The Last White Rose (17 page)

Having dealt with the Cornish – as he supposed – King Henry sent ambassadors to negotiate a peace with James IV. His first demand was that the ‘Duke of York’ must be handed over to him, soothing the argument by adding that the King of Scots need feel no embarrassment at doing so because the young man was an impostor. However, a seven-year truce was agreed at Ayrton in September 1497, without the surrender of the duke.

During the negotiations Perkin left Scotland, sailing from the port of Ayr in July in a ship provided by James, with his wife and child on board. The vessel, ironically called the
Cuckoo
, was a merchant ship belonging to a Breton merchant named Guy Foulcart who had been hired by the king. It looks as though James had lost none of his liking for the young man, despite realizing at last that he was an impostor. He ignored his value as a bargaining counter and the high price, diplomatic and financial, that he might have got by handing him over. On the king’s instructions, his boat was escorted out of port by Scotland’s two most formidable privateers, Andrew and Robert Barton.18

Henry’s spies soon informed him of the
Cuckoo
’s departure from Ayr. Yet it was impossible to intercept her as nobody knew where she was bound. Could her destination be Cornwall, whose inhabitants had such good reasons for disliking King Henry? Once again, the ‘duke’ had baffled his opponent.

9. Autumn 1495–Summer 1497: The Scots and the Cornish

1
. Vergil,
op. cit
., p. 92.

2
.
CSP Sp
,
op. cit
., vol. I, 169.

3
. Gairdner,
History of the Life and Reign of Richard the Third,
p. 300.

4
. Vergil,
op. cit
., p. 84; Hall,
op. cit
., p. 474; Bacon,
op. cit
., p. 127–8.

5
.
LP Hen VII
,
op. cit
., vol. II, pp. 325–6.

6
. W. Busch,
England Unter Den Tudors
, vol. 1, ed. J.G. Cotta, Stuttgart, 1892, trans. A.M. Todd as
England under the Tudors
, vol. 1,
Henry VII
, London, 1895, p. 105.

7
. H. Ellis,
Original Letters Illustrative of British History
, 1st series, London, 1824, vol. 1, p. 23.

8
.
Ibid.
, vol. 1, p. 25.

9
.
Calender of State Papers and Manuscripts … at Milan (1385–1618)
, London, 1912, vol. I, p. 490.

10
. Vergil,
op. cit
., p. 88.

11
.
Chronicles of London
,
op. cit
., p. 210.

12
. Hall,
op. cit
., p. 475.

13
. Bacon,
op. cit
., p. 135.

14
. Bacon,
op. cit
., p. 137.

15
.
Chronicles of London
,
op. cit
., p. 215.

16
. I. Arthurson,
The Perkin Warbeck Conspiracy 1491–1499
, Stroud, Sutton, 1994, p. 165, quoting TNA, PRO KB9/441/6.

17
. Bacon,
op. cit
., p. 142. 18. Gairdner,
Richard the Third …, op. cit
., p. 317.

10

March 1496: The Grand Prior Plans to Poison the King

‘the said Prior of St John and Sir John Tonge, and Archdeacon Hussey, the three of them being at Rome … sought ways and means of procuring the death of the King of England.’

Deposition of Bernart de Vignolles, March 1496
¹

The Grand Prior of England of the Order of St John or ‘Knights of Rhodes’ was a pillar of the realm. A monk-knight who had taken vows of religion, he sat in the House of Lords where he ranked as premier baron of England and was styled ‘My Lord of St John’s’. His priory at Clerkenwell was one of the most magnificent religious houses in London, with valuable estates just outside the city (including St John’s Wood and Hampton Court) that brought in an annual income of over
£
2,300.

The Knights of Rhodes enjoyed huge prestige as Christendom’s frontline troops, who confronted the never-ending Turkish threat in the eastern Mediterranean and the Aegean. Their magnificent defence of the island of Rhodes in 1480, when, despite being heavily outnumbered, they beat off an unusually determined and well-led besieging army, had earned them the admiration of all Europe. Several English brethren had taken part. Since the rents from the commanderies, as their houses were known, paid for such an excellent cause, few people begrudged them their large, meticulously run estates. Occupied by a commander and a chaplain, these houses also served as recruitment centres.

The current Grand Prior was Sir John Kendal, or Fra’ John as he was known in his Order, who has been called ‘the outstanding English knight of his generation’.
²
We know what he looked like from an Italian portrait medallion, which shows the profile of a tough if reflective-looking man in middle age with the long hair of the period, but little is known about his origins except that judging from heraldic evidence he belonged to a family of minor Westmorland gentry from near Kendal. Nor has much been discovered about his early career.
³
What can be deduced is that during the 1460s he joined the Knights at Rhodes as a very young man, taking vows and serving a specified number of ‘caravans’ on board the Order’s galleys in the Mediterranean and Aegean, preying on Muslim shipping and raiding coastal villages in Greece or Anatolia. Once he had completed his sea caravans, he became eligible for a commandery.

He stayed on Rhodes for longer than most brethren, as Turcopolier (the officer who led the Turcopoles or native troops). He was not present at the siege of 1480, however, but instead travelled all over Europe seeking reinforcements. Four years later he was sent to Rome as a member of the Order’s legation, acquiring a working knowledge of Italian, which he spoke and wrote fluently if ungrammatically. After becoming Grand Prior of England in 1489 and returning to his native land, he visited Flanders, France and Italy a good deal, on the business of both his Order and the king, serving on the royal council. He
also went on diplomatic missions to the Scots, which made it necessary for him to spend a considerable amount of time at the Border city of Berwick.

The Grand Prior employed a servant called Bernart de Vignolles who, while Fra’ John was away in Flanders, negotiating with Archduke Philip’s government, obtained leave of absence, having said he wanted to go to Normandy, to see his brother. At Rouen, on 14 March 1496, he made a long and rambling deposition before French lawyers – who no doubt alerted their government – which he then sent to one of Henry’s agents. The document contained a number of alarming allegations about his master.

The most serious allegation was that Kendal had been plotting to murder King Henry. Among those involved were his nephew Sir John Tonge, who was commander of Ribstone in Yorkshire, Dr John Hussey, Archdeacon of London, and the archdeacon’s nephew, together with a man named Lilly and another called John Atwater, and also the Grand Prior’s secretary, John Yolton. (Atwater is not to be confused with Perkin’s ally.) All of these people were implicated in the conspiracy, alleged Bernart, their object being to procure the death of the king, his children and his mother Margaret Beaufort, and anyone close to him, in particular members of his council.

According to Bernart, when Kendal, Tonge and Hussey were at Rome together a few years previously, they had consulted a Spanish astrologer called ‘
mestre Jehan’
who told them he could arrange what they wanted, if they paid him: to demonstrate his power, he supposedly murdered a Turkish servant of Sultan Bayezid’s brother Cem, who was a prisoner of the pope. The three conspirators then returned to England, leaving behind a Sardinian servant of the Grand Prior, Stefano Maranecho, who gave the astrologer a large sum of money on their behalf. However, the man kept on demanding further payments, while doing nothing to earn them.

Two years later, the three had sent Bernart de Vignolles to Rome with orders to kill the astrologer, as he was telling everyone
in the city that they wanted to murder the King of England. But when Bernart reached Rome, instead of killing the man he went to another astrologer, who offered to come to England by way of Santiago, disguised as a friar, and arrange for Henry’s death. Because Bernart did not have funds to pay for the journey, the astrologer made up a lethal poison. Contained in a little wooden box, this was an ointment which, so he said in a message for the Grand Prior, if smeared on the king’s doorway was guaranteed to turn anyone passing through it into a murderer who would kill him.

Opening the box when he returned to his lodgings, Bernart found ‘a vile and stinking thing’ which he threw away in disgust, but on the way back to England he bought from an apothecary at Orleans a similar wooden box which he filled with a mixture of earth, quicksilver and soot from the chimney. In London, he gave the box to the Grand Prior, warning that if it remained in the house for more than twenty-two hours he would be in grave danger – he must keep it outside. Much alarmed, Fra’ John told him to throw it as far away as possible, where no one could find it.

Three or four weeks later, when Bernart was very ill, Kendal had come to his bedside and offered him a horse and money if he would leave England. He replied that he was too weak to do so. The sickness lasted for six months but the Grand Prior kept on trying to persuade Bernart to go overseas, as though fearing that he might be arrested and, under interrogation, incriminate himself and his friends. He was delighted when Bernart asked for leave to return to France.

What should one make of this weird tale? At that date Rome was full of sinsister rumours of poisoning, used to explain the deaths of great personages that baffled physicians – although the vast majority of such deaths must have been due to natural causes. The only poisons available were belladonna and aconite, with a few other noxious herbs, none of them very effective, or arsenic which betrayed its presence by the excruciating
agonies it inflicted. Yet even educated people believed that an expert poisoner was capable of killing anyone if he wanted to, and until 1491 Kendal had often been at Rome, where he was chamberlain of the hospice of St Thomas to which the Husseys also belonged.
⁴
It is of course just possible – but only just – that the Grand Prior was both murderous and credulous, and that Bernart was telling the truth.