unanimously tendered their allegiance to the pretender, as the rightful heir to the throne.  Their homage was of course accepted, and Simnel was solemnly crowned (May 24, 1487), with a crown taken from an effigy of the Virgin Mary, in Christ Church Cathedral.  After the coronation, he was publicly proclaimed king, and, as Speed tells us, “was carried to the castle on tall men’s shoulders, that he might be seen and known.”  With the exception of the Butlers of Ormond, a few of the prelates, and the inhabitants of Waterford, the whole island followed the example of the capital, and not a voice was raised in protest, or a sword drawn in favour of King Henry.  Ireland was in revolt.

When news of these proceedings reached London, Henry summoned the peers and bishops, and devised measures for the punishment of his secret enemies and the maintenance of his authority.  His first act was to proclaim a free pardon to all his former opponents; his next, to lead the real Earl of Warwick in procession from the Tower to St. Paul’s, and thence to the palace of Shene, where the nobility and gentry had daily opportunities of meeting him and conversing with him.  Suspecting, not without cause, that the Queen-Dowager was implicated in the conspiracy, Henry seized her lands and revenues, and shut her up in the Convent of Bermondsey.  But he failed to reach the active agents; and although the English people were satisfied that the Earl of Warwick was still a prisoner, the Irish persisted in their revolt, and declared that the person who had been shown to the public at St. Paul’s was a counterfeit.  By the orders of the Government a strict watch was kept at the English ports, that fugitives, malcontents, or suspected persons might not pass over into Ireland or Flanders; and a thousand pounds reward was offered to any one who would present the State with the body of the sham Plantagenet.

Meanwhile John, earl of Lincoln, whom Richard had declared heir to the throne, and whom Henry had treated with favour, took the side of the pretender, and having established a correspondence with Sir Thomas Broughton of Lancashire, proceeded to the court of Margaret, dowager-duchess of Burgundy—­a woman described by Lord Bacon as “possessing the spirit of a man and the malice of a woman,” and whose great aim it was to see the sovereignty of England once more held by the house of which she was a member.  She readily consented to abet the sham Earl of Warwick, and furnished Lincoln and Lord Lovel with a body of 2000 German veterans, commanded by an able officer named Martin Schwartz.  The countenance given to the movement by persons of such high rank, and the accession of this military force, greatly raised the courage of Simnel’s Irish adherents, and led them to conceive the project of invading England, where they believed the spirit of disaffection to be as general as it was in their own island.