The southern rebels were unlikely to succeed without backing from major magnates, even if they had temporarily secured control of London in Richard’s absence–which seizure had not brought success to the non-aristocratic rebels of 1381 or 1450. In a parallel case, the senior noble anti-Henry VI rebels led by Warwick had taken London in an attack from Calais via Kent in 1460 but Queen Margaret had held out in northern England; Richard also had a northern power-base. Warwick had taken London as he revolted against Edward IV in 1469, but had not been sure of success until Edward’s Welsh/south-western army had been defeated at Edgecote. Richard’s reaction, however, stored up trouble for the future. His appointments to county offices across the south depended strongly on loyal ‘outsiders’ he had brought in from his extensive northern lands. Having brought an army south to intimidate London at the time of his coup and been keen to revisit the north as soon as possible on his summer progress of 1483, he never achieved as wide a degree of support and service among southern magnates as Edward IV had done.53
The number of actual exiles in Brittany and later France as a result of the southern English revolt was small, but Buckingham’s revolt was a serious threat due to his Marcher tenantry and it was lucky for Richard that heavy rain flooded the Severn crossings, discomfited the rebel’s men, and held him up long enough for Richard to gain the initiative. The rebel plan to co-ordinate the risings for 18 October–with Richard out of the way in the north and only John Howard, the new Duke of Norfolk, in charge in London–also failed and Norfolk was able to have enough warning to block the rebels’ advance on the capital from Kent. Had better weather enabled Buckingham to cross the Severn and link up with the rebels in Devon and Wiltshire before Richard arrived from the north the outcome would have depended more on the new King’s military capacity. Richard was an experienced commander and Buckingham was not, while the rebels in the south of England also lacked a ‘professional’ commander to make up for their inexperience–in 1485 the Tudor forces had John de Vere, Earl of Oxford, Warwick’s lieutenant at Barnet in 1471.But Buckingham and the southern rebels combined would have posed as much of a threat to the northern forces loyal to Richard as the combined armies of Welsh and south-western troops (loyal to Edward IV) had done to the rebel Nevilles in the 1469 campaign–though the Nevilles had won the encounter, at Edgecote Field.
Richard III in power: a dangerously isolated regime, or par for the late fifteenth century?
When it is not seen in isolation, was Richard’s position as of summer 1483 really that desperate? Are we too dependent on hindsight to assume that his overthrow in 1485 was inevitable? Buckingham, Richard’s senior ally, like Warwick under Edward IV before 1469 or both Clarence and Richard under Edward after 1471, had been loaded with titles and office by a dependant sovereign. He was virtually unchallenged in Wales, controlling the vital Marcher lordships with their manpower; but Edward had given a similar role to Warwick (which had included the wardship of the underage Buckingham’s lands). When Edward tried to build up William Herbert as a rival to the Earl, Warwick had him killed at the first opportunity. Edward also gave a dangerous local concentration of power in the north to Richard after 1471, amounting to a legally autonomous ‘palatinate’ on the Cumbrian frontier–though Richard was less likely to betray his brother Edward than Buckingham was to betray his cousin Richard. Buckingham’s power indicated a danger to the Crown should he revolt.
Admittedly, the sovereign needed reliable allies with large resources to come to his assistance in an emergency, and relying on a major local magnate to ‘bring in’ his tenants from a large area was normal Late Medieval practice. In Northumberland (and to a lesser extent Durham and Yorkshire), Henry IV and later Henry VI had relied on the locally dominant Percies. A ‘build-up’ of lordships in a district in one family was a genealogical hazard, given the nature of early mortality of male heirs, which could unexpectedly bring extra lands to their sisters’ or daughters’ husbands. This was how Warwick had acquired his eponymous earldom, by the extinction of the Beauchamps in 1446; and his father the Earl of Salisbury had also inherited his earldom by female descent. A powerful family with large numbers of acquisitive sons –like the fifteenth century Nevilles–could amass heiresses to marry the boys and add to the family estates and titles. In addition, political ‘in-fighting’ at court meant a concentration of grants of lands and titles on a few ‘reliable’ candidates–a fault to which Henry VI was particularly prone (see above). The nature of the inter-nobility feuding of 1455–61 meant that Edward IV had a reduced ‘pool’ of trustable allies led by his close blood relatives and needed to bring in a few prestigious ex-supporters of Henry VI like the Beauforts if possible. Edward, an inexperienced youth, had had little option but to trust the available Henry Beaufort, Duke of Somerset, to govern Northumberland in the early 1460s (the local Percies were pro-Lancastrian) and to give similar authority in the Midlands and Yorkshire to his cousin Warwick, the senior figure in his mother’s Neville family and a loyal ally in 1459–61, but it was unfortunate that both then revolted. His attempts to build up William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke, and his own Woodville father-in-law as rival figures of importance only led to Warwick having the two of them executed during his first revolt. He did not learn his lesson about giving too much power to one man with Warwick, and gave Clarence and Richard similarly huge estates and powers after 1471.
Buckingham, one of the excluded senior nobles of part-royal blood in the 1470s, had to make do with a Woodville wife but no local posts, and may well have felt aggrieved and so taken his chance to show his support for Richard in spring 1483 in return for an understanding that he could control his local area (the Welsh Marches). His accumulation of offices in the Marches was a gamble that did not pay off for Richard, for whatever reason–a devious long-term plan to seize the Crown in which Richard was his pawn according to his modern detractors. Once Buckingham proved disloyal Richard fell back on a small group of supporters, among whom only Lord Lovell was a peer–hence the famous satirical rhyme by the Tudor agent William Collingbourne that:
The Rat (Ratcliffe), the Cat (Catesby), and Lovell our dog Rule all England under the Hog (the Ricardian boar emblem).54
Technically Lovell, resident at Minster Lovell in Oxfordshire, was a peer; but he had few resources compared to the usual aristocratic families who the Crown relied on. Ratcliffe was from the Yorkshire gentry, and Catesby from the East Midlands. A similar group of much-criticized ‘low-born’ ministers had served Richard II in his final years, and Richard III elevated a new leading aristocratic supporter by granting the Dukedom of Norfolk with its estates to his ally Sir John Howard. His coronation was relatively well-attended, even if many peers from remote provinces must have set off for London expecting to be attending that of Edward V. But the only other two senior nobles to be entrusted with great office after autumn 1483 were Lord Stanley, who had already been arrested once as a Hastings partisan in June and was married to Margaret Beaufort but was the senior magnate in Lancashire, and Henry Percy, Earl of Northumberland, senior magnate in the north-east. At least one, if not both, of them betrayed him at Bosworth. But the fact is that Stanley had a long record of unreliability, not only to Richard; he had abandoned his brother-in-law Warwick’s cause in 1471. Northumberland, who failed to bring his troops at the Bosworth battlefield into action, had already stood aside from Warwick’s cause to let Edward IV march through Yorkshire unhindered in 1471.
The poor attendance of loyal peers at the royal camp at Bosworth in 1485 indicates a lack of willingness by potential supporters, which the controversial nature of the usurpation must have exacerbated. But this was not unusual or especially dangerous for Richard among mid-fifteenth century sovereigns. The way in which power and the Crown had changed hands frequently since 1455 was a warning to cautious magnates not to risk their lives and property by eagerness to support one particular candidate in battle, and Henry VI (really Warwick and Queen Margaret as his proxies) and Edward IV in 1471 had had a similar lack
of support. On a lower social level, the Paston letters are full of indications of the anxieties of members of the ‘middling’ gentry over which royal candidate or senior noble to support in the case of a revolt and the risks of making a wrong choice and having your estates confiscated.55 In 1487, there was not exactly a major ‘turn-out’ of peers to support Henry VII against the invasion of the Earl of Lincoln and his protégé ‘Lambert Simnel’, and Henry may have preferred to rely on a few trusted peers than on many unreliable ones. The level of violent inter-gentry feuding from c. 1450 to the early 1470s independent of high politics indicates a contempt for the supremacy of the law and the ‘King’s peace’ inconceivable under a strong ruler who could concentrate on enforcing the law.
The use of private retinues as bodyguards and ‘enforcers’ in violent incidents is apparent from the time of the rash of incidents that preceded Henry VI’s first period of incapacity in 1453, and has been linked to the return of large bodies of disgruntled demobilized soldiers from France after 1450. The actions of the Bonville family in the 1450s are among the most notorious of the era, and the like had not been seen since the turbulent early years of Edward II (another time of weak central power and a discredited monarchy). The Pastons were involved in a notorious feud with the more powerful Mowbray Dukes of Norfolk over the inheritance of Caister Castle, in which the armed might of the stronger party prevailed, well into the first reign of Edward IV when a vigorous young king should have been putting down such behaviour. In these circumstances, the fact that many local magnates able to raise troops did not bother to come to the King’s camp in 1485 was a symptom of the general lack of central control by the monarchy rather than a personal reaction against Richard’s alleged villainy, however much the rumours about his nephews were widely believed from early 1484. Neither Warwick/Henry VI nor Edward IV had attracted spontaneous mobilizations of eager adherents in 1470–1, as shown by the small size of the armies involved in their final confrontation.
1485 and 1487: was Henry VII as short of support as Richard?
At the time, no contemporary observer would have had a sense of Bosworth as a ‘new beginning’ and an end to the dynastic strife of the mid-fifteenth century, despite subsequent Tudor propaganda. It would have seemed another remarkable, but reversible, turn of events in an unstable country in the same pattern as Henry VI’s ‘re-adeption’ of autumn 1470. The difference was that the new government was more politically secure as its ousted predecessor, Richard III, was dead unlike Edward IV had been in 1470; however, Henry Tudor lacked the political experience and local ‘power-base’ of Warwick and his brothers. He had been in exile for fourteen years, never held rank or acquired close political allies in England, and had as uneasy a relationship with ‘defecting’ Yorkists as Henry VI’s regime had had with the defector Clarence in 1470. His predecessor’s pardoned heir, the Earl of Lincoln, was to flee to the Continent in 1486 to join the next Yorkist rebellion as Clarence had deserted Edward IV in 1469 and Warwick in 1471. His new mother-in-law, Elizabeth Woodville, was shortly to be disgraced–possibly for plotting, possibly out of royal desire to seize her estates. He lacked Warwick’s military reputation and skill, and was reliant on the veteran Lancastrian commander John de Vere, Earl of Oxford, who had been Warwick’s lieutenant at the battle of Barnet in 1471, his stepfather Thomas Stanley, and the latter’s brother Sir William Stanley. Indeed, within two years England was to be invaded again and Henry had to confront a Yorkist army in the Midlands, acting on behalf of an impostor impersonating the ‘legitimate’ heir (Clarence’s son Edward).
Nor did Henry VII have a large-scale ‘turn-out’ to assist him in defending the new dynasty against the Simnel/Lincoln invasion in 1487. The latter army, based on a body of foreign mercenaries (German) like Henry’s (French) in 1485, was able to march right across England from its isolated landing in the west (Simnel landed at Barrow-in-Furness, Henry at Milford Haven) to take on the King waiting for them in the East Midlands. If Richard’s failure to tackle Henry–or send loyal troops to hold him up en route–before the pretender reached the East Midlands is an indication of weak support among the magnates, the same can be said of Henry in 1487. No pragmatic noblemen would have realized in 1487 that the Tudor regime would last for another 116 years; the precedents available to them would have suggested the possibility of another sudden reversal of fortune as in 1459–61 or 1470–1. As Richard depended on one senior supporter with military experience–Norfolk–as his main general in 1485, so in 1487 Henry depended on the Earl of Oxford (who had fought for Warwick at Barnet in 1471). Lincoln, Richard’s nephew and senior commander of the rebels at Newark in 1487, was an untried young man in his mid-twenties like Henry had been in 1485 but had the advantage of having been named as Richard’s heir when the King’s son died in 1484. It was Simnel and Lincoln’s defeat at Newark, not Bosworth, that established a period of comparative peace and security for the English Crown–and Henry still had to face the lesser threat of Warbeck in 1497. He was lucky in that Warbeck did not land in Cornwall until the most serious local threat of that year, the popular revolt against excessive taxes for the faraway Scots war, had already been put down. That large body of rebels, led by a blacksmith from St Keverne and a minor lawyer in the populist tradition of Cade’s Kentish revolt of 1450, reached Blackheath in their march on London.56 As we have seen, some ex-Yorkists contemplated joining the rebels. Had Warbeck arrived from Scotland in time to promise redress and persuade them to accept him as their leader he would have had far more supporters than he could muster in reality. Nor should it be forgotten that the absence of revolt after 1497 was not necessarily a sign of ‘inevitable’ triumph by a wise and widely-accepted king. Henry may have been paranoid, but his intense fear of foreign-backed plots continued after ‘Warbeck’s execution and was centred on the escaped Edmund de la Pole, Lincoln’s brother. The latter fled to the Continent in 1499, and Henry did all that he could to deny him the military aid that had been given to ‘Simnel’ and ‘Warbeck. Finally, in 1506 Duke Philip of the Netherlands, the son of ‘Warbeck’s ex-host Emperor Maximilian, was driven ashore in Weymouth Bay by a storm and Henry ‘invited’ him to London for talks. Before Philip and his wife, Juana, left England they had agreed to have Edmund handed over, and the pretender languished in the Tower until the new King Henry VIII executed him a few years later. Fear of another Yorkist plot was not limited to the King either, as it was reliably reported that when his elder son, Arthur, died in 1502 senior nobles were discussing if the throne was secure for his second son Henry. The latter was only eleven, younger than Edward V had been in 1483, and his succession was not seen as secure. The witness was treasurer Sir Hugh Conway–speaking in the relative safety of Calais, but terrified of Henry VII’s reaction if he was accused of discussing the succession seditiously.57 One plausible adult alternative was said to be Duke Edward of Buckingham, the son of the 1483 rebel and direct descendant of Edward III’s youngest son Thomas–and his boasts of his ‘rights’ apparently continued into Henry VIII’s reign.58 It is possible that some senior ministers rumoured to be in touch with Edmund de la Pole after his flight (e.g. Sir Richard Guildford, recently ‘marginalized’) were doing this as an ‘insurance policy’ just in case the regime crumbled–as senior figures at William III’s court were to keep in touch with James II in the 1690s. Hindsight should not make us believe that the Tudor throne was seen as secure after 1499, especially once Henry VII’s health declined after 1503. Certain of his extortionate ministers, e.g. Empson and Dudley, were as resented by nobles as Richard III had been.
Bosworth: could Richard have won?
Richard, an experienced commander at Bosworth though dependent on his magnate allies, had the advantages of reputation, high ground, and possibly of numbers on 22 August 1485. (The actual battle-site is still not beyond doubt; the latest 2009 discoveries suggest a different site from the usual one.59) His wait in central England for his enemy to advance to meet him has been interpreted as a sign of weakness, and certai
nly none of his supposed allies moved to intercept Henry Tudor’s small army when it emerged from the isolated Welsh hills into the Cheshire plain. But Richard’s defensive strategy was only a repeat of that of Warwick’s government when facing Edward IV’s invasion (from Yorkshire) in 1471, and of Edward IV’s when facing Warwick (from Devon) in September 1470. It gave him time to muster a larger army rather than hurry forward to take on the invader. Henry, like Richard II when facing Henry of Bolingbroke in 1399, was initially out of reach in western Wales, and could not be tackled safely until he reached the English lowlands. If Richard had moved forward to block Henry’s exit from Wales at Shrewsbury, could he be sure that the Earl of Northumberland (son and grandson of Lancastrians killed by Richard’s kin in 1455 and 1460) would not attack his rear?
Henry was a cautious man who had refused to land in Devon when he arrived to join the 1483 revolt, rightly fearing that the assurances of support he had had from on shore were insincere and he would be arrested. His August 1485 landing in his home country of Wales (in Jasper’s Earldom of Pembroke) avoided that risk but meant that he had a long march into England. Marching to attack him as soon as he landed was not an option for Richard, given the distance to Milford Haven and the hostility of the landscape (and potentially the locals). Luckily for Henry the local magnate, Rhys ap Thomas, had politely refused to send his young son to Richard’s court and could delay his reaction to the invasion, allow Henry to march into mid-Wales without resistance (or many recruits), and belatedly join him a week or so later. (The link between the two men was supposed to have been Rhys’ ex-tutor Dr Lewis, now an agent of Henry’s mother Margaret Beaufort, Lord Stanley.60) The failure to block Henry’s advance into Shropshire and the Midlands lay with the principal magnate of Lancashire, who had enough armed tenants to do it–luckily for Henry, his stepfather Thomas Stanley. Stanley avoided joining either side ahead of Bosworth, although Richard was driven to make threats to execute his hostage son if he did not obey his sovereign. His brother Sir William apparently gave Henry enough private assurances of due–not immediate–support to persuade Henry to move on to attack Richard, which kept momentum with him and arguably gave him his only real hope of winning a battle.61
The War of the Roses Page 20