Bosworth War Walks

*

His helmet encircled with the golden crown,

Richard III, King of England, prepared himself for ordeal by battle.

He rode out against the man who had vowed to wrest the crown from his head

and sought to kill him in hand-to-hand combat.

That spectacular flourish took place here on the 22nd of August, 1485.

These fields, just west of Leicester, near the little town of Market Bosworth,

saw the last battle of the Wars of the Roses, that bloody clash between the Houses of York and Lancaster.

Richard's supporters had advised him to flee. He declined, retorting,

"This day will I die as a King or win."

It was a heroic gesture, far removed from the sneering villain of Shakespeare's play.

Richard, Duke of Gloucester, was a capable, energetic man.

He was a brave soldier and popular commander.

He spent much of his time in the north,

which he successfully ruled for his brother, the Yorkist king, Edward IV.

Edward, son of the Duke of York, had defeated Lancastrian rivals and secured the crown. The opening words

of Shakespeare's Richard III evoked the mood of the time:

"Now is the winter of our discontent Made glorious summer

"By this sun of York."

But it was by no means a cloudless sky. As the story unfolds, we find a plot as murky

as anything in Shakespeare. On Edward IV's death,

his 12-year-old son succeeded to the throne as Edward V.

His uncle Richard was appointed Protector until the boy came of age.

The young King and his brother were lodged here in the Tower of London.

In those days, the Tower wasn't just a prison, but the official royal residence in the city of London.

The two young princes were looked after comfortably here in the royal apartments.

Days before Edward's coronation, they were accused of being illegitimate.

They couldn't succeed to the throne and Richard was invited to do so.

In the weeks that followed, the princes were seen less and less in the Tower grounds.

One day they disappeared altogether.

In the 17th century, two bodies were found here behind this staircase.

Were they the skeletons of the princes? Did Richard murder them or had servants done so on his behalf?

The surviving evidence wouldn't convict Richard of complicity in their deaths,

but he stood to gain by the demise of his nephews.

Even today, it's a sensitive subject.

There are people here

that visit the Tower, some come purposely to see the bloody Tower.

They feel strongly if we suggest Richard was responsible for their deaths.

They jump on us with vengeance

and it's difficult to defend yourself when talking to a large crowd.

Whatever the truth, suspicion undermined the rightness of Richard's cause.

His seizure of power opened old wounds.

Discontented factions looked once more to the rival House of Lancaster.

The spectre of bloody feud now threatened the peace Edward IV had brought to the country.

The anti-Richard party turned to the Lancastrian claimant - Henry Tudor, Earl of Richmond,

grandson of a marriage between the widow of Henry V and a Welsh gentleman, Owen Tudor.

The French King and the Duke of Brittany had given Henry a place of refuge for most of his life.

And it was from across the Channel that he laid claim to the crown of England

on Christmas Day, 1483.

He was 26 years old and had few adherents, but he was determined to reach for the crown.

The long road to Bosworth had begun.

By 1485, Richard's position had worsened.

He was over-reliant on advisers like Sir Richard Radcliff, Sir William Catesby and Francis, Lord Lovell.

A piece of contemporary doggerel linked them to the King's white boar badge.

"The cat, the rat and Lovell the dog rule all England under the hog."

As Richard took up residence at Nottingham, it was not the hog that best described him,

but the spider on his web - well-placed to pounce

on the Welsh upstart.

On the 1st of August, 1485, Henry Tudor assembled his forces at the mouth of the Seine.

He set sail from Harfleur in a small flotilla funded by the French King.

A week later, after carefully skirting the coast of England,

he landed at Milford Haven in Wales.

It was a foreign invasion.

Apart from a small group of English exiles, Henry's army consisted of 2,000 French mercenaries.

His choice of Wales

should come as no surprise.

Although the country had lost its independence, its sense of national identity remained very strong.

Henry was proud of his Welsh roots and hoped to encourage powerful Welsh contingents to his standard.

A week's march across mid-Wales brought him to the borders of England.

Henry had decided to cross the River Severn

here at Shrewsbury and demanded the town's surrender.

The local bailiff, Thomas Mitton, had sworn that Henry would only enter over his dead body.

When the townspeople opened the gates, Mitton lay down and feigned death

and Henry's horse walked over him.

This may be a tall story, but most people would join what looked like the winning side.

Having got to England,

Henry now considered his next move.

He spent the night here while he debated his plans.

He could either head for London

or try to attract the private armies of those families not committed to Richard.

Most likely to join him were the Stanleys whose power base lay in North Wales and Lancashire.

Power broking in England at this time was in the hands of the great feudal dynasties.

Kings ruled only with the support of these families and their armies. Allegiances would shift.

The Stanleys were outwardly loyal to Richard, but were hedging their bets by maintaining contact with Henry.

Their role was to prove crucial over the next few days.

Henry raised his red dragon standard and went east.

He kept open his line of retreat into Wales, while moving closer to the Stanleys.

There were two Stanleyite armies - one under Thomas, Lord Stanley,

the other under his brother, Sir William. Lord Stanley just happened to be Henry's stepfather.

The dragon, the hart and the white boar were on a collision course

that would end on Bosworth Field.

In a secluded vale near Merevale Abbey,

Lord Stanley rode in for a secret meeting with Henry.

We can't be sure what passed between the two men,

but Henry agreed to offer battle the next day, confident the Stanleys would support him.

This support was far from certain as Richard held Stanley's son

as hostage for his father's good behaviour.

Henry only had 5,000 men and knew that Richard would command far more.

Without the Stanleys, he had little chance of winning any battle.

Richard had indeed got his superior army, in numbers at least.

On hearing of Henry's movements, he marched from Nottingham to Leicester where he assembled his army.

On Sunday, the 21st of August, he led more than 10,000 men across this bridge towards Bosworth.

As he crossed, his spur struck against the stone.

We are told that one of those wise women who always seem to be on hand

warned that this was where his head would be broken.

Scarcely an encouraging prophecy.

Richard was an experienced commander who helped beat the Lancastrians at Tewkesbury 14 years before.

And he chose this rising ground just south of Market Bosworth to deploy his army.

It gave him a good view of the surrounding countryside and the movements of his enemy.

It was a strong position and he had the bigger army, but he was clearly a worried man.

Richard camped for the night

near Sutton Cheney within striking distance of his opponent.

It is said that he spent a troubled night.

Was it a guilty conscience or concern about desertions

and the loyalty of those who had sworn allegiance to him, especially the Stanleys?

It is said that just before the battle, Richard heard Mass here in Sutton Cheney church.

He was a devout man, and as he prayed, he must have hoped the Lord would protect him from treachery.

He knew he had the superior force, but did he have the hearts of men?

Betrayal was his greatest fear, yet he was committed to fighting, whatever the risk.

In Sutton Cheney today,

there's a lot of sympathy amongst the villagers for Richard.

I feel that Shakespeare did a lot of bad for him,

but I don't think he was that bad a man.

People around here are more for Richard because of the local connections.

He was around Leicester and also Warwick, so therefore people around this area, it was close...

-He's a bit of a local hero?

-That's right, yes.

The church has become something of a shrine.

People pay their respects to the man they see as the victim of Shakespearean misrepresentation.

I got around to reading a prayer of King Richard's.

Anyone who can write as profoundly as that...

Basically a Christian man couldn't possibly have done those deeds.

I'm certain of it.

So you think that he was a good man who has been misjudged by history?

Exactly. And if he was physically handicapped, in those days that was enough to condemn anyone.

But, um... I don't believe that he was the bad man that he was painted.

I think it's just a prayerful place.

And he probably found that, if he was a pious man, that was the place to be

a short while before the battle.

It's almost never easy to be absolutely sure of the location of a medieval battle.

In the case of Bosworth, although contemporary accounts speak of a battle in Redmore Plain,

that place name no longer survives. The landscape has changed.

There are more hedges and the Victorians built this railway line

across part of the site.

Happily, it now has its terminus at the point where Henry lined up his troops

to confront Richard's forces up there on Ambion Hill.

At 5.15 that morning, as the sun rose,

Richard drew the whole of his army out of their encampments and arrayed his battle line to face the enemy.

We can't be sure of the exact position of the rival armies,

but the Stanleys were on the sideline when battle commenced.

The Bosworth Visitors' Centre puts Richard here on Ambion Hill,

Henry down there at its foot

and the Stanleys over there able to intervene on either side.

The two armies manoeuvred into battle formation.

They drew up in lines facing each other - tightly packed

because of the cramped contours of the hill.

Richard, King of England!

The rival commanders were experienced. The blue boar of the Earl of Oxford led Henry's vanguard.

The King's trusted commander was John Howard, Duke of Norfolk.

Richard himself sat on the crest and watched anxiously.

If he trusted Norfolk, he was not sure of the Earl of Northumberland who commanded the reserves.

DEATH TO THE TRAITOR, RICHARD!

First to engage were the archers, ranks of longbowmen

who sent a withering rain of arrows down on their enemy.

But the longbow was not the winner

it had been at Agincourt. Both sides had them in numbers, and except at close range,

they were unlikely to penetrate plate armour.

-More deadly in this respect was the crossbow.

-This is a 15th-century crossbow.

This attachment at the top is a windlass.

It operates pulleys at the bottom which were attached to the string.

What happens is, as I turn it,

the pulley system allows the string to be drawn up towards the nut where it's held.

It's not taking much pressure

for me to draw this up.

The back has a lever

and that locks this nut in position.

And this allows me then

to loosen off the pulley system.

And the pulley system actually comes right off.

Now you're in position to put a bolt on.

These bolts have leather fletchings.

Why leather rather than feathers?

The power which the crossbow produces,

it folds back feathers and this makes the bolt spin out of control. The advantage of the crossbow

is that it can be held in one position while it is loaded until it's ready to fire.

With a longbow, you would have to stand up, draw and then fire, so there's a difference in the time.

The disadvantage is that it takes so long to fire that 15 or 16 arrows could be shot in the time

that it takes one crossbowman to load and fire.

But if the bow was on the way out, another form of firepower was making its early appearance.

These stone cannonballs were found at Bosworth. They're evidence

that if much that happened wouldn't have shocked the men who fought at Hastings 400 years before,

in one respect war had moved on.

Into the stench of blood, sweat and ordure

was now laced the bad-egg stink of black powder.

This early breech-loader could smash bones. It may not have been accurate, but it was noisy.

And a mass target didn't require precision.

The two lines of infantry moved steadily towards each other.

The impetus of Richard's downhill charge failed to push the enemy back.

Oxford held his line. This led to an hour of bitter hand-to-hand fighting.

Medieval battle is well summed up

as bloody murder. Many of the infantrymen on both sides would have carried weapons like this.

It's called a bill. It can stab, hack or drag a horseman from his charger.

It might have started life as an agricultural implement and it's cheap and nasty.

This is an up-market version - a poleaxe, used by men-at-arms on foot.

It can cut, stab and this is designed

to break armour by sheer physical impact.

It was a time to settle old scores.

Personal enemies sought each other out and engaged in hand-to-hand duels.

Richard had his own grudge.

Furious that the Stanleys sat in the wings, he ordered the beheading of Lord Stanley's son,

whom he held as hostage.

Richard's order was never carried out,

perhaps through confusion, but more likely because his men were hedging their bets.

In armour weighing seven stone, men were quickly exhausted

and commanders needed to bring up reserves of fresh men.

Unfortunately for Richard, his rearguard under Northumberland

displayed what has been described as "masterly reluctance to intervene".

Battles at this time

were rarely fought to the bitter end. With the King making little progress,

his men, it is said, broke off from their fighting for a little while,

and there are suggestions that some of them, their hearts never really in the battle, began to slip away.

With the battle turning against him, Richard's companions urged him to flee. He would have none of it.

Then from his vantage point up here, he saw Henry with a small escort ride round to their left flank,

perhaps to confer with the Stanleys.

If he could kill Henry in single combat, the battle might yet be won.

Richard, fired by anger, charged out of the side of his line of battle

towards him.

Even those who had no love for Richard, or who wrote when Henry or his descendants were on the throne,

cannot deny Richard the glory of his last moments. At full charge, he headed straight for Henry.

To his opponents, he was a formidable sight.

With the point of his lance, he transfixed Sir William Brandon, Henry's standard-bearer.

Then with sword or battle-axe, he hacked his way towards the Pretender and nearly reached him.

At the critical moment,

the Stanleys threw in their lot with Henry.

Sir William Stanley with a force of 5,000 men plunged into Richard's escort with the war cry, "Stanley!"

Lord Stanley remained behind and didn't take part in the fighting,

but Sir William's intervention was decisive.

Richard's position was hopeless. He lost his horse,

possibly in this boggy ground, and his companions offered him another to escape on.

He refused, and as a contemporary tells us, "He was pitifully slain,

"fighting manfully in the thickest press of his enemies."

This memorial marks a possible spot where he fell and was hacked to death as he writhed on the ground,

last of the Plantagenets.

It was probably on this hill at Stoke Golding, overlooking part of the battlefield,

that Henry thanked his comrades-in-arms and had the crown placed on his head.

Even today, it's still called Crown Hill.

Those present were seeing the beginning of one of the most successful dynasties

in English history - the Tudors.

And what of Richard? His body was brought back to Leicester

slung across a packhorse.

It is said that his head hit the same stone that his spur had clipped on his way to Bosworth.

Richard was stripped of the dignity of kingship.

His naked body, spattered with blood and mire, was put on public display

before being buried in a nearby Franciscan friary.

Going back to the quincentenary in 1985, a family visited a week after that.

I said, "Why didn't you come last week?"

"We daren't. Our name's Stanley!"

Henry was the victor and history was written by his apologists,

but we love an underdog, and Richard still lives in people's imagination, while Henry is largely forgotten.

There are no statues of Henry,

but here in Leicester, this striking figure of Richard proclaims his last act of defiant chivalry

on Bosworth Field.

Subtitles by Calum Short, Subtext, for BBC Subtitling 1997