Cork earned the name in 1491, and it earned it by backing a fraud. That autumn a teenage cloth-merchant's servant stepped onto the quays, and within weeks the city was calling him the rightful King of England.
The boy was Perkin Warbeck. The name Cork won for taking his side stuck for the next four hundred years.
The pretender
Warbeck was born in Tournai, in Flanders, around 1474, and reached Cork in November 1491 as the servant of a Breton silk merchant. He was about seventeen. Paraded through the streets in his master's fine clothes, he looked to Cork's merchants like a boy of royal blood, and Cork, still loyal to the defeated House of York and no friend of the Tudor Henry VII, decided that was exactly what he was.
They coached him into a claim. He would be Richard, Duke of York, the younger of the two princes last seen in the Tower of London, not murdered after all but grown to manhood and come for his crown. John Atwater, a Cork merchant who had twice been mayor of the city, put his name and his money behind the story. The fiction left Cork for the courts of Europe.
It should have collapsed in a week. Instead it ran for eight years. Charles VIII of France received him. Margaret of York, sister of the dead King Edward IV, welcomed him to Burgundy as her lost nephew, and Maximilian I and James IV of Scotland backed him in turn. Warbeck landed in England twice and failed twice, and in 1497 he came back through Cork on his way to a last rising in Cornwall, where his men proclaimed him King Richard IV before it fell apart.
The Crown took him that year and hanged him at Tyburn on 23 November 1499. John Atwater, the Cork man who had launched him, was drawn and hanged the same day. Cork had dressed a merchant's servant as a king and sent him to shake a throne, and England did not forget which city had done it.
Cork had dressed a merchant's servant as a king, and sent him to shake a throne.— The Warbeck affair, 1491–1499
A habit the city kept
Cork made a habit of the losing side. In 1690 Marlborough's army besieged the city and broke its medieval walls in days, and the walls never recovered. Two centuries later the National Monument rose on the Grand Parade, a memorial to four failed risings paid for by public subscription and unveiled in 1906, fourteen years before Cork's own generation rose. Both have their own pages, linked below.
1920: the name earned twice over
No year made the name harder than 1920. Cork lost two Lord Mayors and its city centre inside twelve months: Tomás Mac Curtain shot in his home in March, Terence MacSwiney dead on hunger strike in October, the centre burned by British forces in December. That year has its own page, War of Independence in Cork.
The name today
Cork's teams answer to the Rebels and the county to the Rebel County. The city itself goes one better and calls itself the real capital of Ireland.
On the walk
We pass the National Monument on the Grand Parade and trace the line of the walls the siege broke, and tell the whole story of the name, Warbeck included, as we go.