Tudor_Passion. Manipulation. Murder. the Story of England's Most Notorious Royal Family

by Leanda de Lisle

  It was at Atherstone, later that day, that Henry at last met his stepfather, Lord Stanley. They shook hands and discussed their battle plans, although it remained to be seen whether they would be carried out. Meanwhile, Richard III had left the ancient city of Leicester that morning, riding with his army though its narrow streets of timber-framed houses ‘with great triumph and pomp’.13 The rich reds and blues of the royal standards, the glint of his crown and the drama of the trumpets provided one of the greatest spectacles the town had ever seen. Although there had been some desertions from Richard’s army he gained supporters with this impressive display. From Leicester Richard proceeded ‘until he come unto a village called Bosworth’, his vanguard arrayed along the brow of the hill so his army could be seen for miles, giving ‘a terror of the multitude’.14 He then made camp for the night.

  The next day, the Great Chronicle of London recalls, ‘in the fields adjoining, both hosts met.’15 Where exactly these fields were has long been a subject of debate. The earliest sources refer to the battlefield of Redemore, rather than Bosworth. The story became that the battle took place on Ambion Hill near Sutton Cheney, but it is now believed Redemore refers to marshland near the smaller villages of Dadlington and Stoke Golding, just south of Bosworth. Recent archaeology has found more cannonballs here than across all the medieval battlefields of Europe, as well as twenty-two pieces of lead shot from hand-held guns. The personal artefacts found include belt buckles and spurs, but most dramatic of all, dug out of the ground after 500 years – and the item that pinpoints the battle – is a silver gilt badge, an inch and a half across, of a white boar: the insignia of Richard III, worn by his knights.

  The ordinary soldier in Richard III’s army was used to physical work and most were well fed. They varied in age from around seventeen to their mid-fifties. An Italian visitor to England described them as huge men, with ‘hands and arms of iron’, their bows ‘thicker and longer than those used by other nations, just as their bodies are stronger’. They did not have the fitted plate armour of the knights but wore quilted tunics, which they claimed to prefer, being lighter and more comfortable. Most had helmets, however, and all had bows and arrows, as well as a sword and shield.16 But for all their strength and training, the English at Bosworth were not professional soldiers of the kind found on the Continent. Henry was fortunate to have brought some of these from France. Nevertheless, he remained badly outnumbered and as Henry looked towards Stanley’s force for reassurance he was horrified to see his stepfather placing his men equidistant from the two armies. He sent a message asking Stanley to redeploy his men in the form they had agreed. The reply came that ‘the Earl [of Richmond – i.e. Henry] should put his own folks in order’. Understandably ‘vexed’ and ‘appalled’ by this response Henry was obliged to ‘make a slender vanguard for the smaller number of his people’.17

  Richard’s army had kept the high ground and looking down the hill the king could see Henry Tudor’s men circling the marsh. Richard cut a striking figure on the skyline, with his surcoat bearing the royal arms and his battle crown on his helmet. But he was grim-faced. He had slept badly and Mass had been delayed, for ‘when his chaplain had one thing ready evermore they wanted another, when they had wine they lacked bread’.18 There had been no time for breakfast and, like his opponent, he was fearful of betrayal. One sixteenth-century account, only slightly altered by Shakespeare in Richard III, records how Richard’s ally John, Duke of Norfolk, woke to find a piece of doggerel pinned to his gate. It warned, ‘Jack of Norfolk be not too bold/For Dickon thy master is bought and sold.’19 And who was likely to sell out Richard for Henry’s shilling? Clearly the Stanleys could not be relied on, but there was also a question mark over Henry Percy, Earl of Northumberland. The earl had been raised with Henry as another of William Herbert’s wards, and after Henry went into exile he had married Maude Herbert, the daughter that had been earmarked for Henry.20 He had proved loyal to Edward IV, but he had dragged his responsibilities in mustering the northern levies for Richard. Less than a week earlier the loyal citizens of York had still been begging to learn the king’s military requirements.

  The battle was heralded with an opening shower of arrows. Then, Richard ordered Norfolk to attack and:

  They countered together sad and sore

  Archers they let sharp arrows fly

  They shot guns both fell and far

  Bows of yew bended did be,

  Springals sped them speedily.21

  Henry Tudor’s general, the Earl of Oxford, had placed his men in a wedge formation that withstood Norfolk’s charge. Fierce hand-to-hand fighting followed in which Norfolk fell, either killed outright or captured and executed shortly afterwards. Also likely to have been among those who died at this point was Thomas Longe of Ashwelthorpe, Norfolk, who like many ordinary soldiers had prepared to do battle for his king by writing a will. As he left home he had declared himself ‘willing to die as a child of the church, the said day and time, doing forth unto the king’s host’.22

  The advantage of numbers was still with Richard and in the slow hammering of medieval warfare this was important, yet there remained a risk of treachery. Stanley and Northumberland had not yet engaged, but from his viewpoint on the hill Richard now spotted a means of ending the battle quickly, and in his favour. Henry was riding under his standard with only a small number of bodyguards. Richard realised if he could reach and kill Henry the battle would be over, and, characteristically, he decided to seize his opportunity. ‘This day I will die as king or win’, he told one his commanders.23

  As Richard’s cavalry thundered down the hill, standards streaming, Henry looked up and saw the crowned figure of the king galloping towards him ‘like a hungry lion’, battleaxe in hand.24 As Henry dismounted his bodyguards surrounded him, while his professional pikemen and other foot soldiers formed a defensive position in front. When Richard’s charge hit, the force of it was so great that a lance pierced through Henry’s standard-bearer, Sir William Brandon, and snapped in half. The Dragon standard fell. But Henry’s pikemen held their ground, their weapons piercing the charging horses. Richard and a trusted group of men began cutting their way on foot towards Henry. Bills, axes and swords replaced pikes in the hand-to-hand fighting. As the two sides hacked and slashed at each other, however, they became aware of the rumble of more cavalry bearing down on them. Henry’s guard was on the point of despair when a glimpse of red coat told them it was Sir William Stanley’s ‘tall men’. He too had decided to seize the opportunity to bring the battle to a close – by killing Richard. The king’s only hope was to escape the field and fight another day.

  According to a Burgundian account, Richard’s horse foundered in the marsh and fell. Shakespeare has Richard calling out ‘A horse! A horse! My kingdom for a horse!’ But with the king unable to escape, the sources attest that Richard was determined not to surrender, and shouting ‘Treason! Treason! Treason!’ he continued to fight his way towards his rival.25 Henry’s guard, Sir John Cheyne, threw himself in front of Richard, but was knocked out of the way as the king cut his way forward. Meanwhile Sir William’s men were killing Richard’s bodyguard. The royal standard-bearer Sir Percival Thirlwall had his legs severed from under him, and one by one the king’s men all fell. It was at the marsh of Fen Hole, in a field behind what is now Fen Lane Farm that the badge of the white boar was found. Eventually Richard ‘fighting manfully in the middle of his enemies was slain’.26 The Burgundian chronicler claims it was a Welshman armed with a pike fitted with an axe, known as a halberd, who took King Richard’s life.27 Others joined him in striking the king’s body, smashing his skull, ‘until the brain came out with blood’.28 The body of Richard found in Leicester has a massive injury to the skull that would have exposed the brain and is consistent with a blow from a halberd.

  As the news of Richard’s death spread, Norfolk’s men fled the field with Lord Stanley’s in pursuit. Northumberland’s men, who had never engaged in the battle, simply rode away. Henry
Tudor, ‘replenished with joy’, rode up the nearest hill. With soldiers and nobles gathered around, he thanked God for his victory and them for their aid, ‘promising that he would be mindful of their benefits’. The men in turn shouted ‘God save King Henry! God save King Henry!’ Their cries inspired Sir William Stanley to fetch Richard’s battle crown, though it was not caught in a hawthorn bush as myth now has it. The Tudor heraldic device of the hawthorn was an ancient biblical symbol of renewal and would be used by Henry to represent the rebirth of the House of Lancaster and of Cadwaladr. The crown of the last Yorkist king was found amongst the ‘spoils of the field’ lying scattered on the ground. Sir William placed it on Henry’s head saying ‘Sir I make you King of England.’29

  The last Plantagenet king continued to be stripped until, with ‘his body despoiled to the skin, and nought being left about him, so much as would cover his privy member’, he was tied on to a horse like ‘an hog or another vile beast’. In this manner, and with his hair dangling down, Richard was taken to Leicester behind a junior officer of arms called Norrey. Just ‘as gloriously as he by the morning departed from that town, so as irreverently he was that afternoon brought into that town’, a chronicler recalled.30 One of the further injuries discovered on the Leicester bones indicates that he was stabbed through the buttocks, into the pelvis, most likely while he was tied to the horse. His corpse, caked in mud and blood, was to be left exposed to public view for two days, then covered from the waist down with a ‘black cloth of poor quality’.31 Notably, his face had been left largely unmarked.

  The killings of the Wars of the Roses spared no one’s dignity. Descriptions of Richard III’s death resemble those of Warwick the Kingmaker: fighting in the midst of his enemies, suggestions of a blocked escape, and a stripped corpse. That Richard’s body was beaten and stabbed after death is also not untypical of the period. The excavated bones of the soldiers killed at Towton in 1461 have revealed similar levels of brutality with skulls shattered and limbs smashed in an orgy of violence. Richard was buried without ceremony at the church of the Greyfriars, where excavations in 2012 uncovered his body. Sir William Stanley was given his pick of Richard’s possessions and chose tapestries from the royal tent. Henry made a more personal choice for his mother: Richard’s beautifully illuminated Book of Hours. The dead king had adapted an early fifteenth-century prayer to beg Christ ‘to free me thy servant King Richard from all the tribulations, grief and anguish in which I am held, and from all the snares of my enemies’.32 It seemed God had turned His back on Richard. But Henry’s position was still far from secure.

  In York, the capital of the north, they mourned King Richard, ‘piteously slain and murdered to the great heaviness of this city’.33 In Coventry the City Annals also record with disgust how ‘King Richard . . . was shamefully carried to Leicester.’34 They were obliged to welcome Henry Tudor that night, nevertheless. He stayed at the house of the mayor, who saw to it that Henry received a gift from the city merchants of £100, and that his men had the provisions they demanded. Over a hundred gallons of red wine were consumed during the celebrations of Henry’s army, but notably only about four and a half gallons of ale. Henry had been raised with a preference for claret over English beer, as had many of the foreign troops with him. He was a stranger in this country, at the head of an invading army, with no experience even of managing a nobleman’s estate, let alone the kingdom he now held.

  9

  THE ROSE AND THE PASSION

  ON THE BANKS OF THE THAMES, VAST WOODEN CRANES UNLOADED merchandise from the arriving ships, while London’s streets jostled with people of every rank.1 One described England’s capital as a town of sharp eyes, silver tongues and barely suppressed violence.2 When the news that Richard III was dead reached London two days after the battle, the mayor feared it could trigger a free-for-all in the settling of scores. He promptly instituted a curfew while a proclamation threatened immediate jail for those who broke it, or committed any other offence. Plans also began to be laid for the official welcome for England’s new ruler.

  During twenty-five years of turmoil Londoners had become accustomed to preparing a welcome for the victor of the latest struggle, whoever it was. Yet never had a victor been so obscure. A merchant from Danzig, who regularly visited England, learned that he was called ‘King Richmond’, and was somehow ‘related to Harry’ VI.3 Others knew his name was Tudor only because Richard III had described him as the grandchild of one ‘Owen Tudor, bastard born’. Obscurity had its advantages, however. The dubious nature of Henry’s Lancastrian claim and the help his invasion had enjoyed from the hated French were potentially embarrassing. He did not want such details exposed now the adventures of his youth were over and the hard business of holding on to power had begun.

  Henry’s mother sent him the appropriate velvets and silks for his official entry into London and when he arrived with his army north of the City at Shoreditch in early September he was richly dressed, as Edward V had been as he entered London two years earlier.4 As then, too, hundreds of London’s official representatives were waiting, splendidly arrayed in scarlet gowns, and others of tawny and the bright purple-red called ‘murrey’. The Spanish merchants in the city reported that the strain of Henry’s exile was etched on his face, and he looked older than his twenty-eight years. Nevertheless he was judged ‘of pleasing countenance and physique’.5 Henry listened as Latin verses were read celebrating his return to the city he had not seen since he was thirteen. The man who delivered them was French and it is probable he was hand-picked for the task: Henry still didn’t like surprises. The waiting officials then gave Henry a bag of gold raised from local taxes and he thanked them before riding on with his army, trumpets blowing, and the spoils of battle displayed. At the great medieval church of St Paul’s Henry offered his three standards at the altar: the Cross of St George, the Red Dragon Dreadful, and the Dun Cow. He gave thanks to God and the Virgin for his victory and the great hymn of thanks, the ‘Te Deum’, was sung:

  To thee all Angels cry aloud:

  the Heavens, and all the Powers therein.

  To thee Cherubim and Seraphim:

  continually do cry,

  Holy, Holy, Holy:

  Lord God of Sabaoth;

  Heaven and earth are full of the Majesty:

  of thy glory.

  Henry’s mother, who had only spent weeks with her son since he was five, was reunited joyfully with him while he rested in the house of the Bishop of London.6 But they were not to stay in the capital for long. The sense of uncertainty and danger following the killing of Richard III was heightened by the sudden outbreak of a new, virulent disease. It struck only two weeks after Henry entered the city, and was probably brought by his army. It came to be known as the ‘sweating sickness’. Like the Spanish flu that swept the world in 1918, ‘the sweat’ could take the life of a healthy adult in a single day. Victims would develop cold shivers, giddiness, headache and severe pains in the neck, shoulders and limbs. Later came heat and sweating, headache, delirium, a rapid pulse and intense thirst. Palpitations and pains in the heart ended in exhaustion and death. The sweat killed the mayor only a month after Henry’s arrival, and a week after that the mayor’s replacement had also succumbed.7

  Henry and Margaret left London for her house at Woking where they had last been together before Henry’s exile. Henry loved its gardens and orchards but there was little time that September for reflection and relaxation. He had to take practical measures to secure his position and he needed his mother’s advice on a kingdom he knew little about. One of Henry’s first actions was to grant Margaret the Palace of Coldharbour in London. There she was to take care of Edward Plantagenet, Earl of Warwick, the ten-year-old son of the executed Duke of Clarence. Even before Henry left the Midlands for London, he had ensured that this boy, the last male Plantagenet, was under lock and key in the Tower. Little Edward Plantagenet must have been in fear for his life. Not only had his father died there, drowned in that infamous barrel of Malmsey
wine, the fate of the princes in the Tower still remained a mystery, and one it was evident Henry was in no hurry to solve.

  It is possible Henry feared that an investigation into the disappearance of the princes would draw attention to the role of his former ally, Buckingham, or someone else close to his cause. What is certain, however, is that like Richard III, Henry had good reasons for wishing to forestall a cult of the princes. It would not have been wise to allow Yorkist royal saints to compete with the memory of Henry VI, whose cult the Tudor king wished to encourage. Any focus on the princes would also inevitably remind people of the continued strength of the Yorkist claim to the throne represented by Edward Plantagenet and Edward IV’s daughters. Nothing was to be said of the princes’ disappearance, beyond the vague accusation in Parliament later that autumn that Richard III was guilty of ‘treasons, homicides and murders in shedding of infants’ blood’.8

  Henry ordered that Edward Plantagenet should be moved from the Tower to Margaret Beaufort’s custody, hoping that eventually the boy would be married to a close ally or relative, as his sister would be. Margaret Beaufort was also to care for Henry’s future bride, Elizabeth of York. In order to accommodate them in suitably grand style, Margaret began alterations on Coldharbour almost immediately, with some of the best rooms being made ready for the princess. Henry was in no hurry, however, to fulfil his promise to the Yorkists to marry her. He feared being seen as a mere king consort, and intended to be crowned alone to make it clear that he was king in his own right, as his Lancastrian allies had suggested to him in France. Henry had the perfect excuse for the delay: he needed a papal dispensation to marry the princess since she was a kinswoman. This would take months to arrive, and the coronation ceremonies were planned for October.