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Lambert Simnel’s Rebellion: How
reliable is Polydore Vergil?
BARRIE WILLIAMS
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THAT STANDARD worktof reference, the Dictionary of National Biography, notes' if that all other accounts concerning, Lambert Simnel-rderive from Polydore Vergil. For the opening years of Henry VII’s -reign more than for any other period, we - depend almost entirely on the Kin_g’s official historian to give us a coherent narrative of events, and this makes it very difficult to check whether his account '3' is biased or even trustworthy. The outline of Lambert (^) Simnel’s career, as related by Vergil, (^) has been 73 familiar to most of us from (^) our schooldays. Immediately after Bosworth, Henry VII seized Clarence’s son, Edward Earl of Warwick, (^) and shut him up in the Tower. About Easter 1486, Viscount Lovell and (^) other discontented Yorkists 1. slipped away to Flanders to plan a rebellion. The Earl of Lincoln, who had been; -..' named heir to the throne by Richard II! but who had remained loyfl to Henry VII at the beginning of the reign, joined them in February 1487. An ambitious. and unscrupulous priest, Richard Simon, produced Lambert Simnel, whom he -:-.- had trained to impersonate the Earl of Warwick. Henry brought the real Earl out
of the Tower and showed him in London. Simnel was neverthelegs.crowned in:
Dublin, and his adherents landed in Lancashire. Marching to the Midlands, the)" were defeated at the Battle of Stoke (^) (16 June 1487). Lincoln and many others were killed. Simnel was captured and made a servant in the King’s Household, and was still alive when Vergil was writing his history in 1513.
The question (^) of Vergil’s reliability over this episode is important. Writers from Sir Clements Markham2 to Josephine Tey3 have suggested that something very different (^) was going on in the first two years of Henry’sreign, viz. the murder of the two sons of Edward IV and that this explains the curious behaviour of various Yorkists, particmarly the Queen Mother, Elizabeth Woodville.‘ When these events were taking place, Polydore Vergil was about seventeen, had no particular connection with England, and was probably (^) still a student in Italy. He was born at Urbino about 1470 and studied at the (^) universities of Padua and Bologna. His relative, (^) Adrian de Castello, was made Collector of Peter’s Pence in England about (^) 1489, thus beginning a family connection that was to last over sixty years. (^) From 1492, Adrian resided (^) in Rome as the King of England’s representative at the Papal Court, and from 1492 to 1498, Vergil was also in Rome as chamberlain to Pope Alexander VI (Rodrigo Borgia). It is probable that he learnt something of English (^) affairs, including Lambert Simnel, though at second hand, from Adrian de Castello in these years. In 1502, (^) Adrian was made Bishop of Hereford (translated to ‘Bath & Wells in 1504). In 1501 or early 1502, Vergil came to England (^) as Sub-Collector of Peter’s Pence. He received prefennent, and became Archdeacon of Wells. The general View seems to be that he was a conscientious Collector and Archdeacon by the standards of the time. He remained in England until 1553 and conformed, (^) at least outwardly, to all the changes of religion under Henry VIII and Edward (^) VI.'Two years before his death in 1555, (^) he retumed'to Italy with the full blessing of the English government. He was then an old man over eighty. ___
In his lifetime, he was well known for various works of humanist
scholarship, the Adagia, De Prodigiis and De Inventoribus Rerum. To-day, he is , chiefly remembered for his Anglica Historia, a histoxy of Britain from the earliest times, begun at (^) the behest of Henry VII. He (^) had completed the draft by 1513, but later extended it to take in most of the reign of Henry VIII, to whom it was dedicated when published. Successive editions were brought out in 1534, 1546 and 1555.5 From 1501/2 onwards, Vergil was relating events of which he was himself an eye-witness, and his work is contemporary history. Down to the mid- fifteenth century, he made use of earlier histories and chronicles, both skilfully and critically. But for the first sixteen years of Henry VII’s reign, he had to rely on the memories and information supplied (^) by contemporaries. Vergil mingled freely with the leading English humanists of his'.time. These included Colet, Grocyn,’ Lily and Linacre; also More, who through his connections with Cardinal Morton was an important source for the politics of the early years of the reign; and Richard Foxe, who early on took office as Henry VII’s Secretary of State and Lord Privy Seal. Sir Reginald Bray, Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster to Henry VII, (^) and Chfistopher_ Urswick, (^) Dean of Windsor 1495—1522, feature prominently (^) in Vergil’s account of Richard III’s reign, informationfor which they probably supplied themselves:It needhardly be ?~'r__emgrked that More, Morton, Foxe, Bray and Urswick were all strong Tudor artisans. “ Allowing for his lack of first-hand information, and the possible bias of his mformants, Vergil’s history on the whole stands up well to close scrutiny. At the {lid of the last century, Wilhelm Busch examined his account carefully,‘ checking
! (^) I.
cruel to no purpose, and if such treatment was designed to frustrate further plots in Warwick’s favour it singularly failed of its purpose. It would have had more point if Warwick had had information which Henry was anxious not to have communicated. If Edward; son of EdWard IV, had been still alive' m August 1485 and had been with his cousin Warwick at Sheriff Hutton," (^) such knowledge could have been highly embarrassing, particularly 1f the formerl died between then and February 1487. (33) Vergil’s account suggests that Warwick was taken from the Tower to Mass' m St. Paul’s Cathedral (a) to scotch the rumour of his murder and (b) to show up Lambert Simnel as an imposter and deter his would-be supporters.
- Though he does not give a date, his account suggests that this took place before Simnel’s quasi-coronation in Dublin in May 1487. The LondOn Chronicle recently discovered at the College of Arms, however; states that Warwick and Simnel were ‘showed openly’ together at St. Paul’s on 8 July 1487.10 If this" IS correct, Henry VII acted swiftly after the Battle of Stoke and capture of Simnel (16 June), sending Simnel to London while remaining himself at Kenilworth until November. Unless this were the second showing of Warwick to the people, Vergil seems to have mistaken both the timing and purpose of the move. (4) Later 1n his history of the reign, Vergil refers to Sir James Tyrell, at the time of his execution in 1503, supposedly confessing to the murder of Edward IV’s sons. Vergil had been' In England for at least a year before Tyrell’s death and ought to have been able to offer an accurate account. Tyrell could, he says, ‘have spared the boys, re_scued them from death, and carried them to safety” .But he would not do this' 1n order"that he might afterwards try, against all human and
divine injunctions, to help Earl Edmund [de la Pole], son of Edward’s sister. ’2‘ As
it stands, the latter sentence is an amazing absurdity. In the summer of 1483 when Tyrell was supposed to have murdered the princes, there stood three persqns between Edmund (^) de- la Pole and the throne, apart from Richard III himself: the- King’s son Edward, who died in April 1484; Edward, Earl of Warwick, Richard’s first choice as heir after the death of his son; and Edmund’s elder brother John, Earl of Lincoln. Only after John de la Pole' s death at the Battle of Stoke did Edmund have any pretensions as Yorkist candidate for the throne. By the time Vergil was writing in 1513, Suffolk (as Edmund had become on his father’s death) had gone to the scaffold for these pretensions. To suppose Edmund plotting with Tyrell a path to the throne in 1483 is to cast him as a villain in the mould of Shakespeare’s Richard III. Unless the story is a complete fabrication, casting doubt on what Vergil tells us otherwise of Tyrell, it would make more sense to ostulate Tyrcll and Edmund (or more likely John) de la Pole plotting in 1486); to remove rivals from their path, and so hoping to turn the Simnel rebellion to their own advantage. The timing of Warwick’s showing to the people is only important in so far as Vergil may have attributed the wrong motives to Henry VII, though an error of two months can completely change the meaning of events. The other three points lend support, even if only marginally, to the. Markham-Josephine Tey hypothesis that the sons of Edward IV were not murdered 1n the time of Richard 111 but survived to the accession of Henry VII. Two principal (^) objections have been advanced to this hypothesis. One is the evidence (^) of the skeletons found in the Tower in 1674. Quite apart from modern criticisms, I have felt very sceptical
about- identifying the remains with those of the ’gfl‘ll'llfxes ever since lreading Francis ‘ ___ Sandford’s account of the original discovery. s is not eas: y access: e m- 2' "-’< modern works, but should be regarded as compulsory reading on the subject. The other objection—to my mind more weighty—is the apparently genuine: '1 I” perplexity- of- Sir'William‘ Stanley and Henry ‘VII- himself (^) asutoflwheth‘er Perkin
hardly“mm" (^) have;retained^ ‘ea'ly‘was the S’Olmsfinprince—dw if he himselfvhad ouwhich1vI-Icnryat‘least could disposedof him. But. since .1674; largely on the snppoged identification ofithc: remains in,the .,Tower,;it has: been generally assumed that if anyone, murdered one of the princes, (^) he must have murdered them both. If the identifiCation of the remains is (^) seriously in doubt, this assumptiOn is highly suspect, Edward V. having briefly reigned as King, was far more dangerous to anyone aspiring to- the throne than his brother, bastardised through the exposure of his father’s previous marriage. Apart from Richard III and Buckingham m the spanner of 1483, we do not know that anyone ever had the chance of eliminating them both; and there' 18 at least a case for, supposing
:them still to have been aliVe m November. 1483. 2’ Francis. Bacon records that it-
was rumoured in Henry VIPs time that one at least of the princes had been ‘co'nveyed (^) seci'etly away’ from the (^) Tower and was still alive (^) in- 1485. 2“ The rumours; hints and plots all point to: the survivor_—i_fthere was on'é—being the younger prince, Richard,: Duke_ of York It is certainly interesting that Richard Simon is said to (^) have thought of passing (^) off Lambert Simnel as the younger prince before trying the impersonation of the Earl of Warwick.- Even if Polydore’ Vergil emerges from examination generally honest (^) if ' neither disinterested nor unbiased, his account of Lambert Simnel’s rebellion leaVes some; intriguing questions. There is the rumour of- 'a royal personage murdered m (^) the Tower' m 1486/7, an inexpert: attempt to pig; the murder of the sons of Edward IV on the de la Pole family, and an uncertainty as :0: when and why Henry VII shut up Warwick in close confinement in the Tower. As remarked earlier, this gives at le'aSt marginal support to a"hypothesis” that Edward _V died in 1486/7 and not-1483.1? leaves wide open the possxbllmes regarding Richard,"Duke pf York '
' "t NOTES AND REFERENCES l. Dictiormry, of National Biography (DNB) Lambert Simnel --**. -_**
- Sir Clements R. Markham, Richard 111-; His Ll/é 'and Character (London 1906); pp; 268 fi‘. 3 Josephine Toy. The Daughter of ”me (Melbourne, London and Baltimore 1954), pp. 162 IT.-
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