Last month I posted about the intriguing and rather forgotten incident of the so-called Ralph Wilford Rebellion (my actual post title being: Who the Heck was Ralph Wilford?). Wilford was one in a long line of pretenders to the English throne during the Tudor period, impersonating the Earl of Warwick in order to provide himself with a platform to wrest the crown from Henry VII. Henry had his work cut out during his twenty-four reign, especially with other Yorkist threats (the de la Pole brothers, Lambert Simnel, and Perkin Warbeck), as well as with other large-scale tax-based rebellions (such as the Cornish Rebellion of 1497). In comparison, the whole Ralph Wilford incident fails to compare in terms of scale of threat, however, as I noted in my earlier post the whole affair interests me because it is mostly forgotten about.

And so fast forward to now: I have completed research into Wilford and have written a short eBook that is now released on Amazon. Last year I dabbled with Kindle Direct Publishing (as noted in this post) and I uploaded an article I had written about the Earl of Oxford’s seizure of St. Michael’s Mount in 1473. However, this particular eBook was only available to read for a short-time, and I wanted to release something more substantive. I believe this short history on Ralph Wilford to be just that.

The introduction provides an overview of the book’s aims:

This short eBook has been written with the intention of uncovering an intriguing and forgotten episode of Tudor history, in order to ask new questions to help build our appreciation and understanding. The rebellion of Ralph Wilford is entirely ignored by the various textbooks and teaching specifications that I encounter in the A-level classroom, but Wilford is an interesting character that holds great value to the student of history. Although his period of activity was incredibly brief he is important for the fact that his appearance brought about a clear shift in Henry VII in terms of his political outlook.

This review of the episode hopefully helps to provide a greater understanding of Ralph Wilford, as well as to attempt to establish a new platform on which to treat the rebellion’s significance in the wider study of Henry VII’s reign.

And so here it is: an eBook available to read on Amazon (click here to find out more information). The ultimate intention is to continue to research and write about the other threats that Henry VII faced during his reign, hopefully with the purpose of collecting them together for a larger, full-scale book. I’m sure that I will post on this blog as I continue to read and research further.