Authors: Sarah Gristwood
Margaret had presumably been left behind at Lathom in Lancashire, some hundred miles from the eventual conflict point. Her husband Stanley had been summoned back to the king’s side for fear, says Crowland, that she ‘might induce her husband to go over to the party of her son’. But Stanley still seems to have been refusing to commit to either side. Richard was holding Stanley’s son hostage for his good behaviour; none the less, when the summons from Richard came Stanley had sent word that he was ill and unable to travel. He took his forces south but by an independent route, 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 just north of Stafford. But he too refused to commit directly, pending further consultation with his brother. As the opposing armies drew closer to each other, Henry still had fewer than five thousand men under his command – only half the size of the forces his adversary had assembled, says Polydore Vergil.
Richard left Nottingham for Leicester around 19 August; on the 21st, with all pomp and wearing his crown, he rode with his forces from Leicester towards the place where Henry was camped near Bosworth. Here, so some of the often contradictory reports have it, Henry Tudor at last met his stepfather Lord Stanley, as well as Sir William. In
Richard III
Shakespeare 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 was the one agreed ‘in counsel’ with Lord Stanley – which suggests at the least that Henry thought he came away from the meeting with the promise of Stanley support. 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.
The fields around Bosworth are disputed now as thoroughly as they were trampled then. Recent archaeological work has relocated the scene of the battle
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and cast a different light on its strategies – and, as a sideline, perhaps given a fresh glimpse of the women’s background role in the men’s story. Found in the ground where Richard’s army may have camped the night before the battle were two Burgundian coins. They 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 he 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 himself told his men about it in the morning, to explain away his evident ‘heaviness’.
He 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 awoke so early that his chaplains could not be found to celebrate a propitiatory mass, nor did the servants have his breakfast ready. Richard, he 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 him 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 managed to pull 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, his nerves had been kept on edge by the fickle Stanleys. When he sent word to Lord Stanley to get his troops ready, word was sent back that Henry should look to his own men: he 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.
Though Henry was ‘no little vexed, and begun to be somewhat appalled’, he put his troops in order. A slender vanguard with the archers came first, making the best of the ‘small numbers’ of his people. When they were assembled, ‘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 traditional view is 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 ordered that no one should move more than ten feet from the standards in case their smaller force should be lost among the greater one. This gave rise to a pause in the fighting, and seemed also to confuse the enemy. Vergil, writing with Tudor hindsight, later suggested that Richard’s men seized gladly on the break because they had no great desire for his victory.
This would explain why, when Richard caught sight of Henry surrounded by only a small guard, the king set off ‘inflamed with ire’ to finish the fight in single combat. Perhaps 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 now seems almost a quixotic gesture, Richard had surrendered the advantage of high ground and moved beyond the protection of his forces. But it 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 armoured 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 axe, the king began to hack his way towards his adversary.
When Henry saw Richard spurring his horse towards him, he ‘received him with great courage’. Vergil says 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 men brought him fresh horses but, in contrast to the way Shakespeare tells it, Vergil says he refused to flee, swearing again that that day he would make an end of either war or 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 could die, 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 – and, as generations of historians have had it, ended not just one man but a whole epoch. The Middle Ages themselves, as well as the rule of the Plantagenets, died with the unlucky Richard III.
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Vergil describes how Richard’s body was stripped naked and slung across a horse, to be taken back to Leicester, put on public display and buried without ceremony; Crowland says many insults were offered to the corpse. If Richard’s mother Cecily heard of these indignities she, and Richard’s sisters, must have been hideously reminded of other deaths, other ignominies; of when Richard, Duke of York’s body was decked with a paper crown.
Richard III had been not only the last English king to die in the red heat of battle, but the first since the Conquest. It is an image from those early days that comes to mind – Edith of the Swan Neck searching for her lover Harold’s body on the battlefield, just as so many women must have searched here.
The battle had lasted two hours, and Vergil says that a thousand men had been killed; nine-tenths of them, it is estimated, on Richard’s side. Rous has Richard’s last words as ‘treason – treason’. Well they might be: it was a Stanley who placed the crown on Henry’s head. But the legends of Bosworth add one other telling detail – that the crown had been found on a thornbush by Reginald Bray, steward to Margaret Beaufort. The origins of the story can be traced back only to an eighteenth-century antiquary but, given the part Margaret Beaufort had played in bringing her son to this point, it has a poetic authenticity.
O now let Richmond and Elizabeth,
The true succeeders of each royal house,
By God’s fair ordinance conjoin together.
Richard III
, 5.5
The battle of Bosworth Field in 1485 is often regarded as the starting place of the early modern age,
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but that is the result of hindsight. As Henry Tudor assumed the throne, any adult alive then would have remembered not only Richard III’s overthrow of the expected order, and Edward IV’s coup, but Henry VI’s brief resumption of the throne. There was not necessarily any reason to think Henry VII’s dynasty would be more durable.
Henry did have one important advantage. There had been a comprehensive clearing of the decks (and the Tudors would make sure it became ever more comprehensive in the years ahead). Any previous Lancastrian comeback had been shadowed by the knowledge that the sons of York were waiting, prolific and power-hungry. But now, of Cecily Neville’s six adult children her three sons and one of her daughters were dead. Margaret of Burgundy would still repeatedly attempt to intervene in English affairs; and the descendants of Elizabeth, Duchess of Suffolk, would later cause problems. But for the moment, even if one or both ‘Princes in the Tower’ had survived, they, like their cousin Warwick, would have been still too young to have themselves mounted a credible challenge for the throne; and with Buckingham and the senior Woodvilles dead, it is hard to see who would have done it for them. What is more, it would take time for any opposition to rally after the shock of defeat: Bosworth could so easily have gone the other way.
Time is what they would not be given. Henry immediately moved to have Clarence’s ten-year-old son
fn11
brought south and placed in the custody of Margaret Beaufort, for whom everything had now changed. Henry sent her from Bosworth the
Book of Hours
that had been with Richard in his tent – an appropriate tribute for one of Margaret’s piety. But the book, already old when Richard began using it, had been transformed into something more personal by the addition, on blank pages, of prayers for Richard’s use and mentioning his name. One prayer seeks comfort in sadness by emphasising the goodness of God; another more specifically seeks protection against enemies. Deleting Richard’s name, Margaret added on the end-pages the jingle: ‘For the honour of God and St Edmunde/Pray for Margaret Richmonde.’ For a woman of her temperament – so prone, as her confessor would later recount, to see disaster lurking behind the greatest triumph – even so wonderful a turn of Fortune’s wheel as she had just experienced could not have come altogether easily.
When she heard the news of Henry’s victory Margaret would have set out south to be reunited with the son she had not seen since he was in his teens. Henry reached London by 7 September and spent two weeks at Baynard’s Castle, Cecily Neville’s former home. The task facing the new king was immense; to take hasty control of a country which had not only had every opportunity, in recent years, of learning to regard kings as interchangeable, but one which he himself hardly knew. Even his early boyhood had been spent not in England, but in Wales, and he had had few direct opportunities of learning systems and making allies. But he did have recourse to advice.