9

‘A Sorry Spectacle’¹

After Richard III’s death, his body, stripped and slung over a horse’s back, was carried back to Leicester: a distance of some 15 miles.² This journey was accomplished during the afternoon of 22 August, for it was the evening of that day when Henry VII and his army reached the city with their ‘bag and baggage’,³ which now included Richard III’s remains. If we assume the new king and his entourage set out from the battlefield at about two o’clock in the afternoon, the tail end of Henry VII’s baggage train would probably have reached the city by about six in the evening, an hour or two before sunset.⁴ Thus, it may well be the case that the arrival of Richard’s corpse was greeted by the sound of bells from the city’s churches. But these would not have been the ‘great bells’, which were traditionally tolled solemnly for the passing of a soul.⁵ Rather, the sound would have been the bright chiming of little Sanctus bells, sounding from the parish churches for the evening Angelus, combined with the bells of Leicester Abbey and of the various Leicester friary churches, calling their respective communities to the evening office of Vespers.

The basic facts of the transportation of Richard’s corpse to Leicester, and the manner of it, are fairly well known, and the interpretation usually applied to this event is to see it as a major example of Henry VII’s vindictive nastiness. Thus Kendall, writing in the 1950s, chose to amplify the very basic information available from contemporary sources as follows:

Stark naked, despoiled and derided, with a felon’s halter about the neck, the bloody body was slung contemptuously across the back of a horse, which one of the king’s heralds was forced to ride. As it was borne across the west bridge of the Soar, the head was carelessly battered against the stone parapet. For two days the body lay exposed to view in the house of the Grey Friars close to the river. It was then rolled into a grave without stone or epitaph.⁶

The adjectives, of course, are Kendall’s own. Moreover, his highly coloured account certainly contains errors. The Franciscan (Greyfriars) Priory was not close to the River Soar.⁷ Nor is there any evidence that it was at that priory that Richard’s body was exposed to public gaze.⁸ Indeed, a religious house, parts of which were certainly closed to public access, would not have been a very suitable location for such a public display of the dead king’s body. Kendall’s account also contains other errors and misinterpretations, as we shall see in due course.⁹

The whole thesis that the treatment accorded to Richard’s body represents gratuitous horror, personally inflicted upon Richard’s corpse by his successor, is open to question. We must not forget that, whether or not he was held to be the rightful king, Richard III was certainly the de facto king in August 1485, and it was a political necessity for Henry VII to acknowledge that fact, since his claim to the throne, as subsequently embodied in an act of Parliament, was based first and foremost on conquest, which implied defeat of the previous de facto sovereign.

Henry VII is often portrayed by Richard III’s defenders as an innately unpleasant character. One piece of evidence adduced in support of this portrayal is Henry’s reported cynical attempt to date his reign from the day before the Battle of Bosworth (21 August).¹⁰ Another is his supposedly barbaric treatment of Richard III’s body. In fact, there is no evidence that Henry VII antedated his succession. Certainly it was subsequently 22 August, not 21, which was counted as the new king’s accession day for the purpose of calculating his regnal years.¹¹ Nor was there, from Henry VII’s point of view, any possible political or financial advantage to be gained from gratuitous nastiness in respect of Richard III’s corpse – indeed, rather the reverse, since Henry needed to try to conciliate the defeated Yorkists if he was to reign in peace. In this context, it is significant to note that our two main written sources for the battle – Vergil’s account and that of the Crowland Chronicle – are in complete agreement in consistently referring to Richard III as ‘the king’ up to, and indeed beyond, the point of his death. At the same time both sources consistently call Henry ‘Tudor’ ‘the earl’ until after his victory.¹² Bearing this important evidence in mind, let us now carefully re-examine the facts in this case.

Vergil offers an early sixteenth-century account of the sorry spectacle of Richard III’s return to Leicester after the battle:

Interea Ricardi corpus, cuncto nudatum vestitu, ac dorso equi impositum, capite et brachiis et cruribus utrimque pendentibus, Leicestriam ad coenobium Franciscorum deportant, spectaculum mehercule miserabile, sed hominis vita dignum, ibique sine ullo funeris honore biduo post terra humatur.

[Meanwhile, they took Richard’s body to the Franciscan Priory in Leicester, stripped of all clothing and placed on a horse’s back with the head, arms and legs hanging down on either side; a sorry sight by Hercules, but one worthy of the man’s life; and there, after two days, he was buried in the ground without any funerary honours.]¹³

An earlier but briefer statement is supplied by the Crowland Chronicle:

Inventa inter alios mortuos corpora dicto Richardi regis … multasque alias contumelias illatas ipsoque non satis humaniter propter funem in collum adjectum usque Leicestriam deportato.

[King Richard’s body having been discovered among the dead … many other insults were offered and after the body had been carried to Leicester with insufficient humanity (a rope being placed around the neck)].¹⁴

Although there are no other contemporary or near contemporary written accounts, attempts to flesh out this basic story begin with the later sixteenth-century writer Holinshed. His authority (if any) is unknown, and parts of his fuller account may very well have been based upon nothing more than his own imagination. However, for what it may be worth, he tells us that Richard’s body ‘was naked and despoiled to the very skin, and nothing left about him, not so much as a clout to cover his privy parts: and [he] was trussed behind a pursevant of arms, one Blanch Senglier, or White-boar, like a hog or calf; his head and arms hanging on one side of the horse, with his legs on the other side; and all besprinkled with mire and bloud’.

Since they are based upon no known contemporary source, Holinshed’s details cannot be relied upon. Nevertheless, it is interesting to note that, while in general he apparently sets out to depict disgraceful treatment of the corpse – trussed like a dead animal, soiled with blood and mire (details absent from Vergil’s account) – he also adds one snippet which may tend in a different direction: he informs us that Richard’s naked body was transported to Leicester accompanied by the dead king’s pursuivant of arms. We shall return to this point presently.

On arrival in Leicester the corpse seems to have been exposed to the public gaze in the Newark so that all might know for certain that the king was dead.¹⁵ This can only have been done on Henry VII’s instructions, and it is certainly probable that Henry VII would have wished as many people as possible to see for themselves that Richard III was indeed dead. We have no account of what preparation might have been accorded the remains before their public display. However, from Henry VII’s point of view it would have been important that the body should be recognisable. It is likely, therefore, that the corpse was washed and that the cuts to the face and head were pressed shut rather than being left as gaping wounds.

Since it was late August and the weather was probably hot, one might suppose that some preservative measures would have been taken in order to retard the natural process of decomposition. In similar circumstances the body of James IV of Scotland was embalmed in 1516 by the enemies who had vanquished him. Incidentally, the treatment of the dead body of James IV, and the light which this may throw on the events of August 1485 and how we should judge them, will be considered in fuller detail below.

Against embalming, however, we have two pieces of evidence. First, there is the fact that the body of Richard’s friend and supporter, John Howard, Duke of Norfolk (which must have been brought to Leicester at about the same time as the king’s), seems not to have been embalmed. Howard’s body cannot currently be identified for certain, but it seems possible to narrow it down to one of two sets of remains now interred at Framlingham church in Suffolk. Although we cannot be sure which of these two possible bodies belongs to John Howard, both were found to be preserved only as skeletons, and no traces of cere cloth were reported when the vaults containing these remains were opened in 1841.¹⁶ The second piece of evidence is that, when Richard III’s own grave was open in August 2012, as in the case of John Howard, no signs of cere cloth were found.

First, let us return to the treatment that is reported to have been accorded to Richard’s body immediately after the battle. We have seen that, based on the Crowland chronicler (who was almost certainly not present in Leicester in August 1485), followed by Holinshed and other later accounts, this treatment has generally been categorised as barbarous. But perhaps we need to pause at this point and consider carefully what happened. We shall then be in a position to observe that, in terms of the burial arrangements for expelled English medieval monarchs, only in two respects does the treatment of Richard’s remains appear to have been unique, and that is the stripping of his body and its transport from the battlefield slung over a horse. The funeral arrangements made for other deposed medieval English monarchs by their conquerors are considered in greater detail at the end of this chapter. For the moment, let us concentrate on the unique features: the stripping and transportation of Richard III’s corpse. We need to remember that amongst the displaced medieval monarchs of England, the manner of Richard’s death was in itself unique, a fact which cannot fail to be significant when we consider how his remains were handled.

Richard III is often described as the last English king to die in battle, but in point of fact he is the only English king to die in battle after the Norman Conquest, so the circumstances surrounding his burial were bound to be unique in some respects. It is also a well-known fact that bodies on battlefields were routinely stripped – not by their conquerors in person, but by looters (see below). It is highly improbable that Henry ‘Tudor’’s men would have stopped to strip Richard’s body in mid-battle. It is far more likely that the stripping was carried out by local people routinely picking over the field in the wake of the victorious army. The king’s body, which was probably more richly attired than most, would have been particularly susceptible to the attentions of such looters as soon as the tide of battle moved on in pursuit of his retreating army. In this context it is interesting to note that the crown from Richard’s helmet (which was made of gold or gilded metal, perhaps set with jewels or paste) was reportedly found in a thorn bush after the battle. Had it perhaps been pushed there by a looter, intending to conceal it for later retrieval when things had quietened down? The fact that in the aftermath of the battle Richard’s corpse was naked is probably not to be attributed to the innate nastiness of Henry ‘Tudor’ and his men, but was rather the normal and inevitable concomitant of battlefield death. Thus we know, for example, that when the first Earl of Shrewsbury was killed at the battle of Castillon, his corpse could subsequently only be identified by his missing left molar. Clearly, like Richard’s, his body after the battle was heavily disfigured by blood and mire, and had been stripped of every particle of armour and clothing that might have been recognisable.¹⁷ Further apposite examples of this common battlefield phenomenon will be cited presently.

Meanwhile, Vergil tells us that the battle itself lasted for two hours, in the course of which time the tide of the fighting will have swept on to areas far distant from the spot where Richard’s battered remains were lying, thus allowing ample opportunity for looters to make off with the king’s ruined but rich attire. Later, Henry ‘Tudor’ – now acclaimed as Henry VII – will have had to send a search party in quest of Richard III’s corpse, which was eventually ‘discovered among the dead’.¹⁸ When it was found the corpse had almost certainly already been stripped. It is at this point that the body was subjected to post mortem injuries and obscenity, as reported by the Crowland chronicler. Naked, undefended, and in the hands of a group of fighting men who may well have been foreigners, vulgar jokes were probably made and wounds were inflicted on the face, chest and buttocks, before the body was carelessly hauled off to the new king.¹⁹ This was probably when a rope was tied around the corpse’s neck. Had Henry VII been present, he would surely have prevented the infliction of post mortem facial injuries, since he needed Richard’s face to be recognisable.

As for the fact that Richard’s body was reported by Virgil to have been transported from the field to Leicester slung over the back of a horse, this also requires careful evaluation. For those who wished to remove bodies from medieval battlefields the available resources were probably somewhat limited, and we know that in most cases such bodies were not removed at all, but were simply interred on or very near the spot where they fell. Medieval warlords would not routinely have taken with them into battle such items as coffins and hearses – the presence of which might have been liable to misinterpretation by one’s supporters! Thus the obvious possible ways of transporting a body from the field would have been to have it dragged by men or by beasts, to throw it into a wheeled vehicle of some kind, or to drape it across the back of a horse. Where, on a battlefield, would anyone have chanced upon a stray coffin, a hearse, or mourners?

The very fact that Richard III’s body was removed from the field at all, and carried back to Leicester, is a clear sign that it was being accorded quite special treatment. As for the means of its transportation, it may well have been considered by Henry ‘Tudor’ that the back of a horse was actually the most honourable of the limited available options – and fitting for a vanquished warrior of royal blood. This brings us back to the interesting point that, according to Holinshed’s later account, Henry also ordered that Richard’s body should be accompanied by the dead king’s Blanc Sanglier pursuivant of arms.²⁰ Perhaps, in his own way, and within the limits of the resources available to him on the battlefield, Henry VII was, in fact, treating Richard’s body as a royal corpse.²¹ And if a rope remained around Richard’s dead neck from its earlier hauling across the battlefield by Henry’s search party, this may now simply have been used to help tie the body in place on the horse’s back, thereby avoiding accidents.²²

At this point it will, perhaps, be instructive to introduce two further kinds of evidence, which may throw light on what we know of the fate of Richard’s remains in the immediate aftermath of the Battle of Bosworth. The second such category of evidence (which we shall come to in a moment) is literary and cultural evidence bearing on fifteenth-century attitudes to such matters as death in battle. First, however, let us examine late fifteenth-and early sixteenth-century evidence from beyond the boundaries of England, which relates to the deaths of two other European leaders who were likewise defeated and killed.

Richard III’s brother-in-law, Charles the Bold, Duke of Burgundy, was vanquished and slain at the Battle of Nancy in 1477, eight years prior to the Battle of Bosworth. ‘Refusing to fly, and fighting desperately to cover the retreat of his scattered forces, [he] was surrounded and was cleft through helmet and skull by the tremendous blow of a Swiss halberd … all his face was one gash from temple to teeth.’²³ Subsequently, ‘it took two days to find his body and then only after a patient and macabre search over the battlefield. It appeared that his horse had fallen while trying to jump a frozen stream and the duke had been killed by a mighty blow to the head, which left him totally unrecognisable except to his Italian valet who knew him by his long fingernails, and to his Portuguese doctor who identified him by the old battle scars on his stripped and frozen corpse.’²⁴ Thus, like Richard III’s remains, Charles’ body was found naked, having likewise been stripped by looters. It was clearly in much more of a mess than Richard’s when it was finally removed for burial, for in Richard’s case it does not seem to have been unduly difficult to identify his remains once they were found, and this suggests that Richard’s features had not been heavily disfigured.

About thirty years later, in 1513, King James IV of Scotland was defeated and killed by English forces at the Battle of Flodden. After the battle James’ body was recovered, carried initially to Berwick,²⁵ and embalmed. It was then sent to London with the intention that it should be buried there, but initially the body remained above ground because James had been excommunicated before his death, so a religious burial was not possible. Later, Henry VIII arranged for it ‘to be given honourable burial by the monks at Sheen, after he had persuaded the Pope to assume that James had given some sign of repentance as he lay dying on the battlefield, which enabled the Pope to release him from excommunication and to allow him to be buried in a church’.²⁶ It is not absolutely clear whether James’ body had also been stripped on the battlefield, but this seems probable, because afterwards there was considerable debate as to whether the correct body had really been recovered, and it seems unlikely that this would have been the case if the remains were still clothed in their royal garb. James IV’s bloodstained plaid or tunic, at least, seems to have been separated from his corpse after his death but before the body was recovered, for this garment was later delivered to the queen regent, Catherine of Aragon, who then sent it as a token of victory to Henry VIII in France.²⁷

The second category of external evidence, which may be illuminating in relation to the treatment of Richard III’s corpse, is the general evidence of the late medieval chivalric literary and cultural tradition. Late medieval warriors did not exist in a vacuum. They had behind them a whole gamut of written and oral tradition which informed their attitudes. The military heroes of their literature and history were exemplars for their own conduct. Thus, both Richard III and Henry ‘Tudor’ will have known stories of Greek and Roman heroes. They will have been familiar with the fact that Achilles had tied the dead body of the vanquished Hector behind his chariot and dragged it round the walls of Troy before eventually surrendering the mangled remains to King Priam for burial.²⁸ They will also have been familiar with the quasi-historical, quasi-mythological tales of the great Alexander, whose treatment of the dead body of his defeated enemy, Darius III of Persia, was considered quite exceptional and remarkable (Alexander accorded the dead Darius a full royal funeral). As for the typical aftermath of a battle, that had been graphically described in the previous century by the English poet Chaucer:

Whan that this worthy duc, the Theseus,
Hath Creon slayn and wonne Thebes thus,
Stille in that feeld he took al nyght his reste,
And dide with al the contree as hym leste.
To ransake in the taas of bodyes dede,
Hem for to strepe of harneys and of wede,
The pilours diden bisynesse and cure
After the bataille and discomfiture.²⁹

We have already remarked that Richard III was not the only English king to have been violently deprived of his crown and his life. It is now time to consider briefly the other medieval examples of this phenomenon: Edward II, Richard II and Henry VI. In all three cases, the king’s dead body was exposed to the public gaze, before being buried with little funeral pomp in a monastic church: Gloucester Abbey in the case of Edward II; the Dominican Priory at King’s Langley for Richard II; and Chertsey Abbey for Henry VI.³⁰ It therefore seems that we may have evidence of a consistent pattern of what might be described as ‘alternative royal burial’ for ousted kings. This pattern consists of exposure of the corpse (to demonstrate publicly that the former monarch is dead), followed by a basic funeral, with discreet burial in a priory or abbey church, which would not be readily accessible to the general public, and where the body would be out of sight and hopefully, for the time being, out of mind.³¹

In all three cases we find also that after a suitable lapse of time the burial arrangements were subsequently upgraded. Thus Edward III later provided a splendid tomb for his father at Gloucester Abbey. Henry V, soon after his accession, transferred Richard II’s remains from King’s Langley to the tomb at Westminster Abbey, which Richard had prepared for himself during his lifetime, and, as we have already seen (in chapter 5), Richard III, when he came to the throne, transferred Henry VI’s remains to a new royal tomb in St George’s Chapel, Windsor. We shall explore the later upgrading of Richard III’s tomb in chapter 11, but let us begin by looking first at what arrangements were made for his interment in August 1485.