Richard III (32 page)

The Earl of Richmond was in a far from enviable state of mind. It seems that Sir William Stanley had met him briefly at Stafford and had arranged for him to meet Lord Stanley secretly at Atherstone, between Coventry and Leicester, to discuss the situation. Henry then lost contact with his army on the night of 19 August, while marching from Lichfield to Tamworth. He found himself with only twenty men. They hid in a small village, fearful of being caught by Richard’s men. However, at daybreak they discovered that they were only three miles from Tamworth and were able to rejoin their friends without incident. The Tudor told his army that he had been on a discreet expedition to receive a message from some allies who were not yet ready to come out openly for him; in reality, as he seems to have confided in Vergil many years later, he had probably been terrified by the danger and by what lay ahead. The same day he again made contact with Sir William at Atherstone. His stepfather was not there. Beyond question the Stanleys were well disposed towards him, yet, despite their assurances of help, they knew – and he surely guessed – that with Strange in the King’s hands they were powerless. They dared not move, even though fully aware that if Richard won the forthcoming battle, he was likely to wreak a merciless revenge; but someone so cruel and so ruthless, with so much at stake, would not hesitate to execute the young man, and would give orders for him to be killed instantly if they joined his rival. No one dreamed that the King would present Henry with the one tactical situation which would enable them to act.

Henry Tudor can have had little hope of success. But he could not now avoid a battle. For their part the Stanleys decided that their only course was to take their troops to the battlefield. If Henry looked like winning they could support him – if Richard swept all before him, they would join his side instead, and pretend that they had always been loyal. This is certainly the most plausible explanation of their conduct.

Richard marched out of Leicester on Sunday 21 August. He did so with great pomp, wearing a crown so that all might see that the King of England was going forth to battle. With him were the Duke of Norfolk, the Earls of Northumberland, Lincoln, Nottingham and Surrey, Viscount Lovell, Lords Scrope of Bolton, Scrope of Masham, Dacre, Greystoke, Zouche and Ferrers of Chartley, and most of the henchmen – including Sir Robert Brackenbury, who had only just arrived. As they rode forth, the King’s spur scraped the brickwork of the narrow old Bow Bridge over the River Soar – a hag prophesied that very soon his head would bang against the very same bridge.

There is no adequate description in any contemporary chronicle of the battle ahead, while revisionist archaeologists argue eloquently that it was not even fought on the traditional site, although they are unable to agree on a precise alternative. What seems beyond dispute, however, is that it took place over a four mile area around the village of Sutton Cheney. It is also likely that many of the topographical features in the few sources which we possess are in fact the correct ones.

Richard and his army, flanked by a wide screen of scouts, proceeded along the Roman road in the direction of Atherstone. At Sutton Cheney the scouts reported that the enemy was near. It was evening and for his camp that night he selected a position near the summit of some rising ground called Ambion Hill. Although only about 400 feet above sea level, it gave an excellent field of vision over the low-lying Redmore Plain beneath and was protected by a marsh at its foot. It also commanded the road below between the villages of Shenton to the west and Sutton Cheney to the east. (Market Bosworth was two miles north.)

Henry’s army was three miles down the Roman road below, about three miles south-west. He had perhaps 5,000 men, compared with the King’s 12,000. He still hoped that he would be reinforced by the Stanleys. Indeed, he knew that he was doomed without them.

It is clear that Lord Stanley and Sir William had not made up their minds. Accordingly they camped to the north of Ambion Hill, Sir William’s force in front of his brother’s, so that they could await the outcome of the battle and join the winning side. In consequence, as Gairdner points out, there were in fact four armies ‘placed, as regards each other, not unlike whist-players’. They still claimed that they had come to fight for Richard. The thought which must surely have been uppermost in the minds of both the King and the Earl of Richmond was: how would the Stanleys and their 8,000 troops act next day?

If a romantic and undocumented tradition handed down among the family of the Earls of Winchelsea is true, Richard had a moving encounter on the day before the battle. About 1530 a Kentish landowner
(and ancestor of the Earls of Winchilsea), Sir Thomas Moyle of Eastwell, met an old stonemason who told him that, as a child knowing nothing of his parents, he had been expensively educated in London. On one occasion, the boy was taken to a magnificent house where a gentleman with ‘a star and garter’ questioned him and gave him money. Later he was brought to a place which he afterwards realized was Bosworth and in the royal pavilion the same gentleman embraced him. It was the King who informed the boy that he was his father, promising to acknowledge him publicly as his son. ‘But, child,’ added Richard, ‘if I should be so unfortunate as to lose the battle, take care to let nobody know that I am your father, for no mercy will be shown to anyone so nearly related.’ Richard then said goodbye, giving him a purse of gold. After the battle the boy fled and apprenticed himself to a mason. Moyle, at any rate, believed the story. He gave the old man a cottage at Eastwell and had recorded in the parish register that a ‘Rychard Plantagenet’ was buried there in 1550.
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Professor Ross emphasizes that ‘There have been as many different accounts of Bosworth as there have been historians, and even today it is hard to produce a reconstruction of the battle which will command general acceptance.’ In particular, he writes that ‘Kendall’s account of the battle remains an astonishing mixture of imagination, speculation and purple prose, and his description of Richard’s last moments seems to suggest that he was perched on the crupper of the king’s horse.’
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No proper eyewitness report has survived. A Spanish soldier of fortune who was actually present, Juan de Salazar, recounts his experiences in a letter but is too brief and confused to be of much value, though he confirms how Richard met his end and gives some useful details. Nevertheless, careful analysis of the information supplied by the Croyland writer, by Vergil, by the compiler of the
Great Chronicle of London
, and by the authors of the ballads ‘Bosworth Feilde’ and ‘The Most Pleasant Song of the Lady Bessy’ make possible an approximate recreation of one of the most dramatic conflicts in English history.

Both contemporary sources and tradition suggest that the King was unable to sleep. There is a fantastic legend of considerably later date that he went round the camp in the dark and, catching a sentry dozing at his post, stabbed him to death – with the comment, ‘I find him
asleep and I leave him asleep.’ It is certainly in character, or at least in character with what his subjects thought of him.

Richard and his men rose in the dark before dawn, towards 4.00 a.m. One can reconstruct the scene in the royal pavilion where the King was being armed by his pages in a ritual with which he was very well acquainted. Various sections of his steel ‘harness’ would have been laid out on a trestle table together with his weapons; no exact description has survived, but it is possible to guess what they included with a fair degree of accuracy. The armour, which he had worn at Tewkesbury, is likely to have been a German one, perhaps from Nuremberg, since German armourers were then the best in Europe. (Those from Italy were made for elegance and show rather than for fighting.) First he put on a satin-lined fustian doublet, cut full of holes for coolness and worn next to the skin, worsted hose with padded kneecaps, and thick leather shoes. The pages began with his feet on which they placed pointed, articulated ‘sollerets’ to which gold spurs were attached. His legs and thighs were similarly covered in plate, his loins by a mail apron over which was a short skirt of horizontal, overlapping plate ‘tonlets’. His torso was protected by breast- and back-plates, the former reinforced by an extra thickness. His arms were guarded by ‘vambraces’ and ‘rerebraces’, though they were probably without the huge butterfly elbow ‘cops’ so popular until recently, his shoulders by deep, laminated ‘pauldrons’. Then came gauntlets of articulated steel. A loose belt was girded round his waist, from one side of which hung a triangular-bladed dagger and from the other a naked, double-edged sword thrust through a round ring so that it could be easily drawn. We know (from Salazar) that over all he donned a short-sleeved red and blue silk surcoat, slit at the sides, embroidered with the golden leopards and lilies of England and France. At last, after many minutes of buckling and strapping, his helmet was put on – to judge from his Great Seal this would have been a sallet rather than a closed bascinet, and could be pushed back off the face. Almost certainly it was of gold-plated steel and surmounted by a crown. The latter was not the massive diadem which he wore on state occasions, but none the less an unmistakably regal coronet of fabulous splendour and price; Salazar valued it at 120,000 crowns – £20,000 in the money of 1485.

When the King emerged from his pavilion into darkness dimly lit by guttering torches, the captains waiting outside started back at the weirdly pale and haggard face and staring eyes beneath the crown. In response to their unconcealed alarm Richard explained, perhaps unwisely, that during the night he had had terrible dreams in which demons had tormented him. (It was an age which took such dreaming very seriously indeed; just before Arthur’s last battle the dead Sir Gawain appeared while he slept and warned him, ‘For an ye fight as to-morrow, doubt ye not ye must be slain.’) Still more ominous, no chaplains could be found in the camp to say Mass; considerable importance was attached to hearing it daily, as often as three times, and above all before such dangerous events as a battle. Yet the King, normally so conventional and punctilious in religious observance, did not send for a priest from a neighbouring village. Nor had anybody prepared breakfast for him.

Having given his commands, he mounted a tall grey war horse. He may not have uttered Shakespeare’s superb line ‘Saddle White Surrey’, but we know that an animal with this name was in the royal stables, and, according to tradition if not eyewitness testimony, the King rode a white charger at Bosworth. He was handed his principal weapons, a battleaxe and a lance. The former was probably of the type sometimes known as a battle hammer, basically a hatchet with a spike above the small but very heavy blade or hammer, and with a long steel shaft; it was used as a bludgeon rather than an axe, to smash in an enemy’s armour and inflict lethal bruising. His lance would have been a much thicker and heavier weapon than the early twentieth-century cavalry lance, since it was intended to knock an opponent out of the saddle instead of skewering him, but for obvious reasons was only effective at the first impact.

Even the hostile ‘Song of the Lady Bessy’ admits that Richard III arrayed himself for battle like a true monarch:

His captains remonstrated with him for wearing the crown – it made him immediately identifiable as well as offering a glittering booty – but he would not listen.

Standing on a small hillock, Richard addressed his men in the cold dawn twilight. He prophesied wildly that, whoever won the battle, its outcome would destroy England – if victorious he would exterminate every rebel, just as Henry Tudor was going to slaughter all opponents should he win. The King had already threatened that ‘Whoever should be found in any part of the Kingdom after the victory should have been gained, to have omitted appearing in his presence on the field, was to expect no other fate than the loss of all his goods and possessions as well as his life.’ The speech may have been an attempt to inspire ferocity in his troops but, in view of the mood which his captains noted with such alarm, it is more likely to have been dictated by rage. It could well be that the last Plantagenet King was on the verge of hysteria when he rode out to his last battle on Monday 22 August 1485.

Nevertheless, he disposed his forces in a most elaborate formation on top of Ambion Hill. In front, just on the brow, was the van under the Duke of Norfolk; it consisted of billmen and gunners whose cannon, 140 light serpentines and as many bombards, were joined by chains to stop enemy horse riding through them, with lines of archers before and on the flanks. Cannoneers and archers would have been reinforced by several hundred sooty-faced hand-gunners, of the sort employed at Tewkesbury, whose primitive match-locks were now recognizable as arquebuses and increasingly effective. Richard was behind the van, with a small but picked force of men-at-arms – heavy cavalry – supported by more infantry. Behind him was the 3,000-strong contingent of the Earl of Northumberland. Vergil comments that the van was ‘of a wonderful length, so full replenished both with footmen and horsemen that to the beholders afar off it gave a terror for the multitude’. So unusual a formation has been attributed to a knowledge of the new Swiss tactics, which had annihilated the King’s late brother-in-law, Charles of Burgundy, only a few years before. Richard’s military studies went further than merely reading Vegetius. But, as will be seen, his application of what he had learnt was more ingenious than practical.