AFTERMATH – THE TRAGEDY SHAKESPEARE MIGHT HAVE WRITTEN
It can take only moments for a decisive change to occur. In its aftermath, for those who witnessed the fighting, the coronation ceremony must have seemed a lifetime away. The King’s supporters could barely have grasped the scale of the calamity which had overtaken them. Everything they believed in lay in ruins. A mile or so north of Atherstone, Richard’s war camp was being systematically plundered by Tudor’s soldiers. The most valuable artefacts were the coronation crown and other regalia – the rich treasure noted by contemporaries – that had provided the backdrop to the morning’s ceremony. They had been loaded into the wagons of the royal baggage train. Had Richard gained the victory, they would have represented the fresh beginning of his rule. Now they were securely guarded by Henry’s captains. They would be escorted back to the capital and put to another use, the installing of a Tudor dynasty. Choice items were watched over, reserved for Henry and his principal allies. The rank-and-file had the run of the rest. London markets would soon be flooded with silverware as men cashed in on their booty.
Spoils of war needed to be divided carefully. A first debt of gratitude was paid to Sir William Stanley, whose intervention, however belated, had saved the day. Sir William was offered the pick of Richard’s possessions. The best of these was a set of hangings taken from the King’s tent. The tapestries formed a magnificent battle trophy and were to be displayed prominently in one of the chief Stanley residences, where visitors were proudly told how the whole suite had been taken from Richard III’s tent at Bosworth Field.1
Other goods were shared out. Richard’s book of hours, his personal prayer book, went to Henry’s mother, Margaret Beaufort. One object the new Tudor monarch chose to keep for himself was the gold circlet crown worn by Richard into battle. It symbolised Henry’s triumph but also the fragility of that triumph, how close Richard had come to killing him. Tradition later had it that it was recovered from under a thorn bush, and the motif of the crown and thorn bush was used in the lavish decoration of Henry VII’s chapel at Westminster Abbey. Tudor believed it a token of a God-given victory. We might see it as a reminder of how fortunate he was.
A special gift was made to the commander of Henry’s French mercenaries, Philibert de Chandée. The King was wary of creating aristocratic titles to reward his subjects, but for Chandée, perhaps not surprisingly, he made an exception. As a mark of gratitude he elevated him to the earldom of Bath. The French account of the battle, written the day after Bosworth, had said with a soldier’s realism that the pikemen’s dash to protect Henry had been only a part of the reason for victory. But it was a part the Tudor King recalled with unstinting thanks. The French regime may have done more to damage Henry’s cause than to help it. But the mercenaries he had been able to gather at the eleventh hour, however fortuitously, had been vital to his success.
Thomas Howard, Earl of Surrey (later 2nd Duke of Norfolk) (d.1524). Engraving of a lost brass formerly at Lambeth.
Henry VII had no particular reason to be generous to the defeated army of his opponent. Fighting seems to have stopped shortly after the death of Richard. His vanguard had broken and its commander, the Duke of Norfolk, was killed. A final, brief resistance was offered by his son, the Earl of Surrey. The rearguard under the Earl of Northumberland was never deployed and men simply walked away. But evidence for a betrayal of Richard, with his men doing a deal to support Tudor, or of their having no will to fight for him, is lacking. Northumberland and Surrey were arrested by Henry and placed in the security of the Tower of London. Some of Richard’s closest followers escaped the desperate rout by the standards and went into opposition in the wilds of Lancashire. Other magnates were of uncertain loyalty. This was far from being a welcome party for the new Tudor monarch.
News of Henry’s victory was greeted with shocked disbelief in some parts of the country. The citizens of York clearly expected Richard to win and were incredulous when reports reached them to the contrary. They sent a special messenger to the battlefield to establish if these were true. The confirmation of Richard’s death led to an unprecedented outpouring of grief. Some of his supporters were reduced to a state of emotional stupor. Robert Stillington, Bishop of Bath and Wells, one of the architects of Richard’s accession, staggered into York in such distress that people feared for his sanity. He was seen walking about as if in a trance, ‘sore crazed by reason of his trouble and caring’. Henry’s allies shared in the general astonishment. Their small army had unexpectedly triumphed against the many. One later recalled Tudor’s achievement:‘having but a few, he vanquished him that had three men for one’. This was a result against all the odds.2
As it was so hard to comprehend the battle’s outcome, the only explanation some could find was one of treachery. Sir William Stanley’s intervention could rightly be seen as a betrayal of Richard III by that powerful, self-interested family. The last will of one of Richard’s leading supporters, hurriedly drawn up before his execution on 25 August, three days after the battle, spoke bitterly of the breach of trust by the Stanleys, and this was likely to have been a commonly held view. As one of the Harringtons later put it, the Stanleys had supported Tudor because of the bitter feud between the two families, and the ‘old malice and grudge’ that they had. But this was hardly a battle-turning surprise, as Sir William had drawn up his forces separately and Richard already suspected he would defect to the enemy, should a favourable opportunity arise. Instead, there was speculation of treachery within the ranks of Richard’s own army. One of the wildest of these accusations was a betrayal of the King by the Duke of Norfolk, the commander of his vanguard. There is nothing to substantiate this charge. Norfolk died in battle fighting loyally for his sovereign. Some sort of rationale was needed to make sense of it all.
It is with the Earl of Northumberland, the commander of Richard’s rearguard, that the strongest suspicion of betrayal lies. In 1489, four years after the battle, the Earl was murdered by an angry mob in a protest against taxation. It was said that his own retinue simply looked on and did nothing to help him. They felt that as Northumberland had deserted Richard at Bosworth he deserved his comeuppance. The rumour seems to be corroborated by a comment of the Crowland chronicler, that in the Earl’s section of the battlefield ‘no blows were given or received’.This apparently shows Northumberland’s treachery: he is refusing to engage with the enemy. But the remark needs to be placed in its proper context. The chronicler was describing the deployment of Tudor’s army as it engaged with its opponents, and noted a consequence of this, that Northumberland’s formation was left hanging in air, with no force to oppose it. We know Henry’s commanders undertook a manoeuvre enabling them to attack Richard’s army on its flank, so such a scenario is not inherently implausible. If so, it was the developing shape of the battle that precluded Northumberland’s involvement. This would better explain Henry VII’s decision to imprison the Earl in the Tower for several months once victory had been gained. Henry’s action shows him mistrustful of Northumberland. He clearly did not see him as a battle-winning ally.
Soon another story began to circulate, that Richard had been ‘piteously slain and murdered’, that is, disarmed and then killed in cold blood. Already the idea of martyrdom was developing. The use of the word ‘pity’ presaged the development of a posthumous encomium, with Richard portrayed as a redeemer figure. It could be argued that these were merely the sentiments of his partisans. But it is remarkable that such pragmatic politicians chose to put these views to Henry VII himself. They were obviously sincere and deeply felt. Real concern existed over the disparagement of Richard’s corpse and the lack of a proper burial. Popular rumour had it that he had been ‘buried in a ditch like a dog’.This was not the way a victor was expected to behave, and it seemed a disturbing echo of the treatment meted out to Richard’s father after Wakefield.
Henry’s treatment of his dead rival indeed reveals a man not at ease with kingly office. It was traditional to display the body of a defeated opponent so that the fact of his death would become widely known and accepted. But Henry went far further, permitting the corpse to be stripped and mutilated and slung on the back of a horse as he and his entourage proceeded to Leicester. There the body was exposed in this dreadful state for a number of days. This desecration was unseemly and shocking even by the standards of the time. Such a need to humiliate an already vanquished opponent does not sit easily with Tudor’s image as redeemer and reconciler of the nation. Shortly afterwards Richard was buried hastily at the Franciscan house of the Grey Friars, Leicester, and ten years later a simple tomb was erected.
If a king was killed in the course of dynastic change, there were important precedents for an honourable treatment of his remains by those who supplanted him. Richard II was reburied in the more dignified and appropriate surrounds of Westminster Abbey by Henry V, the son of the man who overthrew him. The remains of Henry VI were transferred from Chertsey to Windsor by Richard III himself. But Richard, buried in a place manifestly lacking in royal dignity, was left there, disregarded by both Henry VII and his son Henry VIII. In contrast to their predecessors, the Tudors seemed unable to acknowledge that Richard III had ever been ruler of England and could not be reconciled to the fact of his brief reign. In an age of respect and reverence for the dead, when the rituals of burial and prayer for the soul were vitally important, the contempt meted out here is marked. It was as if they could not make their peace with the legacy of this Yorkist King. At the dissolution of the monasteries Richard’s body disappeared. No-one knows its final resting place.
That Henry VII had won his victory with a largely foreign army was disturbing to contemporaries and was to cause trouble for him in the months ahead. It was not only Richard III who castigated Tudor for the composition of this force. Others too feared the Bretons, Frenchmen and Scots whose presence gave his arrival the appearance of a foreign conquest. These concerns were not diminished after the battle of Bosworth. French mercenaries saving the day for Henry was hardly auspicious and this event was now most unfortunately compounded. The Tudor King’s entry into the capital late in August 1485 was followed less than a month later by the vicious outbreak of a disease never before seen in England. This was the sweating sickness, an horrific epidemic which struck with far greater rapidity than the recurrent plague that blighted fifteenth-century life. It claimed its victims from all walks of society, rich and poor, leading city dignitaries as well as ordinary inhabitants.
People were not slow to draw the obvious conclusion. The disease had only been in England since the coming of Tudor and his army and the presence of so many foreigners made them the likely carriers. The intimidating appearance of these mercenaries, ‘the worst rabble that could be found’, as Philippe de Commynes said nervously, was only too conspicuous. If the invaders were likely carriers, the disease itself might be divine punishment or an ill-omen after what had happened on the battlefield. The manner of Henry’s military success, far from raising the hopes of the nation, was now tapping its darkest fears.
The connection between the lodging of Tudor’s army in London and the outbreak of the sweat was uncomfortably close and soon became inextricably linked in people’s minds. One observer used a telling phrase to describe the onset of the sickness, that it ‘first unfurled its banners’ in the city of London on 19 September 1485, that is three weeks after the arrival of Henry’s soldiers. To liken the disease to a menacing army bivouacked in the capital was an allusion even the most stupid citizen would have readily grasped.
In the city chronicles the two events are ominously juxtaposed. One reads of Henry’s troops entering the capital. One then hears of a terrible illness which is decimating its inhabitants. The details speak for themselves. Shortly after Tudor’s arrival the Mayor of London dies of a ghastly new disease. A replacement is chosen but he also dies within a few days. The aldermen are unable to meet to find another successor because five of them are suddenly struck down. This is hardly a blossoming of civic pride.
One particular manuscript brings out the atmosphere of fear and uncertainty in London in the months following Henry VII’s victory. It is a treatise on the sweating sickness compiled by a French doctor, Thomas Forestier, who dedicated this work to the Tudor King.3 Forestier had formerly been employed as a physician by Richard III and was anxiously seeking a new patron. He seems to have written his tract in October 1485, when the epidemic was at its height, and provides a vivid description of the manifestation of the disease. The drastic suddenness of its onset was particularly frightening. Here Forestier’s account has a terrible immediacy as he gives examples of the fate of those he has personally seen or attended on. Gentlemen and women, priests, merchants and fellow physicians are all victims of the onslaught. Forestier mentions seeing a young man walking in the street who suddenly collapsed and was taken ill. He died the same day. Another, riding to the city gate, fell from his horse in sudden rush of fever. He too died within hours. The symptoms were horrible: a fierce sweating and foul body odour, irritation of the skin and constant thirst, and black spots covering the victim. Forestier himself had been called in to attend two young women of high rank. They were slipping away in agonising pain, their bodies disfigured by an awful red and yellow inflammation.
Forestier recognised the illness was of a type never seen before and emphasised this again and again. He warned against false physicians who pretended to know the disease and to have treated it before. But how then was one to treat it? Forestier’s own treatise drew on well-established plague remedies. He gave recipes for pills and syrups, warned of the vapours that infected places close to stagnant water and offered advice on diet and other precautions.
This was an astute appeal to the Tudor King. As Forestier made clear, a venomous sickness was now endangering the realm, leaving its monarch ‘vexed and troubled’ and the populace terrified. The physician recognised Henry’s desperate need to contain the outbreak and his urgent wish to find out more about the disease. As he gathered his material, he knew the King had already harnessed the printing press to bring out three editions of a plague treatise. Here was an opportunity to become court physician for the new ruling dynasty.
A number of predictions and prophecies linking Henry’s victory at Bosworth to misfortune were already circulating in the capital, and the insecure new regime had banned all such publications. These included tracts and pamphlets on the sweat. Forestier was taking a considerable risk. As he acknowledged in his conclusion, he was now drafting his treatise against royal wishes. Making a link between a recent battle and possible cause of infection may have been standard in earlier plague tracts, but these were sensitive times. Forestier was on particularly shaky ground in including astrological predictions on the future course of the disease. He hoped to exempt himself from the prohibition by a postcript addressed to Henry himself. The physician stressed that his motives were honourable. If at fault, he was willing to submit to the correction of ‘wise men’.
The tactic backfired badly. Forestier was shut up in the Tower with all his medical books and equipment, and only re-emerged three years later. The chastened and disillusioned doctor returned to his native Normandy. There he brought out a more leisured and considered printed edition of this text. His story tells us of the exceptional nervousness of Henry VII at the beginning of his reign. The drastic appearance of a disease that killed thousands seemed to many the awful consequence of the way Tudor had succeeded at Bosworth. Rather than being an occasion of joyous celebration, his victory was instead seen as a terrible harbinger of misfortune.
There was no sign of reconciliation in Henry VII’s treatment of the solely English army that had opposed him. His behaviour here was particularly distasteful. He used the devious ploy of dating his reign from 21 August 1485, that is the day before the battle, to allow him to charge all those who gathered in Richard’s army with treason against his person. This measure could be taken against any man who had obeyed a royal summons from his anointed, reigning king. Tudor’s rancour towards his rival’s army was evident.
The description of the soldiers ranged against Henry at Bosworth is especially revealing to us. This was made in the battle’s immediate aftermath, and contradicts the later Tudor view of Richard as a hated tyrant, who commanded no loyalty. We hear of a great force, well-armed, with banners unfurled, prepared and ready to wage ‘mighty battle’. There is no reference to a half-hearted body of men reluctantly dragging their feet on the road from Leicester, looking to desert at the first opportunity or craftily awaiting a chance to defect to the other side. In the parliament that assembled in November 1485 the King attainted for treason no fewer that thirty persons who had been in Richard’s army, including five peers and eight knights. This reserved the enticing possibility of proceeding against others at a later date.
It was a harsh action that was justifiably unpopular. It provoked considerable opposition from a parliament that would naturally wish to comply with a new king’s decree. A diarist of the sessions in the House of Commons noted it was the subject of heated, angry debate. A contemporary letter of the Yorkshire Plumpton family put the situation bluntly. Many gentlemen were opposed to it, but as it was the King’s strong wish it was pushed through. As the Crowland chronicler wryly remarked, what would happen when a future king of England summoned an army to attend him – would his subjects, instead of responding loyally and wholeheartedly, calculate that if their sovereign lost they were likely to forfeit lands, goods and possessions, and stay at home?4 Had Richard’s force betrayed its master, Henry’s reaction to it would surely have been very different – he is very likely to have rewarded such behaviour. His action was hostile and unfair, and reveals a King deeply distrustful of the army he had fought against.
It is intriguing to consider how Henry himself may have viewed his remarkable victory. The official line is straight-forward. Bosworth was the favourable judgement of God on Tudor’s claim, the vindication of a trial by combat. Subsequent pictures of Richard depicted him with a broken sword, showing through his defeat in battle that he had no right to rule. But private reflection was more nuanced. Entries in the books of hours, the prayer books of those closely connected with the Tudor dynasty, note the date of Henry’s appearance at Milford Haven, alongside that of his victory at Bosworth, as the miraculous working of providence. But Henry’s surprised relief is most clearly expressed by his gratitude to an obscure Breton saint: St Armel now enjoyed a never-to-be-repeated period of veneration at the English court.
According to legend Armel was the founder of a sixth-century Breton monastery, whose local fame included the subduing of a dragon that had terrorised the region. Impressively, Armel bound it to his stole, his vestment of office, before commanding it to drown itself in a nearby river. He is generally represented in the garb of both priest and soldier, with a submissive dragon crouching beneath him. This little-known cult, centred around the relics of a saint preserved at the small church of Ploermel in southern Brittany, came to Tudor’s notice during his long exile. His uncle Jasper was held for a time at the castle of Josselin, less than five miles from Ploermel, and tradition has it that both men prayed to the saint at a time of particular crisis. In November 1483 they had set sail from Brittany to support rebellion against Richard III. Their fleet was caught in a terrible storm and Henry’s own boat was tossed all night in the gale before it managed to reach the English coast. Tudor’s sea voyages did not always go according to plan, but at least he had been saved from shipwreck, and he gave Armel full credit for this. The saint’s support for his cause continued, and Henry prayed to him on the road to Bosworth. He subsequently ascribed his victory to Armel’s intercession.
This gives us an intimate glimpse of the Tudor King. The saint’s obscurity made him an unusual choice, unless he held real personal significance. Henry’s encouragement led to Armel’s name and picture being put in the prayer books and memorials of those linked to the Tudor regime. He had never appeared in England before, and his popularity did not last longer than Henry VII’s own reign. But in a brief devotional flowering, the saint is celebrated in Henry’s chapel at Westminster Abbey with two separate statues. A bearded man is shown with a dragon at his feet, secured by a stole in his hand, which is fastened in a knot around the dragon’s neck. A similar representation is found in the Canterbury memorial of the churchman most closely associated with Tudor, John Morton, who supported him during his exile and afterwards became his archbishop.
Armel’s link with Bosworth is substantiated by the saint’s only known appearance in England in stained glass – in an early sixteenth-century window at Merevale Abbey. He appears in martial array, with his cape open in front, showing a complete suit of armour. In his right hand is a long bag, with a hapless dragon peering from a slit-like opening. Particular care is taken depicting his military equipment. Armel wears a breast-plate, with chain mail beneath. The legs and feet are also protected by metal plate. His presence here in full armour is striking. It reinforces the strong link between Merevale Abbey and the suggested battle site nearby.5 The erection of this glass memorial is most likely a result of Henry VII’s visit to the abbey in September 1503. The Tudor monarch would have gratefully remembered the battle’s outcome. The night before Bosworth Henry and his soldiers had stayed at Merevale. Tudor’s devotional pleas, which must have been considerable, would have been offered here.
It is fascinating that Henry sought help before Bosworth from a saint who had earlier saved him from shipwreck. Once again, he was in mortal danger and very much at the mercy of events. His efforts on 21 August to persuade the Stanleys to join his army had failed and he was forced to line up for battle with far fewer men than he had hoped for. He must have felt as buffeted as he had by the storm he endured off the coast of Brittany. When disaster at sea appeared inevitable, an incredible reprieve had been granted him. There could be no better description of Henry’s experience at the battle of Bosworth than another miraculous rescue from likely catastrophe.
The impact of Bosworth was strong and lasting. One profound effect was the bond of honour between the Tudor King and those who had fought for his cause. Henry VII responded positively to all appeals from the coterie of supporters in 1485, and his deep gratitude remained until his death in 1509. By then one might have expected all such claims on the King’s patronage to have been made. But as he drew up his last will, Henry set aside funds for any man who had risked his life for him at Bosworth. The King cared so much that he took steps to ensure no possible suitor could ever go empty-handed. To have fought under Tudor’s banner was to be bound by an enduring tie of honour and trust. Henry well knew the extreme danger his men had faced.6
The second and even more lasting consequence, in the minds of those present on Tudor’s side, was shock and fear at how narrowly a catastrophe had been averted, and an abiding respect for the tactic that had saved the day. It must have been clear that without the pikemen and their protective formation Tudor and his entourage would have been annihilated, and even with their presence it had been a close-run thing. This formed a persisting battle memory, which lasted even into the reign of Henry’s son. In 1513, Henry VIII wished to fight the French at the so-called battle of the Spurs. He was dissuaded from joining combat with his mounted horsemen by the senior military experts in his army. It is very likely that at least some of these were veterans of Bosworth, twenty-eight years previously, and would have seen at first hand how an endeavour such as this could lead to disaster. Their advice to the young Henry VIII is revealing. His council of war placed the cavalry at the front and kept the King a mile back, surrounded by his bodyguard, and by a specially picked mercenary force of German pikemen.7 This was leadership from behind, and in making this deployment both the trauma and the lessons of Bosworth were still being recalled.
The broader issue about which the battle was fought was legitimacy, and particularly the legitimacy of the rival claimants as rightful successors of the house of York. This is why the symbol of the crown is so important, both in Richard’s ritual before the battle, and the emphasis placed on its retrieval for Tudor after it. Henry VII’s marriage to Elizabeth of York took place in January 1486, but his position as King remained vulnerable. Rumours persisted that the younger of the princes in the Tower had escaped, a part played by the pretender Perkin Warbeck, and plotting on his behalf involved no less a person than Sir William Stanley, who was executed for treason less than ten years after intervening for Tudor at Bosworth. The Yorkist succession designated by Richard III, through the de la Pole family, remained a thorn in the side of both Henry VII and Henry VIII. John de la Pole, Earl of Lincoln, made heir by Richard in 1484, died fighting against Henry VII at the battle of Stoke, two years after Bosworth. And even forty years later, the death of his exiled youngest brother Richard, the ‘White Rose’ who on a number of occasions had threatened to lead a foreign invasion against the Tudors, was greeted with relief and celebration by Henry VIII and his court.
One might imagine that once a reign was thoroughly established, its subjects readily became accustomed to and accepting of its presence. People do become habituated, so it is interesting to consider a pedigree roll drawn up for the de la Poles early in the Tudor period, which tells a somewhat different story.8 It shows the problems the new dynasty was still experiencing in its attempt to portray itself as rightful Yorkist successor, through the marriage of Henry VII to Elizabeth of York. The pedigree is dominated by a fine portrait roundel of Richard III in the centre of the roll. The children of Edward IV are dealt with in a perfunctory fashion. No title is accorded to Edward V, the elder of the princes in the Tower, who is said simply to have ‘died without heirs in his youth’. The accession of Henry VII receives scant respect, being accommodated through the addition of a thick black line in the right hand margin. It seems peripheral to the roll’s content, and is the occasion of a slighting remark about Henry’s grandfather, Owen Tudor. The purpose of the pedigree is clearly to extol the legitimate rule of Richard III. His coronation is described and his subsequent naming of John de la Pole, Earl of Lincoln, as his heir apparent. It is emphasised that this has been done with the consent of the nobility of the land. The male de la Pole offspring cluster round Richard’s portrait and their career details are sobering. By the early 1500s one had been killed in battle opposing Tudor and two more were locked up in the Tower of London. The ambitions of this family warn us that the Tudors still had plenty of work to do to gain full acceptance of their dynasty and that the legacy of Richard III was troubling for them.
At the heart of that legacy was the charge that Edward IV was a bastard and it was this that the Tudors were most uncomfortable about. Their legitimacy as Yorkist successors rested on the status of Elizabeth of York as Queen. A rather different status for her, as the daughter of a bastard son of an archer, was too troubling to contemplate. The Titulus Regius of 1484, which referred to Richard as true heir of his father, was suppressed by Henry VII and all copies destroyed. But the evidence of Richard’s physical resemblance to his father, in marked contrast his brother Edward, was disturbing and could never quite be overcome. This might account for the mutilation of Richard’s body after his death, as an impulse to eradicate this unsettling likeness. The subsequent and increasingly vicious distortion of both Richard’s character and physical appearance may also have at its root the fear of this resemblance and everything it signified.
The vexed questions of resemblance arose in a different guise upon the accession of Henry VIII, for he bore an uncanny likeness to his maternal grandfather, Edward IV. Cecily had died in pious seclusion in 1495. An attempt was made to distance her from the allegation of bastardy, which she had instigated, by suggesting that her wicked son Richard had deliberately slandered her. Shortly after this, the insinuation was also made that Richard had plotted the murder of his brother Clarence. Although this charge grew into an accepted orthodoxy and was used to great effect by Shakespeare, this was in fact the first time that any such suggestion had been made. By now a sustained and eventually highly successful effort was being made to distance Richard from the machinations of the house of York and to present him as a dangerous loner. But the ghost of Edward IV’s legitimacy was not so easily laid to rest.
Later in the reign of Henry VIII, in 1535, a conversation took place between the Imperial ambassador Chapuys and Henry’s servant Thomas Cromwell. Chapuys pointedly asked whether at the time of Richard III’s accession his mother Cecily had in fact made a statement that her son Edward was a bastard. Cromwell was forced to confirm that this was true, but as we have heard, then blamed the evil Richard for intimidating his mother into giving evidence. By this time the blackening of Richard’s name was proceeding apace. But in any case, Chapuys may have had a different agenda, to mischievously rake up an issue that still unsettled England’s ruling house. For Henry VIII’s reckless wooing of Anne Boleyn, his present Queen, might seem to some as politically irresponsible as Edward IV’s pursuit of Elizabeth Woodville. Such lustful misjudgement would revive memories of another, who had behaved similarly – the story of Cecily’s adulterous liaison with the archer. It is thought-provoking to speculate that Cecily’s impetuous fling caused not only a renewal of civil war, followed by the bloodshed of Richard III’s seizure of the throne, but the English Reformation as well!
We now have a more complex picture than the neat certainties of 1485, a turning-point in history. Shakespeare was a prisoner of a Tudor tradition with its own axe to grind. It was only later, in the reign of James I, that the Titulus Regius was rediscovered and it was learned through the researches of the antiquary John Stow that Richard was not actually physically deformed. Shakespeare’s persuasive characterisation of Richard and his nemesis at Bosworth represented a cumulative historical process still influential today. Yet it might be a very different story, and a very different play, if we allow for Richard’s sense of legitimacy and the family dynamic that prompted it – rooted in the scandalous revelation that Edward IV was a bastard.
The Japanese director Akira Kurosawa filmed a version of Shakespeare’s Macbeth, Throne of Blood, in the atmospheric mist of Mount Fuji. There are only three scenes shot in sunlight. In each Macbeth has the opportunity to make a different choice, to turn from the path of destruction. Shakespeare, who drew on an oral tradition as well as the Tudor histories, on three occasions also hints at a more complex Richard III. In one Richard vehemently curses the murder of his father and brother at Wakefield. In another he attributes the bastardy of his brother Edward IV to an adulterous affair conducted while his father was on military campaign. And in a third he searches heroically for Tudor at Bosworth, encountering instead doubles disguised as Henry. Not only does this admit to Richard’s undoubted bravery, but it also alludes to the possible cowardice of his challenger, concealing himself amongst his followers.
Here, instead of the evil loner, we glimpse a Richard who could be the flawed, but ultimately tragic hero of the story Shakespeare might have written. It is a more untidy and unsettling reality than the caricature with which we are familiar. The tragic heroism of Richard’s last battle sheds a very different light upon a courageous, determined and energetic man caught up in a family drama and shadowed by its legacy and by what it had required of him. Capable of acts of terrifying ruthlessness in pursuit of this cause, yet also of a troubled reflection and repentance, Richard’s ritual of preparation for Bosworth drew together these elements of light and darkness. He sought to find in the battle both an act of redemption and the symbol of a new beginning. It is ironic and terrible that in endeavouring to honour the legacy of his father, he found himself in a bloody re-enactment of that father’s fate.