Battle of Bosworth

Like Hastings in 1066, the Battle of Bosworth of 22 August 1485, is misnamed. The great battle of 1066 was fought four miles from Hastings itself, on the ridge known as Senlac. Bosworth was certainly not fought at Market Bosworth but at an uncertain site, only in 2010 relocated by archaeologists from the traditional ‘battlefield’ on Ambion Hill to a position two miles away, straddling the Roman Road near Fenn Lane Farm, the discovery of a silver-gilt livery badge depicting Richard III’s symbol, the boar, being not the least remarkable proof of this relocation. As this implies, Bosworth, unlike Hastings, is one of the least well-reported battles in medieval history. The distribution of the opposing armies, even the question of who actually fought and who stood aloof, remains to a large extent unanswered.

It is still possible to pinpoint similarities between 1485 and 1066. Richard III spent the months before Henry Tudor’s landing, in Nottingham and its surrounding forests, like Harold Godwinson in the Bayeux Tapestry with his hawks and his hounds, or like the proverbial Robin Hood, pursuing what had been the sport of kings for many years before ever William of Normandy set foot in England. In 1066, poor communications and the inadequacy of the old Roman roads had disrupted contacts between north and south, so that William was able to land in Sussex whilst Harold was still busy in Yorkshire. In 1485, although on 11 August Richard had news of Henry Tudor’s landing, and although by 19 August the authorities of the city of York were arranging to send eighty men to the King’s assistance, poor communications ensured that this contingent, like many others, simply failed to arrive. The fact that the battle itself was fought in a marsh, either side of a Roman road, should itself indicate the degree to which England, even a thousand years after the departure of the last Roman legions, still belonged to a sub-Roman world, part cultivated, part still wilderness. Hastings had developed into a mass assassination attempt upon Harold and his bodyguard gathered around the royal standard. Bosworth began as an attempt by Richard III to kill Henry Tudor before any serious blows had been struck, trampling the Tudor dragon underfoot in much the same way that one imagines Harold’s dragon, shown in the Bayeux Tapestry, was trampled underfoot by the Normans.

Just as at Hastings, where Mowbrays and Veres and a host of families who were to dominate English politics for the coming four centuries were assembled, so at Bosworth gathered Percys and Stanleys and Howards, the coming men of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Direct descendants of the Lord Stanley who fought at Bosworth served as prime minister and foreign secretary in the governments of Queen Victoria. Edward Stanley, seventeenth earl of Derby, was still serving as Secretary of State for War in 1924. Two of his sons were members of the British cabinet in 1938. One of them, Secretary of State for War in 1940, was still a government minister as late as 1945. Charles Howard, twentieth earl of Suffolk, died in 1941 as a bomb-disposal expert, posthumously awarded the George Cross. Miles Fitzalan-Howard, seventeenth duke of Norfolk, was still a major-general commanding British troops on the Rhine in 1965. The families which met at Bosworth in 1485 were to enjoy an ascendancy in English politics and military affairs just as great as that enjoyed by the Norman families which had fought at Hastings in 1066.

Here, however, the comparisons begin to run dry and the contrasts assert themselves. Harold was defended to the death by his men at Hastings, to such an extent that the entire flower of the English nobility was cut down in a single day. Richard III commanded no such allegiance. Two of the greatest forces gathered at Bosworth, in theory to support the King, either stood aloof, as seems to have been the case with Henry Percy, Duke of Northumberland, or actively threw in their lot with Henry Tudor, as may have been the case at Bosworth with Lord Stanley. Richard is said to have gone down shouting ‘Treason! Treason! Treason!’, an appropriate summary of the entire political malaise in which England had become embroiled. The only nobleman who died with him was John Howard, the most blatant of upstarts: until 1470 a mere Suffolk knight only later raised through marriage and affinity to the status and title of his former masters, the Mowbray dukes of Norfolk. After Hastings, it took William of Normandy a full three months to lay claim to the English throne. At Bosworth, at least according to legend, the crown or a coronet formerly worn by King Richard, was found on the field of battle and placed on Henry Tudor’s forehead even as the last battlefield executions were taking place. William ‘the Conqueror’ marked the site of his battle with penance and the foundation of a great Benedictine Abbey. Henry Tudor, the future Henry VII, attempted no such commemoration of his victory. Far from founding a religious house, he was the father of a future king who was to suppress and squander the resources of every monastery in England.