The Battle of Stoke, the last and most neglected armed clash of the Wars of the Roses, is one of history's great might-have-beens. The engagement was fought on Saturday 16 June 1487 in fields just south of Newark in Nottinghamshire when the forces of the first Tudor king Henry VII confronted the Yorkist army of the pretender Lambert Simnel and his commander the Earl of Lincoln. Less than two years after Richard III's defeat at Bosworth, the fate of England again hung in the balance. But Henry's victory over the rebels was decisive ? it confirmed the crown to the House of Tudor for more than a century. David Baldwin's fascinating and meticulously researched study of the battle, and the deep-seated conflicts of interest that led to it, gives a keen insight into the opposing armies, their commanders, and the bloody dynastic politics of the period.
