The Chronicle of the Rebellion in Lincolnshire is a brief account of EDWARD IV’s campaign against the Lincolnshire uprising led by Sir Robert Welles in March 1470.

 

Cast in the form of a journal or day-by-day listing of events, the Chronicle is an important source of information for the second coup launched against Edward by Richard NEVILLE, earl of Warwick, and George PLANTAGENET, duke of Clarence. The narrative traces the king’s movements between 7 and 26 March, and provides details of the Battle of LOSECOTE FIELD, fought on 12 March. The Lincolnshire uprising grew out of a feud between Richard Welles, Lord Welles, and Sir Thomas Burgh, Edward’s master of Horse (see WELLES UPRISING). By coming to Burgh’s aid, Edward drove Welles and his son Sir Robert to seek assistance from Warwick, who, since the failure of his 1469 coup, had awaited another opportunity to seize power. Warwick encouraged Sir Robert Welles to raise Lincolnshire by claiming that the king was coming north to exact retribution for the shire’s involvement in the ROBIN OF REDESDALE REBELLION in the previous July, an uprising that had accompanied Warwick’s first coup attempt. Although as yet unaware of Warwick and Clarence’s involvement, Edward left LONDON on 6 March to suppress Welles’s fast-growing rebellion.

 

The Chronicle was written by someone traveling in the king’s party and is thus largely an eyewitness account of the events described. Because the chronicler was particularly well informed as to the documents and letters issued under the privy seal during the campaign, modern historians have speculated that the writer was one of the royal privy seal clerks. The Chronicle is clearly an officially sanctioned PROPAGANDA effort, for its author took great pains to show that Warwick and Clarence were traitors and the instigators of the uprising. The chronicler also stressed the magnitude of Edward’s success in crushing the rebellion, claiming that Welles brought 30,000 rebels to Losecote Field and emphasizing how dangerous the king’s situation would have been had Welles successfully rendezvoused with Warwick. Although its official nature and its obvious exaggerations and biases require it to be used with caution, the Chronicle is valuable because it was composed within days of the end of the campaign. The narrative stops on 26 March, and the Chronicle may have been completed before the end of the month, or at least by mid-April, before the writer knew how Warwick’s rebellion would conclude.

 

Further Reading: Gillingham, John, The Wars of the Roses (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1981); Three Chronicles of the Reign of Edward IV, introduction by Keith Dockray (Stroud, Gloucestershire, UK: Alan Sutton Publishing, 1988).

Duke of Suffolk Arms

Richard de la Pole (died February 24, 1525 in Pavia, Duchy of Milan) was a pretender to the English crown. Commonly nicknamed White Rose, he was the last Head of the House of York to actively and openly seek the crown of England. He lived in exile after many of his relatives were executed; here he became allied with Louis XII of France in the War of the League of Cambrai, who saw him as a more favourable ally and prospect for an English king than Henry VIII.

 

When HENRY VII overthrew RICHARD III and the house of YORK at the Battle of BOSWORTH FIELD in 1485, many descendants of Richard PLANTAGENET, duke of York, remained alive to challenge the house of TUDOR and its possession of the throne.

 

With continuance of their dynasty threatened by their own failure to produce healthy male heirs, Henry VII and his sole surviving son and successor Henry VIII executed many persons of Yorkist blood to eliminate any possibility of a Yorkist restoration. The most dangerous plots during Henry VII’s reign centered on impostors, such as Lambert SIMNEL and Perkin WARBECK, who claimed to be, but in fact were not, members of the house of York. The uncertainty over the fate of EDWARD V and his brother Richard PLANTAGENET, duke of York, the sons of EDWARD IV who disappeared in the TOWER OF LONDON in 1483, made such impostures particularly effective. After 1485, York’s last direct descendent in the male line was the duke’s grandson, Edward PLANTAGENET, earl of Warwick, the son of George PLANTAGENET, duke of Clarence. One of Henry VII’s first acts as king was to secure the person of Warwick and confine him in the Tower, where he remained until his execution for treason in 1499.

 

With Warwick imprisoned, the leading Yorkist heirs were the sons of Edward IV’s sister, Elizabeth, and her husband, John de la POLE, duke of Suffolk. The eldest, John de la POLE, earl of Lincoln, involved himself in the Simnel conspiracy and died at the Battle of STOKE in 1487. In 1499, Lincoln’s younger brother, Edmund de la Pole, earl of Suffolk, fled to CALAIS, where he remained for a time with Sir James TYRELL, the governor of one of the Calais fortresses. Suffolk returned to England shortly thereafter and was taken back into favor until 1501, when he and his brother Richard fled to the court of Maximilian I and tried to convince the emperor to fund an attempt on the English throne. Henry arrested a third de la Pole brother, William, and imprisoned him in the Tower, where he stayed until his death in 1539. In 1502, the king also took advantage of Suffolk’s connection with Tyrell to make the rise of any future Yorkist impostors more difficult. Tyrell was an ideal instrument for this purpose; a former servant of Richard III now awaiting execution for his involvement with Suffolk, Tyrell confessed to having murdered the sons of Edward IV in 1483 on Richard’s orders. With his own eldest son, Prince Arthur, having recently died, Henry VII wanted it made clear that the PRINCES IN THE TOWER were dead. Although the confession could be genuine, the circumstances and timing of Tyrell’s revelation cast doubt on the truth of its claims.

 

Suffolk, meanwhile, was unable to interest a continental monarch in his enterprise and remained safely in the Netherlands until 1506, when Duke Philip of BURGUNDY concluded a treaty with Henry VII that required the duke to cease supporting Henry’s enemies. Suffolk was duly surrendered to the English at Calais and remained in the Tower until 1513 when his brother was recognized as “Richard IV” by Louis XII of FRANCE, an act that prompted Henry VIII to execute Suffolk. Richard de la Pole later served as a soldier in Hungary and in France, and died in 1525 fighting for Francis I at the Battle of Pavia.

 

In the late 1530s, after the birth of his long awaited male heir, Henry VIII resumed the destruction of the house of York with a series of judicial murders. In 1538, he executed Henry Courtenay, marquis of Exeter, the son of Edward IV’s daughter Katherine, and, in 1541, he eliminated Warwick’s sixty-eight-year-old sister, Margaret Pole, Countess of Salisbury. The Countess’s eldest son, Henry Pole, Lord Montague, had also gone to the block in 1538. By his death in 1547, Henry VIII, himself a grandson of Edward IV, had almost fulfilled his openly avowed intention of extinguishing his Yorkist relatives.