Perkin

by Ann Wroe

  From November 1494 Meno was also holding military posts in Ireland. In March 1496 he was made constable of Carrickfergus castle, with six men under him, and captain of a company of archers. Carrickfergus was ideally placed, far north and opposite Galloway, to intercept intrigues on the feigned boy’s behalf between the Irish and the Scots. Meno was also paid often alongside Henry Wyatt, Henry’s commissioner in Ireland, for loans made to messengers carrying the king’s letters. Wyatt’s other life was espionage, mostly in Scotland, and Meno too preserved a secret life for which Henry continued to pay him. ‘Petit John Pregeant the Breton’, or ‘Petty Jean Meno’, was being rewarded at 40 shillings or 66s. 8d. a time until 1497, probably for spying.

  Henry, since his exile, had an affinity with Bretons, and used them widely for undercover work. Their mobility, in ships plying the feigned lad’s tracks between Ireland, France, Flanders and the West Country, was especially useful. An undated slip of paper in the handwriting of John Heron, who kept the king’s private accounts, mentioned the large sum of £95. 6s. 8d. paid to eight Bretons, two of them heralds; another herald was paid ‘to convey them to the sea side’. Exceptionally, the total of their payments was enclosed in a rectangle of neatly stitched white silk thread. In the autumn of 1497, at the last moment, the feigned boy’s official confession was topped up with more crumbs from Bretons across the Channel. They had no names, as befitted shadows.

  For Henry, a prudent and even obsessive manager of money, the expense of employing so many men abroad was cause for keen regret. But he had no choice. If the boy was to be crushed, he had to be exposed as a fraud and detached – by whatever means Henry or his agents could devise – from the foreign powers who favoured him. In theory, this might not be difficult to do. As Henry knew, the European leaders who supported his rival were dallying with Fortune too. For this reason, their favour was as treacherous and qualified as any other kind.

  Every ruler waited to see how the world turned, and changed his loyalties accordingly. Treaties would be signed with great pomp and solemn oaths one year, only to be annulled by deals concluded with a rival party the next. After the Anglo-French peace treaty of 1475, as Commines complained, ‘scarce anything was performed that was promised . . . but their whole business was hypocrisy and dissimulation’. Ferdinand and Isabella, having signed the Treaty of Medina del Campo with Henry in 1489 (setting out, for the first time, the details of the proposed marriage between their daughter Katherine and Prince Arthur), subsequently had their signatures cut out with a pair of scissors. No compunction was felt at abandoning ‘our most dear and well-beloved Cousin’ if some more profitable arrangement suddenly emerged elsewhere. On bases no firmer than this (‘smiling with mouth and teeth’, in the current phrase), Richard Plantagenet’s support in Europe had been carefully constructed.

  His letter to Isabella of August 1493 mentioned eight rulers who seemed to be on his side. Of these, by the end of 1494, only Margaret seemed immovably secure; and she, as he often mentioned (having evidently heard it from her time and again), was ‘only a poor widow, who does not have the resources to help me’. Bernard de Vignolles’s testimony confirmed that Richard was looking elsewhere for money because he had no hope of finding it in Flanders, and Ferdinand and Isabella also thought that Margaret’s ynportunidad eventually drove him to leave.

  This was not how it appeared to Henry. Bernard André said that Margaret had poured out treasure and impoverished herself to help ‘this mean fellow’. (‘Not very good sense,’ he added. ‘Everyone just laughs in mockery to see her throw away so much money like that.’) She had even stripped herself of her rich girdle on his behalf, an implication of sexual wantonness as well as improvidence. Yet the sums Margaret spent on her White Rose were modest compared with those she spent on others. The protocols of December 1494 implied that much more than 8,000 crowns had been raised for him, but even twice that was less than the 20,000 crowns Margaret had spent on Philip’s gold chain at his christening. And every crown of it was understood to be lent, not given. By 1494, having recovered or been recompensed for the lands she had lost in the wars in Flanders, she had money to lavish on Richard’s enterprises if she had wanted to. Moreover she could do so secretly, with no need to declare her spending in her accounts. But, with her usual shrewdness, she seems to have kept the money close.

  Other friends, too, were shaky. James IV of Scotland was in frequent touch, but the depth of his friendship had not yet been tested. In Ireland, the Earls of Desmond and Kildare were being worked on by Henry and his officers. Desmond was holding out, but Kildare – having lost his position as lord deputy in 1492 on account of his Yorkist flirtations – had been issued in 1493 with a general pardon at his own ‘urgent entreaty’. By the end of 1494, after a final surge of plotting with the Irish chiefs and with Scotland, he was pleading once more for royal favour in England. (He had never done anything with the French lad. Never.) The King of Denmark seemed to go no further than sending envoys to Richard. Duke Albrecht of Saxony continued to show kindness, but he, too, was short of funds to spare. That left as the main props – besides Margaret – Philip the Fair of Burgundy and his father Maximilian.

  Philip was only fifteen in 1493, four or five years younger than Richard. The two were natural companions at Malines, where Philip kept his own court and governing council. Since the death of his mother, Mary of Burgundy, when he was four, Margaret had in effect become his mother, although from the summer of 1494 Philip was also the ruler to whom she was bound to defer. The dowager duchess saw to his education and chose his playmates for him; and since she considered both these young men as her children, they were virtually brothers.

  In some of the most memorable events of Philip’s young life Richard was beside him, the closest in age and rank, another king’s son as far as most men supposed. He was with him at Cologne in June 1494 when Philip hugged and kissed his father after months of absence, telling him, like some little ambassador, ‘My Lord, you are very welcome’. He rode beside him that August at Malines and saw him make his first knights, tapping each candidate two or three times on the shoulder with a sword, in the church of St Peter at Louvain in September. They probably played chess, a court craze, together, perhaps using Margaret’s finest set, which had pieces made of glass.

  Philip, young as he was, could live with the risks his friend represented. Moreover, his father and Margaret were insistent that Richard should be helped to win the throne of England. But neither Maximilian nor Margaret governed the Burgundian Netherlands, where Richard was now so fêted and protected; Philip did, through his council, and his councillors were much less sure. The region depended on raw wool imports from England for cloth-making, its chief source of income. But trading relations had soured as soon as Plantagenet had arrived in Malines, when Margaret had organised the letters of marque that authorised attacks on English ships. In the months that followed, as her favour to him increased, so too did the risk of English economic reprisals.

  The whole Burgundian territory was recovering, besides, from the years of internal war that had followed the deaths of Charles the Bold and his daughter. Commines, writing at the start of the 1490s with the contempt of a Burgundian who had sold his soul to France, thought he had never known a people so miserable and desolate – punishment, he thought, for past hubris and lascivious behaviour in bath-houses. Contemporary records for the city of Bruges showed the extent of the misery: the fields around the town ruined and still uncultivated, menaced with wolves, while fishermen on the coast were terrorised by pirates and raiding gangs, some English and some French. The last thing this region needed was the cessation of trade with England. However much Philip was inclined to help his friend, the advice of his council was to drop him.

  Henry sent his first envoys to protest in July 1493, when Poynings and Warham came with their story that Richard, Duke of York was no prince, but base-born, and had assumed the name and persona of a boy who was dead. At the end of ‘a pleasant and a luculent oration’, as
Hall called it, Warham added the strikingly nasty coda that Margaret had given birth to this creature when he was Philip’s age: a leggy and long-haired young man, cropped out of her womb after crouching there for fifteen years, scrambling up immediately to do battle with kings, and the second such child she had borne in a matter of years.

  According to Vergil, Philip and his councillors debated for a long time whether or not the young man they were harbouring was indeed this freakish fairground apparition, or Edward’s son. At last, Philip seemed to buckle; he told Henry’s envoys that, out of respect for their king, he would not support this claimant or his followers any more. But he said he could do nothing to stop Margaret, who was sovereign in her dower lands. This was untrue, since her power was subsidiary to his; Philip could order her to cease if he wanted to. But he did not want to because, despite the smooth words, he did not mean to drop Richard. Young as he was, he had learned to deceive like a prince already.

  Henry, grasping this immediately, broke off trade in September. English merchants were given fifteen days to leave the Low Countries, and the English wool mart at Antwerp was abandoned. No more contacts were allowed between the merchants of the Burgundian territories – especially Flanders – and England, save sales of wool through Calais. Henry talked loudly in September of ‘our great voyage over the sea’, war-noises. He also demanded a surety of £20,000 from the German merchants of the Hanseatic League that they would not ship illicitly to Philip’s territories, a ban they frequently ignored. In October there were riots in London, apparently against Hansa profiteering during the embargo. In April, all Flemings were expelled from England.

  Philip’s councillors, though dreading the economic damage, agreed that the archduke should respond in kind. In May 1494 Philip imposed a counter-embargo: by a decree in his name and Maximilian’s, all imports of English cloth into the Burgundian Netherlands were banned. This was tightened still further in January 1495, just a week before Richard signed over England to Maximilian, by letters patent from Philip and his father that revoked all special licences and proclaimed the ban again. As for Richard himself, he lorded it in the great house in Antwerp that the English merchants had left empty.

  Meanwhile, Henry’s envoys continued to spread their accusations of trickery and deception. In July 1494 Garter King of Arms, the most distinguished of Henry’s heralds, arrived at Philip’s court with the details, or some of them, that Henry had gathered the year before. The young man they were calling Richard, he told them, was a native of Tournai, ‘the son of a bourgeois of the town, and whatever celebration they were making of him, they would be deceived in the end’. When he said this to Margaret, ‘she said the contrary, and gave the herald no credence, and he was in grave danger of prison, but was released because it was his master King Henry who had made him learn those words’. Undeterred, Garter went out into the streets of Malines and proclaimed ‘in front of ten or twelve officers, kings of arms and heralds’ that Richard was a patelineur, a wheedling trickster and a base man’s son, and that Henry had certain proof of it. This, too, Philip’s council heard and pondered.

  In March 1495 Somerset came, with his bold statement that Richard’s tomb could be inspected by anyone who wanted. Philip was beside Richard and Margaret then, sitting a few feet away. He was quite close enough to see how they took that claim, whether their colour changed, and how strongly they reacted. It was said you could always tell fakers because their virtue did not last: their shows of piety or emotion passed too quickly, just as false gold discoloured and false emeralds broke. Plantagenet’s behaviour seemed consistent enough, restrained always by ritual salutations and good manners. But there again, as Vergil remarked, ‘there is no deceit more deep and secret than that which lurketh in the dissembly of understanding, or under some colour of courtesy’.

  Even those who now thought they detected a deception were not entirely sure what sort it was. All the words Jean Molinet applied to Richard when he wrote later, from patelineur to piperie, cheating, and traffiquer, to deal falsely, implied not someone who had taken on a false life, but someone who sold false wares. When this prince displayed himself in Malines or Antwerp he was on the same footing as those who hawked fake relics, bloodstained rags or grey pieces of cow’s bone, or sold fresh handfuls of straw from the stable at Bethlehem. His natural companions were bakers who put dust in their bread, or priests who trickled oil or wine by subterfuge down the face of the local saint to produce miraculous sweats. They might seem convincing in themselves, professionals at their calling, but what they offered was worthless. ‘All is not gold that outward showeth bright,’ wrote John Lydgate; ‘a stockfish bone in darkness giveth a light.’

  No more is known of the story that Garter Herald shouted in the streets of Malines. But the fragments Henry was accumulating about the boy included the assertion, true or not, that he had travelled with a merchant. He had evidently learned young how to swindle, as merchants so often did: weighing false, giving deceptive patter, swearing great oaths to the quality of his wares, showing them fast or in the dark. Details emerged too, at this stage or later, of the boy’s employment at Middelburg in a haberdasher’s shop. That shop sold mostly needles and purses, but haberdashers also filled their shelves with pretty and frivolous junk: playing cards, combs, mirrors, brooches, painted cloths, glass beads, hatpins, laces, tin-foil, jewel-boxes. In the 1480s and 1490s trinkets like these came into England mostly on ships from Flanders, especially from Middelburg and Antwerp. They were often the goods of wandering salesmen and pedlars rather than fixed shops, and the rootlessness of their sellers – like Richard Plantagenet’s – was yet another reason for suspecting and distrusting them.

  More than anything, the quacks and tricksters sold promises. This potion would cure the whooping cough; that bracelet would win a girl’s heart; this little card, pressed into your hand by a wandering friar and printed with the implements of the Passion of Christ, would spare you 32,755 years of the torments of Purgatory. Richard of York made similar great promises, all the time, by many accounts. In 1494, he was promising Maximilian a glorious invasion of England. Later, he made the same promise to other people, and lured in followers with offers of fresh-minted money. With the promises went copious lies about influence and friends in high places. As his prospects waned, so the claims were to become more extravagant. The haberdasher’s boy was apparently in partnership with Fortune, selling typically meretricious stuff: ‘precious jewels’ shaken in a tray, which, if you looked at them in daylight rather than the half-dark, turned out to be bits of tin and glass.

  But the doubts Henry’s envoys had sown were not conclusive. Though the young man’s claim could now be described as a manifest lie, there was still, Vergil admitted, a ‘face of truth’ on it. He was playing his part with such skill that ‘he was praised to the heavens, as possessed of every quality and virtue and the very model of his forebears’. For this reason, no other name was fastened yet on Richard at the court of Burgundy. All through these incidents, Molinet still called him either Richard, or the White Rose. The Tournai clue was apparently ignored, although a journey of only sixty miles would allegedly have turned up people ready to recognise him, call him Perkin, and hug him with parental tears. The simple imposture in the form Henry had it, the ‘great abusion’ that lured people in as with a stage performance, did not seem to be laid at his door. Those who distrusted him at Philip’s court levied charges against him that were vaguer and more general: that he was a deceiver, in some way still to be established, and that the claims he was making somehow did not match him.

  So Philip did not give up Richard, and Henry did not believe for a moment that he had. Richard, after all, remained in Malines until the summer of 1495, raising money and men, and his chief adviser and protector remained Huc de Melun, on Philip’s staff on a salary of 2,000 francs a year. André made a three-headed monster out of Margaret, Maximilian and Philip: the dragon Geryon, a multicoloured creature hanging half on and half off the northern coast of Europ
e, who in turn spawned a fire-breathing monster-child that tried to make war on England. Some time after the attempt, Henry wrote icily to Philip – who was complaining about incidents between English and Flemish seamen – that the ‘great injuries’ done to England had given the king, and all Englishmen, every reason to attack him.

  Nonetheless, in other rooms and at other times, Philip’s councillors assured Henry’s envoys that the archduke had ceased to support the Duke of York. The ruse was one that others followed. Richard Plantagenet had nuisance value, and several European rulers wanted to see how far, and how profitably, Henry could be annoyed. It was quite possible to irritate the King of England without going to the extreme of putting up a pretender to his throne, but the opportunity seemed heaven-sent. Several of Henry’s tormentors seemed genuinely to like the revived Duke of York, but they, too, would have been prepared to drop him as soon as the experiment ceased to pay. It was not only Fortune, though she got the blame, who could toss a man aside like a perfume ball.

  The chief of these experimenters was, and remained, Maximilian. Even before his split with Henry over the peace made with France at Etaples, he was said to appreciate the usefulness of keeping the English king ‘in a state of suspicion’. Richard claimed to have had early offers of help from him. By April 1493, when Maximilian’s wounds were raw, Carlo Barbiano passed on the rumour, current at the French court, that Maximilian intended to try ‘to make king of England the boy who calls himself the son of King Edward, who fled thither, and give him his daughter [Margaret] to wife . . . in order to make perpetual war on France’. A portrait of Margaret survives from a few years earlier: a sulky little girl with her father’s nose, fingering her crystal prayer-beads in a window. Had matters turned out differently, she might have been Richard’s wife.