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The business of Lambert Simnel shows the real peril of the King’s position. The experience of the last forty years had taught the people a most dangerous habit. They were ready to fly to arms on the smallest provocation. Who was Henry, “the unknown Welshman,” as Richard called him, that he should be allowed to sit in peace upon a throne from which three occupants had been dragged down, two by murder and one by battle? But the occasion of the rising was ridiculous. The young Earl of Warwick was in the Tower; it was possible to see him—Henry, in fact, made him ride through the City for all the world to see. Yet the followers of Lambert Simnel proclaimed that he was Edward Plantagenet, Earl of Warwick. Lambert’s father was a joiner of Oxford; Sir Richard Symon, a priest, was his tutor. The boy, who in 1486 was about eleven years of age, was of handsome appearance and of naturally good manners.

After the defeat of his cause, Lambert and the priest who had done the mischief were taken. The priest was consigned to an ecclesiastical prison for the rest of his natural life; the boy was pardoned—they could not execute a child—and contemptuously thrust into the King’s kitchen as a little scullion. He afterwards rose to be one of the King’s falconers—the only example in history of a Pretender turning out an honest man in the end. Can we not see the people about the Court gazing curiously upon the handsome scullion in his white jacket, white cap, and white shoes, going to and fro upon his duties, washing pans with zeal and scraping trenchers? The boy had a lovely face, and manners very far beyond his station. Can we not hear them whispering that this young man had once been as good as King, and knew what it was to exercise royal authority?