The New Murrey and Blue blog

Reblogged from A Medieval Potpourri sparkypus.com

This is thought to be a portrait of Perkin Warbeck/Richard Duke of York from the Tournament Tapestry at Valenciennes

Perkin Warbeck.  Pencil sketch c1560.  Note the eye blemish in both portraits.

Following on from my earlier post and the high likelihood that John Evans ,who lies buried in Coldridge Church Devon,  was indeed Edward V,  has led me to wonder did he ever meet Perkin Warbeck who  claimed to have been his brother, the youngest ‘Prince in the Tower’  Richard Duke of York.   Warbeck’s story is very well covered elsewhere, and I will only be focusing on the events of late 1497, the  Second Cornish Rebellion  and a window in time where it is possible that Warbeck met John Evans.  The one opportunity would have arisen  after  Warbeck’s  arrival  at Whitesand Bay near Land’s End, Cornwall on 7 September from Ireland on ‘2 ships and a Breton pinnace.’   Attainders would later  say that he came with a ‘a great multitude and number‘ while Raimondo Soncino, Milanese Ambassador to England ‘thought they amounted to 80 savage Irishmen‘ who arrived on ‘fishing boats‘.(1)  For some baffling reason, Warbeck chose to bring with him his wife, Lady Katherine Gordon or Kateryn Huntleye as she was called in Henry VIIs Privy Purse Expenses  and their almost one year old child, as you do when you embark on a perilous invasion of a country (2).  However common sense must have prevailed as both she and the child were sent to safety at St Michaels Mount then, according to Wroe perhaps to St Buryan, to await the outcome.

St Michael’s Mount and the Causeway. Photograph © Richard Bowden/Shutterstock

Notwithstanding the defeat of the Cornish rebels at Blackheath on the 17th June  – known as the First Cornish Rebellion and sparked off by Henry Tudor’s heavy taxation –  Warbeck raised his standard at Penzance and begun his march eastwards gathering followers described as ‘undisciplined’ along the way. 

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