by Linda Porter
In Ireland at that time were many Yorkist sympathizers, who could use the island’s traditional recalcitrance towards the English Crown as a fertile base for plots. For these men, Henry Tudor was a usurper and their cause was anything but lost. Two in particular – the Devonian merchant John Taylor and the city of Cork’s former mayor, John Atwater – saw in the distinctive young man who had arrived amongst them a potential that went far beyond the demonstration of silk fabric. The boy’s bearing and his denials that he was the duke of Warwick (as was first believed) combined to play into the hands of Henry VII’s enemies in Ireland. Questions had been raised amid a general stirring of interest that could be exploited. They did not care that this new prospect had been born Pierrechon de Werbecque in Flanders. His past was, indeed, another country. His future, though, would be brilliant. They intended to make him King Richard IV of England.
So was born the Perkin Warbeck conspiracy. History has tended to be rather dismissive of its significance, since we know the outcome, but no one, least of all Henry VII, regarded it as trivial at the time. Faintly ludicrous as belief in Perkin may seem to us now, the late fifteenth century was a credulous age, one where disappearance and reappearance were not impossibilities, where the more open mind of the Renaissance had not entirely replaced the medieval world’s love of chivalry, of adventure, of dark imaginings and miraculous rebirths. Europe was a continent a boy could wander in, dependent on the goodwill of others, his past half-remembered, until fate rescued him from oblivion – or so contemporaries might have liked to believe. And why not Perkin? From 1491 to 1497, this charming, well-schooled and apparently plausible impostor strutted the European stage, plaguing Henry Tudor’s life and compromising the security of his kingdom. The Warbeck affair was a protracted nightmare, raising all sorts of questions about recent, unresolved happenings, such as the fate of the Princes in the Tower (Queen Elizabeth’s missing brothers) and challenging Henry’s very right to rule. At home, it sparked treason in the king’s own household and extended family. Abroad, the monarchies of Europe, so much more powerful than Henry himself, watched the outcome keenly, exploiting uncertainties wherever and whenever they could.
The appearance of a rival with an apparently better claim to the English throne was a powerful diplomatic bargaining tool, to be used with varying degrees of cynicism, but always a weapon against a king who knew that if he was to bring lasting stability at home he must be seen as a legitimate, effective ruler by potential allies in Europe. The fate of the fledgling Tudor dynasty was at stake. And all the time James IV, keen to assume the direction of foreign policy in Scotland and make a name for himself and his country internationally, stood poised to seize any advantage that his neighbour’s embarrassment might offer. He ruled over a smaller and much less prosperous kingdom, but from an international perspective, it was far from insignificant. Henry’s troubles presented James with an opportunity to make a name for himself as a European monarch at the beginning of his personal rule and he took it eagerly. His actions would, eventually, lead to momentous developments for both England and Scotland.
The question of who Warbeck actually was has never been fully resolved. Some might say that it is not altogether relevant, since ultimately it was who he was not that mattered. His own confession, made in October 1497 when he was finally captured, may have been made under duress. It goes into greater detail about his early years and background than about his adventures once he was reinvented as a Yorkist prince: ‘First let it be known that I was born in the town of Tournai in Flanders [Warbeck clearly considered himself as Flemish though the town was ruled by France at that time and his first language would have been French] and my father’s name is John Osbek … which was controller of the said town of Tournai, and my mother’s name is Katharine de Faro…’ He went on to describe his wider family and their role among the civic officials and prosperous small merchants of Tournai, how his mother had sent him to Antwerp to learn Flemish and how, after a long period of illness, he had worked for a number of merchants in Bergen op Zoom and Middelburg.1 Perkin’s solid basis in the mercantile activities of the cloth industry in the Low Countries led somehow to a meeting with Lady Margaret Beaumont, the English wife of a lowly born Portuguese Jew, Duarte Brandao, also known as Sir Edward Brampton, whose conversion to Christianity had been sponsored by King Edward IV. At Easter 1486, Perkin accompanied Lady Margaret on a voyage to Lisbon that greatly expanded his horizons.
The connection with Brampton, a colourful opportunist who seems to have felt little loyalty to anyone except himself, and may even have been a bigamist, was probably more tenuous than conspiracy theorists have wanted to believe. It is impossible to say how well Warbeck knew Brampton but what is certain is that the boy’s year-long stay in Portugal, between 1486 and 1487, made a profound impression on him. At the beginning of the great age of exploration, Portugal was a fascinating place and Perkin found work with a son of one of its greatest explorers, Tristão da Cunha. This opened up for him a wider world and the continuing desire to travel. In 1488 Perkin, who could by now speak several European languages, knew the Portuguese court and had probably picked up a good working knowledge of the Yorkists from Lady Margaret and her husband, entered the service of Pregent Meno. It was perhaps ironic that his voyage in 1491 to Ireland, a country well off the beaten track and not known for the wealth of its merchants, should have led to such a startling, and dangerous, change of fortune for this cosmopolitan, well-educated and apparently self-assured seventeen-year-old from a respectable Flemish bourgeois background.
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HENRY VII could not expect to make much of a mark in Europe until he had tightened his hold on England and established a dynasty. A family was vital for success; sons gave confidence in the future of the Tudors and daughters were indispensable for marriage alliances with other royal houses. In this respect, Henry and Elizabeth had already done well. Two more children arrived after Prince Arthur: Margaret, born in November 1489, and Henry, in June 1491. A year after Arthur’s birth, at the end of November 1487, Elizabeth was finally crowned at Westminster Abbey. This was also the occasion of a magnificent spectacle and the nobility, gorgeously attired and bejewelled, if not, in reality, of unswerving loyalty, paid homage to the eldest daughter of the House of York. By 1489, Henry Tudor’s stock also seemed to be rising in Europe. He entered into an alliance with Ferdinand of Aragon and the powerful archduke of Austria, Maximilian, intended to keep France in check. This was a significant development because Henry had sent military aid to Brittany when France cast envious eyes on the duchy following the death of his long-time protector Duke Francis in 1488. It was also agreed with Ferdinand and his wife, Isabella of Castile, that Prince Arthur should marry their youngest daughter, Katherine.
Yet trouble was never far away, either at home or abroad. In the spring of 1489, less than a month after what seemed like a notable diplomatic triumph with the Spanish monarchs, Henry’s northern strongman, the earl of Northumberland, was murdered by rebels who were protesting against increased taxation at a time of economic difficulty. The earl had saved Henry from assassination three years earlier but there was no one to perform the same service for him. The king sent the earl of Surrey north to administer this vulnerable part of the kingdom and to keep a careful watch on the Scots. Surrey was in his late forties, a former Yorkist with a ruthless streak who had served Richard III loyally and been severely wounded at Bosworth. Yet by 1489, when his lands were restored, he had evidently calculated that his future did not lie in rebellion or exile. Putting his devotion to the White Rose firmly behind him, he went on to serve both Henry VII and Henry VIII with distinction. He would also have a major part to play in the life and death of James IV.
By the time of the birth of Prince Henry in June 1491 there were grounds for Tudor optimism both at home and abroad. The advent of Perkin Warbeck cruelly shattered these. In a short space of time it became apparent just how disruptive ‘Richard IV’ could be. The shadowy conspiracies of widely sca
ttered Yorkist loyalists had not amounted to much before, but now they could begin to coalesce, to have real substance and threat, thanks to the opportunity they offered various European monarchs to keep Henry VII in check. Though Perkin may have posed the greatest danger to Henry when he came to Scotland, he arrived there in 1495 by a circuitous route that took him to the courts of France, Austria and Burgundy.
At the beginning of January 1492 Warbeck was still in Ireland, being heavily coached for his role by John Taylor and Stephen Fryon, a former French secretary to Edward IV. He had much to learn, including a good grasp of the English language, in a short space of time. Why he agreed to this most elaborate of charades remains a mystery. No doubt he was put under pressure, but the advantages offered to him must have seemed worth the effort of transforming himself into someone else. The flattery, the encouragement, the exciting hope that he might actually be believed, must all have outweighed the underlying fear of the consequences of being caught or merely abandoned at some point. And, initially, Perkin was being fed and clothed at the expense of others while being invested with the character of Richard, duke of York. If it came to nothing, he would at least have learned the skills of an actor (something that clearly came easily to him) and could disappear to reinvent himself in another guise. With confidence came plausibility and the self-assurance that he could readily persuade crowned heads of Europe that he was their equal. A vague but heartrending backstory was created for him, and though we do not have evidence for it in writing before 1493, when he appealed unsuccessfully for acknowledgement to the very hard-headed Isabella of Castile, no doubt he had used this story before. He explained that his elder brother Edward V had, indeed, been murdered, and asserted that ‘I myself, then nearly nine years of age, was also delivered to a certain lord to be killed.’ The unnamed lord had taken pity on his innocence, kept him alive and spirited him to a place of safety:
First, however, causing me to swear on the holy sacrament that to no one should I disclose my name, origin or family, until a certain number of years had passed. He then sent me therefore abroad, with two persons, who should watch over and take charge of me; and thus I, an orphan [a curious thing to say, since his supposed mother, Elizabeth Woodville, was still very much alive at this time], bereaved of my royal father and brother, an exile from my kingdom, and deprived of my country, inheritance and fortune, a fugitive and in the midst of extreme perils, led my miserable life, in fear, and weeping, and grief, and for the space of nearly eight years lay hid in divers places. At length, one of those who had charge of me being dead, and the other returned to his country, and never afterwards seen, scarcely had I emerged from childhood alone and without means, I remained for a time in the kingdom of Portugal, and thence sailed to Ireland, where, being recognized by the illustrious lords the earls of Desmond and Kildare, my cousins, as also by other noblemen of the island, I was received with great joy and honour.2
Taylor and his accomplices were much more than instigators and preceptors. They had a well-thought-out strategy to promote the rediscovered duke of York far and wide. By February 1492, well before the appeal to Queen Isabella, they were already confident enough in Perkin’s plausibility to send letters to Maximilian and to Margaret of Burgundy, announcing that the rightful heir to the English throne, Richard Plantagenet, ‘King Edward’s son’, had been found and was seeking their aid. Early in March, the Irishman Edward Ormond arrived at the court of James IV bearing a similar missive. But at this stage, with internal dissent still a problem in his council, James was either unable or unwilling to give support. His interest could well have been aroused but he and his advisers may also have calculated that it would be best to let other European powers take the lead at this point. He wished to improve his relations with the French, who by now had an ambassador in Edinburgh, but he could let them steer events. For that is precisely what happened. Once schooled, Perkin did not stay long in Ireland. The initial interest in him there had not moved to full-scale support and his French backers, now with the added impetus of the outbreak of war with England, did not want to leave him exposed. They sent a fleet of vessels to whisk him to the French port of Harfleur in Normandy and so bring him, now fully fledged as Richard, duke of York, to Charles VIII of France.
The French king did not, however, keep him long. In concert with Maximilian, Henry VII invaded northern France in October 1492. He landed at Calais with a force of fourteen thousand men, in what was, numerically, the greatest invasion of France undertaken by the English in the fifteenth century. After capturing Arras, the campaign was swiftly concluded by the Treaty of Étaples, much to the annoyance of his Austrian ally, who had hoped to regain territory lost to France in 1482 under the Treaty of Arras. Ten years on, Maximilian still had not reclaimed these lands and was further snubbed by Charles’s rejection of his daughter, Margaret of Austria, who, as agreed in the Arras treaty, had been brought up in the French court to be Charles’s future wife. Charles was young but cunning. He had recently solved the Breton problem by marriage to its duchess and now his sights were set on achieving far greater military glory and the kingdom of Naples in Italy, to which he had a distant claim. War with England was an unnecessary distraction for him. Henry VII, on the other hand, may have dreamed of restoring part of England’s lost French empire (his great-grandfather, after all, was king of France) but military advice told him he could not even recapture the important fortress of Boulogne, and so the pragmatist in him settled for peace. But the improvement of relations with France did not solve the problem of Perkin Warbeck’s imposture, a matter of growing concern for Henry both at home and abroad. Instead, it moved Perkin on, with the help of John Taylor’s bribery and scheming, towards the unpredictable and now greatly offended Maximilian, and, more particularly, to the embrace of Margaret of Burgundy, the ‘pestiferous serpent lady’ herself.
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SHORTLY BEFORE Christmas 1492, Warbeck and his backers arrived at the court of Margaret of Burgundy at Malines in Brabant, some fifteen miles south of Antwerp in what is now Belgium.3 The dowager duchess was then forty-six years old, the childless widow of the brave but reckless Burgundian duke, Charles the Bold, who had died in battle at Nancy in 1477. She was born Margaret of York, the youngest daughter of Richard, duke of York, and his wife, Cecily Neville. Sister to two kings of England, Margaret was Duke Charles’s third wife, but her marriage to him in 1468, when she was twenty-two, represented a huge diplomatic triumph for her brother, Edward IV. It more than balanced the disappointment felt by English politicians when Edward himself married Elizabeth Woodville. The wedding took place amid great pageantry in England and in Burgundy and was celebrated in Bruges with one of the greatest series of festivities ever seen there. The tall and slim Margaret would prove herself, in terms of ambition and dynastic determination, a true child of the House of York. As a young woman she was probably good looking, as were most of her family, though a later portrait, the only one that can be confidently attributed, is not flattering.
Margaret of York’s marriage to Charles the Bold underlined the close relationship between the British Isles and the Low Countries that had existed at least since the high Middle Ages. Based on the mutual advantages of trade and commerce, the kings of both England and Scotland needed this wealthy and influential neighbour for their own prosperity. Burgundy was definitely the senior partner in these relationships. It was the ‘mightiest and richest duchy in Europe’ and its dukes ruled over the continent’s largest urban population. It was, in every way, a contrast to the overwhelmingly rural nature of the British Isles. Margaret had made a splendid marriage and was expected to undertake the duties that came with it. Well educated and pious, the duchess seems to have carried out her role with aplomb, travelling widely and presiding over a rich and cultured court. Her failure to produce children must have been a disappointment, particularly to a man who pushed himself as hard as Charles the Bold, but he did entrust to Margaret the upbringing of his daughter, Mary, his sole heir. Mary of Burgundy be
came very fond of her stepmother and was heavily dependent on her in the difficult months after Charles’s unexpected death, when both internal revolt and French invasion threatened. Realizing that the best protection for her stepdaughter would be to find her a powerful husband, Margaret was instrumental in arranging a speedy marriage to Maximilian of Austria. In so doing, she helped create the sixteenth-century’s most formidable dynasty. Mary’s marriage into the Habsburg family would lead to an empire that stretched from the borders of eastern Europe to the south of Spain and eventually to the Americas. Yet though Mary acknowledged Margaret’s assistance at this time, saying that she had ‘given freely and cordially of her help and shared in and supported all of our affairs with all her might’, the dowager undoubtedly had an ulterior motive. Her own survival in Burgundy and, more especially, the granting of her dower lands there, were dependent on her stepdaughter’s goodwill and the attitude of Mary’s husband. Margaret was accustomed to the grand lifestyle of the Burgundian court and although she might herself have looked for a new marriage, she seems to have preferred comfortable widowhood in her adopted country, a choice not uncommon among ladies of her rank at the time and for which she can hardly be blamed. In fact, she was so concerned about concluding the business of her dower that she apparently irritated Maximilian by bringing the topic up on the eve of his wedding.4
This episode reveals an understandable, if not entirely appealing, aspect of Margaret’s character. The death of her brother, Richard III, and the advent of Henry Tudor showed a great deal more about her devotion to her family and her capacity to cause trouble. For the dowager was a true Yorkist – ambitious, proud, mettlesome but ultimately lacking in judgement. Her reaction to Henry VII was instinctive but driven by rancour rather than the desire to do England service. Perhaps it has been overstated by Tudor propagandists, who have given Margaret a disproportionate share of the blame for a prolonged campaign to overthrow the man who had defeated her house, but it is hard to find any saving grace in a woman who, in reality, put the idea of dynasty before the interests of surviving members of her own family. But for Margaret it was York that mattered. She was not a woman to sit quietly, however large her library of devotional books might have been. And she was also living in a past that was less glorious than she remembered. Contacts in her mother’s household kept her informed, as did spies and Irish priests (Margaret, like Henry VII, had an active network of informers), but she was distanced from England by time as well as geography. It is impossible to say whether her support of Perkin Warbeck was always cynical or whether there was a substantial element of self-delusion in it. One thing is certain, however. When Perkin came to Malines, Margaret welcomed him with open arms.
