by Ann Wroe
Monypeny’s part in the delving, after his stint as Plantagenet’s minder in Paris, was curious in itself. His failure to credit Henry’s story, which by now had been known at Charles’s court for more than two years, was less so. Since he had come to offer good money for James’s guest, he could not possibly say he was a nobody. To confirm that he thought ‘rather the contrary’, he sought out and kept daily company with his former charge at the Scottish court, as if he still believed him to be Richard, Duke of York. There is no knowing what Monypeny truly made of Ramsay’s ‘boy’; but he was enmeshed, as everyone else was, in a diplomatic game played out at the highest level.
Ramsay, realising Henry’s keen interest in all this, said he would tell him more when he came home. The thrust of his letter, however, was that the king’s story was proving hard to sell. Nor was it being mentioned openly at James’s court. It was still no more than a background rumour, a rustle of papers exchanged in anterooms, and Henry was doing nothing to push it forward.
But help was also offered from other quarters. In April 1496, when Ferdinand and Isabella got wind that Charles had sent ‘some dicho’ (literally, some witticism) to Henry attesting to the young man’s identity, they were profoundly annoyed. If the King of England wanted anything of this sort, they told de Puebla, they could do much better, sending Henry the statements of ‘lots of people who know him’. They promised this on April 14th, exactly eleven days before the depositions were taken down in Setubal. But they knew all about those already, warmly recommending what Rui de Sousa had said. They also offered, ‘if it will be any use to the king’, to send him the young man’s father and mother, ‘who, they tell us, are in Portugal and are our subjects’. De Sousa had seen this father and mother, they went on (this thought interpolated in the draft, and trailing down the margin). The next moment they thought better of both remarks, and the secretary crossed them out with a couple of light lines, sloping this way and that, as if the thought had hardly been serious in the first place. There were certainly no parents in Portugal, but there could have been if it had been diplomatically useful to find them.
Ferdinand and Isabella offered in the same letter to try everything, todas las vias, to make Henry’s lot easier. The testimony from Setubal should have been especially useful to him: circumstantial, consistent, and tying the boy firmly to one family whose name and address were given. Yet the Spanish sovereigns were in no hurry to send the evidence to him, as if, in some odd way, they thought it might be unwelcome. ‘You should try this on the King of England as though it came from you,’ they told de Puebla, ‘and tell us what he says in reply.’ In January 1497, nine months after the evidence had been taken, Henry was obviously asking about it, but they were still fussing round. ‘We haven’t sent the testimony about York with this letter,’ they explained to de Puebla,
because the copy we have has been authenticated by only one notary, and it’s in Castilian, and it seems embarrassing to us to send such a thing in a language that they don’t understand over there. We are sending off immediately to get it translated into Latin and signed by three notaries, and when it comes back we will send it to you at once and with great care.
Looking at the document, it is hard to see why they were so worried. Fernan Peres Mexia, the notary, had written it out with exceptional regularity and neatness over two and a half sides of paper; in a spidery hand and in Spanish, to be sure, but with only one tiny deletion and two small blots. Evidently it had been copied out properly from rough notes taken at the interviews. As for authentication, that could hardly have been more splendid: a four-step pyramid of Mexia’s name and title crowned with a cross and big crossed keys, signifying ‘notary apostolic’, which took up almost a quarter of the page. Had Ferdinand and Isabella sent it to de Puebla, he could easily have seen to the translation.
Nonetheless in March 1498, five months after Perkin had allegedly confessed to Henry, they were writing as though they had kept the document to themselves right up to the last moment. ‘We give great thanks to God for having shown the truth so clearly,’ they wrote to Sancho de Londoño,
which truth we always believed and took for just such a certainty as we now see, because here in the parts of Portugal where he was [still ‘he’; no need to say who] we got so much assurance of who he was, as now has appeared by his own confession, and with this same certainty we affirm it both by word and in our letters where he was and what was said about him; and because news has come that Fernando Perez [with our letters] has been lost at sea, we ask you to go into England and tell the king all this on our behalf, and find out if there is anything we can do for him, because we will do it most willingly . . .
Fernando Perez de Ayala, who had been sent to check on his relative in Scotland, had been drowned that month on his way to England. He may well have had the Setubal evidence with him but, if so, it was very late. Of course the Spanish sovereigns had always wished to be useful to Henry, as they kept saying; but perhaps, as long as the marriage negotiations for Katherine and Arthur dragged on, not too useful. If they had still wanted, from time to time, to frighten Henry with the thought of York, it was not helpful to their case to send proof that ‘he was the son of a boatman before, from Tournai which is in Flanders’.
Once the boy was in custody, however, Ferdinand and Isabella happily took credit for knowing who he was all along. In their letter to Londoño, for the first time, they called the nuisance ‘Periquin’, and said how pleased they were to hear he had been captured. The French were pleased too, and had also thought the deception obvious, though they much enjoyed boasting, Soncino said, that they had kept this imaginary enemy going against Henry for years. Both parties could have kept York in play even longer, had it suited them. For this reason, Henry seemed to feel he could not trust any evidence they offered him. He could only trust his own.
Accordingly, the king went on adding to the details he had of the Werbecques. In 1496 and 1497 payments to anonymous Frenchmen and women were made regularly, probably for such information. In the late summer of 1497, only days before the boy’s surrender, Breton spies were still providing titbits about the family. On August 16th one brought letters from ‘John Lenesque’s wife’, possibly a Tournai contact; another arrived on September 20th with ‘word of the death of John Perkin’. No other such entry, payment for news of a death, appears in Heron’s accounts, but this added another crumb to Henry’s precious store. His letter of October 7th placed Perkin’s father confidently in the past tense, sometime while he lived comptroller. Heron’s transposition of ‘Perkin’ to become his assumed father’s surname (rather as, in the patent rolls, Walter Herford, baker, became ‘Walter Baker’) neatly caught the only reason why this man was important. In several minds, not just Heron’s, Jehan Werbecque was indeed ‘John Perkin’.
His name caused Henry a strange amount of trouble. In 1493–4 the king had it right (‘a boatman named Werbec’), but constant worrying with the story later made him doubtful. The letter of October 17th 1497 to Waterford, after mentioning that Perkin Warbeck should properly be Piers Osbeck, apparently left a blank after ‘son to John’, as if Henry was not sure he could assume the father was ‘Osbeck’ just because the son now was.
The king attributed the change of name to Perkin’s own information, ‘freely and openly shown’. But if Perkin said that, he was lying, for the name was only Werbecque or Weerbecke in Tournai or the country roundabout. Osbeck was unknown. Henry was lying too, for he had been trying out ‘Osbeck’ at least since the summer of 1495, when it had appeared in his letter of thanks to Canterbury. The punctilious city clerk, who had called the invader Peter or Perkyn Warbecke before, now corrected himself: he was ‘named Peter Osbek’. Henry’s source may well have been Spanish or Portuguese, some witness who had a romance-speaker’s trouble with saying the name. (Gaspar van Weerbecke’s name gave such grief to his Italian employers that they called him simply ‘Gaspar’.) But whatever its origin, this was not a simple change of spelling, as Henry confir
med by mentioning it at all. It was a conscious change of name from something true to something false.
Why this was done is a mystery. Names often mattered little in this world, jobs or rank being more important: so men and women were called, quite simply, ‘the ambassador of France’, ‘the herald’, ‘the silk-woman’, ‘the mayor’s son’. As for the names themselves, people sometimes boasted several. Pardons were issued to offenders ‘by what name or names soever [they] be called’, or with a list of aliases and addresses. The identity of men and women was not fixed about one name, and Henry may have believed the change was of no consequence. Fabyan’s flung-out remark that Brampton had called the youth ‘Petyr Osbek or otherwise Styenbek’ suggested that Londoners, at least, did not care what this ‘unhappy imp’ was called.
Yet Henry had made great efforts to fix this boy’s identity, and now appeared to be undermining them. To English ears and tongues ‘Osbeck’ was trickier than ‘Warbeck’ – a name by now well established in the copious legal records of the commissions set up to deal with the conspiracies. By February 1494, and probably months earlier, ‘Peter Warbeck, born in Tournai’ was already the leader of the plots against Henry. Now the name was in question again, assuming peculiar forms. The confusion was plain in London, where on October 12th 1497 the council learned from Henry’s letter that Peter Warbeck, as they had always called him, had now confessed ‘that he himself was that same person, Peter Warboys’. If the king or his captive were trying to protect the family, or lay a false trail, this was effort wasted, for the Werbecques and their circle were too clearly identified for that. Yet someone chose to muddy the waters.
It is probable that Henry’s captive did not volunteer the name Osbeck at all. There was no reason why this garble should have reached his ears before he was taken prisoner. He had never heard it, but agreed to it, since he was bound to do whatever Henry wanted. He may also have agreed to ‘Piers’, rather than volunteered it, since the name was English and unknown in Tournai. Like Osbeck, it may have come from Portuguese evidence. Together, they made yet another identity for him.
‘Perkin’, of course, was a baby name, not a proper name bestowed at baptism or usable in law unless he was actually a child. It became attached to him, Vergil said, with all its connotations of littleness, feebleness and silliness, ‘when his folly had made him an object of contempt’. Had he accepted it he would have colluded in the insult, rather as if James IV had acknowledged himself as the ‘Jemmy’ that John Skelton mocked. It may be significant that the only time he is known to have used it, in telling his sea-story to de Puebla, the other characters in the story did not know who Perkin was.
In any event, when he came – obligingly or not – to sign his name, he used the version that Henry and he had now agreed between them. In October, at Exeter, he apparently wrote ‘per Pero Osbek’ at the bottom of a copy of the confession, in French, that Richmond later showed Raimondo Soncino in London. (‘He says it’s Perkin’s writing,’ said Soncino, betraying a smidgen of doubt.) The confession took up a single sheet of paper, with the main text written in a different hand. As for his signature, a trace of class still hovered in that per: the suggestion of clerical training that had seemed to show through, almost three years before, in Rychard d’engleterre manu propria. The same hand wrote, but this time apparently in very large letters, as Soncino reproduced it in his despatch to the Duke of Milan. The writer was making a statement, as he was by embracing the false name ‘Osbeck’ at all, though few of those who saw it may have been able to guess what that statement was.
But ‘Piers Osbeck’ did not catch on. It survived for only three or four months in official use before giving way, inevitably, to the Peter or Perkin Warbeck everyone already knew. ‘Osbeck’ featured especially in the documents recording the collection of fines for the rebellion in the West Country, as if it was most closely attached to that time and that place. It appeared as Osebeck, Oxebeche and Osebethe. Fabyan, remembering how the name had first emerged in London, revealed it as a gift to doggerel-artists. ‘And shortly after,’ the chronicler wrote, ‘were made of him sundry Roundells & songs to his shame & derision, whereof one I intend to express In the end of this mayor’s time.’ He forgot to do so, but they could be imagined.
Londoners may not have been the only ones who played around with his name. The French version of the confession, and the letter Perkin allegedly wrote home later, produced a new hybrid, ‘Wesbecque’. Molinet, who saw this version, naturally picked it up. Again, it was an apparently senseless change of name from the easy and established version. The person who did this may have been the same French clerk, taking down from dictation, who had also produced ‘Sir Edward Brixton’; or it may have been the young man, clever and not yet bereft of tricks, who was supposed to have written these documents himself. It is quite likely that ‘Wesbecque’ was a play on words by someone who knew Flemish as well as French: with the Flemish wezen, to be or to be real, and weze, the word for an orphan. For those who could understand him, this was Orphan Perkin speaking.
‘Perkin’, too, had been used very little before the young man arrived in Cornwall. Henry himself seemed deliberately to avoid it. With his own officers, he almost always called him the garçon or the ‘feigned lad’. With ambassadors, even the favoured de Puebla, he did not use ‘Perkin’ until the autumn of 1497, preferring ‘the boy who says he is the son of King Edward’, or ‘he who calls himself Plantagenet’. By repeating the claim his foe was making, Henry gave some substance to the threat against him. This may have been why, as late as September 15th 1497, the king apparently referred to him as the Duke of York, and certainly offered no alternative, in a letter he wrote to the pope. But it is equally possible that, in his careful heart, he did not yet feel he knew enough to call him ‘Perkin’ publicly.
As soon as he thought he could use the name, foreign envoys could help his case by spreading ‘Perkin’ round Europe. But habits of deference, or hedging, took a while to break. Both the Milanese and Venetian ambassadors tried out ‘Pirichino’ before the young man’s capture, Soncino on September 8th and Trevisano on the 17th, but both, on subsequent information that made more of his strength, made him il ducha di Jorch again. ‘At least’, wrote Soncino at the end of 1497, reflecting on Perkin’s defeat, ‘there is no one else of the royal blood at home and abroad who might cause war and mischief.’ No one else, from a man who had seen and read the confession, signed by Perkin’s hand – and had seen him too, in his humiliation.
Henry seemed similarly reluctant to publicise the other details he knew. He could have published a report of Perkin’s origins, attested by competent authorities, at least three years before he did. The rulers of both France and Spain implicitly urged him to do so by offering their own versions, and Vergil said Henry took great pains to get the story out as soon as he knew it, in 1493. But this was not so. All the king did in fact, Bacon said, was to spread the details ‘by court fames’, or palace rumours, ‘which commonly print better than printed proclamations’. He seemed to be waiting for his rival to confirm them himself.
Even then, Henry used the vital document with circumspection. Soncino, when he was shown the French confession, said that many similar sheets, all signed, had been made to be sent ‘so I take it’ to various places. André said Henry had it printed, in one of the first such uses of the presses, and distributed ‘to strike fear into the wicked in a public way’. But Vergil, despite his earlier remarks, mentioned no confession of any kind, oral or written. No originals survive, and no master-copy, with or without ‘per Pero Osbek’ to authenticate it. The wholesale disappearance of the confession documents stands in striking contrast to the survival in triplicate of the expenses for Perkin’s capture.
London at least saw a copy of the confession as soon as Henry returned there in November 1497, for that is when it appears in the London Chronicle. The city council may have heard it earlier, on October 12th, when the mayor, John Tate, read out to them a letter from the king ‘an
d other letters from various other persons declaring that Peter Warboys had come to our lord the king of his own accord and confessed . . . that he was born in Tournay in the parts of Germany’. There may later have been multiple and printed copies in London, handed out in the street as Perkin passed, or there may have been no more than that original, sent to the mayor and aldermen and copied out by the chronicler, as royal missives often were. Fabyan said that Henry publicised the confession in London to avoid ‘the further harm of his subjects’, as if the nuisance was not yet crushed, or as if, in this Yorkist-leaning city, the sight of Perkin was dangerous without it. But there is no contemporary evidence that Henry’s captive read the confession publicly at any stage. Only at the end did he seem, in some way, to paraphrase and acknowledge part of what it said of him.
The London Chronicle asserted that, for similar reasons of prudence and security, copies were sent into ‘all places of England and elsewhere’. But no town besides London hinted at receiving one. The French version, sent through Calais, may have been more widely distributed. Jean Molinet saw it at the court of Burgundy, for his bizarre spelling of the names of the Yorkist plotters in Ireland (‘Jehan Water, Stimen Pomouni, Jehan Taillant, Hurbert Baurd’) exactly follows it, as does the order in which they appear. He saw Henry’s letter of October 7th too, reproducing much of its detail and phrasing in his chronicle. Again, however, no original of the French version survives, and no ambassador seems to have sent a copy home. For the most part, despite all the labours, it seems to have been ignored.