Famous Imposters 2

Famous Imposters 2

The two last mentioned were the princes murdered in the Tower by their malignant

uncle. These three murders placed Richard Duke of Gloucester on the

throne, but at a cost of blood as well as of lesser considerations

which it is hard to estimate. Richard III left behind him a legacy of

evil consequences which was far-reaching. Henry VII, who succeeded

him, had naturally no easy task in steering through the many family

complications resulting from the long-continued “Wars of the Roses”;

but Richard’s villany had created a new series of complications on

a more ignoble, if less criminal, base. When Ambition, which deals

in murder on a wholesale scale, is striving its best to reap the

results aimed at, it is at least annoying to have the road to success

littered with the débris of lesser and seemingly unnecessary crimes.

Fraud is socially a lesser evil than murder; and after all--humanly

speaking--much more easily got rid of. Thrones and even dynasties were

in the melting pot between the reigns of Edward III and Henry VII; so

there were quite sufficient doubts and perplexities to satisfy the

energies of any aspirant to royal honours--however militant he might

be. Henry VII’s time was so far unpropitious that he was the natural

butt of all the shafts of unscrupulous adventure. The first of these

came in the person of Lambert Simnel, the son of a baker, who in 1486

set himself up as Edward Plantagenet, Earl of Warwick--then a prisoner

in the Tower--son of the murdered Duke of Clarence. It was manifestly

a Yorkist plot, as he was supported by Margaret Duchess Dowager of

Burgundy (sister of Edward IV) and others. With the assistance of the

Lord-Deputy (the Earl of Kildare) he was crowned in Dublin as King

Edward VI. The pretensions of Simnel were overthrown by the exhibition

of the real Duke of Warwick, taken from prison for the purpose. The

attempt would have been almost comic but that the effects were tragic.

Simnel’s span of notoriety was only a year, the close of which was

attended with heavy slaughter of his friends and mercenaries. He

himself faded into the obscurity of the minor life of the King’s

household to which he was contemptuously relegated. In fact the whole

significance of the plot was that it was the first of a series of

frauds consequent on the changes of political parties, and served as a

_balon d’essai_ for the more serious imposture of Perkin Warbeck some

five years afterwards. It must, however, be borne in mind that Simnel

was a pretender on his own account and not in any way a “pacemaker” for

the later criminal; he was in the nature of an unconscious forerunner,

but without any ostensible connection. Simnel went his way, leaving,

in the words of the kingly murderer his uncle, the world free for his

successor in fraud “to bustle in.”

 

[Illustration: PERKIN WARBECK]

 

The battle of Stoke, near Newark--the battle which saw the end of the

hopes of Simnel and his upholders--was fought on 16 June, 1487. Five

years afterwards Perkin Warbeck made his appearance in Cork as Richard

Plantagenet Duke of York. The following facts regarding him and his

life previous to 1492 may help to place the reader in a position to

understand other events and to find causes through the natural gateway

of effects.

 

To Jehan Werbecque (or Osbeck as he was called in Perkin’s

“confession”), Controller of the town of Tournay in Picardy, and his

wife, _née_ Katherine de Faro, was born in 1474, a son christened

Pierrequin and later known as Perkin Warbeck. The Low Countries in the

fifteenth century were essentially manufacturing and commercial, and,

as all countries were at that period of necessity military, growing

youths were thus in touch at many points with commerce, industry and

war. Jehan Werbecque’s family was of the better middle class, as

witness his own position and employment; and so his son spent the

earlier years of his life amid scenes and conditions conducive to

ambitious dreams. He had an uncle John Stalyn of Ghent. A maternal aunt

was married to Peter Flamme, Receiver of Tournay and also Dean of the

Guild of Schelde Boatmen. A cousin, John Steinbeck, was an official of

Antwerp.

 

In the fifteenth century Flanders was an important region in the

manufacturing and commercial worlds. It was the centre of the cloth

industry; and the coming and going of the material for the clothing of

the world made prosperous the shipmen not only of its own waters but

those of others. The ships of the pre-Tudor navy were small affairs

and of light draught suitable for river traffic, and be sure that the

Schelde with its facility of access to the then British port of Calais,

to Lille, to Brussels, to Bruges, to Tournai, Ghent, and Antwerp, was

often itself a highway to the scenes of Continental and British wars.

 

About 1483 or 1484, on account of the Flemish War, Pierrequin left

Tournay, proceeding to Antwerp, and to Middleburg, where he took

service with a merchant, John Strewe, he being then a young boy of ten

or twelve. His next move was to Portugal, whither he went with the wife

of Sir Edward Brampton, an adherent of the House of York. A good deal

of his early life is told in his own confession made whilst he was a

prisoner in the Tower about 1497.

 

In Portugal he was for a year in the service of a Knight named Peter

Vacz de Cogna, who, according to a statement in his confession, had

only one eye. In the Confession he also states in a general way that

with de Cogna he visited other countries. After this he was with a

Breton merchant, Pregent Meno, of whom he states incidentally: “he made

me learn English.” Pierrequin Werbecque must have been a precocious

boy--if all his statements are true--for when he went to Ireland in

1491 with Pregent Meno he was only seventeen years of age, and there

had been already crowded into his life a fair amount of the equipment

for enterprise in the shape of experience, travel, languages, and so

forth.

 

It is likely that, to some extent at all events, the imposture of

Werbecque, or Warbeck, was forced on him in the first instance, and

was not a free act on his own part. His suitability to the part he

was about to play was not altogether his own doing. Nay, it is more

than possible that his very blood aided in the deception. Edward IV

is described as a handsome debonair young man, and Perkin Warbeck it

is alleged, bore a marked likeness to him. Horace Walpole indeed in

his _Historic Doubts_ builds a good deal on this in his acceptance of

his kingship. Edward was notoriously a man of evil life in the way of

affairs of passion, and at all times the way of ill-doing has been

made easy for a king. Any student of the period and of the race of

Plantagenet may easily accept it as fact that the trend of likelihood

if not of evidence is that Perkin Warbeck was a natural son of Edward

IV. Three hundred years later the infamous British Royal Marriage

Act made such difficulties or inconveniences as beset a king in the

position of Edward IV unnecessary: but in the fifteenth century the

usual way out of such messes was ultimately by the sword. Horace

Walpole, who was a clever and learned man, was satisfied that the

person who was known as Perkin Warbeck was in reality that Richard Duke

of York who was supposed to have been murdered in the Tower in 1483

by Sir James Tyrrell, in furtherance of the ambitious schemes of his

uncle. At any rate the people in Cork in 1491 insisted on receiving

Perkin as of the House of York--at first as a son of the murdered

Duke of Clarence. Warbeck took oath to the contrary before the Mayor

of Cork; whereupon the populace averred that he was a natural son of

Richard III. This, too, having been denied by the newcomer, it was

stated that he was the son of the murdered Duke of York.

 

It cannot be denied that the Irish people were in this matter as

unstable as they were swift in their judgments, so that their actions

are really not of much account. Five years before they had received

the adventurer Lambert Simnel as their king, and he had been crowned

at Dublin. In any case the allegations of Warbeck’s supporters did

not march with established facts of gynecology. The murdered Duke of

York was born in 1472, and, as not twenty years elapsed between this

period and Warbeck’s appearance in Ireland, there was not time in the

ordinary process of nature, for father and son to have arrived at

such a quality of manhood that the latter was able to appear as full

grown. Even allowing for an unusual swiftness of growth common sense

evidently rebelled at this, and in 1492 Perkin Warbeck was received in

his final semblance of the Duke of York, himself younger son of Edward

IV. Many things were possible at a period when the difficulties of

voyage and travel made even small distances insuperable. At the end of

the fifteenth century Ireland was still so far removed from England

that even Warbeck’s Irish successes, emphasised though they were by the

Earls of Desmond and Kildare and a numerous body of supporters, were

unknown in England till considerably later. This is not strange if one

will consider that not until centuries later was there a regular postal

system, and that nearly two centuries later the Lord Chief Justice

Sir Matthew Hale, who was a firm believer in witchcraft, would have

condemned such a thing as telegraphy as an invention of the Devil.

 

In the course of a historical narrative like the present it must be

borne in mind (amongst other things) that in the fifteenth century,

men ripened more quickly than in the less strenuous and more luxurious

atmosphere of our own day. Especially in the Tudor epoch physical gifts

counted for far more than is now possible; and as early (and too often

sudden) death was the general lot of those in high places, the span of

working life was prolonged rather by beginning early than by finishing

late. Even up to the time of the Napoleonic Wars, promotion was often

won with a rapidity that would seem like an ambitious dream to young

soldiers of to-day. Perkin Warbeck, born in 1474, was nineteen years of

age in 1493, at which time the Earl of Kildare spoke of “this French

lad,” yet even then he was fighting King Henry VII, the Harry Richmond

who had overthrown at Bosworth the great and unscrupulous Richard III.

It must also be remembered for a proper understanding of his venture,

that Perkin Warbeck was strongly supported and advised with great

knowledge and subtlety by some very resolute and influential persons.

Amongst these, in addition to his Irish “Cousins” Kildare and Desmond,

was Margaret, Duchess of Burgundy, sister of Edward IV, who helped the

young adventurer in his plot by “coaching” him up in the part which

he was to play, to such an extent that, according to Lord Bacon, he

was familiar with the features of his alleged family and relatives and

even with the sort of questions likely to be asked in this connection.

In fact he was, in theatrical parlance, not only properly equipped

but “letter-perfect” in his part. Contemporary authority gives as

an additional cause for this personal knowledge, that the original

Jehan de Warbecque was a converted Jew, brought up in England, of

whom Edward IV was the godfather. In any case it may in this age be

accepted as a fact that there was between Edward IV and Perkin Warbeck

so strong a likeness as to suggest a _prima facie_ possibility, if

not a probability, of paternity. Other possibilities crowd in to the

support of such a guess till it is likely to achieve the dimensions of

a belief. Even without any accuracy of historical detail there is quite

sufficient presumption to justify guess-work on general lines. It were