by Ann Wroe
He had told it repeatedly, and could do so now if you required it of him, together with the sighs and tears that such a history called for. As a fatherless child of about nine, he and his brother Edward, who was twelve, had been committed to the Tower of London on the orders of their uncle Richard, Duke of Gloucester. Edward was supposed to await his coronation; instead, he had been killed. He himself, however, though tipped for death, had been spared and bundled abroad. He had been forced into wandering ‘in various countries’ without a name or a background that anyone knew, or was allowed to know. In this way, he passed eight desolate years. Towards the end of them, apparently not yet free of aimlessness and poverty, he ‘spent some time in the kingdom of Portugal’.
Meanwhile, his uncle had been crowned as Richard III. His reign was short. In 1485 Henry Tudor, the Earl of Richmond and a sprig of the House of Lancaster, returned from exile in Brittany to encounter Richard at Bosworth. The king was cut down like a dog in the midst of the battle, and his rival was acclaimed as Henry VII in his place. To try to defuse the claims of York, and to dampen England’s affection for that house, Henry married Edward’s eldest daughter and united their lines. Yet Yorkist claims, true or false, continually dogged him. Every year, risings occurred in some part of England or another. As Henry suppressed them, gradually accustoming the country to his firm and careful rule, the most dangerous claimant of all, this young man, Richard Plantagenet, remained in hiding. He waited only his moment, and the backing of other princes, to cast down Henry Tudor and send him back into the obscurity from which he had come.
So his story stood in most of Europe in 1494. But in 1497, when Henry captured this young man, a different tale eclipsed it. It came in the form of an official confession, already known and publicised in part beforehand, to which he apparently now agreed and put his signature. According to this, he was no prince, but the son of a customs-collector, John Osbeck, who worked up and down the River Scheldt at Tournai, on the border of France and the Burgundian lands. (His own name, though not given in the confession, was established at the same time as Piers Osbeck.) As a very small boy he had been put out to board with his aunt, then sent away to learn Flemish, only to be shuttled back home as war broke out between the local towns and Maximilian, then Archduke of Austria and regent of the Burgundian Netherlands. At the age of nine or ten he went to Antwerp with a merchant of Tournai called Berlo and, almost at once, fell sick. He remained ill for five months, lodged at a skinner’s place beside the House of the English Merchant Adventurers. He was ‘brought from thence’, still convalescent, to the market at Bergen-op-Zoom, where he stayed two months at a tavern called ‘The Sign of the Old Man’. After that he was hired by John Strewe, a merchant, possibly English, of Middelburg in Zeeland, and then by Sir Edward Brampton’s wife, who took him as her page to Portugal. After a year there, restless again, Piers put himself into service with a Breton merchant who took him to Ireland. There, some Yorkist malcontents decided to press him into service as a false Duke of York.
Brampton himself, a Portuguese-born merchant, soldier and royal servant, gave a different version of this young man’s life before he had resurfaced as a prince. He told it to Spanish investigators in Setubal, in Portugal, in 1496. Again the boy came from Tournai, the son of a boatman called Bernal Uberque. He had not, however, gone into trade, but had been placed with an organist in the city. There for some years he had learned el oficio, the profession of playing music, especially at the Mass, but eventually he had run away. His age then, according to another Setubal witness who said he had talked to his father, was ‘fourteen going on fifteen’: still a tender child, by current thinking. He was a moço to Brampton, the Portuguese for a servant boy, though once or twice he used the word rapaz for him, slang for a youth. Typically for the time, Brampton did not use his name at all. But he too thought that he was called ‘Piris’, or Piers.
Ending up in Middelburg, Piers became an assistant to a man who sold purses and needles. His shop was opposite the house where Brampton’s wife was staying, taking refuge from the plague in Bruges, and the boy became friendly with the French children who were kept in her service. When he heard that they were all going to Portugal, Brampton said, Piers pleaded to go with them and join their family. In the end – almost, it seemed, to stop his pestering – they took him. But he was not with them long before he suddenly announced that he wanted to go home. When next heard of, he was being followed as King Edward’s son in Ireland.
All these stories, ostensibly so different, were linked by wandering and jeopardy. The prince had roamed for years, in desperate sadness, in countries he scarcely knew. The boy of the confession had travelled widely under multiple masters, always vaguely discontented, wanting to move on. In Brampton’s testimony, he deliberately ran away from Tournai towards the sea; once in Middelburg, he begged to go to Portugal. He desired, his confession said, ‘to see other Countries’. Polydore Vergil thought his poverty and baseness, oppressing him from childhood, had impelled him to wander, like the ‘land-loper’ Henry called him. He longed constantly for the strange and new.
John Mandeville, in his book of travels, described such restlessness as a characteristic of northern Europeans. The moon, the mother of the waters, was their planet of influence, and they wandered as she did, lightly about the world. Unlike the natives of broiling India, stilled by Saturn’s dryness and passivity, they could not stay unmoving or uncurious. Possibilities impelled them: of profit, fame, love, escape. Their longing could be summed up in the phrase per adventure, which meant, then, ‘perhaps’.
This notion of adventure ran all through life. A young man’s sexual equipment was his denrées d’aventure, the gear with which he hoped to take a chance with girls. Ordinary men and women ‘put their honour in adventure’ when they picked a quarrel with someone violent or implacable. Merchants were ‘venturers’, their adventure a part-share in the ship in which they hazarded their cargoes and their profits. The precarious foundation of the career of Jacques Coeur, high steward and argentier of France, was summed up by the chronicler Georges Chastellain as galées vagans par les estranges mers, galleys wandering on foreign seas. The hunt, every man’s favourite exercise, was high adventure hazarded in local fields and forests. The deer, bounding into the trees and disappearing, was sent perhaps to lure the hunter into a land he did not know. He followed the quest as he was impelled to, though it might lead to the loss of his hounds, his horse or himself.
Venturers could also be found in every city and down every lane: travelling salesmen, itinerant priests, musicians, ex-students, way-walking beggars, mercenary soldiers dismissed from campaigns. They journeyed in the hope of sudden generosity or a lucky chance around the next bend in the road. Some looked for a new ‘good lord’ whose device they could pin in their hats. They would live by their wits, casting off old ties and loyalties, inventing names and histories as needed, and see how far that got them. Such wanderers often carried the tools of a spurious trade, a halberd, a rosary or a diploma, in the expectation that some sponsor or some dupe would appear on the horizon. If that hope failed, they would make for the next chance.
A man who put his body or goods in adventure, whether by trade or travelling or claiming a throne, was not entirely without defences. He kept, between his body and disaster, the thin surety of his own talents, like the well-caulked hull of a boat. A free and open heart, dwelling on future possibility and not constrained by what was feasible, was especially disposed to receive God’s grace and turn adventure to good use. Nevertheless, in general parlance, the word carried more fear than hope. The sense of risk and jeopardy was strong. ‘Unhappy adventure’ was not mishap, but catastrophe: Icarus with his wax wings or Phaeton in his father’s chariot, desperately losing control of the bucking and flaming horses of the sun.
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The date of the boy’s journey to Portugal, where all the versions of his life met, seemed to be sometime after Easter in 1487. He accompanied the wife of Brampton and possibly Br
ampton himself, who had come to fetch his wife from Middelburg. Bruges was no longer a good place to be, seething with political unrest, infected with plague and with trade so depressed that ‘such men as be of any substance . . . steal daily away’.
Brampton played down the boy’s presence on the trip. He had tagged along, he thought, mostly because he hoped to insinuate himself into Brampton’s household. Piers, on the other hand, was thrilled. His excitement showed through even in the stiff, fractured phrases of the official confession: ‘I went into Portugal in the company of Sir Edward Brampton’s wife in a ship that was called The Queen’s Ship.’ Whether prince or servant, or both at once, this was his first long voyage.
It was not necessarily an easy one, as Richmond Herald found when he went on an embassy to Portugal in 1489. The party left Southampton on January 19th, but bad weather forced them into Plymouth and kept them there until February 1st. They then sailed again, but the wind was so contrary that they had to make for Falmouth. There they landed ‘in a great tempest of wind, rain and bad rough weather’. Ten days later they attempted to sail again, managing a night and a day before ‘there was such a great storm of wind and rain that it was a marvel’. On February 15th came such a gust of wind that ‘the said ship took in . . . so much water that she was quite under water and all on one side for a while, and the great sail almost entirely steeped in the sea, and remained so a long time, about a quarter of an hour. And all the ambassadors cried to God, and to all the saints of Paradise . . .’
Richmond had sailed in the winter; the boy sailed later, when the weather should have been kinder. There may have been balmy days, skirting the enormous ocean, with the sun warm on the decks. The smell of Portugal was probably already on the ship, heavy in the perfume of the malagueta pepper Brampton imported. Malagueta grew in the steaming jungles of Cape Mesurado on the Guinea coast, where natives would barter a bushel for a bangle of brass. These ‘grains of paradise’, ground up in wine with sugar, ginger, mace and cinnamon, made hippocras, deeply aromatic and sexually stimulating, which Venus was said to serve lovers on their first visit to her tavern. It was just the sort of thing a fourteen-year-old page might try, having carried it round carefully to the adults with wafers, comfits and ground spices before they went to bed; several steps up from the weak wine and beer he drank routinely, and carrying deep in the beaker the smell of Africa and the Spice Islands.
Yet, according to Brampton, Piers had not found a haven in this household. He had been taken along out of impatience, with nothing particular to offer except, perhaps, a talent for music, and Brampton averred that he did not want him to be either his page or his wife’s. When they got to Lisbon, he broke the news to Piers, and seemed to assume he took it badly. Brampton’s wife was open to keeping him, but Brampton himself wanted no more French brats. He handed him on.
The handover was so swift that, in Portugal, no one seemed to associate the boy with Brampton, only with his wife. Yet their connection may not have been as slight as both implied. When Brampton gave his testimony, in the spring of 1496, he may well have been seeking to ingratiate himself with Henry VII (who was supposedly going to see it) by stressing how insubstantial the boy was and, especially, how little he himself had had to do with him. Bernard André, Henry’s court poet, said Brampton had kept the boy close for a long time, educating him in Yorkist lore. There is no proof of this. But Brampton claimed to know a lot about the boy, including his name, his father’s name, his address and his history in general. As for Piers, on this evidence at least, he seemed strangely taken with Brampton, to the point of deciding to leave Portugal when he realised Brampton did not want him.
His fascination was not surprising. Brampton was a most exotic combination of a Portuguese fidalgo and an English gentleman: as the patent rolls described him, ‘knight, alias of London, alias of Portingale, “merchant”, alias “gentleman”, alias a godson of Edward IV’. He was a wanderer and adventurer par excellence, a Portuguese Jew who had converted to Christianity in England, a member of Edward IV’s household and a businessman whose interests, in wool and wine as well as pepper, spanned northern Europe. For a while after 1482 he was captain, keeper and governor of the island of Guernsey, his highest official position, but one that seemed inappropriately static for him. He probably never went there, and was replaced in a year and a half.
His own career, like that of the strange boy he had taken in, had begun with a knock on a door and a change of name. The door he had knocked on, in about 1468, was that of the London Domus Conversorum, the near-empty house in suburban Holborn for converted Jews, where he stayed for about three years. At his baptism in 1472 he was sponsored by Edward IV himself (kings then routinely standing as godfathers to converted Jews), and took his name: Edward, or Duarte, Brampton, in place of Brandão.
The name he had been given before his flight to England was unknown, as was his father’s. He was probably the son of a Lisbon blacksmith who may not have been married to his mother, but Brampton preferred to insinuate, like any wandering knight, that he had noble blood. He had gone into exile in England not to better himself, he said, but because he had killed a man for calling him a bastard. He escaped in a small boat with no baggage except a cloak and a sword.
Brampton changed parties and countries as readily as he had changed religion, careful to keep on the winning side. In 1472 he had become an Englishman; in 1479 he became Portuguese again. By 1484 – Edward IV’s brother Richard now on the throne – he had acquired by royal grant the manors of Faunston, Rusheton, Great Houghton and Sewell in Northamptonshire, including eleven cottages, three crofts, three tofts, stanks, meadows, underwoods and warrens, but it was impossible to see him in such a setting of deep groves, drifting smoke and skylarks. His place was in the exchanges of Europe, or on the world stage that had opened out from Portugal.
He remained consistently helpful to Richard III, though in mysterious ways. In July 1483, not long after the two small princes had been committed to the Tower, he was paid £350 for services unspecified. His estates in Northamptonshire were given to him that year for ‘good service against the rebels’: the Duke of Buckingham and his adherents, who had risen against Richard the previous autumn in the hope, at first, of freeing the princes. Presumably Brampton was either unmoved by their cause or knew a rising was unnecessary. In 1484, he was given £100 a year from the customs for twenty years, ‘in consideration of services to be rendered by him according to certain indentures’ from Easter 1485. Kings by no means always gave their reasons, but these were big rewards. Conceivably, they had something to do with that irritating boy. It is impossible to know for sure.
Richard III’s defeat at Henry Tudor’s hands in August 1485 either forced Brampton out of England or kept him from returning. Bruges could shelter his ambitions for a time. He had been continually working there not only in trade but on the King of Portugal’s business, and within two years he was off again to Lisbon. João II welcomed him with estates, offices and a seat on his council. Back home and richly honoured – not least because he claimed to have been an intimate of English kings – Brampton could begin yet another new life.
Since he was still avoiding England in 1487, it seemed that his sentiments must be firmly Yorkist. But his sentiments were commercial. If he had a Yorkist prince, or the makings of one, in his baggage, it was because it was worth something to him; but the price of Yorkist princes was by then unpredictable, and that of settled monarchs steady. By May 1489, fresh-set in Henry VII’s good graces, he was acting as a facilitator for his envoys, including Richmond, in Lisbon, entertaining them ‘twice or thrice most honourably’ in his big house on the Serro dos Almirantes, and generally ‘doing them all the honour that was in his power’.
At that point, by his own account, he had long washed his hands of ‘Piris’. The official confession concurred with this: as soon as Piers arrived in Portugal, ‘I was put in service to a knight that dwelled in Lisbon, which was called Peter Vacz de Cogna.’ Pero Vaz da Cunha,
as he was called at home, was a knight of high standing at the court of Portugal, one of João II’s most trusted commanders and privy to his councils. His family were lords of Tavoa, Sinde, Azere and Pombeiro in the province of Beina, and in 1488 Martim Vaz da Cunha was killed, to the king’s great distress, fighting the Moors at Ceuta ‘like a good knight’. Other da Cunhas were international jousters, and were observed by Richmond on that same trip tilting at the court of Spain, after which they danced in disguise with the ladies. It was a mark of Pero Vaz’s status that his confessor on one of his naval expeditions was Master Alvaro, one of the most distinguished Dominicans of the day: ‘a person very remarkable for his life and learning’, in the words of Alvise Cadamosto, a Venetian explorer retained at the court, and a preacher to the king himself.
João actively preferred knights of this sort around him, rather than the grandees of the realm. He once famously compared them to the sardines that were landed in their thousands on the salt-flats at Setubal, ‘so many of them, and very good, and cheap’. By tradition, fidalgos like Pero Vaz – whom the king expected to be expert athletes themselves – were also charged with the instruction of Portuguese princes in horsemanship, feats of arms and ideals of chivalry. He may have trained his page in these, though all he is definitely known to have done with him was to dress him up like a doll, or like a prince.
Pero Vaz was described in the official confession – in which no one else was physically described – as a knight who ‘had but one eye’. It seemed a strange, gratuitous detail, almost a joke. Knights sometimes covered one eye with a piece of cloth until they had performed some deed of courage or adventure, keeping themselves half-blind for years, but this did not seem to be the connotation in Pero Vaz’s case. His one eye made him sound like a pirate, and there was something of that character in him. The Portuguese courtiers called him ‘Bisagudo’: Hatchet-face.