The House of Tudor (5 page)

His route took him up the coast as far as the estuary of the River Dovey and here, about 11 August, he turned east. The passage through Wales had encountered no resistance and a number of gentlemen along the line of march had come in with their tenantry. But, despite the rousing calls of the bards, there had been no sign of any very wild enthusiasm for the Tudor cause. On Saturday, 13 August, the army had reach Welshpool, only a few miles from the border, and by this time reinforcements were arriving from the north - orderly bands of fighting men under their own leaders from Arfon and Mon, Eifionydd, Lleyn and Ardudwy. Rhys ap Thomas had also turned up at last with ‘a great band of soldiers’ and an assured promise of support.

Next day, just a week after landing at Milford, Henry Tudor set foot on English soil for the second time in his life. Late afternoon found him at the gates of Shrewsbury, where he was hoping for news of the Stanleys and their intentions; but, says the old ballad:

At that time was bailiff in Shrewsbury 
One Master Mytton in the town. 
The gates were strong and he made them fast 
And the portcullis he let down.

Someone, it was probably Sir William Stanley, had a quiet word with Master Mytton, and by Monday morning Henry was able to enter the town. The letters waiting for him there contained assurances that his friends would be ready to do their duty ‘in time convenient’ - a phrase which might mean anything or nothing. Gilbert Talbot came in with a force of five hundred men but, counting heads, Henry and Jasper knew they could not hope to win a major battle against a ruthless and determined enemy like Richard Plantagenet without far more substantial support than they had received so far. Everything now hung on the Stanley brothers, who between them controlled the whole of Cheshire and Lancashire.

After an overnight stop at Shrewsbury, the Tudors were on the march again, making for the Midlands and the rapidly approaching confrontation. By 17 August they were at Stafford, where Henry had a brief and apparently inconclusive meeting with William Stanley. The next night was spent at Rageley and on Friday the nineteenth the Tudor battalions camped outside the walls of Lichfield. King Richard had now left his headquarters at Nottingham and was moving south towards Leicester with ‘an host innumerable’. The two armies must converge within a matter of days, and still no one knew for certain which way the Stanleys were going to jump.

A rather curious incident took place on the twentieth. Either by accident or design, Henry and a party of only twenty companions became separated from the main body of his forces. According to Polydore Vergil, he was so much exercised in his mind as to what would be his best course of action that he wanted peace and quiet to think. Is it just possible that he was contemplating cutting his losses and making a bolt for it back to Wales? As darkness fell, he realized that he had lost touch with his rear guard and was forced to spend the night in the open, afraid to ask for directions in case he was betrayed. When he rejoined the army at Tamworth ‘in the gray of the morning’, he found it in an understandable state of alarm and hastened to explain that he had withdrawn ‘of set purpose to receive some good news of certain his secret friends’.

Later that day Henry had another meeting, with both the Stanleys this time, at the village of Atherstone. It seems to have been a satisfactory encounter and a number of useful men - Thomas Bourchier, Walter Hungerford, John Savage and several others - had now thrown in their lot with the Tudors. All the same, on that Sunday evening, when the opposing armies lay camped within striking distance of each other on rough moorland and scrub a couple of miles south of Market Bosworth, the balance of probabilities was still definitely weighted in Richard’s favour.

We do not know what sort of a night Henry passed, but Richard slept badly, disturbed, so he said, by a terrible dream (the natural result of a bad conscience, thought Polydore Vergil), and woke before dawn on 22 August to find no breakfast ready and no chaplains about to say mass. After these deficiencies had been supplied, Richard proceeded to deploy his forces as impressively as possible along the crest of Ambien Hill, a horseshoe-shaped ridge dominating Redmore Plain where the battle would presently be joined. The Duke of Norfolk commanded a strong vanguard of archers, Richard himself, with a picked body of men, held the centre, while the Earl of Northumberland, at his own request, was in the rear.

Henry, positioned on the plain and separated from Ambien Hill by a patch of marshy ground, had no military experience to guide him. Bosworth, the most important battle of his life, was also his first battle. He was, of course, able to rely on the advice of his uncle Jasper and that veteran commander John Vere, Earl of Oxford, who had joined him in exile. But even at this zero hour the interesting question remained - would he also be able to rely on the Stanleys? The Stanleys, Thomas and William, were certainly present with about three thousand men, stationed, according to Vergil, ‘in the midway betwixt the two battles’ (that is, the two armies). Exactly where this was, is not clear. One thing, though, now became crystal clear- that they intended to be on the winning side. Henry, outnumbered by something like two to one, was naturally counting on them to join him before rather than after the issue had been decided, and first thing that morning he had sent a message to Thomas asking him ‘to come with his forces to set the soldiers in array’. The reply, that Henry should set his own folks in order and Thomas would arrive in due course, must have come like a blow in the face. Henry indeed ‘began to be somewhat appalled’, but there was no time to argue the matter. The main body of the Tudor army, estimated at no more than a bare five thousand altogether, was deployed in a wedge formation, with a slender vanguard of archers in the centre, commanded by the Earl of Oxford. Gilbert Talbot led the left wing and John Savage the right, while Henry, still trusting to the aid of his stepfather Thomas Stanley, followed with one troop of horse and a few footmen. As they began to advance across the open ground towards Ambien Hill, keeping the marsh on their right, Richard, watching from above, gave the signal to attack.

Oxford was anxious to prevent his small force from being overwhelmed in the first onslaught and so had given orders that no man was to move further than ten paces from the standards. After an exchange of arrow shot and some hand-to-hand skirmishing there was a lull in the proceedings. The royal troops drew off and Oxford and his fellow commanders, thinking they could detect a certain lack of enthusiasm about the enemy, were encouraged to renew the attack. In the fierce fighting which followed the Duke of Norfolk and several other prominent Yorkists were killed and Norfolk’s son, the Earl of Surrey, was taken prisoner.

Up to now only the two front-lines had been engaged. The Stanleys had still not moved; nor, significantly, had the Earl of Northumberland in the King’s rear. In fact, it was beginning to look as though Henry Percy too was waiting to see what happened, and on Ambien Hill the smell of treachery hung heavy in the air. It is said that one of Richard’s friends urged him to save himself while he could and even brought him swift horses for the purpose, but Richard would not hear of it – ‘such great fierceness and such huge force of mind he had’.

Give me my battle-axe in my hand,
And set my crown on my head so high,
For by Him that made both sun and moon, 
King of England this day will I die.

By this time, the King had been able to pick out his hated adversary from the general confusion on the battlefield, and the sight of that unknown Welshman, the impudent adventurer who, against all the odds, had reached the very heart of his kingdom, seemed to madden him. At any rate, he suddenly made up his mind to settle the issue - ‘to make end either of war or life’. Surrounded by his household troops, he set spurs to his horse and launched himself straight for the spot where the red fiery dragon of Cadwaladr was being borne over Henry’s head by his standard-bearer, William Brandon. It was the act of a berserker, and it came very close to success.

In the first fury of his attack, Richard personally overthrew the red dragon, killed William Brandon and, ‘making way with weapon on every side’, even managed to unhorse John Cheyney, a notable and outsize warrior, who attempted to check his progress. For a while it was touch and go, but Henry’s guard closed round him and Henry himself stood his ground bravely. This, if ever, was the moment for a dramatic intervention and at this moment, right on cue, the Stanleys came thundering to the rescue. Richard was slain, fighting manfully in the midst of his enemies, and the Earl of Oxford, assisted by the arrival of massive Stanley reinforcements, was able to put the rest of the royal forces to flight without difficulty.

The Tudors and Stanleys were left in undisputed possession of the field and while Henry, ‘replenished with joy incredible’, was thanking God and his supporters and saying all the things proper to the occasion, the soldiers set up a spontaneous cry of ‘King Harry’. To add the finishing touch, Richard’s crown, or circlet, was picked up in the debris of the battle and handed to Thomas Stanley, who placed it solemnly on the victor’s head, ‘as though’, wrote Polydore Vergil, ‘he had been already by commandment of the people proclaimed king after the manner of his ancestors’. Thus the new dynasty, and with it the dawn of a new society, was ushered in by a scene which might have been taken straight out of some medieval romance.

As one story was beginning in clamour, confusion and a certain amount of over-excitement, another, old, heroic story was ending in shame. While the victorious army packed up its traps and prepared to ride off the field, the naked corpse of the last Plantagenet king, ‘with not so much as a clout to cover his privy members’, was being slung carelessly across the back of a horse and carried away, arms and legs dangling, for unregarded burial at the Franciscan church in Leicester. The ‘beloved Bull’ had ventured forth and slain the snarling boar - the dragon had taken vengeance on ‘the Mole full of poison’. Bardic zoology might be somewhat eclectic, but the bardic prophecies had been triumphantly fulfilled in the angry end of the summer.

The new King of England was twenty-eight years old, of slender build and slightly above average height. His hair, according to the enthusiastic chronicler Edward Hall, was ‘yellow like burnished gold’, and his deep-set blue eyes ‘shining and quick’. His face has been described as ‘long and pale’ and in repose it looks ascetic, rather melancholy. But Polydore Vergil, who knew Henry personally towards the end of his life, thought his countenance ‘cheerful, especially when speaking’, and his whole appearance ‘remarkably attractive’.

To his new subjects, this slim, fair-haired man was a completely unknown quantity. It would probably be true to say that before Bosworth the great majority had never heard of him. To most English people the series of bitter contests which, over the past thirty years, had turned the crown into a trophy worn by the captain of the strongest team was not an issue which greatly affected the mainstream of daily life. These were ‘King’s games, as it were stage plays, and for the most part played upon scaffolds’. Ordinary men followed the fortunes of the rival factions from a respectful distance, put up with the occasional inconvenience of a battle taking place in their midst, and on the whole successfully avoided involvement. To the crowds who came to the roadside to greet Henry Tudor and his retinue, he was simply another great lord who had come from somewhere beyond the seas to take a hand in the game. They were naturally curious to catch a glimpse of the new man who, it was said, had just won a victory which had put him at the top of the league, but public interest in his past history or the rights and wrongs of his cause was neither informed nor especially strong.

As for Henry, England and its people were almost as strange to him as he was to them, and this journey down Watling Street to London would be his first opportunity to have a good look at both. He saw a green, fertile, well-wooded, well-watered land growing all the wheat, barley and oats needed to support a population of around three million - a rich and beautiful land, abounding in what one visiting Italian described as ‘comestible animals’. Huge tracts of what was still virtually primeval forest swarmed with game, and the damp, temperate climate produced lush pasturage for cattle and sheep. The islanders, surrounded by all this plenty, were a tall, sturdy, vigorous race and wherever their new King stopped by the way, he would have enjoyed lavish hospitality - sampling such delights as ‘peerless’ beef, excellent freshwater fish, venison, mutton and a wide variety of poultry.

Although the country possessed great natural mineral wealth, it was essentially an agrarian society. Apart from London, the only towns of any size were York, Norwich and Bristol; but London, the heart and the key of the kingdom, was something quite special in the way of cities. Visitors commented on the charm and convenience of its situation on the banks of a great tidal river. They admired London’s handsome defensive walls, the strong fortress of the Tower, the fine, stone-built bridge, the noble cathedral, the splendid mansions with their comfortable, prosperous inhabitants, the shops bursting with luxury goods of every kind; but the thing which chiefly struck every foreign visitor was the city’s wealth and importance as an international commercial capital. ‘Merchants from not only Venice but also Florence and Lucca, and many from Genoa and Pisa, from Spain, Germany, the Rhine valley and other countries meet here to handle business with the utmost keenness’ wrote Andreas Franciscius in November 1497- The island’s economy still depended chiefly on the export of raw wool and finished cloth - generally conceded to be the best in the world - but visitors, especially the Italians, were much impressed by the skill of the London metalworkers and by the quality of their products. In one street alone, Cheapside, there were, according to a Venetian diplomat, no fewer than fifty-two goldsmiths’ shops. ‘These great riches are not occasioned by its inhabitants being noblemen or gentlemen; being all, on the contrary, persons of low degree, and artificers who have congregated here from all parts of the island, and from Flanders and from every other place.’