Perkin

by Ann Wroe

  Warwick did little; but the prisoner in the chamber below did less. He had visitors, and they talked to him, but he said nothing back that was worth recording even by those in diligent search of incriminating words. Cleymound said they had talked, and Perkin had asked him to ‘get the Tower’, but the words were not directly reported, nor his side of any other conversation that allegedly included him. The chief actor was curiously absent from the stage. He received all kinds of objects, but in turn sent only three: his letter to Jacques of Flanders, one to Astwood (strangely, since he could surely talk to him) and his ABC, or code-book, sent to Audeley.

  Nothing quite worked in this conspiracy because at its centre – the nerve-centre, as Henry hoped to prove – was a young man who was utterly demoralised. When Cleymound and Warwick spoke to him, the words they used – ‘Be of good cheer and comfort’ – were the kind commonly addressed to the sick and the dying. He does not seem to have replied to them. The same sentiment, that he should keep his chin up (esse boni vultus), appeared in the letter from Jacques of Flanders. The word ‘cheer’ meant no more than the expression of the face; people who were not of good cheer, but had to be told to be, were in a state of deep sadness. Lounde’s bending of the coin, too, suggested a prayer for recovery from desperate affliction.

  He had been in prison for fourteen months, and most of that time alone. Katherine may have visited sometimes; it was thought unusual if wives did not, though after his escape she may have been under more pressure to forget him. His little son, for whose birth he may have thrown away a chance of winning England, had vanished from his life as, most probably, from hers. But from day to day, before his room became a market place in early August, he could not often dispel his melancholy by unburdening himself to other people. The black bile was allowed to work in him unhindered. When Charles the Bold immersed himself in solitude after his defeat at Granson, drowning his grief with too-strong wine, his doctors had to apply hot tow and cupping glasses to his side to reduce the rush of blood to his heart. Neither wine nor cupping glasses would have been brought to a prisoner in chains.

  He may have used the hammer that was slipped to him to break his shackles; this was not difficult, and officers struck them off prisoners all the time. But he remained in chains, and the filing of the window bar, if he had tried it, would have gone rather slowly. Astwood or Ward tried to jog him on August 4th with the book of prognostication, ‘comforting him by the same book to execute the more speedily and willingly his said purpose’ – to break out and seize the throne. That ‘more willingly’, libentius, suggested no great desire on his part.

  On August 24th Astwood had to nudge him again, sending him this time through Cleymound a Cross painted on parchment which Astwood had received from John Watson, a priest. Watson, like Astwood, had plotted before and been pardoned. His picture, according to the indictment, ‘was sent to the said Peter Warbeck for his relief and to help him achieve the aforementioned things’. Again, it did not seem to have the desired effect. The idea that this prisoner was afire with wild schemes, and then revealed them to the king and the council, was plainly untrue. He hardly seemed to know what he was doing. On the day the parchment was delivered, Astwood also received a letter from him, delivered by Jacques of Flanders, beseeching him urgently, by a private token agreed between them, to ask Lounde ‘to be friendly and helpful to him in the accomplishment of the matters aforesaid’. Astwood went to fetch Lounde for him. Again, nothing happened afterwards.

  Watson and Astwood may have erred in sending the parchment. The Cross, capitalised in the indictment, would not have been an empty symbol. The purpose of looking at this image was to feel the pain of Jesus in every detail: the nails tearing through His soft flesh, the thorns digging down almost to the bone of His skull, the lance thrusting to His heart. On His livid and contorted body the blood ran down in streams. His sinews stretched to the limit, His veins broke; His sweet face sweated with the pallor of death. To look on this image with a receptive heart was known to be ‘convenable . . . lacrymable and profitable’, but it would hardly persuade a man to smash off his shackles and break out of jail. On the contrary, he was supposed to find his own chains light and his own pain bearable, compared to Christ’s. He would kiss the picture and cry. Watson and Astwood might have done better to send their would-be king a pair of gloves and green ginger.

  The continuing presence of Lounde told its own story. The two had been together, as priest-counsellor and prince-penitent, in Flanders, Ireland, Scotland and the West Country, before Lounde had fled east to sanctuary in London. His arrival there was noticed, but he received no punishment and, within a year or so, was ministering to his prince again. As with Katherine, there was no particular reason why their closeness should have been altered by the still-dubious and disbelieved official story. While Lounde was in attendance Richard could survive, if only in the compass of a room. Yet one might wonder why Lounde was allowed, with Henry’s knowledge, to keep this flame alive.

  Jacques, the priest ‘from the parts of Flanders’, played a similar role. The letters he was taking to and fro were in English, and contained the sort of caring, uncryptic messages – that the prisoner should put on a brave face and take care of himself – that a mother, rather than a plotter, might write. It is quite possible that the person behind Jacques was Margaret. Her prayers had multiplied through the year, with Mass now celebrated every day in the chapel at Binche; and on St Michael’s Day that year, for the first time, a votive Mass to the great avenging archangel was sung there. She could not write to him, but messages might still pass, continuing the contact on which her White Rose had depended so heavily in his glory days. If so, she too could have kept a little breath in Richard, if anyone still wanted him to live.

  Did the prisoner himself want such a thing? Despite everything, the answer was yes. John Ody, after complaining to him about his lack of money, threw out a remark: ‘If you were known for such a man’s son as you think yourself to be, I suppose many men in England would be glad to do you good.’

  As you think yourself to be. The word was translated as cogitetis, that slightly dreamy subjunctive, and the remark drew no response from him, either concurrence or denial. Yet the sense of what had been said was clear enough. In the Tower, in chains, he was still Edward’s son in his own estimation; even now.

  The schemes in which he was enmeshed, so evidently trembling on the point of exposure, had a trumped-up look about them. Yet the comings and goings outside the Tower were not concocted from thin air, and a much wider conspiracy appears to have lain behind them. Molinet thought that ‘some lords of England’ were plotting that year against Henry, and from the end of July to the beginning of September the king was providentially away from London, making a slow progress to the Isle of Wight and back again.

  Several other close associates of the young man who still thought of himself as Richard were outlawed at the beginning of August, just before the fermentation of the plots in the Tower. John Heron, the chief adviser who had betrayed his prince at Beaulieu, was sentenced despite his pardon of 1497: the Parliament roll revealed that he had been indicted ‘lately . . . divers times’ for misprisions, concealments and high treasons, but had failed to appear in court. Thomas Ward and James Keating, the relic-selling Irish prior, were accused of ‘various treasons now touching the person of the king’ – that ‘now’ showing that these were new crimes, not past ones. On the Monday after the feast of Sts Peter and Paul, Henry Mountford, Richard’s captain at Deal, was also accused of current treasons. All were outlawed at the king’s suit; the names of Heron and Ward were underlined, showing their importance. Henry had shown mercy to these men before, but they had not reformed, and the shaming and imprisonment of their prince had made no difference – as it had made no difference, either, to his supporters outside England.

  Another old adviser also reappeared that summer. On August 12th, John Taylor the younger was granted a general pardon. He had evidently fled to sanctuary, and now gave
Beaulieu as his second address. The fact that he was pardoned when all about him were punished suggests that he had given Henry information about the flowering of new treasons around the two prisoners in the Tower. He, too, may well have been involved in them.

  The plots inside the Tower itself had no such spontaneous character. They were evidently pushed by agents. All the warders were involved both in getting gear and in spreading the word. Polydore Vergil, loyal as he was to Henry, shed some doubt on their devising, and Henry, too, gave different accounts of them. At first, as he told the new King of France, Louis XII, at some point that autumn, he supposed that the plots ‘were led and organised by certain servants of the captain of the castle and great tower of London to get out of that place the son of the Duke of Clarence and Perkin Warbeck who were there for their deserved punishment’. Later, when he had looked into the matter properly, he found that the truth was this:

  that this past summer, when the king was in his Isle of Wight which is beyond the sea, the son of Clarence and Perkin Warbeck, who had more freedom than they should have done in view of their offences, laid out their whole project to the point of executing and accomplishing it.

  The blame had clearly shifted from the ‘servants of the captain of the castle’ towards the young men they were guarding. Yet it is far from clear that the Tower officers were always doing what Henry wanted. As it turned out, the king was to punish all of them severely. If they had been put in place to steer his enemies to their deaths, they had not escaped deeper involvement. Had Perkin’s demoralisation been less complete, it is easy to believe that the old charm might have begun to work again on Astwood, Cleymound and the others, as most early historians thought it had.

  Real plots, then, were still forming around these two young men, to which Henry was adding impetus of his own. The removal of Warwick and Perkin had become a political imperative. As long as uncertainty persisted as to how dangerous the young men in the Tower were or what they intended, the Spanish marriage hung in the balance and Henry’s enemies remained insubordinate. The king had grown visibly worn as he pondered what to do. On March 26th that year, around the time of the Wilford conspiracy, Pedro de Ayala reported that Henry had aged twenty years in two weeks. In the end, the king sought his answer where the plotters had done: in prophecies and in the stars.

  In mid-March, although it was offically a felony to do so, Henry had ordered a Welsh priest to tell his fortune. (‘In Wales there are many who tell fortunes,’ Ayala explained to his sovereigns, ‘in the same way that people in Galicia tell fortunes from certain signs on the back of a man.’) The priest came highly recommended, having foretold the deaths of both King Edward and King Richard. He told Henry, horrifyingly, that his life would be in danger for the whole year. He then added, in a sentence more ominous than Ayala made it sound, that there were ‘two parties of very different political creeds in his kingdom’. In other words, the Yorkist faction would keep causing trouble. ‘Many other unpleasant things’ were also imparted by the priest. Henry swore him to secrecy; and when he chatted, as a Welshman would, those he had chatted to were thrown into prison on Henry’s orders.

  Parron, too, was heavily relied on, in a way he found both flattering and terrifying. For much of 1499 he was working on two projects: his normal set of predictions for the year ahead, and a special book for the use of the king. This was the De astrorum vi fatali (The Fateful Meaning of the Stars), which was completed and privately printed for Henry in October. The main theme of the De astrorum was the chastisement of the just and innocent: why it occurred, how Fate had determined it, and how necessity, too, could sometimes demand it. ‘For those who are unlucky under the stars,’ Parron wrote, ‘the law and causation and justice say they must be beheaded or hanged, or others burned or drowned; some through ruin, some through fate, some by the sword, some snuffed out by various diseases, unless the fate of the stars at their birth dictates that by God’s might it shall be otherwise.’

  To the ‘most serene and most fortunate king’, his astrologer then described in detail how hopeless Warwick’s stars were. In the cryptic fashion of such works the earl was not mentioned by name, but the tenor of the booklet left little doubt who this man ‘not of base birth’ was. His fate was worth eleven pages of careful typesetting and of Henry’s time. All the triple lights had been unlucky at the time of his birth, Parron wrote, set firmly in the house of death. Mars in conjunction with the sun signified the death of his father and the destruction of his property, besides, for himself, the clash of iron and combustion of fire. The positions of Saturn and Mars spelled utter destitution and prison; the movement of the moon between them meant that ‘no act can be profitable to him, and nothing he desires can come to pass’. His fate was frequently repeated: imprisoned, shackled, troubled. He was not only unlucky in himself but also, despite his impotence, a lasting focus of unrest and rebellions in England. Until death ‘took him out’, the evils and upheavals linked to his birth signs would constantly succeed each other.

  Henry was therefore justified in keeping Warwick in prison. ‘A prince may imprison another prince or lord because he fears he will cause insurrection, or that insurrection will come through him, and that is without sin,’ Parron wrote; ‘if he detains him otherwise, he acts through evil intention.’ His death, too, would not necessarily be an evil act. A judge who condemned a man to death for some crime did not sin unless he rejoiced in the death. And if the man was innocent? Again, Christ was innocent, and His death the most evil act of all, yet God had ordained it for the good of mankind. Considered in that light, Christ’s death was not a scandal but an act of mercy and charity. It was undoubtedly good for the country, Parron told Henry – echoing the words Caiaphas had spoken of Jesus – that this one man should die in order to preserve the peace.

  Parron did not mention Perkin, either, by name in the De astrorum. But he reassured Henry that Richard of York, too, had had unlucky stars: so unlucky that he had died as a child, and had now been dead for fourteen years. For four days after Richard’s birth, Parron wrote, at a quarter of an hour before midnight, a white rose had been seen falling from the sky and sinking in the Thames. With it went a pale sun, a pale moon and two arrows flaming and thundering with fire. They fell into the foggy water. All this, said Parron, was written in an almanac not only at the time of Richard’s birth but in the year of his begetting, by a man ‘most worthy of credence’. The signs confirmed the words of Jesus, he told Henry: ‘Bad things must come from evil constellations.’ No other explanation could be found for the pitiful fate of Edward’s sons. ‘What but the fate of the stars presiding at their nativity,’ he asked, ‘could have destroyed such innocents?’

  In previous almanacs, Parron had evidently tried to reassure Henry that Richard was dead. He had done so, he said, sub pena capitis mei, under pain of death if he had been wrong. Despite that, he had failed to convince everyone, and perhaps had failed to convince the king himself at the deepest level. In his public prognostication for the next year, 1500, Parron complained about his reception. ‘When I wrote and said that [Richard, Duke of York] had not been alive for fourteen years past,’ he told Henry, ‘sick people said I was just fawning.’

  He may well have been fawning again, and could not be blamed for it. But he had done the best that an astrologer could manage for Henry: he had suggested that in clear conscience and for the good of the country, with the signs agreeing and the stars abetting, the king could do what had to be done. The servants of Simon Digby had done the rest.

  iii

  On November 12th, before the king and his council, Chief Justice Fineux laid out ‘certain treasons conspired of Edward naming himself of Warwick [his identity, too, now wavering by association] and Perkin & other within the Tower’. The councillors determined that they ‘had done treason’ and deserved death. They then addressed Henry:

  It is thereupon demanded of the King’s Grace what is to be done herein, whether process of law pass upon them, or else that nothing be don
e further upon the said treasons: All the said Councillors and every of them by himself adviseth councelleth and prayeth that not only process but execution of Justice be also had, of not only Perkin but also of the said Edward and other offenders.

  In effect, this was their trial: indictment, arraignment and sentence in absentia, in Henry’s council chamber. Nonetheless, some form of broader judicial process was put in motion. A commission of oyer and terminer, convened on the 13th, immediately asked the sheriffs of London to pick a jury from the city and suburbs, ‘by whom the truth of the foresaid matter may be better known’. Once sworn in, the jurors returned their verdict on November 18th at the Guildhall.

  Perkin, however, had already been arraigned and sentenced. Two days before, on a Saturday – Henry’s lucky day – he had appeared at the White Hall in Westminster. The councillors had put his name first among those who had to die, and Henry did not hesitate. The jury was not yet sworn, the proofs unproduced and unexamined; uniquely among those who were accused of plotting in the Tower, no record remains of Perkin’s indictment or the evidence against him, suggesting that none was gathered. But Henry now had ample justification for hanging him without deliberation, as his lower-class followers had been hanged in 1495.

  No record of his ‘trial’, such as it was, survives either, except a scrawled interlined note that he appeared before the Earl of Oxford, sitting as lord high steward pro tempore, ‘in the same way as Edward, Earl of Warwick’. Since Warwick was noble and was tried by his peers, it could not have been in quite the same way, but the old ambiguity persisted. The phrase may have meant merely that Oxford presided and that Perkin was led to the bar in chains by Digby’s deputy Thomas Lovett, the lieutenant of the Tower. His judges were apparently Sir John Sygly, knight marshal, and Sir John Troubilfield, the warden of the Marshalsea. The charge was ‘certain treasons’. It is hard to see how any definition of treason could apply in England to ‘Peter Warbeck, born under the obedience of the Archduke of Austria and Burgundy’, his legal personality; but for as long as his career had lasted Henry’s lawyers had alternated between describing him as a ‘rebel and traitor’ and making him ‘the king’s enemy’, a category all his own. Rebel or not, traitor or not, he pleaded, one assumes, guilty, and offered no defence.