In 1497, that bold adventurer, Perkin Warbeck, claimed admission within the walls, which, so far as the citizens were concerned, would have been readily granted. The Earl of Devon and his son were less accommodating, and, after Warbeck had set fire to the gates, succeeded in beating off his attack. The pretender’s next appearance in the city, where the King had taken up his quarters, was in the character of a prisoner. Henry’s conduct towards his rebellious subjects was worthy of a great prince, and affords a marked contrast to the brutality that characterized the suppression of the next revolt and the still more notorious savagery of “Kirke’s Lambs.” When brought before him, “bareheaded, in their shirts, and halters round their necks,” he “graciously pardoned them, choosing rather to wash his hands in milk by forgiving than in blood by destroying them.” As is well known, the Reformation was not the popular event in England that it was in Scotland, and the introduction of the Book of Common Prayer in lieu of the Mass was the torch which, in 1549, set the western shires—Cornwall, and Somerset, and Devon—in a blaze. The opposition, started at Sampford Courtenay by a pair of simple villagers, soon came to include leaders of the stamp of Sir Thomas Pomeroy and Sir Humphry Arundel, who barricaded Crediton, the rendezvous of their party. The interests of the Crown were befriended by Sir Peter and Sir Gawen Carew, who, though utterly unscrupulous and barbarous in their methods of warfare, failed to arrest the insurrection. Presently no fewer than ten thousand rebels commenced the investment of Exeter. At this serious juncture, the Lord Lieutenant of the county (Lord Russell) took the helm of affairs, and ultimately raised the siege, the city in the meantime being reduced to terrible straits through famine. But the rebels suffered, too. In all, four thousand peasants fell in the Western Rising. A dramatic episode was the execution of the Vicar of St. Thomas, who was hanged in full canonicals on his church, where his corpse remained suspended till the reign of Edward’s successor, when the Roman Catholics regained, for a season, the upper hand.