by Ann Wroe
The rose, though she had always claimed it, was never so prominent in any other portrait of her. Her body seemed contorted deliberately to show it and to make it catch the eye. She appeared, in short, not merely as the Magdalene, with high-braced breasts and straggling hair that fell louchely on her neck, but as the matriarch of the House of York. Mary Magdalene had recognised Jesus when no one else had done so, anointing His feet with ointment and drying them with her hair in token of reverence for who He was, and had been mocked for it as a woman of sluttish reputation. At the Crucifixion, her grief was second only to the grief of Jesus’s mother; when He rose again three days later, she was the first to know Him and call Him ‘Lord’. So Margaret pictured herself. A nun from the order of Black Sisters in Binche stood behind her with a new jar of ointment, ready for the re-anointing. In death she again acknowledged him, openly showing her love and contrition of heart.
Her White Rose was now wandering again. At the moment of death he had felt himself breathed and lifted out of his body, which at once appeared so horrible to him that he could not believe it had been his. He saw the earth too, little, dark, bare and naked, with its riches and honours ‘all but child’s play in the street . . . wind and a dream’. Almost immediately, certainly in less than half an hour, he found himself before the heavenly tribunal, between God and the Devil, accounting for his sins. Bristling Satan made the case that, though vested with the stole of immortality by his true father, he had accepted instead the black garment of perpetual death: ‘he hath left thy livery and hath taken mine’. His angel defended him, assuring the Divine Judge that his life had been virtuous in some ways, but there was no escaping punishment.
The charge-sheet against him was mostly pride and lying, though to what degree he had lied or been presumptuous was still uncertain to almost all those he had left behind. On the gravity of his sins depended whether he wandered in Hell or in Purgatory. Hell was permanent, allotted to those who had not shown true contrition for their sins; he had shown contrition, but perhaps it had not been true. Purgatory was temporary, God’s mercy intervening after years of punishment to pluck out the purified soul; but for his soul now, naked and crying, God’s grace could not be counted on.
Long ago, when he had first come to his body, God had set his print and figure in him. As he stood at the tribunal, you could not see that resemblance any more. Gradually, through his life, his sins had appeared as blemishes on his face until it was the Devil he conformed to. As he entered Purgatory, his angel held up a mirror to show him his own filth and deformation and the horns and claws he had tried to pretend he did not have. After that single horrifying glance his soul plunged down into horror itself, whimpering and screaming.
In the pitch-dark, the devils attacked him. He saw only the gleam of their claws and their white fangs. Since his chief sin was pride, he was hung on iron hooks on a slowly revolving wheel that was basted and pushed by demons. Where was his pride now? they screeched at him. Where was his vanity? Why didn’t he dance? He fell down, and red-hot grappling hooks rolled him over the coals. A pitchfork pierced him, flung him in the fire and roasted him; his soul-flesh dripped from the bones, yet he did not die. He could still scream, and his screams rose with those of his neighbour-souls, loose-haired women and elbowing men, trampling and tearing him in their own panic. He became liquid, and was passed through an iron sieve as cooks strained a sauce through canvas, falling at last into a great bowl of carrion and sulphur. That smell was all about him, the farting reek of terrified souls, his own stink. At no point was there quiet or the cessation of pain. All was howling, darkness and his own continually repeated dissolution: in flames, on anvils, in the foaming jaws of devil-dogs and in the guts of demons, who shat him out again.
After many years, depending on the sins he had committed and the prayers that were said for him on earth, his angel would take him out of the fire. Together they rose towards the pure ether of which his angel was made. The air was gradually brighter and softer, like ointment on his raw wounds. Light, and growing lighter, he passed through the firmament silvered and soaring with larks that sang ‘Jesu’, a song he had not heard before. The light grew brighter, almost too bright, and dappled with the rainbow-wings of uncountable angels. He stood in the clearness of Heaven Imperial, seven times brighter and fairer than the sun. It astonished and almost frightened him. Before him rose the jasper walls of the heavenly city, shining like glass, and the golden streets in which white-robed souls lived on white manna and sweet unending praise. Everything blazed with light. All was perfect clarity, all veils lifted, at last.
He was close to the judgement throne of God, so close that he would have to stop, hanging back on the hand of his angel, to keep the distance that reverence required. He knelt down. Only two things could happen now, at the moment of his final judging. Jesus would turn His back on him, ending the possibility that he would ever gaze on those sweet eyes that had loved him, leaving him only with the words ‘I tell you, I know you not’. Or He would look on him, smiling, and call him by the name He had always known him by, confessing it as he had promised before his father and all the angels, face to face.
Appendix
The Setubal Testimonies, April 25th 1496
In the town of Setubal in the kingdom of Portugal, the 25th of April 1496, in the presence of me, Fernan Peres Mexia, apostolic notary and [notary of] the witnesses recorded below, on behalf of Don Alonso de Silva, Knight-Commander of Calatrava:
First to be interrogated and questioned was Rui de Sousa, knight of the household of our Lord King of Portugal. In my presence, Don Alonso asked the said Rui de Sousa if he had known the Duke of York, son of King Edward, when he was in England. To which he answered that he had seen him and that he was a very noble little boy and that he had seen him singing with his mother and one of his sisters and that he sang very well and that he was very pretty and the most beautiful creature he had ever seen, and he also saw him playing very well at sticks and with a two-handed sword. And then he heard it said that they had put him and his brother too, the Prince of Wales, in a fortress where a body of water passed by, and that they bled them, and they died from the forced bleeding.
Then Alonso asked the said Rui de Sousa who the person was who now called himself the Duke of York; Rui de Sousa said that a youth had come to Portugal with the wife of Duarte Brandon, a Portuguese knight, and he had seen him walking in the Court of Portugal behind a fidalgo who was called Pero Vaz da Cunha, who treated him as his page, and when they had the celebrations for the Lord Prince of Portugal [Pero Vaz] dressed him up, and he saw him in a doublet of brocade and a long gown of silk. And after that he knew nothing more until now, when he’d heard what people were saying about him.
Don Alonso then asked him if he resembled in his person the Duke of York he had seen in England; he said no, because the other one was very beautiful.
Then in my presence and that of the witnesses Don Alonso, Knight-Commander of the Order of Calatrava, asked Duarte Brandon, a Portuguese who was brought up in England in the household of King Edward, if he knew who this person was whom they now called the Duke of York.
He said it was the worst evil in the world that he and his brother the Prince of Wales had been killed, and the one who they now said [was him] was a youth from a city called Tournai and his father was a boatman who was called Bernal Uberque and he lived below the St Jean bridge and [the boy] was called Piris. And his father had placed him in the said city of Tournai with an organist to teach him the craft for a certain number of years, and the boy had run away.
And the boy came to a place called Middelburg where his [Brandon’s] wife had fled from the plague that was in Bruges. In Middelburg he found a position with a craftsman who lived opposite the place where his wife was staying. The craftsman sold needles and purses, and the boy got to know some of the French boys who were in his wife’s service.
And when the said Duarte Brandon sent for his wife to take her into Portugal, [the youth] found out and to
ld her boys that he wanted to go with them to Portugal and that he would live with the son of Duarte Brandon. So he went on board ship with [Brandon’s] wife and came with her to Lisbon. And his wife asked him [Brandon] if he wanted to take him for the household and he answered no, that he had other French boys in service and didn’t want any more, but he would place him with a fidalgo. And he gave him to Pero Vaz da Cunha. And he, in the season, attended the celebrations of the Lord Prince of Portugal and clothed [the youth] in a doublet with sleeves of brocade and a gown of silk and other things, and he was with him at the celebrations and in them.
A few days after that one of [Brandon’s] boys was being sent in a ship to Flanders and the said boy told him that he wanted to go with him; he wasn’t staying in that country since Duarte Brandon did not want to take him in as his son, but when he had agreed to go with Brandon’s boy the ship sailed and he was left behind. Then he came across another ship that was ready to leave, and asked where it was going. They told him, to Flanders; he asked them if they would take him; they said yes, but they had to go to Ireland first; he said it didn’t bother him.
So he folded up all his clothes and put on other old ones and boarded the ship, and he went with them. And when he arrived in Ireland and disembarked as they told him, he had taken off his jacket and dressed himself in that doublet with the sleeves of brocade and the robe of silk. And since those are wild people they ran after him because of that little bit of brocade, and some started to say that he was one of those of Lancaster and others that he was King Edward’s son, and so people started to join him until little by little matters got as they are now.
In addition his boy, the one who had agreed to go with the boy on the ship, told him [Brandon] how he had talked to the boy’s father in Tournai and given him news of him and told him how he had agreed to go in the ship with him and that he had stayed behind because he hadn’t come in time before the ship left.
And on the 28th of the said month, in my presence and that of the witnesses recorded below, Alonso de Silva questioned and interrogated Tanjar, a herald of the Lord King of Portugal, asking whether he knew who the person was who now called himself the Duke of York.
The herald said he had known him here in Portugal and that he had seen him living with a fidalgo called Pero Vaz da Cunha, and that he had never taken him for a local because it was plain to see that he was a foreigner. And he knew that he had come with the wife of Duarte Brandon.
When that herald was going into Flanders once, he was in Tournai (of which he was a native) and he was in the house of one of his relations where he was staying, when the boy’s father turned up. Since people had told him that [the herald] had come from Portugal and had seen his son there, he asked him [if he had].
The herald said he didn’t know him. Then he asked: ‘Who did he go with?’
The father said he went with the wife of Duarte Brandon, in a ship with her notary.
The herald said that he had seen a youth arrive over there in Portugal, the one who had since gone to Ireland, and that they had raised him up as a king, saying he was the son of King Edward.
The father said: ‘That’s my son.’
‘What distinguishing marks did he have?’ asked the herald.
The father said he had a mark on his face under his eye, and he was a bit of a fool, and he had an upper lip that was raised up a bit and thin legs, and that when he left there he was fourteen going on fifteen.
The herald said that he had all those marks.
Then his father, weeping, said, ‘That is my son, who got him mixed up in this, ah me, they will kill him.’ For his father had no other [son], and by that mark that he had on his face and another that he had on his breast they said that he was the Duke of York.
And his father is a boatman, the master of a boat that comes and goes between Flanders and other places by river and he is rich and he is called John Osbeque, and the boy is Piris, which is Pedro in Flemish.
Notes
“Page numbers refer to the printed edition of this book.”
Principal abbreviations
For publications, here and throughout the notes, the place of publication is London unless otherwise stated.
ADC Acts of the Lords of Council in Civil Cases, ed. George Nelson & Henry Patton (Edinburgh, 1918)
ADN Archives Départementales du Nord (Lille)
AGS Archivo General de Simancas
AH The Anglica Historia of Polydore Vergil, ed. & tr. Denys Hay, Camden Series, vol. 74 (1950)
AN Archives Nationales du Royaume, Brussels
ASM Archivio di Stato di Milano
BL British Library, London
BN Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris
CC Courtrai Codex
CCA Canterbury Cathedral Archives
CCR Calendar of Close Rolls
CDRS Calendar of Documents relating to Scotland, ed. Joseph Bain, 4 vols (Edinburgh, 1881–8)
CPR Calendar of Patent Rolls
CSPM Calendar of State Papers and Manuscripts existing in the archives and collections of Milan, ed. Allen B. Hinds (1912), vol. 1
CSPS Calendar of Letters, Dispatches & State Papers . . . preserved in the archives at Simancas and elsewhere, ed. G. A. Bergenroth et al., 13 vols (1862–1954), vol. 1, Henry VII, 1485–1509
CSPV Calendar of State Papers and Manuscripts relating to English Affairs existing in the archives of Venice and in other Libraries of Northern Italy (1202–1674), ed. Rawdon Brown, Bentinck et al., 38 vols (1864–1947), vol. 1, 1202–1509
DRO Devon Record Office, Exeter
EETS Early English Text Society
EH Excerpta Historica, or Illustrations of English History, ed. Samuel Bentley (1831)
EHR English Historical Review
GC The Great Chronicle of London, ed. A. H. Thomas and I. D. Thornley (1938)
HHSA Haus-, Hof- und Staatsarchivs, Österreichisches Staatsarchiv, Vienna
HRHS The Historia Regis Henrici Septimi of Bernard André, in Memorials of Henry VII, ed. James Gairdner, Rolls Series 10 (1858)
JCCC Journal of the Court of Common Council (Corporation of London, Guildhall)
LC Chronicles of London (Vitellius A XVI), ed. C. L. Kingsford (Oxford, 1905)
L&P Letters and Papers Illustrative of the Reigns of Richard III and Henry VII, ed. James Gairdner, 2 vols, Rolls Series 24 (1861 and 1863)
PI LaPolitica Internacional de Isabel la Catolica, ed. Luis Suarez Fernandez, 5 vols (Valladolid, 1965–72)
PRO Public Record Office, Kew, London
RMS Registrum Magni Sigilli Regum Scotorum 1424–1513, ed. James Balfour Paul (Edinburgh, 1884)
Rot. Parl. Rolls of Parliament, comprising Petitions, Pleas, & Proceedings of Parliament, 6 Edward I–19 Henry VII, 1278–1503, 6 vols (1767–77)
SCRO Southampton City Record Office
SRO Scottish Record Office, Edinburgh
SS Sächsisches Hauptstaatsarchiv, Dresden
TA Accounts of the Lord High Treasurer of Scotland, ed. Thomas Dickson et al. (Scottish Records Series, 1877), 13 vols (Edinburgh, 1877–1978), vol. 1, 1473–1498
TLA Tiroler Landesarchiv, Innsbruck
Introduction
Gairdner’s account: The Story of Perkin Warbeck, appended to The History of the Life and Reign of Richard III, 2nd edition (1898); L&P, prefaces to vols 1 and 2. The sharp-eyed will detect, however, that even he had doubts.
John Ford’s play: The Chronicle History of Perkin Warbeck, A Strange Truth (first printed 1634). For the High Romantic view of this story, see also The Fortunes of Perkin Warbeck: A Romance, by Mary Shelley (1827), in which the hero is at least partly modelled on Shelley himself. Schiller, too, wrote an outline for a play called ‘Warbeck’.
‘Whether I name [him] . . .’ Thomas Gainsford, The True and Wonderful History of Perkin Warbeck, calling himself Richard IV (1618). Harleian Miscellany, vol. 6 (1745), p. 526.
Prologue: Presence
Empire weather: Gerhard Benecke, Maximilian I (1459–1519): A
n analytical biography (1982), pp. 161, 167.
London incidents: LC, pp. 199–200.
princiant: Georges Chastellain, ‘Advertissement au Duc Charles’, Oeuvres, ed. Baron Kervyn de Lettenhove, 8 vols (Brussels, 1863–6), vol. 7, p. 312; Jean Molinet, Chroniques, ed. J.-A. Buchon, 5 vols (Paris, 1828), vol. 5, p. 49.
Painters’ tricks: The Strasburg Manuscript: A Medieval Painters’ Handbook, tr. Viola & Rosamund Borradaile (1966), passim. Ivory: p. 65.
‘A curious piece’: Francis Bacon, The History of the Reign of King Henry the Seventh, in Works, ed. J. Spedding, 10 vols (1858), vol. 6, p. 134.
effingere: HRHS, p. 66.
Margaret’s wedding pageants: J. de Barante, Histoire des ducs de Bourgogne, 10 vols (Brussels, 1835–6), vol. 10, pp. 240–1.
Charles VIII’s image: Molinet, Chroniques, vol. 5, p. 85.
ains Jungen knaben: Maximilian I, Der Weisskunig: Eine Erzehlung vonden Thaten. Facsimile of the 1775 edition (Weinheim, 1985), p. 218, n (a). ‘the Child’: PRO, E404/81/3, warrant of Dec. 6th 1491. ‘imp’: GC, p. 285.
‘Butterfly’: HRHS, p. 71; The Book of Vices and Virtues (The King’s Book), EETS Old Series 217 (1942), p. 60.
His clothes: TA, pp. 263 (Richard), 227 (James). New underwear: p. 259.
Courtly Abusion: John Skelton, ‘Magnificence’, ls 835–41.
Physiognomy, neshness, etc.: Three Prose Versions of the Secreta secretorum, ed. Robert Steele, EETS Extra Series 74 (1898), pp. 219–22, passim; Antonio Scaino da Salo, Trattato del Giuoco della Palla, tr. W. W. Kershaw (1951), pp. 194–5.
Curls: Sebastian Brant, The Ship of Fools, tr. Edwin Zeydel (Columbia, 1944), pp. 68–9; Vices & Virtues, pp. 179–80.
‘Really good-looking’: Molinet, Chroniques, vol. 5, p. 15. zentil: I Diarii de M. S. Sanuto, 54 vols (Venice, 1879–1903), vol. 1, col. 842. forma non ineleganti: AH, pp. 62–3; ‘of visage beautiful’: Edward Hall, Chronicle, containing the History of England . . . collated editions of 1548 and 1550 (1809), p. 462. Bacon on him: Henry VII, p. 133 and n.
