Battles were challenging events even for eye-witnesses to describe since so much was happening at once and phases were difficult to identify. A participant might see part of the event, or know something of the plans and actions of his own side, but a holistic view was impossible. For Bosworth we have no eye-witness accounts. The closest we have is the information which de Valera gleaned second-hand from a participant on Richard’s side, Juan de Salazar.1 No doubt other participants, especially on Henry’s side, did speak of the battle later and Polydore Vergil gathered information from them directly or indirectly.
For the actual fighting historians are dependent on narrative accounts.2 But how should we use them? Should we simply heap up everything that we find in every account in order to create a single narrative? There has been a tendency to do this but it does not bring out the similarities and contradictions. For Bosworth, there is also the accretion of centuries of study and debate which has sometimes taken us well away from the original sources. Yet we must remember that even the latter were written from a moral and political, rather than military, perspective.
In this chapter, the aim is to consider the prelude and aftermath of the battle since these can shed light on the engagement. When discussing the battle itself, we shall examine the various narratives against the background of contemporary military practice and comparison with other conflicts as well as referring back to our study of the armies.
Richard received news of Henry’s landing by at least 11 August. On this day, as we saw, a letter was sent to Henry Vernon of Haddon requesting attendance on the king with troops. It was already anticipated, therefore, that battle would be given. At this point Richard was at Beskwood (now Bestwood), a royal hunting lodge a few miles to the north of Nottingham. We find him at the same location on 17 August when a delegation from the city of York met him there. It is uncertain whether he subsequently returned to Nottingham castle which had been his main base since late June, or on which date he moved to Leicester. Polydore Vergil claims that he reached Leicester by sunset on the same day as Henry marched from Lichfield to Tamworth, an event which the author dates elsewhere to Saturday 20 August. Some historians have suggested that Richard might have reached Leicester on the previous evening.3 The distance between Bestwood and Leicester is about 28 miles (46 km) and between Nottingham and Leicester 24 miles (39 km). It is possible that Richard and his close circle rode there on 19 August with the remainder of his men marching on the following day. The route taken would have been the Richmond–Oakham road (A606) then the Fosse way (A 46) (Figure 3.1).
The king’s move might suggest that, once Henry’s landing was known, Leicester had been chosen as the assembly point for the royal army, as it had been when Richard had been faced with rebellion in 1483. Yet the wording of the Crowland Continuation, whose author was with the king, implies that the initial assembly point chosen in 1485 had been Nottingham.
‘The enemy [were] making haste and moving day and night towards a direct confrontation with the king, therefore it was necessary to move the army, though it was not yet fully assembled, away from Nottingham and to proceed to Leicester.’4
This is also suggested by the will made by Thomas Longe of Ashwellthorpe on 16 August, ‘going forth unto the king’s host at Nottingham to battle’.5 On 18 August the mayor of Nottingham had paid Thomas Hall ‘ridyng forth to aspye for the town afore the feld’.6 If we take ‘feld’ to mean a battle, it confirms that a military engagement was already anticipated whilst Richard was at Nottingham. According to Polydore Vergil, when Richard heard that Henry had reached Shrewsbury (which is dated to 15 or 16 August), ‘the result was that he decided to confront his adversaries as soon as possible, and sent forth scouts to espy what route his enemies were taking’. This fits chronologically with the reference to Hall being sent out from Nottingham, although he was acting on behalf of the town rather than the king. Thomas Hall was a wax chandler and a member of the city council from at least March 1500.7