The Pretender of Tyburn

On November 23, 1499, a young man was drawn on a hurdle from the Tower of London to Tyburn, where he was hanged. For the better part of a decade he had claimed to be Richard, Duke of York, the lost younger son of King Edward IV. History knows him as Perkin Warbeck, the pretender who haunted the first Tudor king.

Warbeck was born around 1474 in Tournai, in Flanders. In 1491 he turned up in Cork, Ireland, dressed in his master's fine clothes, and the townspeople — Yorkist sympathizers all — decided he must be royal. First they hailed him as the Earl of Warwick; then, obligingly, Warbeck became someone grander: Richard of Shrewsbury, Duke of York, the younger of the two "Princes in the Tower," presumed murdered in 1483. If the story were true, he was the rightful King of England.

It was a useful story, and Europe's enemies of Henry VII were happy to use it. Charles VIII of France received him as a prince. Margaret of Burgundy, Edward IV's sister, coached him in his role and bankrolled his cause. The Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian and James IV of Scotland backed him too; James gave him a royal bride, his cousin Lady Catherine Gordon, and a handsome pension.

Warbeck's invasions were fiascos. A landing near Deal in 1495 collapsed before he even got ashore. In September 1497 he landed in Cornwall, where resentment of Henry's taxes gave him an army of some 6,000 men, and he had himself proclaimed "Richard IV" on Bodmin Moor. But when Henry's army approached, Warbeck fled to sanctuary and surrendered. He confessed to being an impostor at Taunton that October and was paraded through London in humiliation.

Henry treated him leniently — until 1499, when Warbeck was accused of plotting an escape from the Tower with a genuine royal prisoner, Edward Plantagenet, Earl of Warwick. That was too much. On November 23, Warbeck was dragged to Tyburn and hanged, reportedly reading out a confession on the scaffold, alongside an accomplice named John Atwater. Warwick was executed days later. Lady Catherine, the Scots king's cousin, fared better: Henry granted her a pension and a place at court.

Warbeck's masquerade cost Henry VII more than £13,000 — a fortune that strained the young Tudor state's finances. And it left a question that may never be settled: was Perkin Warbeck merely a Flemish adventurer, or could he have been the lost prince after all? The Tudors wrote the history, and they had every reason to call him a fraud.

Photo: Mariordo (Mario Roberto Duran Ortiz), CC BY-SA 3.0 (via Wikimedia Commons).