Jo Harkin’s ‘The Pretender’ raises fascinating questions about a royal identity

The Pretender

Jo Harkin

Bloomsbury

For anyone educated in Britain in the middle years of the last century, when the Tudors seemed to dominate the school history syllabus to the exclusion of most other eras, the name Lambert Simnel is familiar. One of the pretenders to the throne of King Henry VII, his story kept cropping up with mind-numbing regularity. Jo Harkin’s take on him and his life is somewhat different to the traditional telling.

She weaves a lively tale around a boy, raised as John Collan, the son of a farmer but considerably younger than his siblings, who at the age of 10 is taken away by mysterious figures to be “educated” in Oxford. There he is told he will be known as Lambert Simnel but really is the Yorkist heir to the English throne, Edward Plantagenet, Earl of Warwick, and nephew of King Richard III. As his story unfolds, he is taken successively to the court of Margaret, Duchess of Burgundy and to the home of the Earl of Kildare in Ireland while the plotting to restore him to his (maybe) rightful throne surges around him.

The young John, Edward, Lambert or whatever seems to be the most useful name at the time, has, according to Harkin’s telling, no certainty as to who he really is. Is he the Earl of Warwick while the other Earl, locked up in the Tower of London, is the imposter? Who knows? He certainly doesn’t and those around him can choose to believe whatever suits their purposes. The doubt that comes and goes throughout the story is one of The Pretender’s greatest strengths, making the central character very real as he struggles with his possible destiny and his conscience and the uncertainty of who he is.

As he grows into adolescence, sex is more on his mind than thrones. However, nothing is going to work out for him, and when his forces are defeated by Henry VII at the battle of Stoke (seen as the last battle of the Wars of the Roses), he is captured. No longer considered a threat by Henry, he is put to work as a spit-turner in the royal kitchen, eventually being promoted to be a falconer, a role that offers him avenues for spying and revenge.

While the language Harkin uses — a mixture of cod-Medieval and robust modern English — can be something of a distraction, her novel is certainly not a standard historical romance. She creates webs of treachery and an overwhelming desire for revenge around Lambert/Edward. The novel shifts from raunchy to funny to bleak to disturbing, and certainly works as a page turner. It brings a new and lively dimension to an old and venerable genre, sweeping away any cobwebs and raising fascinating questions.