The Cornish Rebellions of 1497

In his parliament of 1497 Henry VII, who needed money for an impending war with Scotland, was granted two fifteenths and tenths but asked for an additional amount of £120,000 to be ratified. The collection of part of the taxes, however, was to take a new form with specially appointed commissioners assessing an individual’s contributions. No doubt the entire country was outraged with this innovation but an incident In west Cornwall exploded into a full-scale rebellion. The local leaders, Michael Joseph, a smith, and Thomas Flamank, were supported by clergy and local gentry and in May they swept eastwards and reached Exeter unopposed. They then moved into Somerset where they gained the support of a nobleman, John Touchet, Lord Audley, who became the leader. Rebellion now affected Taunton, Devizes, Dorchester and Winchester and by early June the Wells, Bath and Bristol area. The number of rebels has been estimated between 15,000 and 40,000.

Audley took part of the rebel army to Wallingford, possibly with a view to attacking London from the north whilst the remainder moved towards the capital via Farnham and then Guildford and by mid-June arrived at Blackheath.

Meanwhile the royalist forces were gathered, notably under Edmund de la Pole, Earl of Suffolk, who was charged to defend Staines Bridge against any attack by Audley; and Giles, Lord Daubeney, and the veteran captain, John de Vere, Earl of Oxford, who defeated the rebels at Blackheath on 17 June. The rebel casualities amounted to a thousand or so and the remainder of the army fled. The three leaders were captured and executed.

Although it was successfully suppressed, for almost a month a vast swathe of southern and western England was in the rebels’ control and the speed with which they advanced on the capital and posed a threat to the government was a salutary lesson for Henry. Ostensibly the rebellion was a protest against taxation and the king’s councillors who were behind it, John Morton, Oliver King, Reginald Bray, Richard Fox and Thomas Lovell. It has been argued, however, that the rebellion was not just about taxes but that it was politically motivated and the leaders seeking a Yorkist readeption, thus re-opening the Wars of the Roses. There were two candidates for such a readeption – the earl of Warwick, a prisoner of Henry VII, and the pretender, the duke of York, aka Perkin Warbeck.

News of the rebellion reached the pretender, either before he sailed from Scotland on 6 July or while he was in Ireland and he made the decision to sail for England. He landed at White Sands Bay, Cornwall, on 7 September. After depositing his wife at St Michael’s Mount, the pretender proceeded to Bodmin where he declared himself King Richard IV. The erstwhile rebels now reformed and rallied to his standard. He gathered an initial force of perhaps 3,000 to 4,000 men, which quickly swelled to around 8,000. The king’s representative in the county, the earl of Devon, retreated to Exeter and the pretender followed, briefly besieging the town before moving eastwards towards Taunton. With the earl of Devon behind him, the royalist forces under Giles, Lord Daubeney, marching from the east and a fleet under the command of Robert, Lord Willoughby de Broke, in the vicinity of Plymouth, the pretender was trapped. On the night of the 20th he fled his army and made for Beaulieu Abbey where he was captured. Resistance in the west country was now at end.

Ironically one of the last acts of the rebels was to punish the king’s tax collector, John Oby, whose greed and corruption had sparked off the rebellion five months earlier. A pirate known as John the Rover, who espoused the pretender’s cause, captured Oby whom he ‘dysmembrid’ in the marketplace at Taunton before fleeing the town.

Further reading:

The Perkin Warbeck Conspiracy 1491-1499 by Ian Arthurson. Stroud 1994

Henry VII by S.B. Chrimes, London 1972

Perkin: A story of deception by Ann Wroe, London 2003