Kildare ordered the citizens of Waterford to join him with all their forces, but the mayor, who was a Butler, filled the town with the vassals of the House of Ormonde, and the clans depending on it, and returned for answer that they held all as traitors who had taken any part in the mock coronation. Kildare hanged the poor groom who had brought this message, an act of barbarity with which the Archbishop was much offended, and then repeated his summons. The herald, who bore the Geraldine arms on his tabard, was refused admission to Waterford, and summoned the citizens from a boat, ordering them instantly to proclaim King Edward VI. on pain of being hanged at their own doors. With becoming spirit the chief magistrate replied, that they would not give the Earl so much trouble, that they looked on all his partisans as traitors, and that they were ready to give him battle thirty miles away. Kilkenny, Clonmel, Callan, Fethard, and other towns followed the example of Waterford.[52] [Sidenote: Battle of Stoke, 1487.] There was some division of opinion between the partisans of Simnel as to whether England should be immediately invaded. Two reasons in favour of this course prevailed over those for establishing a separate government in Ireland. The country was too poor to support 2,000 German mercenaries, and the Irish followers of Kildare, who cared little for either rose, promised themselves much pleasure from fighting and plundering in hated England. Accordingly, just a month after the mock coronation, Lambert and his friends left Dublin and landed at Foudray in Lancashire, where they were joined by Sir Thomas Broughton and some of his tenants. 'But their snowball,' in Bacon's phrase, 'did not gather as they went,' and they advanced as far as Newark without materially increasing their force. The popularity which Henry had gained during his late stay at York, and the general pardon which he had given, went far to break up the Yorkist party in the North, 'and it was an odious thing to Englishmen to have a King brought in to them upon the shoulders of Irish and Dutch.' At Stoke, the pretender's motley host came into collision with the far more numerous royal army. The Germans fought well, and so did their few English allies; 'neither did the Irish fail in courage or fierceness, but being almost naked men, only armed with darts and skeans, it was rather an execution than a fight upon them.' At least 4,000 of the pseudo-Yorkists fell, including Martin Swart, the Earl of Lincoln, and Kildare's brother, the Irish Chancellor, Thomas Fitzgerald. Lord Lovel and Sir Thomas Broughton may have escaped for a time, but they were never heard of again. It appears from a passage in the 'Annals of Ulster,' where Henry VII. is contemptuously mentioned as 'the son of a Welshman,' that the native Irish believed Simnel to be what he pretended to be--the last prince of the blood royal.[53] [Sidenote: Loyalty of Waterford.]