The War of the Roses

by Timothy Venning

  Perkin Warbeck: the second chance to depose Henry VII

  (i) The background

  The Simnel/ Lincoln/ Lovell revolt of 1487 was a straightforward provincial revolt plus foreign invasion by an ‘excluded’ royal relative against a hopefully weak King, in the tradition of 1460, 1470, 1471, 1483 and 1485. But the next case of a Yorkist pretender, the enigmatic ‘Perkin Warbeck’, was more unusual–and his real identity was even more contentious than that of Simnel. For one thing, he or his backers, decided that he would assume the identity of Edward IV’s younger son, Duke Richard of York, last seen in the Tower of London and never conclusively proved to be dead–and Henry VII’s cancellation of Titulus Regius put Richard back in the line of succession should he turn up, ahead of Henry’s wife. Unlike the case of Warwick, Henry could not produce the genuine Duke to prove the pretender to be a fraud–though he made a show of treating Warbeck with as much contempt as he had done to Simnel, calling him a ‘feigned lad’56 and boasting to foreign visitors that his agents had discovered that he was the son of a Flemish boatman.57 After Warbeck’s appearance at Cork in 1491 he was apparently taken in hand by a Devon merchant called John Taylor, ex-servant of the Duke of Clarence and mastermind of the plot to smuggle the latter’s son abroad in 1477/8, and deputy Mayor of Cork John Atwater, aided by local Yorkist merchants and Irish lords. Taylor had already been involved in a nebulous plot in September 1491 to rescue Warwick from the Tower, concerning which Taylor had written an encouraging letter to a fellow-Devonian ex-employee of Clarence’s, John Hayes, speaking of aid from two places abroad (possibly France and Flanders).58 The King was now at war with Charles VIII’s regency in France over control of Brittany, where his ex-host Duke Francis II had died in 1488, and the French had seized hold of his heiress, Anne of Brittany, to marry their King and forcibly taken over the state. As a result, the French despatched a small army to Ireland in autumn 1491 to raise a second rebellion in Warwick’s name, but achieved little–and unlike in 1487 the invaders did not even have a pretender in tow. Therefore, the discovery by Taylor and his local supporter Atwater of a ‘Yorkist prince lookalike’ in Cork, visiting merchant Pregent Meno’s servant, was a godsend. They considered who to pass Warbeck off as, and apparently thought of Warwick and of an illegitimate son of Richard III before settling on Prince Richard. But was this merely coincidence, or was Warbeck’s presence in Ireland not as much of a whim as he claimed in his 1497 ‘confession’? Had his previous employer Brampton put him up to it? And as Brampton had been pardoned, did Henry order his role to be ‘forgotten’?

  The timing of the French expedition to Ireland and the first thoughts of Taylor and Atwater about another ‘fake Warwick’ imply that the King’s problems would have been worse in 1491 if a mysterious plan to rescue the real Warwick in January 1490 had succeeded–there would have been a better pretender available. As with so much of the murky world of 1490s plots, we only know about this conspiracy from the subsequent legal documentation of it on the government side–in this case the indictments of the alleged plotters for treason. Edward Franke, former Sheriff of Berkshire and a Yorkist veteran of Bosworth and Stoke who had been put in the Tower after the latter but had escaped, was apparently lurking in London and he and a priest, Thomas Rothwell, met a fellow-enthusiast from Abingdon called John Mayne in the capital on 1 December 1489 to plan the escape. The latter then went to his home town to contact the sympathetic Abbot Sante, host of the sanctuary-seeking Stafford brothers in 1486, who promised them a sum of money and suggested laying a false trail to lure the authorities to Colchester (where Lovell had hidden in 1485–6) when the Earl was rescued. The so-called ‘Sante Plot’ got no further as someone informed the regime and all the above were arrested; Mayne and Franke were executed but Sante (after a large fine) and the monk who had brought his money to the London plotters were pardoned.59 We cannot tell how far advanced the plot was, but certain facts recur in other plots too–circles of conspirators in London, the Abingdon area (not far from Minster Lovell and Lincoln’s old home at Ewelme), and the presumption of subverting guards in the Tower to rescue Warwick. The latter was to recur in 1499. Had the plot succeeded and Warwick been spirited away, he could then have been available for Taylor and the French to use in Ireland in 1491 and for Maximilian to use as a pawn in 1493–4 as he was to do with Warbeck. A genuine Warwick would have been of more import than a dubious ‘Prince Richard’, but still would have had difficulty in securing the throne unless he had substantial foreign military aid–which Maximilian did not give Warbeck.

  Despite aid from the principal local Anglo-Irish magnate, the Earl of Desmond (limited due to his lameness), the Yorkists and French could not make any military headway in Ireland in 1491, though contact was made with King James IV of Scotland. This time Kildare, wary of his narrow escape from ruin in 1487–8 and his kinsmen’s deaths at Stoke, held aloof; so if he had not already learnt his lesson by a previous failure would he have been more willing to revolt? Without a Simnel expedition to Ireland in 1486–7, would Kildare have joined Desmond (a rival for power) and secured Dublin for the fake ‘Richard IV’? In due course French ships arrived to evacuate the expedition, and Warbeck and his sponsors were taken to France where he was recognized as ‘Richard IV’. On board the ships was the Tudor defector, Etienne Fryon, recently Henry’s French secretary, and he and Taylor between them probably knew enough about court life to transform and coach Warbeck into a convincing ‘prince’ with appropriately detailed ‘memories’ of his ‘past life at court’.60 As with the equally convincing ‘Grand Duchess Anastasia’, aka Anna Anderson, in the 1920s–1980s and her alleged memories of the Romanov court and ability to recognize ‘old friends’ and ‘relatives’, the pretender was not short of allies experienced at the courts of their ‘father’ who could have filled in any gaps in their ‘memories’. At any rate, that was what their detractors could point out.

  The Treaty of Etaples between Henry and the French government in December 1492 meant that the latter had to expel Warbeck, and he moved on to the Low Countries. As Duchess Margaret had sent troops to aid Simnel, so both she and her stepson-in-law Maximilian of Habsburg recognized Warbeck as the rightful King of England; and when Henry’s relationship with Maximilian deteriorated due to his rapprochement with France the latter invited Warbeck to his court and paraded him as ‘King Richard IV’ with a bodyguard decked out in Yorkist livery.61 Warbeck was received as rightful king at the State funeral of Maximilian’s father, Emperor Frederick III, and was given a royal residence at Malines where exiled Yorkist plotters congregated under the noses of Henry’s diplomats and spies.62 (In fact, the hard-headed Maximilian was not acting totally altruistically, as he had made the childless Warbeck sign a document recognizing him as his heir to England.63)

  Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile, co-rulers of Spain and supposed allies of Henry VII under the Treaty of Medino del Campo (1489), referred to Warbeck in their coded letters in the manner normally reserved for genuine royals.64 Unlike Simnel, Warbeck had a regal manner and a marked resemblance to Edward IV, and could pass himself off as a prince and as the son of his supposed father65–and even senior courtiers of Henry’s were exposed in the mid-1490s for saying privately that if he was really the Duke of York they would not oppose him.66 Like Simnel, he had substantial support from the traditionally pro-Yorkist lords in areas of semi-Anglicized Ireland remote from the ‘reach’ of the weak government in Dublin. Unlike Simnel, he was able to secure support from the King of Scotland (now James IV, more warlike than his controversial father James III) and received not only a high-born bride, Katherine Gordon, but Scottish troops and James’ personal company for his abortive invasion of Northumberland in 1496. This was, however, not an unqualified bonus, given the locals’ loathing of the Scots and the inevitability of the pretender being seen as a Scottish puppet and receiving no local support–and the gauche Warbeck was so horrified at the blatant terrorizing of his future subjects by the unruly Scots Borderers that he c
omplained to the unimpressed James.67 An invasion of Northumberland by her Scots allies had not worked for Queen Margaret in 1462 or 1463, despite the useful defection of local pro-Lancastrian castle commanders, and she had had the advantages of her husband being the ‘rightful’ and long-ruling, recently-deposed King not an unknown pretender, and having support from senior members of the local Percy dynasty. The Scots war only aided Warbeck indirectly, by requiring Henry to impose harsh new taxes to raise troops and antagonizing the distant and independent-minded Cornishmen so much that they launched their own rebellion. As we shall see, Warbeck’s best hope would have been to hasten to Cornwall and join this expedition, which was able to march all the way to Kent unopposed–though given fifteenth-century communications he would have needed luck rather than a Cornish Yorkist messenger sailing to Scotland to be sure of arriving in time for this unexpected outbreak.

  (ii) Fake or real scion of the House of York?

  The question of who exactly Warbeck was in reality was unresolved at the time, and has never been cleared up despite the best efforts of Henry’s spies and ‘spin-doctors’ to dismiss him as a fake. There are still novelists and historians who think that he was the genuine Prince Richard, and in the absence of a ‘DNA’ test on the bones of the supposed Prince in Westminster Abbey this cannot be disproved. As mentioned earlier, his own story–which varied in detail from time to time–was that an unknown ‘lord’ commissioned to murder him in the Tower had decided to spare him, smuggled him abroad, and given him a new identity but required him to keep quiet about his real identity for a number of years.68 There was no comment on the fate of Edward V–had he been murdered or had he died naturally after being smuggled abroad? Or what about the story that at least one boy had been drowned at sea (convenient for explaining the absence of a body).69 The presumed location of Prince Richard’s hiding place was Tournai, where ‘ Perkin Warbeck’ (or Osbeck) was supposed to have been born and raised; it was part of the Burgundian dominions so Duchess Margaret, Richard III’s sister, could have placed him there under her secret protection. The local Bishop was a close ally of Margaret’s–and Tudor ‘smear-mongers’ later suggested that he was Warbeck’s real father and Margaret was his mother.70 Payments have been discovered to an unknown small boy who was being brought up at Margaret’s court in the mid-1480s–was this ‘Prince Richard’ before he was sent to Tournai?71 Given the payments by Richard III to Sir James Tyrrell, could these have been for smuggling the Prince abroad and settling him at Tournai? And was it significant that Warbeck’s first employer in 1489–90 was the international Anglo-Portuguese Jewish sea-captain and adventurer Sir Edward Brampton (Duarte Brandao), who could thus have smuggled Richard to the Low Countries on board a ship from London?72 Did Tyrrell and/or Brampton take Richard abroad, and know his real identity? Was this why Henry gave Tyrrell an extra pardon for past misdeeds in 1486 (on finding out what he had done) and made him reside overseas, so he could not spread the story that the rightful King of England was still alive? Was this why Tyrrell was ‘selected’ to be accused of murdering the Princes once Warbeck was safely dead and Tyrrell had ‘betrayed’ Henry by entering into a new Yorkist plot–but Henry had him executed in private and did not give public and specific details of the alleged murders as the story was full of holes?73 Or did Richard III genuinely want the boys dead, and it was the Duke of Buckingham–their aunt Catherine’s husband–who saved the Prince but, as the usurper’s loyal subject or intended betrayer, wanted the boy out of the reckoning during a future power-struggle over the Crown?74

  The theory that Warbeck was really Prince Richard is plausible, and the pretender allegedly was able to show Yorkist visitors to his ‘court’ in the Low Countries ‘secret marks’ on his body that proved to veterans of Edward IV’s court that he was genuine.75 This may, however, have been propaganda spread about by people committed to his cause and seeking to make it seem more plausible. His resemblance to Edward IV may be explainable by him being an illegitimate son of Clarence, who appears to have been at large (possibly in the Low Countries) in the years after the Duke’s arrest in 1477 –and one of Warbeck’s first backers at Cork in 1490, John Taylor, was a member of Clarence’s household who was accused of trying to smuggle Clarence’s legitimate son, Warwick, abroad at that time.76 Taylor was capable of taking Clarence’s illegitimate son abroad as a potential pretender in 1477/8 and hiding him with the Warbeck family, and Duchess Margaret could have given sanctuary to her brother Clarence’s son then and after 1485 decided to use him as ‘Prince Richard’ to depose Henry. Does this explain why Warbeck was said by Brampton in 1496 not to have spoken English when he first knew him, in 1489–90?77 Prince Richard, born in 1473, would hardly have forgotten English if he left England as a ten-year-old in 1483; a son of Clarence’s, born before 1477, could have done so if he had left England as a baby. The possibility that Warbeck was an illegitimate son of one of the senior males of the House of York must focus on Clarence, given his location as of 1490 and his age–he was supposed to have been born around 1474/5.78 He was too young to have been a son of Edward IV or Richard III, born during their exile in the Low Countries in winter 1471–2; and Edward and Richard both acknowledged at least one illegitimate son born in England (Arthur and John) so it is unlikely that a discarded mistress of theirs would have been unable to secure money for her son’s upbringing in England (or faced hostility from their wives) and so moved abroad.

  Two more points can be raised about Warbeck’s real identity and the possibility that he was not just the son of a Flemish boatman with a coincidental resemblance to Edward IV. This is not to say that he was Prince Richard–merely that the ‘official’ Tudor version of events put about at the time of his capture in 1497 has problems. Firstly, the ‘confession’ that Warbeck signed up to and was quickly distributed across England and Europe shows signs of having been prepared by the government beforehand, not dictated by Warbeck himself. It was sent out so quickly that the logistics of printing it ‘from scratch’ in the time available were difficult.79 There were two versions, one in English for Henry’s subjects to read of the pretender’s lowly origins, presumption, and sinister foreign sponsors and one in French to disabuse his foreign backers about his real identity. The terminology used in the French version’s–inaccurate–account of events in and around Tournai is that of ‘literary’ French as would have been used by an English-speaker (a Tudor court writer?) rather than the local Picardy patois that Warbeck himself would have spoken and written.80 It made two crucial mistakes–it gave the wrong Christian name for Warbeck’s mother, Nicaise (called Catherine in the text), and it gave the wrong professions for Warbeck’s father and grandfather. His godfather, Pierre Flan, was described as his grandfather. There were also mistakes concerning local geography and customs in Tournai, which a long-term resident would have known were wrong.81 The same mistakes were made in a rather odd and forced-sounding letter that Warbeck allegedly wrote to his mother after his arrest, which does not read naturally and has the same idiosyncratic spelling as the ‘confession’ –it seems to have been written or composed by the same, non-local author.82 The question arises of whether Warbeck knew these details were wrong but was too scared or depressed to correct them, whether his interrogators did not bother to correct them when he pointed this out as it would mean rewriting the text, or whether Warbeck let the mistakes pass as a deliberate sign to his backers that he had been forced to sign up to a pack of lies.83 Another point worth noting is that his account of his early years refers to his having been ‘ill’ for a long time in 1483–4. This would imply that he was not seen in public by the locals in Tournai–so was this when he was introduced to the Warbeck household as replacement for the ‘real’ Pierre Warbeck and was coached in his new identity by his sponsors?

  (iii) Could Warbeck have overthrown Henry? And when?