by Ann Wroe
Wherever he was ‘with the king’, at Sheen or Westminster or on the road, Henry’s prisoner had no position or function save that of being Perkin. In a court of minutely organised routines and duties – in which one esquire’s job was to shake the king’s sheets, another’s to smooth them, another’s to sprinkle them with holy water – his job was to be the person he had said he was, and nothing more. That single, ‘homely’ name placed him among the lowest servants and the court characters: with Bradshaw, who had fetched him from Beaulieu, with Dick the Fool and Pierre the French cook, or with ‘James’ and ‘William’ who, in 1502, were among ‘certain persons working upon the rich bed’. Menials were ordered by these names to run errands or to saddle the horses; and in 1494, dictating his promises to Margaret in a different world, Richard of York had called Henry ‘Henry’, tout court, deliberately to insult him.
This was now his level. He was always just ‘Perkin’ to Heron, after his first eruption into the accounts on October 5th, just as he had always been Perkin to Henry even when listed with a run of other men’s surnames. (‘Perkin, Heron, Skelton and Ashley’, ran the king’s letter of October 7th.) Heron usually wrote Perkin with a lower-case ‘p’, or with the per abbreviated, as in clerks’ Latin, to leave a name that was barely there at all. Those lower than ‘Pkin’ were nameless: ‘a man who scared away crows’ from the cornfields outside Sheen, ‘a woman who brought the king cakes’, or the French and Breton spies.
Signs of him are very rare for the eight months he was at court. His life there can be reconstructed only from a few scattered payments in Henry’s private accounts. Two grooms of the privy chamber, Hugh Denis and James Braybroke, were paid £2 ‘for Perkin’s costs’ on December 18th and March 10th respectively; Jones, one of his minders, was paid 13s. 4d. for him on May 23rd. These were small sums, appearing near the bottom of the daily list of payments: that of December 18th came after payments to Harry the king’s barber, to a woman for three apples and to a poor man in alms.
Since Denis and Braybroke were not guarding Perkin, and since their usual job was to provide the king’s household with dishes, books, pin-cases and tennis-balls, they were probably buying general articles of that sort for Perkin also. Braybroke was so far an intimate of the king’s that he was one of the envoys sent, in 1505, to appraise the skin and breath of the young Queen of Naples as a suitable wife for him. Denis, as the groom of the close stool, was the servant who went with Henry to the privy and supervised his comfort there, laying out the water and scraps of cloth for wiping, holding back the royal robes. His involvement with Perkin, like Smith’s, suggests that Henry was keeping his captive in the circle of his most intimate attendants. They also slept close to each other, Perkin among Henry’s clothes, as quick to find (if you wished to find him) as a fresh shirt or a pair of gloves.
His own clothes are something of a mystery. They were paid for not through the Wardrobe, as Katherine’s were (and as were the liveries of all court officers), but through Henry’s privy-purse accounts, perused by the king himself. The only other clothes ordered in this way were occasional pieces of extravagant armour, cheap coats ordered as acts of charity, and the shirts and hose, in wild patchwork colours, that were bought for Dick the Fool, Henry’s favourite jester. But Perkin also had his own tailor, one Jasper, who was paid £2 in February 1499. The notion of a dedicated tailor, like that of guards who could be taken for his servants, suggested that some bizarre form of princeliness still hovered round him; and Skelton, by calling him a peacock, implied this too. But the only specific payment for his clothes, 11s. 8d. for a knee-length ‘riding gown’ in April 1498, implied it was made of rough woollen cloth, like the Kendal cloth ordered the same year to make a coat for a child.
The privy purse paid too for his ‘horsemeat’, reckoned at 5d. a day. He rode not because his health and exercise mattered, but because he was following the ever-shifting court. Nonetheless this seemed oddly trusting, as if he would never think of suddenly cantering away. The horse and its harness may have been his own, spurred furiously from Taunton and kept since. There is no record that a horse was bought for him, only that it was fed, just as James had paid for the barley and oats in Scotland. Henry did not pay regularly for horsemeat for anyone else, although in 1492 he paid for a horse, saddle, spurs and bridle for Diego, the Spanish fool, who rode to Dover with him, hot to make war on France.
In many ways, Perkin’s status – however honourable it may have seemed to the chroniclers – was close to Dick’s and Diego’s. At Henry’s court he appeared in close association with tumblers, leapers, wrestlers, eaters of live coals and two vain bright-feathered popinjays, brought to the king in January and February, who squawked out bits of French and Dutch from their little gilded cages. He was also a freak among others kept to amuse the king: a woman with a beard, ‘a great Welsh child’, ‘Alen the little Scotsman’, a giantess from Flanders, and three real Indians from the land Columbus had reached. These last came a little after Perkin’s time, brown-skinned and mute, dressed in beasts’ skins and with peculiar straight black hair. Their brazil-wood bows and two red arrows were presented to the king. They were stared at as Perkin had been, captured monsters. It is the chief thing we desire to have him brought unto us alive.
Also somewhere round the court, but never mentioned in the accounts, was Lambert Simnel, his precursor. At some point in 1493–4 Henry apparently made him serve, in his capacity as kitchen-boy, at a banquet of Irish lords. The king introduced him with the words: ‘My masters of Ireland, you will crown apes at length.’ The table fell silent. Simnel, no doubt forced to do so, pledged them in a cup of wine, but no one responded; he went round with the cups, but none would be served by him. At last, Lord Howth cried, ‘Bring me the cup if the wine be good, and I shall drink it off for the wine’s sake and mine own also; and for thee, as thou art, so I will leave thee, a poor innocent.’ So the story went. Simnel too was a joke, but, as Howth had said, he was innocent; and for almost all the time he was invisible, burying himself in whatever lowly duties, first scullion and then falconer, he seems to have been given. Despite the possibilities of a rich comic double-act, he and Perkin were apparently never paraded together.
Despite his odd name, Simnel was also English. But Perkin was supposedly foreign, allowing an extra layer of suspicion and entertainment. Though he had been mocked as French for most of his career, at Henry’s court – with his Flemish name – he was obviously a Fleming. This meant a steep social dive. The French, as everyone knew, were flatterers, lechers, fops and braggards; but Flemings were boors, drunkards, egregious over-dressers and stealers of English jobs. Skelton’s ‘Rutterkin’ was Flemish, a dashing little gallant who could speak no English but babbled instead of fish smeared with butter. (Butter was freely associated with Flemings, who shipped it to England, and a Venetian observer described children in London ‘eating bread smeared with butter in the Flemish fashion.’) Rutterkin’s drinking was prodigious: ‘A stoup of beer up at a pluck, / Til his brain be as wise as a duck’. So, too, was his pissing afterwards. Jehan Werbecque, brawling with beer-mugs in the muddy lanes of Beveren, fitted the caricature exactly.
If people laughed in their sleeves at Perkin, the foolish Flemish prince, he was far from alone. Court life spared no one. Many found it a hell-hole of backbiting, gossip, social climbing and craven overwork; but, above all, a place of dissembling and false flattery. Skelton’s courtiers, beneath their politeness and mock concern for newcomers, wore cloaks ‘lined with doubtful doubleness’, and spent much of their time in sly conversation in dark corners, undercutting the plots of their so-called friends. ‘I hate this feigning!’ cried the courtier Dissimulation to Skelton once, as he pressed his hand and wished him to ‘have good-day’; ‘Fie upon it, fie! A man cannot [know] where to become.’ Perkin was probably in the same state of confusion. Court should have been his element, but he could never fit neatly back into that element again.
The man who so acutely observed this world was th
ere with him, in late 1497 and 1498. Skelton was Henry’s poet laureate and Prince Arthur’s grammar teacher, treating both duties with immense seriousness and pride. He wore a robe of green and white, the king’s colours, embroidered on the breast in gold with the name of Calliope, the muse of epic poetry. At times, he may have worn a laurel wreath in token of his several degrees in rhetoric; certainly he knew he deserved one. Both as a poet and a composer, his opinion of himself was unbounded.
In the spring of 1498, as close as it can be dated, Skelton produced a poem that was aimed with particular viciousness at someone who had offended him by trespassing on his second patch, the playing and singing of music. As with most of his poems, he did not attack his victim by name but went at him sideways, through allusion. Those allusions, as well as dozens of incidental details, make it almost certain that the man he was attacking was Perkin. Skelton was already engaged in, or had finished, a now-lost ‘Treatise on the Triumphs of the Red Rose’, his only attempt at epic history under Calliope’s wing. He knew Perkin’s story and could use it, cunningly interwoven with his own expertise in music, to wreak revenge on him.
From the other side, it is certainly plausible that Henry’s captive, after a few empty months at court, would have tried to find something to do and turned to music. In every version of his life, save the English confession, he had been trained in it, and music-making was in any case a skill expected of princes, true or false. Henry’s court was full of music: harpers, Welsh rhymers, singers, trumpet-players, small royal children stumbling over lute-pieces. The court had a pair of organs (apparently last tuned in December 1493) and some ‘round organs’ that were recast and ‘new furnished’ in 1496. Prince Arthur also had an organ player of his own, presumably on another set. One more young man tinkering on a keyboard would not have attracted much attention. But Perkin seems to have given some sort of public recital, or to have tried to teach his skills to others, and hence brought about his own skewering by the most wounding pen at court.
Skelton Laureate
against.
A comely coystrowne that curiously chanted, and currishly countered, and madly in his musics mockishly made against the ix Muses of politic poems and poets matriculate.
Ten verses eviscerated this ‘coystrowne’ – this groom – who had turned political history upside down. In the second verse, Skelton described the deception as it appeared to him. A coarse bran horse-cake had been somehow made to look like a costly loaf of sugar or a dainty ‘maunchet’, a roll of fine white bread, as served to kings at breakfast:
A sweet sugar loaf and sour bayard’s bun
Be somedeal like in form and shape,
The one for a duke, the other for dung,
A maunchet for Morel thereon to snap.
His heart is too high to have any hap;
But for in his gamut carp that he can,
Lo, Jack would be a gentleman!
Skelton then moved on, raising the pitch, to link his victim to a previous ridiculous enterprise:
With, Hey troly, loly, lo, whip here, Jack
Alumbek sodyldum syllorum ben!
Curiously he can both counter and knack
Of Martin Swart and all his merry men.
Lord, how Perkin is proud of his pea-hen!
But ask where he findeth among his monochords
An holy-water clerk a ruler of lords.
Martin Swart had been the German captain recruited by Margaret to help Simnel; Skelton’s second line was the chorus of a song about him. Like many others then and since, he threw the pretenders together; two stupid boys whose invasions had been fortified by German mercenaries. The ‘holy-water clerk’ may have been Lounde, Perkin’s ‘chancellor’, or Perkin himself, who possibly owed to a spell of churchly training all the skill, or non-skill, he was now showing. Skelton, on the other hand, was a graduate on the verge of holy orders, trumping him there as soundly as he trumped him in music. At any rate, the ‘he’ of the poem was now clearly Perkin, the monochord-player, the unbearable peacock with his arm about his wife and his iridescent, angel-winged pride.
He cannot find it in rule or in space:
He solfyth too haute, his treble is too high;
He braggeth of his birth, that born was full base;
His music without measure, too sharp is his mi . . .
He lumbreth on a lewd lute, Roty bully joyse,
Rumble down, tumble down, hey go, now, now!
He fumbleth in his fingering an ugly good noise,
It seemeth the sobbing of an old sow:
He would be made much of, and he wist how;
Well-sped in spindles and turning of tavels,
A bungler, a brawler, a picker of quarrels.
Skelton’s victim seems to have sung in a high tenor, so high that it was sharp, and to have accompanied himself on both the monochords and the lute. Elsewhere he ‘knacked’ curiously, or sang in an ornate and affected way. But Skelton also stressed, particularly, the singer’s low-born clumsiness and his Flemish stupidity. Roty bully joyse, ‘Good roast boiled’, was a folk-song from Brabant, the region round Brussels and Malines. (In another verse, Skelton got in a dig at Flemish drunkenness, describing how the singer sang the longest notes in his counterpoint as steadily as a man like Rutterkin would drain a flagon of beer.) Spindles and tavels were Flemish tools, for spinning and silk-weaving. His victim should have stuck to these and stayed in his place, both musically and in general: curbing his wish to be made much of, when he was made of the muck in which the old sow snuffled and sobbed.
There was plenty more. At times, though dripping with sarcasm, Skelton recognised the charm of ‘this proud page’: he looked ‘comely’ as he played the clavichords, whistling ‘so sweetly, he maketh me to sweat’. He inferred, too, that the young man’s pretensions were not over. Though ‘Jill’ tried to hold ‘Jack’ back, ‘He counteth in his countenance to check with the best . . . Dreaming in dumps to wrangle and to wrest.’ Most of all, astonishingly, he remained full of arrogance and self-belief:
Nay, jape not with him, he is no small fool,
It is a solemn sire and a solain,
For lords and ladies learn at his school;
He teacheth them so wisely to solf and to fayne,
That neither they sing well prick song nor plain:
This Doctor Deuyas commenced in a cart,
A master, a minstrel, a fiddler, a fart.
Yet all was not fake solemnity and refusal to engage. When mocked, he could defend himself sharply. Skelton in his last two verses described the original quarrel: his rival had ‘brawled’ and ‘barked’ at him first, ‘that meddled nothing with your work’. The poet told him to get lost: ‘Walk and be naught!’ And he ended, deliberately, on a note of Perkin-style lying and confusion, where even the time and the place were not what they were said to be.
Now have I showed you part of your proud mind;
Take this in worth the best is behind.
Written at Croydon by Crowland in the Clay,
On Candlemas even, the Kalendas of May.
In February then, or perhaps in May, this diatribe was read around the court. Perkin would have heard it. There was sometimes fun to be had in ‘flighting’, or arguing back in kind, but his reaction may well have been the reverse: to say nothing and to stop playing. It was hard to withstand mockery as scathing as this.
His custody, meanwhile, was growing stranger. He was not confined to palaces but, by the spring, was being taken round the country by the king. April found him in Henry’s train on a tour of the Medway towns in Kent. He was an exhibit of particular interest in the county that had rebuffed him two and a half years earlier. The last time Henry had toured Kent, in 1492, he had travelled with one of his fools called ‘the foolish Duke of Lancaster’, who had gone with him to the shrine of St Thomas at Canterbury and had put on a performance in Sittingbourne. This time, he travelled with the foolish Duke of York.
When they reached Canterbury on the 21st, a man f
rom Hythe brought Henry one of the standards that had been captured on that occasion: one of the three, perhaps, that Richard Plantagenet had ordered to be planted in the seaside villages when he had conquered them. Henry paid him £1 for his trouble. The standard might have been the White Rose; it might also have been the little boy escaping, so magically and boldly, from the jaws of the wolf or the enclosing tomb. Henry felt such satisfaction that day that he had the Te Deum sung, the hymn of victory. It is harder to imagine what his prisoner would have felt. But less than two months later he slipped his guards, and was gone.
iii
He escaped on June 9th 1498, Trinity Sunday, one of the great feasts of the year and the very day, as it happened, of Skelton’s ordination. Agostino de Spinula, a Milanese agent in England, reported that ‘Perichino Oxbeke’, sleeping between two guards in the Wardrobe of the palace of Westminster, had climbed out of a window at midnight. (Again at midnight, the coward’s hour.) The Wardrobe had been refurbished, with special attention to the better care of the king’s clothes, late in 1493; along with the racks of hanging robes, a press and a ‘brushing table’, a wooden ladder was kept to reach the higher shelves of pillows and hats. If the window was high, perhaps that ladder helped Perkin up and out.
Instantly, all hell broke loose. Messengers were sent to all the ports of England he might conceivably reach – to Poole, Weymouth, Lyme Regis, Bristol, Bridgewater, Barnstaple, Southampton, Boston, Grimsby, Lincoln, Ipswich, Yarmouth, Sandwich, Dover, Hastings – to warn town officers to watch out for him. One messenger was sent to the Abbot of Beaulieu, in case Perkin should think of going that way again. Almost two pages of Heron’s accounts were taken up with payments to these couriers. In New Romney, the mandate brought that day about ‘Peter Warbekke’ was the only mention of his name in the corporation accounts – accounts otherwise more concerned with the leasing of the Salt Marsh and the presentation of capons to the Archbishop of Canterbury. Heron, listing the royal officers looking for him, at first wrote ‘Perkin seeking for Perkin’, a rare slip that seemed to reflect the agitation around him.