck & wife.

Warbeck went back to Ireland to collect peeps & then attempted a landing in Cornwall. The whole thing was a disaster b/c he didn't have enough peeps & he was captured by Henry's forces w/o even engaging in battle. Warbeck was hurled into the Tower (his poor wife was sent to hang out w/ MB & their son taken away; no one knows what happened to the kid) & then supposedly began plotting to escape w/ Edward of Warwick. This was likely engineered b/c prisoners just didn't get to wander about willy-nilly & mingle w/ other prisoners, & Warwick was allegedly lame-brained from birth.

This was enough for Henry to kill 2 birds w/ one stone. He had Warwick's head down on a block on Tower Hill, but he meted out the Braveheart treatment to poor Warbeck, who was dragged on a hurdle to Tyburn to be hanged, drawn, & quartered, granting mercy by just having him hanged until he was dead if he read out a confession that he was a pretender & not the real Richard of York. EW & the girls weren't allowed to meet him, so ya gotta wonder if he had enough of a resemblance to be a believable PITT.  Methinks he kinda looks like Edward, so tis entirely possible he was somebody's Plantagenet bastard if he wasn't the real Richard.

That was known as the Last Gasp of the Wars of the Roses. EW got shoved into Bermondsey Abbey (shades of Queen Catherine who started this whole Tudor mess) for her plotting. No more pretenders reared up to bother Henry VII & so he could start sending out explorers to belatedly grab New World chunks & raising taxes some more.

There was this thing known as Morton's Fork (b/c his chief tax guy was John Morton, Bishop of Ely). Sort of like a Hobson's Choice for you peeps down in Coriolus Effect Land LOL See, if the tax collector knocked on your door & you had nice stuff, then you got socked real good b/c you could afford it. If, however, you did not have nice stuff, then you were hoarding coin & got socked real good b/c you could afford it. Henry piled up coin like ya wouldn't believe w/ this method. Peeps were not amused.

He had to let go of a lot of coin when Catherine of Aragon was finally sent over to marry Arthur.

Catherine of Aragon

Wedding PR & all that. Twas the 1st really good royal wedding in yonks & natch Henry wanted to impress those Spaniards w/ his wealth, so some of it had to be tossed around. It worked, b/c he was then able to betroth his daughter Mary to Charles of Castile, the son of Cath's sister Joanna & her hubby Philip of Burgundy. Philip was known as The Handsome but if so they had lousy portrait painters in Burgundy b/c um no.

Joanna of Castile w/ rellies;
from L, Emperor Maximilian,
daughter Isabella, son Charles,
DH Philip, & daughter Eleanor;
my don't she look thrilled LOL

Art was 15 & Cath was 16. The morn after the wedding Art was joking around that he was mighty thirsty b/c he'd been in hot Spain the night b4 LOL One day that would come back to bite Cath in the arse.  They were packed off to Ludlow as a Prince of Wales was, but within 5 mos word came that they'd gotten sick w/ some kinda flulike thing & while Cath survived, Art had demised.

This left Henry Jr as the sole male heir, as twas soon evident Cath hadn't done her heir duty. His little brother Edmund hadn't survived infancy. So Henry & Elizabeth got busy to make a new one right away. Unfortunately the new baby born 10 mos later was a girl who died within hrs & Elizabeth got sick from childbed fever (no hand washing, remember) & died on her 37th BD, plunging the court into deeper mourning....

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