The Last White Rose (10 page)

7
.
Materials,
op. cit
., vol. II, pp. 337 and 339.

8
. Vergil,
op. cit
., p. 32.

9
. D. Luckett, ‘The Thames Valley Conspiracies against Henry VII’,
Bulletin of the
Institute of Historical Research
, 68 (1995), pp. 164–72.

10
.
Rot. Parl.
,
op. cit
., vol. VI, p. 436.

11
. I. Arthurson, ‘Espionage and Intelligence from the Wars of the Roses to the Reformation’,
Nottingham Medieval Studies
, 35 (1991), pp. 145–6.

12
.
Plumpton Corr
,
op. cit
., letter lxxi; Leland,
Collectanea
, vol. IV, p. 257.

13
.
Calendar of the Close Rolls, Henry VII
(
1485–1500
),
2 vols, London, H.M.S.O., 1955–63, vol. 1, 672, pp. 196–7.

6

Winter 1491–Autumn 1494: One of the Princes in the Tower?

‘At this time the King began again to be haunted with spirits, by the magic and curious arts of the lady Margaret, who raised up the ghost of Richard duke of York, second son to King Edward the fourth, to walk and vex the King.’

Sir Francis Bacon, The History of the Reign of King Henry VII
¹

Perkin Warbeck’s arrival on the scene came as a profound shock to the king, who at first wondered whether this really was one of the Princes in the Tower, returned from the dead – Edward IV’s son, the Duke of York. For at the start of his career Perkin seemed most convincing. Quoting people who had met him, the chronicler Hall says, ‘he kept such a princely countenance and so counterfeit a majesty royal that all men did firmly believe that he was extracted of the noble house and family of the Dukes of York’.
²
Should this be true, he was infinitely more dangerous than the Earl of Warwick – and Henry was well aware that all too many of his subjects wanted it to be true.

In 1490 there had been yet another abortive plot to rescue Warwick, by Yorkists hoping to exploit the war with France. In February the king acknowledged a letter from the Bishop of Durham reporting the capture of Sir Robert Chamberlain (a former Knight of the Body to Richard III), his two sons and a group of friends at Hartlepool, who had been trying to leave the country for France. Henry asked for ‘these rebels and traitors’ to be sent to him urgently.
³

An attainder of October 1491 explains why the king was so keen to lay hands on them. Chamberlain and Richard White, a Norfolk gentleman, had planned to kill him and start a civil war: they had been financed by Charles VIII of France, the ‘ancient enemy to our said sovereign lord’. Their plot must have have hinged on a scheme to replace Henry with Warwick.
⁴
White was charged on 23 August 1490 with engaging in conspiracy and Chamberlain on 17 January 1491, which suggests that both had been under close surveillance for some time. Sir Robert was beheaded on Tower Hill within a month of his arrest but White received a pardon as he stood on the scaffold under the hangman’s rope. (Dramatic reprieves were a feature of fifteenth-century justice, staged to show the king’s merciful nature.)

The French then decided to send an expedition to Ireland in support of Warwick. The brains behind it were those of a Yorkist exile, John Taylor – ‘the elder’ as he signed himself – a middle-aged cloth merchant and former customs officer from Devon. On 15 September 1491 Taylor wrote from Rouen to John Hayes ‘late of Tiverton, Devon’, whom he appears to have met recently during a secret visit. A priest-bureaucrat who had also been in the Duke of Clarence’s service, but was now a receiver of rents at Exeter and Dartmouth for many of the West Country’s leading landowners, Hayes had confided in Taylor that he still felt a secret loyalty to Clarence’s son Warwick.

Coloured by an exile’s nostalgia, Taylor’s letter reminded Hayes of ‘words we spake together in St Peter’s church of Exeter, and at the Black Friars when ye were at your breakfast’.
Telling him how to get in touch, Taylor recommends Thomas Gale of Dartmouth:

ye may speak with him by the same token that he and I communed together at matters touching your master’s son in Stockingham Park when Sir John Halliwell hunted therin, and be you not afeared to show all your mind unto him for he is trusty … the token between you and me is that such as I shall send unto shall take you by the thumb.

(Gale was another staunch Yorkist. Once Clerk of the King’s Ships for Richard III, he had lost his job as a consequence of the new regime. Living at Dartmouth, where he had been both the MP and the mayor, he was the ideal man to help an invasion force.)

The real message of Taylor’s letter was that Charles VIII had been advised by his council to help Warwick, ‘your master’s son’. If the earl and his supporters could reach France, then King Charles would provide troops, ships and money. Those who arrived penniless would get financial assistance ‘if they be known for true men for the quarrel’. Taylor adds that help was coming from two other places outside England, by which he must mean Flanders and Ireland. It is likely he hoped to recruit his old friend because he envisaged a Yorkist expedition landing in the West Country and seizing Exeter.

After reading this exceptionally dangerous document, which reached him on 26 November, Hayes threw it into the fire, but it was saved and handed to the authorities, and he was arrested, the letter being copied in his attainder as a traitor in 1492 – the only reason for its survival.
⁵
When the king read it, he must have smiled grimly at one sentence in particular. ‘The [French] king and his council say they will ask nothing in recompense, but … do it for the wrong he did in making Henry King of England.’ John Taylor the Elder would bitterly regret that he had ever put pen to paper.

Instead of landing in the West Country, the French went to Ireland, a mere 120 troops on board two small ships. Disguised as Englishmen, wearing surcoats with the Cross of St George and flying the English flag, they landed somewhere near Cork at the end of November 1491. Taylor, who accompanied them, quickly became aware that after the disastrous episode with Lambert Simnel there was little enthusiasm for taking up arms for Warwick – everyone knew he was locked up in the Tower of London.

Even so, Taylor’s Yorkist agent at Cork did his best to find support, encouraged by the English-speaking Irishmen’s dislike for the Tudor regime. The agent was John Atwater, a highly respected merchant who had twice been mayor of the city. He came to Taylor with a staggering proposal – to replace Warwick as pretender to the throne with the younger of the Princes of the Tower, the Duke of York. For, as if by a miracle, Atwater had discovered a doppelgänger.

In October or November 1491 the citizens of Cork had seen strolling along the front a handsome, fair-haired youth in his late teens, dressed in silken clothes, who had come ashore from a ship belonging to a Breton merchant, Pregent Meno, and was wearing his master’s clothes. He looked so distinguished that they asked him if he was the Earl of Warwick, the Duke of Clarence’s son. Seeming alarmed, in the presence of the Mayor of Cork and swearing on the Gospel and a crucifix, ‘I took mine oath as truth that I was not the foresaid Duke’s son, neither of none of his blood [no relation]’, the youth recounted long afterwards. ‘And after this came unto me an Englishman whose name was Steven Poytron, with one John Atwater, and said to me, in swearing great oaths, and said that I was King Richard’s bastard son, to whom I answered with high oaths that I were not.’

Convinced he was a Plantagenet, Atwater and Poytron told him to forget his fears. If he would fight for his rights, they would do all they could to help him. They were certain that the earls of Desmond and Kildare would do the same if it meant
being revenged on the English king. ‘Against my will [they] made me to learn English and taught me what I should do and say. And after this they called me Duke of York, the second son of King Edward IV, because King Richard’s bastard son was in the hands of the King of England.’
⁶

All this comes from Perkin Warbeck’s confession, made several years later. Although it sounds convincing enough, it should be remembered that he was desperately trying to exonerate himself from as much of the blame as possible. One cannot rule out the possibility that Atwater and Taylor had brought him to Ireland to impersonate the duke.

Taylor wrote to Maurice FitzGerald, Earl of Desmond, asking him to help the ‘Duke’ recover his throne and received an enthusiastic response. As a result, Perkin, Taylor and the French expedition – now his ‘retinue’ – stayed in Ireland for some months, almost certainly at one of the many castles of Desmond who was the great magnate in the area around Cork, ruling a huge swathe of south-western Ireland from which he took his title. Called ‘
an bacagh
’ (the lame) by the kern, Desmond was a cripple who had to be carried everywhere in a cart or a litter, yet he possessed the power of life and death over his people, and used it. Perkin’s stay with the earl may have been fairly nerve-racking. (At Strancally Castle on the Blackwater, the Desmonds had acquired a name for inviting enemies to dinner and then starving them to death in a dungeon before throwing their bodies into the river through a ‘murdering hole’ cut in the rock.)
⁷

Taylor presumably spent the time with the Earl of Desmond in improving the young man’s English and instilling the background of his ‘royal’ boyhood. Perkin was an apt pupil. Bacon, although relying more on imagination than documentary sources, recaptures his extraordinary charm: ‘he had such a crafty and bewitching fashion, both to move pity and to induce belief, as was like a kind of fascination and enchantment to those that saw him or heard him.’
⁸

It is likely that Kildare also encouraged him. Both FitzGerald earls welcomed a pretender, genuine or not, as long as he could make trouble for Henry VII. So did most Irishmen who came in contact with the boy, since nearly everyone in the Pale and the Irish seaports, and in much of the adjoining territory, remained Yorkist. The Scots were equally delighted: an entry in James IV’s accounts for 2 March 1492 records a payment to a man who brought letters from ‘King Edward’s son and the Earl of Desmond’.
⁹
On the other hand, the Irish lords had no wish to invade England – they remembered what had happened to Sir Thomas FitzGerald and his kern at Stoke Field.

Henry’s spies had reported the Duke of York’s presence in Ireland fairly soon. Although at this stage unaware how dangerous the duke was, the king had reacted by sending a small force of troops to Dublin in December 1491 as a warning, besides releasing his Irish subjects from allegiance to Lord Deputy Kildare.
¹⁰
Perkin’s principal Irish adviser John Atwater realized that the prospects of the ‘Duke of York’ in Ireland were not exactly promising.

Changing his plans, Taylor informed the French authorities that here was just the young man they needed and King Charles sent a flotilla over to Ireland to bring him back to France. Etienne Fryon, until recently Henry VII’s French secretary, was on board. According to Henry’s court poet Bernard André, Fryon, who had also been secretary to Edward IV, then spent several months in tutoring Perkin and furnishing him with details about the old Yorkist court and the Yorkist royal family, until he knew by heart the names of every member of King Edward’s household ‘as though he had known them from the days when he was a little boy’.
¹¹