Mid 16th C. sketch from Receuil d'Arras identified in 18th C. inscription as 'Pierre Varbeck' (Image: Public Domain)
For much of the 1490s Henry VII’s security was dogged by the claims of the second of the two major pretenders to his throne. It was as Richard, duke of York, the younger son of Edward IV last seen with his elder brother in the Tower of London in the summer of 1483, that this young man made his claim; but it was as Perkin Warbeck, the son of a Tournai boatman, that he was hanged at Tyburn in 1499 and it is as Perkin Warbeck that he has generally been known to history. The recent discovery by the Missing Princes team of the ‘Gelderland document’ (Gelders Archief, 0510/1549), in which the newly emerged York provides an explanation for his disappearance and survival, has reignited interest in the question of the pretender’s true identity.[1] His foreign supporters (of whom the most committed were the Princes’ aunt, Margaret, duchess of Burgundy, and her stepson-in-law Maximilian, archduke of Austria and King of the Romans) hailed him as Richard, duke of York, but not so King Henry VII and his allies. The Vatican’s support for King Henry was of long standing and has always appeared to have held secure, therefore it is a little surprising to see that, on 21 May 1494, as Maximilian was slowly preparing the way for the young man’s attempt to oust King Henry from his throne, the bishop in charge of the apostolic office of the Penitentiary accorded him an official grant in the name of Richard, duke of York.
The Papal Penitentiary performed a double function. Chiefly, as its name suggests, ‘it was the department of the Roman Curia which dealt with the sins reserved to papal absolution’, but it also ‘issued letters which conferred an increasingly wide variety of dispensations and graces on their beneficiaries.’[2] The indult granted to ‘Richard, duke of York’ falls into the latter category and was first brought to the world’s attention in 2008 by Peter D. Clarke, who provided the following translation of the text:
Rome [at St Peter’s], 21 May 1494. The nobleman Richard, duke of
York, [requests] that the pope grant him a licence that he may have a portable
altar with due reverence on which he can have masses and other divine offices
celebrated in fitting and decent places by his own or another suitable priest
without prejudice to another’s right and in the presence of himself and his
domestic familiars and that the pope grant him littere confessionales in
forma ‘Fervens’ too. Fiat de speciali Iul. episcopus Brethonoriensis
regens (= approved under a special papal mandate by Julianus de Matteis de
Vulterris, bishop of Bertinoro, regent of the penitentiary i.e. the cardinal
penitentiary’s deputy).[3]
The original Latin text was later published by Clarke and his colleague Patrick Zutshi in their three-volume calendar of the English and Welsh entries in the Penitentiary’s fifteenth-century registers.[4]
This young man had first identified himself as the Duke of York whilst in Ireland in 1491, and in the following year he had spent some time at the French court until the treaty agreed with England at Étaples had forced him to seek the protection of the Duchess Margaret in the Low Countries. It was probably at about this time that his personal statement, preserved in the ‘Gelderland document’, was issued. During 1493 he remained on the continent, supported not only by Margaret but also by Maximilian, who in August succeeded his father as Holy Roman Emperor. In November, the new emperor took the young man with him to Vienna where, early in 1494, he sought to raise loans ‘for the young king of England for the conquest of his kingdom’. Indults for portable altars were often sought by the wealthy in preparation for an extended journey, and this case seems to have been no exception as in May 1494 ‘the nobleman, Richard, duke of York,’ would have been preparing to return with Maximilian to Flanders.
The Vatican official who approved this grant was Giuliano Maffei, Bishop of Bertinoro from 1477-1505 and Archbishop of Dubrovnik in modern-day Croatia from 1505 until his death in 1510.[5] By 1494 Bishop Maffei had been the Penitentiary Regent for over a decade; most of the business that had passed through his office during that time had been unremarkable, routine requests from priests, scholars and minor gentry, but the indult to Richard, duke of York, was not the first politically sensitive request that the bishop had conceded. On 27 March 1484, for instance, he had granted to Henry ‘Richemond’ and Elizabeth ‘Plantageneta’ a dispensation to marry despite being related by consanguinity in double fourth degrees (i.e. being third cousins).[6]
It will be noted that, while the first of these two politically contentious dispensations facilitated the cause of Henry Tudor, the second, issued almost exactly ten years later, acknowledged the right of Henry’s new dynastic rival. It may well be that Bishop Maffei was persuaded that this new pretender was indeed who he said he was because in late 1493 and early 1494 this good-looking young man was appearing at his best: sumptuously dressed, well-spoken and, in a nutshell, ‘fort gorgias’. [7] He charmed those who met him at Maximilian’s court and no alternative identity than the one he claimed was as yet publicly known. But the papacy’s primary concern was for the interests of the Catholic Church, and so the blood claims of the various contenders for the English throne are likely to have carried less weight in Rome than the support it was deemed likely they might provide the Church. Unfortunately for the House of York, in 1485 Richard III’s fugitive enemy, John Morton, Bishop of Ely, had spent some time in Rome where he seems to have made a very favourable impression. After Morton’s delayed return to England following Henry’s victory at Bosworth, Pope Innocent had shown himself remarkably keen to intervene in English domestic affairs, not only issuing several ratifications of Henry and Elizabeth’s new marriage dispensation (granted by a visiting legate in January 1486), but even going so far as to forbid any of Henry’s subjects from stirring up fresh tumults in the realm ‘under pain of excommunication and the greater anathema.’[8]
Pope Innocent, like his immediate predecessor Sixtus IV, had been desperate for the rulers of Christendom to resolve their disputes in order that they might participate in a crusade to liberate Constantinople from the Turks, and it may well be he had been persuaded that this union of Lancaster and York really could put an end to civil strife and place England’s military capacity at the service of Christendom.[9] The existence of the papal Bull anathematizing rebels against Henry VII had severely hampered Yorkist efforts to raise the country against him, and although Pope Innocent had died in the summer of 1492 without any sign of support from England for a crusade, the new pope, Alexander VI, had shown no inclination to change course. In May 1495, a year after the issue of this indult, Margaret of Burgundy was to send a lengthy and impassioned plea to Pope Alexander to withdraw this Bull in order – so she argued – that Richard, duke of York, could reclaim from his sister and her husband the throne that was rightfully his own.[10] But the Duchess Margaret’s plea was to fall on deaf ears, as did a number of similar pleas that she addressed to Henry VII’s Lord Chancellor John Morton, now Cardinal Archbishop of Canterbury, who responded cannily to the Duchess Margaret’s assurances that her protégé truly was the son of Edward IV: ‘But indeed he is not reputed the son of King Edward in this kingdom.’[11]
It has been assumed that a second petition to the Pope sent four months after Margaret’s by the Emperor Maximilian was also ignored because no response to it survives, but just possibly it bore some fruit because in 1497, as he made his bid to take Exeter, the pretender (now publicly identified in England as Perkin Warbeck) is said to have ‘published certain apostolic bulls affirming that he was the son of King Edward and that he meant to coin money and to give money to all.’[12] Or perhaps these bulls were simply further dispensations from Rome issued to him, with no political intent, under the same name in which he had requested them.
Marie Barnfield
Sources and Further Reading
Ian Arthurson, The Perkin Warbeck Conspiracy 1491-1499 (Stroud, 1994)
J.-A. Buchon, ed., Chroniques de Jean Molinet, 5 vols., vol. V (Paris, 1828)
Peter D. Clarke, ‘English Royal Marriages and the Papal Penitentiary in the Fifteenth Century’, EHR, vol. 120, no. 488 (2005)
Peter D. Clarke, ‘New evidence of noble and gentry piety in fifteenth-century England and Wales’, Journal of Medieval History, vol. 34, no. 1 (2008)
Peter D. Clarke and Patrick N. R. Zutshi, Supplications from England and Wales in the Registers of the Apostolic Penitentiary, 1410-1503, 3 vols., Canterbury and York CIII-CV (Woodbridge, 2012, 2014 and 2015)
CMP: Allen B. Hinds, ed., Calendar of State Papers and Manuscripts in the Archives and Collections of Milan 1385-1618, (London, 1912)
CVP: Rawdon Brown, ed., Calendar of State Papers Relating to English Affairs in the Archives of Venice, vol 4 1527-1533, (London, 1871), Appendix: ‘Miscellaneous 1495’
C. S. L. Davies, ‘Bishop John Morton, the Holy See and the Accession of Henry VII’, EHR, CII, No. 402 (1987)
James Gairdner, ed., Memorials of King Henry the Seventh: Historia Regis Henrici Septimi a Bernardo Andrea Tholosate Conscripta, Rerum Britannicarum Medii Aevi Scriptores X (London, 1858), Appendix A
Lambeth Palace Library, MS CM XI/31 (image at https://images.lambethpalacelibrary.org.uk/luna/servlet/detail/LPLIBLPL~31~31~178146~135259)
Philippa Langley, The Princes in the Tower: Solving History’s Greatest Cold Case (Cheltenham, 2023)
The Hierarchy of the Catholic Church (www.catholic-hierarchy.org): ‘Diocese of Bertinoro’: ‘Giuliano Maffei (Matteis)’
The National Archives (TNA), SC 7/23/5, 6 7, 10
Ann Wroe, Perkin: A Story of Deception (London, 2003)
[1]. For an English translation by
Nathalie Nijman-Bliekendaal, see Philippa Langley, The Princes in the Tower:
Solving History’s Greatest Cold Case (Cheltenham, 2023), pp. 331-3.
[2] Peter D. Clarke and Patrick N. R.
Zutshi, Supplications from England and Wales in the Registers of the
Apostolic Penitentiary, 1410-1503, vol. 1: 1410-1464, Canterbury and York
vol. CIII (Woodbridge, 2012), p. xiii.
[3] Peter D. Clarke,
‘New evidence of noble and gentry piety in fifteenth-century England and
Wales’, Journal of Medieval History, vol. 34, no. 1 (2008), pp. 27-8, 34.
[4] Clarke and
Zutshi, Supplications, vol. 3: 1492-1503, Canterbury and York Society vol.
CV (Woodbridge, 2015), p. 127.
[5] The Hierarchy of the Catholic Church (www.catholic-hierarchy.org): ‘Diocese of Bertinoro’: ‘Giuliano Maffei (Matteis)’.
[6] Peter D. Clarke, ‘English Royal
Marriages and the Papal Penitentiary in the Fifteenth Century’, EHR, vol.
120, no. 488 (2005), pp. 1024-5; Clarke and. Zutshi, Supplications, vol.
2: 1464-1492, Canterbury and York CIV (Woodbridge, 2014), p. 151.
[7] Chroniques de Jean Molinet,
ed. J.-A. Buchon, vol. V, (Paris, 1828), p. 15.
[8] TNA, SC 7/23/5-7, 10.
[9] C. S. L. Davies, ‘Bishop John
Morton, the Holy See and the Accession of Henry VII’, EHR, CII, No. 402
(1987), pp. 21-22.
[10] Lambeth Palace
Library, MS CM XI/31. For an image of this document, see https://images.lambethpalacelibrary.org.uk/luna/servlet/detail/LPLIBLPL~31~31~178146~135259. For a full transcript,
see Memorials of King Henry the Seventh: Historia Regis Henrici Septimi a
Bernardo Andrea Tholosate Conscripta, ed. James Gairdner, Rerum
Britannicarum Medii Aevi Scriptores X (London, 1858), Appendix A, pp. 393-9.
[11] Calendar of State Papers and Manuscripts
in the Archives and Collections of Milan 1385-1618 (CMP), ed. Allen B.
Hinds (London, 1912), p. 328.
[12] Calendar of
State Papers Relating to English Affairs in the Archives of Venice, vol 4
1527-1533, ed. Rawdon Brown (London, 1871), Appendix: ‘Miscellaneous 1495’, pp.
482-3; CMP, p. 327.
