Perkin

by Ann Wroe

  Yet Richard of York was still at large. He had not been caught, and preserved his value as an irritant to Henry who could, at any moment, become dangerous again. Many months later, Ferdinand and Isabella instructed de Puebla to give Henry a little lecture on how easily kingdoms were lost and won, and how risky a war might therefore be with ‘him who calls himself the Duke of York’. ‘In feats of arms’, the Spanish sovereigns wrote, ‘no one must ever place his hopes in an abundance of power or soldiers, for it often turns out that smaller forces triumph over larger ones . . . the stronger one is, the more one has to justify one’s cause and have God on one’s side.’ They urged Henry ‘not to stake his good authority and his fortune on an adventure’.

  Publicly, Henry would never have agreed that the balance was so precarious. Yet he was prey to just those nerves. Bosworth, after all, had been close-run, and at Stoke two of his ‘battles’ had refused to engage until they saw what the issue would be. In the Parliament of October 1495 an act was passed, evidently the fruit of long anxiety, ‘that no person going with the king to the wars shall be attaint of treason’. Henry remembered how, after Bosworth, he had backdated his reign by a day to make Richard III’s supporters traitors, though they had been fighting for their anointed king. He had been aware ever since that this might happen to him. His power, too, might be overturned in one battle in a matter of hours. The act referred to him as his subjects’ prince and sovereign lord ‘for the time being’, a rare admission of fragility, and spoke tremulously of ‘what fortune ever fall by chance in the same battle against the mind and weal of the prince’. To fight, he said some time later – still thinking specifically of fighting this boy – was ‘to set the trial . . . upon an unlikelihood’. This did not sound like a man who had sent his flimsy enemy packing.

  Maximilian, though with yet more feinting and circumspection, went on backing his Prinzen von York. On September 19th, he admitted that he had been induced by ‘the pope, the sovereigns of Spain and others of the league’, as well as the Duke of Milan, to include Henry’s name in the league. With that, he officially gave up his idea of funding an invasion to recover the right of his protégé in England. On September 21st in Worms a document was drawn up stating Maximilian’s readiness, in principle, to agree that Henry should join the league by Christmas. The notary then put in, after the words ‘everything included in this agreement to be observed’, a weasel clause that allowed for exceptions. Maximilian scrawled his own, in Latin, in the margin: ‘Except for what we may wish to be done to the same King of England in the cause of the illustrious prince Richard, Duke of York, if divisions and disputes arise between them.’ Again, he had trouble with the name of his protégé, crossing out both the ‘Richard’ part and the ‘Duke’ part and then rewriting them. The very next day, he invoked higher powers to protect him by writing to the pope on Richard’s behalf.

  His son Philip seemed to abandon the cause completely. He officially dropped ‘Monsieur d’York’ as soon as he had failed in Kent, and entered into proper talks to renew trade with England. Five clauses of the new trade treaty of February 1496, the Magnus Intercursus, were concerned with ending favours to fugitives and rebels, including assistance for invasions. Another promised that Margaret, cited by name, would give them no more help or hospitality in any of the towns or palaces in her territory, and would lose those properties if she persisted.

  Margaret, therefore, moved away and fell silent, in order not to damage Philip’s interests. Although Henry was quite aware, Zurita said, that the mala voluntad of Philip and Maximilian was by no means exhausted, their armed support was no longer publicly behind the cause of Richard, Duke of York. From now on their efforts on his behalf, like Margaret’s, had to become surreptitious. Both men’s secret payments for him before the invasion had been distinguished by the phrase a son bon plaisir, as if he were some hidden game or indulgence. They now had to leave him, the falcon trained and sheltered so carefully for so long, to flutter and possibly to fall in his own wildly altering element, the air.

  He had become a wanderer again. A rational observer – Erasmus, say, whose path had crossed his in Brabant – might have wondered what impelled him. He himself, talking two years later, did not place the blame on anyone in his circle: not Maximilian, not Margaret, not John Atwater or John Taylor, or anyone else in the tattered retinue that was left to him. He followed after Fortune. She grasped his hand.

  5

  The pavilions of love and the tents of war

  In March 1471 Edward IV, England’s great lover, had also tried to reclaim his kingdom. He sailed from Vlissingen in Zeeland with a force of Englishmen, Flemings and Dutchmen, putting an end to his three months of exile at the court of Burgundy. On the 12th he anchored off the coast near Cromer, in Norfolk. He sent some men ashore, including Robert Chamberlain and Gilbert Debenham, to find out whether the country was well disposed towards him. It was not, and he sailed on. Storms blew up the next day and he was forced to land at Holderness on the Humber, with the rest of his fleet grounded and scattered up and down the coast. He lodged in a village while his force regrouped, but the people would not come to him.

  The love Edward sought as he progressed disconsolately through eastern England was not the kind with which he was freely associated – snatched fumbles behind the arras or romps with the merriest, the wiliest and the holiest harlots in the realm, the last of whom ‘no man could get out of the church to any place lightly, but if it were to his bed’. He sought political supporters, men who would form a party and sustain his quarrel with arms. The language was often close to that used for chamber-love. Royal and noble allies ‘loved together’ and called each other ‘bedfellows’, sometimes sealing their amity by sleeping together between sheets as they did with their paramours and wives. It was in this spirit that Kildare expressed his fury that anyone should think he had ‘lain with’ the French lad in Ireland. In June 1500, Henry VII’s own report of an embassy to Burgundy spoke repeatedly of ‘loving offers’, ‘right loving audience’ and love itself. The word was commonly connected less with women than with ties of political interest and, if called for, blood.

  Edward found, as he travelled, that England loved King Henry rather than himself. Yet he persevered, and lulled the country into quietness. The young man who claimed to be his son did not show the same persistence. Rebuffed in Kent, he did not sail further north to try his luck in the places where chalk cliffs gave way to easier sands and gravels. He seems to have been meant to. ‘English Edward’ had been sent, after all, to proselytise for him in the coastal towns, and his captains had revealed that Yarmouth, in Norfolk, was a target. But Richard had obviously abandoned that further effort, even if, for a few frantic days, Yarmouth still expected ‘the sight of the ships’. There may never have been a firm idea of softening the country village by village as Edward had done. Instead, once spurned, Richard made for the open sea.

  Henry followed him. As in 1492, the king knew exactly what his movements were. By July 23rd four ships were being victualled at the western ports of Plymouth and Fowey on Henry’s orders, to be at sea for six weeks with 470 men on board. In the days that followed, dozens of crossbowmen, horses and soldiers in brand-new uniforms were sent across to Ireland. Henry, as Maximilian learned, was chasing his protégé hard, ‘and hoped speedily to get possession of him’. As an extra layer of precaution, he made a general inquisition in England and especially in London to find out the names, ages and ‘faculties’ of all Irish men, women and children living there, in case they needed to be watched. Edward Poynings and William Hatcliffe had already been sent, in October 1494, to reduce Ireland to proper obedience, including reversing the legal immunity for rebels; by December, £4,266 3s. 4d., a vast sum, had been disbursed for their operations. In all these ways, Henry tried to make sure that the feigned lad would find no favour there.

  The patrolling ships from Fowey and Plymouth did not, however, intercept him. He sailed on, battling storms that were forcing other ships off the
sea round Ireland, and reached his old friends in mid-July. They were not as numerous as they had been before. Poynings and Hatcliffe had done a good job, and various men suspected of supporting Richard – the dean of Limerick, the dean of Kilkenny, the mayor of Dublin – had recently been arrested and interrogated. Nonetheless, lords in both the north and the south had openly declared for him early that summer. They included two great Gaelic chiefs, O’Neill of Clandeboy and Hugh O’Donnell of Tyrconnell, who commanded the whole north-west and the outer isles towards Scotland; Shane Burke in Galway, described by one of Henry’s officers as ‘the greatest succour that Perkin had while he was in the land save only the earl of Desmond’; and Lord Barry of Munster, in the south-west. The city of Cork, still fired by Atwater, also came out for him. His first ally remained Desmond. Henry had tried hard with him, appointing Richard Hatton in December 1494 to negotiate, receive his oath of fealty, deliver to him a pardon under the great seal and put his firstborn son in ward as surety for his allegiance. All this had worked with Kildare, but it failed with Desmond, and the pardon seems to have stayed in Hatton’s pocket.

  Just before the Deal invasion, but apparently without co-ordination, the earl determined to make a show of force for Richard in southern Ireland. He marched his troops overland to attack Waterford, the principal south-eastern port, from the west. After some weeks, Richard’s fleet arrived from Kent to reinforce him. The errant prince had begun luckily. As he sailed past Youghal, forty miles from Waterford to the south-east, he attacked the port and a ship docked there, the Christopher of Plymouth, carrying sixty tons of iron from Spain and forced into harbour by the bad weather. The ship was seized, and the iron and other goods in her sold to various local merchants. Thanks to this piece of piracy, Richard got cash and an extra ship. Once joined up with Desmond, he could muster eleven vessels and an army of 2,400 men.

  The choice of Waterford was a mistake, for this was the only place in Ireland that had remained consistently loyal to Henry during Simnel’s rebellion. The city’s motto proclaimed it, Urbs intacta manet, like some haughty spinster who would open neither her gates nor her thighs to a stranger. Nevertheless, Desmond and Richard tried a joint attack, the earl’s army from the land and Richard’s ships from the river. He himself was not with them. He had disembarked at Passage, at the mouth of the river, and apparently sent out from there his command that Waterford should surrender. Once again, as at Deal, the cautious invader conducted his rough courtship from a distance.

  But the citizens resisted. A siege started that went on for eleven days, ‘hot of every side’, while the town’s cannon pounded at the ships. The roaring detonations and the cries of the dying could be heard far outside the city, as far as the timid prince was. After one sortie, the citizens returned with a large band of prisoners, lopped off their heads and fastened them on stakes. This seemed to turn the tide. The besiegers, ‘in dread of this cruelty’, became disheartened, and on August 3rd the siege was lifted. They departed before dawn, continuing the siege for a while at Ballycasheen, and the next morning left there too, ‘with dishonour and great loss of their people, and the said Perkin in person fain to take shipping at Passage, and to make sail out of the haven’. His ships picked him up as they retreated.

  He had probably never heard artillery fired in war before, and certainly not that close. The four small cannon taken to Deal had never been used, and in any case the fusillade at Waterford was being aimed at his ships, from the other side. The terrible noise of artillery amazed people. Different sizes of guns were called howlers and clangers, vividly suggesting how they sounded, and hell was imagined to be full of gunfire. ‘Then came the awful sound of the cannon, the big drums, trumpets, clarions, cries of men and beasts, worse than had ever been heard before,’ wrote Molinet of the siege of Arras in 1492; ‘thunder, tempest, lightning had never been heard like that.’

  Four of Richard’s ships, including the stolen Christopher, were captured. One was reported smashed by gun-stones, either real stones or chunks of iron, and the crew killed. The others were sold for derisory sums, showing how small they were. One vessel, la Mare, was swapped for six pieces of woollen cloth to the value of £40. Richard himself slid away – so good at sliding away by now – under Desmond’s protection to Cork and his friend John Atwater. Although Atwater and his son had been summoned before the Irish Parliament in 1493 and condemned the next year, John was now mayor again. He helped his prince for a while, but Richard needed to move on. Some said he was shipwrecked in Ireland, possibly that autumn as he proceeded up the coast, and had to flee across the mountains in disguise so that Henry’s men would not know him. Zurita, who promoted that story, had him drifting as a vagabond ‘among the islands of that sea’. Whatever happened, it added to the drama of the story he would tell to the next potential friend.

  For almost three months he wandered, keeping safely west of the English Pale and heading north towards Ulster. No one really knew where he had gone. Henry heard ‘rumours’ from Waterford about ‘the earl of Desmond’s and Perkin Warbeck’s journey in August’, with more from Brother John and other spies about their movements in Munster ‘and elsewhere’. The king still gave out that he was in hot pursuit, but the quarry had disappeared. Desmond, as Henry thought, was probably with him for the first stage, with Burke and O’Donnell taking over to protect him as he moved through their lands.

  The gorgeous prince of Malines was now among the sylvestres homines, as Polydore Vergil called them: with the wild men of the woods. Here chieftains in greasy homespun plaids continually fought each other, while the common people crouched in smoky hovels over peat fires, eating the clotted blood of their cattle with butter to sustain themselves. O’Donnell had once defeated his great enemy O’Neill by driving wild mares through his camp; the corpse of a Scottish captain, killed in the mêlée, was propped against a tree by O’Neill’s men and plied with drink and women in case these could revive him. Around Lammas, or harvest time, in 1495 O’Donnell was fully engaged in raiding, drowning and burning in the northern parts of Connaught, whether or not he had a fugitive prince with him.

  It is easy to see Prince Richard in those months in the guise of King Sweeney, fleeing across the bogs and mountains, numbing his fierce hunger with watercress and wild apples as he lamented the loss of the affection of his people. The lover shut out from love traditionally roamed disconsolate in the greenwoods and wild places, living on acorns and stream-water, with his bed among the brambles that tangled in his hair. Yet Richard Plantagenet may still have managed to live softly, moving from castle to castle and preserving some segment of his retinue and his soldiers. Henry had heard that remnants of his Deal force were still with him, and these men may have defended their prince quite capably as he wandered. John Wise, sent by the king to spy on them as far as Munster, was forced to flee without his horses ‘and so he lost them’, because he had got too close.

  Those in Prince Richard’s entourage in Ireland were lovers of long standing. Most of them had been with him in France and at Malines, and had joined him for the invasion. With the exception of George Neville, Anthony de la Forsa and ‘gentleman’ Edward Skelton, they were a group with almost no social standing and few resources to contribute to the cause. At least some of their money had come from theft. Besides selling the iron from the Christopher and the relics from Keating’s priory, they had profited from the sleight-of-hand of another crooked priest, William Lounde. This cleric – a Yorkshireman, originally from Doncaster – was said to have absconded with ‘certain money and jewels to a good substance’ from the house of Ralph, Lord Hastings, whose chaplain and steward he had been for some years. The stolen treasure had gone to Richard’s cause and, possibly in gratitude, Richard had made him his private chaplain and one of his principal advisers.

  This venal and unimpressive group had the virtue, at least, of fairly long service together. Their adventures bound them together in a way that seemed to go beyond self-interest, for self-interest would surely have caused
them to bail out long ago. Yet the essence of liege-love was also to fight for a cause; and not one of these men was a fighter. Richard of York’s hopes were now directed towards a man who was.

  The young King of Scotland, James IV, had been roughly propelled to power in 1488 by a clique of nobles who had first opposed and then killed his father, James III. From the earliest days of his reign he had been warmly receptive to taking up a quarrel with Henry Tudor. England remained ‘the auld enemy’, never to be trusted. Henry supported James’s own rebels, that faction in Scotland that continued to regret the rebellion that had destroyed his father. There were also old scores to settle, such as the English occupation of the frontier town of Berwick and the ownership of wild tracts of land in Northumberland. Low-level border raiding and cattle-stealing were constant, and to move from these incursions to invasion or war proper was, as Henry knew, a constant possibility.

  James also had his own ambitions. As he emerged from his minority, intelligent, curious and highly charged, he wanted to prove that he could take decisions and forge policies for himself. Much more than this, he wanted to cut a figure in the world and ensure that his cold, poor, marginal country was noticed in the councils of Europe. A marriage could help, perhaps with Maximilian’s daughter or a princess of Spain. Strategic alliances could help too, and would be especially welcome if they unsettled the King of England. The most alluring, if distant, prospect, to James as to Maximilian, was Henry’s replacement with a new king who would be amenable and grateful.