John Ford’s Perkin Warbeck: A Retelling

King Henry VII entered the royal Presence Chamber in the King’s palace at Westminster. The Bishop of Durham and Sir William Stanley (the Lord Chamberlain) followed him as he walked to the throne. The Earl of Oxford, the Earl of Surrey, Lord Giles Dawbeney, and some guards were also present. King Henry VII began to complain about the Pretenders to the throne — they were disrupting the country. The year was 1495, and the Pretender Perkin Warbeck was gaining support for his claim to the throne of England. Previously, the Pretender Lambert Simnel had caused trouble for King Henry VII. King Henry VII said, “Always to be haunted, always to be pursued, always to be frightened with false apparitions of pageant — mimic — majesty and new-coined greatness, as if we were a mockery, counterfeit King in state, only ordained to lavish sweat and blood, in scorn and laughter, to the ghosts of York, is all below our merits — I don’t deserve this trouble!” Richard, the third Duke of York, was the father of King Edward IV and King Richard III and of the Earl of Clarence. The “ghosts of York” were the various Pretenders to the throne — Pretenders who falsely claimed to be descendants of Richard, the third Duke of York. These Pretenders included Lambert Simnel and Perkin Warbeck. Using the royal plural, and comparing himself to a physician, King Henry VII said, “Yet, my lords, my friends and counselors, yet we sit fast in our own royal birthright; the rent face and bleeding wounds of England’s slaughtered people have been by us, as if by the best physician, at last both thoroughly cured and set in safety; and yet, for all this glorious work of peace, ourselves is scarcely secure.” “Ourselves is” meant “I am.” He was using the royal plural.