A hot August day in 1485 and a battle rages in England. It’s a desperate lurid battle that will decide the fate of a nation and of a king who will one day become a media celebrity.
Knots of soldiers brutally hack away at each other in a muddy field. It’s not the quaint picture of chivalry portrayed in our schoolbooks. There’s nothing glamorous about medieval warfare. The din of battle and clash of steel shocks the senses. Primal screams of agony, hatred and fear, generate the adrenaline rush of a silent movie. Survival is down to luck or brute strength, and a butcher’s yard of severed body parts marks out another killing field that some poor peasant has to clear up.
The legendary Battle of Bosworth is almost over, but one man is determined to be the last English king to die in battle - even if he doesn’t know it yet. His staunchest men-at-arms put on a brave face, adopt animal-like stances and prepare for a certain and painful death. They are outnumbered, surrounded, but in spite of everything, they remain completely loyal to their king, who is crying out for a horse in exchange for his kingdom - a pretty good deal for any enterprising Englishman at any other time or place.
His enemies close in, cockily brandishing their swords and polearms in grisly anticipation of an easy kill. Seeing the king’s predicament, they slaughter the last of his bodyguard in a frenzy of flashing blades and smashed skulls. On the sidelines, treacherous nobles with pointy shoes and even pointier ambitions gleefully watch the spectacle unfold and await the inevitable promotions that might come from inaction.
The king is exhausted. Betrayed. He is the last Plantagenet monarch, and his life is destined to end in a field that centuries later historians will argue about.
But what really happened in that muddy field in 1485? Was Richard III the last man standing? Did he cry out for a fresh horse so that he might fight on, or indeed, escape? Was the king really tricked and betrayed by unscrupulous followers like the Earl of Northumberland and the Stanley brothers? Whether or not we believe Richard was a monstrous tyrant or merely a man of his time facing a host of other power-crazed nobles determined to make a killing, his last stand at Bosworth is, in itself, inspiring. Most people remember it with clarity if they have seen the movie Richard III. But Shakespeare’s poetic vision bombards us with a host of inaccuracies. Olivier’s classic 1955 offering only perpetuates the myth, and somewhere in between, the historian must pick up the pieces because we all know that Bosworth really wasn’t like that.
Even some twenty-first-century popular thinking still asserts that the Battle of Bosworth was where justice was meted out to a tyrant. In popular education, we still teach that Bosworth was another 1066: a glowing change of dynasty emerging from the dark shadows of a decidedly murky and brutal fifteenth century. The story provides a convenient end of an era, casting a large, unwieldy shadow across Richard III’s real character, his short reign, and his last pitched battle. It seems the fiction of Richard’s famous last stand has been chewed, swallowed and digested by the masses so that it is easily remembered and readily absorbed into the consciousness.
So, the strange historical reality of Bosworth Field is that it remains an almost mythical event. We know very little about what happened there on 21 August 1485. We know Bosworth was neither Richard’s fated place of assassination nor was it the end of that period of history charmingly called the Wars of the Roses. We also know England was not unified by two romantic symbolic roses thereafter and that there was little peace for Henry VII or his son. It was certainly not Richard’s intention to be led lamb-like to the slaughter or be killed by an untried knight and his motley crew of foreign mercenaries (some of who had lately been released from French prisons).
Therefore, was Bosworth just another battle of that thorny age? Well, if not for the death of Richard III, my thinking is that it probably was. Even today's consensus is that Tudor propaganda and Elizabethan drama changed our perception of what happened there. To Richard’s character assassins, Bosworth was an overdue overdose of kingly medicine dealt out to punish a disabled cold-blooded serial killer; a fiction that was not seen as such by writers until long after the event. Therefore, like many historians, I think the world has been fed a complete falsehood for years.
But who has ever heard of the Battle of Redemore or a place called Sandeford? Many historians have, and Bosworth's topographic history has changed many times due to new evidence and left-field thinking. It seems King Richard has been killed over and over again in at least three different locations. Memorials to him have been erected in the wrong places. Visitor centres and battle-boards have been venerated in areas where no action took place. In fact, up until very recently, the actual battlefield has become lost in time, memory and modern misconception.
Even those conveying news days after the battle were suitably unsure of what happened where. John Sponer, a sergeant to the Mayor of the City of York, was sent out specifically to bring news from the field. York Civic Records tell us that, ‘King Richard, late mercifully reigning upon us was, through great treason of the duke of Norfolk and many others that turned against him was piteously slain and murdered,’ at a place called Redemore. The report provides us with a heartfelt epitaph from the past, if any were needed, and from a city that revered Richard, the man, not the monster.
Taking a more official line, Henry VII’s proclamation and attainder after the battle give a more damning indictment of Richard’s tyranny, while at the same time letting slip an even more precise location of his rival’s death, ‘at a place called Sandeford’ - an area far removed from tradition and mileage from the ‘accepted’ Bosworth battlefield. Thus the place names of Redemore and Sandeford pinpoint the battle with much greater accuracy thanks to a complete revision of contemporary and topographic evidence supplied chiefly by Peter Foss,Glenn Foard and Anne Curry.1
The recent discovery of Richard’s mortal remains found under a Leicester car park also helps us put to bed several historical fictions perpetrated by the Tudors and replace them with forensic fact. A host of skeletal injuries on his remains denote the brutal way Richard was killed - the eleven battle wounds being copycat injuries to those unearthed at Towton in 1996. Also, the way Richard’s body was mutilated post mortem by some enterprising comedian conveys that overkill, not for the first time, was carried out even after the red mist of war was over. But overall, Richard’s remains do verify some of his contemporaries' claims that he was neither disabled nor had a withered arm. Modern human trials have also proved that in life, Richard was quite capable of defending himself with medieval weapons despite having scoliosis (a fact that is fully supported by his full participation in the battles of Barnet and Tewkesbury in 1471).
So, in conclusion, we can say with some certainty that Tudor and Elizabethan sources unjustly portrayed Richard’s physique and that his last pitched battle, one of the most famous in history, has for some years been venerated in entirely the wrong place.
But, mores the pity, we have barely scratched the surface. Take, for instance, the list of heinous crimes levelled at Richard III, namely the major ‘hits’ of his career: Edward Prince of Wales, King Henry VI, the Duke of Clarence (Richard’s brother), the Princes in the Tower, Queen Anne (Richard’s wife), the Bastard of Fauconberg, Earl Rivers, Sir Richard Grey, Sir Thomas Vaughan, Lord Hastings, the Duke of Buckingham and countless other mafia-like judicial ‘whackings’ make us wonder how Richard slept at night. Who knows, perhaps Ralph Holinshed was right in his observation that Richard’s evil conscience lost him the Battle of Bosworth after all?
Somehow I don’t think so.
Clearly, in my view, Richard was a convenient ‘patsy’ for those in much higher and shadier positions of power. In reality, before he became king, Richard’s elder brother Edward IV must have ordered some of the killings on the above list, using Richard as his official fixer to manufacture the deed. Other so-called victims of Richard’s wickedness were rebels who committed capital crimes; some fell in the confusion of battle, Richard’s queen probably died of tuberculosis, which leaves a number of summary executions that were deemed necessary by Richard when king to secure his throne at a time when it was extremely fragile. The thorny subject of the murder of the Princes in the Tower, which even today remains an unsolved crime, cannot be wholly attributed to Richard either - sticking my neck out there!
However, my main point here is that contemporary evidence is almost always painted with layers of propaganda. To get to the guts of the problem, the only way forward is to hack it to bits and see what remains.
Stay tuned to History Mondays for more on this subject.
The Field of Redemore, Peter J. Foss, 1990. Bosworth 1485, Glenn Foard & Anne Curry, 2013.