Appendix 2

Contemporary and Near-Contemporary Records of the Dublin King’s Identity

This summary restricts itself to sources written within twenty-five years of the coronation of the Dublin King. Ten sources are included. Of these:

four state that he was the Earl of Warwick/King Edward

three ascribe no name to the Dublin King

two give his name as Lambert Simnel

one gives his name as John.

In terms of statistics, these figures might perhaps be interpreted as suggesting that there is a 60 per cent chance that the Dublin King was a false claimant (though if so, his real name remains uncertain). At the same time, however, there seems to be a 40 per cent chance that he was the genuine Earl of Warwick. Apparently there would only be a 20 per cent chance that his real name was Lambert Simnel.

Restricting this analysis to include only the most closely contemporaneous sources would produce a result fractionally more favourable to the suggestion that the Dublin King really was the Earl of Warwick (approximately 43 per cent), with only a 10 per cent chance that his real name was Lambert Simnel.

The most obvious outcome of such analyses is that, despite the general tendency of historians to accept the official Tudor line, in fact the truth about the identity of the Dublin King remains very unclear.