Richard III and the Young Princes
Even now, it was assumed that, having dealt with these difficulties at court, Richard would serve as a loyal protector to his nephew, King Edward V, whose coronation was postponed to 22 June. Instead, on 13 June, Richard ordered the arrest and summary execution of Lord Hastings, the King’s chamberlain, former manager of the royal household, loyal servant of the house of York, almost certainly because Hastings refused to cooperate with Richard in a plot to seize the throne. Obtaining custody of Edward V’s younger brother, Richard of Woodstock, who had fled with his mother to the sanctuary of Westminster Abbey, Richard now committed both of his nephews to the Tower of London. They were never seen again. Whether or not they can be identified with the skeletons of two adolescent boys discovered in the Tower in 1674, by the end of June 1483, the two princes were either dead or awaiting their murderer’s knock at the door. On 22 June, the date to which the coronation of Edward V had in theory been postponed, instead of a twelve-year-old King, the Londoners were confronted by Dr Ralph Shaw, one of Richard of Gloucester’s tame clergyman, who at St Paul’s Cross proclaimed Richard’s own titles to be recognized as King, arguing that the princes in the Tower were bastards, the marriage of Edward IV to Elizabeth Woodville having been contracted against the spirit of canon law. There was a sound legal argument that might have been made here. In practice, it drew only the flimsiest of veils across usurpation and murder. By the time that Richard of Gloucester was crowned King on 6 July, the princes were probably already dead. If not, then they died in August, when an unsuccessful plot was unearthed to rescue them from the Tower.
It remains one of the more remarkable aspects of this story that Richard, potentially a loyal servant of the crown and protector to his royal nephews, should have preferred to seize their throne and, in the outcome, to die a hated usurper rather than a beloved uncle. Perhaps there was some kink in the Yorkist family DNA sufficient to explain the treachery first of Clarence, now of Richard, the younger brother. Perhaps Richard’s morality was fiercer and more sincere than historians have been inclined to suppose; his sense of puritanism simply revolted at the spectacle of Edward V, son of a corrupt Woodville marriage, ascending the throne. Like many puritans, Richard perhaps found it easy to disguise his own self-interest as an act of public duty. After 1483, he did his best to popularize the cult of Henry VI, allowing for the removal of the late King’s relics from Chertsey to Windsor Castle as a means of yet further blackening the moral reputation of his brother, Edward IV. Edward IV’s mistress was forced to do public penance in the streets of London as if she were a common whore. Henry VI was reburied next to the effigy of Edward IV, whose late government was publicly declared to have been motivated by concupiscence with ‘every good maiden and woman standing in dread to be ravished and defouled’. Richard emerged as neither the first nor the last in a series of self-consciously ‘northern’ politicians whose personal austerity and probity seemed to promise a return to core moral values.
Opposition to Richard
In the meantime, the stunned shock that Richard’s usurpation caused very swiftly yielded place to revulsion and to a determination to remove him from the throne. The murder of Hastings had already robbed him of the support of the royal household, of precisely that power base that Edward IV had laboured so hard and at such expense to build up. In the provinces, Richard’s own entrenched authority in Wales and northern England had inspired tensions with families such as the Percy dukes of Northumberland and the Stafford dukes of Buckingham. Buckingham, once Richard’s closest ally, allowed to inherit Hastings’ affinity but not his lands, most of which remained to Hastings’ widow, now made common cause with the Woodvilles and with Lady Margaret Beaufort, mother of Henry Tudor. Their rebellion was swiftly crushed. Buckingham was executed. Nonetheless, from the autumn of 1483, Richard III was to have no peace and the English nothing save a pretence that the realm was safely established under his rule. Unlike any English King since Harold in 1066, Richard was left with no real function in government save to watch and to wait for an invasion that everyone knew to be approaching.
Henry Tudor
As with Harold and 1066, there is a false sense of inevitability to Richard III’s reign. Its outcome is so well known that history itself is inverted so that the end may explain the beginnings. In reality, there was nothing inevitable about Richard’s defeat. The only plausible alternative candidate to the throne to emerge after 1483, Henry Tudor, possessed a claim weaker even than William of Normandy’s had been four hundred years before. William was a foreigner and a bastard. Henry Tudor was of Franco-Welsh ancestry, recently established in France and backed by French and Breton silver. Richard III, by contrast, was the brother of the late King and descended from the senior branch of the family of Edward III. Henry Tudor, a great-grandson of Charles VI, was more closely related to the French royal family than he was to the English, being merely a great-great-great-grandson of Edward III. On both sides, his descent had passed through the female line. The strength of the Tudor claim derived from no innate virtue but from the fact that, by 1483 and after two decades of fratricidal bloodshed, Henry Tudor was virtually the only alternative male claimant left standing. In exile, he was surrounded by a group of French and Breton opportunists rather similar to the French brigands who had gathered at the court of William of Normandy. No more than Richard III or Edward IV was Henry Tudor the sort of person that the English expected to have as king.
Not merely the circumstances but various of the names remained unchanged between the 1060s and the 1480s: John de Vere, Henry’s chief ally, 13th earl of Oxford, was directly descended from the Veres, native to the Norman-Breton frontier, who had fought for the Conqueror, obtained land in Essex and Cambridgeshire and then risen through marriage to the Clares (themselves founders of the honour of Clarence) to become royal chamberlains under King Henry I. Like at least one of the armies at Hastings in 1066, Henry Tudor’s army in 1485 marched under a dragon standard. Like William in 1066, Henry had no alternative but to bring his enemies to a decisive battle, if only to fulfil the prayer that he delivered to the Almighty on first landing, at Milford Haven, on Sunday 7 August 1485: ‘Judge me, oh Lord, and determine my cause!’ William of Normandy could not have expressed a better summary of the role of battle as divine trial, nor Edward III at Crécy, nor Henry V at Agincourt.
Battle of Bosworth
Like Hastings in 1066, the Battle of Bosworth of 22 August 1485, is misnamed. The great battle of 1066 was fought four miles from Hastings itself, on the ridge known as Senlac. Bosworth was certainly not fought at Market Bosworth but at an uncertain site, only in 2010 relocated by archaeologists from the traditional ‘battlefield’ on Ambion Hill to a position two miles away, straddling the Roman Road near Fenn Lane Farm, the discovery of a silver-gilt livery badge depicting Richard III’s symbol, the boar, being not the least remarkable proof of this relocation. As this implies, Bosworth, unlike Hastings, is one of the least well-reported battles in medieval history. The distribution of the opposing armies, even the question of who actually fought and who stood aloof, remains to a large extent unanswered.
It is still possible to pinpoint similarities between 1485 and 1066. Richard III spent the months before Henry Tudor’s landing, in Nottingham and its surrounding forests, like Harold Godwinson in the Bayeux Tapestry with his hawks and his hounds, or like the proverbial Robin Hood, pursuing what had been the sport of kings for many years before ever William of Normandy set foot in England. In 1066, poor communications and the inadequacy of the old Roman roads had disrupted contacts between north and south, so that William was able to land in Sussex whilst Harold was still busy in Yorkshire. In 1485, although on 11 August Richard had news of Henry Tudor’s landing, and although by 19 August the authorities of the city of York were arranging to send eighty men to the King’s assistance, poor communications ensured that this contingent, like many others, simply failed to arrive. The fact that the battle itself was fought in a mar
sh, either side of a Roman road, should itself indicate the degree to which England, even a thousand years after the departure of the last Roman legions, still belonged to a sub-Roman world, part cultivated, part still wilderness. Hastings had developed into a mass assassination attempt upon Harold and his bodyguard gathered around the royal standard. Bosworth began as an attempt by Richard III to kill Henry Tudor before any serious blows had been struck, trampling the Tudor dragon underfoot in much the same way that one imagines Harold’s dragon, shown in the Bayeux Tapestry, was trampled underfoot by the Normans.
Just as at Hastings, where Mowbrays and Veres and a host of families who were to dominate English politics for the coming four centuries were assembled, so at Bosworth gathered Percys and Stanleys and Howards, the coming men of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Direct descendants of the Lord Stanley who fought at Bosworth served as prime minister and foreign secretary in the governments of Queen Victoria. Edward Stanley, seventeenth earl of Derby, was still serving as Secretary of State for War in 1924. Two of his sons were members of the British cabinet in 1938. One of them, Secretary of State for War in 1940, was still a government minister as late as 1945. Charles Howard, twentieth earl of Suffolk, died in 1941 as a bomb-disposal expert, posthumously awarded the George Cross. Miles Fitzalan-Howard, seventeenth duke of Norfolk, was still a major-general commanding British troops on the Rhine in 1965. The families which met at Bosworth in 1485 were to enjoy an ascendancy in English politics and military affairs just as great as that enjoyed by the Norman families which had fought at Hastings in 1066.
Here, however, the comparisons begin to run dry and the contrasts assert themselves. Harold was defended to the death by his men at Hastings, to such an extent that the entire flower of the English nobility was cut down in a single day. Richard III commanded no such allegiance. Two of the greatest forces gathered at Bosworth, in theory to support the King, either stood aloof, as seems to have been the case with Henry Percy, Duke of Northumberland, or actively threw in their lot with Henry Tudor, as may have been the case at Bosworth with Lord Stanley. Richard is said to have gone down shouting ‘Treason! Treason! Treason!’, an appropriate summary of the entire political malaise in which England had become embroiled. The only nobleman who died with him was John Howard, the most blatant of upstarts: until 1470 a mere Suffolk knight only later raised through marriage and affinity to the status and title of his former masters, the Mowbray dukes of Norfolk. After Hastings, it took William of Normandy a full three months to lay claim to the English throne. At Bosworth, at least according to legend, the crown or a coronet formerly worn by King Richard, was found on the field of battle and placed on Henry Tudor’s forehead even as the last battlefield executions were taking place. William ‘the Conqueror’ marked the site of his battle with penance and the foundation of a great Benedictine Abbey. Henry Tudor, the future Henry VII, attempted no such commemoration of his victory. Far from founding a religious house, he was the father of a future king who was to suppress and squander the resources of every monastery in England.
England and the English: National Identity
The Battle of Bosworth did not put an end to medieval England any more than the Battle of Hastings brought the Middle Ages into existence. Traditions and institutions survived. Some, such as the Exchequer, are with us still. Others, such as the chronic willingness of the barons to resort to war, and the crown’s inability to live off its own resources, were still determining factors behind the historical events for centuries still to come: the dissolution of the monasteries and the Protestant Reformation of the 1530s, for example, or the English Civil War a century later. History itself, by contrast to history books, does not divide easily into periods or clear-cut ‘befores’ and ‘afters’. Like the shades of William of Normandy or Harold Godwinson hovering over the events at Bosworth Field, it tends to cast a shadow long after its actors have gone to their graves.
Nonetheless, if we cannot end here with a high note and a declaration that, in August 1485, on Bosworth Field, the modern or the early modern era was born, we can at least declare that by the time that Henry Tudor placed a crown upon his head, England had acquired both a history and a national identity. Wealth and the bounty of nature were England’s birthrights, a consequence of geography, of the constant presence of the sea, and of the toil of those who first cleared the land, dug the mines and tilled the soil. From at least the age of Bede, as far back as the eighth century, came an idea of Englishness and of national destiny united under Christian kingship. For all of the shattering uncertainties and usurpations of the fifteenth century, the kingdom of England, unlike the kingdom of France or the empire of Germany, remained a united and indivisible whole.
From at least the eleventh century, and William of Normandy’s victory at Hastings, a willingness to resort to violence and a determination to prove a God-given destiny through battle, had become defining characteristics of Englishness. From this emerged a state and an aristocracy themselves derived from warfare and the needs of organizing society for war. From the twelfth century, if not before, came a sense both of history and of irony. Nostalgia for past glories and a determination, at some future point, to rebuild a golden age, were combined with an ability to subvert the magniloquence of kings and to laugh at the very pomp that such nostalgia might otherwise encourage. The English, from their lands in France and later in Wales, Ireland and Scotland, had come to think of themselves as an imperial people, heirs to Arthur and to the Roman glories of the past. Deeply mistrustful of foreigners, they were themselves a nation of mongrels, half-breeds and polyglots, ruled after 1485 by Welshmen, dependent upon European trade and closely tied to the fortunes of France. The English were neither polite nor obedient. For all their claim to be doing God’s work, they were as often engaged in spying or rebellion as in administering justice or in protecting their own much boasted liberties. They were a paradox awaiting description. Above all they were a people secure in their knowledge, even in their mythologizing of the past. They had come into possession of a history, and their past was never far distant from their present thoughts.
FURTHER READING
The guide to reading which follows is deliberately not intended as a series of footnotes, tracing each and every citation, but as a selection of books and articles that readers might explore, should they wish to dig more deeply into English medieval history. Readers keen to remark such things might care to notice how much of the following reading list draws upon work published since 1990 (a sign, not merely of the absurd dictates of the government’s Research Assessment exercise, but of the degree to which medieval history now flourishes) and how many of the books cited here were published at Woodbridge, by Boydell and Brewer, thanks to the wholly beneficent influence of Richard Barber.
Historians traditionally divide their sources between the ‘primary’ (essentially those written or created at the time or purporting to supply a direct memory of past events) and the ‘secondary’ (those written by later scholars attempting to make sense of events already long past), and it is to the primary sources that I would first and foremost direct readers. The primary sources for medieval England were mostly written in Latin or French, though excellent translations exist for many of the more important. Selections of them can be found in the four medieval volumes of English Historical Documents, edited by D.C. Douglas, with the individual volumes covering the periods 500–1042, 1042–1189, 1189–1327 and 1327–1485 edited by Dorothy Whitelock, D.C. Douglas and George W. Greenaway, Harry Rothwell, and A.R. Myers. Complete, as opposed to selective, translations of various of the more important chronicles are available from the splendid series of Nelson’s, later Oxford Medieval Texts, ranging from Bede’s Ecclesiastical History (edited by Bertram Colgrave and R.A.B. Mynors) and the principal biography of Edward the Confessor, the Life of King Edward who rests at Westminster (edited by Rank Barlow), through to the Chronica Majora of Thomas of Walsingham (edited by John Taylor, Wendy R. Childs and Leslie Watkiss). Amongst sour
ces written in Anglo-Saxon or English, see, for example, the excellent translations in the Penguin Classics editions of Alfred the Great (edited by Simon Keynes and Michael Lapidge), or Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (edited and translated into modern English by Nevill Coghill), or Langland’s Piers Plowman (edited and translated by J.F. Goodridge). Amongst sources originally written in French, a special significance attaches to the so-called History of William Marshal (edited by Anthony J. Holden, Stewart Gregory and David Crouch, 3 vols, Anglo-Norman Text Society, 2002–6).
Since the proper edition and re-edition of primary sources remains one of the principal tasks of each generation of medieval historians, and since not all of the major sources edited in the nineteenth century have as yet been fully revised and re-edited for a more modern or critical audience, some sources remain available only in translations prepared in the Victorian era, most notably the great chronicles of Roger of Wendover and Matthew Paris (both translated for the Bohn Classics series by John Allen Giles) or the equally significant chronicles for the twelfth century (translated by Joseph Stevenson in his multi-volume Church Historians of England, 1854–56). Others are readily available as Penguin Classics, as for example Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain (edited by Lewis Thorpe) or Gerald of Wales’ Journey Through Wales (also edited by Thorpe), or Gerald’s equally remarkable History and Topography of Ireland (edited by John J. O’Meara). For the administrative, as opposed to the literary or chronicle sources, readers may find it enlightening to dip into the massive runs of such series as the Calendar of Patent Rolls or Calendar of Close Rolls (both in sets of more than 100 volumes, published by HMSO, ongoing since the 1890s). If nothing else, readers will derive from even a glimpse of such sources an idea of the sheer scale on which the medieval evidences of English royal government have been preserved to us. The arts and artefacts of the Middle Ages constitute an equally rich ‘primary’ source. Here, particularly recommended, are the massive illustrated catalogues to the three great exhibitions of medieval art held in London since the 1980s: English Romanesque Art 1066–1200, edited by Sandy Heslop and others (London, Hayward Gallery 1984), Age of Chivalry: Art in Plantagenet England 1200–1400, edited by Jonathan Alexander and Paul Binski (London, Royal Academy 1987), and Gothic: Art for England c.1400–1547, edited by Richard Marks and others (London, Victoria & Albert Museum 2003).
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