Perkin

by Ann Wroe

  The false Baldwin turned out badly. Though he prospered for a while, making glorious entries into Lille, Ghent and Tournai with his long white beard flowing over his purple robes, he was constantly caught out by questions. The Bishop of Senlis asked him when and where he had done homage for Flanders and married Marie de Champagne, Baldwin’s wife; the false Baldwin, of course, could not answer. He claimed that his memory was fading, and tried to avoid conversation. Rather than talk to Louis VIII, the King of France, he fled by night, leaving his servants to find his bed empty. He lived for a while in hiding, allegedly in Burgundy, but was exposed before long as a juggler-trickster – a jongleur – called Bertrand, from the village of Rains near Vitry-sur-Marne. When he was arrested he confessed his imposture freely, but emphasised that he had played the part of Baldwin at the instigation of others. It had never been his idea. Everything had unrolled from that chance moment in the street, as he begged for bread and, with unaccountable devotion, a knight fell down at his feet.

  Some at least of those involved in the story of the kidnapping in Ireland would have known of the conjuror-hermit who played Baldwin, the most famous case of its kind in northern Europe. They would have been aware, too, of how the story ended. Bertrand was dragged on a hurdle and hanged, with his body nailed on a gibbet between the corpses of two dogs. Ravens and kites, faithful denizens of the landscape of perilous wandering, flew down to feed on what remained of him. But nothing adventured, nothing gained; nothing risked, nothing won.

  The ship sailed, and left him: Richard, Duke of York.

  2

  Imagined princes

  The imagining of Richard, Duke of York, the second son of Edward IV, did not begin in 1491 when Meno’s boat reached Cork. It began with Richard’s birth, in the mind of his father. A child was not put on the earth clothed, comforted or with possessions; even a king’s son came in naked and destitute, relying on God for grace and on his father for his substance. All through his childhood he toddled, or trotted, towards a model of princeliness and power that was carefully laid down for him.

  Given the frailty of human life, the imagined end would possibly never be achieved by nature. Imagination itself was a strange and fragile thing. Few people knew for certain in which organ it resided, whether in the heart or the brain, but it was known to vary with the humours in man: grim, sad or cheerful according to the blood, phlegm and bile that coursed in him. It was affected by climate, geography, excessive dryness, the softness of the skin. Good and bad angels shaped it. In the brain it grew like spiders’ webs, trapping images and sensations in a private treasury and holding them up to thought. So Edward, like any father, treasured and considered the image of his second son.

  Prince Richard’s birth went unnoticed in the chronicles. Such carelessness with record-keeping was not unusual. His sister Katherine and brother George had no known birthdays either. The date was later tentatively set as August 17th 1473, at Shrewsbury, near the borders of Wales.

  In the birthing chamber he was laid in a gold-painted cradle canopied with cloth-of-gold under a tiny scarlet blanket trimmed with ermine. He probably puked on this, like any little prince. Cradle-bands laced from silver buckles held him safe and still, and swaddling bands, bound tightly as far as his chest, kept the tiny limbs straight. ‘Rocksters’, hired only to do this, tipped him gently from side to side when he cried. Outside the cradle he was cared for by a wet-nurse. In 1502, when this nurse was old and poor, Richard’s sister Elizabeth remembered ‘the woman that was norice to the Prince brother to the Queen’s grace’ and sent her three and a half yards of cloth for a gown.

  As a baby, Richard was seen at once in terms of the man he would grow into. At baptism, still so new that basins of warm water stood at the chapel door to wash the birth-blood from him ‘if need be’, the prince was expected to hold his lighted candle as he was carried to the altar to make offering. He was viewed with anticipation and impatience. The bundle in the crib was already a long-limbed adolescent sprawled on a bed; his little penis, undoubtedly assessed, was already a getter of powerful lords. Foreign envoys would admire him naked, and send descriptions home.

  In May 1476, when Richard was about two and a half, Master John Giles was being paid for his good service in instructing him in grammar. ‘Grammar’ meant the Latin sort, out of the Ars grammatica of Donatus, every small prince’s first headache; at this stage, such lessons were mostly intended to teach him how to say his prayers. In 1477 he was given rooms of his own, including a council chamber. The allocation of firewood for ‘my Lord of York’ in the Household Ordinance of 1478 (twenty bundles of tall wood, eight faggots, four bundles of coals) implied that there were several fireplaces to keep burning. No one else was given coal, suggesting special warmth for him; and he alone received no candles, suggesting that when dusk fell it was bedtime, naturally enough.

  The prince was not yet five. He had a chancellor, Mr Molyneux, an attorney, Andrew Dymock, a treasurer, a council, his own seal, and several servants to lay out his clothes and make his fires. We know the names of two of these servants: John Rodon and Thomas Galmole, ‘gentleman’. His chamberlain was Sir Thomas Grey, a banneret and knight of the body to the king. It was Grey, unless he was thought too elderly for these duties, who dressed and undressed Richard, sat naked with him in the bath and, on public occasions, brought him out in his best robes to be fawned over by visitors.

  Until he was seven (at which age, the textbooks said, it was advisable to remove boys from the company of women), Richard would have spent much of his time in the company of his mother, Queen Elizabeth, and his six sisters, five of them older than he was. That was where Rui de Sousa saw him in 1482, singing with his mother and one of his sisters. ‘He sang very well,’ said de Sousa, besotted. He would also have passed long hours in his own chambers, as his elder brother did, following the minimum requirements for his education that had been laid down by his father. Edward IV considered that all small boys should have an early start to the day, with Mass, followed by grammar, music or ‘other training exercises of polite learning’. They were ‘in no wise to be suffered in idleness, or unvirtuous occupation’. The human child, like a green branch, was only tender for so long; as he was bent, so he grew.

  His brother Edward, the king-to-be, was always treated with more elaborate care. The 1473 regulations drawn up by his father for his household insisted that he should hear all the divine service every holy day and that, as he ate (‘his dishes borne by worshipful folks and squires having on our livery’), he should have noble stories read to him. Servants were to speak only of honour and virtue in his presence, and his ‘disports’, or games, might be only those ‘as behoveth his estate to have experience in’. Most of this, however, would also have applied to Richard. Edward’s bed-curtains, when he was three years old, were drawn at eight o’clock at night. Very probably, Richard’s were too.

  It was hard to exaggerate the preciousness of these children. As long as the wet-nurse suckled them, her food and drink were carefully tasted. They were not only watched in bed, by servants deputed to stay awake all night, but were constantly attended by doctors. Weapons were never to be drawn in their presence, or rough words exchanged. They were to be sheltered from brawlers, backbiters and dice-players. Again, there was the notion of tender plants: an idea underlined in the king’s illuminated books by the arms of Edward and Richard painted in the borders like growing things, entwined with acanthus leaves and flowers.

  Richard’s bevy of older sisters undoubtedly petted and teased him. Edward seems to have been more solemn company, already ‘most skilful in letters for his age’, but with him, too, Richard played, until at the age of ten his brother was moved away to Ludlow. The chronicler of Croyland Abbey described the court as filled with ‘those most sweet and beautiful children’, as if even the casual visitor would find them skipping round him. The ‘disports’ of the household rules were never specified, but de Sousa saw Richard play-fighting, again very well, with sticks and a two-hande
d sword. Caxton’s 1474 edition of The Game and Playe of the Chesse mentioned that royal boys should be taught to swim, joust, play with axe and sword and, most strangely, ‘spring and leap’, as if even natural exuberance could be codified.

  Sometime around 1482, Richard was portrayed in glass at Canterbury exactly as his father had imagined him. The little prince, in a crown and a cloak with an ermine collar, knelt at a prie-dieu before seven scenes from the life of the Virgin. His back and neck were remarkably straight, his hands clasped as piety required. His real age was perhaps five or six, but his body was that of a slim adolescent who was already responsible and reasonable. His pose was that of filial obedience. He would have knelt like this to his father whenever he encountered him, asking for his blessing, since that touch on his bowed head was a sign that his father’s shaping continued and an admission that he needed it. Edward IV’s letters as a child to his own father, the previous Richard, Duke of York, acknowledged how vital that daily benediction was: ‘through which we trust much the rather to increase and grow to virtue, and to speed the better in all matters and things’.

  Yet it was not only training, or parental will, that shaped a boy. The planets too affected him, sometimes to such a degree that earthly instruction made no difference. The Secreta Secretorum, of which Edward IV had a well-thumbed copy, told the story of two sons. One, born to the King of India, was sent by his father to learn science in the greatest university in the land. Yet ‘the great will of the father, and the great business of the doctors might fasten no wit upon him’. He wanted only to be a metal-forger; he had been born in such a constellation that ‘he had no other grace’. By contrast, another boy was born in a poor weaver’s house ‘in the planets of Venus and Mars, in the degree of Gemini with Balance’, with no star uprising that was contrary. As he grew, his father and mother tried to teach him weaving, but the threads simply tangled in his hands. All their beating and ‘scouring’ made no difference; his stars determined that the boy, though a weaver’s son, would know heavenly wisdom, and would become at last a governor and counsellor of kings.

  So, when all was done that could be done, Fate could still play games. The soul could be mismatched with the body, so that a boy could never grow into his parents’ dreams for him. The king’s son could go to the forge, black-handed and sweating, swearing like a workman, while the weaver’s son moved to the palace. Any father hoped never to encounter this. But there was no denying that the whole process of imagining a boy – looking at him, letting his image lodge in the cobwebby skin of the brain, holding it up to the light of reason – was as hazardous as bringing him, squalling and bloody, into the world in the first place.

  As Edward’s ‘right entirely beloved’ second son grew in virtue, honours were steadily loaded on him. This was done as much for his father’s sake as for his own, to fix in lands and titles the glory Edward had won in battle. Richard’s role, in his father’s words, was to stop the glory gliding away. He had been ‘called into existence’ for that reason.

  When he was about nine months old his father made him Duke of York, girding his son’s tiny waist with a sword and placing on his head a cap and circlet of gold. Solemn jousts were held in celebration. By 1478 he was being called Earl Marshal of England, an honour that included the right to hold, in a small uncertain hand, a golden stick ringed at each end with black and adorned at the upper end with the king’s arms. In May 1479 he became Lieutenant of Ireland, on condition that he did not meddle with the disposal of vacant archbishoprics.

  Richard’s titles did not only make him more illustrious. They turned him, in effect, into a collector of fees for his father’s treasury, and consolidated in him, a little boy kneeling in obedience, the power that would otherwise have gone to a less subservient local lord. He also became a figure with legal authority to make requests or witness deeds, but usefully without the maturity to make legal trouble. And so, from the age of four, he witnessed acts and charters. Before long he was nominated to become a Knight of the Garter, the highest order of chivalry, and on August 17th 1480, probably his seventh birthday, he took delivery of his regalia: the Garter itself, ‘richly wrought with silk and gold’, a blue velvet cloak lined with white damask, a blue silk sash with gold buttons. The blue cloak would have swamped him; there were seven yards of it, almost as much velvet as would have been ordered for a man. A child vested like this, in glory, was supposed to feel his own soul moving with ‘strength sensible’ in parallel with his father’s. He himself would begin to want honours, as he would also begin to want the wonders of Heaven.

  Some years before that, Richard had already taken his biggest step into the adult world. He was married at the age of four – his soul by then endowed with at least some stirrings of reasonable virtue – to Anne Mowbray, aged five, the heiress to huge estates in Norfolk. This marriage, from its first mooting, brought more titles to him: Earl of Nottingham, Earl Warenne, Duke of Norfolk, Lord of Segrave, Mowbray and Gower. By arranging the Mowbray marriage, with a family who were treated locally as princes, Edward was again making use of his son to procure that glory for himself.

  Contracts to join tiny children in marriage were common practice among princes. All Richard’s brothers and sisters were similarly pre-contracted. The wedding itself was usually understood to be years away, ‘when both shall have reached nubile years’. There was no waiting for nubile years in Richard’s case. The little heiress and ‘the high and mighty Prince Richard, Duke of York’ were married, in January 1478, with the full panoply of church and state. Edward organised the wedding jousts, the many-course banquet, the furnishing of St Stephen’s Chapel at Westminster ‘with tappets of azure colour, inramplished with fleurs-de-lis of gold curiously wrought’, the largesse of gold and silver money thrown out to the crowd. So many attended that the man who recorded it, to his irritation, could not see who was who as the last course, of sweets, wine and spices, was carried ‘marvellous reverently’ to the freshly laid tables.

  This was Richard’s wedding, but he was barely noticed. The recorder did not mention him. His bride, bringing all her land to the king’s private domain, was the centre of everyone’s attention. Under the golden canopy, in his miniature bridegroom’s robes of white damask, he would presumably have kissed this unknown little girl and placed a ring on her finger. He did what the adults required of him. No unmannerly incidents were recorded at the wedding or at the banquet afterwards. When Henry VII’s second son, Henry, was invested as Duke of York at the age of three in 1494, he had to be carried a lot, and at one stage he was placed on a table like a trophy so that he could see over people’s heads. It is likely that Richard, too, spent much of his wedding as a small, tired boy in arms. The white robes would not have stayed white for long.

  There was of course no question of consummation, though this too was imagined. The issue of Richard’s body, particularly male issue, was confidently anticipated in the charters that granted his titles to him ‘and the heirs of his body coming’. Richard, Duke of York was both a child and an adult, already a landowner and administrator, girded with swords he would grow into and married to the girl whose womb he would quicken, if God willed it. Each title he acquired – including that of husband – was like another cloak, adding substance to the shadow and warming the body into stronger, healthier life.

  But life could not be taken for granted. God too had His plans, as a common prayer of the primer, one of the first taught to noble children, neatly understood.

  Domine Jesu Christe, qui me creasti et redemisti et preordinasti ad hoc quod sum: tu scis quid de me facere vis: fac de me secundum voluntatem tuam cum misericordia.

  O Lord Jesus Christ, who created and redeemed me and preordained me to what I am, you know what you wish to make of me; of your mercy, make of me what you will.

  In 1479 Richard’s brother George died, still a baby; in May 1481 his sister Mary, aged fifteen, was also wrapped in waxed cloth and placed, in lead, in the ground. The next November his wife, aged eight, fol
lowed her. She died at the palace in Greenwich, where possibly she and Richard had kept some sort of formal company together, eating, reading or dancing as partners; but she did not play boys’ games. Three barges conveyed her body to Westminster, where she was buried in a chapel dedicated to St Erasmus, the patron saint of pregnant women. Like Mary, she had been imagined with a line of small replicas kneeling behind her. Yet nothing had become of her marriage save that, by the king’s strong sleight-of-hand, most of her lands had been passed across to Richard.

  So far, the little prince himself had kept growing. He seemed to shoot quite fast, so that by the age of seven his orders for new clothes of velvet and figured satin were outpacing his brother Edward’s. According to Sir Thomas More, who never knew Richard but, early in the next century, wrote a highly dramatised version of his life, he was a frail child, often ill; yet in 1480 he was invested as Lieutenant of Ireland for another twelve years, as though his father was confident of his strength. The Wardrobe accounts allow a glimpse of the little lieutenant out riding, in a gown of green satin lined with purple velvet and black sarcenet, on a horse saddled and harnessed with crimson velvet and ‘velvet upon velvet’ green cloth-of-gold. ‘A very noble little boy’, Rui de Sousa called him.