Blood Sisters: The Women Behind the Wars of the Roses

by Sarah Gristwood

  The rumors of Richard’s plans appear to have been so explosive that it took more than his Portuguese marriage proposal to defuse them. Only two weeks after Anne’s death, just before Easter and days after the royal emissary had left for Portugal, in the great hall of the Hospital of St. John, Richard was forced to take the extraordinary step of making a public repudiation of any desire to wed his niece. He spoke, says Crowland, “in a loud and distinct voice; more, however, as many supposed, to suit the wishes of those who advised him to that effect, than in conformity with his own.” The records of the Mercers’ Company describe how, in the presence of many of his lords, and of the City hierarchy, Richard “said it never came into his thought or mind to marry in such manner wise nor [was he] willing or glad of the death of his queen but as sorry and in heart as heavy as man might be.”

  He could not altogether quell the whispers. The Great Chronicle recorded “much whispering among the people that the king had put the children of King Edward to death, and also that he had poisoned the Queen his wife, and intended with a license purchased [a dispensation] to have married the elder daughter of King Edward. Which rumours and sayings with other things before done caused him to fall in great hatred of his subjects.”

  The stage, as Margaret Beaufort must have known, was set for her son, Henry.

  _______________

  *In Malory, Tristan is an Arthurian knight fatally in love with a lady, whose mother’s brother he has unfortunately killed.

  19

  “IN BOSWORTH FIELD”

  Here pitch our tent, even here in Bosworth field.

  THE TRAGEDY OF RICHARD THE THIRD, 5.1

  While Richard’s regime was struggling in England, Henry Tudor’s cabal in France was looking more robust than ever. Henry had now every hope of support from the teenage Charles VIII—or at least from his sister and regent, Anne of Beaujeu. And as the spring of 1485 warmed up, Margaret Beaufort’s servant Reginald Bray—whose recent pardon by Richard seems not to have swayed him—was collecting money to fund mercenaries and sending messages across the Channel.

  Richard’s unpopularity had given a fresh chance to Margaret’s son. Even her cautious husband, Stanley, the ultimate political weathercock, was beginning to rate her son’s chances higher. If this particular coup was due to Margaret’s influence, it would prove to be the most important thing she could possibly have done to aid Henry. For all she was in theory debarred from any political activity, immured on Stanley’s estates, Margaret may have been more active than ever during this time.

  Through the spring, Richard continued to hear rumors of an impending rebellion—perhaps heard too that in France Henry Tudor was being described as a younger son of Henry VI. The descriptions were of course erroneous (and alienating to the Yorkist Woodvilles, the enemies of the previous Henry and the clan whose support this new Henry so badly needed). But they did suggest the French were seriously promoting him as a royal heir.

  After the scandal of the spring, Elizabeth of York may have been sent straight to the northern castle of Sheriff Hutton, already the residence of several other royal children—but one source has her in Lord Stanley’s London house for a few weeks at least, where her furious resentment against her uncle swung her to the opposite political side. The Ballad of Lady Bessy, the long early-sixteenth-century verse narrative chronicling the events of these crucial months, survives in different versions. On one thing, however, the versions agree: Elizabeth of York played an extraordinarily active role in this story.

  The Ballad describes how as the spring began to ripen, Elizabeth of York waylaid Lord Stanley in the palace corridors and asked him to send a message to his stepson, Henry Tudor, promising she would marry him and thus greatly strengthen his cause. “For an [if] he were King, I should be Queen; / I do him love, and never him see.”

  She tears her hair in her fury when Stanley refuses to help her, sinking into a swoon, lamenting that she would never be queen. But her determination, in this account, has also a more practical aspect: 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],—

  and 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 her feelings for her uncle were, or had been. But it is certain she must have awaited events with more than uncommon tension: once more, in a way, she had been cheated out of a royal match, and maybe she now feared losing another, if she had heard Henry was pursuing a Herbert heiress—or, as Francis Bacon would suggest, that he contemplated marriage to the heiress of Brittany.

  After having had to make that embarrassing declaration of his marital intentions, Richard himself had left London first for Windsor and then, on May 17, to spend some three days at the home of his mother, Cecily Neville, in Berkhampsted. Possibly he wished to update her on his European marriage plans—or, of course, to explain the other, less flattering, marriage stories as best he could.

  But war was coming, and Richard must have heard that as spring edged toward summer, Charles in France was openly raising money for Henry. And now, the king began to make preparations of his own.

  In the second week of June, Richard set out for Nottingham Castle, not only a comfortable residence but also a military power base, strategically placed in the heart of England. From there he began to raise his army and to prepare for an invasion everyone knew would soon be on the way.

  In late June, Richard’s proclamation against Henry was reissued, with two important changes. The first saw the omission of the name of the Marquess of Dorset, Elizabeth Woodville’s eldest son, from the list of rebels and traitors; Richard was again trying to placate her and her family, dividing and conquering the opposition. 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] indouble avoutry gotten.”

  As Richard continued to try to undercut Henry’s claim to the throne, the young claimant’s stepfather removed himself from the preparations at Nottingham. The same week that Richard issued his latest proclamation, 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—but only on the condition Stanley left his son behind, as a guarantee of his continued loyalty.

  On August 1, Henry Tudor set sail from France, though without all the backing he might have hoped for. The French had wobbled in their support, granting money as a loan only; Henry was forced to pawn his household possessions and leave two Yorkist lords, Dorset and another, behind as a guarantee of the loan. Elizabeth Woodville’s brother, however, unlike her son, 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 uncle Jasper Tudor, an equally battle-hardened leader whose presence compensated for his nephew’s lack of military knowledge.

  Henry and his force landed on August 7 at Milford Haven in Wales—far away from Richard in the Midlands, but the country of his birth and ancestry, where he might hope to attract most support. Falling to his knees, Henry 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 two-week march eastward began along, as Crowland described it, “r
ugged and indirect tracks.” It would have taken several days for galloping messengers to bring Richard the news, but on August 11 the summons to his supporters went out: “orders of the greatest severity” threatening reprisals on all who refused to take up arms. Crowland declares that on hearing news 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.” Henry’s arrival meant the waiting was over and that the fate of England—and of Richard’s own regime—would finally be decided.

  All through Wales, Henry rallied supporters. But he was a virtual stranger in England. Vergil reports that he wrote to his mother, Margaret Beaufort, along the way: it was his mother on whom, directly or indirectly, he had had to rely to raise support in the country.

  Margaret was presumably still under house arrest at Stanley’s home of Latham in Lancashire, some hundred miles from the eventual conflict point. Stanley had been summoned back to the king’s side for fear, says Crowland, that his wife “might induce her husband to go over to the party of her son.” But, extraordinarily, Stanley seems still to have been refusing to commit to either side. Richard was holding Stanley’s own son hostage to ensure his good behavior, which may have had something to do with his hesitation.

  Nonetheless, when the summons from Richard came, Stanley had sent word he was ill and unable to travel. Instead, he took his forces south, toward the area where the armies were likely to meet, but by an independent path, 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 along the route. But William too refused to commit directly, pending further consultation with his brother.

  Richard left Nottingham for Leicester around August 19; on the twenty-first, with all pomp and wearing his crown, he rode with his forces from Leicester toward what would prove to be the conflict point—Bosworth, or, as contemporaries called it, Bosworth Field. Camped near Bosworth, so some of the often-contradictory reports have it, Henry Tudor at last met Lord Stanley, the stepfather he had probably never seen, as well as Sir William. Shakespeare in Richard III 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 had been agreed upon “in counsel” with Lord Stanley, which suggests that Henry came away from the meeting with the firm promise of Stanley support—or at least thought he did. 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. Whatever decision they made on the day of battle, it would be vital. With the Stanleys, Henry’s army would not fall far short of Richard’s. Without them, he was massively outnumbered.

  The fields around Bosworth are disputed now as thoroughly as they were trampled then. Recent archaeological work has relocated the scene of the battle and cast a different light on its strategies—and, as a sideline, perhaps given a fresh glimpse into the women’s background role in what is this day the men’s story. Found in the ground where Richard’s army may have camped the night before the battle were two Burgundian coins. These 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, Richard 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 seems to have made no secret of his feelings. He himself described the dream to his men in the morning, to explain away his evident “heaviness.”

  The ill portents were mounting. Richard, Vergil continued, 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 roused so early, his chaplains could not be found to celebrate a propitiatory mass, nor did the servants have his breakfast ready.

  Richard, Crowland 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 the king 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 pulled 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, Henry’s nerves were kept on edge by the fickle Stanleys. When he sent word to Lord Stanley to get his troops ready, Stanley sent word back that Henry should look to his own men; his stepfather 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.

  Although Henry, Vergil says, was “no little vexed, and begun to be somewhat appalled” at Stanley’s obduracy, he put his troops in order. A slender vanguard with the archers went first, with Henry—or perhaps, rather, his uncle Jasper and supporter the Earl of Oxford—making the best of the “small numbers” of his people. He still had scarcely five thousand, if one left out the three thousand Stanley men. Richard III had “twice so many.” But when both the vanguards were assembled, Vergil continues, “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 armies’ actual tactics are hard to gauge, when the very site of the battle is still debated so urgently. But the traditional view has it 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, gave the order that no one should move more than ten feet from the standards, lest their smaller force should be lost amid the greater one. This restriction on movement created a brief pause in the fighting and seemed also to confuse the enemy. The Tudor historian Vergil later suggested that Richard’s men seized gladly on the break, having no great desire for his victory.

  Propaganda or not, Vergil’s theory would explain why, when Richard espied Henry himself, surrounded by only a small guard, the king set off “inflamed with ire” to finish the fight himself, in single combat. Perhaps, after all, 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 seems almost a quixotic gesture now, Richard was surrendering the advantage of high ground and moving beyond the protection of his forces. But his decision 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 armored 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 ax, the king began to hack his way toward his adversary.

  When Henry saw Richard spurring his horse toward him, Vergil says, he “received him with great courage.” Vergil adds 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 own men brought him fresh horses, but he refused to flee, swearing again that that day he would make an end either of war or of 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 died, 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, ending the ill-starred life of Richard III.