He was not the only culprit whom Henry was willing to pardon.  Clemency indeed was his strong point, and he extended it without stint again and again to his Irish rebels.  He despatched Sir Richard Edgecombe, a member of the royal household, shortly afterwards upon a mission of conciliation to Ireland.  The royal pardon was to be extended to Kildare and the rest of the insurgents on condition of their submission.  Kildare’s pride stood out for a while against submission on any conditions, but the Royal Commissioner was firm, and the terms, easy ones it must be owned, were at last accepted, and an oath of allegiance sworn to.  Kildare, thereupon, was confirmed in his deputyship, and Sir Richard Edgecombe having first partaken of “much excellent good cheere” at the earl’s castle at Maynooth, returned peaceably to England.

The Irish primate, one of the few ecclesiastics who had refused to support the impostor, was then, as it happened, in London, and placed strongly before the king the impolicy of continuing Kildare in office.  Apparently his remonstrance had its effect, for Henry issued a summons to the deputy and all the Irish nobility to attend at Court, one which was obeyed with hardly an exception.  A dramatic turn is given to this visit by the fact that Lambert Simnel, the recently crowned king, was promoted for the occasion to serve wine at dinner to his late Irish subjects.  The poor scullion did his office with what grace he might, but no one, it is said, would touch the wine until it came to the turn of the Earl of Howth, the one Irish peer, as we have seen, who had declined to accept the impostor in his heyday of success.  “Nay, but bring me the cup if the wine be good,” quoth he, being a merry gentleman, “and I shall drink it both for its sake and mine own, and for thee also as thou art, so I leave thee, a poor innocent!”

Howth, whose speech is recorded by his own family chronicler, received three hundred pounds as a reward for his loyalty, the rest returned as they came, lucky, they must have felt under the circumstances, in returning at all.

Simnel was not the last Yorkist impostor who found credit and an asylum in Ireland.  Peterkin, or Perkin Warbeck was the next whom the indefatigable Duchess of Burgundy started on the same stage and upon the same errand.  This time the prince supposed to be personated was the youngest son of Edward IV., one of the two princes murdered in the tower.  He is also occasionally spoken of as a son of Clarence, and sometimes as an illegitimate son of Richard III.—­any royal personage, in fact, whose age happened to suit.  In spite of the slight ambiguity which overhung his princely origin, he was received with high honour in Cork, and having appealed to the Earls of Desmond and Kildare, was accepted by the former with open arms.  “You Irish would crown apes!” Henry afterwards said, not indeed unwarrantably.  This time Kildare was more cautious, though his brother, Sir James Fitzgerald, warmly espoused the cause of the impostor.  Perkin Warbeck remained in Ireland about a year, when he was invited to France and, for a while, became the centre of the disaffected Yorkists there.  He was a very poor specimen of the genus impostor, and seems even to have been destitute of the commonplace quality of courage.