he served during his boyhood under half a dozen different masters in three
or four Netherland cities and in Lisbon. At the age of seventeen he took
service with one Pregent Meno, a Breton merchant, and incidentally appeared
at Cork where he paraded in costly array. Such was the effect of his
appearance and bearing that the citizens of Cork declared he must be a
Plantagenet. Taxed with being in reality either the Earl of Warwick or an
illegitimate son of Richard III., he swore he was nothing of the kind; but
his admirers declared that in that case he could only be Richard of York,
who had somehow been saved from sharing his brother's fate in the Tower.
Perkin found himself unable to resist such importunity, accepted the
dignity thrust upon him, and set himself to learn his part. The partisans
of the White Rose had shown in the case of Lambert Simnel their preference
for even a palpable impostor bearing their badge, as compared with the
objectionable Tudor; and a genuine Duke of York would have the advantage of
a claim stronger even than that of his sister Elizabeth, Henry's queen.
Perkin, however, must have acted up to his part with no little skill to
have maintained himself as a plausible impostor up to the time when
Margaret of Burgundy received him--even though he met no one in whose
interest it was to pose him with inconvenient questions. So apt a pupil
would then have had little difficulty in assimilating the instructions of
Margaret; and, after a couple of years' training with her, in at least
supporting his role with plausibility. That Perkin himself told this story
is not very conclusive, since the confession was produced under
circumstances quite compatible with the whole thing having been dictated to
him; yet difficult as it is to believe, it is less incredible than the
alternative--that he was the real duke, who had been smuggled out of the
Tower eight years before he was produced, and kept in concealment all
through the interval, even while the Yorkist leaders had been reduced to
setting up a supposititious Earl of Warwick for a figurehead.