Thomas Stanley’s earldom was not the only reward that Henry was prepared to bestow upon the man he referred to in his grants as his ‘right entirely beloved father’. Within weeks of the battle, Stanley was rewarded with several manors and royal offices such as master forester and steward of all the king’s game north of the Trent for ‘the good and praiseworthy services performed by him before now with great personal exertions and costs, in many ways and on divers occasions, and now lately in the king’s conflict within the realm of England’, though the most significant of all Stanley’s rewards came with the position of Constable of England, together with its salary of £100. Henry was also notably generous to Stanley’s son and his brother-in-law George, Lord Strange, who was addressed at court as ‘the king’s brother’ and lavishly rewarded with constableships of castles in Ireland, ‘in consideration of the good and laudable service which our right trusty and entirely beloved brother hath done unto us in manifold wise to our singular pleasure’.
With his brother’s elevation, Sir William Stanley must have believed that in reward for his actions on the battlefield, he would have a strong chance of a peerage, if not more: he personally coveted the Earldom of Chester. Yet no reward was forthcoming. After what must have seemed to Stanley as a deliberate snub, he was eventually forced to take the humiliating step of petitioning the king in person to confirm the manors and castles granted to him by Richard, ‘which said grant he feareth is not sure and sufficient in law’, requesting the king confirm the grant ‘in consideration of the true and faithful service of him’. Eventually, Henry reconfirmed his position of justiciar of North Wales and constable of Caernarfon Castle and captain of the town there, though any further rewards were limited to an annuity of £20 from the rent of a manor formerly belonging to Lord Lovell. For the man whose actions on the battlefield had effectively saved Henry’s own life and placed him on the throne, this was hardly the reward he could have expected as kingmaker.
After the ceremonies were complete, the newly created nobles took their place around the dining table in the king’s great chamber in celebration. After the second course, Henry proclaimed seven new knights, among them Reginald Bray, Edward Stafford, the young Duke of Buckingham and Lord Fitzwalter, and that evening Henry himself visited them to read the ‘advertisement of the order of knighthood’. The following day, on Saturday 29 October, they were formally received by the king under his cloth of estate, with a new herald also being created, with a new name, Rougedragon, no doubt reflecting Henry’s Welsh origins, before the new knights together with the king attended chapel and returned to the hall, where they dined at a single table. That same afternoon, the customary procession from the Tower to Westminster Hall in preparation for the coronation the following day took place. Riding bare-headed, as tradition dictated, Henry was dressed in a long gown of purple velvet furred with ermines as he rode on a horse trapped with cloth of gold, a royal canopy held above his head by four knights marching on foot. Ahead of his procession rode Thomas Stanley, Oxford and the Earls of Nottingham and Lincoln, behind came Jasper, now Duke of Bedford, and the Duke of Suffolk, followed by six henchmen. Finally, Sir John Cheyney, as the knight for the king’s body, led the riderless horse trapped in cloth of gold and embroidered with the king’s arms, the courser of estate.
The next day, Sunday 30 October, the stage was set for the king’s coronation at Westminster abbey. Scaffolds had been specially prepared for the crowds to witness the public ceremony. In procession, Jasper, as Duke of Bedford, bore the crown before the king; Stanley as Earl of Derby held the sword of State, Oxford bore the king’s train. As prominent Yorkist supporters, the Bishops of Durham and Bath and Wells were excluded, while the Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Bourgchier, was by now considered so frail that his role in the coronation formalities was limited, though he did perform the anointing and crowning ceremony; in his place, the Bishop of Exeter asked ‘the will of the people’ while the Bishop of London sang the Mass. The entire ceremony had a makeshift quality to it, and was hardly aided by the noise of a collapsing scaffold, overcrowded with eager onlookers, though one observer noted that no one was killed ‘blessed be God’. Perhaps a sign of the speed at which the coronation had been prepared, with most of the attention, and costs, being paid to the splendour of the occasion, little thought had been given to the text of the coronation ceremony itself. The official format that the coronation was expected to follow was usually taken from the fourteenth century Liber Regalis; however, since it was obvious that Henry would not be able to marry Elizabeth of York in time for the ceremony, the usual text that had been prepared for a coronation of a king and his queen would need to be shelved. In its place, a copy of the coronation text that had been used for Richard’s anointing ceremony in July 1483 was hastily altered, even though it failed to remove the dead king’s name from critical moments during the ceremony, and retained key roles reserved for the Duke of Norfolk, in spite of his death on the battlefield, and Viscount Lovell, who had fled into hiding.
Still, in the moment of the occasion, all this mattered little. The significance of Henry’s coronation as king, in many ways unfathomable to those officiating and watching from the galleries, must have left most in stunned silence. Yet as the crown was placed upon his head, the sound of one woman weeping ‘marvellously’ could be heard; it was the king’s mother, Margaret, whose tears were not of joy but rather fear. She understood only too well the responsibility that the weight of the crown bore, and the danger that it could bring to her son. If it had been a long and dangerous journey to this moment; the path ahead lay uncharted, uncertain, terrifying.
After the ceremonies had concluded, Henry returned to the Tower in preparation for the coronation banquet. At his feet, under the table, two esquires of his body, Thomas Newton and Davy Philip were placed, as if to act as bodyguards for the monarch’s personal protection. Once again Jasper took chief place as steward of the feast, riding on a horse trapped with cloth of gold trimmed with ermine. After Henry and the hall had been served the first course, the king’s champion Sir Robert Dymmock entered the hall on a horse and issued his customary challenge, demanding if there was anyone who would challenge him as defender of the king’s right to the throne. The theatrical nature of the occasion must have been mused upon by some present, who had witnessed Dymmock performing the identical ceremony two years before for Richard III, the only noticeable difference being that then his horse had been trapped with red and white silk; now, with obvious reference to the new king’s Welsh origins, it proudly displayed a ‘rich trapper of Cadwaller’s arms’.
The final part of the ceremonies, the traditional coronation jousts were originally scheduled for the Sunday following the coronation ceremony, but were postponed to Sunday 13 November, with Sir Richard Guilford spending £50 2s 2d over the hundred marks he had been granted in preparation for the competition. It seems that the Frenchmen and Bretons who remained in the capital were drafted in for one final battle, the ‘jousts of peace’: a challenge was formally issued by ‘six gentlemen of name and of arms’ who had come from ‘beyond the sea with the king’s grace’ to be ‘disposed for the king’s pleasure and sport and the Ladies to challenge and hold Justes against all men’. For the victor who broke the most spears, just as William Caxton had urged Richard III the previous year in an attempt to restore to a nation its sense of chivalric pride, a prize of a large diamond would be awarded.
News of Richard’s death at Bosworth had reached the courts of Europe slowly. On 30 September Cadinal Sforza wrote to his nephew, the Duke of Milan, from Rome: ‘this very evening news has reached the Ambassador of the King of England that the people have cut in pieces that King’. The Bishop of Imola, wrote to Pope Innocent VIII on 20 October, still uncertain of the outcome: ‘According to common report as heard by me on the way, the King of England has been killed in battle. Here some people tell me he is alive and reigning, but others deny it’. Even when the Spanish monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella wrote complainin
g of the piracy of Henry’s French naval captain Guillaume de Casenove or ‘Coulon’ who, after leaving Milford Haven, had headed south to Cape St Vincent in southern Portugal, attacking ships and seizing ‘a great quantity of merchandise belonging to Spanish subjects’, they addressed their letter to the English king yet purposely left the name blank. Elsewhere, as news of Henry’s victory leaked out, in Danzig one chronicler recorded that Richard had been replaced by a new king called ‘Ritzmund’.
Henry’s coronation had seen him acclaimed as king. He now needed to affirm his title in law, stamping his authority on his new kingdom. On Monday 7 November the newly crowned king took to his throne in the painted chamber of Parliament, the assembled lords and bishops seated before him. Henry’s chosen candidate for chancellor, replacing Thomas Rotherham, was Bishop Alcock, who in his new office gave the traditional opening sermon, on the theme of ‘To strain, to prosper, to go forward and reign’, exhorting members of both houses in a speech filled with classical references to pursue the public and common good. The following day, the commons were instructed to assemble to choose their speaker, Henry’s favoured candidate Thomas Lovell, whose attainder under Richard for his participation in Buckingham’s rebellion seems to have been conveniently ignored – it would, as many probably predicted, soon be reversed.
Henry’s first priority was to have his title affirmed by Parliament in the form of a bill presented by the commons, to be approved by the lords and the king. Without any reference to what had taken place during the decades of civil strife and competing claims between the houses of Lancaster and York, the bill simply declared that
To the pleasure of Almighty God, the wealth, prosperity, and surety of this realm of England, to the singular comfort of all the king’s subjects of the same, and in avoiding all ambiguities and questions, be it ordained, established, and enacted, by the authority of the present Parliament, that the inheritance of the crowns of the realms of England and of France, with all the pre-eminence and dignity royal of the same pertaining, and all other seignories to the king belonging beyond the sea, with the appurtenances thereto in any due wise or pertaining, be, rest, remain, and abide in the most royal person of our now sovereign lord King Harry the VIIth, and in the heirs of his body lawfully coming, perpetually with the grace of God so to endure, and in none others.
After the bill had been presented, Henry himself spoke to the assembled audience, accepting its contents and going further than the bill by insisting that he had gained the crown by just hereditary title as well as by God’s own word, revealed through his victory in battle. The Crowland chronicler noted how Henry claimed his kingship ‘not by one but by many titles so that he may be considered to rule rightfully over the English people not only by right of blood but of victory in battle and conquest’. This was dangerous ground, especially given that many Yorkists would have still considered Elizabeth of York to have a stronger claim to the throne. Henry himself recognised the inadequacy of his Beaufort ancestry by bolstering its legitimacy, re-enacting the statute of 1397 that had declared the Beaufort family legitimate, yet consciously ignoring the 1407 statute that had added the provision that the Beauforts should never succeed to the throne, thereby removing any stigma of bastardy. Henry himself would adopt the Beaufort emblem of the portcullis, a symbol that would feature more prominently, along with the red rose of Lancaster, than the double Tudor rose, in future commissions of stained glass and carvings. In contrast, the Yorkist claim to the throne was further undermined by statements littered throughout bills passed in the Parliament that Richard was a usurper, with no formal claim to the throne, being ‘king in deed but not in right’. Later, the formula was quietly dropped in 1495, with the dead king being termed ‘Richard, late Duke of Gloucester, otherwise called King Richard III’ or even ‘the said King Richard’.
It was hardly an encouraging sign for those Yorkists who had thrown in their lot with Henry against Richard, convinced by the Welshman’s promises that he would marry Elizabeth of York, thereby reconciling both competing claims. Yet with no date set for a wedding, it seemed that Henry was once again pressing his right to rule through his own Lancastrian ancestry alone, something that was hardly part of the bargain. The Crowland chronicler recorded the sense of disenchantment at Henry’s actions, revealing that ‘there were those who, more wisely thought that such words should rather have been kept silent than committed to proclamation, particularly because, in that same Parliament, and with the king’s consent, there was discussion about the marriage to the lady Elizabeth, King Edward’s eldest daughter, in whose person, it seemed to all, there could be found whatever appeared to be missing in the king’s title elsewhere’.
If Henry were to marry Elizabeth, he would first need to remove the legal taint of illegitimacy that Richard’s infamous Titulus Regius had cast upon Edward IV’s children. The scandalous act was deemed by the judges impossible to recite in public in case it perpetuated its terms; instead, it was rehearsed somewhat obliquely that ‘afore this time Richard, late Duke of Gloucester, and after in deed and not of right, king of England, called Richard the IIIrd, caused a false and seditious bill of false and malicious imaginations, against all good and true disposition, to be put to him’. The bill was now to be ‘void, annulled, repelled … and of no force nor effect’; it was to be removed from the Parliament roll ‘and burnt and utterly destroyed’. Anyone possessing a copy of the act was to destroy it or return it to the chancellor, ‘upon pain of imprisonment’. The slow dismantlement of Richard’s regime had begun.
With his own title confirmed in law, Henry moved to establish his new regime as soon as possible. An Act of Resumption was passed that restored to the crown all lands that had previously been granted out since 1455, albeit with a substantial list of exemptions and provisos. At the same time, Henry’s supporters who had suffered confiscations or penalties as a result of their service in the rebellion of 1483 or beyond had their titles restored: even the dead were remembered, with Henry VI, Margaret of Anjou, their son Prince Edward and Henry Beaufort, Duke of Somerset, having all acts passed against them reversed. Margaret Beaufort was restored to whole possession of her lands, as was Edward Stafford, Buckingham’s heir, and Elizabeth Woodville, who in spite of her miscalculation of returning to Richard’s side, was also restored to all her properties.
What the new king might give, he was also prepared to take away. On 9 November he announced his intention to punish those who had offended him ‘in the court of the present parliament according to their deserts’. An Act of Attainder was passed, setting out how the king, ‘not oblivious nor putting out of his godly mind the unnatural, mischievous and great perjuries, treasons, homicides and murders, in shedding of Infants’ blood, with many other wrongs, odious offences and abominations against God and Man, and in especial our said Sovereign Lord, committed and done by Richard, late Duke of Gloucester’. The act stated specifically how on 21 August, ‘the first year of the reign of our Sovereign lord’, there had assembled
at Leicester in the county of Leicestershire a great host, traitorously intending, imagining, and conspiring, the destruction of the King’s royal person, our Sovereign Liege lord. And they, with the same host, with banners spread, mightily armed and defenced with all manner arms, as guns, bows, arrows, spears, gleves, axes, and all other manner articles apt or needful to give and cause mighty battle against our said Sovereign Lord, kept together from the said 22nd day of the said month then next following, and then conducted to a field within the said shire of Leicester, there be great and continued deliberation, traitorously levied war against our said Sovereign Lord, and his true subjects there being in his service and assistance under a banner of our said Sovereign Lord, to the subversion of this realm, and common weal of the same.
What was most striking, and controversial, about the Act of Attainder was its dating of Henry’s reign from 21 August, the day before the battle of Bosworth had actually taken place. In doing so, Henry claimed that Richard and his forces, in a
ssembling at Leicester and marching into battle, had rebelled against their lawful king. As rebels, each was to have his property forfeit and his titles removed. On the face of it, the redating made little difference, since those who were attainted had fought against Henry the following day. Yet the legal consequences of such an arbitrary decision, when it was clear to all that thousands of men, summoned by commissions of array with little choice in the matter, had followed a king they considered to be the lawful monarch, crowned and acclaimed by Parliament, into battle against the then pretender. According to the Crowland chronicler, this deliberate redating of the reign provoked ‘much argument or, to be more truthful, rebuke’. As the chronicler well understood, there were profound potential consequences to the decision: ‘Oh God! What assurance will our kings have, henceforth, that on the day of battle they will not be deprived of the presence of their subjects who, summoned by the dreaded command of the king, are well aware that, if the royal cause should happen to decline, as has often been known, they will lose life, goods and inheritance complete?’ The chronicler was not alone in his criticism of the Attainder, which provoked stormy debates and bad feeling at Westminster; one observer wrote that ‘there is much runyng amongst the lords … it is said it is not well amongst them’. And even though the Act would stand, Henry himself had second thoughts on the provision, making amends a decade later when he allowed Parliament to pass ‘a bill that no man going to battle with the prince should be attainted’.
Bosworth: The Birth of the Tudors Page 43