by Ann Wroe
For all this, Henry affected not to care. A letter sent on June 10th to the Earl of Oxford, whose lands extended to the east coast, played the incident down:
Through the folly and simpleness of such as we put in trust to keep Perkin Warbeck, he is escaped from them, and albeit it is no great force where he be come, yet to the intent he might be punished after his desert, we would gladly have him again. Wherefore cousin we will and desire you to cause good and sure search to be made for him with all diligence all along our ports, creeks, and passages in those parts about you, that he in no wise pass those ways. And over this within the same ports and elsewhere that shall seem good ye make open proclamation that whosoever he be that taketh the said Perkin, he shall have for his reward an hundred pounds with our special thanks.
For those still keeping track, Perkin’s price had fallen further, this time precipitously. His flight, Henry implied, was no more than an unfortunate accident; it did not concern him greatly but, almost for the sake of tidiness, he would be grateful to have him back.
Why had he done it? Contemporaries were baffled. The London chroniclers assumed that Perkin had simply forgotten all the benefits Henry had allowed him: obliviousness, combined with ingratitude, was the reason he had gone. Yet he must have known that Henry had always seemed able both to foresee his plans, and to track him down. If he tried to run away, the king would simply extend a finger and haul him in again, this time perhaps to kill him. Unless he was pricked by some constant longing to destroy himself, as Vergil suggested, to break out of Westminster made no sense.
To run away, of course, was not out of Perkin’s character. The boy of the confession had wandered around for years until he had reached Ireland. His birthplace had been a house with a boat moored just below it, ready to be steered to the north-west and the sea. He had been a typical Saturn-child and moon-child, running away from school and away from Portugal, according to Brampton; he seemed to have a horror of settling, an itch never to be tied down to one place or one master. He had run away from violence in Northumberland and from the burden of kingship at Taunton. Always, when he ran, it was towards ships that could take him away for miles beyond the horizon.
While he was at court, a mariner called Lancelot Thirkill came three times to Henry to beg money for a voyage to ‘the new isle’, Newfoundland. The king was fascinated by this enterprise, often mentioning it to Ayala and other ambassadors, and several mariners besides Thirkill were given money to go there. Henry’s warrant of 1496 to John Cabot, the head of the expedition, imagined that he would find houses, towns and castles if he explored, as Henry wished him to, ‘all parts, regions and coasts of the eastern, western and northern sea’. Cabot had already found, according to Soncino, two very large and fertile new islands, the Seven Cities, and a sea so thick with fish that they could be taken in baskets weighted with a stone. (‘He tells all this in such a way,’ Soncino added, ‘that I too feel compelled to believe him.’) The mariners expected more, of course, including ‘an island which he called Japan, situated in the equinoctial region, where he believes that all the spices of the world have their origin, as well as the jewels’. Those ‘other countries’ were now impossibly beyond Perkin’s dreams. Others were fitting out ships, as Thirkill was; he was in an anteroom or a corridor, his whole world, listening.
Yet he had also found courts comfortable and congenial, unsurprisingly. It had sometimes seemed hard to prise him from either Flanders or Scotland in favour of active promotion of his cause. A soft life, with a pension and fine clothes, suited him far better. A boatman’s son from Tournai should have found Henry’s court just as acceptable, with a little forbearance. He could have settled in time, becoming just as unremarkable as Simnel was and perhaps, on constant evidence of good behaviour, being allowed to be where his thoughts took him, in Katherine’s arms again.
There are some signs that, by the early summer, they were beginning to edge closer. In mid-March, for the first time, their names were together in Heron’s accounts. The next month, perhaps not coincidentally, Katherine abandoned the black clothes she had worn since her arrest. On the last day of April Henry issued a warrant for a gown of tawny medley, the colour of the sea-gown she had worn as she left Scotland. Yet the element of competition, apparent as soon as Katherine had been captured, was also clear to see. The king made out the warrant for ‘our right dear and well-beloved Lady Katherine Gordon’, using her maiden name and showing again how kindly he was caring for her. He had also made a double payment for her servants in March. In his order to Robert Litton, the keeper of the Wardrobe, Henry enumerated, as he had done before, not only the gown but the kirtle, of lined black worsted; the ribbons for her girdle; and the hose of kersey lined with ‘a piece of single cypress’, soft white gauze – doubtless imagining each of them, and on her body. By another warrant in the same week in April he ordered a velvet riding gown of tawny for himself, trimmed with black as her gown was. As a final sting, Litton had been condemned by name in King Richard’s proclamation; but this ‘Caitiff & villain’ was now procuring Katherine’s clothes.
Her husband would have felt even prouder now as he walked beside her; and yet, perhaps, also closer to despair. It was spring, when the sap rose in the green shoots and all living creatures sought their mates and coupled with them. Under the soft breezes and the fine grass powdered with flowers in a hundred thousand colours, the world itself was restless. The courtiers were organising the royal maypole and the bringing of the May boughs, symbols of compulsive physical love. He was in the April of his own life as the almanacs measured it, perhaps not yet twenty-four, prey to sensuality. His wife was beautiful; it would have been their third spring together, but she was still in the deepest sense apart from him.
In other ways, too, his confinement may have become more difficult. Just before the escape, he had been several times in Henry’s train to the Tower of London. The court was there from May 8th to the 19th, and from the 23rd to the 30th. Before this Henry’s captive had visited only briefly, not going inside, to deliver his former servant William to prison and death in November. Henry was not fond of the damp and hemmed-in Tower, much preferring Sheen, Greenwich or Windsor where he had wide parklands to disport in, and it was mostly at Sheen that Perkin passed his strange semi-captivity. Now, in the joyousness of green May, he was at the Tower, the place established in his memory or his imagination as the most dread prison of all. Henry had made it more so, stuffing it with heavy artillery, hand-guns, arquebuses, bombards and battle-axes, besides bows and crossbows. Lions and leopards roared there in basement cages, and in 1494 the privies and drains in the inner ward, so little used, were blocked up with filth and rubbish. The Lanthorn Tower, where Henry had his lodgings, was very probably where the princes had been kept. Richard of York had escaped this place, God’s might intervening, and now his shadow had returned to stones and passageways haunted by the little prince who had laughed and danced in front of Death. Had that been him? If so, by what joke of God’s had he been spirited away, only to be brought back again?
If all things were bound to find their particular course, perhaps his course was to be this prince; perhaps he could not avoid it. You could cage lions, Boethius said, and make them eat from the keeper’s hand; but if a single drop of blood touched their jaws, they remembered their old nature and tore him apart. You could cage birds, minister to them and feed them on honey; but if a caged bird glimpsed again the green trees where he had once flown free, singing from the highest boughs, ‘the woods are all his sorrow calls for’.
Vergil’s simplest explanation for Perkin’s flight was that he could not bear confinement, or tolerate his ‘actual distress’. But he suggested also that Margaret, or ‘friends’, might have pushed him to ‘further his affairs’, whatever he thought those were, by wriggling free. As late as September 1497, on the brink of his capture, they had been in touch by letter, at least from him to her. Although she seemed to have fallen silent, her solicitude for him had not altered. Since she h
ad last seen him, every single military venture had crumbled in his hands. He had proceeded from failure to failure, and had now apparently confessed that Margaret knew he was a boatman’s son. Yet neither Margaret nor Maximilian was prepared to let him go.
Maximilian, always more open in his efforts and his opinions, was caught musing in May 1498 by Fuensalida, the Spanish ambassador to Germany. He was agonising again over his daughter’s marriage prospects; almost ten years after the French king had repudiated her, she still had no husband, for her marriage to the Prince of Asturias, Ferdinand and Isabella’s son, had lasted a mere six months before he died. Bluntly, half-jokingly, Maximilian ran through the possibilities among the Christian princes. ‘The King of Naples has no son of the right age; the King of England has already married his son to the daughter of your princes; the King of Scotland is unimportant; the Duke of York is married and is not at liberty; the King of Hungary has a wife; the King of Poland is nothing.’ The Duke of York was certainly not at liberty, for all Maximilian’s efforts. But he remained among kings and even above some, including James.
Nor had Maximilian dropped his schemes to get him out, somehow. At that moment, he seemed to be trying to get a fleet together to rescue both his cousin of York and Edward, Earl of Warwick, the pathetic subject of so many earlier conspiracies, who was still confined in the Tower. Two months later, in July, Fuensalida reported several remarks about armed ships gathering in Flanders ‘to deliver the Duke of York and the Duke of Clarence [sic] who are prisoners’. This was only rumour, fama, but Fuensalida thought he should pass it on to Ferdinand and Isabella all the same. ‘I also see [the King of the Romans]’ he wrote,
inclined to do everything contrary to the King of England . . . and as far as I can find out, I believe he will do what he can to set Perkin free and throw the realm into confusion, notwithstanding the marriage alliance that your Highnesses have made with England, and I believe that won’t hold him back from trying everything he can do for him, if he gets the chance. I may be deceiving myself in my knowledge of this, but I don’t think so; your Highnesses may take it as my fantasy . . . but if this matter was as I thought it was, putting together this with what he said about the fleet which would be ready to go and deliver Perkin, I think that if he sees he can do it, he will try it.
Maximilian himself in the Weisskunig admitted that for some time he had thought of raising an army and a fleet to help King Edward’s son. ‘He seriously considered avenging these people,’ he wrote (himself, as usual, in the third person):
and he plans an assault in great secrecy. He wants to go over there personally, across the sea, with a great force, and ventures to make himself king in this same kingdom, as he also has a right to this crown through his old mother [Margaret]. And he comes to some kind of agreement with the Blue King [France] that he doesn’t obstruct or interfere with his plans. But when the new Red and White King [Henry] came to know this, he sent a messenger to the White King and said he wanted to be his good friend . . . Whereupon the White King reconsidered the whole situation and meanwhile deliberated how he could get on with the Blue King. But he found the Blue King so difficult that he could not get on with him.
A cryptic note, sent to de Puebla from Brussels in June by a contact calling himself ‘Licenciatus et Decanus’, may also have described these ill-formed plans. ‘A messenger sent by the little duck to the falcon,’ it ran, ‘returned a short time ago much pleased with the answer of the falcon . . . Everything is going well now . . . and it will be concluded in favour of the cuckoo and the young eagle.’ These last two birds may well have stood for York and Warwick, on the point of being sprung by someone’s efforts.
Little, if any, of this plotting and musing could have been apparent to Henry’s captive. If Margaret had not dared to send letters to Scotland, she certainly would not have attempted to send them to Henry’s court. Maximilian, too, had not dared to write directly either to York or to Henry, but had tried to intercede for his cousin at two removes. The prisoner was probably unaware that his old supporters were still backing him, in Brabant or anywhere else. An entry in the patent rolls for the end of March mentioned that Atwater and Barry in Ireland ‘have now of late at several times received as well letters with certain instructions from Parkyn Wosebeck, and the same hath concealed, and as yet keepeth secret from the knowledge of our sovereign lord’. But this may have referred, with the usual time-lag, to the activities of the summer before. It is unlikely that he was allowed to write to anyone; or, if he was allowed to, that he would have been so foolish as to try to revive, under Henry’s nose, the network round Richard, Duke of York.
Another supporter, who did not need to write, may have had some influence on him. Heron’s accounts strongly suggest that Katherine was assumed to have played some part in Perkin’s disappearance. She had, after all, taken part in his last escape, from the forces of Desmond and Kildare in Ireland. This time, too, she may have abetted him. After her husband’s flight, her name disappeared from the accounts for almost a year. When she reappeared in April 1499 – her first name omitted and replaced by a dash – her status had evidently changed. Her payments had been so curtailed that she was constrained to borrow money from the king, and her servants had been reduced from six to one, for whom payment (eleven months in arrears) was not made until the following November. To be deprived of servants was not merely a social humiliation. It also stopped intrigues. For this reason Margaret Beaufort, Henry’s mother, had been deprived of ‘any servant or company’, on Richard III’s orders, for her complicity in Buckingham’s rebellion in 1483. In Katherine’s case, too, this may have been punishment for complicity. In the first year of the next king’s reign, for unspecified reasons, she was included in a general pardon.
Yet there was little she could do to advance a plan of escape. She had no money or resources save what the king allowed her; the only hint at independent wealth comes from another entry in the warrants for the Wardrobe, some years later, when she was to have a gown ‘furred with mink from her own store’. In May and June of 1498 she was almost as penniless as her husband. Like him, she could presumably receive no letters from supporters; and she was watched, as he was. Since they were together only under supervision, any plotting would have had to be almost unspoken. He may have sought to include her; or, as at Taunton, he may have fled without stopping to think what his actions might have meant for his wife.
The question of why he had escaped seemed unanswerable; and there was also the question of how. It was assumed by Thomas Gainsford in the seventeenth century, and the rumour may have surfaced at the time, that Perkin must have plied his guards with ‘a sleepy drink’ to be able to climb from the bed without disturbing them. He had also to get past the king’s watch, two dozen yeomen of the crown who accompanied Henry from palace to palace, ‘piping the watch’ three times on each summer night, and his guard, some 150 to 200 strong, who lined the corridors and passages on either side wherever the king was likely to pass. These men were trained to detect ‘treasons, bruits or noises’ that might annoy the king from any quarter of the palace, but they had somehow missed Perkin leaving. Doubtless this was another miracle or magic trick, or yet another example of how he could ‘graciously escape and overpass’ the enemies set about him.
In fact, it may have been much easier; as easy as opening a door. Three weeks or so after his escape, two ‘yeomen’ of London, John Kebyll and John Sherwyn, were indicted before the king for helping Perkin escape. Nothing is known of them, except that Sherwyn at the end of 1496 suffered a comprehensive burglary from his house in the City in which he lost, among other things, gold rings, a silver chain, a jacket and a russet robe trimmed with lamb’s wool. The burglar was a woman, and the shaming experience may have piqued Sherwyn’s interest in locks and keys. Both men were apparently ordinary Londoners, unconnected to the court. But, knowing that Perkin wanted to escape, they were said to have made ‘various counterfeit keys to open the locks on the prison door’.
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p; The indictment was hard to believe on several levels. It placed Perkin both in the custody of Smith and Jones and in prisone domini Regis; but he was known not to be in prison, and the ‘prison door’ for which the locks were made was no such thing, just some ordinary door of the palace of Westminster. He seemed able to talk to, and deal with, these tradesmen quite freely, though his guards were meant to be beside him. Peculiarly, too, the initiative did not seem to come from him. Kebyll and Sherwyn, eager to help implement ‘that false proposal’, were said to have produced the keys without being asked. The indictment said that traitor Perkin had escaped to wage war treasonably on Henry: a standard phrase when dealing with him, but one that meshed oddly with the king’s remarks that he added up to nothing important. He could hardly wage war on his own, however inflated his conceit.
When prisoners escaped from custody, those who had charge of them – usually the sheriff of the county – were always fined. The standard fine was £5, rising to £20 for the loss of important captives. But Smith and Jones were apparently not punished for their lapse, though Henry himself had blamed the escape on their folly and simpleness. Both went on appearing in Heron’s accounts, receiving payments and working for the king, as if nothing had happened. In November that year Smith was rewarded with £5 in cash; not long before, he was made a king’s officer in Lancashire. Kebyll and Sherwyn seem not to have been punished either, and the indictment petered out inconsequentially. The whole thing looked like incitement or entrapment, and some contemporaries read it that way. A report sent to Venice mentioned that Henry was apprehensive of some insurrection, ‘and this because the king arranged with some of Perkin’s servants that they should put it into his fantasy to escape out of his Majesty’s hands; and thus did this youth do’. Bacon said it was ‘believed generally’ that this had happened.
