by Linda Porter
As Henry’s army advanced along the Roman road it came under artillery attack from Richard’s forces. Such opening salvoes were common in late medieval battles and though they were intended to terrify as much as anything else, they also revealed where Richard and his forces actually were. Henry and his commanders would then have known that the king had an impressive array and could begin to understand how he might deploy it. The royal vanguard, with archers at front and cavalry protecting the infantry, was under the command of John Howard, duke of Norfolk. The rearguard, under the earl of Northumberland, was probably deployed in line with the vanguard to make a wide-sweeping array that was intended to envelop the smaller force of Henry Tudor. The king himself was behind the main battle line, surrounded by a lifeguard of no more than two hundred cavalry.
Henry, without the crucial support of the Stanleys, had to trust to the earl of Oxford and put most of his troops in a vanguard that, though less deep, could at least appear to match the frontage of Richard’s battle array. Henry stayed with the main battle, behind Oxford, but it was a meagre force, probably no more than a troop of cavalry and a company of foot. It left him dangerously exposed once Oxford moved off. The earl, however, was a canny fighter. Richard’s first artillery barrage had helped him form a plan that was, essentially, to outmanoeuvre the king and divide his forces. The battle-hardened Oxford knew his military text books. What had worked for Roman generals might also work for him. If he could drive a wedge through Richard’s vanguard, he could diminish the impact of Norfolk’s archers and give the infantrymen of Henry Tudor’s army a chance of making an effective attack. The outcome of fierce hand-to-hand fighting was unpredictable – panic and confusion were powerful forces in themselves – and Henry’s commanders knew that only decisive action would sway the Stanleys.
For some while (we do not know how long) the fighting was brutal yet without obvious advantage to either side. If Richard had hoped that sheer weight of numbers would bring about a quick victory, he now knew that Tudor’s forces were not ready to break and run and that Norfolk was in difficulties. He needed to change the indeterminate nature of the conflict and it was pointed out to him that the isolated position of his rival, behind the main force of Oxford’s troops, presented him with just such an opportunity. Victory did not have to be achieved through hours of killing. A cavalry charge directed at Henry and the small force guarding him would annihilate the pretender and trample his red dragon banner into the earth. Their leader dead, Henry’s forces would almost certainly flee the field and Richard, in this one decisive moment, would be England’s undisputed king. It was a bold idea, typical of the soldier that Richard had long been and the ruler he now was. The odds seemed to have been on his side. Yet it cost him his life.
Richard III got to within what was literally striking distance of Henry Tudor but it was not quite close enough. He was thwarted in the end by Henry’s French pikemen, who had just enough time to close ranks around their leader. The eighteen-foot-long pikes they wielded could not be pushed aside by men on horseback. So the king was forced to dismount and try with his followers to hack his way through, evidently hoping to come face-to-face with Henry and slay him personally. Richard’s determination and valour were acknowledged even by his enemies, but Henry and his guards fought vigorously as well and their response, coupled with Richard’s increasingly desperate situation, since he was now cut off from his own troops, finally caused the watching Stanleys to abandon their neutrality. The intervention of Sir William Stanley’s soldiers decided the outcome of the battle of Bosworth Field. Richard fought on, even as the Stanleys charged. He killed Henry’s standard-bearer and was still making for Tudor himself, despite being urged to flee the field. Finally, he was surrounded and battered to death. Hearing the cheers from the Stanleys’ forces, Norfolk’s troops scattered and ran for their lives. Northumberland’s, whether through treachery or too great a distance from the action, had played no part in the fighting. Henry Tudor, probably more dazed than triumphant, had emerged victorious. He would subsequently ascribe his success – and his claim to rule England – to the providence of God.
Legend has it that the gold circlet Richard wore on his head, over his armour, was knocked off and rolled under a hawthorn bush as his enemies cut him down. The crown was subsequently retrieved by Lord Stanley, who placed it on his stepson’s head in a powerful gesture that marked the moment when the Tudor dynasty came into being. This is a good story but probably one that gained in the telling by the Tudor propaganda machine.
Richard’s dead body was shamefully treated. Polydore Vergil wrote some thirty years later that it was:
carried to the town of Leicester, as he gorgeously the day before with pomp and pride departed out of the same town. For his body was naked and despoiled to the skin and nothing left about him, not so much as a clout to cover his privy members, and was trussed behind a pursuivant of arms called blanche sanglier, or white boar, like a hog or a calf, the head and arms hanging on the one side of the horse and the legs on the other side, and all besprinkled with mire and blood.12
The body was displayed in the church of the Greyfriars for several days, lest there be any doubt that Richard had died. There was no respect for the loser of Bosworth. Richard was buried without a headstone and only some years later did Henry provide a small sum for a coffin to house the remains of the last Plantagenet king.
* * *
AT TWENTY-EIGHT, Henry Tudor was no longer a ‘pretty lad’. In looks he was still personable, but an itinerant and uncertain youth had shaped a cautious personality. He was not a man who took anything for granted. The immense challenge of ruling the larger of the two realms that formed the island of Britain lay ahead of him. He had come by his crown in blood and battle. Three years later, in the kingdom of Scotland, a much younger man, destined to be Henry’s rival for the remaining years of the fifteenth century, won a throne the same way.
CHAPTER TWO
The Field of Stirling
‘Nothing achieved by violence can endure.’
Queen Margaret of Denmark’s dying words to her eldest son, the future James IV of Scotland
THE ABBEY OF CAMBUSKENNETH stood among peaceful meadows on a bend on the northern bank of the river Forth, below the town of Stirling. Founded as an Augustinian religious house in 1147 by David I, one of Scotland’s most pious kings, it was not a prosperous place in late medieval times. Many reports over the years spoke of its poverty, of the small number of brothers who lived there and the depredations suffered from warfare and the unwanted attentions of the various armies that periodically fought in the area, during and beyond the struggle for Scottish independence in the fourteenth century. Its once beautiful gardens had brought in enough income to endow the abbey with several altars, but this was insufficient compensation for the constant disputes with neighbouring landowners over cattle and sheep rustling and ownership of fisheries in the river. Cambuskenneth was still functioning but had seen better days.
Thus it was probably with resignation rather than enthusiasm that the monks watched as a party of horsemen approached the abbey’s gates and requested entry on a day towards the end of June 1488. The visitors might have been pilgrims or travellers but in fact they were neither. It would soon have become apparent to anyone not forewarned that this was a cortège. Accompanying the coffin was a group of lords who kept a watchful, if respectful, eye on the youth who rode with them. The boy was their new king, the fifteen-year-old James Stewart, who had become the fourth monarch of that name two weeks earlier. His throne had been won in battle, on a field close to where the pivotal conflict at Bannockburn, which saw the English pushed back out of Scotland, was fought 150 years earlier.
But the victory, though clear in military terms, was clouded by doubt and suspicion. For James had rebelled against his own father and now came, or, perhaps more accurately, was being brought, to bury him within the walls of Cambuskenneth Abbey. Though James III would share the tomb of his wife, Margaret of Denmark, who had
died two years earlier, the proceedings of that midsummer’s day were not intended as a private family funeral. Rather, they were a reminder to the young king that he was complicit in his father’s death and that the lords could, at that point, make or break him. The lesson was not lost on James IV. Yet even as his guilt mingled with grief, there was the inescapable fact that he was, indeed, king. The doubts about his future that had plagued him in recent times were finally laid to rest with the father whose love he had lost some years before.
* * *
JAMES ACQUIRED his crown almost as strangely as Henry Tudor did in England, though by a very different path. Scotland in the fifteenth century was not convulsed by periodic bouts of civil war, with rival claimants jockeying for the throne, as England had been. In fact, it proved a refuge for the Lancastrians during the 1460s, when the queen regent gave shelter to Henry VI and Margaret of Anjou after the defeat at Towton. The country had, though, known its share of troubles. Like James IV, his father and grandfather had come to the throne as minors, and in difficult circumstances, both after untimely deaths. Government continued to function, often quite successfully, yet there were inevitable clashes with overmighty nobles and a great deal of competition among the aristocracy for power and influence. Throughout the fifteenth century the great families – the Douglases, the Livingstons, the Humes, the Boyds, the Campbells, the Kennedys, the Hepburns and many others – vied for power and influence at court. The blood feud was a way of life, passed down from one generation to the next, and the Stewart kings themselves, who had occupied the throne for just over a century, were no strangers to violence. James I of Scotland was murdered by disaffected nobles and his bereaved English queen, Joan Beaufort, participated personally in the torture of his assassins. James II, a man with a temper to match the fiery red birthmark on his face, created over a century of ill feeling between the Crown and the Douglas family when he invited the recalcitrant earl William Douglas to a meeting at Stirling in 1452 and, piqued by his guest’s refusal to toe the line, stabbed him to death. This king’s subsequent demise when he stood too close to one of his own cannon and it exploded must have seemed like rough justice to the Douglases.
The throne passed once more to a child, the eight-year-old who became James III in 1460. But while there were tensions among the Scottish nobility, relations within the Stewart royal family itself were scarcely any better. James III seems to have disliked his own family intensely but not to have realized or cared that this might become a permanent disadvantage when trying to govern Scotland. Perhaps it was a product of his upbringing, personally supervised by his wealthy and sophisticated mother, Mary of Gueldres, the niece of the duke of Burgundy. Mary instilled in her son the importance of his position, a strong sense of his own superiority, and, in a departure from prevailing wisdom in Scotland, the notion that seeking peace with England might be a better policy than endless confrontation. She does not seem to have considered how such a change would be received by her son’s subjects. Another aspect that the queen mother either overlooked, or could not adequately address, was how her son was to achieve harmonious, or at least cordial, dealings with his own family. James had three half-uncles, two younger brothers and two sisters, all of whom would play a part in his reign, and his relationships with every one of them would eventually break down.
Fully prepared to reign, but less well equipped for the human aspect of ruling, James III grew up a young man with a high opinion of himself. He did not like to be questioned. His self-confidence was shaken in the uncomfortable period between the death of his mother in 1463 and his own marriage six years later, when the Boyd family dominated court offices after humiliatingly kidnapping him as he hunted near Linlithgow in the summer of 1466. Such an experience, and the mistrust it bred, was not easily forgotten. But in 1469 he felt he could put it all behind him. At the age of seventeen, he married Princess Margaret of Denmark in Holyrood Abbey and took the reins of government into his own hands. Only in the most dramatic of circumstances would it prove possible to loosen his grip.
* * *
THE NEW ROYAL COUPLE were pleasing in appearance. James was dark and rather severe, while his twelve-year-old bride was probably auburn-haired, with an oval face, slim figure, rather long nose and neat mouth. She is the first Scottish queen whose portrait survives. It may be somewhat stylized, but it gives an impression of a refined and interesting face. Since she was very young, time would be needed so that she could settle in to her new role and get to know Scotland, a country that now included domains previously ruled by her Danish father. Under the terms of the Treaty of Copenhagen of 1468, Margaret’s dowry was set at 60,000 Rhenish florins, but the cash-strapped Christian I was obliged to pledge first Orkney and then Shetland as surety for down payments that were never actually realized, and so the Northern Isles passed to the control of Scotland. This extension of Scottish territory was a welcome boost for a king who later pursued grandiose, if rather vague, pretensions to developing a Scottish empire through invading Brittany and pursuing his claim to his mother’s duchy of Gueldres. First and foremost, however, he needed heirs to bolster his own domestic position and after taking his young bride on a tour of northern Scotland twelve months after they were married, three more years were to pass before, in stark contrast with the unfortunate Margaret Beaufort in England, she was felt to have reached childbearing age. Then the Danish queen promptly did her duty and there was rejoicing when a son, Prince James, was born on 17 March 1473, at Stirling, one of the castles given to his mother on her marriage.
There are glimpses of the favour shown to Queen Margaret around this time in her wardrobe accounts. She lived well and dressed superbly, as befitted her role. A gown of crimson satin with a long train and a similar dress in damask were purchased, probably for the ceremonial opening of parliament in 1474. These garments would have been adorned by some of the queen’s splendid collection of bejewelled gold belts. Round her neck and on the caps she wore on her head were the pearls that she seems to have loved; one string was made up of fifty-one pearls. Other jewellery included brooches and rings, often made out of gold, sapphires and rubies. The luxury extended to Margaret’s outdoor pursuits. For riding and hunting, she had blue velvet saddles with gilded trimmings. And, in an age that had very different standards of personal hygiene from the modern world, Margaret ensured that when she did take baths in draughty Scottish palaces, the tub was well covered by broadcloth and that she herself could be wrapped in a large bath sheet. Nor had any expense been spared for the nursery of her firstborn son. The heir to the throne could look up at the silken canopy that covered his cradle and enjoy the comfort of linen shirts and lawn baby caps, with a white coat lined with miniver (squirrel fur) for colder days.1
Two more sons followed: a second James, known as the marquess of Ormonde, in 1476 and John, earl of Mar, in 1479. Margaret had proved an exemplary bearer of male heirs and a dutiful wife. In the first years of their marriage, little is known about the true feelings of the king and queen for each other but there are hints that the relationship became more remote as the years passed. The main evidence for this comes in a brief life of Margaret written after her death by the Italian Giovanni Sabadino and dedicated to the wife of the ruler of Bologna, whose son had been knighted by Christian of Denmark, Margaret’s father. It is a curious document and, like many similar accounts of the period, is intended as much as hagiography as biography. In it we learn that Margaret ‘was a woman of such lofty and wonderful virtue, chastity and prudence that she deserves to be ranked above all the women of that region in excellence of reputation; she brought to the world a beauty, a modesty and a prudence unequalled in their glory and splendour.’ The writer goes on to praise the queen’s religious devotion and generosity to the Church, her graciousness and her support to those in need. Open to all, she granted audiences freely and speedily and was a shrewd and scrupulous judge of what she heard. Yet while this may make Margaret sound almost too good to be true, and perhaps overemphasizes her succe
ss in the traditional intercessional role of queen consort, Sabadino soon reveals aspects of her relationship with her husband that must have caused tension. The veracity of at least some of his claims appears to be borne out by subsequent events. For it was the breakdown of his parents’ marriage that played a major part in the development of Prince James.
Not only, it was claimed, was Margaret more popular than her husband with the Scottish people, ‘since she possessed more aptitude than he for ruling the Kingdom’, a circumstance that he, not unnaturally, resented, but she would only sleep with him in order to bear children: ‘She was a woman of such chastity and modesty that it was understood she would have no relations with her husband except for the procreation of children.’2 Yet though her Italian eulogist finds this an admirable, even holy restraint, it is quite possible that James III did not. We have no way of knowing the precise truth and this interest in the royal couple’s sex life, though wrapped up in the language of holiness and virtue, seems strangely prurient, despite our own preoccupation with such things nowadays. What can, perhaps, be deduced from this picture of a competent and virtuous queen married to a man who was a poor leader and a grudging husband is that, as political problems in Scotland intensified, the king and queen drifted apart, she to bring up their children in Stirling Castle and he to deal with disaffection from his nobles and treason from within his own family, the Stewarts. By the year 1482, James III had more pressing concerns than the coldness that had crept into his marriage. A great crisis threatened to sweep him from the throne.
