The Last White Rose (11 page)

In France, the ‘duke’ was received at court with full royal honours and given a retinue, together with a guard of honour commanded by an expatriate Scot, William Monypeny, Sieur de Concressault, who was an intimate friend of King Charles. He was also joined by about a hundred Yorkists. The most
respectable of these were Sir George Neville, once an Esquire of the Body to Richard III who had been knighted at Stoke Field by Henry Tudor, and an outlawed Cumberland gentleman called Edward Skelton who had fought for Lincoln at Stoke. Members of the little court were told to hold themselves in readiness for an imminent invasion of England.

When the French acknowledged Warbeck, the cat was out of the bag. The fate of the young Princes in the Tower, the great mystery of the century, had stirred everybody’s imagination and the report that one of them had survived aroused widespread excitement. Vergil tells us that the story was believed not merely by all the common people in England but by many of the ruling class. Old loyalties awoke among Englishmen who outwardly seemed to have accepted the new dynasty. In 1485 men with a lot to lose had risked everything to avenge Edward IV’s children and, just as they had rebelled against King Richard, for the same reason they might rebel against King Henry.

In Hall’s fanciful prose, then ‘there began sedition to spring on every side, none otherwise than in the pleasant times of year trees are wont to bud or blossom’.
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‘Widespread plotting started,’ says Vergil, more prosaically. ‘Many nobles got involved, some out of sheer foolhardiness.’ He stresses that it happened only after people realized the implications – if the ‘duke’ was genuine, then the king’s right to the crown was in question.
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Henry saw at once that he was in graver danger than at any time since Richard III had hacked his way towards him on Bosworth Field. In Vergil’s words, the king’s spies reported that ‘rumours about Richard, the Duke of York come back to life, were dividing all England into factions, filling people’s minds with either hope or fear, as nobody could fail to react deeply to such news. Depending on his particular temperament, everyone thought it was going to end in his own peril or profit.’
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Henry knew that unless he defused the situation there would be an upheaval which might destroy him.

He possessed one great advantage, his subjects’ dread of
attainder. They had seen, over and over again, that the new king knew just how to use such a terrible weapon. An attainder put a man outside the law, banishing him from the community – until the day he died he would be hunted for his life. A popular song of the time that apparently was sung all over London at this period,
The Ballad of the Nut Brown Maid
, gives us some idea of what it meant to be attainted.

My destiny is for to die

A shameful death, I trow,

Or else to flee: the one must be,

None other way I know

But to withdraw as an outlaw,

And take me to my bow …

For I must to the greenwood go

Alone a banished man …

For an outlaw, this is the law,

That men him take and bind,

Without pity hanged to be,

And waver with the wind.

Significantly, the ballad attributes high rank to the hero and heroine, the man being the heir to an earldom and the girl a baron’s daughter. Even the most convinced Yorkist had reservations about joining a rising that might result in his attainder.
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Yet from the start, Henry VII suspected the ‘Duke of York’ might be a fraud. Obsessed with Margaret’s implacable enmity, he thought she must have trained the boy before he arrived in Ireland, a mistake echoed by Vergil and Bacon. Even so, for months he had to face the devastating possibility that this might indeed be one of the Princes in the Tower.

Luckily for the king, French support for the Yorkists depended on France’s foreign policy. Although Charles VIII had welcomed Perkin as a pawn in his war with England, his attitude
changed when he decided he wanted a peace settlement that would leave him free to invade Italy without his kingdom being attacked by the English in his absence. As part of the Treaty of Étaples, signed on 3 November 1492, Charles gave his word not to help any rebellions against Henry. The invasion of England promised by John Taylor in his letter of the previous November was cancelled and the pretender forced to leave France.

Perkin moved to Flanders where Margaret of Burgundy welcomed the handsome, well-mannered young man and became convinced he was her nephew, although she had never met the real Duke of York. ‘So wild was her joy that it seemed to unhinge her mind,’ says Vergil. ‘Eager for everyone to see how delighted she was, she made a point of constantly congratulating her nephew in public on his escape and never stopped making him repeat the story of how, having been saved from death by a ruse, he had wandered through different countries.’
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In a letter from Margaret to Queen Isabella of Castile in August 1493, she wrote that she had recognized he was her brother’s son by unmistakeable signs, his identity being confirmed by the way he answered questions about his childhood. ‘Only too aware that he is now our family’s sole survivor after all its disasters and misfortunes, I was deeply moved and … have accepted him as an only grandson, as an only son.’
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Bacon claims that Margaret polished up Perkin’s manners, and gave him ‘the delicate title of the white rose of England’, with a bodyguard of thirty halbardiers in striped liveries of murrey (mulberry) and blue.
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Believing that a restoration was merely a matter of time, the Yorkists sent an envoy to Margaret to find out when ‘Duke Richard’ was planning to arrive in England, so that they would be ready to rise in support. The envoy was Sir Robert Clifford who crossed over to Flanders in June 1493 with his father-in-law William Barley, a gentleman from Hertfordshire. When he reached Malines, Clifford explained to Margaret what the conspirators were planning at home. Ecstatic, the duchess presented
Clifford and Barley to Perkin, who impersonated Richard with his accustomed flair, after which Sir Robert reported to the Yorkist leaders in England that the young man really was the son of Edward IV.

The most important of the ‘conspirators’ mentioned by Vergil were William Stanley, the king’s chamberlain, Lord FitzWalter, steward of the royal household, Sir Gilbert Debenham, a Knight of the King’s Body, and Sir Humphrey Savage – Stanley’s brother-in-law. Clifford had set the plot in motion, recruiting these four, who formed the core of a revitalized Yorkist faction, between mid-January and mid-March 1493. Their plan was to wait for an invasion and then rise: they also meant to assassinate Henry. Meanwhile, to encourage people to rally behind the cause they spread rumours all over England that the youth at Malines was indeed Richard, Duke of York, but so discreetly that no one hearing the rumours was able to learn of their origin.
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Although King Henry’s agents alerted him that a rebellion was probably imminent, they could not discover the men who were behind it or what they had in mind, and while he himself sensed some sort of treachery among his courtiers he was unable to identify any of those involved. Expecting fresh trouble in Ireland, Henry again sent troops to Dublin. There are indications that during the summer of 1493 he also expected an invasion of England, on the same scale as Lincoln’s, if not larger. He established his headquarters at Kenilworth and sent ships to patrol the North Sea.

Sir Robert Clifford, a younger son of Thomas, Lord Clifford (a Lancastrian killed at the second battle of St Albans in 1461), had once been a devoted follower of Edward IV. He had rebelled against Richard III and had fought for Henry’s cause at Stoke where he was knighted on the field of battle. His presence at Malines, with that of Sir Gilbert Debenham from Norfolk who had arrived at the duchess’s court before him, implied there was genuinely solid support for the ‘duke’ in England – although if Margaret and her ‘nephew’ had known how Clifford had
received a pardon from King Richard in return for spying, they might have given him a less enthusiastic welcome.

As soon as he was established at the White Rose’s court, Sir Robert contacted the key people behind the ‘duke’, working closely with them. One of these, of course, was John Taylor. Another was the treasurer for the ‘duke’, a humble Yorkshireman called Rowland Robinson, who had fought for Lincoln at Stoke and then escaped to Malines where he had been in Margaret’s service ever since.

In England, Henry grew more increasingly nervous. Polydore Vergil tells us he sent chosen men to guard the coast and the ports – like King Richard before him. Besides being ordered to stop anyone who looked suspicious from either entering or leaving the country, they were given powers to prevent ships from sailing. As far as possible, all roads and paths near the sea were patrolled, while the local authorities were also told to watch for assemblies of armed men who might be planning a rising.

The royal network of agents stepped up surveillance, abroad as well as at home. ‘During this time the king sent spies into Flanders, Some were instructed to pretend they had fled to the reborn Duke of York, and then find out the conspirators’ plans as well as their names. Others were to persuade Robert Clifford and William Barley to come home by offering them a pardon,’ we are told by Vergil. When the spies arrived they would have been helped by Flemish agents in Henry’s pay, who were already working undercover at Malines – some recruited from among the duchess’s courtiers.

Meanwhile, Henry’s spies in Flanders had been trying to discover whether his rival was an impostor and, if so, to track down his real origins. By the late summer of 1493 they had learned the truth, but it was a long time before their story was generally accepted, despite the king circulating it as widely as possible. Recently, the story has been questioned by Anne Wroe.
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On 20 July of that year, in a letter to Sir Gilbert Talbot, the king refers to a ‘feigned lad called Perkin Warbeck, born at Tournay’.

For the agents had discovered that the duke’s real name was Pierrequin Werbecque, a Walloon from Hainault in what is now south-eastern Belgium, who had been born at Tournai around 1474, the son of a well-to-do bargee on the River Scheldt. (This was a highly paid profession, the barges taking corn to the coast for export and bringing back the wines from Burgundy that were so popular at the ducal court.) In 1483 or 1484, ‘from Christmas unto Easter’ he had worked in the house of an English merchant at Middelburg called John Strewe, to learn his language. Later, he entered the service of Sir Edward Brampton, a Portugese Jew who had converted to Christianity and become Governor of Guernsey, but fled to Flanders after Bosworth. In 1487 Perkin accompanied Brampton’s wife on a voyage from Middelburg to Portugal, picking up useful details about the Yorkist court.
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Leaving the Bramptons, he spent a year at Lisbon, working for a one-eyed Portuguese knight called Pedro Vaez de Cogna. Then, because he wanted to see other countries, he took service with the Breton merchant Pregent Meno.

Many people wondered if this ‘official version’ of the young man’s origins might be no more than a smear campaign. His supporters pointed out that he possessed an unmistakeably regal presence, while by the time the English authorities circulated their version he had developed an extremely plausible cover story that some historians think might possibly be true. The outlines of it are in a letter he sent to Queen Isabella of Spain on 8 September 1493, the gist of which is as follows:

His elder brother, the Prince of Wales, son of King Edward, had been assassinated, He himself had been delivered to a gentleman who had orders to kill him, but who, pitying such a little child, spared him and made him swear on the sacraments to conceal his name, birth and descent for several years. After this, he sent him away under the care of two persons who were both jailors and governors. He then led a wandering life of danger and misery for nearly eight years during which his governors kept him in concealment in different parts of the world, until at last one of them died and the other returned to his own country. In consequence, he was left alone while still almost a boy. Having spent some time in Portugal, he went to Ireland where he was recognised.
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