by Linda Porter
In August 1493, Margaret, too, wrote to Isabella of Castile, reinforcing her ‘nephew’s’ claim and explaining the process by which she had come to accept him. This had started the previous year with letters written by the earls of Kildare and Desmond, telling her that the second son of her brother, King Edward, had been rediscovered in Ireland. This missive, no doubt similar, if not identical, to the one received by James IV in Scotland, had profoundly disturbed her: ‘These things seemed to me to be ravings and dreams.’ But when the young man was accepted as Richard, duke of York, at the French court, Margaret explained that she sent ‘certain men who would have recognised him as easily as his mother or nurse’ and these men confirmed to her with many sacred oaths that the lad was genuine. Presumably these men were among the floating population of Yorkists who fled across the sea after Bosworth, part of what has been called a ‘world of displaced men’, but Margaret did not name them. And she evaded the inevitable question of how anyone could identify Richard of York with certainty after ten years. Instead, she claimed that she knew him at once: ‘I recognised him as easily as if I had last seen him yesterday or the day before,’ adding, somewhat less convincingly, ‘for I had seen him once long ago in England.’ His coming had greatly affected her: ‘I indeed, for my part, when I gazed on this only male remnant of our family – who had come through so many perils and misfortunes – was deeply moved, and out of this natural affection, into which both necessity and the rights of blood were drawing me, I embraced him as my only nephew and my only son.’5
This letter perhaps reveals more about Margaret and her emotional state – the yearning for the glory days of the House of York, her wistfulness at her own childlessness – than it does about the authenticity of the claimant himself. His plausibility had clearly impressed her and, more than anything, she wanted to believe him. The disappearance of the Princes in the Tower and the absence of any firm evidence that they had both died in 1483, as was widely believed at the time, made it impossible to prove with absolute certainty that Perkin Warbeck was not who he said he was. Maximilian, too, was willing to entertain the idea that Margaret’s protégé might be genuine – especially while it served his purpose in European diplomacy. He invited Perkin to accompany him on his travels in Germany and Austria and, in November 1493, at the funeral of Maximilian’s father, the emperor Frederick II, in Vienna, the resurgent Yorkists could congratulate themselves on their greatest achievement to date, when all the princes and bishops of the Holy Roman Empire acknowledged the young man as a prince of the House of York. Maximilian and his son, Philip of Burgundy, maintained public support for the impostor for a couple of years, though most of Perkin’s financial backing continued to come from Margaret. The dowager duchess never did manage to persuade Isabella or her husband, Ferdinand of Aragon, that the duke of York was genuine and the Spanish monarchs affected to be surprised that anyone could take the whole business seriously. They wrote somewhat indignantly to their ambassador in England that Henry VII had complained ‘that they [Isabella and Ferdinand always referred to themselves in the third person] correspond with the person who calls himself “Duke of York”’. They went on, ‘The fact is, the so-called Duke of York and the old Duchess Margaret had written to them once at Barcelona, asking their protection. They had sent no answer to the pretended Duke of York, but only to the Duchess, showing her that the whole affair was an imposture. The Duchess made no reply.’6 More concerned with the negotiations for a marriage between Prince Arthur and Katherine of Aragon and also keen to gain Henry’s participation in the Holy League, their alliance against France, the Catholic Kings believed that their English ally could handle the threat posed by so obvious a masquerade.
Henry had good reason to be less sanguine, though he had known who Warbeck was for some time and his information fits with Perkin’s later confession. Writing in 1493, he declaimed against ‘the great malice that the lady Margaret of Burgundy beareth continually against us … by the untrue contriving of a feigned lad called Perkin Warbeck, born at Tournai in Picardy’. The real purpose of his letter, however, was to request military aid from the prominent men of the shires, in case of invasion or uprising. Indeed, he could hardly have done otherwise, for the support given to Warbeck in the Low Countries had serious repercussions at home. The prospect of an alternative with a better claim to the throne threatened to destabilize England, reviving the Yorkist cause among the English aristocracy and many former adherents of the previous regime who were still at court and even in Henry’s privy chamber. The king decided to parade the ‘real’ duke of York in the first official engagement for the three-year-old Prince Henry, created duke of York on 1 November 1494, in a further display of Tudor pomp and power. Summoned from the calm of his childhood home at Eltham Palace, south-east of London, the little prince rode through the streets of the City of London as part of an impressive procession of the Tudor elite, ‘sitting alone upon a courser [a warhorse]’. He was also created a knight and carried himself well through the elaborate ritual that accompanied the ceremony, culminating in his father girding him with the sword and dubbing him in the time-honoured manner. Afterwards, in a gesture that mingled paternal pride and affection with his innate flair for the public gesture, Henry VII hoisted his namesake son onto the table so that all present could see.
He must have wished that all his knights were as reliable as this attentive, dutiful small child. But they were not, and the king knew it. His spies and informers supplied him with all the unwelcome details, their network stretching into the great households of the realm, providing an abundance of information that was hard to sift. Implicated in the plotting were members of the household of Cecily Neville, the old duchess of York, and, a far greater blow, Henry’s own step-uncle, Sir William Stanley, the man whose intervention had been so crucial to his success nine years earlier at Bosworth. Stanley was chamberlain of the royal household and said to be the richest commoner in England. He had a high opinion of himself and possibly, as well, a deep-seated loyalty to the Yorkist cause that he had served faithfully in the reign of Edward IV. Perhaps he resented his brother’s elevation to an earldom while he remained a knight. For whatever reason, he forgot the golden rule of Tudor England, which was to be very careful where you put your trust. Henry VII had been watching him for some time. Betrayed by a colleague whose life was spared, Stanley was condemned to death at a trial presided over by his own brother in early February 1495 and beheaded a week later. His death demoralized the aristocratic support for Warbeck in England and was a blow to Warbeck’s hopes, though by no means a fatal one.
Hoping to exploit discontent in England and Ireland, Margaret and Maximilian eventually produced sufficient finance for Warbeck to attempt an invasion in the summer of 1495. It was, though, too little, too late. Attempting a landing at Deal in Kent in July, Warbeck discovered that the frequently cantankerous inhabitants of the county had no interest in welcoming him. In fact, they fought bravely and the ensuing bloodbath on Deal’s steeply shelving beach seems to have made Perkin very queasy about any further personal involvement in fighting. With Maximilian preoccupied by greater troubles in Europe and Margaret’s coffers empty, Perkin was now literally at sea. At the end of the month, he reached Ireland, hoping to aid the rebellion of the earl of Desmond that, at one point, seemed likely to tear the island apart. Desmond was besieging Waterford but even the arrival of Warbeck’s fleet of eleven ships could not break the determined resistance of the citizenry. This setback turned the ‘duke of York’ into a fugitive in the very place where he had been invented four years earlier. Yet all was not lost. By the late autumn his faithful backers, aided by the Irish lord Hugh O’Donnell, who met with James IV in Glasgow to plead Perkin’s cause, had found a way out and a new sponsor. So Perkin escaped to Scotland and to a warm welcome from James, now firmly in charge of his own destiny and determined to make his Tudor rival’s life as difficult as possible.
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JAMES IV’s motives for supporting Perkin Warbec
k were driven, however, by something greater than a desire to embarrass Henry Tudor. His developing self-image and his ambitions for his kingdom were focussed on enhancement of Scottish standing in Europe. By the summer of 1495, his sights were set on entering the Holy League in his own right and he was prepared to abandon the French alliance to achieve this aim, particularly if it meant that he could marry either Margaret of Austria, daughter of the Emperor Maximilian, or one of the daughters of Ferdinand and Isabella. For the time being, Perkin Warbeck was a card he would keep up his sleeve. There was no need to play this hand too soon as the Scottish king, a keen gambler, well knew. James was never a man to underestimate his own worth, nor did he see the need to be subtle in his diplomacy. When he got nowhere with Maximilian, he looked to the south. By September 1495 Bishop Blacader, a stalwart and able negotiator, like most high-ranking men of the cloth in those days, was at the Spanish court in Tarazona expressing his king’s wishes for a much closer relationship between Scotland and Spain. He could also point out the disadvantages that might arise if his master was not taken seriously: breaking of the truce between England and Scotland and the possibility of supporting the Yorkist claimant if James did not get his way. Faced with this unexpected overture from a king whom they had hitherto regarded only as a junior partner of France (albeit one who might distract Henry VII from making war on France if the English king found he needed to defend his northern border against a belligerent Scottish foe), the Spanish monarchs played for time by announcing that they would send two ambassadors to Scotland for further discussions with James himself. This ploy went disastrously wrong when the ambassadors, travelling much more slowly than the returning Blacader, found that their instructions to continue stalling had been intercepted and were already known to James himself. His public humiliation of the Spanish diplomats was a calculated insult to Ferdinand and Isabella.
No doubt he was disappointed by their duplicity but he could not have been entirely surprised. It had been a brazen first attempt to catapult himself into the top rank of European monarchs. Yet he was not deterred. He had already spelt out the alternative and now he would proceed exactly as he had threatened. On 16 October 1495 James presided over an unusually large council meeting in Edinburgh. Forty of the country’s leading nobles and churchmen, including the king’s younger brother and heir, the duke of Ross, were present. Though no record of their discussions survives, it is clear that the main topic was whether to receive Perkin Warbeck. Even if concerns about the true identity of the pretender were raised – and by no means all of James’s nobility were keen on a war with England, which seemed the likeliest outcome of embracing Warbeck – the dubious voices did not prevail. On 20 November 1495, Perkin and his small, bedraggled retinue rode through the gates of Stirling Castle to a warm welcome from the king. Perkin was received as ‘Prince Richard of England’, given a house in the town, royally clothed by his new sponsor in, among other garments, ‘a greatcoat of the new fashion with sleeves, in velvet, lined with damask’ and invited to tell his story to the lords and barons of Scotland at an especially summoned meeting in Perth. By this time he was so accustomed to repeating the fabricated version of his miraculous survival and wanderings that he probably believed it himself. And Perkin was undoubtedly a fine actor and very persuasive. James seems to have taken to him at once on a personal level. But did he really ever believe that this new arrival at his court, an impecunious wanderer taken up and then abandoned by some of Europe’s most powerful rulers, was, indeed, the younger son of Edward IV of England?
Rationally, almost certainly not. James had seen how useful, at least for a while, Perkin had been to others and the time seemed right to derive what advantage he could from supporting the impostor himself. The course of his actions from November 1495 to October 1497, when he effectively abandoned Warbeck, indicates that Perkin’s value to him had been cleverly assessed from the start. A document from the end of December 1495 was witnessed by someone described as ‘Richard Plantagenet, son of the serene prince Edward, illustrious king of England, as he asserts’.7 This is hardly a declaration of confidence in the recent arrival. And yet, at this time, the king of Scotland was already preparing for his guest to marry a distant kinswoman, Lady Katherine Gordon, daughter of Alexander Gordon, the earl of Huntly.
Perkin’s Scottish marriage is frequently cited as the major proof that James IV must have believed in him but this is not necessarily the case. If he liked the young man, as he seems to have done, the king probably saw no great harm in providing a bride from the Scottish nobility, without agonizing too much about whether the bridegroom was genuine or not. The gesture was an earnest demonstration of his own sincerity and perhaps also of the romantic side of his nature.8 This was the stuff of the tales told by the professional storytellers who entertained James and the court through the long nights of the Scottish winter, or of the makars, the poets whose output was part of a golden age of Scottish literature. A handsome prince who had narrowly escaped death and lived the life of a fugitive, miraculously rediscovered and come to claim his birthright, was to wed a beautiful and virtuous noble lady. What heart could not warm to this story, or praise the Scottish king as the young couple’s benefactor?
In truth, the union was somewhat less glittering than it first appeared. James IV was not offering a close relative to Warbeck. Katherine Gordon is often described as the king’s cousin but this was a term very loosely used in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries; Katherine’s mother, Lady Annabella Stewart, was, in fact, James IV’s great-aunt. Such a marriage, would, however, undoubtedly add shine to the pretender’s somewhat tarnished prestige. It also sent a message to Henry VII that this troublesome impostor might make things even more difficult by establishing his own spurious dynasty, backed by Scotland. If the earl of Huntly entertained any misgivings about his daughter’s future should her husband’s identity prove false, he must have quickly overcome them. The young lady’s own views are similarly unknown and would not have mattered much in any case. She married at the command of James IV, a man who loved women but, as with all men of his time, viewed them as the weaker vessel and certainly not to be consulted in such matters. At the back of his mind may well have been the realization that he was wedding her to a young man who was a complete fraud but he could equally argue that, impostor or no, if the rediscovered duke of York was successful in his bid for the English throne, then Katherine would become a queen. And he, James, would expect to dictate the future of the entire British Isles.
The marriage was celebrated in Edinburgh, on or around 13 January 1496. This would have been about the earliest time after Warbeck’s arrival in Scotland permitted by the religious calendar, which did not allow weddings in Advent or over the Christmas period. Though an arranged union, it appears to have been a happy one. Perkin had every reason to be delighted with this great improvement in his prospects and in his bride herself, who was, by all accounts, a very attractive young woman. Perkin seems to have been enchanted by Katherine, addressing her in the most flowery of language: ‘All look at your face, so bright and serene that it gives splendour to the cloudy sky; all look at your eyes as brilliant as stars, which make all pain to be forgotten, and turn despair into delight; all look at your neck, which outshines pearls; all look at your fine forehead, your purple light of youth, your fair hair; in one word, at the splendid perfection of your person; and looking at, they cannot choose but love you.’ Perhaps Perkin’s ardour did have an effect, for Katherine was to prove a loyal wife, even when the heady days of her husband’s wooing were replaced by the eventual realization that his cause was lost.
The Scottish king was pleased with his support of ‘the duke of York’ and no doubt gratified that the match was acceptable to both parties, but it was a means to an end. James IV was looking for personal glory and he intended to send a message to the English that, from now on, they would have to deal with him. If Henry VII had ever entertained any hopes that the pro-English party in Scotland would prevent war, by the
summer of 1496 he was forced to accept that James’s intentions were bellicose and that the young King of Scots would not sit quietly in Edinburgh for much longer. The pretender’s cause gave James all the excuse he needed for a military confrontation and he would not be deterred. The time for talking was over and the longer Warbeck stayed without matters being brought to a head, the more of a drain he and his followers were on the Scottish exchequer. James could not command Henry VII’s financial resources, though he was not the pauper that some have made out.
Here was a real possibility to put England at a disadvantage and to gain territory at the expense of a king preoccupied by the prospect of domestic rebellion and the desire to assure the European powers that he could handle all the threats against him. Henry knew earlier than his fellow monarchs that Perkin had found refuge in Scotland and was keen to persuade them that it was a matter of no importance in his relationship with the King of Scots. In March 1496 his instructions to the Richmond Herald, sent on a diplomatic mission to France, were deliberately nonchalant:
