Once news of Henry’s progress through Wales and his intended destination through Shrewsbury had reached Thomas Stanley at his castle at Lathom, he decided to mobilise his own forces. Leaving Lathom Castle with his retinue, Thomas Stanley intended to keep a separate course from his brother William: if his brother had been condemned as a traitor by Richard at Coventry, Stanley’s caution was understandable. He could hardly have been prepared to jeopardise his son’s life by openly joining forces with his brother.
According to the ‘Ballad of Lady Bessie’, Thomas Stanley set out from Lathom on Monday 15 August, travelling through Warrington where he was joined by other retainers, both knights and squires who had assembled with ‘their banners in the sun glittering’, before heading for Newcastle under Lyme. There exists an undated letter from Stanley, requesting James Scarisbrick to meet him with twenty-four horsemen at Warrington to ride with him to London.
Meanwhile Sir William Stanley rode from Holt, just thirty miles to the north of Shrewsbury, to Nantwich, where he met ‘all the North Wales for the most part, the flower of Cheshire, with him he did bring’. Richard had issued a commission to all the knights and gentlemen of Chester on 13 January 1485 signalling that he had granted Lord Stanley, Lord Strange and Sir William Stanley ‘to have the rule and leading of all persons appointed to do the king service when they be warned against the king’s rebels … and if any rebels arrive in those parts that then all the power that they can make be ready to assist the said lords and knight’. Sir William had been given the power to muster their entire county, ordering that its men obey his every command; now Stanley took the opportunity to raise the forces against Richard. Henry himself would later acknowledge the ‘good and faithful service’ that the sheriffs at Chester, John Norys and Hugh Hurleton, together with ‘other of the said city’, had committed to his cause. According to the ballad, on Tuesday morning 16 August, Sir William continued his journey from Nantwich to Stone.
Henry’s hopes had been ‘raised’ by the news that the Stanleys intended to come to his aid. Just as welcome was the additional funds he had been given, with Christopher Urswick returning to his camp ‘laden with money which he had received from the individuals to whom he had been sent’. Departing Shrewsbury, Henry and his army crossed over the Severn at the town’s Welsh bridge, making the journey to Newport, where he pitched camp on the nearest hill for the night.
Already his army had benefited from some significant recruits over the past few days. In addition to the 1,500 men brought by Sir Rhys ap Thomas, a large number of gentry from nearby surrounding counties had begun to join Henry’s standard. Sir Richard Corbet, whose stepfather was Sir William Stanley, had led a force of 800 men from Shropshire. Thomas Croft, a former Yorkist who had been brought up with Edward IV, arrived from Herefordshire; from Worcestershire, John Hanley, a former servant of the Duke of Clarence, while in Gloucestershire, Robert Pointz had set out to join the army. There was further good news when that same evening after they had passed through Shrewsbury, as Henry’s camp settled down for the night outside Newport, Gilbert Talbot came to him in the evening ‘with 500 and more armed men’.
An uncle of the young Earl of Shrewsbury, Talbot also commanded significant influence among the Shropshire gentry. Talbot’s defection had not come as a surprise; he had been in contact with Henry in exile since 1484, but it is likely that he brought with him news of the Stanleys’ initial movements. It is perhaps for this reason that the following morning, Friday 19 August, Henry advanced his army northwards to Stafford, where it had been arranged for him to meet Sir William Stanley, who had ridden from Stone for the meeting. Polydore Vergil is tantalisingly brief about the nature of the discussions between Sir William and Henry, observing only that ‘while he stayed in that district, William Stanley came to him with a few companions, had a brief discussion with him, and returned to his soldiers whom he had collected.’
What exact words were spoken between Henry and Sir William, or what agreement may have been reached, is unknown. Without Thomas, Lord Stanley’s tacit approval, William must have remained circumspect as to the precise support the Stanley family could promise Henry, although William himself, free from any restraint, could easily have committed himself to his cause. According to the ballads originating from the Stanley household, when Sir William arrived in Henry’s presence he knelt in front of him, and taking Henry by the hand, said: ‘I am full glad of thee. Through the help of my Lord thy brother & thee, I trust in England to continue King’. The poem places the following words in the mouth of Sir William:
Welcome my sovereign King Henry!
challenge thy Heritage & thy Land
that thine own is, & thine shall
be be eager to fight, & loath to flee!
let manhood be bred thy breast within!
& remember another day who doth for thee
all of England when thou art King.
After the meeting, Stanley returned to Stone ‘by light of the day’. Stanley was not prepared to compromise his brother by joining forces with Henry quite yet; nevertheless it is significant that, after his meeting with Sir William Stanley at Stafford, Henry changed the direction of his march, deciding to move in a south-easterly direction to Lichfield and on towards Watling Street. Once he joined the Roman road, he would be able to make swift progress into the capital, where he might proclaim himself as king, leaving Richard stranded at Nottingham. Henry arrived at Lichfield that evening, deciding to remain outside the city overnight. His entry into Lichfield early the following morning of Saturday 20 August must have given him confidence that his plan to aim for London would be possible: the ‘Ballad of Bosworth Field’ paints a picture of joyous crowds, ‘both old and young’ crowding together to watch Henry’s army pass into the city over Woosley bridge, so that they might ‘had they a sight of our King’. Meanwhile, guns ‘cracken on high’ in what was ‘a goodly sight to see’. Polydore Vergil wrote in his history that Henry had been ‘received honourably’ by the city’s inhabitants, though in his original manuscript he was clearer as to what had taken place, describing how Henry, upon entering the town, had been ‘received by the clergy as King, with entreaties’. If some kind of unofficial ceremony had taken place, recognising Henry as king, it was a significant moment.
It is not difficult to envisage who may have been involved in planning the elaborate ceremony, treating Henry’s arrival at Lichfield as if it were some kind of coronation triumph. Three days previously, Thomas, Lord Stanley had arrived at the city with an entourage of about 5,000 armed men. Leaving Lichfield before Henry had the chance to make an entry into the city, Stanley journeyed instead to Atherstone, on the edge of the Roman road at Watling Street, where he intended to wait for Henry’s army to arrive. For several days, Thomas Stanley had appeared to withdraw each time Henry’s army had advanced, shadowing his movement. In doing so, Stanley would be able to defend his actions to the king, by blocking the road to London his forces were preventing the rebel advance. ‘This he did,’ Vergil observed, ‘to avoid suspicion, fearing if before they should come to hand strokes he should overtly show himself to stand and hold with earl Henry, least that King Richard, who as yet did not utterly mistrust his loyalty, might kill his son George.’ Stanley may have been certain of his own tactics, yet for Henry the prevarication was nailbiting. At any time, Stanley could turn against him, destroying Henry’s cause, if it meant saving his own son’s life.
When scouts sent out by the king returned, they informed Richard that Henry Tudor had entered Lichfield to great fanfare. The king knew that he could not afford to delay a confrontation any longer. Henry’s army was advancing fast towards Watling Street. If he did not act now to stop Henry’s march, he risked being overtaken, leaving Tudor with an open road into the capital.
Richard would need to move his troops out of Nottingham, towards Leicester, as soon as he possibly could. According to Vergil, the city thronged with ‘a huge number of men in arms’ that were assembled there, ‘his soldier
s being brought forth into good array’. Yet Richard still believed that his army remained unprepared. Henry’s haste, the Crowland chronicler recorded, ‘moving by day and night towards a direct confrontation’, had forced the king to move his troops in spite of the army being ‘not yet fully assembled’.
With letters having been sent out just eight days before on 11 August, it had taken time for levies of armies to be prepared. Soldiers from the north were slow in making up the distance, though their own delays and uncertainty in sending men to Richard had not helped. After the citizens of York had sent John Nicholson and John Sponer to Richard to clarify how many troops were needed, news of the king’s instructions did not reach York until 19 August, after Nicholson had made a round trip of over 140 miles. When the city authorities assembled in the council chamber on Friday morning, they listened to Nicholson’s report listing Richard’s demand for 400 men. ‘It was determined upon the report … which was commen home from the king’s grace,’ the council register recorded, ‘that iiiixx [80] men of the city defensibly arrayed, John Hastings gentleman to the mace being captain, should in all haste possible depart towards the king’s grace for the subduing of his enemies.’ The council resolved to meet again at two o’clock to muster their troops: each soldier was to receive 10 shillings for ten days, with 12 pence a day thereafter. Even if the troops departed straight away at 2 p.m., it would not have been possible for men to arrive until 22 August if they rode on horseback, or more likely 23 August if they marched on foot. Complicit delays such as these meant that even as many began to set off towards Nottingham, they would find that the king had already departed and would miss the battle. Robert Morton of Bawtry, county York, a kinsman of John, Bishop of Ely and a son-in-law of a former retainer of Lord Hastings who had been taken into Richard’s service, made his will on 20 August, ‘going to maintain our most excellent King Richard III against the rebellion raised against him in this land’. In fact Morton may have made his preparations, but left too late to arrive at the battle in time.
In particular, two noblemen on whom Richard had hoped to depend were missing. The Great Chronicle of London infers that both Thomas Stanley and the Earl of Northumberland, despite each having ‘great companies’, ‘made slow speed’ towards Richard, and had yet to arrive, forcing the king to leave Nottingham without them.
By every account, Richard’s departure from Nottingham was a spectacular occasion. In spite of the fact, one chronicler wrote, that ‘its numbers were not yet fully made up’, the size of the army that Richard had amassed was staggering. ‘Here was found ready to fight for the king a greater number of soldiers than had ever been seen before in England’. It seems that most of Richard’s army would have been on horseback. According to Mancini, troops brought horsemen with them: ‘Not that they are accustomed to fight from horseback, but because they use horses to carry them to the scene of the engagement, so as to arrive faster and not tired by the fatigue of the journey: therefore they will ride any sort of horse, even pack horses. On reaching the field of battle the horses are abandoned, they all fight under the same conditions so that no one should retain any hope of fleeing.’ In his letter of 11 August, Richard had also demanded from Henry Vernon that he attend ‘ye in your person with such number as ye have promised unto us sufficiently horsed and harnessed be with us in all haste to you possible’.
Riding along the road from Nottingham to Leicester, Richard ordered his entire army into a defensive formation, commanding his troops ‘to march forward in square battle that way by the which they understood their enemies would come’. In the middle of the square formation, all ‘impediments’ were ‘gathered into the midst of the army’. This included ‘a great mass of treasure’, which one observer described as ‘all the king’s treasure’, along with Richard himself, mounted on ‘a great white courser’ accompanied ‘with his guard’ by his side. On either side of the army ‘did follow the wings of horsemen ranging on both sides’, keeping the army in its tight formation. The army arrived at Leicester shortly before sunset, where Richard was joined by the army gathered by the Duke of Norfolk, who was already quartered in the city. Tradition suggests that Richard spent the night at Leicester at an inn named the White Boar on Northgate Street, a timbered building that upstairs had ‘a large gloomy chamber’ set with beams carved with images of ‘vine tendrils executed in vermillion’, setting up his own bed that had been brought from Nottingham Castle with his baggage train. Robert Brackenbury had still to arrive from the Tower with its ordnance, while the Earl of Northumberland was yet to reach the city on his journey from the north, though Richard expected both to reach Leicester by the morning. That evening he sent out further scouts to discover ‘where the enemy were likely to rest the following night’, as Richard prepared for sleep and the final march to the battlefield where he hoped to finally destroy his rival.
Departing from Lichfield, Henry had moved seven miles south-east towards Tamworth. Although Henry gave the impression of ‘noble courage’ as his forces increased in number ‘wherever he went’, privately he remained anxious, his thoughts being subsumed by ‘a great fear’. Still unsure of Thomas Stanley’s commitment, he had been informed by his spies of the alarming size of the army that Richard had gathered: ‘nothing was stronger … nothing more ready’. When he discovered that Richard ‘with a host innumerable, was at hand’, he began to question his own ability to defeat the king, having second thoughts about the entire enterprise. Needing time to think and assess his position, Henry allowed his troops to continue their march while he remained behind with twenty armed men, ‘so as to deliberate what to do’ as he followed ‘gloomily’ at a distance. As night fell, Henry somehow became detached from his army, and ‘lost sight of its tracks’. According to Vergil,
After he had wandered about a long while and could not find it, he fearfully came to a certain hamlet more than three miles from his camp. So not to fall into a trap, he did not dare ask the way of anybody, and he spent his night there, not so afraid of his present danger as of that yet to come. For he feared this was an omen of some future disaster. His army was no less distraught over the sudden absence of its commander, and then on the next day, as the sky grew light, Henry returned to the army, offering the excuse that this had happened on purpose rather than by his mistake, for he had been outside the camp to receive some welcome news from certain secret friends.
The episode, related only by Vergil, remains shrouded in mystery. Henry’s own thoughts during these dark moments of uncertainty can only be guessed at, though a stroke of fortune would allow him to hide the real reasons behind what seemed a temporary desertion of his forces. Who were these ‘secret friends’?
The answer may lie in an episode told by the Great Chronicle of London. As Sir Robert Brackenbury travelled up from London to meet Richard at Leicester, around Stony Stratford he had been deserted by Walter Hungerford, Thomas Bourgchier ‘and many other’ who then intended to make their way towards Henry. A former Lancastrian, Hungerford had become a loyal servant of Edward IV, and was later to join the household of Edward V. Both men had been involved in Buckingham’s rebellion, Hungerford in the Wiltshire rebellion, and Bourgchier in Kent. Richard had chosen to pardon Hungerford, restoring to him his lands. Yet Richard remained wary of his loyalty, ordering that Brackenbury bring both men with him to the battlefield together with other gentlemen ‘whom he had in suspicion’. Understanding that Richard ‘had them in jealousy, because they would not be brought to their enemy against their wills’, Vergil relates how they forsook Brackenbury, travelling towards Henry’s camp ‘in the night season’. The Great Chronicle infers that Brackenbury, who ‘held good countenance’ with them and ‘had for many of them done right kindly’, did little to prevent their departure, with Hungerford and his men ‘giving to him thanks for his kindness before showed, and exhorted him to go with them, for they feared not to show unto him that they would go unto that other party, and so departed, leaving him almost alone’.
Late in
the evening of 20 August, with their leader having mysteriously disappeared, Henry’s troops decided to camp on the river plain in the shadow of Tamworth Castle, where they were joined by Hungerford and Bourgchier who ‘yielded themselves to his obeisance’. They were not the only ones who were attempting to make contact with Henry that evening. According to the Great Chronicle of London, ‘many of the knights and esquires of this land, they gathered much people in the king’s name and straight sped them unto that other party, by mean whereof his power hugely increased’, while Vergil wrote how ‘there flocked to him also many other noble men of war, who from day to day hated King Richard worse than all men living’.
It seems that, with several bands of armed men making their way across Watling Street to join Henry, Thomas Stanley’s own preparations were thrown into confusion. According to the ‘Ballad of Bosworth Field’, Stanley’s camp, having settled at Atherstone ‘in a dale cold’, discovered news that an armed band of men was fast approaching. Stanley himself believed that it was Richard’s army: he would be forced to declare his hand, and confront the king’s troops before Henry arrived from Lichfield. Spending the night at Atherstone, in the early hours of Sunday 21 August, after hearing Mass they moved ‘toward the field’, arranging their troops in array with Thomas Stanley taking the vanguard, Sir William Stanley the rearguard, with Thomas Stanley’s fifth son Edward taking a wing, where they remained waiting for Richard’s attack. It seems that there may have been some kind of skirmish during the night, according to the ‘Ballad of Bosworth Field’:
Bosworth: The Birth of the Tudors Page 33