Perkin

by Ann Wroe

  He had lived so miserably abroad, he told the council, that he had found himself wishing that he had died like his brother. Sometimes he would try to tell strangers who he was, to induce them to help him, but they would only mock at his pretensions. When he began openly to declare who he was, he was ‘assailed with all the arrows of adverse Fortune’, for it was then that his ‘most crafty enemy’ began to bribe and corrupt his friends and spread false tales about his birth. His aunt Margaret too, and his friends among the English nobles, had been reviled and mocked when they recognised him.

  After a while, he went on – tears stealing down his cheeks, sobs racking him, as the lords listened – he had tried to interest the neighbouring rulers, Philip and Maximilian, in taking up his cause. He could not bear that ‘the blood of princes, oppressed by weeping and misery and fear, should end by wasting away in grief’. But then, in a reference perhaps to the failed invasion, he had fallen into ‘very serious evils’. He would have lost heart completely (though he had always tried not to lose heart) if he had not thought of Scotland. It was common fame through all the world that (in Vergil’s words now), ‘no man shipwrecked by the injuries of Fortune or expelled from his country, as I was when I was a child, has ever sought your help in vain’. If the Scots could do nothing else for him, perhaps at least they could give him a place, ‘so I will not have to wander any more’. But if they helped him to recover his father’s kingdom, ‘I will promise in the future always to cherish friendship for the name of the Scottish people, to protect it with devotion, and you may depend especially on all the resources of my kingdom . . . In thanking you for this bounty, [my people] will think themselves never capable of making up their debt to you.’

  He ended, said George Buchanan in his history of 1582, with many praises of James, ‘part of them true, and part of them tailored to the present design’, deliberately exaggerating the sadness and the gratitude he felt. Then he fell silent, apparently overcome with tears, for James called him aside and told him to be of good cheer, comforting him. With that the sad prince withdrew, and the council debated whether or not they should help him.

  The debate was for form’s sake only. James had promised to help him as soon as he arrived, the decision already approved at the council of forty lords that had been held in Edinburgh in October. Yet the approval was not entirely solid on either occasion. Vergil said the wiser heads advised James not to touch this young man: the affair was just a fraud set up by Margaret, ‘and all these things should be considered as dreams’. Even those who were keen to use James’s prince to make war on England nonetheless nursed doubts about him.

  The uncertainty shows up in a document from two days later, a deed of resignation drawn up in the king’s chamber at Linlithgow Palace on December 5th at around ten in the morning. There, listed first among the witnesses, was ‘the most excellent Richard Plantagenet, the son, ut asseruit, of the serene prince Edward, once the illustrious King of England’. Ut asseruit, as he claimed. The cautious Scottish notary gave him no title of his own but ‘man’: excellentissimus vir. As ever, a slight emptiness touched the magnificence. Yet his grandness impressed people, all the same; as did his tears. In the immediate aftermath of the speech to James’s council, Buchanan said, the majority ‘whether from the imperative of the thing, or the inconstancy of their minds, or to please the king . . . commiserated with the fortune of this man’. So James decided as he had already done. Vergil suggested that he took Richard up with passionate nonchalance, telling him that ‘whoever he was [quisquis esset], he should never regret coming to him’.

  Quisquis esset. Like so many others who dealt with this young man, James had no cast-iron evidence of who he was. For a host of reasons, he chose to believe in him. Richard looked like a prince and behaved like one, and gave him bargaining power against England and in Europe. So he took him in his arms. Having done that, other considerations came into play. De Puebla, the Spanish ambassador in London, mentioned the most obvious: since Richard had placed himself in his trust, James now had an obligation to ‘look out for’ him.

  As soon as the formal presentations were over, he treated Prince Richard with more and more honour, calling him ‘cousin’ and showing him to his people as the Duke of York. A special minder was appointed for him: Master Andrew Forman, priest, protonotary and previously James’s envoy to the pope. Forman’s diplomatic career showed him to be subtle, haughty and insistent on proper respect from his fellow ambassadors. By 1498 Raimondo Soncino thought him ‘a man of considerable influence’, and a few years later he was made Bishop of Moray. This figure, in his solemn black, was now constantly at Richard’s side. He had lighter moods, playing with James at cards and ‘catch’, a sort of tennis, and may well have played them with his charge, too. But his principal tasks were to attend him and protect him.

  In Edinburgh James gave Richard lodgings at the Black Friars, about half a mile west of Holyroodhouse, where Parliament sometimes met and where Henry VI had stayed in his exile. His horses were kept there for some weeks, and he was there with James for a priest’s first Mass at the end of January. But mostly, in those early months, James took him round the country with him. Their movements can be tracked from the king’s use of the great seal: December 3rd, Perth; December 6th, Cupar, where they offered together at Mass on St Nicholas’s day; December 8th, Dundee; December 11th, the monastery of Abirbrothock; December 14th, Perth again; December 22nd, Dunfermline. They were at Linlithgow together for Christmas, in the newly fortified red-stone palace at the edge of the loch. For Candlemas they were at Edinburgh, processing round the church with their blessed and lighted candles. To walk beside each other in church, or to hold each other’s hand as they went to make offering, was a strong sign of confederation and love. On Easter Day in Stirling, having taken the Sacrament privately in their own chapels, they walked together at the High Mass to make offering, shining with new finery and grace. In June they were at Perth, hawking in the hills and downing the salty whey provided by Goldie, a local woman, to refresh them in the chase. They were friends, no matter what anyone else thought.

  This friendship was not cheap. Since Richard had nothing, James topped up his wardrobe with gowns, coats, hats, hose and underwear, and gave him a pension of £112 Scots a month. (The Scottish pound being worth around one-third of the English one, this generosity was somewhat less than it may have seemed in England.) A general subsidy was raised ‘for the sustentation of the Duke of York’, with Wood appointed to collect it in the districts north of the Forth. Prince Richard’s horses, between thirty and sixty of them for his closest followers and himself, were stabled, ferried and fed on chalders of oats and barley at the king’s expense.

  The Englishmen who had followed him, filling the taverns and lodging houses of Edinburgh and Ayr, were paid for too: £26 here, £40 there, more than £100 in May alone. They did not always behave themselves (a number ended up in prison), and there was plenty of mutual antipathy to go round. Still James paid for these dregs of Richard’s forces, or made others do so. Certain towns received letters from the king ‘directing’ Richard’s men to be lodged there at the burgh’s expense, while some of his subjects had their arms twisted more directly. Sir Duncan Forrester of Skippnick, the king’s comptroller, persuaded Katherine Murray and Annes Glass to take in ‘the Duke of York’s folks’, promising them, so they said, 13 crowns and £3 10s. respectively. (For his part, he claimed he had promised them no more than the 20 shillings he had paid them.) Aberdeen in July 1496 had to raise 5s. 4d. a day to keep eight of the Duke of York’s people for a month, and this in a town with so little ready cash that when a subscription had been raised to repair the parish church, three years earlier, people had paid their share in lambskins and fish.

  James himself was as poor as his kingdom. John Ramsay told Henry VII, only half in jest, that at one point the king had barely more than £100 left in the world. ‘My kingdom does not overflow with silver and gold,’ James had told Pope Innocent, through Forman, in 1490,
excusing himself from helping with the pope’s crusade. In 1493 he found himself so short of funds that he was forced to pawn his gold locket, his French saddle and his copy of Gower’s ‘Confessio Amantis’, with its moral tales of high courtly love. Yet James found money for Richard, to the point of impoverishing himself. He even gave him his Mass offerings when they were together in church: usually 14 shillings, just a little less, as rank decreed, than his own. The pension should have covered that, as it should have covered Richard’s clothes. But rather than passing cash through a servant, as the pension was paid, the offerings and money presents were placed directly in Richard’s hand by James; more evidence of love.

  The greatest pledge of James’s commitment, however, was to give him another’s love. Almost as soon as Richard arrived in Scotland, he was betrothed and married to Lady Katherine Gordon, the daughter of George, Earl of Huntly, the most powerful lord in Scotland below the king himself.

  James III had depended on Huntly, his ally against various troublemakers and, after 1478, his justiciary north of the Forth, a post to which he was reappointed ten years later. In the ructions that led to the murder of the king, Huntly’s loyalties were hard to judge; but in 1491 he was made James IV’s lieutenant north of the Esk, and from then on was firmly in his favour. His father, the first earl, had been high chancellor of Scotland; his tomb described him as ‘a noble and powerful lord’ and so his son, too, saw himself. From the centre of his domain, the tower-house castle of Strathbogie in the Grampians, he commanded on every side views as sweeping as his ambitions. He was at least sixty when Richard came to Scotland, and on his third marriage. Katherine seems to have been his second daughter by his latest wife.

  Huntly emerges from the records of the Lords of Council as an almost terrifying figure, and the whole family as violent and litigious. In 1496–7 alone the earl was involved in three lawsuits over land. In May 1497 his nephew Alexander Seton tried to serve a writ against his own father, Huntly’s brother, alleging that he was ‘not of composed mind, a fool and a natural idiot’. (He was made to renounce it.) Seven months later, James himself brought a case against Huntly for failing to ensure the good behaviour of the Innes brothers. Huntly had to pay the king the full amount of the surety, 1,000 marks, and immediately claimed the sum back from Alexander Innes. The Gordon clan seemed to feel that they could wink at infractions, and trample on their neighbours, because they were so far from the king’s eye. When Alexander Seton’s idiocy writ came up, Huntly was given forty days to declare his interest in the case, ‘the distance of his dwelling place being considered’. He probably did not hurry himself to appear.

  Huntly’s most famous son-in-law was to say, later, that Huntly had believed him to be Richard, Duke of York. The aged earl was in James’s privy council, and had therefore heard Richard’s heart-rending account of his life. Yet marriage was essentially a business and financial contract made without emotion, especially by brides’ fathers, and there was little in a marriage to Prince Richard of England to secure – let alone advance – Katherine’s position. Her husband-to-be was an exile and a wanderer. His kingdom was a dream, and his only income was the money James allowed him or which Katherine, in her dowry, could bring to him. He in turn offered nothing but his titles (on paper) and himself, the perfect image of a prince. From Huntly’s point of view there was nothing solid to be gained from this alliance and everything to lose, from his daughter’s ‘shame-faced chastity’ to his own reputation. A few years before, his son Alexander had written to Henry VII, in the heavy burr of his Scottish spelling, fretting about ties of honour and ‘neyr teynderness of blude’ to the murdered king, whose cause he still favoured. To form such ties with an impostor would have been intolerable both to the son and the father. Huntly may have acquiesced, as the king’s council did, mostly because it was the king who asked; and because he could not prove that this princely young man was other than the person he said he was.

  Of Katherine herself very little is known except that she was young, a virgin, and beautiful. She was born around 1474, a year or so later than Prince Richard; and she was so lovely, as all attested, that Henry VII fell for her himself when their paths crossed. Robert Fabyan twice mentioned her beauty and fairness, as well as how ‘goodly’ she appeared. ‘A modest and graceful look and singularly beautiful,’ was how blind Bernard André described her, no doubt on good information. The graceful look of the time was well documented: a long neck, slender arms, a neat waist, high round breasts. André also said she blushed easily, confirming how fair-skinned and young she was. Her accent would have been as strong as her half-brother’s, from the Highland hills close to Aberdeen where the family lived. Pedro de Ayala, the Spanish ambassador, was enchanted by Scottish girls: courteous in the extreme, very bold ‘though mostly honest’, gracious, handsome and with the most becoming head-dresses in the world. That outsider’s view may well have been Richard’s first impression, too.

  Around the time of his arrival, probably in early November 1495, James paid £108 17s. 6d. – almost as much as Richard’s pension for a month – for fifteen and a quarter ells of crimson satin brocaded with gold, and fifteen ells of velvet, to be delivered to ‘My Lady Huntly in Edinburgh’. This ‘stuff’, the only purchase the king ever made for the Huntlys, was almost certainly for the gown Katherine wore when she first met Prince Richard. The lengths of material suggest that she was about the same height as the young man to whom she did reverence, as he to her. The bright dark red (James’s favourite colour) would have been the perfect foil for the gold of her hair and the ivory of her skin. At that moment, she was perhaps more lovely than she had ever been.

  Katherine was probably not a princess of Scotland, but she came close enough. As Huntly’s daughter by his third wife, Elizabeth Hay, she had no Stuart blood in her. But she was descended from two daughters of Robert II, and her father’s second wife had been Arabella Stuart, the sister of James II. James called her father ‘cousin’ when he wrote to him, and in general Scottish parlance Katherine too was called James’s ‘tender cousin’, acknowledging the closeness of blood by marriage. Henry VII was to treat her, without quibble, as someone of near-consanguinity to James; illustris domina, ‘noble lady’, was how he addressed her in André’s writings. In short, she was the closest and noblest woman of marriageable age whom James could offer to his friend.

  There was also, of course, something in it for him. Vergil thought James arranged the marriage so that Richard, when he recovered his kingdom, would be all the more indebted to him. He did so, too, to make him more substantial, both as Henry’s enemy and as his own friend: ‘confirming him in this affinity in the hope of better fortune’, in Buchanan’s words. Treaties held no security, but a marriage was binding, and usually lasted unless death cut it short. It tied James to Richard almost as deeply as it would tie Katherine. The power of the bond was well understood by all those, from Henry to Isabella to the various envoys and agents, who laboured to make James ignore it. He could never do so, for from January 1496 he considered himself bound to Richard, quisquis esset, by ties of blood and sacrament.

  The couple were betrothed almost instantly. For a very short time, perhaps, they went through the rituals of courtship that seemed to stifle, but in fact stoked high, the feelings of both sides. Invigilated meetings would be held in cold rooms and cold gardens (far south, in London, the frost lay thick as glass that winter), after which they might ‘commune aside’, the chaperone still present but the words unheard, the young man sometimes kneeling bare-headed as courtesy required. At public functions he would find occasion to linger close to her, encouraging her to look and smile at him and, if possible, reaching to touch her. The ceremonies for Richard’s arrival in Scotland meant music and dancing; there was his chance.

  O Lord God / how glad then I was

  So for to dance / with my sweet lady

  By her proper hand / soft as any silk

  With due obeisance / I did her then take

  Her skin wa
s white / as whale’s bone or milk

  My thought was ravished / . . . I might not aslake

  My burning heart . . .

  For the fire kindled / and waxed more and more

  The dancing blew it . . .

  As dancing tends to.

  Katherine scarcely knew the young man who now smiled at her and, in the dance, took her hand. Books of instruction for young women insisted that she ought to know him well before she committed heart and body to him, but she was not allowed the chance. Over the days, trustingly as became a woman, she hoped to find out more. Since 1491, when her elder sister Margaret had married the Earl of Bothwell, James’s envoy that year to France, she may have heard whispers of this hidden Yorkist prince. But, in all likelihood, she knew no more about him than he had told her father: his miraculous escape, his miserable exile and his desertion by his friends. She knew, too, that young men had a habit of deceiving girls with words. They used tears less often but those, too, softened and beguiled girls’ hearts.

  She was young, with no experience of a man paying serious court to her, and this one was presented to her as her husband-to-be, without contention. In the first instance she thought less, perhaps, of who he was than of his closeness and his maleness. The ‘stuffing of the codpiece’ was something young women were known to notice, for all their bashfulness, and the striped hose Richard wore from his first days in Scotland, the codpiece aggressively large and fastened with buttons, were designed precisely to show a man from waist to toe, leaving nothing to the imagination. From there, as Stephen Hawes wrote, a young girl’s thoughts might well turn to the still-mysterious deeds they were to do together:

  Otherwhile ye think full privily

  What the man is and what he can do

  Of chamber work as nature will agree