Perkin

by Ann Wroe

  The account suggests a pause: Warwick looking, perhaps, and wondering. He probably knew nothing of the plotters’ executions of 1495 or, if he had known, had forgotten them.

  ‘My lord,’ Williams continued, ‘you may be sure of me and Thomas Astwood at all times.’

  Warwick then ‘received Astwood favourably’: taking his hand, embracing him. ‘Now,’ he said, ‘I have a special friend.’

  Astwood rose to the occasion: ‘My lord, I love you, and I will place myself in as great peril as I ever was in before to do you good and help to put you in your right, in which I hope once to see you.’

  Warwick thanked him. Nonetheless, almost a year passed before anything else was done. Cleymound and Astwood guarded their charges as they were meant to. But in the spring of 1499 a young man called Ralph Wilford, a Cambridge student and the son of a London cobbler, suddenly proclaimed himself as Warwick. Some said he had been prompted into this by a rogue priest, others that he had been ‘sundry times stirred in his sleep’ to say he was Clarence’s son and dream he would be a king. He was hanged for those dreams, and not much else, on Shrove Tuesday, just before Lent. No rumour or insurrection sprang from this, but Henry’s fears were stoked again. While Warwick and Perkin lived, there might be no end to such abusions.

  The following June, warder Astwood, loitering near the Tower in the parish of All Hallows Barking ward, had a conversation with a yeoman, or freeholder, called Thomas Pounte. He asked Pounte a peculiar question: whether, ‘if it were need, he could associate to himself one or two fellows of kindly disposition [humanae conditionis]’. ‘For what purpose?’ Pounte wanted to know. Astwood answered, ‘You shall know hereafter.’

  A month later, on July 6th, Pounte came back to Astwood and asked him ‘when the said felony was proposed’. Astwood shook him off, saying that he could not attend to him just then. He seemed to be marking time and gathering information. One snippet came from William Walker, who muttered to Astwood on June 20th that the king would leave Greenwich soon for the Wardrobe (a royal annex near St Paul’s) and would then go from place to place as his ‘gestes’ were appointed, but would never return to London alive. Walker, a chaplain, appeared to be a colleague at Wanstead in Essex of Perkin’s chaplain and councillor, William Lounde. Like much in this strange affair, his fragment sounded like prophecy rather than solid fact.

  Pounte eventually learned the details from another source, for others were well advanced in plotting. On July 12th, in the parish of St Mary Wolnoth in Langburne ward, Edward Dixon, a draper, laid out the plan for Edmund Carre, a broker who had dabbled in the plots of 1493–5. Dixon, with help from others, was going to snatch Warwick out of the Tower. More important, however, for he mentioned him first, he was going to get ‘Peter’ out. (He would not have called him Peter, or thought of him as such; here, as throughout the indictments, the lawyers rather than the conspirators were speaking.) Having sprung the two prisoners, Dixon would set them at large. Nothing was planned afterwards; like Maximilian’s grand plans for a rescue, the chief point was liberty. This made the plan no less treasonous, of course. Dixon said he was assured that various servants of Simon Digby would help him. Carre said he would join in and, taking ‘a certain book’, probably a psalter or a primer, from his purse, swore on it to be true and secret.

  Still nothing happened, according to the indictments, for almost three weeks more. Then suddenly, on August 2nd, the various plots came together. On that day, Warwick, Astwood and Cleymound, with others unnamed, ‘confederated and agreed that the earl should assume the royal dignity, and erect himself king, and falsely and traitorously depose, deprive and slay the king’. This was a new and fatal dimension: not merely freedom for Warwick, but the death of Henry and the seizure of the crown. ‘With all their force’, whatever it amounted to, the conspirators would seize the Tower, killing any who resisted them. They would then break into Henry’s treasury, carry away all the jewels and money, get hold of the Tower’s store of gunpowder and ignite it and, under cover of the wildly exploding fire, escape beyond the sea with Henry’s treasure. At the same time, they would issue a proclamation that anyone who helped them make war on the king would receive 12d. per diem from the booty they had stolen.

  The plot appeared at this point to be Cleymound’s idea, but he easily persuaded Warwick to take part. ‘My lord,’ he told him, ‘you are well minded in what danger, sadness and duress you here remain; but if you will help yourself . . . you shall come out of this prison with me; I will take you out of all danger, and leave you in surety.’ As a hint of what he meant by telling Warwick to help himself, he gave him ‘an hanger’, a short sword that criminals and muggers often wore on their belts, ‘and the earl received the hanger for such purpose’. It is doubtful that he knew either how to use it, or what the ‘purpose’ was.

  So far, Cleymound had not mentioned Perkin. But another indictment outlined strikingly different plans. Warwick and Cleymound had apparently agreed to ‘take and deliver Peter Warbeck and set him at large, and create and constitute him king and governor of England’ – firing the Tower for his sake, not Warwick’s. This made sense, of course. If he was Richard, as these plotters were assuming with or without sincerity, then his claim was better than Warwick’s, and he was naturally king. Most future indictments put the plot this way round. Some documents, however, kept the question of precedence open. The record of the king’s council meeting on November 12th, for example, said that Warwick meant to help Perkin first to the crown, ‘if he had been King Edward’s son’; and, if it turned out he was not, ‘to have had it for himself’. Such thinking was perhaps deemed typical of the strange and rambling mind of Warwick. Not knowing a goose from a capon, he was probably equally incapable of knowing a boatman’s brat from a proper prince of England. The wording also suggested, however, that King Edward’s son was still a possibility in more minds than poor Warwick’s.

  Others, as always, were sceptical. On the same day, Pounte and William Basset, another yeoman, were in conversation elsewhere in All Hallows ward. Basset asked Pounte if he would help ‘Peter’ and the Earl of Warwick out of the Tower of London. Pounte replied ‘that he would help the earl but not Peter’, and asked what they would do with them once they had them out of the Tower. Basset said he would get them a ship, which Dixon, the draper, would help to fill with woollen cloths, ‘and so the earl would cross the sea’, well buried under the bales. Perhaps in response to Pounte’s opinions, he had left out Peter; or perhaps Peter was never meant to cross the sea, staying instead as king.

  The same day brought other treasonous mutterings in which Peter, rather than the earl, was on the plotters’ minds. Thomas Ody, another yeoman recruit, remarked to Astwood: ‘Will this world never mend?’ Astwood seeming to stay silent, Ody went on: ‘By the Mass, I need money, and I care not what I do, fighting or robbing, just so I have money.’ Ody then swore by the Mass again: ‘I wish Peter Warbeck was at large, because then there would be money around, as there is not now.’ That remark carried an echo of Richard IV’s last apostolic promises in the West Country, that he would coin new money and hand it out far and wide. Perhaps someone had believed him.

  The object of Ody’s longing was present at this conversation, but only half-acknowledged, as if he was on the other side of a slightly open door. He said nothing, while others talked about him and pricked him with the thought of power. Astwood, too, continued to keep silence as Ody cursed along. Throughout the scenes of August 2nd, he was non-committal. John Walsh, a priest, also accosted him that day and asked how those in the Tower, especially ‘Peter’, were.

  Astwood replied, simply, ‘Well.’

  Walsh then said, ‘If I and [he] were now in Ireland, knowing him as I now know him, we would make another kind of rumour than was lately made.’

  ‘Sir John, how do you know him?’ Astwood asked. The question was politely, even slyly, put. The ‘sir’ showed deference to Walsh as a priest; the question itself, from Astwood, should have been unnecessary.
He knew how he himself had known ‘Peter’, not so long ago.

  Walsh answered, ‘I know that Peter is the second son of King Edward IV.’

  Meanwhile, in the Tower, Cleymound and Warwick had allegedly decided to make contact with the prisoner in the chamber below. Why they had waited more than a year to do so, nobody can say. Possibly he had not always been there. Whatever the truth, by August he was only a few yards away from the man he had called, in 1496, ‘our Right entirely well-beloved Cousin Edward’. On August 2nd, Cleymound, with Warwick’s agreement, ‘in order to comfort the said Peter’, knocked on the vault of the chamber so that he could hear them. ‘Perkin, be of good cheer and comfort,’ Cleymound called. He also told him that he had a letter for him from Jacques, a priest ‘from the parts of Flanders’, which he would deliver to him the next day.

  Several others, too, saw him on the 2nd. Ody talked to him, and Lounde paid a visit, after which his priestly ministry took a different turn. Lounde cut the silver tags or agglettes from his mantle, gave some of them to his prince, and then asked warder Strangeways, presumably just outside the door, to give the others to Luke Longford, a gentleman of London. Longford, too, was apparently present, casual visits from the outside world being both easy and encouraged. He ‘then and there’ showed the silver tags to the prisoner, comforting him with the thought that he now had a network of friends. Lounde sent another token to his charge by Astwood, a gold ducat he had bent with his teeth. The bending of a coin meant a promise made, in some extreme difficulty or sickness, to present the coin at the shrine of a saint when the trouble had passed. The plots were coalescing, gathering pace.

  That night, Cleymound reported his conversations to Warwick as they lay in bed together in the Tower. Perkin, he said, had declared to him ‘a certain matter that maketh me right heavy’, and he wanted Warwick’s advice about it.

  ‘What matter?’ Warwick asked.

  Cleymound said that Perkin had advised him ‘that he should try to get the Tower for his will from Simon Digby, if he could do it with any subtlety or craft’.

  ‘How could you get the Tower from Simon Digby?’ Warwick asked.

  Cleymound, according to the indictment, ‘told him how’.

  The earl then said, ‘Why do you want to get the Tower for yourself and your adherents?’ – the saddest question, implying that he had understood nothing of what had already passed. Cleymound answered ‘that he, with many of his adherents, wished to do so for the earl and Peter Warbeck’.

  Warwick, lying beside him in the dark, agreed to the proposal and became a traitor.

  Over the next two days, the indictments suggest that the earl took a little initiative of his own. He had a hole bored in the vaulting (being noble, he would not make it himself), so that he could talk to Perkin properly. But on August 4th, Cleymound suddenly bailed out. He told Warwick that the whole plot had been revealed to the king and his council by Perkin, and that ‘the said Peter hath accused you and me and Thomas Astwood’. As a result, he was going to seek sanctuary. Warwick agreed; this seemed the best thing to do. Bolting out of the Tower, Cleymound stumbled across Thomas Ward and told him the same.

  Ward was another old adherent of the cause of Richard, Duke of York, and his presence now, like Astwood’s and Lounde’s, was suggestive. After his service with the White Rose in Flanders, he had come back to England by 1496, when twenty-two men had given sureties for his future good behaviour. He was forbidden to indulge in any treasonable activity at home or abroad by letter, messenger or in person, and if any of his guarantors died he was to be committed to the Tower. In February 1499 the king had officially pardoned him, but he seemed to be loitering round the Tower as if it was his home. Either he could not stop intriguing, or he was in semi-custody of some sort, or he was acting as the king’s agent to keep the plots simmering, as others seemed to be.

  Cleymound told Ward that he was going to seek sanctuary in Colchester, probably for a long time. Ward recommended Westminster instead, presumably because he might be closer to the action if action happened, and Cleymound agreed. The conspiracy was evidently not over, and Cleymound’s tale, though hinting at real danger, was rubbish. Revealingly, he asked Warwick to send a token to Ward, ‘that he might be the more well-affected to them’. Warwick gave him an ‘image’ of wood, presumably a saint’s image; Cleymound delivered it, fervently asking Ward to help. Warwick also gave Cleymound, as he left, a cloak and a velvet jacket. He did not seem to think he would see his keeper again.

  Left more or less alone, the earl communicated busily with his new-found friend in the chamber beneath his own. ‘Many subsequent times’ he spoke to him through the hole, ‘saying to him “How goes it with you? Be of good cheer”.’ His tapping may not always have been heard, for sometimes the chamber below was a hive of activity. On August 4th, warder Bluet dropped in a file and a hammer (the words left in English in the indictment), so that Perkin could cut through the bar on his window and break his chains, especially the shackles on his legs. Longford, now alerted by the token of the tags from Lounde’s mantle, sent Perkin a closed letter containing a long white thread, ‘by means of which he could receive through the said window letters from the said Luke and other traitors and could send out [news of] his false purpose by other letters to them’. The long thread may be another clue that the window looked out over water; letters could not simply be dropped, but were lowered, to conspirators in boats.

  The prisoner himself delivered ‘a certain book called ABC, otherwise called a Cross Row’ – a code-book, so that people could write to him secretly – to John Audeley, an esquire of Stowey in Somerset, now living in Woolwich. Audeley was apparently the brother of Lord Audeley of the Cornish rebellion. The secret code, which featured a different character or sign for every letter, was probably much like the one that had authenticated, in sunnier days in Flanders, the great loans for men and ships that were to win the crown of England for Richard, Duke of York. The thetas, gammas, musical flats and double-crossed crosses were perhaps employed now to a humbler end, to get him out.

  Meanwhile Cleymound, despite his panic, had not left the scene. He still had in hand the letter from Jacques, the priest of Flanders, which he had to deliver to Perkin, but not until he had read it first. It seemed harmless enough: ‘Jacques advised [him] to be of good cheer, and not do himself any harm for anything that Simon Digby might say.’ In other words, he was not to respond to provocation from the constable. Cleymound handed over the letter and received another from Perkin to Jacques, ‘to comfort him in his felonious purposes’. Long Roger delivered two letters from Longford, apparently supplementing the missive with the white thread. Lastly, Astwood came by, bringing a new shackle for the moment when the prisoner should have cut through his old one, to disguise the deed.

  He also brought, or Ward brought (the indictments disagree), ‘a certain book of prognostication’ to encourage him. Since prophecy was Ward’s speciality, the book was probably his own work, based on the same cryptic forecasts that he had made some years before in Flanders. Doubtless it contained more dreams of Edward’s son, the king ‘twice buried’, ruling England again. By an irony, there was now more substance to them, since by this time Richard had indeed been twice buried, once by his uncle Richard and once by Henry, in the bowels of the Tower. Had he risen now, suddenly, to take his crown, he would have looked as terrifying as the prophecies predicted: a gaunt, dead man with a battered face, clanking his chains along the night roads. In the dim light of his room, turning the pages with his manacled hands, he may have tried to summon up such images again.

  Meanwhile, back in the parish of St Mary Wollnoth, Astwood, Carre and Dixon gathered with two new recruits: Thomas Masborowe, Edward IV’s old bow-maker, and William Proude, a draper. Together, they swore to be true and secret to the plan and to each other. Carre took the book out of his purse again, and all laid their hands on it to take the oath. On the same day, in the parish of St Dunstan in the West in Farringdon Without, Strangeways (os
tensibly Perkin’s jailer) told another recruit, Richard Pynkney, what the plotters were up to and made him swear secrecy in the same way, on a prayer-book. Afterwards, he asked Pynkney to join them. Yet nothing happened, and the days passed.

  Perhaps the omens were not propitious. On August 4th, when so much else was going on, Finch – the man who had foreseen the bear shaking his chains in the street – delivered a roll of prophecy to Cleymound, asking him to look at it with Warwick. Finch also went to Dr Alcock, a priest in the parish of All Hallows, to ask what would happen to the earl. His nervous enquiries had already stretched over many days and ranged up and down the country. One of those who helped, besides ‘Rede of Bristol’, ‘Hurt of Nottingham’ and the authors of numerous other prophecies that Finch anxiously read, was the ever-useful Ward. Ward told Finch that the earl would shortly go free, and gave him cause to hope that he would soon be King of England.

  So far, however, Warwick himself had done almost nothing. For most of the time he seemed bewildered. He did not understand why Cleymound wanted to seize the Tower or how he would do it, and seemed unconscious of any sympathy for him outside his prison. When he assented to the Tower plot, or to the effort to contact Perkin, he was merely agreeing with what Cleymound suggested. For himself, he mostly appeared to be seeking human company and friends. Although the indictment said that he and Perkin frequently discussed their treacherous designs, all that was recorded on Warwick’s side were simple words of fellowship. The tokens he produced were Cleymound’s idea. But when Cleymound seemed to be leaving his service Warwick gave him clothes of velvet that must have been his own, as innocently generous as when he had welcomed Astwood, and embraced him, on hearing the extraordinary words that he loved him.