Perkin

by Ann Wroe

  . . . an order would be had

  Among each degree and each estate

  To ken a tapster from a lady, a lord from a lad.

  Then shall truth and falsehood fall at debate,

  And right shall judge and set aside flattery and guile

  And falsehood for ever be put in exile.

  It might be argued that such a passion for social order implied that the order was crumbling, undermined by ambition or presumption. Most contemporaries claimed it was. Low people in trumped-up clothes, with trailing sleeves or fur trimmings, were symbolic of a more dangerous blurring of the lines. The ways to advancement were marked out, and men on the make, more curious and better-educated than in times past, were increasingly seeking them. Through the Church, the law, the universities and the grammar schools, the sons of ambitious gentry and tradesmen could climb into the professions or find a place at court. At the lowest level, the foundling or the peasant boy, entering a song-school, could start on the first rung of a respected life. From what Henry knew so far, some wild version of those presumptions had propelled Perkin towards him, up a ladder whose highest part was hidden in sun-touched clouds.

  Yet men and women, by and large, did not move from the rank their birth had given them. The Cornishmen who had marched on London that summer did not wish to be more than peasants and artisans, but merely to register their anger. The bumptious Flemish merchants who caused such grief to Charles the Bold and Maximilian (‘villeins’, as Chastellain called them) wanted mostly to have their privileges guaranteed, not to overturn the order of the world. Families remained for generations in the labouring, merchant or gentry classes, without trying to cross the divide between their estate and the level above. They grew rich, or poor, inside the confines of that class. The wandering son, leaving home to find an education or see where his wits could take him, was much rarer than the son who followed – though not without hopes that he could do better at it – the path laid out before him by his father.

  The foundation of social order still lay in blood, pedigree and land. Those with shaky pedigrees, including, occasionally, kings, tried hard to improve them by marriage, legal argument and imaginative genealogies. Land, in practice, counted for most of a man’s standing: a lot, a little, none at all or, in the king’s case, the whole land itself. Yet property in itself could not ennoble anyone without that line of blood. The Pastons, wealthy country gentry with lands, local offices and contacts at court, understood themselves to be socially far below the noble families, the Mowbrays and the Howards, in their part of Norfolk. The Howards were related to kings by marriage and had royal preferments passing through their hands. The Pastons could merely hope that some of those offices and annuities might end up with them.

  Henry himself had in some ways disturbed this picture. As an only son, with no extended family, he had no claque of nobles round him and did not naturally look to them for counsel. England’s nobility had in any case grown weak from fighting and treason, and some of the greatest houses – Buckingham, Warwick, Northumberland – had heirs who were minors and under the king’s control. Henry made few peers to swell their numbers: just five in a reign of twenty-two years, of which one was the faithful Giles Daubeney who had chased Perkin into submission. His intimates, in so far as he wished to have any, were men of lower rank and blood who held power purely by his grace. His council was weighted less with bishops and nobles than with lawyers, many of them sprung from the lesser gentry or, worse, trade, who could now outbid the peers for Henry’s favour. If that favour was the central fountain in the garden of England, the new men were like plumbers brought in to lay alternative pipes from the fountainhead, briskly bypassing the old.

  Richard IV, in the brief time he had addressed the world, had considered this an abomination. In his proclamation of 1496, repeated at the walls of Exeter, he had excoriated Henry for promoting and confiding in these new men:

  and putting apart all well disposed nobles / he hath none in favour & trust about his person / but bishop Fox, Smith, Bray, Lovell, Oliver King, Sir Charles Somerset, David Owen, Rysley, Sir James Turberville, Tyler, Robert Litton, Guildford, Chomondley, Empson, James Hobart, John Cutte, Garth, Hansey, Wyatt, and such others Caitiffs & villains of simple birth which by subtle inventions & pilling of the people have been the principal finders / occasioners & counsellors of the misrule and mischief now reigning in England.

  ‘Oliver King’ was the bishop of Bath and Wells, but Richard thought nothing of him; nor yet Fox, a mere manor-born boy, who had hounded him in Scotland. Somerset was captain of the king’s guard, Turberville the marshal of the household, but Richard did not rate them either, especially not bastard Somerset, whom he had already called ‘villain’ to his face in Flanders. Sir William Tyler and Sir Richard Chomondley were stripped of their ‘Sirs’ for consorting with Henry and his crew.

  The men Richard named were a mixture of those he loathed for private reasons and those he thought egregious examples of Henry’s disordered governance. Tyler was the captain of Berwick, a natural enemy in Scotland, and Wyatt had tried to have him assassinated there. The rest were Henry’s tame churls. Rysley and Bray were associates from pre-Bosworth days, Bray recently favoured with high office in Wales, where he held no lands and was no one’s good lord. Hobart and Lovell were members of the new wave of lawyers-in-high-favour, as was Empson, the son of a sieve-maker. Owen, a Welsh hanger-on, was the king’s chief carver, Litton one of his treasurers of war and Wardrobe. While these men were kept ‘in favour about his person’, Richard complained, Henry had sent certain nobles forcibly abroad. He had also debased the best stock of the kingdom by marrying ‘divers Ladies of the blood Royal’ – Richard’s blood – to ‘certain his kinsmen & friends of simple and low degree’. Meanwhile, since they had no other way to build their fortunes, the king’s favourites pillaged the people. Richard explicitly offered an end to all that. His reign would mark a return to proper order: rule with the help of prudent and experienced ‘great lords of our blood’, from whom favour and good governance would flow down as they should.

  His proclamation showed a deep reverence for rank and the preservation of social order. It could not have been otherwise. People had to be treated ‘after their estate and degrees’. The reward he offered for the taking of Henry, £1,000, was what the ‘lowest of degree’ would get; further up the ladder, he implied, the prizes would be stupendous. His will of 1495 had made the same point, so standard and incontrovertible, that though Fortune might batter both paupers and kings, in the end ‘the deserving man’ would obtain what was his ‘in the scale of honours’. By ‘the deserving man’ – a phrase not necessarily his, but endorsed by him – he seemed to mean the deserts of birth and blood, not those of ingenuity, talent or hard work. He was talking of himself, the prince, getting his kingdom back, not of some ordinary striver finding success. Richard had never been a friend of social climbing.

  By the autumn of 1497 those words seemed rich indeed. By then, according to Henry’s best sources, the would-be king stood exposed as a boatman’s brat from Tournai. This was not merely effrontery and folly, as Henry described it to others in exasperated disbelief; it came close to sacrilege. On one occasion, Henry was said to have ordered one of his falconers to kill a prize bird ‘because he feared not to match with an eagle’. The falcon might be the fairest of fliers, hovering in his airy tower as a symbol of high breeding and nobility, but the eagle was the king. Another story ran that Henry had ordered all the mastiffs in England hanged, because they dared to take on lions. The mastiff was the second among dogs after the greyhound; but the lion, maned and clawed with gold, was royal.

  Perkin had committed a deeper outrage than these. He was not merely a little below kingship but, by Henry’s lights, unutterably far removed. He was no falcon, but perhaps a sparrow; no mastiff, but a prick-eared farmyard cur that ranked, according to The King’s Book, eleven steps lower. As Bernard André put it, voicing the universal view:

  It seems to me
to be against nature

  To endeavour to put in possession

  A poor man of ignoble birth

  In royal place; it is a great oppression.

  Of course, it could not get far. In this world of exquisitely measured hierarchies, gentility and baseness could be discerned at once. Nobility, according to Reason in the Roman de la Rose, could not enter any base heart; courtesy and generosity could not coexist with a man who licked his knife. There was no concealing the fundamental nature either of objects, or of living things. The knight Beaumains, who had come as a nameless stranger to Arthur’s court and was set to work as a kitchen-knave and ladle-washer, was thought to be ‘villein-born or fostered in some abbey’, but at last revealed his nobility in his beautiful hands. Conversely, as Friend put it in the Roman, ‘If anyone wanted to cover a dung-heap with silken cloths . . . it would undoubtedly be the same foul-smelling dung-heap that it had been before. And if any man says . . . it appears fairer on the outside, I would say that such deception comes from the eyes’ disordered vision.’

  In Perkin’s case too, Henry insisted, people were not fooled. They knew of what stock he was, scorning him for it, while Henry himself held him de si petite estime et valeur that he was hardly worth bothering with. In fact, le Roi ne fait estime nulle de lui. It was the same, he felt sure, at Maximilian’s court: people of standing could immediately see through him. The delivery of Perkin, he told James IV through Bishop Fox in 1497, was ‘of no price nor value’ in itself; he desired it only as recompense for wrongs done and honour slighted, ‘not for any estimation that we take of him’, for he took none.

  A little while after transmitting those remarks to James, Henry had been presented at Sheen with one of his finest books, L’imaginacion de vraye noblesse. He paid £23 for it, delighting in its quality and, no doubt, its content. The timing and the theme may not have been coincidental, since this was a book completely concerned, though in a muddled way, with the authentic virtues of princes and the dangers of social climbers. Quintin Poulet, who transcribed it for him, was also Henry’s librarian. Although the text had first been written in Hainault fifty years before, Poulet had subtly updated it with references to the ‘treacheries and derisions’ that were taking place on the borders of England, and with the mauvais garsons felons et orguilleux / pleins de sedicions, the pride-filled evil boys, who were being set up daily to destroy princes. Such charlatans, however, could not possibly succeed, since virtuous knights would never serve them, rendering them limbless and broken. At one point the knight-narrator of the book came face to face with this hapless type, a pleasant young man in a long robe of cloth-of-gold, not unlike himself; but the young man’s arms were severed, and floated disturbingly in the air beside him in their fashionable detachable sleeves.

  More subtle and pervasive undermining was also going on. ‘Good rich bloodlines’ were being overlooked in favour of men with small estates and meagre virtues: garsons, varlets et menues gens, little people, with whom men of noble stock wisely had nothing to do. Poulet, of course, was treading on dangerous ground here, with a dedicatee whose own lineage was cloudy and whose favourites were sometimes not noble. Perhaps, in some cases, pedigree did not matter much. ‘The times are such today that people don’t look for good manners or virtues . . . but like fools they look only at the line they’re descended from, saying “He’s noble on his father’s side but not his mother’s”, or “He lacks a half or a quarter”, and thus . . . nobility is chopped in pieces, as a butcher chops meat in the market.’ In the end, however, it could not be denied that nobility of blood was ‘beautiful’, both in itself and in the lordships, clothes, houses and retainers that went with it. The ideal and unshakeable prince possessed both gentility and virtue, in direct opposition to the garson at the margins of his kingdom: without honour, conscience, chivalry or pity, despicable in everything.

  In that year, of course, the garson had argued back in kind. His proclamation threw in Henry’s face his father’s mere creation as Earl of Richmond, his grandfather’s ‘low birth’ and the ‘simple and low degree’ of his advisers. So the insults were traded, but hardly in equal measure. The king had too good a story to exploit, and the scorn he expressed, both in public and in private, was picked up by all those around him. Nothing remotely connected the spawn of a boatman, loading and unloading goods on a filthy river, to the majesty of kingship. Various documents described Perkin, almost gratuitously, as vir infimi status, a man of the lowest degree; he was called so even when set beside Michael Joseph, the Cornish blacksmith. Vergil called him ‘most vile’, ignobilissimus, obscure and poor from his very beginnings, fit only – as Simnel had been – to wash the dirty cooking pots in the royal kitchens. Skelton called him dung, with or without the silken cloths to cover him. It was in that spirit that mud and night-soil had been thrown at his shield in Antwerp, shit to shit. Bernard André used of him not only the words miser and servus but misellus and servulus, a snivelling and worthless little servant boy.

  The word ‘boy’, Henry’s and Ramsay’s favourite appellation for him, was strong mockery in itself. At best, it meant a page or a servant; more usually, it meant a low-class knave whose vileness was matched only by his weakness. ‘He can’t hurt me,’ said Henry, more than once; ‘he wouldn’t know how.’ When Grand Amour fought the fifteen-foot seven-headed giant in Hawes’s ‘Pastime of Pleasure’, ‘he struck at me with many strokes rude / and called me boy and gave me many a mock’. Grand Amour whacked the giant’s heads off; but that was in a story.

  The snivelling boy was now in Beaulieu, with his pretensions apparently at an end. From the windows he could see the gleam of the inlet that led out to the sea. At high tide the water came almost to the abbey, leaving seaweed along the banks and letting the masts of ships ride above the trees; but there was no escape that way. The country he had galloped through, though perhaps scarcely seeing it in his desperate wish to leave, was already showing signs of autumn: the fields harvested, apples reddening on the heavy trees, dry leaves turning yellow in the woods. It was almost Michaelmas, when the great archangel himself – having somehow failed to heed his intercessions – began to tint the land with fire. Autumn was the falling of things, the season of coldness, dryness and contagion, in which men declined into melancholy and fear of scarcity in winter. It was also the season when boys went fruit-stealing in other men’s orchards, as he had three times tried.

  Nothing changed the natural order. Within the walls where he was confined the day was divided into regular periods of prayer, the scarcely varying hum and chant of men praising God. The monks prayed at the east end of the abbey church, he and the other sanctuary men at the west end, keeping their separate worlds. Lay servants swept the floors or fetched the wood in bundles on their shoulders, while labourers worked the garden. Outside the walls, soldiers guarded, messengers reported and the king, though now on his way westward and no longer enthroned in Westminster, ruled in his own land.

  Henry’s whole court was on the road: the councillors, the knights, the household officers, the sewers and squires, the grooms and pages, the yeomen of the chamber and the yeomen of the guard, the Office of the Butlery, Pantry and Scullery and the man responsible for spices and sauces, with thirteen carriages of furnishings, clothes, papers, reliquaries and jewels. Some of the army, with guns, accompanied. The king’s rule was working as smoothly as kingship had ever worked in England: officers doing his bidding, the nobles peaceable, the people, or most of them, consenting and deferring to his firm benevolence with no desire for change. As Soncino wrote on September 16th, ‘[In England] nothing revolutionary occurs, except what may be compared to the generation of aerial bodies’: first the Simnel bubble, blown in Ireland, broken in England, and now the bubble of the young man whom Soncino still referred to as the Duke of York, drifting towards the inexorable crushing majesty of the king. Soon, the ambassador knew, he would be ‘smoke’, nothing more.

  The social hierarchy was as it had been the week, the month and the
year before. Only for the fugitive in Beaulieu had the world turned upside down. His adoring subjects were lost to him, and his three tattered counsellors had begun to edge away. There remained in loyal attendance only the guardian he had always had, from the lowest order of the angels. In one of Margaret’s most impressive books, the soul of the knight Tondal, grieving in hell, had turned to his guardian angel with the words ‘Goodly sire’. ‘You call me that now,’ his angel replied; ‘but I have always been with you, and you never once deigned to call me by that name.’

  v

  It belongs to Henry to finish this part of the story. On October 7th, at Taunton, the king dictated a general letter to ‘all his friends and well-wishers’ across the Channel. He sent it to Richard Nanfan and the other officers at Calais for translation into French and wider distribution; it survives, in French, in a copy in Courtrai. On October 17th, Waterford got a slightly different and updated version sent from Exeter. Henry had never rewarded the officers of Waterford for the intelligence they had passed on about Perkin or the chase they had attempted, as they plaintively reminded him. But he kept them abreast of the news, at least.

  . . . When [Perkin and his accomplices] perceived they might not get to the sea, and that they were had in a quick chase and pursuit, they were compelled to address themselves unto our monastery Beaulieu to the which of chance and of fortune it happened some of our menial servants to repair, and some we sent thither purposely. The said Perkin, Heron, Skelton and Ashley [sic], seeing our said servants there, and remembering that all the country was warned to make watch and give attendance, that they should not avoid or escape by sea, made instances unto our said servants to sue unto us for them. The said Perkin desiring to be sure of his life, and he would come unto us and show what he is; and over that do unto us such service as should content us. And so, by agreement between our said servants and them, they [blank] them to depart from Beaulieu, and to put themselves in our grace and pity [‘mercy’ deleted]. The abbot and convent hearing thereof demanded of them why and for what cause they would depart, whereunto they gave answer in the presence of the said abbot and convent and of many other, that, without any manner of constraint, they would come unto us of their free wills in trust of our grace and pardon aforesaid.