Tag Archives: Edward VI

Lambert Simnel and the princes in the tower

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The line between history and farce wears thin in places, and with that bit of pseudo-profundity as a starting point, let’s talk about Lambert Simnel, pretender to England’s throne who was crowned Edward VI of England.

Sort of.

The coronation took place in Ireland, not in England, and you won’t find his name on any list of English monarch. He was ten years old when he was crowned and still had to ask permission if he wanted to stay up last enough to watch his favorite shows. 

The usual irrelevant photo: a Cornish hedge

 

The backstory

Simnel’s claim to the throne–or given his age, the claim made in his name–was that he was one of the princes in the tower. (If you’re about to yell that he never claimed that, stay with me. We’ll get there.) In the meantime, though, remember the princes in the tower? When they were 9 and 12 years old when they were imprisoned by their uncle Richard for the crime of being inconvenient. Or to take Richard’s side of the tale, for their protection.

Not long after that, their uncle became King Richard III.

The older boy had a decent claim to the throne–so decent that he was already King Edward V, although his coronation hadn’t been held yet. So yes, if you’re his uncle and want to be king, a pre-existing king who’s still alive is inconvenient. As is his younger brother, another Richard, who was next in line if Eddie turned up dead.

That makes a good and coherent story, and it’s the one most of us (if we’ve heard about them at all) know. But what happened to the kids isn’t 600% clear, leaving plenty of space for rumor and fantasy to do their work. 

But before I go on, an interruption: Names will be flying around here like bats at sunset. A lot of the actors have the same names, which any fiction writer can tell you is a bad idea. If you can keep them all straight, I admire you. If you can’t, don’t worry. Just keep up as best you can and nod when everyone else does. You’ll be fine. We’re overstocked on Richards and if you want a bargain on the name, this is the time to get out your wallet.

To be fair to Richard-the-Uncle, he didn’t invent locking up and crown-stealing. There was a lot of it going around. We’re dancing at the edge of the Wars of the Roses, when two branches of the Plantagenet family, Lancaster and York, fought over who was going to be the king of the mountain–or more accurately, of England. So an Edward locked up a Henry and took his crown, along with all that it symbolized. The Edward married an Elizabeth, offending a Richard, which I only mention to confuse us all. 

The couple had kids.

Are you still with me?

Henry’s supporters broke him free and re-crowned him. At best, that’s awkward. Once should be enough for any monarch. Edward fled with his brother, the Richard we were talking about earlier–the one who would later be king himself.

The alarm just went off, reminding me that it’s 1471.

The Edward we were talking about a minute ago popped up again, bringing an army with him. He defeated the Henry, killed his son and heir, and locked Henry back into the tower, which was getting a lot of use. 

Henry then proceeded to die, either of melancholy (the official explanation) or because he was murdered (the rumor), or possibly of some undiagnosed disease (an easy guess given this period). Take your pick. What matters is that being dead he could no longer be king, and the same could be said of his son, and that was the end of the Lancastrian line, leaving Edward as king, his son Edward as heir, and his son Richard as the backup band, or as they called it then, the heir presumptive.

See what I mean about the names?

In 1483 Edward (that’s the king) died, having named his brother Richard protector of his heir Edward. Richard-the-Brother took control first of Edward-the-Heir and then of Richard-the-Backup-Band, and had an assortment of people executed, including at least one stray Richard. 

And we still haven’t gotten around to Lambert Simnel.

Before Edward-the-Heir’s coronation could be held, the boys were declared illegitimate (don’t ask; it doesn’t really matter) making Richard-the-Uncle the next in line.

Ta da! I give you King Richard III.

The princes went from luxurious quarters in the tower to prison in the tower. They were seen less and less and then not at all. No one accused Richard of killing them until much later, when the Tudors were in power and Richard-the-Evil-Uncle suited their narrative. He probably did have it done, but it was a long time ago and definitive proof is out of reach, although a few hundred years later the skeletons of two boys of about the right age were found in the tower. 

 

Finally, we get to Lambert Simnel

In 1485 Richard III died in a battle with Henry Tudor, who then became Henry VII. Henry could claim a place on the Lancastrian family tree, although it was too far from the trunk to make him an obvious candidate, and he married a descendant of the Yorkist line, the oldest sister of the princes who were no longer in the tower, which you’d expect to put the Wars of the Roses to rest.

But you know how hard it is for people to let these things go. A young boy popped up, claiming to be the Richard who’d been in the tower and who had, he said, escaped and been on the run. Soon afterward, though, he claimed to be Edward, the Earl of Warwick, who’d also been in the tower. If either claim was true, it made him one of the last surviving males on the York family tree.

Except that  he probably never claimed to be Richard. The Richard story didn’t surface until some hundred years later, and over that length of time people’s memories tends to grow hazy. So all that business about the princes in the tower was irrelevant. I apologize. I was having too much fun to leave them out. What we have to do now is forget Richard. We have too many of them anyway. The boy claimed to be Edward from the start. Let’s focus on that.

Edward had been imprisoned in the tower. He was rumored to have died, but look, here was a boy of about the same age with a striking resemblance to some of the Yorks and a good tale about his escape, not to mention the backing of some important surviving Yorkists. Who was to say it wasn’t him?

These days, pretty much everyone. The agreement is that he was Lambert Simnel. Nothing’s known about his mother, but his father was a carpenter. Or possibly a cobbler. Or–well, something along those lines. Not an aristocrat. He was probably from Oxford and was spotted by a priest, who was yet another Richard, unless his first name was William. His last name was Symonds . Or Simons. Or else Simon. 

Listen, don’t try to keep all this straight. It’ll only end in tears. Let’s just call him the priest. He spotted a resemblance between this handsome body and–oh, hell, whoever the last Yorkist king was. (Edward IV, but it won’t be on the test.) The story goes that the priest groomed the boy to be a stand-in for the lost Yorkist heir, then took him to Ireland–a  Yorkist stronghold. By now the boy’s backers included John de la Pole (if you’re watching Wolf Hall, you’ll have heard the family mentioned); assorted survivors of a failed Yorkist rising in 1846; and Warwick’s aunt, Margaret of York, the dowager duchess of Burgundy. That’s worth underlining, since it’s impossible to keep these people straight: the aunt of the boy Simnel was claiming to be backed his claim to be her nephew. 

They had him crowned in Dublin as Edward VI. The Vth, remember, is the one who’d been imprisoned in the tower and then disappeared. 

Somewhat awkwardly, the Edward he was claiming to be was still alive and Henry had him paraded through the streets of London, but communications being what they were his appearance failed to go viral. Those who noticed didn’t care. Those who cared didn’t notice. 

 

What do you do after an irrelevant coronation?

By now we have Lambert/Edward crowned but without a country to rule, so there was nothing to do but invade England, which is what his puppet-masters did in 1487, with 2,000 Flemish mercenaries paid for and shipped to Ireland by Margaret-the-Aunt; some Irish troops (all I know about them is that they were poorly supplied and took the worst of it); and a few English supporters.

Most of England’s nobles were as interested in joining a rebellion as they were in catching the plague. They didn’t join. And Henry had been gathering troops to invade Ireland, whether to deal with the Simnel’s backers or because the English never could resist invading Ireland I don’t know. I think the former, but either way, it meant he had troops at hand and was able to react quickly. 

The king–you will have already figured this out by now–won. Assorted people were executed. Symonds was spared that because he was a priest but was imprisoned for life. 

And Simnel? He was a kid who’d been used by adults. Henry pardoned him and put him to work, first in his kitchens and later as a falconer. You’ll find at least some historians arguing that Henry never used more cruelty than could be helped. You could also argue–and I’m tempted to–that it might have pleased him to have a pretender to the throne working as a servant in his kitchen, but that’s pure speculation.

Not much is known about Simnel’s later life. He might have married and might have had a son, Richard Simnel (every third boy was name Richard), who became a canon of St. Osyth’s Priory in Essex during the reign of Henry VIII. 

Even Simnel’s name is uncertain. The one we’re using is the one that stuck. 

 

And now for the important stuff

First, Simnel did not give his name to the simnel cake, which predates him. I can’t swear that his name didn’t come from the cake. 

Never heard of simnel cake? That’s a sign you’re not British. It’s–umm, it’s a cake. Unless someone offers you a slice, what more do you need to know? In its earliest incarnation it was a sweet bread. At that stage, cake meant something breadlike involving sugar, butter, fruit, nuts–you know, that sort of thing.  

Second, in the process of invading England the Yorkists–some 8,000 of them–landed on the 50-acre Piel Island.  

They faced no resistance and they didn’t stay long, but they behind a bit of local legend: an unsubstantiated belief that the Kings of Piel are Simnel’s descendants, along with a battered, high-backed wooden chair, which sits in the island’s only pub and is the King of Piel’s throne. Any hapless visitor who sits in it has to buy a drink for everyone who happens to be there at the moment.

The legend has two problems: Simnel was around ten, which is young to have descendants, and the kings aren’t each other’s descendants. The title goes to whoever runs the pub. Still, when each new publican becomes king, he gets a rusty helmet and a saber and a bucket of beer poured over his head.

Cornish history: the Prayerbook Rebellion

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The Prayerbook Rebellion started when Henry decided to divorce Katherine.

Yeah, that Henry. Isn’t it odd how we’re on first-name terms with people who wouldn’t have known us from the dirt under their feet?

By way of full disclosure, I set the start date a little early, just for context, so nothing happened for the first few years. Then in 1534 Henry founded the Church of England, with himself as its head. And–no one could’ve been more surprised than him–it decided to grant him his divorce, which the Catholic Church was being very crabby about.

Irrelevant photo: Camellia blossoms. 

 

Henry the Much-Married starts the ball rolling downhill

The reconfiguration of the church took on a logic of its own, and starting in 1536 Henry closed religious centers–monasteries, hospitals, nunneries, abbeys. Some of them served a purpose in their communities–as schools and hospitals. The confiscated land and the buildings went to the crown and a lot of it was sold off to the wealthy. Who else had that kind of money? 

We’ll get to Cornwall any minute here. I promise.

In 1537, Henry banned the feasts on saints’ days. That included St. Piran’s Day, which is where I finally get Cornwall into the picture. St. Piran is Cornwall’s patron saint, and at this point we have a reaction on record: A fisherman from St. Keverne planned a protest and was arrested and probably executed. In Truro–Cornwall’s capital–a customs officer tried to stop a ship carrying people to Brittany to celebrate some unspecified saint’s day. He was pushed into the sea. The story seems to drop out of history there but let’s assume the ship got away and the people came back later and lived happily ever after.

The next year, pilgrimages were banned. 

You get a sense of how life was changing, right? Anne Bolyn, who Henry divorced Katherine for, had been dead by Henry’s executioner’s hand for two years by now. I mention that as a reminder of how far all this had wandered from where it started.

Along with the ban on pilgrimages came a directive that churches had to use an English-language translation of the bible. When I first heard about that–this was, oh, maybe a hundred years ago–I thought it meant people could understand the book they considered holy. The problem was, English wasn’t Cornwall’s language. Cornish was. 

It didn’t go down well. So let’s talk about the ways Cornwall was both a part of England and not English.

 

Cornwall as a country and a county

Cornwall was governed by England at this point, and it had been for a long time. Technically speaking, it was just another English county.  But it also had a distinctive culture: Not just its own language, but its own style of dress, folklore, naming customs, agricultural practices, and games and pastimes.”

High on the list of games and pastimes was pushing customs officers into the sea.

Cornwall also had two distinctive administrative institutions, the Stannary organisation, which oversaw tin mining, and  the Duchy of Cornwall. We won’t stop to make sense of those; we’ll just take it on faith they underlined its sense of separation.

Writers of the time–and well into the next century–wrote about the Cornish as a separate people, as distinct and recognizable as the Welsh, and about Cornwall as almost a separate country.

So that’s what we get to plunk onto the separate-country side of the scales. On the English-county side was an English gentry, which England had long since imposed on Cornwall, and the gradual inward seep of the English language. 

It might not have looked that way at the time, but from our point of view we can see the Cornish language in a slow retreat from the Devon border down toward the tip of Cornwall’s foot. 

Why’d that happen? The English gentry spoke English, although they may (or may not–I don’t know) have spoken Cornish as well. That made it useful to know enough English to do business with them, to work for them, to mix with them in whatever other ways the non-gentry mixed with the gentry. To people who cared about refinement, the fact that the gentry spoke English would’ve made English seem like the language of refinement. 

Cornwall’s ports would also have been full of the English language and the people who spoke it. This was a time when it was easier to get from, say, London by sea than by road.

 

All hell breaks (slowly) loose

In 1547, colleges, hospitals, chapels, and guilds were closed, and no provision was made for anyone else to fill the roles they’d played in caring for the sick and educating–well, some small number of kids, but still it mattered to the ones who might’ve been able to take advantage of it, leaving a very practical gap. The next year, an English official was stabbed when he tried to take down an image in a parish church. 

That makes it sound like a sudden thing. It wasn’t. The conflict had rocked back and forth for months, but we don’t do detail here at Notes. Twenty-eight Cornishmen were arrested and ten were executed for it. 

Then in 1549, Edward VI–or at least his government, since he’d have been somewhere in the neighborhood of eleven–introduced the Book of Common Prayer. Which was in English. And it insisted that church services follow it. That demand’s called the Act of Uniformity, in case that rings any bells from your long-buried memory of history classes.

Straw.

Camel.

Back.

For all that Cornish was in retreat, it was still Cornwall’s language, and for many people it was their only language. This wasn’t bringing the church’s language closer to them, it was moving it further away. 

Nationalism, meet outraged religious beliefs. You’ll find you have a lot to talk about.

Three thousand men gathered outside Bodmin–the geographical center of Cornwall, in case that’s of any relevance, which I suspect it isn’t–and drew up a set of complaints. They chose a leader, Humphrey Arundell, who was one of the richest and most powerful men in Cornwall and from an aristocratic English Catholic family. 

Was he Cornish or English? These days, the only way to figure out who’s Cornish and who isn’t is by how many generations of ancestors a person has buried in Cornish soil. I’ve been told four. I’ve also been told two. Either way, I’m too late. Whether either of those was the standard then, when Cornish identity was more sharply defined, I don’t know. I know Arundell was born in Cornwall and that he had family in England. He could as easily have been moved by religious belief as by nationalism. 

Either this set of complaints of a later one (sorry–the quotes have all gone adrift) said, “We will not receive the newe service because it is but lyke a Christmas game, and so we the Cornyshe men (wherof certen of us understande no Englysh) utterly refuse thys newe Englysh.” 

Half the church’s confiscated land was to be returned.

The complaints were sent to the government, which shrugged its shoulders and ignored them, convinced everyone would settle down as soon as it was time for Coronation Street to come on.

Then, in the random way that these things tend to happen, a rebellion broke out in Devon, the neighboring county: A congregation forced its priest to conduct the service in Latin, and in case that wasn’t enough, a supporter of the book of Common Prayer was killed. Somehow or other things escalated and the next thing anyone knew (okay: the next thing I knew) an army was marching on Exeter, Devon’s capital. 

You know how things can get out of hand, right? One day you’re killing someone over a prayer book and before you know you’ve got a whole damn army and you’re marching on the capital, thinking, How’d I get here? Do I really want to do this? Did someone think to bring sandwiches?

Arundell hadn’t wanted a fight, but the snowball was rolling downhill too fast. His army started off toward London. His plan was to talk to the government, with a few thousand soldiers at his back to serve as a megaphone, but on the way it took Trematon Castle, where some members of the gentry had holed up, and Plymouth. It also took St Michael’s Mount, which is in the wrong direction. This tells us that sat-navs (what Americans would soon learn to call GPSs) were no different then than they are now.  

Plymouth, by the way, isn’t in Cornwall, it’s in Devon, a change that’s marked by the River Tamar, which is wide enough at that point that you’d be hard put not to notice it. It’s also very wet, both there and along its entire length. But like I said, snowball; downhill; and melting gently in the Tamar’s waters. Who’s going to argue about county borders when all that’s going on?

 

Across the Tamar

At roughly this point, the Cornish and Devon armies joined together and laid siege to Exeter for five weeks, and they would have blown up the city walls but their gunpowder was too wet. That’s the English weather for you. 

The Cornish weather’s no better.

In London, the news that a Cornish army was marching on London caused a panic. Bridges were pulled down. Plays were banned–they might turn people against the government. France rubbed its hands and declared war.

The government sent soldiers to defend Exeter.

The leaders of the Cornish on Devonian armies wrote the government again, saying essentially the same thing: “We will have our old service of matins, mass, evensong and procession in Latin as it was before.”

This time the government wrote back. Three times, in fact, all of them saying no. In a long-winded, oddly spelled sort of way.

Several battles were fought, and I won’t drag you through them. The English army was bigger and the Cornish and Devonians lost. In one battle so many were captured that the English were afraid they’d lose control of them and slaughtered them instead. 

In the final battle, 1,400 were killed and the survivors fled. Arundell went into hiding and was captured (his servant turned out to have been working for the English). He was taken to London and with other leaders of the rebellion was hanged, drawn, and quartered.

Which kind of makes getting slaughtered en masse by the people who captured you look almost good. 

His lands were also confiscated and given to the leader of the English army that had defeated him. He was past doing anything with them by then, but it meant his family lost out. 

All told, some three thousand to four thousand Westcountry men were killed, including some priests and mayors hanged after the rebellion was over. According to one source, hundreds may have been killed for taking part–including many who may not have had anything to do with the uprising. 

 

The aftermath

The Cornish language went into a sharper decline after this, and although the Book of Common Prayer was translated into Welsh, it was never translated into Cornish.

Mind you, I’m not sure how welcome the translation was in Wales.

Stained glass windows were broken out of Cornish churches and images with any scent of Catholicism were destroyed, as they were elsewhere in England. 

Maps stopped showing Cornwall as a separate nation, and by 1700 you don’t find anyone writing about it as almost a separate country.

Ironically, the defeat of the rebellion, which was against the king’s new religion, set Cornwall up to support the king during the Civil War. The king was seen as British and the Parliamentary Army was seen as English. I suspect you had to be there at the time for that to make sense. The Parliamentary Army was also far more Protestantly Protestant than the king’s. I don’t know how heavily that weighed on the scales, but I assume it mattered.

When the king was defeated, it was another whack on the head for Cornwall’s status as an almost-country of its own.