Chapter 1

A King in the Frame for Murder 1489

The Tudor era was borne out of a Royal murder mystery. In 1483 the twelve-year-old Edward V and his brother, the Duke of York, aged nine, disappeared. It is generally believed that the Princes were slaughtered that summer. The usual suspect for ordering their untimely demise is Richard III, who had already declared their claim to the throne to be illegitimate and seized the crown for himself. Last seen playing in the grounds of the Tower of London, where they had been imprisoned, Richard is thought to have wanted the Princes out of the way so he could secure his position. Their bodies were never found. According to Sir Thomas More, writing thirty years later, the blue blooded pair were smothered to death on the orders of one of Richard’s henchmen, Sir James Tyrell. More alleged that Tyrell had confessed to the crime before his execution for treason in 1502.

There are, however, other serious suspects for the alleged murder. Chief among these is Henry VII, who became the first Tudor monarch in 1485 following Richard’s defeat and death at the Battle of Bosworth. The theory goes that Richard only became the accepted culprit as the result of later Tudor propaganda. Henry certainly had just as much to gain by the murder of the Princes as Richard. His own claim to throne was even more tenuous. While Henry was not in England between 1483 and 1485, it is possible that the Princes had survived Richard’s reign and were actually killed on Henry’s orders, probably sometime in 1486. It was only then, well after he had become king, that Henry let it be known that the Princes had been murdered.

Royal murderer? An engraving of Henry VII by James Hulett, after George Vertue. (Courtesy of Wellcome Library, London)

Henry’s possible involvement in history’s most infamous murders remains contentious, but there are suggestions that he may also have been implicated in another murder that is less well known, one which would help him tighten his grip on the country in the fledgling years of the Tudor dynasty.

The saying goes that nothing is more certain in life than death and taxes. This was never more true than in the case of Henry Percy, the fourth Earl of Northumberland, slain by a man apparently incensed by the swingeing levies being imposed to pay for Henry VII’s foreign wars. Until his death, Northumberland had led a relatively charmed life. His father had supported the House of Lancaster in the Wars of the Roses and after he was killed his son was briefly imprisoned in the Tower. Working his way back into the favour of the Yorkist Edward IV, Northumberland’s title was eventually restored and he was given important posts in the north of England. Despite drawing up his forces in support of Richard III at the Battle of Bosworth in August 1485, Northumberland mysteriously failed to commit them, helping to assure that the future Henry VII would be victorious and become king. Initially arrested after the battle, Northumberland was soon brought into the fold of the new regime and retained his offices in the north of England. Yet, at the start of his reign, Henry still saw the Earl as a potential threat. He was a powerful figure in Northumberland and Yorkshire, which had been Richard III’s power base. For his part, however, Northumberland seems to have shown nothing but loyalty to the new sovereign.

In January 1489, Henry demanded huge new taxes in his military campaign to support independent Brittany against the French. It fell to the Earl of Northumberland to try and enforce the taxes in the North. But pro-Yorkist sentiment had lingered in the region and its citizens resented the new duties which ordered that every man pay the ‘tenth penye of his goodes’. Northumberland warned Henry that the people were not able to pay the ‘houge some requyred of them … nor yet would once consente to pay’. Henry refused to consider any concessions.

In April 1489, open rebellion broke out. One of those who vehemently opposed the king’s taxes was a ‘simple fellow’ called John a Chambre who became one of the leaders of a rebel force, largely made up of commoners, which gathered in the vicinity around Thirsk. On 28 April, Northumberland and his entourage arrived at Cocklodge, his house in the area, in order to meet them. Northumberland had asked one of his followers, Sir Robert Plumpton, to bring a large company of men with ‘bowes and arrowes’. Yet it seems he did not intend a violent confrontation. Perhaps unwisely, he approached the protestors unarmed. The chroniclers tell us that he, ‘with faire wordes sought to appease, but they like unreasonable vilains, aledging all the fault to be in him, as chiefe author of the taxe’ became enraged. John a Chambre and his men suddenly set upon the Earl and ‘furiouslye and cruelly murthered bothe hym and dyvers of hys housholde servaunts.’ The murder of an Earl at the hands of commoners shocked the nation, with Tudor chronicler William Peeris branding it a ‘horrible mischief’ and ‘cruell cryme’.

Contemporary writers were also surprised that Northumberland’s own armed retinue – numbering as many as 800 souls – had apparently not intervened to save him as he talked to the rebels. Peeris spoke of the treachery of those ‘to whom he gave fees and was right speciall lord.’ The poet John Skelton bemoaned their lack of action alleging that ‘if they had occupied their spere and their shilde’ then ‘this noble man doubtles had not been slayne.’ Skelton believed Northumberland’s men ‘held with the commones under a cloke’.

Had someone told them to hold back? According to the chronicler Edward Hall’s account of the incident, Northumberland’s murder had not been due to a sudden moment of madness on the part of a few rebels but had been ‘procured’. In other words it had been planned in advance.

After the murder, the rebels grew in confidence and a new leader, Sir John Egremont, emerged. The city of York quickly came under their control. In response, Henry despatched a huge force of 8,000 men under the Earl of Surrey and, in the face of overwhelming opposition, the rebels dispersed without a battle. The Yorkshire Rebellion was over as quickly as it had begun and Northumberland, along with a handful of his servants, were the only ones to perish. John a Chambre was soon apprehended and that summer was hanged, ‘upon a gibbet set upon a square paire of gallows lyke an arche traytoure and his complyces and lewde disciples were hanged on the lower gallows roude about their mayster.’ Egremont escaped to France, while Northumberland was buried at Beverley Minster with due ceremony.

The result of the whole episode really could not have been better for the king. The Earl’s death was useful in robbing the Yorkist opposition in the north of a potential leader. It also helped that the dead Earl’s son was only eleven years old at the time, which meant that, for the time being at least, his father’s lands fell into the king’s hands. Meanwhile, Henry was able to appoint a man from the south, the Earl of Surrey, to shore up Tudor dominance over the northern part of the country, effectively quelling revolt. In the aftermath of the rebellion, Henry VII himself visited York to oversee the thorough implementation of the tax.

So did Henry have a hand in Northumberland’s murder? Closer examination of the backgrounds of the two key men involved in the rebellion is revealing. John a Chambre does not seem to have been a staunch Yorkist or even a local, possibly originating from Wales. He was a Royal Forester at Galtres in the North Riding and had been given his position, for life, in recognition of his services fighting at Bosworth for Henry Tudor. Is it possible that he had been encouraged by the king’s agents to believe he had something to gain from confronting Northumberland and was hurriedly hanged once the Earl was dead so he could not reveal who had put him up to it? Intriguingly, Egremont was actually Northumberland’s cousin. As an illegitimate member of the Percy family he may have had a personal axe to grind against Northumberland. Most tellingly, after a brief period of exile on the continent, he quietly reentered England and was given two manors in Northumberland by the king.

Even if Henry had not directly ordered the murder he had certainly left Northumberland vulnerable, purposely putting him at odds with those who might naturally have been his supporters. Northumberland had been left to the mercy of the mob and his death was, at the very least, suspiciously convenient.

There would be an uneasy relationship between the Percy family and the Tudors during the course of the next century. The fifth Earl never regained the offices or power his father had enjoyed. The brother of the sixth Earl was hanged for treason at Tyburn and the seventh Earl was beheaded at York after leading the failed Rising of the North in the reign of Elizabeth. The eighth Earl ended up in the Tower of London for his role in trying to help Mary Queen of Scots escape her imprisonment in England. In June 1585 he was found dead in his cell, apparently having shot himself with a pistol that had been delivered to him in a cold pie. The official inquest’s verdict was suicide, but there were rumours that he had been murdered, with Sir Walter Raleigh one of those convinced that the Earl had not died of natural causes. A Star Chamber inquiry into the matter, made up of the queen’s privy councillors, was convened. It also concluded that the Earl had taken his own life. A similar case of a supposed suicide behind bars would lead to even louder cries of murder in the reign of Henry VII’s son, just five years into the new king’s reign.