Richard The Chird (81 page)

body of troops." I have conjectured Northumberland's behavior on the eve and on the early morning of the battle. The Croyland Chronicle supplies a few details about Richard during the early hours of August 22, which seem to me to represent authentic information. For the battle itself, however, the Chronicle offers an account which brings to its nadir an increasing unreliability as, apparently, the data supplied by the well-informed author came to an end and the monkish editor filled out the narrative with his own opinions. Though he writes too early to learn from the later Tudor court that Richard's army put up little fight, and thus records that the struggle was "of the greatest severity," he falsifies the action by asserting that Henry Tudor charged upon the King, instead of the other way round, as even Vergil frankly reveals, and apparently out of his obsessive hatred of northerners he retails the gross untruth that the chief men of Richard's army, who in actuality were killed—as was well and widely known—"took to flight without engaging" together with "many others, chiefly from the North." This account is so perversely false as to be inexplicable.

Vergil names the captains of Henry's force. Richard's principal supporters are listed in Harleian MS. 542, f. 34 (quoted in Hutton's Bosworth, rev. ed.), which is probably not altogether reliable; and the chief casualties of the King's army are noticed, with a few variations, by Vergil, the Chronicle of Calais, the York Records, and the Croyland Chronicle (if the reader substitutes "killed" for "fled"!), and by a proclamation issued shortly after the battle by Henry Tudor, in which, however, the Earls of Lincoln and Surrey and Viscount Lovell, all of whom survived the battle, are listed as slain, probably in an attempt, which was successful, to prevent the North from rising by picturing all the Yorkist leaders at Bosworth as having been killed. I have made no reference to Richard's heir, the Earl of Lincoln, as taking part in the battle; his name is not given in Harleian MS. 542, and he was not attainted. Lovell and Surrey, however, were both undoubtedly at Bosworth (act of attainder and Vergil). Vergil's reference to the sun indicates that the weather was clear. A few details, such as the red coats of Sir William Stanley's horsemen and the rebel guns secured from Lichfield, I have taken from The Song of the Lady Bessy, a ballad composed some two decades after by a servant of Lord Stanley's (Harleian MSS. 367 and 542; paraphrased in an appendix to Gairdner's Richard HI and cited in Hutton's Bosivorth, rev. ed.). It appears that a few Scots fought for Henry Tudor (see Mackie, The Earlier Tudors, p. 51 and note i).

Narrative sources are Croy. Chron., pp. 501-05; Vergil, pp. 222-27; Great Chronicle, pp. 237-38; Hutton's Bosworth (for some interesting local "traditions" regarding the battle).

1 So says later tradition. Harleian MS. 433, f. 4, records the names of some of Richard's horses, one of which is White Surrey.

2 1 infer these details; one of Richard's heralds was attainted (Rot. ParL, VI, pp. 75-78).

3 Richard's pallor, his mordant comment, the lack of chaplains, are taken directly from the Croyland Chronicle; all these seem to me to be convincing details. The comment is wonderfully suggestive of the movement of Richard's mind on this critical morning.

4 All that is known of Lord Strange is that, despite Stanley's refusal to

join the royal army, Richard did not have him executed. In view of the Croylcmd Chronicle's gross inaccuracy regarding the battle and the likelihood that Richard's intimate servants were completely trustworthy, the Chronicle's statement that those whom Richard ordered to behead Strange, seeing that the issue of the battle was doubtful, left Strange to his own devices and rushed into the fray on Richard's behalf, seems very improbable. Stanley apparently counted on Richard's mercy; he guessed correctly.

5 1 conjecture that Lord Stanley's men were on foot, since this was the customary mode of fighting (see, for example, Mancini, p. 123), but they may have been mounted, as Sir William Stanley's men certainly were.

6 I assume this arrangement of archers and men-at-arms, since such had been the usual—though not invariable—disposition of troops by English commanders for the past century.

7 Hutton in his Boswonh reports the finding of stone cannon balls on Ambien "Hill.

8 Richard's repeated cry of "Treason!" as he battled the overwhelming numbers of his enemies is specifically reported by Rous (Historia Regum Angliae, p. 218). It seems to me likely that Rous, an otherwise very untrustworthy source, must have heard this from one who took part in the battle.

9 Catesby's will, which he wrote just before he was executed at Leicester three days after Bosworth, exudes his feverish terror in every line. Doubtless in the vain hope of winning a last-minute pardon, he forgoes all dignity by abjectly declaring that he has "ever loved" Henry Tudor. "My lords Stanley, Strange, and all that blood!" he rushes on, "help! and pray for my soul for ye have not for my body as I trusted in you" (Dugdale, War-ivickshire, p. 789).

10 Henry VIII's slight encounter with the enemy in the battle of the Spurs can scarcely be counted as fighting in the sense in which Henry V, Edward IV, and Richard fought in battle. After Bosworth, kings sometimes went to the wars, but they did not lead their men into the fray.

11 Some years after, Henry disbursed ten pounds, one shilling for a tomb of sorts for Richard's grave ("Privy Purse Expenses," Excerpta Historica, p. 105). At the dissolution of the monasteries the Grey Friars' was plundered; Richard's tomb was destroyed, his body thrown into the river Soar.

12 York Records, p. 218. The city records show that the soldiers of York were gone for four and a half days (Drake, Eboracum, p. 121). It would have taken them the better part of three days to reach Sutton Cheney from York. They probably got no farther than Nottingham. John Sponer must have ridden night^ and day to reach York the day after the battle. Perhaps he had remained in Leicester, waiting to guide the city troop to the field. This supposition is supported by the fact that he reports the Duke of Nor T folk as betraying Richard, rather than the Earl of Northumberland. This lapse suggests either that he got his first word of the battle from an adherent of Northumberland's who thus sought to conceal his master's treachery from the North, or that the city clerk, out of caution, was ordered to substitute the name of Norfolk for Northumberland,

EPILOGUE

By its very baldness, Robert Fabyan's New Chronicles of England and France (in the continuation including the reign of Henry VII first printed by Rastell in 1533), suggests the darkness of Henry's reign. The yearly entries are for the most part brief and grim, recording money extorted and traitors executed.

For this section I have relied principally upon the following materials:

PRIMARY SOURCES

Calendar of the Patent Rolls, 1485-1509, 2 vols. Rotuli Parliamentorum (Rolls of Parliament), vol. VI. Statutes of the Realm, vols. II and III, London, 1816.

William Campbell, Materials for the Reign of Henry VII, 2 vols., Rolls Series, 1873, 1877.

Croyland Chronicle, "Third Continuation.

"Extracts from the Privy Purse Expenses of King Henry the Seventh" (1491-1505), Excerpta ttistorica, London, 1831, pp. 87-133.

Robert Fabyan, The New Chronicles of England and France, ed. by Henry Ellis, London, 1811.

Letters and Papers Illustrative of the Reigns of Richard HI and Henry VII, 2 vols., ed. by James Gairdner, Rolls Series, 1861.

Memorials of King Henry VII, ed. by James Gairdner, Rolls Series, 1858; contains Bernard Andre's life of Henry VII, Vita Henrici VIL

A. F. Pollard, Sources for the Reign of Henry VII, 3 vols., London, 1913.

Polydore Vergil, Anglica Historia, ed. and trans, by Denys Hay, Camden Series (Royal Historical Society), 1949.

C. H. Williams, England under the Early Tudors, London, 1925.

York Civic Records, vol. I, ed. by Angelo Raine, The Yorkshire Archaeological Society, 1939. I have drawn exclusively on this for my narrative of events in the city, except for the account of the Payntor-Burton controversy, which is taken from York Records, ed. by R. Davies, London, 1843, pp. 220-24.

SECONDARY SOURCES

Francis Bacon, The Life of Henry VII; too remote from Henry's time and

too derivative to be considered a primary source. A. H. Burne 7 More Battlefields of England, London, 1952 (I am indebted to

Col Burne for his spirited and convincing account of the battle of Stoke

in this volume).

W. Busch, England under the Tudors, London, 1895.

J. D. Mackie, The Earlier Tudors, Oxford History of England Series, Ox-Kenneth Pickthorn, Early Tudor Government, vol I (2 vols.), Cambridge,

1934. R. R. Reid, The King's Council in the North, London, 1921.

C. H. Williams, The Making of the Tudor Despotism, London, 1928. Charles Williams, Henry Vll, London, 1937.

ARTICLES OF SPECIAL VALUE

W. A. J. Archbold, "Sir William Stanley and Perkin Warbeck," Eng, Hist.

Rev., XIV (1899), pp. 529-34. C. H. Williams, 'The Rebellion of Humphrey Stafford in 1486," Eng. Hist.

Rev., XLIII (1928), pp. 181-89.

1 Epigrammata, published 1520.

2 Leland, Collectanea, IV, pp. 222-27.

3 CaL State Papers, Spain, I, p. 164 and p. 178.

* Her will, executed on April 10, 1492, shortly before she died, is pathetic: "Item, where I have no worldly goods to do the Queen's Grace, my dearest daughter, a pleasure with, neither to reward any of my children, according to my heart and mind, I beseech Almighty God to bless Her Grace, with all her noble issue, and with as good heart and mind as is to me possible, I give Her Grace my blessing, and all the foresaid my children" (Collection of Royal Wills, p. 150).

5 Cal. Milanese Papers, I, p. 299.

NOTES TO APPENDIX I

Appendix II, "Richard's Reputation," includes a brief study of the Tudor tradition. Both there and in the notes for the text (see especially those for the section "Protector and Defensor") I have discussed its general unreliability. In this appendix, therefore, my analysis of the value of More and Vergil is confined to their accounts of the murder of the Princes. Since the worth of a source as a whole casts light upon the worth of any single piece of testimony it advances, the reader may prefer to read Appendix II before this appendix.

1 For a brief account of the authorship of the "Second Continuation" of the Croyland Chronicle, see Appendix II, p. 512.

2 See the report of one of Henry VTFs spies in Letters and Papers, I, ed. by Gairdner, pp. 231-40.

3 The method of judging More's tale—in the light of its suspicious origins and manifest inaccuracies—which is illustrated by Ramsay and Gairdner and cited approvingly by Lawrence Tanner as late as 1934 (see the last sentence of this note, below) is to concede the incorrectness of all that can be demonstrated to be false or unsatisfactory but to insist that the story is fundamentally true because not every detail has been proved inaccurate! This method is foreign to logical analysis and to law, and it apparently springs from a rooted predilection for the Tudor tradition. Gairdner's rather painful attempt to square this tradition with the unanswerable objections that can be raised against it sometimes involves him in contradictions. For example, in the preface to Letters and Papers, I, he puts forward his belief that Buckingham had a "guilty knowledge" of the Princes' death; yet in his Richard 111 he clings to More's tale of the murders, which excludes the possibility of Buckingham's having had any such knowledge.

Even the one apparent parallel between More's tale and the truth as it

can be ascertained—the discovery in 1674 of two skeletons beneath a staircase within the precincts of the Tower—of which Gairdner et al have made so much, is by no means an established parallel. In the first place, the burial of bodies secretly beneath stairs seems to have been a method of disposal on which the imagination of the time often seized, as it likewise loved to suppose that those in high station met their ends by poison. For example, in a later, embellished Tudor version of the crime (John Rastell, The Pastime of People, published 1529, which offers a bizarre collection of rumors about the Princes' fate), the bodies are first interred at the foot of a staircase and then dug up and flung into the sea; the hole, incidentally, has been excavated in advance and the Princes are lured into a chest so that they can be buried alive. Can it be seriously argued that the disco-very of the skeletons vouches for the essential reliability of this tale, or More's, simply because one detail seems to correspond with the truth? There were many staircases in the Tower. The correspondence may well be coincidence (which is often a weakness in fiction but is even oftener a condition of real life). Why is More, why are the later Tudor writers, at such pains to append the statement that the bodies were later disinterred? Why, except to account for the intransigent fact that the remains had not been exhumed even though Tyrell was supposed to have indicated their precise place of burial? Either the bodies had not been searched for or they had not been discovered. Both alternatives suggest that the staircase instanced in the tale which More heard and the staircase outside the White Tower beneath which the bodies were discovered have no actual connection.

Indeed, the circumstances of the burial recorded by More do not show much correspondence with the conditions of the actual disinterment. More believed a single priest capable of digging up the bodies in secret haste; no single priest could have so disinterred the bodies in their true hiding place. ". . . at^the stair foot, meetly deep in the ground under a great heap of stones" is a more accessible location than ten feet deep in the ground beneath or within the foundations of a staircase, which is where the skeletons were actually discovered.

The surviving seventeenth-century accounts of the exhumation are exas-peratingly vague. Against the south wall of the White Tower there stood a "forebuilding" which housed a stone staircase leading up to a door which may be seen today about fourteen feet from the ground. This door "opens on a small landing of a now blocked spiral staircase," which mounts to the chapel of St. John within the White Tower. The private way from the royal lodgings to the chapel led through the forebuilding, up the stone stairs built against the south wall of the White Tower, through the door, and on up the interior spiral staircase, which is hewed out of the thickness of the eleventh-century wall. In July of 1674, workmen had torn down the fore-building and the stairs leading up to the door and were excavating the foundations of these stairs when they came upon the chest containing the bones. Four contemporary accounts use almost identical phraseology to describe the discovery: (i) "digging down the stairs . . . were found the bones"; (2) "in digging down a pair of stone stairs"; (3) "in digging some foundations in the Tower"; (4) "I saw . . . working men dig out of a stairway ." The first two accounts seem to indicate that the stairs were those