7/25/2023 0 Comments Death to the pretendersThe Irishmen were poorly equipped compared to the Tudor forces, and were slaughtered in their thousands. The battle that followed was hard fought, but gradually the superior numbers and equipment of Henry VII’s men paid off, and the rebels were crushed. Though they found support difficult to raise, the rebel army continued to march south until on 16 June 1487 on a field in rural Nottinghamshire, they found their path blocked by a formidable royal force. In June 1487, an army fronted by Lincoln formed chiefly from Irish recruits and German mercenaries invaded northern England. The leading light of the rebellion at this juncture were the earl of Lincoln, a bonafide Yorkist magnate with a claim to the throne of his own, and Francis Lovell, a close adherent of Richard III who thirsted for vengeance on the Tudor king. The Irish, of course, had no inkling that in London, Henry VII had already paraded the real Warwick around court. Nathen Amin and Matt Lewis explore Henry VII's rise to power. When a boy purporting to be Warwick was presented to them, the Irish roundly accepted him as the rightful king of England, and on he was crowned as much in Dublin Cathedral. The Yorkists had deep connections to Ireland, where Warwick’s father Clarence had been born in Dublin. The problem was, Warwick was safely under lock and key in the Tower of London, which raises the question of just who was the ten-year-old boy now put forward as a potential king?Īfter the rebellion stuttered in England, the small band of rebels around the apparent boy prince fled to Ireland. This Warwick was the nephew of Edward IV and Richard III, a direct male-line Plantagenet descendant who had nevertheless been overlooked for the throne in recent years owing to the treason of his father, George, Duke of Clarence. In early 1487, rumours reached the royal court in London that a rebellion was forming fronted by senior Yorkist claimant, Edward, Earl of Warwick. Within two years of Henry’s accession, his first challenger emerged. He had inherited something of a poisoned chalice.Īs the Lancastrian heir, Henry’s rise had been through the presumed demise of the so-called Princes in the Tower, Edward V and his brother Richard of York, and though he married their sister Elizabeth to symbolically unite the warring houses, not everyone was content with the rushed dynastic settlement. Yet, Henry’s ascendancy at the end of a turbulent conflict known as the Wars of the Roses could not be the end of the story, no matter how hard he and his supporters pressed the matter. He acceded to the throne as Henry VII and initiated one of the most storied periods in English history. Due to a timely intervention from his Stanley in-laws and a general lack of fervour for Richard’s kingship, against expectations the day swung Tudor’s way. Henry was a minor Welsh earl with a slight claim to the throne, able to exploit discontent with Richard’s seizure of the crown to launch his own bid for power. At the Battle of Bosworth on 22 August 1485, Henry Tudor’s army overcame that of the king of England, Richard III, to become the unlikeliest figure to wear the English crown.
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