The War of the Roses (30 page)

The theory that Warbeck was really Prince Richard is plausible, and the pretender allegedly was able to show Yorkist visitors to his ‘court' in the Low Countries ‘secret marks' on his body that proved to veterans of Edward IV's court that he was genuine.
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This may, however, have been propaganda spread about by people committed to his cause and seeking to make it seem more plausible. His resemblance to Edward IV may be explainable by him being an illegitimate son of Clarence, who appears to have been at large (possibly in the Low Countries) in the years after the Duke's arrest in 1477 –and one of Warbeck's first backers at Cork in 1490, John Taylor, was a member of Clarence's household who was accused of trying to smuggle Clarence's legitimate son, Warwick, abroad at that time.
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Taylor was capable of taking Clarence's illegitimate son abroad as a potential pretender in 1477/8 and hiding him with the Warbeck family, and Duchess Margaret could have given sanctuary to her brother Clarence's son then and after 1485 decided to use him as ‘Prince Richard' to depose Henry. Does this explain why Warbeck was said by Brampton in 1496 not to have spoken English when he first knew him, in 1489–90?
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Prince Richard, born in 1473, would hardly have forgotten English if he left England as a ten-year-old in 1483; a son of Clarence's, born before 1477, could have done so if he had left England as a baby. The possibility that Warbeck was an illegitimate son of one of the senior males of the House of York must focus on Clarence, given his location as of 1490 and his age–he was supposed to have been born around 1474/5.
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He was too young to have been a son of Edward IV or Richard III, born during their exile in the Low Countries in winter 1471–2; and Edward and Richard both acknowledged at least one illegitimate son born in England (Arthur and John) so it is unlikely that a discarded mistress of theirs would have been unable to secure money for her son's upbringing in England (or faced hostility from their wives) and so moved abroad.

Two more points can be raised about Warbeck's real identity and the possibility that he was not just the son of a Flemish boatman with a coincidental resemblance to Edward IV. This is not to say that he was Prince Richard–merely that the ‘official' Tudor version of events put about at the time of his capture in 1497 has problems. Firstly, the ‘confession' that Warbeck signed up to and was quickly distributed across England and Europe shows signs of having been prepared by the government beforehand, not dictated by Warbeck himself. It was sent out so quickly that the logistics of printing it ‘from scratch' in the time available were difficult.
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There were two versions, one in English for Henry's subjects to read of the pretender's lowly origins, presumption, and sinister foreign sponsors and one in French to disabuse his foreign backers about his real identity. The terminology used in the French version's–inaccurate–account of events in and around Tournai is that of ‘literary' French as would have been used by an English-speaker (a Tudor court writer?) rather than the local Picardy patois that Warbeck himself would have spoken and written.
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It made two crucial mistakes–it gave the wrong Christian name for Warbeck's mother, Nicaise (called Catherine in the text), and it gave the wrong professions for Warbeck's father and grandfather. His godfather, Pierre Flan, was described as his grandfather. There were also mistakes concerning local geography and customs in Tournai, which a long-term resident would have known were wrong.
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The same mistakes were made in a rather odd and forced-sounding letter that Warbeck allegedly wrote to his mother after his arrest, which does not read naturally and has the same idiosyncratic spelling as the ‘confession' –it seems to have been written or composed by the same, non-local author.
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The question arises of whether Warbeck knew these details were wrong but was too scared or depressed to correct them, whether his interrogators did not bother to correct them when he pointed this out as it would mean rewriting the text, or whether Warbeck let the mistakes pass as a deliberate sign to his backers that he had been forced to sign up to a pack of lies.
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Another point worth noting is that his account of his early years refers to his having been ‘ill' for a long time in 1483–4. This would imply that he was not seen in public by the locals in Tournai–so was this when he was introduced to the Warbeck household as replacement for the ‘real' Pierre Warbeck and was coached in his new identity by his sponsors?

 

(iii) Could Warbeck have overthrown Henry? And when?

 

(a) The plots of 1492–5

The thorny question of Warbeck's real identity is less important than the perceived ‘fact' that he could have been Prince Richard, as accepted by a number of the new King's courtiers in the early to mid 1490s, and there was no way of proving that he was not the Prince without producing the latter's body. There may have been secret searches of the Tower of London for the missing boys' remains, but if so they were unsuccessful; nor did the alleged murderer who ‘confessed' in 1502, Sir James Tyrrell, oblige Henry by giving details of where to look or at least provide a coherent anonymous story of Ricardian villainy that could be circulated. For that matter, if Sir Thomas More was able to state in c. 1510 that at least one of the alleged killers was still at large (presumably in London) and could end up hanged for his (further?) crimes it should not have been beyond Henry's intelligence service's resources to track the man down in the early-mid 1490s and force him to confess.
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A confession would seem ‘forced' and might not be believed –but the same could apply to Warbeck's confession. As Henry had not even specifically named Richard III as the killer in 1485–6 or held a Requiem Mass for his ‘late' brothers-in-law it would seem that he had little idea what had happened and preferred to avoid stirring up more debate by poking around in the mystery when he could not produce answers. There was one odd incident in spring 1495 when Henry's Captain of the Guard, visiting Duchess Margaret and meeting Warbeck, blustered that the real Prince was dead and he could show anyone the chapel where he was buried (possibly one of the two in the Tower); but in that case why had Henry not revealed this ‘fact' and held a public memorial service? The most useful time to publicize a confession to regicide by Tyrrell (or someone else) was while Warbeck the ‘fake Prince' was still at large, not 1502 when he was safely dead–and even in 1502 Henry only apparently showed Tyrrell's account around the court and it was not printed.
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But this gave Warbeck a major advantage throughout his period at liberty, and his backers made the most of it. Notoriously, even Henry's stepfather's brother, Lord Chamberlain Sir William Stanley, apparently seriously considered that Warbeck might be genuine in 1494–5 and pledged that he could–or would?–support him.
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This was ‘treason' at the very heart of the court, or at least chronic insecurity by ‘fence-sitting' nobles fearing another invasion, and its committers could even argue that as
Titulus Regius
had been repealed Prince Richard was the rightful king so it was not treason. The belief that Warbeck could be genuine extended widely across the senior ranks of society, according to Polydore Vergil
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–and this sort of commitment could have had a ‘snowball effect'.

Believing that Warbeck could be the rightful king was not the same thing as actively plotting his ‘restoration', and a question mark remains over how dangerous the actual ‘plot' of 1494–5 was. As named in the later ‘official' version of events, the plotters at court included Stanley, his brother-in-law Sir Humphrey Strange, Steward of the Household Lord Fitzwalter, and Sir Giles Debenham. The crucial evidence to arrest the activists was provided by Sir Robert Clifford, son of a Lancastrian peer killed in the second battle of St Albans in 1460 and a veteran of Stoke in 1487; he apparently masterminded the initial grouping of conspirators in spring 1493 and then crossed over to Flanders with his father-in-law, William Barley, to contact Duchess Margaret at Malines.
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He then took up residence at Warbeck's ‘court', where the leading Yorkist figures were the shady John Taylor and John Atwater who had masterminded (or just taken advantage of?) Warbeck's first appearance at Cork in 1491. Duchess Margaret wrote to Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain to assure them that he was genuine.
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It seems that Henry expected an invasion of England in summer 1493 as he set up his headquarters at Kenilworth and put a watch on the coasts as in 1487, but none materialized; Maximilian had other priorities across central Europe, and his father Emperor Frederick (aged 78) was to die that autumn so logically he was waiting to secure his succession to the latter's title and lands before acting. He invited Warbeck to Vienna–as ‘Richard IV'–for the funeral, but only arrived in person in the Low Countries with his guest in summer 1494. There, Maximilian's son and heir Philip was invested as the local Duke of Brabant in October, with Warbeck in attendance–a shield was put up in public proclaiming his heraldic arms as King of England but was pulled down by Henry's supporters, leading to scuffles.
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Crucially, no invasion took place, although Charles VIII offered Warbeck ships too
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–the first time that both France and the Empire were simultaneously hostile to England, though (as in the next case of this in 1538) they were unlikely to co-ordinate an invasion.

Crucially, at the end of 1494 Henry's agents persuaded Sir Robert Clifford to defect back to England via Calais. He allegedly provided ‘proof' that Warbeck was a fake, and a vital list of the pretender's court and Church sympathizers.
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They were supposed to be planning the assassinate the King, how effectively is impossible to judge. Arrests followed early in 1495, an impressive list including not only Stanley and Lord Fitzwalter but a number of top Churchmen–Dean Worsley of St Paul's Cathedral, Friar William Richford the leader (‘Provincial') of the Dominican Order in England, another senior Dominican friar (the Prior of King's Langley, Hertfordshire), John Kendall the Prior of the Knights of St John of Jerusalem, and William Sutton (priest at St Stephen's Wallbrook in London, a famous preacher). Dr William Hussey, Archdeacon of London, and James Keating (prior of Kilmainham and head of the Knights of St John in Ireland) were also involved, and possibly Bishop Thomas Langton of Winchester. Kendall was the most dangerous of them, as a senior figure in a semi-autonomous Knightly Order who handled their funds and correspondence across Europe and could use both to benefit Warbeck. He was also on Henry's Council and ironically helped to negotiate the Anglo-French treaty in 1492, which removed Warbeck's first foreign patron–and unlike with Stanley, there is evidence of his active ill-will towards the King. According to the 1496 confession of his agent Bernard de Vignolles, during a trip to Rome in 1492 Kendall (who could travel abroad on Order business without arousing Tudor suspicion) asked him to hire a poisoner to murder the King and his family, and a bizarre episode resulted with an astrologer promising him a box of poisonous ointment, which he could smear on a doorpost in Henry's apartments and so incite anyone who came into contact with it (smell or touch?) to regicide. It was allegedly so toxic that exposing it to open air was dangerous to its carrier, so the question of how safe its user would be helped to put de Vignolles off and he threw it away and substituted a fake.
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Assuming the whole episode was not invented, it indicates Kendall's determination to be rid of the King if not his commonsense; and his network of Hospitaller links made him very useful to avoid detection.

Laymen included Thomas Cressener, son of a relative and legatee of Edward IV's elderly mother Duchess Cecily of York, and two of the Brampton family who lived near her residence at Berkhamsted Castle–also close to the priory at King's Langley. William Daubeny, clerk of the Jewel House, and Warwickshire military veteran Sir Simon Mountford of Coleshill (who sent £30 via his son to Warbeck) took part too. Sir Thomas Thwaites, treasurer of the garrison at Calais (and former Chancellor of the Exchequer to Edward IV) and military official Sir Robert Radcliffe represented a dangerous ‘Yorkist cell' at Calais. In these circumstances, Henry's choice of the secure Tower of London for his residence over Christmas 1494 and New Year 1495 was clearly not only to enable him to be on hand to interrogate suspects. Stanley ended up executed for treason on 16 February after a round of executions of the lesser lay suspects, the clergy escaping this fate by reason of legal immunity. But Fitzwalter was not sentenced until the autumn, was reprieved and deported to prison at Calais, and was finally executed in 1496 for plotting to escape.
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The extent and identities of the conspirators made the plot sound like a serious threat and it was portrayed as such, though it should be remembered that no attempt at a coup by regicide and domestic revolt succeeded in medieval or Tudor England. A plot plus foreign invasion would have been far more dangerous, and to that extent Henry was lucky in that 1494 had seen Charles VIII of France take his army off to Italy to overrun both assorted North Italian states (principally Milan) and then the distant Kingdom of Naples. He and his geo-strategic rival Maximilian were thus otherwise preoccupied at the time of maximum danger for England, and the new Emperor could not follow up his provocative parading of ‘Richard IV' in Flanders in autumn 1494 with an expedition to aid him, though he apparently asked the rulers of Saxony to provide troops. Duchess Margaret promised an expedition for February 1495, which never materialized.