Read "The Fortunes of Perkin Warbeck" by Mary Shelley online for free on Textopian. Full text with search, annotations, highlights, and AI-powered reading aids.
-"Such when as Archimago him did view. He weened well to work some uncouth wile; Eftsoon untwisting his deceitful clew. He 'gan to weave a web of cunning guile." --SPENSER.
The birth of Arthur, Prince of Wales, which took place in the month of September of this same year, served to confirm Henry Tudor on the throne, and almost to obliterate the memory of a second and resisting party in the kingdom. That party indeed was overthrown, its chiefs scattered, its hopes few. Most of the principal Yorkists had taken refuge in the court of the Duchess of Burgundy: the Earl of Lincoln only ventured to remain, preserving the appearance of the greatest privacy, while his secret hours were entirely occupied by planning a rising in the kingdom, whose success would establish his cousin Richard Duke of York, the fugitive Perkin Warbeck, on the throne. The chief obstacle that presented itself was the difficulty of exciting the English to any act of rebellion against the king, without bringing forward the young Prince as the principal actor on the scene. The confirmed friendship between the Queen and Lady Brampton had produced a greater degree of intercourse between the former and the Earl; but their joint counsels had yet failed to originate a plan of action: when chance, or rather the unforeseen results of former events, determined their course of action, and brought to a crisis sooner than they expected the wavering purposes of each.