How far do you agree that the Yorkists remained a serious

threat to Henry VII’s throne throughout his reign?

Henry VII’s reign marked the end of one of the bloodiest civil wars in

English history, and did not become king without making a few enemies.

Chief among these enemies were the remnants of the Yorkist supporters,

now culled in battle or stripped of any power by the new king. Despite the

apparent lack of power, these last remaining few were still a serious

threat to Henry VII’s throne throughout his reign. These threats came in

many forms; the support of another, less powerful threat; a last ditch

attempt to unseat a new monarch; a half hearted flee from a king trying

to destroy any other claimants to his throne.

Early in Henry VII’s reign, Richard III’s loyal supporters, Lord Lovel, and

two other followers of Richard, Thomas and Humphrey Stafford, posed a

minor threat to Henry’s throne. Any new king who comes to the throne in

a time of war, though, can expect some rebellion from the old king’s

allies, so this encounter was no major issue for Henry, especially given

how easily the trouble was put down; Henry, confident of his power,

continued his northward path, showing how little he thought of Lovel’s

rebellion. He was right to do so, as only a small armed guard was needed

to disperse the laity raised by the Yorkists nobles. Clearly the Yorkists

were not strong enough to pose a serious threat to Henry’s throne, and

would need some form of external support in order to take back Richard’s

crown.

This external support came in the form of the pretender, Lambert

Simnel. While Lovel had fled, and the Staffords were executed, there were

still surviving Yorkists who could pose a serious threat to Henry’s throne –

and the Simnel plot capitalised on this fact. The young Earl of Warwick

was still alive, though he hadn’t been seen for months, and while he still

survived, the Yorkists could use him (or his character) as a hero to rally

around. This was a serious threat to Henry’s throne if he allowed it to

continue, and unfortunately he had to, because not even a king can justify

killing children. Simnel’s rising was, in some ways, a positive for Henry –

putting down the leaders of the rebellion (since Simnel was no more than

a Yorkist poster child) allowed Henry to squash rumours of Warwick for

the moment and to remove the other Yorkist threat: Lincoln. While the

Simnel plot and the subsequent Battle of Stoke were serious threats for a

king trying to avoid a regression into civil war, and the 8,000 Irish and

German soldiers caused the English some trouble, Henry’s army was able

to essentially wipe out two thirds of the Yorkist threat to his throne.

The final third of the Yorkist threat was no big deal realistically – the

fleeing de la Pole’s posed no serious threat to Henry’s throne, and yet

Henry treated them as such. With no particular support, and being in

Europe, the remaining Yorkists were isolated and powerless, and were not

a serious threat to Henry, but because one of his sons was dead and his

other son was a frail ten year old, and so he pursued the final Yorkists with

a vengeance. Thankfully, he did not need to do so for long, as a chance

storm forced Phillip of Burgundy to hand over the Earl of Suffolk: on the

proviso that Suffolk would not be harmed. Since de la Pole was allowed to

live for Henry’s entire reign, it could be argued that the threat remained

throughout Henry’s entire reign, but de la Pole was not well supported or

particularly cunning, and so his stay (no matter how long) in the tower,

was not a serious threat to Henry VII’s throne.

Throughout his reign, Henry VII faced many threats to his throne, but

the amount of these that were of Yorkist origin were surprisingly few, and

those that were, were not overly serious. Henry was able to deal with

these issues easily, and so even serious threats were not likely to remove

him from his throne. Clearly then, the truth of the Yorkist resistance was

that it had lost the strength of the past - a few dying fragments of Richard

III’s regime could never pose a serious threat at any point of Henry VII’s

reign.