Ireland had always been friendly to the house of York, and there was no one there who knew the young prince or could detect his counterfeit. So Lambert Simnel was first sent thither, to try the temper of the Irish, giving out that he had just escaped from the Tower. The Earl of Kildare and other prominent Anglo-Irish barons were wholly cozened by the young impostor, and saluted him as king. Four thousand men under Lord Thomas Fitzgerald were raised to aid him; Lincoln and Lovel joined him with 2000 veteran German mercenaries under a captain named Martin Schwartz. They crossed to England and landed in Lancashire, where a few desperate Yorkists joined them. Then advancing inland, they met King Henry at Stoke, near Newark. But their ill-compacted army was routed, the Germans and Irish were cut to pieces, and Lincoln, Schwartz, and Fitzgerald all slain. Lovel escaped to his manor of Minster Lovel, in Oxfordshire, and lurked in a secret chamber, where he was starved to death in hiding. Lambert Simnel fell into the hands of the king, who treated him with contempt instead of slaying him. He lived many years after as a cook in the royal kitchen. The rebels in Ireland were pardoned on submission, for Henry was loth to stir up further troubles in that distressful country (1488). [Sidenote: =French war.--Brittany united to France.=] Thinking perhaps to turn the attention of the nation from domestic troubles by the old expedient of a war with France, the king in the next year joined in a struggle which was raging in Brittany. Charles VIII., the son of Lewis XI., was trying to annex the duchy, whose heiress was a young girl, the Duchess Anne. Henry agreed to aid this ancient ally of England, and sent over troops both to Brittany and to Calais. The war went not unprosperously at first, and the garrison of Calais won a considerable victory at Dixmuide, in Flanders. But after a time the Bretons grew weary of the struggle, and the Duchess Anne surrendered herself to King Charles, and became his wife (1491). Thus the last of the great French feudal states was united to the crown. For the future the English could get no support from them, and as a consequence all English invasions of France in the ensuing age met with little good fortune. There was never again any chance of dismembering a divided France, such as that with which Edward III. and Henry V. had to deal. The king recognized his powerlessness, and gladly made peace with Charles VIII. on receiving a subsidy of 745,000 crowns, a better bargain than Edward IV. had made under similar circumstances at Picquigny (1492). [Sidenote: =Perkin Warbeck.=]