In London, Perkin Warbeck, who had spent years posing as Richard of Shrewsbury, the younger of the Princes in the Tower, was tried and convicted of treason. His extraordinary imposture had drawn support from European rulers including Margaret of Burgundy and James IV of Scotland, who recognized him as the rightful King of England. After his capture, he was forced to confess publicly before being hanged at Tyburn.

The Warbeck imposture entered literary tradition as the archetypal pretender story, inspiring poetic and dramatic treatments from Elizabethan drama to Romantic verse. The mystery of the Princes in the Tower, which Warbeck's case kept alive, became a deep well for poets interested in identity, performance, and the gap between claimed and actual identity—a theme central to the work of poets from Shakespeare to W.H. Auden.