Battle and its aftermath also gave men the perfect opportunity to exploit the instability of the new regime to their own advantage. Humphrey Stafford quickly moved to occupy the lands of Sir Robert Willoughby, whose residents later complained to Henry that he had ‘within two days next after your most victorious journey, entered, and yet be in possession of the same accordingly’. Robert Throckmorton, having been appointed sheriff for Warwickshire and Leicestershire after the battle, having failed to bring the counties to order, sought pardon from Henry since having been appointed to his office for a month he had found himself ‘incontinent’ with the surrounding countryside in ‘such rebellion and trouble, and your laws not established’ that he ‘neither might nor could execute his said office of sherrifwick to any profit of your said highness’.
Recognising the need to swiftly restore order and stability to the realm, Henry issued his first proclamation from Leicester:
Henry, by the grace of God, King of England and France, prince of Wales and lord of Ireland, strictly chargeth and commandeth, upon pain of death, that no manner of man rob or spoil no manner of commons coming from the field; but suffer them to pass home to their countries and dwelling places, with their horses and harness. And moreover, that no manner of man take upon him to go to no gentleman’s place, neither in the county, nor within cities nor boroughs, nor pick no quarrels for old or new matters; but keep the king’s peace, upon pain of hanging.
And moreover, if there be any man offered to be robbed and spoiled of his goods, let him come to master Richard Borrow, the king’s serjeant here, and he shall have a warrant for his body and his goods, until the time the king’s pleasure be known.
And moreover, the king ascertaineth you, that Richard Duke of Gloucester, lately called King Richard, was lately slain at a place called Sandeford, within the shire of Leicester, and there was lain openly, that every man might see and look upon him. And also there was slain upon the same field John, late Duke of Norfolk, John, late Earl of Lincoln, Thomas, late Earl of Surrey, Francis, Viscount Lovel, Sir Walter Devereux, Lord Ferrers, Richard Ratcliffe, knight, Robert Brackenbury, knight, with many other knights, squires, and gentlemen: on whose souls God have mercy.
It did not matter that the Earl of Surrey, the Earl of Lincoln and Lovell had not been killed, preferring to flee rather than face death in battle. The statement was not intended to reflect the precise details of what had taken place on the battlefield, although the claim that the victory had resulted in the deaths of most of the nobility who had fought for Richard’s cause was probably deliberate, aimed at preventing any further uprisings from disaffected Yorksists.
Equally important for Henry was that he should be viewed as a king who intended to draw a line under the past. He wanted to send out the message that he would not be prepared to tolerate any attacks on men who had taken arms up against him, a clear break from the vicious reprisals that had followed previous battles such as Tewkesbury or Towton, when the defeated side had been pursued ruthlessly to their deaths. Henry knew that the situation was too delicate, and his own position still uncertain, to provoke possible reprisals. He must also have been mindful that his narrow victory had been won not by his own valour, having come close to death as a result of Richard’s final charge, but by Sir William Stanley’s final show of strength, crashing through the battle to defeat Richard at the very moment it seemed that the late king might have destroyed Henry. Henry must have understood that victory had been obtained not just by the acts of engagement during the battle of a few, but by the abstention of the many from joining the fray altogether.
He owed them his crown too: Northumberland’s desertion ensured that Richard’s rearguard had stood still, refusing to come to their king’s aid; as the Crowland Chronicler remarked, ‘where the Earl of Northumberland stood, with a troop of a size and quality befitting his rank, no opposing force was visible, and no blows were exchanged in anger’. Molinet made clear that Northumberland was expected to charge upon the French, but instead ‘did nothing, and left him and his suit, and abandoned King Richard’. Molinet wrote later that he believed Northumberland had an ‘understanding’ with Henry, ‘as had various other who left him wanting’, but was the earl alone responsible for ensuring that his men did not take part in the battle?
Northumberland had faced the spectre of battle and the consequences of defeat before. Previous to Edward IV’s ascendancy, his family loyalties had traditionally rested with the Lancastrians. For this they had paid the price: the earl’s father had died from wounds received fighting on behalf of Henry VI at Towton in 1461, while Northumberland himself was captured, attainted and imprisoned. He was released eight years later and his attainder reversed. Yet the memories of that bloody battle, in which tens of thousands from the Yorkshire region had died, did not affect Northumberland alone. In 1471, when Edward returned from exile to reclaim his crown, Northumberland should have prevented his landing and opposed his march, but he did not. Instead, landing at Ravenspur and travelling southwards, Edward commanded Northumberland to provide him with an armed force. Northumberland sought to encourage his men to fight for Edward IV, yet according to one report, the memory of the Yorkist victory at Towton was too painful for many to commit to Edward’s cause, and ‘many gentlemen, and other, which have been arrayed by him, would not so fully and extremely have determined them self in the King’s right and quarrel as the Earl would have done himself’. Unable to command his own men to take Edward’s side, Northumberland had no other choice but to do nothing. Nevertheless, one chronicler reported, the earl’s decision at least prevented some in the north from rising up against Edward: ‘his sitting still caused the city of York to do as they did, and no worse, and every man in all those north parts to sit still also’. Could the same situation possibly have repeated itself at Bosworth, where the earl’s inaction at least prevented his men from turning against Richard?
According to the Crowland chronicler, it was ‘for the most part those northerners in whom King Richard had so trusted, took flight before it came to hand-to-hand fighting’. It remains particularly striking that all the northern magnates were not later attainted for their possible attendance in Richard’s army: Northumberland, Westmorland, the two Lord Scropes, Lord Greystoke, Lord Dacre, Lord Fitzhugh and Lord Lumley. In considering why separate noblemen may have decided to sit on their hands and refuse to join in battle, it is worth studying their own individual ambitions. Westmorland, for example, had hoped to have been rewarded for his support for the king; in June 1483 Richard had written to him, appealing to Westmorland to ‘do me good service as you have always done, and I trust now so to remember you as shall be the making of you and yours’. What did Westmorland hope to achieve, or more likely gain, from his support for Richard? He certainly must have hoped to claim a share of the inheritance of his maternal uncle Henry Holland, Duke of Exeter, of whom Westmorland was the male heir. Edward IV had instead passed the inheritance to the Woodvilles in 1483 – Westmorland expected, with a change of regime, that he would retrieve his rightful lands. He was to be disappointed; Richard stripped the inheritance from the Woodvilles, only to keep the Exeter lands for himself in the crown’s possession. Westmorland might have also hoped for the lucrative wardenship of the West Marches, now that the office had been vacated by Richard’s accession as king: it was an office that had previously ‘belonged’ to his great-grandfather. Yet again, he was denied it, with Richard choosing to retain possession of the office, appointing Humphrey, Lord Dacre as his lieutenant. Instead, rather than advancing his power, Westmorland found his influence in his own region curtailed by Richard’s showering of patronage upon Sir Richard Ratcliffe, and by July 1484 even the revenue from the Neville family seat at Raby Castle was assigned to support the Council of the North. The earl must have thought that there was little reason to place his own life at risk, fighting for a king who had not provided him with what he expected was his by right. Westmorland was likely to have been at Bosworth, yet this does not mean t
hat he actually fought on Richard’s behalf. Like so many of his fellow northern men, he stood watching and waiting. After the battle had ended, he joined Northumberland and Surrey in custody, having been captured. He entered into several bonds for his good behaviour on 1 December 1485 totalling £400 and 400 marks, to be paid at Christmas 1486, the feast of the Purification of the Virgin Mary and Michaelmas 1487. On 5 December 1485 he granted Henry the wardship of his eldest son Ralph.
The Earl of Westmorland was not alone in his decision: in their absence and prevarication, the nobility settled Richard’s fate at Bosworth. The Scottish chronicler Pittscottie wrote that ‘some others of King Richard’s army stood and looked on while they saw who had the victory’. Robert Fabyan’s Chronicle remarked that the battle should have been ‘sharper’ if only Richard’s forces had remained loyal to the King; instead they ‘refused him’, some surrendering to the opposing forces while others ‘stood hoving’ from a distance until the outcome of the battle and which way ‘victory fell’ was certain.
The attitude of William Berkeley, the Earl of Nottingham, is perhaps typical of the approach that many of the nobility must have had towards the uncertain outcome of the battle. Berkeley may have been present in the field, but whether he actually engaged is another matter. He must have had divided loyalties: Berkeley, thirty years older than Tudor, seems to have known him from his time when he was resident at the Herbert household at Raglan between 1462 and 1469, since he testified in January 1486 that he had known Henry ‘well for twenty years and more’. A family history written in the seventeenth century attests to the earl’s decision to neither declare for one side nor the other, stating that while he had sent men to the king’s side, he had sent money to Tudor, and ‘neither of both with his person’ so that ‘he preserved the favour of both, at least lost neither of them’.
Four-fifths of the nobility, twenty-eight men, decided it best to remove themselves from the conflict altogether. Of those who chose to fight, two abstained from joining the fray, and only two attainted earls, Oxford and his uncle Jasper, fought for Henry. Only six can be proved to have joined Richard and fought for his cause. Norfolk and Lord Ferrers gave their lives during the battle, yet both were elderly men. Norfolk’s son and heir, Thomas Howard, Earl of Surrey, Francis, Viscount Lovell, Lord Scrope of Bolton and John, Lord Zouche also fought, yet most, it seems, did so because they owed their livelihoods to the king. Francis Lovell, for instance, the king’s closest friend, had been rewarded with grants of land estimated at £400. Lord Scrope of Bolton had been given lands in Devon and Cornwall worth over £200 annually, and had been given an annuity of £156 as well as a salary as the king’s councillor.
It was in this atmosphere of uncertainty and uncommitted loyalty that Henry’s clemency and decision not to wreak revenge would prove a wise one. ‘And since it was not heard nor read nor committed to memory that any others who had withdrawn from the battle had been afterwards cut down by such punishments, but rather that he had shown clemency to all,’ the Crowland chronicler observed, ‘the new prince began to receive praise from everyone as though he was an angel sent from the kingdom through whom God deigned to visit his people and to free them from the evils which had hitherto afflicted them beyond measure.’
Not even Henry’s leniency could extend as far as to save the life of Richard’s most notorious and closest councillor, William Catesby. Captured on the battlefield and taken to Leicester, Catesby must have known that death was inevitable. It was his treachery that had ensured his patron Lord Hastings’ execution, and paved the way to Richard’s seizing the crown. Thomas More later wrote that it had been ‘the dissimulation of this one man that stirred up that whole plague of evils that followed’. Ambition had led Catesby to collude in the downfall of his former master; his reward had been to supplant Hastings as the major landowner in the East Midlands and a meteoric rise at court with his appointment first as Chancellor of the Exchequer and later Speaker of the House of Commons. His influence and power over Richard was almost mesmeric, with the Crowland chronicler believing that the king ‘hardly ever dared offer any opposition’ to his opinion. His position as the king’s most trusted councillor seemingly unassailable, even the nobility had to grovel before him, with Thomas Stanley paying him an annuity ‘for his good will and counsel past and to come’. Catesby used his position at court to ruthless effect, building up a landed estate around Northamptonshire, Warwickshire and Leicestershire fit for a nobleman. If Richard had been victorious, perhaps Catesby, hopeful of further promotion, might have even hoped to establish his own noble dynasty. With defeat and the death of his king, his dynastic ambitions lay in tatters.
Catesby had gone into battle alongside his friends and kinsmen; now they were either dead or had escaped. Isolated and deserted, he must have known that the wheel of fortune had come full circle. On 25 August at Leicester he dictated his final will and testament. With no other friends or associates to rely upon, he requested that his wife Margaret, ‘my dear and well-beloved wife, to whom I have ever been true of my body’, act as his sole executor. Leaving a list of bequests, including that he be buried at the church in Ashby St Ledgers, Northamptonshire, ‘and to do such memorials as I have appointed for’, he asked that ‘all lands that I have wrongfully purchased’ be restored to their rightful owners; those that he had obtained legally, he hoped that his children might inherit ‘as she thinketh good after her discretion’. ‘I doubt not the King will be a good and gracious Lord to them,’ he reassured her, ‘for he is called a full gracious prince’, adding somewhat disingenuously, ‘I never offended him by my good and Free Will; for God I take to my judge I have ever loved him’.
Another bequest was of £100 to the Duke of Buckingham’s widow (of whose late husband’s estates he had been given charge after his execution) ‘to help her children’ and to have Buckingham’s outstanding debts paid. Catesby concluded his testament with an emotionally charged plea to his wife: ‘my especial trust is in you mistress Margaret, and I heartily cry you mercy if I have dealed uncourteously with you. And ever pray you to live sole and all the days of your life to do for my soul … I pray you in every place see clearness in my soul, and pray fast and I shall for you, and Jesus have mercy upon my soul Amen.’
Then, almost as an afterthought, Catesby decided to add a final postscript, recognising that his last moments on earth were drawing near. Uncertain as to the whereabouts of his colleagues who had fled the battlefield, including Francis, Lord Lovell, he hoped that if ‘my Lord Lovell come to grace, then that ye show to him that he pray for me’. He asked his ‘uncle John’, Sir John Catesby, to ‘remember my soul as ye have done my body, and better’. These last words, however, were to be marked with a streak of bitterness, aimed at those whose disloyalty, in his eyes, had led to his downfall: ‘My Lords Stanley, Strange and all that blood, help and pray for my soul for ye have not for my body as I trusted in you.’ Hours later, Catesby was beheaded in the market square. His execution, the Crowland chronicler remarked, barely containing his delight, had been ‘a last reward for his excellent service’.
As William Catesby’s headless corpse was being placed upon a cart to be wheeled out of the marketplace at Leicester, Henry had begun to make his preparations for his triumphal journey to the capital. He had been received enthusiastically by the inhabitants at Leicester, who had been quick to repudiate any connection they had previously had with the dead king. Even the innkeeper at the White Boar, the supposed location of Richard’s final night’s accommodation before he had marched out of the town, found an ingenious solution to his dilemma of displaying the dead king’s badge from his walls by hastily painting the boar on his sign, renaming the inn the Blue Boar, an entirely appropriate change since the blue boar was a badge of John, Earl of Oxford.
After departing Leicester, Henry travelled down Watling Street, the present A5, through the towns of Northampton and St Albans where he was welcomed along the way ‘like a triumphing general’ being ‘greeted with the gr
eatest joy by all’ along the route and in each town and village he passed. ‘Far and wide the people hastened to assemble by the roadside,’ Vergil observed, ‘saluting him as king and filling the length of his journey with laden tables and overflowing goblets, so that the weary victors might refresh themselves.’
Such liberality was on display as Henry passed through Coventry, where the city annals record how the city gave him £100, raised hurriedly from loans given by local merchants, and a gold cup. Henry spent the night at the house of the city’s mayor Robert Onley. It was to be a costly visit for the city authorities, who could hardly refuse their new king their hospitality, in spite of their evident displeasure that Richard had been ‘shamefully carried’ to Leicester. The city annals reveal the extent of the celebrations the night before, with 512 penny loaves of bread costing 42s 8d, washed down with 110 gallons of red wine worth £6 and 41s 4d spent on twenty-seven casks of ale, each containing four and a half gallons.
Not everyone was as elated by Henry’s victory. John Sponer, having been sent by the citizens of York only days before to discover Richard’s wishes, had been outpaced by the speed of events. He had probably only just reached Nottingham when he discovered that the king had been killed during battle. Turning back without delay, he returned to York on 23 August and rushed straight into the council chamber where the citizens were gathered. There, according to the council minutes, Sponer, perhaps not himself entirely sure of the exact details of the battle that had taken place at ‘the field of Redemore’, broke the news that ‘King Richard late mercifully reigning upon us was through great treason of the Duke of Norfolk and many other that turned against him, with many other lords and nobles of this north parts was piteously slain and murdered’. As the reality of Richard’s death reverberated around the council chamber, the minutes recorded how the news was met by a ‘great heaviness’. Both stunned and uncertain for their future, the council resolved that a letter should be sent to the Earl of Northumberland, ‘beseeching him to give unto them his best advice how to dispose them at this woeful season both to his honour and worship and well profit of this city’. In the confusion of the aftermath of battle, receiving John Sponer’s equally confused report of what had occurred, the citizens could not have realised the bitter irony that it had been their patron Northumberland who had turned against the king, and was now imprisoned, just as they could not have known that their traitor, the Duke of Norfolk, had gone to his death fighting loyally for Richard’s cause. All they could know for certain was that their king was dead: as if to emphasise the point, in the minute book, following the date of the meeting, the clerk added the words ‘vacatione regalis potestatis’ – ‘the throne being vacant’.
Bosworth: The Birth of the Tudors Page 40