‘The Pretender' Review: The Boy Who Would Be King

Wall Street Journal

06-06-2025

Set at the end of the Wars of the Roses, the long dynastic struggle between the English royal houses of York and Lancaster, Jo Harkin's exuberant historical novel 'The Pretender' brings to life one of the stranger footnotes in late-medieval history.
In 1487 Henry VII's right to the crown as a distant Lancastrian descendant through the female line was challenged by a boy only 10 or so years old, whom his supporters claimed to be the rightful Earl of Warwick, nephew of Richard III and a direct Plantagenet heir. The Tudor historian Polydore Vergil in his 'Anglica Historia' (1555) named this pretender Lambert Simnel, a base-born lad 'not entirely of bad character.' The episode ended in victory for Henry later that year at the Battle of Stoke Field. Vergil records that Simnel was pardoned for his role in the attempted takeover and was put to work in Henry's kitchen as a spit-turner, while the Tudors went on to rule England for the next century.
The rest, you might say, is history. Or is it? Ms. Harkin takes this incident as the starting point for a rollicking story that's part fact, part lively speculation, and along the way asks some probing questions about the nature of identity.
On an Oxfordshire farm, a peasant boy called John Collan is growing up with no battles to fight other than those with the farm goat, until a mysterious nobleman arrives bearing astonishing news: John isn't the farmer's son at all but Edward, the young Earl of Warwick, who as a baby was concealed among simple country folk for his own safety. Now he is to be brought out of hiding as the last Yorkist hope.