by Ann Wroe
There was also, by Zurita’s account, that counter-offer from Ayala, that ‘the duke’ could be smuggled by fishing boat to Spain if he crossed to Ireland first. Whether Spain meant a trap, or the royal pawn’s treatment he had found everywhere else, was still unclear, since Ferdinand and Isabella had never entirely opened their minds to de Puebla on the subject. But at the solemn leavetaking of Richard and James, the last embrace of silk against steel, it is likely that both friends were keeping certain options secret.
To the very end, there had been hard bargaining. By sending Richard away with a modicum of honour, James had avoided being made to give him up to Henry. The King of England, of course, had wanted him badly. He emphasised in his instructions to Bishop Fox, who was given a new commission to negotiate on July 5th, that the surrender of Perkin in person was the most important thing. If the Scottish king would not ‘make delivery unto us of Perkin Warbeck’ (and Henry knew he would not), then Fox was to suggest that James and Henry should meet in Newcastle and talk about it, in the hope that ‘more fast love and affection should grow betwixt us’. Henry wanted pledges from James, at least, that he would send an embassy to him and that ‘other things concerning the said Perkin Warbeck be performed and accomplished’. The pledges were to take human form: two men of good estate and condition, such as two earls or their sons and heirs, or two barons, would be sent to England and kept there until Perkin was given up.
As usual, Fox had a second book of instructions to ‘keep secretly unto yourself’. He was to try to get Perkin ‘by all wise means to you possible’. But if the talks seemed likely to break down altogether, he was to ask the Scottish spokesmen ‘to send to their prince for further understanding of his mind in this behalf’. The essential was to keep James talking and not to risk war, since despite all Henry’s preparations – including, that July, the setting of £60 worth of new jewels in his helmet and his sword – ‘our subjects [are] sore wearied, and also the issue of battle is full uncertain’. But these feverish schemes were moot as soon as Fox arrived in Scotland on July 10th, for James no longer had the young man with him.
In his instructions to Fox, Henry expressed amazement that James could cling so fast to his protégé, ‘since he is not the person that he surmised to be when he obtained his safe-conduct of our said cousin, as it is well known through all these parts of the world’. It could not hurt his honour, surely, to give up a man who had deceived him. Ferdinand and Isabella, too, thought that ever since the failed raid James ‘was less incommoded about doing what our brother the King of England wanted in the case of the one who is in Scotland’. To James, however, Richard was the same, without another name or lineage than the one he had always claimed. Despite his disappointment in him, and the necessity now of dropping him, he never seemed to alter that opinion. It was, of course, difficult to do so, for Katherine’s honour and Huntly’s as well as his own. Richard was his cousin: tied to him by marriage, tied to him by blood, taken in as an exile and a supplicant, fought for, loved.
Yet James’s best efforts had not come near to winning him England, and the obvious symbolism of the failed invasion was not lost on Henry. At the end of the Roman de la Rose a great assault threw down the walls of the rose garden, and the lover, forcing his staff through the narrow gate, at last plucked the blushing rosebud from among her agitated leaves. Not many months after the feigned lad left Scotland, Johannes Opicius, one of Henry’s court poets, produced his own version of this scene. The rose garden was England, bright with Henry’s red roses of virtue, honour and vigour, swelling and propagating with the king’s seed. The Beaufort greyhound and portcullis guarded the gate against intruders. Who, Opicius wrote, would be mad enough, quis demens, to want to sully these scarlet blooms and make their perfumed brightness fade away in sorrow? Only a false, base, foolish duke, dux perperus, who rushed in to rape the rose and then, rebuffed, could do no more than scatter his sterile seed on the ground.
6
King Perkin
From Ayr, the ships sailed south. They were hardly a royal flotilla: the Cuckoo, escorted by two pirate craft, rocking through the blue-grey waters of the Irish Sea. In the low airless cabins where the king-to-be and his queen-to-be took refuge with their attendants, there was probably little appetite for the cold salted beef that was served to their table. And by the rocking flare of the night candles, carefully watched by some servant, there were probably few plans made of any lasting consequence.
The enterprise – ‘the great abusion’, as Henry called it, or ‘our Righteous quarrel’, as Richard did – had now been playing on the stage of Europe for almost six years. Three or four rulers were still behind Richard and several were staying neutral, as if his claims and Henry Tudor’s could be given equal weight. He had done that much. But he could not win over, or even much interest, the country that now lay dimly to the east in the heaped-up hills of Cumbria: his country, as he kept saying.
Time and again – in Margaret’s letter to Isabella, in his own proclamation, in his exhortations to his followers before each attempted invasion – he had hoped and expected that the lords of England would join him. They would not. Lord Fitzwater was the only English peer who had backed him, and bastard George Neville the only representative of the great houses. The gentry and merchant classes, too, much preferred security and prosperity to the rash dreams he offered, whether true or false. His English supporters had been overwhelmingly the unlettered and poor: yeomen and labourers at Deal, escaped vagabonds in Northumberland. Fabyan – no sympathetic eye – concluded that his followers everywhere had been ‘lewd’, low-class and dishonest, and his chief advisers, too.
His enemies noted that he appealed particularly to the simple-minded and barbarians. More often than not they came from the west, bordering on the great ocean, or from lands of impenetrable bog and forest. You could argue that even James and Huntly, his noblest supporters in Scotland, had a streak of savagery in them, the natural attribute of rulers over wild places. James in the Isles, speaking Gaelic, in his thick travelling clothes and with the taste of herring on his fingers and his beard, was not so easy to distinguish from his subjects.
The essence of barbarians was that, like wild beasts, they preferred to retreat and hide themselves in forests or in caves. The king’s rebels and enemies, according to warrants issued for them, often fled to such secret places to nourish their malice unobserved. So Bernard André made Perkin, too, a cave-dweller. He called him Cacus, after the base fire-breathing villain of ancient Rome who crept out of his cavern to steal the cattle of Hercules. (Hercules, of course, eventually killed Cacus, but André did not get that far with his story.) Although Cacus boasted and threatened wildly, shooting great flames from his mouth, Hercules/Henry made him run away, ‘nimbly without torch or lantern’, and hide himself in his cave again. This timorous monster, André explained, was ‘by nature a great robber, who had never done anything else but rob’; and the cave where he hid, with other ruffians and cattle-stealers, was ‘in Ireland among the savages’.
To Henry, this explained why the feigned lad so often went to Ireland. Though he had been fêted and embraced there in cosmopolitan places and by Anglo-Irish lords, the core of his success, as both the king and Polydore Vergil believed, was the primitive credulity of les Irlandais sauvages outside the English Pale. It was perhaps not his claims that had lured these men at all, but only his clothes: as Edward Brampton said, ‘that little bit of brocade’. Neither speaking nor understanding English, the savage Irish could hardly judge him otherwise. People had seized on his ‘birthmarks’ too in Ireland, just as they emphasised the marks of their chiefs (‘Red Hand’, ‘Large-eared’, ‘the Freckled’) and took these for signs of election. They also noted, perhaps more keenly than others would have done, the heavy rains and ‘English sweat’ that preceded Richard’s coming, the star that shone the Christmas he was with them, and the comet that blazed for two months as he left again.
Though intelligent men soon dropped this folly, the s
ylvestres homines of the bogs and wild places continued to run after the false Plantagenet, and would doubtless do so again if he returned. Henry’s officers, sent, in Vergil’s words, to cleanse the country of the contamination Peter had left wherever he stayed, found that the filth was lasting. It seemed that he had learned two years earlier, however, that the wild Irish could not make up an army for him. Their organised troops were largely of two kinds, common foot-soldiers, called kernes, and armed retainers, known as gallowglasses: the gallowglasses grim brutes, the kernes light-armed with javelins and darts. Some wore primitive brigandines stuck with nails, but their custom was to fight ‘naked’, without armour, as they had fought for Simnel at Stoke with astonishing bravery and futility.
In the late summer of 1497, nevertheless, the would-be king was back in Ireland. It is possible – since hints of a second child coloured these weeks – that some family crisis, rather than strategy, drove him there rather than to England. But he also may have meant to raise troops there. He was spotted on July 25th in the south, ‘in the wild Irishrie’, as Henry put it, having probably spent the best part of three weeks at sea. John Atwater at Cork welcomed him with his old faithfulness, as did Barry of Munster, and the people of Cork, ‘some out of affection, others for desire of change’, flocked round him as they had done before, but no other friends remained. In August 1496 Henry had issued a general pardon to all the boy’s supporters in Ireland, Barry and Atwater explicitly excepted, and the next month Kildare (now Henry’s lieutenant in Ireland) had arrived to root out rebels. O’Donnell and O’Neill, the two north-eastern chiefs who had helped Richard in his wanderings, had sent letters to the earl as soon as he landed, saying they would be ruled by him. Shane Burke submitted too, offering to go to England and seek the king’s grace in person. All took a bizarre form of the oath of loyalty, since they could barely speak or understand English. Their appeals to Kildare had been written by their priests in best church Latin, and they themselves could not sign them in letters of the alphabet.
It seems that Richard may have been enticed to Ireland by Sir James Ormond, who had commanded Henry’s forces against him in 1491 and 1492. Ormond had grown warmer to Richard as he had become resentful of the newly empowered Kildare. He kept an army of kernes and gallowglasses whom Henry Wyatt blamed, in 1496, for wasting and ‘desolating’ much of the country. Conceivably, their wildness might have been harnessed for Richard’s cause. But on July 17th, nine days or so before his prince landed, Ormond was killed in an ambush in the fields outside Kilkenny, a typically Irish blood-feud settled in mud and grass. Ormond had quarrelled with Sir Piers Butler (‘Piers the Red’, as the Gaelic-Irish called him), and when Butler had given his allegiance to Kildare, as he later explained, Ormond ‘showed openly that wheresoever he might find me he would kill me, and over this took goods and cattle from such as he knew were towards me’. When the two men met, by chance Butler said, they fought together ‘so long til God had wrought his will upon him’. Butler told Ormond’s brother, who held office at the English court, that the dead man, ‘upon his comfort and special desire moved, caused Perkin Warbeck to come lately into this land for the destruction of the subjects and possessions here of our Sovereign lord, like as his Highness shall understand within brief time by the report of such as were privy unto the counsel of the said Perkin’.
So the close councillors, once again, were betraying their prince, and the man who may have invited him was dead. It was a dreadful time to come in any case, with ‘very great, grievous famine throughout all Ireland’, as the Annals of Ulster reported. In Meath, five ounces of wheat now cost as much as a peck in good times, and a cow in calf would buy no more than ‘a slender bundle of oats’. Amid this scarcity, there was no hunger for a prince of York. Ireland was now almost totally hostile ground. The mayor of Waterford, getting wind of the wanderer, wrote to Henry on August 1st, sending the letter with such despatch that the king received it at Woodstock by the morning of the 5th. The mayor said he knew that Perkin intended to head for Cornwall, a clue that he had only interrupted his journey thither to find strength, or draw breath, in Ireland. Henry urged Waterford to go after him immediately, offering 1,000 marks ‘in money counted’ to anyone who could take him and send him over.
The king was still not entirely sure that his enemy was not in Scotland, and was briefing ambassadors until mid-August that ‘the individual who styles himself Duke of York’ was with James on the border, making trouble. But the Irish rumour gradually hardened. Waterford, though it sent ‘four great ships at [its] own charges’ to chase Perkin, lost him; but Desmond and Kildare pursued him themselves, old friendship and sacred oaths now laid aside. They would have caught him, too, so Henry told Gilbert Talbot, ‘if he and his wife had not secretly stolen away’. A rumour reached England that Richard had fled incognito and that his wife had been taken prisoner, but it faded again. Atwater smuggled Richard and Katherine out of Cork by night in a small boat and dropped them at Leprous Island, near Kinsale. There, in that ‘little sea-port’, the Spanish ships, probably contracted by Ayala, were waiting.
Zurita said that Ayala had told York and his party the exact place where they had to be to catch those ships, and the exact day. What was still unclear, at least to the crews, was where they were to go. Until the very moment of sailing, Richard may have kept the Spanish option open. But Cornwall seems to have been his first intention, and for good reason. The Cornishmen had risen in rebellion a few months before, protesting against the burden of taxes levied for Henry’s war on Scotland. Behind that grievance lurked broader discontent with the king and his advisers, one possibly to be exploited by rivals for his throne. Under their leaders, Thomas Flamanck, a lawyer, and Michael Joseph an Gof, a blacksmith, some 15,000 of the ‘poor commons’ of Cornwall – joined by those of Devon, Somerset and Wiltshire to the east, and abetted by gentry and clergy – had marched on London. On June 16th, the king’s army had defeated them without much trouble at Blackheath, outside the city. The leaders were executed, with Joseph’s bloody quarters sent back to Cornwall. But the Cornishmen, embittered and humiliated, waited only for another man to lead their cause. In June they had recruited James Touchet, Lord Audeley, to add the necessary cachet of nobility. Now they had another, better candidate in view. Richard of York was sent for, Zurita said, ‘because they did not have a principal person to strengthen their rebellion . . . and they offered him help to take the kingdom of England, as rightfully his’. The message reached him either in Scotland or in Ireland, and he accepted.
It was not clear – as it had not been clear since the fiasco at Deal – who exactly was impelling him on the courses he took now. His royal sponsors in Europe had withdrawn, at least publicly. None of his lower-class advisers could force him on a path he did not want to take. There were, however, private obligations: commitments to Margaret, promises made to James, more personal pledges to Katherine, from which he may have felt he could not draw back. He may also have wanted the throne of England because he believed it was his. For better or worse, he was now his own royal sponsor, and he was returning to rescue England.
He had promised to do so in Northumberland, but nobody had listened. Now he would make the same promises again, assured of an audience that was ready to take up arms for him. The chance that he had found, at last, a crowd of supporters in England outweighed the attractions of retiring to Tortosa or Barcelona. Although it meant dicing with war and death, he behaved as though he had a duty to himself and to England. Molinet thought only extreme indoctrination (‘nursing’, as he expressed it) could have caused him to pitch himself against Henry’s power like this. No one else at the time sought to offer an explanation.
The Cornishmen, at least, wanted to see a prince and had asked him to lead them. The names of those who ‘moved and stirred him by divers messages and writings’ have survived in their attainders. No lords or knights invited him, only three ‘gentlemen’: John Nankevell of St Mawgan, Walter Tripcony of St Columb, Humphrey Calwodley of H
elland. Beyond these came yeomen from Polwhele, St Crowan, St Gwinnear and St Teath, and three Devon men: John Gill of Stamford Spiney, Robert Sturridge of Ashburton, Thomas Hart of Barnstaple. Another Cornish supporter, John Tresinny, emerges from the now crumpled and worm-eaten petition of John Whalley of Padstow, who was set upon by Tresinny as he came home from church, beaten and ‘sore wounded’ and then made to watch as his assailant robbed his house of goods ‘to the value of fifty pounds and better’, all ‘upon trust of the landing of Perkin Warbeck’, to whose cause, presumably, Tresinny meant to make a contribution. As with those who gathered to him in Ireland, it was hard to picture the golden prince responding to their humble or brutal approaches. But he did so, as though he had only been waiting to be asked.
ii
The immediate sequel was high drama. He told the story himself to de Puebla after everything had failed. The Spanish ambassador took the precaution of checking the story, since nothing was automatically to be believed that came from this strange young man. Having had it confirmed, he wrote to Ferdinand and Isabella.
On the subject of Perkin I don’t know whether I wrote to your Highnesses in another letter about what the Biscayans did, in addition to taking him from the domain of Ireland to Cornwall. While they were crossing over, the Biscayan ship which was taking Perkin met the fleet of the King of England, and the fleet captured the ship. The English captain called to the Biscayan master and to those who seemed best to him on the ship, and told them that they already knew about the friendship of your Highnesses with the King of England . . . and the betrothal of the Prince of Wales with the daughter of your Highnesses . . . And for that reason he required of them that if they had Perkin hidden anywhere they should say so and show him, because those Englishmen did not know him. And if they did so, they would be acting like loyal subjects of your Highnesses and the king would give them 2,000 nobles as well as other favours; and for that purpose he gave them a letter, signed and sealed by the King of England, which the said fleet was carrying.
