The Ten-Year-Old Pretender Who Was Crowned King of England in Dublin in 1487 and Then Worked in Henry VII's Kitchen

Henry VII had won the throne at Bosworth Field in August 1485 by killing Richard III and ending the Plantagenet dynasty. The Yorkist faction had not given up. The senior Yorkist claimant in 1486 was Edward, Earl of Warwick, a ten-year-old nephew of Edward IV who was being held by Henry in the Tower of London. The Yorkist project required either freeing Warwick or producing a convincing substitute.

The substitute appeared in Oxford in early 1487. A priest named Richard Simons was tutoring a boy whose origin is variously given as Oxford-baker’s-son Lambert Simnel or as an unknown impostor whose name the Yorkist faction borrowed. Simons trained the boy in court etiquette, taught him a plausible Plantagenet family history, and presented him to the Yorkist network in Ireland as the genuine Earl of Warwick — escaped, the story went, from the Tower.

Dublin, May 1487

The Earl of Kildare, the senior Anglo-Irish nobleman, accepted the boy as Warwick. Margaret of Burgundy, sister of Edward IV and Richard III and the most powerful surviving Yorkist patron, sent 2,000 German mercenaries under Martin Schwartz to support the cause. Henry’s nephew John de la Pole, Earl of Lincoln, defected to the Yorkist side.

On 24 May 1487 the boy was crowned Edward VI of England, Lord of Ireland, and France in Christ Church Cathedral, Dublin. The crown used was reportedly borrowed from a statue of the Virgin Mary in the nearby church of Saint Mary del Dam. The Anglo-Irish lords swore allegiance.

Henry’s response was practical. He paraded the real Earl of Warwick through London the same week, demonstrating that the Dublin claimant was a fraud. The demonstration did not prevent the invasion.

Stoke Field, 16 June 1487

The Yorkist army landed at Furness in Lancashire on 4 June 1487 and marched south. Henry intercepted at Stoke Field, near Newark, on 16 June. The battle was the last engagement of the Wars of the Roses and the largest single one-day infantry battle of the late medieval period in England — approximately 8,000 Yorkists against 12,000 royalists.

The Yorkist army was destroyed. John de la Pole, the Earl of Kildare’s brother Thomas FitzGerald, and Martin Schwartz were killed. The boy was captured. The priest Richard Simons was captured and imprisoned for life.

Henry could have executed the boy. Killing a child impostor would have been politically routine. He did not. He pardoned Simnel and assigned him to the royal kitchens as a scullion — specifically as a spit-turner, the lowest grade of kitchen labour. The political message was that the Yorkist claimant had been so unimportant that Henry could safely employ him to turn meat over a fire.

Afterwards

Simnel worked his way up to royal falconer by approximately 1500 and remained in royal service for the rest of his life. He died around 1525, aged about 48, having spent thirty-eight years in the household of the king he had briefly claimed to be.

The Battle of Stoke Field is conventionally given as the closing engagement of the Wars of the Roses. The substitute claimant who triggered it died in obscurity in a Tudor kitchen.