by Ann Wroe
In these sufferings Katherine was sometimes with him, though the documents cannot prove whether she was his paramour or simply his friend. On December 10th 1508, after she had been absent from the accounts for almost two years, she was paid 20 shillings for ‘stuff bought for the king’, the sort of entry that Elizabeth of York had earned in years past. Near that entry was one for money lost by the king at cards; perhaps they played together. But Henry was already gravely ill, no longer able to ride and organising, through his private chaplain, increasing numbers of daily Masses and offerings for his soul. He was probably suffering from consumption. Within weeks he was so frail that he could not swallow the Sacrament but was reduced, weeping and praying, to looking at Christ’s Body in the monstrance that was brought to his bedside. On March 25th 1509, the Feast of the Annunciation, Katherine was paid 18s. 8d. for ‘four painted cloths for the King’s grace’: holy pictures, often of Christ coming in judgement, that were stretched before the eyes of the dying. The king had strength enough, the same day, to get £2 from Heron as ‘playing money’. But he lived less than a month longer.
His will, made on the last day of March, seemed to carry a final echo of his struggle with Katherine’s husband. He implored Our Lady, ‘whom in all my necessities I have made my continual refuge’, that ‘the ancient and ghostly enemy nor none other evil or damnable esprite, have no power to invade me’. The horror of a horned devil diving into his throat to seize his soul – as had happened in some cases – seemed juxtaposed with Perkin’s ghostly shadow diving at Kent and Cornwall, fearful memories and imaginings laid equally before the Virgin for her help.
Katherine’s compassion for him may still have seemed unthinkable. Henry had hanged her husband and kept her, in effect, in confinement, honourable as it was. But he was the only help and protection she had, and they were both alone. The welfare of her son, too, may have depended on his protection and his amenable kindness. She may therefore have allowed him to show affection to her, however far that went. Her husband had not been executed without provocation, and perhaps she herself was not untouched, in the end, by the doubts surrounding him. She knew the stories and the ‘nickname’ and would have heard, especially, of her husband’s confession at the point of death. To take a man on trust, and to love him, was not the same as being certain who he was.
By the last years of Henry’s life, the rumours and tales surrounding the deaths of the princes had taken more coherent form. According to Fabyan and Vergil, the children had definitely been killed in the Tower on Richard III’s orders. Molinet, too, reported that they had been smothered between two quilts five weeks into their imprisonment and their bodies bundled into some secret place. Both Fabyan and Vergil thought, or hinted, that the murderer had been James Tyrell, who in 1502 had himself been confined to the Tower for helping Edmund de la Pole. Vergil said he knew no details of the deaths, only that Tyrell, though forced and unhappy, had done the deed ‘thoroughly’ when Robert Brackenbury, the constable of the Tower, had shown himself reluctant. Tyrell, he said, could have spared the boys or rescued them, producing the sort of scene that the contrived Duke of York (Ricardus Dux adulterinus, as he called him) had once reduced his listeners to tears by describing. He had chosen instead to kill them, preferring – for unfathomable reasons – to back a claimant further down the Yorkist list.
Thomas More, in his History of King Richard the Third of 1514, embroidered the story greatly, and said that Tyrell had confessed to the murder before his execution. No one mentioned a confession before More did; none survived, and Henry appeared to make no use of the information. But More’s account soon became the accepted story of what had happened to Richard, Duke of York.
The actual murders, More said, had been performed by Miles Forest, one of the princes’ warders, ‘fleshed in murder before’, and by John Dighton, ‘a big broad square strong knave’. They had smothered the boys as they slept with feather-beds and pillows forced hard into their mouths, and had then laid them naked on the bed for Tyrell to see. After this they had buried the bodies at the foot of a staircase, ‘meetly deep in the ground under a great heap of stones’. Later, however, on King Richard’s orders, they were transferred to some more fitting and secret place ‘because they were a king’s sons’. A priest in Brackenbury’s service buried them, and died without revealing where they were.
Forest, too, had died by the early 1490s – More said he had ‘piecemeal rotted away’, apt punishment for such a crime – but Dighton still lived when the confession was allegedly taken, and was left at liberty. Tyrell was not punished for the murders, but for treason, and his attainder of 1504 made no mention of his part in killing the princes. There may have been no confession at all, but a hardening flurry of London rumour. Sir Richard Nanfan said that Henry had been hearing whispers about Tyrell for a while and, typically, had refused to believe them. He had pardoned him in the year after Bosworth and employed him as a royal steward and receiver, first in Wales and then, ‘in consideration of his services’, at Guisnes, outside Calais, giving him the chance to start again. The subpoena under which he had been placed in 1486, obliging him to reveal Richard III’s actions in the case of the Countess of Oxford, apparently involved no broader enquiries. Even if the story of the murders was true, and he had confessed to them, the information was now of little use to the king. There were still no bodies and, in any case, the young man who had claimed to be Richard no longer required refutation.
More claimed that the details he gave came from several different sources, as well as from what Tyrell had revealed. He had heard the story ‘of them that much knew and little cause had to lie’, and ‘by such men and by such means, as me thinketh it were hard but it should be true’. Others, he admitted, remained uncertain about what had happened to the boys:
[Their] death and final infortune hath nevertheless so far come in question, that some remain yet in doubt, whether they were in [King Richard’s] days destroyed or no. Not for that only that Perkin Warbeck, by many folks’ malice, and more folks’ folly, so long space abusing the world, was as well with princes as the poorer people, reputed and taken for the younger of those two, but for that also that all things were in late days so covertly demeaned, one thing pretended and another meant, that there was nothing so plain and openly proved, but that yet for the common custom of close and covert dealing, men had it ever inwardly suspect, as many well counterfeited jewels make the true mistrusted.
More hoped to look at all this in detail, especially if he could find time to write ‘that history of Perkin in any compendious process by itself’. He never managed to. His story of the deaths of the princes, however, usefully consolidated general fears and suppositions that had existed for thirty years. In any event, there were no more feigned lads or well counterfeited jewels. Tyrell was buried close to the last of them, on the west side of the nave of the church of the Austin Friars.
ii
As the years slid away from the November of Perkin’s hanging, not only Henry’s subjects, but foreign rulers too, gave up the game of irritating the increasingly impressive King of England. James IV was the first to give in, though he did not do so lightly.
For much of the spring and early summer of 1499 the peace talks had dragged on with England, still snagging on the safe-conduct clause. Andrew Forman, Richard’s attendant, was now the chief negotiator on the Scottish side. Though James was not persuaded to drop his prince for any of the reasons Henry put forward, he seemed to understand at last that Richard was never coming back. Article 6 of Ayton was stripped of the offending clause, and a new Article 5 cancelled all existing safe-conducts, including Richard’s. Unable to protect his friend any more, James ratified the treaty on June 20th at Stirling, where he had first received him. Three more years passed before the Treaty of Perpetual Peace, drawn up on Henry’s side in a document overgrown with red roses, marked the end of James’s dalliance with Richard of England. The next year, 1503, saw him married at last to Henry’s daughter Margaret.
if you or [Maximilian] entertained such a notion . . . the enterprise might lead to greater difficulties, and be remembered for ages. Beware. This Edmund [Suffolk] will deceive you by too much promising of friends . . . You have sustained no small charges ever since he came to you, and you will not be able to bear them longer, for the heavy expenses of war. Pray excuse me, Illustrious Cousin, if I do not deal gently with you now. You treat kindly a rebel of England, an exile from the greater part of Christendom, to the disgust of your friends and to the complication of your own affairs, at a time when you ought to be conciliating princes rather than exasperating them.
James urged the duke to be quickly rid of his ‘hateful guest’ with his importunity and his ‘pretended power’. This was surely bitter experience talking, especially that ‘too much promising of friends’. Yet Suffolk’s claim was legitimate, all the same; and so, James continued to believe, Prince Richard’s had been. Deception in promises, and deception in a person, were not the same. For honour’s sake and to save his face, but perhaps not only for that, he kept the old story going.
In 1503, writing to the Duchess of Brittany to try to avoid paying compensation to Guy Foulcart, the Breton captain who had been contracted to take Richard to England, James called Foulcart’s charge ‘the Duke of York’ three times, as straightforwardly as when he had been helping him. James’s officers, too, continued to use the name, knowing or admitting no alternative. To the end of his life, in 1502 or so, the Earl of Huntly, Katherine’s father, showed no animosity towards the sovereign who, out of wilful headiness, had supposedly lost him his daughter to some chimera out of Europe. Her husband’s confession apparently made no more impression on Huntly than it had done on James. Legend preserved a final act of piety: that James had Richard’s body brought from London and interred at Cambuskenneth Abbey, just outside Stirling, where his own father and mother were buried, laying him in the vault he had prepared for himself.
Maximilian, that pusher of dreams, also did not forget his cousin of York. In January 1499, writing to the Estates General of the Netherlands, he insisted that his costly promotion of York, ‘his kinsman’, had been for their own good. ‘Had there not been deception and betrayal by people in whom [I] trusted,’ he told them, ‘he would have been King of England, which would have brought great security and peace to Archduke Philip and this country, and might have helped it with financial aid [Hilfsgelder] too.’ When Henry sent ambassadors that summer to try and renew the friendship ‘damaged by the favour shown to Perkin’, they were treated to poor presents and unloving words; and for a year after the death of Maximilian’s cousin, in November, there was no official contact.
Sir Robert Curzon, meeting the King of the Romans soon after the execution, reported his grief and anger. When he told him of ‘the murders and tyrannies of H.’, Maximilian burst out that ‘if [he] might have one of King Edward’s blood in his hands, he would help him to recover the crown of England and be revenged upon H., or else he would spend as much money as his whole lands were in value for a whole year’. Suffolk, when he first met Maximilian, also took care to stir him with the ‘murders’, and said he had been threatened too. But this new claimant, though undoubtedly of Edward’s blood, did not appeal to Maximilian as the old one had. The King of the Romans thought him ‘but a light person’, and kept Suffolk cooling his heels round various imperial towns while he prevaricated, or went hunting. In the end, after toying with helping him, he banished him from his territories. When the English envoys tried to discover where Suffolk was going, Maximilian answered that ‘he knew not, but to seek his fortune’, as if he hardly cared.
It had not been this way with his cousin of York. At the moment of the hanging, as Henry knew, Maximilian still believed as firmly as ever in his Prince of England. A decade later, however – now Henry’s great friend, and honoured with the Order of the Garter – the emperor began to let doubts show as he supervised the writing of the Weisskunig. The young boy had come to him in 1493 and had said he was Edward’s son, but the White King was unsure, and had helped him just a little. He himself believed him to be Edward’s son, but the English ‘thought only that he was a feigned son and not King Edward’s real son’. Later he had helped this ‘other king of England’ more, but the English had still not wanted to believe in him. In the end, the young son of King Edward ‘went to war against the New King of England. But he lost the battle, and he was captured.’ The White King thought for some time of mobilising his forces to help him after his defeat, but in the end made friends instead with the Red and White King, Henry, ‘who because of his wise rule is called the English Solomon’. As for the young man, he had ‘died in prison’. He had not been strung up like a felon, but had lingered forgotten in some dungeon or had been killed secretly, as kings and nobles often were. Had he been Edward’s son, then? In his gloss to his own text, Maximilian pondered. Without sure knowledge of ‘the crime committed against him by his uncle Richard’ after his father’s death, ‘even the White King himself couldn’t really know whether it was him or not’.
From Flanders came silence. Philip, allied to Henry through his own Spanish marriage and more civil trade relations, had long ago taken the path of sobriety. But one last squawk came in 1505 or so from Paul Zachtlevant, a Pomeranian merchant living in Amsterdam, who had lent money to Richard, Duke of York for his expedition to Deal. In his office he had papers signed and sealed in the duke’s name, now worthless. His debtor had tried to pay back some of it, requesting the customs officers of Edinburgh in 1496 to grant Zachtlevant a waiver of duties on 1,612 woollen cloths. Obviously this remission, ‘at the request of Richard, Duke of York’, had not gone far enough.
Zachtlevant told Thomas Killingworth, Suffolk’s steward, that he had two strategies to get his money back. First, he would send someone to Henry with ‘copies of such writings and duties as the duke of York oweth me under notary’s signs, desiring him whereas he hath lent his goods unto the duke of York, which was the right king of England [Killingworth then struck out that phrase], and that, seeing that he is dead without paying, that it would please King H. to pay him the same money’. If he would not, as seemed certain, then Zachtlevant would get a certificate of authority, signed and sealed by Suffolk, and would show it to the King of Denmark and the Duke of Pomerania, who were friends of his. The king and the duke would then distrain upon the English merchants in their lands to pay his money back. The purpose of the certificate was to prove that his debtor had been the man he said he was. ‘Ye know well the abusion King H. hath made against the duke of York that he was a counterfeit,’ Killingworth told Suffolk (revealing, incidentally, what Suffolk’s own view was of the young man who would have been his cousin, and whom he had probably seen at Henry’s court). ‘[Zachtlevant] desireth therefore to have your certificate that it is untrue.’
Neither the certificate nor Zachtlevant’s money seems to have appeared. There was no interest in Europe in posthumously authenticating Richard, Duke of York, even assuming that it could be done. Yet the official story of Perkin, too, still found little purchase there. A hundred miles from the credit-houses of Amsterdam, on the quayside at Tournai, the Werbecque family lived apparently untouched by their notoriety. The town chroniclers did not know or care who they were, and made no effort to flesh out the reports that had come from England. There were signs, though, of greater prosperity in this household now.
In December 1498, s
hortly before her remarriage to Jehan de la Croix, Nicaise sold the house on the Scheldt at Caufours. She went along to sign the deed of sale with Pierart Flan and Adrien Carlier, described as tuteurs et curateurs de ses enfants, Pierrechon et Jenette Werbecque, the guardians of her children after the death of their father. Presumably the house was sold to raise money to support the children, and because Nicaise would shortly be living in another.
‘Jenette’, or Jehanne as she was called when she grew, was certainly a child. She had been born in 1486, according to the ‘letter home’, and still had her baby name. Pierrechon was evidently a child too, or he would not have been called one and would have had no need of guardians. Legal documents were precise about such things and precise, too, about not using diminutive names for men and women who were grown. Despite Henry’s constant belittling of him as a ‘boy’, Perkin had always been ‘Peter’ in legal documents in England from 1494, and probably earlier. Child nicknames occurred only in apprentice contracts, where a child was spoken for by his relations (and sometimes, adult or not, kept his nickname as long as the apprenticeship lasted), or in instances like this, where a child was still in care. By the age of twenty-one a young man had put off childish things, becoming a ‘son’ of the household and being called Pierre or Pierart, like a man.
Absence might have provided an explanation. Perhaps he was ‘Pierrechon’ because the family no longer knew him, and had forgotten how old he was. He was still imagined as a slim and unbiddable boy in need of Flan’s strong hand; a boy whose age had frozen sometime after they had last seen him, and who had never grown up. The letter to Nicaise, if it had ever reached her, would have confirmed this impression. ‘Pierrequin’, after all, had written it, and its whole tone had been that of a child remembering simple things, begging for money, fearing the strap. He had not explained that he was then twenty-three, now twenty-four, married, and a father. So the family instinctively provided a guardian for him, as it did for his twelve-year-old sister. Though Nicaise could not save him, she could give him the comfort of Flan and Carlier signing the paperwork.