Other letters were sent in haste upon Tudor’s arrival. An early manuscript version of Polydore Vergil’s history indicates that Henry sent Christopher Urswick to Thomas Stanley and his mother, Margaret Beaufort, then residing in Lathom Castle, with additional messages for Sir William Stanley, Gilbert Talbot ‘and many others’ that he intended to cross into England through Shropshire, with instructions that ‘they should tell others, how they could meet him on the way, when, at a suitable place and time, he would communicate to them more of his intentions’.26 Arriving at Shrewsbury, Henry had initially been refused entry into the town by its bailiff, Thomas Mitton. Yet, overnight, Mitton suddenly changed his mind: it seems that the influence of Sir William Stanley, sending messages to the town to open its gates, had been the deciding factor. Sir William, by now declared a traitor by Richard, had nothing to lose in declaring his support for Henry. Unlike his elder brother, Lord Thomas, still fearful that any open gesture of support for Richard could lead to his imprisoned son’s death, William and his armed force marched to Stone, where he met Henry, offering his support, but refused to join with his army for the moment. Sir William then departed for Lichfield, where he seems to have been instrumental in organising the welcome reception for Henry on his arrival the following day. Instead Sir William rejoined his brother Thomas, the Stanley army stationing itself on the Warwickshire border near Atherstone, where it could legitimately claim to be guarding Watling Street from a rebel advance, blocking the road to London, and locating itself at the point where Richard, moving down from Nottingham, would seek to intercept Tudor’s army. If Henry had hoped for the Stanleys’ support at this stage, their determination to remain resolutely independent must have come as a disappointment. Henry’s anxiety was further heightened when he heard that Richard ‘was approaching with an innumerable army’.27 It seems that his nerve almost failed him; one evening, with twenty armed men, he departed from his army as they journeyed to Tamworth, spending the night alone. When Henry returned to his army the following dawn, he claimed that he had got lost by accident; his men must have feared that, having been deserted by their leader before and stranded in Brittany while Henry escaped to France, once more they had been left alone to their fate.
Meanwhile, arriving at Leicester, Richard would have discovered the news that Rhys ap Thomas, one of the Welshmen in whom he placed so much trust, had in fact defected to Henry, bringing with him 1,500 mounted cavalry. Gilbert Talbot, an uncle of the young earl of Shrewsbury, had also joined Tudor’s forces, bringing with him 500 men. Sir Robert Brackenbury arrived with further bad news. As his force travelled up from London, after it had passed Stony Stratford the gentlemen he had been given the task of bringing to the battle, including Walter Hungerford and Thomas Bourchier, ‘perceiving that Richard had no trust in them because they would not be brought to the enemy against their will’, managed to desert his camp during the night. That was the story that Brackenbury at least was prepared to tell the king. The Great Chronicle gives a different account, describing how the men had ‘held good countenance’ with Brackenbury, who had ‘for many of them done right kindly’. It seems that Brackenbury was powerless to prevent their departure, or at the least did little to oppose the desertion, for ‘many gentlemen’ simply ‘took their leave of him’, though before their departure they gave him ‘thanks for his kindness before showed, and exhorted him to go with them, for they feared not to show unto him that they would go unto that other party’. Once they had departed, the chronicler wrote, Brackenbury ‘lost much of his people’, and was left ‘almost alone’.28 Other men, including John Savage, Brian Sandford and Simon Digby, were also missing, while two days previously Richard’s sheriff for Leicestershire and Warwickshire, Richard Boughton, was killed. It seems that he may have been caught in a skirmish with Stanley’s forces on their march into the region.
Richard could no longer afford any further delay. He had been informed by his scouts ‘where the enemy most probably intended to spend the next night’, eight miles away, near Merevale Abbey on the Warwickshire border, close to Watling Street.29 On Sunday, 21 August, the king led his army out of Leicester. The Crowland chronicler wrote how Richard departed ‘amid the greatest pomp, wearing his diadem on his head, and accompanied by John Howard, duke of Norfolk, and Henry Percy, earl of Northumberland, and other great lords, knights and esquires and a countless multitude of commoners’.30
Marching west, Richard’s army would have passed nearby the unfinished brick country residence at Kirby Muxloe that William, Lord Hastings, had been building before his execution, as they rode in the direction towards Market Bosworth. Two years earlier, in August 1483, Richard had ridden across the same terrain in the opposite direction, on his summer progress from Warwick to Leicester. Richard’s memories of the area, however, were more likely to have been scarred by the treason of the lord of the manor, John Harcourt, who had joined the rebellion in October 1483, before fleeing overseas with his son Robert. Richard had instead granted the manor to Sir Marmaduke Constable, who cannot have been anything other than an absentee landlord, yet whose own agents may have been able to provide information about the terrain and best location to pitch camp later that evening. The chosen location to rest was at the base of a tongue of high ground several hundred feet above sea level known as Ambion Hill, named after an Anglo-Saxon settlement long disappeared.
After setting up camp, pitching their tents on the surroundings of Ambion Hill stretching down to the nearby village of Sutton Cheyney, Richard’s forces were allowed to refresh themselves from their march, while the king himself took the opportunity and ‘revived his men and with many words exhorted them to the coming battle’.31 As the night sky darkened, they would have been able to discern the flickering lights of campfires in the distance: a sign that Tudor’s army, and their final confrontation with the enemy, was not far away. Richard retired to his tent early, taking with him his Book of Hours for comfort and consolation, with its prayers for the king to be delivered from his enemies, calling on Christ to ‘defend me from all evil and from my evil enemy … and free me from all tribulations, griefs and anguishes which I face’, never so relevant as it was now.
Outside, in the king’s camp, the mood remained uncertain, as anxiety about the fate of the following day’s battle began to grow amid the darkening night sky. Rumours would later circulate of the king’s own crown being stolen that evening by a Scottish highlander called MacGregor, and though it was hastily retrieved, later that evening it was reported that the duke of Norfolk found pinned to his tent a verse, warning: ‘Jack of Norfolk be not so bold, For Dickon thy master is bought and sold’.32
Whether these words, recorded in the sixteenth century history of Edward Hall, were ever written or not, they reflect the dilemma that must have been faced by thousands of men camping in the fields surrounding Ambion Hill that night. In their strength of numbers alone, it seemed that their king would surely defeat the rebel forces of Henry Tudor. Some may have considered it their duty to defend their kingdom against the assault of what must have seemed to many nothing less than a French-backed invasion. Others, like Thomas Longe, considered it their Christian duty to defend their anointed king, even if it meant they might die ‘as a child of the church’. Yet many would have felt the same as Roger Wake, faced with no other choice but to fight on the king’s side, ‘upon pain of forfeiture of his life’, or Geoffrey St German, ‘so manashed’ by Richard’s threatening letters that he attended upon the king ‘full sore against his will’.33
Among the thousands of men settling down to sleep that night, news of defections must have already reached them: anxiously, they awaited the morning uncertain whether the Stanleys and their own powerful army would be ranged on their side, or against them. Not since the last major battles of the civil wars, wounds that many had assumed long healed, did the future of the nation seem so uncertain; yet the passage of fourteen years meant that many men would have been untried and untested in the heat of battle. Then, at the fields o
f Barnet and Tewkesbury, men had at least been faced with a clear choice: to return to the hapless Lancastrian rule of Henry VI, or retain their faith in the certainty of the dynamic kingship of Edward IV. Now the future was far less certain. Richard III may have been crowned their king, but how many genuinely believed that his right to rule had been ordained by God? He had ruled for just over two years, during which time the kingdom had been beset by rebellion, leaving the realm plagued by instability; the king’s only son and heir had died suddenly, while only recently his wife too had succumbed to a mystery illness. It did not appear that divine favour, at least, was on Richard’s side. Publicly, their king had been forced to deny rumours that he planned to marry his own niece; still, it could not be denied that with Richard as king, childless and without a wife, the Yorkist dynasty hung by a thread.
If God brought victory to the king the following day, many must have been uncertain about what the future of that victory would mean for them and their country. For Richard’s favoured councillors and followers, they at least could count upon their king’s continued support. For the rest of the nation, the king’s determination to place his trust in his northern supporters at the expense of the traditional local frameworks of government indicated that they would continue to be ruled by a king who could not shake off his sympathies as a northern overlord. Richard had won his kingship through the influence and strength that his northern hegemony and power had given him; yet to have done so had begun to erode his ability to rule on behalf of the whole kingdom. Obliged to reward his own supporters, he was unable to secure the full support of the realm. Richard was duty bound to ensure their own ambitions were fulfilled, yet even this was something he had been unable to achieve. Failed promises to initial supporters of his regime, noblemen such as the earl of Northumberland or Ralph Neville, the earl of Westmorland, who had hoped that Richard’s elevation to the kingship would have guaranteed a greater role for themselves in the north, now cast doubt on their loyalties.
For a king whose motto translated as ‘loyalty binds me’, Richard now found himself in a spiralling descent, bound by the loyalties that he owed his supporters, or at least loyalties that men such as Northumberland believed that they were owed. The more his supporters were rewarded, the less others considered the king’s loyalty lay with them. Epitomised by the ballad of the ill-fated William Collingborne was the belief that the king was being ruled by his own councillors, Sir Richard Ratcliffe, ‘the Rat’, and William Catesby, ‘the Cat’. Richard, it seemed, was increasingly making the same mistake as his brother Edward had done.
For the past two years, Richard’s own reign had stalled, beset by the threat of rebellion posed by Henry Tudor. Tudor’s threat should have been weak: just as both his claim to the throne and the number of men at his command were weak. But it is testament to Richard’s own weakness as king that Tudor could even be considered a credible alternative to the throne. Foreign alliances and skilful diplomacy could have seen Tudor alienated as a mere pretender; instead Richard’s threats of war on two fronts, against both France and Scotland, propelled Tudor’s claim to be taken seriously to the point that it was given legitimacy and financial backing by the French.
Still, the defeat of his enemies the following morning would at least grant Richard the legitimacy that he ultimately craved, demonstrating that God’s blessing, at last, was upon him. What the future held for his reign, no one could be clear; all that mattered lay in the present, and in victory.
21
‘AN END EITHER OF WARS OR OF HIS LIFE’
During the night, as the hours slowly went by, Richard could barely sleep, suffering from a ‘terrible dream’. The Crowland chronicler claimed that Richard himself in the morning ‘declared that during the night he had seen dreadful visions, and had imagined himself surrounded by a multitude of demons’.1 Vergil wrote how the king had ‘reported his dream to many in the morning’, that ‘he thought in his sleep to see about him horrible images appearing as if they were evil demons and they would not let him rest’. For those who were able to catch sight of the king early that morning, he seemed not to be himself; the Crowland chronicler described how Richard ‘presented a countenance which, always drawn, was on this occasion more livid and ghastly than usual’. Vergil believed the dream had filled Richard ‘with anxious cares. For immediately after, being troubled in spirit, indeed he presaged a sorrowful outcome for the coming battle, not having the spirit or appearance of eagerness with which before he had looked forward to it.’2
To add to Richard’s woes, the Crowland chronicler reported how ‘at day-break … there were no chaplains present to perform Divine service on behalf of king Richard, nor any breakfast prepared to refresh the flagging spirits of the king’. Ralph Bigod, serving as the king’s Master of the Ordnance, recalled years later how ‘king Richard called in the morning for to have had mass said before him, but when his chaplain had one thing ready, evermore they wanted another, when they had wine they lacked bread, and ever one thing was missing’.3 Still there was time for Richard to make one last rallying cry. He addressed his troops, asserting according to the Crowland chronicler that ‘the outcome of this day’s battle, to whichever side the victory was granted, would be the utter destruction of the kingdom of England’, declaring that it was his intention, ‘if he proved the victor, to crush all the traitors on the opposing side’, while he predicted that Tudor ‘would do the same to the supporters of his party, if victory should fall to him’.4
The Scottish chronicler Pittscottie described how Richard sent for his crown from his royal tent, and in the presence of several lords and the bishop of Dunkeld had it placed upon his head in some form of ceremony. Richard’s possession of the crown seems to have struck writers such as John Rous, who observed how the king had ‘with him the crown itself, together with a great mass of treasure’. The spectacle of the king’s troops preparing for battle was an impressive sight. Later it would be described how Richard’s host had been assembled ‘with banners spread, mightily armed and defenced with all manner of arms, as guns, bows, arrows, spears, glaives, axes, and all other manner of articles apt or needful to give and cause mighty battle’. An observer encamped with the Stanleys on a nearby hill wrote how, overlooking the king’s army, they could see little else but for ‘armed men and trapped steeds’ arranged into three battles.5 One hundred and forty serpentines were chained together, locked into a row, ‘and as many bombards, and thousands of morice pikes, hackbushes’.6
The king’s army was described as ‘a line of battle of remarkable length, and closely packed with infantry and cavalry, so that from afar it would strike terror in the beholders because of the great number of armed men’. In front of the line of infantry, Richard placed his archers, ‘like a well-fortified rampart’, under the command of the duke of Norfolk who led the vanguard, together with Sir Robert Brackenbury. Richard, with the ‘chosen cream of the soldiers’, followed behind this ‘long battle-line’, while placed behind the king was his rearguard, to be led by the earl of Northumberland, commanding several thousand men.7 As his army assembled at the base of Ambion Hill, Richard had taken good advantage of his position to place it on the higher ground. In front of them, a plain land stretched out, punctuated by a solitary windmill. Several rivers ran across the landscape, acting as a defence to any attack from the south, while a large marshy area known locally as ‘Redemore’ stretched out alongside the road that led to Witherley and Mancetter, where his scouts had informed him that Henry Tudor and his army had camped the previous night. To Richard’s left, the villages of Dadlington and Stoke clung to the upland ridge of land that framed the landscape, with the spire of the church at Stoke, St Margaret of Antioch, in the distance, overlooking the basin of the chosen site for battle. In the growing light of dawn, Richard and his troops waited, knowing Tudor’s advance to be imminent.
Henry and his forces had already been camped in the area for several days, causing significant disruption to the surrounding fields that were fl
attened to make way for the soldiers’ camp. Henry’s arrival at Atherstone had been marked with welcome news. Not only had Walter Hungerford and Thomas Bourgchier managed to join his camp ‘and bound themselves to his faith’, but Henry had discovered that both the Stanley brothers were encamped near Merevale Abbey. Henry arrived at the abbey to find both William and Thomas, Lord Stanley, ready to welcome him; ‘taking each by the hand’, Henry was overjoyed to discover that both brothers were now willing to join his forces. The following day, Henry met with the Stanley brothers again, where they ‘disputed between them how to attack the enemy whom they had heard was not far away’. After vespers that evening, Sunday, 21 August, the arrival of John Savage, renowned as ‘an excellent warrior’, Brian Sandford and Simon Digby, ‘and many others defecting from Richard’, brought Henry further hope for the battle.8
With the support of the Stanleys, themselves commanding over 6,000 men, everything seemed to be falling finally into place. Henry and his forces had moved from their previous encampment at Witherley, and had camped close by to Richard’s forces. As the sky was ‘barely growing light’, waking the camp, Henry had given the order for his soldiers to arm. He then sent messengers to Thomas Stanley that ‘he should approach with his forces putting them in battle-order’. If Henry had hoped that Stanley would deliver the men he had promised only the previous day, he was to be disappointed. Thomas, Lord Stanley, he was informed, was prepared to ‘lead his men into the line of battle when he himself was present with his army drawn up’, but not before, and certainly was not prepared at this moment to join his own forces with Tudor’s. Once more Henry’s anxieties were heightened; maybe Stanley would, as his past history had shown, sit out the battle altogether.
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