'Perkin Warbeck'
The
Yorkist Pretender known as ‘Perkin Warbeck’ was the most dangerous threat
Henry VII ever faced. He was dangerous for three reasons: first, the breadth
and depth of his foreign support; second, the persistence of his campaign,
which was not thoroughly suppressed until, after eight years, he was executed;
and third, the fact that Henry – despite his boasts to the contrary –
never knew for certain whether or not the young man’s claims were true.
He claimed to be Richard,
Duke of York, the younger of the princes in the Tower: not murdered, as
his ‘brother’, Edward V had been, but spared by the tender-hearted killer
and spirited abroad. The story was thin and implausible, but not impossible.
When he surrendered to Henry VII at Taunton, in October 1497, he put his
signature to a confession that stated that he was, in fact a Fleming,
‘Piers Osbeck’, the son of a Tournai boatman. That name was false, and
the young man’s connnection with the real Werbecque family of Tournai
was never properly established; Henry, in fact, refused to do so. The
mystery remains.
The
Pretender’s first public appearance in his Yorkist-prince persona was
in Ireland, in 1491. He was about 17, strikingly elegant and handsome.
He had arrived in Cork in fine clothes, ready to be received as a claimant
to the English throne, though whether his exact identity had been fixed
by then is as obscure as the rest of his history. He had come from Portugal,
where he had spent the past four years, and where he was known already
as ‘the White Rose’. Before that, he had been in Flanders. He had left
on the finest ship of the Portuguese fleet and under the protection of
Edward Brampton, a Portuguese merchant-swashbuckler and old servant of
Edward IV, whose influence at various times was crucial to the young man’s
success – or instrumental in his failure.
There is no need to give credence to the story,
contained in his ‘confession’, that the Pretender was literally kidnapped
off the quayside at Cork and made to play a prince. The plot was already
advanced when he arrived, thanks partly to the efforts of two old Yorkist
servants – John Atwater, the mayor of Cork, and John Taylor the elder,
a land-manager-turned-refugee – and largely to the machinations of Margaret
of York, Duchess of Burgundy, the sister of Edward IV. Henry knew early
that these were the people to blame. By the time the young man arrived
in Cork, he had already been spying on him for four years.
After Ireland, the Pretender’s career advanced
fairly swiftly. In the summer of 1492 Charles VIII invited him to France,
keeping him there in honour until Charles concluded the Treaty of Etaples
with Henry that November. The Pretender then moved to Malines in Brabant,
to Margaret of York, who (as Henry and his historians thought) had probably
been his secret protector for many years already. Margaret provided the
young man with an honour guard, palaces to live in, a coinage and most
important, an introduction to her stepson-in-law, Maximilian, King of
the Romans, the most important ruler in Europe. Maximilian and ‘York’
met in Vienna in November 1493, and instantly became friends. A small
fleet was assembled slowly with Imperial and Burgundian funds, preparing
to invade England at some point in 1495.
Meanwhile, attempts were made to prepare the
ground in England itself. The Pretender sent out letters to various Yorkists
of standing, and drew some of them over to Malines to see him. Many were
convinced, and Yorkist networks up and down England were partly reactivated.
But, in general, the country was weary and reluctant to revive the Wars
of the Roses. Besides, it was not yet clear what the new Pretender amounted
to, or how strong he was. The men around him were never impressive and
– unlike Lambert Simnel – he himself was often the main figurehead, leader
and strategist, to disastrous effect.
Henry’s
agents had already thoroughly infiltrated the Pretender’s ‘court’ at Malines,
and at the end of December 1494 Sir Robert Clifford, an officer of Edward
IV’s and a confidant of the Pretender’s, was persuaded to reveal all he
knew for a payment of £500. Possibly, he had been a double-agent all along.
Among the names he revealed was that of Henry’s own chamberlain, Sir William
Stanley, who had vaguely expressed a willingness to back the Pretender
if he knew him to be genuine. This was treason enough, and Henry, though
shocked and reluctant, made an example of Stanley and other chief conspirators
by executing them. By the spring of 1495 the conspiracy had been broken
in England, and was never to revive. The Pretender’s invasion in July,
with 14 small boats, was a pointless episode that ended in wholesale slaughter
on the beach at Deal, while the young man himself sailed swiftly away.
After a few forays in Ireland, he made for Scotland.
James IV had been in touch with him for some years, and gave the Pretender
a hearty welcome. Here, as elsewhere, the Pretender tapped into a readiness,
even an eagerness, among European rulers to make life hell for Henry VII
and to settle old scores; but also, as elsewhere, he charmed his hosts
into sponsorship that went as far as love for him. James – though he
knew no better than anyone else who the Pretender really was – showed
his disposition to believe in him by giving him his kinswoman, Lady Katherine
Gordon, in marriage. The marriage, which appears to have been a love-match,
certainly produced one son and probably a second, miscarried or still-born,
in the two short years in which the Pretender and Katherine were allowed
to live together as man and wife
Together, James and ‘York’ invaded Northumberland
in September 1496. The Pretender, sickened by the bloodshed, fled after
two days. As a result, James cooled somewhat towards him, but kept him
honourably and expensively in Scotland for ten more months. In July 1497,
however, with Henry’s armies marching against him, James sent the Pretender
away by sea, intending him to invade England from the south-west. This
the young man eventually did, turning down an offer to go instead to Spain
as Ferdinand and Isabella’s pensioner. This decision sealed his fate,
and showed to what degree he had now embraced ‘Richard’s’ cause as his
own, whether or not it was.
The Cornish campaign began with deceptive success.
Some 8,000 Cornishmen in this discontented corner of England joined the
Pretender’s force. They besieged Exeter, in Devon, but failed to take
the city, and after marching to Taunton the Pretender panicked and fled.
He was forcibly extracted from sanctuary in Beaulieu and taken back to
Taunton, where he agreed to the confession that had already been drawn
up for h
That
confession, with other pieces of propaganda such as a plainly spurious
‘letter to his mother’, was distributed in the Low Countries but left
hardly any trace in England. It had no effect on the Pretender’s European
allies, who continued to support him
and love him as before: both Maximilian and James IV suspended
their diplomacy with England while they made various efforts to release
the Pretender from custody, or to smooth the way for his eventual return.
It also had little effect on the Pretender’s closest English supporters
who, although they had been pardoned by Henry in 1497, started plotting
again on their prince’s behalf two years later.
As
for Henry – still having no idea who his prisoner really was – he took
him into his court ‘at liberty’ and treated him like a captured nobleman,
to the astonishment of contemporaries. He was allowed to see his wife,
though not to sleep with her, to avoid the risk of prolonging his claim.
Only when the Pretender tried to escape, in June 1498, was he put into
close confinement in the Tower. A combination of spontaneous and engineered
plotting inside and outside the Tower, involving the imprisoned earl of
Warwick, the last truly authenticated Yorkist heir, as well as the Pretender,
eventually persuaded Henry to execute both of them
The
Pretender was hanged and beheaded – for high treason, an impossibility
if he was a Fleming – at Tyburn on 23 November 1499. On the scaffold he
denied that he was the second son of Edward IV ‘or anything of that blood’.
Such words were so vital to Henry that they may have been extorted from
him; or they may have been true. What is incontestable is that he played
the part of an English prince, completely plausibly and without mistakes,
for six years in public, and continued in private to insist on his claim
right up to his execution. History still reserves the final verdict on
him.
Ann Wroe is an editor with a leading British
publication. She is the author of several books including Pontius Pilate
and Perkin: A Story of Deception.