Pole, John de la, Earl of Lincoln

(c. 1464–1487)

   A nephew of EDWARD IV and RICHARD III, John de la Pole, earl of Lincoln, was a leader of Lambert SIMNEL’s 1487 attempt to reopen the civil wars and restore the house of YORK to the throne.

   The eldest son of John de la POLE, second duke of Suffolk, and Elizabeth Plantagenet, sister of Edward IV, de la Pole was created earl of Lincoln by his uncle in 1467. Upon Edward IV’s death in 1483, Lincoln became a firm adherent of Richard III, who appointed the earl president of the Council of the North, an administrative body established to maintain order on the distant Scottish border. When Prince Edward, the king’s son, died in April 1484, Richard appointed Lincoln lord lieutenant of IRELAND in his son’s place, although the actual government of Ireland remained in the hands of a deputy, Gerald FITZGERALD, earl of Kildare.

   Although never publicly proclaimed heir to the throne, Lincoln was, following the death of the prince, the nearest adult after the king in the Yorkist line of succession. Lincoln’s cousin, Edward PLANTAGENET, earl of Warwick, the son of Richard III’s late brother, George PLANTAGENET, duke of Clarence, had a superior claim to the throne because it descended from the direct male line, but the earl was only nine in 1484 and was barred from the succession, according to the statute TITULUS REGIUS, by his father’s ATTAINDER. Richard therefore signaled his acceptance of Lincoln as heir by granting the earl lands worth over £300 per year and a pension of £176 per year drawn from the Duchy of Cornwall, which was usually given to the heir to the throne.

   Lincoln was present when Richard was defeated and killed at the Battle of BOSWORTH FIELD in August 1485. Hoping to win the support of the earl and his family, HENRY VII only required Lincoln to swear an oath of loyalty. But the earl was apparently unwilling to renounce his own claim to the Crown, and in early 1487 he fled to BURGUNDY, where his aunt,MARGARET OFYORK, duchess of Burgundy, gave him troops with which to support Lambert Simnel, a Yorkist pretender who was gathering an army in Ireland by impersonating Warwick. Upon his arrival in Dublin, Lincoln openly accepted Simnel’s claim, though, in private, he probably saw his own accession as the ultimate goal of the enterprise.Crossing to England with Simnel’s army, Lincoln was killed at the Battle of STOKE in June 1487. His younger brothers, Edmund and Richard de la Pole, continued to oppose the TUDOR regime.

   See also Yorkist Heirs (after 1485)

   Further Reading: Bennett, Michael, Lambert Simnel and the Battle of Stoke (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1987); Chrimes, S. B., Henry VII (New Haven, CT:Yale University Press, 1999); Ross, Charles, Richard III (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981).