ON 22 JUNE 1485 RICHARD III SUMMONED MILITARY AND CIVILIAN forces in defence of his kingdom. The following day he issued a proclamation. It warned England they faced an invader with an outlandish name, ‘one Henry Tudor, son of Edmund Tudor, son of Owen Tudor, who of his ambitious and insatiable covertise encroaches and usurps upon him the name and title of royal estate of this Realm of England whereunto he has no manner, interest, right, title or colour, as every man well knows; for he is descended of bastard blood both of the father side and mother side’.1 It was plain fact that Margaret Beaufort’s family were of bastard descent, and it was through her alone that Henry Tudor had English royal blood. The claim that he was also descended from a bastard on his father’s side – and that Owen Tudor was the son of an innkeeper from Conway – is probably untrue. But the Tudor name was a reminder that Henry’s father was the result of a scandalous misalliance between a servant and a queen. As a fifteenth-century ballad observed:
They called him Henry Tudor, in scorn truly,
And said, in England he should wear no crown.2
Henry was always known by his title, Richmond, and had taken to signing himself with a regal R. This may have stood for Richmond, but it could also be read as Rex, the Latin for king, a confusion that was surely deliberate for if Henry were the ‘rightful’ King of England then he was already king. Henry still needed a convincing narrative to support his claim to the crown, and to find one he imitated Edward IV’s plundering of the myths of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s twelfth-century ‘History of the Kings of Britain’. The most significant of these popular myths concerned the wizard Merlin, King Arthur, and the life of the last British king, Cadwaladr, from whom the House of York claimed descent through the Mortimers.3 In one of these stories, the fifth-century British king, Vortigan, was building a fortress when he discovered a pool. In it were two sleeping dragons. One was red, the other white. Merlin told the king the red dragon represented the people of Britain, and the white the Saxon invader they would one day fight and defeat.4 In another, an angel appeared to Cadwaladr, and foretold how a prince of his line would come to defeat the Saxons. Yorkist propaganda created an association between the House of Lancaster and the invaders, and conflated the old myths. The fulfiller of the angel’s prophecy to Cadwaladr thus became ‘Draco Rubius’, the Red Dragon – supposedly Edward IV.5 Henry reversed this so that he was Draco Rubius and Richard III the outsider – a narrative already proving popular in Wales, where they still spoke a ‘British’ tongue.
Wales was the one place where the Tudor name had popular resonance, and in its Lancastrian heartlands the Yorkist claims to be the heirs of Cadwaladr had never taken root. The Tudors had maintained their contacts with the Welsh bards who were now churning out prophecies of Henry’s eventual triumph, full of references to the myths of Cadwaladr and the Red Dragon. Jasper Tudor had a dragon as his badge and Henry now took as his principal standard the ‘Red Dragon Dreadful’. In doing so he took on the mantle of the model hero of popular chivalric romances, the ‘fair unknown’. This was a true heir, raised in obscurity only to emerge one day as the rightful king and claim his crown, as King Arthur had. If God had truly chosen this destiny for Henry, his invasion of England was a holy crusade.
In England on the last day of July, the printer William Caxton published his version of Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur, a new reworking of the old myths. It described how King Arthur had once had a dream of a fight in the sky between a dragon and a boar. A philosopher had told him that he was the victorious dragon, while the boar denoted ‘some tyrant that tormenteth the people’.6 On the sunny morning of the following day, Henry’s ships embarked from Honfleur at the mouth of the Seine, and sailed on a gentle southerly breeze. His army included about 400 Englishmen and over 800 Scots, the latter recruited from companies brought over to France by a Scottish nobleman long resident there. A further 1,500 were French or Breton. These included experienced soldiers as well as people on the criminal fringe, ‘the worst kind which could be found anywhere’, one Frenchman recorded.7 Amongst his commanders Henry had one truly notable figure: John de Vere, Earl of Oxford. Once a great champion of the House of Lancaster, he had escaped a decade of imprisonment at Hammes Castle near Calais to join this latest enterprise in their cause.
After six days at sea the flotilla landed safety at Mill Bay on the Dale peninsula along the rugged coastline of Pembrokeshire. Amongst those waiting on the shore was Owen Tudor’s illegitimate son, the twenty-six-year-old David Owen. Henry’s grandfather had left much of his wealth to David, who still treasured his father’s campaign bed in black velvet and russet satin embroidered with swallows and wolves, as well as the letters that sounded out his name, ‘O, N’ in gold. He also had a magnificent tapestry that must have belonged to Catherine of Valois, which depicted Henry V along with his brothers and son. David Owen had been serving Henry loyally ‘beyond and within the sea’, and as the sun began to set Henry now knighted his uncle, along with others who had rallied to his army.8 Then, with the Red Dragon standard fluttering in the breeze, Henry knelt and recited the psalm, ‘Judge me, O Lord, and defend my cause against the unmerciful people.’
Henry intended to strike out through north Pembrokeshire, putting his faith in the pro-Lancastrian western and northern counties of Wales. To prepare the ground, letters were sent to ‘our loving friends and true subjects’, describing Richard as a usurper ‘of our right’. The crusading element in Henry’s invasion was implicit in his expressed trust in the help of ‘Almighty God’.9 Henry also hoped to recruit support in Cheshire, where his stepfather, Lord Stanley, was a powerful landowner. But Richard III had also invested in Stanley’s loyalty. Stanley had been on progress with Richard when the risings of October 1483 had broken out, and he had been obliged to help crush them. This had earned King Richard’s gratitude and saved Margaret Beaufort’s life. The ‘mother of the king’s great rebel and traitor Henry, Earl of Richmond’, condemned in January 1484 for having ‘conspired, confederated and committed high treason’, was made Stanley’s prisoner – and his responsibility.10 Stanley had since ignored Richard’s orders to prevent his wife from contacting her son, but neither side could wholly trust this wily nobleman, who had avoided committing his retainers in any of the bloody battles of the previous twenty years.
Four days after Henry’s landing the news reached Richard III at his principal military base at Nottingham Castle. That same day Richard sent summonses to the sheriffs and commissioners of array who mustered men in their localities, as well as to hundreds of individual nobles and gentlemen expected to raise their affinity. Amongst them Lord Stanley and his brother Sir William were instructed to organise north Wales in readiness to confront the invader.11 A few days later Richard learned that despite his orders Henry was marching unopposed through the region and even gaining recruits. Richard summoned Lord Stanley for an explanation. In an ominous echo of Buckingham’s response to such a summons in 1483, Stanley excused himself on grounds of illness. Richard then played an ace. The message was sent that he had Stanley’s son, Lord Strange, as his prisoner. The boy was now a hostage to his loyalty in the coming conflict. If he betrayed Richard, his son would be executed. He had to choose: his stepson, or his own child’s life?
By 17 August Henry had reached Shrewsbury in the West Midlands. The city had shut its Welsh Gate against him, signalling to other cities that his was an enemy force. He was hugely relieved when one of Sir William Stanley’s messengers arrived and persuaded the mayor to open the gates to Henry’s motley foreign army. The messenger had brought letters and cash from Margaret Beaufort and her husband Lord Stanley, but what Henry really needed were men: he had only managed to raise about 500 extra soldiers in Wales. To his Red Dragon standard he now added two further standards: the Cross of St George, patron saint of England, and the Dun Cow, which had local Neville associations.12 Henry’s allies in the region had continued to exploit the rumours that Richard III had murdered his wife, Anne Neville; flying the Dun Cow would help recruit still more effectively amongst her family’s affinity.
Sir William Stanley met Henry in person on 19 August, at Stone, seven miles north of Stafford. It was there that he delivered the devastating news that Richard had Lord Stanley’s son as hostage. Henry feared he could not now be certain of even Sir William’s support. Richard III, heading for Leicester, already had the weight of numbers on his side, as well as his long experience as a military commander. As Henry Tudor’s army set off towards Tamworth in the heart of England, he fell back from the main body of his men, with a group of twenty trusted individuals The next day, when Henry caught up he claimed he had got lost. Was Henry, in fact, planning his escape from the battle ahead? Jasper Tudor’s name is never mentioned in connection with the Battle of Bosworth. He may have been busy securing a suitable route. Henry had got out of tight spots with Jasper many times before and there was no one he could trust better with such a task.
It was at Atherstone, later that day, that Henry at last met his stepfather, Lord Stanley. They shook hands and discussed their battle plans, although it remained to be seen whether they would be carried out. Meanwhile, Richard III had left the ancient city of Leicester that morning, riding with his army though its narrow streets of timber-framed houses ‘with great triumph and pomp’.13 The rich reds and blues of the royal standards, the glint of his crown and the drama of the trumpets provided one of the greatest spectacles the town had ever seen. Although there had been some desertions from Richard’s army he gained supporters with this impressive display. From Leicester Richard proceeded ‘until he come unto a village called Bosworth’, his vanguard arrayed along the brow of the hill so his army could be seen for miles, giving ‘a terror of the multitude’.14 He then made camp for the night.
The next day, the Great Chronicle of London recalls, ‘in the fields adjoining, both hosts met.’15 Where exactly these fields were has long been a subject of debate. The earliest sources refer to the battlefield of Redemore, rather than Bosworth. The story became that the battle took place on Ambion Hill near Sutton Cheney, but it is now believed Redemore refers to marshland near the smaller villages of Dadlington and Stoke Golding, just south of Bosworth. Recent archaeology has found more cannonballs here than across all the medieval battlefields of Europe, as well as twenty-two pieces of lead shot from hand-held guns. The personal artefacts found include belt buckles and spurs, but most dramatic of all, dug out of the ground after 500 years – and the item that pinpoints the battle – is a silver gilt badge, an inch and a half across, of a white boar: the insignia of Richard III, worn by his knights.
The ordinary soldier in Richard III’s army was used to physical work and most were well fed. They varied in age from around seventeen to their mid-fifties. An Italian visitor to England described them as huge men, with ‘hands and arms of iron’, their bows ‘thicker and longer than those used by other nations, just as their bodies are stronger’. They did not have the fitted plate armour of the knights but wore quilted tunics, which they claimed to prefer, being lighter and more comfortable. Most had helmets, however, and all had bows and arrows, as well as a sword and shield.16 But for all their strength and training, the English at Bosworth were not professional soldiers of the kind found on the Continent. Henry was fortunate to have brought some of these from France. Nevertheless, he remained badly outnumbered and as Henry looked towards Stanley’s force for reassurance he was horrified to see his stepfather placing his men equidistant from the two armies. He sent a message asking Stanley to redeploy his men in the form they had agreed. The reply came that ‘the Earl [of Richmond – i.e. Henry] should put his own folks in order’. Understandably ‘vexed’ and ‘appalled’ by this response Henry was obliged to ‘make a slender vanguard for the smaller number of his people’.17
Richard’s army had kept the high ground and looking down the hill the king could see Henry Tudor’s men circling the marsh. Richard cut a striking figure on the skyline, with his surcoat bearing the royal arms and his battle crown on his helmet. But he was grim-faced. He had slept badly and Mass had been delayed, for ‘when his chaplain had one thing ready evermore they wanted another, when they had wine they lacked bread’.18 There had been no time for breakfast and, like his opponent, he was fearful of betrayal. One sixteenth-century account, only slightly altered by Shakespeare in Richard III, records how Richard’s ally John, Duke of Norfolk, woke to find a piece of doggerel pinned to his gate. It warned, ‘Jack of Norfolk be not too bold/For Dickon thy master is bought and sold.’19 And who was likely to sell out Richard for Henry’s shilling? Clearly the Stanleys could not be relied on, but there was also a question mark over Henry Percy, Earl of Northumberland. The earl had been raised with Henry as another of William Herbert’s wards, and after Henry went into exile he had married Maude Herbert, the daughter that had been earmarked for Henry.20 He had proved loyal to Edward IV, but he had dragged his responsibilities in mustering the northern levies for Richard. Less than a week earlier the loyal citizens of York had still been begging to learn the king’s military requirements.
The battle was heralded with an opening shower of arrows. Then, Richard ordered Norfolk to attack and:
They countered together sad and sore
Archers they let sharp arrows fly
They shot guns both fell and far
Bows of yew bended did be,
Springals sped them speedily.21
Henry Tudor’s general, the Earl of Oxford, had placed his men in a wedge formation that withstood Norfolk’s charge. Fierce hand-to-hand fighting followed in which Norfolk fell, either killed outright or captured and executed shortly afterwards. Also likely to have been among those who died at this point was Thomas Longe of Ashwelthorpe, Norfolk, who like many ordinary soldiers had prepared to do battle for his king by writing a will. As he left home he had declared himself ‘willing to die as a child of the church, the said day and time, doing forth unto the king’s host’.22
The advantage of numbers was still with Richard and in the slow hammering of medieval warfare this was important, yet there remained a risk of treachery. Stanley and Northumberland had not yet engaged, but from his viewpoint on the hill Richard now spotted a means of ending the battle quickly, and in his favour. Henry was riding under his standard with only a small number of bodyguards. Richard realised if he could reach and kill Henry the battle would be over, and, characteristically, he decided to seize his opportunity. ‘This day I will die as king or win’, he told one his commanders.23
As Richard’s cavalry thundered down the hill, standards streaming, Henry looked up and saw the crowned figure of the king galloping towards him ‘like a hungry lion’, battleaxe in hand.24 As Henry dismounted his bodyguards surrounded him, while his professional pikemen and other foot soldiers formed a defensive position in front. When Richard’s charge hit, the force of it was so great that a lance pierced through Henry’s standard-bearer, Sir William Brandon, and snapped in half. The Dragon standard fell. But Henry’s pikemen held their ground, their weapons piercing the charging horses. Richard and a trusted group of men began cutting their way on foot towards Henry. Bills, axes and swords replaced pikes in the hand-to-hand fighting. As the two sides hacked and slashed at each other, however, they became aware of the rumble of more cavalry bearing down on them. Henry’s guard was on the point of despair when a glimpse of red coat told them it was Sir William Stanley’s ‘tall men’. He too had decided to seize the opportunity to bring the battle to a close – by killing Richard. The king’s only hope was to escape the field and fight another day.
According to a Burgundian account, Richard’s horse foundered in the marsh and fell. Shakespeare has Richard calling out ‘A horse! A horse! My kingdom for a horse!’ But with the king unable to escape, the sources attest that Richard was determined not to surrender, and shouting ‘Treason! Treason! Treason!’ he continued to fight his way towards his rival.25 Henry’s guard, Sir John Cheyne, threw himself in front of Richard, but was knocked out of the way as the king cut his way forward. Meanwhile Sir William’s men were killing Richard’s bodyguard. The royal standard-bearer Sir Percival Thirlwall had his legs severed from under him, and one by one the king’s men all fell. It was at the marsh of Fen Hole, in a field behind what is now Fen Lane Farm that the badge of the white boar was found. Eventually Richard ‘fighting manfully in the middle of his enemies was slain’.26 The Burgundian chronicler claims it was a Welshman armed with a pike fitted with an axe, known as a halberd, who took King Richard’s life.27 Others joined him in striking the king’s body, smashing his skull, ‘until the brain came out with blood’.28 The body of Richard found in Leicester has a massive injury to the skull that would have exposed the brain and is consistent with a blow from a halberd.
As the news of Richard’s death spread, Norfolk’s men fled the field with Lord Stanley’s in pursuit. Northumberland’s men, who had never engaged in the battle, simply rode away. Henry Tudor, ‘replenished with joy’, rode up the nearest hill. With soldiers and nobles gathered around, he thanked God for his victory and them for their aid, ‘promising that he would be mindful of their benefits’. The men in turn shouted ‘God save King Henry! God save King Henry!’ Their cries inspired Sir William Stanley to fetch Richard’s battle crown, though it was not caught in a hawthorn bush as myth now has it. The Tudor heraldic device of the hawthorn was an ancient biblical symbol of renewal and would be used by Henry to represent the rebirth of the House of Lancaster and of Cadwaladr. The crown of the last Yorkist king was found amongst the ‘spoils of the field’ lying scattered on the ground. Sir William placed it on Henry’s head saying ‘Sir I make you King of England.’29
The last Plantagenet king continued to be stripped until, with ‘his body despoiled to the skin, and nought being left about him, so much as would cover his privy member’, he was tied on to a horse like ‘an hog or another vile beast’. In this manner, and with his hair dangling down, Richard was taken to Leicester behind a junior officer of arms called Norrey. Just ‘as gloriously as he by the morning departed from that town, so as irreverently he was that afternoon brought into that town’, a chronicler recalled.30 One of the further injuries discovered on the Leicester bones indicates that he was stabbed through the buttocks, into the pelvis, most likely while he was tied to the horse. His corpse, caked in mud and blood, was to be left exposed to public view for two days, then covered from the waist down with a ‘black cloth of poor quality’.31 Notably, his face had been left largely unmarked.
The killings of the Wars of the Roses spared no one’s dignity. Descriptions of Richard III’s death resemble those of Warwick the Kingmaker: fighting in the midst of his enemies, suggestions of a blocked escape, and a stripped corpse. That Richard’s body was beaten and stabbed after death is also not untypical of the period. The excavated bones of the soldiers killed at Towton in 1461 have revealed similar levels of brutality with skulls shattered and limbs smashed in an orgy of violence. Richard was buried without ceremony at the church of the Greyfriars, where excavations in 2012 uncovered his body. Sir William Stanley was given his pick of Richard’s possessions and chose tapestries from the royal tent. Henry made a more personal choice for his mother: Richard’s beautifully illuminated Book of Hours. The dead king had adapted an early fifteenth-century prayer to beg Christ ‘to free me thy servant King Richard from all the tribulations, grief and anguish in which I am held, and from all the snares of my enemies’.32 It seemed God had turned His back on Richard. But Henry’s position was still far from secure.
In York, the capital of the north, they mourned King Richard, ‘piteously slain and murdered to the great heaviness of this city’.33 In Coventry the City Annals also record with disgust how ‘King Richard . . . was shamefully carried to Leicester.’34 They were obliged to welcome Henry Tudor that night, nevertheless. He stayed at the house of the mayor, who saw to it that Henry received a gift from the city merchants of £100, and that his men had the provisions they demanded. Over a hundred gallons of red wine were consumed during the celebrations of Henry’s army, but notably only about four and a half gallons of ale. Henry had been raised with a preference for claret over English beer, as had many of the foreign troops with him. He was a stranger in this country, at the head of an invading army, with no experience even of managing a nobleman’s estate, let alone the kingdom he now held.