Despite the impressive size of his army, the sheer mass of soldiers in itself presented a problem. Many of the men gathering under the king’s standard had been recruited by the commissions of array, like Thomas Longe from Ashwellthorpe, ordinary men whose military expertise and experience would have been limited. The Crowland chronicler observed that, leaving Leicester, Richard’s army had been made up of a ‘countless multitude of commoners’. To solve the problem of having a large number of troops without any military expertise, Christine de Pizan suggested that while the ranks lined up and were arranged, ordered by the constable of the army so that ‘none are to get out of order’, if there were a ‘considerable number of common people’ in the army, they should be ‘used to reinforce the wings in well ordered ranks behind the firepower’ and commanded by experienced captains. Pizan also wrote how they should be placed ‘in front of the major part of the formation, so that if they should be tempted to flee, the men-at-arms behind them would prevent it’. To ensure discipline within his amateur ranks, Vergil in his printed work, though omitting the detail from his original manuscript, described how Richard went further, ordering that his ‘scouts’ should patrol along the ranks, ‘flying hither and thither’ to ensure that his men remained committed to the battle.
Pizan suggested that in the middle of the formation should be placed the ‘commanding prince’, his principal banner held by ‘one of the best and important men in the army’ in front of him, ‘on which the formation keeps its eyes’. Behind the main battle formation or ‘principle battle’ should be arranged the rearguard. These were to be organised in order to ‘support those in front’; the rearguard should be composed of yeomen on horseback, ‘who can aid the others if they have need of it’, holding the horses of their masters, while at the same time ‘forming an obstacle so that no one can attack the army from the rear’. If there were enough men in the rearguard, Christine de Pizan advised, another battalion could be formed, composed of ‘those who are most eager to fight, and are expert in their skill with arms’ who might have their backs turned to both the vanguard and the ‘principle battle’, in case the army came to be attacked from behind by the enemy.
Following Pizan’s advice, at the front of his army Richard placed his archers in a vanguard led by the Duke of Norfolk and Sir Robert Brackenbury, formed into ‘a most strong bulwark’. At the rear of the extended battle line was the king himself, accompanied by a ‘select force’ of soldiers. Richard was surrounded by his most loyal servants, his personal guard otherwise known as the ‘knights of the body’, including Richard’s household men, esquires of the body and household knights, described by Vergil as a ‘chosen strength of soldiers’. To Richard’s left and nearly three-quarters of a mile behind according to one account, a rearguard was to be commanded by the Earl of Northumberland, apparently accompanied by 10,000 men; according to the bailiff of one of the earl’s sixteenth-century successors, the earldom was able to raise at least 9,000 men from its Yorkshire and Cumberland estates alone, including 3,000 horse.
As Richard arranged his forces spread across the lower slopes of Ambion Hill, probably on an elevated position around the 300-foot contour line of Ambion, the exact position and direction of his men would be crucial. The ‘Ballad of Bosworth Field’ relates that, after raising his banners, Norfolk arranged the position of Richard’s vanguard and archers ‘speedily’, keeping ‘to the sun and wind right’.
The duke, by now in his sixties, was an experienced military commander, who had seen service in the French wars during the 1450s, where he had reportedly been wounded and taken prisoner at the English defeat at the battle of Castillion in 1453. He had fought at Towton, in several military campaigns in the north during the 1460s, and had been at Barnet in 1471, where he had clashed with the Earl of Oxford’s forces. Vergil, who would have met men who had known the duke, describes him as ‘a man very politic and skilfull in wars’. Norfolk also spoke French fluently, acting as Edward IV’s lead envoy during the negotiations at Picquigny in 1475; he owned a number of French books, including the military treatise The Tree of Battles by Honoré Bouvet. It is likely that the duke would have been familiar with Christine de Pizan’s work. As he drew up his vanguard, placing the archers in the front rows of his men, with the morning sun rising in the east to the left of his position, and in the early morning still behind him, the duke was deliberately following the standard military practice set out by Pizan, who recommended that, in drawing up a line of troops, a commander should ‘set thy troops in so large a place that thou may move and turn all times of the day with the sun and have the sun and the wind on thy back and in thine enemy’s visage’. By these means, Pizan wrote, ‘the sun shining in one’s face troubleth his sight full sore, and likewise doth the wind that filleth them with sand’. The arrow’s flight would also be helped by the wind, and ‘alighteth more sore and beareth a greater strength’.
With their armies drawn up, both Richard and Henry made their final battle preparations by addressing in person their assembled armies, even if only a few would be close enough to hear them. In doing so, both men followed a long tradition of leaders attempting to inspire their forces before battle. Christine de Pizan had urged every military leader to do so, observing that ‘the good admonition of the valiant leader increases determinations, courage, and strength. For this reason he should often and firmly show his men the rightness of their cause and the enemy’s errors, and how they are obligated to the prince and the country, admonishing them to do well, to be valiant – promising offices and great gifts to those who do so – and, in fact, to give an example to the others.’ Richard’s speech was filled less with optimism than an abject sense of fear, telling his assembled troops ‘that the outcome of this day’s battle, to whichever side the victory was granted would totally destroy the Kingdom of England. For he also declared that he would ruin all the partisans of the other side, if he emerged the victor, predicting that his adversary would do exactly the same’ to his own supporters ‘if the victory fell to him’. A later sixteenth-century account by the chronicler Edward Hall, although embellished with details of the battle that cannot be substantiated, giving as it does the official version of history as the Tudors wished it to be written, nevertheless captures well the final moments before battle. Hall highlighted how Richard’s oration focused on Henry the ‘unknown Welshman, whose father I never knew, nor him personally saw’, who intended to ‘overcome and oppress’ the country with ‘a number of beggarly Bretons and fainthearted Frenchmen’.
According to Hall, when Henry ‘knew by his foreriders that the king was so near embattled, he rode about his army, from rank to rank from wing to wing, giving comfortable words to all men, and that finished (being armed in all pieces saving his helmet) mounted on a little hill, so that all his people might see and behold him perfectly to their great rejoicing’. While most of Henry’s speech, related by Hall nearly seventy years later, must have been placed in his mouth for literary effect, one line in the speech stands out, reflecting Henry’s own uncertain predicament: ‘Backward we cannot fly: so that here we stand like a sheep in a fold circumcepted and compassed between our enemies and doubtful friends’.
No doubt Henry’s passing comment referred to Thomas Stanley who, despite his promises the day before, now refused to join his army, only making the cryptic comment, to be interpreted either way, that ‘he would lead his men into the line’ when Henry himself ‘was there with his army drawn up’. Still, as battle approached and Henry had moved his men into position, Stanley remained stationary, his army positioned between both forces. The ballads, which suggest that the battle was fought in a ‘vale’ surrounded by hills, depict both Sir William Stanley and Lord Thomas Stanley camped on the same side of the battlefield to Henry’s right, watching from hilltops where they would have been afforded an excellent view of both armies marching towards one another. According to one ballad, Sir William Stanley ‘removed to a mountain full high’, possibly around the hills sloping towards
Stoke, where he looked down ‘into a dale full dread’ to witness the sight of Richard’s army; shortly afterwards Richard himself ‘looked on the mountains high’ where he spotted Lord Stanley’s banner, possibly the same ones that Stanley had ordered to be fashioned out of crimson and blue sarcenet for the French expedition ten years earlier.
Henry could not know what decision Thomas Stanley would take, or ultimately to which side he would choose to commit. For Stanley, whose son Lord Strange remained imprisoned in Richard’s camp, it remained crucial to be seen as being able to commit to either side. In drawing up his forces midway and overlooking the battlefield, he had positioned himself close enough to Richard’s forces to be considered a kind of additional vanguard or wing on the king’s left-hand side. This suggests that he had taken up his position, ranged on the brow of the gentle hills around Dadlington, with his brother Sir William Stanley, commanding a force of 3,000 men, assembled on the line of the hill further along towards Stoke. As the Stanleys looked down upon the battlefield, their armies twice the number of Henry’s own forces, Henry understood his fate would be entirely in their hands.
With the battle lines drawn up on either side, as Henry’s forces advanced towards Redemore plain, for the first time both sides caught sight of one another ‘in the distance’. The soldiers made their final preparations for battle, equipping themselves with helmets, and ‘awaiting the signal to advance with ears pricked up’. Edward Hall, though writing in the sixteenth century with his own imagined perspective, nonetheless gives a vivid depiction of the tension palpable in the air: ‘how hastily the soldiers buckled their helms, how quickly the archers bent their bows and frushed their feathers, how readily the billmen shook their bills and proved their staves, ready to approach and join, when the terrible trumpet should sound the bloody blast to victory or death’. Before the armies could engage, they would need to come within a sufficient distance for their arrows and artillery to be effective. Meanwhile, as Henry’s forces advanced, they took care to navigate around a marsh which, according to Vergil, Henry had ‘on purpose left to his right so that it should be a protection to his men’. By now, with the low lying morning sun having risen higher in the sky, by turning leftwards towards the north, he also hoped to have ‘the sun in his rear’. It is uncertain who gave the first cry for battle to commence; Vergil states that it was Richard, witnessing ‘that the enemy had passed the marsh … ordered his men to attack them’, though at the same time, once Henry’s vanguard had passed the marsh, he too ‘gave his men the signal for battle’.
The first sounds of battle after Norfolk had raised ‘a sudden shout’ were the whistling of arrows as both sides began to fire at each other as the archers ‘let sharp arrows fly’, the bowmen being able to fire at a rate of around twelve arrows a minute. At Tewkesbury, Edward’s archers, placed in the vanguard, had ‘so sore oppressed’ the Lancastrians ‘with shot of arrow, at they gave them right-a-sharp shower’. The onslaught of arrow and gunshot had provoked the Lancastrians into panic, launching their vanguard into battle early, with fatal consequences. Yet the initial trading of firepower seems to have been inconclusive, with both sides holding their positions. Next came the deafening sound of Richard’s artillery being unleashed. Recent archaeological investigations have revealed the extent of this awesome firepower, with over thirty lead cannon shot, often containing cubes of iron or pebbles encased in lead, littered across the battlefield, ranging from 30mm in diameter to 94mm. This indicates that there would have been a significant number of guns of different size and range firing that day, with the largest cannonball being comparable to the shot fired from some of the most powerful weapons of the day. According to Molinet, it was Henry’s French mercenaries, who would have had considerable experience of Continental warfare and how to counter artillery fire, who now revealed their crucial expertise. Studying the ‘lie of the land’ by the direction and power of ‘the king’s shot’, as well as ‘the order of his battle’, they informed Henry that ‘in order to avoid the fire’, he should ‘mass their troops against the flank rather than the front of the king’s battle’. With Richard’s left flank facing the marsh, it would have been the king’s right flank, where his vanguard was located, that the French believed the attack should be focused, moving Henry’s men out of the line of fire and strengthening Oxford’s forces as they approached Norfolk’s troops.
Meanwhile, as Oxford’s vanguard neared Norfolk’s forces, on both sides the archers downed their bows and as ‘they came to close quarters’ began to fight ‘with swords’, as the ballad described how the sound of ‘brands rang on basinets high, battle axes fast on helms did light’. The initial clash of the vanguards was fast and furious, reflecting the personal animosity that must have existed between the two commanders. Norfolk and Oxford were old rivals, who jostled for the leadership of their East Anglian region. They had fought against one another before, at Barnet fourteen years before, when Norfolk had defeated the earl, if only as a result of Oxford’s own military failures that day. While Oxford remained imprisoned, it was Norfolk who had benefited from the distribution of his lands. Fourteen years later, the earl now had his chance of revenge.
It was not long before Oxford believed that his men had pushed too far into Norfolk’s ranks. Fearing that they might be subsumed and ‘completely encircled’ by the greater numbers of Richard’s long battle line, the earl sent out an order through the ranks ‘that no soldier was to advance four feet from the standards’, though in relating the detail of the manoeuvre, Vergil later changed the distance to ten feet. The earl’s orders were once again classic textbook advice, with Christine of Pizan advising that troops should keep within a set ‘interval or distance’ so that ‘men ought to see by great care that they overpress not each other’ nor drift too far away; to allow either, she warned, would either ‘lose their strokes and their fighting for lack of more room and space’ or ‘give to their enemies an entry through themself, and so were they in peril to be broken’.
For Oxford, there was perhaps a more personal reason for making his order. The earl had learnt from his bitter experience fourteen years before at Barnet the need to maintain a tight formation among his forces. There his troops had lost the battle through becoming too detached from the main army; when the battle had turned ninety degrees upon itself, in the confusion and the poor visibility, the earl had ended up attacking his own Lancastrian side. It had been a painful lesson that Oxford was not going to repeat this time. As a result, when the earl’s men received the command, they ‘crowded together and withdrew a short way from the battle’. The decision seems to have caused a brief impasse in the fighting, and Norfolk’s vanguard, ‘if terrified and suspecting a trick because of this, also stopped fighting for a short time’.
As Richard studied the opening salvoes of the battle, there were other issues pressing on his mind. Catching sight of Thomas Stanley’s banner fluttering in the distance, with Stanley’s own forces remaining motionless, the king regarded his inaction as nothing short of betrayal. Furious, he was determined to reassert his authority, demonstrating to his own men the price that would be paid for desertion and disobedience. The temporary lull in the fighting gave Richard the chance to order the imprisoned Lord Strange to be brought to him immediately to pay the ultimate price for his father and uncle’s actions. Informing Strange that he was to face his death ‘for thy uncle’s sake’, Strange took the news patiently. He called upon a Lancashire gentleman named Latham, whom he gave a ring from his finger, asking that it be sent to his wife. If Henry were to ‘lose the field’, then she was to be sent a message to flee in exile abroad together with his eldest son, in the hope that one day he might be able to exact revenge against Richard.
Sir William Harrington urged Richard to delay Strange’s execution until both Lord Stanley and Sir William Stanley were captured: ‘we shall have them soon on the field, the father, the uncle and the son, all three; then you may deem them with your mouth, what kind of death that they shall die’.
The tradition is upheld in all of the ballads, and is revealing about the time of the order, which seems to have come just as Richard’s vanguard began their engagement: ‘Then came a knight to King Richard, and said, “It is high time to look about; look how your vanguard beginneth to fight. When ye have the father and the son … look you what death they shall die: ye may head all at your own will”.’
The story is given credence by the Crowland chronicler, who recorded that as the battle had progressed, Richard ordered that Lord Strange ‘should be beheaded on the spot’. ‘However, to whom this task was given, seeing that the matter in hand was at a very critical stage and that it was more important than the elimination of one man, failed to carry out’ the command, ‘and on their own judgement, let the man go and returned to the heart of battle’. It seems that Strange was allowed to go free, perhaps even to join the battle; his fellow prisoner William Gruffudd certainly seems to have been able to do so, for one Welsh poem considered that he was ‘the most important Knight on Henry’s field, and Sir Rhys was there by your side’. It is a telling sign of the breakdown of authority in Richard’s own ranks that the king failed to have his commands obeyed, in stark contrast to Edward IV’s summary execution of Lord Welles before his troops had engaged the Lincolnshire rebellion in 1470. Richard’s kingship, it seems, was already collapsing around him.
Bosworth: The Birth of the Tudors Page 36