JO HARKIN The Pretender. Reviewed by Ann Skea

Jo Harkin’s novel is a fresh and rollicking take on the mystery of fifteenth-century pretender to the English throne, Lambert Simnel.

Perhaps the best part of John’s life (and the funniest) is when he is still ‘a small village boy’, ‘short of words’ but full of strategies for defeating his enemy, the goat. He is the ‘wise general’ and he is going to show ‘the advancing cavalry’, the goat, who is master.

In the kitchen, Jennott has burned the bread again because she, as she always tells him, ‘is a head dairy maid and not a fucking cook’.

‘Old Gaspard got you again, did he?’

Her pretence is that the goat is French. She mislikes the French. They killed her dad …

‘You’re covered in scratches. And so wet. Did you fall into the stream?’

John isn’t going to discuss military strategy with plebeians, but calling Jennott a plebeian might get him one of her blindingly fast smacks around the head, so he doesn’t say anything.

John’s life, however, changes dramatically when two men unexpectedly arrive to take him to Oxford to be tutored. He is, they tell him, Edward Plantagenet, Earl of Warwick, heir to the throne of England.

John, who must now become ‘Lambert’, does not know that Will Collan is not his father or that he has fostered John since he had been hidden away in infancy to keep him safe.

‘So Lambert,’ the nobleman who has accompanied his Oxford tutor to the farm tells him, ‘The truth of your birth is that you’re the son of George, Duke of Clarence.’ George has been killed for plotting against the late king, Edward. The present king, Richard, is rumoured to have gained the throne by killing his nephews, the two young princes in the Tower. He has no son yet, and there are two more nephews who could carry on the House of York line, one of whom is Edward.

It is all so sudden and so strange that it seems to John like one of the ballads he loves:

Though Johnny Collan was his name

’Twas Edward he went by first …

In Oxford, he lives as ‘Lambert’ with his tutor, Master Richard. He hates Latin: ‘may I be free of Latin Grammar’, is what he would write, but can’t. But he has always loved reading and now he discovers Horace, Geoffrey of Monmouth’s history of Britain, Suetonius, Ovid – and he devours whatever books he can find around Master Richard’s house. He has also learned a little more about his background:

He thinks about his real father and mother, the Duke and Duchess of Clarence (dead): King Richard his uncle (dead); Richard’s son, his cousin (dead); King Edward his uncle (dead); the two princes his cousins (dead). He can’t imagine any of them either. But he can’t help but notice they’re all dead. As with fairies, their world seems to run on a lot of gold and a lot of peril.

But this is only the first of the changes John endures. After King Richard’s death on Bosworth Field and Henry Tudor’s claiming of the throne, he is passed from one scheming faction of Yorkist supporters to another, all intent on making him king.

From Oxford, he is taken to Flanders where, as ‘Edward’, he is to be schooled in royal etiquette in the splendid palace of his aunt, Margaret of Burgundy. He is washed, dressed, undressed, waited-on and taught, and it is all overwhelming:

There should be a book to help people like Edward, who are faced with too much splendour. It could give useful advice, better than anything he could come up with, which is:

Hide in the garderobe.

The garderobe is one of the only places he can be alone.

Then one day Margaret tells him that it is ‘time or us to commence our campaign’, and she sends him to the Lord Deputy of Ireland, and the Great Earl of Kildare, Gerald Fitzgerald, welcomes him into his family. Kildare is a rough-speaking Irishman, ‘full of this sort of blather’, as his wife Alice says, and Edward’s time as his guest is enlivened by Kildare’s three young daughters. Fourteen-year-old Joan, just two-years older than him, is especially interesting. She speaks her mind, is determined and intelligent and unpredictable, but as Edward observes, her enemies always seem to come to a bad end. She decides to make a friend of him and asks him to teach her Latin, and he loves her but does not trust her.

Confined to the castle for the sake of secrecy, Edward spends his time immersed in the riches of Kildare’s library, learning everything he can. But his life is never his to direct. He often feels as he did when he was Lambert – ‘like a shadow. An absence. Officially he isn’t here.’ He is controlled by others whose ambitions, beliefs and trustworthiness are always questionable. After his secret crowning in Dublin’s Christ Church cathedral, he spends his first parliament as King Edward VI

playing bowls with the Fitzgerald girls – because he is a minor, and so it’s Kildare who does the holding. Edward had wondered if he ought to watch, but Kildare didn’t think it would be meet. Parliaments could be a rough business, he said, with riots and affray not unknown, and he didn’t want to risk any wrack coming to the new king’s (bruisable, pierceable, snappable) body at this turbulent stage of his kingship.

After the parliament, Kildare boasts that he has attainted two of his own enemies and gained various other possessions, ‘in the name of the king’. and he looks forward to ‘making’ the victims accept this ‘with his fist down their throats’.

‘God save the King!’ he adds.

Now Edward must go to England to claim his throne from ‘the usurper’ Henry, and war is inevitable.

The Pretender is no ordinary novel about this confusing period of history. John is always a believable character, full of doubts, full of boyishness, funny, ironic, and never sure who he really is or what is planned for him next. Harkin is a master of dialogue, and John’s exchanges with others, especially with the women he encounters, capture the humour, the subtle undercurrents, and the character of those who befriend him or are, perhaps, using him for their own ends.

His reading has taught him that history is something that happens to him and around him, and that it is changeable, ‘written in wax’. After the war, when he becomes ‘Lambert Simnel’, a kitchen boy in the service of King Henry, and then a falconer and spy, he bribes a poet’s clerk to let him read the ‘official history’ manuscript the poet laureate is working on:

‘Look, you’re in the book,’ the clerk says. ‘I thought, as with Herostratus, they might have tried to excise your name from history. But here it is.’ …

‘“A wretched lad, a princeling of rascals, a whip scoundrel,” Simnel reads. ‘“Born to low people, of low occupations.” …

‘I once wanted to be a king who wrote history. Now I realise only kings write history,’ Simnel says. ‘Is anything true written anymore?’

‘Probably not,’ says the clerk cheerfully.

And he goes on to note that the historian Rous, when King Richard was alive, described him as ‘a good lord and punisher of oppressors’, but now writes that he was evil, and ‘born with teeth and hair’ and a ‘misaligned body’.

Was Lambert Simnel really of royal blood? What would it be like to grow up on a farm with a loving father and two teasing older brothers, then at the age of ten be unexpectedly dragged off to Oxford by two strangers, then be shipped to France (more strangers, a different language, and a retinue of servants); and finally be sent to Gaelic-speaking Ireland and lodged in a castle with a family whose patriarch is powerful and unpredictable, and is raising troops to fight a war for rights you do not really know you are entitled to?

Jo Harkin beautifully captures the confusion, wit, intelligence, loves and hates of a young man experiencing all this. Through John, she shows the machinations of those around him, and she makes history easy to understand. At the end of the book she provides family trees for the House of York and the House of Lancaster that show just how Edward, Earl of Warwick, and Tudor Henry VII justified their claims to the throne. This is enjoyable history written by a fine storyteller – full of energy, fun, compassion, love and horror.

Jo Harkin The Pretender Bloomsbury 2025 PB 464pp $32.99

Dr Ann Skea is a freelance reviewer, writer and an independent scholar of the work of Ted Hughes. She is author of Ted Hughes: The Poetic Quest (UNE 1994, and currently available for free download here). Her work is internationally published and her Ted Hughes webpages (ann.skea.com) are archived by the British Library.

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Tags: Edward IV, historical fiction, House of Lancaster, House of York, Jo | Harkin, Lambert Simnel, Margaret of Burgundy, Richard III, Wars of the Roses