Perkin Warbeck

With the Lambert Simnel affair not yet forgotten, another boy claims to be the rightful King of England.

1491

King Henry VII 1485-1509

Introduction

After Henry Tudor seized the crown in 1485, he could take some comfort in the fact that his most credible rivals, Edward IV’s sons Edward and Richard, had been murdered by their uncle Richard III. But as their fate was only a rumour, they became magnets for impostors, first Lambert Simnel in 1487, and in 1491 the rather more dangerous Perkin Warbeck.

by Clay Lane

IN 1485, King Richard III was killed at the Battle of Bosworth, ending the Wars of the Roses between the Houses of York and Lancaster.* Henry Tudor took his crown, though he had little right to it save conquest; but when Richard murdered his own nephews Edward and Richard, the ‘Princes in the Tower’, sons of his brother Edward IV, he conveniently eliminated Henry’s only serious rivals too.*

Six years later, Richard’s disappointed Yorkist supporters hit back.* They produced a sixteen-year-old boy named Perkin Warbeck, who had spent most of his life in Antwerp, and declared that he was Richard of Shrewsbury, the younger of Richard’s two vanished nephews, and England’s rightful king. The imposture was slow to gain traction, but he briefly won the backing of Charles VIII of France and then much more importantly of Margaret of Burgundy, Edward IV’s sister and the real Richard’s aunt.* Perkin looked very like her brother, and she may even have believed him, or wanted to.

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See The Wars of the Roses.

For the account of the murders provided in Holinshed’s Chronicles, and taken from the works of Thomas More, see The Princes in the Tower.

Not for the first time. In 1487, a boy called Lambert Simnel had been coached into impersonating Edward, Earl of Warwick, the son of Margaret’s brother George, 1st Duke of Clarence. It was an absurd imposture, as Edward was quite alive and locked up safely in the Tower of London.

Margaret of York was dowager Duchess of Burgundy, and the sister of both Edward IV and Richard III. Francis Bacon suggested that Perkin may have been one of Edward’s many illegitimate children. On the other hand, his subsequent claim (extracted under duress) to be the son of Jehan de Werbecque of Tournai and his wife Katherine de Faro is backed up by local records.

Précis

After Henry VII came to the throne in 1485, killing Richard III in battle, the defeated Yorkists brought forward a young boy claiming to be Richard’s nephew Richard of Shrewsbury, one of the two Princes in the Tower rumoured to have been murdered by their uncle. One of those who apparently believed the claim was the missing prince’s aunt, Margaret.

Sevens

Suggest answers to this question. See if you can limit one answer to exactly seven words.

Who did Perkin Warbeck pretend to be?

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