Free Jean Plaidy by To Hold the Crown: The Story of King Henry VII, Elizabeth of York

grown accustomed now to seeing important men. But the King was by no means the most impressive of these.
    “What have you to say, boy?” asked the King.
    Lambert looked at him and did not know what to say. They had always told him what to say. Now there was no one to do so.
    “Speak up,” said the King.
    The priest spoke then: “My lord King, it is no fault of the boy. He did as he was told.”
    “So thought I,” said the King. “They took you from your baker’s shop, eh, boy? They set you up as their puppet. That was it. I knew it. You admit it, eh?”
    The boy still looked dazed.
    “He is a simpleton,” said the King. “What folly was this! Lincoln dead. I am sorry. I should have liked to ask him what foolishness could have possessed him to pass off this half-witted creature as the Earl of Warwick. Take them away … both of them.”
    So they awaited their sentence. The King was smiling, which was something he rarely did.
    He was not sorry that this had happened. He would show the people how he would keep order. There had been this uprising … yes … with a disgruntled earl and a boy from a baker’s shop. He had quickly suppressed that. He had shown them how he would deal with these impostors.
    The ringleaders were dead or in flight and he had only the priest and the half-witted boy to deal with.
    It should be a traitor’s death for them both. No. They were not important enough for that. He would show mercy to them both. The priest should be imprisoned for life because he had plotted against the King and might well take it into his knave’s head to do it again. The boy … well he was very young; moreover he was addlepated. How could one punish a boy like that? It was no fault of the poor half-witted creature. He had been plucked out of his father’s baker’s shop because of his pleasant looks, which the King admitted was all he had to recommend him.
    He should go into the King’s kitchen. That would best suit him.
    “Let this Lambert Simnel become one of our scullions,” said the King. “I doubt not he will soon forget his grand aspirations there.”
    So Richard Simon, congratulating himself that he had escaped the barbarous traitor’s death, lived on in prison—a contrast to the archbishop’s palace of which he had dreamed; as for Lambert he was happy in the King’s kitchens. His fellow workers laughed at him but without malice, so Lambert laughed with them; and he worked hard and well. He was happier there than he had been sitting on an uncomfortable but very grand chair with a crown on his head.
    In the streets they laughed at the story of Lambert Simnel—which, said the King to his mother, was the way he had hoped it would be.

 
    Coronation
     
    lthough people laughed to think of the leader of a rebellion now working as a scullion in the King’s own kitchens, Henry himself did not dismiss the matter so lightly. He talked it over with a young man whom he had recently made one of his Privy Councillors and toward whom he had felt especially drawn. This was Edmund Dudley, a lawyer in his twenties who was showing characteristics which were not unlike the King’s own.
    Henry wanted to gather round him men of his own choosing. No king should inherit statesmen for they would most certainly compare the present master with the previous one and as the departed always gained in stature such comparisons put the living at a disadvantage.
    Henry’s early life had made him suspicious and cautious and acceding to the throne had not lessened these traits in his character. Edmund Dudley who had studied law at Gray’s Inn and had later become Sheriff of Sussex was a man with whom he felt immediately in harmony; also Dudley had an associate, Richard Empson, another lawyer, educated for the Bar, who had already shown himself to be an astute lawyer. These were the kind of sharp minds Henry needed around him; and he had already shown favor to these two.
    So now as they walked down to the river’s edge in the