The Yorkist Claimant Edward

by Philippa Langley MBE

The first Yorkist Claimant was initially recorded in Ireland, where the Annals of Ulster stated that after Bosworth there remained alive ‘but one young man’ of the blood royal at that time (the Yorkist bloodline of Edward IV), who came to Ireland the following year where he was recognised as that same son of York. Sure enough, in August 1486, almost exactly a year after Bosworth, a royal warrant was signed in Ireland by Edwardus Rex – King Edward – using the royal title and seal, enjoying the acclaim of leading Irish lords of Yorkist allegiance.

The young King Edward has been referred to in a couple of places as ‘Edward VI’, but there is no evidence that he adopted any regnal number himself – those references are assumptions by others. Edward V would have been 15 years and 9 months, and if there is one thing these early reports agreed upon, it’s that the Claimant King Edward was a youth, not a child, nor yet a man. Taking these facts together, there is good reason to suppose the Claimant Edwardus Rex was taken by the Irish lords to be the young prince Edward V who had been proclaimed successor to Edward IV in 1483.

While King Edward was in Ireland cementing support, he already had a formidable army assembling in the Low Countries to help him relieve the Tudor king of his crown. His chief facilitators there were his Burgundian allies led by Maximilian I, who amassed an invasion fleet with men and equipment sufficient to challenge the English king in battle.

Supporting him all this while was the Dowager Duchess Margaret of Burgundy, sister of Edward IV and mother-in-law of Maximilian. But she was not his only royal supporter from the house of York. A driving force behind King Edward, even against his own personal interests, was John, Earl of Lincoln, the nephew of Richard III who was properly Richard’s lawful successor. Together with Richard’s close friend Francis, Viscount Lovell, John played a leading part in the campaign; he would go on to sacrifice his life for King Edward in battle.

In late 1486, when Henry VII heard reports of King Edward in Ireland, he sent a herald across to interrogate him as to the royal identity he claimed. Alarmed when the lad passed with flying colours, the Tudor king began purges in his household and arranged a great meeting of his council which took place at Sheen in February-March 1487.

At this time he held another Yorkist prince permanently confined in the Tower whom he considered a threat. This was Edward, Earl of Warwick, just turned 12, the son of Edward IV’s late brother the Duke of Clarence. It was decided to denounce the young man in Ireland as a counterfeit Edward of Warwick. This allegation was so widely circulated that ever afterwards, almost all reports of the doings of King Edward and his army on the Continent referred to him as ‘the son of Clarence’.

Having spread this story, the next step was to parade the real Warwick in public to disprove the so-called imposture. However, anyone close to the facts would know there was a considerable age difference between poor little 12-year old Warwick and the claimant whose coronation as King Edward was being planned in Dublin. He would be crowned on 27th May (not 24th), soon after the arrival of Maximilian’s fleet from Flanders. King Edward then led a combined army, augmented by men from England and Ireland, to do battle with the forces of Henry VII at Stoke Field on 16th June 1487, when the challenger’s army was defeated. Reports disagree as to what happened to Edward himself.

So who was he? It was well after the battle that the name ‘Lambert Simnel’ came to be documented, though posterity has reverse-engineered it to be attributed to King Edward as if this were his identity all along. This is due to later unreliable chronicling, some of it state-controlled, whose shortcomings can be easily identified by taking the trouble to back-track to the actual events and dates. The wise researcher will avoid placing trust in reports and chronicles penned after the event, or indeed later historical writing (including Wikipedia) because the name ‘Lambert Simnel’ will almost invariably be found attributed to the entire career of King Edward – even though the first mention of ‘Lambert Simnel’ appeared only in November 1487.

It is given in the Act of Attainder brought against the deceased Earl of Lincoln, five months after Stoke Field, which alleged that Lincoln ’caused one Lambert Simnel, a child of ten years of age, (son of a joiner)…to be proclaimed…as king of this realm’.

This 10-year-old ‘Lambert Simnel’ in November has been confused with a much earlier report, from the Canterbury Convocation of February 1487, which coincided (not by accident) with the council meeting at Sheen mentioned above. At that time Archbishop John Morton, Henry Tudor’s long-time political manipulator, produced from his own prison a young priest named William Symonds. This priest confessed that he had taken the son of an organ-maker (not a joiner) to Ireland the previous year and passed him off as Edward, Earl of Warwick.

This is the origin of the allegation that King Edward was a boy masquerading as Warwick, but the organ-maker’s son was given neither age nor name, and Symonds (or Simons) has never been identified or heard of again. The key objective was to prompt the council’s denunciation of King Edward as a counterfeit Warwick, which Henry VII was still citing in July 1487 after the Battle of Stoke.

It is easy to see how history confused the two: first (in February) the Convocation’s anonymous boy of unknown age, alleged to have been accepted in Ireland in 1486 as the 11-year-old Earl of Warwick; versus second (in November) Parliament’s ‘Lambert Simnel’, alleged to have been crowned in Ireland in 1487 at the age of 10. Though it ran to several pages, this Act of Parliament no longer made mention of the alleged Warwick masquerade, probably abandoned because by the time of the coronation Warwick was aged 12, not 10. By contrast, a returning Edward V (now 16½ ) perfectly fitted the described age of the young man crowned King Edward.

History’s indiscriminate ‘Simnel’ identification fails another test when we compare the memorandum of the heralds who accounted for the fallen after Stoke Field, officials whose identifications after battles needed to be rigorously accurate: ‘And there was taken the lad that the rebels called King Edward, whose name was in fact John.’

But ‘Lambert Simnel’ was the name given to this captured lad decades later by Vergil, Henry VII’s historian, who said he was set to work in the royal kitchens. Vergil undoubtedly followed what was said in Henry VII’s Parliament, but whether this kitchen-boy was the same as ‘John’, or the earlier Warwick impersonator, is impossible to know because by then every account had begun to say something different.

With the challenge eradicated and Irish records destroyed on Henry VII’s orders, naturally the chroniclers and history-writers afterwards cobbled together whichever stories they had heard. The alleged imposture by a boy was the headline story they told, while paying little attention to King Edward’s support from leading English and international figures, and the immense amounts of money and material that went into arming and equipping his invasion fleet and army. Margaret of Burgundy became the villain of the story, allegedly so vindictive that she would do anything (and managed to deceive most of Europe!) to dethrone Henry VII.

Fortunately, after investigations in Continental archives by researchers of Philippa Langley’s Missing Princes Project, we have been able to complete this account of King Edward with an item of sober documentation which has not been doctored for public consumption. It is the most unequivocal evidence of his real identity so far discovered. This is a receipt for delivery and payment for pikes for his army, ordered by Margaret of Burgundy, and all the more convincing because it is a private document verified by accounts-keepers and treasurers. This document identifies him as precisely the person he has claimed to be: the arms are for the men sent by Margaret ‘to serve her nephew, son of King Edward, late her brother…(who was) expelled from his dominion.’

Further archival discoveries regarding the Yorkist claimant King Edward were published in 2025.

Philippa Langley MBE is the founder of the Looking For Richard Project who discovered the lost grave of King Richard III, and founder of The Missing Princes Project research initiative. She is the honorary President of the Scottish Branch and Fellow of the Richard III Society.

Articles with named authors reflect the views of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Richard III Society.