House Of Treason: The Rise And Fall Of A Tudor Dynasty (2 page)

There remained the threat of the still uncommitted Stanleys and their tactically important forces which had now arrived in the vicinity. Lord Stanley had earlier pleaded sickness as a rather vapid excuse for not rallying to the royal standard. Tired of his obvious prevarication, Richard sent his pursuivant, or messenger, to Stanley, commanding him to take his place immediately in the royal battle lines. If he still disobeyed, the king swore a terrible oath that ‘by Christ’s passion, he would strike off his son’s head before he dined’. Stanley boldly shrugged off the ultimatum, retorting that he had ‘more sons yet alive’.
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Richard’s advisers, Norfolk among them, convinced him not to execute young Stanley until the outcome of the day’s slaughter had been decided.

Time was slipping away and the monarch’s traditional speech to steel the hearts of the royal troops had to be delivered. The king promised them: ‘One thing I assure you - that in so just and good a cause and so notable a quarrel, you shall find me this day rather dead carrion
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upon the cold ground, than a free prisoner on a carpet in a lady’s chamber. I will triumph by victory, or suffer death for immortal fame.’ He expected his soldiers to be ‘true men against traitors . . . true inheritors against usurpers; the scourges of God against tyrants’. Finally, Richard ordered: ‘Display my banner with good courage, march forth like strong and robust champions . . .The battle is at hand and victory approaches.’
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These were brave words from a doomed king.

By now it was first light and no breakfast had been prepared when the leading echelons of Henry Tudor’s 5,000-strong army were seen advancing east along a narrow country road (now called Fenn Lane) towards the royal forces perched high on Ambion Hill.
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This was an unpleasant surprise; there was no time for the priests accompanying Richard’s army to say Mass and there were frantic preparations for combat, as every man got ready to fight for his cause - and his life:

As they scrambled to their places in the battle lines, even the most stolid and unimaginative of soldiers must have wondered if he would live to see another sunrise. The bulk of Tudor’s troops, commanded by John de Vere, thirteenth Earl of Oxford,
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kept the marshland of Redemore Heath on their right to protect their flank as they advanced at a moderate pace, with the rays of the rising sun glinting on the armour of their foes high above them on Ambion Hill.

Norfolk’s battalion attacked as their enemy cleared the marsh. He was supported by the main body of the royalist army - their war cries and the clank of their armour drowned out by the sharp cracks of Richard’s 140 light guns and bombards opening fire on the serried ranks of the insurgents below. Norfolk’s men ran down the steep slope, splashed through two streams and arrived on level ground. Then the archers in the front ranks let fly their first volley of deadly arrows. Oxford’s bowmen replied and both armies clashed in furious hand-to-hand fighting. After the first shock, Oxford pulled back to rally his men and to close ranks around his standards. He also must have been anxiously awaiting an intervention by the 2,000 troops of Henry Tudor’s so-far neutral stepfather, Lord Stanley, and his brother, Sir William, who were mounted up and impassively watching from Crown Hill and atop a spur of land at Dadlington, one mile (1.6 km.), south of the fighting.

As that unnatural lull fell across the battlefield, destiny confronted the king.

From the lower slopes of Ambion Hill, he had seen the bodyguard of 1,000 horsemen surrounding Henry Tudor on the western edge of the marsh, just behind the right flank of Oxford’s panting troops.

Richard decided on an audacious, do-or-die charge to secure his crown once and for all. Calling together his squires and personal household - including his friends Sir Robert Percy and Francis, ninth Baron Lovell - he led a helter-skelter charge of 120 cavalry to force his way through the protective phalanx and to slay Henry in chivalrous, single combat. The hopelessly small force galloped down the hill, the royal standard, borne by Sir Percival Thirlwall, desperately trying to catch up with the king riding far out in front.

He nearly made it.

The shock of the assault, from behind Norfolk’s left flank, punched through the packed ranks of standing Tudor horsemen. Richard swiftly killed Sir William Brandon who was carrying Henry Tudor’s standard bearing the red dragon of Wales. He then fought Sir John Cheyne, ‘a man of great force and strength’, and knocked him clean off his horse. By now clearly battle-crazed, and scenting the heady, sweet smell of victory, Richard hacked his way ‘by dint of sword’ towards Henry Tudor, who reportedly ‘[with]stood his violence and kept him at the sword’s point’.
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It was then that Sir William Stanley finally showed his hand.

If he ever nursed any doubts - he was already branded a traitor by Richard - he now chose to back Henry Tudor. He led his horsemen in a thundering charge along the eastern edge of the marsh, and wheeled right up Ambion Hill, cutting off both Norfolk’s troops and Richard from any chance of reinforcement or rescue by Percy’s now undecided and timorous reserve. Seeing the Stanleys’ commitment to battle, Oxford renewed his attack and the fighting inevitably became more confused as opponents feverishly hacked at each other in a desperate mêlée, sometimes fatally tripping over the dead and wounded already littering the ground. Norfolk realised with horror that he and his troops were isolated and that he must cut his way to safety before he was completely overrun from front and rear.

Norfolk was distantly related to Oxford - his first cousin, Elizabeth Howard, was the earl’s mother.
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Not only did they have kinship, but they also enjoyed close ties of friendship - such is the dreadful tragedy of divisive civil war. Almost simultaneously in the tumult of combat, both captains recognised each other’s identifying heraldic device - Oxford’s rayed star embroidered on his standard and Norfolk’s silver lion blazoned on his shield. Any memories of their happy times together instantly evaporated in the heat and sweat of battle.

Norfolk must have been desperately weary by this stage of the struggle. He was aged about sixty-three, more than twenty years older than his enemy. But the adrenalin of battle - the ruthless imperative to kill or be killed - enabled him to conquer his exhaustion and continue the fight. Like Oxford, he levelled his heavy fluted lance, and they both charged, almost a ton of horse and man hurling themselves at their adversary. Each weapon splintered with a crack on the other’s armour, and the riders swayed back with the force of the blows.

This was no gallant joust with blunted lances in a festive, courtly tournament and there were no obsequious heralds present to award points in deciding the heroic victor. In the parlance of the day, both noblemen were fighting
a‘ outrance -
to the bitter end.

Discarding their shattered lances, they drew swords and manoeuvred their warhorses closer in for the kill. Norfolk wounded Oxford, who had lost his shield in the charge, with a sweeping, cutting blow, the blade sliding off his helmet and slicing into his left arm. Almost at once, he lost his visor, as Oxford slashed across his bascinet, leaving his face exposed. The coded rationality of chivalry suddenly doused the fury of battle: Oxford refused to continue combat - shouting, above the din, that he now enjoyed an unfair advantage over Norfolk.
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Fate decided that this was no time for debate, or valiant niceties.

An arrow - was it a stray or deliberately aimed? - struck Norfolk in the face and pierced his brain. He slowly toppled out of his saddle, falling dead beneath the feet of his enemy’s charger.
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His son, the Earl of Surrey, fighting close by, saw his father’s death and swore immediate and bloody vengeance.

He spurred his horse towards the nearest group of enemy soldiers on the Tudor right wing, but was soon surrounded and fighting furiously for his life - ‘Howard single, with an army fights’.
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Two royalist knights, Sir Richard Clarendon and Sir William Conyers, tried to rescue him but were cut to pieces by Sir John Savage (a nephew of Lord Stanley) and his retainers. Surrey, now badly wounded, exchanged blow for blow with the grizzled veteran knight Gilbert Talbot who urged him to yield, but he refused to accept any quarter and fought on doggedly, even though unhorsed.

A foot soldier tried to capture him, but Surrey swung his sword high and severed the man’s arm in one final blow.

Weak from loss of blood, he sank to his knees on the ground and surrendered himself to Talbot, begging him to kill him then and there, as he feared an ignominious and lonely death that night from some cut-throat looter searching for spoil among the dead and wounded on the battlefield. Talbot spared him and had him carried off the field to safety.
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No such mercy was shown to King Richard III.

Despite being cut off from his troops and impossibly outnumbered, he refused to flee for his life. The king must have been enraged to look east to see Northumberland’s reserve still occupying the top of Ambion Hill,
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having taken no part in the battle and probably never intending to. Hence his anguished and angry cries of ‘Treason! Treason!’ His last stand was probably in a bog on the edge of Redemore Heath. Surrounded, he was finally felled by a Welsh halberdier,
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killed ‘fighting manfully in the thickest press of his enemies’.
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His body was stripped and taken stark naked to Leicester, trussed to a horse ‘like a hog or a calf, the head and arms hanging on the one side . . . and the legs on the other . . . all sprinkled with mire and blood’.
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It was taken to the town’s Greyfriars church ‘and lay like a miserable spectacle . . . and [after two days] buried’ without pomp or funeral rite in an unmarked grave in the choir of the church.
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Richard had reigned for just two years, two months and one day. Like so many other defeated foes in history, he has been vilified to this day.
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Norfolk’s corpse was treated with greater respect - no doubt due to Oxford’s intercession, after he finished mopping up the last stubborn vestiges of royalist resistance at Bosworth. It was taken via Northampton and Cambridge to the Cluniac Abbey of Our Lady at Thetford, in Norfolk, and there given decent Christian burial one week after the battle
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among the tombs of the earlier Mowbray Dukes of Norfolk.
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The chronicler Richard Grafton wrote that Norfolk

An exultant Henry Tudor was crowned with the circlet of gold worn on Richard III’s helmet by Sir William Stanley, with the words: ‘Sir, here I make you king of England.’ Lord Stanley was reunited with his son, safe and well. Victory had been achieved against a numerically superior and battle-hardened army. The road to London and a glittering coronation as King Henry VII now lay open before him. He knelt in the bloody grass and gave ‘almighty God his hearty thanks . . . beseeching His goodness to send him grace to advance and defend the Catholic faith and to maintain peace and concord amongst his subjects and people’.
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About 1,000 of Richard’s soldiers were killed in the two hours of fighting, compared with three hundred in Henry Tudor’s army. Prisoners vastly outnumbered the dead, among them Northumberland, who quickly changed sides
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and the badly wounded Surrey, who was committed to the Tower of London.

Henry Tudor was duly crowned in Westminster Abbey on 30 October and wasted little time in wreaking retribution on the nobles who had fought for Richard. Both the dead Norfolk and his son were among those attainted for treason on 7 November
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and their estates confiscated by the impecunious crown. Many Howard properties were shared out among the new king’s cronies to reward their loyalty while he was in exile.
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Oxford, now appointed Great Chamberlain, received one of the plums - the castle, lordship and manor of Framlingham and other properties in Suffolk and Bedfordshire, once owned by Norfolk.
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Surrey, now recovering from his wounds, was stripped of all titles and degraded from the Order of the Garter.
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But amid the Howards’ adversity there was some kindness. His wife Elizabeth told John Paston on 3 October that she had found Oxford a ‘singular, very good and kind lord to my lord and me . . . for him I dreaded most and yet in him I found the best’.
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At the beginning of December, she was in London staying modestly at St Katherine’s hospital,
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near the Tower, while she anxiously awaited news of her husband’s fate. Sir John Radcliff, Steward of Henry VII’s household, had tried to seize their manor at Ashwell Thorpe in Norfolk but was thwarted, as it was part of her own inheritance. Even so, he dismissed many of her servants, leaving her to maintain her household of four children with just three or four retainers.
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As he sat drearily in his room in the Tower - he was allowed £8 a month for his board and three servants, costing 3s 6d a week - he must have reflected bitterly on the complete downfall of his family, coming so soon after the triumph of his father being created first Duke of Norfolk.

Its proud line could be traced back to the reign of Edward I in the thirteenth century, to the tiny village of East Winch, six miles (9.7 km.) north-west of King’s Lynn in windswept north Norfolk. This was the birthplace of Sir William Howard, the founder of the dynasty, who became Chief Justice of the Common Pleas in 1297 and died in 1308.
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By loyal and accomplished military and naval service, coupled with a number of judicious marriages with rich heiresses, the Howards rapidly clambered up the greasy pole of aristocratic status throughout the next two centuries. In about 1420, Sir Robert Howard married Lady Margaret Mowbray, elder daughter of Thomas Mowbray, Duke of Norfolk, Earl Marshal of England and the great-great-grandson of Edward I. Their son, John Howard, was born around 1422 and had fought on the Yorkist side in the second Battle of St Albans, Hertfordshire, on 17 February 1461, and at Towton, North Yorkshire, on Palm Sunday, 29 March, the same year.
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Edward IV ennobled him as Lord Howard some time in the late 1460s.