by Ann Wroe
Molinet’s first use of the revealed name, Pierquin Wesbecque, came right at the start of his 293rd chapter, like a great cry of relief. But his last words on the young man called him not Perkin but the White Rose, as if he still more naturally thought of him that way.
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A deeper difficulty also haunted the confession, of family and blood. Henry had made no physical connection between his captive and the Werbecques of Tournai. The father and mother of the confession seemed tied by the lightest of bonds to their son. They played almost no part in his upbringing; he was with them for a while, but was constantly farmed out and soon gone for good. Henry’s greatest problem with the evidence he was offered was to fit his prisoner to this family.
There was clearly some reason to connect the young man to the Werbecques. It would seem preposterous, otherwise, to have picked them out, although a king could deal with people of that class in any way he chose. The route of enquiry, too, may have seemed clear enough. Henry’s agents, asking their questions and distributing their rewards, had tracked the boy back from Ireland, to Portugal, to Bruges, to Middelburg, to Tournai, possibly on Brampton’s evidence. There they found Jehan Werbecque, whose teenage son was said to be missing. He was therefore the boy’s father, this was the family, and all other details could be fitted neatly – or not so neatly – round this fundamental fact.
Yet this ‘fact’ was never proven save by the king’s own word, the word of his captive given in custody, and the corroboration of people who wished to be in his good graces. The story had never needed to be true if others would co-operate, and they did so. Contemporary chroniclers raised no questions; they were interested not in the parentage of the lad, but in his training. Only much later did the notion of a mismatch, so clearly suggested by Henry’s behaviour at the time, cross the minds of writers on the subject. Some surmised that the Werbecques had played foster-parents to a fugitive prince, though surely no prince, no matter how destitute or dejected, would have sought out shelter with a thug in Caufours. Some thought that Jehan had gone for a spell to England, where Edward IV had fallen for his wife and fathered her son. The tale had currency round Tournai itself, and in 1850 Kervyn de Lettenhove, the most eminent historian of Flanders, called this ‘tradition’ ‘not improbable’. In fact, nothing supported it save the English name ‘Piers’ and the care that was possibly lavished on his education. But the story played to the strong impression that these were not quite the parents, and this was not quite their son.
Henry never confirmed the point as contemporaries expected, by linking his rival visibly and physically to the people who were meant to be his parents. This was the easiest way to scotch his claims and, at the same time, humiliate him: the boy going home to mother, as the Kentings had mocked that he should. Both Charles VIII and the Spanish sovereigns, by offering to send his parents, confirmed that this was the acknowledged way to deal with impostors. Charles seemed to have the Werbecques specifically in mind. But Henry rejected or ignored his offer, ‘not wanting it’, de Puebla said. He did so despite the fact that, if he had talked to Brampton or heard anything of what was said in Setubal, he would have gathered that Jehan Werbecque was desperate to see his son again and know he was alive.
The story came from the herald Tanjar, who had returned to Tournai – his native town, or so he claimed – sometime in the early 1490s. He was in the house of one of his relations, he told his questioners, when the boy’s father had suddenly turned up. The father had apparently heard that Tanjar had come from Portugal and had seen his son there. So he asked, was this true? Had he seen him?
The herald said he didn’t know him. Then he asked: ‘Who did he go with?’
His father said, ‘He went with the wife of Duarte Brandon, in a ship with her notary.’
The herald said that he had seen a boy arrive over there in Portugal, the one who had since gone to Ireland, and that they had raised him up as a king, saying he was the son of King Edward.
The father said: ‘That’s my son.’
‘What distinguishing marks did he have?’ asked the herald.
The father said he had a mark on his face under his eye, and he was a bit of a fool, and he had an upper lip that was raised up a bit and thin legs, and that when he left there he was fourteen going on fifteen.
The herald said that he had all those marks.
Then his father, weeping, said, ‘That is my son, who got him mixed up in this, ah me, they will kill him.’ For he had no other son . . .
Coincidences like this were the stuff of legends. Tristan’s father Rual, having looked for his missing foster-son the world over, came after almost four years to Denmark, where he ‘fell in with’ the two pilgrims who had first met Tristan in Cornwall. He asked them whether they had seen his son; they asked him what Tristan looked like; his father described him, ‘and they told him how long it was since they had seen just such a boy . . . all his peculiarities of face, hair, speech, behaviour, body and clothes; and . . . Rual saw at once that the descriptions tallied’. In much the same way Jehan Werbecque, still searching for his son after four years or longer, fell in with a foreigner by chance and discovered, weeping, that this stranger had the very news he wanted.
If this tale was true, father and son seem to have kept in touch before the boy left. Jehan knew the details of the ship Piers had sailed on and who had accompanied him. Brampton’s evidence at Setubal claimed that they had also been in contact afterwards, with Piers attempting to send news back to him through Brampton’s other servants. Yet Tanjar also implied that this was no ordinary boy. For some extraordinary reason, his father, like Rui de Sousa, immediately identified him with the young man hailed as a king in Ireland. By his kingship he knew him, before anything else.
Other parts of Tanjar’s evidence sounded more authentic. Jehan’s list of his son’s distinguishing marks was almost incoherent, mixing tiny signs with general observations, as a grieving father might well do. The boy’s ‘thin legs’ showed his delicateness, the reason perhaps why Jehan had had to indulge in different dreams for him, his precious only son. Whatever those hopes were, the boy, ‘a bit of a fool’, had run away from them. There was tenderness as well as rebuke in that remark. Such a father, searching through Tournai with tears and petitions for news of his vanished son, and able – as fathers were presumed to be – to bring the boy to repentant obedience, could surely have been put to Henry’s service while he lived. He never was.
For several years no approach was made either to Nicaise Werbecque, who had been identified as Perkin’s mother. She was absent, even strangely so, from the Setubal testimonies, where only Jehan had charge of the boy or any eagerness to find him. Of course, it was only the young man’s father who had ever been of interest to Henry; but typically in such cases (Tristan apart) both parents grieved and searched. By contrast, the news that Piers sent back to Tournai was directed only to his father. No mother was ever mentioned or invoked. The fugitive that Brampton’s wife took in seemed desperate not only to travel but also to acquire a family, as if he had never had one. He wanted to live with them, Brampton said, ‘like one of his sons’, and it was because Brampton would not ‘take him for his son’ that he wanted to leave again. In the French version of the confession he spoke of his mother in the past tense, as though she had died. In both versions, his ‘certain season’ with his aunt and uncle, when very young, might have suggested the same.
In the English confession, however, his mother emerged as the more important parent in Piers’s life. It was she who had ‘led him’ away from home to learn Flemish, his necessary bilingual education; his father had had no particular charge of him. On October 13th 1497, therefore, the omission was rectified, and Perkin wrote to her from custody in Exeter.
Ma mere, tant humblement comme faire je puis, me recommande a vous.
Mother, as humbly as I may, I commend myself to you. And may it please you to know that by fortune, under the colour of an invented thing [une chose controuvee], certain
Englishmen made me take upon myself that I was the son of King Edward of England, called his second son, Richard Duke of York. I now find myself in such trouble that if you are not in this hour my good mother, I am compelled to be in great danger and inconvenience, because of the name which, at their instance, I have taken upon myself and the enterprise which I have carried out.
And so that you may understand and know clearly that I am your son and none other, may it please you to remember how, when I parted from you with Berlo to go to Antwerp, you wept as you said ‘God be with you’, and how my father went with me as far as the Porte de Marvis. And also the last letter you wrote to me at Middelburg by your hand, [saying] that you had been delivered of a daughter, and also that my brother Thiroyan and my sister Jehanne had died of the plague at the time of the procession of Tournai. And how my father, you and I were going to live at Lannoy outside the town; and you remember the beautiful pig-place [Porquiere].
The King of England now holds me in his power, to whom I have declared the truth of the affair, very humbly imploring him that his pleasure may be to pardon me of the offence which I have done to him, since I am not his native subject at all, and what I did was at the instigation and wishes of his own subjects. But I have as yet received no good reply from him, nor have I hope of one, at which my heart is very sad. However, Mother, I beg and pray you to have pity upon me and purchase my deliverance. Commend me to my godfather Pierart Flan, to Master Jehan Stalyn my uncle, to my comrade Guilhem Rucq, and to Jehan Bordeau. I hear that my father has departed this life, God keep his soul, which is heavy news to me. And may you be with God. Written at Exeter, the 13th day of October, by the hand of your humble son,
Pierrequin Wezbecq.
Mother I pray you to send me a little money so that my guards may be kinder to me for my giving them something. Commend me to my Aunt Stalyn, and to all my good neighbours.
To Mademoiselle Catherine Wezbecq, my mother, living at St Jean on the Scheldt.
The letter was very like the confession: so like it that the source was certainly the same. The French version of the confession had the same spelling and something of the same style, including an over-fondness for the word pareillement, ‘as well’, as fact was piled on fact. The two documents, both produced in October, seem to have arrived in Flanders simultaneously in a number of copies, and survived together in the archives of Tournai and Courtrai. They were clearly sent to each town as a pair, or in a bundle alongside Henry’s October letter to his ‘friends’ and Daubeney’s letter from Marazion, to authenticate each other, and they did so to striking effect. (Daubeney had begged his Calais colleagues, in a postscript, not to fail to pass on his news ‘as truth’.) Whether the letter to Tournai was ever intended, as it claimed, for Nicaise Werbecque privately, its public life was more important. Most probably it was meant to persuade and shame Maximilian and Margaret, for it was not redacted in English and was apparently never circulated in England.
Letter and confession kept in careful step. Both gave the ‘trading’, rather than the musical, version of his life. Once more he went to Antwerp and Middelburg, after which he naturally lost contact. Aunt Jane appeared again, together with Uncle John, and Guilhem Rucq appeared from the French appendix. The Irish kidnapping was given in much the same form: certain Englishmen made me take upon myself that I was the son ofKing Edward of England. At the same time, the letter, unlike the confession, had kept up with the news. In the confession, Perkin implied that his father was still alive; in the letter, he had heard that he was dead. The confession did not say that Pierart Flan was his godfather; the letter did, perhaps because – alongside the news of his father’s death – word had come that Flan was now doing godfatherly duties as the legal guardian of Jehan Werbecque’s children.
All through the letter, however, the writer also inserted private references to prove to his mother that he was her son. None of this was in the confession. He spoke as son to mother, as they might have sat talking in some window seat, he holding her hand, trying to impress on her the reality of who he was. To underline how vulnerable he was, and how much her little boy, he used the baby name he had refused to use in England. For her he was Perkin, or Pierrequin, again.
The references were tiny but convincing. He reminded her of her tears as he left for Antwerp, how his father had walked on with him through the half-dozen evil-smelling tanners’ streets that lay between Caufours and the Porte de Marvis, and how she had written to him some years later with news of the birth of a daughter. He recalled deaths in the family and dreams of moving to safe Lannoy, a walled town away from the river in the lee of an impressive castle, the home of counts. Only a real son would remember dreams. Et vouz souvenez dela belle Porquiere: a difficult word to interpret, probably the communal field where pigs were meant to be put in the daytime, rather than being left free to roam in Tournai’s gardens and streets. Possibly this was a family joke, as if a piggery could ever be belle. At this point you could smell the scene, bristling pigs rooting in the dung-hill, the mud of the Tournésis underfoot, a typically Picard idyll of a quieter country life. ‘Commend me to Jehan Bordeau’: a name of no meaning or importance, except to his mother and to him.
The letter gained extra authenticity from its portrait of the king. He was not merciful, as he usually liked to present himself, but impervious to pity or argument. If royal officers had written this they would surely have mentioned Henry’s justice and clemency, but Perkin saw no hope of it. The letter seemed credible, moreover, in everything else it said. Such remarkable detail, like the list of neighbours and teachers, could not have been invented. No one would have taken the trouble to produce such a picture of a life if it were not true.
Yet in Tournai, for which it was intended, much in the letter would have rung false. To begin with, Perkin seemed to have forgotten his own surname, his mother’s name, and her address. His name was not Wezbecq, and neither was hers; this variant was as unknown in Tournai as ‘Osbeck’ was. Second, her baptismal name was Nicaise or Caisine, not Catherine, which was what she had been called in England. In Tournai, following the French fashion, the names were attached to two different saints and hence to two separate city parishes. Her son would hardly have got it wrong. Third, she lived at St Jean des Caufours, as everyone in Tournai called it, not at St Jean on the Scheldt. That address, for what it was worth, seems to have come from Brampton.
The language of the letter was ordinary, unremarkable northern French, grammatically correct but with no regard for euphony or elision. It was the same as the French into which Henry’s ‘letter to his friends’ had been translated, and in which the confession had appeared. By comparison with the records of town deliberations in Tournai, where the standard elisions were naturally made, it read like the French of an Englishman. In fact, the distinctive Picard use of ‘ch’ for ‘c’, as in chité (city), menchonge (lie) and Franche, appeared more often in Henry’s and Daubeney’s letters, translated into French in Calais, than it did in Perkin’s. A private letter to a mother, though, was surely an occasion for writing in the language of home.
Other things seemed wrong, too. Perkin mentioned that Lannoy was ‘outside the town’, as if his mother would not know that. He also spoke of ‘the procession of Tournai’, during which, according to the letter his mother had sent him in Middelburg, his brother and sister had died of the plague. Tournaisiens talking among themselves did not call it that: this was just le prochession or le grant prochession, when the statue of Our Lady and her glittering reliquary were carried through the streets on the feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross in September. The festival lasted nine days, with special food – roast game, goslings stuffed with shallots – on sale in the streets, and with thousands of people visiting. It was the high point of Tournai’s year, exhaustively prepared for. Only a foreigner would call this ‘the procession of Tournai’. Its fame raised the suspicion that it was in the letter mostly to gild its authenticity, and that, as with the directions to Lannoy, the writer was
trying too hard to set a scene he did not know.
As Perkin remembered his mother’s letter, the plague and the procession had coincided. Certainly plague would not have stopped it from taking place. In the summer of 1426, when terrible pestilence broke out in Tournai, preparations for ‘the’ procession went on as usual all through August, with busy sewing of the guild liveries and banners and with no thought of cancellation. The strange and poignant scene conjured in the letter was therefore possible: Tournai in its splendour, hung with flags, bright with liveries and trumpets and deafened with bells, the Virgin’s reliquary swaying past under a canopy of velvet and silk, while in the house by the Scheldt two little bodies lay in winding sheets, bunched herbs burning slowly in the fireplace to keep the contagion away. It was impossible only because, between 1484 and the end of the decade, there was no plague in Tournai.
The sister who had died was called Jehanne, the letter said. The new sister, apparently born at almost the same time, was called Jehanne too, and survived. The letter ignored her. Perkin sent her no greeting and did not ask about her; she was just ‘a daughter’, impersonally noted. The proposed move to Lannoy, apparently mentioned in his mother’s letter, featured only his parents and himself, as if the suddenly smaller family was trying to start again somewhere else. And as for that, it was surely improbable that his father, whose only life was the river, would move away from it.
Even without their high false colour of pestilence and procession, the birth and deaths in his mother’s letter seemed too dramatic a combination. More plausibly, they looked like an attempt to devise a family structure that fitted the Werbecques as they were in 1497, apparently with two young children still at home. The traumas relayed to Middelburg contributed to a feeling that the frame was not quite straight, and that, for all the labour, the young man and the family did not quite connect. Perhaps it was not so impressive, after all, that he remembered his mother crying when she said goodbye to him, or the gate where his father had left him. What mother would not weep? What other road went to Antwerp? What Tournaisiens did not think sometimes, in those years of sporadic war and famine, of leaving the city and its troubles for a quieter life outside?