But sometimes he was in acute despair.
“If only I could get out,” he would say. “I’d go away. I’d leave England. I should never want to see this place again.”
The two guards were sympathetic.
“Well, there is the poor Earl just there.” The guards pointed vaguely at the wall. “He’s been here for nigh on fourteen years. Think of that!”
“For what reason?”
One of the guards lifted his shoulders and coming a step closer whispered: “For no reason but that he is the son of his father.”
“Oh . . . of the Duke of Clarence, you mean?”
“Died in this same place . . . Drowned in a butt of malmsey . . . helped himself . . . or others helped him to too much wine.”
Perkin shivered. “And his son has been here ever since the King came to the throne?”
The guards were becoming very confidential. “Well, he’s got a right, hasn’t he?”
“A right?”
One of them made a circle around his head and winked. “Wouldn’t do for him to be around having more right to it . . . some say. Well, it stands to reason. . . .He has to be kept away . . . under lock and key, don’t he?”
Perkin was thoughtful. Only a short distance from him was a young man who had a real claim to the throne. He had made no attempt to rise against the Tudor . . . and yet here he was . . . condemned to be a prisoner all his life maybe.
All his life! Perkin grew cold at that thought. Was that what was intended for him?
“You and the Earl,” said the guard . . .“you’d have a lot in common wouldn’t you? If you liked to write a note to him . . . I’d see he got it.”
“What should I write to him about?”
The guard shrugged his shoulders. “That’s for you. I thought two young men . . . here . . . so near and can’t see each other. I reckon the Earl would like to get a note from you . . . and you’d like to get one from him.”
Perkin shook his head.
The guard went out. His fellow guard was waiting for him.
“He don’t take to the idea,” he said. “He’ll need a bit of working on.”
But Perkin did take to the idea. He thought about the lonely Earl and he felt that if he could pour out his thoughts on paper it would relieve his feelings considerably. He would like to tell someone who could understand, how he had been drawn into posing as the son of a king and how he might so easily have become a king if his luck had gone the other way. It was not that he wanted to be a king; all he asked now was to rejoin his wife and child. That was all he asked but the King would not grant it and kept them apart. If Katharine could come and live with him in the Tower he was sure she would.
He asked the guard for paper and a pen to write. He should have been suspicious of the alacrity with which it was produced.
The Earl was equally glad to enliven his days in correspondence with his fellow prisoner. He told Perkin that he had heard something of him. News came now and then to the prisoners in the Tower—snippets of it . . . and then long silences so that one never really got the real story. Perkin told him what had happened to him and the Earl was eager to know more. Poor young man, he had been so long in the Tower that he knew very little of the outside world.
Perkin wrote of the freedom he longed to obtain, of Katharine waiting for him. All his thoughts were of freeing himself and getting away. . . . Escape from this fearful place, he wrote. Freedom. That is what I crave for.
The Earl craved for it too. “Am I to spend all my life a prisoner?” he wrote.
The guards who read the letters and gave them to the constable who showed them to the King before they were passed on to the intended recipient, said: “We are getting somewhere.”
“They were right. In time the two young men began to write about means of escape. How could they achieve it? “The guards are friendly,” wrote Perkin. “I have an idea that they would help us. There must be many prisoners in the Tower—many of them guiltless. It might be possible to get them to help us . . . It would be freedom for them as well as for us.”
The Earl was inclined to leave the planning to Perkin who had had adventures in various places, who had actually gone into battle. What could a young man who had been a prisoner since he was ten, know of these matters?
Planning made the days pass pleasantly. Perkin had a grand plan for seizing the Tower, they would get the guards to help. Warwick must not forget he was the true heir to the throne. He had the right to command. Perkin was only a humble citizen, but he would admit he had experience.
They grew excited. They drew plans. It was all in the mind. Both of them knew what they wrote about would be impossible to put into action.
But it was far more serious than they realized and they were to pay dearly for their diversion.
One day the guards came into Perkin’s cell. He looked up eagerly thinking they might have brought him a communication from the Earl.
The guards looked different; they were no longer smiling conspiratorially, no longer asking for the latest communication to the Earl of Warwick.
“Perkin Warbeck,” said the senior of the guards. “You are to be tried at Westminster on the sixteenth day of November.”
“Tried! But I have already been judged.”
“This is another matter. You will be tried with the Earl of Warwick for treason.”
Perkin did not understand.
“Plotting against the King’s person. Plotting to take possession of the Tower.”
“You mean . . .”
“You won’t get away with this one, I can tell you. It’s all there . . . in the letters.”
“My letters to the Earl . . .”
“And his to you . . . You’re in trouble, you and the noble Earl.”
Perkin understood then. This had been their plan. The friendly guards were the sinister spies of the Tudor King and he was in trouble . . . moreover he had involved the Earl of Warwick with him.
Henry was gratified. His ruse had worked. Perkin was of no importance to him, but the Earl of Warwick had fallen into his hands.
The two men had written to each other of escaping from prison. It would not be easy to condemn Warwick to death for that. People would say, for what reason was he in prison? Wasn’t it the most natural thing in the world that he should plan to escape?
That would not do.
He consulted with Lord Oxford who was the High Constable of England. The Constable knew what his wishes were and why. It was imperative that the match with Spain be made without much more delay. If the matter was allowed to drift the Spanish Sovereigns might well betroth their daughter to someone else.
“It would seem,” said the King, “that the Earl of Warwick was not planning merely to escape. His idea was to gather an army about him. That is quite clear.”
It was not. But the Constable knew that the King was commanding him to make it clear.
Henry was right. Oxford saw that. While the Earl lived there would be no peace in the kingdom. At any moment someone would arise and use him as a figurehead. There must be peace. What was the life of a young prince compared with the terrible revenge of war? It was the good of the country against an innocent young man.
“It must be made clear,” said Oxford.
Henry nodded.
The Earl was bewildered to find himself in the midst of so much excitement. Up to now he had spent his days in the quietness of his prison. He knew little of the world. Vaguely he remembered life at Middleham with the Duchess of Gloucester who had afterward become Queen Anne. She had been kind to him—she had been his mother’s sister and she used to talk to him about her childhood when she and Isabel his mother were together at Middleham with Richard whom she married and George whom Isabel had married. “They were brothers,” she had said, “we were sisters . . . daughters of Warwick the Kingmaker who married the sons of the Duke of York.” It had all been very interesting. Then she had died and King Richard had been killed at Bosworth and that was when life changed completely and he became a prisoner in the Tower. For what reason he had never been quite sure. Now he was beginning to understand. It was because his father was the brother of King Edward and King Richard and because King Edward’s two sons had disappeared in the Tower and Richard’s son had died and there was only himself left.