But the most considerable honour yet awaited him, which took place in 1487, when by writ of summons dated the first of September in that year he was raised to the dignity of a Baron, and summoned to Parliament as such from that period to the 14 October, 1495. He held the office also of Royal Standard-Bearer to Henry VII. In 1487, John de la Pole, Earl of Lincoln, "a man of talents and enterprise, nephew to Edward IV., Richard III., and Margaret, widow of Charles the Bold, Duke of Burgundy," Henry's uncompromising and implacable enemy, accompanied by Francis, Viscount Lovel (who had been Lord Chamberlain to Richard III.) Fitz-Gerald, Earl of Kildare, the redoubtable Martin Swartz, with a large contingent of veteran Germans, and Irish, having crossed over from Ireland, landed on the fourth of June at Fourdrey in Furness in Lancashire. There they were joined by Sir Thomas Broughton, and the English adherents, and with this motley army was Lambert Simnel, and his tutor Richard Simons the Oxford priest; they marched into Yorkshire, and thence bent southward to Newark. Henry had assembled as numerous an army as he could muster and marched to Nottingham, but was not in sufficient force to give his antagonists battle. There he was reinforced by the Earl of Derby and a body of troops, and also by Talbot, Earl of Shrewsbury, Lord Strange, Sir John Cheney, "and other knights and gentlemen at least three score," bringing with them large additional forces. The king succeeded in occupying Newark before the Earl of Lincoln could reach it, and advanced to East-Stoke, about three miles south of Newark. Here the determined battle of Stoke took place on the sixteenth of June; the Germans fought with great determination, but the Earl's forces were totally routed and all their leaders, except Lord Lovel, slain, fighting to the last sword in hand. Lord Lovel is reported to have escaped, and his fate has been enshrined in a halo of romance. By some he is said to have been killed in the battle, by others "that he fled and swam over the Trent on horseback, but could not recover on account of the steepness of the bank, and so was drowned in the river." But there is also this remarkable story of his disappearance,--