by Ann Wroe
Malicious French tongues had spread a rumour, almost certainly false, that she had been ‘somewhat devoted to love affairs’ (in fact, a putain) before her marriage to Charles. More and more people knew this, wrote the Milanese ambassador to France in July 1468, and ‘in the opinion of many she even had a son’. The tale was so current in Bruges, he went on, that Charles had ordered anyone caught spreading it to be thrown into the river. In short, Margaret was not deemed infertile, and the notion of a secret son already flickered round her. Yet by 1477 the death of her husband, if nothing else, had consigned her to childlessness.
From that point on, her imagination and her deep affection were linked to other people’s children. In 1478, as godmother to Philip, Mary of Burgundy’s son, she carried him at his christening (his long train of crimson cloth-of-gold trailing after him), and later undressed him in public to prove he was a boy. In 1481 she rewarded the Malines receiver for his good services by lifting his tiny, slippery child naked from the holy font of baptism. Almost her last duty, in the first years of the next century when she was close to death, was to care for the little prince, her step-great-grandson, who was to become Charles V. For the decade or so before, and possibly much longer, she also seemed to have placed her hopes in someone else’s child.
Vergil thought that Margaret herself had discovered the boy. Having searched with her spies for years for an ideal candidate, she found one, ‘not unhandsome in appearance, quick to learn and very cunning’. He spoke English already, Vergil claimed, as well as other languages. Building on this perfect base, the duchess gave him an intensive grounding in family history, mythology and duty. How he came to her attention, and what his history was, remained a mystery. ‘By chance she came upon him,’ Vergil wrote. ‘Tournai’ was all the background he was given, although this was a French city with which Margaret had no obvious connection. His wanderings had drawn a veil across his life. He might as well have been the snow-child in Les Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles, conceived, so his lying mother told her husband, when she ate a sorrel-leaf crusted with snow in the garden in winter. The husband, distrusting this tale, took the boy on crusade with him and reported that, in the heat of the desert, he had melted away.
The same sense was often there in the historians’ accounts of Margaret’s creation, a false and pretty thing that could not possibly last long. Nonetheless, they imagined that the boy was trained hard. Vergil described Margaret teaching him methodically about ‘English affairs and the lineage of the House of York’, enabling him easily to deceive the world.Yet women were inefficient by themselves, and Margaret lacked besides one part of the knowledge necessary to make this prince: recent experience of both England and her brother’s court. She had been back home only once since her marriage in 1468, and then for just a few months. André therefore asserted that Margaret needed ‘light and worthless’ part-players to help her. One was Stephen Frion, a former secretary to the Dukes of Burgundy who became, apparently on Margaret’s recommendation, French secretary to Edward IV and Richard III. He was so good that both Richard III and Henry VII automatically reappointed him, on a salary of £40 a year. But his loyalty did not last. By November 1486, his pay now in arrears for more than a year, he was moaning so loudly about ‘importable costs and charges’ that Henry ordered the money paid ‘so that we may hear no further complaint of him in that behalf’. The gesture did not mollify him. Margaret worked on him, André said, until at last – ‘infected by the woman’s poisonous suggestions’ – he left the service of Henry and began to paint (effingere) the image of Edward IV’s younger son on a boy whom he and his co-plotters had found. It is possible that he had been Margaret’s agent all along, and remained so as long as she thought necessary.
André did not say who Frion’s co-conspirators were; there were a lot of them, and it would take too long, he said, to list these scoundrels man by man. The boy they had found, a native of Tournai called Peter, had been educated ‘in this region’ by ‘Edward, a Jew supported in baptism by King Edward’ – Brampton, a tiny gleam of accuracy. By ‘this region’, André meant England; he later said specifically that the boy had been trained there, and added that the plotters ‘then pretended he had been brought up in various countries’. No other source, save André, gave all this plotting and painting. But certainly Frion left Henry’s service, rather precipitately, in 1489, just after heading a mission to France and without collecting the Michaelmas instalment of his salary. He was apparently working now for Charles VIII, although there is no sign in the accounts that the French king ever paid him. In the summer of 1492 he went to Ireland, on Charles’s behalf, to pick up Richard Plantagenet, perhaps a young man he already knew. By then, in André’s opinion, the work of transformation had long been successfully accomplished by Frion and his gang. Margaret’s involvement was mostly to encourage this boy, by alternately bullying and loving him, to imagine that he was Richard.
Charles VIII apparently told James IV of Scotland that Richard of York had been ‘preserved many years secretly’ by Margaret. She herself hinted that this was so. In 1495, in a letter to the pope in which she pleaded for Richard’s claim to be given apostolic recognition, Margaret gave as a parallel example – the only one she cited in a long and rambling letter – the story of the child-prince Joash from the first Book of Kings, snatched away from those who would kill him ‘and secretly brought up in the house of his aunt’. Margaret did not quite have this story straight; little Joash, though indeed rescued by his aunt, had in fact lain hidden for six years in ‘the House of the Lord’, the Temple, not in his aunt’s house. The idea of secretly bringing him up was also missing from the Old Testament version. Margaret seemed to have absorbed this story to make it her own. Possibly, it reflected what she herself had done.
Jean Molinet, as he chronicled the court of Burgundy, did not endorse the rumour that Margaret was creating or concealing a prince. But he kept open the notion that a prince had survived. Margaret, he wrote, had lost her brothers, her husband and her nephews. Most had died by ‘hard swords’; but of her nephews, only one was ‘snuffed out and dead’. The other, presumably Richard, was merely ‘a prisoner’:
J’ay veu haulte princesse
D’Yorck de grant renom,
De Bourgoigne duchesse,
Marguerite avoit nom,
Perdre par dures glaves
Ses frères, son mari,
Ses nepveux, l’ung esclaves,
L’aultre estainct et péri.
In 1486, a payment occurred in Margaret’s household accounts at Malines for eight flagons of wine ‘to the son of Clarence from England’. Since Simnel never went to Margaret’s court, this was perhaps another prince, Warwick or Richard, in preparation. It is possible that the Simnel plot was always intended as a first test of the Yorkist waters; certainly, when it failed, Margaret was undeterred. After Stoke, as after Bosworth, she opened her court to refugees fleeing from England.
With other players, too, she had connections. She knew Brampton, who was active in Bruges and whose service included financial dealings with the Habsburgs as well as her brother’s business. She could have arranged her protégé’s placement in his household and even, as Hall supposed, a voyage with her ‘new invented Mawmet’, her new doll, to Portugal. (Brampton himself never hinted in public testimony that she had been involved with him, but it would hardly have served his cause to do so.) Portugal had close blood-links to Burgundy through Charles’s mother Isabella, the great-aunt of João II, and Charles at moments of passion spoke of ‘we Portuguese’ as though he was one. Maximilian’s mother, too, had been Portuguese. In this friendly but distant place, removed from all pressing European conflicts and probably, on balance, still faintly Yorkist, a prince or quasi-prince could be safely held for a while. Brampton may deliberately have waited at Bruges to hear the outcome of Simnel’s invasion, and taken the boy away with him as soon as that hope disappeared.
By 1488, Margaret was also in secret negotiations and correspondence with Jam
es IV of Scotland. On November 4th that year, only five months after the young king’s accession, an embassy of forty-two exiled Yorkists – including Richard Harliston, a former governor of Jersey, and the undrowned Lovell – was sent by Margaret to see him. Safe-conducts had been granted both to them and, provisionally, to ‘all other English persons whom they may draw to their cause’. In early December Margaret sent another letter to James, carried by ‘an English herald’ who was regularly attached either to her or to an English prince who was taking shape behind her. The exchange of letters became regular, and from 1489 they were carried from Flanders by Rowland Robinson, a Durham man and old Yorkist servant who was later closely attached to Richard Plantagenet. In the same year Margaret was receiving messages, via Scotland, from Ireland, where Richard was to make his public reappearance. By 1490, a year before he landed there, she was actively spreading the rumour that he was still alive.
It is more than likely that she was organising something. If so, it was with great secrecy and circumspection; nothing was committed to paper, and nothing would be set publicly in motion without the approval or acquiescence of rulers more powerful than she was. Yet it seemed plausible enough to contemporaries that her hands were busy. Moreover, this was a woman who well understood the dynamic of acts performed in secret, whether benevolent or malevolent. Her distributions of rye to poor tenants on her Binche estates in Hainault were made by secret deliveries, so that the recipients of her charity would not know who had helped them. The action was the more powerful, and the more deserving of credit in Heaven, because its source was concealed and its effects imagined at a distance. So it could be with princes, too.
iv
In October or November 1491, all these half-secret movements seemed to come together. The moment was right. For much of that year and the two years before, Henry VII had been helping the Duchess of Brittany to make war on France. Brittany, a vassal-state of France, had sheltered Henry when he was in exile – though France, too, had helped him. In gratitude, he had now packed Brittany with English troops and archers. But by the autumn of 1491 Charles was clearly on the brink of overpowering the duchess by military force and offers of marriage. Henry, claiming that the French king ‘threatened the destruction’ of England too, got a huge fleet ready and raised a tax from Parliament to wage full-scale war against him. Charles now had a lively interest in unsettling Henry and had, at his court, restive English agents fired with the same ambition. If Margaret wished to exploit this moment, she, too, could join in.
Charles made his first moves that summer, sending two ships to Scotland in June or July to fetch an embassy from James ‘to treat and communicate on certain matters touching the weal of the king and his kingdom’. The leader of the French contingent was Alexander Monypeny, Seigneur de Concressault, an expatriate Scot who was one of Charles’s intimates. He was sent to discuss ‘great matters’ with James, and was authorised to stay for at least six weeks. These ‘matters’ were almost certainly the favouring of a Yorkist attempt against Henry.
While these ships were on the sea, one ‘Mr George d’Annebar, an English knight’ came in some haste to Charles from Dieppe, ‘wishing urgently to speak to him about the services he could do for him, as much in getting rid of the English who are in Brittany as in other matters concerning England’. Despite the mangled spelling, or possibly the false name ‘Dunbar’, this sounded like Sir George Neville, hot from Scotland, where he had been in April. Neville, a bastard scion of the line that had produced Edward IV’s great rival, Richard Neville, Earl of Warwick, had been banished from England. His ‘other matters’, like Monypeny’s, probably concerned the putting up of a Yorkist claimant, true or false.
By at least September, Charles began to equip an expedition to go to Ireland on the same business. Two vessels were made ready: a ship of 100 tons, the Mary Margot, and a smaller craft, the Passerose. These were manned by up to 140 soldiers and sailors, who were to wear surcoats and carry shields marked with the red cross of St George, à la devise d’Angleterre. Thus accoutred or disguised, they were to take John Taylor the elder ‘and other Englishmen in his company’ from Honfleur, in Normandy, to unspecified harbours in Ireland and England. Taylor and his men were provided with brigandines, or coats of mail, helmets, bows, quivers, bombards, muskets and standards. The whole expedition cost Charles £1,737 tournois, a little less than he had spent on Monypeny’s voyage.
In great excitement, Taylor passed news of the venture to his friends in England. On September 15th he wrote to John Hayes, a fellow-Yorkist and, like him, a former Clarence servant of long standing. Six years before, Hayes had been made receiver of the late duke’s West Country estates on behalf of Edward, Earl of Warwick. He had also been charged to collect fees for Henry from lands in the West Country ‘late belonging to certain rebels of the king’, and had been appointed deputy to Sir John Fortescue, overseer of the royal wine-cellar, in the ports of Exeter and Dartmouth. He preserved, therefore, a wide web of south-western contacts that might be made active again. Taylor, calling himself ‘your old acquaintance’, addressed Hayes with a servant’s deference. But he had extraordinary news to tell him, that Charles had embraced their quarrel.
. . . Sir, ye shall understand, that the King’s grace of France, by the advice and assent of his Council, will aid and support your Master’s Son to his right, and all his Lovers and Servants, and take them as his friends, both by Land and by Water, and all they [sic] may be well assured safely to come unto France, both Bodies and Goods, and such as have no Goods they may come hither and be relieved, if they be known for true men to the quarrel; and over that, he will give help of his own Subjects, with Ships, Gold and Silver, to come into England . . . and the King and his Council say they will ask nothing in recompense, but to do it for the wrong he did, in making Henry King of England, and for the good will he oweth unto the Son of your Master, for they be near of kin . . . Sir, ye shall hear by other friends, Sir, the convenable time of help is come, and therefore now endeavour yourself, and put to your hand, and spare for no cost, for there shall be help in three parties out of Royaume, but here is the place most meetly for you . . .
Taylor, fizzing with the plot, urged Hayes to show the letter to ‘your Master’s Son’s friends’, to get those friends together to help, and to ‘make labour unto my Lady Warwick’, the earl’s grandmother, to write to the King of France encouraging the enterprise. In this, Taylor was over-ambitious or out of touch, for the Countess of Warwick had died the year before, leaving the orphan earl with no close relation but his sister. He needed French help more than ever.
Hayes, who did not get this news until November 26th, treated it with due caution. He did not question the bearer, but told him to go, and threw the letter into the fire. Somehow, it survived to incriminate him; he was arrested, charged with misprision (concealment of knowledge of treasonable acts) and forfeited his lands, goods and offices. On the other side of the Channel, however, the expedition had already gone ahead as planned.
Charles, when commissioning the ships, did not seem to have passed on the purpose of this voyage to his captains. It was understood to be open-ended; they could take two months over it, if need be, until they found the right place at which to land. Taylor, on the other hand, his head still full of Warwick, claimed to know exactly what the king intended. He saw the venture as the first leg of an invasion, to be reinforced by armed help from Ireland and Scotland (the other two of the three ‘parties out of royaulme’) and to reach its climax with Warwick’s release and enthronement. No doubt he expected Hayes to be laying the ground at home. In that, of course, he was disappointed.
The end of the voyage was not recorded anywhere, but the official confession suggested in any case a quite different scene. In that version of events, Taylor and his companions were simply in Ireland in the autumn of 1491 when Piers, out of nowhere, suddenly arrived. Nothing had been planned. They had not been meant to meet, and there was no indication of any French-backed expedition. Two Iri
shmen, Atwater and Hubert Burke, from the ruling family of Connaught, had joined Taylor, together with Stephen Poytron, another Englishman. When they stumbled on Piers, strolling glamorously in the street, they saw his potential immediately, but so did everyone around them. The Yorkist plotters merely joined in, adding their ideas to the general tumult of interest in him. Far from being trained in anything, the Piers of the confession came to Ireland as a blank sheet, to be cut into shape or painted in the colours his sponsors thought they wanted.
According to this version of the story, Richard, Duke of York was in fact their last choice for the character he should play. The people of Cork, predictably enough, thought the boy in silk from the Breton boat ‘should be the Duke of Clarence’s son that was before time at Dublin’. But Taylor, for all his interest in a Warwick plot, did not pursue this idea, perhaps because one false Warwick was enough. Instead, a different scheme took wing. Poytron, together with Atwater, accosted Piers and told him, with emphatic oaths, ‘that they knew well that I was King Richard’s bastard son’.