Bosworth: The Birth of the Tudors (36 page)

Richard had learnt this lesson during Buckingham’s rebellion, when he had found himself almost powerless to act for days without possession of the Great Seal. Then he had written to Bishop Russell requesting that in light of the bishop’s ill health the seal be sent to him; however Russell had delayed acting on Richard’s instruction until four days later, and Richard was not to receive the seal until a week after he had requested it. While he looked to restore order throughout his kingdom, Richard barely allowed the seal to leave his sight, when from 19 October until 26 November he personally retained its control.

On 29 July, in the lower oratory of the Inner Temple, Russell delivered the seal to Barowe ‘at the eighth hour’. Three days later, on 1 August, Barowe arrived at Nottingham Castle, carrying the Great Seal
in a white leather bag, sealed with Bishop Russell’s signet, bearing the image of an eagle. At seven o’clock in the evening, in the oratory of the chapel of the castle, and in the presence of the Archbishop of York, John, Earl of Lincoln, Thomas, Lord Scrope, George, Lord Strange and the king’s secretary, John Kendall, Barowe delivered the seal to Richard, ‘whereupon the king, for causes and considerations him moving’, returned the seal into Barowe’s hands, appointing him keeper of the Great Seal ‘then and there’.

The same day, Henry Tudor, having made his final prayers, ‘praying to God that his undertaking should be fortunate and successful’, ordered his fleet to raise their anchors from the small harbour at Harfleur, and aided by ‘a favourable wind’, to set sail across the Channel for England. The preparation of the fleet had taken months, while negotiations had continued with Charles VIII and his council as to what aid Henry might be able to secure from the French. As late as 29 June, he had remained in Rouen, where the register of the cathedral records that ‘the King of England, Prince of Richmond’ offered a gold ecu from Aquitaine when he worshipped in the Chapel of the Virgin Mary there.

Henry had waited anxiously to launch his invasion, while a fleet was prepared on the Normandy coast. Denis Beton, a merchant from Barfleur who helped to fit out Henry’s fleet would later be remembered by Henry for his ‘various services and kindnesses’ and ‘certain other causes specially moving’. For the invasion to be a success, however, Henry desperately needed money and men from Charles VIII and the French government. At first, it seemed as if no financial support would be forthcoming; according to one account, the ‘Ballad of Lady Bessie’, when Henry arrived at Paris, in the company of Lord Lisle, the Earl of Oxford and Humphrey Brereton, pleading for help from Charles, the French king refused any support, ‘no ships to bring him over the seas; men nor money bringeth he none’.

Charles had ordered that Henry should be granted 40,000 livre tournois in preparation for his invasion and the expenses of his army. However, the grant was not quite what it appeared. The account roll registered by Jean Lallement, the receiver-general of Normandy, reveal that while Charles had promised a grant of 40,000 livre tournois, this was to be paid in instalments, of which only 10,000 livre tournois was paid up front, ‘for his passage to England’. This would be enough for
Henry to begin his preparations, but it would also allow the Beaujeu regime to keep him where they wanted him. Dependent on any future sums of money, Henry would remain securely in France as he planned for military invasion. But at the same time the regime could monitor the situation and any chance of English intervention in Brittany. Henry continued to be a diplomatic pawn, tied by the purse strings of his French backers.

While France had been threatened by Richard’s allied involvement with Brittany, Henry had been a valuable diplomatic counter, acting as a threat which they might unleash at any moment. The hostile environment had remained even as late as 25 June 1485, when Richard had promised to send a force of 1,000 archers to aid Brittany; the same day the French government warned its subjects that the English were preparing to invade their realm. Yet suddenly all this changed. Dissident Breton rebels who had been sheltered by the Beaujeus launched an invasion on the duchy on 24 June. The army that Landais had raised against them refused to resist. By the end of the month his regime had collapsed. A warrant for his arrest was issued on 3 July. After being interrogated, Landais was summarily executed. In an instant, the threat that Landais’ hostility had posed evaporated, and with it the need for the Beaujeu government to countenance giving further financial backing to Henry’s enterprise.

Just as the grant had been agreed, so there was no guarantee that it would be honoured. With the diplomatic situation between France and Brittany substantially altered with Landais’ capture, the French had begun to have second thoughts about the need for Henry’s invasion, and whether it was worth backing at all. Indeed it seems that the first instalment of 10,000 livre tournois was all that Henry ever received: the French receiver-general’s accounts for 1484–5 confirm Lallement’s initial quarter payment to Henry, but it also suggests that this was the only money granted to him. There is no sign that the rest of the 30,000 livre tournois ever arrived.

With only 10,000 livre tournois and unable to pay for the cost of his invasion, Henry needed cash as soon as possible. He would need to look elsewhere to finance his expedition. In desperation, he would need to borrow money. He turned to Phillippe Lullier, Seigneur de Saint-Jean-le-Blanc, one of Charles VIII’s councillors and captain of the
Bastille. Pleading with Lullier of his ‘besoigné et necessité’ – great need and necessity – on 13 July 1485, at the office of the notary Pierre Pichon on Rue Saint-Antoine, Paris, a private contract was drawn up between Henry and Lullier, who agreed to lend Henry 20,000 ecus d’or, the equivalent of 30,000 livre tournois.

As surety for the loan, Henry was to surrender all his personal goods and possessions. But even this was not enough. As pledges for the loan he agreed to leave behind Thomas Grey, Marquess of Dorset and the teenage John Bourgchier, Lord FitzWarin, promising to reimburse the additional costs for their captivity in the Bastille Saint-Antoine. Dorset swore a chivalric oath, that as a knight of the Order of the Garter and ‘
noble personne
’ he would honour the agreement.

Luillier must have known that the possession of the only two Yorkist lords would have increased his chances of getting his money back, regardless of the outcome of Henry’s campaign. But the absence of Dorset and FitzWarin from the campaign would mean that Henry would have been unable to rely on landing his army in the West Country, where both nobles had considerable support. Instead he would have to rely on disembarking in Wales.

He had also been waiting to learn of the support that he had hoped to secure in Wales upon his landing. This finally came when John Morgan, sent by his mother Margaret, intercepted him on his journey from Rouen to Harfleur, with Morgan confirming that Sir Rhys ap Thomas and John Savage were prepared to lend their support to his enterprise and would be ‘strong supporters’ of his cause. Morgan also informed Henry that Reginald Bray had managed to secure ‘not an inconsiderable sum’ of money to pay for his soldiers’ wages, and urged Henry to ‘make straight for Wales as soon as possible’.

‘Overjoyed’ by the news, Henry ‘hastened his journey’, realising that any further delay could only leave his supporters and friends ‘in suspense between hope and fear’. At Harfleur, his men had begun to gather a large force in readiness for embarking across the Channel. While this included the 500 Englishmen who had joined Henry in exile, it is likely that there was also a substantial number of Scottish mercenaries, led by Sir Alexander Bruce. The Scottish chronicler Pitscottie, writing in the late sixteenth century, stated that there were 1,000 men-at-arms ‘called the Scottish company which had to their captain a noble knight
which was called Sir Alexander Bruce of Ershall’ and ‘a born man of Haddington’. Pitscottie’s source for this information seems to have been the history of John Major, published in 1521, which recorded how, ‘inasmuch as the Earl of Richmond had been long a dweller in France, Charles VIII granted him an aid of 5,000 men of whom 1,000 were Scots, but John, son of Robert of Haddington, was chief and leader of the Scots’. The English sources make no mention of any Scottish support at Bosworth; this must have been because the Scots were in the service of the French king. Nevertheless, Sir Alexander Bruce was later given an annuity of £20 by Henry ‘in gracious renumeration of his good, faithful, and approved services, and his great labours in various ways heretofore, and lately done in person’.

Another Scotsman with close links to the French who seems to have taken part in Henry’s invasion was Bernard Stewart or ‘Bernard de Stuart, le seigneur d’Aubigny’ as he was known to the French. An expatriate Scot who had joined the French royal household; described by Commynes as ‘bon chevalier et saige et honnourable’, Stewart had served as a man-at-arms in France since 1469, and in 1483 had been given command of over a hundred lances. In 1484 he was sent by Charles VIII to renew the alliance between France and Scotland. On 13 March James III confirmed the alliance in Stewart’s presence, and the treaty was ratified by the French king on 9 July 1484. As part of the agreement, James sent to France eighteen companies of Scottish footmen led by Stewart. It was probably these men who were now to be sent across the sea to take part in the invasion. Later, Stewart would write his own military manual on how to fight battles, and it is perhaps from his experiences during his campaign with Henry’s forces that he reflected upon how ‘the English have a good way of doing things’ since ‘from the first day they get into battle he who is the warring party’s master has all of it under his command, and this is a very good disposition and practice for the good of the people’.

The bulk of Henry’s contingent was to be supplied from French forces, recently demobilised from fighting on the front at Flanders. The exact number of French troops supplied by Charles VIII can be debated, but they must have totalled over half of Henry’s armed fleet that departed from Harfleur. Polydore Vergil was later keen to downplay the French contribution to Henry’s force, commenting only that Henry received
a ‘slender supply’ from Charles VIII, ‘with 2,000 only of armed men and a few ships’, though his observation, made in the manuscript copy of his work, that the force was ‘partly English and partly French’ was later judiciously removed. Perhaps equally intent to increase the level of the French contribution to Henry’s enterprise, Molinet wrote that Charles VIII had given Henry 1,800 troops together with artillery and ships for his invasion; Commynes increased this to 4,000 men, with ‘a large sum of money and some artillery’. Yet it is notable that the Crowland Chronicler recorded how Henry’s troops were ‘as much French’ as English.

There can be no doubt that Henry’s force included a substantial number of French troops, yet while mentioning Charles VIII’s order that 1,800 troops be sent to Henry, Molinet described how none of these was actually from ‘his own house’. Instead Henry was forced to enlist men from elsewhere; as Commynes recorded, he did so with ‘some three thousand of the most unruly men that could be found and enlisted in Normandy’.

It seems likely that many of the French mercenaries who were recruited to serve in Henry’s army came from a military garrison commanded by the aged Marshal of France, Philippe de Crevecoeur, lord of Esquerdes, or ‘Cordes’ as he was better known in England. Esquerdes had long been a thorn in Richard’s side. Shortly after Edward IV’s death, he had launched a naval campaign, ‘to the great hurt and prejudice of certain English merchants’, under the pretext that he had been unable to be recompensed for ships and goods seized from him during the previous reign. When he sent messengers to England, he felt they had been ‘insultingly treated by the English, or at least derided’. One commentator believed that this was merely a distraction from Esquerdes’ true intent: ‘under colour of avenging a private wrong’, he ‘was supposed to have made the beginning of a war between these most unfriendly nations’. Esquerdes was certainly in no mood to compromise. ‘When our ships, losses, and injuries are restored to me,’ he wrote uncompromisingly to Lord Dynham in May 1483, ‘I shall be ready to remove my hand from all the arrests that I have caused to be made.’ Described as an ‘extremely active commander’, Esquerdes’ chief ambition was to recover Calais, which he‘sore longed’ to recapture from the English, so much so that it was reported that ‘he would commonly say
that he would gladly live vii years in hell, so that Calais were in possession of the Frenchmen’.

By 1485 Cordes had become commander of a large military base in the valley of the Seine at Pont de l’Arche. At the height of his military activity following the death of Charles the Bold in 1477, Louis XI had sought to establish a military camp there to house a settled garrison for a standing army of ‘gendarmerie’, a permanent military army to be commanded by Esquerdes. Louis purchased 2,100 horses, 700 tents and 700 carts stamped with the royal arms for the camp, but almost as soon as it had been established, the king had begun to have second thoughts about the viability of such a massive military operation. After the peace of Arras in 1482, its enormous costs, financed by ‘cruel and excessive tallies’ on the surrounding neighbourhoods, seemed unnecessary; the permanent infantry force of franc-archers was ordered to be slowly disbanded, after costing 288,000 livre tournois in pay alone and the force itself being widely criticised for its indiscipline. The entire camp itself had been threatened with closure, with Pierre-Louis de Valtan having been appointed ‘capitaine generale de la closure’, yet the garrison remained under the command of Esquerdes, with payments surviving for a company of 4,000 men in 1482 and 1483, in spite of costs of the garrison at Pont-de-l’Arche rising to unsustainable proportions, with wages alone increasing from 700,000 livre tournois in 1482 to 827,660 livre tournois in 1483. Neither could the camp shake off its reputation for being ‘as cowardly as they were merciless’. Nevertheless, Valtan was still in position in 1485, suggesting that the camp remained operational in some form when Henry was recruiting a force for his expedition.