THE MYSTERY OF LAMBERT SIMMEL King or Anti-King

I don’t know who Lambert Simmel was. But I know he wasn’t who he said he was. The question is, was he who Henry Tudor said he was? And I truly doubt that, too.  As Gordon Smith has pointed out, his very name has a pantomime sound to it, “and a pantomime context.” As I just said, I have my doubts. Lambert Simmel claimed to be the Earl of Warwick and there is a possibility that, in fact, he was the Earl of Warwick. But, if that was true, then who the devil was Lambert Simmel?  At the core of that mystery is King Richard III, a bundle of mysteries all by himself.

Richard was the last of the legendary Plantagenet Kings of England. Legend says his ancestor Geoffrey often stuck the yellow flower of the ‘common broom’ in his helmet for identification; the Latin name for the plant being “planta genesta”. The dynasty produced Henry II who won the battle of Agingourt,  Richard The Lion Heart and King John who signed the Magna Carta. They and their genes commanded England and large parts of France for 300 years.

But the Plantagenets came to an end on 22 August, 1485 when Richard III (above)), house of York, was killed on Bosworth field. He was the last English King who died fighting in battle, a death which puts the lie to William Shakespeare’s claim that he was a deformed limping hunchback. In fairness it must also be noted that Richard was probably responsible for the death of Edward V, the rightful king of England at the time.

Edward V, the Prince of Wales, was only 12 years old when his father died on April 9, 1483. But, of course, a twelve year old cannot rule a country, and the usual system was for the boy’s adult supporters to divide up the kingdom and run it into the ground until the boy was strong enough to throw them out. That was what had happened with the Prince’s father, Edward IV.

So the future Edward V’s adult guardians sought to reach a deal with the boy’s uncle, Richard, the Duke of Gloucester. Graciously, Richard invited all the other guardians over for a great dinner to booze it up and talk how they were going to carve up the kingdom while Edward grew.

Early the next morning, while they were all still hung over, Richard he had them arrested and later executed.

Richard also had Young Prince Edward locked up in the Tower of London, to be joined within weeks by his eleven year old brother, Richard, the Earl of Warwick. The two boys were seen playing together in the courtyard of the Tower during June and July of 1483 and then they simply faded away. Shortly there after Richard had himself crowned King, Richard III.

The assumption has always been that the Princes were murdered on Richard’s orders. And that would have been the smart thing for Richard to have done.  But the mystery of what became of the princes has kept an army of scribes and historians busy ever since, in the hope of explaining how, in God’s name, a slug like Henry Tudor ever got to be the a king of England.

Unlike Richard, Henry Tudor was no warrior. Nor was he a lover. The only passion he ever displayed was for money.  He was a voracious, avaricious, bloodless money grubber. In fact, his personality is not far from the lead character in the play "Richard III", just without the hump.

He was the only child born to 13 year old Margaret Beaufort Tudor, two months after the boy’s father, Edmund Tudor, had died. Now, Edmund had been the King’s half brother. Margaret was the granddaughter of the third son of King Edward III with his third wife; in short Henry Tudor’s royal blood was so watered down that it resembled lemon aid, and he kept it at about the same temperature. 

But because Richard III had been so ruthless in eliminating his competitors for the throne, his only competition left was his bloodless, passionless distant relative Henry Tudor; unless, of course, one of the missing princes still lived.

Having defeated and butchered Richard III at Boswell Field in August of 1485, the newly crowned Henry VII was given no time to rest on his purple cushions. He had to face down a York rebellion in the spring of 1486.

And then again, in March of 1487, yet another group of nobles crowned a rival King in Ireland, a 16 year old boy who claimed he was the Earl of Warwick, the younger of the two missing princes from the Tower. 

But was he? Most of the noble men who would have known Warwick from 1483, had long since been executed by either Richard III or Henry VII.  And it would have made sense that Warwick, as the younger of the princes, would have been less closely guarded than the direct heir to the throne.

So it might have been possible to sneak Warwick out of the tower and spirit him to Ireland; maybe, possibly.  And how do you tell a King from a common man, except a King wears a crown. As a wise man once said, he must be The King because he ain't got shit all over him. Or maybe it was his manner. He acted like a king. And how does A King act? The only images most people saw of the king was his face imprinted on coins. So unless you have your face on a coin, How do you prove you are The King of England?   

Besides, as historian A.F. Pollard pointed out,  “Immediately Henry gained the throne he accused Richard of cruelty and tyranny but strangely did not mention the murder of the little princes. Henry did not announce that the boys had been murdered until July 1486, nearly a year after Richard’s death. Could Henry Tudor have murdered them?”  Maybe, possibly. After all, once on the throne his life and his children's lives depended on securing his claim to being King.

It appears an Oxford priest, Richard Simon, found the son of a baker who physically resembled the dead Richard, Duke of Warwick.  The bright lad was coached in the history and behavior of the boy last seen in July, 1483.  Simon decided it would be best if the resurrected heir made his first public appearance away from London. Ireland was chosen because the nobility there - as the Duke of Clarence, Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, and Thomas Fitzgerald, Duke of Kildare and the Lord Deputy of Ireland - were eager  to believe the fraud - if it was a fraud.  They borrowed a crown from the statue in a Dublin Church and proclaimed the boy the rightful king. Another York die hard, Margaret of Burgundy, even paid for 2,000 German mercenaries to fight for Simmel, when he invaded England.

On 16 June , 1487, the houses of York and Lancaster fought yet another battle, near Stoke. Some  20,000 men met again to decide the fate of England. (Henry Tudor was, of course, not on the field of battle.) When it ended, half of the rebellions troops were captured and most of their leaders were dead.

Soon after the battle Henry VII was able to announce that the missing prince, Richard, the Earl of Warwick had been captured. And he was not actually Warwick, but an imposter by the name of Lambert Simmel,  The imposter was graciously granted a full pardon by Henry because the boy had been a mere tool of the real conspirators.

The noble conspirators were all executed, and Henry seized their wealth and land. But Lambert Simmel was retained as a spit turner in the palace kitchen, and later a falconer. Henry VII now had living proof always close at hand that the princes were truly dead, at whomever's hand. And all he required was that you believe that Lambert Simmel was the boy who had impersonated the Earl of Warwick. And that Warwick had been murdered by Richard. But could he have been anyone else?

“Lambert” is ancient German for “Bright land”. And “Simmel” seems to come from the Hebrew "Shim’on" meaning ‘listening’. But neither name was common in England during the middle ages.   However, Gordon Smith, in his essay “Lambert Simmel and the King from Dublin” has pointed out that “the maiden name of Edward IV's mistress...was Elizabeth Lambert."

So it could be that Lambert Simmel was a code name for the real illegitimate child of Henry VII and his mistress. If so that would make the boy an imposter of an imposter, used by Henry Tudor to discredit the belief that he and not Richard Plantagenet had murdered a rightful King of England. Maybe. It could be.

If you read enough history you come the realization that the past is like a hallway in the Tower of London. It winds up and around, past cell after cell. There may be scratches on the wall in each room, or personal belongings left behind. But the only way to know what really happened is to have been there at the time. History is what we suspect happened. It is always part fact, part opinion and part imagination. It is a story. It could be. It was possible. It might have happened that way. Or it might not have. In short, reading history is not for the faint of heart.

Lambert Simmel was clearly an imposter. But whose imposter was he? He died around 1525, and left no record of his own. And everything else is just a fascinating conjecture called "his story"

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