Lambert Simnel

Lambert Simnel was the figurehead of a Yorkist attempt to overthrow Henry VII in 1487. As a boy he was trained to impersonate Edward Plantagenet, Earl of Warwick, a genuine Yorkist claimant who was being held in the Tower of London. Supporters carried Simnel to Ireland, where he was crowned as King Edward in Dublin before a rebel army crossed to England.

The invasion was defeated at the Battle of Stoke Field on 16 June 1487. Henry VII treated Simnel as a child manipulated by adult conspirators, pardoned him and employed him in the royal household. His later life is obscure, but records show that he survived well into Henry VIII’s reign.

Nathen Amin’s Henry VII and the Tudor Pretenders examines the conspiracies, rumours and Yorkist networks that challenged the first Tudor king, concentrating on Lambert Simnel, Perkin Warbeck and the imprisoned Edward Plantagenet, Earl of Warwick. In Ethan Bale’s The Knight’s Redemption, as Francis Lovell, Margaret of York and John de la Pole gather support in the Low Countries, the struggle moves towards the Lambert Simnel rising and the Battle of Stoke Field, where Hawker must choose between the White Rose and the redemption he has been seeking. In Griff Hosker’s Tudor Warrior, James of Ecclestone is one such youth and when he runs away to become a billman fighting the Yorkist pretender, Lambert Simnel, he begins a journey that will shape him from a youth to a man, a wild child to a Tudor Warrior.