Bosworth: The Birth of the Tudors (51 page)

At least forty of the nobility and gentry who fought for Richard and were killed can be traced, men from at least sixteen counties, with eight arriving at the battle from the southern counties of Cambridgeshire, Buckinghamshire and Oxfordshire. Nevertheless, the large number of northern gentry who were among the battle dead is testament to the support that many northerners had given their king, in spite of Northumberland’s inaction and Stanley’s defection. Henry was well aware of the contribution that northerners had played in the battle, issuing a proclamation the following month stating how ‘many and diverse persons of the north parts of this our land, knights, esquires, gentlemen and other have done us now of late great displeasure being against us in the field with the adversary of us’.

The Yorkshire knights Sir Thomas Gower, Ralph Danby and Sir Robert Percy were among the dead, while from Durham, Robert Brackenbury, William Gilpin, Gilbert Swinburne of Chopwell and Robert Claxton were named as having died on the king’s side. Other evidence survives of the names of those who must have lost their lives in the battle from the inquisitions post mortem taken the following year: Alan Fulthorpe, the constable of Middleham Castle, had died on the Vigil of St Bartholomew (23 August), while Robert Brackenbury’s inquisition has the date left blank. Four of the men named held the constableships of six of Richard’s castles, while two were sheriffs in 1484–5.

Regardless of whether they had fallen fighting for or against his standard, Henry ordered that every man should be given ‘a decent burial’. The ballads recall how the noble dead of the Duke of Norfolk, Lord Ferrers ‘and many other more’ were carried from the field ‘boldly’ on biers. Many were buried near the parish church of St James at nearby Dadlington, whose churchwardens over twenty-five years later petitioned Henry VIII to recognise the significance of its location
‘standing upon a parcel of the ground where Bosworth feld, otherwise called Dadlyngton feld, in our county of Leicester was done’, requesting that a battlefield chapel might be constructed where ‘the bodies or bones of the men slain in the said field be brought and buried’.

As the armour was pulled from the lifeless carcasses and bodies placed on carts to be taken to Dadlington, there were also the wounded to tend to. Some were so severely injured that they had little chance of survival: John Mynde, a Shropshire gentleman who had survived the battle, had received ‘such grevious hurts and bresurs’ during the fighting that he died soon after. He had fought alongside his son John and six others, several of whom had been ‘right grievously hurt, and some of them maimed for ever’. Many who had been injured in the battle survived, even if they were maimed. Peter Peirse of Bedale lost a leg, but lived ‘long after’ while Gilbert Talbot, who was knighted shortly after the battle by Henry along with Sir John Mortimer, Sir Rhys ap Thomas, Sir Robert Poyntz and Sir Humphrey Stanley, according to John Leland, had been ‘sore wounded at Bosworth’. Roger Acton later petitioned Henry how he had fought ‘in your victorious field and under your standard and there sore hurt’. Ralph Bigod was injured during the battle, and would have ‘likely to have been slain’ had not the battle ended so suddenly.

Many of the wounded must have been taken to Leicester for treatment. Three years after the battle, Henry granted to the mayor and burgesses of Leicester an annuity of £20 for seven years, noting ‘the great costs and charges that they have sustained and borne by our commandment in our journeys, fields, and battles, and of the costs they did and made upon our servants wounded and maimed in our first field’, to a total of £180. It is also noteworthy that the office of ‘principal surgeon for the king’s body’ was granted to William Altoftes, who came from the nearby town of Atherston.

An example of the type of injuries faced by some participants in the battle can be found in a surviving medical textbook that describes how ‘a gentleman that was shot at Barnard or Bosard felde’ had been hit from behind in the thigh by shot from a ‘hackebush’ or arquebus; wearing a coat of mail which had protected him, three rings of mail were ‘left in his left buttock … by ignorance of the surgeon’. Twenty years later, with pains in his ankle, the man ‘met with an old surgeon’ who,
examining him, asked ‘what armour he wore at that time’. Discovering that he had been wearing a coat of mail, the surgeon deduced that the pieces of mail had worked their way down towards his patient’s ankle; cutting it open, he ‘found the three mails as bright as could be and so he healed him where as a plaster could not have and he lived long after’.

As the battle had ended, in the confusion many participants on Richard’s side who had ‘easily abstained from fighting’ had ‘slipped secretly away’ and ‘without incurring any loss’. Among those who had been able to flee the battlefield unnoticed were Francis, Lord Lovell, together with John de la Pole, Earl of Lincoln, Humphrey Stafford and his brother Thomas, who ‘with a good number of companions’ rode through the day and night across the country to reach sanctuary in the monastery of St John at Colchester, on the Essex coast.

Still the number of prisoners captured after the battle had finished ‘was very great, since after Richard was killed men threw down their arms and willingly surrendered into Henry’s power’. Many would have done so earlier, Vergil observed, ‘of their own accord even when Richard was alive, assuming it could have been done without danger’; he would later add in his printed work that ‘the majority would have done from the beginning if it had been possible with Richard’s scouts flying about hither and thither’.

The most prominent captives were Henry, Earl of Northumberland and the duke of Norfolk’s son, Thomas, Earl of Surrey, and Richard’s councillor and close confidant William Catesby. Vergil suggests that Surrey was ‘pardoned at once’, though this clearly did not happen before the earl was taken to Queenborough castle on the Isle of Sheppey until October before being removed to the Tower, where he was still present in December. Northumberland’s surrender was a far more complex matter. Through his inaction, the earl had helped to ensure that victory fell to Henry. Yet Henry remained suspicious over Northumberland’s precise motives and had him ‘seized and held in prison until he handed over that son of the Duke of Clarence and did him homage together with two Earls his relatives, promising to serve him always like loyal vassals’.

There is no evidence that Northumberland had any control over Edward Earl of Warwick, but Henry was taking no chances. One of the first actions after the battle was to send Robert Willoughby to
Yorkshire to seize the fifteen-year-old, whom Richard had placed in Sheriff Hutton. According to Vergil, Henry, ‘not unaware of the mob’s natural tendency always to seek changes’, was concerned that ‘if the boy should escape and given any alteration in circumstances, he might stir up civil discord’. On Willoughby’s arrival, Edward was handed over by the castle governor and brought to London where he was imprisoned in the Tower. Northumberland soon joined him, though he seems to have been released shortly before 6 December, before being restored to favour as the warden general of the East and Middle Marches in January the following year.

Since most of Richard’s inner circle had either been killed or fled the battle, few reprisals seem to have been considered necessary. Most men who had fought for Richard who were taken captive were later released, with the Crowland chronicler recording that only two men ‘from the western parts’, named Bracher, who had fallen into ‘the hands of the victors’ were later hanged on the gallows. Their deaths may have in any case been part of some private vendetta: William Bracher was a yeoman of the crown who in March 1484 had been rewarded with the manors of Cheddar and Barrow Gurney that had belonged to Sir William Berkeley ‘for his good service against the rebels’. With battle came the legitimate opportunity to settle old scores; it was on the field that private and public grievances could be settled as one.

For Thomas Stanley, who for several decades had conducted a campaign of violence and intimidation upon a neighbouring gentry family, the Harringtons, over a land dispute, the battle provided the opportunity he had been waiting for to ensure that his local rival was all but destroyed for taking Richard’s side. After the battle, Harrington was left with ‘no livelihood’ and in ‘great poverty’ as a result of his attainder. Harrington’s nephew later claimed that the attainder had only been passed at Stanley’s insistence, ‘for old malice and grudge that he had’. Years later, one of the family’s ancestors went so far as to declare that Stanley had ‘caused’ Sir James Harrington to be attainted, ‘where in for a truth the said James was never against the King in no field’. In the heat of battle, however, not all private vengeances were exacted as successfully: one north Midlands squire, John Babington of Dethick, was allegedly killed by James Blount, motivated by the chance to increase his inheritance. But Blount got the wrong
man. His intended target had been John Babington of Chilwell.

Battle and its aftermath also gave men the perfect opportunity to exploit the instability of the new regime to their own advantage. Humphrey Stafford quickly moved to occupy the lands of Sir Robert Willoughby, whose residents later complained to Henry that he had ‘within two days next after your most victorious journey, entered, and yet be in possession of the same accordingly’. Robert Throckmorton, having been appointed sheriff for Warwickshire and Leicestershire after the battle, having failed to bring the counties to order, sought pardon from Henry since having been appointed to his office for a month he had found himself ‘incontinent’ with the surrounding countryside in ‘such rebellion and trouble, and your laws not established’ that he ‘neither might nor could execute his said office of sherrifwick to any profit of your said highness’.

Recognising the need to swiftly restore order and stability to the realm, Henry issued his first proclamation from Leicester:

It did not matter that the Earl of Surrey, the Earl of Lincoln and Lovell had not been killed, preferring to flee rather than face death in battle. The statement was not intended to reflect the precise details of what had taken place on the battlefield, although the claim that the victory had resulted in the deaths of most of the nobility who had fought for Richard’s cause was probably deliberate, aimed at preventing any further uprisings from disaffected Yorksists.

Equally important for Henry was that he should be viewed as a king who intended to draw a line under the past. He wanted to send out the message that he would not be prepared to tolerate any attacks on men who had taken arms up against him, a clear break from the vicious reprisals that had followed previous battles such as Tewkesbury or Towton, when the defeated side had been pursued ruthlessly to their deaths. Henry knew that the situation was too delicate, and his own position still uncertain, to provoke possible reprisals. He must also have been mindful that his narrow victory had been won not by his own valour, having come close to death as a result of Richard’s final charge, but by Sir William Stanley’s final show of strength, crashing through the battle to defeat Richard at the very moment it seemed that the late king might have destroyed Henry. Henry must have understood that victory had been obtained not just by the acts of engagement during the battle of a few, but by the abstention of the many from joining the fray altogether.

He owed them his crown too: Northumberland’s desertion ensured that Richard’s rearguard had stood still, refusing to come to their king’s aid; as the Crowland Chronicler remarked, ‘where the Earl of Northumberland stood, with a troop of a size and quality befitting his rank, no opposing force was visible, and no blows were exchanged in anger’. Molinet made clear that Northumberland was expected to charge upon the French, but instead ‘did nothing, and left him and his suit, and abandoned King Richard’. Molinet wrote later that he believed Northumberland had an ‘understanding’ with Henry, ‘as had various other who left him wanting’, but was the earl alone responsible for ensuring that his men did not take part in the battle?

Northumberland had faced the spectre of battle and the consequences of defeat before. Previous to Edward IV’s ascendancy, his family loyalties had traditionally rested with the Lancastrians. For this they had paid the price: the earl’s father had died from wounds received fighting on behalf of Henry VI at Towton in 1461, while Northumberland himself was captured, attainted and imprisoned. He was released eight years later and his attainder reversed. Yet the memories of that bloody battle, in which tens of thousands from the Yorkshire region had died, did not affect Northumberland alone. In 1471, when Edward returned from exile to reclaim his crown, Northumberland should have prevented his landing and opposed his march, but he did not. Instead, landing at Ravenspur and travelling southwards, Edward commanded Northumberland to provide him with an armed force. Northumberland sought to encourage his men to fight for Edward IV, yet according to one report, the memory of the Yorkist victory at Towton was too painful for many to commit to Edward’s cause, and ‘many gentlemen, and other, which have been arrayed by him, would not so fully and extremely have determined them self in the King’s right and quarrel as the Earl would have done himself’. Unable to command his own men to take Edward’s side, Northumberland had no other choice but to do nothing. Nevertheless, one chronicler reported, the earl’s decision at least prevented some in the north from rising up against Edward: ‘his sitting still caused the city of York to do as they did, and no worse, and every man in all those north parts to sit still also’. Could the same situation possibly have repeated itself at Bosworth, where the earl’s inaction at least prevented his men from turning against Richard?