by Ann Wroe
There remained the question of the marriage. When André wrote his scene, he supposed that this marked, in effect, its natural and official end. The record supported him in one respect. From the moment of her capture, Katherine was no longer Perkin’s wife in any official document produced by Henry’s officers. She was ‘My Lady Katherine Huntly’, or ‘the daughter of the Earl of Huntly’, as if she was unmarried or, at any rate, alone. In that state, she could begin to be rescued from her terrible humiliation. In effect, André implied, she had divorced him.
Canon law would strongly have supported her. She had married a man who, by his own admission, was not who he had claimed to be. This constituted an ‘error of persons’, a rare occurrence that usually involved a pouting harlot playing the virgin, or a layman posing as an officiating priest. Tricks of this sort immediately dissolved the bond of matrimony – a bond that could not be broken if a husband merely beat or imprisoned his wife. If Prince Richard was no prince, Katherine’s marriage could be annulled as if the white-robed bridegroom of her wedding day, called ‘by name’ to take her hand, had never stood beside her.
To establish this fact, in the neutral and holy words of the Church, would have been hugely useful for Henry. Divorce would not only have freed Katherine, but would have dissolved the bond of blood that still tied his captive to the trouble-making King of Scots. Yet it was never mentioned or applied for. Perhaps Katherine refused to agree to it, or perhaps Henry was finally unsure of the grounds on which he would request one. The sending of Katherine to Elizabeth may well have been posited on the easy assumption that her marriage to Richard of York, like Richard of York himself, was dead and buried. But this, too, was still not proved and certain. Richard’s ghost had not yet been laid, but had merely been brought indoors.
iv
In André’s account of the scene with Katherine, Henry gave no name to her husband. He was in any case levissimus, the lightest and least of men. He himself, when attempting to explain matters to Katherine, admitted only ‘that he was not who he had said he was’. He did not identify himself as Perkin, grandly Latinised by André as ‘Pirquinus’. He was as anonymous as his shame suggested he would want to be.
Yet his name, and his lineage too, were now established. Shortly after his surrender, a ‘confession and pedigree’ was published containing the facts, as Henry had determined them and Perkin had apparently confirmed them, of his early life. Henry, writing two days after Perkin’s surrender, gave the gist in his letter to his friends; ten days later, he sent this version to Waterford. His captive,
humbly submitting himself unto us, hath of his free will openly showed . . . his name to be Piers Osbeck, whence he hath been named Perkin Warbeck, and to be none Englishman born, but born of Tournai and son to John [blank] sometime while he lived comptroller of the said Tournai with many other circumstances too long to write, declaring by whose means he took upon him this presumption and folly. And so now this great abusion which hath long continued is now openly known by his own confession. We write this news unto you, for we be undoubtedly [blank] that calling to mind the great abusion that divers folks have been in by reason of the said Perkin and the great business and charges that we and our realm have been put unto in that behalf, you would be glad to hear the certainty of the same, which we affirm unto you for assured truth.
Henry never claimed to be surprised by this news. The confession had been under construction for more than four years, ever since he had told Gilbert Talbot that he knew the feigned lad was Perkin Warbeck of Tournai. From that time on, the bare outline had been continually added to. By October 1497 there was probably a document in existence, waiting only to be confirmed, perhaps improved on, and signed. The ‘certainty’ was kept under cover until then.
This confession was to become, as a later historian said, the chief document of this young man’s history; but it became so only because he had failed to convince England that he was Richard, Duke of York. Had he succeeded, this story might never have seen the light of day. That did not mean, however, that it was not true. The sheer intensity of detail suggested, on the contrary, that it had to be.
First it is to be known that I was born in the Town of Tournai, and my father’s name is called John Osbek, which said John Osbek was comptroller of the town of Tournai. And my mother’s name is Kateryn de Faro. And one of my Grandsires upon my father’s side was called Deryk Osbek, which died; after whose death my grandmother was married unto the withinnamed Peter Flam; and that other of my grandsires was called Peter Flam, which was Receiver of the foresaid town of Tournai and Dean of the Boatmen that be upon the water or River of the Scheldt. And my Grandsire upon my mother’s side was called Peter Faro, the which had in his keeping the keys of the Gate of Saint Johns, within the abovenamed Town of Tournai, Also I had an Uncle named Master John Stalyn dwelling in the parish of Saint Pyas within the same Town, which had married my father’s Sister, whose name was Joan or Jane, with whom I dwelled a certain season; and afterwards I was led by my mother to Antwerp for to learn flemish in an house of a cousin of mine, officer of the said Town, called John Steinbeck, with whom I was the Space of half a year. And after that I returned again unto Tournai by reason of the wars that were in Flanders. And within a year following I was sent with a Merchant of the said Town of Tournai named Berlo, and his master’s name Alex., to the Mart of Antwerp, whereas I fell sick, which sickness continued upon me five months; and the said Berlo set me to board in a Skinner’s house, that dwelled beside the house of the English nation. And by him I was brought from thence to the Barrow mart [Bergen-op-Zoom], and lodged at the Sign of the old man, where I abode the space of two months. And after this the said Berlo set me with a merchant in Middleburg to service for to learn the language, whose name was John Strewe, with whom I dwelled from Christmas unto Easter; and then I went into Portugal in the Company of Sir Edward Brampton’s wife in a Ship which was called the Queen’s Ship.
The last part of the confession, a little more than half of it, went on to describe his service in Portugal, his waylaying by the Yorkists in Cork, his multiple denials, his eventual persuasion, his training in English, his forcing into the character of Richard, his invitation to France. It ended: ‘And thence I went into France, and from thence into Flanders, and from Flanders into Ireland, And from Ireland into Scotland, and so into England.’
The confession was evidently drafted as a legal document, or pieced together from several depositions; Soncino spoke of Perkin ‘deposing’ to the king in Exeter, though about more recent matters. ‘The said town of Tournai’, ‘the withinnamed Peter Flam’, ‘the water or River of the Scheldt’ were all stranded legalisms that added, together with the fractured English, to the stiffness of the piece. Fabyan claimed it was intended to make this ungracious person ‘notarily known what a man he was’. It is impossible to say how much had been discovered by good detective work beforehand, and how much may have come from Henry’s suddenly talkative prisoner. One curious phrase in the Irish section, ‘they threped upon me’ – that is, they insisted – was a northern or lowland Scots expression, possibly picked up by him in Scotland. But his contribution may not have been particularly necessary. The confession was largely ready and was drawn up quickly, for Soncino and André both talked about it in the same breath as his surrender.
The version Soncino saw, however, was in French. A copy of this survives in Courtrai, in Belgium; it was apparently sent across via Calais in the same packet as Henry’s letter of October 7th, another clue to how fast the confession was disseminated. The Courtrai copyist did not say it had been translated from English, as he said Henry’s letter had. He viewed this as the original, and possibly it was. No stray legalisms grace this version; Piers’s aunt is plain Jehane, not ‘Joan or Jane’, the Scheldt is neither a water nor a river, just the Scheldt, and the whole thing displays greater fluency and pace. It contains, too, the most bizarre spellings of the English and Irish names (Brampton becomes ‘Sir Edward Brixton’), as if it was ta
ken down by a Frenchman from dictation. The French itself had little Picard touches: ung mien cousin for ‘a cousin of mine’, che for ‘ce’, Franche for France, wicquet, the proper local usage, for the little wooden wicket gate by the river at St Jean. This was surely a boatman’s son from Tournai talking.
He did not begin, as in the English version, by saying where he was born, but simply with the name of his father, ‘living on the Scheldt’. After this came a simplification of the mind-numbing crowd of grandparents. Deryk Osbek was not mentioned, nor his grandmother’s second marriage. The French version read simply: ‘One of my grandfathers was Pierart Flan, receiver of the said town and dean of the boatmen.’ There was no need, as in the English version, to explain what the boatmen did. His readers knew.
They would also have known that there were several things wrong with this account. The confession called Piers’s father ‘comptroller’ of Tournai, a grand-sounding office that did not actually exist there. Perhaps this meant to imply that he collected some of the many tolls payable, in cash or kind, for bringing a boat up or down the Scheldt, but it would have meant nothing at home. It is possible, since none of the Setubal witnesses thought Jehan was anything but a boatman into the mid-1490s, that the new job was made up by his presumed son, to make his father sound a little more exalted. It is more likely, since Piers would have been out of touch with home for years, that his father’s new job was made up for him by someone else.
The confession also stated that Pierart Flan was the town ‘receiver’, but this too was untrue. Town records show the post existed; there were, in fact, two receivers in Tournai, ‘the one in charge of the coffer’ and ‘a companion’, with their own clerks and sergeants. But since they were seen as employees of the town government, they were forbidden by law to combine this office with the rather political post of being dean of a guild, which Flan was. As the rule expressed it, a dean’s job was to protect the common people; he could not also be the man who took their rent and distrained on them for debt. Again, as with ‘comptroller’, this showed either embellishment or ignorance.
A smaller point, but one that would also have been noticed in Tournai, was the question of the keeping of the wicquet at St Jean. The confession made Pierre Farou, Piers’s maternal grandfather, the keeper of the keys, but this was wrong, as years of watch-lists testify; Flan was the keeper of the wicquet. The wicquet itself was described as in la porte St Jan, but there was no gate there, as war-weary Tournaisiens were only too aware: only the frail wooden wicket, fortified with a mound of mud and stones. A wicquet-keeper got 20 sous less than a gatekeeper, for doing only half his job.
On a more private level, Flan was called Piers’s grandfather, a serious slip if taken literally. He was clearly not that. The English confession had made him his step-grandfather, which was bizarre enough. If Piers’s grandmother had really married Flan, it would have been a strange marriage indeed, between a woman who was probably in her seventies and a contemporary of her sons. Elsewhere this versatile man – fairly well known in town as the dean of the boatmen’s guild – was more plausibly described as Piers’s godfather and his guardian, neither of them roles that a grandfather, or even a step-grandfather, usually played.
Yet if there were mistakes in this family story, as there were, they seemed fairly small in a background that was given in such detail. Confusion, forgetfulness and wandering could account for all of them. Most vitally, these were real people. They lived, or had lived, in Tournai. You could find them in the town records if you cared to look, in assembly debates and court papers. You could visit the wicquet by the Scheldt, find Pierart Flan jangling his keys in a self-important way, and shake him by the hand. If Jehan Werbecque still lived (the confession assumed he did, but it was uncertain) you could have seen him too, handling goods or checking sacks on a boat that rocked and strained out on the river, and you could have asked him, half-joking, when he last had word of Piers. The sheer detail of these unimportant lives seemed to prove conclusively that Jehan’s son, whatever his minor stumblings, had finally confessed the truth.
The most interesting part of the French confession came as a separate appendix. Both Soncino and Jean Molinet mentioned this, marvelling that the confession gave the names of schoolmasters and neighbours as well as ‘godmothers and godfathers’. Its omission from the English version may have been deliberate, or may simply have reflected lack of interest among the London chroniclers who copied down the rest of it. Here the evidentiary detail, already overwhelming, became even more so.
Here follow the names of my neighbours living in the Parish of St Jean, and also my schoolmasters.
First Jehan Pernet [Josbert, in the Tournai version], Pierart Pernet, Nicholas du Bos, Jehan Carlier, Michel de Grandmont, Jehan Capelier, Jehan de Genet, Guillem Rucq, Thieri Micquelet, Jerome Capelier, and Michael de la Chapelle.
The first of my teachers: Master Jehan Badoul. And afterwards Master Baulde Muguet [Maquet], cantor of Notre Dame de Tournai, who taught me to play the manicordium. Also I had another master who taught me my grammar and he was called Master Guilhem. And he lived in a house called Les Bons Enfants.
That was the end. But if you wanted more, you could go to Tournai and catch Jehan Capelier or Guillem Rucq in the street, as Henry’s agents had probably done, and ask them about the boy. Henry said he had made enquiries of ‘those who have been brought up with him’. In case you distrusted that, here were their names. They were flesh and blood; they lived in the parish of St Jean, right by the river; and they knew him. He had been their playmate, their friend, the boy they saw out of the window. If you had suggested to any of them that he was a prince, they would have laughed.
So Tournai was his place, appropriately ambiguous, an island of Frenchness on the western edge of Flanders. The Scheldt on which it stood marked the border between French Picardy and the Burgundian lands. The city was under the jurisdiction of the King of France and owed him allegiance, but the Dukes of Burgundy also made bids, sometimes roughly, for Tournai’s loyalty. In its own mind the city was independent, ‘fair, free and entertaining all comers’, as Commines described it. (‘Incorrigible and ill-conditioned people’ was Henry VIII’s sourer view.) The Tournaisiens were mostly French-speaking, with French administration and French names, but their parentage and their blood were often Flemish; so they commonly had Flemish names too, just as Rogier de la Pasture, Tournai’s most famous son, was also Rogier van der Weyden. Piers’s father, though he was a Fleming whose name was properly Weerbecke, was therefore spelled as a Frenchman, Jehan Werbecque, in the town records.
Tournai, though several notches down from Antwerp or Bruges, was a bustling and impressive city. Its craftsmen produced tapestries, carpets, copperware and statuary that were famous all over Europe; its guilds were vigorous and frequently troublesome, and in good times the river was busy with commerce. Its great cathedral proclaimed its confidence and the wealth of many of its merchants. Yet for much of the latter half of the century Tournai’s fortunes had been mixed. Constant sniping and full-scale wars between France and Burgundy interrupted trade, diminished taxes and cut food supplies. Twice, in 1451 and 1477, town officers made agonised representations to the King of France. That of 1477 shows how the situation stood, painted blackly to be sure, when Piers was three or four:
[May it please you to know] that the merchants of this town always used to go to Antwerp and elsewhere to buy everything that’s used in this town, but [ever since the king’s men-at-arms came to Tournai] they have not been able to do so. When it pleased the king to declare war, all communication stopped.
This town has now been at war for about half a year, and we are running out of everything that might feed the tradesmen and the people and the men-at-arms. There is great and extreme scarcity . . .
The common people can’t earn money and don’t know what to live on, and those who used to be rich get nothing now in revenues . . .
Some merchants of the town got as far as Lens with cattle and other
provisions, but they couldn’t get closer [to Tournai] because of the men-at-arms in Artois, and the cattle died . . .
Lots of people want to leave, and would abandon the town if they could get safe passage.
So the town will lose people, and that will mean ruin and desolation.
The chiefs and the deputies are in great perplexity and don’t see what, by themselves, they can possibly do about it . . .
The officers added later that year that they had never been so low, tant au bas.
Long debates took place over whether the city should be neutral between France and Burgundy, which might have made it more secure. But Tournai, though polite to Burgundy, clung to France, and suffered. In 1477, German men-at-arms in the service of Maximilian, then Duke of Austria, forced their way into town and insisted on taking over watch duty, though the terrified citizens ‘do not think they know the proper watch-cry’. Tournai closed its gates but, in some confusion, kept the famous wicquet open. In May 1478 the town officers reported that there was only two months’ grain left, and no wine, salt or salt bacon; the next month, the straw roofs of all the thatched houses at the edge of town, where Piers lived, were torn off in case of attack by fire. Men-at-arms were seen just outside, on horseback, menacing to come in.
By then, though ‘with no skill or experience in war’, as they protested, the townsmen found themselves caught up in local fighting, helping to provision the French army at the siege of Condé, a few miles upriver, and also trying to supply the army round Mortaigne. Pierre Farou lost his boat (for he was a boatman too, as almost all Piers’s relations were) to some men-at-arms at Condé, who returned it in such a battered state that it was seized by the town officers as an unfit craft. Not until 1484 did the town officers talk of war as something ‘in the past’, and in that year there were still men-at-arms camping in the suburbs and demanding, in no uncertain terms, food and fodder for their horses. It made little sense for a child and his mother to travel to Oudenaarde, let alone to Antwerp, in years when merchants from Tournai were routinely beaten by raiders on the roads; or for a child to retreat, as Piers said he retreated, from Antwerp or Oudenaarde to Tournai in order to be safe.