Bosworth: The Birth of the Tudors (57 page)

Certainly some of Richard’s former supporters who had faced attainder were encouraged enough to appeal against the decision, throwing themselves upon the new king’s mercy. Less than a week after the Act had passed, Roger Wake petitioned Henry to overturn his attainder. He explained how he had fought at Bosworth ‘against his will and mind’, quoting from Richard’s letters which commanded him to fight ‘upon pain of forfeiture of life, land, and asmuch as he might forfeit’. He went on to explain how he had a wife and eight children ‘of tender age, which without your especial grace unto them should be like to perish for default of sustenance: the children be of so tender age they can be put to no one else to relieve themselves, and their mother can full simply apply her to ask alms for them it is so contrarious to her bringing up’. Wake pleaded for Henry’s ‘gracious and merciful disposition with which God of his great grace hath excellently and abundantly endowed you’ and asked him to pardon his life and spare his personal possessions, ‘whereby he, his said wife, and children may have some living unto the time that he at your other leisure sue further to your good grace for their more relief’. Though he had died in battle, Geoffrey St Germyn was one of those attainted, yet his daughter Margaret petitioned Henry that, although she admitted her father had fought for Richard ‘in the last field’, he had done so under duress, having been ‘so manashed by the letters of the same late Duke, that unless he came to the said field he should lose his life, lands and goods; for dread whereof, he was in the same field, full sore against his will’.

The experiences of Roger Wake and Geoffrey St Germyn, together with the fates of other attainted men, highlight the thousands of individual consequences and tragedies that had occurred on the day of battle, leading to divided loyalties between king and family, country and community. There were difficult choices to be made, often cutting through traditional family relations. Sir Gervase Clifton and John Byron were friends and neighbours, but chose to
fight on opposite sides of the field. Clifton was a royal servant active in the Duchy of Lancaster and an esquire of the king’s body as well as a prominent Nottinghamshire landowner; there would have been no chance of his not committing to the king. Byron on the other hand decided to back Henry. Tradition recalls that they made a pact on the battlefield that whoever survived would protect the interests and inheritance of the other. Richard’s own supporters, perhaps through close family ties, also managed to help the relatives of the fallen. John Kendal was attainted after the battle, though survived to marry Elizabeth, the widow of Sir Richard Charlton, who had died fighting for Richard. Sir Richard Charlton’s death on the battlefield must have left his sister Agnes distraught, not least because her husband was Sir Thomas Bourgchier, who had defected to Henry’s side. Perhaps her grief was alleviated when her brother’s lands were granted to Bourgchier in reward for his service.

Other families torn by the battle included the Berkeley family, revealing very different attitudes between generations. Sir William Berkeley of Uley in Gloucestershire, aged forty-nine, fought for Richard, while his younger cousin, Sir William Berkeley of Beverstone, aged thirty-five, had chosen to take Henry’s side; Berkeley of Beverstone had been a household knight of Edward IV and had taken part in Buckingham’s uprising, later fleeing abroad into exile in Brittany and France. Sir William Berkeley of Uley lost his lands, suffering attainder for his support for Richard. On the other side of fortune’s wheel, his cousin Berkeley of Beverstone had been appointed a king’s councillor. The turn of the wheel could be fast: three months later, Berkeley of Beverstone was dead, with his elder cousin outliving him by fifteen years. Eleven years after the battle, Sir William Berkeley’s attainder was eventually reversed, though his family never recovered its property, and were still pursuing their lands in vain in 1531.

If there was a general anticipation during the winter of 1485 that the new king would issue pardons to those attainted, Henry was not so fast to act. ‘These lords and gentlemen that was attainted’, one London merchant wrote in surprise in February 1486, ‘they get no grace, as it is said’. Restoration to the king’s favour would clearly be a slow process, a form of probation that would necessarily have to be drawn out over a long period – long enough to win back the king’s limited trust. Roger
Wake’s attainder was annulled in the following Parliament, and by the time of his death in 1503, he had nearly recovered all the lands that he had lost fighting at Bosworth.

With the lands of the attainted being parcelled out to his own supporters, the balance between reward, retribution and reconciliation was a delicate one. Henry understood the precarious financial position that the realm stood in. Forfeited lands that were not used to reward his followers were an invaluable source of income for the crown. In an early sign of the king’s determination to exploit the machinery of government to strengthen his authority, Henry set out to ensure that he received all the forfeitures that he was entitled to. In August 1486 a commission was established to oversee the collection of revenues still outstanding. No amount was too small: the crown even recovered plate which Sir Robert Brackenbury had sold to a London chaplain a week before Bosworth in order to pay off his debts, but which the chaplain had failed to hand over.

Parliament ended its first session on 16 December with a petition being handed to the king by the speaker Thomas Lovell, on behalf of the commons, urging that Henry should now take Elizabeth of York as his wife. The language of the petition made it clear that Henry’s own title should in no way depend upon the legitimacy of the Yorkist heiress. As its text tacitly hinted, Henry was king in his own right, but the marriage could only bring further union between the houses of Lancaster and York. Already preparations had begun to obtain from Innocent VIII a formal papal dispensation for the marriage, with a list of eight witnesses, including Thomas Stanley, testifying in January that the match had long been considered. A draft oration intended to be delivered to Innocent VIII further explained how ‘the king of England, who had been tossed on the waves and exposed to innumerable dangers, like another Aeneas, having been nearly fifteen years an exile, acknowledged that it was by divine aid and beyond all human expectation that he had recovered in so brief space the throne of his ancestors. To put an end to civil war, he had, at the request of all the lords of the kingdom, consented to marry Elizabeth, daughter of Edward IV.’ The papal dispensation was finally granted in a Bull from Innocent VIII on 27 March 1486. An English version of the letter was swiftly
sent off to printing presses for circulation, to be distributed across the realm. The value of papal support for Henry’s kingship was too great not to go unnoticed; it would now be used to highlight the emotional significance of the marriage:

In fact, Henry had already taken matters into his own hands, and on 18 January had married Elizabeth in a ceremony somewhat shrouded in secrecy. Perhaps he had little choice but to do so sooner rather than later; eight months later, on 19 September, a male heir, Arthur, was born to the couple. Nevertheless, Elizabeth’s official coronation as queen was delayed for almost two years, with the ceremony taking place finally on 25 November 1487.

For the moment, there were other matters clearly weighing down the new king’s mind, not least the prospect of renewed opposition in the north, ‘whence all Evil spreads’, the Crowland chronicler observed menacingly. Recognising the limitations of his own power and authority in the region, Henry had chosen to tread carefully in his appointments there, retaining most of Richard’s officers in their posts: noblemen such as John, Lord Scrope of Bolton and Thomas, Lord Scrope of Masham, in spite of their actions fighting for Richard at Bosworth were to be reappointed as commissioners of array to the north in September 1485. Sir John Conyers of Hornby, a member of Richard’s ducal council and appointed a knight of the garter, similarly appears on the commission of array and by February 1486, on account of his ‘good and faithful service’ to Henry, was granted several offices in Richmondshire and appointed a knight of the king’s body. Sir Thomas Markenfield, a knight
of Richard’s body who had been rewarded with an annuity of 100 marks and appointed sheriff of Yorkshire in November 1484, despite his fighting on Richard’s side at Bosworth, was allowed to remain in the post as sheriff there. For Marmaduke Constable, Bosworth was to be but a temporary setback to his career. In the aftermath of the battle, he was stripped of his Duchy of Lancaster offices in Staffordshire, Derbyshire and Leicestershire, yet by 18 November he had secured a pardon and by May 1486 was restored to his position as a knight of the body. In the same year he rode alongside Henry during his first progress into Yorkshire. Like Richard, Henry would need the support that northern gentlemen such as Constable could offer: unlike Richard, who had planted Constable in the south, Henry wanted him exactly where he lacked support, in the north. He was soon to be appointed sheriff of his native county of Yorkshire, supplemented with an unusually generous reward of £340.

After first appointing another prominent Ricardian, Lord Fitzhugh, to the office of warden of the East and Middle Marches, Henry soon came to realise that he needed the weightier support that the Earl of Northumberland’s Percy connections brought; in December the earl was released from prison and restored to his former office as warden of the Marches held by Fitzhugh. Northumberland’s rehabilitation was a limited one: the earl was appointed warden of the East and Middle Marches on the border with Scotland, but was not granted the security of tenure his family had previously enjoyed, while Henry preferred to retain Thomas, Lord Dacre as warden of the important Western March.

By mid-February, Henry had resolved to make a personal journey to the north. ‘It is said he purposes to do execution quickly there on such as have offended against him’, wrote one commentator. On his journey towards York in early April 1486, the king was ‘struck by a great fear’ when he discovered that Viscount Lovell and Humphrey Stafford, having fled their sanctuary at Colchester, were planning on raising the standard of revolt in Yorkshire and Worcestershire. Undeterred, Henry continued on his journey, arriving at York to be welcomed by Northumberland. In the event, Henry had less cause for concern than he imagined. Lovell managed to raise a large army around Richard’s former stronghold at Middleham, but he had underestimated the success of
Henry’s policy of rapprochement with many of Richard’s former supporters, who were unwilling to indulge in yet more bloody fighting. When Jasper Tudor was sent ahead, offering the rebels pardon if they threw down their arms, it was enough for Lovell to realise that his efforts were doomed to failure; slipping away in the middle of the night, he escaped to the north where a band of the most diehard Ricardians held out in the wilderness, camped out on the Furness Fells. One by one, the group led by Sir Thomas Broughton and Sir John Huddlestone were prised out by promises of pardon.

As his support eventually melted away, Lovell fled abroad to Flanders, where he sought the protection of Richard’s influential sister Margaret, Duchess of Burgundy, who was determined to seek revenge upon Henry for her brother’s death, pursuing him ‘with insatiable hatred and with fiery wrath’. Humphrey Stafford meanwhile desperately sought sanctuary again near Abingdon, with little success: he was dragged out forcibly, and in July 1486, after it had been formally decreed that sanctuary could not be pleaded in treason cases, went to the block.

Henry’s visit to York was not without incident; it was reported that there was an attempt on the king’s life on St George’s Day, thwarted only by the actions of Northumberland. There had also been other worrying signs of underlying discontent, with Richard’s nephew, John, Earl of Lincoln, making a failed attempt to escape the city ‘over the walls’ to join the rebels. It would soon become clear that Henry would continue to face further resistance to his regime, this time coming in the remarkable episode of Lambert Simnel, a joiner from Oxford, who was persuaded by a priest to impersonate Richard’s nephew, Clarence’s son, Edward, Earl of Warwick. When rumours spread that the young man pretending to be Warwick was free, Henry took them seriously enough to have the real earl, until now imprisoned in the Tower, paraded around the streets of London in February 1487.

It was not enough to prevent several prominent Yorkists, who had previously submitted themselves to Henry, choosing to throw in their lot on this bizarre last throw of the dice, John, Earl of Lincoln among them, who fled across to the Low Countries to join the court of Margaret of Burgundy, where Viscount Lovell had fled. Irreconcilable to the new regime, Lovell had remained undeterred by his previous defeat.
With his latest venture, he believed he had the means to oust the Tudor pretender. Margaret of Burgundy provided the resources to finance 2,000 German mercenaries led by the experienced Swiss captain Martin Schwartz, who landed in Ireland on 5 May 1487, with Lambert Simnel being crowned ‘Edward VI’ there several weeks later. Schwartz’s forces, bolstered by 6,000 Irish levies who, in spite of being severely ill-equipped, landed at Furness in Lancashire on 4 June. From the start it was obvious that the resources he had been promised by Richard’s supporters were not going to be forthcoming. When the opposing forces clashed at Stoke in Nottinghamshire on 16 June, Henry placed the command of his troops once more in the trusty hands of the redoubtable Earl of Oxford while the king remained, as at Bosworth, sensibly positioned at the very back of the field. There was little chance that Schwartz was ever going to replicate the success of Philibert de Chandée and his French mercenaries at Bosworth: completely outnumbered by the royal army twice his army’s size, Schwartz, together with Lincoln and Lovell, chose to mass their forces into a single unit. Even then, they struggled to face the force of the king’s vanguard and the fire of its archers, so much so that the battle was over before most of Henry’s army even had the chance to engage in the fighting. Four thousand Irishmen were slaughtered on the field; Lincoln’s body lay strewn among them. Lovell escaped, never to be seen again, though his disappearance may have been solved by the discovery of a sealed underground chamber at Minster Lovell, Lovell’s family residence, when workmen were laying a new chimney in the building in 1728, ‘in which was the entire skeleton of a man’ sat at a table, ‘with a book, paper, pen’ ‘which the family and others judged this to be lord Lovell, whose exit hath hitherto been so uncertain’.