Bosworth: The Birth of the Tudors (58 page)

Lambert Simnel himself was captured. Rather than face execution, Henry decided to show his mercy by employing the boy in the royal household, first as a kitchen spit turner and later as a falconer. Rather than exact revenge upon the Yorkists who had turned against him in spite of his previous promises of pardon, he would offer clemency but only at a price. Both Lords Scrope, who seemed to have been reconciled to Henry’s rule before turning against him in June 1487, bought their lives with bonds of £3,000.

If Henry was looking for encouragement, he could point to the fact
that Richard’s designated successor, the Earl of Lincoln, was dead. He could also take heart that if a few disaffected Yorkists had chosen the path of rebellion, most had not, deciding to remain loyal to his new regime. Lord Dacre, who had previously ‘raised all the north country’ for Richard at Bosworth, sat on his hands, as did Thomas, Earl of Surrey, who reportedly refused the chance to escape from the Tower during Simnel’s rebellion. The Earl of Northumberland stuck loyally by the king’s side, mopping up outbreaks of revolt and keeping the city of York in obedience. If Henry had forgiven the Earl of Northumberland for his role at Bosworth, it would prove that others would not. Two years later the earl was doing his duty as one of the king’s officers, collecting an unpopular income tax, when he was attacked by a mob of protesters at South Kilvington, just outside Thirsk, on 28 April 1489. According to the Earl of Oxford, relating news of the earl’s death, Northumberland, hearing that the men were unarmed, had approached them not wearing any harness, hoping to address them ‘in peaceful manner, trusting to have appeased them’: ‘How be it, as it is said, that he is distressed and that they have taken him or slain him, which the King intendeth to punish’.

What was most striking for contemporaries was that as the earl was struck down and attacked, his retinue stood around him in silence, refusing to come to his aid. In the poet John Skelton’s words: ‘Barons, knights, squires, one and all … Turned their backs and let their master fall.’ Henry issued a proclamation against the ‘rebels’ who had ‘against all humanity cruelly murdered and destroyed his most dear cousin’, though the author of the Great Chronicle of London remarked that he had died for reason of the ‘deadly malice for the disappointing of king Richard at Bosworth field’. When in York, a year after Northumberland’s death, in a drunken conversation ‘distempered either with wine or ale’, John Painter believed that the earl ‘died a traitor to our sovereign the lord the king’, he did not mean Henry VII, but that the earl ‘was a traitor and betrayed King Richard’.

Henry remained dogged by challenges to his authority for years to come, with Yorkists remaining sheltered by Margaret of Burgundy who provided them with their own exiled court. It was apparent to Vergil that the king would remain ‘harassed by the treachery of his opponents and assaulted frequently thereafter by the forces of his enemies and
the insurrections of his own subjects’. A fresh pretender to the throne arrived in the figure of the imposter Perkin Warbeck, who became a puppet in the hands of neighbouring foreign rulers, yet failed to win a strong enough following in England to mount a serious challenge to Henry’s reign. Ironically one of the few men who chose to desert the king was the man who had done so much to place him on the throne, Sir William Stanley. The days of Henry’s impromptu coronation on Crown Hill in the moments after the battle at Bosworth long behind him, Stanley’s disappointment at not receiving what he considered his due reward had slowly transformed itself into bitterness and resentment. According to Vergil, ‘William, although he held a great place of friendship with the king, was more mindful of the favour he had conferred than that he received, and he still hoped, as the Gospel verse has it, to have more abundance, so that he put a low value on the rewards given him by the king. When Henry perceived these were cheap in his eyes, he began to be so angry that the both of them, their minds provoked, lost the fruit of their grace.’ Ten years after he had turned the tide of the battle, placing Henry on the throne and maybe even placing the crown on his head, Sir William Stanley decided to throw his lot in with Perkin Warbeck. Arrested, he was convicted for treason and executed in 1495, though Henry felt remorse enough to contribute to the costs of his funeral. After his death, Stanley’s castle at Holt was surveyed, with an inventory of its contents made: among his possessions was a gold collar, emblazoned with the livery of Yorkist suns.

For those who considered loyalty the best policy, the aftermath of Bosworth was soon to become a distant memory. Sir Ralph Bigod, who had recalled the disorganisation of Richard’s camp on the morning of the battle, was soon restored to favour, being made a knight of the new king’s body; the following year he was granted the royal offices of constable and porter of Sheriff Hutton, as well as the bailiff of the town and keeper of the park there. He continued to be a loyal servant of the crown, being placed on commissions of the peace and array, and in 1492 served in the invasion of France. In 1503 he accompanied Henry’s daughter Princess Margaret to Scotland on her journey to marry James IV. Bigod continued to serve under Henry VIII with equal distinction: in 1513 he was ordered to seize the Yorkshire properties of the Scottish king, who by then was at war with England. When he died in 1515, his
grandson and heir became a ward of Thomas, Cardinal Wolsey.

Now firmly a member of the Tudor establishment, in 1492 Sir Marmaduke Constable accompanied Henry VII on his expedition to France, just as he had done with Edward IV in 1475; Constable was himself involved with the negotiations that resulted in the Treaty of Étaples in November 1492. He continued to serve unstintingly in various offices, including a third term as sheriff of Yorkshire, the local MP and justice of the peace in the East Riding, until late in life came his greatest triumph, when at the age of seventy, he was to captain the left flank of the English forces at the battle of Flodden in 1513. The epitaph on his tomb, written at his death five years later, carved out how Constable wished to be remembered, serving both Edward IV, ‘that noble knight’, and ‘noble King Henry’, making ‘adventure into France’, being ‘at Berwick at the winning of the same, and by King Edward chosen captain there first of any one’, and his service at Flodden, where ‘then being of the age of threescore and ten … courageously advanced himself among other there and then … he nothing heeding his age. Any mention of Bosworth and Richard III had been conveniently erased from memory.

Others remained proud of their actions that day. John Sacheverell, son of Ralph Sacheverell of Switterton and Hopwell in Derbyshire, who fought and died on Richard’s side, was remembered with a memorial brass at his local church forty years later, stating that ‘he died in the war of Richard the third near Bosworth’. William Sheldon’s tomb in St Leonard’s church in Beoley, Worcestershire also attests to the fact that he fought for Richard at Bosworth; however, Sheldon survived the battle, and with his lands eventually restored to him, died in 1517.

Henry too, could hardly have been prepared to forget his past. He never forgot his fondness for Brittany, despite the fact that Duke Francis’s death in 1488, coming months after the disastrous battle of St Aubin du Comier, that had seen another Bosworth veteran Sir Edward Woodville killed fighting as a mercenary on the battlefield, had brought the collapse of Brittany as an independent state, with his daughter Anne marrying Charles VIII in 1491, thereby bringing a union between France and the last independent duchy. Seventeen years after his victory at Bosworth, in January 1502 Henry sent an envoy to the cathedral at Vannes to deliver a chasuble of crimson velvet, decorated with the
royal arms of England in gold leaf and the words
Regis Henrici Septimi
on the back, along with two crimson velvet altar cloths, woven with gold leaf, intended for the altar of St Vincent Ferrier, the town’s patron saint. When Henry commissioned his own tomb to be built in Westminster Abbey, he personally ordered one of the gilt medallions to be reserved for St Vincent.

There was another Breton saint whom Henry was minded to remember, believing that he had provided him with personal protection during his trials. According to legend, in the sixth century St Armel had founded a Breton monastery after defeating a dragon that had terrorised the surrounding region. He had bound the dragon to his religious vestment, before commanding the beast to drown itself in a nearby river. Armel’s relics were preserved in the small church at Ploermel in southern Brittany, less than five miles away from the castle at Josselin, where Jasper Tudor had been imprisoned. Tradition recalls that both Jasper and Henry had prayed to the saint during their time in Brittany, and that they believed St Armel’s intercession had saved their small fleet from shipwreck during their aborted journey to England in November 1483, when during a gale the stormy seas had tossed their ships throughout the night, leaving them in fear of their lives. From then on, Henry had kept the saint close to his heart; in the chapel he had built at Westminster Abbey, Henry ordered that not one but two separate statues of St Armel be placed there, depicting the saint as a bearded man with a dragon at his feet, tied to a stole that Armel holds in his right hand covered by an armoured glove. Notably, a similar carved statue of Armel appears in the memorial to John Morton, the Bishop of Ely, who had been instrumental in helping to organise Buckingham’s rebellion and assisting Henry in exile.

There is another location where St Armel’s image is to be found: in the stained glass of Merevale church, the former gatehouse of Merevale Abbey where Henry had met with the Stanleys before the battle. For the Crowland chronicler, revealing his ecclesiastical bias, Merevale Abbey was central to the battle’s location: Richard set up camp ‘near the abbey of Merevale’ and the battle is later referred to as ‘this battle of Merevale’. Yet recognising the debt that he owed to the abbey, not least in providing his army with food and sustenance as they camped on the abbey’s lands, crushing its crops at the height of harvest season, on 7
December 1485 Henry granted 100 marks to the abbot of Merevale in compensation for ‘right great hurts, charges and losses by the occasion of the great repair and resort that our people coming toward our late field made, as well unto the house of Merevale aforesaid as in going over his ground, to the destruction of his corns and pastures’. With the battle still fresh in the king’s mind, the abbot decided to take his chances and press Henry for even greater reward for the assistance the abbey had given him, ‘meeking beseeching’ the new king to grant the abbey the lordship of Atherstone, ‘which if ye so do shall be to your avail, as here before ye have been informed and in perfect and perpetual remembrance of your late victorious field and journey at the reverence of god, to whom he shall specially pray for the prosperous continuance of your most noble and royal estate’.

There is no evidence that Henry responded to the abbot’s audacious letter, let alone granted him his request, but eighteen years after the battle, with his kingdom secured and the uncertain early years of revolt and rebellion firmly behind him, in September 1503 Henry decided to return to the place of his triumph, visiting the abbey, where he gave money for a stained glass window. In the south aisle of the church, the window remains there to this day. There is St Armel, his open cape revealing a full suit of armour, a breast plate with mail beneath, with his legs and feet also covered in metal plate. He carries in his right hand a bible and a bag, from which protrudes a dragon, its eyes peering out from a slit-like opening. Perhaps Henry believed that the saint had been with him during the uncertainty of battle, when with the Stanleys refusing to commit to join his side, it seemed for a moment that all had been lost as he faced Richard’s final desperate charge.

It was not the last time that a Tudor king would pay homage to the site of Henry’s ‘victorious triumph’. In August 1511 the young king Henry VIII passed through Leicester where he travelled to Coventry, staying at Merevale Abbey. With the occasion of the battle, the anniversary of which had only just passed, very much in his own mind at the time, Henry decided to mark the battle with its own official memorial, a chapel dedicated to those who had fallen on the field. At Nottingham, on 24 August, two days after the battle’s anniversary, Henry VIII issued a signet warrant authorising the churchwardens of Dadlington to appeal for funds throughout four midland dioceses for a period of
seven years, ‘towards the building of a chapel of Saint James standing upon a parcel of the ground where Bosworth field,
otherwise called Dadlington field
, in our county of Leicester was done, and towards the salary of a priest by the said churchwardens provided to sing in the said chapel principally for the souls of all such persons as were slain in the said field’.

In doing so, Henry was following the long tradition of establishing battlefield chapels. The earliest dates from the Saxon period, erected on the site of King Oswald’s victory at Hefenfeld in 634; perhaps the most famous is Battle Abbey, founded by William the Conqueror to commemorate 1066, with its high altar on the spot where King Harold’s standard had fallen. The tradition had been renewed with vigour in the fifteenth century, with the greatest example being All Souls College, Oxford, which had been founded in 1438 as a place to pray for ‘all Christian souls’ who had died during the French wars; the civil wars between the houses of Lancaster and York saw further smaller chantries founded in memory of the battle dead, close to the site of the battle itself: in 1458, when Richard of York was reconciled to Henry VI at their ‘Loveday’, he agreed to endow a chantry at the abbey of St Albans for the souls of those killed in the battle fought there three years before. Henry VII chose to found a chantry at Tewkesbury Abbey in 1500 that included prayers to be said for those slain in the battle within the abbey’s shadow. A small mortuary chapel known as the ‘hermitage’ was built to commemorate the fighting at Barnet, while at Towton Edward IV had planned to enlarge an existing chapel where many of the dead had been buried, going so far as to obtain a papal indulgence to attract contributions. The plans were left to Richard to complete, with the king himself heading a list of donors to the proposed chapel there with the donation of £40. Even then Towton’s memorial remained incomplete, with the Tudors hardly prepared to countenance a memorial towards the greatest single defeat of their Lancastrian forebears; instead, the location of their victory at Bosworth Field, or ‘Dadlington Field’ as Henry VIII had noted significantly, would be the focus of attention.