The Yorkist Pretender, with Jo Harkin

Who was Lambert Simnel—the boy who nearly claimed the Tudor throne? In late 15th-century England, identity wasn’t just a matter of birth—it could be a political weapon, a tool for rebellion, and sometimes, an outright performance. The story of Simnel, a boy plucked from obscurity and passed off as the York heir, reveals how precarious the Tudor dynasty really was—and how easily the lines between truth and fiction could blur.

Author Jo Harkin joins us to explore the strange life of Simnel, the so-called Yorkist “pretender” who nearly toppled Henry VII. In her new novel The Pretender, Harkin imagines Simnel’s life beyond the history books, from his childhood on a farm to his years at court. Along the way, she unpacks what it meant to be groomed for kingship, what royal power struggles looked like from a child’s point of view, and how historical fiction can fill in the gaps of the past.

Though Shakespeare never wrote a play about Henry VII, his portrayal of Richard III helped shape how we remember the Wars of the Roses—and how we understand power, myth, and legacy. Harkin reflects on those cultural inheritances, showing how writing about this era means grappling with historical facts and the fictions we’ve come to accept. Simnel’s story reminds us that what endures isn’t always what’s real, but what people are ready to believe.

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Jo Harkin’s debut speculative fiction novel, Tell Me An Ending, was a New York Times Book of the Year. Her first historical novel, The Pretender, was published in April 2025 in the U.K. and the U.S. She lives in Berkshire, England.

From the Shakespeare Unlimited podcast. Published April 22, 2025. © Folger Shakespeare Library. All rights reserved. This episode was produced by Matt Frassica. Garland Scott is the executive producer. It was edited by Gail Kern Paster. We had help with web production from Paola García Acuña. Leonor Fernandez edits our transcripts. Final mixing services are provided by Clean Cuts at Three Seas, Inc.

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FARAH KARIM-COOPER: From the Folger Shakespeare Library. This is Shakespeare Unlimited. I’m Farrah Kareem Cooper, the Folger Director.

[Music plays]

KARIM-COOPER: In the Shakespeare world, we don’t talk much about Henry VII, also known as Henry Tudor. He’s the king who came between the much more colorful Richard III and Henry VII.

Maybe that’s why Shakespeare never wrote a play about him, although he does show up in Richard III as the guy who finally does Richard In.

Henry VII was the first Tudor Monarch. His reign ended the Wars of the Roses between the houses of York and Lancaster.

But while Henry was king, rebel lords started two uprisings behind pretenders to the Crown. Imposters who were believed to be Yorkist Princes.

One of those pretenders was Lambert Simnel, and his eventful life is now the subject of the novel, The Pretender by Jo Harkin. Jo Harken is also the author of the sci-fi novel. Tell Me an Ending, about a tech company that removes unwanted memories.

Here’s Jo Harkin in conversation with Barbara Bogaev.

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BARBARA BOGAEV: I was hoping we could start with a reading from your book, maybe from right from the beginning. Could you set it up for us please?

JO HARKIN: Of course. So, this is our character, John, as he’s known at this point in the book, and he’s growing up on the farm where his life is pretty peaceful, aside from doing battle most days with his nemesis, a goat. So, this is chapter one.

[Jo Harkin reads a scene from her novel, The Pretender (2025)]

. . . Was this the first thing he wrote of his own?

I am John Collan
today in the yere 1483 I will defeat the goat.
In the name of honnour and glory to god highest & for reson that
it knocked me in the mud again today
& has TRODDEN churlishly over my back
has despoiled!
an insult that cannot be borne.

John has made a plan of battle. According to the ancient art of the famous Vegetius, who set out in his book how the Roman Empire toppled and suborned all enemies. According to his brother Tom.

Tom did not read that book, but he told John what he was told was in it.

Tom had a favorite military stratagem of his own. This was the goose trap. He’d stand in front of something and call, Little John! Oh, little Johnny John John! You are a pink pig’s arsehole, a hairy ball sack, a shitbeetle—and then, when John, sore wroth, would charge at him, Tom would dodge and John would run into that thing he was standing in front of, which was usually a cow shit. And then Tom would shout: Goose trap!

BOGAEV: John’s having a great time.

HARKIN: Yeah, poor Tom.

BOGAEV: How old is John here?

HARKIN: I think he is 10 at this point in the book.

BOGAEV: The Yorkist pretender, 10.

HARKIN: And everyone’s victim, yes.

BOGAEV: Okay. Well, let’s just get some facts before we start again with the fiction. What is known for sure about this—here he’s John Collan, but later he’s Lambert Simnel, the Yorkist pretender.

HARKIN: Well, actually very little—this is one of the things that intrigued me about him. He only got a tiny little footnote in the history book that I discovered him in and when I googled and went into his story, I didn’t really get much more. There just wasn’t much more to be had. He basically rose to prominence, signed a pretty much fake confession, and then all he disappears from history and all the chronicles of the time just really kind of pass over him. I think nobody really wanted to dwell on the fact that this kid was put forward as the true heir to the throne.

BOGAEV: Well, what kind of nitty gritty details were there? Was it clear he grew up on a farm?

HARKIN: Well, no, the farm was my own addition but I felt very confident in adding that in because nobody agreed on where he actually came from. Everyone said he came from low people. That was how they phrased it. So, he was a peasant according to them.

But some people said his dad was a tailor. Some people said a joiner. Most sources said he came from the Oxford area. He was just a peasant child who had a passing resemblance to royalty and he got picked up by an ambitious priest who wanted to groom him as a pretender and then at some point in his story, he was brought to the attention of disaffected Yorkist nobles who just wanted their moment in the sun again. They wanted the throne back and he represented the last York heir, the last chance to do this, and that’s when he enters history more fully. He pops up in the records of the court at in Burgundy, which is modern day Belgium, and we know he was in Ireland for some time as well, before launching this invasion attempt of England.

BOGAEV: Okay. Yorkists were trying to pass him off as a prince who was imprisoned in the Tower of London by Henry—and who is this prince? Because I don’t want people to be confused. We’ve talked with Philippa Langley about her book about the princes in the Tower and all the debate about what happened to them but those are not the princes that we’re talking about who were imprisoned by Richard III.

HARKIN: This is correct. So, this is their cousin, effectively.

So, at this point you had three York brothers. There was Edward IV, who was the king. Richard III—we’ve all heard of—he ended up being the king. And then there was George, Duke of Clarence, who was the middle brother—the one who in Richard III famously was executed by drowning in a butt of malmsey wine.

So, they were claiming that he was Edward, Earl of Warwick, who was the son of the Duke of Clarence. After the two princes in the Tower died slash were murdered, Edward, Earl of Warwick, became the remaining York heir. So, he represented the biggest threat to the Tudor throne.

BOGAEV: Endless princes, the Tower was full of pesky princes.

HARKIN: Yes, they were absolutely riddled with them. But yes, Edward, Earl of Warwick, he also was a boy heir who spent time at the Tower. Ultimately, he was—in real life—he was executed because he basically grew up in the Tower, became an adult, and later on, he was accused of mounting an escape attempt, and so, he got executed for that.

Really, his death was probably because the Spanish monarchs who were in the process of marrying their daughter to Henry VII’s son saw him as a threat and wanted him out of the way. So, it was really unfortunate what happened to him in real life.

BOGAEV: Okay, so there was a reason people back then in England would take this pretender seriously because it was just so unclear and chaotic what was happening at the time.

HARKIN: Well, it’s interesting. There was so much public affection still for the Yorks I think after the deaths of the princes in the Tower. My book begins really in the aftermath of that and people were—you know, the deaths of children were not unheard of by any means—but the event did capture the public imagination.

You know, it was really bad PR for Richard, and it was coming fresh off that, the idea of another young York heir trapped in the Tower. People were invested in that and there were these periodic attempts to break this kid out. Obviously, in my book it’s based on at some point the rebel Yorks decided not to get him out of the Tower but just to put forward another child and say, “This is the real Earl of Warwick.”

There was this appetite to believe it because Henry VII at the time, he’s the founder of one of our most famous dynasties, but at the time he was seen as just a tenuous king. His descent and his claim to the throne was based on an illegitimate union. He was an outsider. Throughout his reign, he had to fight off these attempts by pretenders—Lambert was just the first of these—and that was partly because people didn’t love him. People didn’t rally behind him, and people were quite keen to see a change.

BOGAEV: Right, right. His reign was so fraught with questions of illegitimacy—and we’re talking about Henry Tudor. Henry Tudor becomes Henry VII, and this is the Tudor Dynasty. Okay.

So, the other interesting thing that comes up in your book—and I’m assuming it happened—was that Henry Tudor at some point was so threatened by the pretender, by the Yorkist plots, that he took this Prince Edward, Earl of Warwick, out of the Tower and paraded him about in London when he heard about this pretender. Or was that just a widespread rumor at the time?

HARKIN: No, he really did do this and he only did it because he felt forced to. I think at this point he must have been pretty baffled and annoyed by the situation that everyone was going around so ready to believe them.

BOGAEV: Understatement.

HARKIN: Yeah. So, he obviously begrudgingly dragged this kid out of the Tower and showed him to assembled nobles.

It didn’t really work. After the kind of unveiling of the real earl—which I think he thought would convince everyone—a lot of nobles actually fled and joined the other side. I think part of that was because by this point, this poor kid had been in the Tower for so long that he wasn’t really the full ticket and so maybe people were happy to believe that he wasn’t the real deal by this stage. So yeah, it was a PR exercise. Henry was a master of PR in so many ways, but this episode did kind of backfire on him. People just didn’t want to believe it.

BOGAEV: It is wild. And I imagine also news didn’t really get around that fast back then. So, how would you know what to believe?

HARKIN: Well, exactly. I mean, the Tudor internet was basically, you know, pieces of paper nailed to church doors and the town criers. Things spread slowly, and they spread via rumor and hearsay, so it was quite hard to get word out. And obviously it’s not like you could show people a photograph or video or anything. So, to an extent, people were able to believe what they wanted to believe.

BOGAEV: Okay. Continuing with facts, after the Yorkist are defeated at the Battle of Stoke and King Henry puts down this revolt, he pardons this pretender Simnel. So why?

HARKIN: That was actually a really interesting move on his part, and I think it was a really canny one. It was effectively an exercise in humiliation. So, you had all these powerful overseas nobles and Yorkist nobles who had joined their side. It really was saying to all these people, “You put your reputations on the line backing this kid but I don’t see him as any kind of threat. I’m not going to kill him. He’s just a child. He’s been puppeted by you, and so, I’m going to put him back to his rightful place. He’s going to have a job working in my kitchen, turning a spit, and now everything is restored as it should be.” He was saying, “I don’t see this as an ongoing threat.” So, I think it did go a long way to restoring Henry’s reputation in that and I think that was a great move on his part.

BOGAEV: Wow, yeah, pro-power move. Now, as you say, he became a kitchen boy, spit boy, but then a falconer and then, in your telling, he becomes a spy. So, where do you depart from the fact and why did you have his life take that route?

HARKIN: There’s one source that says he became a falconer. There’s no reason to doubt it, but a lot of them are quite hazy on the details because a lot of them were written by people who weren’t at court at the time or after the event. It’s obviously all heavily biased towards the Tudors. But I did choose to take that one as relatively reliable fact. Any fact I felt was reliable in the historical record and primary sources, I kept. I think it’s Hilary Mantel’s approach. I think it’s a great approach.

I think with his time at court this really interested me because it’s the second act of his life and it’s the one that was up for grabs, creatively speaking. He has this whole mysterious second portion of his life and it’s when he’s becoming a man. I think he’s still 12 when he’s defeated. So, I wanted to show his coming of age at the English court and he is drawn into Henry VII’s spy network, which was documented and was extensive because he had to monitor the constant threat from the Yorkist faction. I felt like it would make sense for him to get involved in this, especially as by this point, he’s become embittered, and he has his own agenda and his own feelings about what happens to him. So, it was a really great way—I really enjoyed exploring how he’s enmeshed in the political intrigue, while also having some agency of his own and pursuing his own slightly dark goals.

BOGAEV: Yeah, that is fascinating. I mean, it is a hero’s journey from naive to embittered, as you say, because he’s been used by everyone and used cruelly as a child. Okay, so there’s a lot of blank canvas for you to work with here. What do you think was the biggest act of imagination or poetic license that you took if not the spy story? Or maybe the most challenging aspect of creating fiction out of this really pretty patchy life story?

HARKIN: Yeah. I think in terms of the biggest liberty, I think possibly his relationship with Joan, the daughter of the Earl of Kildare, who he meets when he’s in Ireland. We don’t know very much about Joan at all. We know the Earl of Kildare was this very famous, very powerful and charismatic figure, and his daughters were no less strong. They pop up in the Irish history books, which is rare for women to get a mention, and they’re kind of acting with agency. They’re involved in wars and strategizing and all sorts of things. So, I loved the idea that he would have this set of equally forceful daughters. There is absolutely no evidence that Simnel met and fell in love with one of them in Ireland but that was something that I really wanted to happen. It’s not the easiest romance. Joan, the daughter of the Earl of Kildare, is kind of sociopath—

BOGAEV: She’s fantastic. She’s a kind of proto-feminist, I think you’d say. She really wants to not marry and she has a great head for politics, as her father always says. She’s fascinating.

HARKIN: I think in her own way, yeah. I think she has a low opinion of other women. I think she’s kind of a feminist for herself.

BOGAEV: Well, you got to start somewhere! I should back up though, because Simnel is this great character because he’s kind of like a Zelig of the 15th century. He meets everyone important. You’re talking about the Lord Deputy of Ireland who’s hilariously named Gerald FitzGerald and he supports the Yorkist plot, right?, and he sounds like quite the guy himself. How much did you have to draw from historical record to create this vivid portrait of the man who ruled Ireland effectively at the time?

HARKIN: Named the uncrowned King of Ireland, famously he was taken prisoner by Henry VII later in his life. Ireland just basically descended into chaos without him, Henry had to concede defeat and send him back to rule—knowing all the while that this man was a real threat to him. He would look to support anyone overturning the Tudors. He was loyal to the Yorks but also, he had an eye for his own power in Ireland. Anything that allowed him more autonomy, which he had had under the Yorks and Richard, he was in favor of. So, I mean, he was only nominally under the control of the English throne. He ruled a part of the island known as “The Pale” that was under English control. The rest of Ireland was ruled by warring Gaelic kings, and Gerald FitzGerald united the two. So, he came closer than anyone at that point to really, to genuinely ruling Ireland. It was great to be able to put him in the book and have Simnel meet him because it’s on the record how funny and eventful and charismatic he was as a man.

BOGAEV: Right, and just vital. He had, what, 10 children?

HARKIN: Yeah, he was a busy guy.

BOGAEV: Yeah, a lot going on. So, I’m going to, again, back up because it’s just so interesting with historical fiction how you do your research. You said Simnel got on your radar because you encountered him in a footnote. What book were you reading?

HARKIN: Yes. It wasn’t a book I was supposed to be reading. At the time I was meant to be writing another sci-fi, and I was supposed to be reading a neurological study about the formation of memory at a molecular level. Of course, instead of doing that, I was reading a book about the kings and queens of England because I’m a champion procrastinator. So, this is where I stumbled on Simnel.

I had no intention of writing a historical novel. I knew it was a lot of work, not fond of hard work, but he intrigued me, the story really intrigued me. Not so much as what we know about him, but what we don’t know—just wanting an insight into his mind, and that was my way in. That’s what led me to embark on an awful set in a period I knew nothing about. I didn’t know anything about the politics, the culture, the society. I did English literature at uni, so I’d read Chaucer—that was probably about the only insight I had into the period of that time—so yeah, the research threw up lots of surprises along the way.

BOGAEV: You procrastinate by reading about the monarchy?

HARKIN: Yeah. I feel like if I can justify it, I have, like, some merit in what I’m doing, then that allows me in my mind to get away with procrastinating. It has to have value in itself. It can’t just be like watching The Kardashians or something. It has to have merit.

BOGAEV: It has to be nutritious.

HARKIN: Exactly. Yeah.

BOGAEV: Okay. You were taken with writing a second act, but you’d never done historical research. So, where did you start?

HARKIN: I can’t remember my exact story. I think really early on in the process I decided I didn’t just want to show the plot and the politics and obviously his everyday life. I really wanted to show him as a product of his culture. This was a huge task. I kind of bit off more than I could chew with this because his education would’ve been quite full as a boy being groomed to be a king. He would’ve been reading not only the classics, but all the medieval literature of his day, and he would’ve spoken several languages. So, I decided to give myself a similar—I didn’t learn Latin, or middle French, but I did try to read as much of the things he would’ve been consuming as much as I could, just to really kind of embed myself and get that immersion factor. Obviously once I’d done all that, it was a challenge because the book was then just stuffed with things that I found interesting but weren’t strictly relevant to the plot.

BOGAEV: But wonderful. Like, what were you reading? Because Simnel, for instance, he loves his Chaucer, and he’s obsessed with getting his hands on a copy of Le Morte d’Arthur, the original French version of the tales of King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table, which is fun to think that this was the racist, soft porn thing going at the time.

HARKIN: It was quite racy. Le Morte d’Arthur is a very strange one in that you get these long stretches of quite tedious, repetitive fights, and then you’ll get some quite outlandish sex scenes. So, you can imagine an adolescent boy in Medieval England like he was, you know, this was like the equivalent of sneaking in to see a dirty film, like, this would’ve been super exciting to him, especially as, you know, he could get illustrated ones. So, yeah, a lot of his sexual awakening comes via early literature, early printed books.

BOGAEV: So, what kind of fascinating things did you come across in your research? There are just wonderful little details as you say, cultural details beyond what he’s reading, just what was going on at the time. For instance, an early modern hangover cure in your book: drinking wine in which an eel has been suffocated.

HARKIN: Yeah, there were some really strange remedies.

BOGAEV: What was the most interesting thing for you to stumble on?

HARKIN: One really fascinating thing actually was when I first conceived of the book, I felt like he was just a straight fake.

Someone had found this child with a resemblance, and it was a kind of an opportunistic situation. I don’t think it was a priest that it began with. I think it was probably the Yorkist side. Maybe he was an illegitimate child of Clarence. These are my working theories. I never thought of approaching it as anything other than he’s a fake.

But then when I was looking into the Duke of Clarence, the one who famously drowned in the barrel of wine on the orders of Edward IV, his brother, he, at one point, one of his many crimes against the throne was to try to swap his baby son for a peasant child. At this point in his life, he was really paranoid, and he had a right to be. He’d been plotting against the king, and he was about to get executed for it, so, he wanted to keep his heir safe and this was one of the schemes he came up with. He’d enlisted two of his retainers to do this. And they later confessed and gave that up, and they got pardoned. They said that the scheme never actually succeeded, but of course they would say that.

So, it did introduce this interesting note of doubt and ambiguity to me that the idea that possibly he could have been the real deal. I still think on balance, he probably wasn’t. But I rewrote the book to keep this ambiguity and make that a part of the plot, just his feelings about his identity and his origins, and I think it ended up being a much more interesting and rich book for that.

BOGAEV: Oh yeah, because that’s a major theme of identity. Who am I? Am I this peasant or am I royalty? What’s the difference? You know you’re still yourself. It’s such an enduring and seductive narrative: the commoner suspected of noble birth. It feels like an archetype (I don’t know if it’s technically an archetype) but why do you think it’s so enticing?

HARKIN: I think the idea of identity, and also our heritage, just has this enduring fascination for us and that is a choice. You know, you could argue that selfhood should not be based on genetics or history but we do like to see ourselves that way and that does feel timeless.

But back in Simnel’s era, it wasn’t even just this curiosity that we could choose to indulge or not, it was a really crucial part of who you were in the world. That’s how other people would know how to identify you. You had your place in society that wasn’t quite a caste system but was close and the idea of a well-functioning society was to know your place and behave yourself within it, not to step out of your lane.

So for him to not know what lane he was meant to be in was incredibly destabilizing. In the earlier stages of the novel, once Joan—it’s Joan who first says to him, “Do you think they’re telling the truth about who you are?”—once she’s introduced that note of doubt, he’s really upset and concerned about this for quite a large chunk of the book after that.

BOGAEV: As a kid, did you ever fantasize about your parents not being your parents?

HARKIN: Oh, absolutely. So, my childhood was sort of unstable one in a lot of ways and I loved fiction that was people being swept away, like Harry Potter kind of style where someone comes along and tells you, “Yes, you’re not who you think you are. Off you go to a palace.” Like, that’s obviously incredibly enticing, so, it was really fun to revisit that and play with it from a historical point of view.

BOGAEV: You do take him to a number of palaces. I think the first one, Simnel grows up on this farm. He thinks he is a farm boy and then he gets taken away by a noble mysteriously. It turns out his father’s not his father, and he goes off with this noble and a tutor and the tutor’s, kind of, a real, a low life and tries to sell him out. He ends up in Flanders, Belgium, at the castle of his alleged Aunt Margaret. I don’t know if there’s a basis, any kind of basis, in history for this but you take him there too in your novel.

HARKIN: Yes. So, he definitely was at this court for at least a period of time where I imagine he was being groomed for power in some way or other—

BOGAEV: —and schooled in etiquette because he just has no idea what’s going on and how to even curtsy or bow. He runs into some really weird food rules, for instance, you must eat boiled meat before roasted meat, you must eat a certain amount of cheese to seal up your stomach.

HARKIN: Yeah. Actually, this did happen. They had an idea of the body being made up of four humors, which I think we’re still familiar with.

BOGAEV: Of course.

HARKIN: The idea that the belly was the fire that fueled your body and you had to be very careful what you put in it so as not to cool your fires too much. So, if he’s reaching for the wrong thing, his aunt, who is very health conscious will correct him. They would have a lot of very formalized ritualized banquets in the royal palaces that could go on for hours, and so, I wanted to just show his absolute—he has no idea what to expect. He has been tutored by a lowlife priest, as you say, so, he’s had a quite humble existence up until this stage of his education. He’s just spending his time in agony trying to guess what the right thing to do is, watching other people, trying to work out what this silver thing is on the table in front of him in the shape of a ship—turns out it’s full of salt.

BOGAEV: A salt ship.

HARKIN: A salt ship, yeah. So, a lot of his pain in dealing with this situation was actually my pain at puzzling through the research because I had to go through all of this education with him trying to work out how exactly a banquet played out because there was so many rules. Actually, a lot of the stuff on the banquet came from books, helpfully that were given to staff in the royal households telling them exactly how to behave, what their role was in a banquet, so, it was a training manual.

BOGAEV: Oh, a like a banquet bible.

HARKIN: Exactly. Yeah, so that was actually super helpful because up until then I knew a few things. Like people would carry their own knives as standard. So, I was kind of thinking, “Well, okay, but they’ve carry their own knives to a very formal banquet? Or was this just the common people?” There are so many questions like this, and a lot of the sources are silent on it, so, there were so many just day-to-day questions that were really hard to find from the sources and these manuals for servants were useful.

BOGAEV: Okay, so these rules really did exist, and they do sound weird to us now. The humor notwithstanding, though, this Margaret person sounds wacko, but also, a really wise strategist. Remind us who she was in history and what you drew on to portray her.

HARKIN: Sure. So, we actually know quite a lot about her life—this is Margaret of York, who’s also known as Margaret of Burgundy, and she actually made a real success of her marriage and her life in Burgundy to the point where she had a lot of power. She ended up governing in the stead of her niece.

BOGAEV: Which it sounds like she did very ably.

HARKIN: Yes, she was very politically minded, very restrained, very savvy. She was quite close to how we would imagine a modern woman operating in power—

BOGAEV: I would happily read a novel about Margaret.

HARKIN: Oh, absolutely.

BOGAEV: Just hinting around there.

HARKIN: She never remarried. Her husband died; she could have absolutely remarried, and she chose not to.

BOGAEV: So, Simnel spends time with Margaret. That’s a really fascinating part of the novel and then he is off to Ireland with Gerald FitzGerald there. Then eventually, after the defeat of the Yorkist rebellion, he’s there with Henry Tudor in Henry VII’s court and there’s some great scenes with Simnel and Henry.

HARKIN: Yeah.

BOGAEV: Maybe you should remind us just what kind of King Henry VII was, because famously Shakespeare never wrote a play about him.

HARKIN: Yes. I think he sort of pops up at the end of Richard III, doesn’t he?

BOGAEV: Barely.

HARKIN: Yeah, but only in the context he’s defeated Richard. He’s sort of a means to that end. He does not take the limelight really away from our central villain in any way—And that’s the kind of king he was really. Shakespeare probably didn’t bother with him because there wasn’t much to go on. I think it was Bacon possibly—or I can’t remember who—called him a “dark prince” and “infinitely suspicious”. He was quite a solemn, paranoid man and had a right to be paranoid. Everyone was genuinely out to get him.

BOGAEV: Right, at least in the beginning but then he had a pretty long reign, a very stable one and peaceful. Was it just too boring for Shakespeare?

HARKIN: I think, yeah. He was notoriously tight-fisted and greedy, but then so many English kings were. Edward IV was absolutely no exception to that. It was just Henry that got the reputation for it because Edward was quite charismatic whereas Henry didn’t really have the charisma to pull off his naked money grabs. So, when he died, his son Henry VIII, who had got quite fed up of his dad’s controlling ways, basically, one of his first acts was to execute his father’s tax collectors who the people hated and that really was just an immediate reputation win for him. Like, everyone loved that move.

BOGAEV: After all this research that you’ve done on this king that was overlooked by Shakespeare pretty much, but I imagined you looked back at Shakespeare’s Henriad and Richard III. Or did you not go back and reread them because they weren’t quite the period that you were researching?

HARKIN: Strangely, they really set the tone for my initial ideas for the book—

BOGAEV: Oh, in what way?

HARKIN: Well, a lot of my research was effectively unraveling the preconceptions I’d taken from Shakespeare. I read Richard III at university, which is longer ago than I really would like to admit, and I bought into this idea of Richard, as you know, he was the villain. I knew that there were some inaccuracies and obviously Shakespeare takes a lot of liberties with the telling, but still, that kind of portrayal, it goes into your mind like that. That was my assumption.

So, when I was researching this book, there were quite a lot of things I was like, “Oh, actually the reality is a lot grayer and more muddy.” You know, Richard wasn’t just this straight monster. I don’t think he was a great guy by modern standards, but then none of them were and actually, that was really interesting to me because I wanted to preserve that sense of moral ambiguity, the fact that the Tudor mindset wasn’t like us. Death for them was an option, you know? It was a practical thing. They lived a lot closer to it. I think it’s really hard for us to imagine what that kind of existence is like and that kind of fear—I think Richard had this fear, as did the Woodvilles who he obviously, famously set himself against. They were all worried that they were going, like the other person was out to kill them and I think they all acted—

BOGAEV: And often they were.

HARKIN: Exactly, they were. Richard had good reason to believe this. They probably all thought, “We need to make the first move here, or the other person’s going to, you know, get rid of us.”

BOGAEV: So, Simnel ends up spying in your book for Henry VII. I don’t want to give away too many spoilers, but we don’t know much at all of what happens to the real Simnel later in his adult life and we really don’t learn that much more in your novel. Were you always sure that you would end the story with that mystery?

HARKIN: Yes. I really wanted to leave it as his future is undetermined. Without going too far into spoilers, I wanted to end it while he was still a young man—I mean, there is a lot of his life left to go and I think by ending it with a mystery as to where he does end his days that allows him to kind of have to step off the page and carry on in our imaginations. So, I think cutting it off a little early is a good way to do that.

BOGAEV: Well, yeah. I’m not going to ask any more about the end because as we’ve established—

HARKIN: It’s tricky.

BOGAEV: Yeah. It’s tricky and keep it mysterious. That’s wonderful. But it did make me wonder whether there’s a sequel brewing in your mind.

HARKIN: Oh yes. In fact, there is, which is a good thing because I’m under a two-book deal. So, at this point there needs to be something brewing. I’m going to set it in the same era as Simnel, so end of the 1400s, start of the 1500s. But this time it’s going to be a very different setup. I’m going to have a female lead. She’s going to be the daughter of a rich merchant in London, very spoiled, and she’s going to go on a very different character journey to Simnel. She is going to end up in Spain at the court of a queen called Juana La Loca, Joanna the Mad and is going to get caught up in the intrigue and machinations of that course.

BOGAEV: Wow, that sounds wonderful.

HARKIN: Yes, I think it’s really interesting. Juana La Loca was not really mad. She was actually taken advantage of by the men around her who wanted to basically usurp her hereditary birthright. So, she’s a really fascinating person to write about.

BOGAEV: Well, I can’t wait.

HARKIN: Brilliant. Thanks.

BOGAEV: Thank you so much.

HARKIN: Thank you very much for having me. It’s been such a pleasure.

—————–

KARIM-COOPER: That was Jo Harkin, interviewed by Barbara Bogaev.

The Pretender is out now from Knopf.

This episode was produced by Matt Frassica. Garland Scott is the executive producer. It was edited by Gail Kern Paster. We had technical help from Nikki Elsin in Redding, England and Voice Trax West in Studio City, California. Our web producer is Paola García Acuña. Leonor Fernandez edits our transcripts. Final mixing services provided by Clean Cuts at Three Seas, Inc.

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