NINETEEN
Here pitch our tent, even here in Bosworth field.
Richard III, 5.1
Henry Tudor in France now had every hope of support from the teenage Charles VIII – or rather from his sister and regent Anne of Beaujeu. As the spring of 1485 grew warmer, Margaret Beaufort’s servant Reginald Bray was collecting money to fund mercenaries and sending messages across the Channel. Even her cautious husband Stanley, the ultimate political weathercock, was beginning to rate her son’s chances more highly now that Richard had become so unpopular. If this were down to Margaret’s influence it would soon prove to be the most important thing she could possibly have done, for all that she was in theory debarred from political activity.
Throughout the spring Richard continued to hear rumours of an impending rebellion. Perhaps he heard, too, that in France Henry Tudor was being misdescribed as a younger son of Henry VI, suggesting that the French were seriously promoting him as a royal heir.
Elizabeth of York may have been sent straight to Sheriff Hutton after the scandal of the spring; but one source has her for a few weeks at least in Lord Stanley’s London house, where her furious resentment against her uncle swung her to the opposite political side. The long early sixteenth-century verse narrative the Ballad of Lady Bessy,29 which chronicles the events that led up to the battle at Bosworth, survives in several different versions. On one thing, however, they all agree: Elizabeth of York played an extraordinarily active role in this story.
The Ballad describes how as the spring began to ripen, she waylaid Lord Stanley in the palace corridors and asked him to send a message to his stepson Henry Tudor, promising to marry him and thus greatly strengthen his cause:
For and he were King, I should be Queen;
I do him love, & never him see
She tears her hair in fury when Stanley refuses to commit, sinking into a swoon and lamenting that she will never be queen. But her determination has a more practical aspect too: the ballad has her raising money, rallying supporters and detailing the Stanley military strength with considerable precision. Lady Bessy volunteers to write letters to Stanley’s adherents, which she boasts she can do as well as the scrivener who taught her. Presented as a ‘lady bright’, as spirited and beautiful as she is able, Bessy successfully brokers a contact with Henry, and he responds with his own verse:
Commend me to Bessy, that Countess cheer [or, ‘clere’], –
& yet I did never her see, –
I trust in god she shall be my Queen,
For her I will travel the sea.
Did Elizabeth in truth hate Richard – and if she did, was it for trying to seduce her, or for repudiating her? It depends on what we think were or had been her feelings for her uncle. But it is certain she must have awaited events with more than uncommon tension: once more, you might say, she had been cheated of a royal match. Maybe she feared losing another, if she had heard Henry was now pursuing a Herbert heiress – or, as Francis Bacon would suggest, that he contemplated marriage to the heiress of Brittany. We cannot be sure, at this juncture, what were the relations between Margaret Beaufort, still held under house arrest, and the Woodville clan.
After having had to make that embarrassing declaration repudiating his marital intentions Richard had left London first for Windsor and then, on 17 May, to spend a few days at his mother Cecily Neville’s residence at Berkhamsted,30 possibly to update her on his European marriage plans or to explain the other marriage stories as best he might.
But war was now coming. As spring edged towards summer Richard must have heard that Charles in France was openly raising money for Henry. In the second week of June the king set out for Nottingham Castle, a military power base strategically placed in the heart of England. From there he began to raise his army and to prepare for the invasion that everyone knew would soon be on the way.
In late June Richard’s proclamation against Henry was reissued, with two important changes. The first omitted the name of the Marquess of Dorset, Elizabeth Woodville’s eldest son, from the list of rebels and traitors: Richard was trying to placate her and her family. The second laid out Henry Tudor’s – Margaret Beaufort’s – bloodline, ‘descended of bastard blood, both of father’s side, and of mother’s side … [John of Gaunt’s and Katherine Swynford’s children being] in double avoutry [adultery] gotten’.
That week Thomas Stanley requested leave to withdraw from court and return to his estates ‘in order to rest and refresh himself’. His estates in Lancashire were the site of Margaret Beaufort’s enforced residency. Richard agreed, on condition that Stanley left his son behind, as a guarantor of the magnate’s continued loyalty, and the same day sent for the Great Seal, a sure sign he expected urgent business of great importance.
On 1 August Henry Tudor set sail from France. The French had wobbled in their support, granting money as a loan only. Henry was forced to pawn his household possessions and leave behind as security two Yorkist lords, including Dorset. Elizabeth Woodville’s brother, however, would ride with Henry’s army. With him were a hired band of expert French pikemen, and the two supporters – the Earl of Oxford, a powerful nobleman and experienced commander, and Henry’s equally battle-hardened uncle Jasper Tudor – whose presence compensated for his own lack of military knowledge. Henry landed six days later at Milford Haven in Wales, where he fell to his knees and kissed the soil of a country he had not seen for fourteen years. He is said to have recited the psalm ‘Judge me, O Lord, and defend my cause’.
Then the fortnight-long march eastwards began along, as Crowland described it, ‘rugged and indirect tracks’. It would have taken several days for galloping messengers to bring Richard the news, but on the 11th the summons to his supporters went out: ‘orders of the greatest severity’ threatening reprisals on all who refused. Crowland declares that on hearing of Henry’s landing Richard ‘rejoiced, or at least seemed to rejoice, writing to his adherents in every quarter that now the long wished-for day had arrived, for him to triumph with ease over so contemptible a faction’.
All through Wales Henry was rallying his supporters, with more flocking to his cause. But in England he was a virtual stranger. Vergil reports that along the way he wrote to his mother. It was Margaret Beaufort on whom, directly or indirectly, he had had to rely to raise support in the country.
Margaret had presumably been left behind at Lathom in Lancashire, some hundred miles from the eventual conflict point. Her husband Stanley had been summoned back to the king’s side for fear, says Crowland, that she ‘might induce her husband to go over to the party of her son’. But Stanley still seems to have been refusing to commit to either side. Richard was holding Stanley’s son hostage for his good behaviour; none the less, when the summons from Richard came Stanley had sent word that he was ill and unable to travel. He took his forces south but by an independent route, there to wait until the eve of battle, unattached to either party. His brother Sir William Stanley, on the other hand, took his three thousand or so men to meet up with Henry just north of Stafford. But he too refused to commit directly, pending further consultation with his brother. As the opposing armies drew closer to each other, Henry still had fewer than five thousand men under his command – only half the size of the forces his adversary had assembled, says Polydore Vergil.
Richard left Nottingham for Leicester around 19 August; on the 21st, with all pomp and wearing his crown, he rode with his forces from Leicester towards the place where Henry was camped near Bosworth. Here, so some of the often contradictory reports have it, Henry Tudor at last met his stepfather Lord Stanley, as well as Sir William. In Richard III Shakespeare pays brief tribute to Margaret as the link between them, an unspoken presence of which they must both have been aware.
Polydore Vergil would later report that Henry’s battle plan the next day was the one agreed ‘in counsel’ with Lord Stanley – which suggests at the least that Henry thought he came away from the meeting with the promise of Stanley support. Certainly the Stanleys sent away with Henry two of their kinsmen backed by a force of their retainers – but they themselves remained in their own, detached, camp.
The fields around Bosworth are disputed now as thoroughly as they were trampled then. Recent archaeological work has relocated the scene of the battlefn10and cast a different light on its strategies – and, as a sideline, perhaps given a fresh glimpse of the women’s background role in the men’s story. Found in the ground where Richard’s army may have camped the night before the battle were two Burgundian coins. They were legal currency in England, so it is certainly going too far to trace a link from Richard’s camp back to Duchess Margaret’s home of Burgundy – Burgundian mercenaries had fought in other battles of the wars. But it is a useful reminder that people and places far from the action might yet influence the progress of events.
Polydore Vergil – and, before him, the Crowland chronicler – reported that the Yorkist king slept badly on the eve of battle. Crowland says that in the morning he complained of ‘a multitude of demons’ surrounding him, and that although his face was always drawn it ‘was then even more pale and deathly’. Vergil says he ‘thought in his sleep that he saw horrible images as it were of evil spirits haunting evidently about him … and that they would not let him rest’. Later, of course, his unease would be put down to guilt over his reputed crimes, but at the time Richard himself told his men about it in the morning, to explain away his evident ‘heaviness’.
He could not manage to ‘buckle himself to the conflict with such liveliness of courage and countenance as before’. It did not help that – so Crowland reported – he awoke so early that his chaplains could not be found to celebrate a propitiatory mass, nor did the servants have his breakfast ready. Richard, he said, had had a presentiment that, whoever won the day, the outcome of this battle ‘would prove the utter destruction of the kingdom of England’. In this he was no prophet. But when a Spaniard called Salazar, a mercenary commander, warned him that those he trusted would betray him that day, he knew the man could be speaking the truth. He answered (or so it was later reported to the Spanish sovereigns): ‘God forbid that I yield one step. This day I will die as a king or win.’ He chose to wear the royal diadem above his helmet: an encouraging sight for his soldiers, but one that would mark him out as a target for the enemy.
As Polydore Vergil tells it, Richard managed to pull himself together and ‘drew his whole host out of their tents, and arrayeth his vanward, stretching it forth of a wonderful length, so full replenished both with footmen and horsemen that to the beholders far off it gave a terror for the multitude, and in the front were placed his archers’. After that long vanguard came the king himself, with a ‘choice’ force of cavalry.
In Henry Tudor’s camp, meanwhile, a few grassy fields away, the mood was hardly more cheerful. Even on the morning of the battle, his nerves had been kept on edge by the fickle Stanleys. When he sent word to Lord Stanley to get his troops ready, word was sent back that Henry should look to his own men: he would do what he had to do, when he was ready. Henry could not but notice that the Stanley force was now drawn up exactly halfway between the two opposing armies.
Though Henry was ‘no little vexed, and begun to be somewhat appalled’, he put his troops in order. A slender vanguard with the archers came first, making the best of the ‘small numbers’ of his people. When they were assembled, ‘they put on their head pieces and prepared to the fight, expecting th’alarm with intentive ear’. It was perhaps eight in the morning. The fighting would be over by ten.
The traditional view is that Richard’s troops were drawn up on higher ground. Henry, learning there was a marsh between the two armies, determined to keep it on his right as he advanced, ‘that it might serve his men instead of a fortress’. This also meant the sun was behind him – and in his enemies’ eyes – on what promised to be a scorching day.
When Henry’s troops moved out from the protection of the marsh, Richard saw his chance and gave the order to advance. As the lines drew together, and the exchange of arrows became hand blows, Henry’s commander the Earl of Oxford ordered that no one should move more than ten feet from the standards in case their smaller force should be lost among the greater one. This gave rise to a pause in the fighting, and seemed also to confuse the enemy. Vergil, writing with Tudor hindsight, later suggested that Richard’s men seized gladly on the break because they had no great desire for his victory.
This would explain why, when Richard caught sight of Henry surrounded by only a small guard, the king set off ‘inflamed with ire’ to finish the fight in single combat. Perhaps Henry’s long march through Wales had been less trying on the nerves than the waiting game that had been Richard’s lot – waiting, with the dawning suspicion that his support was ebbing away.
In what now seems almost a quixotic gesture, Richard had surrendered the advantage of high ground and moved beyond the protection of his forces. But it almost won the day. Richard’s own horse thundered down the gentle slope with perhaps as many as a thousand knights riding behind. It would be the last time a king of England led a charge of armoured cavalry. The noise – on a battlefield already ringing with the thunder of primitive cannon, with the voices of the fighting and the dying, with the screams of horses as the foot soldiers’ billhooks ripped open their bellies – must have been terrifying. The force of Richard’s lance killed Henry’s standard bearer and, drawing his axe, the king began to hack his way towards his adversary.
When Henry saw Richard spurring his horse towards him, he ‘received him with great courage’. Vergil says that Henry ‘abode the brunt longer than ever his own soldiers would have weened, who were now almost out of hope of victory’. But it was not the personal courage of either man that would decide the day. It was probably at this point – acting, crucially, for Henry’s side – that Sir William Stanley threw his troops into the fray. Richard, knowing the battle was lost, resolved (as even the Tudor historian Vergil admitted) to die ‘fighting manfully in the thickest press of his enemies’. His men brought him fresh horses but, in contrast to the popular misperception, Vergil says he refused to flee, swearing again that that day he would make an end of either war or life.
As Richard fought on, his horse foundered in the marshy bog, stained red with the blood of friends and foes. It is unlikely his end was either quick or easy; but at least he could die, as even the normally unsympathetic Crowland put it, ‘like a brave and most valiant prince … while fighting, and not in the act of flight’. At last an anonymous Welsh soldier jabbed home a final weapon – and, as generations of historians have had it, ended not just one man but a whole epoch. The Middle Ages themselves, as well as the rule of the Plantagenets, died with the unlucky Richard III.31
Vergil describes how Richard’s body was stripped naked and slung across a horse, to be taken back to Leicester, put on public display and buried without ceremony; Crowland says many insults were offered to the corpse. If Richard’s mother Cecily heard of these indignities she, and Richard’s sisters, must have been hideously reminded of other deaths, other ignominies; of when Richard, Duke of York’s body was decked with a paper crown.
Richard III had been not only the last English king to die in the red heat of battle, but the first since the Conquest. It is an image from those early days that comes to mind – Edith of the Swan Neck searching for her lover Harold’s body on the battlefield, just as so many women must have searched here.
The battle had lasted two hours, and Vergil says that a thousand men had been killed; nine-tenths of them, it is estimated, on Richard’s side. Rous has Richard’s last words as ‘treason – treason’. Well they might be: it was a Stanley who placed the crown on Henry’s head. But the legends of Bosworth add one other telling detail – that the crown had been found on a thornbush by Reginald Bray, steward to Margaret Beaufort. The origins of the story can be traced back only to an eighteenth-century antiquary but, given the part Margaret Beaufort had played in bringing her son to this point, it has a poetic authenticity.