Epilogue: The Perkin Warbeck Debate

Abstract

In the late autumn of 1491, 300 years before James Molesworth Hobart posed as the Duke of Ormond, a handsome, blond youth wearing a “doublet of brocade with sleeves” and a “long robe of silk” (Wroe 50) appeared on the streets of Cork, Ireland. As Ann Wroe explains, the silk robe would have made a strong impression on the people who gathered around the young man: “Silk was so precious that it was used, in England at that time, mostly for laces and ribbons. No one below the rank of knight could wear it” (53). After interrogating the youth, a group of Yorkists desperate to depose Henry VII proclaimed him Richard Plantagenet, Duke of York, the younger son of Edward IV and one of the princes imprisoned and allegedly murdered in the Tower of London at the behest of Richard III. Following his Irish debut, the purported Duke of York won recognition from Charles VIII, the King of France, and adventurers flocked to his cause. His claim to the English throne was also supported by Maximilian, the King of the Romans, and James I V, King of Scotland, who “introduced him to the [Scottish] nobility and gave him as wife Lady Catherine Gordon, daughter of the first earl of Huntly, who was [the king’s] distant cousin” (Mackie 138). With the help of King Henry’s enemies, the would-be Richard IV participated in three unsuccessful invasions of England.