Perkin

by Ann Wroe

  The nature of their idol’s new captivity can be pieced together from the indictments issued at the end of his life. The Tower had no prison cells as such, only rooms of various sizes and levels of salubriousness; so his room was called a camera, or chamber, like the room above it, which was used for a state prisoner who was kept in some comfort. This implied that Perkin had a certain amount of space and furniture, in theory. The ceiling was fairly high, with stone vaulting, suggesting that he was confined in the thirteenth-century wing of the Tower that stood out over the river. The room above his had a proper bed; he probably had one too, with the bedding changed, as often as anyone remembered, by two boys who worked for his old guard Smith, sometime keeper of the beds within the Tower. Since he apparently managed to write letters, he may have had a table and a chair. De Puebla was not quite right to say that he saw neither sun nor moon; there was a window, but it was small enough to be blocked with a single iron bar. Through this window, probably open to the air, small objects could be passed. He was allowed to receive letters, though they were usually read first, and he could have visitors. William Lounde, his chaplain and chancellor, seems to have come regularly to say Mass for him.

  The services of Jasper were no longer required; in February 1499 he was referred to as Perkin’s ‘late’ tailor, though neither man was dead. Perkin now wore basic prison clothes, hose and a shirt, with perhaps a coat of some sort. He was also fitted with pedenae, foot-shackles, and cathenae, the sort of neck-and-body chains that were put on performing animals. The Tower had two categories of prisoners, those with ‘liberty of the Tower’ and those under close constraint, although this normally meant no more than confinement to a room. Chains such as his, as if he were some criminal in Newgate, were relatively rare.

  Four men guarded him: Thomas Astwood, Walter Bluet, Thomas Strangeways and Roger Ray, known as ‘Long Roger’. All were described as servants of Simon Digby, the constable of the Tower, but at least two of them, from the beginning, were also sympathisers with the cause of Richard, Duke of York. Long Roger had fled his job in 1494 and had been arrested by the king’s officers, which suggested treason or rebellion; for some reason, he had been spared and re-employed. Astwood had been a fervent believer, spared the rope at the last minute in 1495 only because he was so young. The arrangement had possibilities, as did the fact that their charge’s room was directly under the one that held Richard’s cousin Edward, Earl of Warwick. For more than a year, however, these possibilities seem to have gone unexplored.

  The new prisoner was brought out three times in the seventeen months he was confined there. The first time was on July 30th, about six weeks after his committal. A delegation had arrived in London from the court of Burgundy, sent by Philip to try to sort out various nagging disagreements over trade. Its second, hidden purpose (de Puebla said he had been told this was a secret) was to negotiate for Margaret. Henry, well aware that the duchess had not dropped her protégé, wanted to impose sanctions against her as agreed in the trade treaty of 1496, but Philip and Juana, his new archduchess, would not allow this. Somehow, from Henry’s point of view, Margaret had to be persuaded to give up the boy, since her support continued to sustain his claim; somehow, from hers, she had to save her White Rose and get him back to Flanders.

  The delegation was headed by the Bishop of Cambrai, who was then Philip’s first chamberlain and leader of his council. His deputy was Jean Courtville, whom Philip had sent at his father’s request the previous December; the third-ranking member was the servant of the president of Flanders, who had come on that embassy also. Cambrai, according to Erasmus – who had been his Latin secretary and was in regular touch with him – had left Brussels on July 3rd in a thoroughly bad mood, ‘embarrassed by a crowd of engagements, anxious about the raising of his own supplies, and somewhat angry, too, that Prince Philip, in whose name he is sent, has helped him with only 600 gold pieces’. (A man of Cambrai’s magnificence, Erasmus said later, really needed more when being sent on an embassy ‘to rich and very ostentatious people’.) In short, ‘He expended on me plenty of complaints.’

  The secret business of his embassy – Erasmus, too, said there was a secret side – was broached about a week after his arrival. The bishop, de Puebla reported, asked for Perkin to be brought out ‘so that they could see him and talk to him, because the bishop had brought news with him’. Behind the peculiar thinness of this reason was the obvious wish of the dowager duchess to find out how he was. For much of that summer she had retired to Binche, so ill that she had a new wall built in the courtyard to stop people entering the palace, and so restlessly unhappy that her whole living quarters were reorganised ‘so that Madame can make her bedrooms and her lodgings wherever she will please to do so’. She now depended, though she must have known it was hopeless, on whatever Cambrai could do.

  Maximilian, too, may have made another approach to Henry. In July the king had letters from him, ostensibly friendly, egging him on to war with France to win back the lost English lands. Maximilian offered eagerly to help such an effort, promising to perform ‘wonders’. This drew from Henry the sarcastic remark that ‘he was extremely pleased to hear that, and he would be even more pleased to see the King of the Romans in the thick of a war’. An ambassador had been expected from Maximilian for a long time, but he was making ‘infinite delays’: still plotting, as Fuensalida knew, to rescue his cousin of York. Something of this may have caused his sudden amiability, a dream of delivering York from what was now almost certain death. But Henry, reasonably enough, was not to be moved by any such appeal.

  Nonetheless, he showed Cambrai his prisoner. The bishop, after all, knew him well. How well, perhaps Henry too wondered; for if Maximilian’s piece of gossip about Cambrai and Margaret had indeed reached London with Robert Clifford, the king may have heard it. For what it was worth, the suburban part of Tournai dela Escaut, including Caufours, lay within Cambrai’s diocese: there, perhaps, lurked another possibility of a link between the bishop and the boy. These murmurs aside, the bishop may well have been the young man’s confessor at Malines, as he was Margaret’s. Molinet’s made-up story, that Cambrai had helped to shelter Perkin after his escape, showed that he had no trouble in presenting the bishop as an intercessor for him and almost as a private friend. Erasmus found him both kind and distant, his moods ebbing and flowing like violent tidal water: at times generous with affection, at times ‘so cold that it seemed almost unnatural’. His coldness stemmed from his awareness of his high nobility: and he evidently cut a fine figure in London, despite Philip’s stinginess with his money.

  On July 30th Henry himself conducted the bishop to the Tower. He was on his way east with the court in any case, heading for Stratford and on to East Anglia. It was a Monday morning. De Puebla was invited too, the essential Spanish witness to how closely Perkin was now guarded. What followed was another set-piece carefully arranged by the king. Perkin was to swear solemnly to his identity in front of Cambrai, who would then understand – and lead Margaret to understand – that the game was up. The importance of the solemn oath-taking, which could not be done without due ritual, and the fact that Henry made an offering in the chapel of Our Lady in the Tower that day, suggest that the interview was staged after or during Mass, with the Mass-book laid open and Christ brought in as witness. If so, there was a horrible familiarity to the scene. This young man had so often sworn on Christ’s Body (His Body racked on the Cross, His Body under the form of bread) to confirm what his own body was, whose flesh and whose blood. By this time, he may hardly have known.

  Simon Digby, who had been paid 16s. 8d. for his services, brought Perkin in. As form required, he knelt down in his chains. Henry asked him, de Puebla said, why he had practised such a great deception (tan gran engaño) on the archduke and his country. Perkin did not precisely answer the question. Instead, ‘he swore solemnly to God that the Duchess Madame Margaret knew, as well as he himself did, that he was not the son of who he said he was’.

  The too-ready
answer to a different question suggested words that had been practised. They had also been heard before. Soncino remarked that, among the other bits and pieces tumbling from the young man’s lips in Taunton, he had said that ‘Madame Margaret of Burgundy knew everything’: knew, in other words, that he was fake. Now, in the Tower, the words were more laborious. They could also have been clever and ambiguous, but the prisoner seemed past that. De Puebla was shocked at the sight of him. He found it hard to believe that he could have changed so much ‘in so few days’. He thought, ‘as many others here believe’, that he could not live much longer. In six weeks, however, it was clearly not just confinement that had altered his appearance, or the chains or the prison clothes. He was desfigurado; they had broken his face.

  Why they had done so was easy enough to see. It was another way to emphasise the end of being Richard. He had admitted, Henry said, to being Piers Osbeck, and had written this as his name. He had probably stood silently by while the story of Piers was proclaimed in public. Yet his face had still looked like Edward’s to some people, and in that half-recognition, as well as in his own appreciation of his handsomeness in a glass, there was a danger that he would never put Richard away. The answer was to beat Richard out of him. ‘And it serves him right,’ said de Puebla, recovering from his moment of queasiness and horror: Quien tan fizo que tal pague.

  Perkin apparently said nothing more during the interview. What he had said was enough, sending a clear message to Margaret that the lie was exposed and her support of him should end. In fact, he had implied yet again that Margaret had been involved in setting him up from the beginning.When Henry had asked him why, his first words of answer had been her name. She knew as well as he did, with not a moment of doubt, though he had ostensibly come to her as suddenly as he had come to all the others. She knew, most probably, because she had made him.

  This was not the story of the confession. It was Henry’s old story, with Margaret as prime mover, though more delicately put than at some times in the past. The king still believed this in private, but no hint of her agency had appeared in the document her protégé had signed. It is hard to say why. Henry had no wish to spare her feelings, since he still loathed her heartily, and she him. Late in 1495 de Puebla seems to have told his sovereigns that Henry wanted to drive Margaret out of Flanders, a suggestion that almost made them feel sorry for her, ‘though she has always shown herself an enemy of ours’. The next July the king was telling de Puebla how pernicious and central, at Maximilian’s court, Margaret’s supporters were. ‘I will never be certain of the King of the Romans,’ he told the ambassador, ‘especially while the duchess lives.’ Yet her very support, like that of Maximilian and James (who also went unmentioned in the confession), gave the feigned lad his credibility; and so, too, might the story of a trainee prince, dangerously close to Richard of York, fostered with her in Flanders. The adventures of Piers Osbeck, dragged round the boarding houses of Flanders and tossing on wool ships in the Irish Sea, were nothing like that.

  Perkin remained silent, standing or still kneeling, in front of the king, the bishop and their attendants. Henry went on talking. ‘The king said to the Bishop of Cambrai and to me,’ wrote de Puebla, ‘that the pope and the King of France and the archduke and the King of the Romans and the King of Scotland had been deceived, and almost all the Christian princes except your Highnesses.’ The vital second part of the show was Henry’s public appreciation of the shrewdness and perceptiveness of Spain, the only country not gulled. In his enthusiasm, he seemed almost to be praising the wretched young man for the scale of his deception.

  De Puebla did not record any more of the interview after that, the best part, and there may not have been much to report. It is not known whether Cambrai, having seen the state of the prisoner, thought it worthwhile to give him the ‘news’ he had brought. It could only have come from Margaret, whom the young man had just repudiated. De Puebla gave no indication that they talked privately. For all his coldness, Cambrai was probably much more shocked by the prisoner’s appearance than de Puebla was; for he had seen him at the height of his glory. The words he had just heard from the prisoner’s mouth were plainly not his, but forced out of him, as spirits had spat out words from the foaming mouth of a young nun at Quesnoy-le-Comte seven years before, when Cambrai’s dean had jammed his fingers between her teeth to exorcise her. In every way, the scene was awkward and distasteful. But visiting prisoners was one of the seven corporal acts of mercy, one in which Margaret had portrayed herself, in cloth-of-gold and ermine, tapping delicately at the barred window of a jail from which two men gratefully watched her. To try to deliver them was an even greater mercy, reflecting the delivery by Jesus of the souls bound in hell. The bishop would probably have blessed this prisoner, at least, before leaving with that part of his mission undone. He may not have said another word to him.

  Cambrai stayed until near the end of September, struggling on with his diplomatic instructions. When de Puebla talked to him in August, in the ambassador’s rather scruffy suite of rooms at the Austin Friars, Cambrai was full of ‘pain and passion of heart’, having made no headway on any of the subjects he had been sent to discuss. De Puebla offered to help, claiming later that he had persuaded Henry to drop completely ‘the bold expedient he had determined on’, aimed most probably at Margaret, ‘though he was very angry at first, and the things he said were by no means nice’.

  Some time later, while Cambrai was still in England, Margaret apparently wrote to Henry, apologising for what she had done and asking him ‘to receive her into his obedience’. No letter survives; de Puebla reported it. The dowager duchess had probably never written to Henry before, although André suggested she had sent a letter of simulated joy when he had married Elizabeth. She did so now largely because of the report that Cambrai had sent to her, though also, de Puebla suggested, because the Archduchess Juana and her chaplain had advised it. Shrewd as she was, Margaret would have realised the pointlessness of persisting with her White Rose. But an apology, with a promise of good behaviour, was also her last hope of saving him. Maximilian, when he had promised that he and York would make no more trouble, had done the same. Henry had no intention of rising to such offers, but he needed to reply somehow. He held a great council, de Puebla said,

  about what the duchess Madame Margaret wrote to him, and what he decided was that since the lady archduchess and her council so clearly rejected the measures which the ambassadors of King Henry demanded should be taken against the said duchess Madame Margaret, he must send her a gracious reply about the matter. And he did so, and the bishop is very pleased with it.

  Because Henry could not isolate Margaret as completely as he wished, he was obliged, through gritted teeth, to be civil to her. He could not compel her by a trade embargo to keep her promise of good behaviour; but he had her precious White Rose in his custody and, through him, all the leverage he wanted. He would not release him; but if she agreed to cease all efforts for him he would, perhaps, not kill him. ‘It doesn’t seem a bad way to me,’ de Puebla concluded. Cambrai had achieved half of what he had come for.

  The summer was not, in any case, filled only with ambassadors and trade talks. With Perkin in the Tower, Henry could at last relax in the safety of his favourable stars. William Parron had foreseen a little trouble in mid-August, but the king was so victorious that the forecast did not need to disturb him. Soncino reported that Henry, ‘in great peace of mind’, had planned to spend the weeks until mid-September on hunting and recreation, travelling from pleasance to pleasance with a reduced court and no great state, round his quiet kingdom.

  On August 1st, the day after Cambrai had seen Perkin, the king set off through East Anglia on his way to stay with the Earl of Oxford. At every stop, but especially at Bury St Edmunds, he made several offerings, an outpouring of thanks. At the Earl of Oxford’s, where great entertainments were laid on for him, the king seemed most impressed with the earl’s dancing bear. He gave the bear-ward 4 shillings, and ‘
one that held my lord of Oxon’s bear’ 6s. 8d., so delighted was he with the mangy creature that stood on its hind legs, clanking its shackles and neck-chains, and did what it was told to do.

  ii

  After Cambrai’s visit, Henry’s chief prisoner was not produced again for more than a year. He did not, however, die, as de Puebla had predicted. He clung on, and in the summer of the next year allegedly began to plot to be King of England again.

  The beginnings of the conspiracy, fragmentary and dim, seem to have centred on the person of Warwick, the ghost of the past twelve years. On February 6th 1498 John Finch, a London haberdasher, entertained Thomas Astwood and Robert Cleymound, ‘gentlemen of London’, in his house in the parish of All Hallows Honey Lane, in a warren of run-down streets and gardens not far from the Tower. Cleymound was Warwick’s keeper, sleeping beside him in his chamber in the Tower. Astwood was to be Perkin’s keeper in the room beneath, but that was still five months away.

  Finch had a prophecy to show them, probably written – as they usually were – on a small roll of paper. ‘The bear’, it ran, ‘will shortly beat his chains within the city of London.’ The chained bear with a ragged staff was Warwick’s badge; the prophecy needed no further explanation. Nonetheless, Finch went on ‘traitorously’ to say that he hoped to see in Cheapside a great crowd shouting, ‘A Warwick! A Warwick! A Warwick!’, the earl’s battle cry, and wearing their ragged-staff badges. Finch wanted Cleymound to comfort the earl with this prophecy, sending it along to him with a present of two pairs of gloves and ‘a pot of spice called grenegynger’. Thus, as Finch’s indictment put it, he compassed the destruction of the king.

  Five months later, with Perkin now committed to the Tower too under Astwood’s charge, a man called John Williams introduced Astwood to Warwick in the earl’s chamber. Their conversation, clearly conspiratorial, was described in their indictments for treason. ‘My lord,’ said Williams, ‘I have brought you hither this man who loves you well and he has lately escaped a great danger, for he was to have lost his head lately, and yet he loves you.’