Perkin

by Ann Wroe

  His sentence was as the crime required, though that too was not recorded in the controlment roll, his name the only one missing among the suspects in the case. He was to be taken back to the Tower, then drawn on a hurdle through the city of London to the gallows at Tyburn. There he was to be hanged, ‘and cut down living to the ground and his innards torn out of his stomach and burned before his face. Then he shall be beheaded and his body divided into four parts, the head and quarters to be placed where the king wishes to put them.’

  He had not been arraigned alone. His old friend from Cork, John Atwater, who had been arrested in Ireland a few months before, was condemned with him, as were Atwater’s son Philip and John Taylor the elder. Taylor had been arrested, to Henry’s delight, in France in July. All were summarily convicted, with no record of evidence against them, though again this was hardly necessary. Atwater, for example, had already been attainted and convicted in absentia of high treason in the Irish Parliament in March 1498. All, too, received the same sentence, though Taylor’s was commuted to life imprisonment in the Tower. Atwater’s son was pardoned. Two days later, on the 18th, the grand jury was assembled and returned its verdict, presumably in these cases.

  Perkin’s four warders – Astwood, Long Roger, Bluet and Strangeways – were tried before a petty jury of twelve local men at the Guildhall on St Andrew’s Eve, November 29th. For these jurors the evidence was properly laid out and presumably sifted through, for they had time. The warders were eventually found guilty ‘of various high treasons touching the king’s person’ and sentenced to drawing and hanging. Only Strangeways confessed his treason. The others ‘said they were not guilty of any of it’, and flung themselves on the mercy of the court. Even Astwood did this, though he must have known he could hardly escape the rope a second time.

  The others mentioned in the indictments, laymen and priests alike, were also indicted of high treason. (Ward, the maker of prophecies, had died in the Tower in September, apparently of natural causes.) Yet only one, Finch, was executed, and only two, Proude and Masborowe, were committed to the Tower. The rest were outlawed, with the outlawries renewed until the end of Henry’s reign and, in some cases, beyond it. The king appeared to acknowledge by this that he could not bring these men to justice, but could only forfeit their goods – such as they had – and place them outside the law’s protection. The priests, of course, could not be executed under their privilege; the laymen had probably run away or sought sanctuary, as Cleymound, for one, had always intended. Lounde, his invulnerability peculiar to the last, returned to his other job as rector of the parish church of St Mary Wanstead, and was pardoned within eighteen months.

  Warwick was brought to trial before his peers on November 21st. He was judged by the Earl of Oxford, sitting under a cloth of estate in the Great Hall at Westminster, and by twenty-two lords, including Daubeney, the chamberlain, and John Kendal, still prior of the Order of St John of Jerusalem in England. The indictment said that Warwick was to be ‘examined and compelled to answer’, but there seems to have been no examination. Judge Fineux had said, in any case, that he had confessed already. Standing at the bar with Lovett beside him, the earl was asked how he wished to plead. He replied, in the standard phrases, that he could not deny he was guilty of the treasons, that he expressly acknowledged them, and that he put himself in the king’s hands. He may or may not have understood what he was saying. He was sentenced, as his new friend had been, to drawing, hanging, disembowelling, beheading and quartering. The record of his trial, exceptionally and illegally, was locked away in a special cupboard with three locks, to which three different royal officers had the keys.

  Warwick’s execution was almost a private affair. The sentence was commuted, in deference to his rank rather than his innocence, to simple beheading, and on November 28th, between two and three o’clock in the afternoon, the earl was led out between two guards to die on Tower Green. No crowds watched, but the effects were noted. That same day, wrote the Grey Friars chronicler, ‘was great floods, winds, thunder, lightnings, which did much harm and hurt in divers places and counties in England’. Warwick’s head and his body were placed in the coffin together – he was not, at least, to be exposed and shamed – and the next day were conveyed by water to Bisham Abbey, in Berkshire. Henry’s privy-purse accounts show that he paid £12 18s. 2d., in four separate bills, for Warwick’s burial there beside his ancestors. The king’s conscience was bothering him, but at least the Spanish marriage, ‘made in blood’, as Katherine of Aragon later described it, could go forward unimpeded.

  The rest of the blood had been shed five days earlier, at Tyburn. In contrast to Warwick’s execution, and the summary references to the executions of 1495, this was an extraordinary event that took up more than a page of the London Chronicle. The chronicler went solemnly into Latin (as, for the death of Charles VIII the previous year, he had gone showily into French) to flag the two deaths in the margin. ‘Comes de Warwyk’ was followed by ‘Obitus Petri Warbeck. The death of Perkin’.

  A huge crowd had gathered and a special scaffold had been erected, once more to raise him up above the crowd. It was a Saturday, exactly a week since he had been sentenced. The interval can probably be explained by Henry’s wish to keep the stars on his side. The feast was that of St Clement, the first pope, the day that marked the start of winter and on which – appropriately enough – boys went round in elaborate disguises, giving mock-blessings to households and demanding fruit and money. Some of these urchins were probably in the crowd, with gaudy robes and nut-stained faces, pausing for a moment in their begging and nuisance-making. In the Gospel reading for the day, Nihil opertum, Christ told his disciples that there was nothing covered that would not be revealed; words spoken in darkness or whispered in closets would now be shouted from the rooftops. This final certainty, proclaimed from the scaffold, was what the crowd was waiting for.

  Perkin and Atwater had been drawn on hurdles from the Tower. The London Chronicle said so, and this had been their sentence, though Molinet thought they had walked the distance led by the halters around their necks. If so, this would have been a commutation of their sentence; but it was probably not so. They were pulled behind horses through streets that were covered, as an Italian visitor described them, with a vast amount of mud, churned up by cattle and rain, that smelt awful and never went away. November added a mulch of fallen leaves, especially in the open fields round Tyburn, and more dead leaves, in their last gold livery, drifted in the wide sky above their heads.

  When they arrived at the scaffold, Perkin climbed the small ladder to the stage. Since his wrists were bound, it was difficult for him to do so. A guard pushed him up, and the executioner put the halter on him. He probably wore, apart from this, the simple knee-length white shirt that was the usual garb of the condemned man. After three miles of muddy roads and vituperation, there was probably not much white left about it, nor brightness in his hair. His face would still have showed traces of the beating of the previous year; the late November cold would have turned his legs blue and stiffened his hands. ‘Some said and still believed he was King Edward’s son,’ wrote Molinet, ‘but he didn’t look much like him on his last day.’

  Some slim chance remained of a miracle. A few years before, a labourer, unjustly sentenced to hang, had called on Blessed King Henry, the king’s step-uncle, to save him. The murdered Henry VI had appeared as the man swung in the noose, supporting him in his ‘most sweet embrace’ and putting his soft, dead hand between the prisoner’s neck and the rope. Another man, a cupbearer, had been saved in the same way: King Henry appearing, tall and thin in his blue velvet coat, to relieve the pressure of the noose, while Our Lady, in a white cloak, tenderly held the hanged man’s feet and supported him. Both men, though cut down as dead after a while, revived and were pardoned. In more prosaic fashion, an officer might ride through the crowd, waving a piece of paper in which the king declared a change of heart. Wild optimism of this sort had always been a feature of this young man
’s career. But there had been too much optimism and too much mercy, and both were now at an end.

  Standing before the people, the rope around his neck, he made some sort of confession to them. Hall, writing fifty years later, said he recited the version he had read at the Standard in Cheapside: the whole lot, with the cousins and uncles and aunts and the Portuguese knight with one eye. Even allowing for the fact that he had probably not read it there, or anywhere else, this would seem inhuman. He could not have held it to read it, and few would have heard him if he had. In any case, it was unnecessary. The final confession needed to be, above all, a negation, not an affirmation: he was not Richard.

  In the London Chronicle ‘he showed to the people . . . that he was a stranger born according unto his former confession . . . and . . . never the person that he was named for, that is to say the second son of King Edward the iiijth’. It seems, this time, that he spoke himself, for there is no indication that anyone spoke for him. He said, Fabyan wrote – and the alderman was almost certainly in the crowd to hear him – ‘that he never was the person which he was named nor anything of that blood, but a stranger born likewise as before he had showed’. Only astrologer Parron, who does not seem to have heard him, suggested that he gave more details: ‘he said he was not English, but a Picard from Tournai, by the name of Peter, the son of the late Peter de Orbeth’.

  Perkin also added ‘that he named himself to be the second son of King Edward by the mean of the said John Atwater there present and other as before time he had truly showed’. The handing-off of blame seemed exceptionally mean-spirited, as Atwater prepared to follow him on the scaffold, but Zurita said that Atwater seconded Perkin’s words and admitted they were true. If Atwater took the blame, those ‘other’ could be absolved from it, most obviously Margaret. Ever since her protégé’s capture, and up to this point, her plain promotion of his cause had been publicly passed over. In the end, it was better that way.

  The confession on the scaffold, whatever the actual words, was vital both to Henry and to him. For pressing diplomatic and domestic reasons, Perkin had to confess again at the very point of death, with his soul’s salvation in the balance. Only then would his supporters believe the official story was true. ‘He took it upon his death to be true,’ said the London chronicler; conclusive, incontrovertible words. Parron explained that Perkin’s ‘free’ confession, ‘at the point of death, in public’, was the one thing that could cure his sick followers from the poison of his base words and deceptions. Silence, as preserved at their executions by the conspirators of 1495, would have left a question mark. The imperative for Henry was that no question remained.

  For this reason, the king made sure that both de Puebla and Ayala (probably standing together, their mutual loathing palpable) ‘heard the confessions’ on the scaffold. That they witnessed the deaths was less important, though de Puebla seems to have been much affected by them, writing to his sovereigns later that ‘I must forebear importuning you on the subject, as I have written at great length and in many ways about the execution of Perkin and the son of the Duke of Clarence’. Henry also apparently briefed the two ambassadors, telling them that Perkin’s execution was justified ‘because the Duchess Margaret of Burgundy and the King of the Romans would not stop believing that Perkin was the true and legitimate son of King Edward, and Duke of York; and the duchess had given him so much authority and credit, that it had to be done’.

  The briefings had limited success. After the executions, de Puebla told his sovereigns that ‘no drop of doubtful royal blood’ now remained in the kingdom; dudosa, perhaps, but sangre real all the same. Molinet, too, could not help but describe the double executions as Henry’s attempt to remove all traces of the rival line. To do the job thoroughly, he wrote, the king had to kill Warwick too, as well as the young man who had ‘gone on saying’ that he was Edward’s son.

  Henry’s captive therefore had to confess on the scaffold that he was not Richard. Nevertheless, it is hardly possible to think it was a lie. The moment, as the whole crowd knew, was too dreadful for lying, and the consequences for his soul too great. Since his sentencing, he had been given a few precious days to think hard about what lay ahead of him. The great blessing – the only blessing – of a criminal’s death was that the hour was known and could be prepared for. ‘If thou wilt learn good and evil,’ said The King’s Book,

  go from home, go out of thyself, that is go out of this world, and learn to die; depart thy soul from thy body by thinking; send thine heart into that other world, that is unto Heaven or into Hell or into Purgatory, and there thou shalt see what is good and what is evil.

  Half in that other world, for a man condemned to die was adjudged dead already, he would have made a proper private confession before leaving the Tower. In that state of grace he may also have received the Sacrament, although in the case of the condemned this was controversial and often withheld (as it was withheld, too, if every last sin was not confessed). At the least he would have been given holy water and holy bread, a quasi-sacrament with which he could sublimate, to some degree, every Christian’s longing for the sight and honeyed taste of Jesus before he died. As far as possible, he had cleansed and prepared his soul for leaving the body. It would have to pay the penalty for past sins in any case, but these absolutions made it as ready for God’s preliminary sentence as an earthly man could manage. At public executions, the condemned tended either to keep silent or to burst out with some defiant truth, clearing their consciences. The last thing they did was to speak falsehoods. It is almost unthinkable that Henry would have forced such a thing on Perkin, or that he would have agreed to do it.

  Yet Henry still possessed some leverage over him. He had possession of his wife and, presumably, control of his son, and he also had the power to commute or soften his sentence, as he had done for Warwick. These considerations, combined with the utter collapse of his own schemes and the schemes of others, could have induced the prisoner on the scaffold to seek a last bargain. He had always been sickened by the shedding of blood, both his own and other people’s. Young, and not brave – how easy to say that – he confronted the thought of being cut down from the gibbet alive, butchered and eviscerated, with his bloody entrails burned before his eyes. All that stood between a man’s hands rooting in his ripped belly, and merciful oblivion at the end of a rope, was the statement that he was not Edward’s son, or anything to do with him. The torments of Hell, believed in but not seen, may have faded before that calculation.

  It is just possible, therefore, that he lied on the scaffold. It seemed evident to the crowd and the chroniclers, however, that he could only be telling the truth. The third possibility, also aired at the time, was that he no longer knew what the truth was. Vergil was the first to suggest that if he had lied in his career as Richard, he had come to believe in the lie. ‘Having twisted falsehood into truth, truth into falsehood,’ he wrote, ‘he fell at last on the scaffold, the victim of his own deceit.’ A century later, Francis Bacon continued the thought. ‘With long and continued counterfeiting’, he asserted, ‘and with oft telling a lie, [he] was turned by habit almost into the thing he seemed to be; and from a liar to a believer.’ In his own later Latin translation, Bacon dropped the ‘almost’: quae fingeret simul et crederet, ‘what he feigned, he believed’. It is also possible that, in this state of deep confusion about who he was, the young man on the scaffold simply did what others asked, or what they had come to expect of him.

  At the end of his confession, he asked God and the king ‘and all other that he had offended unto’ for forgiveness for what he had done. The plea for absolution might have cleansed his soul again, to some degree, if that were necessary. He then prepared to die. The way men died was not usually recorded in the London chronicles, any more than the details of their deaths. But this event, before an immense crowd, was clearly a performance worth describing.

  Whatever the public may have been expecting, what Perkin gave them was the attitude their spiritual manuals
ceaselessly recommended. The priest would urge the dying man, as a final act of imagination, to ‘wrap himself’ in the Cross that was held up before him. True meekness came when the sinner, at last, knew himself for the wretch he was, ‘nought and foul as a knave’, and, having acknowledged that, tried to become like Christ.

  Perkin, or Peter, or Richard, or however they thought of him, gave them this last impersonation. He took his death ‘meekly’, said the London Chronicle, ‘patiently’, said Fabyan: like Jesus, surrendering completely. The death of the gibbet was the closest in form to Christ’s; in some meditations on the Crucifixion, He had even climbed a little ladder to position himself against the Cross. Then, ‘having been so courteous, noble, free and benign’, He gave himself up to His executioners. In manus tuas, Domine, commendo spiritum meum, Christ’s last prayer on the Cross, was traditionally the prayer of those on the scaffold or without much time. The first three words alone had become a shorthand for hanging, the last gasp of the condemned man:

  And that in manus tuas check

  Shall break thy neck.

  When the ladder was taken away, his neck suddenly took the weight of his body. ‘It finds out what your buttocks weigh,’ as François Villon said. A man long in prison, thin and starved, did not strain the rope much. Men usually died within an hour, but it was seldom quick. There was time to feel the noose tightening, the eyes fogging over, life leaving. Some men still prayed and beat their breasts as they swung there. You could struggle, or you could hang there quietly, as the crowd watched and listened for your death to come. Apparently, he died that way.