The Other Yorkist Pretender

Lambert Simnel, Perkin Warbeck and...who?

Everyone who has a passing interest in the 15^th century has heard the names Perkin Warbeck and Lambert Simnel, the famed pretenders who appeared from shadowy corners to lay challenge to Henry VII’s crown. Much, much ink has been spilled trying to persuade others about their true identities, even though we will categorically never know. Some, like the Richard III Society, even now claim that Simnel was Edward V and Warbeck was Prince Richard, even though there are clear issues with such confidence.

But few people have encountered the THIRD pretender who, very briefly, emerged to, well, challenge would be too strong a word. Emerged to irk Henry VII. And that man’s name was Rauf Wilford.

By 1499, Henry VII had reigned for fourteen years and they had not been straightforward. Though he had hoped to have been accepted as a unifying force, the man who had brought York and Lancaster together through his victory of Richard III at the Battle of Bosworth, from the first moment of his reign he had been subject to conspiracy.

This was to be expected – there were plenty of people upset at the combined Tudor/Beaufort/Woodville ascendancy, particularly those who had been devoted to the fallen regime of Richard III and who could not stomach submission to his conqueror. These men, by themselves, the Stafford Brothers, for example, or Francis Lovell, John Taylor, John Atwater were not significant enough or influential enough to drive regime change.

But they did appeal to various external forces that sought to undermine Henry VII’s kingship for their own benefit – just as Henry himself had effectively been an agent of the French, now these rebels were co-opted by successive foreign powers. This was a recurring theme throughout this fourteen year period, and had led to the emergence of the Lambert Simnel and Perkin Warbeck conspiracies. Henry, however, had persevered.

Simnel had been captured, it was declared he was but a boy of Oxford who had been impersonating the Earl of Warwick, and was sent into the bowels of the royal household to work in the kitchens. Warbeck had also, eventually, been captured, had issued a confession that corroborated with previous investigations into his background that confirmed he was a fraud, and was safely under lock and key in the Tower of London. In that very same Tower still rested the one Yorkist prince whose identity was unquestionable – Warwick. This is a very brief overview of matters, of course, and much of the narrative is contest, but you can learn more in my book HENRY VII AND THE TUDOR PRETENDERS: SIMNEL, WARBECK and WARWICK.

But so, as the final year of the fifteenth century, 1499 marked the end of a turbulent era in English history, and it probably did not escape much notice it was exactly one hundred years since the House of Lancaster first ascended the throne under Henry IV – that, of course, had been a contentious usurpation with far-reaching consequences that had violently divided the kingdom for several generations afterwards, albeit exacerbated through financial and military hardship.

Just when Henry VII believed he had finally got a grip on the situation, that had had overcome the legacy of dynastic warfare and had quelled any overt threats to his person, his family, and his crown, word reached him that yet another claimant had emerged from the shadows. His exasperated sigh must have been heard throughout the coat, and can be felt centuries later.

The Simnel affair had involved a full scaled military invasion of his kingdom, and Henry had been forced to defend his crown in battle. Warbeck had proven a more protracted sage that had played out across the European stage, and though this second pretender ultimately did not pose the acute military threat of the earlier episode, the mental stress of a near-decade long conspiracy had really tested the Tudor king’s patience. This time around, Henry was not going to wait for the threat, such as it was, to be given grounds to grow. The swiftness in which he dealt with this third pretender was such that his name, unlike that of Lambert Simnel or Perkin Warbeck, did not even merit mention in contemporary accounts, either because it was not known or rather was not deemed important enough to be documented. That he existed, however, seems beyond doubt.

In the account of Polydore Vergil, Henry VII’s court biographer who arrived in England a handful of years later and had access to significant persons who had lived through these events, the pretender was merely called, somewhat scornfully, ‘some lad or other’. In the Great Chronicle, meanwhile, an invaluable source written around a decade later, he was listed simply as a ‘maumet’, or puppet. No name is given by either.

The name Raufe Wilford, is first found (to my current knowledge, at least) in the often questionable account of the lawyer Edward Hall half-a-century later, ‘The Union of the Two Noble and Illustre Families of Lancastre and Yorke’, better known as Hall's Chronicle. Hall is a hugely influential historical reporter whose account inspired much of those that followed, which in turn provided Shakespeare with much content, but he was prone to imaginative commentary, particularly on events that predated his own existence.

According to the Great Chronicle, an invaluable and more credible source written around a decade later, in early February 1499, the nineteen or twenty year old son of a London cordwainer began claiming to be Edward, Earl of Warwick, with word spreading along the Norfolk-Suffolk border. It is unclear whether people believed the claims, as Warwick was widely known to be locked up in the Tower of London, but it is perhaps telling that no known following seems to have been cultivated.

According to the chronicle’s account, no one was to blame for this affair other than the youth himself. The story goes that when this pretender was rounded up and brought before the mighty Earl of Oxford, hero of Bosworth Field, he readily confessed that he had been born in London but when he had been at school in Cambridge, had been stirred in his sleep to assume Warwick’s identity. He did this so that he should ‘in process obtain such power that he should be king’. He admitted to Oxford, however, that his father was not the renowned Duke of Clarence, Warwick’s father, but rather just a shoe tradesman who lived in the Black Bull Inn on Bishopsgate Street.

Polydore Vergil, meanwhile, suggests this third pretender, the second to claim to be Warwick, tried in vain to rouse the people of Kent with what the Italian humanist regarded an ‘absurd fabrication. Close to the heart of the Tudor court in the years following this episode, Vergil claimed the impetus behind this latest anti-Tudor conspiracy, if it can even be called that, came from a bold Augustinian friar named Patrick who had been able to persuade the youth to impersonate the earl of Warwick.

This ‘nefarious scheme’ has shades of the Simnel affair back in 1487, which possibly featured the participation of a priest named Simons, and certainly an abbot by the name of Sant. Friar Patrick supposedly promised the youth that ‘many of the nobles would support him and make him king’, which for a gullible shoemaker’s son, might have been an alluring prospect. They travelled into Kent, ‘breeding ground of revolutions’, to try and gain support, but were ‘promptly seized’.

Edward Hall, meanwhile, his reliability notwithstanding, also named the mastermind behind this imposture Friar Patrick, likely following the example of Vergil. In Hall’s account, this friar ‘greatly favoured’ this particular scholar of his, in whose mind he ‘infused this foolish and fantastical concept’ that he could be king of England if he followed his master’s advice. Wilford, ‘like a good disciple’, went along with the matter. Together, friar and would-be king of England travelled into Kent where the ‘young mawmet’ began to tell many he was the earl of Warwick, freed from the Tower. Friar Patrick even declared it openly from pulpit, desiring the local populace to rise. Alas, they were soon apprehended.

Noticeably, unlike the previous two impersonations, there is no evidence whatsoever that Margaret of York, the sister of Richard III and who had played a key role in Simnel and Warbeck episodes, had any involvement this time around. Maybe she didn’t even have time to learn there was another opportunity for revenge on the Tudor king. But Henry VII’s immediate and ruthless reaction to this third pretender is telling.

Back in 1487, Lambert Simnel had been granted mercy and given a job in the royal kitchens, eventually working his way up to the comfortable role of trainer of the king’s hawks. Ten years later, Perkin Warbeck was likewise granted mercy, permitted to live around the royal court until one night he attempted an escape, after which he was placed in the Tower. Even so, he was permitted to live. Henry VII was not a vindictive man, prone to the same outbursts of violence that would plague his son’s kingship.

But patience was waring thing. Henry had faced these threats for fourteen years, and he was growing tired of his authority being subjected to such open mockery. The Great Chronicle says that that after the king held a brief audience with this latest challenger, sadly unrecorded like an earlier such summit with Perkin Warbeck, the pretender who Hall called Wilford was sentenced to execution. Vergil agrees that the ‘lad’ was ‘dragged before the king’.

On 12 February 1499, Shrove Tuesday, a day of absolution, he was hanged wearing just his shirt at St-Thomas-a-Watering. The body was left hanging for four days, a visible warning sign to anyone using the principal route between London and Canterbury. Perhaps this was because he had allegedly sought support in Kent. It was later cut down and buried in an unknown location. The entire episode had lasted just a fortnight. Hall, like the other accounts, agrees Wilford was hanged, adding that the friar was subjected to perpetual imprisonment.

Wilford’s foolishness, however, had a bloody legacy. It is little surprise to learn that this episode had caused Henry considerable stress. According to a Spanish ambassador, at the beginning of a year he consulted a priest, desiring to know how his life would end. The priest responded his life would be in danger for the rest of the year. It is little surprise, the ambassador notes, that Henry ‘has aged to much during the last two weeks that he seems to be twenty years older’.

There were happier times that followed – ten days after Wilford was hanged, Henry’s queen Elizabeth of York gave birth to the couple’s third son, christened Edmund after the father he never knew. On 19 May, meanwhile, the king’s eldest son and heir, Prince Arthur, was married by proxy to Katherine of Aragon, securing the highly sought after union he had long wanted between the House of Tudor and the Spanish House of Trastamara. This alliance was crucial to Henry’s ambitious vision for the prosperity of his dynasty going forward and a colossal endorsement of his kingship.

There was a catch, however. Though the Spanish ambassador, Roderigo de Puebla, was sure that ‘many of the intrigues which have hitherto been carried on’ would ‘now cease’, his masters weren’t so confident. The Catholic Monarchs, Isabella of Castile and Ferdinand of Aragon, were not going to hand over their daughter Katherine to the English when pretenders littered the land. Their concern wasn’t the Simnels, Warbecks or Wilfords, but the genuine Yorkist prince who still lived, one whom had inspired at least two conspiracies.

It has been stipulated during the negotiations for the marriage that Katherine would only set sail for England when her husband reached the age of fourteen, which would occur in September 1500. But first, all and any threats to her future as a Tudor queen had to be dealt with to a permanent conclusion. The Spanish, it was said, feared the name Warwick, for it conjured memories his infamous grandfather Richard Neville, the Earl of Warwick whose machinations earned him an immortal legacy as ‘The Kingmaker’. The Spanish wanted Warwick gone, and the Wilford affair had hardly dampened their concerns. As long as Warwick lived, there existed a clear threat to Tudor supremacy. Henry’s choice was not a palatable one, but his hand was forced, in the interests of both national security and personal survival.

Though Wilford was not the direct cause of what was to follow, and Perkin Warbeck himself had much to answer for, the former’s brief emergence at a moment of intense political importance hadn’t helped matters. Not for the first time in living memory, a Yorkist prince dwelling in the Tower of London was a risk to those who ruled. Though we can debate what happened to the sons of Edward IV in 1483, sixteen years later, the son of Edward’s brother Clarence had to die. And before the year 1499 was out, die Edward of Warwick would. As Edward Hall would say, though Warwick ‘could not by own doings seek his death and destruction, yet by the drift and offence of another man, he was brought to his end’.

You can read more about Warwick’s sad end HERE