by Thomas Penn
Throughout the country that summer, with forces mobilizing and the threat of renewed civil war in the air, the prevalent response to Richard’s call to arms seemed to be fatigue. For most, the demand to prove themselves ‘good and true Englishmen’ by marching halfway across the country to endanger their lives in a conflict of remote significance was, as it always had been, something best avoided. Meanwhile, in villages and towns, marketplaces, churches and inns, life continued. People discussed the usual subjects and anxieties, the usual hopes and fears: the harvest – better, this year, than the appalling yields of recent times, despite the damp weather; property disputes; exchange rates, business deals and the price of cloth; and a virulent new sickness, its hallmark a violent fever, which killed in hours.64 Yet somehow the constant enervating state of emergency had to be resolved; sides had to be chosen. The instinctive impulse of many, when presented with Richard’s letters and a flourish of the great seal, was to turn out for their sovereign lord against rebels who, as Richard’s proclamation put it, had confounded ‘all truth, honour and nature’ by ‘forsaking their natural country’. In the minds of others, the blame for England’s instability was to be laid firmly at Richard’s door.
On 31 July, as troops assembled, William Caxton brought out an edition of the late Sir Thomas Malory’s Morte d’Arthur. The story of King Arthur and his knights of the round table was a perennial favourite – Caxton had, he said, been prompted to publish by ‘many noble and diverse gentlemen’ – and Malory’s version was an obvious choice. Malory had fought in Edward IV’s wars against the Lancastrians and had completed his book in prison during the tumultuous late 1460s. All human life was here, Caxton explained in his prologue: ‘herein may be seen noble chivalry, courtesy, humanity, friendliness, hardiness, love, friendship, cowardice, murder, hate, virtue, and sin.’
The printed book included a number of alterations to Malory’s manuscript. In one episode, a sleeping King Arthur dreams of a mortal fight between a ravening bear, ‘a tyrant that torments your people’, and a dragon, which kills it. In Caxton’s edition, someone changed the bear to a boar. The allusion was unmistakeable: the boar was Richard. And the dragon? Back in 1461 Edward IV had claimed that beast, portraying himself as heir to the mythical British king Cadwaladr – ‘rubius draco’ – who would unite England, Wales and Scotland and whose heirs would reign to the end of the world. But now, in the summer of 1485, ‘rougedragon’ denoted somebody different: the man who, in the absence of Edward’s children, loyalists to the late king now saw as the heir to his cause – Henry Tudor.65
On 11 August, days after Caxton’s publication of the Morte d’Arthur, messengers arrived at Beskwood Lodge outside Nottingham, where Richard was hunting. Tudor had landed. The prophecy was right, in a way. Tudor had landed at Milford, but not the Dorset village: he had come ashore at Milford Haven, on the westernmost tip of Wales. Richard, it was said, was jubilant: ‘the day he had longed for, had now arrived’. The same day, he fired off urgent orders. The final confrontation with his elusive enemy was at hand. Nobody, he told his followers, was to miss it.66
21
A Beginning or End
That unsettled August, messengers rode through England with Richard’s letters. As always, his language, underscored by his neat signature, was categoric. His supporters should come in person with the forces they had promised: as fast as possible, no excuses. Those who failed to do so would be punished with the loss of ‘all that you may forfeit and lose’, including, so the implication went, life itself. Richard himself stayed in Nottingham, not moving until he had celebrated one of the most significant feasts of the religious year, that of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary on 15 August. It was an act of piety that masked something else. Richard was finding it hard to raise men.
Partly it was down to the season – harvest time, when extra labour was needed in the fields. Yet the signs of foot-dragging were all too evident, even among his supporters. On receiving Richard’s summons, the city of York sent not a detachment of troops but a messenger to the king, ‘to understand his pleasure’: to find out, in other words, whether this mobilization would be any different from any of the other false alarms the king had raised since his first such alert back in April 1484. Other royal officials enacted a deliberate go-slow. Some failed to raise troops at all; some did so and took them instead to Tudor.1
On the 19th, over a week after Tudor’s landing, Richard rode the twenty-five miles south to his army’s muster station of Leicester.2 There, he took stock. Prominent among the assembled forces were the banners, badges and colours of the earl of Northumberland; and those of John Howard, who had come from East Anglia together with his son Thomas. Robert Brackenbury had made the journey from London, bringing guns from the Tower armoury. If some contingents still hadn’t yet turned up – most notably the forces of Lord Stanley and his brother Sir William – the turnout, at around ten thousand men, was still substantial. It was big enough, Richard presumably felt, to deal with Tudor’s ragtag assortment of exiles and foreign mercenaries, who were now moving through the east midlands, aiming hopefully for London. Time was an important factor: the longer Tudor went without being intercepted, the more convincing his claim would become. In any case, Richard was eager to get on with it.
On the morning of 21 August, Richard’s army rode west out of Leicester in battle formation in ‘great pomp’, banners flying. Flanked by John Howard and the earl of Northumberland, Richard wore his crown; the cross was borne before him. A dozen miles or so out of town, scouts rode in with reports that Tudor had halted south of Watling Street, the straight Roman road to London, in the grounds of Merevale Abbey, near the village of Atherstone. Richard headed for nearby high ground and pitched camp.
If Tudor’s campaign of misinformation, his gnawing away at the structures of Richard’s government, had worked well from a distance, it was now proving harder to attract drifting loyalties to his cause. As he and his four thousand men slogged through the rugged Welsh terrain, through the Marches and into the English midlands, many of those who had promised their support now stood off. Richard had left the uncommitted in no doubt of the consequences of opposing an anointed, crowned king.3
To Tudor’s horror, those sitting on the fence included the Stanley family: his mother’s in-laws, of whose support – despite their public pledges of allegiance to Richard – he had been quietly confident. Lord Stanley’s equivocations weren’t so surprising: his motto ‘sans changer’ stood in ironic counterpoint to his slipperiness of the last decades; besides, his son and heir was now in the custody of a suspicious Richard. But Tudor had hoped for more from Sir William Stanley. A former household knight of Edward IV and household steward to his son and heir, Sir William was precisely the kind of unswerving Yorkist loyalist whom Tudor now claimed to represent – and his three thousand men could make all the difference. But when Tudor and Sir William met at Stafford on the evening of Friday the 19th, the pair had a short, positive but inconclusive talk. Sir William then went away again.4
By this point, Tudor was ‘full of fear’. Over the next two days, as his forces marched southeast through the midlands, he spent much of his time in increasingly frantic attempts to reach out to the Stanleys. On the evening of the 20th, Tudor disappeared altogether. He returned to his camp at dawn the following morning, assuring his anxious troops that he had good news from certain ‘secret friends’. But later that day, after reaching Merevale Abbey, a clandestine meeting with Lord Stanley in person didn’t change matters. Remarking, surprised, on how few men Tudor had, Stanley refused to give him any guarantees. Tudor, who had hoped for so much, was on his own.5
Richard awoke early on 22 August 1485. He had slept badly, it was later reported – restlessness as likely to have been down to adrenalin and nerves as much as a troubled conscience. The king’s jitteriness rubbed off on those around him. When he wanted to hear mass, his half-awake chaplains scrambled to find what they needed for the divine service, even managing to mislay the sacrame
nt: when they had ‘one thing ready, evermore they wanted another, when they had wine, they lacked bread, and ever one thing was missing.’ Neither, added another chronicler, was Richard’s breakfast ready. Then, a rogue Scotsman apparently walked off with the king’s battle coronet before he was apprehended and the crown returned.6
A general sense of suspicion and unease pervaded Richard’s camp. As dawn rose, Richard’s right-hand man John Howard emerged from his tent to find a note pinned to it: ‘Jockey of Norfolk’, it ran, alluding to Howard’s ducal title, ‘be not so bold/ For Dickon thy master is bought and sold.’ The story was a Tudor one, but the atmosphere of mutual distrust it conveyed was real. If Richard had spent much of the previous two years trying to ensure that people turned out for him, he was equally concerned that when push came to shove, those who did turn out would actually fight – and on his side. He was, it seemed, almost anticipating betrayal, or at least indifference.7
Once he was armed, Richard summoned his commanders to his tent. In front of them, he held a ceremonial crown-wearing and took an oath to go on crusade against the Turks in the event of his victory: acts designed to emphasize that his was the righteous cause. In his pre-battle speech, Richard was said to have told his men that the battle to come would, either way, ‘totally destroy’ the kingdom of England. If he won, he would ‘ruin’ those who had lined up with his enemy; if victorious, Tudor would, he knew, do ‘exactly the same’ to Richard and his supporters.8 This vision of total destruction was not one to which many were prepared to subscribe. In the minds of many of his supporters, Richard’s apocalyptic world of black and white dissolved into shades of uncertain grey.
Around seven in the morning, Richard drew up his men and gave the order to advance. First to move off, leaving the high ground of their encampment, was John Howard’s vanguard, archers protected by spearmen, and in their midst Brackenbury’s gunners. Behind them, watching the deployment – and keeping an eye on Lord Stanley, whose red-jacketed troops could be seen taking up position on the slopes of an adjoining hill to his left – was Richard with his elite household knights; in the rear, with several thousand men, was Northumberland. Reaching the plain below, Howard took up position and waited.
Meanwhile Tudor’s mixture of Yorkists and Frenchmen, Lancastrians, Scots and Bretons marched in battle formation, east, through the ripe cornfields. His last-ditch plea to Lord Stanley had been batted away. Sitting tight, Stanley offered him the token support of four of his knights and their followers – that was it. Already ‘vexed’, Tudor now ‘began to be somewhat appalled’. But, as his troops drew within bowshot of Richard’s army, he had to get on with it.
Tudor himself was in the rear, protected by his own household men and a phalanx of French pikemen. His ‘slender vanguard’ was commanded by the earl of Oxford. The last battle Oxford had fought in England was fourteen years before, in the fog at Barnet, when the indiscipline of his troops had proved fatal. Now, he had a highly unlikely shot at redemption – against John Howard, the man who, following Edward IV’s near-extermination of the Lancastrian cause in 1471, had been handed many of his family lands. With around three hundred yards separating them, the two vanguards eyeballed each other, fastened their helmets and prepared to fight.
Then Oxford advanced. Trying to avoid a patch of boggy ground, and the destructive combination of Howard’s arrowfire and Brackenbury’s artillery, he targeted the right-hand extremity of the enemy lines. As the two lines came together in a frenzy of hacking, stabbing and slashing, the earl, fearful of a repeat of Barnet, ordered his units of infantrymen to stay tight to their divisional standards and ‘throng thick together’ to avoid being split up in the fighting. Briefly, the lines disengaged: Howard’s men paused, bewildered and suspicious, ‘supposing some fraud’. The lull gave Oxford time to reshape his entire vanguard into an ‘array triangle’, a wedge formation protected on both sides by French pikemen, before punching again with concentrated force into the enemy lines, aiming for Howard himself. Soon, Howard’s ranks, comprising lightly armed archers and foot soldiers, began to disintegrate under the disciplined ferocity of Oxford’s onslaught. When Howard was killed, his banners swept away, panic rippled through the rest of Richard’s vanguard.
Richard had been following the fighting with increasing impatience. As updates of Howard’s collapse came in – the vanguard, as one of Richard’s panicked household knights put it, ‘breaketh on every side’ – it was clear that Lord Stanley’s forces were not about to intervene on Richard’s behalf. Equally alarming was the realization that the earl of Northumberland, with his three thousand-odd troops at the rear of Richard’s army – ‘stationed in a part of the field where no encounter was discernible and no battle-blows given or received’, as one chronicler put it understatedly – was showing no inclination to get involved.
Back in 1483, Northumberland’s military might had been instrumental in Richard’s rise to power. But, with Richard refusing to hand Northumberland control of the northeast, all the earl’s resentments about Richard – of how, in the 1470s, Richard had muscled into the region he regarded as his birthright – had come flooding back. Now, Northumberland stayed where he was. Later, some tried to explain away his inaction, stating that the earl had been physically unable to advance through the boggy ground in front of him. But Northumberland had a history of ‘sitting still’. Back in 1471, as Edward IV advanced south to reclaim his throne, Northumberland had done nothing: a non-intervention that, as one of Edward’s men had remarked, was in fact a ‘notable service’. Whatever the case, with both Stanley and Northumberland refusing to budge, Richard had to act. There was an opportunity, his scouts told him: Tudor’s own forces, detached from Oxford’s marauding vanguard, were alone, isolated and vulnerable.
As Richard contemplated a cavalry charge against Tudor, one of his advisers, a Spanish mercenary named Jean de Salazar, worriedly counselled him against the move. Richard himself was exposed, Salazar said: there were blatantly treasonous manoeuvrings among his own men. The king should retreat, seek safety while he still could. Richard’s reply was entirely in character. Having waited so long for the chance to resolve the uncertainties of the past two years, he wasn’t about to wait any longer. He wouldn’t retreat one step, he told Salazar unequivocally. ‘This day, I will die as a king or win.’ Later, the Tudor historian Polydore Vergil reflected on Richard’s words: ‘such huge great fierceness and such huge force of mind he had’, Vergil wrote, ‘he came to the field that thereby he might either make a beginning or end of his reign.’9
Over his armour, Richard put on his royal coat of arms, and fixed his gold coronet to his helmet.10 Leading his mounted household knights, gripping his battleaxe in one hand, reins in the other, Richard skirted his collapsing vanguard and rode down the hill towards Tudor, circumspectly at first, then, when he could see Tudor’s banners clearly, faster, stabbing his spurs furiously into his horse’s flanks, charging at the enemy he had wanted to meet for so long.
Tudor’s men bunched together, preparing to absorb the shattering impact of Richard’s horsemen. Tudor himself dismounted – ‘he wanted to be on foot in the midst of us’ – recalled one of the French mercenaries at his side. Packed tightly around him were the Yorkist loyalists faithful to Edward IV and his sons, their commitment transferred to Tudor: Sir William Brandon, clutching Tudor’s red dragon standard; the giant figure of John Cheyne; Sir Edward Woodville, the dowager queen’s brother; Giles Daubeney, Edward Poynings, Richard Guildford.
Richard’s cavalry crashed into Tudor’s lines, the shock partly absorbed by the marshy ground through which they had charged and by a hastily redeployed wall of French pikemen. Richard hacked his way towards Tudor with the white heat for which he was renowned, his rage fuelled by the sight of his nemesis, by the foreign mercenaries who had blunted his charge and who he cursed as he fought, by the treason in his own ranks. He got close, killing William Brandon – Tudor’s standard briefly listed – and felling John Cheyne. The two men, king a
nd pretender, were face to face. Then, with Tudor almost overwhelmed, relief arrived. Sir William Stanley’s forces had been concealed behind the brow of a hill, out of Richard’s eyeline. Now, they piled in. As Salazar had feared, Richard and his household knights were now beyond help.
Richard fought fiercely: even his enemies agreed. As he did so, according to many commentators, he shouted repeatedly and wildly that he had been betrayed. The indifference and disaffection that had set in over recent months, much of it shaped by Tudor’s own long-distance phony war, had been carried onto the battlefield, fulfilling all Richard’s anxieties.
Finally, he stumbled, or his horse lost its footing and threw him. His helmeted head was battered; blades sliced through his head, shearing off bone; a dagger was forced through the top of his skull. It was said that Welshmen killed Richard, their bloodlust fuelled by memories of Edgecote over fifteen years before, when ‘northernmen’ had massacred a generation of Welsh gentry. Now, they had their revenge against Richard and his northern knights – Brackenbury, Ratcliffe, Sir Robert Percy – whose bloodied bodies lay around their dead king: they ‘killed the boar’, puffed the Welsh bard Guto’r Glyn, ‘shaved his head’.