Perkin

by Ann Wroe

  De Puebla maintained that Perkin had escaped ‘without any opportunity having been given him to do so’. He may, as so often, have been stressing – at Henry’s bidding – the opposite of the truth. Heron’s accounts, too, suggest the opportunity was there. On May 23rd, between the payment to Jones for Perkin and the entry for his riding gown, a payment of 4 shillings appeared for ‘a new lock made’. No other lock-fitting was going on in those weeks, and the unusual lack of specification – whether for coffer or box, window or door – suggested that it was just for Perkin, somehow.

  Henry had been kind to him for a long time. But Perkin’s presence at court, where he still played the prince, was an anomaly and an embarrassment. In particular, it did not make much sense to the hard-headed Spanish sovereigns with whom Henry was still, tediously, negotiating dowry details. Fuensalida, writing to Ferdinand and Isabella from Maximilian’s court, talked of ‘the Duke of York Pierrequin’, as though a little dynastic hedging was still going on. The Milanese and Venetian ambassadors, too, kept his old name going; since this young duke was defeated anyway, and his cause lost, they saw no need for the further humiliations. Nothing more rigorous could be done to Perkin unless he deserved it; but he could be made to deserve it. Henry’s strategy had always been to allow him enough rope so that, in his folly and vanity, he could hang himself. He may well have paid out a little more rope in the summer of 1498, in the almost certain knowledge that his captive, delighting in it as in new gold chains, would twine it round his neck.

  The chance, then, was probably given to him. By opening the window or unlocking the door, no guard preventing him, he slipped away from the palace of Westminster. At midnight, the dark could be depended on, as could the emptiness of the fields that lay beyond the palace to the south and east. No one, for the moment, chased or stopped him. He had no shadows. In all likelihood, he also had no plan. He ran, almost certainly, not towards an objective – whether war, or Margaret, or a waiting ship – but away from something he could not endure. He ran away from being Perkin.

  iv

  Henry was sure that his captive would go towards the sea. Instead he fled upriver, as if the dark had disoriented him. Molinet said he spent three or four days hiding in the reed-beds on the banks of the Thames. At most he may have been a few hours there, knee-deep in the dark water. It should have been a good season for hiding: the air balmy and the trees and hedges, elder, hawthorn and eglantine, thick with leaves and blossom that glowed white and shed perfume in the dark. A hare could hide in those hedges, as in the young corn, quivering and listening like he did, appearing and disappearing with all the wiles of a moon-creature. When Dorset fled from sanctuary at Westminster in June 1483, he had managed to escape the king’s troops and dogs ‘who sought him, after the manner of huntsmen, by a very close encirclement’, by hiding in the high crops and woodland nearby. But the summer of 1498 was a hot one, the grass ‘sore consumed’ and dry, and the crops not yet tall enough to conceal a man.

  As he ran, he soon heard the king’s men after him. They were picketing all the roads that led away from Westminster. Two naval captains, one of them Stephen Bull, were in charge of searching the port of London for him, and four yeomen in boats had been sent to scour the Thames. He could probably hear their shouts, and the splash of their oars in the water. Vergil imagined that their clamour pushed out of Perkin’s mind whatever faint plans or resolve he had. Racing at full tilt, he managed to get seven miles in a night along the bends of the dark river, at some point crossing it by boat or swimming, and then threw himself into sanctuary in the Charterhouse at Sheen.

  He was in terrible distress. Having bungled his escape, he had to cast himself once more on Henry’s mercy, and it was unclear that any remained. In that light, the choice of Sheen may have been deliberate as well as desperate. The Charterhouse had Yorkist connections: the prior before last, John Ingelby, had been an executor of Elizabeth Woodville’s will. But Henry, too, had a particular devotion to this house. He referred to the palace of Sheen itself as ‘the palace at the Charter House’, and wrote enthusiastically to the pope in 1490 to tell him that the Carthusian rule ‘exceeds that of all other orders as regards religious perfection’. Their abstinence, he wrote, their hair-shirts, their solitude and their abandonment of the world bound him to protect them, and the Jesus House of Sheen in particular, ‘with peculiar favour’. His favour, sitting uneasily with their austerity, included the gift every year of two tuns of ‘our prize wines’ coming into the port of London, an ancient tradition that was sometimes replaced, in his reign, with hard cash.

  Henry also had a high regard for Ralph Tracy, the prior. In June 1497 he had taken delivery from him of a ‘table of imagery’, a series of sacred paintings for private meditation, and Robert Fabyan thought that Tracy stood greatly in the king’s favour. The prior was now ‘instanced lamentably’, with ‘piteous motions’, by a young man whose history, in his deep otherworldliness, he may not have known. He was treated, no doubt, to a story as heartbreaking as the one that had been told by Richard Plantagenet around the courts of Europe. It had worked then, and it worked now. Tracy agreed to intercede for him and, having placed the wretched fugitive under firm lock and key, went to the king to implore him to spare his life.

  The Charterhouse had no place for prisoners, only another cell like those of the monks themselves. The Carthusians were an enclosed order, preserving silence towards each other and leaving their private rooms only for their tiny walled gardens or for the church next door. Their whitewashed cells contained a pallet bed, a crucifix, and sometimes a vivid painting of the Passion; a small window gave light, and a hatch in the wall allowed the delivery of food. The new arrival may have been handed, silently, one of the holy cards that the brothers had had printed and sent out all over London: a heraldic shield of the five bleeding wounds of Christ, surmounted with the crown of thorns and held by two angels against the Cross. Of your charity in the worship of the five wounds of Our Lord and the five joys of Our Lady say Pater Noster and Ave.

  The monks themselves scarcely ceased praying. They lived on their knees, ‘grovelling like beasts’, their critics said, through day and night alike. Their privations were considered almost foolish; but on the other hand, they were released by them. Carthusians were never afraid, Thomas More wrote, of ‘the loathness of less room and the door shut upon us, a horror enhanced of our own fantasy’. Their souls had almost escaped from the prison of the body and the world, dwelling only on the beauty of the kingdom to come. They remembered that kingdom as theirs and recalled that they were royal, a king’s children – as this young man, in whatever clothes he had grabbed before he ran, falling to his knees on the doorstep, had said he remembered too.

  Before the king, Tracy argued hard. He would not leave, Fabyan said, until he had ‘gotten grant for his life’. Vergil said that Tracy interceded for Perkin humbly, with many prayers, so moved was he by his distress. Molinet wove a more highly-coloured story out of this. His Perkin, once out of the reeds, rode to the Charterhouse on a mule – no doubt provided by a sympathiser – and besought the prior to hide him. ‘And because Henry had announced that Perkin was not to be helped, on pain of great punishment, the prior was extremely worried about what he could do for him, and took it into his head to put him in the hands of the Bishop [of Cambrai], who also helped him for many days; but then, fearing to be held in disrepute, he delivered him up to the king again.’

  Cambrai had not yet arrived in England, so the story was pure fantasy. Yet it was not thought odd, on its face, that eminent churchmen should scramble to help Perkin. And it was not thought odd, though it was an astonishing access of charity, that Henry, in the end, agreed to spare him. With that message, the prior returned to Sheen. Alongside him rode Bradshaw, who had fetched Perkin – with a little help – from Beaulieu, ready to strong-arm this fugitive for the second time in a year. The young man had left Beaulieu like a prince on progress and had entered London like a dancer, but no such scene was likely
now. Almost certainly it was Death, with his stretched-paper smile and his belly heaving with worms, whose likeness he would dance with next.

  The whole process, escape to recapture, took about four days. At some point in those four days, probably on June 13th, de Puebla sat down to write to Ferdinand and Isabella, appealing to them again for help with ‘the Perkin business’. Perkin’s escape, he wrote, made good advice even more vital.

  The Spanish sovereigns, still keen to keep Henry on edge and Katherine’s dowry down, were always eager to get news of Periquin, as de Puebla called him. The harried ambassador remarked once that he had written ‘so often’ to them about him, implying that it was hardly possible they could want more. June 13th, however, was his lucky day. In mid-letter, within an hour of the event, Henry sent an officer of the bedchamber to tell him that Perkin had just been recaptured. ‘Thanks be to God!’ the ambassador wrote. ‘No time to know what will be done with Perkin yet,’ he went on, rejoicing in his topicality and writing on a small, snatched scrap of paper, ‘because the king sent to tell me the news just as I was writing this, but I think one of two things: either he will be executed for it, or kept under very strict guard and in prison.’

  For two or three strange days, Perkin was held in the palace of Westminster under tight security. Execution would have suited Spain better, but the Tower, where Henry had now determined to put him, was good enough. It probably meant death fairly quickly, as other ambassadors assumed. ‘So the king has put him in prison, where he will end his life,’ wrote Trevisano. Once he was there, de Puebla could reassure his sovereigns that Periquin was ‘in safe keeping in a tower where he sees neither sun nor moon’. He added, in another letter, ‘He is in such a secure prison that he won’t be able to play any burla now, God willing.’

  Before he was committed, however, he was exhibited again. On Friday, the day after Corpus Christi, he was set ‘fast locked’ in the stocks – and in chains, Vergil said – on a scaffolding of barrels in Westminster Hall. The hall, which was both concourse and meeting place, contained three ‘houses’ called Paradise, Purgatory and Hell, and was crammed with people even on ordinary days. A high proportion of them, according to contemporary prejudice, were petty criminals and prostitutes. Now they swarmed round Perkin, who was ‘wondered again upon, as he had been oft times before’.

  A double meaning lay in his barrel-throne. It raised him above the crowd like a mock-king, and it was made of ‘empty vessels’ like his promises and claims. The constant escaper could not escape this time. His sentence, though, was light. Although low-class players of tennis and bowls could expect to spend a day in the stocks, and idlers and tricksters three, he merely sat there ‘a good part of the forenoon’, after which, it seems, he was taken back to the main palace.

  On the next Monday, June 17th, he was displayed again. This time he stood on a special scaffold, made of empty barrels like the last, in front of the King’s Head tavern (or ‘at the Standard’) in Cheapside. Standing in the street, though usually in the pillory and usually at Cornhill, was the long-established punishment for frauds and deceivers. In 1493 two men were put in the pillory for counterfeiting pardons, ‘and one of them feigned himself a priest, and was none’. In 1496 John Gamelyn was pilloried there for changing Greek wines into ‘candy butts’ and selling them as malmseys, ‘to the great hurt and jeopardy of all such persons who drank of such muddled wines’. Perhaps most ingenious of all was a young man called John Camell, punished in October 1496, who had tricked people

  by the mean of iv Boxes of ij Sorts, ij of them being like of fashion and quantity, in one of the which ij boxes was beads or other things to the value of xxs or iv nobles, in the match old nails and Stones; upon which Box stuffed with the beads he would have borrowed certain money, and suddenly and craftily delivered the Box with nails and Stones in pledge for the other with the Beads; by mean whereof he had by his own confession deceived divers men and women.

  Perkin stood on the scaffold, ‘to his great shame’, from ten in the morning until three in the afternoon, and was ‘exceedingly wondered upon’. He seemed to be simply standing there, though some kind of restraint must have been put on him. Possibly he was tied to the Standard itself, a giant wooden post that had been festooned in the past with various papers from his life, true or false: with Thomas Bagnall’s rhymes against Henry, which had signalled the public start of the conspiracy, and with the notices for the wedding jousts of Richard, Duke of York, to which Robert Clifford had so eagerly signed up. Now Perkin was advertised there. Nothing so marvellous was to appear again at the Standard until a pageant was built there three years later to welcome Katherine of Aragon, featuring God the Father enthroned in a heaven of seven gold candlesticks and a blaze of lesser candles, surrounded by singing angels and with a great red rose before him as tall as a man.

  As Perkin stood there, according to Hall, he read his confession to the crowd from a copy he had written out himself. No contemporary reported this. Those who stood on public display as malefactors in the city did not read out papers for themselves; they simply stood there, carrying or wearing the items that accused them, while their crimes were proclaimed by a city officer. The crier sometimes recited the list three times, crying it properly, as ordinary folk could not do, even assuming they could read. If Perkin’s offences were proclaimed, he did not do it himself.

  Nor is it likely that he had written out his confession to be read, though he may have done, and had apparently signed copy after copy the previous autumn with his new name in large letters. All he was required to do was stand and listen, displaying his face, allegedly his instrument of deception, as the others had displayed their fake pardons and their boxes full of old nails and stones. He had plainly demonstrated, by escaping, that he had not settled into the person he was required to be. Now he was to be made to understand who he was. The crowd mocked him, Vergil said, with more derision than ever. But it could not be said that he did not deserve it.

  These shows were not only for his own instruction, but also for that of the crowd and an audience far beyond. De Puebla, writing to his sovereigns on July 17th, was anxious to check that they had received his letters about Perkin ‘being put to shame for two days’ and then imprisoned, ‘since it may be . . . that others, biased by party feeling, will write about the escape and not about what followed it’. His letter betrayed that a faction still existed that had wanted Perkin to escape and would have feasted on his disappearance. Those hopes were quite dashed now.

  When he had stood there long enough, he was taken down from the scaffold, put on a horse and taken ‘in the greatest ignominy’ to the Tower. He passed along Cheapside to the Great Conduit, then to the stocks, to the Standard on Cornhill, to St Peter’s Church and Grace Church, then along Mark Lane, ‘cursed by everyone and laughed to scorn’. City officials and Tower officers went with him: ‘sure guides’, said Fabyan, in case he doubted where he was going. He was led through the gates, and the door was shut on him.

  His adventure was over, and so, a few months later, was another. John Cabot, having persuaded his backers of his expert knowledge of the world, had sailed out over the West Sea early that summer towards the new island he was certain was there. Merchants of London and Bristol had ‘adventured goods and slight merchandises’ (caps, laces, woollens and ‘other trifles’) on this dream-voyage, and Henry had helped to pay for his ships and released the prisoners to man them. ‘Vast honour is paid to him,’ wrote Trevisano disapprovingly; ‘he dresses in silk, and these English run after him like mad people, so that he can enlist as many of them as he pleases, and a number of our own [Venetian] rogues besides.’ But after the smooth self-promoter sailed west, nothing more was heard of him. Vergil said he had probably found his new isle all the same, tilting his bold ships towards it with their sails trailing like seaweed, at the very bottom of the sea.

  9

  Bad stars

  William Parron, Henry’s Italian astrologer, had been right about June 1498. He had pr
edicted trouble at the beginning of the month – though also, to be honest, in the middle of May, the middle of August and ‘around the 10th or 24th day of April’. His printed prognostication for 1498 had generally taken the broad and safe view. The king would be ‘exalted and fortunate’, and disposed to ride about his kingdom. Prince Arthur ‘would prosper and increase his stance and honour’. There would be sickness in some places but easy profit in others, and the weather would be variable but fruitful. Though readers might mock, Dr Parron (doctor of medicine, professor of astrology) did not hesitate to point out the cases where he had been right before. ‘Kings shall subdue their adversaries,’ he wrote for 1498, ‘as [I] said the last year in my prognostications / whereby the Cornishmen if they had been wise might have been wary.’

  That was true enough, and the false god of the Cornishmen had now disappeared altogether from public view. If they were still furious with him, as seemed likely, they certainly could not get at him now. At the top of one of Henry’s subsequent lists of fines, raised unsparingly by his commissioners from all who had followed or vaguely favoured King Richard, the Cornishmen were described as infelicissimi: ill-starred and bound to come to grief. Parron’s printed booklets, popular in London, clearly did not reach the extremities of England.