Kildare's appointment was as deputy to the Duke of Bedford, and for four years Irish affairs had no connection with English. But the success of usurpers breeds impostors, and Henry, who had seized his throne by force, had once more to face an impostor and a rebellion. Perkin Warbeck, avowing himself to be Richard, Duke of York, and armed with a circumstantial story of his escape from the Tower of London, landed at Cork, having journeyed from Lisbon, and sent messages to Kildare ordering him to join him there with an army. Whatever the earl's answer may have been, Perkin did not wait for it, preferring to seek temporary safety in Paris. The deputy, however, had always shown a fondness for impostors, and Henry, unable to trust any of the leaders of the English in Ireland, sent Walter Fitz-Simon to be the deputy in place of Kildare. Fitz-Simon worked assiduously to secure the Earl's fall, and when he returned to England in 1493, leaving Viscount Gormanstown as his deputy, he was able {60} to nullify the effects of Kildare's passionate protests to Henry VII. The next year Henry appointed his son, then aged four, afterwards Henry VIII., to be Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland, and his deputy was the notorious profligate and zealous soldier, Sir Edward Poynings, the son of Elizabeth Paston. The "Paston Letters" throw much light upon the workings of the viceroyalty of the period, although Poynings himself had only a couple of years' experience of that country. He did Henry two notable acts of service, however, by capturing Kildare and sending him a prisoner to London, and by driving Perkin Warbeck out of Ireland. When Kildare was imprisoned in the Tower of London, his fate seemed settled, but he was too clever for the age he lived in, and he succeeded, a stranger in a strange country, in securing his liberation and the annulling by Parliament of his act of attainder. Kildare thereupon became the lion of the London season. He was invited everywhere, and every class of society crowded to see the man who had held Ireland in his power. All the time he was nominally under arrest, with serious charges pending against him. When Henry summoned the earl to his presence, and offered him the choice of any man in the kingdom to be his counsellor, Kildare promptly chose the king himself! It was a piece of shrewd flattery, but it had less to do with Kildare's restoration to favour than his marriage with the king's first cousin, Elizabeth, daughter of Oliver St. John. The moment his alliance with the clever daughter of a {61} powerful family became known, Kildare's enemies melted away, and the king, saving his face by insisting upon Kildare's son remaining in London as a hostage for his father's good conduct, restored Kildare to his deputyship, and sent him back to Ireland. Henry Deane, a cleric who had been holding the post, retired, and was rewarded later with the See of Canterbury.