The Hollow Crown: The Wars of the Roses and the Rise of the Tudors

by Dan Jones

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  Richard III may have been a usurper, but when he turned his attention to issues of more general government he was capable of being generous and sympathetic. Over Christmas 1483 his mind had been on the plight of England’s poor, who found themselves unable to get justice due to the high costs of the legal system. A grant dated 27 December shows him granting a yearly payment for life of £20 to his clerk John Harington, who served the court of requests. This court was designed to hear the ‘bills, requests and supplications of poor persons’, offering a route to legal redress that would not ruin them financially.26 After the New Year celebrations he travelled around Kent, and just as he had done on his northern progress, he refused to accept expensive gifts from the towns through which he passed – a richly decorated purse stuffed with more than £30 of gold was graciously declined at Canterbury, with the king ordering its contents ‘to be redelivered to the said persons from whom the said sum had been collected’.27

  The parliament of January 1484, when it was not concerned with the business of legitimising Richard’s claim to the crown, also suggested that his inclinations as king were towards the principles of justice and fairness. One law granted that ‘every justice of the peace in every county, city or town shall have authority and power to grant bail … at his or their discretion’ – meaning that all people convicted of felonies could in theory be freed until they faced trial, and not suffer confiscation of their goods before they had had a chance to defend themselves in court.28 Forced loans known as benevolences, which had been used by Edward IV, were declared illegal. Where taxes were levied, they were imposed most heavily on foreign merchants, yet even here Richard showed himself to be relatively enlightened, ensuring that the flourishing new book trade was exempted from import duties, and that every writer, printer and bookbinder could do business freely, ‘of whatever nation or country he may or shall be’.29

  All the same, the extreme circumstances surrounding Richard’s ascent to the throne meant that all the progressive policies in the world would not bring unity to his realm overnight. One of his most serious problems was the fact that he remained forced to rely heavily on the men who had brought him to power, rather than constructing a broad and inclusive government that represented the interests of the whole realm. His chief servants, who included William Catesby, Richard Ratcliffe, Francis, Lord Lovell, Sir James Tyrell and Robert Brackenbury, were all unconnected to Edward IV, and mostly men who had served Richard as duke.30 His household was packed with northerners whom he could trust, a fact which worsened the sense of a north–south divide to his kingship.

  Worst of all, Richard was simply unlucky. The king suffered the first personal tragedy of his reign on 9 April 1484 when his beloved little son, Prince Edward, died. He was about ten years old. The child had grown up in the castles of the north, including his birthplace of Middleham, where he enjoyed the life of learning and entertainment common to all boys of his class, with trips in a chariot about the countryside, the japery of fools in his household and the occasional involvement in ostentatious ceremonies at which his father had his status as heir to the crown publicly proclaimed.31 But childhood was a perilous time of life, and Prince Edward’s death, following a short illness, came as a crushing blow to Richard and Queen Anne. The news reached them at Nottingham and it threw the bereaved royal couple into ‘a state almost bordering on madness, by reason of their sudden grief’.32 The long-term hopes of any usurper’s regime depended on the security of succession. While Richard had fathered several bastard children, including one John of Pontefract, whom he knighted at York in 1483 and acknowledged as ‘our dear bastard son’ when he appointed him captain of Calais in 1485, Edward of Middleham was the only child who could have been an acceptable heir to the crown. His death was therefore a catastrophe, even to a ruler as tenacious as Richard III.33

  Prince Edward’s death made it essential that Richard should step up his attempts to capture Henry Tudor. With Francis of Brittany ailing, the king of England made his move through Pierre Landais, the Breton treasurer. By September 1484, he was close to an agreement that would exchange Henry’s person for the title of the earldom of Richmond, which in ancient times had been given by English kings to dukes of Brittany. By chance, Henry was warned of these negotiations just as they neared their conclusion. The Tudors, with their court of exiles, had established themselves in Vannes – but it was clear that the duchy, for so long a haven, had now become a dangerous place. Early in September Jasper Tudor led a small advance escape party over the Breton border near the town of Rennes. Two days later Henry followed him, galloping over the frontier disguised as a groom. By the end of September, most of his adherents had joined them. It was a highly dangerous dash for freedom, since outside Breton territory the Tudors enjoyed no safe-conduct and none of the guaranteed diplomatic protection that for many years had kept them safe. But in 1484, with an heirless Richard determined to hunt and exterminate his chief remaining foe, it was a gamble worth taking.

  Fortunately for Henry, it paid off. Charles VIII’s government received the Tudors neither with trepidation nor hostility, but rather with delight. There was no excitement in the French court at the prospect of a renewed Anglo-Breton alliance, and the voluntary flight of the Tudors greatly reduced the prospect of this happening. So the renegade Englishmen were greeted with honour by the French king’s envoys, presented with money, clothes and lodgings, and encouraged to continue their plans to invade Richard’s realm. As they wintered in France they were reinforced by a steady trickle of defectors and sympathisers: John de Vere, earl of Oxford escaped from Hammes Castle in the Pale of Calais and joined the Tudors in November; the academic and rising cleric Richard Fox offered his support from his position at the university of Paris, and former members of Edward IV’s household continued to smuggle supplies and messages out of England to the Tudor court in exile.

  This was all extremely irksome to Richard, whose attempts to establish secure and broad-based kingship were undermined by the existence of a possible rival authority, no matter how small and far away. On 7 December 1484, from the palace of Westminster, the king issued a proclamation against the Tudors and their allies. He described them as rebels, traitors, murderers and extortioners ‘contrary to truth, honour and nature’. The proclamation damned Henry’s ‘ambitious and insatiable covetice’ which led him to ‘encroach upon … the name and title of Royal estate of this Realm of England, whereunto he hath no manner, interest, right or colour as every man well knoweth’. If the rebels were to be successful in their plans to invade, Richard warned, they would ‘do the most cruel murders, slaughters, robberies and disinheritances that were ever seen in any Christian realm’. All natural subjects were called upon ‘like good and true English men to endeavour themselves at all their powers for the defense of themselves, their wives, children, goods and inheritances’. They would be in good company, for Richard, ‘a well-willed, diligent and courageous prince will put his most royal person to all labour and pain necessary in this behalf for the resistance and subduing of his said enemies …’34

  And indeed, Henry Tudor had begun to style himself as king of England. Around the time of his flight from Brittany to France he began to sign documents with the initial H, a considerable presumption which had not been adopted by any unanointed English king-in-waiting before him. His intention to marry Edward IV’s eldest daughter, Elizabeth of York, remained undimmed, although it was an intention that Richard was determined to subvert. On 1 March 1484 Richard had reached a settlement with Elizabeth Woodville by which she and her girls could leave the sanctuary at Westminster, where they had been for the best part of a year. The king had sworn publicly to ensure that if the Woodvilles would emerge ‘and be guided, ruled and demeaned after me, then I shall see that they shall be in surety of their lives … [and] I shall put them in honest places of good name and fame …’35 Richard promised to marry the girls respectably and provide modest lands for their upkeep. Rumours began to circulate at Christmas
1484 that he intended to discard Queen Anne and marry his niece Elizabeth himself, despite a closeness in relationship that bordered on the grotesque, even by fifteenth-century aristocratic standards. The prospect was unpalatable – ‘incestuous’ and guaranteed to incur the ‘abhorrence of the Almighty’, was one verdict – but this was Richard, after all, whose attitude towards members of his family had proven to be anything but sentimental. Could he marry Elizabeth? ‘It appeared that in no other way could his kingly power be established, or the hopes of his rival be put an end to,’ wrote one chronicler.36

  Queen Anne died on 16 March 1485. She was only twenty-eight and mutterings of poisoning accompanied her demise. These, combined with the lurid speculation about Richard’s intentions, were enough to prompt the king to make a public statement in the presence of London’s mayor and citizens shortly after Easter. He had been advised by his disgusted councillors that to press ahead with plans to marry Elizabeth would incur not ‘merely the warnings of the voice; for all the people of the north, in whom he placed the greatest reliance, would rise in rebellions against him’. For this reason, Richard stood in the great hall of the Hospital of St John and made a denial ‘in a loud and distinct voice’, assuring his people that he did not intend to wed his brother’s daughter. The limits of good taste had been reached.

  On 23 June 1485 Richard issued another proclamation against the Tudor rebels in France, damning Henry’s ‘bastard blood both of father side and of mother side’ and warning of ‘the disinheriting and destruction of all the noble and worshipful blood of this Realm forever’ should a Tudor invasion succeed.37 Evidently, Richard was acutely concerned for his crown. According to Vergil, the king remained ‘vexed, wrested and tormented in mind with fear almost perpetually of the earl Henry and his confederates’ return; wherefore he had a miserable life.’38

  Yet he was no more nervous than Henry Tudor, who was, Vergil continued, ‘pinched by the very stomach’ at the rumour concerning Richard’s intentions towards Elizabeth of York, and had also to deal with the wavering of Elizabeth’s half-brother the marquess of Dorset, who flirted with returning to England as a loyal subject of the king. By the height of summer it was clear that both sides needed a resolution. Henry in particular sensed that his chance to strike at Richard was both fleeting and immediate. He borrowed a modest forty thousand livres tournois from Charles VIII, took counsel with his uncle Jasper and the other leading exiles, fitted out a small fleet with four thousand men – some of them dredged up hurriedly from the jails of Normandy – and set sail from Honfleur at the mouth of the river Seine. They were headed for the western tip of Wales, the land from which Henry’s grandfather, Owen Tudor, had first emerged, where Edmund and Jasper Tudor had held sway during Henry VI’s reign, and from where the Tudors had fled when Edward IV had retaken his realm in 1471. Their journey, propelled by a helpful southerly breeze, took seven days: plenty of time for those aboard the invasion fleet to consider the enormity of what they were about to attempt.

  Henry Tudor was described succinctly by Philippe de Commines as being ‘without power, without money, without right to the Crown of England’.39 Nevertheless, on Sunday 7 August 1485, this unlikely claimant to England’s crown landed at Mill Bay near Milford Haven, waded through the salt water onto wet Welsh sand, knelt and kissed the ground, and uttered the words of Psalm 43: ‘Judge me, O Lord, and plead my cause.’40 His time had finally come.

  19 : War or Life

  They marched through the mountains beneath the sign of the dragon. Henry Tudor and his allies had been on the road for a little over a week, travelling on a cautious route and at a slow pace through the rolling and occasionally inhospitable Welsh countryside. Frenchmen, Welshmen, English exiles and a smattering of Scots made up this hotchpotch army, but above their heads the banners of the campaign included a few clear symbols of their intent. The cross of St George and the Dun Cow of the Beaufort family spoke of royal intent and Lancastrian ancestry. The red dragon against a background of green and white reminded those who passed by that as a Welshman, Henry could connect himself not only with Henry VI (who had granted Edmund and Jasper Tudor the right to use it as a heraldic symbol) but with ancient kings of the Britons such as Cadwaladr, whose exploits were celebrated by the bards.1

  Their route during the first week of their march had taken them north-east from Mill Bay, via Haverfordwest to Cardigan, then hugging the coastline up to Aberystwyth. This was by no means the most direct path towards Henry’s sworn enemy, the man whom his letters to local Welsh gentry described as ‘that odious tyrant Richard late duke of Gloucester, usurper of our said right’. But it was the safest road to take: partly because south Wales was well secured against the Tudors and partly because Henry entertained a keen hope that his stepfather Lord Stanley and his brother Sir William Stanley would be willing to add their substantial military might from their estates in north Wales and north-west England.

  On Sunday 14 August the invaders were at Machynlleth, the small town in the Dyfi valley that had in Owain Glyndwr’s day been the rebel capital of the whole country, and from which it was possible to turn directly east and traverse the mountains of mid-Wales, descending through the marches to reach England by the fertile plain of Shropshire. Even in the height of summer this was rugged and difficult countryside, but after three days Henry’s men had dragged their feet and their guns over the high ground and were approaching Shrewsbury. The English midlands and their chance at seizing the realm opened up before them.

  Of all the men and women who had fought for the English crown during the struggles of the century, perhaps none was less familiar to the majority of that crown’s subjects than Henry Tudor. A thin face with high cheekbones framed a long thin nose, a feature shared by his mother, Margaret Beaufort. Round, somewhat hooded eyes formed a tight triangle with his thin, downward-sloping mouth, and dark wavy hair tumbled down almost to his shoulders. Having barely lived in England, he preferred to speak French. But he had already adopted the style and bearing of a crowned king, and his letters calling for support suggest that he was more than comfortable in the language of imperious persuasion that was expected of an English monarch. ‘We will and pray you and on your allegiance straightly charge and command you that in all haste possible ye assemble [your] folks and servants … defensibly arrayed for war [and] come to us for our aid and assistance … for the recovery of the crown of our realm of England to us of right appertaining,’ he wrote from Machynlleth to potential supporters among the Welsh gentry.2 To many of these Welsh supporters he also dangled the alluring prospect of the principality’s ancient liberties and legal freedoms being restored, should he be victorious. All the same, the Tudor rebellion struck most contemporaries as so unlikely that reinforcements trickled, rather than flowed, to his side.

  As Henry rode through the mountains, word reached Richard III that the attack he had long anticipated had finally arrived. He was in Nottinghamshire during mid-August, and according to one well-informed chronicler he ‘rejoiced’ at the news, celebrating Henry’s arrival as ‘the long-wished-for day … for him to triumph with ease over so contemptible a faction’. The Stanley family was the one serious ally whom the Tudors could hope to recruit, but Richard had taken precautions to secure their loyalty: while Lord Stanley was absent from the king’s side in Lancashire, he had agreed to leave his son and heir, George, Lord Strange, under royal supervision. Richard did not trust the Stanleys – indeed, as a precautionary measure he had declared Sir William and his associate Sir John Savage to be traitors simply as a warning to others who might consider joining the rebellion – but he had enough of a hold on them to feel that they would think long and hard before attacking their anointed king.

  All the same, as the Tudors came down out of the mountains into England, they found that their association with the Stanleys was beginning to work in their favour. On their first arrival at Shrewsbury on Wednesday 17 August, the bailiff, Thomas Mitton, lowered the portcullis against them, swearing an oath that th
ey would have to walk over his belly – implying his dead body – before they were allowed to pass through the streets of the town. After a short impasse, word reached Mitton from the Stanleys that Henry was to be afforded civility and assistance. The rebel army marched through, and in order to protect his oath and his honour, Mitton lay on the ground in front of Henry and allowed him to step over his – very much living – belly as he went.

  Little by little, Henry was gaining momentum. Although the nobility remained thinly represented – of the highest ranks only John de Vere, earl of Oxford was with him – the rebel army slowly began to expand with gentlemen who either had connections to the Stanley family or else remained loyal to the memory of Edward IV, Buckingham and even the duke of Clarence. The Stanleys themselves had three thousand men in the field, although Lord Stanley refused to formally join his forces with the five thousand or so who were directly behind the Tudors. On Friday 19 August they were at Stafford. The following day they had reached Lichfield. The day after that Henry had his army camped around Atherstone, near the border between Warwickshire and Leicestershire.

  By this stage, Richard III had travelled from Nottingham to Leicester and had somehow scrambled together an army described as ‘greater than had ever been seen before in England collected together in behalf of one person’. The king rode out of Leicester at the head of his army on the morning of Sunday 21 August with the duke of Norfolk and earl of Northumberland by his side and the crown on his head. ‘Amid the greatest pomp’ and with ‘mighty lords, knights and esquires, together with a countless multitude of the common people’, Richard rode west towards the place where his scouts told him Henry Tudor was waiting.3 By nightfall little more than a mile separated the armies of king and pretender, both of whom were now ready to meet their fate.