The Fortunes of Perkin Warbeck

The Fortunes of Perkin Warbeck Review

The Fortunes of Perkin Warbeck, published in 1830, is the last of Mary Shelley’s major historical novels and the least read of her significant works. This neglect is partly attributable to its subject — the late-fifteenth-century pretender to the English throne — which is less immediately resonant than the Italian Renaissance world of Valperga or the pandemic futurity of The Last Man. But it is also, in significant ways, her most controlled and emotionally coherent historical fiction.

The historical question at the novel’s centre is genuinely mysterious: was Perkin Warbeck a pretender — a Fleming taught to impersonate the dead Richard, Duke of York — or was he actually the younger Prince from the Tower, who had somehow survived? Historical consensus leans toward imposture, but the matter has never been resolved with certainty. Shelley takes the romantic interpretation: her Warbeck is the real prince, and the tragedy is the tragedy of rightful legitimacy destroyed by political expediency.

This choice — treating Warbeck as genuine — has structural benefits for the novel. It makes his cause unambiguously just and his eventual defeat unambiguously tragic, giving the narrative a clear moral architecture. Henry VII, by contrast, is portrayed as a man of cold, effective, entirely pragmatic political intelligence — someone who rules successfully precisely because he has no illusions and no loyalties that complicate calculation. The contrast between Warbeck’s idealism and Henry’s realpolitik is Shelley’s consistent subject across her historical fiction, and she brings it to one of its sharpest formulations here.

The novel’s outstanding quality is Katherine Gordon, Warbeck’s Scottish wife. She is loyal, intelligent, and fully aware of the odds against her husband’s cause; her continued devotion is not delusion but a choice made with full knowledge of the likely outcome. Shelley’s portrait of a woman who chooses loyalty to a doomed cause — not from weakness but from moral conviction — is among the finest things she wrote, and it gives the novel an emotional depth that its historical machinery alone could not achieve.

Our rating: 3.6/5

Shelley’s Historical Method

The Fortunes of Perkin Warbeck, published in 1830, demonstrates the historical research practice that Mary Shelley brought to her fiction with unusual rigor. Where contemporary historical novelists often treat research as background to be gestured at, Shelley worked from primary and near-primary sources — chronicles, diplomatic correspondence, legal records — and the late-fifteenth-century world she constructs has the density of genuine historical knowledge rather than the smoothness of imagination unconstrained by evidence.

Mary Shelley (1797–1851) produced her major historical fiction in the years after Percy Bysshe Shelley’s death in 1822 — Valperga in 1823, The Last Man in 1826, and The Fortunes of Perkin Warbeck in 1830. This period, during which she was supporting herself and her son by writing, produced some of her most ambitious work alongside the popular travel writing and biographical dictionary entries that paid the bills. The historical novels were labors of genuine intellectual commitment, not commercial calculation.

The Political Allegory

The novel’s engagement with questions of legitimacy and political succession carried obvious contemporary resonance in 1830. Europe was in the midst of post-Napoleonic reaction; the July Revolution in France would occur the same year the novel was published; the question of what legitimates political authority — birth, conquest, popular will, effectiveness — was live and urgent. Shelley’s portrait of Henry VII as a supremely effective ruler whose power rests on pragmatic calculation rather than principle, and Warbeck as a figure whose legitimate claim cannot compete with Henry’s cold efficiency, is a meditation on these contemporary questions through historical displacement.

Katherine Gordon as Moral Center

The novel’s deepest achievement is Katherine Gordon, Warbeck’s Scottish wife, who is fully aware of the odds against her husband’s cause and continues to support it not from naivety but from moral conviction. She understands that Warbeck will probably fail; she chooses loyalty anyway, on the grounds that some commitments are worth making regardless of their likelihood of success. Shelley, who had herself remained loyal to Percy Bysshe Shelley through circumstances that tested most forms of loyalty, brought personal understanding to the portrait of a woman who loves a doomed man without illusions, and the result is one of the most fully realized female characters in the historical novel tradition.

The novel remains one of Shelley’s least-read significant works, and this obscurity is a genuine loss: it is carefully constructed, historically serious, and emotionally honest in ways that would reward a contemporary readership prepared to meet it on its own terms.

The Pretender as Lost Prince

The Fortunes of Perkin Warbeck (1830) is Mary Shelley’s most sustained historical novel, taking the famous fifteenth-century pretender to Henry VII’s throne and treating him not as an impostor but as the genuine lost prince Richard, younger of the Princes in the Tower. Shelley follows his doomed campaigns and exile with a Romantic sympathy for the noble figure crushed by the machinery of power, extending the concern with the outcast and the dispossessed that runs through all her work.

Shelley undertook extensive historical research for the novel, and her decision to present Warbeck as the true prince rather than a fraud reflects a lifelong sympathy, inherited from her radical parents, for figures cast out and disinherited by the powerful — the same sympathy that animates the creature in Frankenstein and the survivor of The Last Man.