Bosworth: The Birth of the Tudors (47 page)

Henry could not know what decision Thomas Stanley would take, or ultimately to which side he would choose to commit. For Stanley, whose son Lord Strange remained imprisoned in Richard’s camp, it remained crucial to be seen as being able to commit to either side. In
drawing up his forces midway and overlooking the battlefield, he had positioned himself close enough to Richard’s forces to be considered a kind of additional vanguard or wing on the king’s left-hand side. This suggests that he had taken up his position, ranged on the brow of the gentle hills around Dadlington, with his brother Sir William Stanley, commanding a force of 3,000 men, assembled on the line of the hill further along towards Stoke. As the Stanleys looked down upon the battlefield, their armies twice the number of Henry’s own forces, Henry understood his fate would be entirely in their hands.

With the battle lines drawn up on either side, as Henry’s forces advanced towards Redemore plain, for the first time both sides caught sight of one another ‘in the distance’. The soldiers made their final preparations for battle, equipping themselves with helmets, and ‘awaiting the signal to advance with ears pricked up’. Edward Hall, though writing in the sixteenth century with his own imagined perspective, nonetheless gives a vivid depiction of the tension palpable in the air: ‘how hastily the soldiers buckled their helms, how quickly the archers bent their bows and frushed their feathers, how readily the billmen shook their bills and proved their staves, ready to approach and join, when the terrible trumpet should sound the bloody blast to victory or death’. Before the armies could engage, they would need to come within a sufficient distance for their arrows and artillery to be effective. Meanwhile, as Henry’s forces advanced, they took care to navigate around a marsh which, according to Vergil, Henry had ‘on purpose left to his right so that it should be a protection to his men’. By now, with the low lying morning sun having risen higher in the sky, by turning leftwards towards the north, he also hoped to have ‘the sun in his rear’. It is uncertain who gave the first cry for battle to commence; Vergil states that it was Richard, witnessing ‘that the enemy had passed the marsh … ordered his men to attack them’, though at the same time, once Henry’s vanguard had passed the marsh, he too ‘gave his men the signal for battle’.

The first sounds of battle after Norfolk had raised ‘a sudden shout’ were the whistling of arrows as both sides began to fire at each other as the archers ‘let sharp arrows fly’, the bowmen being able to fire at a rate of around twelve arrows a minute. At Tewkesbury, Edward’s archers, placed in the vanguard, had ‘so sore oppressed’ the Lancastrians ‘with
shot of arrow, at they gave them right-a-sharp shower’. The onslaught of arrow and gunshot had provoked the Lancastrians into panic, launching their vanguard into battle early, with fatal consequences. Yet the initial trading of firepower seems to have been inconclusive, with both sides holding their positions. Next came the deafening sound of Richard’s artillery being unleashed. Recent archaeological investigations have revealed the extent of this awesome firepower, with over thirty lead cannon shot, often containing cubes of iron or pebbles encased in lead, littered across the battlefield, ranging from 30mm in diameter to 94mm. This indicates that there would have been a significant number of guns of different size and range firing that day, with the largest cannonball being comparable to the shot fired from some of the most powerful weapons of the day. According to Molinet, it was Henry’s French mercenaries, who would have had considerable experience of Continental warfare and how to counter artillery fire, who now revealed their crucial expertise. Studying the ‘lie of the land’ by the direction and power of ‘the king’s shot’, as well as ‘the order of his battle’, they informed Henry that ‘in order to avoid the fire’, he should ‘mass their troops against the flank rather than the front of the king’s battle’. With Richard’s left flank facing the marsh, it would have been the king’s right flank, where his vanguard was located, that the French believed the attack should be focused, moving Henry’s men out of the line of fire and strengthening Oxford’s forces as they approached Norfolk’s troops.

Meanwhile, as Oxford’s vanguard neared Norfolk’s forces, on both sides the archers downed their bows and as ‘they came to close quarters’ began to fight ‘with swords’, as the ballad described how the sound of ‘brands rang on basinets high, battle axes fast on helms did light’. The initial clash of the vanguards was fast and furious, reflecting the personal animosity that must have existed between the two commanders. Norfolk and Oxford were old rivals, who jostled for the leadership of their East Anglian region. They had fought against one another before, at Barnet fourteen years before, when Norfolk had defeated the earl, if only as a result of Oxford’s own military failures that day. While Oxford remained imprisoned, it was Norfolk who had benefited from the distribution of his lands. Fourteen years later, the earl now had his chance of revenge.

It was not long before Oxford believed that his men had pushed too far into Norfolk’s ranks. Fearing that they might be subsumed and ‘completely encircled’ by the greater numbers of Richard’s long battle line, the earl sent out an order through the ranks ‘that no soldier was to advance four feet from the standards’, though in relating the detail of the manoeuvre, Vergil later changed the distance to ten feet. The earl’s orders were once again classic textbook advice, with Christine of Pizan advising that troops should keep within a set ‘interval or distance’ so that ‘men ought to see by great care that they overpress not each other’ nor drift too far away; to allow either, she warned, would either ‘lose their strokes and their fighting for lack of more room and space’ or ‘give to their enemies an entry through themself, and so were they in peril to be broken’.

For Oxford, there was perhaps a more personal reason for making his order. The earl had learnt from his bitter experience fourteen years before at Barnet the need to maintain a tight formation among his forces. There his troops had lost the battle through becoming too detached from the main army; when the battle had turned ninety degrees upon itself, in the confusion and the poor visibility, the earl had ended up attacking his own Lancastrian side. It had been a painful lesson that Oxford was not going to repeat this time. As a result, when the earl’s men received the command, they ‘crowded together and withdrew a short way from the battle’. The decision seems to have caused a brief impasse in the fighting, and Norfolk’s vanguard, ‘if terrified and suspecting a trick because of this, also stopped fighting for a short time’.

As Richard studied the opening salvoes of the battle, there were other issues pressing on his mind. Catching sight of Thomas Stanley’s banner fluttering in the distance, with Stanley’s own forces remaining motionless, the king regarded his inaction as nothing short of betrayal. Furious, he was determined to reassert his authority, demonstrating to his own men the price that would be paid for desertion and disobedience. The temporary lull in the fighting gave Richard the chance to order the imprisoned Lord Strange to be brought to him immediately to pay the ultimate price for his father and uncle’s actions. Informing Strange that he was to face his death ‘for thy uncle’s sake’, Strange took the news patiently. He called upon a Lancashire gentleman named
Latham, whom he gave a ring from his finger, asking that it be sent to his wife. If Henry were to ‘lose the field’, then she was to be sent a message to flee in exile abroad together with his eldest son, in the hope that one day he might be able to exact revenge against Richard.

Sir William Harrington urged Richard to delay Strange’s execution until both Lord Stanley and Sir William Stanley were captured: ‘we shall have them soon on the field, the father, the uncle and the son, all three; then you may deem them with your mouth, what kind of death that they shall die’. The tradition is upheld in all of the ballads, and is revealing about the time of the order, which seems to have come just as Richard’s vanguard began their engagement: ‘Then came a knight to King Richard, and said, “It is high time to look about; look how your vanguard beginneth to fight. When ye have the father and the son … look you what death they shall die: ye may head all at your own will”.’

The story is given credence by the Crowland chronicler, who recorded that as the battle had progressed, Richard ordered that Lord Strange ‘should be beheaded on the spot’. ‘However, to whom this task was given, seeing that the matter in hand was at a very critical stage and that it was more important than the elimination of one man, failed to carry out’ the command, ‘and on their own judgement, let the man go and returned to the heart of battle’. It seems that Strange was allowed to go free, perhaps even to join the battle; his fellow prisoner William Gruffudd certainly seems to have been able to do so, for one Welsh poem considered that he was ‘the most important Knight on Henry’s field, and Sir Rhys was there by your side’. It is a telling sign of the breakdown of authority in Richard’s own ranks that the king failed to have his commands obeyed, in stark contrast to Edward IV’s summary execution of Lord Welles before his troops had engaged the Lincolnshire rebellion in 1470. Richard’s kingship, it seems, was already collapsing around him.

Of course there could have been other reasons why Richard was forced to delay Lord Strange’s execution. The incident seems to have chimed with another critical moment in the battle. Having withdrawn temporarily from the fray and drawn his troops closer together, the Earl of Oxford now renewed his attack on Norfolk’s vanguard. Vergil relates how the earl ‘collected his squadrons together and attacked the enemy on one side’, a manoeuvre that seems to chime with Molinet’s
description of how the French forces on Henry’s side advised how to avoid Richard’s cannon fire ‘by assembling on the side of the king rather than facing him’. In effect, Oxford was placing all of Henry’s strength on his left wing. In making this formation, Oxford once again followed Christine de Pizan’s advice, who had urged in her work that commanders should ‘take most heed of that whether thou fight with thy right wing, or thy left wing or thy centre’ and to ‘set thy strongest and mightiest and wisest fighters that thou hast, both horsemen, footmen and archers, there where the burden and brunt of the battle will be’.

Yet this strengthened attack on Richard’s right hand side was not the only manoeuvre that Oxford had planned. At the same time, the earl ordered that ‘others on the other side made a wedge and simultaneously pressed on and renewed the battle’. The use of a wedge formation, or ‘
cuneo
’ in Vergil’s account, exactly the same Latin word deployed by Vegetius, to describe a tight column of men charging forward, was used to break through the ranks of an extended battle line such as Richard had deployed. The timing of the renewed charge of the wedge into Richard’s main army at the same time as Oxford pressed forward onto the right flank of Norfolk’s vanguard came just as Richard was giving his orders for Lord Strange’s execution. According to the ‘Ballad of Lady Bessie’, Strange’s execution was only delayed by Sir William Harrington’s insistence that ‘our ray breaketh on every side’, believing that any delay ‘put our folk in jeopardy’. The ballad suggests that it was Rhys ap Thomas’s men, wearing their recognisable liveries of a black gown who were part of this wedge formation that broke ‘the ray’ of Richard’s men, causing Northumberland on Richard’s left flank to be isolated.

In fact, what Oxford hoped to achieve by this pincer movement was far more complex than this. The combined effect of his own attack around the side of Richard’s right flank at the same time as sending a wedge of soldiers to break through the king’s battle line, was not only to attempt to separate Richard’s forces, detaching Northumberland’s rearguard from the fighting, but to turn the entire battle round so that Oxford’s forces would now be attacking Norfolk’s from behind, thereby ensuring that the sun was now in their faces when they faced Oxford’s attack. With the fighting now having swung round on its axis, fighting Norfolk’s vanguard from their extreme right-hand side and rear,
Oxford had also managed to secure another advantage by ensuring that the sun was facing directly into the eyes of Norfolk’s men; one ballad, ‘The Rose of England’, states that Oxford managed to take Norfolk’s right hand, so that ‘the sun and wind of them to get’. The position of the morning sun across the battlefield is crucial here: the actual date of the battle in our modern calendar would have been 31 August, when early in the morning, the sun rises from an easterly direction, moving across the sky at approximately fifteen degrees each hour. At the beginning stage of the battle, from where Richard’s forces were positioned along the brow of Ambion Hill and Sutton Cheney, the sun would have been roughly behind them. As the hours passed, and the sun rose in the sky, its position would have moved to in between the two forces. As the battle went on and the sun rose in the sky and swung round to a more midway point in the sky, the advantage that Norfolk would have had at the beginning of the battle was being slowly lost. It seems the only move Oxford could have made to gain the sun’s position behind him was if he were able not only to attack the right flank of Norfolk’s vanguard, but to move completely round these opposing troops and turning round, begin to attack Norfolk’s troops from behind.

Once again, the movement itself had been set out by Christine de Pizan, as a means by which a small army facing an opposing force of far greater number, might be able to inflict defeat in spite of their size. Pizan suggested that: