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The Perkin Warbeck Conspiracy 1491â"1499

The History Press

The Beginning and the End of the Problem

In December 1499 the curious traveller crossing London Bridge on his way to Kent could have seen displayed on poles the heads of two recently executed traitors. One only had been born a king's subject, John Atwater of Cork. The other was a subject by adoption, Perkin Warbeck, born in Tournai, originally a subject of the Duke of Burgundy. Their execution at Tyburn Tree had been watched by a huge crowd of people drawn by the fascination of Warbeck; to hear him rehearse once again that litany of his life: who he was, who his ancestors were, what places they had lived in, what masters he had served and that he, a Tournaisian, had called himself Richard, Duke of York, second son of Edward IV, only when forced to by John Atwater, sometime Mayor of Cork. Then, and not for the first time, he asked forgiveness of the King, and of anyone else he had offended. His confession and obligatory ritual obeisances to the Crown finished, he was hanged first and then came Atwater's turn.

The chance meeting of these two was described by Warbeck in his confession; copies of which had circulated in every city in England, and every court in Europe, over the previous two years. Warbeck described how he and his master, a Breton merchant called Pregent Meno, had arrived in Cork. There Meno obliged Warbeck to wear some silks he was peddling. Instantly the men of Cork recognized him for who he was, Edward, Earl of Warwick, the Duke of Clarence's son, who they recognized because they had seen him in Dublin. Perkin vehemently denied all this and called for a crucifix and Gospel to swear an oath of denial. All this was witnessed by the Mayor of Cork, John Lewellen by name, and Warbeck swore not only that he was not the duke's son but that he was no blood relative either. However his trials were not over. He was approached by two Englishmen, of whom Atwater was one, who swore equally convincing oaths that he was in fact the bastard son of Richard III, John de Pontefract. Warbeck again countered with sincere oaths that he was not this person. But Atwater and the other man, Stephen Poytron, persisted and told Warbeck not to be afraid but to take it on him boldly, and that if he went along with them they would help him with the considerable power at their disposal, to overthrow the King of England. Help was guaranteed from the local Earls of Desmond and Kildare who like them wished for revenge on the king and so would make common cause with them. So, said Warbeck, against his will they made him learn English and taught him what to do and say; and finally, because John de Pontefract was in Henry VII's hands, they called him Duke of York. After this the conspirators – John Taylor, John Atwater, Stephen Poytron and Hubert Burke – aided and abetted by the earls began, what Warbeck called, this false quarrel. It was a quarrel which attracted immediate international support. The King of France sent a two-man embassy to Ireland, Louis Lucas and Stephen Frion, which recognized him as Duke of York, rightful heir to the throne of England and invited him to take up residence in France. Warbeck, or Duke Richard as he now was, was received in France as the true King of England. Thereafter the King of Scotland and Maximilian, the Holy Roman Emperor, also acknowledged him to be Richard Plantagenet.

There is nothing in Warbeck's confession which should make us doubt its truthfulness. Whenever historians have pursued its detail, and they have done so to considerable extent, they have found evidence which substantiates it. And yet it remains tantalizingly unsatisfactory, a completely incomplete document. Why? Partisans of the House of York have suggested that it was produced under duress, a deliberately misleading document covering up the real story: Warbeck was Richard, Duke of York. Historians aiming at objectivity have seen its reticence as proof of Henry VII's desire not to offend the guilty party. For, ten or so years after it had all begun, relations with the guilty had changed to such a degree that it was inadvisable to pin the blame too securely on any one person. Yet this is to enter into a debate with a document which had a strictly limited purpose: to circulate sufficient personal and circumstantial material about Perkin Warbeck and so end the debate about whether he was Richard Plantagenet, Richard IV, true King of England or not. Warbeck's confession was not intended to tell the whole story, least of all to demonstrate in detail that every monarchy in Europe, bar one, had lent dignity to this conspiracy, and so pave the way for others. It was intended by Henry VII as a resolution of what was for him an unresolvable problem – that he could never completely translate his right as King of England by the victory at Bosworth, de facto, into a statement that he was rightfully, de jure, king. Henry VII's kingship rested ultimately on a transfer of allegiance by the greater part of the political community of Yorkist England from their master, Edward IV, and his murdered son, Edward V, to him. This transfer had been worked out in the two years before Bosworth and sealed with Henry's undertaking to marry the late king's daughter, Elizabeth of York. That Henry VII was a Yorkist king is now part of the consensus about him among late medieval historians. What is meant by this, that Henry used Yorkist methods of government, and that there was great continuity of service between Edward IV's government and his, is undeniable. But the ironic style of the statement and the overwhelming concentration on government and administration obliterates the motivating values of the chivalric élite who backed Henry before, and after, Bosworth.

It is the great Dutch historian Huizinga who draws our attention to the intensely personal nature of late medieval politics, so personal and so intense that the main driving force of politics in this period are loyalty to a lord and loyalty to his family, and blood; and what flowed therefrom – pursuit of his right, revenge, and the demand for justice. Henry and his son Henry VIII always remained vulnerable to the claims in blood of surviving members of the Plantagenet family, such as the Courtenays and the de la Poles, because of the muddle and mystery surrounding the fate of Edward IV's sons. A sure signal of this vulnerability is given by Henry's own propagandist historian Polydore Vergil when he starts the history of Henry's reign with the transfer of the Duke of Clarence's surviving son, Edward, Earl of Warwick, from prison in Sheriff Hutton to the Tower of London. He was moved here, we are told, lest he stir up civil discord, sedition. And indeed he had, all things considered, a better blood right to the throne than Henry.

On the continent the Burgundian historiographer Jean Molinet heard another story of the days after Bosworth; that Henry, taking the oath of allegiance in towns near to London before his coronation, proclaimed that if there were anyone of the line of King Edward who had a right to the throne, he should show himself and he, Henry, would help to crown him. However we read this story, at face value, or as part of a scheme to flush out immediate opposition to him in the London region, his initial vulnerability never far receded. Not after 1499 when Henry attempted to free himself from the ghost of a Yorkist comeback by executing Edward, Earl of Warwick at the same time as Perkin Warbeck; nor later in 1504, when the story that the real Richard and his brother Edward V had been murdered by Sir James Tyrrell first appeared. Even on his deathbed, if one account is to be believed, he warned his eighteen-year-old son to execute the Yorkist claimant to the throne, Edmund de la Pole, rather than leave him alive in England if he was ever obliged to leave the kingdom to fight in France. The people were not to be trusted as long as pretenders lived.

Had the Warbeck conspiracy never existed, or had it never taken on the strength which it did in 1493, it is possible that we would have been spared the awful final decade of Henry VII's reign; a decade of distrust, repression, imprisonment, and execution. It was, thought Sir Thomas More, a decade of perpetual winter; a decade which prompted some to begin moves against the monarchy under the Magna Carta. That the Warbeck conspiracy developed well beyond its inauspicious beginnings was a tragedy for all whom it touched. But that it did so was due to its roots which ran long and deep into English and European politics. They began in the relationship beween the Wars of the Roses and European monarchs. They lay in the political method of the rising French state. They developed out of all proportion in 1492 and 1493 when Henry VII's obsessive reactions to the dynastic problems which confronted him converted a plot of small-time losers into a viable focus for discontent. And they already existed in the psyche of the late medieval Englishman who expected the imminent return of the dead leader.

A World of Displaced Men

The Europe into which Perkin Warbeck was projected as Richard IV was at a point of departure. Everywhere there was dislocation, the same strange mixture of old and new. In the east the Turks threatened the existence of Christendom. In the west methodical Portuguese sought for the route round Africa to Asia; but dreamers like Martin Behaim and Christopher Columbus dreamed of sailing to Japan across the Atlantic. All over Europe a religion compounded of philosophy, customary beliefs and magic satisfied the majority. Yet everywhere radicals, intellectuals and heretics called for renewal – psychological, spiritual and institutional. Scientists, mathematicians and geographers redefined the limits of the material world. Yet they coexisted with alchemists, fraudsters and astrologers. And as often as not they were the same people. All over Europe the old élite founded on rural wealth jostled for power with new urban and capitalist classes; confronting, adapting and exploiting them. All over Europe armies, based on Roman and medieval ideas and facts: archers, footsoldiers and knights, were giving way to the new technologies of gunpowder and cannon. Everywhere technology was in advance; from the Fenlands where the rich and prosperous, including the King of England's mother, drained land for profit, to the library where, in common with the upwardly mobile yeoman and gentleman, her son collected printed books rather than manuscripts. If the sixteenth century saw the rebirth of Europe, then the hour of its conception was the fifteenth century, and the onset of labour was in 1492. This was a rich, perhaps over-rich, culture waiting for that transforming event, the discovery of the New World, which would give coherence to its disparate material and spiritual patterns and harness new economic forms unleashed by a growing population. The discovery of America was the event which created a new world order. Perkin Warbeck, who might hardly seem a footnote to this process, touched and was touched by all the people who made the discovery of the New World possible: bankers, explorers, princes, charlatans, greedy men bent on disciplining a continent emerging from the chaos of civil wars.

All over Europe in the latter half of the fifteenth century civil wars had been fought, in Scotland, France, Portugal, Spain, and in the ashes of the Burgundian state. The Wars of the Roses were the English experience of a common phenomenon and there has been an enormous outpouring of published work on the subject. Families, administrations, counties and regions have been described minutely to provide an understanding to the nature of and reasons for the Wars. But with the exception of the attention given to the loss of England's French lands, in the 1450s, because of the furore this caused within England, most of what has been written is myopically Anglocentric. In their earliest manifestation the Wars of the Roses were a consequence of Henry VI's disastrous mishandling of foreign affairs. Yet, such was the nature of politics in the 1450s, there was little of a foreign dimension in England's troubles except Richard, Duke of York's retreat to Ireland, and Warwick the Kingmaker sweeping the sea before withdrawing to Calais with Edward, Earl of March. But when the dam burst and civil war broke out in England, between 1459 and 1465, Scotland and France became bases for the exiled Lancastrians. During the Readeption crisis and the renewal of the wars, between 1468 and 1471, Burgundy and Brittany became involved, the former as supporter and financier of Edward IV, the latter as home in exile for Jasper Tudor and his nephew, Henry, after Edward IV's return to England. The Yorkist triumph meant France's failure to install its client candidate, Richard Neville, Earl of Warwick as King's Lieutenant in a restored Lancastrian regime.

The most complex configuration of the internationalization of the Wars occurred during the period 1483 to 1509 when no fewer than five major powers, Brittany, France, The Holy Roman Empire, England and Spain, were at loggerheads over French ambitions, first in the Burgundian Netherlands, then in Brittany and then Italy. In an effort to maintain their domestic and foreign policies each power in turn was sucked into the civil war and political instability wished on England by Richard III's seizure of power. In 1485 the French were for once successful in having their client candidate, Henry Tudor, placed on the throne after the Battle of Bosworth. But Bosworth did not simplify the drift of European politics the complexity of which, if anything, intensified so that further interference in English politics by France and its main rivals, Spain and the Holy Roman Empire, was to be expected. In 1487 Imperial intervention in England came through Margaret of York, dowager Duchess of Burgundy. Imperial mercenaries fought, unsuccessfully against Henry VII in battle at East Stoke.

Such intervention by powers intent on the short term neutralization of England's military capacity had the inevitable effect of increasing contacts between man and man in what was already a cosmopolitan situation. Margaret of Anjou, unsuccessfully, used the French commander Pierre de Brézé against Edward IV in the early 1460s. In 1470 Edward lived in the home of Louis de Gruuthuse at Bruges. Once Edward was back in England he showed his gratitude to Louis by giving him an English title, Marquess of Winchester, and by showering him with gifts, some of which were his own personal belongings. Henry VII's period of exile resulted in his penchant for employing Bretons, Frenchmen and, at times, anyone he could woo from foreign service.

The fighting which took place during the wars has been shown by Anthony Goodman to have involved all classes of people from almost every region of England. But the combatants were by no means limited to Englishmen alone. The early battles may have been fought only by interested English parties, but from 1485 onwards the conflict engaged many outside the English ruling élite. Bosworth is a nice case in point. There a French-backed candidate supported by a mixture of English exiles, Scots and French troops (lent by Charles VIII), joined with native English and Welsh supporters against an English army, but one which contained observers from Spain and one of the most prominent Burgundian mercenary captains of the day, Jean Salazar. At East Stoke the position was reversed. At that battle Henry VII's English forces fought Irish, Scottish, Swiss mercenary and English troops led by the Earl of Lincoln and Martin Swart. This was only one side of the coin. English kings were happy to employ mercenaries from the Netherlands, France and Switzerland in England, and they were equally happy to employ, as Edward IV did in 1471 and Henry VII did in 1492 and 1497, artillery personnel who had experience of European, particularly Flemish, warfare. The other side of the coin was the desire of European monarchs to staff their forces with England's élite force, its archers. Charles the Bold deployed English archers in specially trained units in battle, and staffed his bodyguard with them. In 1478 Margaret of Burgundy successfully recruited men from Coventry to serve as archers in Flanders. In the 1490s the French were said to quake at the thought of English troops entering their country against them.

Men saw service widely in Europe, a Europe that was not yet one of nation states, but rather a place of lords and men personally attached to each other, not inviolably to their 'patria'. Political relations were peculiarly personal. Loyalty, a key concept in the period, was not given, forever, irreversibly. If loyalty was dishonoured the wounded sense of honour would dictate service elsewhere, where true, truer, loyalty was recognized. The tension between loyalty and honour is one cause of the otherwise bewildering shifts in the politics of the time, their apparent and real irrationality and lack of sequence. Thus could Louis XI offer the slighted kingmaker, Richard Neville an apanage in north-eastern France to betray Edward IV. Thus could Louis support such unlikely allies as Margaret of Anjou, George Duke of Clarence and Warwick the Kingmaker at Margaret's court at Angers. It was a feature of the Wars of the Roses that between 1460 and 1525 England spawned a number of satellite courts, the courts of the dispossessed and exiled in European states. The internal exile of the Lancastrians began at Coventry and York in the 1450s. Thence they fled to Scotland, briefly, before settling at Angers. The House of York saw its noble progenitor forced to a self-made court in Ireland in 1459, while in 1470 his son, Edward IV, fled to Burgundy. Pensions and gifts maintained these royal guests against the day when the debt would be repaid with an attack on their native country. So, for fourteen years, Henry Tudor lived in prison and at ease in Brittany before gathering his band of exiles at Vannes. Then, caught in the welter of European politics, he crossed into France and for a brief period was established in Anjou and at Paris.

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Excerpted from The Perkin Warbeck Conspiracy 1491â"1499 by Ian Arthurson. Copyright © 2013 Ian Arthurson. Excerpted by permission of The History Press.
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