Perfect Prince The Mystery of Perkin Warbeck and His Quest for the Throne of England

Chapter One Into Adventure The beginnings of his story, as he told it, lay deep in the turmoil of the recent history of England. For three decades, to the astonishment of foreigners, the crown had been wrestled back and forth between the Houses of Lancaster and York. Henry V, the glory of Lancaster and the victor of Agincourt, had been followed in 1422 by a child-king, Henry VI, who grew into a saintly fool at the mercy of his scheming lords. England quickly descended into factional warfare, with extraordinary slaughter of the nobility on both sides. In 1460 Richard, Duke of York, claiming descent from Edward III, tried to proclaim himself king but was rebuffed and, in short order, killed. The next year, his son defeated Henry in battle and was crowned as Edward IV at Westminster. The claims of Lancaster had been blurred by bastardy in the fourteenth century; but those of York, too, were not secure. Edward was king de facto but not de jure. In recent history, the Yorkist line had passed twice through women; and Henry, besides, still lived. In 1470 Edward IV's great rival, the Earl of Warwick, forced the king into exile in Flanders and brought the befuddled Henry out of prison. The restoration was short-lived. Edward was back within months, gathered supporters in the north, and early in 1471 recovered the crown. For some years afterward, comforted by this epitome of glorious kingship, the country calmed down. But Edward died in 1483 at the age of forty, leaving in the balance the fate of both England and his two child-sons, Edward and Richard, whose story this young man gave as his own. He had told it repeatedly, and could do so now if you required it of him, together with the sighs and tears that such a history called for. As a fatherless child of about nine, he and his brother Edward, who was twelve, had been committed to the Tower of London on the orders of their uncle Richard, Duke of Gloucester. Edward was supposed to await his coronation; instead, he had been killed. He himself, however, though tipped for death, had been spared and bundled abroad. He had been forced into wandering "in various countries" without a name or a background that anyone knew, or was allowed to know. In this way, he passed eight desolate years. Toward the end of them, apparently not yet free of aimlessness and poverty, he "spent some time in the kingdom of Portugal." Meanwhile, his uncle had been crowned as Richard III. His reign was short. In 1485 Henry Tudor, the Earl of Richmond and a sprig of the House of Lancaster, returned from exile in Brittany to encounter Richard at Bosworth. The king was cut down like a dog in the midst of the battle, and his rival was acclaimed as Henry VII in his place. To try to defuse the claims of York, and to dampen England's affection for that house, Henry married Edward's eldest daughter and united their lines. Yet Yorkist claims, true or false, continually dogged him. Every year, risings occurred in some part of England or another. As Henry suppressed them, gradually accustoming the country to his firm and careful rule, the most dangerous claimant of all, this young man, Richard Plantagenet, remained in hiding. He waited only his moment, and the backing of other princes, to cast down Henry Tudor and send him back into the obscurity from which he had come. So his story stood in most of Europe in 1494. But in 1497, when Henry captured this young man, a different tale eclipsed it. It came in the form of an official confession, already known and publicized in part beforehand, to which he apparently now agreed and put his signature. According to this, he was no prince, but the son of a customs-collector, John Osbeck, who worked up and down the River Scheldt at Tournai, on the border of France and the Burgundian lands. (His own name, though not given in the confession, was established at the same time as PieWroe, Ann is the author of 'Perfect Prince The Mystery of Perkin Warbeck and His Quest for the Throne of England', published 2003 under ISBN 9781400060337 and ISBN 1400060338.