Rumours of the murders of the princes in the Tower were now spreading like wildfire in London and the Edwardian heartlands of the south.23 A contemporary Londoner later recalled people were ‘so sore against the king for the death of the innocents that as gladly would they have been French, as be under his subjection’ – and no Englishman could imagine a fate more horrible than being French.24 On 10 October violence broke out in Kent. The next day Richard learned that Buckingham was assembling his main force in Wales around Brecon Castle. Raising men proved harder than Buckingham had expected, however. He was an unpopular landlord, and as torrential rain drenched his army over the following ten days the men he had recruited lost heart. By the time Henry set sale for England in late October Buckingham’s army was disintegrating. Henry remained ignorant of this as he struggled for his own survival, the storms buffeting his flotilla of around fifteen ships as they sailed towards England. The English joined the Bretons in praying to St Armel, a Breton prince who had killed a dragon, while some of the ships were driven to Normandy, and others back to Brittany. When Henry’s ship, and a few others, at last dropped anchor off Plymouth his men were so relieved they would later dedicate shrines to St Armel in England.
A group of soldiers were spotted on shore waving in greeting to the battered fleet, and Henry sent a boat to reconnoitre. The soldiers advised Henry’s men to land immediately, explaining they had come from the Duke of Buckingham. Henry chose instead to wait for the other ships in his fleet to arrive. After a lifetime as an observer, with his life often at risk, Henry was a watcher and waiter. And as he waited news reached him that Buckingham had been betrayed by one of his own servants, captured and executed. The southern risings had collapsed and the soldiers on shore were working for Richard III. The king had prepared an ambush for Henry amidst the rolling hills of Devon; but his last rival was already sailing back to Brittany to prepare for invasion another day.
7
THE EXILE
OVER THE EARLY WINTER OF 1483, 400–500 ENGLISH EXILES ARRIVED at the coastal town of Vannes in southern Brittany.1 Most were in their mid to late twenties – the same generation as Henry. Some were Lancastrians and former supporters of Henry VI, others were former servants of Edward IV, or members of the Woodville family. One such was Elizabeth Woodville’s sole surviving son, Thomas Grey, Marquess of Dorset, her eldest son by her first husband, the Lancastrian Sir John Grey of Groby.2 The town porter was happy to point these new arrivals in Henry’s direction. They usually found him sitting with two or three other lords, a lean-looking man, dressed elegantly in black, his narrow, expressive face marked only by a small red mole above the chin.3
It was evident Henry was more comfortable speaking French than English – he had grown to manhood in Brittany and was imbued with Breton culture. He had charm, even charisma, and began immediately to build a sense of mission amongst the exiles. At the same time, however, Henry had to come to terms personally with his new role. His childhood quest to regain his rightful place in England as Earl of Richmond was now replaced with a higher goal, and it seemed to Henry that God must be guiding his destiny. If the grandson of a mere Welsh squire was to be a king, it was the only possible explanation. His royal mother believed that St Nicholas had guided her in choosing to marry his Tudor father. Henry also recalled his audience in 1470 with his uncle, Henry VI, when the king had said that the young Henry was someone to whom ‘both we and our adversaries must yield, and give over the domain’. At the time the king’s words may have seemed like ramblings, but now that Henry VI was judged to be a saint, it was clear they had been a prophecy.
The belief in divine providence gave Henry’s long years of suffering in exile meaning and purpose, for they were now revealed as preparation for what was to come: his overthrow of the false King Richard III.4 Henry had a duty to live up to this sacred task and for that he needed God’s help. Later Henry would be remembered as ‘someone who daily participated with great piety in religious services’. In Brittany he had developed what would prove to be a lifelong devotion to a saint whose shrine lay in the local cathedral at Vannes: Vincent Ferrer.5 An early fifteenth-century Dominican missionary, Ferrer’s writings are a manual to spiritual self-improvement. They suggest daily declarations on sin, asking for God’s help to feel true sorrow for them, and apologising for repeating sins previously confessed to a priest. Henry would also pray regularly to the Virgin Mary, who he described later as his ‘continual refuge’. The only records he was to leave in Vannes are those of the offerings he made at High Mass in the cathedral on the Virgin’s feast days.6
At Christmas 1483, Henry was ready to take the exiles to the heavily fortified Breton city of Rennes. There, in a religious service at the cathedral, the exiles swore their loyalty to Henry and he, in turn, made his solemn vow to marry Elizabeth of York and so to unite the houses of Lancaster and York. Richard’s claims that his kingship would bring peace and concord had been badly dented by the October risings and Henry’s proposed marriage promised to deliver what Richard had not. Brittany was, however, becoming an increasingly dangerous place for Henry. Duke Francis was growing senile and, by the time the first anniversary of Richard’s coronation came round, the king had found an ally in the Breton treasurer, Pierre Landais. A warning from a spy at Richard’s court in the summer of 1484 gave Henry the time to gain assurances of protection from France.7 He then had to plan his escape.
In late September or early October, Jasper Tudor left Vannes with a small group of English nobles, supposedly on a mission to Rennes. On the way he slipped across the border into neighbouring France. A couple of days later Henry followed, also riding with a small retinue, ostensibly to visit a friend at a nearby manor house. Five miles from the town he rode into woodland and changed into the clothes of a serving man. With a guide acting the part of his master, Henry then galloped towards Anjou, stopping only to water his horse. His absence in Vannes was noticed almost immediately, however, and when he crossed the border his pursuers were less than an hour behind him.8
Henry had been fortunate in having escaped and also in having gained the backing of the fourteen-year-old French king, Charles VIII, along with the regent, his sister Anne of Beaujeu.9 But Richard III still had England’s resources of wealth and manpower at his disposal, and he was proving in many respects an excellent king. His actions and proclamations stressed that his laws were to be administered impartially, without delay or favour; bail was introduced so the innocent would not suffer while they awaited trial; forced loans to the Crown were being abolished, the fledgling printing industry and book trade were encouraged, and Richard was also showing himself to be a good friend and protector to the church. Nevertheless, despite all the good he did, there was a sense of deep malaise.
The faction that had brought Richard to power had contracted following the executions of his former allies: Edward IV’s close friend, Hastings, in June 1483, and Buckingham in October 1483. This had forced him to lean more heavily on his northern support base and the cost of maintaining order in the south only increased his unpopularity there. More troubling still was the absence of God’s blessings on the king. When Richard’s young son had died in April 1484 it looked like punishment for his usurpation of Edward V. When his grief-stricken queen, Anne Neville, followed their only child to the grave in March 1485, Henry’s friends spread rumours that Richard had poisoned her in order to marry Elizabeth of York – and even some of Richard’s friends believed he was indeed planning an incestuous union with his niece.
The princess had left the sanctuary of Westminster Abbey with her mother and sisters, after Richard had made a written promise to protect the girls from ‘ravishment or defouling contrary to their wills’, and not to imprison them.10 Richard had thereafter treated them well. Elizabeth of York was seen dancing at court at Christmas, dressed to match the queen. This, now, only encouraged the rumours he wished to marry her and he had to issue a public denial that this was the case. Certainly, however, Richard was determined to recon
cile the Woodvilles – as Henry discovered to his shock after his men caught Thomas Grey, Marquess of Dorset, en route from Paris to Flanders. It transpired Elizabeth Woodville had sent messages telling Grey that Richard had agreed to pardon him and he was planning to desert Henry’s cause. Henry was relieved Grey could not now take Richard information on his invasion plans. But when he later also heard the rumour that Richard III was to marry Elizabeth of York the news ‘pinched Henry by the very stomach’. If she were to be married to Richard rather than Henry, it would leave Henry unable to claim he could unite the royal houses.
The Lancastrian exiles reassured Henry, telling him the advantages of marrying a York were exaggerated. They believed he should claim the throne in his own right – as a Lancastrian.11 That he would now do, and Henry made another crucial decision – his invasion was to take place just a few months later, in August 1485. He didn’t want any more surprises.
8
BOSWORTH
ON 22 JUNE 1485 RICHARD III SUMMONED MILITARY AND CIVILIAN forces in defence of his kingdom. The following day he issued a proclamation. It warned England they faced an invader with an outlandish name, ‘one Henry Tudor, son of Edmund Tudor, son of Owen Tudor, who of his ambitious and insatiable covertise encroaches and usurps upon him the name and title of royal estate of this Realm of England whereunto he has no manner, interest, right, title or colour, as every man well knows; for he is descended of bastard blood both of the father side and mother side’.1 It was plain fact that Margaret Beaufort’s family were of bastard descent, and it was through her alone that Henry Tudor had English royal blood. The claim that he was also descended from a bastard on his father’s side – and that Owen Tudor was the son of an innkeeper from Conway – is probably untrue. But the Tudor name was a reminder that Henry’s father was the result of a scandalous misalliance between a servant and a queen. As a fifteenth-century ballad observed:
They called him Henry Tudor, in scorn truly,
And said, in England he should wear no crown.2
Henry was always known by his title, Richmond, and had taken to signing himself with a regal R. This may have stood for Richmond, but it could also be read as Rex, the Latin for king, a confusion that was surely deliberate for if Henry were the ‘rightful’ King of England then he was already king. Henry still needed a convincing narrative to support his claim to the crown, and to find one he imitated Edward IV’s plundering of the myths of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s twelfth-century ‘History of the Kings of Britain’. The most significant of these popular myths concerned the wizard Merlin, King Arthur, and the life of the last British king, Cadwaladr, from whom the House of York claimed descent through the Mortimers.3 In one of these stories, the fifth-century British king, Vortigan, was building a fortress when he discovered a pool. In it were two sleeping dragons. One was red, the other white. Merlin told the king the red dragon represented the people of Britain, and the white the Saxon invader they would one day fight and defeat.4 In another, an angel appeared to Cadwaladr, and foretold how a prince of his line would come to defeat the Saxons. Yorkist propaganda created an association between the House of Lancaster and the invaders, and conflated the old myths. The fulfiller of the angel’s prophecy to Cadwaladr thus became ‘Draco Rubius’, the Red Dragon – supposedly Edward IV.5 Henry reversed this so that he was Draco Rubius and Richard III the outsider – a narrative already proving popular in Wales, where they still spoke a ‘British’ tongue.
Wales was the one place where the Tudor name had popular resonance, and in its Lancastrian heartlands the Yorkist claims to be the heirs of Cadwaladr had never taken root. The Tudors had maintained their contacts with the Welsh bards who were now churning out prophecies of Henry’s eventual triumph, full of references to the myths of Cadwaladr and the Red Dragon. Jasper Tudor had a dragon as his badge and Henry now took as his principal standard the ‘Red Dragon Dreadful’. In doing so he took on the mantle of the model hero of popular chivalric romances, the ‘fair unknown’. This was a true heir, raised in obscurity only to emerge one day as the rightful king and claim his crown, as King Arthur had. If God had truly chosen this destiny for Henry, his invasion of England was a holy crusade.
In England on the last day of July, the printer William Caxton published his version of Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur, a new reworking of the old myths. It described how King Arthur had once had a dream of a fight in the sky between a dragon and a boar. A philosopher had told him that he was the victorious dragon, while the boar denoted ‘some tyrant that tormenteth the people’.6 On the sunny morning of the following day, Henry’s ships embarked from Honfleur at the mouth of the Seine, and sailed on a gentle southerly breeze. His army included about 400 Englishmen and over 800 Scots, the latter recruited from companies brought over to France by a Scottish nobleman long resident there. A further 1,500 were French or Breton. These included experienced soldiers as well as people on the criminal fringe, ‘the worst kind which could be found anywhere’, one Frenchman recorded.7 Amongst his commanders Henry had one truly notable figure: John de Vere, Earl of Oxford. Once a great champion of the House of Lancaster, he had escaped a decade of imprisonment at Hammes Castle near Calais to join this latest enterprise in their cause.
After six days at sea the flotilla landed safety at Mill Bay on the Dale peninsula along the rugged coastline of Pembrokeshire. Amongst those waiting on the shore was Owen Tudor’s illegitimate son, the twenty-six-year-old David Owen. Henry’s grandfather had left much of his wealth to David, who still treasured his father’s campaign bed in black velvet and russet satin embroidered with swallows and wolves, as well as the letters that sounded out his name, ‘O, N’ in gold. He also had a magnificent tapestry that must have belonged to Catherine of Valois, which depicted Henry V along with his brothers and son. David Owen had been serving Henry loyally ‘beyond and within the sea’, and as the sun began to set Henry now knighted his uncle, along with others who had rallied to his army.8 Then, with the Red Dragon standard fluttering in the breeze, Henry knelt and recited the psalm, ‘Judge me, O Lord, and defend my cause against the unmerciful people.’
Henry intended to strike out through north Pembrokeshire, putting his faith in the pro-Lancastrian western and northern counties of Wales. To prepare the ground, letters were sent to ‘our loving friends and true subjects’, describing Richard as a usurper ‘of our right’. The crusading element in Henry’s invasion was implicit in his expressed trust in the help of ‘Almighty God’.9 Henry also hoped to recruit support in Cheshire, where his stepfather, Lord Stanley, was a powerful landowner. But Richard III had also invested in Stanley’s loyalty. Stanley had been on progress with Richard when the risings of October 1483 had broken out, and he had been obliged to help crush them. This had earned King Richard’s gratitude and saved Margaret Beaufort’s life. The ‘mother of the king’s great rebel and traitor Henry, Earl of Richmond’, condemned in January 1484 for having ‘conspired, confederated and committed high treason’, was made Stanley’s prisoner – and his responsibility.10 Stanley had since ignored Richard’s orders to prevent his wife from contacting her son, but neither side could wholly trust this wily nobleman, who had avoided committing his retainers in any of the bloody battles of the previous twenty years.
Four days after Henry’s landing the news reached Richard III at his principal military base at Nottingham Castle. That same day Richard sent summonses to the sheriffs and commissioners of array who mustered men in their localities, as well as to hundreds of individual nobles and gentlemen expected to raise their affinity. Amongst them Lord Stanley and his brother Sir William were instructed to organise north Wales in readiness to confront the invader.11 A few days later Richard learned that despite his orders Henry was marching unopposed through the region and even gaining recruits. Richard summoned Lord Stanley for an explanation. In an ominous echo of Buckingham’s response to such a summons in 1483, Stanley excused himself on grounds of illness. Richard then played an ace. The message was sent that he h
ad Stanley’s son, Lord Strange, as his prisoner. The boy was now a hostage to his loyalty in the coming conflict. If he betrayed Richard, his son would be executed. He had to choose: his stepson, or his own child’s life?
By 17 August Henry had reached Shrewsbury in the West Midlands. The city had shut its Welsh Gate against him, signalling to other cities that his was an enemy force. He was hugely relieved when one of Sir William Stanley’s messengers arrived and persuaded the mayor to open the gates to Henry’s motley foreign army. The messenger had brought letters and cash from Margaret Beaufort and her husband Lord Stanley, but what Henry really needed were men: he had only managed to raise about 500 extra soldiers in Wales. To his Red Dragon standard he now added two further standards: the Cross of St George, patron saint of England, and the Dun Cow, which had local Neville associations.12 Henry’s allies in the region had continued to exploit the rumours that Richard III had murdered his wife, Anne Neville; flying the Dun Cow would help recruit still more effectively amongst her family’s affinity.
Sir William Stanley met Henry in person on 19 August, at Stone, seven miles north of Stafford. It was there that he delivered the devastating news that Richard had Lord Stanley’s son as hostage. Henry feared he could not now be certain of even Sir William’s support. Richard III, heading for Leicester, already had the weight of numbers on his side, as well as his long experience as a military commander. As Henry Tudor’s army set off towards Tamworth in the heart of England, he fell back from the main body of his men, with a group of twenty trusted individuals The next day, when Henry caught up he claimed he had got lost. Was Henry, in fact, planning his escape from the battle ahead? Jasper Tudor’s name is never mentioned in connection with the Battle of Bosworth. He may have been busy securing a suitable route. Henry had got out of tight spots with Jasper many times before and there was no one he could trust better with such a task.
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