Supplemental: The Pretenders with Matthew Lewis
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of a recent chat that we had with Matt Lewis. Matt is a medieval historian. He has a number of very cool podcasts through the History Hit Network. One's called Gone Medieval. Another one is looking at the history behind the Assassin's Creed video games, which my husband actually plays. So I am familiar with the

My husband and my daughter actually both enjoy them. I like the part where you climb up to the very high tower and you do the little jump thing into the hay cart. Anyway, he would always call me. My husband would always call me when he was going to do a jump because he'd be like, do you want to watch? And anyway, beside the point. So Matt Lewis came and did a chat for those of us who are in the Tudor Top 50 year-long program that I'm doing. Some of you know about this and are part of it.

It is a year-long examination, I suppose, of the top 50 moments in Tudor history. Every week there's a new video with information on a workbook, all that kind of good stuff. And once a month we have these live chats with historians. Our first one was Nathan Amin talking about Henry's victory at Bosworth.

And then this month, we chatted with Matt Lewis about the pretenders and some of the early rebellions against Henry Tudor. Because this month, a lot of the videos were about Perkin Warbeck, Lambert Simnel, all of those people in those early challenges to the early Tudor reign. So Matt came and dropped by. And this is a highlight reel of that discussion. If you would like to be part of these events live,

You can still join in for sure. We're only two months into it. So there's still plenty of time, plenty of year left to hop on. You can just go to englandcast.com slash Tudor top 50 to learn more. I hope you enjoy this discussion, these highlights of Matthew's talk. I have long followed him. He actually spoke at a Tudor summit I did, gosh, years ago. I think it was 2017, 2018 about some of his theories around the princes in the tower and

He has a bit of a contrarian, could you call it that, view of The Princess and the Tower and some of the stuff that is traditionally the way we see Tudor history. He is also a trained solicitor lawyer, so he brings kind of a legal mind to it as well, which is really interesting to hear. So I appreciate Matt for stopping by. You can learn more about him. Definitely get his books, Matthew Lewis. He has a really good sub stack.

I will put links all below. And also his website is mattlewisauthor.com. So you can learn more about him there. Like I said, I'll put links into everything. I do definitely recommend you give his sub stack a read because he puts out some really good stuff there. So good stuff. I hope you enjoy again this highlight reel and englandcast.com slash tutor top 50 if you want to join in on the fun that we're having this year.

All right, I will just turn it over to the highlight reel of our discussion with Matt. Just tell me a little bit about how you got into this period of history and kind of your unique perspective for people who might not be familiar with you. Unique is the byword for barmy here, I think. Yeah, I guess I arrived where I am today slightly by accident. So I did history at A-level at school. So that's the exams we do at 18 here in the UK.

And we did the Wars of the Roses for that. And that period absolutely fascinated me and has ever since. I didn't do history at university. I applied to some places to do history, other places to do law. I got in somewhere to do law. My parents always wanted me to be a solicitor. The first year of my law degree put me off that idea completely. But history kind of remained a

a fascination for me that I always read around. I guess I was always struck by how similar the two disciplines of law and history are. You know, it's research, it's learning where to go to find out the information you need to know. It's learning how to construct cases and stories and see different perspectives and how to weigh up evidence and all of that kind of thing. So I think they're very similar kind of disciplines in a lot of ways. But history kind of just rumbled along as a

an interest in the background of various careers that I had and I started writing I wrote a fictional book about Richard III because I'm obsessed with Richard III and I self-published that to Amazon it did appallingly badly no one bought it and then six months later they found Richard III Remains which was like the best kind of I mean campaign I couldn't have paid for that

Suddenly the book started selling. Everyone was interested in Richard III. It did so well I wrote a sequel to it. And I started doing a blog as well because I was seeing so much stuff in the news around the discovery and the identification of his remains. And then even after that, the reinterment a couple of years later, I was just seeing so much stuff in the media that was just factually incorrect.

There's lots of opinion and interpretation around Richard III, but there are also just facts that are correct and incorrect. So I started writing a blog just to try and get some facts there that I consistently saw being misrepresented. And eventually a publisher got in touch with me and said, we really like the way you write on your blog. Would you like to write us a book? I picked myself up on the floor and was like, okay, is this real? Yeah.

And yeah, I wrote a nonfiction book for them. The first one on the Wars of the Roses kind of as a whole. And I just kind of haven't stopped since. I'm waiting for someone to tell me that actually I'm not very good at this and they don't want me to write any books. I suffer from terrible imposter syndrome. As long as people keep asking me to write books and do brilliant things like this, then I'm going to keep doing it. Yeah.

Fantastic. What do you think are some of the main fallacies that people have around Richard and this period in general? I think a lot of it is the conviction that he was just a vicious child murderer, that he almost has no redeeming characteristics, the certainty that some people have. And it gets down into as well, really nerdy minutiae. Like if you take the spring and summer of 1483,

there is a series of events that take place. Again, there is lots of interpretation that you can layer around, but those events take place in a very specific order and the number of times you still see people completely misrepresent the order in which those things happened. Particularly, I think the biggest one is people will say Richard murdered his nephews so that he could be king. It's like the last time they were seen alive, he'd been king for almost six months.

So he didn't kill them to become king. If he killed them, it was to cement his grip on the throne, to remove them as potential threats in the future and things like that. But he didn't kill them so that he could be king. It's just, maybe it's semantics a little bit. Some of that stuff is important because you get things out of order and suddenly you can't start creating a different version of events and a different story. And you're not quite telling it the way that actually happened. And a really big example of this is,

So in Shakespeare's Richard III, most people only know of the existence of Richard III because of Shakespeare's play. It's a fantastic piece of fiction. For too long, it was accepted as history. So in Shakespeare's play, he rearranges the geography of England to allow Richard to intercept Edward V and Earl Rivers at Stony Stratford on their way to Northampton. But Stony Stratford is past Northampton on the way to London.

Gotcha. So then you're rewriting the potential controversy around the fact that they've overshot the meeting place by about 20 miles. And you're actually making Richard the active one who has intercepted them and attacked them on the route on the way there. And it's just stuff like that that is just like I say, it's just factually incorrect, but it bends the story out of shape.

And it's kind of one of those things where if you just turn one degree off and then you follow that, suddenly you're hundreds of miles away from where you might have been if you hadn't turned that one degree, right? Yeah, it is exactly that. And I've absolutely come to the conclusion that Richard is a vicious child murdering monster. I don't particularly have an issue with people who think that, as long as they think that based on actual real facts about what happened.

Do you think that this is getting super sidetracked, but I see this in the political system that we have in the US and the UK right now where there seems to be no ability to see nuance on side? Do you think there's like we've just lost any ability to see nuance at all or what?

I think we have. And you know what? You mentioned Nathan when he came in and I did a thumbs down and booed. So completely in jest. Nathan and I disagree about almost everything. And that's not just history. That's football, soccer. That's politics. We disagree about every single thing. But I have never once fallen out with Nathan. We respect each other's opinions. He has moved my opinion on several things. I think he would concede that I've moved his opinion on several things.

And we're able to recognize that we might not agree, but there are also bits that we don't know for certain and we can't be sure about. And I genuinely do believe in this world today. I see so much stuff on social media in this country and from friends in the US that is just so polarized. It's like it's right or wrong and there is nothing in between. And if I'm right, you have to be wrong. And there is no willingness to move. There is no acceptance that there is nuance.

The thing about history with most things is it's neither left nor right. There is generally a grey area in the middle and somewhere in that mushy area that we can't quite see properly, that's a bit out of focus, that's probably where the truth is. And we don't need to be encamped in our trenches firing off at each other all of the time because all we do then is actually drive each other further apart. We entrench the other person's opinion by attacking them all of the time. We need to get to a world where

We're willing to hear other opinions, to have our own opinion changed and altered a little bit, even if it's just a slight mellowing or a bit of a nuance that we take away from something that someone says, because that's the way, the only way we're ever going to meet and get anywhere near consensus. But just firing off constant bombardments will just entrench people further. It's interesting because you say that spoken like a lawyer as well. So I can tell. Yeah.

Like, let's look for the nuance. No, I applaud that sentiment. And I love that you and Nathan, like you guys have this really beautiful, beautiful relationship. It seems like where you kind of go at each other, but you still are friends. And it's inspiring. The world needs more of that. So thank you for that. Actually, I had to...

Facebook friend anniversary with Nathan on Valentine's Day. Okay, so that's not weird, right? No, not at all. We made friends on Facebook on Valentine's Day 11 years ago. And I kind of posted the memory thing of it. And I was like, I can't believe Nathan hasn't unfriended me after 11 years.

And Nathan sort of said, you know, he's the chaos in our relationship and I'm the slightly sensible one. And he got in a conversation with someone else underneath it and he replied to one of them saying, oh, he's basically like my big brother. And that's the nicest thing Nathan's ever said to me. You know, normally he's really horrible about me. Yeah.

But that's exactly it. You know, we disagree, but we can still be friends and we can still be really close. And somewhere along the line, we've lost that in the world about everything, you know, not even just politics. Everything has lost that ability to say, I disagree with you, but let's go and have a beer.

Right. For sure. All right. Well, something that you disagree on with Nathan is Henry VII being perhaps the greatest monarch ever in the history of monarchs. I think he he loves Henry VII like deeply. So what this we're in a period right now where we're going through and looking at Henry's early reign. And I know you look at this through a different lens. What can you tell me from your perspective of Henry VII and the early challenges that he faced as a monarch?

So I always pitch, and obviously I don't necessarily disagree with Nathan that Henry was, he turned out to be a really good king. So I am really interested in Richard III. I find him fascinating. I think there is so much more to him than people allow.

But I will always concede that ultimately he's a failure as a king because he loses his crown, loses his life, ends his dynasty. All things that Henry VII comes along and does perfectly. He keeps his crown. He dies with it on his head. He hands it to his son for the first time in generations. So he does a lot of the things that Richard III doesn't do. So it's not like, you know, I don't hate on Henry II at all.

And I think sometimes it's interesting to think about the similarities between Richard and Henry's lives. They both lose fathers. Richard loses his young Henry before he's even born. They're raised around their mothers. They have spells in exile. Henry's are a lot longer. Richard has a couple of spells in exile in the Low Countries. Henry has years and years of that kind of thing. But they're both...

thrown about on the political wheel of this period that we call the Wars of the Roses. You know, their families move up and down. They lose people close to them in battles and all of that kind of thing. So in many ways, there's much more, like me and Nathan, there's much more that unites Henry and Richard than there is that divides them. And I always say, you know, Bosworth for me, Battle of Bosworth was nothing personal. This wasn't like Henry hated Richard's guts and desperately wanted to kill him. This was an act of survival on the part of both men.

But I think when Henry comes to the throne, he is incredibly conscious of how he's arrived there. So he has come from nowhere. He has almost no claim to the throne. He's like the last kind of tiny little petal hanging on the family tree right at the end of the branch. He's the last available option, but should never have made it to the throne. He manages to gather a few dissident Yorkists from England.

a few latent Lancastrians who have never been able to get on with the Yorkist regime. And then he gets a bit of French backing as well. And they supply him with some soldiers and some mercenaries. There's a couple of sources that say they empty the prisons and send them over to England. And so I think the French back Henry because they want to keep Richard III's eye off France.

Richard, in 1484 into 1485, is building an aggressive alliance against France. So he's got Spain on side. Queen Isabella in Spain is writing to Richard saying, I will give you like 50,000 men and I'll pay for them if you'll use them to attack France because I hate France. And she says, you know, I fell out with Edward IV. I'm willing to get back in England's camp again now.

And England still wants to, just also to put this in context, England still wants to have like the Hundred Years' War because that's, the Wars of the Rose have kind of interrupted that, but they still think that that's going on, huh? Absolutely. So to a contemporary, we often view the Hundred Years' War as ending in 1453 at the Battle of Castile.

just at the beginning of the Wars of the Roses. But I think very few Englishmen in 1485 would have felt like that was a done deal. You know, we've lost the last round, but we're coming back for some more pretty soon. You know, as soon as we can sort ourselves out, get our house in order, you better believe we're coming back. And, you know, Henry VIII will want to continue this. He's desperate to replicate the successes of Henry V in the early years of his reign.

to the point where he mirrors some of Henry V's behaviour in his early efforts to go to France. And he's desperate to have the Battle of the Spurs painted as this huge victory when, in fact, they just chase a load of Frenchmen across the countryside for a bit. So, anyway, it's not until whatever it is, 1718-something, that English monarchs will give up calling themselves kings of France too. With the French Revolution, isn't it, when there's no longer such a thing as the king of France?

So to a contemporary in 1485, the Hundred Years' War hasn't ended. We're still going to try and get France. We want back all of that territory that we used to have over there.

So Richard is building this kind of aggressive alliance. He's got Spain on side. He's almost got Brittany on side. You know, he's offering them archers to secure them against France. He's trying to separate the Holy Roman Empire and Burgundy from a peace treaty that they've got with France so that they can sort of round on Charles in France altogether.

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And so France, I think, looks at this and thinks, what can we do to stop this? Because they've got a minority crisis of their own. We often talk about England's potential minority crisis under Edward V, but Louis XI in France dies at almost the same time, which is a couple of months after Edward IV in France. And he's succeeded by a 13-year-old son in Charles VIII. So they have their own minority crisis going on.

And from 1485 to 1487, France will slip into this civil war known as the Mad War, the regency of France during the minority of King Charles. So they've got their own internal political problems going on in France, too. And they're looking at what Richard is doing and they're thinking, we can't have this. You know, we can't be invaded by France.

this grown man from England with all of his allies on every side of us while we've got a minority crisis and political instability here. So what we can do is we can take this Welsh bloke who's been over here for a while, we'll give him a few soldiers, we'll chuck him across the channel and we'll do it in August so that that uses up the campaigning window for 1485. We'll string it out and we'll make sure there's lots of rumours that he's coming throughout the summer. We'll send him at the end of summer

By the time Richard's dealt with him, he's got no chance of invading France that year. So they think they've bought themselves, you know, half a year, a couple of seasons before they have to worry about it. I don't think for one moment they expected Henry to succeed. I don't think they really cared whether he succeeded or failed.

I think he was meant as a distraction. And I think the other part of the reason that they're doing this, I'm getting massively sidetracked, sorry. I think the other reason that they're looking at this as well is that Henry Tudor has more royal French blood than royal English blood. So when they're locked in the midst of a minority crisis and political instability and questions around the regency, what they don't want is this 28-year-old guy hanging around at the French court who is...

you know, a great grandson of Charles VI of France, a grandson of Catherine of Valois, because people might start looking at him and saying, why are we putting up with this 13-year-old kid? We could have this 28-year-old man. And so I think it's a way also of stopping Henry looking at the French crown and how unstable that is as a potentially attractive target and keep him focused on the English crown. So Henry arrives in England, becomes king totally unexpectedly, utterly aware that

that having done that to someone else, someone could come along and do the very same thing to him. He's aware now of how precarious someone like Richard is, an experienced governor, a man who, whatever you think of Richard, generally had the respect of the people in the country, knew how to govern. He arrives with no experience of anything. And so he must have been aware of just how precarious he was. He's now reliant on a lot of Yorkist nobles who had...

My reading of this situation is that a lot of the people that abandon Richard is because they're from a group of people in the southeast of England, kind of country gentry, who, when Richard comes to the throne, he rails against the corruption of Edward IV's reign. And this is the layer of society who've been doing very well out of that corruption. They've actually got quite rich and influential in their shires out of working that corruption. So when Richard comes along and says, no more of that, these are the people who go over to Henry and,

And I think to some extent they're marching onto the field at Bosworth under a banner of wanting to restore corruption. But that's not very chivalrous, is it? So then you have to have Richard being the monster that we want to get rid of. And why don't we throw in that he killed some children as well? Because that makes us sound better. If Henry's going to be the good guy and be the hero, there's got to be a bad guy who's got to be vanquished. And for me, that's how Richard ends up with the reputation that he does have.

So Henry's early government is utterly reliant on Edwardian Yorkists, as I call them, so people who were loyal to Edward IV, because they know how government works and he doesn't. He's been in exile since he was a child. He has no experience of ruling, doesn't know what to do, and so has to rely on these people. So I think the Yorkists think they're getting this malleable figure who they can control. I wonder whether they still

It's not really clear how many people really believed that princes in the Tower were dead by 1485. How many of those Yorkist lords followed Henry back to England thinking they were going to restore Yorkist rule? They were going to get Edward V back. That really isn't clear. You know, quite often we get this picture that everybody knew Richard had killed his nephews. They were dead, gone, should have done it. And everybody knew it. And that's why they were outraged. There is no evidence to back that up, really. It's a big assumption to think that everybody knew that.

Particularly when you think of someone like William Stanley, who fought against Richard at Bosworth in 1485. In 1495, he gets his head chopped off in the belief that Perkin Warbeck is probably the real Richard, Duke of York. So if he can't be sure, how on earth can we be sure?

So let's talk about those pretenders, Lambert Semnall and Perkin Warbeck. How much from your reading do you think people actually believed in them? And how much were they just pawns that were being used? That's the really tricky thing, because people may have believed they were genuinely who they said they were. They might not have cared if it served their own political ends. They might have

believed that they were but they weren't really they might have been tricked by them all of there are so many different possibilities within this that is difficult to pin it down so we're left with theories and this is where all i will say is that the only correct answer is sorry the only incorrect answer is a definite one you know i will will only ever tell you you're wrong if you tell me 100 that they were or weren't genuine because i don't think anyone is in a position to say that

The Lambert Simnel Affair, 1487. I think this is really interesting in a couple of contexts. So Richard III is king for about two years. Then there's an invasion by this small force that looks like it's not very threatening. Improbably, Richard is killed on the battlefield, defeated and loses his crown. What happens two years into Henry's reign? Almost exactly the same amount of time. There is an invasion from Ireland by this apparently small force.

Looks unlikely, but you better believe that Henry is on the field at Stoke thinking, oh, this could be really bad. This is like exactly what I did to Richard and someone is now going to do it to me. So later on, it will it will be sort of brushed over as this almost joke business that there was no real threat. Henry was never really worried.

And I'm sorry, but I don't buy it at all. I think Henry is pretty shaken up by this whole affair. So the traditional story tells us that this is an invasion in the name of Edward, Earl of Warwick. So a nephew of Richard III and Edward IV, who is a prisoner in the tower. So because they don't have Edward, they get this boy from Oxford. They take him over to Ireland. They train him to pretend to be the Earl of Warwick. And then they invade with him.

And the intention appears to be to get to London and free the real Edward Earl of Warwick and make him king. But there are several things that simply don't add up about that account. The biggest one for me arrives before they even leave Ireland when they have this Lambert Simnel figure crowned in Dublin. So he undergoes a coronation in Dublin Cathedral. And you don't find other instances of pretenders undergoing coronations elsewhere.

in this kind of way. So for me, it's a really interesting moment for several reasons. A medieval coronation is a deeply, deeply religious moment. This transforms a normal human being into being God's appointed representative on earth as king. It's not something that anyone would undertake, like particularly the bishops and archbishops who take part in that coronation in Dublin. So something must have convinced them

that this was a viable person to undergo a coronation. The bottom line with the coronation is when you're anointed with oil during that coronation, you are now king. That can never be undone. So if they've taken this 10-year-old boy from Oxford to impersonate the 12-year-old Earl of Warwick, if they've crowned that boy and anointed him, that 10-year-old boy, whoever he was before, he's now king. It removes any stain of...

or illegitimacy or lack of right to the throne or anything like that. So they've just made a 10-year-old boy from Oxford King of England. That's nonsense. No one's going to do that. There are some interesting people sat in the room in Dublin Cathedral when this happens. The most interesting is John de la Pole, the Earl of Lincoln. So he is another nephew of Richard III and Edward IV. He's the oldest surviving male member of the House of York.

So his mother is Elizabeth the Duchess of Suffolk, who is the sister of Richard III and Edward IV. So really complicated but. So his claim is in a female line, but the claim of the whole House of York at this point is in a female line via the Mortimus. So female descent is not an issue. When Richard III's heir, Edward of Middleham, dies in 1484, John de la Pole is considered to be his heir presumptive. So he's the next in line to succeed to the Yorkist throne.

John de la Pole is a man in his kind of early to mid 20s. He's been trained for government, for rule. He leads the Council of the North under Richard III. And yet he sits in this cathedral in Dublin and watches this 10-year-old boy from Oxford be crowned as the rightful Yorkist King of England.

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I'm fine with this. I'm going to give up my right to the throne in favour of this 10-year-old boy who's pretending to be my 12-year-old cousin who's a prisoner in the Tower of London. Why did the people who were following that rebellion focus on this 10-year-old imposter and not focus on this man, John de la Pole, in his 20s? There's no doubt about who he is.

He's not a child. He's not an imposter. He's trained for government. He's been considered Richard III's heir for over a year after the death of Edward's heir, of Richard's heir. Why is nobody focusing on him? In 1487, the only people with better Yorkist claims to the throne than John de la Pole, if they're still alive, are the sons of Edward IV, because they've been restored to legitimacy by Henry VII. So...

If he's overlooking his own claim and everyone around him is overlooking his claim, for my money, it has to be in favour of a better claim. And the only better claim that exists is that of Edward V. When Edward V is proclaimed king in 1483, when his father dies, he never makes it to a coronation. So it's almost like a coronation is the missing piece of Edward V's kingship.

Is he being crowned in Dublin in preparation for arriving in England as a rightful king who has undergone a coronation? There's a precedent for this when we think back to the 13th century and Henry III, when he becomes king on the death of King John. He's originally crowned at Gloucester Cathedral because too much of the rest of the country is in the hands of the French and the rebel barons, particularly London. So he undergoes a coronation at Gloucester because it's important to have that

that confirmation of your kingship of a coronation, and then it's repeated at Westminster Abbey later on when England is secured, is the plan to do the same thing? So I just think there is enough space to wonder whether the Lambert-Simnel affair was never about the Earl of Warwick. It was really about Edward V. And what Henry VII does afterwards is to try and brush it off as a joke and something that was never really a threat to him.

He points to this boy that's in prison and says, look, they're trying to make this kid over here who's a prisoner king by pretending they've got him in Ireland. What a joke. What an absolute nonsense. And I think we've kind of bought that story for way too long without questioning. And I think there is enough room to ask those questions.

I have a question for you about the coronation ceremony. Would it have made a difference in the way it was seen, the validity of it, that it was done in Ireland, that it wasn't done in England? Like, could John de la Pole have maybe thought, OK, well, I'll watch this happen because this doesn't really count, as it were. And then when we go over, I'll press my own. Like it was a diversion or something. Could there have been something like that? Possibly, although the fact of coronation has less to do with where it takes place.

than the religious symbols of being anointed, particularly with oil. That's the core moment in a coronation ceremony. So when Henry III undergoes his coronation at Gloucester, no one thinks that that isn't valid. They redo it again at Westminster at the suggestion of a papal legate, just to firm things up, just to make it 100%. But that was still in England. I'm just thinking of a different country. Yeah.

Dublin is within the part of Ireland, is within the pale of Dublin that is under the direct control of the English crown. Gotcha. Okay. So it's not a foreign country. All right. It's an area that is under the direct control of the English crown at this point, albeit it's always shaky and a bit ropey, English control of Ireland. Okay.

I guess it's similar to if it had happened in Wales during this period. It's considered English territory in which it happens. Okay. Interesting. So then, so it's possible that there was so much more to this and Lambert Simnel wasn't just the pretender to the Earl of Work and all of that. And how, I guess, what about Perkin Warbeck then?

Can I say one more thing about Timber? Yes, of course. Actually, I'm going to say two things. Now you've let me say one, I'm going to say two. The first is when we talk about pretenders, it's important that that word means a claimant to the throne. So it's derived from the French pretendre to claim.

So it's different from an imposter. An imposter is someone who isn't who they claim to be. So when we talk about pretenders, that doesn't explicitly denote that they weren't who they claim to be. That would be calling them imposters. So when we talk about pretenders, we talk about the great pretender, the Stuarts and all of that kind of stuff. That's not because we doubt who he was. It's because he claimed the throne. So it's just a technical point. Yeah. Yeah.

And on Lambert's symbol, you know, there are also a few written sources that specifically say that that uprising in 1487 was about Edward V. So there are, you know, Bernard André, the court poet to Henry VII, when he writes his account of what happened in 1487, he absolutely says the princes in the Tower are dead and Richard III murdered them. But he also says that the uprising in Wales was about the son of Edward IV.

He calls him the son of Edward IV several times. He says that a herald is sent over to Ireland who says that he knew this boy when he was in England and would be able to prove if he was lying. And he comes back and says, he answered all my questions perfectly. So...

There's also a letter that's written during Henry VIII's reign. It's a report for Henry VIII on the state of things in Ireland. And when that references the Lambert-Simlin affair, it talks about a boy claiming to be the son of King Edward coming out of Ireland. There are three or four or five or six, you know, there's maybe half a dozen different sources from around about the time that say the Lambert-Simlin affair was about Edward V. How did it get so twisted to this case? I think it's because of...

Yeah, I think this was the deliberate ploy of the Tudor government. And you think what annoys historians and anyone interested in the Wars of the Roses the most? It's that everyone is called Edward or Richard or Henry. So I think when the early Tudor government get wind in early 1487, there's this big council meeting as part of which Elizabeth Woodville is deprived of her property and packed off to Bermondsey.

partly because she's suspected of being involved in the Lambert Simnel affair. And I would ask what Elizabeth Woodville possibly has to gain from putting her deceased husband's nephew on the throne when her daughter is already there. If she's deposing her daughter, for me, it can only be for her son. It's the only way she improves her position. But I think when news arrives that there's an uprising in Ireland in favour of an Edward...

They see an opportunity in the thing that annoys people interested in the Wars of the Roses the most. And they go, well, there's an Edward over there. We've got an Edward in prison over here. What if we start to make a bit of a joke of this? Because the one thing that you can't allow a rebellion to gather is confidence. So if everybody is convinced from the outset that this is some kind of joke, they're claiming to have this boy who, you know, will parade around London and St. Paul's and will show him to everybody and say he can't be in Ireland because here he is. But they're missing the key point that that's not the Edward they're claiming to have.

in Ireland. And once they've won, once they've defeated this rebel army at the Battle of Stoke, they're writing the history then. It can be whatever they say it is. Thanks so much to Matt. Again, check him out, mattlewisauthor.com. Check out his books, his sub stack, his social, all of those kinds of things. Very much a fan of him. Very much a fan of, I'm very much a fan of him. And I was really grateful for

I'm very much a fan of his, and I was really glad to have the opportunity to hear his perspective. All right, friend, thanks so much for your listenership and for being here, and I will chat with you soon. Bye-bye.

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