Lambert Simnel

If the plotters set sail for the Emerald Isle, they'll find an oven-ready pretend Earl of Warwick waiting for them.

His name, apparently, is Lambert Simnel.

No one knows exactly who he is or how good he's going to be at the old impersonation game, but let's be real.

With the Tudor family expanding, the Yorkist plotters might never get a better opportunity than this.

Dublin Cathedral is packed with a mixed crowd of troublemakers and rubberneckers.

It's 24th May 1487, Ascension Day, and so long as your name isn't Henry Tudor, you've got to admit that this is great crack.

They're waiting for the arrival of Lambert Simnel, or, as he'll be when they're done here, King Edward VI of England.

And though there are plenty here, possibly everyone, who know this whole thing is a pantomime, you'd have to have a heart of stone not to laugh.

The pretender was taken prisoner, and so was the priest who was with him.

They confessed that the prince was no prince at all, but a boy called Lambert Simnel, the son of a baker.

The priest, who was a Yorkist or White Rose man, hated Henry, and finding that the boy Lambert was clever as well as handsome, he taught him how to behave as a prince ought.

He told him stories of the Duke of Clarence and of Richard III, so that he might pretend to be what he was not.

Henry did not kill Lambert Simnel, as many kings who reigned before him would have done.

Instead, he gave him a punishment, which had Lambert indeed been a prince, would have been a very dreadful one.

He was sent into the king's kitchen to be a scullery boy, and to help the cooks.

This boy, who had worn a crown and royal robes, who had been carried through the streets shoulder-high while the people cheered him as their king, was a few days later turned into a kitchen drudge, to be ordered about by the cooks and set to do the meanest kinds of work.

Superstition of many kinds was indeed rife in England in 1485, but its types were at any rate somewhat gentler and more humane than those of other countries.

End of Section 3 Section 4 of The Early Tudors by Charles Edward Moberly This LibriVox recording is in the public domain, read by Pamela Nagami Chapter 3 Lambert Simnel, The Britannia War, 1486-1492 On November 7th, 1485, Henry VII held his first parliament, thus seeming to fulfill the general expectation that as a Lancastrian sovereign he would follow the example of Henry IV and Henry V in taking kindly to constitutional government.

His House of Lords contained only 27 lay peers, a fact which has been supposed to prove how many families had become extinct during the Wars of the Roses.

In reality, however, only two had thus failed for want of heirs, and the number of peers in this parliament was so small because no summonses had been sent to 25 who were likely to be malcontent.

The marriage of her niece with Henry had by no means conciliated her.

She rather hated Elizabeth as a deserter from the White Rose.

Her ill-feeling found its opportunity in 1486, when Lambert Simnel was brought forward as a pretender to the English crown.

The broad facts of the imposture were that this youth was represented as being really the Earl of Warwick, whom Henry had under lock and key in the Tower.

But the second thing that we found was we could then see evidence after evidence after evidence after evidence that they lived on into the reign of Henry VII.

And they were the two Yorkist claimants to the throne who have been given the names Lambert Simnel and Perkin Warbeck.

They were those individuals.

And I know that's controversial.

But then we have, we see this most fascinating of things because When there's the Battle of Stoke in 1487, which is where King Edward and his forces fight against the forces of Henry VII, they lose that battle.

But then in the parliament that follows, Henry VII then talks about this individual.

And this is where we first get the name Lambert Simnel, right? This is in November 1487.

But he's very clever because he doesn't give the date of the coronation of King Edward in Ireland.

Warbeck or

Lambert Simnel?

B.

A.

Chapter 3.

Lambert Simnel.

The Britannia War.

1486-1492 On November 7th, 1485, Henry VII held his first parliament, thus seeming to fulfill the general expectation that as a Lancastrian sovereign he would follow the example of Henry IV and Henry V in taking kindly to constitutional government.

The marriage of her niece with Henry had by no means conciliated her.

She rather hated Elizabeth as a deserter from the White Rose.

Her ill-feeling found its opportunity in 1486, when Lambert Simnel was brought forward as a pretender to the English crown.

The broad facts of the imposture were that this youth was represented as being really the Earl of Warwick, whom Henry had under lock and key in the Tower.

Chapter 3.

Lambert Simnel.

The Britannia War.

1486-1492 On November 7th, 1485, Henry VII held his first parliament, thus seeming to fulfill the general expectation that as a Lancastrian sovereign he would follow the example of Henry IV and Henry V in taking kindly to constitutional government.

He faced the threat of the de la Pole brothers and a network of Yorkist sympathizers who were still clamoring for an alternative claimant to the throne.

Enter Lambert Simnel, a young boy about ten years old in 1487, whose claim that he was the real Edward Plantagenet, the seventeenth Earl of Warwick, was used by those Yorkists as a convenient figurehead.

Historians agree that Simnel was almost certainly an imposter, but his presence was enough to galvanize support and create a rallying point.

The main organizer behind all this was John de la Pole, Earl of Lincoln, nephew of Edward IV and cousin of the Lost Prince, who had already reconciled with Henry but later decided to revive Yorkist ambition.