Perkin

by Ann Wroe

  For much of St Matthew’s Day, September 21st, Richard reviewed his troops in the fields at Taunton, encouraging them for the confrontation to come. Henry had sent Daubeney to issue a challenge to him and set a day for the battle, which the king supposed would be at Glastonbury. Daubeney now awaited an answer. Courtenay in Exeter had meant to engage him formally also, but had been too tired. All this was fascinating in itself. Challenges were not issued to rebels, but to equals or near-equals, as James IV had challenged the Earl of Surrey, representing Henry, at Norham earlier that year. Honour was involved here, and Henry, through Daubeney, apparently did not hesitate to match his honour against this young man. Trevisano had also suggested that if the ‘war’ did not end in a battle, it would do so ‘by agreement’. Such terms suggested that, for all Henry said and wrote, he did not yet know for certain with whom he was dealing. At Glastonbury, Arthur’s holy place, the seal of royal legitimacy would at last be set on one of them.

  His opponent, having made no answer yet to Daubeney, issued his orders and took a muster roll, noting exactly who was there and who was not. His forces, according to Fabyan, were ‘minished & somedeal decreased’; he noticed this ‘as a man comfortless’, but still went up and down the lines with a dissembled show of confidence. For the last time, he smiled on them. Then, around midnight, he fled for the coast.

  At that moment, Daubeney’s army was perhaps twenty miles away. King Richard could neither see nor hear it but, in the pitch-dark, he could imagine it. ‘The night,’ Thomas More wrote, ‘is by itself discomfortable and full of fear.’ To an army waiting for battle, no part of the landscape of the dark could be trusted. More told the story of an army encamped near Belgrade that saw, by the glimmering of the moon, the Turks’ whole force ‘coming on softly and soberly in a long range all in good order’. By day, that force turned out to be ‘a fair long hedge standing even stone still’. Commines related how an army bristling with weapons had loomed up at night once before the Burgundians: when dawn came, they saw it was a field full of thistles.

  It is easy to believe that night fears may have got hold of Richard. Henry had recommended, after all, that he and his force should be kept harried, sleepless and hungry, ‘watching and waking by means of scries [attacks] and near approaches as those horsemen may well and wisely do . . . that they shall be half discomfited without any stroke’. It is easier to believe that he fled because he could not face what was coming, by day or night. Zurita said that Richard knew he was surrounded, and had already heard that James in Scotland was suing for peace. Far away in London, the citizens and ambassadors knew that Henry was about to take him and that he could never get away. The young deer had in its heart a piece of bone that stopped it, when the hounds went baying after it and it crashed exhausted through the woods, from dying of fear. Men did not have such things.

  When Richard fled, he took little with him. Sixty horsemen were said to have left Taunton when he did, but he seems to have lost them on the way. Many were probably captured. John Heron, Edward Skelton and Nicholas Astley – ‘the most worthy of his council’, as the London Chronicle sneered – kept him company, but William Lounde, his chaplain, galloped back with a few others towards London, throwing himelf on the 26th into sanctuary at St Martin’s le Grand. ‘And thus’, said the chronicler, ‘his disciples fled from their feigned Master.’ Richard’s chests were abandoned and seized by Henry’s men, leaving Soncino to worry that many people might be compromised by the documents and letters inside them. But there had been no time for sifting or selective destruction. The imperative was unhampered speed.

  It is not clear which sea he was aiming for at first – any sea, Henry thought – but he made at last for Southampton Water. This was eighty miles away, much further than the nearest coast, but it offered the sanctuary of Beaulieu in case of desperate need. The route was hard, often trackless: to Ilchester, through the moors, over the Sherborne Heights, through the Forest of Blackmoor, across Cranborne Chase. What was most in his mind, perhaps, was the thought of taking ship for Flanders. Possibly the ships that Henry had destroyed, or ordered to be destroyed, had been meant to sail from Penzance along the coast to find him if he sent word. They could have taken Katherine and the babies too; but there were now, very probably, no ships. There were no troops, either. He left behind his ragtag army and, at least in intention, the country he had kept insisting belonged to him.

  He also left his kingship behind. For twelve days, as Richard IV, he had dazzled his lowly followers in the West Country with the elegance and manners that had charmed the rest of Europe. If only in the eyes of these strange, swarthy, tin-scrabbling people, he was at last a king. They had knelt in reverence to him, expecting favours and healing in the touch of his hand and benediction in the sweetness of his smile. No longer. According to the London Chronicle, the remnants of his army were ‘amazed and disconsolate’ to find him gone. Vergil said they feared at first that he had been killed; but when they realised he had abandoned them, they fled too. By the third hour of the day, Soncino wrote, not one of them was left in Taunton. They did not yet understand, until Henry told them later, that ‘they had been worshipping a low-born foreigner as their king’.

  Only the Cornish were ever said to have worshipped or adored him, as if he were a false god. He was their idolum aut simulacrum, wrote Henry’s clerks. It was in the nature of most idols, not being Christian, that they could bring only disappointment. When his followers failed to find King Richard after Taunton, about 600 of them, led by a man called James the Rover, turned their fury on one of Henry’s commissioners and tore him limb from limb in Taunton’s market place. Fabyan said this happened ‘in the time of the rage of this Perkin’, as if he had maddened and infected whole parts of the country. William Parron, Henry’s astrologer, agreed. Perkin had sickened people with his poison, especially the men of Cornwall, turning their stomachs like the bad bread and the bad beer. The king, by contrast, brought them both death and cleansing, or, as Soncino neatly described it, ‘holy oil’.

  His enemy had now to be hunted down. ‘Good number of well-horsed men,’ wrote Henry as soon as he knew, ‘been after him from every quarter.’ The London Chronicle said that Daubeney ‘sent towards the seas side CC Spears to Stop him from the Sea, and to Search the Country if they might take him’; Fabyan made it 500. But ex-king Richard, riding so fast that his pursuers could not catch him, reached Southampton Water in less than two days. Whatever plans he had made for fleeing, he found no ship there. He was forced to double back to Beaulieu and take sanctuary on the 22nd, as he may have always intended.

  When he arrived, he was apparently in disguise. He had fled incognito, Trevisano wrote, and the abbot merely ‘thought’ that the young man was in the party of fugitives who banged in desperation on his door. Once admitted, he put on in any case the habit of the monks themselves – most probably the black habit of the conversus, rather than the black and white of a fully fledged Cistercian. So dressed he was obliged, like all sanctuary men, to attend at least some of the offices of compline, matins, prime, terce and evensong, as well as daily Mass. In his short time at Beaulieu his persona was that of a rather-too-graceful and uncertain lay-brother, telling his beads with the rest, his dark cowl hiding the emotions on his face.

  It is not hard to imagine what those were: fear, misery and shame. There was nothing more dishonourable than to flee the field of battle (‘foul flight’, as Vergil called it), except to do so before the battle had started. Trevisano said that the Duke of York had ‘not wished to accept’ the challenge from Daubeney to fight, but no official refusal was recorded. He merely abandoned what would have been the field. To flee by night was ‘the most shameful manner’, Christine de Pisan said, ‘because it is called running away’. Henry was keen to emphasise both Perkin’s panic (‘he took no leave nor licence of them’) and the sorry hour when he had bolted, just as, the year before, he had noted that James IV fled ‘about midnight’ from his approaching army.

  Failing h
earts and desertion of forces happened often enough, it was true. Earl Rivers, a paragon of courage, had left the retinue of Charles the Bold just before a battle against the Swiss, and Charles had mocked that ‘the Queen of England’s brother’ was scared. (Rivers denied it, and claimed to have been tipped off by an Italian astrologer.) The Duke of Buckingham in 1483, finding that he could not trust the little band of men he was reduced to, slipped on a disguise and left them. Henry too, before Bosworth, had deserted his troops for a while and seemed to lose his nerve, wandering away in the dark assailed by fears of Richard III’s ‘host innumerable’ and his own uncertain reinforcements. But he recovered and went back to his men, ‘heavy for the sudden loss of their captain’, to explain that he had left them ‘of set purpose to receive some good news of certain his secret friends’. Sudden secret news, or new wiles to hurt the enemy in another place, were the textbook methods of running away and yet preserving some honour. King Richard IV had not had time for that subtlety of conduct.

  Of course, the situation had been desperate, with the odds overwhelming and his army crumbling around him. Vergil thought he had perhaps feared he was betrayed; or that vecordia animi, frenzy of soul – a sort of wild distress that Bernard André, too, attributed to him – had overtaken him; or that, ‘most likely’, he knew his men were incapable of fighting Henry’s. He had also not expected the fight to come upon him so fast. In other words, Vergil rather gently excused him. Yet some of the poorest members of his ‘lousy army’, unarmed and unlettered, had not fled as he had done but had waited, leaderless, at Taunton Castle to see if he returned. His actions made him less than they were. Cowardice was in itself a mark of baseness, for in the end it was virtue, not appearance, that proved a man’s true worth.

  September 22nd found the King of the Cornishmen cowering in sanctuary with a bankrupt mercer, a bankrupt merchant and a scrivener ‘of like authority & dishonesty’, as Fabyan thought. These second-rate and venal characters were seen as reflecting the prince they thought they served. His status, in the monks’ eyes, was no higher than theirs, for they were all rebels and wanted men. The beautiful robes and polished armour had been put away. There was also little treasure left. Henry’s men later found the grand sum of ten crowns, or £5, at the sanctuary. Either the English, wrote Soncino, or the others who had supported ‘Perichino’ had allowed him to come to want: lo havenano lassato venire in miseria. Five pounds would hire five carts for three days, or pay 100 soldiers for two days at the king’s rate. It would also buy you a pardon from a Grey Friar or eight coat-armours, should you qualify to wear one. The King of the Cornishmen could not pay an army, or win a throne, with that.

  On entering chartered sanctuary, as well as handing in his weapons and paying 2s. 4d. for his fee, he had to give the clerk 4d. to enter his name in the register. One wonders what name he gave. He was nobody in particular, nobody to notice. In fact, he might as well have been Perkin.

  iv

  Everything in Nature was laid out in order. The concentric circles of the universe moved as God had planned them. In the beautiful machine of the world itself all things were arranged in threes, the perfect number. North Pole, Centre, South Pole; Europe, Asia, Africa; past, present, future; line, surface, body; beginning, middle, end. Inside the three lay the power of four, as in air, water, earth and fire; the humours phlegmatic, sanguine, choleric and melancholic; childhood, green youth, maturity, crabbed age; spring, summer, autumn, winter. Containing both was the mystical seven: planets, sciences, sacraments, deadly sins, stairs in Purgatory by which the penitent stumbled to heaven.

  The pattern did not vary. None of the tricks and devices of Fortune affected in the least the movement of God’s grand design. Within that design, all things had their fixed limit and their natural course. A fire could throw its heat only a certain distance, and no more. The sound of artillery could be heard for so many miles and no further. A stone, cast upwards, could only fall to the ground again.

  The earth, suspended at the centre of this ordered creation, went through its days and seasons as the sun, in its course, moved around it. Winter’s frosts, with the peasant warming his cold legs by the fire, gave way to the verdant cloak of spring enamelled with numberless flowers. The lord went hawking among the May boughs, and lovers lay together. As the sun climbed higher, the wheat grew and ripened until by searing August the cutters were in the fields, their tunics hitched round their waists. The progression was sometimes delayed or surprised by freak weather, but it was never reversed. Winter did not follow the May games, any more than ripe wheat could suddenly rise from the snow.

  All things came not only in their season, but in their place. Everything in the world, wrote the author of The Treatise on the Ball Game,

  is inclined by a certain innate and constant desire to move to the place assigned to it by nature for the preservation of the universe . . . each having its own inclinations and desires by which they are kept to their own places . . . Furthermore . . . each of these moves by natural inclination towards the habitation of that element that holds dominion over it: earthly things towards earth, watery things towards water, airy things towards air, and fiery things towards the fire.

  The ideal of beauty was perfect tidiness in accordance with God’s scheme. The perfect landscape had about it nothing wild, no ‘loathliness’ of mossy ruins or upstart weeds. The demolished towers and scattered stones of the House of York, as Molinet had described them, were a horror-picture, awry and ‘counterfeit’ in the word’s most disturbing sense. Instead, the ideal scene was a garden with sanded paths ‘in compass’, lawns soft and short as carpets, and carefully clipped trees within an enclosing wall. In the world’s best gardens, according to Mandeville, the songbirds and peacocks were mechanical, singing and flying only to order. The centrepiece of such a garden was often a fountain from which water was trained to run, with crystal clearness, over raked and ordered stones. Alternatively, it might be an arbour as perfectly circular as creation, or a temple in which the number of sides, the number of columns and the number of steps to be ascended symbolised the fixed gradations of earthly life or the life to come. Here, in bliss, the poet could set his dreams:

  The gravel gold, the water pure as glass,

  The bankés round, the well environing,

  And softé as velvet the youngé grass

  That thereupon lustily came springing

  The suite of trees about encompassing

  Their shadow cast, closing the well around

  And all the herbés growing on the ground.

  Within this garden all flowers were in their order, beginning with the rose; all trees in their order, beginning with the oak; all birds subservient, and by degree, to the eagle, which was the king of birds. Above in his heaven shone the sun, emperor and chief of the seven planets, with his hair arranged neatly in rays of gold, highest of all metals.

  There was no part of life that had not been minutely divided, subdivided and placed in ascending rank of importance. The King’s Book listed seven sorts of meekness and seven ornaments of obedience. No prayer was simpler or more often said than the Pater Noster: but this had ‘seven notes, that are the seven biddings that purchase the seven gifts of the Holy Ghost, that destroy the seven capital wickednesses of heart and set and nourish the seven virtues by which a man comes to the seven blessednesses’.

  Such lists were not merely aids to salvation, but reflected the organising and prioritising principles of God himself. Heaven was the most hierarchical of kingdoms. In a treatise owned by Edward IV on the nine orders of angels, the highest-ranking seraphim did nothing but worship God in devotion and love like fire; the cherubim plumbed the secrets of God; the thrones relayed His majesty to the subordinate angels; dominions, principalities and powers cared for the world in general, protecting it against the devil, and the lowest orders of archangels and angels acted as messengers and helpers to ordinary men and women. All knew their place and duties, linked each to each in perfect harmony and unfeigned o
bedience.

  The well-governed earthly kingdom modelled itself on this. Each king commanded, in descending order, barons, seneschals, esquires, secretaries, messengers and servants, all minutely aware of their duties and their place. The heralds who recorded the public festivities of Henry’s court took their greatest pleasure from this ‘fair order’. They noted eagerly the proper precedence of men and horses, the required salutations and firing of artillery, attendants ‘well-appointed’, lords ‘honestly accompanied’ and the perfect manners of all concerned. Any glimpse of chaos, a thrilling subversion of everything normal, was carefully organised at the king’s command. Henry’s Lord of Misrule, one Ringley, was paid £5 each Christmas season for the careful anarchy he planned.

  Outside the court, the same strict rules of social order were expected to prevail. By wearing the clothes of their station and holding the tools of their trade, people could be known for what they were, without deception. By this means, with any luck, they would not get above themselves. Pages, before they left their chambers in the morning, were enjoined to see that every item of clothing ‘be so sitting / As to your degree seemeth according’. It was pure bad manners, when walking in the street, to look so proud that men stared after you and wondered what you might be. Rather, men and women were urged at every moment – as they opened a door, began a conversation, took water to wash – to make their rank obvious and acknowledge who their betters were. Due reverence and obedience, no person desiring more than was his or hers by kind, kept the world in tranquil governance and peace. Peter Idley explained the ideal to his son: