Perkin

by Ann Wroe

  King Richard, too, would have heard of the forces quickly massing against him. As early as the 12th he had probably had Katherine transferred from the Mount, which had no privilege of sanctuary, to St Buryan, eight miles to the west. In itself, this was an admission of uncertain hopes. St Buryan was a strange and dismal place, virtually abandoned by its clergy. It was hardly safe, despite its privilege, and hardly comfortable. Katherine presumably stayed in one of the handful of prebendaries’ houses beside the church: a building of surpassing ugliness, new-built of great blocks of brownish granite, on a bleak plateau with views of nothing except the sky. Across the new rood-screen in the church, strange creatures fought each other: black demons devouring blue-and-gold birds, hounds with gold collars pulling down gold-antlered deer, a speckled unicorn engaging with a writhing winged dragon whose jaws were open to seize its throat. There Katherine waited, with a few servants and a few priests, to hear what would become of her husband.

  At this point, Henry was not sure that he would need to go himself to defeat him ‘and all other that will take his part if any such be’. He almost disdained to, confidently expecting that his rival would run away or find no supporters. André insisted that the king never wanted to fight him, just to save the country from the evil he represented. To take on this lying rascal with arms would do him too much honour, especially since he would soon destroy himself. On September 15th, in a letter to the pope, Henry announced that his enemy ‘would soon fall into his hands’. Soncino picked up that mood, writing on the 16th from London that ‘everyone thinks that this will be the final ruin of the Cornishmen and the end of the Duke of York . . . it was considered impossible for him to escape from [the king’s] hands, and it was thought that the affair would be settled within a month . . . he cannot possibly escape’.

  The duke seemed still to be hoping, Soncino said, for ‘some stroke’ from Scotland, but his detour to Ireland had ruined the chance of a double-pronged attack. James had launched his own raid more than a month before, taking advantage of Henry’s distraction with the Cornishmen’s first march on London. There had probably been every intention that they should strike together, one last throw on Richard’s behalf. But Richard, for whatever reason, had delayed, and James grew tired of waiting. In August he attacked Norham Castle, just over the border with England. Henry sent forces under the Earl of Surrey to cross the Tweed at Ayton; headstrong as ever, James challenged Surrey to single combat with Berwick as the prize, but was soberly waved aside.

  As the English prepared to fight properly, in the constant rain and cold of a Scottish August, James gave the order to stop fighting and brought his artillery home. On September 22nd Rowland Robinson arrived, with the news that Richard had landed in Cornwall; but by then the momentum in Scotland was all towards peace. Ominously, Robinson did not bother to return to the master who had sent him. Richard was on his own and perhaps, as the days wore on, he knew he was. ‘The Duke of York,’ Soncino added, ‘like a desperate man, does not want to drag this out at length.’

  That psychological insight may have come from Henry. Having watched him so long, he already knew the young man he was pursuing, and how hard he found it to persist in violent action. He knew, too, what the odds were. Some Spanish envoys later maintained that Henry had reacted with great fear and distress to Perkin’s landing, but other foreign visitors, less eager to see weakness in him, noticed only a determined calm that covered intense activity. It was at this moment, at Woodstock in September, that Soncino was ushered into the ‘wonderful presence’ of Henry beside his throne, utterly confident and blazing with jewels. ‘Everything favours the king,’ Soncino reported, ‘especially an immense treasure.’ (‘I am informed that he has upwards of six million in gold,’ he wrote in another letter, ‘and never spends anything.’) ‘All the nobles of the realm,’ he went on, ‘know the royal wisdom and either fear him or bear him an extraordinary affection, and not a man of any consideration joins the Duke of York.’ The core of his rival’s weakness, as always, was that noblemen would not join him, few gentlemen were interested, and his chief supporters were the half-civilised and poor. ‘The state of the realm,’ said Soncino, rather unnecessarily, ‘is in the hands of the nobles and not of the people.’ The king of the wild people stood no chance.

  iii

  On St Lambert’s Day, September 17th, which was a Sunday, King Richard IV arrived at the gates of Exeter. His herald shouted his proclamation at the city walls, commanding Exeter to surrender by the duty of its allegiance. The new king also promised, Bacon said, that he would ‘make them another London, if they would be the first town that should acknowledge him’.

  The city clerk briefly recorded that ‘one Perkin Warbeck, calling himself king’ had come through the country as far as their gates. They had no intention of admitting him. In Northumberland, his proclamation had been met with indifference and silence. Here in Devon they mocked it, laughed at his pretended title, and sent him back defiance by his own messenger. Then they locked the city gates against him.

  Exeter, like Waterford, seemed a bad choice for a siege: the most important town in the West Country, entirely walled, protected by the river on the west, and moreover a town with loyalty to prove, since its citizens had let the Cornish rebels pass through some months before. A new gun, with a store of 400 gun-stones, was installed on the roof of the Guildhall, and Edward Courtenay, Earl of Devon, was already in the city with his son preparing to resist attack. Courtenay came from a line of faithful Lancastrians who, as early as 1483 during Buckingham’s rebellion, had proclaimed Henry king in Exeter and in Bodmin. He himself had been restored to his earldom by Henry. At first he and his men, mustered at Okehampton, had been meant to oppose Perkin there. But, fearing that he was up against a multitude, Courtenay withdrew east to protect Exeter. Once there, he managed to augment his force with other local gentry: Sir Edmund Carew, Sir Thomas Fulford, Sir Piers Edgecombe (anxious to redeem himself), Sir John Halwell, Sir John Croker. Their retainers and indentured troops came with them. This company, though gathered slowly, made in the end several thousand men.

  Meanwhile Henry, still no further west than Woodstock, had sent money to Exeter: 1,000 marks, despatched with Sir Richard Empson on September 10th. He had also sent Courtenay full instructions, dictated on September 16th ‘at viii of the clock in the night’, very late for him, and despatched, as a matter of extreme urgency, by a night messenger. His local commissioners in Devon had told him what was happening, and news had been transmitted regularly by his ‘posts’ along the roads. By these means, he knew every step and flutter of Perkin’s kingly progress; and he knew, too, that Exeter might be a target. His letters, however, came too late, reaching Exeter on the day the siege started.

  Henry was not certain that Exeter would be attacked. He thought it likely that Perkin would march past; in which case, while taking care not to leave the city undefended, Courtenay was to harass Perkin’s rearguard, stop food getting to his force and keep them in a state of constant fear. While the Earl of Devon prodded the rebels from the west, Daubeney would approach from the east, Henry wrote, ‘with . . . such an army royal of people so furnished with artilleries and ordnances for the field as shall be able to defend any prince Christian with God’s favour’. And Perkin would not escape; for if he slipped through this trap, Henry had ordered his ships, ‘be they at Saint Ives, Penzance or in other place’, to be ‘taken, bouged [holed] or burned’.

  Unaware of these plans, and no doubt bolder for his unawareness, King Richard on September 17th surrounded Exeter on the north and east sides and tried, for about two hours in the early afternoon, to take it. Henry described him arriving with his company at about one in the afternoon and ‘inrang[ing] themselves in the manner of a battle, by the space of two hours’: a clumsy, inexperienced performance. Since the morning had been set aside for hearing Mass and observing the proprieties of Sunday, the siege took place in the part of the day when melancholy had mastery, rather than the choler of the morning
. No textbook would have advised it.

  Exeter, meanwhile, got its priorities straight. The second and third items in the siege expenses, after the gunpowder, were 40 shillings for ‘two hogsheads of wine carried and sent to the north and east gates of the city’, and 8 shillings for duobus barrels de beer ‘sent to the gates in the same way’. The disproportion of wine and beer showed how many gentry and nobles were now among the city’s defenders. After this Exeter quickly moved its guns to the gates, brought in a dozen ‘men called gunners’, evidently never employed before, to fire them, and invested in 500 pounds of lead to make pellets, seven sheaves of arrows, a few big gun-stones (apparently chipped into shape on the spot, at night) and, at the north gate, various lengths of iron piping.

  However improvised those defences were, King Richard could do little against them. Of the five principal engines recommended for besieging towns, he had none, and no guns. Instead he used rocks, fire and battering rams. He tried to burn the north gate, but the townsmen piled up a fiercer blaze on their side, flinging on piles of wood, and beat him back. Undeterred, he tried again at the east gate. When that failed, he attempted to get his troops in by ladders over the walls. His force gave up after a while, but then, regrouping on September 18th, broke in through the east gate and poured into the High Street.

  The alarm bells rang, the signal for the defenders to mobilise. Courtenay rushed out of the Blackfriars, where he was staying, and took an arrow in the arm; ‘but he was therewith so little dismayed’, wrote Richard Hooker, a mayor of Exeter in the next century, ‘that both he and his son, the Lord William Courtenay, did more eagerly follow upon them’. The earl ran to the east gate, where the fighting was hand-to-hand, ‘hot and fiery’, and found the enemy swarming in the High Street as far as Castle Lane, ‘yet they were driven back and with force compelled out of the gate’. Exeter also let its artillery loose on them, charged not only with gun-stones but with shards of glass, old iron and musket balls.

  Richard’s men had hardly got far; Castle Lane was only just inside the east gate. But they had had enough, and Courtenay, writing to Henry by return on the same day, admitted that he and his men were too tired to follow them. Instead, they had come to an arrangement:

  . . . when Perkin and his company had well assayed and felt our Guns, they were fain to desire us to have licence to gather their company together, and so to depart and leave your City, and put us to no more trouble; which because we be not able to recounter them [engage them in battle], and that our company were weary and some hurt, therefore it was granted unto them that they should depart, and not to approach the City in no wise. And so the said Perkin and his company be departed from us this day about eleven of the Clock in the forenoon, and by twelve were out of sight, and which way they would hold I cannot yet ascertain your Grace; But as it was said amongst them they would to Cullompton this night, and thanked be God, there is none of your true subjects about this business slain, but divers be hurt. And doubt not again, one of yours hurt, there is twenty of theirs hurt and many slain. And now I understand certainly that Perkin is to Cullompton, and many of his company departed from him, and more will as I [see] well, and trust verily that your Grace shall have good tidings of him shortly.

  Hooker never mentioned Richard among the besiegers in Exeter. He thought little of him in any case, a poor figment of Margaret’s ‘malicious mind’ who had been brought to ‘confusion’ by her. Yet if ‘Perkynge’ or ‘Parkyns’ had been spotted there, Hooker might have included it among the other tales of the siege that he had gathered. It is probable that the new king stayed outside, directing the siege, rather than braving the terrors inside. Yet he had changed, all the same. He was attacking his own subjects with flame and sword, as he had shrunk from doing almost exactly a year before. When the siege failed, some sources said he decided to starve them out. The Northumberland softness had gone now; he was their heavy lord, as he had threatened he could be.

  And he might have taken Exeter if he had persevered. For all their defiance, the townsmen had been terrified at first, letting messengers down on ropes over the unmolested walls to appeal to King Henry for help. Courtenay himself was far from confident, but was hanging on in the hope that Daubeney would soon arrive. Meanwhile, the king himself was about to come westwards, though very slowly. On September 20th, still at Woodstock, he told the Bishop of Bath and Wells that ‘we with our host royal shall not be far, with the mercy of our Lord, for the final conclusion of the matter’. (‘We trust soon to hear good tidings of the said Perkin,’ he added, as if it hardly mattered whether he stirred or not.) It was not until September 30th that the city fathers of Wells were to see ‘our most serene prince and lord Henry the Seventh’ coming through the town with 10,000 armed men ‘against a certain Perkin Warbeck, rebel, and other rebels of the said king’.

  At the news of his approach, and the worse news of Daubeney’s, King Richard first asked Courtenay for the truce, of six hours, and then moved away towards the north-east and Taunton. His forces were beginning to be badly outmatched. Although he had started his siege with about 8,000 men, he had lost (by Courtenay’s count), hundreds of men dead or injured in the fighting. Around 500, dead and injured, was the figure most agreed on; Henry thought it was certainly ‘above three or four hundred’. The Exeter receiver boasted that the city had lost no men at all.

  In striking contrast to Richard’s forces, Daubeney’s ‘army royal’, as Henry had described it, was packed with nobles and guns. Courtenay’s force, headed by lords, was heavily provisioned with gentlemen and local worthies. Henry, taking evident pleasure in the repetition, called it several times a company of ‘nobles’ with their retinues, well-equipped men serving their worthy masters. However confused or slow Courtenay seemed at times, he, like Daubeney, was in constant touch with the king himself. The lines of command were clear, the weapons organised, the discipline generally tight. This was the sort of force Richard had watched from the sea off Deal, suddenly overwhelming and slaughtering his men.

  By contrast, his own men were even poorer than on that occasion. He was without mercenary troops and military captains. Astonishingly, he was now his own commander. (Hence, perhaps, the elaborately polite and almost apologetic request to Courtenay: ‘they were fain to desire us to have licence to gather their company together, and so to depart . . . and put us to no more trouble’.) Courtenay, watching them leave Exeter, had seen them straggle across the landscape for an hour with no clear idea where they were going. These men had no armour, no weapons save swords, billing hooks, pitchforks and bows, and no social standing. Among all Perkin’s troops, Henry sniffed, ‘on Monday last, the eighteenth day of September, there was not one gentleman’.

  These ‘poor commons’ were becoming disheartened. Discouraging numbers had been killed, and the bridges had already been cut on the straight roads in front of them. They were probably not being paid, for there is every sign that the enterprise was running out of money. Henry had sent messengers among them, Soncino said, promising them pardons if they laid down their arms. God seemed to be on that king’s side anyway, because all the Cornishmen who had eaten grain harvested since the June rebellion, or who had drunk beer brewed with this year’s barley, had died as quickly as if they had taken poison, felled by papal excommunications. If Henry’s men did not get them at Exeter, or at whatever place was next on King Richard’s list, they would be sickened by the curse that had soured their bread and fermented in their beer.

  By the night of the 18th, having marched, or perhaps walked slowly, all day, they reached the village of Nynehead Flory, four miles west of Taunton. There John Wikes, the fifty-four-year-old lord of the manor of Nynehead, appears to have given Richard a bed for the night; he was later fined 100 marks, one of the stiffest fines levied on rebel sympathisers in the west. Richard’s men camped in the yard and the fields and, the next day, moved on to Taunton. But the force was disintegrating. Henry knew as much; the letters he sent to London said that Perkin had ‘fled’ from E
xeter to Taunton, already panicking and retreating, though to the east, nonsensically, straight into the path of the king.

  Gradually, then in increasing numbers, men began to desert his army and go home. Their king kept trying to encourage them. He was going to coin money, he told them, and give cash to everyone. He was in close touch (avia grande intelligenza, in Soncino’s words) with certain lords of the realm, who would soon help. If the bridges ahead were cut, he would simply track to the right and find another way. He was taking them all to Somerset because it was easier to get recruits there, and then they would march on London to see him crowned.

  At Taunton, at least in the local memory, he threw the town into consternation by seizing the castle and seeming determined to make a stand there. The castle, on the west side of town, was little more than a fortified house; it was not defensible, and nor was the unwalled town around it. The owner, Bishop Thomas Langton of the Kendal circle, was in the middle of repairing it, so the place could only be camped in. Langton had finished, two years before, a new crenellated gateway decorated with an escutcheon placed between roses and charged with a Cross carrying, as roses, the five wounds of Jesus and the inscription Laus tibi Christi, ‘Praise to you, O Christ’. The date 1495, the moment of the dissolution of Richard’s previous hopes in England, was carved underneath and in other places here and there.

  The new king may have attempted to contact Langton, one of those ‘great men of the realm’ he had such hopes of, but the bishop could not be blamed if he ignored him. Richard tried to dig himself in by other means. It was here, by Soncino’s report, that he published certain ‘apostolic bulls’ confirming that he was Edward’s son. Almost certainly, these had been nowhere near Rome; and even if they had been, the papal envoy of eight years before could have told him that the English thought most papal bulls were fakes.