How to Murder Your Medieval Royal Relatives

You would think that being a member of the royal family would set you up for a life of luxury and security wouldn't you?  Well you would be wrong as being a royal in history has sometimes been a very hazardous occupation, especially if you were a royal child.  If we travel back to medieval times and take a look at the history of the English royal family, you will soon discover that family feuds were common and that several members of the Plantagenet family were murdered or disappeared in mysterious circumstances.  So let us have a look at some of these unfortunate royals and find out a bit more about their tragic fates.

King John's Tomb in Worcester Cathedral

Shortly after the Norman Conquest, King William II, better known as William Rufus because of the ruddy appearance of his face, was one of the first to meet with an untimely end.  This unfortunate monarch was out hunting on a summer’s day in 1100 in the New Forest when an arrow pierced his chest and killed him.  Things being what they were back then, as soon as they realised that their monarch was dead, the rest of the hunting party, which included his brother Henry, promptly departed, rushing off back to secure their own estates leaving William Rufus’s corpse lying on the forest floor.  Even the young Prince Henry high tailed it to Winchester to make sure that he would get his hands on the royal treasury before anybody else could claim it and then went on to London where he had himself crowned King of England within a few days. The contemporary chroniclers claimed that it had not been murder, but had just been an unfortunate hunting accident, but as William Rufus had not been a popular king, either with his barons or the Church, it was perhaps inevitable that rumours would abound that William Rufus had been murdered. It was recorded that it fell to a man called Purkis, who was a local charcoal burner, to rescue the royal corpse and take it on his cart to Winchester.

King John enjoys a generally bad reputation even for a Plantagenet king, as he has been widely vilified through the tales of Robin Hood, the outlaw who robbed the rich to give to the poor, as the wicked prince who was trying to steal the crown of his hero brother, King Richard the Lionheart.  King John probably deserves a lot of this evil legacy, as he spent a lot of time waging war and generally trying to get one up on his elder brothers and fairly regularly fell out with the Pope to the extent that he would be excommunicated and the whole country of England placed under interdict. However, it was the mysterious disappearance of his young nephew Arthur of Brittany that could have been the most nefarious deed of his unsavoury career.  Arthur of Brittany was the posthumous son of John’s elder brother Geoffrey Duke of Brittany, who had been killed in a tournament.  A fatherless royal child in possession of vast estates, fortune and titles would always have the wolves circling, and young Arthur became a pawn in the power games between John, Richard the Lionheart and King Philip II of France.  After Richard the Lionheart’s death, John managed to seize the throne of England, but as Arthur of Brittany had declared himself a vassal of the King of France, the French nobility were keen to place the English crown on Arthur’s head instead.  The new King John was forced to invade France in 1202 to combat this threat and, under the terms of the treaty of Le Goulet, Arthur of Brittany was forced to change his allegiance and acknowledge King John of England as his overlord.

King John fairly swiftly fell out with the French King again, and the Philip II gave his territories of Normandy and Anjou to young Arthur.  Even though he was still only a young teenager, Arthur of Brittany decided to assert his authority in his lands by besieging his own grandmother, the indomitable Eleanor of Aquitaine, in the castle at Mirebeau.  Eleanor of Aquitaine managed to alert King John to her peril and he raced to rescue her and imprisoned his young nephew at the same time.  The youthful prince was first imprisoned at Falaise in Normandy under the stewardship of William de Braose and the following year he was sent to captivity in the castle at Rouen.  Sometime in April of 1203, Arthur of Brittany mysteriously vanished, never to be seen again.  Although nothing was ever proved or officially recorded, the finger of blame was pointed squarely at King John, with rumours saying that the English monarch had killed his young nephew in a drunken rage and then thrown his body in the Seine, or that Arthur had been blinded and the gelded by the King’s agents and had died of shock and blood loss.   Again we shall probably never know the truth of the matter, but if King John did not murder his nephew, what did happen to poor Arthur of Brittany?

So moving up through the centuries, King Edward II was an ineffectual King of England, who was prone to having unpopular favourites and could not keep control of his barons.  He was married to Isabella of France who, when on an official trip to France, met an exiled English baron called Roger Mortimer, and became his mistress.  The new power couple decided that they had had enough of the dithering King Edward II and his latest favourites the Despensers, and invaded England in 1326. Their army met with little resistance, and they easily took over the country, capturing the Despensers and King Edward in the process.  The Despensers were summarily executed and Edward was imprisoned in Berkeley Castle.  Edward II was deposed in favour of his young son, who became King Edward III.

Tomb of King Edward II in Gloucester Cathedral

Although he was in captivity, Edward II still posed a threat to the new administration and he was found murdered on 11^th October 1327, supposedly by agents of Queen Isabella and Roger Mortimer.  Contemporary chroniclers stated that the unfortunate Plantagenet monarch had either been strangled or suffocated, but in later years a rather more lurid legend grew up that Edward II had been killed by having a red-hot poker thrust into his nether parts.  This gruesome story has never been substantiated and there are historians that argue that, in fact, Edward II was not killed in Berkeley Castle at all but survived in exile on the Continent until around 1341.  But what goes around comes around as they say, and in time the young monarch Edward III grew tired of being dominated by his powerful mother and her lover, so in 1330 he seized Roger Mortimer and had sent him to the Tower of London. Roger Mortimer was accused without even getting a trial and was taken to Tyburn where he was hung, drawn and quartered as a common traitor.

Of course the biggest, baddest, wickedest uncle of them all, at least according to William Shakespeare, is King Richard III, who stands accused by history of murdering his two young nephews, known as the Princes in the Tower.  Before the death of his big brother, King Edward IV, in 1483 he had enjoyed an entirely untarnished reputation.  Unlike his brother George of Clarence, he had always remained loyal to his brother and worked hard in the North at keeping England’s border with Scotland secure.  However, he was not a fan of King Edward’s wife Elizabeth Woodville, and was highly suspicious of the lands and titles that she induced her husband to shower onto her large and rapacious family.  Edward IV’s death in 1483 was both premature and unexpected, and as Richard III had been named Lord Protector, he hastily assembled an army and marched south to meet up with his young nephew, who was now the new King Edward V and was being escorted to London by his maternal uncle Anthony Woodville, Earl Rivers.  

Richard had Anthony Woodville arrested and then executed and took his nephew to the Tower of London, the traditional lodging place of English kings before their coronation. The widowed queen, Elizabeth Woodville, had fled into sanctuary with her younger son and daughters, but Richard persuaded her to allow Richard of York to join his older brother at the Tower.  Both the young lads were reported being seen around the Tower of London and playing in the gardens and preparations for Edward’s coronation proceeded.  However, just before the coronation, Richard seized the crown for himself and was crowned as King Richard III.  Sightings of the two young princes began to dwindle and rumours started to fly that they had been murdered to make the throne safer for their uncle.  However, although their supposed murder has been carefully investigated by many historians, there has never been any concrete evidence come to light that Richard III murdered the Princes in the Tower.  In fact, there is no real evidence that they were killed at all, and many stories circulated about their continued existence and several pretenders, such as Lambert Simnel and Perkin Warbeck, came forward to declare that they were one or other of the boys.

So as you see, being a medieval royal in England could prove fatal and it was your own royal relatives that you had the most to fear from.  It wasn’t only uncles and wives that could be murderous; Henry IV locked his first cousin Richard II up in Pontefract Castle after he seized the throne and reportedly starved him to death.  So next time that you bemoan how ordinary your life is, remember that there is nothing romantic or exciting about being murdered, however exciting we think that these historic tales are.

King John Tomb image Wikimedia Commons Public Domain
King Edward II image Wikimedia Commons Public Domain

Anne and Isobel Neville – Pawns in the War of the Roses

Do you have a glamorous view of history? Do you think that the Anne and Isobel Neville lived exciting, dazzling lives or were controlled as pawns in a high risk political game? Much of how we perceive our past has been shaped by films, TV and historical novels where handsome knights romance beautiful ladies in gorgeous frocks. The reality, however, was somewhat different.  For most ordinary people, life consisted of hard work, little education, poor healthcare and hygiene and very few chances to get ahead in life. For women it was even harder, as they were viewed as possessions of their families and were married off as advantageously as possible.  Love was not considered to be a factor; even liking your future spouse was not taken into consideration in many cases.  The life of a poor woman consisted of hard work, marriage, bearing children and struggling to bring them up.  Infant mortality was high and women had large families, where sometimes very few of the children reached adulthood.

Richard III and Anne Neville, Rous Roll

But what if you were a princess or born into an aristocratic family like Anne and Isobel Neville?  Surely then your life would have been more like the Hollywood movie? Not really, is the answer.  Royal and noble women in medieval times were still controlled by their family.  They would have been reared with the skills to run a large household and be a mother, but they probably had been betrothed at a young age to someone they might not even have met.  Their lives would have been more comfortable and they would have the beautiful gowns and jewels, but their lives could still be cut cruelly short by disease or death in childbirth.

So let’s have a look at the lives of these two sisters in 15^th century England, who on the surface of things seemed to have had such romantic and exciting lives? Isobel and Anne Neville were both born at Warwick Castle; Isobel in 1451 and Anne in 1456.  Their parents were Richard Neville, Earl of Warwick and his wife Anne Beauchamp.  The couple were to have no further children and this would be a grievous blow to the Earl as it meant that he had no heir. Girls at that time could inherit property and estates, but not carry on the title. Both of the girls spent much of their childhood at Middleham Castle in Yorkshire in the company of Richard the young Duke of Gloucester, George Duke of Clarence and Francis Lovell.  Their childhood was played out against the violent backdrop of the War of the Roses and they were both to become pawns in the struggle for the throne.

The Earl of Warwick supported the claim of Edward of York and helped him onto the throne as King Edward IV.  Edward was the elder brother of George of Clarence and Richard of Gloucester, and this is why Warwick took them into his household and was keen for them to become close to his daughters.  He was looking to consolidate his power by marrying them to the two royal princes, who at this time were still Edward’s heirs.  The Earl of Warwick became dissatisfied with his rewards for helping Edward IV gain the throne and was outraged when he married the widow Elizabeth Grey, humiliating him as he was negotiating an alliance for Edward with a French princess.  He was desperately unhappy with the amount of titles, lands and money that Edward lavished on his new wife’s family and what he regarded as the new Queen’s grasping, avaricious nature.

In 1469 Isobel was betrothed to George of Clarence.  This was against the king’s wishes as he believed that the union would bring too much power and influence to Warwick. Because of Edward’s disapproval, Warwick took the young couple to Calais where they were married on 11^th July 1469 by Warwick’s brother George Neville, Archbishop of York.  The Duke of Clarence turned traitor against his brother the King and threw his lot in with Warwick and the Lancastrians who were plotting to overthrow Edward IV and restore Henry VI to the throne.

 At this time the Lancastrian forces were led by Henry VI’s wife Marguerite of Anjou, and to cement their alliance the Earl of Warwick offered his 14 years old daughter Anne in marriage to the 17 year old Prince of Wales.  They were formally betrothed at the Chateau d’Amboise with the blessing of the French king.  The Earl of Warwick had Anne’s sister Isobel in his train along with her traitorous husband George, Duke of Clarence.

However, after Anne was married to Edward, Prince of Wales, Clarence perceived this to be a snub to him and his pretensions to power.  So he threw himself on his brother’s mercy and betrayed Warwick to return to his brother’s side with his large army.  Marguerite of Anjou had been suspicious of Warwick’s motives because of Clarence’s presence, but Warwick returned to England to fight to restore Henry VI to the throne.  He was initially successful but was eventually killed at the Battle of Barnet early in 1471.

 

Anne Neville returned to England with Marguerite and Edward, but their army was defeated at the Battle of Tewkesbury in May 1471.  Her young husband was killed and she was imprisoned along with Marguerite.   It has been argued that Richard of Gloucester was closely involved in the death of the young Prince of Wales, as he himself wanted to marry Anne. Again it has been argued that this was because he was in love with her or, more cynically perhaps, that it was because he wanted to get his hands on the estates and possessions of her late father and her mother’s vast Beauchamp inheritance. She was taken first to Coventry and then to the household of her sister and brother-in-law, the Duke of Clarence who was once more back in the Yorkist fold.

Richard of Gloucester asked his brother Edward IV for Anne’s hand in marriage, which outraged Clarence who believed that he should get the lion’s share of the Warwick estates and titles.   There is a story that Anne was either so scared of Clarence that she ran away and worked as a kitchen maid in a chophouse in the city or was put there by the Clarence to keep her out of Richard’s hands.  Richard supposedly tracked her down and placed her in sanctuary at Westminster Abbey until they could be married on 12^th July 1472, with the King’s blessing.  Richard was allocated much of Warwick’s former estates after his marriage. He was also appointed Governor of the North and the young ducal couple spent most of their time at Middleham Castle.  Their only child, a son called Edward, was born there some time in 1473.

Warwick Castle

The Clarence’s first child was stillborn, but in 1473 their daughter Margaret was born and in 1475 she was followed by their son Edward.  Tragically, Isobel died the following year at the very young age of 25, probably from consumption.  After Isobel’s death, Clarence continued to plot against his brother the King and was finally imprisoned in the Tower of London.  He was executed privately there in 1478 and there is a legend that he was killed by being drowned in a butt of Malmsey wine.  Anne Neville, as their aunt, took his two young children into her care.  Isobel and George’s son Edward later became Earl of Warwick and Earl of Salisbury, but historians believe that he may have had learning difficulties.  After the Battle of Bosworth, Henry VII kept him in prison because of his claim to the throne and he was executed in 1499 supposedly because he had been plotting to escape with the pretender Perkin Warbeck.   Their daughter Margaret was married to Sir Richard Pole and had five children and she was allowed to take the title Countess of Salisbury.  When she was 67 year old she was charged with treason by Henry VIII and beheaded.  There is a story that she refused to lay her head on the block and that the inexperienced executioner had to strike her with his axe ten times before he managed to kill her.

Edward IV died prematurely in 1483, and after confronting the Woodville’s and declaring his two nephews illegitimate, Richard took the crown and Anne was crowned Queen and their son Edward created Prince of Wales.  Edward tragically died suddenly at Sheriff Hutton Castle in April 1484 at the age of 11.  His mother Anne was already suffering from consumption and seemed unlikely to bear another child.  Rumours apparently sprang up at the Court that Richard was planning to divorce Anne and marry his niece Elizabeth of York. When Anne Neville died in March 1485 at the young age of 28, more rumours arose that Richard had poisoned her so that he could marry a healthy young wife who could bear him an heir.  Anne Neville died in the Palace of Westminster during an eclipse of the sun. She was buried in an unmarked grave in Westminster Abbey, and there was no memorial for her until in 1960 the Richard III Society installed a bronze tablet.  Her husband, Richard III died a few months later during the Battle of Bosworth, ending the rule of Plantagenet kings in England.

So however entrancing the lives of these two women may seem to have seemed on the surface, in reality they both died tragically young, after suffering from consumption (tuberculosis).   In their short lives they had been used as political pawns first by their father, the Earl of Warwick and then by the two Plantagenet brothers they were married to.  They knew the heartache of losing children at a young age and had had to bear the grief of the deaths of many of their close relatives and companions on the battlefield or on the scaffold, including their own father and Anne’s youthful first husband. Their stories make a good historical tale, but did they have a happy, fulfilled life?

Richard III family image Wikimedia Commons Public Domain

Warwick Castle Image Roland Turner Wikimedia Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike 2.0 Generic

Have They Found the Lost Burial of King Richard III?

You would expect to find a medieval king of England buried in an elaborate marble tomb in an important ecclesiastical building such as Westminster Abbey or St George’s Chapel in Windsor. But for the last Plantagenet King of England, Richard III, there was no such impressive memorial to commemorate his life and reign and the location of his grave was an unsolved mystery for hundreds of years.  So you can imagine the excitement when a team from the University of Leicester started to search for the grave of the lost king, especially as the king in question was the notorious and controversial Richard III.  For he is the infamous English monarch who was accused of murdering his own nephews to gain his crown and was portrayed by the famous bard William Shakespeare as an evil, deformed hunchback with a withered arm.

King Richard III

However, it must be remembered that history is written by the victors and descriptions of Richard’s appearance penned by the likes of Shakespeare, Thomas Moore and Raphael Holinshed were Tudor propaganda designed to shore up the legitimacy and power of the new royal dynasty and smear the Yorkist king’s reputation in order to justify leading a rebellion against him and usurping his throne. Inconveniently for Henry Tudor’s supporters, until the unexpected death of his elder brother King Edward IV, Richard’s reputation had been blameless.  Unusually in the chaos that was the War of the Roses, Richard had remained totally loyal to his older brother, even when his other brother George, Duke of Clarence sided with the Earl of Warwick and joined with the Lancastrian forces headed by Margaret of Anjou.  He was richly rewarded by a grateful Edward IV, who gave him the title of Duke of Gloucester and allowed his marriage to the traitorous Warwick’s daughter Anne Neville.  Richard spent little time at the court in London, and based himself mainly in the north, where he led several successful campaigns against the Scots and recaptured Berwick-upon-Tweed in 1482.

After Edward’s unexpected death in 1483, Richard was named Lord Protector and marched down from Yorkshire to meet up with his nephew the twelve year old new King Edward V.  Edward V was travelling to London in the company of his maternal uncle, Anthony Woodville, Earl Rivers, who Richard arrested and subsequently executed along with Richard Grey and Thomas Vaughan in Pontefract Castle. Once he arrived in London with the new King, Richard lodged him in the Tower of London, which was the traditional place where English monarchs stayed before their coronation and persuaded Edward’s mother, Elizabeth Woodville, to allow his younger brother Richard, Duke of York to join him.  The arrangements for Edward’s coronation were going ahead when Richard suddenly changed tack and seized the crown for himself, citing as the reason that his nephews were illegitimate because his brother Edward IV has already made a contract to marry another woman, Lady Eleanor Butler, before he secretly married Elizabeth Woodville.

After Richard’s coronation sightings of the two young princes playing in the grounds of the Tower of London dwindled and rumours started to fly that the boys had been murdered by their uncle. However, there is still no real evidence that King Richard murdered his nephews and what really happened to the Princes in the Tower is still just conjecture.  His short reign held much personal tragedy for the new English king, as his only son and heir Edward of Middleham died tragically in 1484 and his wife Anne Neville also died of tuberculosis a few short months later in March 1485.  But during his reign Richard proved to be a popular monarch with his people and he introduced laws that allowed poorer people to have their grievances heard and he also stopped restrictions being placed on the printing and sale of books.

Richard III was the last English king to be killed in battle, and he was slain at the Battle of Bosworth on 22^nd August 1485 defending his kingdom against the forces of Henry Tudor.  This decisive battle brought the War of the Roses into its final stages, placing the Lancastrian Henry Tudor onto the throne of England as King Henry VII and bringing to an end the rule of the Yorkist dynasty and the Plantagenets.  We don’t really know the details of how King Richard was killed during the battle, but legend has it that after he was slain his mangled corpse was ignominiously slung over the back of a horse and taken into the nearby town of Leicester and left on display for the public to come and view for three days.  However distasteful this may seem to our modern minds, it was a politically astute move from the new King Henry VII, as it would stop any rumours being put around that Richard hadn’t really been killed during the battle and thus preventing a potential focus for rebellion against the new dynasty . The king’s body was then said to have been thrown into the River Soar that runs through the town and one of the bridges is known as ‘King Richard’s Bridge’.

However, a contemporary chronicler Sir Thomas Frowyk made a reference to King Richard being buried in the church of the Newarke in Leicester and chroniclers later in the reign of Henry VII spoke of money being set aside by the new Tudor king to build a tomb for him and of Richard’s burial being in the Greyfriars Church which was part of the Franciscan Friary. Greyfriars was destroyed during the Dissolution of the Monasteries instigated by HenryVIII in 1536, and it would seem that it was at this time that the location of the royal burial became uncertain, as the bones could either have been removed from the tomb when the building was razed and either moved or discarded, or the royal skeleton was buried under the ground and was undisturbed but covered by more recent building work.  The Mayor of Leicester, Robert Herrick, constructed a mansion over the remains of the friary church and when Christopher Wren visited him in 1612 he reported seeing a stone pillar inscribed as a memorial to Richard III in the garden.  Around the same time in 1611, a map maker called John Speedie was recording local landmarks in Leicester and it is thought that he may have been the one who started the story that Richard III’s body had been thrown in the river. It is said that he did this to cover up his embarrassment at not being able to find the King’s grave, and that he had not searched in the right place, as he had been looking at Blackfriars rather than Greyfriars.

The archaeologists from Leicester University located the site of the lost Greyfriars church by examining historical maps and comparing them to modern ones. They started their excavations on 25^th August 2012 in a car park belonging to the local council.  The mansion built by Robert Herrick had been demolished in the 1870s and replaced with public buildings, although the gardens were not paved over until the middle of the 20^th century, and the excavations soon uncovered paving stones that are thought to be from the mansion’s gardens. Medieval finds included inlaid floor tiles, fragments of tracery from the church windows, and part of a stone frieze believed to be from the choir stalls and the locations of the eastern cloister walk and the chapter house were established.  But the most exciting find of all was the discovery of an intact skeleton of an adult male buried in the Choir area of the Friary Church.  The remains had not been interred in a coffin, but seemed to have been laid to rest in a shroud that has subsequently disintegrated, and there was nothing buried with the body to indicate the skeleton’s identity. So what clues are there that this could be the body of King Richard III?

The skeleton is that of an adult male who had been strong and in good health when he had died.  The remains also display injuries that could have been sustained during a medieval battle as there is a blade wound to the back of the head and an iron barbed arrowhead was found lodged between the vertebrae of the upper back.  The skeleton also has a curvature of the spine, known as scoliosis, that would have meant that during life the man’s right shoulder would have seemed to have been higher than his left.  This fits in with contemporary description’s of Richard’s appearance which speak of a raised shoulder and could have been the basis of Shakespeare’s exaggerated depiction of the monarch as an ugly, short hunchback who had a withered arm.  The experts are hoping to extract DNA samples for analysis from a few of the teeth and femur of the skeleton, which they are hoping will match with that of Michael Ibsen, a Canadian descendant of Richard III’s elder sister Anne of York to prove the identity of the remains.

This DNA testing will take about twelve weeks and during this time it will have to be decided where the remains will be reinterred if the testing proves that the skeleton is that of the King.  There are no plans for the excavation to be kept open for the public, so it is unlikely that the body will be returned to its original grave. A memorial stone already lies in Leicester Cathedral, so perhaps this could be Richard’s final resting place? Or could he be buried in York Minster as he himself had planned? Whatever eventually happens to the remains our last Plantagenet King, if it is proved that this really is Richard’s body it will offer historians and archaeologists much valuable evidence that will help them piece together what really happened to him at the Battle of Bosworth and how he was killed.

Mystery People of History – Perkin Warbeck, Prince or Pretender?

Few mysteries of history have fascinated us as much and prompted so much speculation as the mystery of the disappearance of the Princes in the Tower.  Were the two young princes really murdered in their beds, and if so who by and why? Or were they somehow spirited away from the Tower of London in secret and taken to a safe place to live out their lives in obscurity?  Against the chaos and political instability of that period of English history known as the War of the Roses, it is perhaps not surprising then that several figures came forward during the reign of King Henry VII claiming to be one of the lost princes and becoming a focus for rebellion, and one of the most famous of these royal pretenders was a young man know as Perkin Warbeck.

After Henry VII defeated King Richard III at the Battle of Bosworth in 1485 and claimed the English throne by right of conquest, his main tasks were to secure his kingdom and win the loyalty of his nobles and people.  He married Elizabeth of York, the eldest daughter King Edward IV, in an attempt to further legitimise his claim to the English crown and unite the Lancastrian and Yorkist factions, even though to do this he had to overturn the ruling that had declared that she and all her siblings were illegitimate due to their father’s alleged pre-contract of marriage with Lady Eleanor Talbot.  But if Elizabeth of York and her sisters were once again recognised as being the legitimate children of Edward IV and Elizabeth Woodville, then so too were her two brothers, King Edward V and Richard, Duke of York.  Many historians consider that to have overturned this ruling, Henry VII must have believed that the two young princes were indeed already dead, as if either of the two boys were still alive, they had a much greater claim to the throne than Henry himself, and he knew that there were still powerful forces both in England and across Europe who would back a Yorkist claimant to the throne.

Perkin Warbeck

One of these powerful forces was Margaret of Burgundy, the sister of the two dead kings Edward IV and Richard III and the aunt of the Princes in the Tower, and it was at her Court that Perkin Warbeck first came to public attention and claimed the throne of England. It is not known whether Margaret of Burgundy genuinely believed that Perkin Warbeck was her nephew or whether she was fully aware that he was a fraud and groomed him in the ways of the Yorkist Royal Family in order to create a focus of rebellion against Henry VII.  The other major European player to get involved was King Charles VIII of France, and both he and Margaret officially recognised Perkin Warbeck as King Richard IV of England.  For a while Perkin Warbeck was feted across Europe, attending the funeral in Vienna of the Holy Roman Emperor, Frederick III, and gaining the recognition of his successor Maximilian I, spending time at the French Court in 1492 and then residing at the Court of Burgundy. However, in 1492 Charles VIII signed the Treaty of Etaples with England to prevent a threatened invasion of France and part of the treaty was an agreement to expel Perkin Warbeck from French territory.  Warbeck’s presence in Burgundy rattled Henry VII so much that he imposed a trade embargo on Flanders in 1493, even though this would lose England a great deal of revenue.

Perkin Warbeck’s first foray into rebellion against the English crown had been in 1491 when he arrived in the Irish city of Cork, which had long been a Yorkist stronghold. The good people of Cork thought that Warbeck was actually the Earl of Warwick, the son of the hapless George, Duke of Clarence, who had been attainted for treason and executed in the Tower of London after trying the patience of his brother Edward IV one time too many, who was currently being held captive by Henry VII.  Warbeck’s English was apparently not very good, but he managed to deny his being the Earl of Warwick and declare himself as Richard, Duke of York. However, little became of this rebellion and he was forced to return to Europe.

With the support of Margaret of Burgundy, he tried his hand again in 1495 and landed with a small force in Deal on the Kent coast.  His small force was effectively routed and Warbeck was forced to sail on to Ireland without even disembarking onto English soil.  Once in Ireland, he gained the support of the Earl of Desmond and laid siege to the town of Waterford, but was once again unsuccessful.  He fled to the Court of King James IV of Scotland, where he was graciously received, given a pension of £1200 a year and the hand of the Scottish King’s cousin, Lady Catherine Gordon, in marriage.  At that time James IV was happy to use any means at his disposal to rile Henry VII, so he encouraged Perkin Warbeck to use his pension for funding for attempting to mount an attack across the English border.  However, Warbeck received no support whatsoever from the English and was forced to retreat back into Scotland.  Henry VII may still at this point in his reign have felt insecure on his throne, but he had set up an effective network of spies and had rooted out and dealt with any English supporters of Perkin Warbeck.  In 1495, Sir William Stanley was tried and executed for treason due to his support of Warbeck and the Yorkist cause, which is ironic in the light of the fact that he was the very same William Stanley who switched sides at the Battle of Bosworth ensuring the defeat of the Yorkist King Richard III. Henry VII’s steward Lord Fitzwalter was also attainted and executed and it seems that they were being informed on by one of their co-conspirators Sir Robert Clifford, who was secretly working for Henry.  Clifford’s reward for his participation in the conspiracy against the crown was not the more usual short trip to the scaffold but a full pardon and a hefty reward.

After Warbeck’s failed attempt to enter England, James IV of Scotland gave up on the idea of being a thorn in the side of the English King, and signed the Treaty of Ayton that brought him peace with England and Henry’s daughter Margaret Tudor as a bride. Warbeck was once more expelled and returned again to Ireland to make another attempt at laying siege to the town of Waterford.  This attempt was swiftly defeated and he was chased from Ireland by four English ships.  Left with only a handful of supporters, Perkin Warbeck sailed to Cornwall, where he hoped to capitalise on the discontent still fomenting there after the uprising that had taken place only a few months earlier. The Cornish people welcomed him and declared him King Richard IV on Bodmin Moor.  The support of the Cornish swelled his army by 6000 and he marched on Exeter and then on to Taunton.  Henry sent an army to counter Warbeck’s rebellion, and when Warbeck heard that this force had sighted he fled to Beaulieu Abbey in Hampshire, where he was captured. Henry VII was initially merciful to Perkin Warbeck, allowing him to stay at Court under supervision.  However, he attempted to run away, so was removed to the more secure environment of the Tower of London.  In 1499 he allegedly tried to escape again, this time supposedly in the company of the real Earl of Warwick, and was hanged at Tyburn.

So was Perkin Warbeck really Richard, Duke of York?  It is popularly believed that he was actually a Fleming born in Tournai in around 1474, the son of a French official called John de Werbecque and his wife, Katherine de Faro, and that he had spent his boyhood years working as a servant in several different households. He then became an apprentice for a fleece merchant called Pregent Meno, and it was while he was working for Meno that he first arrived in Ireland and declared himself to be Richard, Duke of York.  Perkin Warbeck also supposedly bore a strong resemblance to the dead Yorkist monarch, Edward IV, and it has been speculated that Warbeck could actually have been Edward’s illegitimate son. But what of Margaret of Burgundy’s support of Perkin Warbeck.  Would she really have supported an imposter as her nephew?  Would she really have wanted a non-royal foreigner on the throne of England, however much she despised Henry VII’s regime?  She declared that she recognised Warbeck as Richard of York because of certain birthmarks on his body and his supposedly detailed knowledge of what life had been like living in the English Royal Household.  In return for Margaret’s support, Warbeck had to promise to return all her lands in England to her that had been confiscated after the Battle of Bosworth when he gained the English crown. But was this enough to make her support an imposter? 

Moreover, if Perkin Warbeck really spoke such poor English and was uneducated, would sophisticated monarchs like Maximilian I and Charles VII even have deigned to let him into their presence, let alone backed him as a pretender to the throne of England? In the 15^th century class was all important, and people rarely moved out of the milieu into which they had been born.  There was also a mystique and a reverence surrounding royal blood, and preserving royal bloodlines and family ties was regarded as all important, so encouraging someone who had worked as a servant to make a bid for a crown would have been almost unthinkable.  After all, the real Richard, Duke of York had been excluded from the possibility of ever sitting on the throne of England purely because his father might have made a pre-contract of marriage with another woman before he married Richard’s mother Elizabeth Woodville.

Like all great historical mysteries, we shall never probably really know the truth about Perkin Warbeck.  Perkin Warbeck made a confession before his execution that gave his parentage and early history, some of which has been backed up by documentary evidence.  But was he forced into this confession by Henry VII, who would have been very eager to ensure that there was no doubt in anyone’s mind that that Perkin Warbeck was an imposter and not a Yorkist prince? Most likely he was just an apprentice from Flanders, who by chance bore an uncanny resemblance to a dead king and was in the right place at the right time, but there is always the chance, however slight, that he really was Richard of York and that he had been spirited away from his imprisonment in England and brought to Europe for safety.

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