Bosworth: The Birth of the Tudors (59 page)

As soon as the royal warrant had been granted, the churchwardens at Dadlington hurried to publish a printed appeal, known as a letter of confraternity, urging parishioners throughout the dioceses of Lincoln,
Chester, Worcester and Norwich to grant alms for the building of a new battlefield chapel, its text containing a blank space for the name of the relevant donor who would be ‘declared to be a partner and partaker of all the indulgence, pardon, masses, prayers, good deeds and meritorious works as is afore rehearsed both in life and death for evermore’. Its initial letter formed by a woodcut depiction of St James, the chapel’s patron, the appeal letter declared:

The amount raised was enough to pay for Dadlington church, which had previously shared a resident curate with the nearby village of Stoke, to employ for the first time its own priest, Roger Normanton, with the substantial salary of £4 until at least 1526.

Henry VII had preferred to make his own memorial a more personal one. In 1509, as he lay on his deathbed surrounded by his anxious courtiers, he devoted his final energies to drawing up his lengthy final will and testament. Among his many bequests, he would not forget those who had dedicated and sacrificed their lives to placing him upon the throne, remembering those ‘lords as well of our blood as other, and also knights, squires, and divers our true loving subjects and servants’ who had ‘faithfully assisted us, and divers of them put themselves in extreme jeopardy of their lives, and losses of their lands and goods, in serving and assisting us, as well about the recovery of our Right and Realm of England’. And in one final tribute to his victory in battle twenty-four years before, the dying king requested that a wooden image, wrought with plate of fine gold, should be made, ‘representing our own person
… in the manner of an armed man’, to be equipped with an enamelled coat of the arms of England and France, together with a sword and spurs. The statue was to be placed kneeling on a silver table, ‘holding betwixt his hands the crown which it pleased God to give us, with the victory over our enemy at our first field’. The statue was to be dedicated to St Edward the Confessor, and set in the middle of his shrine, with detailed instructions as to the exact measurements of the statue, so that it would seem as if Henry was almost offering up his crown to St Edward in thanks.

Of those surrounding the frail king as he languished in his bed, Henry would have recognised few faces who would have been at his side on the fateful day of his ‘victorious field’. By then, most of his old comrades in arms were dead: Sir Edward Woodville had been killed in 1488; Sir John Savage had also died in action in Bolougne in 1492; his uncle Jasper had died in 1495, the same year Sir William Stanley had been beheaded for treason; his queen Elizabeth had died in 1503, followed by Thomas Stanley the next year; Sir Richard Guildford had passed away while on pilgrimage to the Holy Land in 1506; Giles Daubeney had died in his bed in 1508. In their place came a fresh-faced generation of new men who had little experience of the tribulations that their king had faced during the decades of civil war that were fading fast into distant memory.

It was a very different world to the one George Neville had described in 1461, when he had written that the English were ‘a race deserving of pity even from the French’ due to their ‘intestine’ civil wars. Even if the tenacious king, paranoid to the last, may not have believed it himself, Henry had healed a nation, laying the foundations for the future stability of the Tudor dynasty that would remain on the throne until 1603.

While previous assertions that 1485 had marked the birth of the early modern period and the death of the medieval age are both anachronistic and unsubstantiated, Richard’s death at Bosworth had brought with it the end of the Plantagenet dynasty. Henry’s accession had heralded the self-conscious image of a new monarchy that brought with it the idea of a country reconciled and harmony restored. As the decades wore on and the Tudors became more entrenched, strengthening their power and authority upon their subjects, they wove their own official
history of events, best typified in Edward Hall’s
The Union of the Two Noble Families of Lancaster and York
, asserting that Henry’s ascent to the throne was an act of providence, bringing with it ‘the union of the two noble and illustrious families of Lancaster and York, being long in continual dissension for the crown of this noble realm, with all the acts done in both the times of the princes, both of one lineage and of the other, beginning at the time of Henry IV, the first author of this division, and so successively proceeding to the reign of the high and prudent prince King Henry VIII, the indubitable flower and very heir of both the said lineages’. The events of the fifteenth century were to be fashioned into drama, with Hall’s chapter on Richard’s own reign being titled ‘The Tragical Doings of King Richard the Third’. It was a compelling tale of the Tudor’s inexorable rise, contrasted against the downfall of the houses of Lancaster and York, inspiring William Shakespeare to transform it into blank verse for popular audiences who devoured his history plays, the power of which defined for generations the wider view of what became known in Sir Walter Scott’s famously invented phrase, ‘the Wars of the Roses’.

The reality of Henry Tudor’s ascent to the throne – his narrow escapes from death, his failures and anxieties, complete with constant uncertainty of his situation and the compromises that he had been forced to make, including the support from France and his former Yorkist enemies in gaining the crown – was a far less welcome tale. It remains nonetheless just as remarkable; against all the odds, at Bosworth Henry achieved a victory that he should not have won. For Philippe de Commynes, who had met Henry as a fourteen-year-old when he arrived as an exile at Duke Francis’s court in Brittany in 1471, knowing exactly how Henry, who had told Commynes to his face how he had been a prisoner all his life since the age of five, had ‘suffered much’ having ‘neither money, nor rights, so I believe, to the crown of England, nor any reputation except what his own person and honesty brought him’, there could be no other explanation. Writing his memoirs, Commynes wrote simply, ‘A battle was fought. King Richard was killed on the battlefield and the Earl of Richmond was crowned king of England on the field with Richard’s crown. Should one describe this as Fortune? Surely it was God’s judgement.’

14

BOSWORTH REDISCOVERED

W
hen the blind French poet Bernard André came to describe the events of the Battle of Bosworth in his life of Henry VII, the
Vita Henrici Septimi
, he quite literally drew a blank. Writing that ‘although I have heard of this battle with my ears’ from men at Henry’s court, he believed that when it came to detailing exactly what had happened, in ‘this business the eye is a surer witness than the ear’. Joking that if this was the case he was hardly best placed to pass comment given his blindness, he declared that he ‘would not be so bold as to affirm the day, the place, and the order of battle, and so I pass this by’. In the place of his description of the battlefield, at least ‘until I am better informed’, André resolved to ‘leave a large blank field on this paper’.

Fortunately for the historian of Bosworth, several fuller accounts of the battle do exist, allowing for a conjectural history of the events of 22 August to be pieced together. The most comprehensive description of the battle comes from Polydore Vergil’s
Historia Anglia
, first published in print at Basle in 1534, yet Vergil had written his history in manuscript form thirty years before when he was a visitor at Henry’s court, noting how when writing his history, ‘on approaching our own times, I could find no such annals’ so he ‘betook myself to every man of age who was pointed out to me as having been formerly occupied in important and public affairs, and from all such I obtained information about events up to the year 1500’. For the first time this book has returned to this original manuscript, still surviving in the Vatican Library in Rome, to add fresh details to the story.

Vergil can be supplemented by other fifteenth-century narratives such as the ‘Spanish Account’ of the battle, written on 1 March 1486 by Mosen Diego de Valera, in a letter to the Spanish monarchs, Ferdinand
and Isabella. Valera was writing from Puerto de Santa Maria, a port inland from the Bay of Cadiz, but he had been inspired to write following the arrival of ‘trustworthy merchants who were in England at the time of the battle’. The identity of the Crowland chronicler, who wrote his account of events in the same year, has been hotly debated; however, it is clear that the author must have had a first-hand view of Richard’s court. Other accounts of the battle can be found in the Great Chronicle of London, written in the late 1490s, as was the Burgundian chronicler Jean Molinet’s description, though this relies heavily on the experience of the French mercenaries fighting on Henry’s side, while two ballads, the ‘Battle of Bosworth Field’ and the ‘Ballad of Lady Bessie’, were likely to have been composed by members of the Stanley affinity, probably before Sir William Stanley’s execution in 1495. These accounts do not provide a definitive detailed version of events; indeed, it can be difficult to reconcile these disparate sources into a single narrative, with each providing their own separate, often conflicting, version of events. The history of what actually happened that day must therefore remain in the hands of the historian’s own judgement, balancing competing claims surrounding the timings of the battle, the movements of both armies, and most controversially, the location of where both sides clashed and victory was won.

How did the battle become known as the Battle of Bosworth? The first mention of the battle as being named as ‘Bosworth’ was not until twenty-five years after the event, mentioned in the manuscript edition of Vergil’s
Anglia Historia
as being at a place near Leicester ‘Bosworth’. The manuscript of the Great Chronicle of London also observed how Richard ‘came unto a village called Bosworth where in the fields adjoining both hosts met’. But the name Bosworth was first printed in the 1516 edition of Robert Fayban’s New Chronicles; Fabyan, who is thought also to be the author of the Great Chronicle, indicated that the battle had taken place ‘near unto a village in Leicestershire named Bosworth’. Yet in one edition of the work, discovered in the National Library of Scotland by Peter Foss, in the margins next to the account of the battle, a sixteenth century hand has corrected: ‘the battay[le] of Redesmore heath was bytwene K.R. & K.H. th[e] viith’. The anonymous reader of the Chronicle, taking his pen to the margins of the printed work, was only reflecting what had long been common knowledge. Indeed it was
‘the field of Redemore’ that was first identified by the city of York as where their king Richard had been ‘murdered’, with the name in various forms appearing in nearly all other contemporary accounts. It was Redemore that contemporaries recognised as the location where the battle had been fought: but what or more importantly where was the field of Redemore?

For most of the past century, especially since Leicestershire County Council established an official Battlefield Centre near the village of Sutton Cheney, it had been assumed that the battle had been fought near Ambion Hill. Over time, successive generations of antiquarians and historians managed to convince themselves that, with topographical features such as ‘King Richard’s Well’ nearby, the fighting had occurred around this location. Yet the first mention of Ambion comes as late as 1577, when the chronicler Raphael Hollinshed stated that Richard had ‘pitched his field on a hill called Anne Beame, refreshed his soldiers, and took his rest’. If Ambion Hill had played a part in the battle, it was clear from the beginning that it was never actually where the battle had been fought.

But if the primary accounts of the battle are not forthcoming in detail as to where the battle was fought, it was evident from some of the earliest attempts to piece together the location of the battlefield that Bosworth was not fought upon Ambion Hill, but rather upon a plain. The notion that the battle was fought on a ‘plain’ comes not from Vergil, but is first found in Hall’s Chronicle, who stated how ‘King Richard, being furnished with men and all habiliments of war, bringing all his men out of their camp into ye plain’. The poet Michael Drayton, born in 1563 at Hartshill, not far from the battle, stated that the armies had fought ‘on a spacious Moore, lying southward from the Towne’, while Sir George Buck, in his
History of the Life and Reign of King Richard III
, written in 1619 has Richard’s death occurring ‘upon the plain’. But it was the seventeenth-century Leicestershire historian William Burton, who in his
Description of Leicestershire
published in 1622, was to give the earliest detailed description of where the battle took place. Burton was born in Lindley in 1575 and his family owned the manor of Dadlington from 1585. He wrote that as a child he had heard accounts of actual eyewitnesses to the battle second hand. While the likelihood of this remains slim, Burton must have been able to draw upon local tradition
of where the battle was fought, stating how he had constructed his history ‘by relation of the inhabitants, who have many occurrences and passages, yet fresh in memory; by reason, that some persons thereabouts, who saw the battle fought were living within less than forty years: of which persons myself have seen some, and have heard their discourses, though related by second hand’. Burton claimed that the battle had been ‘fought in a large, flat, plain, and spacious ground, three miles distant from this Towne [Market Bosworth], between the Towne of Shenton, Sutton, Dadlington, and Stoke’.