Bosworth: The Birth of the Tudors (45 page)

That night, as the skies darkened across Redemore plain below, Richard would have seen the flickering of his enemies’ campfires, pitched several miles away towards the villages of Fenny Drayton, Witherley and Atterton. His mind turning towards the next morning, having
ensured that his men were fed and ‘refreshed’ ‘from their exertions’, he chose to make ‘a lengthy speech to encourage them for the coming battle’.

As the king’s camp settled down for the night, filled with the restless sleep and muttering prayers of men uncertain whether the following morning might be their last day upon the earth, a sense of unease was palpable in the air. Perhaps some drowned their fears in drink, which might help to explain the Scottish chronicler Pitscottie’s tale of how, the night before the battle, a highlander named Macgregor, a servant of the Bishop of Dunkeld who having been present at Richard’s court at Nottingham had somehow managed to find himself swept up in the campaign, stole the royal crown from Richard’s tent. Having been seized, he was brought to the king who asked why he had attempted the theft. Macgregor replied that his mother had once prophesised that he would one day be hanged, and that he thought if this were the case, he should be at least hanged for something memorable. Amused by his explanation, Richard supposedly granted the Scotsman an immediate pardon.

Other pranks were considered less welcome. According to the Tudor chronicler Edward Hall, during the night an anonymous message was pinned to the gate of the Duke of Norfolk’s tent. It read:

The anonymous writer who urged the duke not to place his faith in the king, believing that Richard’s fate had already been sealed, was perhaps attempting to warn Norfolk of what, under the cover of darkness, was already taking place. Several men managed to slip away, either in retreat or to join Tudor’s camp. One of the royal commissioners of array, John Biconnell of Somerset, in spite of his family ties with Lord Zouche, took his forces to Henry.

That night Richard struggled to rest. The following morning he spoke of how in his fitful sleep he had ‘a terrible dream’, imagining that ‘he was surrounded by evil demons, who did not let him rest’. Rather than being refreshed from sleep, he awoke feeling ‘sick at mind’ and filled with ‘anxious cares’. Richard always had a countenance, the
Crowland Chronicler observed, ‘which was always drawn’, but by the morning he appeared ‘even more pale and deathly’. Vergil, who claimed that in the morning Richard ‘related his dream to many men’ so that his men did not think that he displayed any ‘melancholy because he feared the enemy’, believed that ‘from this apparition he foresaw the evil outcome of the battle, and he did not prepare himself for the fight with his usual eager expression’.

11

THE BATTLE

A
t around quarter past five, the sun began to rise across the horizon. After waking and leaving his tent, Richard requested to hear Mass. Even though Sunday Mass would have been observed upon the army’s arrival at Ambion, Richard was determined to receive one final divine blessing before he entered battle. He had brought with him his book of hours, an illustrated manuscript in which Richard’s own birth date had been entered in its calendar. At some stage during his reign, Richard had commissioned a personal devotional prayer inserted into the book. Perhaps now, Richard turned its pages to recite the passage that reflected his own desperate predicament, hoping that he might be spiritually armed against the challenge he faced:

Yet when Richard ordered ‘Mass to be said before him’ before he armed himself for battle, his chaplains were unprepared and ‘not ready to celebrate Mass’. According to one account, taken by surprise, the chaplains struggled to find the bread and wine, since ‘ever one thing was missing’. It seems that the king, possibly kept awake by his nightmares, had risen before dawn in an unsettled state, taking his chaplains unaware. Richard’s early awakening had left his cooks equally unprepared, for according to the Crowland chronicler, ‘nor was any breakfast ready with which to revive the king’s flagging spirit’.

The sense of disorganisation in Richard’s camp, suggesting that the king never managed to hear Mass before departing for battle, together with his unsettled dream, has been viewed by later writers as some kind of divine judgement. Polydore Vergil was quick to give his own interpretation of events, stating that Richard’s nightmare ‘was no dream, but a conscience guilty of heinous offences, a conscience I say so much the more grevious as the offences were more great, which … in the last day of our life is wont to represent us to the memory of our sins committed, and withal to show unto us the pains imminent for the same’. The image of a ruler facing battle unable to hear Mass due to the disappearance of the host was a familiar example used by authors to suggest that God was not on their side. Even if Richard had faced delays in hearing Mass, it is unlikely that some form of ceremony would not have taken place, probably performed by his confessor John Roby, a Franciscan friar whom Richard had rewarded with preferment.

There survives a powerful reminder of the central role that faith would play in the conflict for Richard in the form of one of the most striking battlefield relics, the ‘Bosworth Crucifix’. Discovered at or near the site of the battle in 1778, the cross is 23 inches tall and 11 inches wide, made of bronze alloy and would have been originally overlaid with gold. At its centre is the figure of a crucified Christ, cast in bronze alloy. Each arm of the crucifix ends with a roundel, decorated on its front with the symbols of the four evangelists, likely to have been covered with enamel. On their backs, the roundels are engraved with what
appear to be suns or stars, with rays streaming from them, the familiar emblem of the Yorkist sun. There would have been additional branches carrying the figures of Mary the Virgin and St John, since attachments for the branches spring from the base of the cross, although these are missing. The cross could have been mounted either for use on the altar in a private chapel, or on a stave for processional use. Maybe the crucifix itself had been used during Richard’s private Mass, positioned upon a portable altar in the royal tent; after the king had heard Mass, it would have been taken off its base and mounted upon a tall wooden stave, fastened into place by a hinged ring of iron, to be led out into the fields of battle.

There was another reason why Richard’s camp was in disarray. According to a later account related by Ralph Bigod, who was present at the camp on Ambion Hill, it was the unexpected sight of Henry’s advance ‘coming on apace’ which had suddenly left Richard’s camp unprepared, being ‘constrained to go into battle’.

Early that morning, as the sky was ‘barely growing light’, Henry sent a messenger to Thomas Stanley. Stanley had moved his own forces forward, so that having approached ‘the place of the fight’ he was now ‘midway between the two armies’, in the fields between Stoke and Dadlington, south of the Roman road running through the countryside. Henry requested that Stanley should allow his men to join with his own troops, allowing him to place his army into formation, with Stanley being asked to personally lead the vanguard. Stanley’s reply was not what Henry had expected. ‘He would lead his men into the line’, he replied, but only when Henry ‘was there with his army drawn up’. It was clear that Stanley was not prepared to join the battle until Henry himself was about to engage. Whereas Henry had planned for Stanley’s participation in advance, joining with his army into one single force, Stanley would only commit to ‘be at hand with his army in proper array’, located in ‘the battle area midway’. Meanwhile, his brother Sir William Stanley remained to the side of his brother’s forces, perhaps closer to Stoke, being described as ‘hindmost at the outsetting’. Nevertheless, the Stanleys arranged for their forces to be prepared in a state of military readiness, remaining drawn up into two ‘battles’, totalling 6,000 men. The ballads suggest that Stanley did provide Henry with
at least some help: recognising that Henry’s forces were too small to combat Richard’s army, he sent Sir Robert Tunstall, Sir John Savage, Sir Hugh Percivall and Sir Humphrey Stanley to join Henry’s vanguard.

This was hardly the aid that Henry expected to receive. With time running out, and knowing ‘the greatness of the cause’, Henry became ‘anxious and began to lose heart’. He had little choice: he would have to fight without the Stanleys. Henry had no other option but to draw up a ‘single battle line’ as far as he was able, on account that he had too few men. It was ‘making a virtue of necessity’, Vergil wrote, though it seems that Henry was carefully advised by his generals as to what his battle formation should take.

The Earl of Oxford played a central role in devising how Henry’s forces should be drawn up for battle. Having been given the command of the vanguard after Thomas Stanley’s refusal to take up the post, the earl had in effect been placed in charge of the military leadership of Henry’s army. According to André, it was Oxford – ‘not inexpert at arms’ – who ‘urged a strategy on the prince’. At the front of the line Oxford placed the available archers, with himself in command. He ordered Gilbert Talbot to take the right wing to ‘defend’ the archers and in order ‘to keep an eye’ on the battle line, while on the left wing he placed John Savage. Behind this line Henry, still hoping to rely on Stanley’s aid, placed himself ‘surrounded by scarcely one squadron of cavalry and a few infantry’, including his standard bearer, Sir William Brandon. Some of the French mercenaries were also placed alongside Henry. According to one French report, written by a participant in the battle, Henry remained on foot, surrounded by Frenchmen, claiming that ‘he wanted to be on foot in the midst of us’. Curiously, there is no mention of Jasper Tudor’s involvement in the battle, or where Henry’s uncle was positioned as the armies came to face each other. Perhaps he remained close by to his nephew, ready to prepare for a possible escape if the outcome of the battle turned against them.

As for the rest of the French mercenaries in Henry’s army who made up a significant number of the force, having been kept separate from the English and Welsh troops overnight, setting up their own forces ‘a quarter league from the camp’ they now ‘similarly held their preparations’ and joined Oxford’s men, with the Crowland Chronicler noting that the earl’s army now consisted ‘of a large body of French
and English troops’. Placed in charge of these ‘sturdy soldiers’, Bernard André noted, was Philibert de Chandée, ‘a man endowed with a military education’. Vergil believed that the total number of Henry’s soldiers ‘was not more than 5,000’ compared to Richard’s army which ‘was about 15,000’.

Oxford’s decision to draw his limited forces up into a single battle line with two wings, rather than the traditional formation of a vanguard, a middle army and a rearguard, reflected the fact that Henry’s army was numerically inferior to Richard’s own forces. Yet the precise layout of the troops seems to have been based on advice in Christine of Pizan’s work, the
Fais d’armes et de chevalerie
, itself based largely on the classical work by the Roman author Flavius Vegetius Renatus, the
De Re Militari
. In her work, Pizan advised that if there were not enough men available to form the traditional formation of a vanguard, a main army otherwise known as the ‘great battle’ or forward followed by a rearguard, ‘some that be expert in arms do counsel that when men have no great quantity of commons but have for the most part all men of arms, that all the whole assembly be put together only in one battle without none other forward or a rearguard but only the wings of the front of the battle, and say that more surely they fight’. To prove her point, Pizan recalled the victory of the French king Charles VI who, despite being vastly outnumbered by 40,000 Flemings at the Battle of Roosebeke in 1382, had managed to obtain victory against the odds by employing a similar single formation, as had John the Fearless, Duke of Burgundy against the might of 25,000 rebel citizens at Liège in 1408.