‘English History’, declared those evergreen sages W C Sellar and R J Yeatman in 1066 and All That, ‘has always been subject to Waves of Pretenders’. Their hilarious chapter on Lambert Simnel and Perkin Warbeck (transmuting into permutations of each other – Warmnel, Perbeck, Warmneck, Lamkin) is one of the highlights of the book. But for the ruling Tudor dynasty, as Desmond Seward reminds us in this lively and readable new study, the existence of Yorkist pretenders was no laughing matter.

Seward, an accomplished popular historian with a strong track record in the later medieval period, quite rightly wants to remind us that it was no foregone conclusion that the sixteenth century would be that of the Tudors, and that in an important sense the Wars of the Roses