The Life and Times of Richard III

by Anthony Cheetham

  Treason was in the air. In an atmosphere of deepening mistrust and suspicion Richard gave out fresh proclamations against his rival’s claims, renewed the commissions of array first issued in May, and authorised the commissioners to summon ‘the knights, squires and gentlemen within the said counties, and know from them what number of people, defensibly arrayed, every of them severally will bring at half a day’s warning, if any sudden arrival fortune of the King’s rebels and traitors’. Harwich was reinforced with a strong royal garrison, and the faithful Sir James Tyrell was sent across the Channel to assume command of the castle of Guisnes. To preserve an outward façade of strength and confidence, Christmas was celebrated at Westminster with the magnificence of a second coronation. But behind the show of ‘dancing and gaiety and many vain changes of apparel’, Richard was champing for action. The strain of waiting was beginning to affect his purse as well as his nerve. The careful administration of the royal estates covered the normal expenses of his household in peace time: but it could not generate the huge sums of ready cash needed to maintain a permanent state of military alert.

  The best news that reached Richard at Christmas 1484, came from his agents in France: the Lancastrian invasion was definitely scheduled for the following summer. At last the issue would be decided one way or the other.

  Early in March 1485 another personal tragedy put a potent psychological weapon into Henry Tudor’s hands. Queen Anne was dying, wasted by a disease her doctors declared to be mortal and highly infectious. On the 16th, ‘upon the day of the great eclipse of the sun, Queen Anne departed this life and was buried at Westminster with no less honours than befitted the interment of a queen’. The rumour-mongers lost no time in getting to work: Richard himself was said to have poisoned the Queen who could bear him no more children. Worse still, he now planned to gratify an incestuous passion for his niece, Elizabeth of York. Such a marriage would, of course, have scuppered Henry’s prospects. But it made no sense for Richard to marry the lady himself. His own claims to the throne were founded on the theory that all Edward IV’s children were bastards. But the rumours stuck. Had the King not equipped his niece with gowns as magnificent as the Queen’s during the recent Christmas festivities, and avoided his wife’s bedside as she lay dying? Henry’s supporters were probably genuinely frightened that the match might take place, and did all in their power to promote the scandal as a means of preventing it. Even the faithful Cat and Rat were persuaded to subscribe to the rumours, and bluntly informed their master that the country – particularly the North – would not stand for it. Twelve doctors of divinity were paraded to tell Richard that the Pope would not grant him the necessary dispensation. By these tactics the King was eventually manœuvred into making the public denial the Lancastrians were hoping for. At the Hospital of the Knights of St John, in Clerkenwell, the Mayor and Aldermen heard from the King’s own lips that the marriage had never crossed his mind. At the same time he wrote to the Mayor of York advising him to pay no heed to the ‘divers seditious and evilly disposed persons’ who ‘enforce themselves daily to sow seeds of noise and slander against our person’.

  Those evilly-disposed persons were doubtless also complaining loudly of Richard’s financial exactions. The treasure bequeathed by Edward IV had all been spent in the suppression of Buckingham’s rebellion and in the preparations of the previous summer. A pliant Parliament could usually be cajoled into granting a subsidy, but such taxes took a long time to collect. There was no alternative but to revert to the benevolences which caused so much unfavourable comment in Edward’s day. Since Richard had gone out of his way to condemn benevolences in Parliament only twelve months before, their renewal caused widespread resentment. Nevertheless, between February and April his commissioners managed to scrape together some £20,000.

  The great guessing game was about to begin. Where would Henry land and when would he come? Richard was not inclined to take any chances, and in June he once again took up his watch at the castle of Nottingham. His most able lieutenants were disposed in a great area covering the coasts from Essex to North Wales. The south-east was entrusted to Norfolk and his son the Earl of Surrey. Sir Robert Brackenbury, Constable of the Tower, took charge of London’s defences. In Southampton harbour a well-equipped naval squadron lay at Viscount Lovell’s command. The Tudors’ family connections with South Wales and the lordship of Pembroke called for special defences in that area. William Herbert, Earl of Huntingdon, held Carmarthen and Brecon; Richard Williams held the strongholds of Pembroke, Tenby and Haverfordwest; and James Tyrell’s men garrisoned Builth and Llandovery. On the adjoining hills beacons were laid, ready to flash across the valleys the news of Henry’s coming.

  On 22 June Richard put his commissioners of array on special alert. ‘In all haste possible’ they were to ‘review the soldiers late mustered, and see that they be able persons well horsed and harnessed to do the King service, and if they be not, to put other able men in their places.’ They were to be ready to move at an hour’s warning ‘upon peril of losing their lives, lands and goods’. At the same time the propaganda war was stepped up with another proclamation: the Lancastrian rebels were in the pocket of the King’s ancient enemies, the French to whom they had pledged the towns of Calais, Guisnes and Hammes. Their leader was one Henry Tudor, of bastard blood on his mother’s side as on his father’s. If his cause prospered, this same Henry planned to strip the King’s subjects bare in order to reward the traitors, adulterers and extortioners who followed him.

  Despite these energetic preparations, Richard knew well that the issue could turn on the loyalty of a few men in high places. One such man was Thomas, Lord Stanley, who sought the King’s permission in July to visit his family in Lancashire. As Steward of Richard’s Household, Stanley had spent the best part of the last two years at the King’s side, and was associated with him in all the principal acts of his reign. But he was also married to Henry Tudor’s mother, Margaret Beaufort, the Countess of Richmond. It was an awkward dilemma: assent – and risk that Stanley would lead his three thousand Lancashiremen to Henry’s camp; deny – and risk a mortal insult to the man who had taken Richard’s part against his own Countess in 1483. Never at his best when it came to diplomacy, Richard settled on a compromise which invited both the treason and the insult. Stanley was allowed to go, providing he sent his eldest son, Lord Strange, to Nottingham in his place.

  The waiting was now almost done. On 24 July informants brought word from France that the Tudor was making ready to embark at Harfleur. The Master of Rolls was quickly sent to London to fetch the Great Seal of England. On the same day that the Seal was delivered to the King at Nottingham, the rebel ships slipped their moorings and hoisted sail for the Welsh coast.

  7

  Bosworth

  1484–5

  With the help of fair weather and ‘a soft southern wind’, Henry Tudor, Earl of Richmond landed at Milford Haven in the county of Pembroke at sunset on 7 August. Nearly half of his twenty-six years had been spent in exile. It was his first visit to the land of his fathers since his uncle Jasper Tudor, Earl of Pembroke, had taken him abroad following the Lancastrian débâcle at Tewkesbury in 1471. With a proper sense of occasion, and a shrewd eye for propaganda, Henry’s first recorded act was to kneel down and kiss the sands of Mill Bay.

  The army he brought from France was hardly impressive. Jasper Tudor and the Earl of Oxford were the only two men of any consequence. Edward Woodville represented the family of his prospective bride. The rest of the English contingent were mainly the attainted rebels of Buckingham’s abortive rebellion – Richard Guildford, John Cheyney, William Brandon, William Berkeley and a few others. The two thousand soldiers at his back were French convicts, persuaded to enlist by the promise of a free pardon. But it was not on them that Henry pinned his hopes. Since the early spring, his messengers had been sounding out possible sympathisers, rekindling the embers of Lancastrian loyalism, promising lands and titles to those who would betray their oaths to King Richar
d. In Wales especially the seeds of treason had fallen on fertile ground. The Tudors were known in Wales, while the Yorkist kings were foreigners. As his banner Henry chose the red dragon of the old Welsh kings, from whom he claimed his descent.

  On 8 August Henry marched unopposed into the county town of Haverfordwest. A delegation from the town of Pembroke arrived to pledge its allegiance. Rumours that Sir Walter Herbert from Carmarthen was approaching with a large troop loyal to the King proved groundless. As Henry marched north through Cardigan and Aberystwyth to Merioneth, the towns and fortresses whose loyalty Richard had been at such pains to insure opened their gates to welcome his rival. From Merioneth his line of march swung to the east, through Newton and the Vale of Powys to the borders of Shropshire. Here he was joined by ‘a great baulk of soldiers’ under the black raven banner of Rhys ap Thomas, the Welsh chieftain who had promised Richard that the Tudor would cross the mountains into England only over his dead body. Shrewsbury opened its gates to the invader on 15 August. Pushing on to Newport the next day, Henry’s growing band of French and Welsh was joined by five hundred Shropshiremen under Sir Gilbert Talbot.

  Thus far the enterprise had prospered. But Henry was in England now, less than sixty miles from Richard’s crag at Nottingham, and still his step-father, Lord Stanley, had not joined him. So much depended on the notorious trimmer and on his scarcely less powerful brother Sir William, who held North Wales and much of Shropshire. At Stafford, on 17 August, Henry had his first meeting with Sir William. King Richard, he was told, held Stanley’s son, Lord Strange, a hostage at Nottingham. If the brothers declared for Henry now, he would surely lose his head. Glibly Sir William unfolded his strategy: Lord Stanley’s army, presently encamped at Lichfield only fifteen miles away, would retreat before Henry’s line of march until Richard’s forces blocked the way. Richard himself would suspect nothing until the battle commenced, and Stanley’s men fell on his unguarded flank. As proof of the Stanleys’ good faith, Sir William arranged a secret rendezvous between Henry and his brother at the village of Atherstone, south-east of Lichfield astride the old Roman road of Watling Street. It was a neat plan, but Henry saw that when it came to the battle, his own flank would be as vulnerable as Richard’s.

  By this time Richard had received an equally ambiguous token of Lord Stanley’s intentions. The couriers who rode from Pembroke with the news of Henry’s landing reached Nottingham three days later, on 11 August. His army, they reported, was pitifully small and ill-equipped. In the words of Henry VIII’s historian, Edward Hall, this intelligence ‘so inflated Richard’s mind, that in a manner disdaining to here speak of so poor a company, [he] determined at first to take little or no regard to this so small a sparkle, declaring the earl [of Richmond] to be innocent and unwise because that he temerariously attempted such a great enterprise with so small and thin a number of warlike persons’. His Welsh captains, Sir Walter Herbert and Rhys ap Thomas would doubtless put the invader to ‘shameful confusion’. All the same if Henry did emerge from his Welsh mountains, the opportunity to come to grips with the man who had kept Richard on the hook for the past two years was not to be missed. The King therefore lost no time in summoning his captains to his side – Northumberland from his manor of Wressell, Norfolk and Surrey from Essex, Lovell from Southampton, Brackenbury from London and Thomas, Lord Stanley from his Lancashire estates. The royal army would muster further south at Leicester, poised to intercept the Lancastrians if they planned a march on London.

  In the event, the shameful confusion was not Henry’s but Richard’s. For on Monday 15 August his mounted scouts or ‘scurriers’ brought word that the Earl of Richmond had crossed the Severn at Shrewsbury and was heading in a straight line for Nottingham, his forces swollen by the Welsh levies raised to stop him. ‘At which message,’ according to Hall, ‘he was sore moved and broiled with melancholy and dolour, and cried out, asking vengeance on them that contrary to their oath and promise had fraudulently deceived him.’ Resisting the impulse to set out, as originally planned, on the following day, the King had to kick his heels for four more days, waiting for his army to reach its full strength.

  More ominous news followed shortly. A message from Lord Stanley regretfully announced that the Steward was too sick with the sweating sickness to obey the King’s summons. Fearing Richard’s vengeance, Lord Strange tried to slip away from the castle. When he was apprehended in the nick of time, Strange confessed under interrogation that he, his uncle Sir William and Sir John Savage were indeed conspiring to ally themselves with Henry Tudor. But he would not implicate his father.

  Rhys ap Thomas, Walter Herbert, Talbot and now Stanley – a fog of treason was closing in around Richard’s well-laid martial plans. On Tuesday the 17th, as he sought to relieve the tensions of his enforced idleness by hunting in Sherwood Forest, two messengers from York arrived to cast doubts on Northumberland’s loyalty too. Having learned of Henry’s landing, the city fathers were anxious to know why the commissioners of array had not called on the men of York to send armed help to their King. Perhaps the reason was the plague that had recently swept the city. Or was Northumberland trying to restrict the levy to his own retainers, men who would put their loyalty to the House of Percy above their allegiance to the reigning House of York?

  Late on Thursday the 18th the Lancastrian army was reported to have changed its line of march. Turning south-east from Stafford towards Lichfield, Henry’s van now seemed to be headed not towards Nottingham, but towards Atherstone where Lord Stanley lay, and the main highway to London. Even if his muster was not yet complete, Richard must act now. The following morning the royal army, marching four abreast, left Nottingham by the southern gate and took the road for Leicester. ‘With a frowning countenance and truculent aspect’ Richard rode at the centre of the column, mounted on a great white courser, the yeomen of the Crown before him and wings of cavalry at his flanks. By 9 o’clock that same evening the King was at Leicester at an inn which displayed his own sign of the White Boar. The two halves of Richard’s host were now united: together with Northumberland’s contingent which was expected within the next twenty-four hours, they appear to have numbered more than ten thousand men. ‘Here’, states the Croyland Chronicle, ‘was found a number of warriors ready to fight on the King’s side, greater than had ever been seen before in England collected together in behalf of one person.’

  This was, of course, an exaggeration, but Henry Tudor was heavily outnumbered all the same. His recruiting drive in Wales and Shropshire had added about three thousand men to the two thousand who landed at Milford Haven. Without the certainty of Stanley’s support his prospects seemed decidedly bleak. The mass desertions confidently predicted by his agents in the spring had simply not materialised.

  Distracted by these unpalatable thoughts, Henry apparently paused by the roadside on the evening of the 19th while his army marched on to Tamworth. The only others with him were a bodyguard of about twenty armed men. When night closed in he was shocked to discover, in Vergil’s words, that ‘he could not discern the trace of them that were gone before, and so, after long wandering could not find his company, he came unto a certain town [village] more than three miles from his camp, full of fear; who lest he might be betrayed, durst not ask questions of any man, but tarried there all night’, as fearful of the present as he was of the perils to come. Reunited with his army on the morning of the 20th, Henry blandly assured his anxious followers that he had slipped away on purpose ‘to receive some good news of his secret friends’.

  20 August was in fact the day appointed for Henry’s secret rendezvous with the Stanleys at Atherstone, some eight miles beyond Tamworth and barely twenty miles from Richard’s host at Leicester. Vergil’s details of this meeting are sparse, but they do indicate that it went some way to allaying Henry’s doubts about his step-father: ‘taking one another by the hand, and yielding mutual salutation, each man was glad for the good state of the others, and all their minds were moved to great joy. After that they enter
ed in counsel in what sort to arraign battle with King Richard if the matter should come to strokes.’ When the conference was over, Lord Stanley withdrew his troops to Stoke Golding and Henry’s army took over Atherstone.

  That same evening at Leicester, King Richard conducted a final review of his troops. All the most important Yorkist leaders were with him now, including the two late arrivals, Northumberland and Brackenbury. Early on Sunday morning a vanguard of archers and men at arms, wearing the silver lion badges of the Duke of Norfolk, led the royal army west towards the Lancastrian camp at Atherstone. The two armies would not clash on a Sunday, but Richard was anxious to narrow the gap as much as possible, both to forestall a Lancastrian dash down Watling Street, and to establish visual contact with the two forces led by the Stanley brothers. Twelve miles from Leicester, just beyond the village of Sutton Cheney, he found a position ideal for his purpose. Overlooking Redmore Plain, Sutton Cheney stood on high ground at the eastern end of a ridge, about one and a half miles to the west of Sir William Stanley’s camp at Shenton, and just over two miles north of Lord Stanley at Stoke Golding. Less than three miles beyond Stoke Golding lay Watling Street, the highway to London.

  As the afternoon wore on, Richard’s scouts informed him that the Earl of Richmond’s van had left Watling Street and taken the old Roman road towards Redmore Plain, soon to be renamed Bosworth Field. The long wait was over. Henry Tudor had decided to commit his cause to the test of arms. That night the campfires of Richard’s enemies lit up the sky less than three miles from the King’s tent.

  Predictably enough, our two contemporary voices – Croyland and Vergil – attribute to Richard a sleepless night, interrupted by ‘dreadful visions’ and premonitions of disaster. At daybreak, says the Croyland Chronicler, his drawn features were even more livid and ghastly than usual. Moreover ‘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’. If he did indeed dispense with early morning Mass and breakfast, it was because a vital strategic manœuvre had to be performed before the Lancastrians stirred from their bivouacs. This was the occupation of Ambien Hill, the western end of the ridge on which Sutton Cheney stood. Ambien Hill jutted out some four hundred feet above the level of Redmore Plain: on its northern side the steep slopes would protect the right flank against Sir William Stanley’s men, just as the swampy ground on the gentler southern slopes would deter his brother from an attempt on Richard’s left.