Bosworth: The Birth of the Tudors (50 page)

It was the perfect culmination to Henry’s victory; too perfect perhaps. Bernard André idealised the scene of victory, complete with the ‘blare of bugles and bray of trumpets’ that ‘assaulted the stars’. But there is another story. The Great Chronicle recorded that it was Sir William Stanley, ‘as it was said’, who having ‘won the possession of King Richard’s helmet with the crown being upon it’ came straight to King Henry and set it upon his head saying, “Sir, here I make you King of England”’. Could Sir William Stanley, rather than his brother, have been the official kingmaker, as his actions on the battlefield had won the day? It seems unlikely that Thomas Stanley, as the senior nobleman of the two brothers, would not have been given the honours of crowning Henry. If Henry had climbed what was to become Crown Hill in order to reach Thomas Stanley’s camp, seeking his approval for his victory, it would seem natural for Stanley himself to perform the unofficial ceremony. Sir William Stanley, having retrieved Richard’s crown, could of course have passed the crown to his brother; the ballads suggest that the crown was delivered to Lord Stanley who ‘unto king Henry then went he, and delivered it, as to the most worthy to wear the crown and be their king’.

PART FOUR:

AFTERMATH

12

OUR VICTORIOUS FIELD

A
ccording to the Crowland chronicler, Richard’s corpse had been discovered ‘
inter alios mortuos
’ – among the other dead. It is likely that Richard’s body would have at first been unrecognisable, as one chronicler described, ‘so all besprung with mire and filth’. Molinet suggested that Richard had been killed by a Welsh halberd, while another account described how Richard’s helmet had been beaten into his skull and ‘destroyed the head’. If this were the case, it is hardly surprising that the king’s body may have at first gone unnoticed among the scattered bodies of the dead covered in the mud of the marshy land on Redemore plain where they had fallen. At the Battle of Nancy eight years earlier, Richard’s brother-in-law Charles the Bold, Duke of Burgundy, was killed: ‘refusing to fly, and fighting desperately to cover the retreat of his scattered forces, [he] was surrounded and was cleft through helmet and skull by the tremendous blow of a Swiss halberd’. It took two days to find Charles’s body, by now frozen. As a result of the ‘mighty blow’, his face was ‘one gash from temple to teeth’, leaving him ‘totally unrecognisable except to his Italian valet who knew him by his long fingernails, and to his Portugese doctor who identified him by the old battle scars on his stripped and frozen corpse’. When the first Earl of Shrewsbury was killed at the battle of Castillon, after his body had been stripped of its armour, he was only later identified by his missing left molar.

Once Richard’s body had been identified, the Crowland chronicler noted, ‘many other insults were heaped on it, and, not very humanely, a halter was thrown around the neck’. It was likely that rather than Richard’s body being stripped naked as part of a deliberate humiliation of the dead king, his body ‘besprinkled with mire and blood’ had only been identified after his armour had been removed. Polydore Vergil gave more precise details about the fate of the corpse: ‘stripped of all
he was wearing and put on its back’, Richard’s body was placed on the back of a horse and brought to Leicester ‘with his head and arms hanging down on one side of the horse and his legs on the other, a wretched sight indeed, but very worthy of the man’s life’. Trussed up like a ‘hog or another vile beast’, his entrance into the town was followed by a lone herald, ‘the pursuivant called Norroy’. The chronicler could not help but observe with pathos that ‘as gloriously as he by the morning departed from that town, so as irreverently was he that afternoon brought into that town’.

Henry had ordered that Richard’s body, almost naked, should be placed on public display for two days in Leicester, ‘for all men to wonder upon’. In doing so, it was clear that Henry intended to prove that Richard had died in battle, to prevent any rumours to the contrary. After the battle of Barnet, Edward IV had done the same with Warwick’s body, which had been displayed at St Paul’s laid out almost naked in a wooden coffin. Men flocked to get a sight of the dead king, ‘with everyone wishing to look at him’, ‘naked and despoiled to the very skin, and nothing left about him, not so much as a clout to cover his privy parts’. Richard’s bloodied and near-naked corpse had been trussed up in the collegiate church of St Mary-in-the-Newarke. The decision to display his mortal remains there appears to have been entirely deliberate: not only was the church a Lancastrian foundation, Richard’s body would suffer the further indignity of being displayed among the tombs of Henry, Earl of Lancaster, Henry, Duke of Lancaster and Mary de Bohun, the grandmother of Henry VI, who had all been buried there. The message could not be clearer: Henry, the inheritor of the Lancastrian dynasty, had finally ensured that vengeance had been secured. When Richard’s corpse was cut down, Henry chose not to have the Yorkist king buried among his Lancastrian ancestors, but rather in the plainer Greyfriars church, part of the Franciscan Friary, ‘irreverently buried’ without any funeral ceremony in the choir of the Franciscan Friars Minor in Leicester.

It was not until ten years later, in September 1495, that Henry would give thought to providing the dead king with any tombstone to mark his grave, ordering that James Keyley be paid £10 1s for making ‘King Richard’s tomb’. Even in the grave, it seems, Richard would continue to cause controversy, with the payment for the alabaster monument
becoming the subject of a lawsuit between two stonemasons. There are no contemporary descriptions of the monument, but a manuscript copy of its epitaph survives. It reads:

Richard’s tomb did not survive the Dissolution of the Monasteries, which brought an end to his final resting place at Greyfriars. John Speed, in his
History of Great Britian
, published in 1611, stated that at the suppression of Greyfriars’ monastery, Richard’s tomb was ‘pulled down and utterly defaced, since when the grave overgrown with nettles and weeds is very obscure and not to be found.’ According to one tradition, after the monastery had been dissolved during the reformation, the tomb was broken into and the bones of the dead king were carried through the town accompanied by jeers, finally to be thrown from Bow Bridge into the river Soar below. Richard’s supposed coffin was apparently placed outside the White Horse Inn in the city, where it served a new purpose as a watering-trough for horses. John Evelyn wrote in his diary in 1654 that Leicester, that ‘old and ragged city’, was famous only ‘for the tomb of the tyrant Richard III, which is now converted
into a cistern, at which (I think) cattle drink’. The trough was eventually broken up during the reign of George I, to be used as steps into a cellar. Christopher Wren, Dean of Windsor and father of the great architect, told a different tale: after Richard had been slain, he wrote, ‘his body was begged by the Nuns of Leicester, and buried in their chapel there; at the dissolution whereof the place of his burial happened to fall into the bounds of a citizen’s garden, which being after purchased by Mr. Robert Herrick was by him covered with a handsome stone pillar, three foot high, with this inscription, “Here lies the body of Richard III, some time King of England.” This he showed me walking in his garden, Anno 1612.’

For centuries, in spite of the location of Richard’s final resting place being well known, the king’s body was forgotten by history. Robert Herrick’s house was eventually demolished, to be replaced in the eighteenth century by a row of houses; eventually the site of Richard’s burial would become a council car park, with the king’s remains lying somewhere beneath its tarmac.
*

Henry and his victorious army eventually arrived at Leicester, where he was received ‘with all honour and gladness’. He remained there for two days, allowing his soldiers to refresh themselves and prepare for his march to London to claim the crown. In the aftermath of the battle, several important tasks faced the new king. In his victory speech upon Crown Hill, Henry had spoken of his grief at beholding the sight of the deaths ‘of so many brave men’. He had witnessed his own standard-bearer William Brandon being cut down and killed by Richard during his final ill-fated charge; according to Polydore Vergil, Brandon was ‘the only one from the nobility’ who had fallen on Henry’s side, which had seen ‘scarcely 100’ soldiers killed in the battle. Estimates of the number of men killed during the two hours of fighting varies wildly between different sources, with one even suggesting that over 10,000 died on both sides. The number of bodies scattered across the battlefield was undoubtedly fewer than this: a more realistic total comes from Vergil, who estimated that in addition to the hundred men lost on Henry’s side, ‘on Richard’s side about a thousand men fell in this battle’ while Molinet believed that there were ‘only 300 dead on both sides’.

Casualties had been heaviest on Richard’s side where the engagement of the vanguards or ‘in the first battle line’ had taken place. Led by the Duke of Norfolk, according to Vergil, ‘a very great number were killed in the flight’ following their rout by Oxford’s troops. Once identified, Norfolk’s body was taken from the battlefield to be buried in his family tomb in Thetford priory. Later it would be moved to Framlingham following the priory’s dissolution, and in 1841 the sheet lead coffin was opened, where the skull of an old man, judging by the state of its teeth, was discovered still with its hair, ‘of a fair or sandy colour’ intact. At the front of the skull there was ‘a large hole … as if the head must have had some severe blow at some time or other’. No epitaph for the tomb survives, yet the chronicler Edward Hall gave perhaps the most fitting tribute for a man who had fought his first battle in the French wars during the 1440s, who had witnessed the tribulations of battle throughout the tumult of the civil wars of the 1450s and 1460s, who had been present at Barnet, and who finally went loyally to his death over forty years later: ‘he regarded his oath, his honour and promise made to King Richard; like a gentleman and faithful subject to his prince he absented himself not from his master, but as he faithfully lived under him, so he manfully died with him to his great fame and laud’.

Among the dead were also Richard’s dedicated supporters who must have joined the king on or near to his final charge. Richard’s close companion Sir Richard Ratcliffe, Sir Robert Brackenbury, the keeper of the Tower of London, John Kendal, the king’s secretary, Sir Robert Percy, controller of the king’s household and Walter Devereux, Lord Ferrers all perished. Of the commissioners of array who assembled for Richard, ten were likely to have been killed at the battle: in Buckinghamshire, Thomas Hampden of Kimble and Thomas Straunge, William Allington in Cambridgeshire, John Coke in Essex, John Kebyll in Leicestershire, Richard Boughton and Humphrey Beaufort in Warwickshire, Sir Thomas Gower and Sir Robert Percy in Yorkshire all are listed among the inquisitions post mortem as having died around the date of the battle. Other commissioners are known to have died in late 1485, perhaps from injuries sustained in battle, though this cannot be confirmed. Those who died with only young children as their heirs indicates that their deaths were probably unexpected, though sudden death from the sweating sickness that swept England in the autumn of 1485
cannot be discounted. They included Thomas Pygot in Cambridgeshire, John Harlyng, John Grene, William Gate and John Wrytell in Essex, John Twynyho and John Wykes in Gloucestershire, William Druell in Hertfordshire, Sir Thomas Frowyk and Thomas Windsor in Middlesex, Henry le Strange in Norfolk, Sir William Stokes in Northamptonshire, John Cawardyne in Staffordshire, John Wode junior in Sussex, John Hugford in Warwickshire and Sir John Stourton in Wiltshire.