Stoke Field by David Baldwin

Author:David Baldwin [Baldwin, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pen and Sword
Published: 2006-09-18T23:00:00+00:00

Engraving of the tomb of Gerald, eighth Earl of Kildare in St Mary’s Chapel, Christchurch Cathedral, Dublin, destroyed in the seventeenth century, and detail of tomb slab, showing the family crests and arms, supported by two apes, which may have given rise to King Henry’s remark about ‘crowning apes’.

And what of Simnel, the boy of uncertain identity who, for a few weeks, doubtless believed he was to become King of England? Henry, as we have seen, treated him kindly, if contemptuously, by setting him to work in the royal kitchens; but the presence which had made him a plausible Plantagenet also helped him to rise to the position of King’s Falconer. He is almost certainly the ‘Lambert Symnell yeoman’ who attended Sir Thomas Lovel’s funeral in May 1525, and Vergil indicates that he was still living when the first printed edition of the Anglica Historia was published in 1534. He may even have married and had children since a Richard Simnell, canon of St Osyth’s in Essex, was awarded a pension of £100 when his house was dissolved on 8 August 1539.25 It has been suggested that the conspiracy originated in Richard Ill’s reign in response to the disappearance of Edward V and Richard, Duke of York, (this would, perhaps, explain why Lambert’s identity was subsequently changed from York to Warwick), and also that he may have been one of the missing ‘princes’ or the real Earl of Warwick. One theory is that the boy crowned in Dublin was actually Edward V, and it was only when he was killed at Stoke Field that King Henry substituted Simnel (probably with the connivance of Robert Bellingham) in order to prove to everyone that he was plainly an impostor.26 It is not clear how Henry hoped to benefit from this, however, and even if he had managed to contrive it he would surely have realised that he could not fool everyone. The vast probability is that Lambert was an ordinary boy who became a pawn in the hands of powerful Yorkists, and it is likely that, from the comfort and security of his later years as a senior royal servant, he looked back with some pleasure on his few weeks as an English king.

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