The King's Grave: The Discovery of Richard III's Lost Burial Place and the Clues It Holds

by Langley, Philippa

  He therefore drew his chief credentials from relentless attacks on Richard and the violence he had used in taking the throne. Henry had repeatedly denigrated the king as a murderer and homicide, who no longer had the right to rule the country. Here lay the genesis of Tudor mythology about Richard III. The new dynasty was forced to attack Richard’s reputation because its own claim to the throne was so weak. And yet, for this strategy to be effective, its accusations had to be founded upon at least some measure of fact. The Princes in the Tower had disappeared shortly after Richard had taken the throne, and many believed the rumours that they had been murdered by the king. Richard had certainly executed a number of noblemen as he took power, on charges of treason that looked contrived and unconvincing to others; it is more likely that they were seen as threats to Richard and so were summarily removed. But after the bloody events of the summer of 1483 Richard ruled moderately and with merit. Tudor’s accusations therefore carried some weight, but whether they would be enough to unseat the king in battle was far from clear.

  This was a ruthless and self-interested age, where loyalty and moral scruple were tempered with pragmatism. Richard III had disposed of one serious uprising, in the autumn of 1483, and the majority of the English peerage had stayed loyal to him. However, one thing was clear: Henry Tudor was now the king’s only serious challenger. The Tudors were keen to stress Richard III’s anxiety on the eve of battle. But Richard would have known that if he could decisively defeat Henry and his invading army, his own rule would then be secure.

  Both men had much to gain through seeking the death of their opponent in combat. In the bloody clashes of the Wars of the Roses, decisive victory rested not only in winning on the battlefield, but by ensuring the death of one’s challenger. Bosworth did not happen in isolation – it was part of a series of battles where vendettas were pursued and old scores settled. As we have seen, in the first engagement of the civil war, at St Albans in 1455, fighting ceased once Richard, Duke of York, Richard’s father, had slain his bitter rival, Edmund, Duke of Somerset, chief councillor to the Lancastrian King Henry VI. In the cruel clash at Wakefield in 1460 the roles were reversed: it was now a Lancastrian army that surrounded and cut down the Duke of York, and in the aftermath of battle despoiled his body. These were events that Richard had learned of as a child, and they were central to the story of his family, the House of York, and its claim to the throne of England. It was a claim that had to be fought for repeatedly – and that fight reached its culmination at Bosworth.

  Brutal realpolitik was paramount when Richard, now a young man, was able to participate in battle himself. After a misguided policy of leniency and conciliation in the early part of his reign, his brother Edward IV had faced a renewed assault on the throne. He was at first driven out of the country, but returned with an army to turn the tables on his opponents with a vigorous campaign and victories at Barnet and Tewkesbury in April and May 1471. In the latter battle and its aftermath Edward deliberately killed all his principal challengers, even those who had found sanctuary at Tewkesbury Abbey. Some chroniclers believed Edward IV perjured himself, solemnly promising those inside a pardon if they left the abbey; others that he had desecrated holy ground by hauling them out by force. But the message from the House of York was clear: when faced with dynastic challenge, no mercy would be shown to any future opponent.

  Richard at this troubled time does not come across as nervous and tormented, but rather as a man of action – decisive and uncompromising. We have spoken of his support for Edward IV at Barnet and Tewkesbury. His performance in the battles that restored his brother to the throne in 1471 demonstrated he was a warrior of considerable bravery. Some years later, in an endowment to Queens’ College, Cambridge, Richard remembered those who had fallen by his side in battle, recalling each by name, even the most humble of his retainers. Such careful commemoration was unusual in late medieval society – and notable. Richard had positive values of his own, prizing courage as the standard to attain for himself and those around him.

  The Tudor portrait of an amoral tyrant is countered by Richard’s strong interest in the chivalric code – the code of honour that bound medieval knights together – and to the ritual of chivalry, owning ordinances about the conduct of knightly affairs. He was fascinated by the crusades, the greatest examples of martial endeavour in the medieval age, and this fascination was linked to a genuine and deeply felt piety. We know that he owned a small collection of chivalric texts, and one of his books, a beautifully illuminated manuscript, depicted a king of ancient times, Alexander the Great, seeking out and dispatching his rival Porus in mounted combat. These two crowned leaders were shown in a fight to the death, while the majority of their followers looked on.

  With such a background, it is entirely plausible that Richard III wished to imitate this action at Bosworth, and strike down his challenger himself. If so, he would think carefully about the shape of the engagement ahead of him, not defensively and fearfully, as the Tudors would have us believe, but boldly and aggressively. Richard would need to anticipate the contours of the battle, plan his tactics, anticipate how Henry Tudor would arrange his army, and, above all, imagine where his opponent might place himself within it.

  In medieval combat, armies were organized in three main units: a vanguard, main division and rearguard. A courageous commander, wishing to lead by example and inspire his troops, would position himself in the main division, amid the principal grouping of his men, and make himself clearly visible. As an additional demonstration of resolve, he would dismount and fight on foot, showing he would never flee the field and that battle would end in victory or death. Some seventy years earlier, England’s great warrior king Henry V deliberately placed himself in the middle of his main battle grouping at Agincourt. Henry V was wearing a richly adorned battle crown and fighting under the royal standard – a target for his enemies but a fighting example to his men. And that fighting example had been crowned with success: a crushing defeat of a numerically superior French army.

  But Henry Tudor was no Henry V. His only experience of battle had been as a frightened twelve-year-old, witnessing, at a safe distance, the overthrow and devastating defeat of the forces of his guardian William, Lord Herbert at Edgecote in 1469. In the aftermath of this debacle, young Tudor had been led away to safety by a Shropshire knight, Sir Richard Corbet. It was hardly propitious that as Tudor’s invading army crossed Wales and entered England at the town of Shrewsbury, Corbet and a small body of followers were once more there to greet him. Corbet had reminded the challenger, if reminder was necessary, of this act of service – giving Henry an unhappy premonition of the battle he was about to face against King Richard III.

  Richard may well have heard about Henry’s flight from the field from his guardian and mentor, the Earl of Warwick, whose retainers had crushed Herbert’s army, although he would not have read much into it at the time; Tudor after all was only twelve. But the image presented here – of a hapless and frightened bystander, at the mercy of events he is unable to control – would be repeated in Henry’s adulthood, in two further incidents Richard most certainly knew about. With little other experience of his challenger, these may have formed, over time, his opinion of Tudor’s character and mettle.

  The first had occurred in November 1476, during the second reign, after his brief period of exile, of the Yorkist Edward IV. Richard was prominent at court and in the counsel of his brother the king; Tudor, by contrast, was an exile in the Duchy of Brittany. Edward was now eliminating all potential challengers to the throne, and the previous year had devised a most convenient ‘accident’ for one of them, Henry, Duke of Exeter, whom he arranged to be pushed off a boat and drowned on his return from the king’s French expedition. He then turned his attention to another possible threat – Henry Tudor – and an embassy was sent to the Breton court demanding he be handed over to the English king.

  Once again, this was Edward IV, not his brother Richard, demonstrating absolute ruthlessness in orde
r to safeguard his rule. Unluckily for Tudor, his protector, the Duke of Brittany, had fallen ill. During this illness the duke’s principal adviser – temporarily governing the duchy – was amenable to negotiating a deal with the English. As a result, Tudor was handed over to Edward’s men and forcibly escorted to the Breton port of Saint-Malo. Nineteen-year-old Henry imagined that he was about to suffer a similar maritime mishap to that of his unfortunate predecessor. Fearing this prospect, and clearly in terror of his life, he succumbed to a violent burst of stomach cramps, exclaiming he was unable to proceed any further. During the ensuing confusion, the invalid suddenly regained his mobility and fled into one of Saint-Malo’s churches, claiming the right of sanctuary. Edward IV’s men then tried to extricate him from his new-found ecclesiastical shelter. It was a strange echo of the denouement of the Battle of Tewkesbury some five years earlier, where Edward IV’s opponents also sought refuge in consecrated ground, but had been forced out and executed. But for Tudor – unlike the Lancastrians at Tewkesbury – there was a happy ending to the drama.

  For the townspeople of Saint-Malo, watching events with considerable interest, now strongly took against the activities of the English. Resenting foreigners forcing their way into one of their own churches, a mob of irate Bretons rallied to the assistance of Tudor. An uneasy stand-off followed. At this very moment the Duke of Brittany made a sudden recovery from his illness, and hearing what was happening, sent a party of riders to overtake the English ambassadors, rescue Henry from sanctuary and secure his return to the Breton court.

  It was a dramatic adventure, and young Tudor was certainly lucky to have survived it. His story would have been told with wry humour at the Yorkist court. At the age of eighteen Richard had fought his way out of trouble in battle, demonstrating presence of mind and bravery, and at Tewkesbury he had commanded a Yorkist division. His opponent – when faced with a threat to life and limb – had collapsed with stomach pains. Tudor’s retreat into sanctuary was only too understandable. But it was also undignified and even, in retrospect, darkly comic.

  Richard would have remembered this story. Another incident, which took place after he had secured the throne, gave it greater force. In the autumn of 1483 Richard faced the first major rebellion against his rule. The conspirators staged a series of uprisings: in Kent, Wales and the West Country. Richard and his supporters responded quickly and confidently to this threat. John, Duke of Norfolk, who would be chosen as commander of Richard’s vanguard at Bosworth, had speedily overwhelmed the Kentish rebels. The West Country rising was more dangerous, and Richard resolved to deal with it in person. The West Country rebels were supposed to be supported by Henry Tudor, who had raised a small force in Brittany and set sail to assist them.

  As Richard bore down on the rebel stronghold at Exeter, Tudor’s ships hesitantly appeared off the Devon coastline. Tudor’s intervention was less than heroic. He sent a small boat to the shore to ascertain the progress of the uprising. Judging that it was not going well, he then quickly turned tail and fled back to Brittany, never actually setting foot on English soil in support of the rebellion. Richard – prizing courage as a virtue above all others – may well have decided at this time that Henry Tudor was a coward.

  In August 1485 Henry Tudor had finally managed to land – though in Wales not the West Country – and was marching towards Richard. As the king sent out spies and informers to gather intelligence on his rival’s advance, he was struck by the news that one of Tudor’s principal supporters, his uncle Jasper, who had shared Henry’s Breton exile and landed with his force at Milford Haven, was no longer accompanying him. It was hard to explain such an extraordinary absence, unless his opponent was so despairing of his chances that he had deliberately left Jasper behind in Wales to safeguard an escape route if the battle went badly. The king would have drawn much encouragement from this. His opponent hardly seemed to be spoiling for a fight. And if this was so, Richard could expect that the cautious and militarily inexperienced Tudor, rather than dismounting and making himself a target in the centre of his army, would remain on horseback and position himself well to its rear.

  Here we now have a different Richard on the eve of battle. Far from being paralysed with indecision, he sought to exploit the battle initiative. And if he believed Tudor was primed to flee at a moment’s notice, Richard would need to counter this, and thereby scotch all threat of rebellion once and for all.

  There is evidence that Richard had already devised a plan to prevent his challenger rapidly departing from the battlefield. Richard ordered some of his men to gather at Leicester ‘horsed and harnessed’ – ready to fight either on horseback or on foot. And he had within the ranks of his solely English army one foreign adviser, a Spaniard, Juan de Salazar, an experienced military professional who may have been skilled in the organization of cavalry attacks. Richard, it seems, was envisaging the launch of a sudden, mounted charge against the rearguard of his opponent, to overwhelm his force and cut him down before he could flee from the field.

  These are not the actions of an uneasy and apprehensive villain. If we put Richard back into the context of his times, we gain a different sense of him, in which the king had decided – in advance of actual battle – to destroy his challenger, and had drawn up a clear plan for doing so. Richard was an avid reader of chivalric romances, and within these a cavalry charge was extolled as the epitome of valour, so he knew that if he achieved success in this fashion, he would win martial kudos as well as destroying all opposition to his rule, kudos that might serve to offset the damage done to his reputation by the way in which he had taken the throne. In this scenario, Bosworth, far from being a moral judgement on his character, would become an act of redemption defining his right to rule.

  It was, in purely military terms, a risky course to undertake because timing and co-ordination on the battlefield would become difficult after the charge was launched. Once again, there were military precedents for this. The Battle of Towton, in 1461, was the Yorkist victory that put Richard’s brother, Edward IV, on the throne. It was the bloodiest clash of the entire civil war, fought for an entire day in a blinding snowstorm, and during the course of this the Yorkists were at first worsted. Their Lancastrian opponents then launched a cavalry charge to finish them off. But the charge was not supported by the infantry behind, who moved too slowly to back it up, giving the Yorkists the opportunity to repulse the attack and regain the initiative. Again at Tewkesbury, in 1471, a battle where Richard was present and in command of the Yorkist vanguard, his opponents once more charged his position – only to find that others had failed to join them. On this occasion, one of the Lancastrian leaders, the Duke of Somerset, became so irate that he returned and smote off the offending captain’s head. Unsurprisingly, this action quickly led to the entire Lancastrian line dissolving into chaos.

  As Richard was well aware of such danger, we can assume he consciously chose to take the risk, aiming to enact his cavalry manoeuvre successfully, and thereby prove his right to be king through courage on the battlefield. Such a bold course would also pre-empt any intervention by the Stanleys. With Sir William Stanley’s forces close by, the sooner Richard could finish the battle, the better his chances of victory.

  It was Tudor, not Richard, who had most reason to be nervous and fearful on the eve of combat. While Richard marched to battle, Henry had spent the day in Atherstone, locked in fruitless discussions with Sir William Stanley. As the king’s army was so near, it was vital that Tudor and Stanley now combine their forces, but Sir William would not commit to doing so. He was of course still worried about the fate of his nephew, who Richard would surely execute as soon as Sir William joined Tudor’s army. He may also have been pessimistic about Henry’s chances of securing victory. Stanley would only promise to advance in the direction of the king’s forces, but keeping his men separate and at a distance from Tudor’s, with a vague assurance that he would intervene directly when the opportunity was right. Henry may or may not have believed him, but
he had to act as if he did, for without Stanley’s assistance he was outnumbered three to one by the royal army and facing almost certain defeat.

  On his return to Merevale Abbey that night Henry consulted with his principal captains, the Earl of Oxford and Philibert de Chandée, and together they decided on their battle tactics. Unusually, they would advance towards Richard’s army with the largest part of their strength concentrated in the vanguard, including many of the French mercenaries. The hope was to force an early advantage, which would persuade Stanley to commit himself at last to Tudor’s cause. This was a desperate gamble, and all knew that if it failed, their forces would be overwhelmed and destroyed. Accordingly, it was agreed that Henry would place himself among the rearguard, and this would be positioned a substantial distance from the main battle line – almost a mile behind it – to give him a chance of escaping the field. These battle dispositions could hardly have filled Tudor’s men with confidence, and yet it seems that this forlorn hope was embraced with grim determination. With Henry so far from the majority of his troops, he would be unable to exercise any meaningful control over his army and the command was instead given to Oxford. Once again Tudor was relegated to the role of a helpless bystander, watching while his fate was decided by others.