Perkin

by Ann Wroe

  Cordis contritio, oris confessio, operis satisfactio: contrition of heart, open confession, reparation. All three were needed, and the first, the most essential, was not necessarily contrived in his case. There may have been much to be sorry for. The list began with Pride, the first of the seven deadly sins, by which Lucifer, the Prince of Hell, had desired to govern all Heaven and make himself equal to God. ‘False usurpation’ was Satan’s particular sin, so grotesquely arrogant and presumptuous that few had tried to imitate it. But Perkin had, if he was Perkin; and in that moment when, robed with gold, he had gone towards the king, he had epitomised it. Robert Fabyan’s favourite word for him was ‘ungracious’, implying not ingratitude but the sharp removal, for pride, of God’s grace from him. He too was bound to fall in flaming shards from Heaven, but not before other particular and subsidiary sins had been laid to his charge.

  His new confessor could list them, if he had the right manual to hand. Hypocrisy, the blindness by which a man could neither see himself, nor know himself. Vainglory of the world, especially in fair tales and quaint words, well polished and coloured. False goodness, arrogance and vaunting (‘facing and bracing’, in the common phrase); self-exaltation (‘the devil’s own frying-pan, where he maketh his fritters’); rebellion. These were the first, second, tenth, twelfth and thirteenth branches of the sin of Pride, almost the whole tree. After these offences came the twelfth branch of Envy, drawing others to sin; the second branch of Wrath, hatred and conspiration; the sixth branch, homicide; and the ninth, clamour, cracking and fraud. He had clambered too to the first branch of Sloth, dolorous cogitations and desire not to leave sin; and to the third branch, inconstancy, pusillanimity and curiosity. Of Covetousness he had assayed the thirteenth branch, fraud and being double, and the seventeenth, forswearing and false witness. All this, and he could still parade himself as though God favoured him.

  Henry imputed only three sins to him: great abusion (deception), presumption, and folly. Bernard André, who himself accused Perkin mostly of boasting and robbing, said the king rebuked him directly with the deaths of his worthier followers and the slaughter of his people, as he might justly have done. But Henry generally played the outrage down. Perkin may have been as presumptuous as Lucifer, but he was also, always, a boy playing the fool.

  What had he himself confessed to so far? Any of the above, perhaps, vaguely and in general. André had imagined, at Taunton, a full exposure of his heart:

  Fear and dread of conscience are now so overwhelming me that I am going to open my mind to you, open it completely to the light of truth, though I’ve kept it hidden from you right until this moment. The truth is, I am not Edward’s son as I told you, nor worthy to be of such stock or great blood at all . . .

  But the young man’s real list may still not have included the taking of another name and ‘the May-games of a higher life’, as Buchanan called them. That sin was anyway so rare that the manuals of confession did not include it. The words ‘imposture’ and ‘impostor’ were not yet in use, and no single word summed up that notion in the mind of the monk who now confessed him. Either he had not committed such a sin, being truly Richard, or the sin had so consumed his life that it was almost past explaining; or somehow, in one of the ceaseless bargains with God that men and women made every day, he had justified it before Him in a way that stilled the subject in his mind. Perhaps, after all, he did not need to mention it in so many words.

  Yet nothing could be hidden from God. God knew what he was. Each daily Mass began with the Judica me, a virtual plea to be closely watched: ‘Judge me, O God, and discern my cause’, the words Henry had sung as he knelt, fresh from exile, on the beach at Milford Haven. God also knew him from his beginnings, flesh and bone and marrow of the bone, as he had been woven in the womb of his mother; He knew the action while his mind still pondered it, and the words of his mouth when his tongue had not yet formed them. The almost frightening truth was there, among the psalms of David in his psalter: O Lord, you have tried me and known me.

  Domine, probasti me, et cognovisti me:

  Tu cognovisti sessionem meam et resurrectionem meam.

  Intellexisti cogitationes meas de longe . . .

  Non est occultatum os meum a te, quod fecisti in occulto;

  Imperfectum meum viderunt oculi tui, et in libro tuo omnes scribentur.

  All-seeing God saw him, and recorded him. Every particle of what he did or what he was was written in the book that would be opened at the moment of judgement. All silences, too, confessed themselves to Him, and were written down as words and deeds were. Again, there was no denying them.

  The point of confession, then, was not to reveal himself to God, who already knew him in every way, but to reveal the self to the self, which could not bear to admit what it was. The act often sprang from struggling and coercion, the sinner clinging to the spiritual darkness in which he had learned to be comfortable. He feared to see himself exposed in the light; but others could see him, besides God. Confessions of any kind, to ordinary men as well as to priests, were sometimes merely an admission of something the confessor already knew and could insist upon. They did not disclose a secret, but marked the end of resistance. Manuals of confession noted that simple people often felt so much awe and fear, when unburdening themselves to others, that they would ‘say “Yes sir” unto that that a man them demandeth, be it truth or lying’.

  Such a confession was not accounted valid by the churchmen. True confession had to spring from a free heart, not out of dread but from love of Christ. Yet having said that ‘Yes sir’ and heard the Ego te absolvo, the words of absolution, the same feeling often followed: joyous lightness and relief. From the branches of the apple tree of Penance, as one of Margaret’s books described it, four fruits were gathered for the body: clearness, lightness, subtlety, impassibility. He would shine; he would be as light as thought, and would feel as if he could pass, like the risen Jesus, through locked doors. Most of all, the grace of Jesus would reform his human body to the figure of clearness, like His own. As all sin was a wandering from God’s loving fatherhood, so penance restored the bond of recognition. The stained and spotted conscience was wiped as clear as glass; and God, leaning down, received the penitent again as His child. God was his father, he God’s true son, as undeniably as Jesus was.

  He is the mirror clear and bright

  Without spot both day and night

  In the which a man by grace

  May behold his own face.

  Kneel down. Begin. Benedicite.

  ii

  At Taunton, his chief confessor waited for him. Henry was not in the half-repaired castle but in the Augustinian priory in comfort, as became a king. His excitement was intense. He had been tormented by this garçon for six years; now was the endgame. Eagerness to see him, despite his professed indifference, pervaded the letters that Henry had sent to foreign princes, mayors and army captains. ‘We have received your writing by the which we conceive how there is word that Perkin is landed,’ he wrote to the Bishop of Bath and Wells on September 20th 1497. ‘Truth it is that he is so landed.’ The drama was spun out with delight. ‘It is the chief thing we desire,’ he wrote to Edward Courtenay on September 16th, ‘to have him brought unto us alive.’ Perkin must not escape them, ‘not in any wise’. He wanted no limp or broken body, but the creature in all its moving fascination: one reason why, though some in his council had advised him to kill Perkin when he was seized at Beaulieu, Henry had not considered it.

  The cost of this young man was worth bearing in mind, too. Henry was to pay a total of £3,621 11s. 6d. for travelling to ‘the parts of the west’ and back to apprehend him; without thinking – or not without horror – of the money he had sent in advance to fight him, or the thousands of pounds despatched to Ireland to keep the country safe from him, or the treasure he had laid out to oppose him in Scotland. He had never spent, and was never again to spend, so much money resisting anyone. Now he would see the cause. In the accounts of John Heron, his kee
per of the privy purse (and no relation to Perkin’s counsellor), the heading ‘Tuesday’ for October 5th was superscribed with the words ‘This day came Perkin Warbeck’. Heron had not noted a news event since the crying of the peace with France five years before, and did not do so again until four years later, when Katherine of Aragon came at last to marry Prince Arthur. At the end of the entries for the day before came one for £9, corrected from £7 13s. 4d., for Henry’s losses at cards. The king had never lost so much in a single night, as far as is recorded. He can seldom have been so wildly, prodigally happy.

  The details of Perkin’s arrival in Taunton came from Richmond Herald, who told them to Soncino later in London. His report suggests that the young man was ushered at once into a room already filled, in expectation of him, with noblemen, councillors and the king, to whom he made his formal surrender. But it is likely that other, less public, conversations took place first. Henry’s own phrase, ‘immediately after his first coming’, suggested a two-stage proceeding. Not least, he wanted the first sight of him, as kings always saw before anyone else any curious object that was brought to their courts. When Henry wrote to de Puebla after Perkin’s capture, in a note so excited that even the address was ridiculously overdone, he told him that his prisoner ‘will be brought with us on our return, which we think will be very shortly; then you will be able to see [him]’. This was clearly a man who was still thrilled to see him himself.

  Besides, a public meeting without preparation was something that Henry’s native caution would not have allowed. Whatever had been arranged in Beaulieu – and most people called it an arrangement, as though the two sides dealt on even terms – his captive was well known for his charm and trickery. Above all, Henry had never heard him say, confessing it with his own mouth, that he was Perkin. He needed to. His letter to his ‘friends’ stressed that Perkin had promised ‘to show us what he is’. This was the young man’s principal exchange for his life. Henry would give him everything; he would give Henry something the king professed to have known for four years, his name, now publicly acknowledged. To be sure this was done, and to avoid any sort of unexpected difficulty, the king was well advised to take a brief first stock of the feigned boy himself, in private.

  In effect, they took stock of each other. What the young man saw was a slender man of forty-one, taller than himself, with a pleasant but sallow face, lively blue eyes, greyish-brown hair that fell limply to his shoulders, and a few widely spaced black teeth. All these, though, would have been subsidiary to the grandeur of his kingship, the robes and jewels, and the calculated stillness. Henry was especially good, Polydore Vergil wrote, at maintaining his royal dignity, and everything pertaining to it, at all times and in all places. On most days in the West Country he displayed the divine power of his unction by healing the sick (the cure hastened by an angel coin, worth 6s. 8d., slipped into the sufferer’s hand by an aide). His captive, too, now depended on that royal grace and generosity, though it was far from certain that he deserved it.

  What Henry saw before him was a tired, childlike young man with perfect manners, dressed in gold. He had a strange eye, its dullness perhaps more obvious for the strain he had been under. Dressed up as he was, he was capable of the same royal attitudes as Henry, perhaps incapable of changing them. The king in his majesty faced the boy, at least at first, in his. This artificial confrontation cannot have lasted long.

  The substance of their private encounter emerges from the finer details of Soncino’s report, crumbs too small for a fully staged surrender. Perkin ‘told the king’ that Skelton and Astley believed he was the Duke of York, but that Heron, despite what he had said to Henry, knew he was not. Maximilian, the King of Scotland and Katherine’s father ‘had all been taken in’. Margaret ‘knew everything’. Although the King of France had long ago ‘been put right as to the truth of the matter’ (Richmond’s words, not Perkin’s), Alexander Monypeny had still tried to persuade his old charge to go to France with a broad safe-conduct and a large pension. All this was allegedly Perkin confessing to Henry, directly and without intermediaries. According to Henry he also confessed his name to be Piers Osbeck, the first thing Henry wanted. The French version said he ‘declared and understood’ that, as if persuading himself, as much as Henry, of the person he was now bound to be.

  André’s account, most unusually, made no attempt to reconstruct or embroider their conversation. ‘It is very difficult for me to relate what words our most modest king addressed at first to this most worthless trifler,’ he wrote, ‘since this conversation took place between them alone [singulari].’ However, he knew ‘this one thing’: that Henry was truly pained by, and presumably blamed Perkin for, the deaths he had caused in England, and that Perkin, seeing the king’s great clemency, ‘told him everything’.

  Did matters really go so smoothly? Naturally everyone said so, taking their lead from the highest source: ‘of his free will . . . openly shown’, Henry wrote, Perkin had confessed to the whole charade. The king controlled the story, but what he said cannot be contradicted by anything in the records. Andrea Trevisano, whose reports were generally accurate, said that when Perkin mentioned the men who had ‘instigated’ him, ‘the king wanted to know who these were, and he showed great kindness to Perkin’, feva bona compagnia a ditto Perichino. There was almost the sound of laughter in this, and pleasant conversation. It was not the last time Trevisano used the phrase to describe how the king and his prisoner got on together. No torturers’ services appear to have been paid for. He had already been mentally softened up, it is supposed, in Beaulieu, and had been brought back to Taunton, the scene – as Henry pointed out – of his despair. His confession was now understood as the price of his life; and, at twenty-three or twenty-four, he wanted to live. His wife and baby son were, or soon would be, under Henry’s control. The king held all those cards. Richmond did not infer that the information Perkin gave was forced from him in any other way. On the contrary he seemed astonishingly, even frantically, talkative. He was falling over himself to ‘do such service as shall content us’, in Henry’s words: as though he was laying down, with relief, a burden he no longer wanted to carry.

  The Perkin of Taunton, and later of Exeter, was also busily assigning blame to others. He evidently gave the impression to Richmond that Heron, Skelton and Astley ‘governed’ him; he told Henry ‘at whose instance he took upon himself this abusion and folly’. Soncino said he fingered the English and the Irish, but Trevisano said he laid the blame on certain people of Cornwall. The official confession, when it appeared, made much of the way he had been forced into the imposture. It was natural, of course, for young princes to be managed and governed by others – and to be led astray by them, too. Richard Plantagenet had often made use of the counsel of older advisers, such as Monypeny in France and Huc de Melun in Flanders; behind the scenes he had been helped by more shadowy figures, such as George Neville and Taylor the younger. But Henry, to this point, had held him completely responsible for his claims and his actions, once Margaret had set him in motion, and he in turn had given the impression that he was. In Taunton he became, by his own admission, a puppet cynically set in play by others.

  In these early conversations or interrogations – evidently more the former than the latter – he seems also to have let slip his own description of what he was. He was not a deceiver but, in Soncino’s translation of Richmond, a ‘substitute’ (supposittio), ready to replace a prince and able to do so naturally. He did not play the part of Richard, but stood in for him, as one preacher or jouster might replace another in the pulpit or the lists and provide, for the audience, a spectacle just as satisfactory. In short, he had simply filled, with his own qualities of grace and princeliness, the gap that Richard had left behind.

  After that first meeting came the set-piece, his formal public surrender. The audience that witnessed this was still elite and select. Richmond, who reported it but was not invited, said it was made only in front of ‘princes’; Henry told Waterford that it
took place before ‘the lords of the council and other nobles’, presumably the twenty-three lords or earls and the one real prince, Arthur, aged eleven, who were travelling with the king. In some chamber of the priory these great men were assembled, and Perkin was brought in. Although he did not come freely, but ‘at our will and commandment’, as Henry put it in another place, he was apparently not bound or chained. He had to be shown to be confessing not for dread, but because he wanted to.

  Before the king, Richmond said, he knelt down and asked for mercy. Requests of this sort were properly made with the hands joined and upraised, as at the Sacring of the Mass. He did not, however, throw himself at the king’s feet and beg pardon, as Robert Clifford had done. There was a sense of greater dignity and restraint. Trevisano used the verb inchinarsi: he did not kneel to Henry, but bowed to him. This, in fact, fitted more naturally with what followed.

  The king – to stay with Richmond’s account – bade him rise, kindly and magnanimously. He said, ‘We have heard that you call yourself Richard, son of King Edward. In this place are some who were companions of that lord; look and see if you recognise them.’

  The gentleness had an edge. Richmond and Soncino translated Henry’s ‘you’ as tu, the form of address for children, servants and fools. The king pointed already to the social chasm between the prince and the claimant: ‘that lord’, and tu.

  The young man replied that he did not know anyone among the men who faced him.

  No other outcome could have been expected. Had the question been put the other way – did any of them know him? – it would have received the same response, for the same reasons. No one’s interests were served by an affirmative answer. You could argue on both sides that the task of recognition was either impossible, since he was a stranger, or made difficult by the lapse of time, fourteen years, since they could have seen each other. But neither strangeness nor the lapse of time was the chief reason for the young man’s statement and the council’s silence. They knew, and he knew, that he had to be Perkin now. He said what had to be said, and the council, silently, accepted it. They did not know him, golden robes or not, just as he did not know them, and no one present at the meeting ever hinted otherwise.