by Ann Wroe
How far English Edward got is not recorded. But an exhaustive document, the charges brought by an oyer and terminer commission – one specially charged to deal with cases of treason – after Richard had tried to invade, shows how widely the network of supporters extended by the spring of 1495. The first six names on the list came from Warwickshire, Norfolk, London, Surrey, Ashton-under-Lyme and Kent: in short, from all over England. Two of them, Henry Mountford and John Corbet, both ‘captains’ of Richard’s forces, were sons of people of standing who themselves had kept a prudent distance. Henry Mountford – who had taken 100 men to Ireland three years before to help squash Plantagenet’s supporters, and had been rewarded by the king as his ‘trusty and well beloved knight’ both for service there and, earlier, in Brittany – was the younger son of Sir Simon Mountford of Coleshill in Warwickshire. (Thomas Bagnall, the ballad-maker, had also come from Coleshill, signs of a tiny Mountford cell.) Mountford père was a knight-commissioner of the shire and a guest at the ceremonies where little Henry Tudor was created Duke of York. He also bought one of the Caxton-printed Kendal indulgences, touching on another circle of conspiracy. On receipt of Richard Plantagenet’s letter he had sent him £30, somewhat less than the standard present Henry VII gave to visiting ambassadors. He entrusted the money to his son Henry to deliver, not seeming to wish to make direct contact himself. John Corbet was the son of an ‘honest’ grocer of London, who owned Corbet’s Quay on the Thames: a rich man who also kept apart from such unnecessary risk.
Even more striking were the names that followed those of Richard’s captains, the foot-soldiers of his invasion force. Almost all were yeomen or labourers, and they came from some of the remotest spots in England. Thomas Slater and John Martindale came from the fells of Kirkby-in-Kendal in Westmorland. Yorkshiremen came from Whitby, Ripon, Ripley and Sherburn-in-Elmet, possibly places where the northern rebellion of 1489 still found an echo. The west of England yielded soldiers from Bristol, Taunton, Hereford and Chipping Campden. Having heard the rumour of Richard’s survival (in the village street, in the fields, in the wool-clipping shed), they appear to have taken individual decisions to help him. That help included making their way to Malines, when many of them had never seen the sea before, and leaving their wives – as Clifford had left his – to manage affairs at home.
Vergil was not surprised at this; any field labourer, or worker in some humdrum job, would be only too pleased to join up and get the chance of plunder. Some, perhaps, were simply strong-armed by their masters. The masters, however, trod carefully, preparing the ground in England but keeping their heads down. They sent Richard letters, telling him they were waiting and would help him when he came. It was mostly the young and headstrong, like John Corbet, or the poor, like Henry Lount, labourer of East Sutton, who took their bodies across the sea and offered to fight and die for him, the greatest risk of all.
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As these conspiracies grew, Henry watched them with his usual keenness. His network of spies was superb, and was bolstered – as Edward IV’s had been – with the newly invented system of ‘posts’, or mounted relay-riders, placed along the roads. In 1497 Henry’s postal service in the West Country ensured that letters could reach Woodstock from Devon, a distance of more than 100 miles, in a day. These gave extraordinary speed to a system already staffed with the sharpest eyes and ears. ‘As for such tidings as ye have sent hither,’ the Earl of Oxford told John Paston in 1487, ‘the king had knowledge thereof more than a seven-night passed.’ He made certain he did.
Looking through Henry’s account books, the range of nebulous helpers is impressive. ‘To two men that came from Ireland’, ‘to a black friar a stranger’, ‘to an Englishman of the French king’s guard’, ‘to two monks spies’, ‘to a spy that dwelleth in the West Country’, ‘to a fellow with a beard a spy in reward’. Two more clerics, Brother John of the Dublin Franciscans and Master James Norwich, trained in theology, were sent to spy in Ireland when the ‘Child’ was there. Heralds such as Richmond, Rouge Dragon, Carlisle Herald and Bluemantle Pursuivant were constantly on spy-business, Bluemantle sometimes with six other people in a kind of undercover progress. Lowlier court officers were sometimes sent too, such as ‘Guilhem, one of the shakebushes [beaters]’, sent to Flanders ‘in our especial message’ in 1496. At many points, trumpeters were employed to gather information. These, like the heralds one or two notches above them, were ideally suited to spying: close to the elbows of important people, yet also faceless functionaries who might not be thought to be listening or watching, though almost all were.
To this crew of people, usually invisible and nameless (‘flies and familiars’, as Bacon called them), were added others who passed on scraps to Henry as part of their daily work. Top officers in Calais had a separate budget for spying, as did the keepers of other castles nearby. In 1503 instructions went to Sir John Wiltshire, then controller of Calais, to get in touch with ‘Messire Charles’, a French spymaster, and use his agents to descry the intentions of the king’s rebels. He could recruit anyone to get information ‘in any manner’, and the king would pay them. He was to make a list of the rebels’ names and give it to one of Henry’s heralds, and was to do his best to turn the servants of the chief man he was spying on, promising each of them the king’s pardon on condition that ‘he will declare those whom he knows . . . on his coming to the king’. These methods exactly were used against the new-found prince in Flanders.
Professional diplomats, too, had a brief to spy. All Henry’s envoys had this coloration. There was no spy so good or safe as an ambassador, said Commines; if the other side sent one over, he recommended sending two back. Other princes’ envoys were never to be trusted, yet they should all the same be lodged handsomely and given attendants who could, in turn, spy on them, while preventing fickle and mutinous people from resorting to them with news. Dr Rodrigo Gonzalez de Puebla, the Spanish ambassador in London, remarked that his lodgings in a city monastery were ‘the most public place in the whole of England’, so crowded were they with foreigners, ‘sharp spies’ and king’s officers trawling for information. He trawled in turn, assiduously. For his part, Henry had a habit of giving his most private briefings to envoys – flattering them deeply by ‘opening his whole heart clearly and completely’, as they supposed – out of doors, riding in the parks or gardens of his palaces, where no spy could overhear them unless he lurked in the trees.
These ambassadors were public figures with public duties to perform; they mixed with other envoys, were well known to the rulers whose courts they visited, and smoothly delivered their official statements. Yet their more vital job was to observe and report anything of interest. When William Warham went to Malines in the summer of 1493 he overstayed his visit by ten days, somehow eking out his expenses, to watch how Margaret’s protégé was treated. The officers Henry sent in 1494 and 1495 are known to have given the king such reports. Their work involved nothing difficult or undercover, but simply mingling and looking.
Such men were also usually given a last page of instructions, unmonogrammed and unsigned, that assumed they would delve deeper than the usual tres affectueuses recommendations, catching the king or some chief councillor ‘on his own’, ‘in secret’, or ‘when you see some convenient moment’. Richmond Herald, Henry’s usual envoy to France, was once told that if the subject of the feigned lad and his latest sponsor did not naturally arise, he should ‘endeavour by all proper means to give occasion to such remarks’, after which ‘he may reply that as far as that business is concerned the king cares nothing about it, and it is the least of his worries’. As well as showing the king’s bravado, the envoys could also use these private moments to intimate a nastier side.
The most useful people of all, perhaps, were officers whose standing was deliberately ambiguous. One such was François du Pon, one of Henry’s French secretaries, who was employed for him from May 1488 to 1494, and probably later, ‘in the parties beyond the sea’. His service involved keeping close to Ma
ximilian, ‘to abide with him during a certain season, and to advise us’, sometimes performing some particular ‘charge and hasty errand’, at others simply attending on him for as long as Henry required. Du Pon was never said to be on an embassy, and his pay, £10 a month, was only one-third of what proper ambassadors like Warham received. He was so permanently hanging round the court of the King of the Romans, doing ‘good service . . . there daily unto us’, that he had to be paid not with cash from the Exchequer but by payments sent out with unreliable German merchants, or by letters of exchange drawn up by Florentine creditors in London.
November 1493 found du Pon in Antwerp, writing to Henry to complain that Herman Ryng, the Cologne sable-merchant assigned to pay him, ‘hath but late done to be delivered . . . 20 pounds sterling in ready money’. From his address, it appears that his brief had not been to follow Maximilian or the feigned boy to Austria. That job had been given to the better-qualified ‘John Stoldes, alman’, who had been ‘sent into the parties of Almayne . . . for certain great matters touching the weal of us and this realm’. (Exceptionally, the warrant for Stoldes’s payment was written twice, ‘and [we] be greatly desirous of his speedy coming again’, added Henry, writing in December.) But du Pon, too, had uses. In July 1493 – a moment of intense anxiety in Henry’s relations with Burgundy – the faithful Frenchman had been sent again into the parties beyond the sea with four horses, intended as a present. The king wrote that du Pon was to be paid a reasonable sum of money to get the horses well-bitted, bridled and stabled. No word was said of who this present was for, or why, which was in itself unusual. It was most probably a present for information, and about one subject in particular.
In all these ways – through diplomats, heralds, lieutenants based abroad, snoopers recruited locally and at home – Henry spied on ‘the lad who makes himself out to be Plantagenet’. He began early, but the galvanising moment, Vergil said, was Clifford’s departure for Flanders, and Henry’s conviction that the nobles of England were about to embrace the conspiracy after him. The marginal notes in André show how, at this stage in the boy’s career, the king acknowledged his subtilitas, astutia, malicia and calliditas, a dangerous and slippery intelligence. Henry had to show very quickly that he could expose and thwart him. He followed two main lines of subversion: first, combing northern Europe to find out who his tormentor was, and second, burrowing into his household at Malines, to find out who supported him and to peel them away.
It was vital to pin a name on this boy – almost any name, and fast. An invention would have troubled nobody on moral grounds. Political expediency could re-order the world, if it was essential; and it was essential. The deception, Vergil said, had to be quickly recognised as such by everyone, or new upheavals would occur. Henry had done the same with Lambert Simnel, using the name early – whether true or not – and persisting with it, until its lightness and silliness turned the threat into a joke. If you could name the devil when you saw him, you could make him disappear.
The king’s agents fanned out through all the cities of Flanders and northern France, searching for the boy’s home and his parents and promising rewards for information. Vergil also said that Henry wrote to ‘friends’, presumably the other kings of Europe, asking them to do the same. The young man’s own friends were hard to find, since he had apparently travelled so incessantly since childhood that very few people knew him. Yet when the spies reached Tournai they stopped searching, discovering that he was remembered there. Before that moment, Tournai ‘in France’ had probably meant no more to Henry than the place his tapestries and carpets came from, delivered by the Grenier brothers, Jehan and Pascal, and confusingly measured in ‘ells Flemish’. From then on, the city was to feature much more than he wanted in his thoughts.
By the summer of 1493, probably before Clifford had reached Malines, and as du Pon was busy with his equine presents beyond the sea, Henry had assembled a plausible alias for Margaret’s White Rose. He was, he wrote to Gilbert Talbot in July, ‘another feigned lad called Perkin Warbek, born at Tournai, in Picardy’. The ‘feigned’ was added later, stressing the point. In August 1494, in a set of instructions issued to Richmond before he went on embassy to France, Henry emphasised that ‘the person who calls himself Plantagenet and the son of the late king Edward’ was of no consanguinity or kin to him, but ‘the son of a boatman called Werbec, as the king is duly assured’.
How had he come to know this? According to Richard Plantagenet, in his royal proclamation of 1496, he had made it up. The king had just ‘surmised us falsely to be a feigned person giving us nicknames, so abusing your minds’. These nicknames showed Henry’s ‘malicious’ brain at work; they had not necessarily sprung from any researches he or his agents had done. In any case, Richard went on, it was evidently a false story. If he had been a fake, he would have been easily exposed; Henry would have had no need to bribe people to leave him, because they would never have stayed. ‘Every man of Reason & discretion may well understand,’ Richard sniffed, ‘that him needed not to have made the foresaid Costages and importune labour if we had been such a feigned person as he untruly surmiseth.’
As he pointed out, Henry had done much more than call him silly names. The king
as soon as he had knowledge of our being alive Imagined, Compassed and wrought all the subtle ways & means he could devise to our final destruction . . . [and] also to deter & put us from our entry into this our Realm hath offered large sums of money to Corrupt the princes in every Land & Country and that we have been Retained with / & made importune labour to certain of our servants about our person / some of them to murder our person / and other to forsake & leave our Righteous quarrel and to depart from our services . . . and to bring his Cursed and malicious intent aforesaid to his purpose / he hath subtly and by Crafty means levied outrageous and importable sums of money upon the whole Body of our Realm to the great hurt & impoverishing of the same . . .
In the speech attributed to him in Scotland, Richard mentioned that his nemesis had also bribed, corrupted and exposed those who had befriended him and taken him in during his years of exile. Some years later Edmund de la Pole, an undoubtedly genuine Yorkist claimant, confirmed that this was Henry’s modus operandi, complaining to Maximilian that the king was ‘[practising] in all quarters and with all kinds of people whom he can corrupt with gold and silver to destroy me’.
Vergil thought Henry’s ‘friends’ among Europe’s rulers had provided most of the information he needed to trace his young tormentor, and certainly they sent him some. The king gave the impression, however, that he had also done much foraging on his own account and at his own expense. His August instructions to Richmond Herald, now much damaged, mentioned three sorts of overseas sources for the young man’s life, all of them people very close to him. First, Henry had heard from ‘those who [are acquainted with] his life and conduct [gouvernement]’, presumably from watching him in Malines. Second, he had questioned ‘some others his companions, who are . . . at present with the king’. Third, Henry mentioned ‘others . . . beyond the sea, who have been brought up with him in their youth, who have publicly declared at length how . . .’
No trace survives of these long declarations, nor of the board, lodging or rewarding of the ‘companions’ who came to England. Ambassadors did not notice them, and Henry himself did not otherwise refer to them. That does not mean they did not exist. ‘A certain French spy coming from overseas’ was sent on from Westminster to Henry at Kenilworth in July 1493, the very month in which he wrote to Talbot with, at last, the boy’s name. For whatever snippets he provided the spy was paid 30 shillings, a handsome sum for spying, and was then fitted out with new clothes, from bonnet to boots, for the journey back.
Yet it is possible that the Tournai discoveries did not derive from any of these sources. Other useful people had reverted to Henry, bringing with them information about the boy; and it is likely that Henry had been gathering this, piecemeal and secretly, even before the boy’s emergence in Ir
eland. Edward Brampton seemed to dodge back to England for a while in 1488, staying almost incognito at the Domus Conversorum; in 1489, the year he played host to Richmond Herald in Portugal, he was given a general pardon, ‘provided that the said Edward produce sufficient security in the King’s chancery for bearing himself as a faithful liege should bear himself towards the king’s person and majesty’. Such a rider on a pardon was unusual, suggesting that Henry wished to make double-sure of this wandering ‘knight, alias of Portingale’. The official confession, as it eventually emerged, mentioned Brampton’s wife but not Brampton himself, perhaps by arrangement, and contained very little that might obviously have come from him. But he remained in good standing, and in the autumn of 1499 (now billed as an ambassador of the King of Portugal) was still enjoying exemptions from customs duty in the port of Southampton.
Pregent Meno, the Breton merchant who had brought the boy to Ireland, had also changed sides. He had been captured in December 1491, having been followed from Cork, by a ship called the Anne of Fowey. Yet he does not appear to have been punished and eventually reaped rewards, presumably for information or for a mouth kept shut. In April 1495 he was given a grant of £300, to be paid in instalments of £30 twice a year, from the customs on wool, hides, wool-fells, lead and tin going through Dublin and Drogheda. In 1496 he was made an English denizen, a privilege granted to no more than half a dozen people a year and those mostly in high places, such as Henry’s chief legal adviser, also a Breton, and his Norman confessor. In May the same year Meno was granted ‘licence to buy, within one year from that date, thirty sacks of wool from any seller of wool in England’, and to ‘transport [them] to any part of the world free of customs or other dues’, a generous reward for nothing in particular. An entry in March called him the king’s servant rather than, as usual, ‘merchant’.