The Tudor Rose (36 page)

“It seems that the two men were frightened and buried them hastily beneath the bottom stair as Tyrrell told them. But Tyrrell says that when King Richard heard of it he was uneasy. They were Yorkists, of his own brother's blood, he said. They must be buried in sacred ground and a solemn requiem said over them. Yet he had wanted them dead. Such inconsistency taxes my credulity.”

“But Richard was like that. It was as if there were two Richards: one whom you hated and one whom you—came dangerously near to loving. I can imagine that he could deliberately kill and yet worry about the shriving of his victim's soul. And his family arrogance was prodigious.”

“Then perhaps it is true. You knew him better than I,” said Margaret, rising with a sigh. “At any rate Will Slaughter told somebody that the following night he saw a shuffling old priest and a man muffled to the eyes creep to the place and exhume them. And now, as you know, the priest is dead.”

“And so all this renewal of agony has been to no purpose, Madam? Henry has not even their poor bones to show.”

“But the public confessions of these two men have persuaded people that the Duke of York is dead.”

Elizabeth lay back with closed eyes. “And I suppose that every tavern in London hums with it.”

“Say rather every tavern in England!” said Margaret. “And everywhere the name of your Uncle Richard is execrated.”

With the perfect timing of a man who has escaped an unpleasant half-hour with a woman, Henry came to join them. “I am sorry, Elizabeth, that you must go through all this again,” he said. “But at least it will serve to kill this widespread belief that was becoming so dangerous to our dynasty.”

“For the sake of our children's security I can bear it,” Elizabeth assured him.

“I would not go so far as to say security,” he said cautiously. “But how could I expect foreign powers to conclude marriages with them while pretenders kept digging at the foundations of my throne? Now we will invite the Spanish Ambassador to dine again.”

“That must be a matter for much satisfaction,” said Elizabeth expressionlessly. “But who, then, is the young man in Flanders?”

“Does it matter?” shrugged Henry.

“No, I suppose it does not,” agreed Elizabeth. “And will Sir James Tyrrell be given a governorship or something on the Isle of Wight too?”

“Be patient, my child!” advised Margaret, touching her gently on the shoulder.

Henry eyed his wife with uncertainty, wishing she would not speak like that. “Let Tyrrell have his day,” he said, gathering up some of his everlasting documents. “He has served my purpose. Later, you will see. I shall deal with him.”

But for once Henry was over-optimistic. Belief that is based upon desire dies hard. There were many Englishmen who had cause to want back a son of Edward the Fourth. Archbishop Morton, as Chancellor of the Exchequer, had proved too clever an extortioner. Henry's trade reprisals against Flanders had hit the London merchants hard—so hard that they wrecked the rich Steelhouse wharf where foreigners from the Hanseatic towns reaped double harvest from the trade they might not enjoy. And practical as he was, the Tudor lacked the common touch which had made many a worse King better loved. So that, in spite of those hard-won and gruesome confessions, interest in the pretender grew.

It was like a cloud above the Tudors' lives. At first it had been just something which they joked about. But gradually, as the years went on and more and yet more people believed—or, for their own ends, pretended to believe—that a son of Edward's still lived, it began to darken their world—and perhaps even to cloud their own certainty. Because it affected them both it brought Henry and Elizabeth closer together. But it affected them differently. To Henry, with his poor claim to the throne, the whole affair stood for affront and fear; whereas to Elizabeth—although it brought fear for her family—it never really ceased to hold a shining element of hope. A hope which she wore herself out trying to extinguish, knowing it for the crazy thing it was.

A
LTHOUGH THERE WAS LITTLE money forthcoming for the Queen to buy herself silver shoe-buckles, there always seemed to be plenty of money to pay the King's spies. Seeing that even murderers' confessions could not quench the rumour that one of the Princes had escaped, he drew carefully hoarded gold from his coffers and sent a whole posse of spies to comb the towns of Western Europe and to ferret around the household of the Dowager Duchess of Burgundy. They were a long time gone, and when they came back and began to piece their information together it was not very consistent. But they had at least found a name for the mysterious young man who was beginning to be known abroad as the Duke of York and sometimes—to Henry's exasperation—as Richard the Fourth of England.

It was the unromantic bourgeois name of Perkin Warbeck.

“Or was it Osbeck?” they debated.

They really did not seem very sure. But they were all agreed that he had lived in Picardy, in the prosperous town of Tournay.

“Then how is it,” asked Elizabeth, who had been summoned to the King's room to hear them, “that he speaks such faultless English?”

“Jean de Warbeck, his father, being a free burgess of the town, sent him into commercial houses in Antwerp and Middlesburg, where he had much to do with English merchants,” one of Henry's spies told her. “We have proof that one year he was there from Christmas until Easter.”

“Not very long in which to learn a language,” pointed out Sir William Stanley, sceptically.

“In order to perfect it, Sir, he was sent into Portugal in the household of Sir Edward Brampton, and remained there for months,” he was told.

“But still in a foreign country,” said Elizabeth, remembering for how long a time a faint French accent had clung to her husband's speech in spite of his being Welsh bred and born.

“It is possible that this young man may actually have been born in England, Madam, while his parents were on a commercial visit here,” explained Archbishop Morton, who had been invaluable in assembling the varied and conflicting evidence. “Jean de Warbeck was, it seems, a converted Jew, and it has even been suggested that either for that reason or in order to encourage the Flemish trade your illustrious father himself may have stood godfather to the child.”

“Are his parents dead?” asked Lord Stanley.

“His mother, Katherine de Faro, is thought to be still alive.”

“And was this Katherine de Faro particularly beautiful?” enquired Jasper Tudor with a meaning smile, joining in the conversation from the chair to which illness now confined him.

“Of that we have no evidence, milord,” the informers said solemnly, surprised by his seeming irrelevance. “But probably, since the young man himself is said to have the asset of good looks—”

“If you are suggesting, my good uncle, that this Warbeck child was something more than godson to my father,” interrupted Elizabeth crisply, “then I think your ingenious idea is shattered by the unlikelihood of his Grace bestowing upon him the name of Peter, or any of its absurd diminutives.”

“How did this Perkin turn up in Ireland in the first place?” asked Lord Stanley, returning more realistically to the matter in hand.

Archbishop Morton consulted a voluminous sheaf of papers. “For the sake of travel, or for some love of adventure which was in him, he appears to have gone there to assist a Breton merchant called Pregent Meno, who dealt in velvets and other expensive fabrics,” he said.

“Then it was probably these fine fabrics bedecking his elegant person which so impressed the Irish and bedevilled them into believing that he must be some important personage!” suggested Stanley, with his rich indulgent laugh. “Well, write the whole matter down,” ordered the King, who had been listening in attentive silence.

And as the Palace clerks made a great shuffling with their parchments and inkhorns milord Archbishop, who had been standing beside him, leaned closer. “It is an interesting story, Sir, and would look well in print,” he suggested, his fine dark eyes glittering with lively intelligence.

“And probably more persuasive to the masses than in manuscript,” agreed Henry, making a note to write yet again to his Holiness in Rome about a Cardinal's hat for so able a Primate. “Well, milords, that should lay this bogey for ever and set the Queen's mind at rest,” he added more formally, in that precise, rather high-pitched voice of his, while drawing his gown about him and rising. “I would have you know that I have already written to the Archduke acquainting him with our findings and asking him to expel this gross impostor from Flanders. So now let us leave these good people to prepare their news for the printing press while we betake ourselves to the council-chamber. There are fresh dispatches arrived from their most Christian Majesties of Spain, and we would discuss the all-important matter of the marriage of our right well-beloved son the Prince of Wales with their daughter, Princess Katherine of Aragon.”

Elizabeth, taking his courteously outstretched hand and allowing him to escort her from the room, was sensible of the new lightness of his step. “So you see it turns out to be, as I told you, just another foolish pother over another tradesman's son,” he said smugly, at parting. But, while agreeing with the common sense of his words, Elizabeth shared nothing of his relieved lightness. As she passed along the gallery towards the garden with her ladies she experienced an extraordinary flatness, as if some hope held insanely in the back of her mind had once again been dispelled. So that coming upon Sir William Stanley and Sir Robert Clifford standing together beneath an archway, she felt impelled to ask, “And what do you two gentlemen make of it?”

Each of them held a document from which dangled the royal seal, and they had been so close in conversation and ceased speaking so abruptly at her approach that she was sure they had been still talking about Perkin Warbeck.

“In spite of all this reassuring evidence, the King has very sensibly issued orders to all of us to hold ourselves and our men in armed readiness in case of trouble,” replied Sir William, covering his embarrassment with a statement of fact which was no answer at all.

“And what do
you
think, Sir Robert?” persisted Elizabeth, trying to make her voice as cold and casual as possible. “You who were at first so much impressed that you lived for several months in the pretender's entourage?”

Robert Clifford's position was a delicate one, and although he now enjoyed the King's favour the Queen's forthright way of speaking disconcerted him. “All the carefully amassed information we have just been listening to must, of course, be correct,” he answered carefully. “But the backers in this business were singularly fortunate in finding a young man who so much resembles your Grace's family.”

Although this was the very confirmation which Elizabeth's heart sought, her chin went up proudly and her hand went to the locket beneath her gown. “Surely your judgment must be at fault,” she rebuked him, “if it ever saw anything in common between a mercer's son and my father's!”

Like a good Court Chamberlain, Sir William hastened to say the tactful word. “If either of us really believed for a moment that this Perkin Warbeck was your Grace's brother,” he swore, tapping the summons he held in one hand with the back of the other, “your Grace must know that I would not lift my sword against him.”

But Elizabeth left them feeling that the good man was both worried and uncertain. She wished above everything that she could see her Aunt Margaret of Burgundy and find out just how much that woman, whom she remembered with so much liking, had been activated by hatred of the Lancastrians and how much by belief in Perkin as a nephew. It must be more than ten years since Margaret Plantagenet had seen the real Dickon in England, when he was only a child of eight. After ten years, confronted by a grown man, could anyone be certain? Could she herself, who had seen him more recently? But of course her heart would cry out at sight of him and tell her. And it would all be confirmed because he would remember things—small foolish things which only the real Dickon would know. But why think about it? Why stand there with the tears in her eyes? Why keep recalling the loveableness of his personality, or the enchantment of his smile? Dickon was dead. Smothered, poor terrified precious, by Dighton's or Forest's rough, hell-hound hands. And had not she herself dreamed of Ned's crying out to her during that long night?

To hope to see Dickon again in this world was madness. Of course Margaret of Burgundy, whatever she believed, was acting merely as the adoring sister of a dead Yorkist King. Only the previous evening Elizabeth had heard her husband dictating his letter to the young Archduke Philip and complaining that her malice was both causeless and endless. Henry could not, it seemed, rid himself of the conviction that she had been responsible, too, for all that trouble when Lambert Simnel had impersonated Warwick. “Being a woman past childbearing, she now brings forth full-grown imposters,” he had written. “Can she not instead be grateful for the joys which Almighty God serves up to her in beholding her niece Elizabeth in such honour, with children to inherit the throne of England?” As usual, Henry had set forth his arguments with reasonableness and restraint, preferring to conclude with a request rather than with the threats which he was undoubtedly in a position to make. “As Charles of France discarded this impostor,” he had written, “so I entreat you to do the same.”