by Ann Wroe
Those who were able to compare the stories attached to this young man, as Richard and now as Perkin, could notice that they moved in parallel. In both, at about the age of nine or ten, a weeping mother said goodbye to him. A father-figure, in Richard of York’s case the man who had spared his life, gave him his instructions for the road ahead, before he was handed over to a life of permanent wandering. Two men had charge of him (in the confession, Berlo and his master Alexander), but he was never to see his family again. You could choose, as you listened and looked at him, which biography seemed the more true. There was Richard’s story, with its curious lacunae and lapses of memory, based on a premise that strained credulity; or this one, Perkin’s tale, minute and circumstantial, but strewn with mistakes too fundamental to be explained away by disorientation or distress.
The letter was most remarkable, however, for its lack of feeling and courtesy. This was supposed to be a son writing to his mother after fourteen years of absence, eleven of them without contact of any kind. It should have been hard to exaggerate the remorse and love he felt. But the letter began, with extraordinary curtness, ‘Mother’. No qualifying words: no ‘right worshipful and reverent’, no ‘most honoured’, ‘right special’ or ‘most beloved’, the words that were naturally given to mothers. Nor did he ask for her blessing, a source of deep pain to any mother if it was omitted. Margaret Paston rebuked Sir John strongly when, on a rare occasion, he forgot to seek it. A son writing to his mother began with that genuflection, putting himself physically in her presence and often continuing as though he was responding to her anxious questions. Here, by way of example, was Henry VII writing to his own mother. As he himself admitted, he did not do so very often; but when he did, it was as a son was meant to.
Madam, my most entirely well-beloved lady and mother, I recommend me unto you in the most humble and lowly wise that I can, beseeching you of your daily and continual blessings . . . I shall be as glad to please you as your heart can desire it, and I know well, that I am as much bounden so to do, as any creature living for the great and singular motherly love and affection that it hath pleased you at all times to bear towards me. Wherefore, mine own most loving mother, in my most hearty manner I thank you . . .
By contrast, Perkin’s letter began with words (‘as humbly as I may, I commend myself to you. And may it please you to know . . .’) that were the standard opening to a piece of business correspondence. Addressed to a mother, they were cursory and even hurtful. Though he called her ‘Mother’ five times, including (rather gratuitously) in the address, in truth he did not seem to feel the bond at all. The redactor of the Courtrai Codex called the letter a rescription, an official statement or report, just like the others that had come across to Flanders. The only character in this missive was Perkin himself, in such trouble and confusion (tele perplexite), put upon, broken-hearted. He was not writing to his mother to try and restore the love and due obedience between them, but to ask her to send money to release him and an extra bit of cash ‘so that my guards may be kinder to me’. The letter portrayed him as low-class, discourteous and self-pitying; it was useful for that. It was less useful for its implication that he did not know this mother, or she him.
The mention of his father’s death was also curious. It was virtually a postscript, as though he had just heard it; but he had presumably known it for at least a week, or as long as he had been in Henry’s hands. The letter had been written, to this point, with no mention of the event that should have overshadowed it. His father had already featured several times with no addition of the required formula, whom God absolve, and even with the implication that he was still alive. Such news, in a real letter, would hardly have been tacked on after ‘Commend me to my friends’; it would have informed his whole approach both to his father and to his mother, who was grieving for him. He was now her chief comfort in the world, presumably also the proper organiser of her affairs, yet he had no more to say to her than ‘May you be with God’. He would have said as much, since it was as common as ‘Good morning’, to a stranger passing in the street. In this respect, as in his first words to his mother, there was a sense of a writer not daring to plumb – or unable to imagine – emotions that were not his own.
The letter seems in any case never to have reached her. Certainly, if it did, Nicaise Werbecque took no action that is recorded. If she was indeed his mother, and he her only son, it would have been extraordinary if she had not tried to see him, risen from the dead. Only in hell, the churchmen said, did parents feel no compassion for their children. She would surely have tried to intercede for him and reclaim him, as mothers did constantly, even when their sons were grown. The words of ‘King Richard’s’ proclamation in Scotland bear repeating: [We] shall put ourselves Effectually in our devoir not as a stepdame / but as the very true mother of the Child / languishing or standing in peril to Redress. At any time after June 1494, when news of the son of a bourgeois from Tournai was being cried in Malines, Nicaise and Jehan could have travelled the sixty miles to find him; at any time after November 1497 she could have been brought to London to drown, with a mother’s tears, any lingering doubt as to who this young man was. But there was never, at this stage or later, the least public confirmation of any connection between the Werbecques and Henry’s prisoner. As he himself seems to have hinted, he may have been Wezebeque after all: Hall’s ‘young fond foundling’, whose real name, and real parents, the best labours of Henry’s spies could never quite uncover.
Henry could also have asked for official proclamations from the Tournai authorities, attesting to who the boy was. He does not seem to have bothered, and Tournai does not seem to have provided them, perhaps because a king’s word was good enough, or hard to argue with. The town authorities, to all appearances, neither claimed him nor denied the association. No other place was linked to him. But throughout the Perkin episode, only silence came from the city whose name he was associating even more closely with artifice and sleight of hand.
With one exception. The city fathers had a habit, when moved or excited, of striking commemorative copper money. Coins had been struck in 1421, at a time of particular difficulty in their straddle between France and Burgundy, with the legend Vive le Roy de Franche. At some point after 1497 a batch of copper marks appeared in Tournai with the inscription Vive Perkin, jestois de Tournai: ‘Long live Perkin, I was from Tournai’. Either Tournaisiens or Englishmen (for in 1513 the English captured the town) could have produced them. Their size and style were so like the silver gros minted for the White Rose in Flanders that it is possible they were copper coins of King Richard IV that had been overstamped. Appropriately, they were worthless. English visitors probably brought them as souvenirs. On the reverse, among royal flotsam and jetsam such as fleurs-de-lis and rose branches, they carried the common, constant prayer to the mother who could intercede and whose address was known: O mater dei / Memento mei. O Mother of God, remember me.
8
This world my prison
On All Souls’ Day, November 2nd 1497, the court left Exeter for London. Mass was sung that morning in remembrance of the dead who had gone before and were still imprisoned in Purgatory, hoping for release by God’s mercy and by the prayers of their friends. These souls were vivid in books, not least Margaret’s books, heaped naked in the dark, or falling like flakes of ash into deep crevasses of flame. None was yet damned; they were punished for their sins that they might in the end be purified and walk in the shining parks of heaven, free. You prayed, on this day in particular, that their captivity would not be long and that yours, too, would not be.
On the king’s last evening in Exeter the town fathers, showing off their loyalty and possibly their relief, organised a sumptuous banquet. The king contributed, with the costs of Butlery, Scullery and Spicery rising to three times as much as usual. The town had already been presented by Henry with a black felt cap, probably from his own head, which became for them a ceremonial cap of maintenance; the sword ‘which he wore about his midd
le’, which they sent away to London to be decorated; and a new set of rules for mayoral elections. In exchange they gave him a fifteenth from the city’s taxpayers, tipped his officers handsomely and fed the royal commissioners with capons, cygnets, ‘a big fish called a gross conger’ and ‘light bread’. The River Exe must have abounded with eels: Giles Daubeney, too, was presented with one. In all, the city spent £76 6s. 61/2d. on entertaining the king. By contrast, the total spent on resisting Perkin had been £21 16s., wine and beer included.
A high point of Henry’s visit was his review of the captured rebels, corralled on the green by St Peter’s church (coincidentally, the church where Taylor the elder and John Hayes had done their plotting six or seven years before). Henry observed them from a ‘fair large’ window in the treasurer’s house, where he was staying. This window had been specially installed, and half the trees on the green cut down, so that the king, stepping from his chamber, could appreciate the scene: ‘the commons of this shire of Devon . . . before us in great multitudes in their shirts, the foremost of them having halters about their necks, and full humbly with lamentable cries for our grace and remission, submit[ting] themselves unto us’. Untruthfully, Henry told Waterford that this was happening ‘daily’; the piteous crowds kept coming. The ringleaders had already been hanged and quartered outside Exeter’s walls. But the men who knelt and cried before him he let go, after pausing for an agonising while, simply enjoying the sight of them, and giving them a lecture on the obedience he expected in future. More surprisingly, he seemed intent on showing fairness and mercy to his chief captive, too.
That particular prisoner was not in the public eye. Though Henry had brought Perkin with him, he seems not to have been displayed at any stage in the three weeks that the king remained in Exeter. He was probably being kept close, as was only to be expected. His letter to his mother, for what it was worth, implied that his guards were being rough with him and that talking to other people was discouraged. Yet he seems not to have been under arrest in the usual sense. Raimondo Soncino, when he talked to Richmond, asked him a strange question: se la vita de Perichino sea libera, whether Perkin’s life would be free. Richmond said yes, but it would be ‘necessary to guard him well’ to stop the Cornishmen killing him. He was in custody, it seemed, for his own protection, and would probably enjoy freedom in spite of all he had done.
He was also, presumably, in mourning of some kind. If Katherine had been mourning a second child, that child had also been his, and the death perhaps only just announced to him. Besides, as Perkin, he was mourning the death of his father. To wear drab clothes and go unshaven were the signs required to show grief for a parent. At Exeter, bizarrely, he may have grieved in both characters, with the liturgy of All Souls more than usually sharp and raw to him. As the royal party left the city afterwards, through the east gate that still showed the marks of King Richard’s siege and his fire, he could reflect that the king who had ordered them was now invested with nothing, like souls when they stepped out naked from the bodies of the dead.
The journey back was as slow as the king’s progress westwards had been. By November 6th they were at Bridport, by the 9th at Salisbury, by the 15th at Basingstoke, still forty miles from London. All the way, the crowds gathered to gaze on Perkin. They were ‘eager above all’, Vergil wrote, ‘to see Peter Warbeck, for most accounted it miraculous that a man of such humble origins should have dared to try to get so great a kingdom by trickery, and should have made so many illustrious men believe him’. The chroniclers said people ‘wondered’ at him, looking on him boldly with amazement and surprise. (When Edward IV’s mistress, Jane Shore, did public penance in 1483, this ‘wondering’ was like a rough undressing that brought blushes of shame to her cheeks.) It is not clear whether Perkin’s low birth was advertised yet, with shabby clothes and a shambling horse, or whether Henry was still indulging the joke of the king’s golden robes. Heron’s accounts, however, contained some weeks later a payment for ‘Perkin’s trumpet’: not this time a spy, for he was constantly guarded, but probably a man on real trumpet-duty, blowing ironic fanfares to announce that the fake king was coming.
Vergil said the rumour reached Flanders that Perkin was led as a captive in chains. Henry’s historian did not claim this himself. Instead, the king ‘took him in his company’, and contemporary sources give the same picture. There Perkin ‘awaited’ or ‘attended upon’ the king, as lords did when they met the king on his progresses round the country and joined his train with their retinues. ‘By appointment [agreement] he came to the king,’ wrote the Grey Friars chronicler, ‘and so remained following the court’ – a courtier rather than a prisoner. Prisoners did not attend upon the men who arrested them, but were ‘brought up’, lords and commoners alike, with no sense of volition. Henry, however, wished at every stage to stress the free will and consent of his captive. So this strange figure rode somewhere behind him, probably neither bound nor chained but civilly and without protest, and drawing crowds so great that the king’s own safety was sometimes threatened by the press. Henry, despite his mood of ‘marvellous joy’, would have sensed that he himself was not the main attraction: a peculiar sensation for a king, crowned with victory, passing through towns that had rarely seen him.
Henry had dreamed of this moment for months and years: the feigned boy at last in his hands. Again and again, in his letter to Courtenay of September 16th, he had imagined how he would capture him. Courtenay’s troops would trail behind him as he marched, then hem him in, jostle and exhaust him ‘to the intent that ye may the more assuredly annoy [him]’, closing in with Daubeney’s men like the jaws of a trap from the east and the west. Ordinary people, reading the royal placards and moved by the thought of reward, would ‘take Perkin in fleeing or going backward by sea or by land’. Arriving at last at the coast, Perkin would find his ships half-sunk or blackened by fire, and know there was no escape. ‘Hereunto we pray you to have an especial regard,’ Henry had written, ‘for it is the thing we have greatly at heart.’ Now, less simply but with no less drama, he had the lad fast; and had to decide what on earth to do with him.
On November 18th the royal cortège reached Sheen, where the king rested for three days. The palace was a favourite retreat, on a broad bend of the Thames seven miles from London. Edward IV had enlarged, reglazed and beautified the palace; Henry’s gardeners and builders had worked assiduously on the grounds around it, planting orchards, vines, lawns and new flower beds and erecting tennis courts and galleries for archery. Beyond were fields where men found hares and partridge nests, and from where their wives brought peascods and fresh curds to the king. Richard of York would have known this place, remembering where doors led and what was seen from windows, how the low knot-hedges could be jumped and how the river shone below the grassy banks. Henry’s improvements had probably not altered the fundamental look of it. To enter Sheen, his first prison-palace, may have been a strange test of both memory and imagination for Henry’s captive. Or perhaps he thought of nothing more, as he rode across the tilting yard and dismounted, his escorts uncomfortably close, than that somewhere in these buildings was the woman he had claimed as his sister, and with her his son and his wife.
By this time, if not earlier, Henry was disclaiming the importance of the West Country campaign. On November 22nd he rode to Lambeth, his prisoner attending him, and then took his barge to Westminster. As was customary when the king came over the water, the trumpets blew, but Trevisano said that Henry had no wish to enter London with his usual pomp and triumph. He had hardly gained a worthy victory, he felt, over ‘such poor people as these Cornishmen’. No ambassadors were picked to go and meet him, and the London worthies welcomed him not in the street, in their special violet robes, but in Westminster Hall, where the aldermen and guild officers stood in rows on either side to hear the recorder greet the king ‘with a short proposition . . . of the good exploit of his Journey and subduing of his Rebels’. After this, they got their first glimpse of ‘the Person Perk
in’. When the king went towards the palace of Westminster his captive walked freely before him, leading a courtier by the arm: as if he was graciously in charge, or as if he was dancing. He seemed to have slipped into his natural place, among the young men who led the revels and disguisings.
The aldermen and commons were astonished. Again, they ‘wondered’, and threw curses at him, a racket that must have echoed round the king himself. This reaction was to be repeated whenever Perkin appeared. On at least two occasions – Soncino said it was ‘every day’ when the court first returned to London – he was led on a horse through the city streets, ‘so that everyone may understand the past mistake’. Bacon said he was conveyed leisurely, not in any ignominious fashion, while the crowd jeered him tumultuously, like small birds mobbing an owl uncovered in the daylight. The mockery came from above as well as below, from people standing at the windows of overhanging upper floors that darkened and narrowed the streets. The purpose of these displays, Bacon wrote, was so that Perkin ‘could tell better what himself was’.
On one such ride, on November 28th, he was required to lead a horse on which sat Henry’s old sergeant-farrier William, the keeper of the king’s mares and foals, who had joined Richard’s court at Malines in 1493. William had fled after his prince’s capture, ‘when he apperceived that all was otherwise than he before supposed’, and had taken the habit of a hermit. He rode bound with ropes, still in his hermit’s robe, with his feet lashed together beneath the belly of the horse. Fabyan said that when this man had been brought to Henry, ‘[the king] commanded his said master Perkin to bring him unto the Tower for his faithful service’. So his master led him there, delivered him to the Tower gardens, and then ‘with such as were assigned to ride with him returned again by Candlewick Street toward Westminster with much wondering & many a bitter curse’.
