Perkin

by Ann Wroe

  Despite this, [the sailors] swore blind that they did not know and had not heard of such a man – and he was hidden in the bows of the ship in a barrel. Perkin told me this himself, and so did the man who came here to get letters from your Highnesses about the pardon of these Biscayans, who were present on the ship during all that, and your Highnesses may hold this for truth.

  Two phrases rose out of the tale. First, ‘those Englishmen did not know him’. They had been sent in search of Perkin, but had no idea what he looked like. England knew little of him except that this foreign ‘child’ had been trying for years to invade. If they had found him in the barrel, it would have seemed appropriate enough: packed in like salt herring or butter, or some other stuff that Flemings shipped.

  Yet the sailors ‘swore blind that they did not know and had not heard of such a man’. That may well have been true. They had never heard of Perkin, only of the Duke of York, and him they were not asked for. Two thousand nobles were promised them, but they kept up their denials. Their contract with Ayala, of course, made denial easier. But in their own minds they were not concealing Perkin, for they had no such person on board. Instead they had a prince, even if at that moment he was swaying in an upright coffin, his knees pressed under his chin, almost fainting from the reek of the wine-soaked wood around him.

  This was stirring stuff, but it was also an omen of his future. So far he had largely dodged Perkin, but with each encounter that person (that ‘nickname’ as he had put it) became a more insistent presence in his life. The Biscayan captain had been shown letters patent, sealed with the royal seal, demanding Perkin’s arrest. On the high seas, as on the land before him, there was a growing legal record in which his actions and his supporters were accredited to Peter Warbeck, born in Tournai. When he landed, unless he swept all before him, Perkin would not be kept at bay for long.

  September 7th was the day of his landing. It was not a grand affair. Although the attainders said he came with ‘a great multitude and number’, Raimondo Soncino thought they amounted to eighty savage Irishmen. His ships were unimpressive, too. Henry, probably well informed as always, called them ‘two small ships and a Breton pinnace’; Soncino knew they were fishing boats. They beached on the startlingly bright sand of Whitesand Bay at Sennen, near Land’s End, to establish Richard’s cause with another group of rough and half-civilised people.

  Cornwall in the 1490s was not impoverished: its people were farmers, fishermen and miners, and the eastern counties had rich Devon as a market. Tin-working had industrialised Cornwall earlier than the rest of England, and the metal, though not precious, was highly prized. In Bodmin and Launceston, you could find rich merchants and impressive buildings. But this was not how the county was seen from the soft south-east or from civilised Europe. The Cornish, to those eyes, were dirt-poor, ‘the poorest people in England’, according to the Venetian ambassador. Bodmin was ‘a village’. Another Venetian called it ‘a very wild place, which no human being ever visits, in the midst of a barbarous race’. Fifty years after Prince Richard landed, the Cornishmen were still described as going barelegged and barefoot, drinking foul muddy ale and heating their hovels with fir cones. At Blackheath they had fought, as the savage Irish did, with little more than raw courage: raw courage and enormous arrows, the length of a tailor’s yard, which Londoners collected with wonder as the weapons of wild men. Those taken prisoner were sold to the authorities for one or two shillings each, all a Cornishman was worth.

  Most tellingly, many of these people could speak only Cornish, and did not care to do otherwise. English was known to be essential for anyone who wished to progress, or for gentlemen, but these were not the men who followed Richard, Duke of York. As so often, his supporters could barely string together three words of English, let alone distinguish the subtleties of native or well-bred speech from what had been learned by rote by a foreigner. Many would have had no notion what this young prince was saying to them. They merely looked at him.

  The Cornish showed their primitive nature by working underground, tapping for silver and tin. Earth smeared the miners’ faces black, as smoke tanned the skins of the smelters. Richard Carew, describing his native county at the start of the seventeenth century, wondered how such skills ‘could couch in so base a cabin as their (otherwise) thickclouded brains’. From Falmouth and Fowey the Cornish also worked as pirates, sending out fishing boats to attack Spanish and Italian ships, for preference, with their cargoes of wine and silks. Although the sea-lanes were busy, a man arriving at Land’s End – as Richard Plantagenet did on his half-pirate ship – was still struck, and even dismayed, by the immensity of the western sea by which the Cornish lived.

  Their faith, like that of the Irish, was fervent Christianity infused with superstition. Their land swarmed not only with home-grown saints, whose chapels and holy wells were half-hidden in glades and rocks, but with beings who moved the leaves, turned the stones and, if a man was a fool, tormented him. The world contained, to the Cornish, a parallel half-seen kingdom of mysterious foundlings and spirit-people engaged in trickery and enchantment. Some may have seen glimmerings of all this in the new prince, bright-haired and slightly unsteady after days of sailing, as his new supporters knelt to him in the white sand.

  In the folk-tales of Cornwall, there were already heroes whose lustre he could borrow. The Life of St Meriasek (Beunans Meriasek), written around 1497 to be performed at Camborne, featured the bold and pious Duke of Cornwall whose appearance, even in rumour, struck terror into the tyrant Teudar. The duke lambasted Teudar for his lack of a royal claim ‘on the side of mother or father’; that ‘dirty hound’, with his ‘caitiff knights’, had no right to rule in the country. He therefore gathered the Cornishmen against him. A messenger raced to tell his enemy the news:

  Hail Teudar, Emperor of Grace!

  A duke is here in the kingdom

  Risen surely against thee.

  And with him right truly a great host.

  Thy death he will see

  He doth boast certainly.

  Teudar. Out on him, the false dirt!

  I defy him day and night!

  After much challenging and counter-challenging (the duke threatening to turn Teudar into ‘hash’ and ‘broth’) they fought with enormous, ear- shattering guns, and Teudar was driven from the country. Or so the dramatisation went.

  Arthurian echoes could be heard too in the Meriasek play. The Duke of Cornwall particularly mentioned that his chief seat was Tintagel, Arthur’s castle. The Cornishmen’s reverence for Arthur, the king who would come again, not only coloured this stage-duke but told in favour of any personable prince who arrived, as if shipwrecked, on their shores. At Sennen, where Richard landed, fishermen still dragged up on their hooks pieces of doors and windows from the lost, drowned land of Lyonesse. The region between Bodmin and Exeter, through which he was to march with his men, was Arthur’s country: his rocky throne could be seen on the high moors, ready for his return.

  Yet Richard did not fill the king-longing that Arthur represented. Tudor loyalists could point out that there was an Arthur, Duke of Cornwall on the scene already: Henry’s son, deliberately named after him. If the new arrival was any figure from Cornish legend, he was much closer – in wandering, love and perhaps dissimulation – to Tristan, who had never come to much good at all. He was their leader for the moment, the man to poke Henry Tudor in the eye; but the Cornish rebellion had already lost much of its momentum. The great landowners in the west were Henry’s men, and the churchmen and gentry were uninterested this time. All that remained was the primitive unrest of simple men who sought some outlet, somehow. As much as anyone else who had embraced him, their first cause was their own.

  If Richard had doubts, he did not show them. He came to Cornwall, wrote Gutierre Gomez de Fuensalida, con boz de Rey, ‘with the voice of a king’. He so roused and impassioned the people, Vergil said, and promised them so much, that they immediately embraced him as their leader. At Penzance, he raised his
standards and was received with adulation. Immediately after that – according to the local story – he captured St Michael’s Mount, the holiest place in Cornwall.

  There he left Katherine with their son, almost on his first birthday. It is possible that by now there were two sons, the second even more vulnerable and helpless than the first. The small family was placed in the great archangel’s protection. Andrea Trevisano thought that Katherine and the children were left at ‘a place by the sea called Perin’, presumably Penryn, along the coast, and Henry seemed to think she was entrusted from the beginning to the sanctuary of St Buryan, on the road from Sennen to Penzance. But this was not yet a moment for guiltily retreating, as sanctuary implied. On the contrary, everything seemed possible, including seizing the sea-circled shrine of the first warrior of heaven.

  The Mount was ‘a strong place and a mighty’, wrote William Warkworth in his chronicle, ‘and cannot be got if it be well victualled with a few men to keep it, for twenty men may keep it against all the world’. Yet Richard did not find it difficult to capture. The garrison there was small, with few weapons; it was manned by three priests, a receiver and a master of works, all Yorkist by inclination. It therefore made sense for the young man who claimed to be Edward’s son to seek favour and blessing in this place, as well as the high symbolism of making it his first foothold in England.

  In the event he and Katherine had merely to appear, crossing the causeway or the sea, and climb, like any pilgrims, the ‘fourteen times sixty steps’ William of Worcester had counted, nineteen years before, to the top. The priests could confirm that they had thereby remitted one-third of the time due in Purgatory as penance for their sins. Prayers could be said before the reliquaries of the Virgin’s milk and the Virgin’s girdle in her chapel; September 8th, as it happened, was the day of her Nativity. But the most urgent pleas for intercession were made at another altar before the silver-gilt statue of St Michael, protector in battles and trampler of dragons. This particular St Michael was dressed more for hawking than for fighting, in a cloth-of-gold coat, a bonnet of tinsel satin and a chain of gold, like any prince. Somewhere, you might presume and hope, he also had a sword of fire, and could draw himself up in vengeance to the flaming height of the sky.

  Richard, having left the most precious things he possessed in the world, marched on towards the east. By local accounts his ships sailed north to St Ives, the nearest safe anchorage by sea. He was said to have proclaimed himself king there, but it was off the path of his march; it merely seemed that a king had come, with ‘four ships of war’, as they appeared in that poor fishing village. Wherever he went now, men flocked to him. Fra Zoan Antonio de Carbonariis, a Milanese friar who happened to be in the West Country, reported that, barely off the ship, the Duke of York already had 8,000 peasants brandishing arms at his side. He was full of confidence, Vergil said, and in his joy he had decided, for once, to be methodical. He was going to proceed from one fortified place to the next, moving by careful and defensible steps across the south of England. The fact that his force was quite undisciplined – tutta via male in ordine, as Soncino put it – did not discourage him.

  On the news of his appearance Henry had ordered Piers Edgecombe, the sheriff of Cornwall, to muster the county against him. Edgecombe was said to have raised 20,000 men; but when the force drew near Bodmin they found the would-be king in possession of Castle Canyke, an ancient hill-fort south-east of the town, and his troops blocking the roads to the west. Castle Canyke also had spiritual power, as the natural focus of the paths of the saints across Cornwall. Edgecombe’s men, defying their captain’s repeated orders, would not go on, but fled home. They may have been afraid, or they may have begun to sympathise with the cause of the invader. News of Richard’s victory was greeted in Bodmin with trumpets, bonfires and acclamations. He entered the town as king indeed: king almost by right of battle, since Edgecombe’s forces had turned back, stumbling over the purple moors, merely at the sight of him.

  There was no coronation. That glorious culmination would have to wait for his arrival in Westminster, where he would sit in the throne that Edward had assumed and be anointed with the special, sanctified oil of the Yorkist kings. Instead, he was proclaimed king – as the local story had it – in a house behind St Petroc’s church. Heralds and trumpeters cried him aloud as Richard IV, ‘second son of Edward late king’, undoubted heir to the crown of England. He now had 3,000 followers thronging the hilly streets of Bodmin, one and a half times the population of the town itself. He would have thanked God for them in one, or perhaps all, of Bodmin’s three impressive churches: the priory church of the Augustinians, where he was probably staying; the large and beautiful church of the Franciscans, with a hall attached to it accounted as fine as the one at Westminster; or St Petroc’s, the finest and largest parish church in Cornwall, built only twenty years before of golden Pentewan stone and furnished with brand-new oak benches costing almost £200. There, members of the town’s forty guilds would have prayed with him. This was perhaps not so poor a place to begin being King of England.

  Richard IV assumed majesty, wrote Davies Gilbert in his Parochial History of Cornwall,

  with such boon grace and affable deportment, that immediately he won the affections and admiration of all who made addresses unto him . . . And, moreover, besides his magisterial port and mien, being an incomparable counterfeit, natural crafty, liar and dissembler, Qui nescit dissimulare, nescit regnare, as the old proverb saith; so that in short time he grew to be so popular and formidable about Bodmin that no power durst oppose him there.

  ‘About Bodmin’ was a pitifully small compass, a regniculum, in Gilbert’s words. Within that span, however, the people seemed to have in Richard IV a king as good as any other: better, indeed, since he loathed Henry’s taxes and had promised not to repeat them. Perhaps his claim had cloudiness and mystery in it; but all kings to some degree lied, dissimulated and made improbable promises to their subjects. Qui nescit dissimulare, nescit regnare. As a king, he was perhaps a dissembler; if a dissembler, he made a perfect king.

  He did not stay with them long, only a day or so, before moving on to subdue the rest of his kingdom. He crossed the Tamar at Launceston and entered Devon. Riding across Dartmoor, with its crags and tors and deep ravines, his irresistibility stayed with him. He made sure his troops paid for the food they were given in the tiny settlements they passed through, proof of his royal magnanimity and kindness. Devon men flocked to join him, and the sheriff of Devon, ordered to prevent his march to Exeter, found his forces, like Edgecombe’s, too terrified to fight the king who approached them.

  At the walls of Exeter, the first substantial town they had come to in England proper, close to 8,000 men camped under Richard’s standards. Those standards showed the escaping child and the red lion, a symbol in prophecy of political salvation. His own standard of the White Rose, so briefly aired in Northumberland, may have been borne before him as he rode, now a king, now in battle armour, through the strange moors and red-earth hills of a landscape he had never seen before.

  Yet he had another identity in this country. As he rode eastwards that identity kept pace with him and also loped before him, competing for attention. Along the roads and in the villages, Henry’s officers had distributed ‘placards’ – official licences, signed by the king himself under the signet or privy seal, like the one produced by the English captain to show to the Biscayans. The placards offered a reward for the taking of Perkin, alive. This ‘reward and benefit’ was proclaimed in the ports too, so that people would be alert to catch Perkin if he tried to escape by sea. Henry was offering 1,000 marks, or £667, for him, the same sum he had promised to the citizens of Waterford just a little before. Whoever caught him would also have all their offences forgiven, ‘first and last’, but nonetheless his price was falling. It was now much less than the reward offered to the Biscayans, and many times lower than the 100,000 crowns the French had wanted to buy him for in Scotland. But Perkin, the boatman’s son, c
ould not command what a prince could.

  Meanwhile he was being sought on all sides, fast and hard. Henry, keeping his court at his hunting-palace at Woodstock, had word of him by September 10th, three days after his landing. ‘So,’ André had him say, with a sarcastic smile, ‘this prince of knaves is troubling us again.’ He wanted, André said, to try ‘gentle methods’ first, to avoid bloodshed; Soncino said that Henry offered the Duke of York ‘a full pardon’ as soon as he landed. But if the king had that thought, it soon passed. His natural caution impelled him to act as though the threat was serious; and he could not be sure that it would not be. He later paid Simon Digby, the constable of the Tower, for bringing in forty gunners and other troops to defend the Tower against ‘Peter Osebek and his adherents’, as though they might well reach London.

  Before September 12th the king had sent Giles, Lord Daubeney, his chamberlain and lieutenant of Calais, to ‘arready our subjects for the subduing of him’ by land, and Lord Willoughby de Broke, the steward of the household, ‘to take the said Perkin, if he return again to the sea’. On the 12th itself he sent letters to Talbot, Lord Darby and Lord Strange, among others, ordering them immediately to get men organised; Talbot was to bring ‘six score tall [strong] men on horseback defensibly arrayed’, and was to meet Henry at Woodstock on the 24th. By the 17th word had got as far as Knaresborough, in North Yorkshire, where Sir Henry Wentworth mobilised his colleagues to march against Perkin. These, in turn, spread the word to others.