Perkin

by Ann Wroe

  Yet the scene evoked in the document seemed simpler than that. A widow went to the office of the maieur et echevins of St Brice to sell the family house, accompanied by the guardians of her children. Since children usually attended such occasions, they went with her, standing solemnly beside her as the deed was signed. The deed of sale gave no hint of complications in this picture. The lives of the Werbecques, unperturbed by anything that had happened outside Tournai, continued as usual. If Nicaise had known that her son was in the custody of the King of England, she would hardly have arranged guardians for him in Tournai, just as she would not have stayed indifferent to his fate. By doing both, she strongly suggested that the Pierrechon of the deed of sale was not the young man in the Tower. It is possible that he was a much younger brother, named after a son who had gone missing and was presumed dead. Tanjar at Setubal, allegedly recording a conversation of around 1492, had said that there was no other son save ‘Piris’, the teenager who had disappeared, but one had perhaps been born in the intervening years. It is also possible that there was no blood connection between these boys: that one was a son of the family, and one had never been.

  Whatever the truth, Pierrechon did not reappear in Nicaise’s will of 1509. Jehanne, now married, was the residuary legatee and apparently the only child, though Nicaise left money to Jehan’s two illegitimate sons, Colin and Innocent. She also left money to the church of St Jean des Caufours, where she wished to be buried, to the hospital at Marvis and to the hospital of Le Plancque at St Jean, where she asked to have a perpetual Mass sung for her soul in the chapel. The will has vanished now; but it seems that she made no mention of the soul of her first husband, or of his only legitimate son.

  In so far as prayers were said for the mysterious young man who had been attributed to the Werbecque family, they were said elsewhere in Flanders. Margaret had ceased to push his cause since her apology of 1498, at least in public, though Henry was quite correctly convinced that in private she had not changed. Her support for Suffolk later proved how incorrigible she was. She may well have kept in touch with her White Rose before he died, through Jacques of Flanders and others. Just before his execution a priest-servant of Anthony de Berghes, the Abbot of Flanders and Cambrai’s brother, turned up in London. This was perhaps a last vicarious visitation. The next year, almost three times the usual sum was spent to burn candles in Margaret’s chapel at Binche.

  By now there were other substitute children in her life. In November 1498 the Archduchess Juana had given birth to a daughter, Philip’s first child. At the baptism, held with great pomp in Brussels on the last day of November, Margaret, who was one of the godmothers, carried the baby in her arms for Cambrai to plunge in the water. The last scene Molinet recorded was of Margaret riding home in a special ‘throne-chair’ borne by two strong men, torches and trumpets blazing round her, still carrying the baby.

  The chair showed her advancing age. She was growing weak and had been ill for much of the year, with her Masses and devotions multiplying. Yet she had not ceased her semi-secret acts of charity. In July 1499 she undertook to pay for the upbringing of ‘a little English child’ from the revenues of her estates at Rupelmonde. The child was put to nurse with the family of Pieter van Tiemple, from his name a Fleming of some substance. Van Tiemple was given, along with the little bundle, £144 tournois ‘to be used to the profit’ of the child. There is no knowing where this child had come from, or what was supposed to happen to him next. Yet the money to be spent on him, though a large sum, was considerably less than Margaret had spent on the last child she had taken under her wing.

  That child had come into her life more than twenty years before, in the autumn of 1478: the first year after Charles’s death, and the year when Mary, her beloved step-daughter, gave birth to her first child, a son. Sometime after September a little boy called Jehan le Sage, ‘good little John’, was taken into her palace at Binche, her favourite country retreat in the hills of Hainault, to live there at her expense and to be educated by a priest. He was then ‘about five’, the same age as Richard, Duke of York. Jehan appeared to be an orphan and his name a nickname: the same name, as it happens, as Edward IV’s favourite jester, who had accompanied Margaret on her wedding-journey to Burgundy ten years earlier to soothe the distress of a long voyage. He was also, perhaps, an especially bright or well-mannered child who was thought likely to benefit from Margaret’s close attention. Although she helped other children, and provided scholarships, Jehan was the only one whose upbringing and teaching she personally supervised. Yet this was done at a distance and out of the public eye, a long way from Brussels or Malines, with Margaret often absent, and with the priest officially in charge of him.

  Every year, for seven years, Margaret gave the priest £24 tournois for Jehan’s keep and his instruction; he did not seem to have his meals counted in with the other palace residents. She also paid up to £12 a year for his ‘clothes, gear and other essentials’. For one precious year, 1479, when he was about six, his clothes and gear were itemised in the accounts. The list was then struck out, as though these details were not to be publicly recorded. He had a robe of costly scarlet cloth for Easter, a ‘jacket of vesture’ to wear underneath it, two shirts of fine linen, two doublets, a bonnet and a hat, three pairs of shoes. He was a very small boy; less than two ells of cloth made up his robe. His doublets were striped and laced with silk, and the ‘bonnet and hat’, usually worn together, turned him into a little nobleman. The insignia on his jacket was not improbably the one worn by Margaret’s escorts the next year in England, the white rose.

  That same year he was given, as presents, a rosary and a pair of skates. In his sharp shining shoes perhaps, skidding on the ice, he broke his leg, and the surgeon of Binche was paid £8 to mend it. The surgeon, Master Colart Fedorq, was not otherwise called on in twenty-seven years of accounts, and his fee for this treatment was probably a quarter of his annual salary. But little Jehan was, in effect, Margaret’s child, and was cared for accordingly.

  He may never have known, and may never have thought to ask, what his real background was. It is not impossible that he was a child from Tournai whose violent father was sporadically absent and whose mother had died. Rescued, perhaps, from a home where he had already been beaten, he had been passed on through the Cambrai diocese or through relatives to Margaret. It is also not impossible that he was a love-child of Edward IV’s, sent out as his namesake had been to comfort a childless sister. Edward’s warrants for the summer of 1478 show a fair amount of secret business going on with ‘Flanders’: a voyage by the Falcon ‘from London to the parts of Flanders and from thence unto London again’, and the sending of ‘certain secret persons . . . to bring us knowledge of certain matters . . . Whereof we have the perfectness to our great pleasure.’ The possibilities can only be raised and left, but there they are.

  Jehan’s education may not have been especially high-flown. The teacher who had nominal charge of him, Sire Pierre de Montigny, was from a family closely related by marriage to the de Lalaings, the highest blood of Hainault and long-time fighters and councillors in the service of the Dukes of Burgundy. The de Montignys, too, had been councillors and ambassadors, with several made ducal chamberlains and knights of the Order of the Golden Fleece. Sire Pierre was of noble stock, therefore, but also an ordinary non-graduate priest. Evidently, from the rosary, he was teaching Jehan his prayers and some of the Latin that went with them. The boy would have learned reading and writing, but not necessarily any language other than the French his teacher spoke. On the other hand, education of this intensity may have included many subjects, for he was evidently in some ways an experimental child. So his days passed, in peculiar isolation with his tutor in the palace, picking up the ways of court and church as he picked up his grammar, until at the end of 1485 he and Father de Montigny vanished from the accounts.

  The timing of his disappearance, as Margaret realised the apparent finality of the destruction of the House of York, was suggestive, but m
ay have been merely coincidence. The boy was twelve now, old enough for higher schooling or service somewhere. It may also have been coincidence that the room in which Jehan lived, the only one at Binche designated for a child alone (all other designated rooms being shared by Margaret’s ‘girls’, or her ‘gentlemen’, or allotted to important officers and visitors), was the same one, under the chapel and with the tennis court outside, that was later called ‘Richard’s room’.

  If the young man who tormented Henry was not Richard – and nothing definitively proved, or so far proves, that he was not – he may have been Margaret’s surrogate son. Either story seems likelier, on the evidence found so far, than the tale of commercial wandering and random kidnapping that was hung on him in 1497. The inexplicable factors, as Henry too noted, were his rival’s own persistence and the enduring loyalty of the greatest names that backed him. Both he, and they, seemed to feel themselves under an obligation which had not been invented and which the confession did not change. We may never know what it was.

  In 1512, well after Henry’s death and more than a decade after the death of her first love, Katherine felt herself free again to take a succession of husbands. Her second was James Strangeways, an usher of the chamber, who died six years later. Her third, Matthew Cradock, whom she married almost instantly, was the Earl of Worcester’s deputy in South Wales, a sea-captain, a grandfather and the owner of large estates in Glamorgan. In 1531 he too died. Cradock had built a great tomb for them both in Swansea, but Katherine did not lie there. She married Christopher Ashton, another gentleman usher, living with him at her own manor of Fyfield. Almost the only image of her comes from those years: she was remembered often riding a white gelding, Ashton’s gift to her, round the parish, always in her widow’s black.

  No children came from these marriages. But she was now a woman of substance, with wide landed interests and an array of gifts from her husbands. Cradock’s will listed the jewellery and plate she had owned at the time she married him, some of it given to her by the first two men whose hands she had taken. Among the jewels were two hearts of gold, one with a fleur-de-lis of diamonds ‘and a pearl hanging by him, which was a noch [brooch] of Our Lady’. There was also a separate fleur-de-lis of diamonds, ‘with three pearls hanging by him’. The fleur-de-lis, highest of flowers, was a royal symbol and a favourite device of Edward IV’s; for his meeting with the French king at Picquigny, cheekily, Edward had worn a large fleur-de-lis of precious stones in his hat. The symbol could not in fact be worn or bestowed by anyone who was not royal. The fleur-de-lis of diamonds, the stone of betrothal, had therefore probably been given to Katherine by the man she had first married; the heart of gold, with the royal lily repeated, had perhaps been placed by him round her neck on their wedding day. The face of that impoverished and wandering prince may have passed in remembrance as Katherine touched them. The lily-white rose me thought I saw.

  Her subsequent husbands, Strangeways and Cradock, had been members of the Tudor establishment, Cradock becoming constable of Caerphilly six months after Bosworth. Yet Cradock was said locally, in south Wales, to be ‘warm against’ Henry VII and ‘on the side of the one whom he believed to be the true heir of the crown – the one who is nicknamed Perkin Warbeck’. That sympathy may have drawn him and Katherine together, or may more plausibly have grown once Cradock had married her. It is hard to say otherwise why this far-away Welsh captain should have been on Richard’s side.

  On October 12th 1537, two days before her death, Katherine made her will at Fyfield. She described herself as ‘wife unto Christopher Ashton of Fyfield in the County of Berks Esquire, sometime wife unto James Strangeways, late of Fyfield aforesaid esquire . . . and also late wife unto my dear and well-beloved husband Sir Matthew Cradock of Cardiff in Wales’. Ashton, her ‘most entirely beloved husband’ was thanked for ‘his loving licence and gentle sufferance’ in allowing her to make a will at all.

  Women never having much of their own to give away, her own gifts were small: her white gelding, a black silk gown, a kirtle of black worsted. But the first bequest, after 40 shillings for her executor, was to her ‘cousin’ Margaret Keymes, who was to be given ‘such of my apparell as shall be thought meet for her by the discretion of my husband and my said executor’. Margaret was the daughter of Cicely, Edward IV’s second surviving daughter, who had taken Thomas Keymes or Kyme as her second husband. This marriage, to ‘an obscure man of no reputation’, as Vergil called him, had made Cicely an outcast among the royals. Evidently, at some point, Katherine had befriended her and her daughter. The term ‘cousin’, though, suggested either a blood tie or that general cousinage of royals that Richard Plantagenet had claimed, in 1493, with half the crowned heads of Europe. Katherine’s claim to be cousin to Margaret could have come only through her first husband, assuming that he had been the prince he said he was. It was perhaps a tiny signal that she still believed in him.

  The suggestive mention of cousin Margaret, however, hardly made up for the aching absence of Katherine’s first husband from the rest of the document. There was supposed to be no love like a woman’s for that first partner, to whom her unschooled heart had been given and with whom she had first felt a man’s weight, urgency and desire, shockingly physical and real. In nature, some birds of the air never took another mate after the death of their first; the type of the faithful widow was the turtle dove, sobbing low and soft in the woods and flying only to barren trees in never-settled grief. Tradition said that Katherine felt this way; ‘in all fortunes’, Bacon wrote, she ‘entirely loved’ him. Yet Katherine could not call him either ‘Richard’ or ‘Perkin’ in her will, and to call him ‘my first husband’ was also impossible if she could not name him. So she did not mention him, as though he had never been part of her life.

  Yet his name was vital. More than anything, men and women wished to be held in such remembrance. Since their souls could not help themselves, they hoped to depend on the constant recollection of family and friends. In that hope they had their names carved on tombs, set in glass, painted on rood-screens, engraved on chalices or specified as a permanent part of the prayers that were said in chantries. At family graces, before meat, the De Profundis was said particularly for them, and the priest intoned their names as he washed his hands at the Lavabo of the Mass. Their names, ‘rehearsed openly’ by the living, immediately and directly succoured their souls struggling in Purgatory. Katherine herself had bequeathed a penny, on the day of her burial and at her month’s mind, to 500 of the ‘impotent and poorest’ folk in Berkshire, ‘through whose devout prayers it may please God to mitigate my pains that my Soul the sooner may attain to the fruition of his godhead’.

  With Strangeways, Katherine had also founded a perpetual chantry in the monastery of St Mary Overy in Southwark – a place, incidentally, where special prayers had been instituted years before for the family of Edward IV. In her will she mentioned the regime she had established there, ‘with one priest therein daily to sing Mass for the souls of my father the Earl of Huntly and Gordon, and my lady and mother his wife, my soul, my said husbands’ souls, James Strangeways his father and mother and all Christian souls’. These were all the people of importance in her life, save one. He was included, of course, in ‘all Christian souls’, but not among ‘my said husbands’, since he had not been previously mentioned. He was numbered, in effect, with the forgotten dead in the churchyard, in sunken or unmarked graves, who had no kin or friends to pray for them. The phrase covered him as adequately as ‘all other that he had offended unto’ had covered Katherine in his plea for absolution on the scaffold. In that sad, vague way they were equal in their treatment of each other.

  There remained one other will in which he might have been mentioned. In October 1503 Margaret, by then very ill, drew up hers. Her French still showed that she was English, and her chief anxiety remained the ‘return and restitution of our marriage money, amounting to 115,000 écus d’or more or less’. Despite all Richard had tried to do for her, she was now
owed more than when he and she had drawn up the protocols in 1494. Margaret asked that the money, if recovered, should be paid to Philip, who would then assign it to various charitable causes. ‘Among other things’, £30 tournois was to go each year for devotions in the chapel of Our Lady at Binche. Every day, ‘towards evening’, the Angelus was to be sung there before Our Lady’s image, and every Thursday a Mass was to be sung in honour of the Blessed Sacrament: ‘which foundations we are making principally for the salvation and remedy of the souls of our late lord and husband, of our very dear daughter Dame Mary of Burgundy, of ourselves and of those souls to whom we feel bound’.

  A cui nous sentons tenue. The binding had gone very deep; and yet at this moment, exposed before posterity and before God, Margaret went no further with her list of names. It is possible, in the case of her White Rose, that she felt she could not do so. She left him wrapped with others, in a vague embrace of love.

  Sometime in 1499 she had commissioned a copy of a popular painting, ‘The Lamentation on the Road to the Sepulchre’, to hang in the palace at Binche. She herself, her face familiar from other portraits, appeared in it as Mary Magdalene weeping at the pierced feet of Christ deposed from the Cross. She wore a robe of cloth-of-gold trimmed at the neck and sleeves with pearls, a cloak of crimson velvet lined with grey fur and a rich belt (the balteus Bernard André had mentioned, wantonly removed for her beloved) set with enamel daisies surrounded with pearls, her flowers and her stones. Fixed to the belt was a White Rose for which, you might imagine, she also wept.