Second entry in the series dedicated to the Battle of Stoke Field.
We had left the first entry in this series with the defeat of the rebel army against Henry VII at the Battle of Stoke Field on June 16, 1487, and with the question of whether history could have some connection with the mystery of the princes of the Tower of London.
For this we have to recover another of the usual themes in this project:the mystery of the princes of the Tower of London. To summarize their history, treated in one of the entries linked here:these princes, Edward V and Richard of York, were sons of King Edward IV and the succession of the first to the death of his father in 1483 was aborted by the brother of the deceased , Richard III. He installed the young people in the Tower of London (which was at that time and for the boys a royal residence and not a prison), Parliament declared that the marriage of their parents Edward IV and Elizabeth Woodville was null and, therefore, that the children of the same (including the princes of the Tower and his sister Elizabeth of York) were illegitimate. Richard III was proclaimed king. Over time, the princes of the Tower of London disappeared and were never heard from again. This is, even today, one of the greatest enigmas in the history of England and continues, more than five hundred years later, to be the subject of lively controversy on the islands.
For centuries, thanks in large part to the writings of Thomas More and William Shakespeare, Richard III has been almost unanimously considered to have murdered the princes in the Tower of London. But in recent times, movements have emerged that claim the figure of this reviled monarch and that defend that the boys were victims of a plot orchestrated by Enrique Tudor and his mother Margaret Beaufort; others point to Henry Stafford, Duke of Buckingham as responsible for his death. Meanwhile, certain indications point to the possibility that the princes or at least one of them did not die, but survived.
And one of the lines connects the princes with the story of Lambert Simnel, the crowned king in Dublin. The Irish sources recounting the coronation speak of King Edward, but do not add an ordinal to the name, so we do not know (except from English sources to which I shall refer later) whether the crowned Edward there introduced himself as Edward V (the Prince of the Tower of London) or as Edward VI (as he would be if he were the Earl of Warwick). But some clues (note, I say clues, not evidence) could point to the first of them. These are data revealed in the book that has served as a source for this entry and neither for its author Matthew Lewis do they intend to be conclusive, nor do I consider them to be, but rather intriguing enough to share them and for the reader to draw their own conclusions. 
To begin with, we must refer to what happened with the Edward V's mother, Elizabeth Woodville. This woman had been the queen during the government of her husband Edward IV and took refuge with her daughters during the first months of the reign of Richard III, although later both she and her daughters left the sanctuary and joined the court of this , which provided them with a generous financial endowment. One of her daughters, Elizabeth of York, married Henry VII, so it could be expected that the fortunes of a woman who could wield the title of queen dowager and who was the mother of the current queen would improve even more. /p>
However, in February 1487 (shortly after the story of the pretender to the throne who dared to challenge Henry VII broke) there was a substantial change (for the worse) in fortunes of Isabel Woodville's mother. Her son-in-law dispossessed her of all her property and forced her to retire to Bermonsdey Abbey, where she remained until her death in 1492. Also in February 1487, Elizabeth Woodville's eldest son from her first marriage, named Thomas Gray and titled Marquess of Dorset, was imprisoned in the Tower of London. The contemporary historian Polidore Vergil points out that Henry intended in this way to punish Woodville for having put her daughters at risk by leaving the sanctuary of Westminster. But it should be remembered that Henry VII came to the throne after his victory at Bosworth on August 22, 1485, and that Woodville's fortunes did not change until February 1487. As Matthew Lewis says, it seems too long to be brooding. anger. Could the cause be another, more linked to something that happened around the same time?
Relating this turning point in Woodville's fortunes with the simultaneous appearance of a pretender to the throne does not make much sense if this was the Earl of Warwick. Isabel and Jorge de Clarence had not exactly been friends, Clarence ended up dying because of her repeated betrayals towards Woodville's husband, Eduardo IV, and her claims went against hers and her numerous relatives. It seems unlikely that Elizabeth risked her position and that of her daughter Elizabeth of York by supporting the son of her treacherous brother-in-law. But the thing changes, and a lot, if the Eduardo who aspired to dethrone Enrique VII was the own son of Isabel Woodville. So it would make sense for Enrique to react the way he did against her and against Eduardo V's older stepbrother.
Also the support of John de la Pole, Earl of Lincoln, should be subject to greater scrutiny. A notable member of the York branch to the point of being regarded as Richard III's leading candidate for heir apparent when his son died, he had come out of the Battle of Bosworth surprisingly well, keeping his estates and titles, but was he knew under constant scrutiny that his luck could change at any moment. Warwick had been in his custody and it is inconceivable that he would support the Dublin rebel if he knew he was an impostor. But neither does it seem very likely that he supported the pretender even though he was the son of George of Clarence, who had no support at all, whose name also did not attract an enthusiastic stream of followers, and whose claim to the throne was no greater than that of the Earl of Lincoln himself ( although his was through the female line). It only seems understandable that de la Pole put everything he had (even his life) at risk if the rebellion orchestrated by his aunt Margaret of Burgundy was in favor of the only man who clearly had a claim to the throne superior to his own:Edward V (not It goes without saying that Henry VII had to once again recognize the legitimacy of Edward IV's children in order to give meaning to his marriage to Elizabeth of York).
Other signs that point in the same direction are revealed to us by some contemporary sources. The first of them is offered to us by a curious character. Bernard André was a blind French monk and poet who served as tutor to Henry VII's eldest son, Arthur Tudor. Bernard wrote between 1500 and 1502 an account of what happened in the turbulent first years of the reign of the first Tudor and, although he affirms that the princes of the Tower of London were assassinated by Richard III, when he refers to the events related to Lambert Simnel he incurs in some curious contradiction. According to him, the defeated rebels at Stoke Field were following a young man who pretended to be the eldest of the princes of the Tower of London (not the Earl of Warwick). He later indicates that rumors reached the court that the young man crowned in Dublin was the second son of Edward IV (this is doubtless a mistake, because the Dublin king identified himself at all times as Edward, not Richard). Q>
André continues his narrative by pointing out that a herald was sent to Dublin with instructions to verify the identity of the young man (which would imply that this man, whom he does not name, knew the princes of the tower). The curious thing is that André admits that the boy had everyone convinced (it is not clear if even the herald himself) of being the son of Eduardo IV, which he attributes to the evil of the advisers who had taught him to play his role. and to reproduce the story of the prince of the Tower. It is highly significant that a man writing in the reign of Henry VII, in the service of his son and panegyrically on early Tudor, should acknowledge that the boy crowned in Dublin in 1487 was generally recognized as one of the missing sons of Edward IV. .
Another contemporary historian, Polidore Vergil, refers to the rebellion of 1487 and when he speaks of the coronation in Dublin of the pretender Edward he uses the verb «restore». This expression makes no sense if the crowned one were the Earl of Warwick, who would have been instituted as king in any case. The use of that term only gains meaning if the one restored to the throne had previously been considered king, that is, if it were Edward V who, by the way, had been recognized as monarch at the death of his father in 1483 but had not been crowned, which would make sense of a coronation ceremony in 1487.
The letter the pretender to the throne wrote to the city of York asking for aid and supplies was recorded in the York House Book as sent by Eduardo VI, but in the same letter nothing is indicated regarding the identity of the signatory beyond The King Therefore, the ordinal that an official unaware of the suitor's true identity recorded does not constitute a decisive element in one way or the other.
The question that arises almost immediately is:if the young man crowned in Dublin claimed to be Edward V, why does the story that has come down to us refer to him as an alleged Earl of Warwick identified as Lambert Simnel? What has been mentioned so far about the history of the princes of the Tower and that of the crowned pretender in Dublin constitutes sufficient proof of the confusion in the sources of a very convulsive period of English history. Much of the blame can be placed on the propaganda and misinformation that those closest to the first Tudor king felt were necessary to try to erase the many threats caused by Henry VII's lack of legitimacy to wear the crown after his victory at Bosworth.
For example, Lambert Simnel's name only appears in official reports after (sometimes decades) the Battle of Stoke Field. He is an unusual name, even in medieval England. According to the Herald Memoirs the young man from Dublin was named John, but all other sources identify him as Lambert (which, curiously enough, was the maiden name of one of Edward IV's best-known mistresses, Jane Shore). Another given (for me a bit twisted) that Matthew Lewis points out is that Simnel means in English a type of grain (it must be remembered that according to the official Tudor account, the impostor from Dublin was the son of a miller) and a grain used to make Easter cakes (the rebellion started at Easter, Simnel was crowned on the day Ascension and landed in England on the day of Pentecost). It may, Lewis points out, that the Tudor officials invented for the young man from Dublin a name of rare resonance, easy to remember and unlikely to coincide with that of another person as part of the patina of fraud of the boy they constructed.
Another aspect that draws attention is the one referring to Lambert Simnel's age. According to the sentence against the Earl of Lincoln, he was a ten-year-old boy. In 1487 Edward of Warwick was twelve years old, and the princes of the Tower would have been thirteen (Richard of York) and 16 (Edward V). Polidore Vergil's Latin manuscript contains a correction describing the boy as puer (child) to adolescens, which would place him in an age closer to that of the princes (specifically Eduardo V). Francis Bacon (writing as early as the 17th century) attributes to him an age of 16 years at the time of his coronation.
What these and other details reveal, Lewis points out, is that the official account of the 1487 invasion was slow to crystallize and that, even among the sources on the list of the first Tudor, there are substantial variations on the content of the story. There is no contemporary source that relates that the young man from Dublin pretended to be Edward V, but the logical thing is that if there were any that pointed it out, it was duly silenced, (Henry VII ordered, under penalty of treason, that the records of the Parliament of Ireland of 1487 were destroyed) as any other indication that the main threat to the reign of Henry VII was still alive.
The contradictions outlined show that it is not easy to say who the crowned boy in Dublin was, who he pretended to be, or even how old he was. What is clear is that if the princes in the Tower survived 1485, Edward V was the natural candidate to be crowned and lead an invasion with strong Yorkist support. Only in this way would the support of his mother and the earl of Lincoln's renunciation of his own rights and properties and even the loss of his life be understood.
In any case, Henry VII had successfully dealt with the threat of the young crowned man in Dublin. But if he thought that he was definitely done with the ghosts of the princes of the Tower of London he was very wrong... but that's another story.
Daniel Fernández de Lis:What Shakespeare didn't tell you about the Wars of the Roses.
Matt Lewis. The Survival of the Princes in the Tower. Murder, Mystery and Myth.