Perkin

by Ann Wroe

Though by experience ye know nothing thereto

  Yet oft ye muse and think what it may be

  Nature provoketh of her strong degree

  Betrothal itself was marked in the romances by no particular ceremonial, but with the first kiss. The lover kissed his betrothed on the lips once, then twice: the first kiss tentative and polite, the second bolder, confirming his right to be there and to touch her in this way. Modesty required that in public young women should open their mouths only a little, dimpling rather than smiling. It was understood, from the merest hint of a smile, that they wanted more than this. The favourite symbol of nascent sexual love was the red rosebud, the petals not tight-folded but ready to unclose, as soft lips pressed open. Within them, if he dared, the lover might touch her tongue, sugared and swelling gently under his own. Such a kiss was a private act, usually reserved by princes for the chamber and the closet, as was the taking of the Sacrament. To kiss properly in public was a deliberate demonstration of the intimacy to follow.

  It sometimes followed very quickly, as soon as the Mass of betrothal had been sung. Ferdinand and Isabella, their betrothal sealed and the Mass said, immediately went to bed together. In 1490 Prince Afonso of Portugal, betrothed but not yet married to their daughter Isabella, stole in to make love to her night after night in the monastery where she was staying, scandalising the monks by choosing such a place but not, it seems, by the act itself. (The wall of the monastery church, just beside their room, crashed to the ground as if shaken by their passion.) Once a young man and a young woman were solemnly contracted to marry, all parties to the contract willed their bodily union and, in some cases, assisted it. The chaperone would slip from the girl’s bed, allowing the young man to take her place, or the couple would simply find each other, understanding that their love was sealed and permitted. In a famous poem by Guillaume de Machaut the lover, approaching his beloved to kiss her, found a leaf across her mouth. Her chaperone gently took the leaf away.

  In Richard and Katherine’s case, the season of Advent intervened before they could sanctify their vows in marriage. Advent was a period of penitence and fish-fasts when marriages could not be solemnised and when the absence of meat, so churchmen hoped, dampened down desire. But young desire is not easily dampened, and it seems that they did not wait. A child was born to them the following September, too early for a January wedding. In some unguarded room, with the tacit approval of those who had brought them together, they probably made love a matter of days after they had first seen each other.

  The actual wedding took place on or around the octave of Epiphany in mid-January, presumably in Edinburgh, where the king then was. Richard wore a ‘spousing gown’ of fourteen and a half yards of white damask, costing £28. His six servants were also in damask robes and his two trumpeters in gowns of tawny cloth, with camlet doublets and red hose. No concession was made to the bitter cold except tippets, or short capes, for the king and the prince, of taffeta and fur. Katherine, like Richard, was robed in white, her hair loose on her shoulders. Both wore wedding crowns. These, with the white robes, proclaimed them as virgins and maidens, words applied equally to her and to him, whatever the truth was.

  The bridal couple, having reverenced each other, stood first at the door of the church and made the dowry offering, laid out on a gold or silver tray. After this Huntly gave Katherine away to her husband-to-be, who took her right hand in his. By this ‘hand-fastening’, in the presence of witnesses, the first sacramental seal was set on the marriage. After this, inside the church with the guests standing around them, the priest asked the couple and the assembled company whether the marriage might lawfully go forward. The questions to be asked were set out in the order of service; they concerned only consanguinity and prior contract, the most common rocks on which marriages foundered. No mention was made of doubtful or false identity, and clearly no one raised it. To most of those who stood there, the identity of this crowned and shimmering young man was not uncertain.

  When the priest had ‘diligently’ made his enquiries, he asked the bridegroom ‘by name’, Richard, whether he would protect and keep his wife. He answered, Volo: ‘I will’. Katherine was asked whether she would take this man for her lawful husband, ‘to serve him faithfully in all things’, and replied, in turn, Volo. Her father then gave her again to Richard, who presented her with a marriage gift. The ring and the bridal offering were placed on a dish or on the Mass-book to be blessed and sprinkled with holy water: one ring only, as was customary, for Katherine, ‘and may she who wears it be armed with the virtue of heavenly protection and may it be to her eternal salvation . . . may she remain, O Lord, in your peace, and live and grow and grow old and bear children in long length of days’.

  Richard then took the ring and placed it lightly on each finger of her left hand. As the priest led him, he said after him: In nomine patris.

  ‘In nomine patris.’

  Moving the ring from the thumb to the second finger: Et filii.

  ‘Et filii.’

  To the third finger: Et spiritus sancti amen.

  ‘Et spiritus sancti amen.’

  There he left it, on the finger from which a vein ran directly to the heart. He then said, after the priest, ‘With this ring I thee wed’: De isto anulo te sponso. Lastly, he gave Katherine the gold pieces from the dish: Et de isto auro te honoro, ‘And with this gold I honour thee’. They bowed their heads as the priest declared them blessed by God, who had made the world out of nothing. Then, her right hand in his, they walked to the high altar for the Mass of their marriage.

  The Epistle was from Corinthians (‘Know you not that your body is the temple of the Holy Ghost, and you are not your own?’). The Gospel was from Matthew (‘They shall be no more twain, but one flesh’). Prayers asked that their bodies and hearts should be conjoined and sanctified in the delights of love, as Adam and Eve had been coupled by God’s grace in the garden. After the Sanctus, bride and groom prostrated themselves as a golden canopy was spread over them. They did not rise until the moment when the priest pronounced the Pax Domini: at which point Richard received from the priest the pax, a silver tablet engraved with an image of the Crucifixion, kissed it and gave it to Katherine, ‘kissing her and no other, and neither kissing anyone else’. They now belonged exclusively to each other, ‘knit together fleshly’, living in truth and faith to the other as parts of one body and one soul. Churchmen taught that the foundation of married love lay in that moment, their kiss in the presence of Christ. Poets took it further. When a girl ‘sweetly gave me the pax between two pillars of the church’, the act plainly symbolised a sublimation that was no longer surreptitious, but fully lawful.

  Katherine was now his wife. She was also the Duchess of York, sister-in-law of the Queen of England, niece of Margaret of York, daughter-in-law of the most serene Edward, late king. She shared her husband’s name and all it meant, if it meant anything. A cloth of estate was hers, and the right to have her train carried by a baroness in her own house. She could dream, if she wanted to, of processions and coronations in England. Among the crowd of guests, there were probably not many who thought that outcome likely, even if the young man’s claim was true. And somewhere outside, no doubt scribbling a report to Henry, was at least one man, John Ramsay, who believed this ‘boy’ had simply hoodwinked her.

  In love, the state in which they were, the possibilities of deception were manifest. Everyone knew that love ‘obfusked, endulled and ravished’ all those it touched, men as well as women. The poet François Villon described how, in dalliance with his love and leaning close to her, she could make him believe that cinders were flour, old iron glass, a felt hat a mortar:

  Heaven, a brass pot

  The clouds, a calf-skin

  A cabbage stalk, a turnip

  Morning, evening . . .

  The trusting lover also believed that roses grew on nettle-stalks, that leeks gave honey, that curlews dried clothes on stands in the meadows and that, in the woods, whiting armed with bows went hunti
ng the deer.

  Love’s world appeared to be a garden of delight, but not if you looked closely. Venus, who ran the only tavern there, offered arousing hippocras spiked with gall. If you plucked an apple from the shining boughs of the trees, it fell apart as grey ash. Under the leaves of the pretty flowers in the borders, adders lurked, and tiny pricking serpents coiled around their stings. In the garden strolled characters of exquisite looks and courtesy whose names, Fair Semblant and Fair Seeming, gave warning that nothing could be trusted. Still the lover was taken in, entranced and half-drunk, and lured towards destruction.

  A baron’s daughter fell for a vagrant juggler once, a man who had changed himself into an angel and had conjured ‘a well good steed’ from an old horse bone and a saddle cloth. He pricked and pranced so alluringly before her bower that, though she had disdained all lovers, she took him to her bed. The dawn broke, the birds sang: still twined around her angel-lord, she called for her maidservants.

  ‘Where be ye my merry maidens

  That ye come not me to?

  The jolly windows of my bower

  Look that you undo

  That I may see;

  For I have in mine arms

  A duke or else an earl.’

  But when she lookéd him upon

  He was a blear-eyed churl –

  ‘Alas’, she said.

  Robert Fabyan and Bernard André both assumed that something similar had happened in Katherine’s case. The mawmet from Flanders had married her ‘to her confusion’, a phrase carrying strong implications that she had been tricked, seduced and left ruined. But this never seemed to be her reading of it, then or later. However little she knew of Richard, she, like James, had decided to believe. She trusted him, as she had shown in that moment when she had let him take her hand. The churchmen taught in any case that, inside marriage, it was right that some love-blindness should remain. ‘Every woman should love and fear her husband so highly,’ said the Secreta, ‘that she should find no man fairer, wiser or stronger than he; and if any man does appear fairer, wiser and stronger, she should not find him so.’

  From her husband’s point of view, the marriage may have seemed very different. James obviously meant it to bolster him, to give him confidence and express his own support, but he may have gone uncomfortably far. Contemporaries describing this young man’s career considered his marriage as the extraordinary peak of his deception, and possibly it was: a climb too high, to a place where the world was different and unsettling.

  By this time, Richard of England had bound himself with many sorts of obligations to Margaret, Maximilian and Philip. He had been liberal in his promises of how far he would get and what he would do for his friends once he got there. This was part of the game of high politics; papers signed but not acted on, breezy undertakings given. Each side understood the limits of any commitment that was made, including the recision of all that had been promised. Marriage, by contrast, was a pledge without reservation. As the love-letter had acknowledged, his soul was now enfolded with another’s, and his life was not his own.

  If that life was a lie, it was hardly possible to admit it to the young woman with whom he was increasingly in love, as she with him. He could not do so without destroying her as well as himself, for the greater part of her honour now stemmed from his. He was her husband and her lord; he could not break that. As much as Margaret’s maternal bullying, or James’s fierce encouragement, or any convictions on his own account, it may have been Katherine’s devotion to him, and his to her, that bound him to pursue the claim of Richard, Duke of York. This may have been what he meant – if anything he said at that point was sincere – when he confessed two years later that he had been prevented, sometime around the autumn of 1495, from letting the whole thing go, as he had longed to.

  If he was not Richard, marriage made him more vulnerable than he had ever been. He was so close to someone else that their flesh was supposed to contain one heart, hers and his together, each laid open equally to the secrets of the other. In love, he could not pretend with her. As he could lawfully undress her (unpinning her head-dress to loosen her hair, unfastening her bodice, lifting her kirtle over her hips), so she could uncover him: robe, surcoat, shirt, points. One by one, under her hands, all princely trappings could fall away. He could not conceal himself, any more than he could conceal the eager hardness of his gear as she embraced him.

  Yet at that moment, too, there was no escaping love’s deception. Inside the drawn curtains, in the busy and tender darkness, Venus taught them to work by touch alone, uncumbered by the knowledge or the etiquette of daylight. At the height of pleasure both partners closed their eyes, the better to lose themselves in the rapture of their bodies. He could deceive her then as completely as he abandoned himself to her, and she, crying out in love, would not have cared. He was hers, and she his – whoever he was.

  iii

  He had been married in white damask. Once the ceremony was over he fought in white damask, or was at least apparelled in it, in a tight-fitting arming jacket stuffed with horsehair and halved or quartered with purple. His attendants would have laced him into it, hard. He also put on thick white arming hose and prepared to take part in the wedding tournament. It is unclear whether he ever did so. His six servants were also given arming jackets, of cheaper stuff decorated with wide ribbons, and may have had a go in his place. New bridegrooms were sometimes excused from fighting, in order to conserve their energy and preserve their bodies for the jousts of love. James fought, in an arming doublet of costly crimson satin, and hurt himself; more than two weeks later his ‘sore hand’ was still bound up in a bandage of double-thick silk, a mitten of white kersey and a taffeta sling.

  The difference between them was telling. James was devoted to tournaments, often inviting all his lords, earls and barons, as well as champions from Europe, to come to his court and prove themselves by jousting, fighting with battle-axes, fighting with two-handed swords, and crossbow-shooting. In the welcome-jousts for Richard at Stirling, perhaps lacking other challengers, James paid for an unnamed ‘person’ to dress up in damask and break spears against him. Pedro de Ayala, the Spanish ambassador, found him so prone to dash into dangerous situations ‘that at times I had to drag him back at all costs and restrain him myself to get him out of them’. At his own wedding, in 1503, James fought disguised as the Wild Knight with an escort of savages, highlanders and borderers, laying about him with such frenzy and disregard for bloodshed that spectators were amazed to see afterwards, tugging his helm from his sweat-slicked hair, the king himself.

  James was eager to cement his new friendship not just with a marriage, but with war against England on Richard’s behalf. Almost as soon as Richard arrived, written orders for weapons-showings were sent to sheriffs round the kingdom. In February 1496, a tax of spear-silver was levied from barons, clergy and burghers to pay for a campaign. In June, couriers were sent to summon the host to meet James at Lauder. He himself supervised the collection of artillery from his forts and castles. By then, such loud war noises had reached England that Henry’s Scottish fool, Harry the Scot, was being fitted out in ‘habilaments of war’ to pour mockery on James’s efforts.

  John Ramsay’s reports to Henry of September 1496 made clear that it was James, not the ‘boy’, who was pushing for an invasion of England. James insisted on it, despite the truce concluded with Henry and despite visits, in 1495 and 1496, from English envoys led by Richard Fox, Bishop of Durham, to offer him Henry’s little daughter Margaret in marriage. The rewards for threatening Henry were increasing; there was no reason to stop now. James also insisted on fighting despite some uncertainty, exaggerated by Ramsay, among his own lords. He would ‘in no wise be inclined to ye good of peace nor amity,’ wrote Henry’s spy. His ‘young adventurousness’ was likely to put all his people and the ‘boy’, too, in jeopardy. ‘This simple wilfulness,’ Ramsay concluded, ‘can not be removed out of ye King’s mind for nae persuasion nor mean.’

  Foreign e
nvoys, too, were drawn in as sympathisers. Early that September, Alexander Monypeny, Richard’s old captain-of-the-honour-guard from Paris, arrived in Scotland as ambassador from the King of France. His brief, according to Ramsay, was to understand the king’s mind and to work out whether James or Henry was to blame for the drift towards war. James seized on him, took him before his council and explained ‘how it was all moved on the part of England’. As a result Monypeny became, to Ramsay’s disgust, ‘but right soft in ye solicitation of this peace’. According to a member of Henry’s council, the arrival of the French envoy immediately caused the Scots to abandon their vague ‘arrangement’ with the Bishop of Durham. Monypeny told Ramsay himself that it was no wonder the Scottish king was stirred to unkindness. Such encouragement was hardly needed, and especially not from Monypeny, who had also found his young prince again and was constantly in his company. ‘He and the boy,’ wrote Ramsay crossly, ‘are every day in council.’

  Henry did not underestimate the danger from Scotland and, especially, he did not want the other members of the Holy League to belittle it. In May 1496 his envoy to Maximilian, Christopher Urswick, had told the Venetian envoy Contarini in private that Henry

  was compelled to be much on the watch against the youth who says he is the son of King Edward and went lately to Scotland, whose king received him with many promises; the which king is linked by an indissoluble understanding and league to the King of France, and although the poorest king in Christendom, yet all his subjects are bound to serve him in person and at their own expense, during three weeks in the course of every year, on any expedition he may undertake; and for that period he can bring 50,000 men into the field.

  Contarini’s brother, then in England, had reported that Henry was ‘in dread’ of being expelled from his kingdom by the Duke of York. Dread was not the word Henry would have wanted at all: he preferred a sense of general suspicion, watchfulness in the face of danger. The truth was perhaps midway between them.