by Ann Wroe
The appendix to the French confession, however, presented a quite different picture. Piers was not sent away, but kept in Tournai, and no expense was spared to educate him. Jehan had ambitions for his only son that went far beyond the daily grind on the river. The first indication of special care was mentioned in the English confession, where he was sent, still very young, to live with his uncle and aunt Stalyn in the parish of St Pyat. He was moved out of rough Caufours to the other side of the river, up the little hill, to the wealthier streets just east of the cathedral. This may have been done because he was a delicate child, in need of better air; later on in the confession, he was ill for five months when he went to Antwerp. The move may also have reflected some sort of trouble at home since his father had been sent away.
If Jehan had wished to educate his son, he could have sent him to school in Caufours. The monks of the Cross, les Croizières, had just set up a school at St Jean that was highly regarded, so much so that the cathedral schoolmasters complained of it as a ‘novelty’, and tried to get the town to close it down. The monks’ new church, with the school attached, loomed impressively across the road from the church of St Jean itself, beside the main town graveyard and the ‘profane place’ where unknown bodies were buried. But, according to the French appendix, Piers did not go there. He was instructed first by a graduate priest and then at the cathedral choir school. Brampton at Setubal also gave this story – a musical training (though Brampton talked of it as an apprenticeship with an organist) that lasted some years. Piers was deliberately placed on the ladder to a better, higher life: tuition in music, service in the church, perhaps university. Lessons in the cathedral were supplemented by classes at Les Bons Enfants, the Good Children School, the best in Tournai, founded in 1255 by Bishop Walter de Marvis specifically for the cathedral choristers. Here, at the feet of Master Guilhem, Piers learned his Latin grammar.
It is hard to believe that Jehan Werbecque cared a bean for either grammar or polyphony. The low-key commercial wanderings of both the English and French confessions sounded far more plausible for a boy of Piers’s background, with such a father. For some reason, perhaps because he did not seem cut out for dock-work, Piers took the path that was painted in the chapel of the Blessed Sacrament in the church of St Jacques, on the good side of the river, where sweet-faced angels made music on trumpets, citharas, manicordiums and little organs, against the blue vaults of a Heaven spangled with gold stars.
Yet his training in music was not, perhaps, as strange as it appeared. The family’s most famous member in those years was Gaspar van Weerbecke, born in Oudenaarde, a celebrated priest-musician who spent much of his career in Italy, working especially for the Sforzas of Milan. In his time, Gaspar ranked with Jospin and Dupré as a composer of motets and Masses on themes from popular songs. One Mass was called N’as tu pas? (‘Haven’t you?’), another Et trop penser (‘To think too much’). He wrote settings of the Lamentations, the Stabat Mater and verses from the Song of Songs. From time to time he came back north to recruit boys for the Duke of Milan’s chapel, travelling as far as England in search of the purest voices. In 1472 Gaspar was in Bruges, the next year in Burgundy; in 1490 he was back in Oudenaarde, where his home town celebrated and gave him wine. A little after this he returned for good, and was listed in 1496–7 among the musicians in Archduke Philip’s chapel. All this had begun in the church of St Walburga in Oudenaarde, much less grand than the cathedral at Tournai, where Gaspar had been a chorister. His story formed a link – indeed, a second link after Jehan’s pardon – between the Dukes of Burgundy and the family at Caufours. And there were others. Oudenaarde was one of Margaret’s dower properties, to which she would have paid attention; and in the late 1470s the ducal chapel was run by the Bishop of Tournai. It is not implausible that at some point, for some reason, these connections touched Piers’s life. Certainly Gaspar’s story proved that a leap from the banks of the Scheldt to a palace was not impossible, through music.
So Piers, if this version of his life was true, learned singing and Latin in the huge cathedral piled up like a fortress in the middle of town, and in the Good Children School close by. The cathedral, built in the grandest Romanesque style, was already several centuries old. Both buildings were surrounded by market stalls selling cloth, meat, bread, knives and cheese from as far away as ‘England and Cornwall’. Women hawking leeks and onions plied their trade as the choristers filed past, their market hours set by the chiming of the bell as Christ’s Body was raised at the high altar. From time to time, the town officials tried to ban commerce on ‘the Little Hill’, so close to the cathedral, but they failed. This was no rarefied academy; although within the vast cathedral, in the forest of pillars and vaulting that rose a hundred feet above the heads of the worshippers, the racket of the world was hushed by the solemnity of God.
Piers’s days at school would have been largely taken up with music of one kind or another. The appendix said he was taught the manicordium: in French, this meant the clavichords or some sort of keyboard instrument, possibly the organ that Brampton had mentioned. The strings of such instruments were sometimes wrapped in cloth to muffle the sound, especially in church, of small boys practising. Or perhaps he learned the monochord proper, a single-stringed instrument played with bridge and plectrum, which was used to instil the principles of harmony in small children and to accompany singing. Master Muguet or Maquet, his teacher, would have been in charge, as cantor, of the choir and all the music. (Since Muguet was not cantor before 1480, Piers did not go to the cathedral until he was seven, at the earliest.) The little chorister would have worn a robe supplied by the cathedral and would have taken his turn, as all the choirboys did, to serve at daily Mass in local great houses. The boys would stand four or five to the lectern that held the single book of music, small heads close, just behind the priest as he did his holy work at the altar. On Saturdays they sang the Salve Regina, a special devotion newly instituted in the cathedral, before ‘the Virgin Mary Our Lady of Tournai’, as she was always called. To the silver Virgin, as tall as they were, flanked by blazing banks of candles and with a golden crown containing a jewel that shone at night like a star, they made the prayer for her mercy in their valley of exile and tears.
Salve regina, mater misericordiae,
Via dulcedo et spes nostra salve.
Ad te clamamus exules filii Evae,
Ad te suspiramus gementes et flentes
In hac lacrymarum valle.
At Corpus Christi, and at the Feasts of St Barnabas and St John the Baptist in June, much play was made with crowns of red roses that were worn by the priests or placed on the Blessed Sacrament in procession. This would have been Piers’s first contact with the higher significance of roses, carried reverentially (though their velvet petals still fell, making a crimson-pink mosaic underfoot) to be placed on the high altar. Once a year too, on the Feast of the Holy Innocents at the end of December, the choirboys would deck themselves as little priests, dance in the sanctuary and pretend to say Mass. Then, on a special stage on the cathedral porch, they would dress up one of the priests or minor canons as the Bishop of Fools, in full pontificals, and take him on a wild and jeering progress round every tavern in town. Such observances were seen elsewhere, but the show of the small counterfeit priests sometimes lasted as long as a week in Tournai, performed so boisterously that in 1462, just for that year, the town banned the foolish bishops, ‘or abbots, or anyone else like them’. They were causing, it was said, great excès et desrisions: the very accusation Henry VII was to level against the madcap counterfeit boy who had been, perhaps, one of them. At the end of the days of dressing-up the mock robes were put away, the daily round of Masses and classes reverently resumed, and the unbroken voices rang again in the high dark vaulting, innocents and angels.
It was from this regime, Brampton said, that Piers ran away. A fine education, like rich food, was known to sometimes turn boys wilful. Music, especially organ music and polyphony, could also have dangerous e
ffects, leading to vanity, pride and lasciviousness of heart. The Setubal testimonies made Piers fourteen or fifteen when, no longer an angelic choirboy in the Good Children School, he fled from Tournai and the ‘organist’ who was teaching him. He became a runaway, the very definition of a bad child; and so, some would say, he remained.
The confession took great care to give a plausible chronology for Piers’s life until he sailed for Portugal. But the fact remained that there were two distinct versions of his life, and they could not be reconciled. Either Piers had spent those years roving around the markets of Flanders, or he had learned the organ in Tournai. If the latter was true, as most of the evidence suggested, there seemed no reason for a different story.
In any event, neither story made sense of what had happened. This, as contemporaries pointed out, was an abusion that had lasted a very long time, played without mistakes. ‘The greatest persons in the world,’ as Molinet said, had been deceived by this young man and had heaped honours on him. Not least, he had taken a princess of Scotland as his wife. His English, his manners and his knowledge of the Yorkist court seemed exceptional. Even now, as a captive, ambassadors could not help seeing him as the noble young man they had imagined. Was this really a Flemish boatman’s boy, indifferently trained, who had flitted from master to master before ending up in Ireland with no idea ‘what I should do and say’?
Francis Bacon, writing in the 1620s, best expressed the general bewilderment. ‘This youth was such a mercurial,’ he wrote, ‘as the like hath seldom been known . . . [and] one of the strangest examples of a personation, that ever was in elder or later times.’ Yet with the confession, he went on,
the king did himself no right: for as there was a laboured tale of particulars, of Perkin’s father and mother, and grandsire and grandmother, and uncles and cousins, by names and surnames, and from what places he travelled up and down; so there was little or nothing to purpose of anything concerning his designs, or any practices that had been held with him; nor the duchess of Burgundy herself, that all the world did take knowledge of as the person that had put life and being into the whole business, so much as named or pointed at, [but utterly passed over in silence]. So that men missing of what they looked for looked about for they knew not what, and were in more doubt than before. But the king chose rather not to satisfy, than to kindle coals . . .
The king’s manner of showing things by pieces, and dark-lights, hath so muffled it, that it hath left it almost as a mystery to this day.
Nonetheless, some tried to explain it. Perkin himself, to begin with, must have been an extraordinary child. Vergil started this, and later chroniclers enhanced it; he was so marvellous that, even in Tournai with a boatman for a father, people might well have assumed he was royal. It sounded like the old story of the weaver’s son with his prince’s soul, mismatched by the stars. Bacon added, for good measure, dark powers of intoxication and enchantment.
The musical version of Perkin’s childhood explained the mismatch slightly better. Tournai was his place, but the little chorister had naturally grown restless there, educated beyond the town’s drab horizons and the salty dockers’ talk. According to Zurita, he confessed to Henry not only his name and his base birth but also ‘how he had longed that in his upbringing, and in the disposition of his person, he should correspond to the blood and nobility that he pretended to be of’. This was why, despite ‘the sort of man he was, so dirty [soez] and of vile condition’, he nonetheless sustained his character ‘for so much time, and with such great industry and talent’. Pressure from others had not done this; everything came from inside, from his own motivation to be more than he was.
The theory plausibly fitted his character as Brampton had described it: the moço posturing and pestering to be taken to Portugal, the boy dressing in his silks in Ireland. He was always too restless to settle in one place, and also too hungry for the admiration of others. Vergil thought Perkin had responded so readily to Margaret’s teaching because ‘it’s the nature of that sort of man, coming from that background, to strive for the praises of those better than himself’. In the end, he wrote, he drove himself to destruction because he despised his birth. Molinet’s conclusion was similar. Perkin had been pushed, but the prime factor had been his own outrecuidance, his overweening conceit, which had turned him into the gorgeous prince he had observed in Flanders.
Yet even that, surely, could not account for what he had become. No piece of evidence offered up by Henry and his spies could explain it. Contemporaries, therefore, put these explanations aside. Ambassadors ignored them, as did the rulers they worked for. More gallingly for Henry, his own historians did so. Both Vergil and André, under the king’s nose, clung to the story that Margaret had trained Perkin for years before his appearance. They preserved ‘born in Tournai’, his baseness and his name; but if those things were true, the most intensive princely training, they believed, must have followed them. André even added, for good measure, his story that Perkin had been Brampton’s servant at the Yorkist court itself. To a man, they refused to touch the allegation that he had merely been kidnapped and trained in Ireland. The masquerade, they were convinced, had started long before, with the boy already under Margaret’s wing when he was sent to Portugal. The record suggests that Henry, too, thought this was the real story. And if this vital part of the young man’s life had been rewritten, as it seemed, it raised the question of what else had been invented, and why.
When Simnel had been captured and exposed, nothing more was made of him than that he was an artisan’s son, trained by a priest. By contrast, the Perkin information was overwhelming. Henry clearly felt he needed it because he could produce no real York, living or dead, to make his case impregnable. It seemed unnecessary, all the same, to argue quite so much; especially since, having argued so much, he seemed not even to have convinced himself.
v
The king was never satisfied with the Perkin story. Although he had the main outlines early, he followed up through 1494 with almost obsessive spy-work and, as he claimed, interviews and depositions in London. The envoys sent to Flanders between 1493 and 1495 hinted first at the boy’s base birth, then at a bourgeois family in Tournai, without apparently providing names either for him or for them. They also brought no written proofs: just ‘assurances by mouth alone’, Molinet said. No mention of Perkin or the Werbecques reached Molinet until more than two years later, when the French confession arrived at the court of Burgundy.
Right up to that point Henry kept looking, always groping further and gathering more. In the summer of 1495 the king subjected to interrogation anyone useful he could find among the captives from the Deal invasion. Two men who worked for him during those years – his astrologer, William Parron, and Richard Nanfan, then deputy-lieutenant of Calais – later admitted they had feared he would kill them if they failed to sort out the rumours that Edward’s son was alive. ‘I had likely to be put to a great plunge for my troth,’ said Nanfan, thinking of the gallows. Parron thought he might lose his head.
Henry’s anxiety to find more and better details, or indeed a whole new line of evidence, was well known in Europe. Other kings, wishing either for his friendship or to have him in their debt, did their best to help him. None helped more than the French, who needed particularly to have him on their side as the Holy League formed against them. From at least 1494 Henry’s research was assisted by Louis Malet, Seigneur de Graville and Admiral of the French fleet, who was then also Governor of Picardy. Commines said that Malet was Charles VIII’s favourite among his closest advisers, acting as his chamberlain and gentleman of the bedchamber, and he had undoubtedly known Plantagenet during his sojourn in Paris. In December 1494, Richmond Herald’s secret instructions for his trip to France included the note to thank Charles especially for ‘such services as [the admiral] has done . . . and will do for us’ at ‘our express charge and commandment’, and the request that Malet should keep doing Henry’s service and pleasure in any way he could.
Charles himself helped too. After Richmond had ‘put him right as to the truth of the matter’, as Soncino said, and after Henry had written to tell him ‘that it was quite clear that Perkin was a bourgeois of Tournai’, he made himself useful. By the beginning of 1496, Charles was providing Picard spies for Henry to send into Scotland. He also sent him evidence from a Portuguese herald, sealed by himself and his council, to prove, in Ferdinand and Isabella’s words, ‘that the so-called Duke of York was the son of a barber, and offering to send over his father and mother, etc’. His offer sounded exactly what Henry needed. Tournai was technically a French city, from which only Charles had the power to extract the Werbecques, as his subjects, to send them to England. De Puebla had noted that the Kentings at Deal knew that ‘his’ father and mother lived in France. Charles’s Portuguese herald was plausibly Tanjar, who also gave evidence at Setubal; and barbero, as Ferdinand and Isabella had it, may well have been a slip for barquero. But Henry was not interested. He ‘did not like the proofs and testimonies that [the French king] sent of who he is’, de Puebla said. This came more than three years after Henry had started delving. He did not like the Tournai story, at least in Charles’s version, and wanted something else.
The French, in any case, were not to be trusted. When they wanted Henry as their friend, the young man was a barber’s or a boatman’s son; when they wanted to put pressure on him, attempting to frustrate any alliances with Spain or the Scots, he was still the Duke of York. When John Ramsay met Alexander Monypeny in September 1496 in Scotland, they talked about the ‘boy’. Monypeny remarked, in Ramsay’s words, that ‘great inquisition had been made to understand of Perkin’s birth both by the admiral and him’. The ambassador implied that they had not come up with much, so Ramsay privately showed him ‘the writing’ drawn up by Meautis, Henry’s French secretary, which presumably contained what Henry had gleaned of the boy’s background so far. It must have been much the same as the evidence Charles had offered. But Monypeny looked at it, ‘and he plainly said he never understood it but rather trowed [believed] ye contrary’.