The Dublin King: The True Story of Lambert Simnel and the Princes in the Tower

by John Ashdown-Hill

  8. For full details of the evidence on this point see Ashdown-Hill, Third Plantagenet.

  9. Traditionally in English histories his surname has tended to be spelt Waurin. However, the name is a toponym, and the modern spelling of the town name in northern France from which it is derived is Wavrin. Therefore, that is the spelling which will be used here.

  10. ‘le roy Edouard avoit deux jennes frères, lun eagie de neuf ans et lautre de huit ans.’ W. Hardy and E.L.C.P Hardy, eds, J. de Wavrin, Recueil des Chroniques et Anchienne Istories de la Grant Bretaigne, à Present Nommé Engleterre, col. 5, 1891, reprinted Cambridge 2012, p. 357. Another observer thought George was 12 and Richard 11 (Calendar of State Papers – Milan, p. 73). This also suggests that the two boys were of very similar height despite their age difference.

  11. Ashdown-Hill, Third Plantagenet, citing http://www.fpnotebook.com/endo/exam/hghtmsrmntinchldrn.htm, accessed February 2013.

  12. Based upon the modern average height of 5’ 0” (152.40cms) for boys of 12.

  5

  Lambert Simnel

  There remains yet one other potential childhood of the Dublin King to consider.

  Despite evidence from both Ireland and the Low Countries that chroniclers in both of those places believed that the Dublin King was the genuine Earl of Warwick, the official account of the Tudor government in England produced an entirely different explanation. The surviving Heralds’ Memoir 1486–1490 reports the Battle of Stoke as follows:

  on the morne, whiche was Satirday [16 June 1487, Henry VII] erly arros and harde ij masses, wherof the lorde John [sic for Richard] Fox, bishop of Excester, sange the ton. And the king had v good and true men of the village of Ratecliff, whiche shewde his grace the beste way for to conduyt his hoost to Newark, … of whiche guides the king yave ij to therle of Oxinforde to conduit the forwarde [vanguard], and the remenant reteynede at his pleasur. And so in good order and array before ix of the clok, beside a village called Stook, a large myle oute of Newarke, his forwarde [vanguard] recountrede his enemyes and rebelles, wher by the helpe of Almyghty God he hade the victorye. And ther was taken the lade that his rebelles called King Edwarde (whoos name was in dede John) – by a vaylent and a gentil esquire of the kings howse called Robert Bellingham.1

  This account states quite clearly that according to the information available to the heralds, the boy captured at the Battle of Stoke was an impostor. As we have already noted from other sources, his official royal identity was that of ‘King Edward’. Thus the heralds presumably accepted that at the time of his defeat the Dublin King was claiming to be the Earl of Warwick, son of the Duke of Clarence. However, the account goes on to report that he was a false claimant, whose real Christian name was John. No surname is recorded for him by this source.

  Confusingly, however, the Heralds’ Memoir account is contradicted by other Tudor sources. According to the Act of Attainder against John de la Pole, Earl of Lincoln, preserved among the records of Henry VII’s 1487 Parliament:

  on 24 May last, at the city of Dublin, contrary to his homage, faith, truth and allegiance, [the Earl of Lincoln] traitorously renounced, revoked and disclaimed his own said most natural sovereign liege lord the king, and caused one Lambert Simnel, a child of ten years of age, son of Thomas Simnel late of Oxford, joiner, to be proclaimed, set up and acknowledged as king of this realm, and did faith and homage to him, to the great dishonour and shame of the whole realm.2

  This record, dating from November 1487, is the earliest surviving source which gives Lambert Simnel as the name of the Dublin King. It is the only source for the alleged first name of Lambert’s father. It is also the only source which states that his father’s profession was that of a joiner. As we have already seen, Bernard André asserted that the Dublin King’s father was a baker or a tailor.3 An alternative source, which will be presented shortly, tells us that he was an organ maker. The record in Lincoln’s Act of Attainder also appears to imply that Lambert and Thomas Simnel were permanent inhabitants of Oxford. However, other sources imply that this was not the case.

  Map of Oxford, showing the area in which Thomas Simnel is said to have lived.

  Much earlier in the same year, according to the modern calendar (or at the end of the previous year according to the calendar of the time), on 13 February 1486/87, at the convocation of the Province of Canterbury, at St Paul’s Cathedral, London:

  A certain Sir William Symonds, was produced, a priest, of the age of twenty-eight years, as he declared, in the presence of the said lords and prelates and clergy who were there, as well as the mayor, aldermen, and sheriffs of the city of London. He publicly admitted and confessed that he took and carried off to Ireland the son of a certain [blank], organ maker of the University of Oxford, the which son was there reputed to be the Earl of Warwick, and that afterwards he was with Lord Lovell in Fuvnefotts. These, and other things were admitted by him in the same place. The said most reverend father in Christ [Archbishop John Morton] asked the aforesaid mayor and sheriffs, that the above mentioned Will. Symonds be brought unto the Tower of London, to be kept there for him, since the same most reverend father was holding another of the company of the said William, and had [space for] but one person in his manor of Lambeth.4

  This slightly earlier account, reporting what took place at the convocation, had not named either the pretender or his father. Presumably these points either had not been discovered, or perhaps had not been invented, at that point. The convocation report did, however, name the priest who confessed to having taken the boy to Ireland, and who, according to this account, was already a prisoner in the hands of Archbishop John Morton in February 1486/87. There is also the curious statement that Morton did not have room to imprison William Symonds at Lambeth Palace, since he only had room there to accommodate one detainee, and that space was already occupied by ‘another of the company of the said William’. This suggests that William Symonds either was, or was seen to be, part of a group of conspirators. It may also suggest that he was not perceived as being the most important member of the conspiracy. At all events, another alleged member of the group had also been detained, but was not made to appear before the convocation – possibly because he was not a priest. The name of this other detainee, and also his alleged role in the conspiracy, remain unknown.

  Curiously, as we have already seen, Polydore Vergil’s semi-official account of these events contradicts the earlier convocation report in several respects. Vergil mentions a priest with a slightly different name: Richard Simons.5 Moreover, Vergil says that Simons remained with his protégé until the Battle of Stoke. According to Vergil, it was only after their army’s defeat in the battle that both Richard Simons and Lambert Simnel were captured together:

  Young Lambert the pretender was taken, together with his tutor Richard, but the lives of the both of them were spared, because the former was innocent and, thanks to his youth, had done no wrong, as being incapable of doing anything in his own right, and the latter was a priest.6

  The obvious conflict between Vergil’s account and the report from the Canterbury convocation is intriguing. The contemporary report of the convocation not only gives a different name for the priest but also states clearly that he was already a prisoner some months before the Battle of Stoke took place. Do both records refer to the same priest? And if so, how can the conflict between them be reconciled? Previous writers have tended to assume that a single priest called Simons or Symonds was involved, and that his first name was either William or Richard. Curiously, no one seems to have considered the possibility that there may have been two priests: William Symonds, who was arrested before February 1486/87, and Richard Simons, who was only captured later in the year, after the Battle of Stoke.

  The discrepancies over the name and arrest date of the priest involved in the Lambert Simnel case also remind us of another issue, which was highlighted in Chapter 4. There, we noted Vergil’s statement that ‘Richard Simons … took his Lambert to Oxford’.7 This wording clearly impl
ies that the boy was not a native of Oxford, and that he had not previously been resident there. By contrast, the Canterbury convocation account states that William Symonds found Lambert Simnel already living in Oxford, where his father was reportedly employed by the university. These discrepancies and contradictions make it difficult to be sure of the true nature of Lambert Simnel’s connection with Oxford.

  Based upon its rather pantomime-like quality, it has also been suggested that the unusual name of Lambert Simnel may indicate a foreign – possibly Flemish – background.8 However, when I asked a Dutch-speaking Belgian whether ‘Lambert Simnel’ sounded to him like a name derived from his homeland, his reply was negative. In fact such a suggestion seems to have been made only by native speakers of English – presumably because the name did not appear to be typically English.

  It is important to recognise that, even in the early sixteenth century, surnames were not necessarily fixed in England, and there is evidence to show that men (particularly clergymen) often used more than one surname, even at that comparatively recent date.9 Actually, no one seems previously to have undertaken much research into the various surnames which figure in the official Tudor version of the Simnel story. On the internet, however, the following rather interesting information is to be found under the surname ‘Simnel’:

  Recorded in over one hundred surname spellings throughout Europe, this interesting surname is of pre-written historical origins. It ultimately derives from the Hebrew personal name ‘Shimeon’, meaning ‘one who harkens’ … In England the name generally takes the form of Simon … The surname first appears in the latter half of the 13th Century (see below), Pieter Ziemke, of Hamburg, Germany, in 1289, and William Simon in the 1291 Calendar of Letter Books of the City of London. Other recordings from medieval times include Ernest Symers of Bremen, Germany, in 1262, and John Simon in the Subsidy Rolls of County Sussex, England, in 1296. The first recorded spelling of the family name [in England] is shown to be that of John Simond, which was dated 1273, in the ‘Hundred Rolls of Oxfordshire’ … Throughout the centuries, surnames in every country have continued to ‘develop’ often leading to astonishing variants of the original spelling.10

  The first thing which emerges is the fact that there is evidently no reason to suggest that the surname Simnel was foreign. The second important point is that Simnel is merely a variant form of the English surname ‘Simon’. More specifically, Simnel is a diminutive form. Interestingly, other potential variants of this surname in medieval England were Simons and Symonds.

  The existence in the late fifteenth/early sixteenth century of yet more variant forms of the surname Simons/Symonds is clearely indicated, for example, in the following entry from Emden’s Biographical Register of the University of Oxford:

  Symonds, William (Simondes, Symondes, Symondys, Symons, Symunds), All Souls College, fellow adm. 1503, still in 1511, Warden of All Souls &c.; supplicated for M.A. 3 March 150[6/]7. Vicar of Bishops Tawton, Devon, adm. 11 June 1520.11

  Although Emden does mention a priest who reputedly trained Lambert Simnel, and whose name was said to be William Symonds or Richard Simons, it is clear that Emden found no specific evidence for the existence of either of these individuals among the surviving records of the University of Oxford. Whether the William Symonds listed by Emden in 1503–20 was in any way connected with the priest who reputedly trained Lambert Simnel in about 1485–86, and who was made to appear before the Canterbury provincial convocation in London, there is no way of knowing.

  However, the variant recorded forms of the surname of Emden’s early sixteenth-century William Symonds, including the mixture of ‘i’ and ‘y’ in the first syllable, and the presence or absence of the final ‘d’ and ‘s’, all help to make it clear that Simons (as recorded by Vergil) and Symonds (as recorded at the Canterbury convocation) are merely variant versions of the same surname, and could either refer to the same person, or – given the two alternative Christians names – to two different people, who were, however, possibly members of the same family. Moreover, hopefully it is now also clear that Symonds (and its variations) are probably a much more common spelling of the rather unusual surname Simnel.

  Thus we find ourselves confronting a hitherto unrecognised situation in which the surname of Lambert Simnel was merely a variant form of Simons or Symonds – the surname(s) of the priest(s) reported to have educated him. Moreover it was a diminutive variant form, of the kind which might well have been applied to a young boy.

  Two possible interpretations might logically be formed upon the basis of this evidence. The first would be that the boy pretender and the priest or priests who trained him were in some way related to one another. However, an alternative possible interpretation would be that when it became essential for Henry VII’s government servants to come up with (perhaps invent) a name for the Dublin King in order to demonstrate that he was a fraud, they may have done so by adopting a diminutive form of the surname of that priest (or of those priests) whom they were already accusing of acting as his instructors.

  If the first of these interpretations is correct, neither of the priests is likely to have been the pretender’s biological father. Priests, of course, were supposed to be celibate. While that in itself does not absolutely guarantee that none of them had children, we also have to take some account of the fact that, for the boy’s father, we are supplied by the Lincoln Act of Attainder with the Christian name of Thomas. However, it remains possible that the priest was (or the priests were) related to the boy. It is therefore very interesting to note that in a significant and intriguing marginal annotation to a manuscript copy of the Book of Howth preserved in Trinity College, Dublin, we find the pretender described as ‘Simon’s son’.12

  As for the second interpretation, that offers one possible added advantage, in that it also would provide a potential explanation for the fact that, as we have seen in another, less public and less official Tudor source (the Heralds’ Memoir), an entirely different Christian name is cited for the boy in question.

  Michael Bennett, an earlier researcher on the 1487 claimant, who wrote the present ODNB entry for the Dublin King under the name of Lambert Simnel, does claim to have documented the existence of Thomas Simnel of Oxford:

  A Thomas Simnel worked in Oxford in the late 1470s and held a tenement on the conduit towards St Thomas’s Chapel13 from Osney Abbey14 in 1479. […] The organ builder William Wooton was a neighbour, suggesting Thomas Simnel was a carpenter by trade who built organs.15

  Unfortunately, however, Bennett’s claim cannot easily be verified, because, sadly, he failed to record his source for this information.

  The poll tax records for Oxford dating from a century earlier (1381) record no organ makers as Oxford residents – though there were three harp makers in Oxford at that time.16 It is, perhaps, also worth noting that no men from Oxford were recorded among the supporters of the Dublin King in 1486–87, despite the fact that, according to some sources, at least, Lambert Simnel was reputedly ‘the son of an Oxford joiner and had been launched on his impostor’s career by an Oxford priest’.17

  Reconstruction of late-medieval Oxford, showing Osney Abbey in the foreground, and the Castle Mound in the background. Thomas Simnel, the third possible father of the Dublin King, is reported to have held a tenement from Osney Abbey in the 1470s, which was located between the abbey and the castle, in the area shown here.

  It is interesting that Emden’s assumption appears to have been that although William Symonds and/or Richard Simons may have been priests studying in Oxford, neither was necessarily a native of the city. This ties in with Vergil’s implication (see above) that Lambert Simnel was not actually a native of Oxford, but was simply taken there by the priest who trained him, for the purpose of preparing him for the role he had to play. Thus we find that it is very unclear how long-lasting and permanent was the connection of the Simnel/Simons/Symonds family with the city of Oxford.

  We have now examined in detail all the possible versions
of the childhood of the Dublin King. The suggestion that he was one of the sons of Edward IV – either Edward V or Richard, Duke of York – appears to have no real evidence to support it. Thus, while it is quite possible that Richard, Duke of York outlived the reign of Richard III, the notion that either he or his elder brother subsequently re-emerged as the Dublin King has been firmly rejected. So too has the notion that the Dublin King was a fake claimant who attempted to assume the identity of either Edward V or Richard, Duke of York. At the same time, it has been shown that the official Tudor accounts of the identity of the Dublin King contain significant contradictions and uncertainties. Therefore, it cannot be asserted that anyone has ever proved that the Dublin King and Lambert Simnel were one and the same person. The further implications of that statement will need to be considered later.

  What does now seem clear is that the Dublin King used the royal identity of Edward, Earl of Warwick, son of the Duke of Clarence. Of course, he may nevertheless have been a fake claimant. On the other hand a real possibility has emerged that he may have been the genuine Earl of Warwick. What is more, if he was Warwick, the further question then remains as to whether he was brought up in England, and only taken to Ireland in about 1486, or whether he was shipped to Ireland by his father when he was very small, and brought up there by the Earl of Kildare. And in either case, the question of what may have become of him after his army was defeated at the Battle of Stoke also still remains. That is another aspect of the story, which has yet to be explored.

  A late fifteenth-century organ. According to one account, Lambert Simnel’s father was an organ maker.

  But before we begin investigating the possibilities of the aftermath of his story we need to look at who supported the Dublin King, and who opposed him, and why. We also need to look at the short but fascinating history of his reign. Among other things, this will include a detailed enquiry into the intriguing story of how on earth his supporters managed to carry out a coronation when they had no access to St Edward’s Crown – not to mention the lack of an orb and sceptre, the lack of a throne, and the impossibility of any access to Westminster Abbey.