by Ann Wroe
Yet recognition could have been possible, in principle. Some thirty-five of Henry’s regular councillors had also been councillors to Edward IV, attending him sometimes when the little duke was present, and certainly knowing the look of the father well enough. Some of those who were there in Taunton might well have recognised him, if he had been the prince. On the other side, three men were in the room whom the young man should have known instantly, if he had been Richard. They had been fetched specially, presumably for this; their names are mentioned consecutively in the accounts for September 26th, the moment Henry knew he had his quarry in his hands.
One was Thomas Grey, Marquis of Dorset, Richard of York’s half-brother and his companion, before he fled away, in sanctuary at Westminster in 1483. Although he was twenty-two years older, Dorset had perhaps been as close to Richard as the difference in age allowed. When Edward IV had created him marquis in 1475 he had wished especially to elevate him as a companion for his sons, joining them ‘perpetually by love as much as by blood’. The second companion of old was John, Earl of Arundell, Richard’s cousin, a contemporary of the little prince who had recently married Dorset’s daughter. The third associate was far less prominent, and not a gentleman. This was John Rodon, the servant who had turned down Richard’s sheets, brought him his watered-down wine and laid out his clothes.
Henry’s production of these old companions might have seemed risky on his part. In fact, he was fairly sure of all of them. After several years of wavering loyalty, Dorset in 1492 had made an indenture with Henry, ‘whereby it is agreed that if the said marquis find sureties and demean himself loyally, his highness will admit him to favour, and grant him letters of pardon’. The sureties were for £10,000, an enormous sum; fifty-five people, among them three bishops, undertook to guarantee them. Almost all Dorset’s lands were put in trust, save two manors in Essex, on the income of which he was supposed to live. Dorset also gave up his son to be a ward of the king. What exactly he had done is unclear; what he promised not to do, on pain of disinheriting his son and forfeiting his lands, was treason and misprision contrary to his allegiance. If Dorset heard of such treason, he was to disclose it to Henry in writing, ‘and the parts be proved and the plotters convicted’.
This pre-emptive strike appears to have worked on him. He never supported the new-found prince in Flanders, and in March 1495, at the height of Henry’s reprisals against the conspirators, Dorset could be found not only shooting at the butts with the king, but also daring to beat him. Sometime in 1496 or 1497 a lighter arrangement to ensure his loyalty seems to have been put in place: Henry persuaded nine lords and knights of the West Country, including William Courtenay and his son, to put up new bonds for Dorset’s allegiance. By this time he was in any case in his mid-forties, past the age of dangerous tendencies. In the late summer of 1497 he was actively on the king’s side, fighting the Cornishmen and their butterfly with his own body and those of his men. So, too, was Arundell. There was little risk in showing either man this prisoner, even close up and still dressed as a prince.
With Rodon, too, Henry had not been incautious. He had made him a royal sergeant-at-arms, with wages of 12d. a day and a livery of vesture, immediately after Bosworth, and had granted him ‘the rule and keeping of the place called Broken Wharf’ in the city of London, with all profits going to his pocket. In 1491 Rodon had been appointed joint keeper of the great park at Windsor. In 1497 this still seemed to be his job; he was the king’s servant now, and had nothing to gain by jeopardising that.
The young man who claimed to be Richard could not, in any case, recognise any of them. He seems to have said so very quickly, as if he barely glanced at the faces before him. He immediately added, Richmond said, that ‘he was not Richard, nor had he ever come to England except that time, and he had been induced by the English and the Irish to commit this fraud and to learn English. For two years now he had longed to escape from these troubles, but Fortune had not allowed him.’
This was apparently his true confession, made with the mouth as well as the heart. For what it is worth, this was the form his spoken confessions were always to take: not who he was, but who he was not. Henry said his captive declared before the council that he was Piers Osbeck; but Richmond, Soncino and the Venetian ambassador merely reported that he said he was not Richard. In truth, this was all that Henry required of him. The young man had once boasted to Maximilian that he could prove he was Richard to all the princes of the great houses, and to Henry himself, ‘if the opportunity were only given him’, by the birthmarks on his body. Here was his opportunity. But there was no mention of birthmarks once he got to Taunton. That fire had gone out of him.
At this point, the performance seems to have ended. Though Perkin had been taken from Beaulieu ‘in trust’ of Henry’s pardon, he had not explicitly received one. A request for mercy made formally and kneeling required some sort of answer; but Henry merely showed him mercy by not killing him, and by courteously allowing him to stand. He did not go further. Perkin’s three ‘councillors’ were officially pardoned, and their pardons appeared in the patent rolls a few weeks later. Perkin himself was not given that grace. As a foreigner, of course, he could not be pardoned of his offences, since he did not owe this king a subject’s spontaneous respect. Instead, he was ‘pardoned of his life’ with no paper record needed, like a prisoner of war.
He was then removed by the guards, and the lords of the council dispersed. One of them, or the king himself, briefed Richmond on what had happened. Rodon, who had come a long way, prepared to go home again. As he went, bumping in the saddle over rutted roads, ducking under low trees, he would have held in his mind the image of the young man who had not known him; as well as the image, buried for many years, of the fair-haired and beautiful little boy whom the young man had once said he was.
iii
After the first set-piece, another followed. According to André, Perkin was faced with Katherine and was made to confess to her, in Henry’s presence, that he was not a prince, but a deceiver.
The king’s interest in Katherine long pre-dated her arrival in England. Her family was not unknown to Henry, for her half-brother Alexander had been in secret correspondence with him four or five years before her marriage. After it, secret missives from John Ramsay in Scotland may have told the king how lovely she was. Henry was a keen appreciator of the fairer sex, hoping aloud that Katherine of Aragon’s ladies would be good-looking, and once remarking to the Earl of Oxford, who had boasted how handsome Norfolk women were, that ‘he would see them sure’. His privy-purse expenses contain an extraordinary payment of £30 in September 1493 to ‘the young damoiselle that danceth’, and another, of £12, to a little dancing maiden in January 1497. He had always mentioned Katherine in his letters whenever he had an excuse; from their leaving of Scotland until their separation in Cornwall, it was always ‘Perkin and his wife’ he was pursuing. Now that the pursuit was over, he was gallantly prepared to pay court to her.
It took some time for Katherine to be fetched from west Cornwall. Although Henry knew as early as September 16th that she was at St Buryan, it was not until the morning of October 7th that the king’s delegation – Daubeney, Courtenay and the Earl of Shrewsbury, the master of the household – turned up at the sanctuary to take her away. They appear to have set out after Perkin’s surrender, as Daubeney already knew all about ‘how he gave himself up to the king and is with his Grace at present’. The very size and weight of the delegation, considerably more impressive than the one that had fetched Katherine’s husband, showed how much importance Henry attached to her.
In his letter of September 16th, the king had made it clear that he meant to extract her despite the privilege of sanctuary. ‘It is thought unto us’, he wrote, ‘that ye should in anywise do the wife of Perkin being in Saint Buryans to be taken by sea or by land out thereof and to be safely kept in ward or sent unto us.’ Like her husband, Katherine needed persuading. ‘She was so much talked to,’ wrote Daubeney to his c
olleagues back in Calais, l’on a telement parle, ‘that she was content to renounce the privileges of sanctuary and surrender herself to the king’s grace.’ Daubeney’s original words have not survived; the French translation suggested a hands-off, delicate operation. As a result of it, ‘at her own desire she has come to this town in my company’.
‘This town’ was apparently Marazion, opposite St Michael’s Mount, and it was either there or at the Mount itself that Katherine was lodged for a while. Daubeney, though not entirely in the king’s good graces (Henry had thought him ‘very slack’ in dealing with the first Cornish rising in June), was now deliberately delaying sending her to the king. By the 7th, the day Katherine was taken, Henry knew Daubeney had her; he mentioned the vital news in the postscript of his letter ‘to his friends’. The journey could be done, therefore, in well under twenty-four hours by a fast rider, and in three or four days by a sedate one. But ten days later, when the king sent his update from Exeter to Waterford, he had still not seen Katherine, although he had issued orders the day before for her to be properly looked after. ‘We trust she shall shortly come unto us to this our city of Exeter’, he added, ‘as she is in dole.’ There, almost certainly, was the reason Daubeney had not brought her: a reason the king had not known on the 7th. Katherine was not simply in distress – grieving, one might suppose, for the capture of her husband and the implosion of her dreams – but in formal mourning, which required her to be shuttered in a house or a room for several days without disturbance. She may well have been mourning the loss of a second child, perhaps miscarried or stillborn after their arduous journeys between Scotland, Ireland and England. And meanwhile her little firstborn still sought her arms and wept for her.
Although she was a prisoner, she had therefore to be dealt with very gently. Henry did so, showing also by his courtesy how close to royalty she was presumed to be. Once protocol allowed, Katherine was honourably brought from the Mount, André said, with all the respect due to her nobility. A troop of the king’s horsemen ‘escorted’ her. Henry also had a full travelling outfit made for her: a satin dress decorated with velvet ribbons, a riding cloak and hat, gloves, a kirtle, hose and shoes. Everything was black. The king took her mourning seriously, and wished her to know that he did.
Katherine arrived in Exeter around October 18th, the day new horses and saddles were ordered for her journey onwards. Henry was not disappointed when he saw her. As he wrote in his frisky letter to de Puebla on October 23rd, the capture of Perkin and his wife ‘did not deceive us in any respect at all’, a neat joke. Vergil said the king fell for Katherine at once, judging her ‘more meet to be the prize of a commander-in-chief’ than of a common soldier. Hall added that he ‘began then a little to fantasy her person’, and the evidence suggests that this was so. For the moment, though, he was a father to her, showing her every solicitousness and giving her money, clothes, sober matrons to escort her ‘because she was but a young woman’, and even ‘night kerchers’ for her periods. The implication was that in providing the most elementary things for her, the ‘necessary’ things, her husband had failed her.
There was barely time for Katherine to pause in Exeter; on the Saturday before the Feast of St Simon and Jude, October 28th, she was apparently at Sheen. At some point, somehow (André placed it in Taunton, though it could not have been), Henry supposedly engineered a meeting with her, her husband and himself. No record survives of this except André’s: a scene written not for history, but for Henry, in a small plain volume to be perused in the king’s spare time. It was for entertainment like this that Henry paid André his 10 marks a year, ordering it to be put ‘into his hand’ so the blind man could feel it, and gave him his occasional rewards. The importance of the scene his poet had painted was not that it had happened this way, but that Henry liked to think it had. In André’s account of the history of Perkin, this was the longest chapter.
Perkin had confessed; Henry, with great clemency and forbearance, had merely chastised him. The two were alone, Perkin limp and dazzled with the king’s mercy, when the door opened.
Then his wife, with a modest and graceful look and singularly beautiful, was brought into the king’s presence in an untouched state, with great blushing and breaking into tears. To her this most kind king offered this most humane prayer:
‘Most noble lady, I grieve too, and it pains me very much, second only to the slaughter of so many of my subjects, that you have been deceived by such a sorry fellow. For the nobility of your blood, the excellence of your manners and your whole body, beauty and dignity were crying out for another man of far greater superiority. But because it has pleased God that you should be reduced to this miserable condition by the perfidy and wickedness of this lying scoundrel here, you should suffer this with equanimity; and because the remainder of your life will not be lacking in many possibilities, for my part I exhort and advise you to bear your fate with an even mind . . .
Henry’s first theme was rank and blood: Katherine’s nobility, her excellence of manners, compared with the homuncio (a little insect, a man scarcely worth the name of a man) and the nebulo (idle liar) who stood before her. His second theme was sex. She came in ‘untouched’, not simply because she had been courteously treated by his officers – and it was a marvel they had not touched her, beautiful as she was – but because she was, in a sense, beginning again after marriage with a man who had not counted. His lustful fumblings had left no mark on her. Her ‘whole body’ had ‘cried out’ for something and someone better, and now she could make the comparison herself. On the one hand stood Henry, forceful, kingly and compassionate; on the other, defeated and silent, ‘this lying scoundrel here’. That dreadful association was now almost over, and a life full of new possibilities of ‘worthiness’ and ‘honesty’ lay ahead of her. She should not concern herself further about this man, ‘your husband hitherto’.
All through this speech, Katherine knelt on the ground crying. She was ‘soaked through with a fountain of tears’. Because she could not move for grief, Henry had to order her, though gently, to stand. When she had done so, ‘he ordered her husband to repeat to her the same things he had said to the king’.
There followed, at first, silence. ‘Partly out of fear and partly out of shame’, Perkin could not bring himself to say anything. At last ‘he openly confessed that he was not who he had said he was, and asked for forgiveness; he had been badly advised, he grieved for her abduction, and he begged the king that she might be sent back to her family’. So this was all their marriage was: an ‘abduction’, or a rape. André had implied this before, saying that Perkin in Scotland had wanted only ‘a woman to copulate with’. Now, pathetically, the wastrel tried to undo the damage by having Katherine sent home again.
His wife broke out in fresh tears, convulsed with a storm of loathing for him. ‘So after you seduced me as you wanted,’ she sobbed,
with all your false stories, why did you carry me away from the hearths of my ancestors, from home and parents and friends, and into enemy hands? Oh wretched me! How many days of grieving, how many worries will this give my most noble parents! Oh that you had never come to our shores! Oh misery . . . I see nothing before me now but death, since my chastity is lost. Alas for me! Why don’t my parents send someone here to punish you? Most wicked man, are these the sceptres you were promising we would have? Most accursed man, is this the honour of a king to which you boasted that our glorious line would come? And as for me, hopeless and destitute, what can I hope for? Whom can I trust? With what can I ease my pain? I see no other hope ahead . . .
Except in one man. Beside her stood ‘this most powerful and merciful king, who has promised not to desert me. I place all my faith, hope and safety in that royal promise.’ Here at last was a true, dependable prince, not a false one. Katherine turned definitively to Henry, while he bathed her in royal consolatio, mansuetudo ac benignitas, tenderness and kindness. ‘I would say more,’ she whispered, ‘but the force of pain and tears chokes off my words.’
In reality, both she and her husband would have known that some sort of confession would be drawn from him if he were captured. He knew already what his ‘nickname’ was, and the shape of the story that went with it. Katherine would not necessarily have believed it even if she heard him say it, but that would not have made it any easier to hear. His confession – in any form – meant that the great adventure had ended and that her prince had consented to be filth, dragging her too into filth alongside him. She may well have been as angry and heartbroken as André painted her, and her husband as silently miserable, and Henry, ardently admiring her in the new black satin gown with the black ribbons, as full of clement satisfaction as a king could justly be.
He had decided very early, some time before he saw her, to send Katherine as a lady-in-waiting to the household of his queen, the sister of Richard, Duke of York. There was little else he could do with her, if he wished to treat her with honour and yet not send her home; and he did not dare, at this point, to allow her out of the country and out of his control. It was extraordinary, on the face of it, to send her to Elizabeth, for if Katherine still believed in her husband’s claim at all – or, worse, possessed some proof of it – she might work against Henry through the queen herself, rekindling Elizabeth’s love for a brother she had supposed was dead. But Henry seemed confident that there was no danger in it. Perkin had confessed – perhaps indeed, in some form, to Katherine too – and that play was over.