As the Lancastrian van, under the Earl of Oxford, skirted the swamp and moved towards Ambien’s western slopes, they were greeted by the sight of Norfolk’s men already ensconced on the brow of the ridge above them. The archers crouched in the front ranks, equipped with their six-foot longbows of yew, oak or maplewood. The longbow, with a range of up to two hundred and fifty yards was still the favoured weapon of the common soldier, and an expert could discharge a dozen arrows within a single minute. However, since the end of the wars in France the general level of expertise had declined – so much so that in 1478 an act of Parliament specifically outlawed football and other frivolous pastimes which were held responsible for the decline. Like the archers, the ordinary infantrymen drawn behind carried swords at their sides, but their main weapon was a stout wooden pike, about the same length as the longbow and tipped with a heavy metal spearhead for jabbing their victims to death. The common soldier was lightly armoured, if at all. His tunic, or jack, was made up from layers of boiled hide, stuffed with hemp to give added protection. It was said that an English jack, which reached down to its owner’s thighs, could stop an arrow or a swordthrust more effectively than a knight’s hauberk of chain mail. On his head the common soldier wore a sallett, or plain metal helmet, without a vizor to protect his eyes and face.
The cream of Richard’s army were his men-at-arms. They had come to the battlefield mounted, but they would fight on foot, clustered round the pennons of the simple knights, or the more gorgeous silken banners of the knights banneret to whom they were bound by their contracts of indenture. There was a gesture of bravado in this tradition – as in the story that the Earl of Warwick slew his horse on the eve of the battle of Towton, swearing that he would not live to run away. Less nimble than the common soldier, the man-at-arms was encased from the waist up in two metal plates, one to guard his chest, the other his back. He carried a variety of weapons – sword, dagger, pike, battleaxe or the formidable halberd which could stab like a pike or be swung like an axe. A few were equipped with firearms of wrought iron or brass, but loading the lead pellets was a cumbersome business and they were of little use when it came to hand-to-hand fighting.
Seven thousand men or more were stretched along the top of the ridge, from the summit of Ambien Hill to the outskirts of Sutton Cheney where the line was anchored by Northumberland’s rearguard of three thousand. At the centre of the vanguard a knot of horsemen under the banner of the silver lion signalled the presence of the Duke of Norfolk, his son Thomas, Earl of Surrey and his chief lieutenants, Lords Zouche and Ferrers. At the centre of the ridge, a larger mounted concourse marked the King himself, surrounded by his close advisers Lovell, Ratcliffe and Catesby, by the knights and esquires of his bodyguard, and by the men who led the contingents of the North and Midlands, Lords Dacre, Graystoke and Scrope of Bolton.
Richard’s mood was both determined and resigned. In Vergil’s words: ‘Knowing certainly that that day would either yield him a peaceable and quiet realm from thenceforth or else perpetually bereave him of the same, he came to the field with the crown upon his head, that thereby he might either make a beginning or end of his reign.’ From his own bitter experience he knew that war was no chivalric adventure, as recounted in the ballads of Crécy and Agincourt. If he won, he told his captains, he meant to crush every one of the rebels marching under Henry’s banners. If he lost, Henry would do the same to them. In this spirit he sent his last message to Lord Stanley. Declare for Richard now, or Lord Strange would be instantly beheaded. Back came the answer that Lord Stanley had other sons, and would not join the King. Either because Richard relented when his bluff was called, or because his orders were disobeyed, Lord Strange survived his ordeal.
* * *
Arms and Armour at the time of Bosworth
The knights who fought for Richard and Henry Tudor at Bosworth wore plate-armour, riveted at the joints. Plate provided protection against sword and lance thrusts, and to a certain extent against primitive firearms, but was extremely bulky and uncomfortable to wear. Knights would carry swords, daggers and battle-axes. Men-at-arms wore armour to protect only the upper parts of their bodies, while common soldiers usually depended for protection upon tunics of leather stuffed with hemp, for they had to be agile in battle. On their heads they would wear salletts, and they would carry a variety of staff weapons, including pikes and halberds.
* * *
As the gap between the opposing vanguards narrowed, Henry Tudor too sent a last appeal to Lord Stanley, whose men were moving slowly forward towards the swamp. Would he now join forces with Oxford in the assault on Ambien Hill? Stanley still hesitated. He would make his own dispositions, and join his stepson when the time was ripe. The trimmer’s steadfast refusal to declare himself left Henry, in Vergil’s words, ‘no little vexed’, but he was now too far committed to draw back. With Talbot’s Shropshiremen on his right and Sir John Savage commanding the Welshmen on his left, Oxford planned to throw the entire Lancastrian army into the attack. Henry, who had no experience of war, would remain in the rear, protected by a slender screen of footmen and a single troop of horse.
The rebel troops reached the lower slopes and began to climb. As soon as they were within range Norfolk’s troops unleashed a shower of arrows. Then Norfolk’s trumpets sounded the order to charge, and the royal army streamed down the slopes. The Lancastrians were under strict orders not to stray more than a few feet from the standards of their company commanders. Under the shock of Norfolk’s charge, Oxford’s close-packed formations wavered but did not break. All around the lower slopes of Ambien Hill, the two front lines were locked in fierce hand-to-hand combat. Slowly at first, the Yorkists began to give ground. Norfolk himself thrust his way to the front in the effort to rally his men. Then disaster struck. Norfolk was down. Soon his men were in full retreat towards the top of the hill. Richard immediately gave orders for Northumberland to bring up his rearguard. But Henry Percy, taking his cue from Lord Stanley, had no intention of risking his neck in the dynastic blood feud which had already killed his father and his grandfather. When the battle was over, he would give his allegiance to the victor. Politely but firmly he let Richard know that he would stay put, to guard against a possible move by Lord Stanley’s men.
The situation was dangerous but not desperate. The vanguard was badly mauled, but the Yorkist centre was still intact. Northumberland refused to move for Richard, but neither of the Stanleys had yet moved against him. Nonetheless Richard was too impatient to let the grim mêlée on Ambien Hill decide the day. While his best captain lay dead, the King’s sword was still unblooded. The morale of his personal followers was sinking. Some faint hearts suggested flight: in the North there were still plenty of able-bodied men who would take his part against Henry Tudor.
Abruptly, Richard came to his decision. Less than a mile off on Redmore Plain his scouts had spotted the red dragon banner of his rival, screened by the small rearguard which Oxford had detached from his main force. If he could despatch Henry Tudor, the battle would be over. More than that, Henry’s death would settle for ever the bloody feud between Lancaster and York. The orders were quickly given. At the head of his household knights and squires of the body – Sir Richard Ratcliffe, Hugh and Thomas Stafford, Sir Robert Brackenbury, Sir Robert Percy, Sir Ralph Assheton and about eighty others – Richard rode forward, skirting the battle on his left, down the north-western slope of Ambien Hill, and thundered out across the plain. His route took him straight across the path of Sir William Stanley, whom he had proclaimed a traitor less than a week before. As Sir William’s men struggled into their saddles, Richard’s cavalry crashed into the enemy ranks. The impetus of the charge carried them straight through the protective screen of infantry. Making straight for his target the King slew the Earl of Richmond’s standard bearer, Sir William Brandon, with his own hand, and unhorsed the bulky figure of Sir John Cheyney who came to Brandon’s aid. For a moment it seemed as if the King’s desperate enterprise was about to be crowned with
success.
But already Sir William Stanley’s horsemen were colliding with the rear of Richard’s little force. As the ring of steel closed in around him, Richard was overwhelmed and battered to the ground. John Rous, who had no cause to bless Richard’s memory, had this to say of his last moments: ‘If I may speak the truth to his honour, although small of body and weak in strength, he most valiantly defended himself as a noble knight to his last breath, often exclaiming as he was betrayed, and saying – Treason! Treason! Treason!’
After the battle Richard’s body was recovered from the corpses piled around Henry’s fallen banner and stripped of all its clothing. With a halter around the neck the naked corpse was strung across the back of a pack horse and taken off to Leicester. Here it lay exposed for two days, as proof of Henry’s triumph, before it was buried without ceremony in the chapel of the Grey Friars. The tomb to which Henry contributed the sum of £10–15, was destroyed at the dissolution of the monasteries, and Richard’s bones were thrown into the River Soar.
8
Scorpio Ascendant
1485
Although he reigned only two years and two months, Richard is assured of immortality. He was the last English king to die in battle, the last of the Plantagenet line of kings, and the date of his death is said to mark the close of that otherwise indefinable episode known as the Middle Ages. Above all, he is the chief suspect in the longest and most emotive murder trial in English history.
Oddly enough, it was the imaginative efforts of the Tudor historians to blacken his name which most effectively ensured lasting fame and the great debate which continues to this day. Henry VII and his son Henry VIII after him, were always naggingly conscious of the flaws in their hereditary claims to the Crown. The Tudors were therefore particularly susceptible to the flattery of the propagandists who portrayed Richard as an inhuman tyrant, hunch-backed, treacherous and cruel, and who contrasted the dark winter of the House of York with the spring sunshine of the first Tudors. The first man to contribute to this tradition – a Warwickshire priest with antiquarian interests named John Rous – is especially interesting because he wrote both before and after Bosworth. His best-known work is an illustrated history of the earls of Warwick, which survives in two copies, one in English and the other in Latin, both of which were completed before 1485. In the English version Richard is described as ‘a mighty prince and especial good lord... in his realm full commendably punishing offenders of the laws, especially oppressors of the Commons, and cherishing those that were virtuous, by the which discreet guiding he got great thanks and love of all his subjects great and poor’. In the Latin version, which was presumably still in the author’s possession in August 1485, this passage is edited out and Richard appears simply as ‘the unhappy husband’ of Anne Neville. Sometime before his death in 1491, Rous also compiled a History of the Kings of England, which he dedicated to Henry VII. The venomous flavour of this tract can be judged from the statement that Richard was born, after two years in his mother’s womb, with a complete set of teeth, and hair down to his shoulders. ‘At whose birth’, Rous continues, ‘Scorpio was in the ascendant, which sign is in the House of Mars; and as a scorpion mild in countenance, stinging in the tail, so he showed himself to all.’
Neither Rous’s monster nor the ‘serpent swollen with rage’ and ‘thirster after human blood’ depicted in The Life of Henry VII by Prince Arthur’s blind tutor, Bernard André, were sufficiently subtle or convincing for Henry’s taste. In the last years of his reign he decided to commission a history of England from an Italian scholar trained in the Classical traditions of Renaissance humanism. Polydore Vergil’s History, first published in 1534, was designed for the consumption of courts and scholars, and avoids the crude invective of his predecessors. The overall argument is that the Wars of the Roses were a divine punishment visited on the kingdom as a result of the original sin of Henry IV’s usurpation in 1399, culminating in the tyranny of Richard’s reign and eventually purged through Henry VII’s union of Lancaster with York. In order to lend substance to this theme Vergil deftly adds to the list of Richard’s villainies several new accusations, always safeguarding his integrity with the qualifications that he is reporting popular beliefs. Thus Gloucester is portrayed, along with Clarence, actually stabbing Henry VI’s son Edward to death after the battle of Tewkesbury. Of Henry VI’s death in the Tower he declares ‘the continual report is that Richard, Duke of Gloucester, killed him with a sword whereby his brother might be delivered of all hostility’.
But the most influential account of Richard to appear in the early sixteenth century was Sir Thomas More’s incomplete History of King Richard III, written in about 1513. Ironically, More’s book, which ends with Buckingham’s rebellion, was never intended for publication, nor was its primary aim to glorify the Tudor dynasty. More saw Richard as the antithesis of the humanist vision of a Good Prince, a symbol of evil rather than a person of flesh and blood, his crippled body a mirror image of his twisted soul: ‘Malicious, wrathful, envious’, ‘little of stature, ill featured of limbs, crook backed’, ‘close and secret, a deep dissimuler, lowly of countenance, arrogant of heart, outwardly companionable where he inwardly hated, not letting to kiss whom he thought to kill’, ‘he slew with his own handes king Henry the Sixth’, and ‘lacked not in helping forth his brother Clarence to his death’. After doing away with the Princes in the Tower Richard ‘never had quiet in his mind’, ‘so was his restless heart continually tossed and tumbled with the tedious impression and stormy remembrance of his abominable deed’.
Vergil and More provided the inspiration for all the later Tudor versions, including the chronicles of Edward Hall (1548), Richard Grafton (1568) and Raphael Holinshed (1578), and culminating in the ‘poisonous hunchbacked toad’ of Shakespeare’s great melodrama.
Inevitably, such absurd exaggerations have provoked a flood of counter-claims in Richard’s favour. Not long after the last of the Tudors was in her grave, Sir George Buc, James I’s Master of the Revels, set to work on a five-volume biography, whose theme is that Richard’s ‘wisdom and courage had not then their nickname and calumny as now, but drew the eyes and acknowledgment of the whole kingdom towards him’. A more important milestone in Richard’s rehabilitation is Horace Walpole’s Historic Doubts, which argues most persuasively on the grounds of common sense that ‘many of the crimes imputed to Richard seemed impossible; and, what was stronger, contrary to his interest’. At the end of the nineteenth century, Sir Clements Markham ingeniously turned the tables on Richard’s conqueror by accusing Henry VII of the murder of the Princes. Markham’s theories, which have been generally discounted since the analysis of the skeletons from the Tower, underline an important point about almost everything that has been written on Richard’s life and reign: that the King’s guilt or innocence in the murder of the Princes is an acceptable yardstick whereby we can judge everything else that he did. Fuelled with moral outrage, the hostile critic sees in every act of justice a cynical attempt to cultivate popularity; in every grant a bribe; in every gesture of conciliation the stirrings of an uneasy conscience. As recently as 1966 the All Souls antiquarian A. L. Rowse declared that ‘anyone deriving his view of the whole story from Shakespeare would not be far out’; compared the execution of Lord Hastings with Hitler’s Night of the Long Knives; and with a logic worthy of his fifteenth-century namesake John Rous, cites Henry’s barbarous treatment of his rival’s corpse as proof of Richard’s villainy.
Even if we do succeed in peeling off the layers of prejudice, it is still not easy to arrive at a true assessment of Richard’s character. His life coincides with a particularly barren patch as far as contemporary historians go. Most of the major events in his reign have to be reconstructed from unreliable Lancastrian or Tudor sources whose bias is manifest. Even his physical appearance is elusive. His portraits show him with a rather careworn expression, thin pursed lips, brown eyes, a thrusting jaw and delicate tapering fingers. According to Sir Thomas More, who comments f
avourably on the good looks of Edward and Clarence, Richard was ‘little of stature, ill featured of limbs, crook backed, his left shoulder much higher than his right’. This disparity of the shoulders, which John Rous also mentions, appears to be the sole foundation for the later myth of the ugly, hunchbacked cripple. The Elizabethan antiquarian John Stow specifically discounts the myth on the evidence of ‘ancient men’ who testified that Richard was quite handsome, although a little below average height. Horace Walpole repeats an anecdote that the Countess of Desmond, after dancing with Richard, declared him to be the handsomest man in the room excepting his brother Edward. There is disagreement even about his height. The Scottish orator of 1484 made reference to Richard’s shortness in his speech of address: yet the German diplomat Nicolas von Poppelau, who spent more than a week with the King at Middleham in May 1484 recorded that Richard was ‘three fingers taller than himself, but a little slimmer, less thick set, and much more lean as well; he had delicate arms and legs, also a great heart’.
The Life and Times of Richard III Page 12