The Last White Rose (20 page)

3
. A.F. Pollard (ed.),
The Reign of Henry VII from Contemporary
Sources
, 3 vols, London, Longmans, Green and Co., 1913, vol. 1, pp. 162–3.

4
.
LP Hen VII
,
op. cit
., vol. II, p. xli–xlii.

5
. Pollard,
Reign of Henry VII
,
op. cit
., vol. 1, p. 163.

6
.
Ibid
., p. 168.

7.
Rot. Parl.
,
op. cit
., vol. VI, p. 545.

8
. Vergil,
op. cit
., p. 106.

9
.
CSP Milan
,
op. cit
., vol. I, 325.

10
. Pollard,
Reign of Henry VII
,
op. cit
., vol. 1, p. 150.

11
.
Chronicles of London
,
op. cit
., p. 217.

12
. A.L. Rowse,
Tudor Cornwall
, London, Macmillan, 1969, p. 131

13
.
CSP Milan
,
op. cit
., vol. I, 327.

14
.
Ibid
., 329.

15
. Pollard,
Reign of Henry VII
,
op. cit
., vol. 1, p. 173.

16
. B. André, in
Memorials
, pp. 73–5.

17
. Hall,
op. cit
., p. 485.

18
. Vergil,
op. cit
., p.108.

19
. Vergil,
op. cit
., p. 109.

20
.
LP Hen VII
,
op. cit
., vol. II, pp. 335–7.

21
. Bacon,
op. cit
., p. 151.

12

Autumn 1499: Bringing Down a Curse

‘The tragic destiny of the House of York made it necessary for Earl Edward to perish, so as to make absolutely sure that no male representative of his family remained alive.’

Polydore Vergil, Anglica Historia
¹

In Westminster Hall on 21 October 1497 Henry VII was welcomed back to his capital by its mayor, aldermen and commoners. Much to their surprise, Perkin was there too, instead of languishing in a dungeon. During the next few weeks, well guarded, he was regularly paraded on a horse through the main streets of the city, some of the crowd yelling abuse as he passed.
²
According to Soncino, the Milanese envoy, he was made ‘a spectacle for everybody and every day he is led through London’.
³

On 28 November Warbeck was forced to accompany one of his supporters when the man was taken to the Tower. This was the former sergeant furrier to the king, who had been caught disguised as a hermit. A few days later, the furrier and another
rebel, once a yeoman to the queen, were tried and condemned to death, the former being hanged, drawn and quartered at Tyburn although the other escaped with a mere hanging – it seems that betraying the queen was not so heinous an offence as betraying King Henry.

Soon after, the former White Rose signed a confession in which he admitted his real identity and described how he had been persuaded to impersonate the Duke of York. This was printed for circulation.
⁴
He also wrote to his mother at Tournai, declaring: ‘The king of England is now holding me, to whom I have told the truth of the matter, most humbly beseeching him that he will please to pardon the harm I have done him.’ This letter was given equally wide distribution, probably with the confession.
⁵

Despite all the trouble he had given, for the moment his only punishment was mockery. The Venetian ambassador reported having seen Perkin and his wife in ‘a chamber of the King’s palace’, adding that Henry was treating the couple well enough, but would not let them sleep together.
⁶
Perkin was never allowed into the royal presence, although occasionally the king took a surreptitious look at him from a window.

One theory for Henry’s behaviour is that he wanted to make the White Rose an object of derision, as the best way of demolishing his claims. Another is that he really was Edward IV’s son and Henry felt uneasy about executing him out of hand: some Yorkists remained convinced he was the White Rose, bullied into signing a false confession. There is a more subtle possibility, however. After his victory at Stoke, the king had regretted being unable to interrogate the late Earl of Suffolk and discover the full extent of his conspiracy. By keeping Perkin on display, he may have hoped to lure Yorkist supporters into plotting a rescue and revealing themselves.

Warbeck’s nerve broke after eight months. About midnight on Saturday 9 June 1498, having persuaded the two yeomen warders who were his guards into giving him keys, he ‘stole away
out of the court, the king being then at Westminster’, a London chronicler records.
⁷
He had only gone a short distance when he realized he was being pursued and that the roads were picketed. Instead of making for the coast as expected, he fled inland up the Thames – one source says he hid in the reeds – as far as Sheen (Richmond) where he threw himself on the mercy of the prior of the Carthusian monastery. The prior went to Henry and begged for the young man’s life, which was granted. Brought back to London on Friday 15 June, he was placed in the stocks in Westminster Hall, on top of a pile of empty wine barrels. The following Monday he was again set in the stocks, on a scaffold in Cheapside opposite The King’s Head tavern. Then he was taken to the Tower.

‘The same hour he was arrested, the King of England sent one of his gentlemen of the bedchamber to bring me the news,’ reported the Spanish ambassador to Ferdinand and Isabella.
⁸
Hoping to secure a bride from Spain for his eldest son, Prince Arthur, King Henry was anxious that the Spaniards should believe beyond any shadow of doubt that he was secure on his throne: they were not going to waste a daughter on a dynasty that might be toppled. The incident shows how much import ance both Henry and international opinion still set on Perkin, however ridiculous he pretended to think him. During Perkin’s brief escape, the king had sent letters to every port on the south coast, ordering them to search for the fugitive. He had been very worried indeed.

Once inside the Tower Perkin found himself in a cell, chained by his neck and ankles. De Puebla, the Spanish ambassador, saw him two months later, when he was brought to court to tell the Bishop of Cambrai (Archduke Philip’s envoy) that he was not Edward IV’s son and had tricked everybody, including most of Europe’s rulers. ‘He is kept with the greatest care in a tower where he sees neither sun nor moon,’ wrote de Puebla. ‘He is so much changed that I, and everybody else here, feel his hlife is going to be a very short one. He will have to pay for what he has done.’
⁹

‘After Perkin had been shut up in the Tower, for once the country seemed to be in a thoroughly peaceful condition,’ Polydore Vergil informs us. ‘Although there were plenty of people who wanted a change, nobody was prepared to do anything about it until a certain little friar called Patrick, a member of the Augustinian Order did so by persuading a young man to pretend he was the Earl of Warwick.’
¹⁰

‘A young fellow of the age of nineteen years, which was the son of a cordwainer [shoemaker] dwelling at the Bull in Bishopsgate street,’ is how a London chronicler describes the wretched Ralph Wilford.
¹¹
Early in 1499 Wilford, who was a Cambridge undergraduate and quite plainly crazy, deluded himself into believing he was Warwick and, abetted by his tutor Friar Patrick, wandered round the border of Norfolk and Suffolk, asking men to come to the aid of their rightful king. Caught by the Earl of Oxford, the pair were sent to London, Wilford being hanged on 12 February on a gallows by the Thames – where he hung in his shirt for several days – while the friar was condemned to life imprisonment. But the incident reminded the king that Warwick was still a threat.

It was not only Henry who thought so. ‘Ferdinand, King of Spain, would never make full conclusion of the matrimony to be had between Prince Arthur and the lady Katherine his daughter nor send her into England as long as this earl lived’, the chroncicler Hall informs us. ‘For he imagined that as long as any Earl of Warwick lived, that England should never be purged or cleansed of civil war and privy sedition, so much was the name of Warwick in other regions had in fear and jealousy.’
¹²

According to a Spanish envoy, who wrote to Ferdinand and Isabella in March 1499, the constant strain took its toll on Henry VII. ‘A few days ago the King asked for a priest who had foretold the death of King Edward and the end of King Richard, to tell him in what manner his latter end would come,’ he reported. ‘The priest, according to common report, told the King that his life would be in great danger during the whole year
and informed him, besides many other unpleasant things, that there are two parties of very different creeds in his kingdom.’

This priest was the Italian astrologer Guglielmo Parron, at this period much trusted by Henry, who often asked him to look into the future.
¹³
The writer adds that the priest indiscreetly had told the secret to some friends, one of whom was immediately placed in confinement to prevent him from putting the rumour into circulation, although the other evaded arrest.

Coming after the Wilford affair, however ridiculous, the astrologer’s prophecy and the fact that it might become widely known shocked the king to the depths of his being. ‘Henry has aged so much during the last two weeks that he looks twenty years older,’ reported the Spaniard, who was generally an objective observer. It is significant that Vergil says many Englishmen still wanted a change of ruler, even though there seemed to be no obvious pretender. Henry knew this. He suffered a complete nervous collapse.