For a brief moment in medieval England, a poor boy stood at the centre of a royal rebellion and wore a crown meant for kings. Lambert Simnel was only around 10 years old when Yorkist supporters presented him as a claimant to the English throne during the turbulent years after the Wars of the Roses. In 1487, he was crowned in Dublin in a dramatic challenge to King Henry VII’s rule. Yet the glory lasted only months. After the rebellion collapsed in battle, the boy who had once been treated like a monarch was spared execution and quietly sent to work in the royal kitchens. His extraordinary rise and fall remains one of the strangest stories in English history.
