Perkin Read online

  BY THE SAME AUTHOR

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  Epub ISBN: 9781409018261

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  Published by Jonathan Cape 2003

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  Copyright © Ann Wroe 2003

  Ann Wroe has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work

  This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

  First published in Great Britain in 2003 by Jonathan Cape

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  Contents

  Introduction

  Prologue: Presence

  1 Into adventure

  2 Imagined princes

  3 Evidence of things seen

  4 Fortune’s smile

  5 The pavilions of love and the tents of war

  6 King Perkin

  7 Confession

  8 This world my prison

  9 Bad stars

  Epilogue: Absence

  Appendix: The Setubal Testimonies, April 25th 1496

  Notes

  List of Illustrations

  Acknowledgements

  Introduction

  The story of Perkin Warbeck is, or used to be, one of the most compelling mysteries of English history. It is the story of a young man who claimed to be Richard of York, the younger of the Princes in the Tower, risen from the dead, or almost dead. As such, he tormented Henry VII for eight years. He emerged in Ireland in 1491, to be honoured and protected by the courts of France, Burgundy, the Empire and Scotland. He tried three times to invade England, sometimes eluding capture only by the skin of his teeth. He was a political pawn, and also the most keenly sought diplomatic prize in Europe. He behaved as a prince and was married to an earl’s daughter, but was officially proclaimed to be – and apparently, in custody, confessed he was – a boatman’s son.

  Many believed he was a prince; others did not, or merely pretended to. Some believed that he was Perkin Warbeck, the name that eventually settled on him; others never could. Many, perhaps most, neither knew nor cared. Instead, they used him. The greatest European rulers of the age – the Emperor Maximilian, Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain, Charles VIII of France – employed him for their own purposes. All who dealt with him gave him the identity they wished him to have: either the Duke of York, or a jumped-up lad from Flanders. It is possible that he was neither. It is also possible that, by the end, even he did not know who he really was.

  This book’s first purpose, therefore, is to tell again a marvellous tale that seems on the brink of being forgotten. Its second purpose is to dissect, and call in question, the official cover-story. Modern cover-stories leave cracks, computer messages, phone logs, by which they betray their nature. Very old cover-stories acquire a patina of age and settle into history. So it is with Perkin’s confession, which – though largely ignored at the time – is now accepted as true by almost all respectable historians. James Gairdner, the finest fifteenth-century historian of the Victorian age, effected that change by first linking the family details given in the confession to documents in the archives of Tournai, in Belgium. Henry VII hadn’t made this family up; so his rival must have been, indeed, just a boatman’s boy, cajoled into being a prince (as the confession said) by a group of dissaffected Yorkists in Ireland. And that was the end of the story. Most historians of the period now treat Perkin with a certain impatience, as a colourful but tiresome diversion on the way to the Triumph of the Tudors. He sparkles for a time but soon fades away, amusing and inconsequential.

  Those who look closely find a picture that is deeply perplexing. This young man caused far more trouble, and more nearly upended Henry, than he is usually given credit for. Though he was allegedly attempting an astonishing trick – trying, as a low-born foreigner, to get the throne of England – he proved very hard either to deflate or to expose. The main players, including Henry, behaved towards him in ways that are often hard to explain. Beyond this, the Tournai family was never linked properly to Henry’s captive, nor he to them. Much does not fit into the neat parameters of the official confession, and never has. A different story, perhaps a surprising one, may have been unfolding here. The truth lies somewhere in the details.

  Yet catching this character is notoriously hard. He was known to be ungraspable in his own time, like quicksilver or a shooting star. It is possible that no one has captured him except John Ford, whose wonderful play portrays an impostor-prince who believes so completely in his own majesty that he is, in effect, the person he claims to be. In the febrile, casually mendacious and highly coloured world of the late fifteenth century, this young man is almost the perfect examplar of his time. To write his life, therefore, requires exploring not just late-fifteenth-century politics and diplomacy, but late-fifteenth-century ways of seeing, deceiving and understanding.

  Much of this involves putting him in the roles people gave him, or which he gave himself. He was an adventurer, an inveterate wanderer, when real adventuring was prising open the closed husk of the medieval globe. He was a lost prince, at a time when lost kings of all kinds were keenly invoked and regretted. He was a consummate performer, in a world where pageant and display were paramount. He was, as he himself said, Fortune’s victim, in an age when all men and women felt the rush of her wheel propelling them to greatness or nothingness. And he was – in one character or another, or both – a deceiver, in a whole world of false appearances. If we look at him in all these roles, as people of the time observed and judged him, we may get a little closer to knowing who he was.

  And yet, in the end, the aim of this book is not to stick a name on him. On the contrary, it is almost the opposite: to free him from the tyranny of forced identities. The name ‘Perkin’ is used in these pages only when people would have used it of him, and not otherwise. Thomas Gainsford, whose account of 1618 did so much to make him at the same time lu
rid and pathetic, was the first to grapple with the idea that his biographers had to use all his names, in all their multiplicity, and then get past them. ‘Whether I name [him] Peter, or Perkin, or Warbeck, or Prince, or Richard Duke of York, or Richard the Fourth,’ he wrote, ‘all is one Man and all had one End.’ Gainsford was right. My subject was all these people and, in the deepest sense, none of them.

  I sometimes felt as I wrote that this book is not so much about one man as about the human soul: about the ‘I’ that exists apart from the names we are given, the family we acquire or the titles we aspire to. The concept is dimmer to us than it would have been to him. Medieval people pictured the soul as a naked miniature of themselves which, after death, left the body like a candle flame. It glimmered a little in life, and you tried to detect it, but it was hard to catch. Beneath everything that was fastened on this young man, by himself and by others, lay his true self, which was not touched or changed. In the course of retelling and re-examining the story of his life, I hope this book may also uncover a little of that.

  A note on spellings

  Since many, or most, of the quotations in this book are translated from other languages into modern English, I have also modernised the spelling of the quotations from English sources. The phrasing, punctuation and capitalisation are unaltered, which should preserve the ‘feel’. In quotations from Scots, I have deliberately left some words (e.g. ‘nae’, rather than ‘no’) which allow us to hear the accent; and I have preserved William Dunbar in his full glory.

  Quotations in foreign languages have been left in the original spelling. This means, in the case of French, that accents do not appear on quotations from manuscript sources (where accents were not used), but do appear on quotations from sources that we know from edited and printed editions (Chastellain, Commines, Molinet). This is inconsistent, I realise, but the alternative would have been to modernise throughout for all languages, and I did not feel I was up to the task.

  Prologue: Presence

  Face to face, the two men sat at the window. One was an artist; you could see this from his drab workaday gown, the tablet he held and the way, from long habit, the chalk or metalpoint nestled in his hand. The formalities had been concluded: he had doffed his hat and, holding it to his chest as etiquette required, had knelt to his subject with a few soft words of greeting. Now, as carefully as he might without touching or outraging him, he was overseeing the way he sat and appraising the light that fell on him.

  The young man who faced him was a prince. You could tell this from his clothes: a long gown of cloth-of-gold trimmed with fur, a surcoat of cloth-of-silver, a shirt of exquisite linen and, arranged on his shoulders, chains of briquettes of gold. His black velvet hat bore a brooch set with one large jewel and finished with three pendant pearls. Attendants hovered by to hold his gloves, move his chair or, at a nod or lift of a finger, take some murmured message from him. No more credentials were required of him for the moment. These were enough.

  His name was already famous. This, as far as the artist knew, was Richard Plantagenet, Duke of York, the second son of Edward IV, late King of England. He claimed to be the rightful heir to the throne now held by Henry VII, and the hoped-for restorer of his father’s line. He had been thought dead, murdered as a child with his child-brother in the Tower of London, but now he was alive. He was here, and you could touch him, if you dared touch a young man who was both a prince and a sign of God’s miraculous power.

  The encounter probably occurred in Malines or Dendermonde in the Burgundian Netherlands, in one of the palaces where the prince was staying as the guest and protégé of his aunt Margaret of York, Duchess of Burgundy. The date was probably the autumn of 1494, though it is not known for certain. Columbus’s caravels had already reached, and returned from, the islands east of Cipango across the West Sea. The thrones of France, England and the Empire were occupied respectively by Charles VIII, Henry VII and Maximilian, each in a state of advanced suspicion of the others. Plague had ravaged the western parts of the Empire, and had been followed by a spring so cold, under the domination of Saturn and the moon, that vines had frozen and cherry-blossoms had turned to ice on the trees. In London, Nantwich salt was selling for 6d. a bushel and white herring for 2s. 8d. a cord, and an old woman had been burned at Smithfield for nine articles of heresy. The world was composed of nine spheres, nine companies of angels, seven planetary influences, five earthly zones, four elements, four states of existence, four humours (yellow bile, black bile, phlegm, blood) and, at the apex, the perfection of the Trinity, Father, Son and Holy Ghost.

  So the two sat, and looked at each other. The prince’s gaze was still, the artist’s quick, darting from his subject to the sheet of paper he held before him, steadied on a book or a block of wood. The artist’s stool was low, the chair of the prince set higher. It could not have been otherwise, for the degrees of social separation had to be preserved. That separation extended to their sense of time as they sat there: the artist’s expendable, the prince’s precious, belonging to a higher life.

  Yet the artist and the young man before him were perhaps more similar than they appeared. Both were engaged in the making of works of art: the prince princiant, proving his high nobility by elegance and presence, and the artist endeavouring to show, by sheer skill, that he could make a counterfeit that would live. A counterfeit, as both he and the prince understood it, was a true image, a copy so exact that it could take the place of the living person or the real thing. As a mirror trapped a perfect reflection, so the frame of this portrait could catch the subject in perfect similitude, so lifelike that the figure appeared to breathe, the silk to shimmer and the fur to sink under the hand. Kissing this counterfeit – as you would want to kiss it, or prop it next to you at table – your lips would surely brush living flesh, slightly rough and warm. This mouth, like a mouth in the mirror, could perhaps form words; the hands could move, in their heavy sleeves, in a gesture of courtesy; tears could steal from the subject’s eyes, wet to the touch on the painted wood. A master-painter could move you deeply with a counterfeit such as this.

  He would use all kinds of trickery to achieve his effects, as artists were known to do. In common parlance, to ‘paint’ meant to feign; a ‘colour’ was a fiction, an allegory or, at worst, a plain lie, built on a ground of oily untruth as a painter established his colour on the wood. The secret of the best pigments was sometimes common filth, as when urine, lye and alum mixed with powdered brazil wood made the colour of a red rose, or when lumps of soot and lye made a beautiful bright wash for the painting of a young girl’s hair. Some artists knew, too, about the artificial yellow that could simulate gold, or how to make pretended gold leaf from varnish and Greek pitch crushed in oil. Many a ‘masterpiece’ relied on such techniques. One writer of a painter’s guide boasted that he knew how to make ‘a beautiful ivory which can take a polish and is white and even more lovely than real ivory’. Lovelier than the real: the ideal of works of art.

  There were many who would say, in the years to come, that Richard Plantagenet was just such a masterpiece: cut from the block in Tournai, sculpted and painted in Burgundy, and then exhibited everywhere. ‘A curious piece of marble’, Francis Bacon called him. The same verb, effingere, was applied to his alleged makers as was used for painting and sculpting in the ordinary way: as if, from wood or silver or white limestone, they had moulded a compelling human form. Nature was easily and busily imitated by those who knew how. At Margaret of York’s main wedding feast, in 1468, dry deserts were made of silk and buckram, the waves of the sea of silver-painted wood, and the growing grass of wax: all done ‘from life’ and ‘as lifelike as possible’, although this static and shining beauty was nothing but artificers’ work. The painted funerary image of Charles VIII in 1498 was so well done, wrote the chronicler Jean Molinet, ‘by subtle art and exquisite pictures, that he seemed actually resuscitated, full of spirit and life’. Such skill could no doubt be applied to the making of princes, too.

  He sat no
w with his gold robes falling round him. To gather from those who observed him, he was not particularly tall. Any presence he had did not come from that. Maximilian, who first met him when he was about twenty, called him ‘a young boy’, ains Jungen knaben, and Henry VII first described him, two years or so before this portrait, as ‘the Child’. The word ‘boy’, fixed on him by his enemies, meant first of all a churl and a rascal. Yet it also suggested someone suited to diminutives, as well as to manipulation by those who were older and wiser. Both Bacon, writing his story in the 1620s, and Edward Hall, recording it in the 1540s, called him a doll: played with, fought over, carried about, dressed up.

  Contemporaries also found two stranger words to describe him. Robert Fabyan, a London alderman who first saw him when he was about twenty-three, called him ‘this unhappy Imp’. The word, usually applied to innocent children, seemed peculiar for a man in adulthood who was, by then, married. It also suggested other images: an urchin, a devil-child, or a creature small enough to hide inside a pitcher or cling to a man’s cloak, chattering and harrying him.

  The second word was more bizarre. It was used by Bernard André, Henry VII’s poet laureate and ‘royal historiographer’, who was blind and never saw the man he was describing. Possibly, then, it came from the circle of the king himself. Recording the campaign in 1497 to drive this presumptuous invader out of the West Country, André referred in passing to Cornubii . . . unacum papilione suo, ‘the Cornishmen and their butterfly’. Smallness, lightness, effeminacy and, in William Caxton’s version of The King’s Book, printed ten years before, falseness too. ‘The liar fareth as a butterfly, that liveth in the air and hath nothing in her guts but wind, and at every colour that she sees changeth her own.’

  He was certainly embellished, as his age and his station required. Fashion dictated that a young prince in the early 1490s should wear precisely these clothes. He was, and remained, at the cutting edge of elegance. When he was taken up by James IV of Scotland, the king paid for ‘a great coat of the new fashion to the Prince, with sleeves’, and for black hose daringly striped with purple in the French style, the only style worth following. (James had white hose striped with green.) In Stirling at Easter 1496 the prince and his patron, young fellow-dandies, indulged in new hats and fresh lacings for their shirts. Even their underclothes were new, tied up with new ribbons tipped with bright silver tags, as they processed at Mass together.