Barton, again became a fugitive. He was leading a precarious existence in Ireland, when he was invited by some malcontents of Cornwall and Devonshire to join them. On September 27th, 1497, he accordingly arrived in Whitsand Bay, near Penzance, with four small vessels, and landed with a few followers. He took St. Michael's Mount, gathered as many as three thousand men, and laid siege to Exeter; but on the approach of Giles, Lord Daubeney,[1] with the royal forces, he fled to Taunton, and subsequently to Beaulieu Abbey in Hampshire, where, on October 5th, he surrendered himself. His life was spared, and he was generously treated, until repeated attempts to escape, and participation in a plot with the Earl of Warwick, led to his execution in 1499.
During the earlier years of the reign of Henry VII. there were fewer examples than might have been expected of piracy and unofficial warfare in the Narrow Seas; and in 1497, the year of Warbeck's surrender, England and France came to an agreement which had the effect of rendering such proceedings less common than ever, especially in time of nominal peace between the two countries. A treaty was signed, in pursuance of which shipowners were required, ere sending their vessels to sea, to furnish good and efficient bail that they would observe the peace.
In the year 1500, the plague then raging in London, the king and his family went to Calais, arriving there on May 8th, and returning about the end of June. Thereafter, until the death of Henry, there were few events which, by any stretch of the imagination, can be associated with naval affairs. The voyages and explorations undertaken during the reign are separately dealt with elsewhere; and it only remains to note that when, in 1506, Philip of Austria, who had succeeded to the kingdom of Castille, and who was on the way, with his queen, from the Netherlands to Spain, was driven by bad weather into Weymouth, and, contrary to the advice of his suite, ventured ashore, he was speciously detained by Henry, under various polite pretexts, until he had consented to a renewal, very advantageous for England, of the treaty of commerce between the two countries,[2] and had engaged to deliver up Edmund de la Pole, Duke of Suffolk,[3] who had fled the kingdom, and who, being a nephew of Edward IV., was a possible thorn in Henry's
