A Princely Knave Read online

  A Princely Knave

  Philip Lindsay

  © Philip Lindsay 1956

  Philip Lindsay has asserted his rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

  First published in 1956 by Hutchinson & Co. Ltd.

  This edition published in 2018 by Endeavour Media Ltd.

  DEDICATION

  for

  HUGH ROSS WILLIAMSON

  My dear Hugh,

  This is the second of my books to bear your name which I am proud to write there. The first, a biography of King Henry V, was written in the days of our youth; and this novel on Perkin Warbeck must, most definitely, also be offered in the hope of interesting and pleasing you because you are its “onlie begetter”. Not long after our first meeting you lent me the manuscript of a play of yours called The Adventurer, urging me generously to take from it whatever I liked to form the foundation of a novel. At the time, I did not use the suggestion because I felt that what is legitimate on the stage is not always, acceptable in the wider world of fiction, and, for dramatic purposes, you had invented a heroine. This device gave you the opportunity for an exciting last act, but I shied from using it in a novel. The idea of Perkin’s story remained ticketed, however, at the back of my mind; and doubtless it would have remained half buried there had I not heard you on the B.B.C. speaking about the mystery of his birth. The way you told that tale, convincingly unfolding the only convincing explanation, so excited me that almost at once I began work on this book.

  It would be absurd to tell an authority with such historical knowledge as yourself the material out of which this story has been welded, and you know that there are many lacunae in the records. The main authority remains James Gairdner’s Richard III with its appendix on Warbeck’s adventures; but other historians, from Pollard’s Henry VII to Professor J. D. Mackie’s The Earlier Tudors, give valuable details. (The latest work on the subject is in French and, to my knowledge, has not yet been translated. This is L’Imposture de Perkin Warbeck by Jean-Didier Chastelain, 1952. And, perhaps, I should also mention Sir Frederic Madden’s valuable paper in Archaeologia, Vol. XXVIII, 1838.) Contemporary comments must be sifted very carefully and balanced one against the other and then against the writers bias.

  The truth about Warbeck is unlikely now to be discovered, and his confession can scarcely be accepted arty more than one can accept other legends propagated by Henry VII. While he lived and after his death there were many theories spun about his origin, including the one on which you based your play and broadcast and which I have taken for this novel, and to me it is the most credible one. Without making this dedication absurdly long it would be impossible to argue the facts, but who else could he have been? All other attempts at explanation fail to convince one wholly and I am deeply grateful for the way in which you emphasized it until — to me, at least — you made it inescapably the truth.

  I have always found the fifteenth century in England the most fascinating in our history, and whenever I return to it it is with a feeling of nostalgia and familiarity which no other period can give. It was an age of rich colours, of blinding blues and reds, an age as of trumpets blowing, of poetry and battle, of heroism and treachery; and I walk there as though I were at home, not because I am either a hero or a traitor but because I have read so much about it and my early loves — schoolboy loves that have endured and still can touch my heart — were the magnificent Morte Darthur of Malory and William Morris’s Early Romances. No later interests have shaken the influence of these two men — not even Shakespeare and Balzac and Dickens — and the first novel of Scott’s I read was Ivanhoe which, with its confusion of periods, fits more neatly into the age of Edward IV or Richard III than into that of Richard I. An enchanted enchanting world, the world also of Bouquet with his miraculous miniatures, those little windows opening on to a real yet poetical landscape.

  Some readers might be interested in the fate of Katherine after the end of this novel. Eleven years later she wearied of her celibate state and tossed away mourning, marrying in turn Sir James Strangeways, Sir Matthew Cradock and Christopher Ashton, from the second of whom, on the female side, descends the noble house of Pembroke.

  Well, Hugh, after these many years here is the book I should have written long ago and all my thanks go with it. I have been very fortunate in my friends but rarely, I think, more fortunate than when I first met you in your little box of an editorial office when, under your guidance, the long-lamented Bookman flourished. Little did I realize at the time how great my debt to you would become. I only hope this tale will be, in some small fashion, a repayment of what I owe you for your enthusiasm and encouragement.

  Philip Lindsay.

  Sussex.

  Table of Contents

  CHAPTER ONE

  DARKNESS IN THE DARK

  CHAPTER TWO

  COAST TO DESTINY

  CHAPTER THREE

  ST. MICHAEL’S MOUNT

  CHAPTER FOUR

  ON TO ADVENTURE

  CHAPTER FIVE

  THE SANDS RUN ON

  CHAPTER SIX

  CAGED IN IRON

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  AT THE GATES OF EXETER.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  BATTLE

  CHAPTER NINE

  END AND BEGINNING

  CHAPTER TEN

  THERE IS NO ESCAPE

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  THROUGH NIGHT TO DARKNESS

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  SANCTUARY

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  PRINCE OR PERKIN?

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  KATHERINE MEETS THE KING

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  WITHOUT ARMOUR

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  A WIFE AND NO WIFE

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  JAILED IN THE FLESH

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  LOVE’S COVENANT

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  SLOW TIME TO PASS

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  MIDNIGHT AND AFTER

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  A GHOST TAKES FLESH

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  A PETAL FROM THE ROSE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  THE DREAMER AND THE MAN

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  CAUGHT IN THE WEB

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  THE END OF THE DREAM

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  MEN ARE UNWISE …

  WATCHMAN

  What would ye, ladies? It was ever thus.

  Men are unwise and curiously planned.

  A WOMAN

  They have their dreams, and do not think of us.

  Hassan. J. E. FLECKER.

  CHAPTER ONE

  DARKNESS IN THE DARK

  ABOVE them on the deck they heard the sailors’ shouting rise higher even than the wind. Smothered through the planks, shredded by the gale, the words became a tangle of meaningless sound, but there was no mistaking the shrill note of urgency in the captain’s bawling. And Robert Barton, King James of Scotland’s man, called “pirate” by the enemy, the English, was never the kind of man to know fear without cause, thought Lady Katherine.

  Unused as she was to the sea, the sea-noises, the screaming of wind amongst ropes, with the sudden diving and rolling of the ship, and the repeated impact of waves smashing, crashing like an army.at the planks, made her feel that she was tossed in some devil’s sieve in which she soon must drown. Against the uneven boards she lay, clinging to the rope that the captain had slung for her to grip in bad weather, and with frightened eyes she watched her handsome husband smiling down at her. An experienced traveller, sudden storms su
ch as this in the Irish Sea could not frighten him; only he wished that there were something he could do to help this woman he loved from being so bruised and shaken.

  A sudden squall, nothing more, disturbing because of its suddenness and annoying because you could not keep your feet in the heaving ship; but should he let go this rope, he might be flung cruelly against the timbers; and he wanted to go on deck, hating to be below during angry weather. Back against the planks he leaned, legs far apart, and smiled to give her courage, although he knew that she could not see him through this darkness. To him, her face was a white blur, a smudge, with the pale hair swinging like water behind and around and under her.

  “It will soon pass,” he shouted cheerily. “Have no fear, my lady.”

  Like somebody else’s voice, remote and far away, his voice sounded to her. Death, she felt, was closing icily on them in that tiny chamber and they were alone with it, lost and alone together in a universe whipped mad; and because of that, because she was certain that at any moment they would die, pretences left her and she spoke the truth. She said what she had wanted to say for many months.

  “You are not Prince Richard,” she said. “Your name is Warbeck. Perkin Warbeck.”

  He shivered and turned pale yet still he smiled although she could not see his smile. Had they been in the light she must have noticed that he had flinched; yet no fear sounded in his young voice when he shouted: “Who told you that?”

  “No matter.” A roll of the ship tossed her up, tossed her to one side, then flung her against her husband’s legs; yet she did not lose her grip on the rope. As she pressed up against him, she seemed to rise suddenly out of a sea of darkness, a bright-eyed mermaid with golden hair swimming almost to within kissing-distance; then she was swept down and he heard her gasp when her elbow struck the deck.

  “No matter,” she cried again, still watching the pale smudge that was his face. “It was said freely at court. Often, Bothwell spoke of it … I took little heed of him … jealous, a rogue … the king blind to his faults … But I knew it … I felt it.”

  “It’s a lie!” he bellowed.

  “I knew it,” she said and was again swept away from him, being lost in the larboard shadows. All now that he could see was the shimmer of her gown, the swirl of her pale hair, and her fist on the rope close to his face, her knuckles white as cream, as though she menaced him.

  “A lie!” he bellowed a second time, and began to sweat. “A lie devised by my enemies … trick of damned Tydder, spreading lies … Afraid, he’s afraid of me … Good, he’s afraid … Whatever Bothwell says, Tydder knows … knows I’m Edward’s son.”

  “They say … Perkin Warbeck … bastard of a Jew … they say … They say many things.”

  “Let them choke on their lies!” Impossible was it to argue, to speak convincingly, when he had to shout above the lusty wind and words were swallowed by the uproar. “I am Prince Richard … Tydder killed my brother … the Tower, but I escaped. All the world knows it … except you. Tydder knows it or he’d not fear … Only you, you don’t believe me.”

  Out of the darkness came her voice, clear in a sudden lull. “No one believes you,” she said.

  “They do! They do!” He trembled, astounded at his own anger. Others had taunted him with being Perkin Warbeck and he had smiled at their malice; but for his own wife to think it … that was beyond bearing. “Your cousin, your king, believed it.”

  “Very distant cousin … through my mother … James of Scotland, a fox at the chickens of England … He’d believe anything should it hurt England.”

  “Burgundy believed me … My aunt, the duchess, should know.”

  “She hates King Henry, her brother’s murderer … She’d tell any lie to hurt him.”

  “Mother of God!” he howled. “Why do you say this now? … Why did you marry me … if you thought me cheat?”

  She did not answer and furiously he waited for her to speak. Then in an ebb of the storm, he believed that he heard her sobbing. Sobbing! The Lady Katherine Gordon sobbing! He had thought that nothing could-touch that cold heart through the cold skin; yet she wept!

  He closed his eyes and groaned. Already she wept because she was his wife. Less than two years after their bridal in Scotland, she wept and called him liar. If she loved him, she’d not care whether he were Perkin Warbeck, son of the controller of Tournay; or whether he were the son of Sir Edward Brampton, the baptized Jew, as some insisted was the truth; or whether he were what he claimed to be, the second son of great Edward the Fourth and therefore uncrowned King of England. Names should count no more than clothing to describe the man within. She called him cheat; yet was she not the cheat who, at the lure of a mighty name, had wedded him and now apparently regretted it? He blinked to clear the tears from his lashes.

  Rage suddenly mastered his self-pity. He glared into the darkness at this ghost of a woman and would have slapped her had that been possible in the lurching ship.

  “Giglot!” he called her, shouting at her. “Proud-stomached bitch,” he called her. “You ape of love, liar, pretending love, you liar. Not love for me, not me, for my blood royal. Not for poor Dickon your husband, for your own orgulous vanity, your own damned face in the mirror with a crown on its head, ay, and your friends’ greatness biting you to become greater. Would I were poor Perkin Warbeck, unlucky lad, and not Prince Richard of York that your punishment might be the greater, God’s murrain on you for a whore ... but I am, alas, Prince Richard Plantagenet and must carry a cheat for a queen, a cozener of love in my bed.”

  Never before had he spoken to her in such angry fashion. Darkness and the storm gave him the courage to say what he had longed yet feared to say to her imperturbable arrogance. And she did not answer him. He waited, hearing his own heart’s, beating seeming louder than the wind, and she did not answer. As though she were indeed a ghost, she swam in the air, insubstantial while tantalizing, one hand on the rope, her long hair sweeping down her sides.

  “Why did you marry me?” he shouted, and waited, sweating.

  Not until the roll of the ship had rushed her towards him again did she answer. She said, surprisingly: “Love … I suppose, love … ” and she would have been rushed back again had he not caught her by one arm and held on tightly.

  “Love?” he bawled, and tried to laugh scornfully, ferociously. “A woman’s word to cover what aught she desires … Lust, love, all’s one … what matter it? All’s one … in her vocabulary … I am honoured, lady, honoured.”

  Hard his fingers pressed into her arm, but she gave no sign, no sound, no tremor of the flesh, to show that she was hurt. A solid grey shadow, she swung below him, and he could imagine rather than see her big blue eyes open, staring uninterestedly up into his.

  “At first I thought it policy,” he shouted. “Not yours, his … that slinking fox of Scotland, that King James … thought he pressed us together, left us alone … meet as though by chance in gardens, dance together … dipping fingers in the same dish at table … drink from your goblet when you were not looking … God save me for a fool, I thought, not James, but you … you … uncharitable you with the empty eyes and sidling ways … more wanton than with any words, I thought that you … ”

  He closed his eyes and flung her from him.

  “Would to God we had never met,” he sobbed.

  Behind his closed eyelids, he saw again those days of heady splendour. Welcomed with drum and tucket to King James’s Scotland after he had sailed with a cargo of dreams and had met the king at Perth. That night, amongst the queen’s ladies, for the first time had he met and danced with this Lady Katherine. Dressed in red velvet trimmed with grey fur, the gown low-cut to show the arch of breasts, the furred train lifted to curl over her forearm that she might move without tripping in it, she had stood before him. The French hood of red cloth of gold with its heavy folds falling behind the shoulders had been pushed back a little to show a thin line of golden hair parted
in the centre. From that moment, at a blow of her eyes, had he loved her. In the way she had stood, her shoulders back, hands modestly clasped under the stomach, and peered at him, he had sensed a challenge to his masculinity. Yet she had said nothing beyond the common phrases of courtesy. “Lady,” the king had said, “you must royally welcome this cousin of mine, Prince Richard, rightful King of England. Cherish him, hinny, for my sake.” The king had then smiled and moved away, leaving them together close to the stepped cupboard aflare with plate of gold, with the butler’s yeomen waiting beside it to pour out wine.

  A conspiracy had it been! But on whose part? Had King James placed them thus together, then left them alone together, in expectation that they would love? Yet now she hinted that the king had known him to be Perkin Warbeck. not Prince Richard. Impossible! Would he then, so great a man, have conspired to marry his wealthy kinswoman to a base-born adventurer? and would she, proud bitch, with royal Scottish blood to snarl her lips, have given herself had she believed him mere Perkin Warbeck?

  “Why did you marry me?” he bellowed again.

  In that tumult, the battering of waves outside with the groan of timbers and the devils’ wailing in the wind, he could not hear her answer; nor was he really certain that she had answered. It had been the wind, perhaps, and not her tongue that had cried again that she loved him. He could not trust his ears in this storm; and again he gripped her by the arm when she swept towards him.

  “You’ve not answered,” he cried, staring at the milky patch which must be her face. “Why did you marry me?”

  “Love, mayhap,” he heard her say again, “hope, mayhap, that you might carve me a kingdom. I would look brave in a crown with my yellow hair. A golden crown with jewels. Women are dreamers … they have so little to do but dream.”

  “You say you loved me?”

  “Ay,” she sighed, “I loved you … or thought I did.”