Perkin: a story of deception by Ann Wroe

Christina Hardyment is enthralled by a tale of a Tudor impostor whose gall won loyal support, but led him to the scaffold

"The young man was such a mercurial, as the like hath seldom been known." The Jacobean historian Francis Bacon's judgement on Perkin Warbeck reflects a puzzlement that Ann Wroe revives in this astonishingly detailed and moving biography. Every reader of 1066 and All That knows about Perkin Warbeck and Lambert Simnel, Yorkist pretenders to the throne grabbed from Richard III in 1485 by the first Tudor king, Henry VII. Knowing as we do that the next century resounded with the glorification of the Tudor dynasty, they now seem forlorn, fated figures.

But Henry's claim to the throne was distinctly flaky. He could claim descent from Edward III, but only through his mother's bastard Beaufort line. For the next two decades, anyone boasting less diluted blood royal was a potent threat. Either of the boys could have been the future: the next instalment in the internecine struggle between the houses of York and Lancaster which had dominated the previous 40 years.

The English were notorious for their fickleness towards their kings. "Alas, this is a great default of us Englishmen, for there may no thing please us no term," wrote Sir Thomas Malory after Henry VI had been displaced from his throne by Edward IV, only to be replaced on it in 1470 by the "king-maker" Earl of Warwick and Edward's brother Clarence. Edward IV had retrieved it again a year later with a tiny handful of faithful supporters. When he died in 1483, his little son Edward lasted only a few months as Edward V before his uncle declared both him and his brother illegitimate, imprisoned them in the Tower and had himself crowned as Richard III.

Ten-year-old Lambert Simnel was said to be Edward's brother George's son: Edward, Earl of Warwick. His claim was easily disproved by parading the real young earl, who was enduring Henry's hospitality in the Tower of London. Lambert ended his days as first a kitchen boy, then a falconer.

The young man whom Henry VII labelled as Perkin Warbeck, the errant son of a Flemish boatman, was a far greater threat when he stepped out of a ship on to the quayside in Cork in 1491 – slim, fair-headed and strikingly beautiful, all dressed in silks and satins. He was spontaneously claimed by the crowd (so it was said) as Prince Richard, the younger of Edward's sons, those princes in the Tower whose deaths – it was widely believed – Richard III had engineered. Worse, he was acclaimed by his aunt, Edward IV's sister Margaret, now Dowager Duchess of Burgundy. She welcomed him to her court in Bruges and persuaded other European crowned heads to back him.

Henry's spies nipped one planned invasion in the bud, executing the hundred or so brave souls who landed at Deal in 1495, but worse was to come. Perkin, "Prince Richard", sailed away first to Ireland, where he was acknowledged by lords who had very ancient allegiances to the house of York, then to Scotland, where he found an ally in James IV.

James provided the pretender with snowy white tournament armour and an entrancing and nobly born wife, Lady Katherine Gordon. Within a year of their marriage they had a son. Even more alarming for Henry was a raid, led by the Scottish king and his "esteemed cousin" into England itself. But after four days, "Prince Richard" retreated, horrified, it was said, by the bloodshed and the plunder of "his people".

Next year, he sailed for Ireland again in a little ship touchingly called the Cuckoo, then on to Cornwall. He raised his standard at Penzance, captured St Michael's Mount, and came close to taking Exeter. But as Henry's forces advanced, he panicked, ran to take ship from Southampton, then settled for sanctuary in Beaulieu.

His downfall was inevitable but oddly prolonged. Extracted from sanctuary on promise of his life, he repeated public confessions that he was an impostor, spent eight months in civilised custody at court, then, after an attempt to escape, in the Tower. A conspiracy to free both him and the Earl of Warwick, took both to the scaffold in 1499.

Writing medieval biographies has been likened to making bricks without straw. But Ann Wroe, who rose to a far greater challenge in her reconstruction of the life and after-effect of Pontius Pilate (accurately subtitled "the biography of an invented man") is no stranger to making magnificent mountains out of intriguing molehills. Like Kay in Masefield's Box of Delights, she "goes deep, goes small". Finding rich pickings in contemporary chronicles, diplomatic correspondence and legal records, she works like an Impressionist painter, applying hundreds of tiny details, all meticulously but unobtrusively documented, to achieve her effects.

Using the gossip and chattering current in the courts of Europe, Wroe turns the puppet pretender into a disarmingly real young man. She explores the psychology of his invented life, what it took to allow himself to be made into such a perilous mascot, how his spirit quailed at the sight of blood, but rallied with meek dignity on the scaffold. Mulling over his eight-year career fills nearly 600 pages, but the texture of the times – material and political, emotional and spiritual – builds up in a formidably convincing way.

So who was the man who died as Perkin Warbeck? An invention or a lost prince? Or someone else entirely? Wroe balances probabilities with exemplary objectivity, then puts forward some enticingly convincing theories. She concludes that "nothing definitely proved or so far" shows that Perkin was not Richard of York. "The inexplicable factors, as Henry himself noted, were his rival's own persistence, and the enduring loyalty of the great names who backed him."

Christina Hardyment is writing a biography of Sir Thomas Malory