by Ann Wroe
And you may also ask him,
just as he leaves,
which side does the lord of Ravenstein prefer,
and Madame Margaret.
Will the prince come, or
won’t he, this summer,
and what will he do?
And what will he [the doctor] ask?
And what will you reply?
This was certainly the moment when Richard Plantagenet was arranging his invasion of England, when ‘Madame Margaret’ – Edward IV’s sister, the Dowager Duchess of Burgundy – was backing him with all her power, and when Philip of Cleves (‘Ravenstein’), who had been fighting Maximilian on the side of the rebellious Flemish towns, was still undecided. It seems that some, at least, at the Portuguese court were watching this ‘prince’ or ‘young king’ with more interest than was usually shown in the politics of northern Europe. Unlike their Spanish neighbours, they did not seem to question his claims or to ask who this figure was. They seemed to know.
Sometime in the 1530s João’s favourite page Resende, the songbook compiler and the boy’s contemporary, also remembered him. He gave him a verse in his ‘Miscelanea’, in which he listed the notable people and events of his times. Brampton, the brave and invaluable war-captain, was also in the collection, tam valente capitam / e valer tanto na guerra, but the two were not connected in Resende’s head, at least. Many verses separated them, and Brampton featured, next to Vasco da Gama, in one about famous soldiers. The boy, to Resende, had appeared in Portugal as a character alone and in his own right. Like de Sousa, the poet had no name for him, other than the one he was supposed to have assumed much later.
Vimos alcar Branca Rosa
por Rey muytos dos Ingleses,
foy cousa maravilhosa
que em dias e non em meses
juntou gente muy fermosa:
chamouse Rey natural,
a el Rey batalha campal
deu, mas foy desbaratado,
e por justicia enforcado,
por acharem non ser tal.
We saw the White Rose acclaimed as King by many of the English, and it was a wonderful thing that in days, not in months, he gathered people of the highest birth to him. He called himself their natural King, and gave the King battle on the field, but he was defeated and sentenced to hanging, because they thought he was not such a man.
Resende added a comment in the margin: ‘This boy came to Portugal, and was a page to Pero Vaz Bisagudo.’
It is not improbable that in Portugal the personality of the prince, whether judiciously hidden or deviously constructed, began to emerge from the shadows. Indeed, it is almost certain. He had taken courage, galante contra fortuna; he had breathed in the tang of the sea. At Afonso’s wedding celebrations, the most memorable pageant was a procession of dream ships. They sailed into the special wooden ‘fortress’ constructed for the jousts on bolts of cloth that were painted as stormy waves of the ocean, behind a great swan with white and golden feathers. The ships had quarter-decks of brocade, sails of white and purple taffeta and rigging of gold and silk, the whole ablaze with candles and oil lamps. When the make-believe masters and pilots in silk and brocade swung and climbed in the gold ropes, with a tumult of shouting and whistling, the mysterious boy was perhaps among them. Richard Plantagenet unfolded like the unfurling of the sail, the crack of the boards, and the intoxicating swing and dip of the ship as it moved, away from dreams, into the open water.
vi
By Richard’s own account, the decision to leave Portugal was sudden. Sometime in 1491, in the schoolboy Latin of his letter to Isabella of Spain, Inde ad Hiberniam navigavi, ‘From there I sailed into Ireland.’ By his own reckoning, he was seventeen going on eighteen. This was no longer a child-prince bundled from place to place by his guardians or left in an anomie of grief, but a young man suddenly in charge of his own life. He was going to Ireland to seek the protection and help of his ‘cousins’, the Earls of Desmond and Kildare, who had been alerted by letter to expect him. (In the seventeenth century, those letters still existed.) Once there, he would begin to show himself as King Edward’s son.
His choice of Ireland was simple. This was a place of strong Yorkist sympathies, where the lieutenancy of the elder Richard, Duke of York, Edward IV’s father, was fondly remembered. The duke had not tried to impose English ways on the Irish, as Henry Tudor was doing, but had allowed free rein to the ambitions of the Anglo-Irish lords such as Desmond and Kildare. Kildare was now Lord Deputy of Ireland, a post notionally held from the English crown; Desmond was the overlord of the south-west, in control of the ports that faced the outlying parts of Europe. Under a law passed by the Irish Parliament, devised when the elder Richard of York was organising his own counter-claim to the English throne, the English king’s rebels had immunity in Ireland. This law remained in force, and Yorkist movements had found good purchase even in the part of Ireland, the Pale around Dublin and Drogheda in the east, that was administered from London. So Richard sailed for this useful, half-wild country. He made for Cork, a relatively prosperous and cosmopolitan town in Desmond’s south-west: a good place for an aspiring Yorkist prince to go.
According to the confession, Piers went to Ireland too, but by a more tortuous route. After his year with Pero Vaz, he returned to commerce and to wandering. He felt, oddly enough, that he would not see the world with his old master. So he ‘took licence of him’, showing, as with Richard’s navigavi, the first gleam of independent action. He then put himself into service – the first time he had done so – with a Breton merchant, Pregent Meno, with whom he plied the seas for two or three years. At some undated point, assumed to be the autumn of 1491, they ended up in Cork. Once there, Piers walked the streets dressed like a mannequin ‘in some silks of my said Master’s’. The people of the town, deeply impressed with him, decided he must be of royal blood. A group of Yorkist partisans then prevailed on him to be a prince, almost any prince, of their house, so that they might seize back the throne from Henry Tudor. He resisted; they insisted. Once he had agreed, the adventure unfolded inexorably through half the countries of Europe.
Brampton too gave this story of random adventure, but with a very different start. A few days after Prince Afonso’s fiestas, he said, the boy went down to Lisbon harbour to try and take a ship home. One of Brampton’s servants was going back to Flanders, and the boy thought he might go with him. Since Brampton did not want to ‘take him in as his son’, Piers did not want to stay in Portugal any more. Somehow, however, he missed the ship for Flanders. Eventually, he found another that would take him; but it was stopping in Ireland first. He did not mind, he said. It didn’t matter to him.
As the ship docked in Ireland, Brampton continued, Piers put on once again the gorgeous clothes he had worn at the fiestas. The Irish, being wild people, immediately began to follow him, ‘and some started to say that he was one of those of Lancaster and others that he was King Edward’s son, and so people started to join him, until little by little matters got as they are now’.
Brampton’s ‘few days’ were probably a longer spell of time. One sailing was missed anyway, and it is not at all sure that the boy did not touch base in Flanders, where rumours of him sprang up that spring. Whatever happened, a ship seemed to drop him in Ireland eventually; and the scene that followed was the same, a boy walking into adulation. Both the confession and the Setubal testimonies stressed the importance of his clothes: the doublet of brocade with sleeves, the long robe of silk. In the English version of the confession it seemed to be pure chance that Piers wore them, or possibly a sales effort by Meno: a good-looking boy advertising his wares, like the sleek and well-dressed Africans left behind by Diaz.
Yet Meno was no silk merchant, and Ireland no place to find buyers. The trade of Bretons with Ireland was mostly in linen, canvas, tin and bay-salt; they took back white-fish and timber boards. Meno’s business was in raw wool, fleeces that he had to ‘bard, clean and clack’ before he shipped them. Clacking was the removal fr
om the greasy wool of lumps of mud and dung: not quite the job that a vain and restless boy would have held down for more than two years. Almost certainly he and Meno were together for only one voyage, the one that ended with his mobbing by the Irish.
In the French version of the confession, too, the silks were not Meno’s, but Piers’s own. Brampton substantiated this. He said that Piers, before he left Portugal, had folded up his finery into a bag and put on ‘other, old clothes’; then, as the ship docked, he took off his jacket and put on his silks again. The idea of cutting such a figure among the wild men of Ireland came from his head alone, perhaps in imitation of sailors who, preparing to land in some unknown part of Africa, would put on their ‘gala clothes’, as Vasco da Gama described it. It seemed just a bit of crazy attention-seeking, like much of what he did. It was also perilous, because the Irish might kill him for his clothes if they cared to. But he robed himself, and jumped. Homesick though he was for Flanders, he did not mind this detour to Ireland. On the contrary he seized it, literally, as a chance to shine. This was his adventure, wherever it might lead him.
Such stories were all around him. Arthur’s knights would stray deliberately from the well-worn path, travelling through unknown regions in a mood compounded of hope and impatience. After a while, strange, chance scenes would begin to appear before them. A hermit praying in a wood; a knight asleep by a stone cross; a shield hung on a tree; a horse saddled and waiting; a woman weeping beside a corpse. If these adventures were ignored, they would come to nothing. But knock on the cobwebbed door, rouse the sleeper, bang on the shield with your own sword, board the ship, and the story would begin, as Lancelot’s had:
And at the last by fortune he came to an abbey which was nigh the sea, and that night he rested him there. And as he slept, there came a voice and bade him go to the sea. Then he started up and made the sign of the Cross, and took him to his harness and made ready his horse; and at a broken wall he rode out, and by fortune he came to the sea. And upon the sea he found a ship that was covered all in white samite. Then he alit and betook him to Jesus Christ. And as soon as he was entered, the ship departed into the sea, and to his seeming it went fleeing, but it was soon dark . . .
The peculiarity of adventures did not mean that it was wise to evade them. God sent them, each day devising new ones, as He also sent the fresh new hours in which lives could be radically changed. Arthur’s court was once shown an adventure of a white hart and a white greyhound pursued by thirty pairs of black hounds; they circled the Round Table with such commotion that Arthur was glad when they had gone. But Merlin rebuked him. ‘Nay,’ he said, ‘ye may not leave it so, this adventure, so lightly, for these adventures must be brought to an end, or it will be disworship to you.’
Arthur’s own first adventure had been the most casual of all. As far as people knew, he was a foundling ‘of no high blood born’, handed over to a poor man at the postern gate of the king’s castle, a scrap strangely wrapped in cloth-of-gold. Foster-parents cared for him. As a boy of fourteen or so, he went home one day to fetch his brother’s sword for the jousting. Finding no one there to deliver it to him, he took instead the sword he found quivering in a stone in the churchyard. It was not difficult to pull it out; he did it again when his father and brother asked him. Then, to his astonishment, he saw them kneel down before him. ‘Dear father, why kneel ye to me?’ he asked. His father replied: ‘I was never your father nor of your blood, but I wot well ye are of a higher blood than I weened ye were.’ Within a year the boy was King of England, ‘by adventure and by grace’.
With stories like this ringing in his head, the boy arrived in Ireland. He was a stranger. And there, in a town full of half-savage people, he was suddenly trailed after as though he were a prince. Brampton pictured his followers as a general rabble, but in the confession they were a small, malicious and determined group of more educated men, some of them English.
Immediately they saw him, they cornered him and presented him with a series of challenges. He was Edward, Earl of Warwick, they told him, the son of Edward IV’s brother, the Duke of Clarence, the Yorkist with the strongest claim to the throne if Edward’s sons were dead. Piers swore that he was not, and kept on denying it. The men did not believe him. The Cross and the Holy Evangelists were brought to him by the mayor of the town, John Lewellyn, ‘and there in the presence of him and other I took mine Oath as truth was that I was not the foresaid duke’s son, neither of none of his blood’. The men did not give up. He was the bastard son of King Richard, they told him. Again, ‘with high Oaths’, he swore he was not.
The oaths made no difference. Still the men insisted; and when he hesitated, ‘they advised me not to be affeared but that I should take it upon me Boldly’. He had denied it before God, but he was pushed into this identity and, eventually, a third: that of Richard, Duke of York. The men assured him that they would help him with all their power against the King of England, ‘and that the Earls of Desmond and Kildare should do the same, for they forced not what party so that they might be revenged upon [him]’. Ye may not leave it so, this adventure, so lightly. ‘Against my will,’ the confession said, he took up the challenge, not denying the name this time but, at some level, apparently accepting it. If they insisted, he would be the prince they wanted.
Brampton’s version, again, was different, carrying no sense of coercion. There were no promoters, but instead a natural gathering of simple souls to a boy who walked alone, making no effort to deny their claims for him. Both of these were tall stories, but they carried for those who heard them a true Arthurian ring: chance encounters, instant claims, immediate counter-claims, the ready invocation of the Cross and the sense, so strong in the legends of Arthur, that a man who fitted requirements might be put to the test long before his name had been properly established.
From the point of view of the Yorkist partisans, according to the confession, the arrival of this paragon was even more startling. They found a ship docked in the harbour and a striking young man wandering in the street. He wore silk, a whole long gown of it that floated and shone about him. This was a country in which the loyalty of Irish chieftains was bought by Henry Tudor with lengths of green and blood-red woollen cloth; but the boy wore silk. Brampton mocked at the way the Irish had run after him ‘because of that little bit of brocade’. But the arm clothed in white samite rising from the lake, or the ship sailed in silk that Lancelot saw on the sea, was not more shocking than this apparition. Silk was so precious that it was used, in England at that time, mostly for laces and ribbons. No one below the rank of knight could wear it. It was so magical and precious that it was supposed never to decay, and in royal Wardrobe accounts it was paid for by the ounce, as if the stuff could be compacted in the hand like gossamer. A boy dressed in silk was a challenge that could not be ignored: as, Brampton implied, the boy himself knew.
The Yorkists of the confession guessed his quality without knowing who he was. They did not care. He looked worth taking up, and they pressed him. Typically, too, he tried to resist them without revealing who he was. He told them only who he was not, leaving intact the mystery of his background and his name. This, of course, only inflamed them all the more. They pestered this strange boy; he brushed them off, or tried to, presumably speaking in French, the language of courtiers and palaces. Then came the ritual set-piece: the boy, in his astonishing clothes, kissing the processional Cross that was thrust slantwise towards him, then kneeling to touch and kiss the Gospels, his golden hair falling forward, confirming even at the supreme moment of denial the possibility of everything he might be, or might be made to be.
Another story had begun like this, when Tristan at fifteen had been dropped in Cornwall after his kidnapping by merchants from Norway. He was left there alone on the shore, an unknown boy with his fair hair curling in locks to his shoulders, in a robe and mantle of magnificent brocade interwoven with slender cords of silk, ‘and so well cut to his handsome figure that fine clothes have never been cut better by man or
woman’. The first people he met on the road, two pilgrims, were immediately captivated by him, and especially by the splendour of his clothes. ‘Good God,’ they mused, ‘who is this boy and where is he from, that has such beautiful manners?’
Tristan was royal: the orphan son of a knight and a princess, hidden and fostered for seven years, then trained abroad for another seven in all the skills befitting a prince. But he was also, as he was to remain, a consummate dissembler. He told the pilgrims he was a Cornish huntsman lost in the chase, ‘and somehow, I don’t know how, I rode out of touch with both huntsmen and hounds’. He told those huntsmen, however – proceeding ‘very subtly to fabricate his story’ and speaking, like Piers, in French – that he was a merchant’s son from Parmenia, ‘seized with an urge that ceaselessly nagged me to go into foreign lands’. His true story was that he had been lured on board a merchants’ ship and carried away by strangers, for ‘they resolved that if, by some ruse, they could get him away they would reap great profit and honour from him’.
Strong echoes of the story of Tristan could be heard in the official story of Piers. Yet for those who distrusted or scorned it, there was a precedent in history as well as legend. It came, appropriately enough, from Flanders. Twenty years after the mysterious disappearance of Baldwin IX, Count of Flanders, in 1205, a hermit came to live in a wattle hut by a fountain in the forest of Glançon, not far from Tournai. He had once been a minstrel and a conjuror, but had decided on impulse to embrace the holy life. As he begged one day in the local town, ‘by adventure asking bread for God’, a knight approached and prostrated himself before him. ‘Lord, I recognise you,’ he said. ‘You are truly the Emperor Baldwin.’ The hermit denied it, saying that he was just a poor man; but the more he denied it, the more the knight insisted it was true. In the end, the bewildered hermit let himself be taken to the knight’s house. There, installed most reverently and surrounded by noblemen who assured him that he was just like Baldwin, he began to soften to the prospect of imposture.