Gairdner J. History of the Life and Reign of Richard the Third: To which is Added the Story of Perkin Warbeck from Original Documents

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THE STORY

PERKIN WARBECK

FROM ORIGINAL DOCUMENTS

THE STORY OF PERKIN WARBECK

FROM ORIGINAL DOCUMENTS.

THE

career of Perkin Warbeck, whatever may be thought

of his pretensions, was certainly in itself so extraordinary that

it is no wonder it gave rise, even from the first, to a good

many strange and inconsistent statements; and it is a mis-

fortune for English history that the student's chief guide

hitherto has been a mere summary of the case, written, of

course, with great vigour and clearness, but highly coloured

and from very imperfect information, by the great Lord Bacon

in his History of Henry the Seventh. Lord Bacon, indeed,

discredits the pretensions of the adventurer as most other

writers do; but he is clearly smitten with the love of the

marvellous, and, as we shall see, he considerably misinterprets

in some things the scanty records on which he founds his

narrative. But he really seems to have made use of all the

evidences available at the time he wrote; and as until our

own day there was very little more material by which to

form a judgment, historians have been generally content to

follow his guidance. It is the object of this paper, however,

to trace the career of Warbeck from contemporary documents,

most of which have been altogether unknown till the present

generation.

A few words, nevertheless, seem called for at the outset,

264 PERKIN WARBECK.

merely to state the case in a general way, from evidences

which have always been available.

Perkin Warbeck was executed as an impostor in the reign

of Henry VII. He pretended to be the younger of the two

young princes, the sons of Edward IV., who are commonly

supposed to have been murdered in the Tower in the days

of Richard III. That there were some who really entertained

such a belief in his day, it would be idle to dispute; but it

appears to me that such a

belief,

if well grounded, would

have produced more important consequences than it did.

Indeed, when one considers the high esteem for birth and

rank that has always prevailed in England, it becomes not

very easy to believe that a prince of the blood-royal could

have secreted

himself,

or been kept out of sight for years,

and been unable afterwards to prove his identity to the satis-

faction of his countrymen. What the real story of his ad-

ventures was if he was the person he pretended to be, no

pen has yet ventured to write and no brain to imagine; but

if we admit the common hypothesis that he was an impostor,

we have a pretty minute account of his early life which I

believe it will be found exceedingly difficult to impugn.

To this I may here add one argument that has not been

much taken into account. If Warbeck's pretensions were

true,

he was the brother of Henry's queen. What an act

then it must have been in Henry to send him to the gallows !

Lord Bacon, indeed, tells us that this king was no very in-

dulgent husband, aversion to the House of York having a

place even in his chamber and his bed. But this seems to

have been a mere surmise, not founded upon any real evi-

dence. The touching story recorded by some contemporary

pen, of the grief of both Henry and his queen on learning

of the death of Prince Arthur, and of the consolation which

each in turn gave to the other, speaks far more truly of the

real cordiality between them

. Can it be supposed that

Leland's

Collectanea,

v. 373, 374.

HIS CONFESSION. 265

Elizabeth of York was comforted by Henry in her sorrow

if her own brother had been put to death by Henry's order

The account of Warbeck's life, which I believe it will be

difficult to impugn, is that contained in his own confession.

It is true that a good many stories inconsistent with that con-

fession were circulated even in his own day, and some of

these have been adopted by historians in preference to the

more authentic narrative. The history of Warbeck was, evi-

dently from the first, the theme of much idle gossip, which

had no foundation in fact; while the repeated attempts to

explain the marvellous, and combine contradictory testimony,

have only, as might be expected, involved the facts of the

case in tenfold greater confusion. Each new generation of

historians has added something to the tale, until the whole

story has become so dressed up in the popular imagination,

that it cannot easily be cleared of exaggerations and mis-

statements.

To arrive at the simple truth, the most hopeful method

appears to me first to examine Warbeck's confession by the

light of other documents—such as letters written by or about

him from day to day in the course of his career—dismissing

for a time, or at least keeping in the background, though in

view, the evidence of contemporary historians who wrote some

years after the facts.

I am aware that Warbeck's confession has been considered

open to suspicion as having been uttered when he was in

Henry's power. Of course it is easy to imagine that, under

such circumstances, it was dictated, so that it only represents

what the king said of Warbeck, and not what Warbeck said

himself.

Be it so. Let us suppose it was not a voluntary

statement, but put into his mouth by Henry. This, then,

was the story the king was interested in disseminating; and,

indeed, we know from Bernard Andre"

that Henry ordered

it to be printed, so that we cannot doubt it served his purpose

Memorials

of Henry VII. p. 73.

266 PERKIN WARBECK.

to make it known. A printed document could not have failed

to be criticised at the time if there was any perversion of well-

known facts in it.

On the other hand, the minuteness of the particulars it

contained, •with its circumstantial statement of facts, of which

many persons then alive must have known the truth or false-

hood, is to my mind very strong evidence in its' favour. In

the first place, let it be remarked that Warbeck in this con-

fession speaks of both his parents in the present tense as

persons who were then alive and quite well known:—' My

father's name is John Osbeck—which said John Osbeck' (it

is added, perhaps by the chronicler, in a parenthesis) 'was

controller of the said town of Tournay;—and my mother's

name is Katharine de Faro.' Now, it so happens, as will

be seen in the course of this paper, that we have distinct

and separate testimony from other sources, on more than

one occasion during his career, to the fact of both Warbeck's

parents being then alive. Moreover, his birth and connections

were not altogether obscure; for the confession continues as

follows :—' And one of my grandsires upon my father's side

was named Diryck Osbeck, which died; after whose death

my grandmother was married unto the within-named Peter

Flamme that was receiver of the fore-named town of Tournay,

and dean of the boatmen that row upon the water or river

called Leschelde. And my grandsire upon my mother's side

was Peter de Faro, which had in his keeping the keys of the

gate of St John's within the same town of Tournay. Also

I had an uncle called Master John Stalyn dwelling in the

parish of St Pyas within the same town, which had married

my father's sister, whose name was Joan or Jane, with whom

I dwelled a certain season.' On the face of matters it is surely

very improbable that the persons here mentioned were unreal;

but if anyone be disposed to think so, the extracts from the

municipal archives of Tournay cited at the end of this paper

will dispel his doubts; for there we have Pierart Flan (or

HIS CONFESSION. 267

Peter Flamme as the confession calls him) the grandmother's

second husband, and Pierar Faron (or Peter de Faro) the

maternal grandfather, taking out their freedoms as burgesses

in February 1459—60, and Jehan de Werbecque the father,

son of the late Diericq de Werbecque doing the like in 1474,

besides other notices. The confession further states that while

a boy he was taken by his mother to Antwerp to learn Flemish,

and stayed half a year with a cousin named John Stienbeck,

an officer of the town; after which he was compelled to return

to Tournay by reason of the wars in Flanders, probably in

the year 1483 or 1484. From this date he gives a minute

account of his time for about three years, during which he

was placed in service under different masters at Antwerp and

at Middelburg. At Middelburg he was placed with a merchant

named John Strewe, 'for to learn the language,' and remained

with him from Christmas to Easter. He afterwards went into

Portugal with the wife of Sir Edward Brampton, an adherent

of the House of York. He remained a year in that country

in the service of a knight named Peter Vacz de Cogna, ' which

said knight,' he tells us, 'had but one eye.' Afterwards, de-

siring to see other countries, he took leave of him and entered

the service of a Breton merchant named Pregent Meno, who

in the course of time brought him to Ireland. There, we are

told, the citizens of Cork, seeing him dressed in the silk clothes

of his master (probably the goods in which his master traded),

insisted on doing him honour as a member of the Royal

House of York. At first they made him out to be the son

of Clarence, who had been in Ireland before; but he refused

to acknowledge it, and took oath to the contrary before John

le Wellen, Mayor of Cork. Then they said he was a bastard

of King Richard III.; but this, too, he denied. At last they

insisted that he was the Duke of York, son of Edward IV.,

and bade him not fear to assume the character, for they were

determined to be revenged on the King of England, and they

could assure him of the support of the Earls of Desmond and

268 PERKIN WARBECK.

Kildare. ' And so,' adds Perkin, ' against my will they made

me to learn English, and taught me what I should do and

say.'

Such is the story of Warbeck's early life as contained in

the confession. Walpole urges, as one objection to it, that

it makes him learn English twice over. But even if English

was the language which he was sent to learn at Middelburg

(though that is not quite clear) he could hardly have acquired

it to perfection between Christmas and Easter, when he was

in the service of John Strewe. He was probably then about

ten or eleven years old

, and though doubtless an apt scholar,

would naturally have required a little further teaching after

being a year in Portugal, even if there were no intermediate

wanderings, as I think there must have been. In this, there-

fore,

as in other things, notwithstanding Walpole's objections,

the confession appears to me to be thoroughly consistent, not

only, with

itself,

but with all the best sources of information

that we possess. In fact, it agrees with some other evidences

remarkably well. For Perkin, be it observed, first appeared

in Ireland in 1491, a youth of about seventeen, and whatever

acquaintance with English he had made six or seven years

before would naturally require to be improved. And it is

worth noting how the Earl of Kildare refers to him in a letter

written in February 1493. Kildare, there can be no doubt,

had encouraged his pretensions in 1491. He

himself,

as we

have seen, says in his confession that it was by the assurance

of support from the Earls of Kildare and Desmond that he

was emboldened to assume the character of Duke of York;

It appears from evidence cited by Sir Fred. Madden (Arc/ueol. xxvii.

161) that the Duke of York was bora on the 17th August, 1472. Warbeck,

however, supposed the character he was personating to have been not quite

nine years old in 1483; which, we may presume, nearly tallied with his

own age. Moreover the Venetian ambassador who saw him in London in

1497 says that he was then 23 (Venetian Calendar, vol. i. No. 760). So

that he seems to have been born in 1474.

FIRST APPEARANCE IN IRELAND. 269

and as Kildare was then Lord Deputy of Ireland, he could

not have better patronage. But, of course, such conduct was

not to be tolerated in a Lord Deputy, and Kildare very well

knew that in time he would be called to answer for it. He

was already, however, under a cloud and perhaps hoped for

immunity in some new Yorkist rising in which Henry should

be driven from the throne. Just before Warbeck's appearance

the king had summoned him to England, but he had got the

lords of Ireland to write in his favour that his presence in

that country was indispensable. Next year he was very natu-

rally discharged of his deputyship, and some of his servants

whom he had sent to the king with messages were imprisoned.

It was this which gave rise to his writing the letter above

referred to, in which he was bold enough to deny that he

had either 'lain with,' or given any countenance to, 'the

French lad,' as his enemies asserted'. If Warbeck could be

plausibly called ' the French lad' after his first appearance

in Ireland, is it not somewhat of a presumption that his

English was imperfect when he arrived there

It was in Ireland, in fact, that Perkin was educated to

play the part which he so long upheld. The Duchess of

Burgundy, no doubt, soon found him to be a useful instrument

against Henry VII., but the elaborate training he is said to

have received from her to enable him to personate the Duke

of York to perfection must be attributed to the imaginations

of historians. Lord Bacon assures us that she instructed him

carefully in the family history of Edward IV., and in every-

thing that concerned the Duke of York, whom he was to

personate; that she described to him ' the personages, linea-

ments, and features of the king and queen, his pretended

parents; and of his brother and sisters, and divers others that

were nearest to him in childhood, together with all passages,

some secret, some common, that were fit for a child's memory,

until the death of King Edward.' Further, if we are to believe

Letters,

&c,

Richard

HI. and Henry VII. ii. 55.