English sense of its value.
Under its new king however, Charles the Eighth, France showed her purpose
of annexing Britanny. Henry contented himself for a while with sending a
few volunteers to aid in resistance; but when the death of the Duke left
Britanny and its heiress, Anne, at the mercy of the French king the
country called at once for war. Henry was driven to find allies in the
states which equally dreaded the French advance, in the house of Austria
and in the new power of Spain, to call on Parliament for supplies, and to
cross the Channel in 1492 with twenty-five thousand men. But his allies
failed him; a marriage of Charles with Anne gave the Duchy irretrievably
to the French king; and troubles at home brought Henry to listen to terms
of peace on payment of a heavy subsidy.

[Sidenote: Henry and Ireland]

Both kings indeed were eager for peace. Charles was anxious to free his
hands for the designs he was forming against Italy. What forced Henry to
close the war was the appearance of a new pretender. At the opening of
1492, at the moment when the king was threatening a descent on the French
coast, a youth calling himself Richard, Duke of York, landed suddenly in
Ireland. His story of an escape from the Tower and of his bringing up in
Portugal was accepted by a crowd of partizans; but he was soon called by
Charles to France, and his presence there adroitly used to wring peace
from the English king as the price of his abandonment. At the conclusion
of peace the pretender found a new refuge with Duchess Margaret; his
claims were recognized by the House of Austria and the king of Scots;
while Henry, who declared the youth's true name to be Perkin Warbeck,
weakened his cause by conflicting accounts of his origin and history.
Fresh Yorkist plots sprang up in England. The Duchess gathered a fleet,
Maximilian sent soldiers to the young claimant's aid, and in 1495 he
sailed for England with a force as large as that which had followed Henry
ten years before. But he found a different England. Though fierce
outbreaks still took place in the north, the country at large had tasted
the new sweets of order and firm government, and that reaction of feeling,
that horror of civil wars, which gave their strength to the Tudors had
already begun to show its force. The pretender's troops landed at Deal
only to be seized by the country folk and hanged as pirates. Their leader
sailed on to Ireland. Here too however he found a new state