Of those surrounding the frail king as he languished in his bed, Henry would have recognised few faces who would have been at his side on the fateful day of his ‘victorious field’. By then, most of his old comrades in arms were dead: Sir Edward Woodville had been killed in 1488; Sir John Savage had also died in action in Bolougne in 1492; his uncle Jasper had died in 1495, the same year Sir William Stanley had been beheaded for treason; his queen Elizabeth had died in 1503, followed by Thomas Stanley the next year; Sir Richard Guildford had passed away while on pilgrimage to the Holy Land in 1506; Giles Daubeney had died in his bed in 1508. In their place came a fresh-faced generation of new men who had little experience of the tribulations that their king had faced during the decades of civil war that were fading fast into distant memory.
It was a very different world to the one George Neville had described in 1461, when he had written that the English were ‘a race deserving of pity even from the French’ due to their ‘intestine’ civil wars. Even if the tenacious king, paranoid to the last, may not have believed it himself, Henry had healed a nation, laying the foundations for the future stability of the Tudor dynasty that would remain on the throne until 1603.
While previous assertions that 1485 had marked the birth of the early modern period and the death of the medieval age are both anachronistic and unsubstantiated, Richard’s death at Bosworth had brought with it the end of the Plantagenet dynasty. Henry’s accession had heralded the self-conscious image of a new monarchy that brought with it the idea of a country reconciled and harmony restored. As the decades wore on and the Tudors became more entrenched, strengthening their power and authority upon their subjects, they wove their own official history of events, best typified in Edward Hall’s The Union of the Two Noble Families of Lancaster and York, asserting that Henry’s ascent to the throne was an act of providence, bringing with it ‘the union of the two noble and illustrious families of Lancaster and York, being long in continual dissension for the crown of this noble realm, with all the acts done in both the times of the princes, both of one lineage and of the other, beginning at the time of Henry IV, the first author of this division, and so successively proceeding to the reign of the high and prudent prince King Henry VIII, the indubitable flower and very heir of both the said lineages’. The events of the fifteenth century were to be fashioned into drama, with Hall’s chapter on Richard’s own reign being titled ‘The Tragical Doings of King Richard the Third’. It was a compelling tale of the Tudor’s inexorable rise, contrasted against the downfall of the houses of Lancaster and York, inspiring William Shakespeare to transform it into blank verse for popular audiences who devoured his history plays, the power of which defined for generations the wider view of what became known in Sir Walter Scott’s famously invented phrase, ‘the Wars of the Roses’.
The reality of Henry Tudor’s ascent to the throne – his narrow escapes from death, his failures and anxieties, complete with constant uncertainty of his situation and the compromises that he had been forced to make, including the support from France and his former Yorkist enemies in gaining the crown – was a far less welcome tale. It remains nonetheless just as remarkable; against all the odds, at Bosworth Henry achieved a victory that he should not have won. For Philippe de Commynes, who had met Henry as a fourteen-year-old when he arrived as an exile at Duke Francis’s court in Brittany in 1471, knowing exactly how Henry, who had told Commynes to his face how he had been a prisoner all his life since the age of five, had ‘suffered much’ having ‘neither money, nor rights, so I believe, to the crown of England, nor any reputation except what his own person and honesty brought him’, there could be no other explanation. Writing his memoirs, Commynes wrote simply, ‘A battle was fought. King Richard was killed on the battlefield and the Earl of Richmond was crowned king of England on the field with Richard’s crown. Should one describe this as Fortune? Surely it was God’s judgement.’
14
BOSWORTH REDISCOVERED
When the blind French poet Bernard André came to describe the events of the Battle of Bosworth in his life of Henry VII, the Vita Henrici Septimi, he quite literally drew a blank. Writing that ‘although I have heard of this battle with my ears’ from men at Henry’s court, he believed that when it came to detailing exactly what had happened, in ‘this business the eye is a surer witness than the ear’. Joking that if this was the case he was hardly best placed to pass comment given his blindness, he declared that he ‘would not be so bold as to affirm the day, the place, and the order of battle, and so I pass this by’. In the place of his description of the battlefield, at least ‘until I am better informed’, André resolved to ‘leave a large blank field on this paper’.
Fortunately for the historian of Bosworth, several fuller accounts of the battle do exist, allowing for a conjectural history of the events of 22 August to be pieced together. The most comprehensive description of the battle comes from Polydore Vergil’s Historia Anglia, first published in print at Basle in 1534, yet Vergil had written his history in manuscript form thirty years before when he was a visitor at Henry’s court, noting how when writing his history, ‘on approaching our own times, I could find no such annals’ so he ‘betook myself to every man of age who was pointed out to me as having been formerly occupied in important and public affairs, and from all such I obtained information about events up to the year 1500’. For the first time this book has returned to this original manuscript, still surviving in the Vatican Library in Rome, to add fresh details to the story.
Vergil can be supplemented by other fifteenth-century narratives such as the ‘Spanish Account’ of the battle, written on 1 March 1486 by Mosen Diego de Valera, in a letter to the Spanish monarchs, Ferdinand and Isabella. Valera was writing from Puerto de Santa Maria, a port inland from the Bay of Cadiz, but he had been inspired to write following the arrival of ‘trustworthy merchants who were in England at the time of the battle’. The identity of the Crowland chronicler, who wrote his account of events in the same year, has been hotly debated; however, it is clear that the author must have had a first-hand view of Richard’s court. Other accounts of the battle can be found in the Great Chronicle of London, written in the late 1490s, as was the Burgundian chronicler Jean Molinet’s description, though this relies heavily on the experience of the French mercenaries fighting on Henry’s side, while two ballads, the ‘Battle of Bosworth Field’ and the ‘Ballad of Lady Bessie’, were likely to have been composed by members of the Stanley affinity, probably before Sir William Stanley’s execution in 1495. These accounts do not provide a definitive detailed version of events; indeed, it can be difficult to reconcile these disparate sources into a single narrative, with each providing their own separate, often conflicting, version of events. The history of what actually happened that day must therefore remain in the hands of the historian’s own judgement, balancing competing claims surrounding the timings of the battle, the movements of both armies, and most controversially, the location of where both sides clashed and victory was won.
How did the battle become known as the Battle of Bosworth? The first mention of the battle as being named as ‘Bosworth’ was not until twenty-five years after the event, mentioned in the manuscript edition of Vergil’s Anglia Historia as being at a place near Leicester ‘Bosworth’. The manuscript of the Great Chronicle of London also observed how Richard ‘came unto a village called Bosworth where in the fields adjoining both hosts met’. But the name Bosworth was first printed in the 1516 edition of Robert Fayban’s New Chronicles; Fabyan, who is thought also to be the author of the Great Chronicle, indicated that the battle had taken place ‘near unto a village in Leicestershire named Bosworth’. Yet in one edition of the work, discovered in the National Library of Scotland by Peter Foss, in the margins next to the account of the battle, a sixteenth century hand has corrected: ‘the battay[le] of Redesmore heath was bytwene K.R. & K.H. th[e] viith’. The anonymous reader of the Chronicle, taking his pen to the margins of the printed work, was only reflect
ing what had long been common knowledge. Indeed it was ‘the field of Redemore’ that was first identified by the city of York as where their king Richard had been ‘murdered’, with the name in various forms appearing in nearly all other contemporary accounts. It was Redemore that contemporaries recognised as the location where the battle had been fought: but what or more importantly where was the field of Redemore?
For most of the past century, especially since Leicestershire County Council established an official Battlefield Centre near the village of Sutton Cheney, it had been assumed that the battle had been fought near Ambion Hill. Over time, successive generations of antiquarians and historians managed to convince themselves that, with topographical features such as ‘King Richard’s Well’ nearby, the fighting had occurred around this location. Yet the first mention of Ambion comes as late as 1577, when the chronicler Raphael Hollinshed stated that Richard had ‘pitched his field on a hill called Anne Beame, refreshed his soldiers, and took his rest’. If Ambion Hill had played a part in the battle, it was clear from the beginning that it was never actually where the battle had been fought.
But if the primary accounts of the battle are not forthcoming in detail as to where the battle was fought, it was evident from some of the earliest attempts to piece together the location of the battlefield that Bosworth was not fought upon Ambion Hill, but rather upon a plain. The notion that the battle was fought on a ‘plain’ comes not from Vergil, but is first found in Hall’s Chronicle, who stated how ‘King Richard, being furnished with men and all habiliments of war, bringing all his men out of their camp into ye plain’. The poet Michael Drayton, born in 1563 at Hartshill, not far from the battle, stated that the armies had fought ‘on a spacious Moore, lying southward from the Towne’, while Sir George Buck, in his History of the Life and Reign of King Richard III, written in 1619 has Richard’s death occurring ‘upon the plain’. But it was the seventeenth-century Leicestershire historian William Burton, who in his Description of Leicestershire published in 1622, was to give the earliest detailed description of where the battle took place. Burton was born in Lindley in 1575 and his family owned the manor of Dadlington from 1585. He wrote that as a child he had heard accounts of actual eyewitnesses to the battle second hand. While the likelihood of this remains slim, Burton must have been able to draw upon local tradition of where the battle was fought, stating how he had constructed his history ‘by relation of the inhabitants, who have many occurrences and passages, yet fresh in memory; by reason, that some persons thereabouts, who saw the battle fought were living within less than forty years: of which persons myself have seen some, and have heard their discourses, though related by second hand’. Burton claimed that the battle had been ‘fought in a large, flat, plain, and spacious ground, three miles distant from this Towne [Market Bosworth], between the Towne of Shenton, Sutton, Dadlington, and Stoke’.
Burton’s own words, depicted as they are with distances in miles in mind, sound like those of someone who had studied a map of the area. Yet the emergence of cartography was to play an important part in shifting perceptions of the battle’s location away from its accepted site at Redemore and instead to up on Ambion Hill. Through subtle, almost unnoticeable changes, Redemore was to become divorced from the battle site, known as ‘King Richard’s Field’. In 1576 Christopher Saxon published the first map of Leicestershire and Warwickshire that showed ‘Kinge Richards feild’ as a pear-shaped area; the map lacks any further detail, yet this was supplied in 1602, when a map of Leicestershire and Rutland was drawn up, with Burton’s assistance, which drew a pear-shaped boundary around what it described as ‘K. Ric: feild’, in the precise location that Burton describes. The field in question is bisected by a tributary of the river Sence, a branch of the Tweed which has its source near Stapleton. Eight years later, however, John Speed’s map of the county made significant changes, separating the area known as ‘Red More’ from ‘Kinge Richards field’, on a separate orientation. Speed clearly shows ‘Redmore’ as taking up only a part of the field, to the north-east of the river, nearer the area around Sutton Cheney.
These subtle changes were to have a significant impact on the ideas of future historians, not least William Hutton, who published his Battle of Bosworth Field, the first book dedicated solely to the battle, in 1788. It was Hutton’s supposedly comprehensive account which would influence historians for centuries to believe that Bosworth had been fought around Ambion, with Hutton himself publishing a plan of the battle that went much further than Speed’s map and pushed the battle site entirely north of the river Sence, imagining the confrontation to take place on Ambion Hill itself, with Hutton himself discounting any evidence that seemed not to fit in with his own designs, declaiming that ‘there neither is, nor ever was’ a marsh, in spite of its almost universal feature in all early accounts of the battle.
For Hutton, describing in detail the terrain as it existed in the late eighteenth century, ‘Redmore Plain’, where the battle had been fought, was to be placed a mile from Market Bosworth, with its name derived ‘from the colour of the soil’. In believing Redemore had been named after its red soil, Hutton was following in a tradition stretching back to the sixteenth-century poet Michael Drayton who used the analogy in his poem ‘Poly-Olbion’ to lament how ‘then it seemed, thy name was not in vain, when with a thousands blood, the earth was coloured red’. Hutton placed Redemore in the parish of Sutton Cheney, with the village lying to its east.
It is rather an oval form, about two miles long, and one broad, and is nearly in a line between Bosworth and Atherstone. The superficial contents may be 1,500 acres, inclosed in a ring fence. Part is waste land, part is grass, and part in tillage. The whole field is uneven. The south end, where Henry approached, is three miles from Bosworth, now a wood of 4 or 500 acres, and is bounded by the above rivulet. About thirty yards above the wood is a spring, called at this day King Richard’s Well. A small discharge of water flows from the well, directly down the hill, through the wood, into the rivulet; but, having no channel cut for its passage, it penetrates through the soil, and forms that morass which Henry is said to have left on his right. Richard left his tents standing, and commanded the troops to rendezvous in Sutton field, about the mid-way to Amyon Hill.
Hutton’s depiction of the battle being fought in the area was embellished further by John Nichols in his Description of Leicestershire, published in 1811, with another detailed map of the formations of Henry and Richard’s battles opposing one another on Ambion Hill, supposedly synonymous with Redemore Plain.
The recent researches of Peter Foss have comprehensively unpicked Hutton’s theory: to begin with, the name Redemore has nothing to do with it being a ‘Red Moor’; instead, the etymology of the word comes from the Anglo-Saxon word for ‘reed’, and is used to describe an area adjacent to wetland. There are references in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries to ‘Redelondes’ and ‘le Redehull’ in the parish of Market Bosworth, yet to locate precisely where Redemore is, we need to go back several centuries to an agreement concerning the allocation of tithes made in the parish of Hinckley, dated 1283. This document refers to ‘six roods of meadow in Redemor in the fields of Dadlington’.
If Redemore should be placed near Dadlington, then we might expect evidence for the battle having been fought around the fields near the village. In particular, an important clue to where the battle took place can often be found in the location where the bodies of the battle dead are buried. Unlike at Towton, no identifiable grave-pits have been discovered, though successive historians have been keen to identify various surrounding tumuli or raised earth as signs of mass graves. Where are the Bosworth dead? Putting aside the most exaggerated claims that 10,000 men were killed, Vergil’s estimate that a thousand were slain on Richard’s side and a hundred on Henry’s seems the most realistic. Nevertheless, the number is sizeable enough that a mark or sign of their burial might have been noted. Some of the more illustrious victims of the battle, such as John, Duke of Norfolk, would
have been taken away from the site to be buried in their family chapels and churches. But the majority would have been buried near the battle itself. Henry gave orders that they should be buried ‘with honour’ at the field itself, with the tradition that the dead should be buried in the parish in which they fell persisting. It is here that the rediscovery of Henry VIII’s signet letter of 1511 and the printed letter of confraternity by the churchwardens of St James’ chapel at Dadlington by Colin Richmond in 1985, provided the crucial evidence that it was at Dadlington that the dead were buried. Henry VIII’s signet letter reveals that St James’ chapel stood ‘upon a parcel of the ground where Bosworth field, otherwise called Dadlington field, in our county of Leicester was done’, while the printed letter of confraternity is insistent that it was at St James’ chapel where ‘the bodies or bones of the men slain in the said field be brought and buried’. Yet whereas Henry VIII had stated that Bosworth Field was known also as ‘Dadlington Field’, the churchwardens seem to have taken little interest in having the battle renamed for their own benefit, preferring instead to keep the battle’s name of Bosworth Field in their letter appealing for alms. Perhaps by 1511 Bosworth had already become the accepted name for the battle.
Bosworth: The Birth of the Tudors Page 46