by Ann Wroe
Although Bemoy seems to have done nothing particular to add to the captain’s anxiety, the two men fell out with each other. Now they had reached the mouth of the Senegal, Bemoy’s home territory, Pero Vaz turned on the prince and killed him. Cadamosto told the story:
When Pero Vaz entered the river anaga with that great power, which amazed all the barbarians of that land, and while he was erecting the fortress (which they say is built in an ill-chosen place on account of the floods of the river), he stabbed Bemoy to death on board his ship, saying that he was preparing a treason. Some maintained that Pero Vaz was deceived in this, and that what chiefly condemned D. João Bemoy to death was the fact that many people began to fall sick, because the place was very unhealthy, and that Pero Vaz was more fearful of having to remain in the fortress when completed than he was of Bemoy’s treason.
The crime was treated with surprising leniency when Pero Vaz returned to Portugal. The erring captain was not punished, and João showed his sadness and ‘great displeasure’ only by ordering work to stop on the fortress on the Senegal. Resende thought it showed João’s ‘singular capacity and great piety’ that he suffered such a thing. Rui de Pina supposed the captain was excused because ‘many other people’ were somehow involved. The murder, it seems, was seen mostly as an offence against courtesy and hospitality, because Pero Vaz had held Bemoy ‘in his free power’, with no sign of ill-will from him, and yet had killed him.
It may be wondered how much of that distrust, and how much of that casual brutality, had been experienced by the page who stayed with Pero Vaz, however long he stayed. Perhaps the same hand that felled Bemoy on the ship at the Senegal, under the hot blue dome of an African sky, had also struck the boy who waited on him, almost as foreign and unknown. Or perhaps the whole Senegal incident, including the king’s inexplicable forgiveness, was coloured by that other charge Pero Vaz had: a boy who, servant though he seemed to be, could not be struck by his master, or by anyone, without some faint imputation of treason.
v
On whatever terms he was with his master, Pero Vaz’s boy made an impression in Portugal. Five or six years later, in 1496, he was remembered in the testimonies given to Spanish investigators in Setubal, that favourite retreat of the Portuguese kings. It is peculiar, of course, that he should have been noticed or remembered at all. He was supposedly nothing but a page, one of hundreds around the court. Yet something had drawn people’s attention to him, and made them identify him as the young man who was proclaiming, all round Europe, that he was Richard, Duke of York.
When Ferdinand and Isabella, Spain’s rulers, offered the Setubal testimonies to Henry VII, they recommended especially the evidence given by Rui de Sousa, a Portuguese nobleman and one of the most prominent figures at court. Indeed, his testimony was all they offered at first, adding the others as an afterthought. ‘He knows this business well, and is a person of authority and trust,’ they told their ambassador in London. ‘Having been on an embassy from Portugal to England, he knew the Duke of York very well. Two years later, he saw this other person in Portugal.’
De Sousa, the Lord of Sagres and Beringuel, was one of João’s closest advisers, so intimate with the king that when the two men argued it was the king, ‘with very few people’ and on a mule, who came to his house to apologise. ‘A person of much worth and authority, of good counsel and lively intelligence, very useful and of great grace and estimation’ was the assessment of Resende, who knew him well. Ferdinand and Isabella knew him too, for he had represented Portugal at the negotiations with Spain that preceded the Treaty of Tordesillas in 1494. There, after weeks of argument by de Sousa and his colleagues that pitted the claims of Portugal against the new discoveries made by Columbus, a line was finally drawn from pole to pole in the middle of the ocean, 370 miles west of the Cape Verde Islands, to designate owners for the new world and the world-yet-to-be-found.
Tordesillas marked the peak, and the end, of de Sousa’s diplomatic career. But he had long been entrusted with talks and embassies of similar importance. In 1482 he had been an ambassador to Edward IV’s court, renewing the old alliance and explaining to Edward that João now owned Guinea, despite any pretensions the English might have to exploring it. Edward was pleased with this embassy and received it with great honour, including an intimate sighting of his children singing and playing.
Accordingly, at Setubal, de Sousa was questioned first, and was asked to describe the little Prince Richard he had seen then. He had been deeply impressed with him, thinking him ‘very pretty, and the most beautiful creature he had ever seen’. He had heard people say since then that he and his brother had been put in prison, ‘in a fortress where a tide of water passed by,’ and that they had been killed. So who, he was asked, was the person who was saying he was the Duke of York now? He was a boy, said de Sousa, a moço,
who came to Portugal with the wife of Duarte Brandon, a Portuguese knight. I saw him walking in the Court of Portugal behind a fidalgo who was called Pero Vaz da Cunha, who treated him as his page. When they had the celebrations for the Lord Prince of Portugal [Pero Vaz] dressed him up, and I saw him in a doublet of brocade and a long gown of silk. And after that I knew nothing more of him until now, when I’ve heard what people are saying about him.
Far from a lapse of two years, as Ferdinand and Isabella supposed, between the little prince in London and the boy in Lisbon, five years had passed. De Sousa, by then an old man who was soon to die, did not seem to ‘know the business well’ at all. His knowledge of English affairs was very misty, his knowledge of the boy even more so. He did not seem to know his name, and gave only two sightings of him.
Yet two aspects of his evidence were intriguing. First, he had noticed the boy as he arrived. In the crowded life of a councillor-ambassador, there seemed no reason for this, unless some buzz had attended him. The buzz may have come from the ship in which he arrived. The Queen’s Ship, the Rainha, was one of the prize vessels of João’s fleet: ‘a most beautiful ship’ in Dr Münzer’s view. When he saw her in Lisbon in 1494 she was fully armed, with thirty-six big bombards and 180 smaller ones, preparing to take 200 men to Naples. Seven years earlier she was probably less well equipped, but it is still no wonder that the boy, affirming his confession years later in custody, bothered to mention her. The greater mystery is why João had sent her for Brampton and his household, however high ‘the captain’ – as he was called in Portugal – stood in his estimation. They sailed from Bruges in splendour. A boy who stepped from such a ship, sent by the king, was already perhaps proclaiming himself as someone.
De Sousa dropped other hints. He said that Pero Vaz ‘treated him as his page’, as if this was not necessarily the sort of boy he was. A second Setubal witness, Tanjar, a herald of the King of Portugal, gave the same impression. He had seen the boy ‘living with’ Pero Vaz, but did not say he was his servant. And he, too, knew that he had come in the retinue of Brampton’s wife, a woman of no particular importance at court. For some reason, the boy was drawing glances as soon as he arrived.
Tanjar gave a clue as to why people might have noticed him: ‘I never took him for a local, because it was plain to see that he was a foreigner.’ The difference did not lie conclusively in his fair hair, for there was plenty of racial mixing in Portugal, not least with the Flemings who had been recruited to colonise Madeira and the Azores. The richest men in Lisbon, Dr Münzer claimed in his patriotic way, were ‘Germans from Flanders’, whose tow-haired children were common on the streets. The queen and Prince Afonso, too, had fair hair, Afonso’s so bright that he was said to have ‘a face like an English child’. Something else made this boy different. Tanjar implied that he knew him quite well, though it was not until later – on a visit to Tournai, of which he said he was a native – that he encountered the boy’s father and learned his son’s name: ‘Piris, which is Pedro in Flemish’. Tanjar seemed not to have known it before, as though the strange boy at court went by some other name and claimed some other background. They
had got so close in Portugal, however, that the herald could describe the boy’s distinctive features: features that made people say, Tanjar added, that he was the Duke of York.
The boy’s clothes, too, attracted a strange amount of attention. Both de Sousa and Brampton commented on the doublet of brocade (‘with sleeves’, Brampton added) and the long gown of silk (‘and other things’, said Brampton). Of course the courtiers of Portugal were obsessed with clothes, especially oddities and extravagances, and may have naturally lighted on them. De Sousa, for all his eminence, contributed mostly to Resende’s songbook to poke fun at the clothes of his nephew, who had come back from Castile wearing ‘a big velvet hat which the Castilians call a seesaw’:
Nephew, you look as if
you’ve been in Valladolid;
you’re wearing three olive branches on your head!
But I will forgive you . . .
. . .
It shouldn’t happen to anyone
To bear such a weight on his head.
Afonso’s fiestas had been a special moment in the sartorial life of the court. In 1486, João – austere himself, and believing that austerity would do his subjects good – had passed strict sumptuary laws explicitly forbidding the wearing of silk and brocade ‘by anyone in the kingdom of whatever condition’. They were banned even for the king and queen and on days of fiesta, except as trimmings to people’s clothes. The law remained in force until the end of the century, with only one exception: in December 1490, for Afonso’s wedding, when silk and brocade were provided by special dispensation. This was precisely when the boy was noticed in his finery: at the moment when almost everyone at court was arrayed, just for a few days, in silk and brocade.
Yet de Sousa may well have picked him out for a different reason. The old councillor was renowned as a ‘maker of plays’, fazedor de momos – the best ever seen at court, some said. He was thought to be especially good ‘because he fits so well into this world we’re in’: that universe of contrived and alluring presentations. At Afonso’s wedding, de Sousa had been one of the three court officers who organised the joust-plays, together with Fernão da Silveira, the man who had so warmly recommended the arts of fine dressing and lying. In this capacity he may have remembered the boy at the fiestas not just for what he wore, but – since Brampton said he was ‘in’ them – for the part he played. It remains hard to say otherwise why the boy drew, or was allowed to draw, such attention to himself.
Rightly or not, some rumour of fame seemed to hang round him, and may have travelled further than Portugal. While he was there, Anglo-Portuguese contacts perceptibly increased. In 1487–8 Edward Woodville came twice through Lisbon. Woodville, ‘Monseor Duarte Senhor d’Escallas en Ingraterra’, was the uncle of Richard of York and of his sister Elizabeth, now Queen of England. His brother Anthony, Earl Rivers, had been the chief guardian of Richard’s brother Edward, and Woodvilles had provided some of the officers, and much of the influence, in Richard’s own small household within his father’s court. In effect, he had been a Woodville boy. The English visitor, though not counted as important at home and possibly keen to avoid meeting Brampton, who had chased him like a pirate across the Channel in May 1483, was much fussed over in Portugal for his royal connections.
On his way out, coming through Lisbon to fight the Moors in Granada ‘out of devotion, and to exalt our Holy Faith’, Woodville did not see the king, but he was fêted nonetheless with banquets and celebrations as João’s ‘magnificent and puissant . . . kinsman and friend’. On his return, João laid on toros, canas e momos, bullfights, cane-fights and plays, held a feast at which the principal nobles were present, and organised all kinds of pageants, ‘of which he was very fond, and of which he was a most cunning and careful inventor’, just as de Sousa was.
The boy was probably there, walking behind his one-eyed master; and he may also have been the reason Woodville had passed through. The ardent crusader did not need to go via Lisbon to fight the Moors, but could have made landfall in northern Spain without touching Portugal. He was said to have been discussing a marriage between one of João’s cousins and a sister of the Queen of England, but it seemed unofficial and half-hearted. On his return Henry VII gave him twenty marks, listing the payment among others for his spies. The king paid, too, for ‘a Scotsman with a beard’ to spy on Woodville for as long as the trip lasted and to send him information in the year that followed.
From that point until the summer of 1491 Henry paid special attention to this distant and friendly country, attention he had not shown before and was not to show again. In subsequent years, Portugal was mentioned only as the place that oranges came from, or swarthy sailors who brought wild cats and popinjays from the new land to the west. In 1488 and 1489, however, fairly generous payments – £6. 13s. 4d., £10 – were made every few months to unnamed agents coming from the Portuguese court. The interest reached its peak in Richmond Herald’s embassy of 1489, when João was presented with the Order of the Garter, a rare honour, as Henry’s ‘true ally and brother’, and in a five-month visit by João’s ambassadors from December 1490 to May 1491, when they were given costly silver cups with covers as Christmas presents. Prince Afonso’s marriage, piracy on the western seas, and Henry’s threats of war with France over Brittany explained some of this short-lived interest. They cannot explain it all. Henry had heard something, true or not, and was using his customary instruments to poke and pry.
Richmond himself seems to have gone to spy before he went as an envoy proper. He was sent to Portugal ‘for certain causes’, and apparently alone, in August of 1489, before joining the official delegation that left in December. (His August payment was listed alongside that of Carlisle Herald, who was sent to Bruges, Brampton’s town, a few days later.) On the later trip their main business was in Spain, where a marriage was under negotiation. In Portugal their only official errand was to give João the Garter, though they stayed seven weeks, following the court from place to place, enjoying the bullfights and dances, and observing.
Eight years later, it was Richmond who described the young man with the strange left eye as he rode out to give himself up. He gave no indication that he had ever seen him before, though it is not unlikely that their paths had crossed in Portugal. Brampton, as he played host to the envoys, could certainly have passed on information, and others too knew about the boy. As the English party rode into Beja to meet the king, and as they left again, de Sousa escorted them. They rode past a ‘beautiful high tower’ fortified with marble, from which banners flew, cannon fired and minstrels played on ‘cherumbelles and sackbuts, marvellously pleasant to hear from the height that they were in that tower’. The boy, too, may have heard them and craned his neck to see them, as their instruments glinted in the sun. Somewhere among the 700 or 800 barons, knights and squires who rode with Richmond and his colleagues, among the flags that fluttered all over town or among the dancers in the palace, he may have been observing the representatives of the king who was eventually to hunt him down.
The King of Portugal himself may well have been aware of him, from his arrival in the Rainha onwards. João was a man of restless curiosity in every branch of knowledge, from astronomy to artillery, and was also a keen observer of men, whose names and aptitudes he listed in a secret register. Like Henry VII, he was often unreadable, revealing to others neither his thoughts nor his designs. He died, in 1495, before the Setubal testimonies were taken, and never mentioned their subject directly in any correspondence that survives. In 1493–4, however, he sent Behaim the globe-maker as an emissary to ‘the king’s son in Flanders’.
Only one person was so described in Flanders at that point: the young man who was saying he was King Edward’s son, Richard, Duke of York. Later in the letter in which he described this mission, Behaim explicitly identified him. He had been sent to see ‘the young King of England, who is at present with the King of the Romans [Maximilian], so that he may live and keep his court there, etc.’ The casual and unequivocal referen
ce to who the young man was – or who Behaim and João thought he was – was all the more striking, since Maximilian himself was still not sure.
Officially, the mission was secret; Behaim was ostensibly going to sort out some payments he was owed for sugar. His journey turned out to be as frightening, for him, as any voyage out into the unmapped ocean. As he crossed the sea he was captured and ‘taken into England, together with my servants and all the money I had to pay my expenses, amounting to 160 gulden.’ He was then detained for three months ‘on account of the young king’ he was going to see, since tough restrictions had by then been placed on any movement of men or goods between England and the Burgundian lands, where the young man was favoured.
While in detention Behaim fell dangerously ill with fever, and reported that twice he lay with a taper in his hand, lighting the way for his soul to leave the body. At last, a ‘pirate’ took him secretly by night to France. But for that, he might have been imprisoned for many months more. As for the young King of England, Behaim did not find him, any more than he might have found the bearded rulers he had dotted notionally through Africa and the Indies; for Richard Plantagenet in those days was pitching his tent in Louvain, Innsbruck, Vienna or wherever else Maximilian might take him, and was seldom staying long enough anywhere to be pinned down on a map.
Though many in Europe that year were sizing up this young man and promoting his claims for their own ends, Portugal had never played those games. João knew who the King of England was and, being every bit as shrewd and pragmatic himself, had no desire to unsettle him. But in his court, at least, the interest persisted. At the end of 1494 João Fogaça, an officer of the household, sent a list of suggested questions for the chamberlain to ask Dr Münzer before he returned to Nuremberg. He was to be pumped for news, ‘fiction or not’, of the Great Khan, and then for information of what ‘the great ones of Castile’ were up to in Navarre and Aragon. After those typically Portuguese queries came more esoteric thoughts: