Perkin

by Ann Wroe

  The confession said that this was the role Piers first agreed to be trained for. He was to be taught, presumably, that ‘proficiency in all good manners’ which is almost all that history records of King Richard’s bastard son, John of Gloucester. John’s claim was a weak one, but as the illegitimate son of the last king he had a slightly stronger title than Henry had. He had been treated, too, as a Yorkist prince, lodged in palaces and clothed in silk jackets, and had been maintained for a while by Henry himself on a pension of £20 a year. Piers could probably pass for him already, for all anyone knew. It was only ‘after this’ – after they had played with the notion of making him John – that his sponsors decided he should be Richard of York, ‘because King Richard’s bastard son was in the hands of the King of England’. As he was.

  Henry, in his letter to Talbot in 1493, gave the same impression, though in a different order, of the late appearance of Richard of York in the planning of the ‘great abusion’. The boy’s first identity, he wrote, had been Richard III’s bastard son; ‘after that’, the son of the Duke of Clarence; ‘and now the second son of our father, king Edward the Fourth, whom God assoile’. And now. His identity could have been changed even after the boy left Ireland; it was just a whim, the last in a series of rash and ridiculous inventions.

  As Henry would later present it, the ‘invention’ of this boy came fairly close to alchemy. Like the various practitioners he paid from time to time for their experiments with powders and their demonstrations of ‘multiplying’, so the Yorkist plotters, lacking anyone authentic, tried to manufacture gold out of dross. They believed, as Henry liked to believe, that the process was possible in principle. According to a treatise on alchemy of 1477 that Edward IV had among his books, Ramon Lull, the Catalan philosopher, had once succeeded in making four ladies of silver and four knights of gold, bearing on their robes the story of their transformations:

  Of old horses’ shoes, said one, I was iron;

  Now I am silver, as good as you desire.

  I was, said another, iron fette from the mine;

  But now I am gold, pure, perfect and fine.

  Once was I copper, of an old red pan,

  Now I am good silver, said the third woman.

  The fourth said, I was copper, that grew in filthy place;

  Now I am perfect gold, made by God’s grace.

  Some similar persistent experimentation with rubbish seemed able to produce princes, at least in Flanders and Ireland.

  The official confession implied that it took a lot of labour. Piers Osbeck, fresh from the boat, had to be made a plausible Englishman before he could be made a prince. ‘[They] made me to learn English,’ the confession said, the first essential act. By this account – so different from Vergil’s, where he was fluent years before – he already spoke a little. He had gone to John Strewe’s in Middelburg ‘for to learn the language’ (presumably, though not certainly, English), and had then lain sick for months beside the House of the English Merchant Adventurers in Antwerp, where the sound of the language outside the window might slowly have become familiar. When he was approached in Cork he understood what people were saying to him, and seemed to know enough to protest that what they were saying was wrong.

  Brampton, however, implied at Setubal that ‘Piris’ spoke only French. In Middleburg as a runaway he had sought out French children as friends, and he tagged along too with French-speakers in Portugal. In 1494 the Earl of Kildare, who had flirted very briefly with him, remarked indignantly in a letter to the Earl of Ormonde that he had been accused of comforting, aiding and lying with the ‘French lad’. This may well have been how the boy appeared to him in Ireland, as yet unschooled. On the other hand, it may have reflected the principal power, France, that was then behind him; or, since Kildare was trying hard at that point to content the king’s mind, as he put it, it may have been an ingratiating reference to Henry’s own dismissive term for him, le garçon.

  Piers said he did not want to learn English, but was forced to ‘against my will’. Resistance would have made the learning sulky and slow; presumably it went in somehow. Yet it may have been a strange sort of English, all the same. He was in Ireland. His chief Irish sponsors, Atwater and the Anglo-Irish Earl of Desmond, would have spoken quaint and heavily accented English; Kildare, although a virtual king in Ireland and among the most anglicised of the Irish rulers, was barely literate, signing his name with a rough ‘G. E. of K.’ These lords employed priests and secretaries endowed with proper education, but still one that was far beneath the standards of the court in London. The Yorkist plotters were aiming very high, and with difficult material.

  They themselves would have been little better-educated than the Anglo-Irish lords, and their speech provincial. Foreign supporters of their new prince might not care or notice if he spoke like a Devon bailiff, but Englishmen would. In his preface to the Eneydos, Caxton noted how much speech differed from place to place in England: so much so that a London mercer, asking a woman for eggs sixty miles away in Kent, could not make her understand until his companion asked her for ‘eyren’. England was a patchwork of different usages and accents where the language of princes, delivered ‘in polished and ornate terms craftily’, was not to be heard outside the court.

  The teaching of court English to Piers, therefore, would have been something of a miracle. But miracles occurred. Goodness knows, even magpies could be taught phrases of politesse; and James IV in 1493 discovered that, if you confined a dumb woman with her infants to the empty island of Inchkeith in the Firth of Forth, they could turn out speaking something that was very like good Hebrew. Many poets of the time wrote in an English so heavily Frenchified and Latinised that it could usefully disguise more basic errors. Stephen Hawes, a groom of Henry’s chamber, thought he made his groom’s English noble by using words like ‘respeccion’, ‘facundiously’, ‘finishment’ and ‘solacious’. Perhaps others would have thought so, too, had Piers tried.

  He would have had to be trained in manners, too, and again from scratch, before the more delicate and detailed remembering of Richard could begin. His sponsors ‘taught me what I should do and say’, he said in the confession. According to that document he had already learned, at most, the conduct required of a page. He knew to keep his nails clean, not to spit across the table, not to jiggle his feet or turn his back on people. Besides that, he had perhaps learned how to make conversation (though not with his betters, to whom he did not speak), and how to do something entertaining, such as play the lute or sing. He was not completely unpolished, though almost so.

  A servant could be turned into a royal herald in a matter of days; it had been done before. Commines related how in 1475 Louis XI had seized on un varlet, a simple servant, put a herald’s tabard on him, and sent him into Edward IV’s camp to deliver a speech on Louis’s behalf. The man seemed, in Commines’s opinion, not up to the job at all, ‘fit neither in stature nor in aspect’, although he could express himself ‘tolerably enough’. He was also terrified at the proposal, and fell down at Commines’s feet begging not to be sent. Commines tried to persuade the king to employ someone ‘more proper’, but Louis would not. Over a night and a day Commines and the king instructed the man; a coat of arms was made up for him, an escutcheon was borrowed, his boots and his cloak were fetched and, with a final briefing, he was sent into the English camp. There he acquitted himself so smoothly, to everyone’s surprise, that Edward dismissed him with a present of four nobles, and Commines did not report that the imposture was detected. But that was a piece of play-acting of, at most, a few hours’ duration, requiring no change of language and only a few degrees of separation on the social scale. It was easy compared with what was required of Piers.

  Again, his sponsors could hardly help him. The roughness of Kildare’s manners, when he visited London, astonished Henry VII’s court. (Among other things, he took the king by the hand; talked bawdy to him; told him, with liberal ‘beJaysuses’, three unflattering tales of the Bishop of Meath �
��as though he were among his fellows in his own country’; and reduced the king and his company to gales of laughter that he could not understand.) Desmond had had to be forced, by Richard III, to abandon his warrior’s cloak and leggings for proper doublets and hats. Atwater was of the merchant class, presumably not without intelligence, but with no knowledge of the maze of etiquette in which princes moved. The same was true of the other hangers-on in Ireland mentioned in the confession. None could have taught Piers as he needed to be taught.

  Nonetheless, against these odds, the confession said the plotters took him and princified him. Geronymo Zurita described the last, essential part of the process: ‘They called him Richard, and proclaimed him as Duke of York, and gave him hope that they would put him in his kingdom of England, which legitimately belonged to him if he was who he said he was.’ Much of the instruction might have been difficult; but the infusion of a little hunger, the waving before his eyes of a king’s life, could have made the boy warm to the project on his own. ‘Why kneel ye to me?’ cried the teenage Arthur, astonished, as Sir Ector and Sir Kay fell to the ground before him. With every day that men knelt to him, waited on him, laid out his clothes and made up his fires in that Irish winter, Piers could enter a little deeper into the prince’s part. ‘How very pleasing it must be to a human creature,’ ran one of Henry’s books, L’imaginacion de vraye noblesse, ‘when he realises he is of noble generation and of ancient lineage, for . . . those sprung from a noble line are more inclined than others to be courtly, debonair, frank and virtuous.’ When his imagination thrilled to his nobility, the alchemy was performed.

  This arduous experiment, however, may never have occurred, for the opening scene on the quayside at Cork was probably quite different. When lords entered towns, either as rulers or as guests, the clergy and town officers would come out to meet them. They carried, typically, the town Cross and the relics, to which the visitor knelt in veneration, and holy water, with which he was asperged. The officers of Cork may well have been there to receive Richard Plantagenet in this way, with honour. The oath sworn by Desmond to Henry five years later strongly implied that he had ‘received’ the young man on his arrival in the town, but was not to do so in future. Certainly this was as likely as the thought that the officers would come, with their holy articles, to sort out a quayside argument between some Englishmen and a ship’s boy.

  Taylor’s French ships, too, bobbing in the harbour with their red-and-white panoply as the boy arrived, had gone there for some purpose. They were not an invasion force; the soldiers and sailors were there to defend and manage the Mary Margot, and only Taylor and his nine companions were meant to land. Looked at closely, they seemed more ceremonial than warlike. Taylor’s small band was an armed escort for someone royal, or presumed royal: carrying standards, with special helmets and breastplates for four of them, and imitating, with their bows and quivers, the elite archer corps that guarded Charles himself. Stowed in the hold was a single suit of precious white armour costing £49 tournois, much like the armour ordered the next year by Henry for his war with Charles. This was gear for a prince, whether real or imagined.

  In his letter to Isabella, Richard explained that he had gone to Ireland from Portugal for a purpose. Henry too, in his letter to Talbot, kept a sense of purpose in the journey. ‘At his first into Ireland,’ the king said, the feigned lad ‘called himself’ a Yorkist prince, no forcing necessary. Pregent Meno was arrested at sea for having ‘conveyed’ him, as though he was his servant and under orders to make trouble. James Ware, an Irish historian of the mid-seventeenth century, said many asserted that the young man had openly ‘carried himself’ as Richard, Duke of York when he arrived in Cork, and that the citizens had joyfully received him. His letters had preceded him, and Richard told Isabella that his ‘cousins’ had recognised him. There was nothing random about his coming, and no confusion, either, about his name.

  The prince who had come to Ireland was not necessarily a real one. He could still be a contrivance, a young man merely trained to look, speak and act the part. But authenticity had never been the point of the plots that had multiplied since Bosworth. Whoever he was, men immediately ran after him, as Brampton said: an authority he could hardly have enjoyed if he had come to Ireland as a simple foreign lad. Immediately, they pinned their hopes on him and saw him, in their minds, enthroned. And he, with a prince’s smile, accepted their devotion.

  v

  In the event, the re-imagining and the remembering of Richard, Duke of York were not so far apart. If the real Richard was alive, he had been stripped of his titles, taken out of England and concealed abroad in a process that was much like death. For safety’s sake, he had been made to stop looking and behaving like a prince. And he had been made to forget. This was Richard Plantagenet’s own version of what had happened to him. He had lost everything, he told Isabella, and the connection with royal blood had been severed; he had become a hollowed-out child whose only occupation was wandering and weeping. Like the human soul fallen from heaven, grieving for it knew not what, he drifted through the world oblivious of the fact that he had ever been a prince.

  In a speech that was given to him by Vergil, ostensibly delivered in Scotland in 1495, the resurrected Richard told his listeners that he had been obliged for a long time ‘almost to forget myself’, ego vero per aetatem mei ipsius fere oblitus. In the end, a slow unfolding, he had begun to know what he was; but he had forgotten so deeply that he had needed strong prompting in order to remember. ‘At last, when I had been thoroughly taught what I was,’ he became himself again. The word Richard used was not quis, but qualis; he sought to recover not who, but what sort of man, he was. Having been tasked so hard to forget his name and background, he could not remember even that fundamental.

  It could be argued, of course, that any effort of forgetting which he had been forced to make had not been applied to a prince’s life at all. Instead, it had quietly obscured his life as an organ scholar or a boatman’s boy. Perhaps this was the identity he had had to bury in darkness, forgetting his low manners, his rough friends and his father’s quayside language. In so far as he remembered it, it could become the prince’s other life, entered into for a time like a station of Purgatory and then, by God’s grace, left again. The central task was the same: to forget utterly the tiny acts and feelings that might betray him until he was allowed to be himself again, whoever that person was.

  Deliberate forgetfulness of the self was usually a sin. The churchmen called it acedia or caecia cordis, heart-blindness and loss of inward sight, applying it especially to a man’s obliviousness of where he had come from in order to exalt himself. The boat boy’s acedia was oiled with ambition and vainglory, but the prince’s would have been allowed for a while, as long as it did not slip as far as wanhope or despair. The line between self-forgetting and madness induced by grief was a very fine one. A woman in mourning was often said to be ‘out of herself’, and only after a little time would be ‘set in her mind’ again. In 1486 the friends and family of Thomas Langford, who by continuous ‘vexations’ had been ‘put from his remembrance and mind’, tried to organise, if they could, his ‘finding of himself’. By Richard’s own account, he had needed much the same sort of gradual persuasion.

  In order to live as a prince, he needed either to remember himself or to be remembered by others. The word meant reassembling: fragment by fragment, he would be remade, as Christ had commanded His disciples in the upper room to remember His Body in the wine and bread. The process was always an effort. Somehow the image had to be summoned from the back of the head, where Memory kept a cobwebbed and ramshackle cupboard of past things, before it could be imprinted in the heart, as in a book. Henry VII promised Ferdinand of Spain that he would keep all secrets communicated to him ‘in the shrine of his heart’, both a place of careful keeping and a library of imprinted confidences. This was where Richard Plantagenet needed to be reassembled: in Yorkist, and in English, hearts.

  The act of remembrance
was an antidote both to absence and to death. By writing of lost loved ones, thinking of them, repeating their name in prayers, they came alive. In Skelton’s poem ‘Philip Sparrow’, a girl mourning her pet bird brought him to life merely by embroidering him, stitch by stitch, on a piece of silk; with the last dip of the needle, the bird flinched and bled. A counterfeit prince, too, could be made that way, reassembled with each stitch and brushstroke into the figure of the real one. And perhaps in a while, if you pricked the young man who walked the world as Richard, he too, in some mysterious way, would stain the needle with Richard’s blood.

  Remembrance and imagination were in any case perilously close. Imagination drew partly from objects that were remembered, while memory could conjure up pictures that were imagined. Georges Chastellain once found himself on the brink of a dream, entre-oublié, forgotten and forgetting, still in his clothes and half-dozing on a bench a little before dawn, ‘and with my imagination full of impressions of the day that had passed, afterthoughts beginning to rise into my spirit’. Memories had become imaginings. Conversely, Earl Rivers in his Cordyal asked readers to fix the vile images of Hell in their memory, although as yet they had traversed that dreadful place – scalded by fire, frozen by unendurable cold – only in imagination. Their hearts would now be stamped with Hell as if they remembered it; as if they had travelled there in unconsciousness or dreams, like the shivering heroes of the books they read.

  Richard Plantagenet, newly remade, could do the same. When prompted, he remembered another life; or perhaps he only imagined it, by repetition fixing it so deeply that he believed he remembered it. He was made to repeat his life-story often, especially by Margaret when she later publicly displayed him: a sign of careful and deliberate imprinting. Those who talked to him were impressed and convinced, Bernard André said, by the details he could recall of his life as a prince. ‘He showed plainly,’ he wrote, ‘and rehearsed from quick and easy memory all the times of Edward IV, and all his servants and household officers, as if he had been brought up there and knew it from earliest childhood. And he added, besides, circumstantial details of places, times and persons, with which he very easily swayed the fickle minds of those men.’ Vergil agreed: the young man was trained ‘so that afterwards he might readily remember everything, and convince everyone by his performance that he was a child of the House of York’. It is not clear whether these alluring memories were fetched from the back of his head, or from the red and beating book of his fresh-imprinted heart.