Perkin

by Ann Wroe

  Epilogue: Absence

  The white shirt covered carrion and dung. That was all the body was, a coming feast for the worms of the earth. The carcass of a hanged man in particular was held for nothing; people squeamishly avoided it. When you cut it down it fell like a sack, and you saw the naked arse or the drawers stained with the frightened shit of the dying. ‘Drivelling and spurging’ were the usual results of hanging. A corpse did not bleed, so they said. But when the head was lopped off there was often blood enough to dip a rag or a kerchief in it, if you thought it would do you good. Some kept those scraps for precious relics, as other misguided people took up the ashes of heretics in little pots and bowls.

  Perkin’s body was cut down dead, a surprise and a disappointment. (‘They gave him such grace,’ Molinet wrote.) In the end his death had not been a traitor’s, merely that of a common criminal, hanged high for men to see. His still-pulsing guts were not grilled on the fire, but his head was cut quickly from the flopping bag of the rest of him. That was put in a cart for the Austin Friars to take charge of, burying it somewhere with other gallows-birds on the west side of the nave of their church in Bread Street. At least, it was assumed to be there and not cast away; but when the chronicler John Stow visited the church a century later, writing down the names on ninety tombs, he found no record of him. The names of those executed for treason were generally marked there, yet his, perhaps unsurprisingly, was not. Book, bell and censer, Placebo and Dirige – the obsequies accorded, in poems, even to pet sparrows – were evidently forgotten. The writer of the London Chronicle, so assiduous at asking God’s mercy for the souls of those hanged or burned or beheaded, also neglected to do so in his case.

  The head was jammed on a pole, the fair hair falling over the face, and placed on London Bridge. (If heads were not put out of reach, mad women sometimes washed their cheeks and combed their hair, as one had done for Owen Tudor.) Weather and the birds worked on it. The eyes went first, dug out by crows, or by the kites and hawks that walked quite tamely in the London streets. Villon described the faces of hanged men pecked like soft fruit on a garden wall, until they were as full of holes as thimbles. The flesh sank closer to the skull, blackening, and sagged round the empty sockets of the eyes. The hair was the last to go, an improbable wig, wispier but still bright when the morning sun rose over the river. Those who knew Tournai and the letter to his mother and all that side of his history – if it was his history – would know that in Tournai the heads of criminals were put only on the Porte de Marvis, where his father, if he was his father, had said goodbye to him. The grinning heads had stared down at him, the crying child, bound for the same end. ‘And so,’ wrote Molinet, ‘the White Rose, who had caused so much trouble to the Red Rose . . . was hung and dried in the sun.’

  The buried body bloated and began to liquefy, breeding worms in its own slime. Within nine days it was bones and ash – ash rather than dust, cinis rather than pulvis, as the priests said on Ash Wednesday – as if life had consumed it like a fire. All things ended that way, even the stars that went shooting through the sky in summer. A century later Bacon constantly likened Perkin, a comet and mercurial, to such blazing stars. ‘Whereof it happeth,’ wrote Caxton,

  oft they that sail by the sea or they that go by land have many times founden and seen them all shining and burning fall unto earth; and when they come whence it is fallen, they find none other thing but a little ashes or like thing, or like some leaf of a tree rotten, that were wet. Then apperceive them well, and believe, that it is no star . . .

  In the case of men and women you might find buckles and coins in the debris, or charred ends of velvet and tarnished scraps of cloth-of-gold, all whitened with flesh-powder among the bones. But there was no distinction otherwise between the beggar and the king. Though one had crouched in a hut and one had brought lands and seas to his subjection, each lay for a while with the roof of his new habitation pressed against his face and his own ribs as vaulting above him, before dissolving into the earth. Great Alexander lay like this beside the poorest man, equal. Both were dirt, born of it and returned to it. So Perkin lay, and blew away, not differently from kings.

  England was comfortable without him. Although Molinet thought his imprisonment astonished the country, causing several ‘great persons’ and ‘barons’ to revolt against Henry, the reaction both to that and to his death was very quiet. (Molinet, still confused about his subject, could not have it both ways; if this young man was exposed as ‘Pierquin Wesbecque’, his treatment could not be outrageous or lead to disorder.) The great pestilence that followed in 1500, killing 30,000 Londoners by Vergil’s estimate, was loosely linked by some to Warwick’s death, but not to Perkin’s. The earl’s death, the killing of an innocent, had truly scandalised all those who knew of it. Perkin’s, long overdue by almost every reckoning, had not.

  The game was over, and could be treated with proper contempt. Henry had once offered £1,000 for the capture of Perkin alive; but at some point in 1499 the king had himself acquitted and utterly released from ‘all manner writings, bills, obligations or promises’ that he had made on that subject. In the end, the capture of Perkin had been worth no more than the £40 paid to Mayor Godfrey of Southampton. William Parron’s prognostication for the next year was appropriately decorated by the printer, Wynkyn de Worde, with a woodcut of a squint-eyed king being delicately but decisively trampled by the Virgin Mary.

  Around the same time a strange little poem appeared, suggesting that the Virgin’s preferences might have been different. But the scene had been too confusing and uncertain, both for her and for everyone else.

  In a glorious garden green

  Saw I sitting a comely queen

  Among the flowers that freshé been.

  She gathered a flower and sat between.

  The lily-white rose me thought I saw,

  The lily-white rose me thought I saw,

  And ever she sang:

  This day day dawes

  This gentle day day dawes

  This gentle day dawes

  And I must home gone.

  The gentle day dawes

  This day day dawes

  This gentle day dawes

  And we must home gone.

  In that garden be flowers of hue,

  The gillyflower gent that she well knew

  The fleur-de-lis she did on rue [take pity on]

  And said, ‘The White Rose is most true

  This garden to rule by rightwise law.’

  The lily-white rose me thought I saw.

  But after those brief glimpses – on a ship off Kent, in John Wikes’s house at Nynehead Flory, on a horse in the Strand – there was no confirmation, but rather the reverse, and nothing more to see.

  At the beginning of the new year and the new century, de Puebla summed up with a sweeping historical perspective:

  This kingdom is at present so situated as has not been seen for the past 500 years til now . . . because there were always brambles and thorns of quality that gave the English a reason not to remain peacefully in obedience to their king, because there were various heirs of the kingdom and of such quality that the matter could be disputed between the two sides. Now it has pleased God that all should be thoroughly and duly purged and cleansed . . .

  On this reading, the matter had been finely balanced to the end. Henry had faced not upstarts and impostors, but a clash of legitimate claims of calidad. The image of the tangling briar, like Molinet’s rose-bush and Bacon’s later metaphor of a ‘winding ivy of a Plantagenet’, suggested that Henry’s enemy had sprung, though in some disordered way, from genuine royal stock. Yet Spain could now feel confident that the scare was over, and Henry was in charge.

  The king himself, however, did not feel safe once Perkin was gone. He could not forget. Tiny acts of piety suggested that his conscience pricked him: payment for some of William Stanley’s debts in 1499, and for the burial of Gilbert Debenham, who had apparently died still in sanctuary, in September 1500. I
n March 1497 he had also made a gift of £33 6s. 6d. to Lord Fitzwater’s widow. Charity vied with deep suspicion in his mind. Ayala remarked in April 1500 that ‘the sentiments of the king towards a great number of his people are not very friendly, partly on account of their dealings with King Richard [III] and partly on account of Perkin’.

  In particular – feeling, as Vergil said, an ageing man’s crabbed avariciousness as well as distaste for disloyalty – he seemed to become obsessed with collecting every last fine from those who had favoured his rival in the West Country. The first fine-collecting commission, set up in September 1498 (and covering both the 1497 rebellions under the general heading of ‘contempt’), had brought in about £1,500 from Devon and Cornwall by August 1499. The second, covering Hampshire, Wiltshire, Somerset and Dorset, was set up in March 1500; a third, for the same counties (Henry being dissatisfied with the second), was set up the next August. These two commissions, after backbreaking months of work, assessed 4,541 people to pay more than £14,000. Henry endorsed the rolls of fines with memoranda in his own hand, noting who had to answer for the money and when the first payments were due. His men swept ‘most ruthlessly’ through the West Country, Vergil wrote, sparing none at all. Long after the shining impression of King Richard had passed through, yeomen and labourers were made to repent for the error of following him. Not all of them understood why. ‘For why ’tis hard,’ remarked one Cornishman in 1500, ‘to know who is rightwise king.’

  In 1504, seven years after the event, Parliament attainted for treason the Cornishmen who had invited Prince Richard to lead them in their rebellion. It proceeded too, at the king’s behest, against five of the Tower plotters of 1499, three of whom – Astwood, Bluet and Finch – had been executed long before. Warwick, ‘the late earl’, was also attainted. Henry needed to tidy up unfinished business beyond the grave, making sure the heirs felt their fathers’ disgrace. Around the same time some of the 1495 attainders were reversed, but other hangers-on remained conspicuously unforgiven. At the beginning of the new king’s reign in 1509, a general pardon specifically exempted John Taylor the elder, ‘in ward in the Tower’.

  The attainders of 1504 included Edmund de la Pole, Earl of Suffolk, the focus of a new conspiracy. The de la Poles, nephews of Edward IV and therefore legitimate claimants, had kept quiet as long as Richard of York had been in any sense politically alive. Suffolk seemed comfortably in favour with Henry, aggrieved only that he had been demoted to ‘earl’ on assuming his father’s dukedom. In 1494, when little Henry was made Duke of York, Suffolk had been the star challenger in the ‘jousts of peace’, his Yorkist ambitions apparently reduced to the favours on his helmet. But he had fled the country in the summer of 1499 – that summer of wide and vague conspiracy – and, though fetched back and apparently restored to grace, fled again two years later, in August 1501.

  Before leaving England he dined secretly with Dorset, the Earl of Essex (a Yorkist by inclination) and William Courtenay, the son of the Earl of Devon, who had married Edward IV’s daughter Katherine. Dorset and Courtenay might have been considered safe king’s men, especially since the autumn of 1497 when they had both fought Perkin, defeated him and seen him close and scorned. But clearly they were not safe, and neither was Courtenay senior, the victor of Exeter, who seemed to give Suffolk his blessing as he left. Something, possibly the executions of 1499, had troubled their loyalty and caused Yorkist feelings to resurface. George Neville also joined the reconstituted cause, though since 1498 he had been pardoned three times over for his previous misdeeds. So did Stanley’s son Thomas, after serving years in jail for his part in the previous conspiracy. Dorset’s son Thomas, implicated as ever in his father’s waverings, had been pre-emptively imprisoned in the Tower before being moved to the castle of Calais, ‘and should have been put to death if [the king] had lived longer’.

  Another conspirator also remained, still young and beautiful and still at court. Molinet recorded her at St Omer in June 1500, six months after her husband’s death, when Henry and Elizabeth crossed the Channel to avoid the plague in London and to renew the alliance with Philip. Katherine was fifth-ranked among the fifty English noblewomen, ‘beautifully adorned’, who accompanied the queen to church. As the festivities continued, sweetened with strawberries, cream, spice-cakes and seven horseloads of cherries, she was kissed by Philip and let him dance with her, as he danced with all the queen’s chief ladies. Presumably he knew who she was, as Molinet did: the chronicler called her la veuve de Pierquin Wesebecq, as if widowhood was now her first acknowledged status. It was not, or not officially, at Henry’s court. There she was ‘Lady Gordon’, her marriage unacknowledged, or ‘the White Rose’, a name that may have wounded as much as it flattered her. Katherine herself wore black until her death, enlivened with only the tiniest touches of colour: brass spangles sewn on her bodice, a headband of crimson velvet, a tawny kirtle glimpsed as she turned. In 1509–10 the new king, Henry VIII, included ‘Katherine Gordon, widow’ in his general pardon, but whose widow she was went unsaid.

  She had still not remarried; possibly because the old king had not wanted it, or possibly because she herself had no desire to. This evidently surprised Bernard André, at least. At the end of his great scene of Perkin’s confession to Katherine, he had confidently written what he thought would happen next. ‘For a while, grieving, she lost her faith in men as marriage partners in Christ, but eventually she married — and —, men of outstanding soundness, trust and probity’ – so unlike her last. Yet when André wrote, continuing to improve his text until 1502, he had to leave blanks in the manuscript. The inevitable new marriage had not happened, and Katherine’s severe disappointment in men was perhaps not the only explanation. Indeed, it may have been no explanation at all.

  At court she passed her days largely as she had done before, waiting on the queen until Elizabeth’s death in childbirth in 1503. She was held in proper honour, and was present in 1502 at the betrothal of Margaret and James IV by right of her blood connection to the Scottish king. The money for her servant was paid regularly again as soon as her husband had been executed, and her own allowance was changed in 1508–9 to an annuity of £40 a year. The royal Wardrobe continued to provide her with gowns, kirtles, stockings, shoes and body sheets. At times of formal mourning, for Prince Arthur in 1502 and for the queen a year later, she was once again dressed in black at the king’s expense. On the last day of the funeral ceremonies for Elizabeth, Katherine, in her black, laid the fourth of thirty-seven palls on her coffin, one for each year of the queen’s age. As she did so, she may still have believed that she knelt to a sister as well as a queen.

  By then her home was England, and she became a denizen in 1510. The same year, she was granted – apparently at the late king’s behest – large estates at Fyfield, in Berkshire. Both the denization and the grant of lands carried the condition that she could not leave England, for Scotland or for any other country, without royal licence. As far as the estates went this was standard practice, emphasising that the crown would not subsidise her unless she stayed and cared for her properties. It was not, however, a standard part of becoming a citizen of England. For more than economic reasons, Katherine had to be kept close. She was so far an exile from her own country that in 1510, bizarrely, a beautiful woman claiming to be her turned up in Scotland and, until she confessed the fraud, was kindly received by the late earl’s friends.

  The shadow of her little son may also have passed across the picture. He had seemed to disappear as soon as they reached London, but a rumour surfaced later in Wales that a child of Perkin’s had been brought up there. The Perkins family of Rhos-y-gelli traced their descent to the son of ‘Peter Osbeck of Tournai’, and the Perkins family of Reynoldston, at the very tip of Gower, also claimed him as an ancestor. This story, though perhaps pure fantasy, gained a strange strength in coming from Wales, where Richard – or Perkin – had never been and was scarcely known. Katherine, having obtained permission, settled briefly in Swansea, eight
miles from Reynoldston, later in her life. The child’s name was apparently Richard, to which was added the patronymic ‘Perkins’: a little Yorkist ghost, grounded in the valleys of Wales.

  Whatever his deeper fears were, Henry’s fondness for Katherine had not faded. This too was a reason for retaining her at court, especially once Elizabeth had gone. In Scotland, Adam Abell repeated in his chronicle what may have been the local gossip: ‘[She] oftenmost remains in company of King Harry and some [thought] that they were married.’ Physically, however, the king had little to offer her. Though not far past forty, he had aged fast, and his ill health seemed directly connected to the grief her husband had caused him. He fell sick in the month after Perkin’s execution, and lay so ill for a while at Wanstead that his death and the succession were murmured of. From 1501 he began to build his tomb. Each spring found him weak, with a variety of illnesses for which he craved exemptions from the Lenten fast. He employed more and more doctors, and consulted schools of medical practice in Germany and Italy. Each day he heard sermons and increased his devotions, hoping for healing that way. William Parron left his service under a cloud, having foretold that the queen would live to eighty. That death too, of a wife he had loved deeply in his undemonstrative way, aged and weakened the king. His interest in quintessentia, the hidden fifth element after earth, air, water and fire, may have been an attempt to find an elixir, distilled from good wine or the blood of sanguine young men, to preserve the living body from rotting and to restore its youthful vigour. The blood of sanguine young men had not, until then, been propitious for him.