by Ann Wroe
In this strange little scene Perkin appeared as Henry’s servant, the obedient performer of a cruel joke. Yet he performed as if he was without constraint, escorted rather than guarded; as if he was himself in charge and free. By contrast, when Henry VI had been paraded through London as a captive in 1465, he had worn a foolish straw hat and had been bound with a rope that was held on either side. Nothing of this kind was reported in Perkin’s case. He rode down Cheapside, the most showy street in London, where more than fifty goldsmiths’ shops displayed gold and silver vessels more magnificent, one Venetian wrote, than all the shops in Milan, Rome, Venice and Florence put together, and it seems that he might almost have lingered to admire them through the spitting uproar around him. Soncino remarked that on these rides, when Perkin was made ‘a spectacle for the world’, he bore his fortune animosamente, with spirit and courage.
Londoners clearly found these relaxed outings strange. Henry had every reason to keep Perkin in strict custody, not least because – however amenable he had appeared since his capture – he was thought very likely to try to escape. More than this, the king had reason to kill him. By the laws of nature, opposites did not spare each other. Fire did not pardon water, nor the cat the mouse, nor the victor his powerless captive. Besides, a prisoner who remained an active threat demanded to be killed for the good of the kingdom. Henry had not hesitated to hang as ‘adversaries of the king’ the Flemings he had captured at Deal. In early November 1497, while ‘the duke’ was still in the west with Henry, Trevisano relayed a report ‘that he had been taken by the king and hanged for being in his dominions’. It seemed reasonable enough. A month or so before, Soncino had thought it ‘impossible’ that the Duke of York would be pardoned, despite the talk of it. When the king had badgered James IV to hand Perkin over, this had always been understood as the preliminary to his execution. Ferdinand and Isabella understood the same and, indeed, expected it. This was why neither party had been prepared to let him go.
Several reasons, however, suggested that Henry should not execute his captive and should even, perhaps, treat him kindly. He had removed Perkin from sanctuary on the promise of his life, although an agreement reached with a criminal was eminently breakable. Beyond that, it was the general duty of a lord to pardon and show mercy: God’s law, not nature’s, the expression of his higher self. Soncino mentioned with wonder how Henry ‘is most clement and pardons everybody, even the common people of Cornwall, although if he wanted to do strict justice he would have to put to death more than 20,000 men’.
There was a famous precedent for clemency, too, in the king’s treatment of Simnel. The eleven-year-old had been placed among the mean dependants or ‘blackguards’ of scullery and woodyard who, on royal progresses, followed after the court in a cart with the clanking kettles and pans. Vergil thought this was Perkin’s natural station too, among the dirty plates. Unlike Simnel, however, Perkin was not an innocent child: he, and no one else, had been at the head of the troops who had marched against Henry. To put him in the kitchens would appear to make light of the appalling deeds he had attempted.
To treat Perkin kindly might also raise questions, now meant to be settled, about who he was. Henry knew well that esteem and status were measured by how a prisoner was kept. He himself had been treated doulcement as a child in Brittany, out of regard for his blood. In 1505, checking on how a new and noble Yorkist claimant, Edmund de la Pole, was being treated by the Duke of Guelders, he asked his envoy to find out ‘what the Duke of Guelders intends to do with the said Edmund: whether he has a liking for him, or only esteems him a little? How is the said Edmund now watched: is he kept like a prisoner in strict confinement, or does he enjoy freedom, though not complete freedom?’ The questions betrayed, fairly clearly, his anxieties of eight years before.
The answer, perhaps, was to intersperse clemency with organised mockery in order to stress the king’s contempt. Every so often Henry seemed to play with people who had deeply offended him, before they were put to death as they deserved. In this spirit, he disputed in April the following year with a heretic at Canterbury, converting him from his error and giving him 6s. 8d. in alms, before the man was burned alive. Henry had often said that Perkin was so insignificant that he was hardly worth troubling with. Now, crushed and beaten, he was perhaps being kept at court as a token of the king’s utter confidence that no one would take him for Richard and try to adhere to him.
Yet Henry was not confident at all. In truth, he was hamstrung by uncertainty. In June 1498, more than eight months after Perkin’s surrender, de Puebla reminded Ferdinand and Isabella that Henry still did not know what to do with his captive, and wanted their advice. ‘I besought your Highnesses many days ago,’ he wrote,
to write your opinion and advice about what the lord king ought to do about the Perkin business. Your Highnesses – no doubt for some just reasons and impediments – have never to this day sent word about this nor written any other thing . . . This causes me great pain, because I am sure the lord king would do whatever your Highnesses direct.
Henry had never before admitted to Ferdinand and Isabella, on any subject, that he did not know what to do. Now that Arthur and Katherine were officially betrothed, he could be somewhat more familiar and forthright with her parents; but to admit uncertainty, implying weakness, was still not a wise course. To them, the answer to this burla was simple: now that the boy was definitely useless for Spain’s purposes, Henry should imprison him or kill him. If the King of England dared not, it raised unwelcome questions both about him, and about the boy he seemed too nervous to touch.
At around the same time, Henry had agreed – at Pedro de Ayala’s suggestion – to ask Ferdinand and Isabella to act as mediators in his dispute with Scotland. It was best to do so, wrote Cardinal Ascanio Mario Sforza to the Duke of Milan, ‘while the King of England has the Duke of York in his hands’. Without that bargaining chip, it would be hard to push the King of Scots towards a proper peace. Henry was now to discover that he could make diplomatic play with this young man himself: another reason, if a temporary one, for keeping him alive.
On September 30th, nine days after Perkin had fled from Taunton, a treaty of peace had been concluded between England and Scotland at Ayton, on the border. It was to endure for seven years and was to be sealed, at last, by the marriage of James to Henry’s daughter Margaret. But James, though he realised that Richard’s cause was lost, was not prepared either to drop or disown his friend. He had restricted the scope of Article 6 of the treaty, which bound the sovereigns to surrender each other’s enemies and rebels or expel them, by introducing a clause exempting from the article anyone who had a safe-conduct. By this he meant explicitly Richard and his supporters, to whom he had given safe-conducts when they arrived in Scotland. The exemption was expressed in a forceful phrase in the ablative absolute: ‘the safe-conducts granted formerly, by the aforesaid princes or one of them, being not in the least revoked by the force of the present article, but remaining in their strength and effect for ever’. This clause allowed James, as Henry complained, to keep in his kingdom indefinitely ‘and favour and aid the same rebels saying, that he doth it not . . . for he will so straitly keep him or them that they shall have no power’. The king saw through that at once. Although ‘continual or established peace’ with Scotland was proclaimed in London in December, Henry would not let the clause stand, and in February 1498 he sent Norroy King of Arms, one of his heralds, to remonstrate with James. The safe-conduct clause had to be taken out, and more besides:
Item in the same article be left out these words Salvis conductibus etc. for the principal cause moving his said Cousin [James] to put in the said words . . . was for a grant of Safe conducts made by [him] to Perkin and other his adherents the king’s Rebels. And forasmuch as [at] this time the said Perkin is in the king’s keeping and at the commandm[ent] of his grace and shall never use the benefit of the said Safe conducts . . . And also his adherents . . . be departed out of his said Cousin’s realm. And
if there [sic] should under the colour of their said Safe conducts resort and repair unto the same Realm again and there to have grace and succour there might grow a grudge between the king’s grace and his said Cousin . . . it is thought expedient those words touching such Safe Conducts to be left out.
As Henry reminded James, he was keeping Perkin ‘straitly’ himself, and had exposed what he was. One of the earliest showings of him after Henry’s return to London took place as part of the reception of the Scottish ambassador, who could hardly have missed it. Yet the February negotiations still snagged on him. James – completely unmoved by the confession – was keeping alive the possibility that his Prince of England, somehow springing from his confinement, would one day come back. He was still his cousin, bound to him by blood and love, whoever Henry said he was. In July 1498 Ayala admitted that it was ‘very difficult’ to conclude the peace because ‘the old emnity is so great’. In August, Norroy had still not got his alterations.
There was pressure on Henry, too, from other quarters. Bernard André’s poem ‘Les Douze Triomphes’, written in 1497 but before Perkin’s capture, showed that despite the restoration of trade with Burgundy and the fine pledges of the Holy League, Henry did not believe that Philip and Maximilian had stopped their machinations against him. In July 1497, after all, wild letters had still been passing between Philip and Maximilian, claiming that the people of England ‘in great part’ had taken up arms against Henry in favour of the Duke of York and James, and that ‘the king had fled London in terror’. Whatever the source (conceivably King Richard IV, whose proclamation had so boldly predicted such events), Philip and Maximilian wanted this to happen. They exulted in it. André saw the two rulers, with Margaret, as a three-headed monster, ‘the three being all of one opinion, and also of the same will, living in union’. They were still cooking up ‘evil designs’, including offering large rewards for Henry’s assassination; they had ‘never understood how to behave’. And they continued to cling to the young man whom Henry had so utterly defeated.
No reaction to his capture was recorded from Margaret except what Vergil imagined: that the story, relayed to Flanders, ‘made her weep many tears for her prince, for whom previously she had spent many nights full of fear, waiting for news of his doings’. The news of ‘Monsieur d’York’, as she and Philip had received it, reached Maximilian at Innsbruck on October 16th. The Duke of York, he learned,
had gone to a certain part of England called Cornwall, which had rebelled against the king, and having collected a multitude of 30,000 armed men he led his expedition towards London against King Henry. King Henry himself, while he prepared to encounter him, sent ahead a certain chief of his army who, having joined battle with them, inflicted such huge slaughter on them that the rest of the multitude was routed and fled; and in that flight were captured, among others, the Duke of York himself with his wife and one-year-old son. They were brought as prisoners to the citadel of London.
Thus his sponsors preferred to believe: that he had fought in battle and been honourably defeated, brave to the last.
Maximilian fired off a letter at once to the Council of Flanders and its president, Jean le Sauvage, asking him to go to Henry and appeal for York to be spared and released. He then explained his strategy to Philip – belatedly, since le Sauvage was Philip’s officer and not his own – in a letter, full of urgency and emotion, written from Metz on November 8th:
Right dear and well-beloved son: We have heard that our very dear and well-beloved cousin the Duke of York has recently been taken prisoner and delivered into the hands of the King of England, his enemy, and we are very much afraid that, for the reasons you know well enough, he will put him to death. And because we hold our said cousin of York in very great love and affection because he is our kinsman and our ally, we are bitterly saddened by his evil fate and his misfortune and would be very much more saddened by his death; and we are held and obliged, for the quittance of our honour and the discharge of our conscience, to help and comfort him to all our power.
We have determined that you should be a mediator in this matter with King Henry, and that to this end you should send to him Mr Jean le Sauvage, the president of Flanders, to request him not to put our cousin of York to death and also not to do any harm or injury to his person; but to be willing to send him back to us and put him in our hands safe and sound. And in return we will leave off and renounce in perpetuity all rights, quarrels and actions that our said cousin of York and his heirs and successors may pretend, dispute or demand in the kingdom of England in whatever fashion or manner he or they may do so, and will never make or move armed warfare . . . And we will give [the king] our letters patent of assurance such as he will wish to have them; and thus he should be satisfied and content and completely assured.
Besides this, you know that in such a task it is necessary to have some good friends and procurers to see to things and help to steer the business. So we have given power and authority to the said [president] of Flanders to promise in our name to the people who seem best to him, the most intimate servants of King Henry, a one-off payment of up to 10,000 gold florins so that they may see that King Henry lets this business take effect and reach the good conclusion that we desire and intend. If you agree to this, please send the president of Flanders to King Henry and dispatch him with good and simple instructions in these matters . . . together with all the other good means and methods you may think best for the welfare and salvation of our cousin of York. And you will be doing us a wonderful favour.
Maximilian enclosed with this letter two documents authorising le Sauvage to plead for his cousin’s life. One promised to pay the 10,000 florins to any useful contact; the other, which did not mention money, was ‘the one he was to show to the English’. Both these, and the letter to Philip, were kept in several copies. The King of the Romans recognised, however, that there might be a complication. There would need to be a secret page to le Sauvage’s instructions:
You should also adjust these instructions to tell King Henry by way of remonstrance that in so far as he says and maintains that our said cousin of York is a counterfeit person and not the son of the late King Edward, nevertheless it is the common renown of the whole of Christianity that yes, he is, and he is held to be the son of the late King Edward, and because of this if he puts him to death he will be putting to death his own brother-in-law, which would be shame, dishonour and reproach to him for ever and to his people too, because he [York] will not be able to do him any more harm from henceforth, alive or dead.
Maximilian also drafted a short personal note to le Sauvage, explaining to him directly that he wished ‘with all his heart’ to save his cousin. He ended: Employez vouz en ce le mieux que pourrez, car nous avons la matiere fort a coeur: ‘Do the best you can in this, for we have the matter much at heart.’ Ten days after sending it, his sadness had not lifted. Describing York’s defeat and capture to the papal legate, he closed with the remark: Sic transit gloria mundi.
For all the paternal pushing, or perhaps because of it, Philip did not send le Sauvage to England. (As Maximilian’s envoy to Flanders had once told him, the archduke, at nineteen, could be surprisingly wilful and unhelpful.) But he sent le Sauvage’s servant and Jean Courtville, his own councillor, who was in London by December 10th. Courtville was paid £20 by Henry. There is no sign that he made use of Maximilian’s bills behind the king’s back, but presumably he had them with him. Hard-up as he was, Maximilian seems to have had every intention of paying the sum he had promised. He was doing this for a young man not only declared, but apparently self-declared, to be a boatman’s son. This ‘fact’ was as well known across the Channel as it was in England, yet Maximilian did not believe it. He insisted, on the contrary, that the boy was Henry’s brother-in-law, challenging the king (who still had no proof that Edward’s son was dead) to prove him wrong. Though his interests were no longer remotely served by this young man, he honoured him and loved him; to the point of abandoning all his own claims
, and York’s too, just to have him back and safe.
Another unwavering view may well have touched Henry more closely. He had sent Katherine to the queen in the apparent belief that the marriage could not long survive her husband’s confession of imposture. As early as October 23rd, however, when he wrote to de Puebla, he spoke of his captives as a couple, just as he had pictured them before. He told the ambassador that he would soon see Perkin and his wife, whose capture had so delighted him. They were to be displayed in London together as joint collaborators. The king’s words were the first indication that, whatever had passed between Katherine and her husband in Exeter, they remained – and insisted on remaining – married to each other.
Soncino and Trevisano saw them together on November 26th in the palace of Westminster. The occasion was the formal reception of the Scottish ambassador, who had arrived (‘with 30 horses’) to present his credentials to Henry. After the reception, the ambassadors accompanied the king to a smaller chamber for more favoured conversations, though still in a crowd. When Henry told Soncino that he had heard reports that the French king was planning another Italian expedition, Trevisano had to make signs to him that the French ambassador was in the room too, and close. Everyone was there. On the way out of the chamber, towards the door, Soncino found that an extra treat had been laid on for the envoys, a showing of Perkin and Katherine. ‘He is 23 years old,’ wrote Trevisano, ‘a noble young man [zentil zovene], and his wife a most beautiful woman; the king treats them well, but does not want him to sleep with his wife.’