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

by John Ashdown-Hill

  21. See arguments of Davis, Paston Letters, p. 451, for the identity of the recipient and the year of the letter.

  22. Davis, Paston Letters, p. 451, n. 810.

  23. ‘Ryght wurshipfull and myn aspecyall good maister, I comaund me vonto your good masitership. Ser, it is so that ther hath ben a gret rumour and mervelous noyse of yower departing fro Yermoth, for summe seid in a Spaynessh ship and some seid in yower ship, and some seid ayein your wyll ye were departed; of wych departing my lord Steward hadde knowleche and comaunded a-noon after your old seruaunt Rychard Fitz-Water to ryde to Norwich and so to Yermoth to knowe the trowth. And at Norwich I spoke with your seid seruaunt, and ther he shewed vonto me that my lord hadde send another of his seruauntes vonto my lord of Oxynford to shewe vonto his lordship of your departyng, &c. And furthermore he shewed vonto me prevyly that my lord hath imagyned and purposed many grievous thynges ayein your maistership; for wych cawse he shewed vonto me that in ony wyse your maistership shuld not come that wey. And I shall shewe your maistership moch more at your comyng, with the grace of God, whoo euer preserue your good maistership. At Norwich the Sonday next after Sent Marke. Your seruaunt T. Balkey.’

  24. Davis, Paston Letters, pp. 452–3, n. 811. As printed, the letter is said to have been addressed to ‘John Paston II’, but this must be a misprint. John Paston II cannot possibly have been the recipient, since he died in 1479.

  25. See Davis, Paston Letters, p. 453, no. 811A.

  26. ‘As for you, ye be sore takyn in sum place, seying þat ye jntende swyche thyngys as ys lyke to follow gret myscheffe. I seyd I vndyrstood non swyche nor thyngys lyke yt. And yt ys thought ye jntende nat to go forthe thys jorneye, nor no jentylman jn þat quarter but Robert Brandon that hath promyseyd to go with them, as they seye.’

  27. ‘what jentylmen jntende to goo … and be assuryd to go to-geþer.’

  28. The Earl of Oxford?

  29. ‘Furþermore, cosyn, yt ys seyd þat after my lordys departing to the Kynge ye ware mette at Barkwey, whyche ys construed that ye had ben with the Lady Lovell; but wrather seyd neuer well. And jn asmoche as we vnderstonde my lordys pleser, yt ys well doon we dele wysly þer-after. And nexte to the Kynge I answered pleynly I was bownde to do him seruice and to fullfylle hys comawndment to the vttermest off my powere, by the grace off God, who euer preserue you to hys pleser. Wretyn at Oxburgh the xvj day off Maye. Your cosyn E. Bedyngfeld.’

  30. Davis, Paston Letters, pp. 455–6, n. 813.

  31. Davis, Paston Letters, p. 455.

  32. Cavell (Heralds’ Memoir, p. 108, n. 254), incorrectly states that this date fell on a Thursday.

  33. ‘At that counseill was therle of Lincolln, whiche incontinently after the said counseil departed the land and went into Flaunders to the lorde Lovell and accompanied hym silf with the kings rebelles and enemyes, noysing in that country that therle of Warwike shulde bee in Irelande, whiche him selffe knew and dayly spake with him at Shene afore his departing.’ Cavell, Heralds’ Memoir, p. 109.

  34. ‘Thomas Grey, first Marquess of Dorset’, ODNB.

  11

  Burgundian Preparations

  We have no surviving record of any of the discussions which took place in Margaret of York’s Mechelen Palace between the dowager Duchess of Burgundy and her guests. However, there can be no doubt that meetings and discussions did take place there. In these meetings Margaret must have explored with her nephew, the Earl of Lincoln, and with Viscount Lovell, and others, what exactly they planned to do in order to promote the cause of the ‘son of Clarence’ and the future of the royal house of York.

  The ‘son of Clarence’ himself had arrived in Mechelen some months before Viscount Lovell and the Earl of Lincoln. We know that this boy was in the Mechelen Palace by Saturday, 24 June 1486 – the feast day of St Rumbold – since on that day, as we have already noted, Margaret gave him a present of some wine. Apparently it was Margaret herself who had sent for him, but no precise record survives of how, or when, or from where, the boy reached Mechelen.

  The two royal candidates for the role of the Dublin King (in bold), with two of his key supporters (underlined).

  When the ‘son of Clarence’ arrived at Mechelen, the official Earl of Warwick was, of course, in England. At that time he may still have been under the guardianship of Henry VII’s mother, Margaret Beaufort, Countess of Richmond and Derby. During February 1486/87 this boy had been attending Henry’s royal court at the Palace of Sheen. Thus it is clear that the ‘son of Clarence’ who was in Mechelen in June 1486 cannot possibly have been identical with the official earl. And, of course, no one would have been in a better position to know and prove this than the Earl of Lincoln himself, since he had been in the company of the official Warwick at Sheen before he left England to meet the ‘son of Clarence’ in Mechelen.

  Actually, as we have already seen, Vergil later confused the situation even further by reporting that there had been rumours in London at about this time that the official Earl of Warwick had died. He claimed that it was:

  When Simons learned this, [that] thinking the time had come for his intended crime, he changed the lad’s name and called him Edward, the name of the Duke of Clarence’s son, who was of the same age, so that neither was older than the other, and immediately took him and crossed over to Ireland.1

  However, even if Vergil was correct in alleging that there were rumours of Warwick’s demise, in reality the official earl had not died. Moreover, it seems highly unlikely that the boy held by Henry VII as the Earl of Warwick ever left the king’s custody. That means that the ‘son of Clarence’ received by Margaret of York in Mechelen in the summer of 1486 must have come from somewhere else. Given the alternative life history of the young Earl of Warwick presented in Chapter 5, the most likely location would obviously be Ireland.

  Bernard André implies that the Dublin King was in Ireland when the Earl of Lincoln endorsed him. Although the surviving evidence makes it quite clear that the ‘son of Clarence’ was already in Mechelen at the time when the Earl of Lincoln made the decision to publicly embrace the boy’s cause, Lincoln had clearly been in touch with his aunt Margaret for some time. It is therefore conceivable that he had heard news about the ‘son of Clarence’ from the duchess before that boy left Ireland for Flanders, and had then shown interest in this candidate for the throne.

  André then goes on to say that the boy made his trip to the Low Countries because he had received a letter from Margaret of York inviting him to come and visit her. André’s implication is clearly that the ‘son of Clarence’ went to Mechelen from Ireland. Later André says that he returned from the Low Countries, backed by an army supplied by Margaret, and that he then travelled to England, with his army, to assert his claim there.2

  Thus it seems that the ‘son of Clarence’ must have come to Mechelen from Ireland, in which case there are three possibilities regarding his true identity:

  a) The boy was delivered to the Earl of Kildare in 1476/77 as the Earl of Warwick, and was then brought up under Kildare’s guardianship at his Castle of Maynooth in County Kildare. Under the umbrella of this first basic theory there are two possible further interpretations.

  i) The boy was the genuine Earl of Warwick, sent to Ireland by his father, the Duke of Clarence.

  ii) The little boy was a substitute ‘Earl of Warwick’ created as part of Clarence’s rather confusing plans regarding his son and heir.

  b) He was a fraud: a boy trained to imitate the manners of a prince by a scheming priest whose precise motivation remains unknown; a boy who had been brought to Ireland from Oxford only recently.

  There is no way of knowing for certain which explanation of the boy’s origin and identity is correct. Nevertheless, whatever his true identity and origin, it appears certain that this child, who had either been brought up in Ireland by the Earl of Kildare, or taken to Ireland by a priest called Symonds/Simons, was identical with the boy who was subsequently crowned as ‘King Edward VI’ in Dublin in 1487.


  But in that case we cannot ignore the fact that the Dublin King also had the full support of Margaret, Duchess of Burgundy – and of the troops she had sent to support his claim. What is more, he also had the full backing of the Earl of Lincoln and of Viscount Lovell. Therefore presumably the boy who was crowned in Dublin’s Christ Church Cathedral must also have been one and the same person as the ‘son of Clarence’ whose presence in Mechelen was recorded more or less by accident in June 1486.

  The picture that emerges is therefore that the boy crowned in Dublin in 1487 had previously been the guest of Margaret of York in her Mechelen Palace, but that earlier (i.e. before June 1486) he had been living in Ireland. And it is absolutely certain that the Dublin King cannot possibly have been the official Earl of Warwick, since he had been at Henry VII’s court at Sheen in February 1486/87, at a time when the ‘son of Clarence’ (i.e. the future Dublin King) was already at Margaret’s palace in Mechelen.

  How can we possibly clarify the true identity of this boy? We have no precise record of how well Margaret of York knew the official Earl of Warwick. She certainly could not have met the official earl prior to her visit to England in 1480, for at the time when she left England for her marriage with Charles the Bold, Warwick had not yet been born. It is not even certain that she met him during her 1480 visit – though the surviving accounts of Edward IV appear to suggest that plans were in place for such a meeting. What is more, even if the meeting actually happened, it perhaps occurred in the context of a large family gathering. Thus Margaret may not have paid a great deal of attention to one particular young nephew among all the various relatives who had come to greet her.

  But the question of whether or not Margaret had met the official Earl of Warwick in 1480 seems, in any case, to be irrelevant. After all, the ‘son of Clarence’ whom she received in 1486 came to her from Ireland, at a time when the official Earl of Warwick was in or near London, with Henry VII. It is therefore obvious that Margaret could not possibly have recognised the 1486 ‘son of Clarence’ as the boy she had (perhaps) met at the court of Edward IV in 1480 – because he was not the same person.

  Thus it seems that in the early summer of 1486 Margaret of York received at Mechelen a boy she had never previously set eyes on, sent to her from Ireland by the Fitzgerald family as her nephew. Given the fact that the official Earl of Warwick was then known to be in Henry VII’s custody, what on earth persuaded the dowager duchess to accept the identity of this boy from Ireland and endorse him as her nephew?

  Even more surprising is the fact that the boy from Dublin was also accepted by the Earl of Lincoln as his cousin, even though Lincoln had spent about two years in the company of the official Earl of Warwick, when both of them had been resident at Sheriff Hutton Castle in Yorkshire.

  There seem to be only two possible explanations for the extraordinary behaviour of Margaret of York and the Earl of Lincoln. The first explanation – a very simple one – is that neither of them had any interest in the truth. According to that scenario, even though the boy presented to them was an impostor to whom neither of them was related in any way, they merely wanted to oust Henry VII, and put the house of York back in control of things in England. However, the second possibility is that, for some reason, both Margaret and Lincoln were genuinely convinced that the boy from Ireland really was the ‘son of Clarence’.

  The first of these explanations raises very serious questions. Henry VII’s wife, and the mother of the future royal line, was Elizabeth of York, the genuine niece of Margaret and the genuine first cousin of Lincoln. Why displace this real daughter of the house of York (together with all her future descendants) merely in order to replace her with an impostor? Of course Elizabeth, like all the children of Edward IV’s Woodville marriage, had formally been declared illegitimate by Parliament in 1484. Nevertheless, Margaret later supported the claim to the throne of Perkin Warbeck, who said he was Elizabeth of York’s younger brother, Richard, Duke of York. Thus, despite their dubious legitimacy, when the chips were down Margaret clearly considered Edward IV’s Woodville children preferable to any non-Yorkist candidate for the English crown.

  And even if the Yorkist line of Elizabeth seemed unacceptable to Margaret, when linked with the bloodline of Henry VII, her obvious solution would have been to replace Henry with an authentic Yorkist claimant. The most obvious contender would then have been the Earl of Lincoln himself. As we already know, this very obvious potential Yorkist solution was plainly evident, even to those contemporaries who believed that the Dublin King was a fake. Indeed it explains why King Henry VII himself found the plot hatched by Margaret and Lincoln utterly mystifying.

  It therefore appears that both Margaret and Lincoln must have been convinced – or succeeded in convincing themselves – that the boy in Margaret’s palace really was the ‘son of Clarence’. Since not a shred of evidence exists to suggest that the Duke of Clarence ever fathered a bastard child, as far as is known, his only surviving son in 1486 was Edward, Earl of Warwick. This does not, of course, guarantee that Margaret and Lincoln got it right. In the last century, when a woman appeared claiming to be the Grand Duchess Anastasia Nikolaevna of Russia, some members of the imperial family accepted her and some rejected her. Likewise some of the imperial family’s supporters recognised, and some rejected, the claimant. In the end it became apparent that the woman was an impostor – though she herself may have believed her own claim.

  In the same way, a boy brought up by the Earl of Kildare in Ireland, and then sent to Mechelen, may well have believed in his own royal identity. If Kildare thought that his ward was the ‘son of Clarence’, obviously he would have brought him up under that name. This may have created a situation somewhat similar to an intriguing earlier episode in Russian history, when the son of ‘False Dimitry II’ (a pretender to the Russian throne) was brought up as an imperial prince, in spite of the fact that his father had been (and must have known himself to be) an impostor.3

  It seems probable that in 1486 Margaret of York and her nephew, the Earl of Lincoln, were confronted, not only by a stranger who looked to be about 9 years old, and who was claiming to be the ‘son of Clarence’, but also by letters from the Earl of Kildare backing that claim. As we saw in Chapter 5, it is possible that the Duke of Clarence had sent his real son to Ireland in 1476/77. If Clarence did such a thing, then in the interests of the little boy’s future, he might have felt obliged to ensure that he also left some proof of the child’s identity. Perhaps Margaret of York and her nephew the Earl of Lincoln were therefore confronted, in 1486, by a claimant who was actually 11 years old (but looked younger), and who was backed not only by letters from the Earl of Kildare, but also by a document of some kind from Margaret’s dearly loved brother, written and sealed by him before his death, nine years earlier. If so, that would have been a document which sought to provide some kind of proof that this boy really was the ‘son of Clarence’.

  Whatever it was that made Margaret of York and the Earl of Lincoln accept the claim of the boy from Ireland, once they had made this decision there were various sequels. First, Margaret had to employ armed forces who would back up the claim of the new Yorkist king. She therefore recruited an army for him under the command of an experienced German general called Martin Schwartz. Schwartz, who came originally from Augsburg in Germany, was a shoemaker’s son by birth. He grew up to become a mercenary soldier, and then rose to a position of command. He was reportedly an able, if somewhat arrogant, officer, and he is first on record as having fought for Margaret of York’s husband, Charles the Bold, Duke of Burgundy at the siege of Neuss in 1475.

  Nine years later, in 1486, Schwartz was recruited by Maximilian of Austria, the widowed husband of Margaret of York’s stepdaughter, Marie of Burgundy, and the father of her son and heir, Philip of Austria. As regent for his young son, Maximilian needed Schwartz’s help in driving the French out of Flanders. During the 1486 campaign, Martin Schwartz had found himself in command of 200 Swiss mercenaries.