Something Old

Not everything worth reading is hot off the press. In this section, we recommend "something old" that is still well worth reading. "Something Old" can mean anything from a venerable and antique classic to a good book first published four or more years ago.     

“PERKIN WARBECK” by John Ford (first published 1634; probably written in the 1620s)

            As I have noted before, one of my pastimes is reading Elizabethan, Jacobean and Caroline plays written by playwrights other than Shakespeare. So you can find postings on this blog about George Chapman’s Bussy D’Ambois, the anonymous Arden of Feversham, John Marston’s The Malcontent, Thomas Heywood’s A Woman Killed With Kindness, Philip Massinger’s The Roman Actor and John Ford’s ‘Tis Pity she’s a Whore.  As I said in an earlier posting, “the attractions of these plays for me are obvious. They are short enough to be read at a sitting or two, and no matter how convoluted, bombastic or melodramatic they (all of them) can get, they are written in a robust language that can rise to poetic heights.” But while my interest in John Ford’s Perkin Warbeck embraces these attractions, I have another reason for looking at this play. In my last “Something Old” posting, I discussed Josephine Tey’s detective novel The Daughter of Time, which set out to prove (quite convincingly) that Richard III was a much maligned king, caricatured by Tudor propaganda and turned into a monster by William Shakespeare’s enjoyable melodramatic play. As is now widely understood, the man who succeeded to (or usurped) the throne after Richard III’s death, Henry Tudor (Henry VII), was a far more murderous person than Richard. 

                                                     (Portait of John Ford)

            Henry was a very canny organiser and administrator, but in the early years of his reign, he set about diligently eliminating (i.e. having executed) anybody of royal lineage who had a stronger claim to the throne than he had. Henry’s own claim to the throne was very feeble indeed. Yet there were many pretenders to his throne. One of them was Perkin Warbeck, raised in Europe, who claimed to be Richard Duke of York, one of the “Princes in the Tower” who had, according to legend, been murdered on the orders of Richard III. Perkin Warbeck was accepted in a number of European courts as the legitimate heir to the English throne. John Ford’s play chronicles the life and death of Perkin Warbeck when he came to Britain and asserted his claim. Perkin Warbeck (or to give its full title as shown on his first publication The Chronicle History of Perkin Warbeck – A Strange Truth) was first performed in the 1620s and first published in 1634, over 130 years after the (1490s) events it depicts. John Ford was aware that chronicle history plays were rare since the time of Shakespeare. As he says in his prologue “Studies of this nature have been of late / So out of fashion, so unfollow’d…”. His prologue also tells us there is in his play no “unnecessary mirth forc’d, to endear / a multitude”. So groundlings begone, watch carefully and be serious.

            Throughout the play, King Henry VII of England is depicted as a wise and thoughtful king and it is taken for granted that Perkin Warbeck is an impostor.  In other words, this is a play with an apparently Tudor bias. John Ford took his historical detail from a history of the reign of Henry VII written by the Elizabethan (and obviously pro-Tudor) sage Francis Bacon; and from a popular history written by Thomas Gainsford. Bear in mind that even in Caroline England (the reign of the Stuart Charles I) playwrights could not write negative things about the Tudor dynasty, given that the Stuarts were related to the Tudors and it was the last Tudor monarch (the childless Elizabeth 1) who had invited a Stuart to succeed her. What is intriguing about the play, however, is how ambiguous it is in its sympathies

            To give a simplified synopsis, Perkin Warbeck himself does not appear on stage in Act One. Instead we have King Henry at his court congratulating himself on having brought to an end the civil wars (the “Wars of the Roses”) as he boasts “The rent face / And bleeding wounds of England’s slaughter’d people / Have been by us, as by the best physician, / At last both thoroughly cur’d and set in safety…” (Act One, Scene One). He is advised that Perkin Warbeck has landed in Scotland and hears how this impostor has been accepted as genuine by some people. Henry sets to work activating his spies to see who might be supporters of the pretender. Meanwhile at the Scottish court of King James IV, a courtier is hoping that he will be able to marry Lady Katherine Gordon, but he is rebuffed by the lady’s father.

            In Act Two King James of Scotland welcomes Perkin Warbeck to his court, accepting him as the true king of England as he has been endorsed by the kings of France and Bohemia. Perkin Warbeck is at once depicted as courteous, well-spoken, aristocratic - in a word, kingly. He gives a detailed account of himself (full forty lines of speech!) and later in this Act, King James declares: “How like a king ‘a looks! Lords, but observe / The confidence of his aspect. Dross cannot / Cleave to so pure a metal. Royal youth. / Plantagenet undoubted.” (Act Two, Scene Three). Some of the Scots courtiers are a little more sceptical, noting how fluent and persuasive a person Perkin Warbeck is: “[He] courts the ladies / As if his strength of language chain’d attention / By power of prerogative.” (Act Two, Scene Three). To the chagrin of the suitor who hoped to marry Lady Katherine Gordon, King James gives the lady in marriage to Perkin Warbeck, hoping thus to seal an alliance of Scotland and England. Meanwhile in England, King Henry is ferreting out people who might betray him. He sends Sir William Stanley to execution once Stanley has admitted his guilt. Hearing that King James has accepted Perkin Warbeck as king, Henry moves to secure the border with Scotland and sends an army off to quell an uprising in Cornwall. He also begins to consider ways of winning King James over to his side.

            Offstage, the Cornish uprising is easily defeated in Act Three and King Henry righteously orders the surviving ring-leaders to be executed – but the playwright also shows the king mourning for those who have been misled into rebellion. He now parleys with the Spanish ambassador, plotting a way to make peace with King James at the expense of Perkin Warbeck. As this is going on, Perkin Warbeck raises a force to invade the north of England, with the help of King James. Before he leaves for the war, he says a fond farewell to his wife Lady Katherine Gordon who, it is clear, loves him deeply. But the planned invasion does not go well. King James attempts to besiege Durham, but is quickly made aware that very few people are rallying to Perkin Warbeck’s cause. From the ramparts of Durham, the Bishop of Durham ridicules Warbeck. He says that Warbeck is of lowly birth and chastises King James for having been deceived by him: “You rend the face of peace and break a league / With a confederate king that courts your amity, / For whom too? For a vagabond, a straggler, / Not noted in the world by birth or name, / An obscure peasant, by the rage of hell / Loos’d from his chains to set great kings at strife. / What nobleman, what common man of note, / What ordinary subject hath come in, / Since first you footed in our territories, / To only feign a welcome? Children laugh at / Your proclamations, and the wiser pity / So great a potentate’s abuse by one / Who juggles merely with the fawns and youth / Of an instructed compliment.” (Act Three, Scene Four). What with this and with news of King Henry’s victory in Cornwall, King James gradually gives up the siege and begins to lose faith in Perkin Warbeck.

            So in Act Four, as Henry’s forces now invade Scotland, King James no longer includes Perkin Warbeck in his court. Warbeck laments his demotion, but still thinks that people in England will rally to him and he plans to take a force to the English west coast. King James negotiates with the Spanish emissary, who says that all of Europe wants peace between England and Scotland. King Henry has sent a message saying that his daughter Margaret can settle the bond between the two countries by marrying into Scots royalty. King James agrees to this, but even as he sends Perkin Warbeck away, he still sees Warbeck is a noble person and he does not want him harmed. He says “No blood of innocents shall buy by peace. / For Warbeck, as you nick him, came to me / Commended by the states of Christendom, / A prince, though in distress. His fair demeanour, / Lovely behaviour, unappalled spirit / Spoke him not as base in blood, however clouded.”  (Act Four, Scene Three). When Warbeck lands in England the second time, attempting to encourage his small band of supporters, he still speaks to his wife Katherine as if great numbers will rally to him: “After so many storms as wind and seas / Have threaten’d to our weather-beaten ships, / At last, sweet fairest, we are safe arriv’d / On our dear mother earth, ingrateful only / To heaven and us in yielding sustenance / To sly usurpers of our throne and right. / These general acclamations are an omen / Of happy process to their welcome lord. / They flock in troops, and from all parts with wings / of duty to lay their hearts before us.”  (Act Four, Scene Four) In the same scene he declares that there is “divinity of royal birth” that will overcome any opposition.

            The inevitable happens in Act Five. Perkin Warbeck’s small army is easily defeated by Henry VII’s much larger army, Warbeck is on the run for fear of being handed over to Henry by turncoat supporters, and Katherine is taken to Henry’s court with promises of safe conduct. When Perkin Warbeck, captured and under guard, is finally brought before King Henry, he still declares his belief that he is the true and legitimate king. After he leaves the stage, King Henry says “Was ever such an impudence in forgery? / The custom, sure, of being styl’d a king / Hath fastened in his thought that he is such…” (Act Five, Scene Two). Henry’s verdict is that Perkin Warbeck sincerely believes he is royalty because he has, since childhood, been fed on fantasies in European courts, and especially by the Duchess of Burgundy. Warbeck is put in the stocks and offered the option of having his life spared if (like another less credible pretender called Lambert Simnel) he publicly renounces his claim to the throne. Steadfast to the end, he refuses to do this, and is executed. King Henry speaks the last words of the play: “Perkin, we are inform’d, is arm’d to die. / In that we honor him. Our lords shall follow / To see the execution. And from thence / We gather this fit use: that ‘public states, / As our particular bodies, taste most good / In health when purged of corrupted blood’ ”(Act Five, Scene Three) Or, to put more brutally, what his closing maxim Henry says is that he, as king, has the right to put to death anyone who challenges his legitimacy to the throne.

            In very general terms, the play could be seen as championing Henry VII’s wise statecraft; his benevolence when he allows some of Warbeck’s peasant followers go free and orders that they not be pursued; the courteous way he accepts Perkin Warbeck’s wife Lady Katherine into his court; and the chance he gives Warbeck the possibility of saving his life by declaring the he is not the true king.

            Yet here the ambiguity creeps in. As a character, King Henry is basically flat and less interesting than Perkin Warbeck. He gives orders, he makes decisions, he praises himself and his moments of clemency seem perfunctory. Note, too, he has no intimate love. The eponymous character is far more interesting, far more persuasive as a speaker and there is no suggestion that he does not truly believe that he really is the legitimate king. He is not consciously a fraud. Despite John Ford’s opening statement that the play would have no “unnecessary mirth forc’d, to endear / a multitude” there is comedy in the way Warbeck’s leading advisors are always characterised as inept, stupid, often semi-coherent in the three or four scenes in which they appear, and ultimately lacking in any real courage or strategy. The clear implication is that Perkin Warbeck, a man of integrity, has been led astray by fools unworthy of him. Perkin Warbeck’s nobility, aristocratic bearing and - dare one say – glamour make him a sympathetic character.

            In spite of everything; in spite of the fact that he is about to be executed, Perkin Warbeck is still given a sort of victory by the steadfast love of his wife Katherine. In face of the mockery of one of Henry’s courtiers, Katherine asserts her profound love of her husband, and Perkin Warbeck says “Spite of tyranny / We reign in our affections, blessed woman! / Read in my destiny the wrack of honor; / Point out, in my contempt of death, to memory / Some miserable happiness, since herein, / Even when I fell, I stood enthron’d a monarch / Of one chaste wife’s troth, pure and uncorrupted. / Fair angel of perfection, immortality / Shall raise thy name up to an adoration, / Court every rich opinion of true merit, / And saint it in the calendar of virtue, / When I am turn’d into the selfsame dust / Of which I was first form’d” (Act Five, Scene Three). Earlier, Ford has presented in the play two love scenes in which Perkin Warbeck has to say a fond farewell to his loving wife. The scenes are sentimental, “pathetic” almost in the manner of a Beaumont and Fletcher play but effective. They allow us to see more intimate feeling in the pretender than there is in the cold, pragmatic Tudor King. While the play champions Henry’s right to rule, Ford is telling us that in many ways the pretender was the more noble character. You could say that Ford’s brain was with Henry VII, but his heart was with Perkin Warbeck.

            In his essay on John Ford, T.S.Eliot said that the play Perkin Warbeck was “almost flawless” and was “one of the very best historical plays outside of the works of Shakespeare.” In this case, I’m inclined to agree with Old Possum.