The Last White Rose Read Free Page A

theirminds in the light of information about his true origins. None of their names seem to have been on the list given to Henry by Sir Robert Clifford.
    The spiritual dimension can be overlooked in assessing the secret connections of Fra’ John Kendal and his friends with Yorkism. He was very conscious of the vows he had taken. (In his letters he invariably addresses fellow members of his order as ‘ Spectabilis ac religiose in Christo frater praecarissime ’ – ‘Most beloved noble and religious brother in Christ’.) Like the clerics mentioned in the affair, such as Bishop Langton or Archdeacon Hussey, and many other clergymen, it is not impossible that Kendal’s attitude towards the young man at Margaret’s court was to some extent dictated by conscience, which made him anxious to find out whether he really was who he claimed to be. Had Kendal become convinced beyond all doubt that this was the Duke of York he might well have fought for him.
    In the event, Henry VII took no action against Fra’ John, who resumed his place on the royal council. Such a reliable administrator was too useful to lose. He never discovered that Bernart de Vignolles was a traitor, and the man remained in his service for some time to come, presumably spying on him for the king. Kendal stayed on at Clerkenwell as Grand Prior until his death nearly five years later. If Bernart had denounced him earlier, however, his career might have ended very differently.
    Yet King Henry must have noted with considerable unease that at one point someone as respected as Fra’ John had accepted that Perkin really might be the Duke of York. The seizure of the Grand Prior’s correspondence in 1496 shows that despite the failure of the Yorkist invasion, the authorities suspected Warbeck was still being taken very seriously indeed. How many Englishmen remained loyal to the White Rose?
    10. March 1496: The Grand Prior Plans to Poison the King
     
1 . LP Hen VII , op. cit ., II, pp. 318–23. Our only source for this episode is Bernart’s Depositum .

2 . G. O’Malley, The Knights Hospitaller of the English Langue 1460– 1565 , Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2005, p. 144.

3 . Oxford DNB .

4 . I. Arthurson, The Perkin Warbeck Conspiracy 1491–99 , Stroud, Alan Sutton, 1994, pp. 76 and 232 n. 54.

5 . The Knights Hospitaller , pp. 146–50.

6 . A. Wroe, Perkin, a Story of Deception , London, Jonathan Cape, 2003, pp. 166–9 and 203–4.

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Autumn 1499: Edmund de la Pole, Earl of Suffolk
     
‘Edmund [de la] Pole, Earl of Suffolk, son to John, Duke of Suffolk and Lady Elizabeth, sister to King Edward IV, being stout and bold of courage, and of wit rash and heady, was indicted of homicide and murder, for slaying of a mean person in his rage and fury … [and] fled to Flanders, without any licence or safe conduct given to him by the king, to the Lady Margaret, his aunt on his mother’s side.’
    
     
Edward Hall, The Union of the two Noble and Illustre Famelies of Lancaste and Yorke [1548] 1
     
    If Warwick’s killing brought a curse it wasted no time in striking and Henry VII soon suffered a shattering series of bereavements. In 1500 his third son, Edmund, Duke of Bedford died, not yet a year old. In 1502 Arthur, Prince of Wales died at only seventeen, so that the young Prince Henry was now the onlymale Tudor other than the king. In 1503 Elizabeth of York died in childbirth.
    Thomas More wrote ‘A Rueful Lamentation on the Death of Queen Elizabeth’. For contemporaries, two of its lines had a hidden meaning.
‘Was I not born of old worthy lineage
Was not my mother queen, my father king?’ 2
     
     
    There is nothing to suggest that More was a Yorkist – not yet, at any rate – but everyone knew that Henry Tudor had not been born of ‘old worthy lineage’.
    The story of a curse on the Tudors was not going to fade away. Years later, Bacon heard that when Henry VIII announced his intention to