Perkin Warbeck Rebellion

4 Key excerpts on "Perkin Warbeck Rebellion"

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  Elizabethan Rebellions

  Conspiracy, Intrigue and Treason

  • Helene Harrison(Author)
  • 2024(Publication Date)
  • Pen and Sword History

    (Publisher)

  Skeletons recovered in the Tower of London in 1674 which had been buried under a staircase in the White Tower were placed in an urn on the orders of Charles II and interred in Westminster Abbey. These were assumed to be the remains of the Princes in the Tower but there is no evidence, and the remains have not been examined. Perkin Warbeck was the son of a Tournai man, John Osbeck, and his wife, Katherine de Faro, and was said to have a striking resemblance to Edward IV, the father of the Princes in the Tower. His own confession given at the time of his capture by Henry VII’s troops, suggests he was born into an educated family, comfortably off if not wealthy, in the French town of Tournai. 7 His father was described as the comptroller to the city of Tournai. His name is sometimes spelt as Pierrechon de Werbecque, but the English seem to have changed it to Perkin Warbeck. Warbeck’s confession was obtained under duress, so the veracity of what he said cannot be guaranteed. Warbeck arrived in Cork, Ireland, in the employ of a Breton merchant called Pregent Meno. He was parading around advertising some of his employer’s wares when the citizens declared him to be Edward, Earl of Warwick. He had to swear an oath to refute this. It was then thought that he was a bastard son of Richard III, which would not have made him a legitimate claimant to the English throne anyway. Warbeck later claimed that it was against his will that some Yorkist adherents, including the former mayor of Cork, John Atwater, declared him to be Richard, Duke of York, younger of the Princes in the Tower, and made him learn English, royal history, and manners. Early Tudor Rebellions 9 Warbeck’s arrival on the international scene shocked Henry VII as, at first, he seemed like a legitimate claimant to the throne. He gained the backing of James Fitzgerald, 8th Earl of Desmond, and Gerald Fitzgerald, 8th Earl of Kildare, while in Ireland.

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  The Wars of the Roses

  • Michael Hicks(Author)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Yale University Press

    (Publisher)

  Henry VII continued to fear Ricardian insurgency in the North and treated the Yorkshire Rebellion of 1489 as such, wrongly as we now know, but the defeat of Ricardianism did not terminate the challenges to his throne. The Battle of Stoke was not the end. There remained alternative candidates for the Crown. There were to be further conspiracies, rebellions and even invasions. Margaret of Burgundy sheltered more dissidents, funded their plots and invasions, and so indeed did the Scots. There were to be two major popular revolts, in Yorkshire in 1489 and in the West Country in 1497. These destabilizing elements did not interact and were not to remove Henry VII from the throne. Yet the threats were real for another fifteen years at least. What links the most serious from 1491 to 1497 was Perkin Warbeck.

  Like Simnel, Warbeck was a youth of modest stock. Most probably he was a son of Jehan and Nicaise de Werbecque, a prosperous mercantile family of Tournai in northern France, who embarked early on an appenticeship in trade in Burgundy and courtly service in Portugal, whence he was plucked in Ireland as a suitable impostor for the younger of Edward IV's sons and Prince in the Tower, Richard, Duke of York. In time he styled himself King Richard. Warbeck had the noble demeanour, manner and manners required of a prince and courtier. He was literate and must also have been a brilliant linguist, fluent in French, Flemish, English, perhaps also Portuguese and Latin. His imposture convinced many with no desire to be convinced as well as those, like his supposed aunt Margaret, who were looking for a credible Yorkist claimant. He was admitted to the courts of the Empire, Burgundy and Scotland, and treated with much more honour than most pretenders. Warbeck even married in Lady Katherine Gordon a noble lady connected to the Scottish Crown. Yet he was an impostor. Nothing suggests either political competence or military capacity, whether in generalship, prowess, or courage. Presumably he did not have the conventional aristocratic education at arms and was indeed ‘a prince for chambers and gardens’.34

  Yet Warbeck did have about him men who knew Edward IV's court, current English affairs, and much else of relevance. Indeed, at times his court in exile in Burgundy and Scotland was several hundred strong and comparable perhaps to that of Henry Tudor in 1484–5. Like Margaret of Anjou before him, Warbeck was an important pawn on the international scene, who was harboured by all the principal powers in turn, received military aid for invasions of Kent from Burgundy in 1495 and of northern England from Scotland in 1496, and sought to combine this activity with internal conspiracies. Much more is now known both of the international dimension35 and of those prosecuted in England. It remains uncertain whether the defendants were all the plotters there were or just the most important. ‘The names of the plotters are thus in no sense random, but closely associated with the royal court and its children.’ They failed because Henry's ‘network of spies was superb’ and because Henry broke Warbeck's English support.36

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  Riot, Rebellion and Popular Politics in Early Modern England

  • Andy Wood(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Red Globe Press

    (Publisher)

  49 2 R EBELLION IN S IXTEENTH -C ENTURY E NGLAND I The Pilgrimage of Grace of 1536 and the Rebellions of 1537 Sir Geoffery Elton once remarked how ‘it is of the essence of the poor that they do not appear in history’. Yet even the most high-political histories of Tudor England have been forced to allow the large-scale rebellions of 1536 and 1549 into their accounts. 1 Once present within such narratives, popular insurrection is difficult to contain. For the sudden intrusion of rebellious plebeians into conventional histories of government, court faction and administration ruptures the assumption that politics stemmed only from the central state and the ‘political nation’ of the gentry and nobility. A different interpretative approach is demanded: one that emphasises the shifting place of rebellion within pre-existent popular political cultures. For the forms and outcomes of popular rebellion are only explicable when set within the context of the low politics of riot, resistance, negotiation and litigation. In this chapter we shall see how such a perspective allows us to reassess the forms taken by Tudor rebellions; the extent of popular autonomy in such rebellions; the changing ideology of rebellion; and the reasons for the decline of rebellion in Elizabethan England. The most prominent cause of rebellion in pre-Reformation Tudor England was taxation. The preference of early Tudor government for assessing taxation on the basis of the land and income of individual households rather than upon the wealth of a community as a whole led to a heavier tax burden falling on the poor. Taxation was the central cause of rebellion in Yorkshire in 1489 and in Cornwall and Somerset in 50 Riot, Rebellion and Popular Politics in Early Modern England 1497. Public leadership in both insurrections came from the local gentry, but closer study of the 1497 rising has also revealed the import-ant organisational role played by attorneys and wealthier villagers.

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  Mary Shelley

  • Graham Allen(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Red Globe Press

    (Publisher)

  206 She wrote to Walter Scott asking him for information for her Scottish chapters (L, II, 77–8), and John Bowring for information about and histories of Spain for the early chapters of her hero’s exile (PW, xvii). She also made various requests to John Murray and others regarding texts relevant to the historical period of late fifteenth-century England. As was the case with the history of Castruccio, Shelley here is dealing with a conflictual historical record, as she makes clear in her preface: It is not singular that I should entertain a belief that Perkin was, in reality, the lost Duke of York. For, in spite of Hume, and the later historians who have followed in his path, no person who has at all studied the subject but arrives at the same conclusion. Records exist in the Tower, some well known, others with which those who have access to those interesting papers are alone acquainted, which put the ques- tion almost beyond doubt. (PW, 5) The subject of her narrative is stated directly here: it concerns the well-known story of Perkin Warbeck, who, during the early years 118 M A R Y S H E L L E Y of Henry VII’s reign, passed himself off as Richard, Duke of York, legitimate heir to the throne, one of the two princes imprisoned in the Tower of London by Richard III. The historical Perkin Warbeck gained support in various courts and kingdoms hostile to the new Lancastrian order in England, and was assisted in various abortive military campaigns, until he was finally captured and made to confess his true identity before being executed. As Shelley suggests, she is not the first reader of the historical record to enter- tain the idea that Perkin Warbeck was in fact who he claimed to be, Richard, Duke of York. As she also makes clear, the dominant historical interpretation took the opposing view. Shelley’s state- ments in themselves embody the conflicts and debates generated by the figure of Perkin Warbeck.

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