Bosworth: The Birth of the Tudors (40 page)

While John Paston or Thomas Hoo may have chosen to absent themselves from any forthcoming conflict, evidence survives for those who chose perhaps a braver course of action. The recent rediscovery of the will of Thomas Longe of Ashwellthorpe gives an indication of the kind of ordinary retainer whom Norfolk could rely upon to follow their lord blindly into battle. On the same day that Norfolk had informed John Paston in his letter that he would be departing Bury for Richard’s army at Nottingham, Thomas Longe drew up his will in a nuncupative, or spoken, form, suggesting that Longe had dictated the will himself, as he was about to depart on the long march northwards:

The will makes no mention of land, only of chattels. This may be because it was nuncupative but it could also be indicative that Longe was not a man of great substance and that his position in the manor may have been as a retainer within the household of the Earl of Surrey. A Norfolk manor situated some 3½ miles south-east of Wymondham and 12½ miles south-west of Norwich, Thomas Longe’s village
of Ashwellthorpe had a long Yorkist pedigree – Norfolk’s son the Earl of Surrey owned the lordship of the manor. One can imagine Longe, commanded to meet at Bury on 16 August to march under his lord’s the Earl of Surrey’s banner, to have hastily drawn up his will; knowing that he was to join ‘the king’s host’ at Nottingham and then ‘to battle’, Longe would have been typical of the unnamed soldiers who would form the backbone of battle. Departing from his home village, the drawing up of his will indicates that Longe himself was uncertain whether he would ever return home, a sense of doubt highlighted by the ambiguous phrase that his body might be buried ‘in such a place as God might dispose for him’.

If ordinary men such as Thomas Longe were prepared to fight for their king, it seemed that there were others who were less than certain. Rumours began to spread that many nobles were preparing to delay their arrival, in the hope that they might avoid taking any part in the impending conflict. According to the chronicler Molinet, the nobility was unwilling to prepare for war, with some deciding to ‘turn their backs’. Others prepared for war, ‘not in the least to come to the help of the king, but to settle their debts with him, and to avenge the bad deeds he had done’. Of all the members of the nobility, it was Thomas Stanley’s response Richard most feared, being suspicious over his wife Margaret Beaufort’s influence, that she ‘might induce her husband to support her son’s party’.

According to Vergil, earlier in the summer Stanley had requested permission to ‘have gone into his country, for his pleasure as he said, but indeed that he might be ready to receive earl Henry as a friend at his coming’. Richard refused Stanley’s request, ‘and would not suffer him to depart before he had left George Lord Strange his son as a pledge in the court’. On the other hand, the Crowland Chronicler related that ‘a little before the landing’ of Henry’s army, Thomas Stanley had received permission from Richard to go into Lancashire to visit his family ‘from whom he had long been separated’, yet he had only been permitted to leave ‘on no other condition than that of sending his eldest son, George Lord Strange, to the king at Nottingham in his stead; which he accordingly did’. It seems that rather than leave his son at court before he departed, Thomas Stanley and Lord Strange had journeyed together into Lancashire, where the records reveal that they jointly signed a legal
document in Lancashire on 18 July. By 1 August, however, Lord Strange had returned to the king’s court at Nottingham Castle, where he was present when the Great Seal was delivered to the king.

Richard’s worst fears were confirmed when, after sending orders to Stanley to present himself at Nottingham ‘without any delay’, he refused. According to ‘Bosworth Field’, Stanley had left to visit Richard at court but ‘fell sick at Manchester by the way’, claiming to be suffering from ‘sweating sickness’. Lord Strange continued on to Nottingham, where he was arrested. Attempting secretly to escape from his prison cell, he was ‘discovered by a snare and seized’. Upon his re-arrest, Strange revealed, possibly under torture, that there was a conspiracy between himself, his uncle Sir William Stanley and Sir John Savage ‘to support the party of the Earl of Richmond’. He begged for forgiveness and promised that ‘his father would come to the king’s aid, as fast as possible, with all his power’. Strange wrote to his father making clear his own precarious situation and the ‘danger he was in’ together with a plea for urgent support.

It seems that Lord Strange was not alone in being singled out for arrest. A Welsh poem dedicated to William Gruffudd, a nephew of Thomas Stanley by marriage who had been appointed chamberlain of Gwynedd in late 1483, suggests that Gruffudd was arrested and taken to Nottingham at the same time as Lord Strange: ‘manifestly by deceit he was put unwillingly somewhere out of his own country … the arrest and the taking away of Lord Strange … was a double misfortune’. Another poem mentioned that his arrest was due to his office, and that Gruffudd was ‘under God’s care while at the mercy of King Richard, a man who is cruel to a prisoner’.

According to a version of the ‘Ballad of Bosworth Field’, Richard sent a messenger to Thomas Stanley who told him he ‘must raise up under your banner to maintain Richard our king, for yonder cometh Richmond over the flood with many an alyannt [foreigner] out of far country, to challenge the crown of England; you must raise that under your banner be with the noble power that you may bring, or else the Lord Strange you must never see, that is in danger of our king’. If the ballad is correct, news of Strange’s imprisonment came as a surprise to Stanley, who is supposed to have remarked that he had never dealt ‘with traitory’. Both Thomas Stanley and his younger brother
Sir William had previously benefited from Richard’s patronage, with the king showing his gratitude for their support during Buckingham’s rebellion, granting Thomas Stanley the lordship of Kimbolton and Sir William Stanley Buckingham’s manor of Thornbury in Gloucestershire. Other grants to the family followed, ‘for the singular and faithful service which they have hitherto done to us not only in favouring our right and title … but also in repressing the treason and malice of our traitors and rebels’. In the context of the Stanleys’ previous support, Richard’s arrest of Lord Strange seems to have been a political miscalculation that would backfire spectacularly. The ballad suggests that Stanley only became involved against Richard and joined Henry’s cause after the arrest of Lord Strange, alleging that Richard was advised by ‘wicked councell’ that Stanley and Strange had been in conspiracy with the Earl of Oxford, organising that ‘they may show upon a day a band such as may no Lord in Christianity’ and urged him to order their arrest, ‘or else short while continue shall ye in England to be our King’.

For now, despite the king’s dire threats, Thomas Stanley chose to remain uncommitted to either side. Stanley’s caution was understandable. With his son in captivity, to demonstrate any sign of revolt would have inevitably resulted in Strange’s execution. As long as Richard remained uncertain about Stanley’s actions, and which side he might take in the forthcoming battle, Stanley could have reasonably surmised that his son would be safe: possession of Lord Strange was all that Richard had to influence his father’s actions. Polydore Vergil believed this was why Thomas Stanley had refused to commit to Henry’s cause sooner, knowing that to do so would have placed his son’s life at risk.

His brother Sir William Stanley’s reply to Richard’s messenger was more peremptory. ‘I marvel of our king’, he is reported to have said, discovering news of Lord Strange’s arrest, ‘he hath my nephew, my brother’s heir; a truer knight is not in Christianity: he shall repent … for all the power that he can bring, he shall either fight or flee, or lose his life. I will make a vow, I shall give him such a breakfast on a day as never knight gave king.’ Perhaps Sir William Stanley felt that he had nothing to lose: he had always been more hot-headed than his elder brother, being attainted for his participation at the battle of Ludlow in the Parliament of 1459, whereas Thomas Stanley had more sensibly avoided punishment. In the summer of 1485, there was perhaps another
reason behind William Stanley’s fatalism: on 12 August, his sixteen-year-old stepson Edward, the Earl of Worcester, died. Stanley had married the boy’s mother, Elizabeth Hopton, sometime after the death of the previous earl, John Tiptoft, who had been executed in October 1470; Stanley and his wife had been awarded the joint guardianship of the estates of the earldom, ensuring that Sir William was able to live the life of a nobleman with wealth independent of the king’s favour. All this changed in August 1485, when the death of the young earl meant that the title lapsed, with the estates passing to the remaining sisters of the family.

Sir William Stanley was probably comforting his wife Elizabeth on her young son’s death when news reached him that Richard had issued a proclamation at Coventry and other towns publicly denouncing him and Sir John Savage as ‘traitors to the King’. Suddenly he was left with nothing: and with nothing to lose, neither lands nor offices, he must have considered that he had no other choice than to declare his hand, throwing his lot in with Henry Tudor.

The Crowland Chronicler was in little doubt that Henry’s journey, ‘along wild and twisting tracks’, was aiming for North Wales, ‘where William Stanley … was in sole command’. Continuing his march northwards on 11 August, according to tradition Henry stopped at Wern Newydd, four miles from Llwyndafydd. It seems unlikely that, only four miles away from Llwyndafydd, Henry would have made an overnight stop, but this does not preclude his enjoying some kind of hospitality. Travelling across the low-lying plains, he finally spent the night at St Hilary’s church at Llanilar, four miles south of Aberystwyth, where Henry is supposed to have slept at the old mansion of Llidiardau, which overlooks the Ystwyth valley.

The following day, on Friday 12 August, Henry and his forces continued their march towards Aberystwyth. According to Vergil, Henry made almost uninterrupted progress, ‘delaying almost nowhere’. There were, however, he wrote, ‘several enemy districts which had been strengthened by garrisons’ that had to be overcome, but he ‘took them with almost no trouble’. In his printed work, Vergil did not specify which locations exactly had caused Henry’s army difficulty, but in his manuscript he revealed that when Henry reached Aberystwyth castle,
‘held by his opponents with a not very strong garrison’, he was forced to attack it ‘and took [it] without much trouble’. The castle had been under the control of the Duke of Buckingham before it had been granted to Walter Devereux, Lord Ferrers, a stalwart supporter of the king’s. If Richard needed any evidence that Henry’s invasion, which he had at first dismissed as being of little consequence, was picking up momentum, the news that Aberystwyth had fallen to his enemies must have been a significant blow.

For Henry, the absence of any effective opposing army was proving unsettling. It was almost as if his uninterrupted journey was too easy. He remained especially nervous about the movements of Walter Herbert and Rhys ap Thomas; he had hoped that Rhys would have joined him at his landing in Milford Haven, but instead had to make do with a trickle of defections from Rhys’s camp while Rhys himself remained frustratingly elusive. The later ‘Life of Rhys ap Thomas’ claimed that the defections had been deliberate, ‘so to strengthen his party, if occasion were offered; to direct and convoy him over those uncouth ways and fastnesses; to call in for such provisions, as the country could afford, for the relief of their army; and lastly, to inform the people as they went along, what side Rhys ap Thomas meant to stick to’. Nevertheless Henry remained ‘much appalled and troubled in mind, not knowing well what to think’, since rumours that had spread through his army suggested that Rhys ‘meant to side with Richard, and for that purpose was ready to give him battle and interrupt his passage’. According to the Tudor chronicler Edward Hall, Sir Walter Herbert and Rhys ap Thomas intended ‘to encounter’ with Henry’s army and ‘to stop their passage’, while another stated how they were both ‘in a readiness to give him battle’. Rhys had his own reasons for remaining ambivalent. The account of his life later claimed that Richard had written Rhys a letter demanding his loyalty and an oath of allegiance that he was to use his ‘best endeavours for the conservation of your royal authority in these parts, and to apply likewise my soundest forces for the safe guarding of Milford Haven from all foreign invasion; especially to impeach and stop the passage of the Earl of Richmond, if so by any treacherous means he should attempt our coasts’, at the same time as sending his young son as a hostage. Rhys refused to send his son, but may have been bought with further financial inducements: Jean
Molinet suggested that Richard had given £700 to ‘a rich man named Thomas to raise an army, and they had to gather together with Lord Herbert’.

Rhys’s ‘Life’ would later claim that his hesitancy to commit to Henry’s cause was a deliberate ploy on his part in order to ‘hoodwink’ Richard into believing that he intended to give battle. Even if this convenient story were the case, Henry could not afford to gamble on Rhys’s equivocation. After he had taken Aberystwyth, possibly spending the night there, he paused to send out scouts to discover where Rhys and Walter Herbert’s armies were encamped. Since Henry’s landing, both armies had been shadowing his progress through Wales; Rhys ap Thomas had commanded that beacons across the region be set on fire, ‘thereby to give notice to all the countries adjacent, of his landing, and withal to summon his friends and kinsmen from all parts’. He now had at his disposal a significant force, estimated at 1,500 men. Having travelled to Carmarthen, he then journeyed to Llandovery and then to Brecon in the Usk valley. By the time Rhys came to Brecon, his train had grown so long that he needed to reduce its number, ‘the company that followed him growing cumbersome’. Finding that women and children were apparently offering themselves to fight, Rhys decided to examine his troops and selected the best 2,000 men fully armed on horseback, who supposedly ‘drew with a kind of ravishing delight, the eyes of all beholders’. At the same time, Rhys decided to make provision for his own fortunes, and how to ‘make a safe retreat in case of extremity’. In doing so, he chose an additional 500 men whom he placed in the charge of his two brothers, David and John, and his only son Griffiths Rhys, commanding them not to take to arms ‘until his pleasure were further signified’. They were also to ensure that those who had rallied to support him were to be protected from injury. Those who were left behind went back to their homes, not without an ‘abundance of tears’ while Rhys continued to move northwards across the mountainous terrain of Wales.