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Act Five

• 71. The play combines the aborted invasion of 1483 with the successful one of 1485.
  In terms of the numbers of men deployed in the major battles of the English civil war, Henry's command was not large, but is was significantly larger than any invasion force which had assaulted English shores in the period since 1460. But its composition - Frenchmen, Bretons, Scots - provides something of a forceful comment on Richard's failure to win the neutrality of his immediate foreign neighbors. In addition to the troops, France supplied Henry Tudor with a loan of 40,000 livres and with the necessary shipping. Thus, after twenty-two years of hopeless exile, and some eighteen months during which his potential as a rival claimant to the throne had risen steadily, Henry finally set sail from Harfleur on 31 July or 1 August 1485. (pg. 202)
  On 7 August 1485 Henry Tudor made a safe landfall at Mill Bay, on St. Anne's Head, a few miles west of the modern deep-water port of Milford Haven. From there he marched through Machynlleth, Shrewsbury (by 15 August), Newport, Stafford, Lichfield and Tamworth, to arrive at Atherstone by 21 August.

• 72. Henry might well have hoped that his own stepfather, at least, would support his cause. On the other hand, given Lord Stanley's highly equivocal political record over the past twenty-five years, it would have been deeply naive to place any dependence upon a Stanley promise, and there were experienced men with Henry Tudor, like Jasper Tudor and John de Vere, earl of Oxford, who had ample reason to be aware of the risk of trusting this wily nobleman. Here, at least, they were at one with the king himself. Even when summoned by Richard to join him in arms, Lord Stanley declared himself ill with the 'sweating sickness', but this did not mean that he had committed himself to Henry Tudor, nor was he to do so. (pg. 211)

• 73. The royal army spent the night before the battle at Sutton Cheney. (pg. 215)

• 74. Despite all his hopes, Henry Tudor had failed to obtain any definite commitment from the Stanleys, and had little choice but to engage his inferior force against a well-positioned enemy. Henry's early morning message to the Stanleys' camp had met with a rebuff. It is most unlikely that Lord Stanley (even if he were not genuinely ill with the sweating sickness) took part in the battle at all: he had already managed to avoid Towton, Barnet and Tewkesbury. If Henry Tudor, with Sir William's help, won the battle, then Thomas, as Henry's father-in-law, could claim credit; if not, his own non-intervention might save the family fortunes from Richard's wrath. Sir William had already been declared a traitor. (pg. 218)

• 75. Richard III awoke in his camp at Sutton Cheney early in the morning of 22 August, after a night troubled by uneasy dreams. We need not suppose they were of quite the violent, ghostly and portentous sort envisaged by Shakespeare, although some contemporary support exists for the notion that he appeared 'pale and death-like ... as though surrounded by a host of demons'. For Richard, as for Shakespeare, dawn brought relief. He recovered his nerve, and was up and about early enough to move his men forward to what, in a mildly rolling landscape, was to prove a commanding height, the modest and rather narrow plateau of Ambien Hill, some 400 feet in elevation. Thence he would have a good view of the disposition of the enemy forces advancing from the west, and certainly would have been able to pick out the location of particular commanders by their great battle-standards. Such standards, in the melees of English fifteenth-century battles, were the only means by which the rank-and-file of an army contingent could keep in touch with their individual commanders. Whether he could also have discerned the intentions and movements of Sir William Stanley, who seems to have taken up a position on another modest eminence called 'Hanging Hill', a mile or so north of the scene of the battle, near the village of Nether Coton, is less clear, but he would certainly have been well placed to identify any direct intervention by Sir William in the fighting going on in advance and below. Equally, Sir William himself had a useful vantage point from which to survey the entire field. (pg. 217)

• 76. The engagement seems to have begun with a vigorous exchange of fire, both of guns and arrows, between the two vanguards. This exchange proved inconclusive. Even if we ignore the use of rival artilleries, which were not only expensive but rather inefficient, English armies using bows and arrows tended to cancel each other out. Neither side had the decisive tactical advantage. Hence the armies had tended to become involved in a straightforward hand-to-hand fight, or melee, so characteristic of the battles of the civil war, with almost every man fighting on foot, whether originally mounted or not. Because of his formation, and the limited space on the top of Ambien Hill, Richard could not deploy all his superior forces at once. His own rearguard, for example, was completely out of touch. (pg. 220-221)

• 77. After Norfolk's' troops were brought under heavy pressure, Richard decided to make a direct attack upon the person of Henry Tudor himself. Experience had shown clearly that no enemy force would go no fighting once its principal commanders had been killed or captured. It may have been that he saw Norfolk's troops already in trouble against the main bulk of the Tudor forces, and that he could not readily engage the remainder of his own forces. It may have been that, already angered by the equivocal replies he had received from the Stanleys, and, seeing from his vantage point that Earl Henry was 'afar off' with only a small force of soldiers about him, 'all inflamed with ire, he struck his horse with his spurs, and runneth out of the one side without [i.e., around] the vanguard against him'. It was, therefore, so Polydore Vergil would have us believe, an impulsive and ill-considered act. Equally, he may have discerned that Sir William Stanley was preparing to engage, or had already engaged, on Henry's behalf, and that is was essential to attack Henry personally before the full weight of the substantial Stanley contingent came in form the north and was committed against him (although this is not what Polydore would have us believe).
  Another possible reason is that Richard had already learned that the earl of Northumberland was not prepared to commit his men on the royalist side, and, again, that early action was needed. Northumberland's alleged prevarications have often led him to be regarded as one of the great traitors of English history. It is a view which commands little credence. We have already seen that the physical confines of the terrain did not allow him to engage and this is supported by the evidence of the Croyland Chronicler. Two days after the battle, the corporation of York believed that the earl was already back in his East Yorkshire castle of Wressle, hardly the action of a man who had conferred a signal favor on the new king by withholding his troops at a vital stage of the battle, but this report proved to be unfounded. In fact, he was taken into custody, along with Thomas Howard, earl of Surrey, and probably placed in the Tower. There he seems to have remained until admitted into favor in the spring of 1486.
  Finally, Richard may have faced the prospect of low morale, or even mass desertion, among his own forces. Desertions there had been, but before the battle, and from men whom Richard already had under suspicion and had placed under guard. Yet two contemporary sources allege that Richard was in the event betrayed by his own people. A report reaching York two days after the battle, by the hands of its own agent, John Spooner, states that Richard 'late mercifully reigning upon us, was, through the great treason of the duke of Norfolk, and many other that turned against him, piteously slain and murdered, to the great heaviness of this City'. The Croyland Chronicler points up this claim by adding that many of those who deserted Richard were the northerners in whom he had placed such trust; but the chronicler's intense dislike of northerners is clear and repeated, and there is here an obvious element of bias in a otherwise reliable authority. Among these alternatives we may only guess, but cannot know. On balance, it seems probable that Richard's action was a combination of impulse and calculation. To dispose rapidly of his rival, especially if he had become separated from the main body of his troops, was to be certain of victory. Whether he would have done better to wait until he was able to bring his superior force fully into action is again a matter of speculation. Whether desperate, ill-advised or merely premature, Richard's charge came remarkably close to success. It seems likely that he took with him only his own household men and the immediate personal friends who were beside him at the time, rather than the main 'battle' of '1,000 or more knights', as some have supposed. Most of these committed supporters were to share his own fate in the subsequent hand-to-hand fighting. Nevertheless, this small but determined squadron swept through the enemy ranks to close with Henry's immediate bodyguard. Richard himself cut down Sir William Brandon, Henry's standard-bearer - the only casualty of note on Richmond's side - who could not have been more than a few feet from Henry himself. He then engaged and finally overbore Sir John Cheyne, described as a man of outstanding strength and fortitude. At this stage his horse seems to have been killed under him. (pg. 222-224). See also The Battle of Bosworth

• 78. Two contemporary sources state that Richard had the chance of a fresh horse and of escape, but refused. In a series of loaded sentences, Polydore Vergil says: 'when the matter began manifestly to quail, they brought him swift horses; but he, who was not ignorant that the people hated him ... is said to have answered, that that very day he would make end of either war or life, such great fierceness and such huge force of mind he had ... wherefore, knowing certainly that that day would either yield him a peaceable and quiet realm or else perpetually bereave him the same, he came to the field with the crown upon his head, that thereby he might either make a beginning or end of his reign'. (pg. 224)

• 79. So great was the threat to Henry at this crucial point of the battle that his own soldiers 'were now almost out of hope of victory', until Sir William Stanley's intervention turned the tide. Richard continued to fight on bravely, 'making way with weapon on every side', until he was finally overthrown. Even his hostile critics did not stoop to deny his martial prowess on that day. 'Alone,' says Polydore, 'he was killed fighting manfully in the press of his enemies.' (pg. 225)
  Henry Tudor is not likely to have killed Richard personally. None of the histories say so.

• 80. The crown which Richard had worn into battle was found on the field (according to a later legend, upon a thornbush) and placed upon Henry's head. (pg. 225)

• 81. Casualties seem to have been heavy, especially among the circle of Richard's immediate supporters. Howard of Norfolk, Ferrers of Chartley, Robert Brackenbury, Richard Ratcliffe, and Robert Percy all fell in the battle; Catesby was captured, to be executed in Leicester two days later; Lincoln, Lovell, Humphrey and Thomas Stafford all escaped to make more trouble another day; Northumberland and Surrey were placed in honorable imprisonment. But in the immediate aftermath of battle all sorts of rumors flew about as to who was alive and who was dead: neither the informants of the city of York nor even Henry Tudor himself were quite certain. Polydore's speculative estimate of 1,000 dead among the rank-and-file may not be too wide of the mark. (pg. 225)

• 82. The king's dead body was stripped, carried naked across a horse to the house of the Franciscans in Leicester, exposed to public view for two days to prove that he was indeed dead, and then buried without stone or epitaph. Some years later, Henry VII provided the miserly sum of £10 1s to provide a coffin of sorts for the dead king's remains. When during Henry VIII's reign, the Franciscan convent was dissolved, the bones were thrown out and the coffin became a horse-trough outside the White Horse Inn. By 1758, even that had disappeared; the broken pieces had come to form part of the inn's cellar-steps. In is an indication of the continuing hostility of the Tudors towards Richard, as well as of their bad manners, that no move was ever made to give him fitting burial. Whether for reasons of policy or piety, previous 'second-generation' usurpers had done public penance. No such generous move came from an uncaring Henry VIII. With the problematic exception of Edward V, Richard III is the only English king since 1066 whose remains are not now enshrined in a suitably splendid and accredited royal tomb. (pg. 225-226)

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