Bosworth: The Birth of the Tudors (37 page)

It was at Pont-de-l’Arche that soldiers were hastily mustered by Esquerdes to join Henry’s army, on the promise of pay and possible military glory. The camp was divided into four separate divisions of men: the ‘archers du camp’, the professional group of French archers, crossbowmen (‘abaletiers’), halberdiers (‘voulgiers’) and later a band of pikemen (referred to as ‘lanciers’ or ‘piquiers’), though the only evidence of the type of soldier sent to fight with Henry comes from a letter by one ‘archer du camp’, Colinet Leboeuf, who had been present in ‘du camp sous M. D’Esquerdes’ when he was enlisted to join Henry’s enterprise, which Leboeuf himself referred to as the ‘voyage d’anglettere’.

When approached for men from his garrison to join Henry’s army
against Richard, Esquerdes must have felt it was yet another opportunity to cause division and disarray among the English nation whom he hated. Esquerdes would later be credited for transforming Henry’s fortunes from a ‘fugitive of his own country’, with Esquerdes’ own epitaph stating how ‘by me had Richmond revived in French land … I was ordained judge settler of the tournament’, while another French poem addressed to Esquerdes recalled how ‘You were made the Lord to take away one’s right, for another as well awaited his own right, so to make his name … you were made judge thereof, for you supported him’. For the moment, it is likely that Esquerdes simply saw in Henry Tudor the chance to cause maximum discomfort to an English king who, once more bogged down in civil war, might one day loosen his grip upon Esquerdes’ precious territory of Calais.

Esquerdes himself chose not to lead his forces across the sea; instead command of the French troops was given to Philibert de Chandée, a young nobleman from Savoy, who had recently joined the French court following the death of Louis XI, under the household of Philippe de Savoy, Count of Bresse. Henry would later refer to Chandée as being ‘our dear kinsman, both of spirit and blood’, suggesting that Tudor himself believed that they were both descended in kinship through the French royal family.

With a fleet of around thirty ships in place, Guillaume de Casenove, known by his nickname ‘Coulon’, a notorious naval captain whose expertise was recognised at the French court, was chosen as commander of the fleet for the journey, commanding his flagship, the
Poulain of Dieppe
. Everything was now in place. Leaving Thomas, Marquess of Dorset and John Bourgchier behind them, Henry made his final preparations before embarking on his voyage. On 1 August, around the same time as Richard received the Great Seal in the solemn ceremony in the sanctuary of Nottingham castle, Henry Tudor and his flotilla of French troops and English exiles left the shelter of the Seine at Harfleur and made their journey out towards the Channel on a soft southerly breeze, determined to claim the Crown of England and its Great Seal as his own.

PART THREE:

‘THIS OUR ENTERPRISE’

9

MARCH TO WAR

I
t was shortly before sunset on Sunday 7 August when at half-tide and under a clear sky, the fleet of thirty ships led by Guillaume de Casenove’s flagship, the
Poulain of Dieppe
, turned inwards into the mouth of Milford Haven. The fleet had been at sea for seven days, though a ‘favourable wind’ had eased their journey. Sailing past the sheer-faced red sandstone cliffs several hundred feet high, hidden from view to the left was their intended destination, the small rocky inlet that formed Mill Bay.

Shielded by two large promontories, the bay was out of sight from the village of Dale and its castle a mile and a half away, where Henry’s landing went unnoticed. Henry had learnt that the previous winter, Richard had sent a ‘cohort’ of men to be stationed there, in order to ‘turn him away from the shore’, yet arriving onshore, there was no sight of armed resistance, no troops shadowing the cliffs or boats skirting the haven, as Henry must have feared, remembering his experiences in Plymouth nearly two years previously.

Henry’s immediate sense of relief was obvious. According to the chronicler Robert Fabyan, ‘when he was come unto the land he incontinently kneeled down upon the earth, and with meek countenance and pure devotion began this Psalm:
Judica me deus, & discern causam meam
’ (Psalm 43: ‘Judge me, O God, and distinguish my cause’). When Henry had finished reciting the psalm ‘to the end’, he ‘kissed the ground meekly, and reverently made the sign of the cross upon him’. Afterwards, he commanded those around him to ‘boldly in the name of God and Saint George to set forward’. In spite of Henry’s Welsh ancestry, and the location of his landing, it would be the English saint and chivalric hero that Henry would seek to emulate. As the ships were unloaded, one of the principal banners unfurled was one of ‘the image
of St George’, though Henry’s Welsh descent was also represented with a second banner of a ‘red fiery dragon beaten upon white and green sarcenet’. Following traditional chivalric precedents, Henry also decided upon landing to knight eight of his most prominent followers – Edward Courtenay, Philibert de Chandée, John, Lord Welles, John Cheyney, David Owen, Edward Poynings, John Fort and James Blount, men who would then have been expected to take up roles as commanders within the army. It was a significant moment, the implications of which everyone watching the ceremonies being performed would have understood: Henry was formally asserting his claim to be the fount of virtue, something only a king could legitimately claim. In knighting his men, Henry was staking out his own claim to be king.

A fragment of the jubilant landing scene is preserved in a eulogy to a Carmarthenshire squire who was present at the landing: ‘You conducted … your king from the water once when chieftains landed and mustered … There were seen our gallant ones and a throng like York fair and the host of France, a large and heavy host by the sea-shore, and many a trumpet by the strand, and guns around a red banner, and mighty tracks where you passed.’ Its mention of the strength of French troops indicates their importance to Henry’s overall military campaign. Numbering in their thousands, in spite of a disagreement over the exact figures, it was clear, as Vergil stated in his manuscript history, Henry’s army was very much ‘partim Anglorum, partim Francorum’.

One report stated that French troops remained aboard while Henry landed at Dale, reluctant to disembark. When finally they were persuaded, they were ‘marvellously well and kindly received’ and given fresh provisions of food and drink to cheer them up. As soon as all the soldiers had disembarked, the French commander of the fleet Guillaume de Casenove was quick to depart for adventures new. On 20 August 1485 he was already to be found near Cape St Vincent in southern Portugal where he was involved in an attack on four Venetian galleys sailing to Flanders, before returning to England where he divided up his booty, ‘a great quantity of merchandise belonging to Spanish subjects’, causing the Spanish monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella to write to England in protest. With Casenove’s ships disappearing around the edge of the Milford Sound and out into the Atlantic, Henry was now on his own. There could be no turning back.

Once both men and munitions had been unloaded from the boats, the first task was to reach the village of Dale and to secure its castle. At half-tide, reaching twenty feet above the water level at low tide, the landing spot would have been cut off from the path out of the bay. The only route was to climb up through the steep incline rising 200 feet to Brunt Farm, a third of a mile away. The farm is said to have been named after a comment supposedly made by Henry, struggling up the hill, that ‘This is Brunt’ – ‘brunt’ meaning difficult or hard. The village proved somewhat less difficult to subdue, though Vergil hints that it had to be ‘occupied’, suggesting some brief resistance.

As the skies darkened and night fell, Henry ordered that his army set up camp at Dale, possibly on the stretch of land near the castle. Possibly with his French troops in mind, whom Commynes had after all described as being ‘the most unruly men that could be found’, Henry addressed his troops, according to Bernard André, telling them ‘not to commit any wrong on the common folk either to gain sustenance or to turn a profit, nor to take any property from any inhabitant without paying him recompense. And if you require money, behold, men are here to pay you a proper salary. Do not do anything to other men, either by word or by deed, that you would not wish to have done to yourselves. If you conduct yourself thus, God will be propitious to us, since a thieving lawbreaker does not long rejoice in other men’s property.’ If Henry was to ensure a swift and safe journey through Wales, he would only be able to enlist support if his troops maintained discipline and did not take it upon themselves to pillage the surrounding neighbourhoods. Henry would later draw up a series of ordinances of war, which must have reflected his own rules set out during the campaign. These outlined the powers of the king’s harbinger, whose responsibility was to purvey lodgings for the king’s camp. ‘Also that no manner of person or persons, whatsoever they be, take upon them to lodge themself nor take no manner of lodging nor harborage but such as shall be assigned unto him or them by the King’s harbinger, nor dislodge no man, nor change no lodging after that to be assigned, without advice and assent of the said harbinger, upon pain of imprisonment and to be punished at the said will of our said sovereign lord’. Ordinances of war were essential if discipline were to be kept. Henry would later issue strict instructions ‘ordained by his proclamations, for the good rule of his host’. No soldier
was to ‘take nor presume to take any manner of victual, horse meat, or man’s meat, without paying therefore the reasonable price thereof assigned by the clerk of the market or other the king’s officer therefore ordained, upon pain of death’. Henry would later comment to the Earl of Oxford that ‘blessed be God’, the English army ‘hath among themselves kept such love and accord that no manner of fray or debate hath been between them since the time of their departing’.

Oxford and Pembroke were also ordered to muster the French troops in order to ‘take a view of their defects’ and to understand what equipment and weapons they lacked. It was not an encouraging sight. ‘They were very raw and ignorant in shooting, handling of their weapons, and discharging the ordinary duty of soldiers; men, as it seemed, raised out of the refuse of the people’. According to the account of his life, Sir Rhys Ap Thomas, who retained a life-long distain for the French, revealing his own personal desire ‘soundly to cudgel those French dogs’, later found himself having to equip them with as much equipment as he could spare, though in his heart he wished he could send them back to France, ‘there being not one man of quality among them’. It was perhaps the mutual hostility between the French and the Welsh soldiers that forced Henry to decide to separate his troops, agreeing that they be ‘kept asunder, to prevent such jarres and quarrels, as commonly arise between strangers’.

As the first light of dawn broke on the morning of Monday 8 August, Henry began his march from Dale to the town of Haverfordwest. Speed was essential if Henry was to make progress and gather momentum before Richard discovered news of his landing. Haverfordwest was around twelve miles away, along a route which passed near Merlas and crossed a tributary of the Western Cleddau river at Radford Bridge, yet the army marched so fast and without delay that the town had hardly been notified of Henry’s landing, with it being ‘announced that he was present at the same time as it was announced that he was on his way’. There Henry and his army were received ‘with the utmost goodwill of all’.

This encouragement was soon shattered by the disappointing news brought by John Morgan that, contrary to what Henry had been informed in Normandy, ‘nothing had come of the help which he had
previously indicated’ and that Rhys ap Thomas and John Savage were not prepared to defect and join his forces, with Morgan reporting that they were apparently still ‘in arms for King Richard’. Worse still, the funds that had been promised by Reginald Bray to pay for his troops’ wages had not materialised.

If Henry was distraught at the news, he was quickly cheered by the arrival of the Welshman Arnold Butler, whom Henry had last seen during his exile in Brittany; Butler had accompanied Henry when he had fled to Brittany in 1471, but had been removed from Henry’s service by Duke Francis II and forced to return home. According to Vergil, Butler ‘came to him and told him that the entire nobility of the County of Pembroke was prepared to serve him, provided that he would grant pardon for and wipe out the memory of anything they had done against him and against Earl Jasper during the time when both had gone to Brittany’. Henry, ‘in accordance with his nature and for the benefit of his enterprise, with Jasper easily forgave them. At which they came voluntarily to him and bound themselves by the military oath.’ Vergil, in his printed work, makes clear that Jasper’s own position as the region’s traditional lord must have been influential in their decision to support Henry, stating that ‘they were prepared to help their Earl Jasper’.