The Demon's Brood (40 page)

In desperation, Henry borrowed money from a French courtier to hire 1,000 men and seven small ships – a much less formidable force than the 4,000 troops originally promised by Charles VIII's government. The king's spies believed he would make for Milford, a tiny harbour in Hampshire, and Lovell assembled a fleet at Southampton to intercept him. In June Richard went to Nottingham Castle, at the centre of England, so he could confront his enemy as soon as he landed. In a proclamation, he denounced the followers of ‘Henry Tydder'. They were murderers, adulterers and extortioners, who would steal everyone's estates and offices, killing and robbing on an unheard-of scale.

Richard's challenger was an obscure Welshman, ‘descended of bastard blood' on both sides whose grandfather, Owain Tudor, Keeper of the Wardrobe to Henry V's widow, Catherine of Valois, had supposedly married her. One of their sons had married Lady Margaret Beaufort, the heiress of John of Gaunt and Katherine Swynford, and it was they who were Henry Tudor's parents. That someone with such a feeble claim to the throne, whom few Englishmen had ever seen, could become a pretender shows how desperate men were to find an alternative to Richard.

On 7 August Henry landed, not at Milford in Hampshire but at Milford Haven in Pembrokeshire. Supporters joined him as he marched so that he had about 5,000 men. Richard assembled 12,000 troops at Leicester, the largest contingents those of Lord Stanley and his brother Sir William, and of the Earl of Northumberland. This was a small army for a King of England with time to prepare, but it looks as if a few people wanted
to fight in his defence while so obscure a challenger as Tudor seemed to have little chance of winning.

If Richard felt doubtful about Lord Stanley and his brother Sir William, their contingents were too strong for him to act on mere suspicion. In retrospect, however, it is clear that Margaret Beaufort had converted Lord Stanley to her son's cause. It is also clear that the Earl of Northumberland had no liking for the king, despite having worked closely with him in the North – or perhaps as a result.

On the morning of 22 August 1485 the two armies faced each other near Market Bosworth in Leicestershire. Every reconstruction of the battle that followed is based on Polydore Vergil, who, although he spoke to people who had fought in it, wrote thirty years later. There is no full eyewitness description, just a few scraps to flesh out Vergil's account, but this was scarcely another Towton – neither leader inspired much loyalty and the ruling class were less inclined to risk their lives. Even the topography has been misunderstood, a recent archaeological examination finding it was fought over a 4 mile area around a group of adjoining villages instead of on the traditional site.
²⁴

The veteran Lancastrian who led Henry's army, the Earl of Oxford, attacked first, despite having fewer troops. However, archaeologists have recently discovered bullets on the battle-field, suggesting they included French arquebusiers, whose new matchlocks were highly effective against cavalry. It is also likely that there were Swiss-style pike-men among them. When the Duke of Norfolk charged at the head of the vanguard, his men-at-arms were held off by long pikes and shot down. Another attack failed, ending in Norfolk's death. Losing his most loyal commander, fear of treachery by the Stanleys and the enemy's weaponry explain Richard's next, desperate move.

Seeing Henry Tudor's dragon banner, he realized that his
rival was near. If he eliminated him he would win, regardless of matchlocks or pikes. Together with the knights and squires of his household, who amounted to about a hundred and sixty men-at-arms, he charged, killing Henry's banner-bearer with his lance, striking another of his enemy's bodyguard out of the saddle with his axe and cutting down several more.

At the last moment, Sir William Stanley changed sides and led his own men to Henry's rescue, overwhelming the royal household. Northumberland made no attempt to rescue the king, but watched him being killed. Richard's horse became bogged down in the marshy ground and he was forced to dismount. Alone, surrounded by enemies, crying ‘Treason! Treason!', he fought to the end. Even the hostile Croyland writer admits he died ‘like a brave and most valiant prince'.
²⁵
The wounds found on his skull suggest a frenzy of blows.

Stripped naked and slung over a horse, its face disfigured by banging into a bridge, the king's corpse was taken back to Leicester where for three days it was displayed on a church pavement. Men other than valets or tailors were able to see for the first time how much higher one shoulder was than the other, and perhaps too that he had a small hump, which is not uncommon in sufferers from scoliosis. Then he was buried at the Franciscan friary – the beggars' church; his grave was lost when it was demolished in 1538 during the Dissolution of the Monasteries until its rediscovery in a ‘long stay' car park in 2012.

Although Richard III is one of the most studied figures in English medieval history, his brief time on the throne was merely a lurid postscript to his brother's reign. Its only lasting significance lies in providing a
raison d'être
for Henry Tudor. He had committed not just political but dynastic suicide. In March 1483 there had been five male Plantagenets; by August 1485 only Clarence's disinherited son was left, the ten-year-old Earl
of Warwick. Vergil was stating the obvious when he wrote of Richard ‘destroying the house of York'.
²⁶
The Great Chronicle of London
(written by someone who lived in the City at the time) comments that ‘had he continued still Protector and suffered the childer to have prospered according to his allegiance and fidelity, he should have been honourably lauded over all, whereas now his fame is darkened and dishonoured'.
²⁷

As his namesake had prophesied three centuries before, after being begotten by the devil, the Plantagenets ended by going to the devil. Not even the Borgias killed children. Yet the last Plantagenet sovereign has a strange fascination, not just for his partisans, but for those convinced of his guilt.

For where is Bohun? Where is Mowbray? Where is Mortimer? Nay, which is more and most of all, where is Plantagenet? They are entombed in the urns and sepulchres of mortality!

Chief Justice Crewe in 1625

The place of most Plantagenet monarchs in our pantheon is a shadowy one, but once they were proudly remembered. Edward III became a hero to Henry VIII's court through Lord Berners's stately version of Froissart, which he translated at the king's command, and Edward Hall's
Union of the Two Illustre Families of Lancaster and York
(1548) gave some idea of England's rulers from Henry IV onwards. The Elizabethans were familiar with the entire dynasty from Raphael Holinshed's
Chronicles
(1577). They also learned about the Plantagenets from the theatre. While Bishop John Bale's
Kyng Johan
, written in about 1538 and portraying John as a victim of papal tyranny, was performed
only once or twice, it is likely that George Peele's bloodstained
King Edward the First
(1593) made more impact.

Still more important, Holinshed gave Shakespeare the material for his plays about Plantagenet kings (as he did for Christopher Marlowe's
Edward II
.) Despite changes for the sake of entertainment – such as exaggerating the wildness of ‘Prince Hal' – Shakespeare is often astonishingly near the mark, since he echoes the contemporary chroniclers from whom Holinshed took his information. A famous example is Richard II's lament for his lost crown, which came from Adam of Usk.

But during the reigns of the first two Stuarts, although Edward I was venerated as a lawgiver by jurists who at the same time shuddered at the memory of John, the Plantagenets inspired no new dramas. Curiously, from Shakespeare until comparatively recent times, almost no plays were written about English history or English monarchs, let alone about the Plantagenets. Admittedly, even the most sanguine playwright would find difficulty in convincing himself he could improve on Shakespeare. On the other hand, the seventeenth century learned something of its former ruling family from the cartographer John Speed's
Historie of Great Britaine
. Similarly, the eighteenth century was treated to the whole story in depth by David Hume, whose six solid volumes had a place on the shelves of every respectable library. Even so, most men and women of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries discovered the Plantagenets from Shakespeare, whom they read as we do novels – the great Duke of Marlborough once declared he had learned his history exclusively from the Bard.

What this meant for an understanding of the Plantagenets can be gleaned from William Hazlitt's
Characters of Shakespeare's Plays
(1817), in which Hazlitt analysed their portraits. King John was ‘more cowardly than cruel', while Richard II was ‘a voluptuary, proud, revengeful, impatient of contradiction, and inconsolable in his misfortunes'. Henry IV was ‘humble, crafty, bold and aspiring, encroaching by regular but slow degrees,
building power on opinion, and cementing opinion by power'. The summary of Henry V is particularly shrewd: ‘Because his own title to the crown was doubtful, he laid claim to that of France . . . He was a hero, that is, he was ready to sacrifice his own life for the pleasure of destroying thousands of other lives.' Henry VI ‘wished to pass his time in monkish indolence and contemplation'. As for Richard III, he was ‘towering and lofty; equally impetuous and commanding; haughty, violent, and subtle; confident in his strength as well as in his cunning'.

Surprisingly, Plantagenets rarely featured in nineteenth-century historical novels. Scott found room only for Richard Coeur de Lion and John. However, Edward IV came into Bulwer-Lytton's costume drama,
The Last of the Barons
, which portrayed him as ‘a temporizer – a dissimulator – but it was only as the tiger creeps, the better to spring, undetected, on its prey'. Bulwer-Lytton credited Richard III with a ‘soft and oily manner that concealed intense ambition and innate ferocity'. The only other well-known mention in fiction was a vignette of a youthful Richard (when Duke of Gloucester) in Robert Louis Stevenson's ‘piece of tushery'
The Black Arrow
– ‘slightly deformed, with one shoulder higher than another, and of a pale, painful, and distorted countenance . . . he that rides with Crooked Dick will ride deep'. Even so, the Victorians knew all about the Plantagenet kings from Shakespeare, Charles Dickens's
Child's History of England
and John Richard Green's phenomenally popular
History of the English People
. Another source was Bishop William Stubbs's
Constitutional History of England
, glorifying the Lancastrians as forerunners of the Whigs, which was widely read and not just by scholars.

In the first half of the twentieth century, before the temporary decline of the historical novel, Conan Doyle and Alfred Duggan wrote stirring romances in which Plantagenet monarchs sometimes played a prominent role. But the authors who really kept their memory green during this period were ‘patriotic historians' such as Sir Winston Churchill and Arthur Bryant, whose
exuberantly written books enjoyed a vast readership, Churchill praising ‘this strong race of warrior and statesman kings'. There were also Laurence Olivier's hugely successful film versions of Shakespeare's
Henry V
and
Richard III
.

Today, we are less aware of them. A multicultural world is embarrassed by patriotic history, which it dismisses as ‘celebratory' or politically incorrect, and despite the revival of the historical novel and although Shakespeare's plays still work their magic, the Plantagenets have faded from people's memory. Henry II is known as Eleanor of Aquitaine's husband and for Thomas Becket's death, Richard I is recalled for his ‘homosexuality', John for Magna Carta, Edward I for persecuting William Wallace and Edward II for the gruesome way in which he was murdered. Richard II, Henry V, Henry VI and Richard III are more familiar because they were fleshed out by Shakespeare.

Yet the Plantagenet kings can recapture popular imagination, now that the Tudors have been almost – if not quite – worked to death. One straw in the wind is the success of Philippa Gregory's historical romances, one of which became a TV ‘soap'. They offer a new field for dramatists. Richard III, already a cult, is attracting increased attention since the discovery of his skeleton. We can expect more new novels and soaps about him, which might revive interest in the entire dynasty.

Only a handful of medieval English men and women can be glimpsed, on a tomb or a monumental brass, in an illuminated manuscript – but even then it is stylized representation. Save for one or two rare exceptions, they have not left revealing letters or journals. In contrast, from John's time effigies or portraits provide a vivid impression of the Plantagenet kings, while chroniclers make a point of describing them, in depth. They can be seen as human beings, so that their personalities offer unique windows on to their age.