Perkin

by Ann Wroe

  Henry had no obvious reason not to tell his friends and well-wishers the truth. Nonetheless, this was neither the whole nor the straight story. Polydore Vergil summed up some of it: Henry could not get Perkin into his hands by force, so he did so by subterfuge. The evidence shows that force was applied too, though not by the king directly. As far as he was concerned, the process was heavy – artificially so – with negotiation and free will. He was generous, too, offering not only to pardon Perkin but to forget everything he had done. His agents at Beaulieu were always ‘servants’ or ‘menials’, suggesting pages, grooms or cook’s boys; they were not ‘soldiers’. The dirty work was left to others, and was certainly not revealed in correspondence.

  Henry had a long record of taking people forcibly from sanctuary. In 1486, Humphrey Stafford had been removed from Culham, near Oxford, by a man called John Savage and sixty ‘helpers’. Stafford tried to argue in court that his privilege should have been respected, but the judges, after some difficulty, concluded that it could not be pleaded in cases of treason. So the law stood. Henry had sent 140 horsemen to pluck out Robert Chamberlain in 1491, besides rewarding the mayor and bailiff of Hartlepool ‘and his servant’ for their help. Thomas Bagnall’s friends, in sanctuary in St Martin’s le Grand in 1494, had been extracted by armed officers. Although Humphrey Savage and Gilbert Debenham were left untouched in Westminster Abbey, staying there at least until 1499, they were in effect the king’s prisoners, fed and watered at his expense: and somewhat indifferently, as the abbey kitchener complained in 1495, as the king had not expressly mentioned ‘meat and drink’ in his orders, and the treasurer would not pay him for them.

  The privilege of sanctuary had also been amended, a few years earlier, to allow the king to put royal soldiers round the holy place when a traitor was inside. (Although Perkin could not be a traitor by Henry’s definition, his councillors were, and in any case the technicality of Perkin’s foreignness was often forgotten, then and later.) So Henry sent his men to Beaulieu. His letter of October 7th said that, par fortune, some of his servants already ‘found themselves around’ the abbey when Perkin appeared. Their numbers were speedily increased until Beaulieu was encircled by squadrons of cavalry, reinforced by boats on the sea, ‘so that he would have no hope of escape’. One particular shipman, Robert Symonds from Barnstaple in Devon, was paid £10 10s. for apparently plying the south-west coast in his ‘balinger’, looking for Perkin’s ships in order to destroy them, and keeping an eye on the inlets round Beaulieu in case the fugitive tried to slip away.

  In cases of treason, the king could also legally appoint ‘keepers’ to ‘look to’ a fugitive within the sanctuary itself. So he made sure, as he said in his letter, that his men got inside Beaulieu too. By the end the place was crowded with outsiders, many of them his officers. The account he sent de Puebla on September 30th shows how the stand-off stood. ‘We signify to you that we are informed of where Perkin is,’ wrote Henry:

  and furthermore he is in such a place that he may be held there at our request and guarded by our servants and will come to us as soon as possible. We therefore wanted to tell you this fact, for we do not doubt that you will be truly glad to hear it.

  De Puebla was asked to pass the news on to the Venetian and Milanese ambassadors, who had been sending scare stories home, to emphasise how certain of the outcome Henry was and how glad they themselves should be. The phrase non dubitamus, ‘we don’t doubt’, occurred three times in the last sentence. His men were there in force, inside and out, to press Perkin to give in.

  It was important, however, for Henry to emphasise that all the moves towards surrender had come from Perkin’s side. The feigned lad and his counsellors, ‘seeing our said servants there’, ‘made instances’ to the king’s men, and eventually to the king himself. According to Henry, Perkin himself said, more or less, that he would do anything to be sure of his life; ‘showing what he was’ would be only the start of it. Once the ‘agreement’ was made with Henry’s officers, the fugitives insisted they wanted to leave: ‘without any manner of constraint’, of their own ‘free will’, seeking the mercy of the king.

  That Perkin wanted to surrender in the end is not unlikely. He had little choice, less hope and no resources. That he agreed quite so readily and fully to turn himself in is doubtful. It was probably not coincidence that Henry switched from ‘he’ to ‘they’ for the scene of the explanations to the abbot and the leaving of Beaulieu: the feigned boy led and persuaded by his counsellors. Soncino heard what seemed like the full story from Richmond Herald, who, with some of the king’s council (hardly ‘servants’), had gone to Beaulieu:

  and came to the following arrangement [compositione] with John [Heron] and his fellows, that John should go to his Majesty and either bring back a pardon for himself and his companions, or should be put back into sanctuary, while in the meantime the two companions should stay behind and guard the boy [il garcione] so that he should not escape, despite the fact that all around the franchise, especially on the sea side, there were so many royal guards that not one of them could get away from the place.

  John, having sworn to the king that he had never known Perkin except as Richard, second son of King Edward, returned with a pardon, and offered the young man the chance to be pardoned too if he would go to the king’s presence. The boy agreed to go, and renounced the franchise into the abbot’s hands.

  It seems he had not wanted to bargain until then. If he had ever been offered, on landing in Cornwall, the full royal pardon that Soncino talked of, he had rejected it. He had wanted to fight, at least at first, and now he wanted to escape: badly enough to need Nicholas Astley and Edward Skelton, counsellors-now-turned-keepers, to prevent him, over and above the soldiers the king had posted. But John Heron arranged to go to the king. As early as the 25th ‘a man that came from Perkin’ arrived at Woodstock: ostensibly not pushed, but petitioning. The role of Heron, not his prince, as chief negotiator may explain why his prince later exposed him as a man who had lied to the king, thereby dropping him in trouble and treating him as someone who was no longer his friend.

  When the fugitives decided at last to leave Beaulieu, the abbot, by Henry’s account, went through the motions of asking them why and potentially dissuading them. He is very unlikely to have done so, since it was the abbot, on Richmond’s evidence, who had first tipped off the king about them, despite the duty of attendant clergy to defend the privilege of sanctuary. The scene was in Henry’s letter to stress how willing, even eager, Perkin was to go. But if his decision had truly been voluntary, there would have been no need for the extra help that Henry recruited.

  The king’s privy-purse accounts suggest that no one was sent to Beaulieu until, on September 30th, he sent one Bradshaw, a man who was often employed to make arrests. London heard on October 1st, however, that Perkin had been taken ‘within the sanctuary of Beaulieu’, well before Bradshaw arrived. It was done by the mayor of Southampton, the nearest town to Beaulieu, ‘and other divers persons’, who acted, as in Stafford’s case and Chamberlain’s, on the king’s behalf. They were put down for £482 16s. 8d., a huge amount, for ‘costs expenses and rewards to others for causes and business concerning Piers Osbeck’ – the name Henry had now announced that Perkin ought to have. The payment was recorded on two separate sheets of parchment and in a separate book, as were all the expenses surrounding the boy’s capture. This triplicate record, undated and presumably kept apart because the action was happening at some distance from king, court and Heron’s pen, showed the huge importance in Henry’s mind of getting Perkin out. All were signed with the royal monogram later, one set twice over at the bottom and the top. Their separate status also suggests that some of these payments, if not all, were meant to be kept secret.

  The town accounts show that the men of Southampton had been observing Perkin for a while, as might have been expected. On September 20th, when Perkin was still at Taunton, John Elmes was paid 5 shillings ‘for riding to Master Dawtrey and to Mast
er Controller to have tidings of Perkin’, while Oliver Sherde was paid the same ‘for riding to spy on Perkin’s ill demeanour’. That remark suggested that Perkin was seen as a threat to Southampton, or that he already looked like a man about to flee for the south coast. A last payment on the 20th went to a man from Lymington who brought news of ‘masts by the stream’, possibly a glimpse of strange ships approaching to spirit the boy away.

  Southampton’s role in his capture, and the large sum it apparently earned for it, did not appear in its own accounts: with one exception. At the end of September, the town got a new mayor. By that time the old one, John Godfrey, had earned himself a reward of £40 from Henry ‘for the taking of Perkin Warbeck’. The reward was listed proudly at the top (‘in primis’) of Godfrey’s list of his own receipts as mayor – a list that also included money from sales of old pewter and a brass pot, fines from a cobbler for making defective shoes and from a baker for making bad bread, forfeits for violent misbehaviour and ‘the killing of a cow great with calf’. Quite how, amid all this, he had captured Perkin is not clear. There was a story in Southampton that at the end of September the fugitive was not at Beaulieu but at Bugle Hall in Bugle Street, near the west gate, a fine house that belonged to the abbot and was under his protection. No other source suggests that. Perhaps Godfrey put him there, having seized him; for it is fairly clear, Henry’s story notwithstanding, that Godfrey and his men went in and got him in the king’s name, and handed him over to the king’s officers.

  The actual leaving of Beaulieu seems to have occurred on about October 3rd, two weeks after the four men had sought refuge. The sixteenth-century copyist of Henry’s letter to Waterford left a blank for the verb that described how the ‘servants’ made Perkin leave sanctuary. It is not clear whether Henry left a blank too. The letter of October 7th merely said that the fugitives resolved among themselves to leave. Bernard André, in an account written for Henry and read around the court, produced a scene that wavered just on the edge of violent extraction. ‘He was led out trembling, jocularly hissed at [exsibilatus] by the king’s servants, with wonderful deridings and insults thrown at his ridiculous head.’

  According to André, surrender had been on Perkin’s mind as soon as he had despaired at Taunton. This ganeo – this ruffian and brothel-seeker – had realised then that Henry’s power and virtue irresistibly assured him of God’s favour. His own cause, he now knew, was useless and hopeless. His unwarlike and effeminate soul shook with terror, and what strength he had deserted him. In a frenzy of shame and crying, he told his men he would have paid them that day, ‘but I’ve got nothing left, not a single coin, and I don’t know where to get any or what to do with myself’. He told them that he was really the servant of a converted Jew, but begged them to forgive him. ‘Please pardon me and be nice to me, and make every effort to save yourselves, for I myself don’t know where to turn or where to flee. But wherever it will be, I will certainly surrender to this most gracious king rather than die.’ So saying, wracked with weeping and exposed by his own cowardice, he had made for Beaulieu and sought the king’s clemency. Henry, the most merciful of kings, had granted it. And the ganeo was led out of sanctuary, still trembling, as though he had never stopped.

  Dramatically, from Henry’s point of view, this was the right and satisfactory ending. The idol and painted puppet was revealed for what he was. André’s marginal notes, allowing the king easily to find the place he wanted, read at this point ‘Perkin’s surrender’, ‘Perkin’s frenzy’, ‘Perkin expresses his misery’, ‘Perkin is mocked’. The word exsibilatus meant ‘hissed off the stage’ – and so, perhaps, it happened. But there was a twist in the final scene. Richmond, who was in the party that escorted Perkin back to Henry at Taunton, reported that the young man ‘put aside the habit in which he had disguised himself in this place and, clothing himself again in gold, set out with some of the king’s men’.

  A man who clothed himself in gold was not surrendering. In the most extraordinary way, he was going to Henry on even terms. The wearing of cloth-of-gold was forbidden to anyone below the rank of duke; so he was meeting the king as Richard, Duke of York. No one seems to have suggested that he should not do this. He was, by Richmond’s account, ‘governed’ by his three companions and obedient to their advice, but this particular action was his own. Without their help, he put on his prince’s clothes. Cloth-of-gold was heavy, and not especially suitable for a ride of eighty miles. If a king’s robes were all he had (the clothes he had fled in, not pausing to find others), he could doubtless have borrowed some more suitable for a boatman’s son, and for the circumstances. He did not do so.

  Not only Richmond recorded this scene. An echo of it seemed to reach the king’s own accounts. The strangest payment in the triplicate Perkin expenses of the autumn of 1497 was one ‘to the Duke of York for certain considerations’. One version, much damaged, seems to read ‘for certain considerations and messengers’. The official Duke of York, the king’s son Henry, was six years old and in Woodstock or London ‘in our nursery’ with his sisters. It is hard to see what secret ‘considerations’ could have concerned a six-year-old, or what messengers he might have wanted to send. It was not his birthday while Henry was away. He was not of an age to be given money directly, and was not paid in his own name for several more years. These particular expenses, in any case, were incurred away from the court, somewhere in the West Country or around Southampton, on the road. The amount in question, £7, was almost exactly the same as Henry was to pay for Katherine’s travelling expenses from Exeter to London. Although the entry sat cheek-by-jowl with those relating to ‘Piers Osbeck’, another character remained disconcertingly on the scene.

  They went back more or less the way he had fled, but more slowly now, through the October woods and fields. Richmond rode beside him. He had taken down pages of instructions about this ‘lad’: how he was held in derision by anyone of consequence, was no kin to anyone of standing. The appearance was contrary and unsettling. In the party of sergeants and officers he was the golden-robed and golden-haired exception, the captive prince. Richmond talked to him a little and found him ingenioso, in Soncino’s translation, clever in a witty sort of way, as well as ben parlante, well-spoken. The words suggested, as the clothes did, that Richard, Duke of York had not given himself up. Not quite. Not yet.

  7

  Confession

  Kneel down. Make the sign of the Cross: Father, Son and Holy Ghost. Begin:

  Benedicite.

  Dominus vobiscum.

  He had done this so often in his life. The common people made do with confession once a year before the Easter Sacrament; but princes, as always, were different. Confession, for them, was much more frequent and more or less a public act. An official confessor (in his case, William Lounde) was part of his household. Ambassadors would notice how often and with how much devotion a prince confessed; and people would especially take note when, holding hands with some former enemy, a prince walked to church to repent and be reconciled with him. Louis XI confessed every week before touching for the king’s evil, a necessary precaution. His confession, said Chastellain, was an ‘exterior sign’ that was beautiful to see.

  Yet the process of cleansing was meant to go deep. A man should show his sins to the priest, William Dunbar said, as he laid out a grievous wound to the surgeon, allowing it to be agonisingly probed and cleaned. The King’s Book said the sinner should spill out his mind and heart like water from a pot, ‘and when the water is out there is no colour seen, no sweetness of milk nor smelling of wine nor no savour of honey; no more shall they withhold within them, after they have shriven of their sin, no manner colour of shrewdness that they have used . . .’ With this sweet vomit, like the recommended vomits of spring, he was to shake himself out and be cleansed utterly.

  The priest’s own questions were meant to be exhaustive. The grades and lists were gone through in order: the seven deadly sins (how often?), the Ten Commandments (how badly broken?), the five b
odily wits (luring to sin by looking, feeling, touching, especially of money and women), the seven spiritual works of mercy, the seven corporal works of mercy, the seven gifts of the Holy Ghost, the seven sacraments (how often cheated of the reverence owed to them?), the eight beatitudes. Of each infraction the penitent was to say where, how, when, with whom, how many times, and whether in speaking, consent, will or deed; ending after each, with knocking of the breast, ‘whereof I cry God mercy’.

  This young man’s confessions, very probably, had seldom been so rigorous in recent years. Once he had knelt and gone through the formalities, there might follow a soothing conversation in which the gravity of his sins was dismissed and the penance lightly imposed, for he was a prince. More than that, his confessor was his dependant and perhaps, at times, his debtor. To say Confiteor alone might be enough to obtain forgiveness, especially with the dramatic mea culpas it contained. In sanctuary, however, without Lounde, a new sort of confession was required. A fugitive was assumed not to seek sanctuary unless he had sinned, and could not be granted it unless he was penitent. He had therefore knelt down in Beaulieu with a hooded ‘ghostly father’ who was unknown to him, bent on proving, with desperate intensity, how sorry he was.