The Lincolnshire Rebellion of 1470 Revisited

The Lincolnshire rebellion of 1470 lasted little more than a week, ending in the rout of the rebels by the king, Edward IV. Despite its extreme brevity, it was important, as it spelled the end of any hope of a reconciliation between the king and the man who hitherto been his leading supporter, the earl of Warwick (‘the Kingmaker’). The rebellion is generally believed to have been instigated, or at least exploited once it had begun, by Warwick with the aim of replacing King Edward with his younger brother, the duke of Clarence. The argument of this article is that historians have been led astray by an apparently authoritative royalist account of events, supported by what purports to be the confession of the rebel leader, but is not. Using other evidence it can be demonstrated that, of the several possible interpretations of the causes of the rebellion, the presently dominant one is the least likely to be correct. The interpretation of what happened that best fits the evidence is that the king exploited, and may even have himself provoked, the rebellion. His attitude towards the earlier attempt at a reconciliation with Warwick and Clarence helps to explain why he experienced so many problems in the first decade of his reign

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