Warbeck was taken to London and put under guard. He confessed that his alleged identity was a deception, but this statement has often been viewed with suspicion because it was made while he was at the King’s mercy. Perkin ‘admitted’ that he was the son of a Flemish official of the town of Tournay. He had travelled to Ireland in 1485 in the service of a Breton merchant, he said, and was received by the people of Cork who, because of his resemblance to the Royal Plantagenets, convinced him to assume the identity of the Duke of York.

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Henry confined Warbeck in London. Perkin ended his life by unwittingly serving the purpose of the King he had sought to supplant. Henry’s agents feigned sympathy for him, and encouraged him to plan an escape, thus giving Henry a convenient, if rather flimsy, excuse to execute him.

So goes the traditional history of Warbeck’s life. But there is reason to suspect the reliability of this ‘official’ story. Audrey Williamson, in her book The Mystery of the Princes, justifiably questions the likelihood that a stranger arriving unexpectedly in Cork could spontaneously be hailed as the supposedly dead Duke of York and then convinced on the spot to go along with a treasonous masquerade, the thought of which had never before entered his head. Almost certainly Warbeck’s confession misrepresented this episode. But was the whole story fabricated by Henry to hide the truth–that Warbeck was who he claimed to be? Or did Henry truthfully report a story that Warbeck himself concocted to avoid implicating co-conspirators?

Warbeck’s often-noted resemblance to Edward IV might seem to indicate that the two men were indeed related; however, a physical similarity to the dead King should be expected even of an imposter. Any pretender that did not have at least a superficial resemblance to Edward would not have risked his life on such an implausible claim. It is even possible that Warbeck was recruited by others precisely because of his fortuitous appearance.

If this was the case, however, it is necessary to explain how the pretender maintained his deception for so long, and, if he was enlisted by others, to identify who might have done so. The first problem is by far the easier, though many writers have struggled over the question of where Warbeck, if a fraud, could have obtained the knowledge needed to convince doubters.

There is, in fact, no mention in any account of Warbeck’s career of his ever winning over a reluctant sceptic by disclosing some intimate detail of the Duke of York’s life. His support came entirely from people who found it politically expedient to acknowledge him, whether or not they truly believed his claims. On his first two invasions of England, he apparently failed to convince anyone that he was the lost Duke; in fact, he seems hardly to have made any effort to do so. The army that gathered around him in Cornwall can almost certainly be numbered among those for whom it did not matter whether or not Warbeck was a fraud, but who were ripe for revolt given any convenient excuse.

More difficult to explain is why any of the Yorkist exiles, such as Margaret of Burgundy, would have supported Warbeck if they knew him to be an imposter. One would think that even the most devoted Yorkist would prefer to leave Henry on the throne of England, rather than replace him with a Flemish merchant.

However, there was a precedent for such a plot. In 1487, Yorkists apparently sponsored the pretender Lambert Simnel, claiming that he was the Earl of Warwick. In this case, there is no doubt the claim was false, because Henry already held the Earl prisoner, and displayed him in public as proof of Simnel’s deceit.

The Yorkists seemingly planned to use Simnel only as a means of winning popular support and would have replaced him once Henry was forced from the throne. There may have been similar plans to supplant Warbeck if he had defeated Henry, but there is no firm evidence of such a plan.

Another intriguing possibility was put forward by Williamson, who recalls that a contemporary writer made the statement that in his early years Perkin Warbeck was raised by a converted Jew. Edward Brampton, one of Richard III’s most reliable supporters, was also a converted Jew. Brampton fled to Flanders after the Battle of Bosworth, and thereafter his name occasionally reappears during the course of Warbeck’s history. If Brampton was the mysterious converted Jew, he may have been commissioned by Richard to look after the Duke of York and perhaps to arrange for him to assume the identity of a member of Tornay’s Warbeck family until he was old enough to make his true identity known.

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