by Linda Porter
On which day all the English lords went with great solemnity to the chief church of the city and there each gave faith and promise to the other. The earl himself first took a corporal oath, and on his honour promising that incontinent [immediately] after he should return, he would be conjoined in matrimony with the lady Elizabeth, daughter to King Edward IV. Then all the company swore to him fealty, and did to him homage as though he had been that time the crowned king and anointed prince, promising faithfully and firmly assuring that they would not only lose their worldly substance, but also be privated [deprived] of their lives and worldly felicity, rather than to suffer king Richard, that tyrant, longer to rule and reign over them.5
Such a symbolic gesture, coming at the end of a year that had both raised and dashed his hopes, made him a king in waiting. But he was still some way from fulfilling his mother’s dream.
The realization that the figurehead of the main opposition to the king’s rule was the stepson of Lord Stanley brought Margaret Beaufort and her third husband into great peril. Margaret narrowly avoided attainder and Stanley’s eloquence before Richard III, when he somehow managed to convince a very sceptical audience that he had nothing to do with his wife’s actions, probably played a vital part in preventing imprisonment or worse. But Margaret lost her titles and estates, which were given over to her husband, and she was deprived of her liberty when Stanley undertook to keep her under strict supervision and control. The effect of this on their relationship can only be imagined, but neither came out of it as badly as might have been expected. Stanley’s professed loyalty made him important to Richard III, especially in Wales, where support of Richard was scarce, and Margaret, ‘albeit that in King Richard’s days she was oft in jeopardy of her life, yet she bore patiently all troubles in such wise that it is wonder to think it’,6 had managed for much of the Yorkist years to balance pragmatic adherence to the regime with unflinching support for her fugitive son. In Margaret’s case, piety and plotting were both important parts of her daily life. That there might be a moral contradiction between these extremes never occurred to her.
Yet while it was possible to limit the opposition caused by malcontents in England, Richard could not afford to ignore the growing band of influential exiles gathered around the unlikely figure of Henry Tudor in Brittany. His main aim in scotching Tudor’s hopes was to persuade the duke of Brittany to give up the young man he had supported since 1471. Francis had resisted English offers before, but in the early summer of 1484 Richard III made a generous offer of support, through the Breton treasurer, Pierre Landais, that the Bretons accepted during one of Duke Francis’s many bouts of illness. In return for archers and money, Brittany would hand over Henry Tudor. Fortunately for Henry, the clever and ubiquitous Morton, bishop of Ely, still had his own sources in Richard’s government and got wind of the deal. Though Morton was himself in Flanders, his efficient courier network was able to inform Henry Tudor swiftly. With Brittany no longer a safe haven, negotiations were opened with the French government for Henry and his supporters to go into France. Following his uncle and other nobles, Henry slipped across the border from Brittany into Anjou, disguised as a servant. The story goes that he was only an hour away from being intercepted by a Breton force sent to arrest him. When Duke Francis found out about the change of policy implemented in his name he generously offered money for the remaining rank and file of Henry’s stranded court-in-exile to join him in France. Henry’s place of residence had changed but he would have known in the spring of 1484 that, though safe for the time being, he was now at the mercy of a larger, more powerful government, one that would not hesitate to manipulate him ruthlessly in the pursuit of its own ends in the wider European context.
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FRANCE WAS NOT without its own problems. Charles VIII was only fourteen years old and his kingdom was ruled by a regency government led by his elder sister, Anne de Beaujeu. With her husband, Pierre, directing the council and the princess herself in charge of the person of her brother, the young king was not always grateful for their direction. Though understandable, Charles’s chafing at the bit did not do his sister justice. At twenty-two years old, she was to prove an able stateswoman and a steadying influence in uncertain times. Her success suggests she would have made an excellent monarch in her own right, but Salic law, which allowed only males to occupy the throne in France, forbade such a possibility.
At first there were only hints of how the French might make use of Henry Tudor. Absorbed with trying to impose her own authority, Anne had to deal with domestic difficulties and the threat posed by the Orléans faction of her family. She was not in a position to give direct help yet. But her underlying aim, like that of her father, was to unite Brittany with France. While Richard III and his ally the Archduke Maximilian publicly supported the independence of Brittany, the French government was content at least to maintain Henry Tudor. Any more positive help seemed likely to be modest and its timing contingent on how seriously the French viewed the likelihood of Richard III intervening militarily on Brittany’s behalf.
Henry’s hopes rose and fell as the months went by. His situation was almost entirely dependent on events elsewhere. In England, Richard III had strengthened his hold on power by persuading Elizabeth Woodville to come out of sanctuary in Westminster Abbey and rejoin the court. There was talk of good marriages for her daughters, though the question of their legitimacy remained unresolved. And then the wheel of fortune turned again. Richard was dealt a heavy blow when his son, Prince Edward, died in April 1484, followed within the year by Richard’s wife, Anne Neville. Suddenly, Richard’s own dynastic hopes had evaporated. There were rumours that he intended to marry his niece, Elizabeth of York, a course of action that the king was forced to deny publicly. This news alarmed Henry Tudor but Richard, whatever his intentions might privately have been, did not go through with it. The passage of time was leaving both Richard and Henry with fewer options. There had also been notable additions to Henry’s cause, such as the earl of Oxford, the most senior surviving Lancastrian commander, who effected a daring escape from a castle in the Pale of Calais, bringing with him two other experienced soldiers to bolster Henry’s hopes. By the beginning of 1485 it was clear that the only serious rival to the widowed and childless English king was the little-known Welshman still living in exile across the sea.
Richard had suffered personal losses but in England the strong core of support among the new aristocracy created by the Yorkists was not ready to desert him for an unfamiliar rebel with a distant claim to the throne. Mindful of the advice that ‘the king of France is young and the kingdom governed by a number of princes who agree ill, so that the king of England will never have so good an opportunity as he has at present’,7 he had already moved into a vigorous propaganda campaign to discredit the pretender to his crown. In a proclamation distributed throughout England, Henry’s supporters were described as ‘open murderers, adulterers and extortioners … and to abuse and blind the commons of this said realm [they] have chosen to be their captain … Henry, late calling himself earl of Richmond, which of his ambitious and insatiable covetousness … encroaches upon the name and title of royal estate of this realm of England. Whereunto he has no manner, interest, right or colour [quality] as every man well knows.’ To achieve his aims, it was alleged, Henry had agreed to give up England’s ancient claim to the throne of France, to the French lands that had belonged to the early Plantagenets and even to Calais itself, the last remaining outpost of a once substantial English empire in France. This traitor and his brutal henchmen would terrorize England once they arrived, perpetrating ‘the most cruel murders, slaughters, robberies and disinheritances that ever were seen in any Christian realm’. The country’s hope lay in Richard III, ‘our sovereign lord’, who ‘as a well-willed, diligent and courageous prince will put his most royal person to all labour and pain necessary … for the resistance and subduing of his enemies.’8
Such vituperation suggests that Richard had accepted that arme
d confrontation was fast approaching. By the summer of 1485 Henry Tudor was running out of money, the loyalty of one of his key supporters, Elizabeth Woodville’s son, the marquess of Dorset, was wavering, and the possibility of his marriage to the Yorkist heiress looked to be receding. Most serious of all, the French no longer needed him. The collapse of the Breton government removed the threat of English interference on behalf of the duchy and any diplomatic reason for sponsoring Tudor. This loss of what had always been uncertain support forced Henry’s hand. By mid-July he was seeking loans and putting together a military force to invade England. He had already written to potential supporters there but his tone, though positive, was still one more of hope than expectation:
Being given to understand your good devoir and entreaty to advance me to the furtherance of my rightful claim, due and lineal inheritance of that crown, and for the just depriving of that homicide and unnatural tyrant, which now unjustly bears dominion over you, I give you to understand that no Christian heart can be more full of joy and gladness than the heart of your poor exiled friend, who will, upon the instant of your sure advertising what power you will make ready, and what captains and leaders you get to conduct, be prepared to pass over the sea with such force as my friends here are preparing for me. And if I have such good speed and success as I wish … I shall ever be most forward to remember and wholly to requite this your great and most loving kindness in my just quarrel.9
The force that he referred to was only about half the size of the one scattered by storms nearly two years earlier. It probably comprised about two thousand men and no more than seven ships. Most of the soldiers were mercenaries from different European countries: France, Switzerland, Brittany and Scotland. Only four to five hundred of them were English. But if their numbers were not impressive, Henry and his advisers had chosen experienced men, familiar with the latest military tactics and weaponry. On 1 August 1485 the little fleet left the mouth of the Seine at Honfleur in Normandy and passed without incident across the Channel and into the Irish Sea. Six days later it made landfall at Mill Bay near Haverfordwest on the Pembroke coast. His faithful uncle Jasper at his side, Henry Tudor had, at last, come home to Wales. If there was relief, there must also have been a great deal of apprehension as to what might follow.
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HENRY’S PRIORITY was to gather men in his support. He needed a larger force behind him if there was to be any prospect of defeating Richard III in battle. But the underlying plan of his campaign had been carefully considered. As soon as he landed, he had sent out letters, signed as king, and riders had spread out across Wales bringing the news of his arrival and seeking commitment to his cause. Eloquent and carefully phrased, Henry’s letters transformed him from ‘your poor exiled friend’ to a rightful king:
Through the help of Almighty God, the assistance of our loving friends and true subjects and the great confidence that we have to the nobles and commons of this our principality of Wales, we be entered into the same, purposing by the help above rehearsed to descend into our realm of England not only for the adeption [recovery] of the crown unto us of right appertaining but also for the oppression of that odious tyrant Richard, late duke of Gloucester, usurper of our said right …10
These were sound tactics, for it was by no means inevitable that Wales would answer the call of an almost forgotten pretender, hoping that his Welsh ancestry and the locally strong affection for his Uncle Jasper would make a material difference to his prospects. Richard III had done his best to ensure that his own men were in charge of the key fortresses of the country and that Henry Tudor could not move unimpeded through Wales towards confrontation with the Yorkist king. Henry stayed in the west of Wales for some days, taking his force across the Pembroke peninsula and along the Cardiganshire coast before reaching Aberystwyth by about 12 August. Five days or so later, having traversed difficult terrain in mid-Wales, he reached the English border at Shrewsbury. He had encountered little resistance and his army was growing, thanks to locally influential Welsh leaders whose loyalty to Richard III was far less certain than the king had hoped. At Shrewsbury, though, Henry was firmly rebuffed by the local dignitaries: ‘Master Mitton made and swore, being head bailiff and a stout wise gentleman that he knew him for no king but only King Richard to whom he was sworn’.11 Tudor pleaded with Mitton but to no avail, until messengers from his stepfather’s brother, Sir William Stanley, arrived and persuaded the townspeople to change their minds.
Henry had marched largely unimpeded through Wales but any hope he may have entertained of joining up with the Stanleys and marching down Watling Street to London without engaging Richard’s forces was not to be realized. Richard could command a much larger army and was not likely to sit around waiting for Tudor to outwit him. The king was at Nottingham, where he had spent much of the summer expecting news of an invasion by his rival. But he did not learn of Henry’s landing until 11 August, thus losing some time and giving Henry the opportunity to establish himself in Wales. In the space of a week the king summoned his main commanders, the duke of Norfolk and the earl of Northumberland, continued to recruit men and prepared himself for battle. He also held what he probably believed was a singular advantage, if not actually a trump card. Lord Stanley, Margaret Beaufort’s husband, had been forced to leave his eldest son by an earlier marriage, Lord Strange, with the king. The young man was effectively a hostage for the Stanley family’s loyalty, still seen as unreliable despite Stanley’s best efforts to persuade Richard otherwise. This negation of the Stanley threat (or so Richard hoped) was expected to have a material impact on the outcome of a major confrontation between Tudor and Yorkist forces. Between them, the Stanley brothers could muster about six thousand men, more than enough to change the course of a battle. Richard could not force them to fight for him but he could ensure that they stayed on the sidelines. And that indeed is where they were as the two armies approached each other in the Midlands at the beginning of the third week of August 1485.
The Stanleys were equally important to Henry Tudor. On 19 August Henry met Sir William Stanley at Stafford, hoping for a firm commitment that the brothers would support him and, in so doing, put him on the throne. He may have received assurances of goodwill but the Stanleys were careful to avoid joining their forces with Henry’s. Margaret Beaufort’s husband no doubt did have concerns for the safety of his son but he was as much of a pragmatist now as he had always been. There may have been fair words but Henry’s army, though swelled by recruits gathered in Shropshire, was a separate entity from the Stanleys. Lord Stanley passed through Lichfield consciously avoiding his stepson. The town opened its gates to Henry Tudor and he moved on, towards Tamworth. Though a number of men had already started to desert the king, the uncertainty over the Stanleys’ intentions seems to have got the better of Henry on the night of 20–21 August, when he became detached from the main body of his troops and went missing until about dawn, to the consternation of his commanders.
Perhaps rather than a late loss of nerves he really had received messages from the Stanleys, as he subsequently explained. At any rate, he met both the brothers at Atherstone on 21 August. The outcome was by no means satisfactory. Lord Stanley offered four of his best knights and their troops but would not agree to put the greater Stanley force under the command of the earl of Oxford. Henry knew then that his stepfather would not commit wholly to his cause and that Stanley’s troops would probably decide the battle. For half a lifetime he had had little reason to trust others or expect their unswerving commitment. Nothing had changed on that late summer eve. The man who would be king needed to rely on his own leaders, most of whom had not known him for more than eighteen months, and pray that God would uphold his cause.
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RICHARD III arrived in Leicester on the night of 20 August 1485. He was ready to fight and eager to be done with Henry Tudor, who, he wrote ‘intending our utter destruction, the extreme subversion of this our realm and disinheriting of our true subjects of the same, towards whose
recountering, God being our guide, we be utterly determined in our own person to remove in all haste goodly that we can or may.’ From Leicester he moved about fourteen miles to the west, to engage the smaller force of his enemy in the gently undulating countryside close to the old Roman road of Watling Street. On 22 August, the confrontation itself took place.
History knows it as the battle of Bosworth but despite a fair amount of contemporary or near-contemporary comment, there is still a great deal that remains unclear about the battle. Many books have been written over hundreds of years on the subject, positing different ideas about its location and the movement of the opposing forces. Recent archaeological research has apparently proved them all wrong. The discovery of cannon shot, the badge of the White Boar and other military paraphernalia such as swords and armour now puts the site of the battle two miles to the south and west of the current battlefield centre, in terrain that would have been more open than it is now, dotted with low hills and criss-crossed with marshy areas. The nearest village, Stoke Golding, has long boasted that it is the birthplace of the Tudor dynasty and the discovery of so much evidence in the fields nearby adds weight to that claim.
The ground had been chosen by Richard III, whose forces outnumbered Henry’s by about two to one. We cannot be certain where either he or Henry camped with their armies on the night of 21–2 August. Henry was probably to the west, at Merevale Abbey and the nearby village of Atherstone, and Richard was further east, at Sutton Cheney. The king’s troops may actually have camped on Albion Hill, the highest piece of local ground, but the recent finds further south indicate that the main part of the battle was not fought there. It was Henry who had to march to engage Richard, breaking camp at sunrise (just before six) and proceeding along Watling Street to its junction with Fenn Lanes, where his troops made rendezvous and formed line of march. The Stanleys, as they had intimated, kept their distance and formed a separate battle array between the two other armies, on rising ground to the south that enabled them to have a good view of how the fighting was going.
