One report stated that French troops remained aboard while Henry landed at Dale, reluctant to disembark. When finally they were persuaded, they were ‘marvellously well and kindly received’ and given fresh provisions of food and drink to cheer them up. As soon as all the soldiers had disembarked, the French commander of the fleet Guillaume de Casenove was quick to depart for adventures new. On 20 August 1485 he was already to be found near Cape St Vincent in southern Portugal where he was involved in an attack on four Venetian galleys sailing to Flanders, before returning to England where he divided up his booty, ‘a great quantity of merchandise belonging to Spanish subjects’, causing the Spanish monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella to write to England in protest. With Casenove’s ships disappearing around the edge of the Milford Sound and out into the Atlantic, Henry was now on his own. There could be no turning back.
Once both men and munitions had been unloaded from the boats, the first task was to reach the village of Dale and to secure its castle. At half-tide, reaching twenty feet above the water level at low tide, the landing spot would have been cut off from the path out of the bay. The only route was to climb up through the steep incline rising 200 feet to Brunt Farm, a third of a mile away. The farm is said to have been named after a comment supposedly made by Henry, struggling up the hill, that ‘This is Brunt’ – ‘brunt’ meaning difficult or hard. The village proved somewhat less difficult to subdue, though Vergil hints that it had to be ‘occupied’, suggesting some brief resistance.
As the skies darkened and night fell, Henry ordered that his army set up camp at Dale, possibly on the stretch of land near the castle. Possibly with his French troops in mind, whom Commynes had after all described as being ‘the most unruly men that could be found’, Henry addressed his troops, according to Bernard André, telling them ‘not to commit any wrong on the common folk either to gain sustenance or to turn a profit, nor to take any property from any inhabitant without paying him recompense. And if you require money, behold, men are here to pay you a proper salary. Do not do anything to other men, either by word or by deed, that you would not wish to have done to yourselves. If you conduct yourself thus, God will be propitious to us, since a thieving lawbreaker does not long rejoice in other men’s property.’ If Henry was to ensure a swift and safe journey through Wales, he would only be able to enlist support if his troops maintained discipline and did not take it upon themselves to pillage the surrounding neighbourhoods. Henry would later draw up a series of ordinances of war, which must have reflected his own rules set out during the campaign. These outlined the powers of the king’s harbinger, whose responsibility was to purvey lodgings for the king’s camp. ‘Also that no manner of person or persons, whatsoever they be, take upon them to lodge themself nor take no manner of lodging nor harborage but such as shall be assigned unto him or them by the King’s harbinger, nor dislodge no man, nor change no lodging after that to be assigned, without advice and assent of the said harbinger, upon pain of imprisonment and to be punished at the said will of our said sovereign lord’. Ordinances of war were essential if discipline were to be kept. Henry would later issue strict instructions ‘ordained by his proclamations, for the good rule of his host’. No soldier was to ‘take nor presume to take any manner of victual, horse meat, or man’s meat, without paying therefore the reasonable price thereof assigned by the clerk of the market or other the king’s officer therefore ordained, upon pain of death’. Henry would later comment to the Earl of Oxford that ‘blessed be God’, the English army ‘hath among themselves kept such love and accord that no manner of fray or debate hath been between them since the time of their departing’.
Oxford and Pembroke were also ordered to muster the French troops in order to ‘take a view of their defects’ and to understand what equipment and weapons they lacked. It was not an encouraging sight. ‘They were very raw and ignorant in shooting, handling of their weapons, and discharging the ordinary duty of soldiers; men, as it seemed, raised out of the refuse of the people’. According to the account of his life, Sir Rhys Ap Thomas, who retained a life-long distain for the French, revealing his own personal desire ‘soundly to cudgel those French dogs’, later found himself having to equip them with as much equipment as he could spare, though in his heart he wished he could send them back to France, ‘there being not one man of quality among them’. It was perhaps the mutual hostility between the French and the Welsh soldiers that forced Henry to decide to separate his troops, agreeing that they be ‘kept asunder, to prevent such jarres and quarrels, as commonly arise between strangers’.
As the first light of dawn broke on the morning of Monday 8 August, Henry began his march from Dale to the town of Haverfordwest. Speed was essential if Henry was to make progress and gather momentum before Richard discovered news of his landing. Haverfordwest was around twelve miles away, along a route which passed near Merlas and crossed a tributary of the Western Cleddau river at Radford Bridge, yet the army marched so fast and without delay that the town had hardly been notified of Henry’s landing, with it being ‘announced that he was present at the same time as it was announced that he was on his way’. There Henry and his army were received ‘with the utmost goodwill of all’.
This encouragement was soon shattered by the disappointing news brought by John Morgan that, contrary to what Henry had been informed in Normandy, ‘nothing had come of the help which he had previously indicated’ and that Rhys ap Thomas and John Savage were not prepared to defect and join his forces, with Morgan reporting that they were apparently still ‘in arms for King Richard’. Worse still, the funds that had been promised by Reginald Bray to pay for his troops’ wages had not materialised.
If Henry was distraught at the news, he was quickly cheered by the arrival of the Welshman Arnold Butler, whom Henry had last seen during his exile in Brittany; Butler had accompanied Henry when he had fled to Brittany in 1471, but had been removed from Henry’s service by Duke Francis II and forced to return home. According to Vergil, Butler ‘came to him and told him that the entire nobility of the County of Pembroke was prepared to serve him, provided that he would grant pardon for and wipe out the memory of anything they had done against him and against Earl Jasper during the time when both had gone to Brittany’. Henry, ‘in accordance with his nature and for the benefit of his enterprise, with Jasper easily forgave them. At which they came voluntarily to him and bound themselves by the military oath.’ Vergil, in his printed work, makes clear that Jasper’s own position as the region’s traditional lord must have been influential in their decision to support Henry, stating that ‘they were prepared to help their Earl Jasper’.
The defection of Arnold Butler was significant, not just for bringing the support of Pembroke with him, which ‘cheered the troubled minds of all’. Butler himself was a close friend and long-time acquaintance of Sir Rhys ap Thomas who, recognising Butler’s renowned skills as a soldier, had employed him to train young gentlemen, ‘according to the true military discipline of those times, in which they employed much labour, accustoming them daily (as if they had been in field) to the hardest duties of a soldier’. Could Butler’s defection be taken as a sign that Rhys remained sympathetic to Henry’s cause? Henry was uncertain of Rhys ap Thomas’s motives; having promised his support, remaining in the Tywi Valley, Rhys had decided to remain cautious. Richard’s servants Richard Williams and Sir James Tyrell continued to hold a strong grip on the region; in any case Rhys may have wished to pursue a deliberate policy of tracing Henry’s progress, shadowing him as he moved northwards in order to decide at a later stage whether to support or crush him.
It was in this atmosphere of extreme uncertainty and nervousness that Henry departed from Haverfordwest that same afternoon, setting out for Cardigan, twenty-six miles away. Five miles into the journey, Henry decided to pitch camp ‘at the fifth milestone’ towards Cardigan so that his soldiers might rest. Suddenly a rumour broke out and spread throughout the camp that Sir Walter Herbert, the Earl of Huntingdon’s younger b
rother, and Rhys ap Thomas had encamped near Carmarthen and ‘were not far away with a huge band of armed men’. Uproar immediately ensued, and in the panic ‘each man began to get ready his arms and test and prepare his weapons’ as ‘a certain degree of fear seized them all’. The fear that was evidently latent among Henry’s followers is understandable: not only had Herbert and Rhys ap Thomas been tasked with crushing any rebellion, but the entire region of South Wales remained both in Richard’s control and his pay. During Buckingham’s rebellion, if the act of attainder against the duke’s ninety-seven supporters is considered comprehensive, not a single Welshman rose in support, while twenty-two men residing in South Wales were rewarded with annuities. Among them was Sir Thomas Vaughan of Tretower, whose father had been executed by Jasper Tudor at Chepstow in 1471. Vaughan had ensured that a watch was sent into the surrounding countryside, and was instrumental in the capture of the Duke’s castle at Brecon. To many marching through the hostile countryside, victory must have at that moment seemed against all odds.
Henry decided to send a party of scouts on horseback to discover the true situation. When they reported back that ‘all was quiet’, nerves were calmed. In fact, the rumours were likely to have been caused by the sight of the arrival of Gruffydd Rede, whose family had been prominent in Carmarthen for generations, who having left Walter Herbert and Rhys ap Thomas’s camp had journeyed to join Henry, bringing with him a band of soldiers, ‘although few were properly equipped’. Rede was accompanied by John Morgan of Tredegar in Gwent, described as a man ‘of no mean authority among the Welsh’, who had been a royal officer in Carmarthenshire and Cardiganshire during the 1470s. The defection of the two men ‘greatly heartened the spirits of all’, while their presence in Henry’s camp perhaps gave Rhys ap Thomas an effective line of communication to Henry, allowing him to negotiate terms for his possible desertion.
With three defections in the course of the day, momentum seemed to be gathering. It seems likely that, after a seventeen-mile journey and several delays both at Haverfordwest and in the temporary panic that Gruffydd Rede’s arrival had caused, there was little time in the day for any further march, and the army would have remained encamped at the fifth milestone.
They would need their rest; by the following morning of Tuesday 9 August Henry felt confident enough to begin the next and most difficult part of the march, leading his army up over the craggy Preseli Hills, the highest point of the journey where, several hundred metres above sea level, clouds can often descend over its highest point. It would be a lonely and punishing journey; the slow climb at times must have seemed endless as fields and pasture gave way to a desolate bracken-covered landscape. Crossing the ridge of the Preseli hills at Bwlch-y-Gwynt, ‘the Pass of the Wind’, Henry intended to reach Fagwr Llwyd, south of Cilgwyn, a seventeen-mile journey. The site lies a mile from the Cardigan road. Abandoned in the early twentieth century, the ruins of the farmstead remain marked by a clump of beech trees, yet the shape and size of the building is clearly discernible, overlooking the valley of the river Nevern, above the haven of Newport, which must have provided a good campsite for his army. Across the valley, Henry could view his next intended destination: Cardigan, where crossing the river Teifi, he would enter the Principality of Wales.
Resuming his march the next day on Wednesday 10 August, after a journey of nine miles, Henry and his army crossed the river Teifi at Cardigan, reaching the walled town where little resistance seems to have come from the castle there. Tradition records that Henry stopped at the Three Mariners Inn; despite the short journey, Henry decided that he would need to pause to gather further support from the Welsh gentry in the north. Now that he had entered the Principality of Wales, Henry felt able to formally set out his claim to the throne. Letters were written, to be sent out across the region. A copy of one of these letters survives, addressed to John ap Meredith ap Jevan ap Meredith, an influential squire who lived in the Eifionydd area of south Caernarfonshire:
By the King.
Right trusty and wellbeloved, we greet you well. And where it is so that through the help of Almighty God, the assistance of our loving friends and true subjects, and the great confidence that we have to the nobles and commons of this our Principality of Wales, we be entered into the same, purposing by the help above rehearsed in all haste possible to descend into our realm of England not only for the adeption [recovery] of the crown unto us of right appertaining, but also for the oppression of that odious tyrant Richard late Duke of Gloucester, usurper of our said right, and moreover to reduce as well our said realm of England into his ancient estate, honour and prosperity, as this our said Principality of Wales, and the people of the same to their erst [original] liberties, delivering them of such miserable servitudes as they have piteously long stand in. We desire and pray you and upon your allegiance straitly charge and command you that immediately upon the sight hereof, with all such power as ye may make defensibly arrayed for the war, ye address you towards us without any tarrying upon the way, unto such time as ye be with us wheresoever we shall be to our aid for the effect above rehearsed, wherein ye shall cause us in time to come to be your singular good lord and that ye fail not hereof as ye will avoid our grevious displeasure and answer unto at your peril. Given under our signet.
There is no personal comment in the letter, suggesting that it may have been a standard missive, but it remains a fascinating insight into Henry’s own mind during his campaign to claim the throne. What is most striking is its tone of authority. Beginning with the traditional formula of royal letters, ‘By the King. Right trusty and wellbeloved, we greet you well’ and sealed under Henry’s own ‘royal’ signet, the letter outlined Henry’s clear intention to seize the reins of monarchy, speaking of ‘our subjects’ and ‘our realm of England’. The letter had also been carefully crafted to appeal to its Welsh readers. Not only was Henry setting out his claim as King of England, refusing to even acknowledge Richard’s title, he was positioning himself as the liberator of the Welsh, playing upon Welsh nationalism by claiming that he had come to restore their liberties, promising to deliver them from ‘such miserable servitudes as they have piteously long [stood] in’. It was a convincing and powerful elucidation of Henry’s intentions, of which anyone reading the letter could have been in no doubt. Equally powerful was Henry’s royal assertion and threat that if men failed to come to his aid, they would face his ‘grievous displeasure and answer unto at your peril’. To those reading the letter, the message was obvious: no longer could they avoid taking sides. The time had come to make their decision.
As messengers hastened ahead of him with copies of his declaration, Henry’s forces left Cardigan, moving northwards, hugging the route along the coast. Stopping for water at Ffynnondewi at the fourteenth milestone north-east of Cardigan, Henry reached the country mansion of Llwyn Dafydd in the parish of Llandysillio-gogo. Henry’s resting place after a total journey of twenty-three miles may have been a house called Neuadd, belonging to Dafydd ab Ieuan. Standing over a narrow and secluded valley which runs down to Cardigan Bay at Cwmtydu, two miles south of Newquay, it is worth considering that the cove nestled there is the only viable location where ships might be safely landed on the Cardigan Bay, raising the question of whether Henry’s entire army had journeyed with him on land, or whether a small fleet may have traced the Welsh coastline, allowing more troops to disembark once Henry’s advance party had reached this next location. The resting place clearly had significance for Henry, who would later reward Dafydd ab Ieuan for his pains with a gift known as the Hirlas Horn, a drinking horn mounted on a silver stand, decorated with the Welsh dragon and a greyhound, the insignia of the Woodville family as well as being a Breton Celtic symbol, linked to the honour of Richmond, and with images of roses and the portcullis, the traditional insignia of the Beaufort family, engraved on a silver covering around the rim of the horn.
Earlier in the year, after it had seemed that Henry was too unprepared to launch an invasion of any significance, Rich
ard had decided to withdraw some of the ships that he had placed in defensive positions guarding the Welsh coastline, including those based in the Milford Sound. Still he remained cautious. ‘Lest he might be found altogether unready’, he had ordered members of the nobility and gentry ‘dwelling about the sea coast, and chiefly the Welsh men, to keep watch by course after their country manner, to the intent that his adversaries should not have ready recovery of the shore and come a land’. Polydore Vergil described how in time of war, on nearby hills lamps would be ‘fastened upon frames of timber’; ‘when any great or notable matter happeneth, by reason of the approach of enemies, they suddenly light the lamps, and with shouts through town and field give notice thereof; from thence others afterwards receive and utter to their neighbours notice after the same sort. Thus is the same thereof carried speedily to all villages, and both country and town arm themselves against the enemy.’ If Henry were to slip through his net, Richard was determined that he should know as soon as possible where his enemy had landed.
At Dale, the ideal position for such a beacon would have been at St Ann’s Head, at the top of the cliff face on the north side of the Milford Sound, which today remains the site of the coastguard and lighthouse. Located on the site in 1595 was an ‘old chapel decayed having a round tower builded like a windmill or pigeon house of stone’, twenty feet high and used by sailors as a navigation landmark. Though the beacon could be seen from the opposite side of the bay to the south, due to a rise in the land on Dale Peninsula, St Ann’s chapel would have been invisible inland on its own side. This helps to explain why, even if a beacon had been lit there, knowledge of Henry’s landing did not reach Haverfordwest in time before his arrival. The burning torch would however have been clearly visible four miles away across the mouth of the Haven, in the neighbourhood near Angle.
Bosworth: The Birth of the Tudors Page 29