SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
Kings are born, but can they also be made or faked? It's 1483, and John Collan is 10 years old. His object in life is to rid his village of a demon goat that knocks him about, until a stranger, well dressed, arrives and informs John that, in fact, he is not the son of a farmer. He is the son of the late George, Duke of Clarence. John's real name is Edward, Earl of Warwick, and he is to be king. "The Pretender" is a new novel from Jo Harkin, and it is drawn from history. Jo Harkin joins us from Berkshire in the U.K. Thanks so much for being with us.
JO HARKIN: Thank you so much for having me.
SIMON: Tell us about the people who show up one day. What do they say to him?
HARKIN: Yes. So these two nobles arrive, and he thinks he's going to be sent off to have a tutor in Oxford, which is the nearest town to his little village. And he is shocked to learn that, apparently, he was swapped at birth by his father, the paranoid Duke of Clarence, who is the brother of King Edward IV and the brother of King Richard III. And Richard III is the one on the throne at the time that the novel starts. So these nobles say, you are the last York hope. You're a lost heir. We've come to get you, and now it's time to go and reclaim your glorious destiny as the king of England. We just have to basically get Henry Tudor out of the way first. He's pretty terrified, but he goes off and - yeah - to learn to be a king.
SIMON: Yeah. A dangerous job for a 10-year-old because a lot of kings and would-be kings and heirs were being slain in England at this point, weren't they?
HARKIN: Exactly. This is in the aftermath of the princes who were killed in the tower. So England is still kind of rocked by these two deaths. And so for John Collan to - for the story to be, oh, this is the real Earl of Warwick, this child was kind of an ongoing threat.
SIMON: How did they settle on this child? What made him so propitious for what they plotted?
HARKIN: Well, this is the interesting thing. It's based on a true story, which I sort of discovered by chance when I was reading a history book. The real child, Lambert Simnel, got barely more than a footnote. So when I first started with the novel, I just actually thought that this kid was a straight fake, that they had just found someone with a passing resemblance to the Yorks, or maybe a bastard, and they'd decided to just sort of groom him, basically, to be - you know, to impersonate this kid.
And then when I was looking into the research, it turns out that his father, the Duke of Clarence, actually did try to swap him as a baby because at this point, he was basically scheming against his brother the king, Edward IV. He knew his life was in danger, and it was. He was later executed. And somewhere along the line, he made an attempt to swap his infant son out for a peasant child, just to keep him safe. The story is that he didn't succeed. His two sort of retainers who confessed to being part of this scheme said that they hadn't actually managed to do it. But then I kind of thought, well, they would say that. So I actually had to retool the novel...
SIMON: Yeah.
HARKIN: ...To kind of make way for this ambiguity. Like, there was a possibility that his father succeeded and this kid was the real deal.
SIMON: When you're writing a novel, when do you have to leap from the research into your imagination?
HARKIN: So this one, actually quite early on. I always follow Hilary Mantel, who was just such a huge inspiration. I obviously loved the "Wolf Hall" trilogy. And her basic approach was that if something was historical fact and it was on the record, then she would treat that as solid. And then it was where there was a gap that she would fill in with her own invention. And I thought that was a really great way to do it. I'm not really interested in writing alternate history.
But then the problem with the time I'm writing about, the late 1400s, records are really patchy, and what you had at the time were the official chronicles. And those were basically the propaganda of whatever monarch was in power in whichever country they were from. So some of it was just hearsay and rumor. Ultimately, yeah, I found that there was a lot to fill in. So - and Simnel himself, he's barely a mention in these histories. The consensus is that he was a peasant, but no one knows who his family were. And peasants' lives were generally unrecorded anyway.
SIMON: The people who take him from the farm feel that he needs to be educated as a - you know, if he's going to be a proper sovereign. What do they feel is important for him to know?
HARKIN: So as a young king in grooming, a sort of king-to-be at the time, you would be required to hunt with birds and with dogs, as you'd obviously need to be good on the horse. You might be - need to be good at jousting, archery, sword fighting, as well as they were required to be well read. That was the expectation. So he suddenly has to catch up on all this education in quite a hurry. And this is something I wanted to really show in the book, how he's not just shaped by his society and the environment around him, but how his culture has gone into forming him as a person. It was obviously a challenge to show that with a light touch rather than going into extensive tracts of medieval poetry, but I had to restrain myself with some of that.
SIMON: Well, I want you to read something because he turns out to be, I think it's safe to say, gifted at language and writing. And, why don't we read something that he writes?
HARKIN: Sure. Yeah. So he has aspirations of becoming a writer himself and becomes a little bit disillusioned with this as the novel goes on. But in his early years, this is one of his compositions, and it's basically him trying to make sense of his life.
(Reading) And little John played at a yeoman, a boy raised on the farm. He went by the name of John Collan so to come him to no harm. Though Johnny Collan was his name, 'twas Edward he went by first, and Lambert he shortly after became to escape the old king's curse. Riding along, he thinks of his dad, no Christmas with his brothers. The two mothers that he never had, never smelled the rosemary in her hair.
SIMON: There's something very sad about that, isn't there?
HARKIN: Yeah. It's his - he's trying to fictionalize his life. And this is at the moment where he's riding away from the farm to begin this bright future that is - also kind of horrifies him. So he's framing it as this fairy tale, which - and it does fall into that kind of trope, but the reality is very different. And yeah, he has mixed emotions, to say the least.
SIMON: Of course, it's irresistible to do a little research ourselves to look up what happened to John - Lambert Simnel. Not an unhappy life. Did he receive a certain kind of mercy?
HARKIN: This is the thing. The real child, he's pardoned by King Henry after his attempt to take the throne fails. He gets set to work in the kitchens. Some accounts have it that he became a ladle washer, others that he was turning a spit. And he might have been relieved that he didn't die on the battlefield, which is obviously the risk that's uppermost in my character's mind throughout a lot of it. And that's the end of him. We don't hear anything more about him.
Yeah, that left me with just this huge space to kind of create a second act for him. And I think that's sort of what interested me about his story almost as much as the known facts, which are pretty crazy - but the idea that he could then go on to have this a second existence where, possibly, he has a little more agency than the first time around.
SIMON: Jo Harkin's new novel, "The Pretender." Thank you so much for being with us.
HARKIN: Thank you so much for having me. It's been a real pleasure. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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