Battle of Bosworth Field

• 1. Introduction

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  On the 22nd of August 1485, a king died on a battlefield in Leicestershire, and England was never quite the same again. Richard III, last of the House of York, rode into the thick of his enemies and was killed fighting. His crown, according to legend, was plucked from a field and placed on the head of a Welsh exile who had spent half his life abroad and barely knew the country he was about to rule.

  The Battle of Bosworth Field settled the long, devastating civil conflict between the Houses of Lancaster and York. It ended one royal dynasty, the Plantagenets, and launched another, the Tudors, whose descendants would shape England for more than a century. Yet historians have argued ever since over what the battle actually meant, where it actually happened, and whether its place in English legend bears any resemblance to the messy, treacherous reality of that August morning.

  How did a man dismissed by the Yorkist king Edward IV as "a nobody" come to seize the throne? What role did betrayal play on the battlefield itself? And why did William Shakespeare, writing a century later, turn this obscure Midlands skirmish into the defining drama of English kingship? Those questions thread through everything that followed.

• 2. The Weak Claimant

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  Henry Tudor spent the first fourteen years of his life in Wales and the next fourteen in Brittany and France. Chroniclers such as Polydore Vergil and ambassadors like Pedro de Ayala described him as far more interested in commerce and finance than in warfare. He had never fought in a battle before he crossed to England in 1485.

  His claim to the throne was fragile by any measure. His mother, Lady Margaret Beaufort, was a great-granddaughter of John of Gaunt, uncle of King Richard II. The Beauforts had been legitimised by an Act of Parliament, but Henry IV had swiftly modified that decision with a royal decree barring their descendants from inheriting the throne. Edward IV regarded Henry as a distant threat at most, describing him as "a nobody".

  The Duke of Brittany, Francis II, took a different view. Henry was a useful pawn, a bargaining chip to hold over England in any dispute with France. When Edward IV attainted Jasper Tudor and his nephew Henry, naming them traitors and confiscating their lands, the two tried to flee to France. Strong winds forced them ashore in Brittany, where Francis took them into protective custody. That accident of weather kept the last Lancastrian claimant alive and out of Yorkist hands for years.

  Henry's moment arrived because of events that had nothing to do with him. At Christmas in Rennes Cathedral, Henry swore an oath to marry Edward IV's daughter, Elizabeth of York, binding together the two warring houses and drawing to his cause those Yorkists who could not stomach Richard III. That alliance was nearly destroyed when Richard's treasurer Pierre Landais agreed to hand Henry and his uncle back to England in exchange for military aid, a scheme foiled only because John Morton, a bishop of Flanders, learned of it in time to warn the Tudors to flee to France.

• 3. Richard's Fragile Hold

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  Richard III was small and slender, lacking the robust build associated with many of his Plantagenet predecessors. He compensated with an appetite for rough sports and a battlefield record that impressed his brother Edward IV, for whom he served as the leading power in the north of England through the early 1480s.

  His path to the throne was rapid and brutal. On the 29th of April, Richard took custody of his twelve-year-old nephew, King Edward V, and arrested senior members of the Woodville family. He had the Queen's brother Anthony Woodville, 2nd Earl Rivers, and her son Richard Grey executed without trial on charges of treason. On the 13th of June he accused Lord Hastings of plotting and had him beheaded. Nine days later, an informal Parliament declared the marriage between Edward IV and Elizabeth illegal, their children illegitimate, and on the 26th of June Richard was proclaimed king.

  The timing and extrajudicial character of those acts cost him dearly. Rumours spread across England. The two young princes were confined in the Tower and never seen in public again; their fate remains unknown. Richard's most loyal subject, John Howard, 1st Duke of Norfolk, had his own reasons to support the usurpation: Edward IV had circumvented the law of inheritance to deny Howard a share of the wealthy Mowbray estate, and backing Richard restored it to him.

  Henry Percy, 4th Earl of Northumberland, told a different story. Richard had promised Northumberland the Wardenship of the East March, a position historically hereditary for the Percy family. After Richard became king, he began grooming his nephew John de la Pole, 1st Earl of Lincoln, to manage the north instead, leaving Northumberland, in historian Christine Carpenter's assessment, despairing of any prospect of advancement under the new king.

• 4. The Stanleys' Calculation

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  Thomas Stanley, 2nd Baron Stanley, had served three kings: Henry VI, Edward IV, and Richard III. His political method was to vacillate between opposing sides until the winner was clear, a habit that earned him high office without costing him his army. His men trusted him precisely because he would not send them to die on the wrong side.

  Stanley's wife was Lady Margaret Beaufort, Henry Tudor's mother, which made Stanley Henry's stepfather. The relationship between Stanley and Richard had never been warm; the two had come to open violence around March 1470. When Richard executed those who had joined Buckingham's rebellion in 1483, he spared Margaret but stripped her of her titles and transferred her estates to Stanley's name, a calculated mercy aimed at keeping Stanley loyal. It may not have worked: historian Christine Carpenter identifies a further source of friction in Richard's plan to reopen an old land dispute involving the Stanley family and the Harrington family, overturning a ruling Edward IV had made in Stanley's favour in 1473.

  Richard, acutely aware of Stanley's unreliability, took Stanley's son, Lord Strange, as a hostage before the battle, as insurance against defection. Stanley replied to Richard's battlefield ultimatum, when the king threatened to execute Strange, that he had other sons.

  Sir William Stanley, Thomas's younger brother, had been a staunch Yorkist, fighting at the Battle of Blore Heath in 1459 and helping to suppress uprisings against Edward IV in 1471. He refrained from joining Buckingham's revolt in 1483 and was amply rewarded. On the morning of Bosworth, both Stanleys commanded a combined force estimated at between 4,000 and 6,000 men. They held their position on and around Dadlington Hill and waited.

• 5. The Charge That Decided Everything

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  John de Vere, 13th Earl of Oxford, commanded Henry's army at Bosworth. He was one of the most experienced soldiers in England, a man who had led the Lancastrian right wing at the Battle of Barnet, captured the island fort of St Michael's Mount in 1473, and escaped from prison in 1484 to join Henry's court in France, bringing along his former jailer Sir James Blount. Oxford's arrival had troubled Richard III and lifted morale in the Lancastrian camp.

  Facing a Yorkist army estimated at between 7,500 and 12,000 men strung along a ridgeline, with Richard's 3,000 infantry at the centre, Norfolk's force of spearmen and around 1,200 archers on the right, and Northumberland's approximately 4,000 men on the left, Oxford made an unconventional decision. Instead of splitting his smaller force into the traditional three divisions, he ordered his men to remain within 10 feet of their banners and form a single compact mass, flanked by horsemen. The Lancastrians manoeuvred around the marsh at the south-western foot of the hill under cannon fire.

  Norfolk's men attacked and met determined resistance. Several of Norfolk's troops fled, and one of his senior officers, Walter Devereux, was killed early in the fighting. Richard signalled Northumberland to assist. Northumberland's force did not move. Some historians believe the narrow ridge of Ambion Hill physically prevented Northumberland from joining the battle; others, including historians Horrox and Pugh, believe he chose not to act for personal reasons.

  Seeing Henry at some distance behind his main force, Richard decided on a direct charge. He led his mounted household knights and closest companions in a sweep around the melee. In the opening moments, Richard killed Henry's standard-bearer Sir William Brandon and unhorsed the burly Sir John Cheyne, Edward IV's former standard-bearer, with a blow from his broken lance. French mercenaries who survived described how the attack caught them by surprise and how Henry dismounted and concealed himself among his men to reduce himself as a target.

  Oxford had left a small reserve of pike-equipped men near Henry, and those pikemen slowed the mounted charge long enough for Henry's bodyguards to surround their commander. Richard's force was separated from his main army. William Stanley chose that moment to move. His men surrounded Richard's group. Richard's bannerman, Sir Percival Thirlwall, lost his legs in the fighting but held the Yorkist banner aloft until he was killed. The king's advisor Richard Ratcliffe was also slain. Richard himself, according to Polydore Vergil's account, was "killed fighting manfully in the thickest press of his enemies". The Burgundian chronicler Jean Molinet recorded that a Welshman struck the death-blow with a halberd while Richard's horse was trapped in the marshy ground, and that the blows were so violent that the king's helmet was driven into his skull.

• 6. After the Crown

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  Richard's circlet, according to tradition, was found after the battle and brought to Henry, who was proclaimed king at Crown Hill near the village of Stoke Golding. The story of the crown being discovered in a hawthorn bush was dismissed by historians Stanley Chrimes and Sydney Anglo as legend unsupported by any contemporary source, though historian Ross argued that the hawthorn would not have entered Henry's coat of arms without a real connection to his accession.

  Richard's body was treated without ceremony. Stripped naked and strapped across a horse, it was brought to Leicester and displayed in public to prove he was dead, probably at the Church of the Annunciation of Our Lady of the Newarke. After two days it was interred in a plain tomb at the church of the Greyfriars. When that church was demolished following the friary's dissolution in 1538, the tomb's location was lost. On the 12th of September 2012, archaeologists announced the discovery of a skeleton with spinal abnormalities and head injuries under a car park in Leicester. On the 4th of February 2013, DNA testing convinced scientists at Leicester University beyond reasonable doubt that those were Richard's remains. On the 26th of March 2015, the bones were ceremonially reburied in Leicester Cathedral.

  Henry moved swiftly to consolidate. He backdated his reign to the day before the battle, enabling him to declare as traitors those who had fought against him at Bosworth. Northumberland, who had not acted during the battle, was imprisoned and later released to pacify the north. Norfolk had been killed in single combat by Sir John Savage, according to the Ballad of Lady Bessy. Henry restored Oxford's confiscated lands and titles and appointed him Constable of the Tower and admiral of England, Ireland, and Aquitaine. He made his uncle Jasper Tudor the Duke of Bedford. Lord Stanley received the earldom of Derby.

  The first open revolt came two years later. Lambert Simnel claimed to be Edward Plantagenet, 17th Earl of Warwick, and the Earl of Lincoln led rebel forces in his name. Henry defeated that challenge at the Battle of Stoke Field on the 16th of June 1487. A rebellion in 1489 began with the murder of Northumberland; a note left beside his body blamed him for Richard's death.

• 7. Shakespeare's Battlefield

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  William Shakespeare gave the Battle of Bosworth a prominence in English culture far beyond what the surviving historical record could support. In his play Richard III, the battle is the single great fight, the climax around which three scenes and more than four hundred lines of buildup are arranged, even though the battle itself occupies only five sentences of stage directions.

  Shakespeare compressed history freely and departed from it when drama required it. Margaret of Anjou died in 1482, three years before Bosworth, but Shakespeare kept her alive to speak to Richard's mother before the battle, fulfilling a prophecy she had made in an earlier play. The nocturnal haunting Richard suffers before battle, in Shakespeare's telling a parade of ghosts of the king's victims including Buckingham, was Shakespeare's amplification of the brief, cryptic note in the Croyland Chronicle that Richard's face appeared "more livid and ghastly than usual" that morning.

  The iconic line "A horse, a horse! My kingdom for a horse!" was Shakespeare's creation, as was the single combat between Henry and Richard. The True Tragedy of Richard III, an earlier anonymous play about the same events, contains no stage directions suggesting visible combat between the two leaders. Shakespeare likely borrowed the idea of Henry using decoys from the historical example of Henry IV at the Battle of Shrewsbury in 1403, but there is no documentary evidence that Henry Tudor employed any such tactic at Bosworth.

  Shakespeare's primary sources were the chronicles of Edward Hall and Raphael Holinshed, which themselves drew heavily on Vergil's account, written in Henry's service. His portrait of Richard as a hunchbacked tyrant who murdered his nephews to steal the throne was shaped largely by the writings of Thomas More, whose extreme bias against Richard was noted even by later historians. For roughly four centuries, this dramatised version served as the standard account of Bosworth in English textbooks.

  In Laurence Olivier's 1955 film adaptation, the battle became a general melee rather than a single duel, a sequence that became the film's most recognised scene and a fixture at the Bosworth Battlefield Heritage Centre. Ian McKellen's 1995 adaptation, which transposed the action to a 1930s fascist England, drew a sharper critical response: historian Adams argued that the original Shakespearean moral, that one faces one's fate with dignity no matter how unjust, was drowned out by pyrotechnics.

• 8. Where the Battle Was

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  The exact location of the Battle of Bosworth is not known. According to historian Michael Hicks, it is one of the worst-recorded clashes of the entire Wars of the Roses, and historians' common complaint is that, beyond its outcome, very few details of the fighting appear in any chronicle.

  The Bosworth Battlefield Heritage Centre was built in 1974 on Ambion Hill, based on research by historian Daniel Williams commissioned by Leicestershire County Council. After the battle's quincentenary in 1985, scholars began seriously questioning Williams's theory. Geological surveys conducted by the Battlefields Trust between 2003 and 2009 found that the southern and eastern flanks of Ambion Hill were solid ground in the 15th century, undermining Williams's claim of extensive marshland there.

  The earliest documentary record of the battle is a municipal memorandum dated the 23rd of August 1485 from York, which locates the fighting "on the field of Redemore". A letter from 1485-86 corroborates this, naming "Redesmore" as the site. Historian Peter Foss argues that "Redemore" derives from the Anglo-Saxon phrase "Hreod Mor", meaning "reedy marshland", and that records did not associate the battle with "Bosworth" at all until 1510.

  Landscape archaeologist Glenn Foard led the Battlefields Trust survey and in October 2009 announced that the evidence pointed to a location approximately 2 miles south-west of Ambion Hill. The survey recovered thirty-four lead round shot through systematic metal detecting, more than the total previously found on all other 15th-century European battlefields. Among the finds was a small silver-gilt badge depicting a boar, Richard III's personal emblem, which experts believe may mark the actual site of his death. A new interpretation places the battlefield either side of the Fenn Lanes Roman road, close to Fenn Lane Farm, some three kilometres south-west of Ambion Hill. Historic England has since re-drawn the registered battlefield boundary to incorporate this newly identified site.