When the Earl of Richmond was made king, and was called Henry the Seventh, many persons began to be afraid that the wars of the Roses would begin again. But Henry was a wise man, and he had made friends of the party of York, by promising to marry his cousin Elizabeth, the sister of the little princes who were smothered in the Tower. So, as soon as he was crowned himself, and the people had owned him for their king, he married Elizabeth; and as Henry was King of the Red Rose party, and she was Queen of the White Rose party, the people agreed better than they had done for more than thirty years, and England began to be quiet and happy.
However, there were two disturbances in the beginning of Henry’s reign that I must tell you of. There was a very good-looking young man, called Lambert Simnel, that some people thought was very like the Earl of Warwick, a son of that Duke of Clarence who was killed in the Tower; and some persons, who wished to annoy Henry the Seventh, persuaded Lambert to say he was Warwick, and that he had run away from the Tower, and had hidden himself till after his uncle Richard’s death; but that now, as Richard and his little cousins were all dead, he had a right to be king. Some few Englishmen joined him, and a good many Irish. But in a battle at Stoke, in the North of England, they were all driven away, and Lambert was taken prisoner.
Marriage of King Henry VII. and Elizabeth of York.
The king, who knew the poor young man had been forced to do what he did by other people, did not send him to prison, but made him a turnspit in his kitchen; and, as he behaved very well there, he afterwards gave him the care of his hawks.
The second disturbance was of more consequence. A young man, called Perkin Warbeck, was taught by one of King Henry’s enemies, the Duchess of Burgundy, to call himself Richard Duke of York.
He said that he was the brother to the little king killed by Richard in the Tower, and that Dighton and Forrest could not bear to kill them both, and that he had hidden himself till he could get to the duchess, who, as he said, was his aunt.
Now King Henry knew this story was not true, yet it vexed him very much. For Perkin Warbeck prevailed on several noblemen in Ireland to take his part, and he went to Scotland, and got the king to believe him, and to let him marry a beautiful young lady, named Catharine Gordon, the king’s own cousin, and to march into England with an army, where he did a great deal of mischief before King Henry’s army could drive him away. Then Perkin sailed to Cornwall, and collected a small army; but after doing just enough mischief to make everybody fear him and his people, he was taken prisoner by King Henry, who kept him some time in the Tower: at last he was hanged at Tyburn, and nobody was sorry for him but his poor wife Lady Catharine.
King Henry sent for that unfortunate lady, and took her to the queen, who treated her very kindly, and made her live with her, and did all she could to make her happy again.
England was quite quiet for the rest of King Henry’s reign; and Wales, which had been ill-treated by the Kings of England ever since Edward the First conquered it, was better treated by Henry.
As there was no fighting, the young men began to try to improve themselves in learning. Some years before that time, some clever men in Germany had found out how to print books instead of copying them in writing, so there were a great many more books, and more people could learn to read. The young men in Cambridge and Oxford began to read the good books that had been forgotten in the wars of the Roses, and they were ashamed to find that there were not half a dozen men in England who knew anything at all about Greek. I think one of those few was Grocyn, a teacher at Oxford.
But the English had soon a very good Greek teacher. A young man born at Canterbury, called Thomas Linacre, after learning all he could at the school in his own town, and at Oxford, went to travel in Italy, where the most learned men in the world lived at that time. These learned men soon found out that Thomas Linacre was very clever indeed, and so they helped him to learn everything that he desired, for the sake of improving his own country when he came back. He studied everything so carefully, that on his return to Oxford the greatest and wisest men went to him to be taught Greek, besides many other things he had learned in his travels. He was chosen to be tutor to the king’s eldest son, Prince Arthur, and he was afterwards tutor to some of the next king’s children. He was the greatest physician in England, and before he died he founded the same College of Physicians that we have now.
In the next chapter we shall have a great deal to read about several of Linacre’s scholars; but I tell you about him now that you may know that it was in this king’s time that the gentlemen of England began to think of reading and studying, instead of doing nothing but fight.
About this time, sailors from Europe first found their way to America. Christopher Columbus went from Spain, Americo Vespucci from Italy, and Sebastian Cabot from England. They all arrived safe at the other side of the wide ocean, and then it was first known for certain that there was such a place as America. How surprised all their friends must have been, when they came home, and told of the strange things they had seen! The trees and the flowers were all different from ours. The birds were larger, and had more beautiful feathers; the butterflies had gayer colours than we had ever seen. Then they brought home turkeys, which their found in the woods, and potatoes, which they had eaten for the first time, to plant in our fields and gardens. But I should fill a whole book if I tried to tell you of all the things that were brought from the new countries found out in Henry the Seventh’s time.
We must now speak of the king himself. His wife, Elizabeth of York, was dead. She had four children, Arthur and Henry, Mary and Margaret. Mary became Queen of France, and Margaret Queen of Scotland. Arthur, who was the eldest, was good and clever, but very sickly, and he died before his father; so Henry was the next king.
Henry the Seventh was a very wise man, and a severe king. His greatest fault was loving money, so that he took unjust ways to get it from his subjects. He was very unwilling to spend anything upon himself or other people. But yet he laid out a great deal of money in building a great palace at Richmond, and in adding a beautiful chapel to Westminster Abbey, and in other fine buildings. He sent to Italy for painters and sculptors, to make pictures and statues; and he was fond of encouraging learning and trade.
But though he did many good and useful things, nobody loved him; and when he died there were very few persons indeed sorry for him.