Then in their host there did fall affray
A little time before the night;
You never saw men so soon in their array
With fell weapons fierce for to fight.
There may be some truth behind there being some kind of initial skirmish, if not several, taking place during the night of 20 August and the early morning of the 21st. If later inquisitions post mortem are taken at face value, Richard Boughton, the sheriff of Warwickshire and Leicestershire, is recorded as having died on 20 August, John Kebell of Rearsby in Leicestershire on the 21st; both were prominent Leicestershire figures who had been retainers of Lord Hastings, but had continued to serve Richard as JPs. A separate group of men, from around the Essex area, are also recorded as having died on 20 or 21 August, including John Cock of Chadwell St Mary in Essex, who died on the 20th, William Curson of Brightwell in Suffolk, who died on the 21st, Thomas Hampden of Great Hampden in Buckinghamshire but who also owned lands at Theydon Mount in Essex died on the same day, as did William Joyce, who may have been the same person as William Joys of Halesworth in Suffolk. None of these men held any office under Richard, but they did all live near to Castle Hedingham in Essex, the ancestral home of John, Earl of Oxford. Could these men, making their way to join Oxford in Henry’s camp, have been intercepted by loyal enforcers of Richard’s regime along the way? If the Essex men had travelled from the location of Castle Hedingham, they would have taken the Roman road from Cambridge to Leicester, before joining Watling Street at its junction at Mancetter. It may have been possible, that in doing so, they had been forced to confront Richard’s men or had become caught up in a battle with the Stanleys.
The following morning, hearing the sound of ‘trumpets and tabors tempered on high’ from a ‘forest side’, Stanley’s men prepared themselves for Richard’s attack. They were surprised to find that it was in fact Henry arriving from Tamworth, riding on a ‘bay courser’.
It was at the Cistercian abbey at Merevale near Atherstone where Henry finally met Thomas Stanley. Henry’s relief at making contact with the man whose intentions he had remained unsure of until just hours before was shared by many who were present. ‘It was a goodly sight to see the meeting of them’, one observer later remarked. According to Vergil, Henry and Stanley took each other ‘by the hand, and yielding mutual salutation’, both were ‘moved to great joy’, after which ‘they entered in counsel in what sort to arraigne battle with King Richard, if the matter should come to strokes, whom they heard to be not far off’. After planning the disposition of both armies for battle, the meeting ended with further good news for Henry, with more defections arriving at his camp, including John Savage, Brian Sandford and Simon Digby, together with ‘many others, revolting from King Richard’. They brought with them ‘a choice band of armed men’ which cheered Henry’s spirits further, ‘and greatly replenished him with good hope’.
Henry and his troops departed from Stanley, leaving the main Roman road of Watling Street, intending to settle his camp for the night ‘nearer the enemy’. The exact location of his camp was decided by men on Henry’s own side with local knowledge of the terrain. John de Hardwicke was lord of the nearby manor of Lindley. He had joined Henry that day with men and horses, and apparently served as a guide on the morning of the battle. The camp must have been situated within the location of the neighbouring villages of Witherley, Atterton and Fenny Drayton just outside Atherstone. It was at ‘Wryth’, which must be Witherley, that Henry knighted several of his key supporters including Sir Richard Guilford, whom Henry had appointed master of his ordnance on 8 August, Sir John Hastoy, Sir John Risley, Sir William Brandon, Sir John Trenzy, Sir William Tyler and Sir Thomas Milborn.
Evidence that the camp was established near the villages also comes from payments Henry later made to reimburse local residents in compensation for the grain and pasture that they had lost when his troops had settled for the night, camping on the nearby fields. Henry issued a warrant to reimburse the abbot of Merevale with 100 marks sterling, writing that ‘we understand that the abbot of the monastery of Merevale had sustained great hurts, charges and losses, by occasion of the great repair and resort that our people coming towards our late field made, as well unto the house of Merevale aforesaid as in going over his ground, to the destruction of his corns and pastures’. The abbot was later given a separate reward of 10 marks. John Fox, the parson at Witherley, was also given £12 2s ‘for divers damages of the towns and boroughs in his grain’. A sense of the damage to the crops that Henry’s army had caused in each township can be gathered from reimbursements Henry made ‘to certain townships, which sustained losses of their corns and grains by us and our company’: Atherston received a total of £24 20s 4d, Fenny Drayton £20, Witherley £13, Atterton £8 10s and Mancetter £5 19s.
From surviving records of expenses that Henry later paid, we can also guess at the state of his own personal military preparations including the equipment he intended to use. William Bret, a draper in London, was reimbursed for purchasing six complete cuirasses ‘called harneys’ and twelve pairs of brigandines, twenty-four sallettes for £37 which were sent to Henry in France, ‘by our commandment … and to our use’. Having largely been sheltered or imprisoned away for most of his adult life, the inexperienced Henry Tudor, who had probably never even needed to wear armour before, now found himself preparing for his first battle.
On the morning of Sunday 21 August, Richard’s scouts returned, reporting back the location of Henry Tudor’s position near Atherstone. By now, both the Earl of Northumberland had arrived from the north and Sir Robert Brackenbury from London, breaking to Richard the news of Hungerford’s defection from his force. The king’s disappointment was soon forgotten when, donning his surcoat of arms over his full plated armour and placing a ‘diadem’ on his head, he rode out to inspect his assembled army.
It was an impressive sight. The Crowland Chronicler described how there assembled at Leicester ‘great lords, knights and esquires and a countless number of commoners’; ‘you never heard tell of such a company’, the ‘Ballad of Bosworth Field’ reported, giving a list of the members of the nobility and gentry who had joined Richard’s army. In the higher ranks of the peerage, eight names are mentioned, including the Duke of Norfolk, the Earl of Surrey, the Earls of Kent, Shrewsbury, Lincoln, Northumberland, Westmorland and Viscount Lovell, who was ‘sad at assay’. Of the peerage, the poem names sixteen other lords, though the list is both factually incorrect and at times somewhat confused: the list included Lord Maltravers, the Lord Arundell, Lord Wells, Lord Grey of Codnor ‘in his armour bright’, the unknown ‘Lord Bowes’, surely a case of mistaken identity, Lord Audley ‘fierce to fight’, Lord Berkeley ‘stern on a steed’, Lord Ferrers of Chartley, Lord Ferrers of Groby, Lord ‘Bartley’ ‘Chamberlain of England that day was he’, Lord Fitzhugh, Lord Scrope of Upsal, Lord Scrope of Bolton, and Lord Dacre who had ‘raised all the North country’, Lord Lumley and Lord Greystoke who ‘brought with him a noble company’. An earlier prose version of the ballad, however, does not include in its list Lincoln, Arundell, Welles, Grey of Codnor or Lord Bowes. At the same time there are several alterations to the ballad’s inaccuracies. Lord ‘Bartley’ is replaced by Lovell, while Arundell is instead Lord Ogle. The ‘Ballad of Lady Bessie’ suggests that the Bishop of Durham was present at the battle, as well as the Earl of Kent and Lord Scrope.
Of the members of the gentry who assembled for Richard, sixty-seven names are listed in the ballad, while the prose version names sixty; however, both lists should be treated with a degree of caution. There are significant differences between the two lists: only thirty names appear in both, while there are stanzas in one version that are missing in the other, with four stanzas in ‘Bosworth Field’, naming knights from the Midlands including Gervaise Clifton, Henry Pierpoint, John Babington and Humphrey Stafford, who are absent from the prose version. On the other hand, three stanzas in the prose version naming Yorkshiremen such as Sir Robert Plumpton, Sir William
Gascoigne, Sir Thomas Markenfield and Sir John Pudsey, are missing from the ballad. Nevertheless, both lists highlight Richard’s dependence upon the northern members of the gentry, from Yorkshire, the East Riding and Durham, in constituting the bulk of his forces.
There were other members of Richard’s forces assembled at Leicester that morning who had come from much further afield. Juan de Salazar was a Spanish soldier who had been a prominent commander in the army of Charles the Bold and later for the Emperor Maximilian; he had been given his epithet of ‘little Salazar’ to distinguish him from the ‘Grand Chevalier’ Jean de Salazar, a fellow knight from the Biscay area, and possibly his father, who fought in the French armies of Charles VII and Louis XI. As captain of a band of Spanish mercenaries in Flanders, his campaigns against the French were recorded by the chronicler Jean Molinet who described him impressively ‘as bold as Hector, as subtle as Ulysses and as fortunate as Caesar’. In 1480 Salazar married Beatrice de Portugal, a wealthy widow, and at the wedding feast, perhaps to his new bride’s surprise, he wagered that he could spend six nights in enemy territory undetected. He did and won the bet. He was present at the successful siege of Utrecht in 1483, but then disappears from record in any Continental accounts until 1486.
Instead Salazar is to be found in England, employed in Richard’s service. The king’s own signet docquet book indicates that Salazar must have been present in England from at least 1484: on 26 September 1484, payment is made for £51 6s 4d ‘by the King’s commandment’ for a ship to be rigged out to ‘convey Saluzard’ to Brittany. The following March, passports for Salazar’s servants to travel to Flanders and Brabant were issued, as well as ‘a passport for Henry Delphant, servant of the Captain Salasar with ii servants in his company and as many horses … to go unto the Duc of Ostriche [the Duke of Austria, Emperor Maximilian]’. Three more of Salazar’s servants were granted similar permission, the last being given by Richard at Nottingham on 16 June 1485.
Now he was back in England, accompanying the king into battle. Salazar’s involvement places Richard’s confrontation with Henry in the European context it should be seen, particularly in the growing tensions between Maximilian, who had recently been victorious in Flanders, and Charles VIII. Salazar had presumably been given permission by Maximillian to travel to England to aid the king, though it is unknown whether he brought any significant force of Burgundian soldiers with him.
As Richard prepared to lead out his force to embark on his final journey towards Atherstone, Richard knew that one man was missing: in spite of his promises to attend the king, Thomas Stanley had failed to show, possibly still claiming that he was preventing Henry Tudor’s march down Watling Street towards London. Whether Richard believed him was another matter; the king would soon find out whether Stanley would be true to his word.
Commanding the front of his army, Richard rode out of Leicester ‘amid the greatest pomp, and wearing the crown upon his head’, flanked by Norfolk and Northumberland. Richard understood the need for ceremony and the importance of his own leadership to enthuse his men. Before his coronation, according to Mancini, Richard had summoned 6,000 troops to muster on Finsbury Fields; the king ‘himself went out to meet the soldiers before they entered the city; and, when they were drawn up in a circle on a very great field, he passed them with bared head around their ranks and thanked them’.
Richard’s glittering armour, together with the crown upon his head, must have made a formidable impression. Only the wealthiest and most important commanders would after all be dressed in full plate armour. The average soldier would be dressed more plainly, though according to Mancini, who observed Richard’s troops in 1483,
There is hardly any without a helmet, and none without bows and arrows: their bows and arrows are thicker and longer than those used by other nations, just as their bodies are stronger than other peoples’, for they seem to have hands and arms of iron. The range of their bows is no less than that of our arbalests; their hands by the side of each a sword no less long than ours, but heavy and thick as well. The sword is always accompanied by an iron shield; it is the particular delight of this race that on holidays their youths should fight up and down the streets clashing on their shields with blunted swords or stout staves in place of swords. When they are older they go out into the fields with bows and arrows, and even the women are not inexperienced at hunting with these weapons. They do not wear any metal armour on their breast or any other part of the body, except for the better sort who have breastplates and suits of armour. Indeed the common soldiery have more comfortable tunics that reach down below the loins and are stuffed with tow or some other soft material. They say that the softer the tunics the better they do withstand the blows of arrows and swords, and besides that in summer they are lighter and in the winter more serviceable than iron.
Richard led his army out through Leicester’s west gate and over Bow Bridge, perhaps across the water meadows near to the Augustinian priory and towards Leicester Forest where he travelled through its open chase towards Earl Shilton. With a complete absence of sources describing the journey, the exact route of Richard’s journey can only be guessed at. In any case, the direction of his army could have altered significantly depending upon local hazards met along the route. The medieval idea of a road was not an exact and defined carriageway upon which people might travel freely, but rather that of a route, a right of way between two points, which might change according to seasonal variations in the weather, particularly across marshy terrain. In such a situation, a journey might take several routes across higher ground, especially if carrying heavy equipment such as artillery. At the western edge of the forest, Richard would have faced a choice of moving southwest onto Watling Street, but with his ‘scurriers’ informing him that Henry was camped at Atherstone, he would turn westwards along an ancient track that seems to have crossed the country from east to west, leading to the village of Sutton Cheney, Ambion Hill. Alternatively, Richard could have taken the Roman road that led directly to Mancetter, passing Kirby Muxloe, where towards his right he would have caught sight of the unfinished red-brick country residence that had been built by William, Lord Hastings, abandoned by his workers who had downed their tools shortly after their master’s execution. Partially deserted, the imposing unfinished ruin stood as a memorial to the man who had unwittingly helped to place Richard on the throne and for his reward had gone to his death.
After making the eight-mile journey, Richard chose to pitch his camp west of Sutton Cheney, in the vicinity of Ambion Hill. Rising to 400 feet above sea level, the hill had been the site of the early medieval village of Anebein, abandoned in the fourteenth century. Now the area was covered with ‘furze and heath’. Looking down across the landscape, to the left of his view Richard would have seen the track of the Roman road leading to Mancetter and Atherstone, as well as the village of Dadlington up on higher ground; tracing the road along its route, in the distance he would have been able to make out the spire of St Margaret’s church in Stoke. To his right was the village of Shenton, while looking northwards, the square tower of the church at Market Bosworth could be seen. In between these settlements, made purposefully upon the higher firmer ground, the gentle western slope of Ambion Hill gave way to a wide plain, its only notable feature being a windmill that had been recently built in the 1470s. Beneath him lay the marshy terrain of a plain around the Sence river, known locally as Redemore, its grasses still green in high summer.
As he surveyed the land that he had chosen for the site of battle, Richard would have been satisfied with his position. He understood well the need to occupy the most advantageous terrain for battle, as set down by the precepts of Vegetius, translated by Christine de Pizan in the early fifteenth century. ‘The wise commander will decide to be the first to take advantage of the terrain,’ Pizan had written. ‘There are therefore three points to consider: the first is to take the high place; the second is to make sure that at the hour of combat the sun will be in the enemy’s eyes; the third,
that the wind should be against them. If these three things can be arranged, he will profit as there is no doubt that the one in the highest place has an advantage of strength over the one below.’
Richard ordered his men to set up camp upon the hill itself or nearer the village of Sutton Cheney; with nearly 15,000 men in his army, the royal camp would have encompassed several fields stretching across the area. Richard himself prepared to spend the night in his royal tent. While the tent may have been constructed of canvas and wood, the splendour of the royal court was imitated as best possible with tapestries, brought especially with the king’s train, being hung from the inside walls, along with the king’s camp bed. The bed itself was far from being of simple construction: when the German visitor Nicholas Von Poppelau was invited into the king’s tent at Pontefract in 1484, he found ‘the king’s bed decorated from top to bottom with red samite and a gold piece which the Lombards call altabass and which also decorates His Imperial Majesty’s bed. In the king’s tent there was also a table set up next to the bed, covered all around with silk cloths of gold embroidered with gold.’
That night, as the skies darkened across Redemore plain below, Richard would have seen the flickering of his enemies’ campfires, pitched several miles away towards the villages of Fenny Drayton, Witherley and Atterton. His mind turning towards the next morning, having ensured that his men were fed and ‘refreshed’ ‘from their exertions’, he chose to make ‘a lengthy speech to encourage them for the coming battle’.
Bosworth: The Birth of the Tudors Page 34