Great Tales from English History, Book 2 (8 page)

E
UROPE WAS SCANDALISED BY RICHARD III
’
S
seizure of power.’See what has happened in England since the death of King Edward,’ declared Guillaume de Rochefort, the
Chancellor of France, to the Estates-General, France’s Parliament, in a speech that positively oozed gloating disapproval.‘His
children, already big and courageous, have been slaughtered with impunity, and their murderer, with the support of the people,
has received the crown.’

In fact, the support of England’s people for their self-appointed monarch was anything but whole-hearted. The opening months
of Richard’s reign, as he disposed of his critics and enemies, saw five executions, and this made London
an uneasy place to be.’There is much trouble,’ reported one newsletter to the provinces,‘and every man doubts the other.’

The new king’s favourites ruled the roost, and Richard’s roster of unpopular sidekicks prompted a famous piece of doggerel:

The Cat, the Rat, and Lovell our Dog

Rule all England under the Hog.

The Cat was Sir William Catesby, a sharp-witted lawyer who was Speaker of the House of Commons — his job it was to make sure
that MPs toed the line with the new regime. The Rat was Sir Richard Ratcliffe, one of Richard’s oldest cronies; Francis, Lord
Lovell, who had a silver dog on his crest, had grown up with Richard in the household of Warwick the Kingmaker; and the Hog
was Richard himself — a derisive reference to the white boar of his crest.

Today it is our sacred right to make fun of our rulers. Satirists and cheeky impersonators make up a major branch of the entertainment
business, sometimes becoming so famous in their own right that they outshine the national leaders they deride. But things
were very different in 1484, when the authorities tracked down Sir William Collingbourne, the Wiltshire gentleman who had
dared pen the scornful verse that had ended up pinned to the door of St Paul’s Cathedral. Collingbourne was one of several
West-Countrymen accused of plotting rebellion, and while the others were spared, the lampooner received special treatment
for his’rhyme [in] derision of the king and his council’.
He was strung up on the gallows, then cut down while still breathing, to be castrated and disembowelled.

To his credit, Collingbourne seems to have retained his sense of humour to the end.‘Oh Lord Jesus, yet more trouble,’ he sighed,
as the executioner reached inside his body to yank out his intestines.

O
NE DAY IN THE SUMMER OF
1485, THE French chronicler Philippe de Commynes encountered Henry Tudor at the court of the King of France. It was the young
Welshman’s latest port of call in more than twenty years of exile. Moving from castle to castle across Brittany and France,
he knew what it was to live from hand to mouth. From the time he was five years old, Henry told the Frenchman, he‘had always
been a fugitive or a prisoner’.

Now all this was about to change. With his faithful uncle Jasper Tudor beside him, Henry was preparing his bid for the English
throne. Since Richard III had seized power two years earlier, an increasing trickle of Englishmen had been
making their way across the Channel to throw in their lot with the young man whose descent through his mother Lady Margaret
Beaufort — and, to a lesser extent, through his grandfather Owen’s romantic marriage to Queen Catherine of France — made Henry
the best alternative to Richard.

On i August Henry set sail with a force of a thousand or so soldiers, including a group of French pikemen he was paying with
borrowed funds. They were heading for the south-west tip of Wales, Jasper’s home territory, where Henry himself had been born,
and they dropped anchor in Milford Haven on Sunday the 7th. Their plan was to head north in a loop across Wales, gathering
support as they marched. Local poets, we are told, had been primed to proclaim the coming of
y mab darogan,
’the man of destiny’.

In the event, the response was far from overwhelming. Few Welshmen were willing to risk their lives on Henry’s threadbare
enterprise, and when he reached Shrewsbury and the English Midlands there was further disappointment. Henry had been counting
on the support of his stepfather, his mother’s third husband Thomas, Lord Stanley. But anticipating such a move, Richard III
had seized Stanley’s eldest son and was holding him hostage.

The Stanley family certainly had the power to determine the course of the forthcoming conflict — they were the major magnates
in the area. But they had not achieved their standing by taking chances. In battle, they had a history of holding back their
troops till the very last possible moment — and in the high summer of 1485 this was as far as they were prepared to go for
young Henry. When the armies of Henry Tudor and Richard III finally confronted each other on
Monday 22 August, Henry’s forces were considerably outnumbered by those of the King — though Richard’s army also lacked the
reinforcements he had been promised, with the Stanleys keeping their troops on the side.

Tradition has set the momentous Battle of Bosworth Field not far from Leicester. But modern research suggests that the armies
may have clashed several miles further west near the modern A5 and the village of Mancetter, just north of Coventry, where
Boadicea made her last stand fourteen hundred years earlier. The A5 follows the great curve of Watling Street, the Roman road
connecting London with north Wales. So as Henry’s pikemen made their uncertain way towards Richard’s army, they were tracing
the route of the Roman legions.

By one account, Richard was plagued by bad dreams and premonitions on the night before the battle. But he put on a brave face.
He clad himself ostentatiously in glorious kingly armour, setting the gold circlet of the crown over his helmet. Then, when
he caught sight of his rival’s standard at the back of the Tudor army, he launched a cavalry charge directly at it.

’This day I will die as a king,’ he cried, or win.’

There is some speculation as to why Henry was stationed to the rear of his men. The cautious claimant seems to have had an
eye to cutting his losses if the battle went against him — he had left his uncle, Jasper, even further to the rear to cover
his getaway. But Henry was saved by his French pikemen, who presented Richard’s charging horsemen with a tactic never before
seen in England. Swiftly, they formed their five-metre-plus steel-headed staves into a bristling defensive
wall around their leader, and as Richard’s cavalry hit the pike wall, the King was unhorsed. An eyewitness account by one
of the mercenaries, written the day after the battle and recently rediscovered in a nineteenth-century transcription, describes
Richard crying out in rage and frustration:‘These French traitors are today the cause of our realm’s ruin!’

This seems to have been the moment that prompted the Stanleys, at last, to intervene. Cagey as ever, Lord Stanley himself
continued to hold back, but his brother Sir William deftly moved his troops across the battlefield, overpowering Richard’s
soldiers and cornering the King. Richard fought on, bravely refusing his friends’ offer of a horse on which to flee.

A horse! A horse! My kingdom for a horse!’ Shakespeare’s
Tragedy of King Richard III
dramatically portrays the hunchback monarch screaming for a fresh mount to carry him to the personal showdown he craved with
Henry Tudor. And in this depiction of defiant courage, the playwright finally does right by the King. By most eyewitness and
contemporary accounts, Richard fought to the very last, until he was finally overpowered and cut down, his crown rolling off
his helmet as he fell. Sir William Stanley picked up the gold circlet and placed it on Henry Tudor’s head.‘Sir, here I make
you King of England.’

As always after a battle, the victors turned to plunder. Stanley was allowed to take whatever he wished from the dead king’s
tent — he picked out a set of royal tapestries for the Stanley residence, enduring evidence of the family’s decisive, if less
than heroic, doings on Bosworth Field.
Richard’s miniature Book of Hours, his beautifully illustrated personal prayer book, went to Henry’s mother Lady Margaret
— while Henry himself chose to keep the delicate gold crown.

Richard’s corpse, meanwhile, was stripped of all clothing —‘naught being left about him so much as would cover his privy member’.
The body was then slung over a horse, with arms and legs hanging down on both sides,‘trussed… as a hog or other vile beast
and so all bespattered with mire and filth’. He was taken to the Greyfriars Church at Leicester, and there he was buried‘without
any pomp or solemn funeral’.

Five decades later the tomb was broken open when the friary was destroyed during the Dissolution of the Monasteries. To this
day, the bones that are said to have belonged to the little Princes in the Tower rest in honour in Westminster Abbey. But
sometime in the 1530s the bones of Richard III were thrown into a river in Leicestershire.

O
N
18
JANUARY
1486
THE NEW KING HENRY
VII, the twenty-eight-year-old victor of Bosworth, married nineteen-year-old Princess Elizabeth of York, the elder sister
of the tragic Princes in the Tower. Plotted by Henry’s mother, Margaret Beaufort, the marriage was a step towards mending
the bitter and bloodstained rift between the House of Lancaster and the House of York.

But the mysterious disappearance of the little princes had left a curious legacy. No one could be quite sure what had happened
to them — and, if they
had
been murdered, who was to blame. Despite the suspicion attaching to Richard
III, there were no bodies and no closure: the poison had not been drawn. For a dozen years England was haunted by conspiracy
theories made flesh. It was the age of the pretenders.

The first was Lambert Simnel, an Oxford tradesman’s son who became the tool of Richard Symonds, an ambitious local priest.
Symonds took his twelve-year-old protege to Ireland, claiming that Simnel was Edward, Earl of Warwick, the young nephew of
Richard III (see Wars of the Roses family tree, p. x). On Whit Sunday 1487‘King Edward VT’ was crowned by dissident Irish
noblemen in Dublin.

The real Edward was in the Tower of London. Henry had made it a priority to put Warwick away when he came to the throne, and
now he lost no time in bringing him out to be paraded through the streets of London. When Simnel and his Irish followers landed
at Furness in Lancashire later that June, Henry marched north to defeat them in a rerun of the previous years of disorder.

But the Tudor response in victory was a new departure. Instead of executing‘Edward VI’, Henry gave Simnel a job in the royal
kitchens, turning the spit that roasted the royal ox. The boy made such a good job of his duties as a scullion that he rapidly
earned promotion, rising to take care of Henry’s beloved hunting hawks and finishing up as royal falconer.

In his humane, rather humorous treatment of Lambert Simnel, Henry was making a point — this new king did not kill children.
He even spared the boy’s Svengali, Symonds, who had planned to have himself made Archbishop of Canterbury. But Henry might
have done better to be more severe,
for within a few years he was confronted with another pretender. This one declared himself to be Richard, Duke of York, the
younger of the Princes in the Tower. Apparently, he had made a miraculous escape following his elder brother’s murder and
had now returned to claim the throne.

’King Richard IV’ — by this account, Henry’s brother-in-law — would later confess that he was, in fact, one Pierquin Wesbecque
(Perkin Warbeck) from Tournai in the Netherlands, the son of a boatman. But it suited all manner of people to believe he was
indeed the nephew of Richard III, and he did the rounds of Henry’s enemies and neighbours, being treated to banquets and hunting
excursions and given money to buy troops. King James IV of Scotland even found him an attractive wife, his own cousin Lady
Katherine Gordon.