The War of the Roses (27 page)

The potential for ‘Richard Plantagenet' as a focus for revolt in 1486 was thus unlikely, and in any case the adult Earl of Lincoln or the teenage captive Warwick were the acknowledged Yorkist heirs. Instead, the next conspiracy focussed on an obscure youth known to posterity as ‘Lambert Simnel', apparently aged around ten in 1486/7
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–whose unusual name has led to suggestions that it was a pseudonym. The very fact of his emergence suggests the weakness of Henry's regime and/or the determination of its opponents; Edward IV had been on the throne for eight years before he faced a serious revolt in his ‘heartland', in 1469, though the Lancastrian remnants in Northumberland had held onto isolated strongholds in 1461–2 and had risen in revolt again several times until 1464 aided by the Scots and French. As of 1486 Henry had had no opportunity to make serious mistakes and alienate senior supporters, as Edward IV had done in 1464–5 by announcing his secret marriage to Elizabeth Woodville and then in 1465–9 by building up the power of his Queen's relatives. ‘Simnel', an organ-maker's son, appears to have been trained in courtly manners and set up as a pretender by an obscure Oxford priest called Richard Symons/Symonds, whether or not with local backing, and was presented as the Earl of Warwick.
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The latter was really in the Tower, but his survival there may have been dubious to contemporary rumour considering what had happened recently to his cousins Edward V and Prince Richard. Was Symonds relying on the real Earl being dead, or was ‘Simnel' an ‘insurance-policy' for use in a planned rising–there was no point in Henry killing the real Warwick before rescue as then the pretender would assume his identity.

The boy was now smuggled abroad to Dublin, where the weakly-supported new regime had had to keep on the loyal Yorkist partisan Gerald, Earl of Kildare–greatest feudal Anglo-Irish magnate of the ‘Pale'–as its Lord Lieutenant in 1485 despite his probable disloyalty. The attention and justice that Richard III's father had displayed in Dublin as Lord Lieutenant in the late 1440s had paid dividends for the Yorkists ever since; York and his adherents had fled there after Queen Margaret's attack on Ludlow in 1459 and Edward IV and Richard III had had no trouble from the island. Dublin was clearly teeming with Yorkist adherents, and Symons and his ‘Earl of Warwick' received a warm welcome from assorted senior local lords. The news was taken to London in February 1487, just as writs had been sent to Cornwall and Devon for the arrest of several prominent local gentry headed by Sir Hugh Bodrugan. (The latter was said by local legend to have escaped capture by jumping his horse over a cliff at ‘Bodrugan's Leap'.
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) Henry had the real Warwick taken out of the Tower and paraded through London to a meeting of the Church Convocation, where assorted senior clerics (led by the Chancellor, Archbishop Morton) could vouch for his being genuine. He then spent the night with Morton at Lambeth Palace and was taken on to the royal country residence at Sheen (i.e. the later Richmond) up the Thames to be shown to the court.
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But this precaution did not stop the treachery of the Earl of Lincoln–the alternative Yorkist claimant to Warwick. Lincoln had been present at a Council meeting to discuss what to do about Simnel and had spoken to the genuine Warwick at the Convocation, so he knew that the boy was a fake; nevertheless at the end of the Council discussions on 9 March he headed home to Suffolk and immediately took ship for Duchess Margaret's court.
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On 19 March, according to Lincoln's attainder, he was meeting unknown persons–probably Lovell and/ or Duchess Margaret–in Flanders. Meanwhile, his servants were tracked by royal agents on an apparent mission to Hull and Yorkshire with saddlebags full of gold, no doubt recruiting more rebels.
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The defection of Lincoln was a major blow to Henry and gave the planned rising a credible military leader as well as an alternative candidate to the throne to Warwick, should the latter be murdered or set aside as too young or barred by reason of Clarence's 1478 attainder. Indeed, it was subsequently claimed that Lovell had come to see Lincoln during the royal visit to York, shortly before the planned attack on the King, and asked him to join in the plot but had been turned down as the attack was too risky.
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The prospect of a successful revolt would have been increased then had Lovell succeeded in attracting Lincoln's support. It was perhaps a little odd that Lincoln should set aside his own claims to the throne in favour of an untried boy of eleven or twelve–but, like the Duke of Buckingham in 1483, he may have hoped to supersede his allies' pretender later in the rebellion. He also knew Simnel to be a fake; but he and Lovell may have intended to supersede the Oxford youth by the real Warwick once they had rescued the latter, a twist of plan worthy of Anthony Hope's
Prisoner of Zenda
. The most surprising potential ally for the plot was, however, ex-Queen Elizabeth Woodville, who suddenly had all her lands and property seized at the time of the plot's discovery in February 1487 and was required to retire to the apartments of the Queen Dowager at Bermondsey Abbey near London for the rest of her life. The reason given was that she had betrayed the Christmas 1483 agreement with Henry by proposing to arrange marriages for her daughters (including Elizabeth of York) with Richard III;
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but Henry had known that when he took the throne and had then restored all the lands that Richard had taken from her. She had been welcomed back to court, and had been in attendance at Henry's son Prince Arthur's baptism at Winchester Cathedral in September 1486 as the baby's godmother.

Why did Henry wait until February 1487 to strip her of her lands? Some historians have argued that she was in ill-health (she was aged around fifty and died five years later) and genuinely wanted to retire from court; and she was to receive some future signs of royal goodwill such as a Christmas present of fifty marks in 1490. In November 1487 he was to propose her as a potential wife for the widowed King James III of Scotland (fifteen years her junior), which admittedly would get her out of the country for good; and in November 1489 she was summoned to court to meet a visiting French relative.
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But all these acts may have been signs of necessary political goodwill and ‘normality' in the royal family to impress observers; the previous Queen-Mother ‘exiled' to Bermondsey Abbey, Henry's grandmother Catherine of Valois, had recently had her secret second marriage and children exposed and died a few months after her ‘retirement'.
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There is a strong possibility that Henry's mother and principal adviser, Margaret Beaufort, did not get on with the ex-Queen, her successful rival for court power in the 1470s, and their rapprochement over the Henry–Elizabeth betrothal of December 1483 had been out of political necessity and mutual dislike of Richard III. There was not room for two formidable matriarchs at the Tudor court by this argument, and Margaret made sure that Henry removed his meddling mother-in-law–who may have been angry at the long delay before Henry had his wife crowned.
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It would seem illogical for Elizabeth Woodville to retaliate by planning to dethrone her son-in-law, particularly in favour of the son of the Duke of Clarence who had threatened her, her royal sons, and her husband's position in 1477–8. (According to one theory discussed earlier, she had even been responsible for having Clarence killed.) She would hardly have believed Simnel to be the genuine Warwick, nor was she likely to have been on good terms with Richard III's chosen heir, Lincoln–supplanter of both her royal sons (assuming they were alive) and her daughter. It has been suggested that she could have intended to have Henry murdered or forced into exile so her daughter, the Queen, could re-marry–Lincoln or the genuine Warwick?–and retain her title, with Elizabeth Woodville not Margaret Beaufort as the new ‘power behind the throne'.
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One theory even has it that Simnel was a ‘stalking-horse' for the real Edward V, alive and hidden in exile as Elizabeth Woodville knew, and that the boy who was to land in England and lead the rebel army at Stoke Field in 1487 was not the Oxford Simnel but the older ex-King, installed in his place. The boy captured at Stoke was said to be around fifteen–older than Simnel–and some Irish rebels had said that they were fighting to ‘restore' the King, i.e. to restore Edward V.
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But this is unlikely in the extreme; it is more probable that the ex-Queen was targeted by the suspicious Margaret Beaufort as a potential ‘kingmaker' for Warwick (on good grounds or not) and that Henry wanted to secure her property for himself.

Whether or not Elizabeth Woodville was hedging her bets in case Lincoln and the fake Warwick won the forthcoming conflict, the Yorkist plan now proceeded to invasion thanks to military support from Duchess Margaret. Given that Henry was an ally of France and had hired mercenaries from there in 1485, France's rival Maximilian (sole ruler of Burgundy since his wife's death in 1482) had no reason to interfere in Henry's favour. On 5 May Lincoln and Lovell landed from the Low Countries in Ireland, with 2,000 Swabian and Swiss mercenaries loaned by Duchess Margaret under a professional commander, Martin Schwartz. This was equivalent to the aid that Charles VIII's French regency had given to Henry in 1485–and unlike Henry in Wales in 1485 the invaders had a substantial body of local Anglo-‘Celtic' nobles waiting to join them. Kildare and his allies welcomed them to Dublin, as did a body of English Yorkist refugees, including Bodrugan and the ex-commander of the Calais garrison, Thomas David. The Church under the Archbishop of Dublin recognized Simnel as the Earl of Warwick, and on 26 May (Whit Sunday) he was proclaimed as rightful king by the Bishop of Meath at Christchurch Cathedral and then crowned as ‘Edward VI' by him with a circlet taken from a statue of the Virgin Mary at a nearby church.
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(The theory that Simnel was really Edward V does not explain why in that case he was not crowned under his real identity, avoiding muddle later.) The Archbishop of Armagh stayed away, but to all intents and purposes Simnel and his controllers were as firmly in charge of Ireland as the refugee Duke of York had been in 1459–60; as in 1460, invasion of England was the next move. The last claimant to be King of England who had been crowned outside London due to a ‘usurper' occupying the city had been the child Henry III (crowned at Gloucester) in 1216, when Prince Louis of France held London–and that had not stopped him from going on to regain the lost areas of his kingdom later. He had been re-crowned in Westminster Abbey in 1220 after winning the civil war–and possibly Simnel would have been re-crowned later in a similar manner. But the
Chronicle of Calais
and Polydore Vergil heard that Lincoln intended to supersede him in case of victory.
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The Yorkist army landed in Furness in Lancashire, safely cut off from loyalist territory by the Fells and by Morecambe Bay, on 4 June. They first landed on Foulney Island off shore to occupy undefended Peel Castle, indicating caution in case of loyalists in the vicinity, and then were welcomed to the mainland by local Sir Thomas Broughton–Lincoln's host and fellow-plotter in 1486.
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As of 8 May Henry was at Kenilworth Castle awaiting invasion, well-placed in central England as Richard III had been in 1485 but also facing a rebel force that landed in an isolated region and was able to advance across mountains to central England unopposed. The situation appeared to be one of
déjà vu
from 1485, or even from Warwick's invasion of south-west England in 1470, and there was no guarantee that all the great lords would be more loyal to Henry than they had been to Edward IV and Richard III. In these circumstances, it is perhaps surprising that Henry had not summoned most of the garrison of Calais to aid him, as this compact and fully-trained body of 6–700 troops could make all the difference. Or did he fear treachery from them? Lincoln's small army marched unopposed across the Pennines into Yorkshire, joined by the two Lord Scropes (of Bolton and Masham)–who later claimed their tenants had forced them to do so–and by Thomas Metcalfe of Knappa, Edward Franke of Knighton, Sir Robert Percy of Scotton, Sir Ralph Assheton of Fritton-in-Redesdale, and Sir Edmund Hastings of Pickering. Tenants of Jervaulx Abbey may also have been involved. They defeated a smaller Tudor loyalist force under Lord Clifford on the night of 10 June at Bramham Moor, scene of a crucial Lancastrian victory against rebel Percies in 1408, but failed to secure entry to York when the two Lords Scrope attacked a gate on the 12th. The loyalist Earl of Northumberland was nearby with his tenants, which may have stiffened resistance; but York's civic authorities had a record of caution and in 1471 had only admitted Edward IV on his return to England when he assured them that he was only seeking his legal rights as Duke of York, not to depose the current King Henry VI.

Overall, the rebels seem to have had around 8–10,000 men by the time they reached Yorkshire, a larger force than Edward IV had had in 1471 (until the Duke of Clarence defected to him) and twice what Henry had had in 1485. They failed to build up momentum, at least according to Bacon's assessment, and possibly the uncouth appearance and reputed savagery of their Irish contingent was partly to blame.
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(Using ‘uncivilized' troops from the ‘Celtic fringes' had also harmed Queen Margaret's recruitment as she marched on London with a Scottish contingent early in 1461.) Apparently Schwartz, the most professional soldier in the invading army with experience of battles on the Continent, had expected–and relied on–a far larger body of recruits from England to bolster his troops and complained to Lincoln that the latter had tricked him about local enthusiasm. He was thus expecting to lose an encounter due to lack of men before he encountered the royal army.
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The fact that Lincoln lacked the ‘hard core' of dedicated and experienced veterans from the gentry class, plus veteran aristocrats, which Edward and Henry had had in 1471 and 1485 was a problem too–men such as Broughton and Percy were hardly the potential ‘inner core' of a future regime such as Lord Hastings had been for Edward and Bray and Giles Daubeny for Henry. Their absence may also have put off potential recruits from the gentry class, as implying that the invasion was not thought likely to succeed; though Henry's French mercenaries of 1485 had not had the reputed experience and skill of Schwartz's men. It was also useful when a major magnate went over to the invaders, as Clarence had done and as Lord Montague had done for his invading brother Warwick ‘the Kingmaker' in 1470–or stood back, as Derby and his brother had done from joining Richard's camp in 1485.