Henry had ordered that Richard’s body, almost naked, should be placed on public display for two days in Leicester, ‘for all men to wonder upon’. In doing so, it was clear that Henry intended to prove that Richard had died in battle, to prevent any rumours to the contrary. After the battle of Barnet, Edward IV had done the same with Warwick’s body, which had been displayed at St Paul’s laid out almost naked in a wooden coffin. Men flocked to get a sight of the dead king, ‘with everyone wishing to look at him’, ‘naked and despoiled to the very skin, and nothing left about him, not so much as a clout to cover his privy parts’. Richard’s bloodied and near-naked corpse had been trussed up in the collegiate church of St Mary-in-the-Newarke. The decision to display his mortal remains there appears to have been entirely deliberate: not only was the church a Lancastrian foundation, Richard’s body would suffer the further indignity of being displayed among the tombs of Henry, Earl of Lancaster, Henry, Duke of Lancaster and Mary de Bohun, the grandmother of Henry VI, who had all been buried there. The message could not be clearer: Henry, the inheritor of the Lancastrian dynasty, had finally ensured that vengeance had been secured. When Richard’s corpse was cut down, Henry chose not to have the Yorkist king buried among his Lancastrian ancestors, but rather in the plainer Greyfriars church, part of the Franciscan Friary, ‘irreverently buried’ without any funeral ceremony in the choir of the Franciscan Friars Minor in Leicester.
It was not until ten years later, in September 1495, that Henry would give thought to providing the dead king with any tombstone to mark his grave, ordering that James Keyley be paid £10 1s for making ‘King Richard’s tomb’. Even in the grave, it seems, Richard would continue to cause controversy, with the payment for the alabaster monument becoming the subject of a lawsuit between two stonemasons. There are no contemporary descriptions of the monument, but a manuscript copy of its epitaph survives. It reads:
I, here, whom the earth encloses under ostentatious marble,
Was justly called Richard the Third.
I was Protector of my country, an uncle ruling on behalf of his nephew.
I held the British kingdoms in trust, although they were disunited.
Then for just sixty days less two, And two summers, I held my sceptres.
Fighting bravely in war, deserted by the English, I succumbed to you, King Henry VII.
But you yourself, piteously, at your expense, thus honoured my bones
And caused a former king to be revered with the honour of a king
When in twice five years less four
Three hundred five-year periods of our salvation had passed.
And eleven days before the Kalends of September
I surrendered to the red rose the power it desired.
Whoever you are, pray for my offences,
That my punishment may be lessened by your prayers.
Richard’s tomb did not survive the Dissolution of the Monasteries, which brought an end to his final resting place at Greyfriars. John Speed, in his History of Great Britian, published in 1611, stated that at the suppression of Greyfriars’ monastery, Richard’s tomb was ‘pulled down and utterly defaced, since when the grave overgrown with nettles and weeds is very obscure and not to be found.’ According to one tradition, after the monastery had been dissolved during the reformation, the tomb was broken into and the bones of the dead king were carried through the town accompanied by jeers, finally to be thrown from Bow Bridge into the river Soar below. Richard’s supposed coffin was apparently placed outside the White Horse Inn in the city, where it served a new purpose as a watering-trough for horses. John Evelyn wrote in his diary in 1654 that Leicester, that ‘old and ragged city’, was famous only ‘for the tomb of the tyrant Richard III, which is now converted into a cistern, at which (I think) cattle drink’. The trough was eventually broken up during the reign of George I, to be used as steps into a cellar. Christopher Wren, Dean of Windsor and father of the great architect, told a different tale: after Richard had been slain, he wrote, ‘his body was begged by the Nuns of Leicester, and buried in their chapel there; at the dissolution whereof the place of his burial happened to fall into the bounds of a citizen’s garden, which being after purchased by Mr. Robert Herrick was by him covered with a handsome stone pillar, three foot high, with this inscription, “Here lies the body of Richard III, some time King of England.” This he showed me walking in his garden, Anno 1612.’
For centuries, in spite of the location of Richard’s final resting place being well known, the king’s body was forgotten by history. Robert Herrick’s house was eventually demolished, to be replaced in the eighteenth century by a row of houses; eventually the site of Richard’s burial would become a council car park, with the king’s remains lying somewhere beneath its tarmac.*
Henry and his victorious army eventually arrived at Leicester, where he was received ‘with all honour and gladness’. He remained there for two days, allowing his soldiers to refresh themselves and prepare for his march to London to claim the crown. In the aftermath of the battle, several important tasks faced the new king. In his victory speech upon Crown Hill, Henry had spoken of his grief at beholding the sight of the deaths ‘of so many brave men’. He had witnessed his own standard-bearer William Brandon being cut down and killed by Richard during his final ill-fated charge; according to Polydore Vergil, Brandon was ‘the only one from the nobility’ who had fallen on Henry’s side, which had seen ‘scarcely 100’ soldiers killed in the battle. Estimates of the number of men killed during the two hours of fighting varies wildly between different sources, with one even suggesting that over 10,000 died on both sides. The number of bodies scattered across the battlefield was undoubtedly fewer than this: a more realistic total comes from Vergil, who estimated that in addition to the hundred men lost on Henry’s side, ‘on Richard’s side about a thousand men fell in this battle’ while Molinet believed that there were ‘only 300 dead on both sides’.
Casualties had been heaviest on Richard’s side where the engagement of the vanguards or ‘in the first battle line’ had taken place. Led by the Duke of Norfolk, according to Vergil, ‘a very great number were killed in the flight’ following their rout by Oxford’s troops. Once identified, Norfolk’s body was taken from the battlefield to be buried in his family tomb in Thetford priory. Later it would be moved to Framlingham following the priory’s dissolution, and in 1841 the sheet lead coffin was opened, where the skull of an old man, judging by the state of its teeth, was discovered still with its hair, ‘of a fair or sandy colour’ intact. At the front of the skull there was ‘a large hole … as if the head must have had some severe blow at some time or other’. No epitaph for the tomb survives, yet the chronicler Edward Hall gave perhaps the most fitting tribute for a man who had fought his first battle in the French wars during the 1440s, who had witnessed the tribulations of battle throughout the tumult of the civil wars of the 1450s and 1460s, who had been present at Barnet, and who finally went loyally to his death over forty years later: ‘he regarded his oath, his honour and promise made to King Richard; like a gentleman and faithful subject to his prince he absented himself not from his master, but as he faithfully lived under him, so he manfully died with him to his great fame and laud’.
Among the dead were also Richard’s dedicated supporters who must have joined the king on or near to his final charge. Richard’s close companion Sir Richard Ratcliffe, Sir Robert Brackenbury, the keeper of the Tower of London, John Kendal, the king’s secretary, Sir Robert Percy, controller of the king’s household and Walter Devereux, Lord Ferrers all perished. Of the commissioners of array who assembled for Richard, ten were likely to have been killed at the battle: in Buckinghamshire, Thomas Hampden of Kimble and Thomas Straunge, William Allington in Cambridgeshire, John Coke in Essex, John Kebyll in Leicestershire, Richard Boughton and Humphrey Beaufort in Warwickshire, Sir Thomas Gower and Sir Robert Percy in Yorkshire all are listed among the inquisitions post mortem as having died around the date of the battle. Other com
missioners are known to have died in late 1485, perhaps from injuries sustained in battle, though this cannot be confirmed. Those who died with only young children as their heirs indicates that their deaths were probably unexpected, though sudden death from the sweating sickness that swept England in the autumn of 1485 cannot be discounted. They included Thomas Pygot in Cambridgeshire, John Harlyng, John Grene, William Gate and John Wrytell in Essex, John Twynyho and John Wykes in Gloucestershire, William Druell in Hertfordshire, Sir Thomas Frowyk and Thomas Windsor in Middlesex, Henry le Strange in Norfolk, Sir William Stokes in Northamptonshire, John Cawardyne in Staffordshire, John Wode junior in Sussex, John Hugford in Warwickshire and Sir John Stourton in Wiltshire.
At least forty of the nobility and gentry who fought for Richard and were killed can be traced, men from at least sixteen counties, with eight arriving at the battle from the southern counties of Cambridgeshire, Buckinghamshire and Oxfordshire. Nevertheless, the large number of northern gentry who were among the battle dead is testament to the support that many northerners had given their king, in spite of Northumberland’s inaction and Stanley’s defection. Henry was well aware of the contribution that northerners had played in the battle, issuing a proclamation the following month stating how ‘many and diverse persons of the north parts of this our land, knights, esquires, gentlemen and other have done us now of late great displeasure being against us in the field with the adversary of us’.
The Yorkshire knights Sir Thomas Gower, Ralph Danby and Sir Robert Percy were among the dead, while from Durham, Robert Brackenbury, William Gilpin, Gilbert Swinburne of Chopwell and Robert Claxton were named as having died on the king’s side. Other evidence survives of the names of those who must have lost their lives in the battle from the inquisitions post mortem taken the following year: Alan Fulthorpe, the constable of Middleham Castle, had died on the Vigil of St Bartholomew (23 August), while Robert Brackenbury’s inquisition has the date left blank. Four of the men named held the constableships of six of Richard’s castles, while two were sheriffs in 1484–5.
Regardless of whether they had fallen fighting for or against his standard, Henry ordered that every man should be given ‘a decent burial’. The ballads recall how the noble dead of the Duke of Norfolk, Lord Ferrers ‘and many other more’ were carried from the field ‘boldly’ on biers. Many were buried near the parish church of St James at nearby Dadlington, whose churchwardens over twenty-five years later petitioned Henry VIII to recognise the significance of its location ‘standing upon a parcel of the ground where Bosworth feld, otherwise called Dadlyngton feld, in our county of Leicester was done’, requesting that a battlefield chapel might be constructed where ‘the bodies or bones of the men slain in the said field be brought and buried’.
As the armour was pulled from the lifeless carcasses and bodies placed on carts to be taken to Dadlington, there were also the wounded to tend to. Some were so severely injured that they had little chance of survival: John Mynde, a Shropshire gentleman who had survived the battle, had received ‘such grevious hurts and bresurs’ during the fighting that he died soon after. He had fought alongside his son John and six others, several of whom had been ‘right grievously hurt, and some of them maimed for ever’. Many who had been injured in the battle survived, even if they were maimed. Peter Peirse of Bedale lost a leg, but lived ‘long after’ while Gilbert Talbot, who was knighted shortly after the battle by Henry along with Sir John Mortimer, Sir Rhys ap Thomas, Sir Robert Poyntz and Sir Humphrey Stanley, according to John Leland, had been ‘sore wounded at Bosworth’. Roger Acton later petitioned Henry how he had fought ‘in your victorious field and under your standard and there sore hurt’. Ralph Bigod was injured during the battle, and would have ‘likely to have been slain’ had not the battle ended so suddenly.
Many of the wounded must have been taken to Leicester for treatment. Three years after the battle, Henry granted to the mayor and burgesses of Leicester an annuity of £20 for seven years, noting ‘the great costs and charges that they have sustained and borne by our commandment in our journeys, fields, and battles, and of the costs they did and made upon our servants wounded and maimed in our first field’, to a total of £180. It is also noteworthy that the office of ‘principal surgeon for the king’s body’ was granted to William Altoftes, who came from the nearby town of Atherston.
An example of the type of injuries faced by some participants in the battle can be found in a surviving medical textbook that describes how ‘a gentleman that was shot at Barnard or Bosard felde’ had been hit from behind in the thigh by shot from a ‘hackebush’ or arquebus; wearing a coat of mail which had protected him, three rings of mail were ‘left in his left buttock … by ignorance of the surgeon’. Twenty years later, with pains in his ankle, the man ‘met with an old surgeon’ who, examining him, asked ‘what armour he wore at that time’. Discovering that he had been wearing a coat of mail, the surgeon deduced that the pieces of mail had worked their way down towards his patient’s ankle; cutting it open, he ‘found the three mails as bright as could be and so he healed him where as a plaster could not have and he lived long after’.
As the battle had ended, in the confusion many participants on Richard’s side who had ‘easily abstained from fighting’ had ‘slipped secretly away’ and ‘without incurring any loss’. Among those who had been able to flee the battlefield unnoticed were Francis, Lord Lovell, together with John de la Pole, Earl of Lincoln, Humphrey Stafford and his brother Thomas, who ‘with a good number of companions’ rode through the day and night across the country to reach sanctuary in the monastery of St John at Colchester, on the Essex coast.
Still the number of prisoners captured after the battle had finished ‘was very great, since after Richard was killed men threw down their arms and willingly surrendered into Henry’s power’. Many would have done so earlier, Vergil observed, ‘of their own accord even when Richard was alive, assuming it could have been done without danger’; he would later add in his printed work that ‘the majority would have done from the beginning if it had been possible with Richard’s scouts flying about hither and thither’.
The most prominent captives were Henry, Earl of Northumberland and the duke of Norfolk’s son, Thomas, Earl of Surrey, and Richard’s councillor and close confidant William Catesby. Vergil suggests that Surrey was ‘pardoned at once’, though this clearly did not happen before the earl was taken to Queenborough castle on the Isle of Sheppey until October before being removed to the Tower, where he was still present in December. Northumberland’s surrender was a far more complex matter. Through his inaction, the earl had helped to ensure that victory fell to Henry. Yet Henry remained suspicious over Northumberland’s precise motives and had him ‘seized and held in prison until he handed over that son of the Duke of Clarence and did him homage together with two Earls his relatives, promising to serve him always like loyal vassals’.
There is no evidence that Northumberland had any control over Edward Earl of Warwick, but Henry was taking no chances. One of the first actions after the battle was to send Robert Willoughby to Yorkshire to seize the fifteen-year-old, whom Richard had placed in Sheriff Hutton. According to Vergil, Henry, ‘not unaware of the mob’s natural tendency always to seek changes’, was concerned that ‘if the boy should escape and given any alteration in circumstances, he might stir up civil discord’. On Willoughby’s arrival, Edward was handed over by the castle governor and brought to London where he was imprisoned in the Tower. Northumberland soon joined him, though he seems to have been released shortly before 6 December, before being restored to favour as the warden general of the East and Middle Marches in January the following year.
Since most of Richard’s inner circle had either been killed or fled the battle, few reprisals seem to have been considered necessary. Most men who had fought for Richard who were taken captive were later released, with the Crowland chronicler recording that only two men ‘from the western parts’, named Bracher, who had fallen into ‘the ha
nds of the victors’ were later hanged on the gallows. Their deaths may have in any case been part of some private vendetta: William Bracher was a yeoman of the crown who in March 1484 had been rewarded with the manors of Cheddar and Barrow Gurney that had belonged to Sir William Berkeley ‘for his good service against the rebels’. With battle came the legitimate opportunity to settle old scores; it was on the field that private and public grievances could be settled as one.
For Thomas Stanley, who for several decades had conducted a campaign of violence and intimidation upon a neighbouring gentry family, the Harringtons, over a land dispute, the battle provided the opportunity he had been waiting for to ensure that his local rival was all but destroyed for taking Richard’s side. After the battle, Harrington was left with ‘no livelihood’ and in ‘great poverty’ as a result of his attainder. Harrington’s nephew later claimed that the attainder had only been passed at Stanley’s insistence, ‘for old malice and grudge that he had’. Years later, one of the family’s ancestors went so far as to declare that Stanley had ‘caused’ Sir James Harrington to be attainted, ‘where in for a truth the said James was never against the King in no field’. In the heat of battle, however, not all private vengeances were exacted as successfully: one north Midlands squire, John Babington of Dethick, was allegedly killed by James Blount, motivated by the chance to increase his inheritance. But Blount got the wrong man. His intended target had been John Babington of Chilwell.
Bosworth: The Birth of the Tudors Page 39