CHAPTER TWELVE

My Kingdom for a Horse

Henry Tudor’s claim to the throne was very tenuous, but he had an advantage over most of the others in not being dead. Despite being from the illegitimate Beaufort line, he was enough of a threat that Edward IV offered a huge reward for his capture, although he was safe as long as the Duke of Brittany protected him; unfortunately, the Duke was, like many of the rulers at the time, periodically insane so he could not always be relied on.

Shakespeare presented Tudor as a heroic figure who came along to save the day, but in real life he was not especially popular or loved or even liked as king. A man with small, shrewd eyes ‘and noticeably bad teeth in a long, sallow face beneath very fair hair,’ Henry Tudor had lived rather against the odds and grew into an understandably cautious man. Still, he won, and that’s what matters when it comes down to it.

After Henry V’s death, his widow Catherine of Valois had become close to Edmund Beaufort, the future Duke of Somerset who was five years her junior. Edmund was also the nephew of Cardinal Henry Beaufort, then the archenemy of Humphrey of Gloucester, and so in 1427, under Gloucester’s influence, Parliament spitefully forbade queens from remarrying without ‘special licence’ of an adult king for the sake of ‘the preservation of the honor of the most noble estate of queens of England.’ Since Catherine’s son was six at the time, this made things rather difficult for her.

Catherine was described as being ‘unable to fully curb her carnal passions,’ but the position of a young dowager queen was a difficult and sometimes perilous one, doubly so if she were foreign. Her sexual habits were of prime interest to the Crown, as any lover or spouse would be raised to great power. Henry V’s widow therefore shocked those around her by secretly marrying a man who was not only not of noble blood but also Welsh, viewed as barbarians at the time.

Owain Tudor was Catherine’s footman, and according to one version she used to spy on the Welshman as he bathed naked in the Thames, or alternatively she noticed him when he fell asleep drunk on her lap—British men are so romantic, which women find irresistible. The Tudors had served the princes of Gwynedd and later the English kings. Owain’s grandfather had been Tudur (Theodore) ap Goronwy, a nobleman from Anglesey, a Welsh-speaking region of the country, but his father Merdeddap Tudur, along with his brothers, had sided with Owain Glyndwr in his revolt, and while he had inherited his father’s land, many of his relations had been excluded and they remained poor; Owain had risen through society solely by his soldiering ability and charm, serving in France for many years.

At some point around 1430, Catherine and Owain were married, although they were certainly an odd couple; she came from the royal family of Christendom’s leading power, the heirs of Charlemagne, while he … did not. One evening, Owain brought his cousins John ap Maredudd and Hywel ap Llywelyn ap Hywel to meet the queen but they only spoke Welsh and Catherine said, ‘they were the goodliest dumb creatures that she ever saw.’

After three or four children, Catherine died in 1437 and her sons Edmund and Jasper at the ages of seven and six went to work for Katherine de la Pole, abbess of Barking and the sister of the Duke of Suffolk. She was an influential figure who was godmother to the children of many wealthy families, and the abbey served as a sort of proto-boarding school. The Tudor boys spent five years at Barking, and as they got older, the king became closer to his half brothers. Blacman wrote that Henry VI put the Tudors under ‘strict and safe guardianship’ and ‘before he was married, being as a youth a pupil of chastity … would keep careful watch through hidden windows of his chamber, lest any foolish impertinence of women coming into the house grow to a head, and cause the fall of any of his household.’ The two teenage boys must have really thanked him for that.

In November 1452, the Tudor lads were raised to the peerage, Edmund as Earl of Richmond and Jasper Earl of Pembroke. They were also made legitimate half brothers of the king, while Parliament praised the ‘famous memory’ of their mother and ‘all the fruit which her royal womb produced.’ Jasper was given land seized by Yorkists, while Edmund managed to get himself engaged to the first Duke of Somerset’s daughter Margaret Beaufort, the richest heiress in the kingdom.

Margaret’s childhood had been grim even by the standards of the day; her father committed suicide before her first birthday, so she became a ward of the Earl of Suffolk, and he arranged her marriage to his son when he was just two and she one. Now, after Henry VI had dissolved that union, she was married off at twelve to Edmund Tudor and was pregnant at thirteen. This is even worse than it sounds, as girls matured later then (diet being poorer), and it was customary to wait until at least a girl’s fourteenth birthday before consummating a marriage, for health reasons; she also had a slight frame, and as a result had a difficult pregnancy; she almost died in childbirth, as did her sickly baby, and was unable to conceive again. It’s most likely Tudor did this out of greed rather than lust, for once she had given him a child, he owned her land forever, and maybe he didn’t want to risk her dying in the meantime; either way, it doesn’t present him in a great light. Not that Edmund got to enjoy the rewards, as he was already dead by this stage, having expired in captivity at the hands of his rival ‘Black William’ Herbert, who was from the most powerful Yorkist family in Wales.

Just two months after giving birth, Margaret rode to the home of the powerful Duke of Buckingham and negotiated a marriage with his second son, Henry Stafford, which was happy enough, although she rarely saw her own child. When Henry Tudor was only four, the Yorkists overthrew his uncle and the same William Herbert was able to buy his wardship for one thousand pounds, giving him tutors and grooming him for marriage. According to Polydore Virgil, he was ‘kept as prisoner’ by Herbert, although well looked after by his wife Anne Devereux; it was around this time he learned Welsh. The Herberts had also bought the wardship of the young Earl of Northumberland, whose father had just died at Towton. At the age of twelve, Henry was taken by Herbert to the Battle of Edgecote Moor to watch him take on Warwick, but unfortunately Herbert was on the losing side and afterward he was beheaded. Not the ideal awkward stepfather/stepson day out.

After Tewkesbury, Henry and his uncle Jasper fled to the continent and spent the next few years in exile in Brittany, under the protection of Duke Francis. They were kept in the capital Vannes, in a palace with a tennis court and fine stables, but in reality they were prisoners of Francis and depended on his goodwill, and, in 1476, the Duke agreed to send him back to Edward; Henry feigned an attack of fever, and fled to sanctuary in a church to recover—by the time he came out, Francis had changed his mind. It was a lucky escape. Meanwhile, Margaret Beaufort had been brought into the Yorkist circle. When, in 1476, Richard of York was reburied in Fotheringhay, Margaret attended to Queen Elizabeth; then after the birth of Edward and Elizabeth’s daughter Bridget in 1480, Margaret carried the baby to the christening. Soon, there was talk of Henry Tudor marrying Edward IV’s daughter Elizabeth, and it was only the king’s premature death that ruined this.

After the Buckingham rebellion, Henry had another lucky escape when the Bretons—during one of Francis’s bouts of insanity—again agreed to hand him over to the English. Morton had heard about the plans, most likely through Stanley, and was able to warn Tudor before he was taken. Instead, Henry and Jasper both snuck off the road, changed their clothes in some forests, and escaped into French territory; when Francis regained himself, he welcomed Henry back and apologized with a gift.

Richard, meanwhile, met with disaster in April 1484 when his only son died, leaving both parents devastated, and perhaps Richard feeling it was divine retribution. By the end of 1484, Anne Neville was dying, too, and Richard’s behavior to his wife during her final weeks was of a new order of derangement; he spread a rumor that she had already died, knowing that the story would get back to her, so she would think he was trying to kill her. Richard hoped this would finish her off, for now that their son was dead he needed to be rid of her to make way for a new wife. He also refused to share her bed, although since she most likely had tuberculosis this was quite sensible.

To fight off the Tudor threat he considered taking a new wife, one bizarre option being Elizabeth of York. Sure she was his niece, and she looked just like her father, and he’d murdered both her brothers, but perhaps they could get over these stumbling blocks. Whether or not this was just black propaganda, Richard was forced to deny rumors he planned to marry Elizabeth, after Ratcliffe and Catesby warned the king that if this happened the North would rebel. He declared: ‘It is so that divers seditious and evil disposed persons (both in our city of London and elsewhere within this our realm) enforce themselves daily to sow seed of noise and disclaundre against our person, and against many of the lords and estates of our land, to abuse the multitude of our subjects and avert their mind from us,’ blaming it all on ‘seditious persons.’ (He liked long rambling letters, like his father.)

The king’s paranoia had now reached fever pitch. After the rebellion, Vergil said, Richard became ‘as yet more doubting than trusting in his own cause, was vexed, wrested and tormented in mind with fear.’ Thomas More said of Richard that ‘when he went abroad [outside], his eyes whirled about; his body privily fenced [secretly armed], his hand ever on his dagger, his countenance and manner like one already ready to strike again.’ He ‘rather slumbered than slept, troubled with fearful dreams.’

In June 1485, the king issued a proclamation against the threat of invasion, warning of ‘the disinheriting and destruction of all the noble and worshipful blood of this Realm forever’ if Tudor invaded. Vergil said he was ‘vexed, wrested, and tormented in mind with fear.’

Bosworth

In August 1485, Tudor finally landed with a small force in Wales, his ancestral home, where he recited Psalm 43: ‘Judge me, O Lord, and plead my cause.’ He had recruited ‘some three thousand of the most unruly men that could be found and enlisted in Normandy,’73 his army filled with ‘the worst sort,’ men ‘raised out of the refuse of the people,’ among them two thousand Frenchmen and Bretons recently released from prison, as well as one thousand Scots and four hundred Englishmen. When they arrived in Britain, the Welsh and French troops had to be separated to stop them fighting, and local commander Sir Rhys Ap Thomas detested his allies so much he wished ‘soundly to cudgel those French dogs.’

In the Powys town of Machynlleth, Tudor visited a bard, Dafydd Llwyd, who was also a noted clairvoyant. Asked whether Henry would be victorious, Dafydd was nervous about giving the wrong answer and so told him he’d give a reply the following day. Looking anxious in bed, Dafydd’s wife asked him what was wrong and told him the answer was obvious: tell him he would succeed, because if he was right he’d be rewarded, and ‘if not, you need not fear that he will return here to reproach you for being a false prophet.’74

Richard, hearing about the invasion, dictated a ranting letter on August 11 saying, ‘And forasmuch as our rebels and traitors accompanied with our ancient enemies of France and other strange nations departed out of the water of Seine the first day of this present month.’ He had stationed men across the West to intercept the force; however, after crossing the border, Henry’s army was met by Thomas Mitton, who was in charge of Cawes on the Welsh marches and had pledged to Richard that an army would pass ‘only over his belly.’ Henry asked him to lie on his back so he could keep to his oath: ‘upon this they entered and in passing through the said Mitton lay along the ground and his belly upward and so the said Earl stepped over him and saved his oath.’75

Meanwhile, the king’s demand for military support was widely ignored. The Duke of Norfolk, one of the three largest magnates left, sent a letter to John Paston that concluded: ‘Wherefore I pray you that you meet with me at Bury … and that you bring with you such company of tall men as you may goodly make at my cost and charge, besides that which you have promised the king; and, I pray you, ordain them jackets of my livery, and I shall content you at your meeting with me,’ signing off, rather strangely to modern ears, ‘Your lover, J. Norfolk.’

During the Buckingham rebellion, Norfolk had written to Paston asking him to bring ‘six tall fellows in harness,’ but he’d ignored him then—and did so once again. The Pastons had taken part in many of the battles in the war, including Towton and Barnet, but like most people they’d had enough. The same went for the House of Percy. The Earl of Northumberland turned up for the battle but just stood there doing nothing; after most of the Percy males had been killed fighting, it occurred to them it might be better to focus on things like landscape gardening.76 Compared to earlier battles, Bosworth was very small; some, because of their position or connections, were forced to fight but there was little enthusiasm, and with all civil wars, it brought painful personal divisions: Sir Gervase Clifton and John Byron were neighbors and friends in Nottinghamshire who fought on different sides of the battle, Clifton for Richard and Byron for Henry. They had an agreement that whoever survived would look after the other’s family (they both did, as it happened).

While King Richard was in Nottingham, he was told that Tudor had entered Shrewsbury and crossed the Severn. ‘Suffering no inconvenience, he began to burn with chagrin,’ a chronicler reported, and promised to kill any knight or squire ‘from the town of Lancaster to Shrewsbury, leaving none alive’ and promising to lay waste ‘from the holy-head to St. David’s Land, where now be towers and castles high’ reducing them to ‘parks and plain fields.’ This reference to Lancashire was probably because he suspected Thomas Stanley of treason. In fact, Stanley, who always got away with playing both sides, was now in a very difficult position; his son Lord Strange was arrested and confessed that he and his uncle William were working for Tudor, but Lord Strange insisted that his father was loyal; Stanley expressed surprise his son was imprisoned as he had never dealt ‘with traitory,’ although he was obviously lying.

The two armies were camped near Bosworth, just outside Leicester, on the site of a plague village, one of three thousand that had disappeared in the fourteenth century. There had been numerous defections in the previous days, with soldiers sneaking out of Richard’s camp to escape battle or to join Tudor. A poem was stuck on Norfolk’s tent the night before, warning that there would be a deal to uncrown the king:

Jockey of Norfolk, be not too bold

For Dickon thy master is bought and sold.

The day before battle, Richard’s crown was also stolen by a Scots Highlander called MacGregor, when he explained that—as his mother had prophesized—he would be hanged, he thought it may as well be for something memorable, the king was amused enough to pardon him. What his eventual fate was is unknown—probably hanging for something really humdrum and banal.

The king was eager for battle with Tudor, despite the odds beginning to turn against him, and may well have wished for his reckoning, one way or the other. Historians tend to make a great deal of the fact that Richard was plagued by bad dreams the night before battle, sometimes taken as proof of a bad conscience, though with four thousand soldiers marching his way, it’s hardly surprising.

In the morning, Richard addressed his Spanish servant: ‘Salazar, God forbid I yield one step. This day I will die as king or win.’ Richard then gave a speech before battle attacking the ‘unknown Welshman, whose father I never knew, nor him personally saw,’ who intended to ‘overcome and oppress’ the country with ‘a number of beggarly Bretons and fainthearted Frenchmen.’

Lord Stanley, meanwhile, had claimed to not be able to come because he had the highly contagious and fatal sweating sickness. The king threatened to execute his son, whom he now held as hostage, to which the lord replied: ‘Sire, I have other sons.’ Stanley said he’d join the king ‘at some suitable junction’ (i.e., when he was winning), but in the end Richard’s aides persuaded him not to execute Lord Strange, or they didn’t carry it out because they figured that Tudor might win. And so Stanley got away with it again.

Realizing that the Lancashire lord would betray him, Richard ordered Northumberland to place his troops between the Stanleys and Tudors. He then led his knights into the battle ‘all inflamed with ire’ and decided he would lead from the front, wearing his helmet with a royal, golden crown on top, even though his advisers had warned him it would mark him out. In a furious charge downhill, the king killed Henry’s banner-bearer with his lance, and knocked another man out of the saddle with a battle-ax. He may even have fought with Tudor who was almost killed; at one point Henry’s men ‘were now almost out of hope of victory.’

Stanley’s affinity was uncommitted until it was clear which side was winning, and only then did he join his stepson. Then at some point, King Richard was brought down and the back of his head was chopped off, most likely by a Welsh soldier. His last words weren’t ‘my kingdom for a horse,’ but ‘Treason! Treason!’—although Richard’s horse, White Surrey, was also cut down. Vergil wrote: ‘King Richard, alone, was killed fighting manfully in the thickest press of his enemies.’ He preferred to die rather than flee, he recorded, and shouted: ‘I will die king of England, I will not budge a foot.’ He was, in fact, the last king of England to die in battle, a record he probably won’t lose for some time.

Afterwards, his body was stripped naked, ‘nought being left about him so much as would cover a privy member,’ and the body was horribly mutilated. The chronicler of Crowland remarked dryly of the abuse of Richard’s corpse: ‘many other insults were heaped upon it … not exactly in accordance with the laws of humanity.’ Someone found the crown in the field, and Stanley, the luckiest man around, happened to be at the right place at the right time to crown Tudor as King Henry VII. Northumberland, having watched the thing without helping, slunk off home with his men.

Not everyone was happy about the result. The Recorder of York wrote in the city records: ‘This day was it known that King Richard, late mercifully ruling over us was piteously slain and murdered, to the great hevines of this citie.’ It wasn’t until October 22 that authorities in the town, the north’s largest, formally acknowledged Henry as king by dating their minutes by his reign.

Richard had spent his last night at the nearby White Boar, and after the battle the innkeeper hastily repainted it and renamed it the Blue Boar, which just happened to be the badge of the Earl of Oxford—the site is now a Travelodge, a chain of hotels.77 Henry marched south toward the capital with his French and Breton troops, where they were met by the city’s leading dignitaries—most of whom would be dead within weeks.

The Tudors

That year most people would have been less concerned about who was the king than with a ghastly new disease, the Sweating Sickness or ‘English Sweats,’ most likely brought by Henry’s soldiers. The Sweats killed two mayors of London and six aldermen in just one week; Mayor William Stokker lasted only four days in the role. The infected burned with uncontrollable temperatures and thirst so bad they ripped the clothes from their bodies even in the freezing cold. Then they died, usually.

Tudor’s triumph meant the end of the War of the Roses, although no one knew it at the time, or referred to it as such, or had a concept of the ‘Tudor era.’ Long into the reign of his monstrous son Henry VIII there was still the fear of further dynastic threats, which is why the two Henrys, father and son, killed so many of their relatives. As one of his first acts, Henry VII had twenty-eight people attained on high treason after passing a law stating that his reign had begun on the eve of Bosworth, which therefore made anyone who fought for Richard a traitor. There was widespread outrage at this trick; however, the new king showed clemency to the defeated, the exception being the hated Catesby who was executed. He left a moving letter to his wife with a passive-aggressive request to the Stanleys that they ‘help and pray for my soul for ye have not for my body as I trusted in you.’

After the necessary papal dispensation was received, Henry VII married Elizabeth of York in February 1486, and later that year a son, Arthur, was born, his name a tribute to the king’s Welsh ancestry. Henry and Elizabeth’s descendants still rule the country today.

The new regime meant great rewards for the supporters of Tudor. His uncle Jasper, who had spent most of his life in poverty, now became one of the richest men in England. He was made Duke of Bedford, Earl of Pembroke, and lieutenant of Calais, lord-lieutenant of Ireland, and earl marshal of England and went by the title ‘The high and mighty Prince Jasper, brother and uncle of kings.’

The loyal Lancastrian Earl of Oxford got back all his estates, but he was magnanimous to his enemies, including the son of his archenemy the Duke of Norfolk. Norfolk’s daughter-in-law Lady Surrey wrote that ‘I have found mine lord of Oxenford singular very good and kind lord to mine and lord and me … For him I dreaded most and yet, as hithero, I find him best.’ Oxford also took in a former comrade, Lord Beaumont, after he went mad.

Poor Jane Shore ended up a beggar, ‘nothing left but ravelled skin and hard bone,’ the men in her life all violently dead and her ‘unfriended and worn out of acquaintance.’ The Earl of Northumberland, despite his attempts to avoid conflict, was eventually beaten to death by a mob in North Yorkshire, still angry that he had deserted Richard III.

Margaret Beaufort, who had endured an incredibly tough life, now found herself a very powerful and rich queen mother. One of her first jobs was to take care of Clarence’s son, the hapless Edward, Earl of Warwick, who had the best claim to the throne but most likely had some sort of intellectual deficiency (the constant inbreeding probably didn’t help). Despite his feeble state, Warwick was always a problem, and when rumors broke out that Tudor had been defeated at Bosworth, there were protests in favor of him.

Beaufort retired to Collyweston in Northamptonshire where she became a sort of nun and took a vow of chastity, keeping an entire choir, with a dozen boys and four men at her own personal chapel. She confessed twice each week and ended up damaging her back from kneeling so much in church. Her confessor was one Dr. John Fisher, a future cardinal, ‘an awesomely austere figure’ who had a skull placed on the altar whenever he said Mass and on dining tables during food. He ended up being executed by her grandson Henry VIII in 1535.

Margaret Beaufort herself died after eating a cygnet, a baby swan, which is ironic as it was her son who made all swans the property of the crown, which is still a well-known and eccentric law today in England.78 In recognition of his mother’s ancestry, Henry VII adopted the Beaufort family symbol of the Portcullis—a medieval gate—as his own, which is how it came to be used to symbolize the House of Commons.

Although Bosworth looks like the finale in hindsight, the dynastic conflict dragged on for a while. Richard’s heir had been his sister’s son John de la Pole, Earl of Lincoln, and he remained a threat, so that Tudor, after Bosworth, spread a rumor he had been killed to stop any immediate uprising in his favor. There was actually yet another battle in 1487, the little known Swiss invasion of Britain which culminated at the Battle of Stoke Field; although forgotten about, Stoke was probably bigger than Bosworth.

It began with a pretender to the throne called Lambert Simnel who turned up in Dublin claiming to be Clarence’s son Warwick, even though the real Warwick was, if not well, then alive. Simnel was from a humble background, the son of an organ builder, but at the age of ten he was taken in by a priest called Richard Simons. The slightly dubious cleric noticed Simnel had a strong resemblance to the princes in the tower and so groomed him to talk like an aristocrat in order to pretend to be Richard. However, at some point Simons heard that Warwick had died in custody and so changed the story.

Despite this rather implausible tale and, as it turns out, Warwick still being alive, Simnel was accepted by a number of aristocrats. He turned up in Dublin, where the leading nobleman in Ireland, the Earl of Kildare, got behind him and at Christ Church Cathedral he became the only English ‘king’ crowned in Ireland as Edward VI. He was also supported by John de la Pole, who planned to simultaneously invade and also claimed to have helped this ‘Warwick’ escape from the Tower. Presumably, he hoped to become king himself.

Henry, always paranoid, could never trust anyone, although quite sensibly; when the invasion came he had the Marquess of Dorset placed in custody and, when he complained, the king explained that if he were a true friend he wouldn’t mind this precautionary measure. The king also distrusted Dorset’s mother, his own mother-in-law Elizabeth Woodville, and now confiscated her widow’s income and sent her to live with nuns in Bermondsey for the rest of her life.

At Stoke Field in Nottinghamshire, the mixed Swiss, German, and Irish army was defeated by Henry’s troops; some four thousand invaders died in the battle, as did the Earl of Lincoln. Simnel was pardoned, and he ended up working as a cook in the royal household, living another thirty-five years. There was later a plot in favor of Warwick hatched by the monks of Abingdon in 1489; townsmen hanged an abbot, but a conspiring cleric, Abbot Sant, escaped and was pardoned four years later, on condition that he say a Mass daily for the king, a sort of joke on Henry’s part. Then, in 1495, yet another pretender turned up with an army, this one even more improbable, a Belgian called Perkin Warbeck or Pierrequin Werbecque. The son of a boatman, Perkin had arrived in Ireland in 1491 and while walking through Cork was dressed in his master’s clothes when someone pointed out that he resembled one of the princes in the tower (one theory about all these young men looking like the princes is that they might have been Edward’s illegitimate sons). He was taught English and told to pretend to be Richard of York.

Warbeck invaded twice and was put in the Tower, but after trying to escape in 1499, he and the hapless Warwick were both executed. Poor Clarence’s son was killed because Ferdinand of Aragon told Henry his son could not marry his daughter Catherine because the dynasty was insecure while there were Plantagenets still around. Afterward, Henry Tudor’s son did get to marry Catherine of Aragon, and they lived happily ever after. Sort of.

The Stanley family luck also ran out. Sir William Stanley, who had helped put Tudor on the throne, wasn’t given titles after 1485, partly because the king felt that he had been slow in helping him; then his stance during the 1495 rebellion was ambiguous enough to get him executed.

Nineteenth-century constitutional expert Lord Mersey estimated that between 1400 and 1485 some four kings, twelve princes of the blood, and twelve close relatives were killed in battle, murder, or execution. The only Plantagenets in the male line to have survived the era are the Beauforts, descendants of John of Gaunt.79 Among the later achievements of the family, the eighth duke of Beaufort popularized the Indian sport ‘battledore and shuttlecock,’ which became known after his stately home, Badminton House in Gloucestershire.

There were still plenty of people with royal blood left to kill, however. Lincoln’s brother Edmund was executed in 1515. Another, Richard de la Pole, was killed at the Battle of Pavia in 1525. Henry, Marquess of Exeter, son of Edward IV’s daughter Catherine, was sent to the block in 1538. Henry, Lord Stafford, was put to death in 1521. Clarence’s daughter Margaret, Countess of Salisbury, was executed in 1541 by Henry VIII, three years after her son Henry de la Pole. The sixty-eight-year-old ran away and screamed around Tower Green until the guards pulled her down and took her head off. Margaret was executed because she had refused to accept her cousin breaking with the pope, the Reformation now giving the royal family a different reason to kill each other.

By then, Henry VIII had dissolved the monasteries, and the medieval period had truly given way to the early modern. Countless old religious institutions were left ruined, among them Greyfriars in Leicester, which was destroyed and the graves lost—among them that of Richard III. And yet, rather miraculously, the king’s remains were discovered in 2012, under a car park, identified via the mitochondrial DNA of a male descendant from a direct female line of the king’s sister, Anne, Duchess of Exeter. The king was finally buried in 2015 in a solemn ceremony in Leicester cathedral, and the following year Leicester City won the Premier League title, having had odds of over 5000/1, the biggest upset in English and possibly European soccer history. Some people attributed it to Richard III as a joke, the mayor of Leicester saying the city was being repaid for burying him.80 (In fact he’d wanted to be buried at York.)

The end of the medieval era came with the fall of Constantinople in 1453, which led to an influx of Greek scholars into western Europe. Thirty years earlier, the Portuguese King Henry the Navigator, descended from Gaunt, had explored West Africa, the start of that country’s incredible adventurers around the world, which further accelerated after the Ottoman Turks had cut off the East. In 1486, the Portuguese rounded Cape Horn, and just seven years after Bosworth this new age was ushered in when an explorer working for Spain set foot in the Americas. The modern world had begun. And so, for English history, Bosworth marks a convenient end to the medieval period, for although life went on for most people as before, the time of warring aristocrats was over. The future now belonged not to knights or barons or vengeful dukes, but to lawyers. Which was a good thing … sort of.