More than ten years have passed since the first edition of this book, and in the interval our understanding of Bosworth and the king who fought and died there has moved forward substantially. In the last few years significant archaeological discoveries have taken place. Major finds of artillery shot and other remains – including a boar badge, the personal emblem of Richard III, probably worn by one of his supporters in the last fateful cavalry charge against his opponent – give us a clearer idea of the battle’s location and, movingly, where the king may have met his end. And the remarkable discovery of Richard’s remains under a car park in Leicester show the terrible injuries he sustained in that clash’s bloody denouement.
History is about tangibility – and we now have a far greater connection to Richard III and Bosworth. When I wrote the book, in 2002, Richard’s battle position was still a matter of debate. Now battlefield archaeology has placed the king further east than I originally suggested, blocking the Roman road to Leicester a mile and a half to the west of Dadlington, although Henry Tudor and his army almost certainly marched to meet him from the abbey of Merevale, as I proposed. Our grasp of this fateful clash has progressed, and when Richard’s remains were dramatically unearthed in the summer of 2012 we saw the wounds that ended his life: the king’s head was shaved by a glancing blow from a sword and the back of his skull cleaved off by a halberd – a two-handed pole weapon, consisting of an axe blade tipped in a spike.
However, other aspects of the battle remain more elusive. While the crucial importance of the French mercenaries in Henry Tudor’s army is clear, the tactical arrangement that made them so effective is less so. In 2002 I suggested that some of these troops were deployed in a pike formation to protect Tudor from Richard’s cavalry charge. The evidence here is indirect – but nevertheless compelling. Tudor’s French soldiers had been largely recruited from a disbanded war camp at Pont-de-l’Arche in eastern Normandy. These troops had been drilled and trained in pike weaponry, and by 1484 their elite group, the francs-archers, had been converted to this form of deployment. I still think it likely that this formation was used against Richard at Bosworth, in the clash of vanguards, and also to protect Tudor when the king’s cavalry charge came so close to killing his opponent and winning the battle.
I also argued that Richard enacted a crown-wearing ceremony before his army at Bosworth, for such a ceremony seems to be referred to, albeit obliquely, in some of the earliest sources. The Croyland Chronicle commented that ‘a most precious crown’ was displayed by the king, and a Spanish newsletter – composed after the battle by Diego de Valera – confirmed this, describing it as the ‘crown royal’ and estimating it of considerable worth. Such a valuable object could not be the circlet crown, welded to the helmet that Richard wore into battle; rather, some form of pre-battle ritual appears to have been recorded and remembered.
And if Richard was choosing to perform a crown-wearing ceremony in front of his soldiers, he was thereby making clear, in his eyes at least, the legitimacy of his right to rule. A sense of legitimacy, how it arose, and its repercussions on Richard and those around him, formed the cornerstone of my book – and it remains my belief that the king and many of his supporters genuinely believed in the rightfulness of his claim to the crown of England. In 2002 I considered whether this was derived from Richard’s belief that his brother, Edward IV, might have been illegitimate. In my 2013 book with Philippa Langley, The King’s Grave: The Search for Richard III, I put greater emphasis on the revelation of the pre-contract that invalidated the marriage of Edward and Elizabeth Woodville, his queen. Interested readers are invited to consider both these lines of interpretation.
When I wrote Bosworth 1485 I deliberately chose to break away from later Tudor accounts of the battle that portrayed Richard as a nervous and fearful leader, undermined by betrayal, and always reacting to events beyond his control. Instead, I showed him as a confident and aggressive commander, fully believing in his ability to win this vital clash of arms and determined to seek out and kill his challenger. Ten years ago such a depiction was novel; now it is often followed in works on the battle.
Bosworth remains a poorly documented engagement, even by late medieval standards, and fresh ways of interpreting Richard III’s actions are always valuable. In my 2002 book, I felt that Richard’s reverence for his father, the Duke of York, was crucial to understanding his sense of identity, as man and king. I also thought it illuminated his conduct on the battlefield. New research – which I undertook for The King’s Grave – has only strengthened this conviction. On 20 July 1441 the Duke of York launched a daring attack at Pontoise that came close to capturing the French king, Charles VII – an act of chivalric renown that could have ended the Hundred Years War in England’s favour. On 22 August 1485 I believe his youngest son, Richard III, deliberately chose to emulate such boldness, leading a cavalry charge that came very close to winning Bosworth in the most resounding fashion possible.
Both father and son were strongly influenced by the warrior code of chivalry and Bosworth 1485 tells a chivalric story of Richard III’s life and death. Ten years on, I believe this chivalric interpretation remains an important way of understanding the battle.
For the recent advances around the battle location, see Glenn Foard and Anne Curry, Bosworth 1485: A Battlefield Rediscovered (Oxford, 2013), and for a different, more positive view of Henry Tudor: Chris Skidmore, Bosworth – The Birth of the Tudors (London, 2013).The likely importance of a French pike formation during the battle was first raised by Dr Alexander Grant in a collection of essays we were both involved in: Richard III: A Medieval Kingship, ed. John Gillingham (London, 1993); a good overview of the evidence and context can be found in Sean Cunningham, Henry VII (London, 2007). The possibility of a crown-wearing ceremony at Bosworth was first drawn to my attention by Professor John Gillingham.