Prologue
It is an astonishing fact, and a measure of how much the world has changed in five hundred years, that of the thousands of men who were present at what would come to be called the Battle of Bosworth Field, not one left us a description of it. By any reckoning it was one of the great events of English history—even a glorious event, assuming that your idea of glory is broad enough to embrace the firing of arrows into the bodies of living men and the breaking open of their skulls with axes. It was the blazing sundown of the Middle Ages: men in armor, gleaming blades, banners waving in the summer breeze. It would bring the last charge by mounted knights ever seen on English soil, the last death of a king of England in battle.
But because we have no eyewitness accounts, nor even any accounts written while memories of the battle were still fresh, we know far less about it than historians have traditionally pretended.
We know of course that King Richard III was on the scene—a tough little man with reddish-gold hair, only five foot four but a seasoned warrior, awesomely courageous, the hardened veteran of many bloody fights. We know with certainty that he was there, because he was within minutes of his famously nasty death. We can be sure that he wore a sword, the familiar tool of his trade, and that he carried it as easily as a carpenter carries his hammer. His armor would have been covered with a tunic, made of silk, probably, bearing the colorful symbols of his Plantagenet ancestry. We are told that his horse was white. Being the king’s, no doubt it was a majestic horse; feel free to picture it snorting and prancing. That Richard wore a lightweight crown, a coronet, over his iron helmet also is plausible, as his purpose that day was to defend his possession of the crown. With him was his standard-bearer, his old comrade-in-arms Sir Percival Thirlwall, holding aloft a staff from which streamed a long standard displaying Richard’s emblem, the blue boar.
And of course Henry Tudor was there—a good distance from Richard, necessarily, but not quite so far away as to be out of sight. As it happens, he too was astride a white horse, one he had been given at some point in the previous two weeks as he and his ragged little army of French and Breton mercenaries and English runaways made their long trek across Wales. No doubt people would have been surprised to learn that, at twenty-seven, Henry was only four years younger than Richard; he was so unknown, had so much less experience and apparent substance, as to seem a boy by comparison. So far as we know, he had never been in a fight of any kind. He had never commanded soldiers or ruled anything. Until that month he had not set foot in Wales in almost fourteen years, and the time he had spent in England could be measured in days.
Richard could trace his descent in the male line back through three hundred years of royalty—he was a shoot of the same family tree that had produced Richard the Lion-Hearted and any number of other legendary heroes. Beyond that his ancestry reached to William I’s granddaughter and so finally to the Conqueror himself. By contrast, Henry Tudor was the grandson of a Welsh commoner who had had his head chopped off in a town square, and this at a time when most Englishmen regarded the Welsh as a scarily alien race. And yet here he was, presuming to call himself the Earl of Richmond, come to the gentle green hills of the English Midlands for the declared purpose of making himself king.
That he might ever be able to launch even a semicredible effort to take the throne would have seemed impossible just thirty months before. Until 1483 he had been living an idle, pointless life at the court of Duke Francis of Brittany, whose guest and political pawn he had been for nearly half his life. He had been adopted, by then, as the focus if not necessarily the real leader of England’s Lancastrian faction—as the man who would be king if somehow the House of York could be overthrown, though increasingly that seemed an empty honor. The leader of the Yorkists, Edward IV, was a strong king in secure possession of the throne, the picture of boisterous good health at age forty, if soft and overweight after almost a decade and a half of peace. He also had a large brood of daughters and sons, the eldest of them just entering adulthood. There was every reason to expect that he and his descendants would rule for generations—and that there would be no place in England for the likes of Henry Tudor.
But then in March 1483 King Edward suffered something like a stroke and within a few weeks was dead. His heir, another Edward, was only twelve and therefore not possibly ready to rule, but that should not have been a problem because the boy had uncles—men of proven loyalty and talent—to govern on his behalf and guide him to maturity. On the paternal side was the dead king’s youngest and last surviving brother, Richard, Duke of Gloucester, still barely thirty but deeply experienced in the arts of war and governance. Opposite him was Anthony Woodville, Earl Rivers, eldest of the numerous ambitious brothers of Edward IV’s widow, Queen Elizabeth. There was a problem, however: bad blood between Richard (who was supported by many of the old noble families) and the upstart Woodvilles, who were resented bitterly because of the wealth and power that had come to them for no better reason than the fact that King Edward, while still a very young man, had impulsively married the obscure if powerfully attractive widow Elizabeth Woodville Grey.
Duke Richard, it is clear, saw the situation as fraught with danger for himself. Earl Rivers had a close relationship with their nephew, whereas Richard, who for years had been far from court governing the north as his brother’s representative, scarcely knew the boy. The duke need not have been paranoid to fear that if the Woodvilles could maintain custody of young Edward V—hardly an improbable development, considering that the child’s mother was the most prominent Woodville of them all—they could also control the government and destroy their rivals. Whatever his motives, whether he was driven by ambition, hatred, or fear, Richard struck first, setting in motion a series of atrocities that would not end until eight of the last ten legitimate Plantagenet males, five of them boys too young to marry, had died violently. He came down from the north and ordered Rivers to bring their nephew to him. When Rivers did so, both he and the boy were taken into custody. In short order Rivers was executed along with young Richard Grey, Queen Elizabeth’s son by her first marriage. Edward V and his ten-year-old brother were sent to the Tower, and Duke Richard had himself crowned.
Convulsion followed convulsion, and with each new upheaval the existence of Henry Tudor became both more significant and more precarious. The princes in the Tower were heard of no more—it was impossible to doubt that they had been murdered—and many of the men who had figured importantly in Edward IV’s regime left England rather than support the new King Richard III. Ineptly and for reasons that remain obscure, the Duke of Buckingham, probably the richest noble in England and a man whose royal blood gave him a claim to the throne, raised a rebellion not in his own name but in Henry Tudor’s. Francis of Brittany gave Henry a tiny fleet and army with which to invade England, but it was scattered by storms. By the time the ship carrying Henry hauled alone into Plymouth harbor, Buckingham had been defeated and executed and the rebellion was over. Richard’s agents met an advance party sent ashore by Henry and, by reporting that the rebellion had already succeeded, tried to lure him ashore. He learned the truth in time, however, and made his escape. Fresh storms then drove him into port in France, and with great difficulty he managed to make his way overland back to Brittany. When on Christmas Day the English exiles who had gathered in Brittany assembled at Rennes Cathedral and pledged to support Henry, their oaths must have seemed nearly meaningless. Equally empty was Henry’s promise, made that same day, to marry Edward IV’s eldest daughter, Elizabeth of York, then in sanctuary at Westminster Abbey with her mother and four sisters.
Worse soon followed. An exiled bishop with sources of information at the English court sent word that the Duke of Brittany was negotiating an agreement by which he would be richly rewarded for delivering Henry to King Richard. Henry opened communications with the French court and, upon establishing that he would be welcome there, laid plans to get himself and his followers across the Breton-French border. This ended in high drama: Duke Francis’s soldiers were hard on Henry’s heels as he galloped to France and safety. From that point, however, all his luck was good. The French king, Charles VIII, was a boy in early adolescence. His older sister, Anne of Beaujeu, headed the government as regent and badly needed to make trouble for Richard III, who was attempting to encircle France by allying himself with the two autonomous duchies of Brittany and Burgundy. (It is worth noting, in this connection, that Charles and Anne would have regarded young Tudor not only as a useful political tool but as a near kinsman. Henry’s grandmother Catherine of Valois had been their grandfather’s sister.) They added to the money coming to Henry from England to provide him with the means to again assemble some ships and hire a mercenary army. The resulting invasion force sailed out of Honfleur in Normandy on August 1, had good weather all the way this time, and made landfall at Milford Haven in the southwestern corner of Wales just six days later. It is said that Henry had to set one of his ships afire to prevent some of his more fainthearted troops from returning to France.
Richard, meanwhile, was experiencing much misery. His son and heir had died early in his reign, and when his wife died not long afterward, it was widely rumored that he had had her poisoned in order to free himself to marry his niece Elizabeth of York. The rumors became so damaging that he was obliged to take the humiliating step of denying them publicly. His subjects, evidently, were prepared to believe anything of him so long as it was sufficiently horrific. He made efforts to shore up his base of support—raising John Howard to Duke of Norfolk, for example, and giving offices and lands to the Stanley family—but the estimated number of his troops, when they came face-to-face with Henry Tudor’s on August 22, suggests that he should have done more along that line, done it sooner, and been more careful in selecting the beneficiaries.
We don’t know the size of the armies that faced each other that day. Henry must have had about five thousand men: several hundred displaced Englishmen who had made him the centerpiece of their quest for revenge, a few thousand thuggish soldiers-for-hire contributed by the regent of France, and a disappointingly small number—no more than a thousand or two, surely—who had joined him after he came ashore in southwestern Wales. Richard may have had twelve thousand, possibly ten, possibly fewer than that; the estimates vary, and there is no way of choosing among them. Whatever Richard’s total, it would have been cause for concern. It was pathetic compared to the thirty-five thousand or more troops that his late brother Edward IV had taken into the Battle of Towton on Palm Sunday in 1461, or the army of fifty thousand Lancastrians that Edward’s men had shattered that day. Richard had known months in advance that an invasion was being prepared. He had learned on August 11 that the invaders had landed four days earlier, and he had sent out summonses for the nobles of England and Wales, all of whom had been put on alert weeks before, to muster their soldiery and join him at Leicester. No more than one in every five had done so. It was unsettling evidence of how little support Richard had, and of how badly the old feudal system had decayed.
Strangely, ominously, there was a third army on the field; it might even be accurate to say that there were four. These were the forces of the Stanley clan, raised to the nobility less than twenty years before but already a major power, the greatest landowners in the northwest and de facto rulers of the Isle of Man. The Stanleys had remained loyal to Richard in 1483, when he seized the throne after his brother’s sudden death and the Duke of Buckingham raised a rebellion against him, and they had been richly rewarded for doing so. The head of the clan, Thomas Lord Stanley, had been made constable of England and steward of the royal household. His brother Sir William was chamberlain—governor, in effect—of Chester and North Wales. Upon receiving word that Henry Tudor was ashore, Richard had ordered the Stanleys to join him with their liegemen. They had done so, but more slowly than Richard could have wished, and their behavior had become increasingly suspect. Much earlier than Richard himself, they were in a position to intercept the invaders as they emerged from Wales. Instead of doing so they had continually fallen back, allowing the advance to continue. Now, with the showdown clearly at hand, they had some five thousand men with them, separated into two groups, each commanded by one of the brothers. Nobody knew whose side they were on; apparently they were pretending to be on both sides while not yet knowing themselves what they were going to do. Their first loyalty had always been to themselves, and they had long ago demonstrated that they would betray even kings when doing so was more or less certain to be to their advantage. Richard, aware of their history and fearful of their power, was holding Lord Stanley’s son hostage. It is said that he threatened to have the son executed if the Stanleys failed to join their forces with his, and was told by way of response that his lordship had other sons. It is said also that when Henry Tudor asked Stanley to join him on the morning of August 22, he was told to mind his own business.
One of the more bizarre aspects of this story is that Stanley was Henry Tudor’s stepfather, the third husband (or fourth, if one counts a childhood marriage that ended in annulment) of his mother, Margaret Beaufort. It was a purely political marriage—the contract stipulated that the bride’s chastity was not to be compromised. Though it is almost certain that Henry had long been in secret communication with the Stanleys and was counting on their support, he could not have been confident of getting it. The brothers were hanging back, Sir William with his men in one place and Lord Thomas with his in another, watching the situation unfold. If they could be counted upon to do anything, it was to wait until someone was winning and then strike at the loser in order to be in on the spoils.
The detailed descriptions in countless books notwithstanding, we have no way of knowing how the various forces were arranged. We don’t even know where they were, except somewhere within a circle with a diameter of several miles. When the earliest account finally was written, presumably drawing on the testimony of participants, its author was an Italian retainer at the English court who had good reason to want to please his Tudor masters. He tells wonderful stories: That Richard was uneasy all through the night before the battle, and that the little sleep he managed to get was punctuated with horrible dreams. That he rose while it was still dark (which means that he must have been up by four A.M.), inspected his lines, and ran his sword through a sentry who was sleeping on duty. That he wanted to hear mass, but the only available priest was unable to find the necessities. That when he called for breakfast, it too proved to be impossible. And that the most powerful and dependable of his henchmen, long-faced old John Howard, Duke of Norfolk, awoke to find a handwritten verse fastened to the entrance of the house where he had slept:
Jack of Norfolk, be not too bold,
For Dickon, thy master, is bought and sold.
“Dickon” would be Richard. For “bought and sold” we would today say “sold out.” We are told that Richard’s army was melting away like snow in springtime, some of the deserters joining the rebels, others running for home.
These stories have come down to us at second or third hand, selected by a writer who was a propagandist at least as much as a historian, and any or all of them could be inventions. We can’t even be certain that the Battle of Bosworth Field was fought at the place called Bosworth Field, which is now a popular attraction with walking tours and a visitor center and all the paraphernalia of the tourist trade. Richard is supposed to have positioned his forces there, atop a high point called Ambien Hill, from which he could look out and see his enemies approaching in the distance. Henry Tudor would have been accompanied by his standard-bearer William Brandon, who hoisted a banner on which was displayed the red dragon of Wales. They would have been surrounded by a lifeguard of pike-wielding foot soldiers and mounted knights.
Supposedly the battle began when the main body of Tudor troops, commanded by the dashing Earl of Oxford, recently escaped after ten years as Richard’s prisoner, started up Ambien Hill. Perhaps it happened that way, but students of the battle now living claim that the two sides collided not at Ambien Hill but on flatter ground some distance away. The evidence they offer is complicated but not easily dismissed. The author of the present work can attest, after visiting Bosworth and walking its length and breadth, that the landscape as it exists today does not make the traditional version of the story particularly convincing.
This we do know: at some point after the first clash of troops under the command of Oxford on one side and Norfolk on the other, with the situation stalemated and the Stanleys still hovering like vultures on the sidelines, Richard made a decision that would lead to one of the most dramatic climaxes in the history of warfare. He decided to forget about defeating the invader army with his army and instead settle things personally, in something very close to single combat, himself against Henry Tudor. In the absence of sources, it is permissible to imagine him summoning his lifeguard of perhaps a hundred knights to gather round, unsheathing his sword and pointing with it in the direction of the red dragon, and shouting for his men to follow while spurring his charger into a headlong gallop. Something like that has to have happened.
Why it happened we can never know. Possibly Richard acted out of desperation: apparently Norfolk had been killed by this point (taken by an arrow in the throat by one account, executed on the spot after surrendering to Oxford by another), and if indeed his troops had failed in an initial assault despite their superior numbers, this must have been deeply unsettling. Or perhaps Richard saw a target that was simply too tempting to ignore: the tiny far-off figure of Henry Tudor, as passive as the king in a game of chess, remote from the action and not that strongly protected. If Henry’s guard could be penetrated—and why not, if Richard himself brought a phalanx of heavy cavalry down on it like the blow of a mace—killing him would become a simple matter. It would no longer matter what the Stanleys or anyone else did. The Tudor cause would be decapitated, the whole invasion rendered pointless.
What ensued was a poetically fitting end to three centuries of rule by Plantagenet warrior-kings. The last link in that long royal chain, sword in hand and blue boar unfurled above his head, thundered across the battlefield with his knights just behind, the hooves of their chargers throwing up fat clods of earth. Richard crashed headlong into the first defenders to come out to meet him, laying about him with his sword, bringing down the banner of the red dragon by instantly killing William Brandon, and sending the biggest of Henry’s knights crashing to the ground with a clang of armor plate. His horsemen hit like a wave of flesh and iron, driving into the melee with lances lowered, hacking away with clubs and blades. Whether any of them got close enough to engage Henry personally is not known, but the onslaught had to be terrifying. It is to Henry’s credit that, despite never having experienced anything like this, he did not turn and run. Nearby, perhaps steadying him, was his uncle Jasper, as tough and fearless an old campaigner as anyone on the field that day.
For a long moment things hung in the balance. In one recent treatise on the battle, the writer claims to have found evidence that Richard’s assault was foiled by a tactic he had not encountered before: French pikemen, forming up in a square around Henry and planting the butts of their weapons in the earth to create a wall of iron points that no cavalry could penetrate.
To return to what we know: suddenly, from the side or rear, scores and then hundreds and finally thousands of men in red tunics came pouring in, swamping Richard and his band. These were William Stanley’s men, wearing the Stanley livery. In the moment of crisis—perhaps as soon as it became clear that Henry was not going to die—Stanley had seen his opportunity and gone in for the kill.
Richard was swept back and unhorsed. Shakespeare, more than a century later, would have him crying out for a fresh mount: “My kingdom for a horse!” Older accounts say something very different: that one of Richard’s companions urged him to flee, offering him a horse. If that happened, the king refused. Again we can only guess at his thinking. He could have had little hope of assembling another army if he managed to escape, and perhaps he could accept nothing but victory or death. He fought on as, one after another, his men were cut down around him. The faithful Thirlwall held the blue boar aloft until his legs were chopped from under him. Finally it was Richard’s turn: men he could not get at with his sword, Welsh troopers, jabbed at him from all directions with their long-handled points and hooks. He screamed defiance, cursing them as traitors. It must have been even more like butchery than most battlefield deaths in the Middle Ages, the pikemen probing for the seams in the king’s armor. Without question it was a brave death; even those who depict Richard as a monster have always acknowledged that. When it was over his body was stripped naked, thrown over the back of a horse like a sack of grain, and hauled off for public display. Those of his men who were not dead or captured ran for their lives. Lord Stanley’s son was still alive. In the confusion no one had remembered, or bothered, to kill him.
The whole thing must have seemed a dream or a nightmare, depending on which side one was on. In seconds Richard had been reduced from a king at the head of an army of thousands to a mangled lump of dead flesh. Henry had been vaulted from adventurer to conqueror. Survivors must have stumbled about the field, trying to absorb what had happened.
It fell to the ever-resourceful Lord Stanley, who had played no part in the battle even after his brother went in, to focus the moment. Someone retrieved the crown that Richard had lost in the moment before his death. The legends say it was found in a hawthorn bush. Sober historians have dismissed this as a romantic fabrication but fail to explain why, not many years after the battle, a crown in a thornbush became a royal emblem. In any case, Stanley arrived on the scene while everything was still in confusion and took possession of the crown. Putting himself at the center of a great occasion that he had done nothing to bring about, he placed the crown on his stepson’s head and led the assembled company in a hearty round of cheers.
At which moment, in a turn of fate as improbable as any in history, Henry Tudor became King Henry VII of England.