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Historical person
1474–1499
Perkin Warbeck was a pretender who claimed to be Richard, Duke of York, the younger of the Princes in the Tower. During the 1490s he gained support from Margaret of York, the king of Scotland and several European rulers, creating a serious diplomatic threat to Henry VII. His attempted invasions failed, and after surrender he was kept at court before trying to escape. Warbeck was executed in 1499 after alleged involvement in another plot.
Philippa Gregory’s The White Princess makes Warbeck and the uncertainty around his identity central to the later story. He also appears in numerous novels about Henry VII and the missing princes. Fiction can plausibly sustain the possibility that he was genuine, but the surviving evidence remains contested and was shaped by both Tudor interrogation and foreign propaganda.
In Alison Weir’s The Pretender’s Wife, To his enemies he is not Richard Plantagenet but Perkin Warbeck, a dangerous pretender whose invasions threaten the new Tudor dynasty. In Griff Hosker’s Tudor Spy, James of Ecclestone thought that when Perkin Warbeck was executed his days as a spy were over. Other novels featuring Perkin Warbeck include Griff Hosker’s Tudor Warrior and Griff Hosker’s Flodden.
Series
Tudor Warrior follows James of Ecclestone through early Tudor politics, espionage and war. The series begins under Henry VII, uses the lingering threat of Yorkist claimants such as Perkin Warbeck, and moves toward Henry VIII and Flodden. It is a short sequence about service to a new dynasty…
All books in this series
The Plantagenet and Tudor novels form a chronological sequence of connected but independently readable stories about women near the English throne. They move from the Lancastrian court and the Wars of the Roses through the rise of the Tudors, Henry VIII’s marriages, the mid-Tudor religious crisis and the…
All books in this series
Standalone books
