Meanwhile, almost six hundred miles away at Eltham, at the other extremity of his father’s dominions, the six-month-old Henry lay in one of his grand cradles. His status too was denoted by magnificent fabrics and furs. And he also was destined by his parents to follow in the wake of his murdered uncle, Richard, duke of York. But Richard’s name, title and inheritance were now in contention. Who would gain them? Henry? Or Warbeck?
The scenes in Cork were not spontaneous. In mid-November, Charles VIII of France had financed and equipped a Yorkist expedition to Ireland. This had landed at Cork just before Warbeck, setting the town on edge and creating the explosive atmosphere to which Warbeck’s dazzling appearance was the spark.
But equally, Warbeck’s epiphany was the fulfilment of the wildest dreams of the expedition’s leaders, for in him they had found the most promising Yorkist impersonator yet. Others had tried before, but Warbeck was in a different league. Despite his relatively modest birth as son of a bourgeois of Tournai, he was handsome, literate and affable. He also had the right experience, being widely travelled, multilingual and familiar with the ways of courts from his time in service to the royal house of Portugal.
The conspirators wrote to Charles VIII with news of their good luck. Charles responded by sending an embassy to ‘Richard, duke of York’. It bore a courteous invitation to him to take up residence in France, and was accompanied by a fleet to carry him there. Warbeck accepted, and landed in France in March 1492. Charles VIII ‘received [him] honourably, as a kinsman and friend’.
Perkin Warbeck alias ‘Richard, duke of York’ had made his entry on to the European stage. And the stage would prove a broad and resonant one. As Warbeck put it himself, ‘thence [from Ireland] I went into France, and from thence into Flanders, and from Flanders into Ireland, and from Ireland into Scotland, and so into England’. It was also a saga that would twice seem to threaten Henry’s life and lead his mother to seek safety for her son, first in the Tower and then in the remote extremities of Norfolk.
* * *
Warbeck is – and was – an enigma. Prince? Pretender? Puppet? Pawn? He meant different things to different people; there may have been times when he himself was unsure who and what he really was.
Above all, he assumed a very different importance on either side of the Channel. For Henry VII, Warbeck was a dagger thrust at his very heart. For Charles VIII, he was a mere counter in Anglo–French relations. The result was that each monarch misjudged, almost comically, the reactions of the other. Charles’s initial support for Warbeck had been intended to deter Henry from interfering with his takeover of Brittany by marrying its young duchess, Anne. Instead, it drove the English king to his full-scale invasion of France in 1492. Henry’s peace terms of course required Charles to renounce all aid to Warbeck. But this too backfired. Fearing that they might be handed over to the English, in early December Warbeck together with his handlers and followers managed to escape across the French border to Malines (Mechelen in Flemish) in the Netherlands. There they found, to their delight and Henry VII’s chagrin, a very different patroness to the fickle and calculating Charles VIII.
For Malines was the principal residence of Duchess Margaret of York. Her husband Charles the Bold, duke of Burgundy, had died in 1477, leaving her childless, rich and unfulfilled. But her life found new meaning with the fall of the house of York in 1483–85. Thereafter, the grand passion of her life, which she pursued recklessly and with unrestrained partisanship, became the restoration of her family to the English throne. To achieve this, she would do anything and use anybody.
Now providence, it seemed, had placed the ideal weapon in her hands, and she greeted Warbeck’s arrival like manna from heaven: ‘[I] embraced him,’ she wrote, ‘as an only grandson or an only son’ – the son, of course, that she had never had. She gave him a bodyguard, clad in the Yorkist livery of murrey and blue, an official residence and a high-ranking official to manage his affairs.
Relations between England and the Netherlands were close, and news of Warbeck’s reception as duke of York spread like wildfire in England. If Margaret believed him to be her nephew Richard, it seems to have been reasoned, his claims must be true. And if Warbeck’s claims were true, then he, and not Henry VII, was rightful king of England.
Even the leading officers of Henry VII’s own household were persuaded, and by early 1493 were giving their support to Warbeck’s cause. John Ratcliffe, Lord Fitzwalter, the lord steward, committed himself in January. Then, in March, Sir William Stanley, the lord chamberlain and Henry’s saviour at the battle of Bosworth, threw his massive weight behind the conspiracy.
Henry VII, who had at least an inkling of these machinations, now faced a pincer movement as domestic treason threatened to combine with foreign invasion. One of his first responses, strikingly, involved Henry.
On 5 April 1493, Henry, as the king’s secundogenitus (‘second-born’) son, was made lord warden of the Cinque Ports and constable of Dover Castle. The joint position, which was responsible for England’s first line of defence against cross-Channel invasion, had been left vacant since the death of the previous holder, the earl of Arundel in 1487. It is easy to see why it needed filling as a matter of urgency to deal with Warbeck. But why the not-yet-two-year-old Henry? Was he simply a suitable dignified front for his deputy, Sir Edward Poynings, who was one of the strongmen of the regime and would do the real work?2
Or had it already been decided that the Tudors would deploy second son against pseudo-second son: Henry against Warbeck?
In fact the feared invasion did not happen, since Margaret alone did not have the resources to support one. She was rich and influential, but she was not the acting ruler of the Netherlands. That was Maximilian von Habsburg, archduke of Austria and, as king of the Romans, quasi-elective ruler of the confederation of German states known as the Holy Roman Empire. As if all that were not enough, Maximilian had married Charles the Bold’s only child by his first marriage, Mary. Mary had died in 1482 at the age of only twenty-five, leaving two children of the union: Philip the Fair, for whom Maximilian was acting as regent of the Netherlands, and Margaret.
Maximilian was Henry VII’s intended ally in the war against France. Indeed, it was Maximilian, rather than Henry, who had been personally injured by Charles VIII’s coup in seizing Brittany. The Duchess Anne, whom Charles had married, had already been betrothed to Maximilian; similarly, Maximilian’s daughter Margaret was herself betrothed to Charles, and on the strength of that had already been sent to live at the French court as the prospective queen of France. But, despite the double insult of losing a wife and having his daughter repudiated and returned home like unwanted goods, Maximilian came to terms with Charles. Instead, his venom over the affair was redirected against his erstwhile ally, Henry VII.
This meant that when Warbeck was sent to meet Maximilian in Germany, he got almost as warm a welcome from him as he had from Margaret herself, and was received with royal honours. These were redoubled the following year when Maximilian returned to the Netherlands to present his son Philip, who at sixteen had attained his majority, to his subjects as their duke. Ceremony after ceremony unrolled, each grander than the last: at Malines in August, at Louvain in September and finally at Antwerp on 24 October 1494. Throughout, Warbeck was treated as king-to-be of England. It was at Antwerp that the display reached its peak: his bodyguard of twenty archers wore the badge of the white rose, while the façade of his lodgings was hung with the royal arms of England, with an explanatory Latin inscription underneath: ‘The arms of Richard, prince of Wales and duke of York, son and heir of Edward IV, sometime by the grace of God, king of England, France and lord of Ireland.’
This insolent display was too much for a couple of Englishmen loyal to Henry VII. They armed themselves with a pot filled with night-soil and flung the stinking contents at Warbeck’s lodgings, before making good their escape.3 This small, if highly effective, piece of private initiative set Malines in uproar, and an innocent English bystander was stabbed to death for no other reason than his nationality.