Pod Insights Dan Snow's History Hit The Battle of Bosworth About this episode In August 1485, the would-be king Henry Tudor went head-to-head with King Richard III - the final, decisive battle of the Wars of the Roses. Only one of these men would leave the battlefield alive, and this bloody clash between Houses York and Tudor would decide the future of Britain.
Joining us is Matt Lewis, host of the Gone Medieval podcast, to take us through this climactic moment in British history.
Produced by Mariana Des Forges and edited by Dougal Patmore.
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Transcript 10,774 words · 7 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
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1:57 Dan Snow? It's the climax of the Wars of the Roses. The epic, decisive finale. The Battle of Bosworth is about to begin. King Richard III, wearing his crown into battle, faces down a rebel army led by the pretender, Henry Tudor. Richard's superior army holds the high ground. But his crucial allies, he hopes, the Stanleys, wait on the flex. Their loyalty is undecided. As the battle rages, Richard risks everything on a desperate lightning charge across the battlefield to kill Henry and end this generational struggle here and now.
2:43 Dan Snow? This is the story of that day. It's the story of the end of the Plantagenets and the birth of the Tudor Age.
2:59 Dan Snow? The Battle of Bosworth is just one of the key turning points in England's long history. And it's a wild story. So it can only be done justice to by the wild man of history himself, the incredible historian Matt Lewis.
3:13 Speaker 03 T minus 10.
3:14 Speaker 04 The Tommy Bomb dropped on Hiroshima. God save the king. No black-white unity till there is first from black unity.
3:22 Speaker 03 Never to go to war with one another again. And lift off, and the shuttle has cleared the tower.
3:32 Dan Snow? Matt, great to have you on the podcast. It's wonderful to be here, thank you. We're going to talk all about the famous French invasion of England with their puppet. Just one of the many. Oh my goodness, we mustn't go there straight away. Let's explain to people what we're talking about. Okay, so. Wild century, 15th century, civil wars, regicide, kings are killed, all sorts going on. Quick, just sum up the Wars of the Roses.
3:57 Speaker 05 Henry VI is not a great king. He's deposed eventually by Edward IV.
4:00 Dan Snow? His cousin Edward IV.
4:01 Speaker 05 King of the House of York, a different line from Edward III. Edward IV is kicked off the throne briefly. Henry VI comes back. He's still not very good. Edward IV's back. He dies unexpectedly in 1483. Some things happen in that year. There are some young children involved.
4:15 Dan Snow? So Edward IV dies unexpectedly, great warrior, ends the Wars of the Roses, what it looks like. So brings England under his sway. Henry VI is killed in the Tower of London. He then dies. Two little boys left in the Tower of London, his two sons.
4:28 Speaker 05 There's a 12-year-old and a nine-year-old. The 12-year-old should have been king, never makes it to his coronation for reasons that are open to debate and discussion.
4:36 Dan Snow? Okay.
4:36 Speaker 05 And instead it is Edward's brother, the prince's uncle, who becomes Richard III in 1483.
4:43 Dan Snow? Now, you are a big Richard III fan, okay? So I'd be interested to tell people that. But traditionally, it has been said widely that he killed those two princes in the Tower.
4:53 Speaker 05 It has been said widely and incorrectly for many, many years.
4:56 Dan Snow? Okay. And folks, if you want more content on this, then Matt has got his own podcast in which he unpacks this on numerous occasions and has done so on my podcast as well. Go and check that out. So we've got Richard III on the throne now, 1483. Everything looks sorted. The two princes have disappeared in the Tower. They've gone. It looks like the House of York, it's secure on the throne. Richard III, good king.
5:18 Speaker 05 You've potentially replaced the issues of a minority with an adult king who is experienced. This could have been perceived by many people to be a good thing, but there are lots of people who aren't happy. And I'm not sure that this revolves around the idea that Richard had murdered his nephews quite as much as the fact that people have spent 12 years preparing for Edward V's kingship. They've put people in his household to grow up with him. They've kind of put all their eggs in an Edward V-shaped basket. And they've all been tipped out by Richard III. So there are people who are deeply unhappy with the way things have gone.
5:48 Dan Snow? And by people, we mean aristocratic, sort of courtiers, stuff like that. So they've thought, like, a young Edward V is going to take over, all nice. Suddenly the uncle's taken over.
5:55 Speaker 05 And I think in particular, Margaret Beaufort, who is the mother of Henry Tudor, spies in all of this an opportunity. The crisis of a contested succession provides her with an opportunity to get her son back from exile and back to England.
6:09 Dan Snow? Right, so Margaret Beaufort is a British noblewoman, royal blood in her veins. She has got a son called Henry Tudor. He's been in exile in France for...
6:19 Speaker 05 By the time he comes back, 14 years, he's 28 years old, so half of his life is in exile.
6:23 Dan Snow? Hardly remembers what Britain...
6:24 Speaker 05 And nobody in England knows him.
6:26 Dan Snow? No one in England knows who this guy is, but as with, however with royal history, he's got that all important thing, he's got that royal blood in his veins.
6:32 Speaker 05 Yeah, so his mother Margaret is descended from Edward III through a line of illegitimate children who are later legitimised of John of Gawne, who is the third son of Edward III. So the same Lancastrian line that gave us Henry IV, Henry V and Henry VI. Margaret Beaufort is from that kind of stable family.
6:47 Dan Snow? So she's from the pantagene family, that's okay.
6:49 Speaker 05 She has royal blood.
6:49 Dan Snow? She's got royal blood. Her son is this guy, Henry Tudor. He's been sitting out the Wars of the Roses, too dangerous for him to come back. People have tried to kill him, right?
6:58 Speaker 05 There has been a long effort by both Edward IV and afterwards by Richard III as well to get custody of him. He's very much seen as the last potential rival to the House of York. Edward, by the end of his life, has sort of come around to the idea of Henry coming home and becoming Earl of Richmond, his father's old title, and he dangles a marriage to one of Edward's daughters and the potential to return home. And when Edward dies unexpectedly, I think whether you get a minority under Edward V or you get Richard III, it's not a great time to be bringing exiled rebels home to muddy the water even more. But Margaret Beaufort kind of had got so close to getting her son home, the paper is drafted waiting for Edward IV's signature when he dies. And I think having come so close, her patience now just really snaps and she's like, that's
7:43 Speaker 05 it. Come hell or high water, by hook or by crook, I'm getting my son home.
7:46 Dan Snow? Best thing ever happened to that family arguably, because they would get the big prize. Anyway, we're going to talk about that. So Henry Tudor is sitting there, Richard III is on the throne. What's Richard like as a king? He's 30 years old?
7:56 Speaker 05 He's 30 when he comes to the throne in 1483. He's an experienced governor and experienced nobleman. He's had some military experience a few years earlier in the Wars of the Roses, but maybe not for a little while. He's been constantly battling the Scots on the borders in the north of England. And maintaining law and order there. He's seen as as quite a fair and just man. He's interested in the lot of the common man. He reforms lots of laws in the north to increase and improve the lot of the ordinary people offered at the expense of the nobility, which in some way doesn't make him very popular with some of the nobility. And when he comes down to London, this also means that he is slightly viewed as a bit of a northerner, a bit of an unknown quantity, and everyone isn't quite sure what they're going to get with him.
8:38 Dan Snow? So people should put out their minds, the richer the further that they get from Shakespeare, which is the sort of physically and emotionally and mentally sort of twisted and angry and vile human being. That's just pure propaganda.
8:49 Speaker 05 Well, we know that he had scoliosis from his skeleton. So he did have a curvature of his spine, which Usain Bolt's got, you know, this isn't a terrible, terrible thing, which may have made one of his shoulders look slightly higher than the other, but they would have covered that probably in padding in his clothing. It's significant that nobody during his lifetime talks about him having uneven shoulders. And quite often those physical symptoms are used in a medieval mind as the outward representation of a corrupted soul. And that's something, you know, we wouldn't recognise today, but Shakespeare kind of builds on all of those physical elements of Richard. He gives him a limp and a withered arm and things like that as well, to really drive home that this is a bad guy to his core.
9:28 Dan Snow? Right. Okay. So we've got a more rounded picture now, thanks to you. But he's making a few waves in the nobility. Quite quickly though, his reign is thrown into crisis. He faces invasion. So what's going on?
9:38 Speaker 05 He's crowned in July, 1483, and in October, there is the first big rebellion against him that's remembered as Buckingham's Rebellion. And this has as part of it getting Henry Tudor home. So Margaret Beaufort is backing this. She's actually related to the Duke of Buckingham as well, because everyone's related amongst the aristocracy. And it seems like this autumn 1483 rebellion is centred on the idea of putting Buckingham on the throne instead of Richard, probably so that Buckingham will allow Henry Tudor to come home. That's why Margaret is funding all of this. It doesn't become an effort to put Henry Tudor on the throne until after Buckingham is dead.
10:11 Dan Snow? I see. Okay.
10:12 Speaker 05 The first time that Henry is talked about as a potential rival to the crown is a few days after Buckingham is executed, after this failed rebellion. So Henry does try to invade as part of this rebellion. To support it, but his fleet is scattered by a storm in the Channel. There is a report that his ship sights land and lots of York soldiers realise who it is and they've sort of come ashore. It's going really, really well. We're going to overthrow King Richard. And Henry, in a way that seems, he seems to have a knack for this for his entire life, looks at it. You imagine him narrowing his eyes and going, nah, that smells funny. And he turns his ship around and goes back to Brittany.
10:44 Dan Snow? Okay, so he gets quite close to it, well, gets extremely close to invading and then goes back to Brittany, back in France, right? So now Buckingham's dead, so another potential king's been taken off the board. I mean, it is all just, there's only Henry left really now, isn't there?
10:57 Speaker 05 He really is the last man standing and at this point, he enters an alliance with Edward the Fourth's widow, Elizabeth Woodville.
11:04 Dan Snow? Yes, so anyone that doesn't like Richard III, for whatever reason, Henry the Fourth is the only man left standing.
11:10 Speaker 05 And I think he knows it and his mom knows it. There's no doubt that Margaret is the brains behind everything that is going on here. And I think she builds this alliance with Edward the Fourth's widow, based on a marriage between Henry and a daughter of Edward the Fourth. To try and get all of these disaffected Yorkists who aren't happy at Richard III coming to the throne, to get them into to Henry's camp. And so at Christmas Day, 1483, he swears an oath at Rennes Cathedral that he will marry Elizabeth of York, Edward the Fourth's oldest daughter, if he's able to invade England and defeat Richard III and take the throne. So then all of these disaffected-
11:45 Dan Snow? So he's going for the throne now, there's no, obviously there's no question now.
11:48 Speaker 05 So now he is clearly and openly saying, I am coming for Richard III's throne. And he begins this kind of faux court in exile. Initially, he's in Brittany, he flees to France just before the Bosworth campaign. But he builds this kind of faux court with all of these Yorkists who don't want to be in a Richard III version of England. And all of those who've been driven out after the rebellion of October 1483, those who took part. And they all begin to coalesce around Henry and he's building quite a nice little faction around himself. And we see Richard, for the rest of his reign, preoccupied with what Henry is doing and trying to get his hands on him. He tries to bribe the Duke of Brittany to hand Henry over and the Duke of Brittany wants a load of soldiers and archers and things. And Richard seems to be preparing to do it and he almost gets his hands on Henry.
12:31 Speaker 05 And yet again, Henry seems to have his wits completely about him. He gets a last minute warning that he's about to be handed over and he feigns illness on the road on his horse, steps off the road, you know, presumes to go and throw up in a bush or something like that, and just runs to the French border. He just likes it. And he manages to get across the border into France, makes it to the French court. During this period, what would the French like more than a rival to the English throne at their court?
12:55 Dan Snow? It's so useful to have a puppet in your court, isn't it?
12:57 Speaker 05 And he's just fallen in the lap of the French.
12:59 Dan Snow? So Henry's a sort of king in waiting. He's in France. Is he dependent on the French to give him the ships and the men and the money to get him across the channel?
13:07 Speaker 05 He really is slightly at their mercy. He doesn't have any resources of his own. He's got some fairly minor Yorkist gentry around him. The Earl of Oxford, who has been a prisoner at Calais for the last 10 years or so, manages to escape from prison and make his way to Henry. This is someone else who can't be reconciled to a Yorkist government. Edward IV had killed Oxford's father and brother, so he's firmly out for revenge too. But apart from Oxford, he's not really got any ranking noblemen around him. His prospects don't look entirely great, but as soon as he gets to the French court, and there's a little bit of context here in France as well. So when Edward IV dies, a few months later, Louis XI, who is his great rival in France, also dies fairly unexpectedly and leaves behind a 13-year-old boy to rule as Charles VIII. And Charles VIII
13:51 Speaker 05 has this kind of Regency Council all around him. There is lots of problems with people looking to take control of that Regency Council, not necessarily to depose Charles, but there is a lot of infighting around who should have control of the Regency. And this will spill into a period of civil war in France known as the Mad War from 1485 to 1487. So they are conscious that they have their own internal problems. Richard is building a huge aggressive alliance against France. He's had Queen Isabella in Spain has offered him tens of thousands of men that she'll pay for if he'll take them into France and attack them. He's trying to get the Holy Roman Empire out of their alliance with France, and he's trying to work with Burgundy and Brittany, who are trying to maintain their independence from France. So England now looks like a threat to France at the very time when they're faced with their
14:35 Speaker 05 own minority crisis. And all of a sudden, this guy falls into their lap, who is the last man standing that could possibly lay claim to the English crown, apart from Richard.
14:45 Dan Snow? And there's nothing the French like more than just throwing a claimant to the throne across the channel and seeing if it will just light the fires in, well, in England and Wales.
14:53 Speaker 05 Yeah, I mean, we saw Louis XI did it in 1470, when the Earl of Warwick came over. He mashed him together with Margaret of Anjou, his old rival, and threw them like a hand grenade across the channel to explode into England, drive Edward IV out, put Henry VI briefly back on the throne. It all went a little bit wrong, but I imagine Louis XI was laughing his head off at all of that.
15:12 Dan Snow? Yeah. And then they do it again in the 1740s with Bonnie Prince Charlie. I mean, it's never ending. So what is the moment at which they decide to launch this invasion?
15:20 Speaker 05 It gets towards the end of campaigning season in 1485. So the fleet launches from Harfleur on the first of August, which is fairly late in the year to be embarking on a military campaign. You're sort of right at the end of the window of summer weather that you would want to be campaigning during. And it seems like they probably feel like they've kept Richard on his toes for as long as they possibly can. He's been waiting for this invasion for a couple of years now. He knows it's coming. He's just not sure when. And I think they're conscious of this alliance that he's building against them. And it's kind of a case of if we don't move now, he's going to move against us. So it seems like a really good time. There's talk of them kind of emptying all the French prisons, rounding up a load of French mercenaries, piling them all in ships with these disaffected Yorkists, and shoving them out from Harfleur into the channel.
16:03 Dan Snow? So a few Englishmen who've sort of gone into exile and found their way to Henry's courts. So these are mostly French troops?
16:09 Speaker 05 A large portion of them are French troops, and it's French ships and it's French money that is bringing them across.
16:14 Dan Snow? And unusually, the weather in the English Channel plays ball.
16:18 Speaker 05 Everything seems to be working out for Henry. These are all good signs. I mean, it takes them a week to get to where they're going. They leave Harfleur on the first of August and they land at Milford Haven in southwest France.
16:29 Dan Snow? Yes, interesting. They don't just go straight across the Narrows. They don't go straight across the channel. They go all the way round, round by Cornwall, up into the Bristol Channel and land in southwest Wales.
16:38 Speaker 05 And it seems that part of the game that they've been playing is to keep Richard guessing about where they might come. Richard has based himself in Nottingham, which is kind of geographically the the middle of his kingdom, because he doesn't know where they're going to come from. There's been lots of invasions. Henry IV and Edward IV have both landed in Yorkshire in the North East. Traditionally, you'd expect them to maybe land somewhere in Kent or on the south coast.
16:59 Dan Snow? But the second's wife landed in East Anglia, didn't she somewhere?
17:01 Speaker 05 Yeah, so kind of anywhere down there. Richard seems to have had intelligence that they're going to land at Milford. He thinks that could be Milford at Southampton.
17:09 Dan Snow? That's near my house, yeah.
17:10 Speaker 05 He sends some men to Milford at Southampton to watch there, but it ends up being Milford Haven in the southwest of Wales. And this is really playing into, so one of the key people that is coming back with Henry is his uncle Jasper Tudor. And they are a strongly Welsh family. The southwest of Wales is Jasper's kind of old heartlands before he'd gone into exile with his nephew. So I think there is a feeling that they can come and land there and maybe try and drum up some more men. They haven't got enough men for an invasion, really. They hope this is going to be fertile ground for them as they move through Wales.
17:40 Dan Snow? And is it?
17:41 Speaker 05 Probably not as fertile as they were hoping.
17:43 Dan Snow? That's the way.
17:44 Speaker 05 There's a few people who come to them and there's a couple of armies that seem to sort of gather and march parallel to Henry, shadowing him. They don't ever stop him or attack him. And it seems a lot like people are beginning to hedge their bets now. The Welsh are keen to have a Welshman on the throne and Henry really leans into that. He comes under the banner of the Red Dragon of Cadwalladr. He's really leaning into that old Welsh heritage of those Arthurian prophecies of Merlin that the Red Dragon will return to drive out the White Saxon Dragon from the English lands. Henry is really playing up to all of that in the hopes of drumming up some men. And he gathers some, but I suspect he would have wanted more to come as he marches up the west coast of Wales,
18:25 Speaker 05 up through Aberystwyth, gets to kind of Mcconclith, where Owinglin Durd had held his parliament earlier in that century. And then he cuts east and decides now is the time to head to London. He heads to Shrewsbury to pick up the old Roman road.
18:35 Dan Snow? Heading into the heart of England. And you said there were some armies shadowing him. What? So Richard's troops in Wales don't get involved? They're sort of hovering around the edges?
18:43 Speaker 05 There's a guy called Rhysap Thomas who becomes significant at the Battle of Bosworth. He's a name that crops up as someone who potentially makes a fairly decisive slice during the Battle of Bosworth. Richard has appointed him as effective ruler of South Wales. And Rhys has kind of sworn that anyone who tries to take Richard's land or assault Richard will have to do so over his body. And there's a story that Rhys stands underneath a bridge and lets Henry walk over the top of the bridge. It's like, oh, he's done it over my body. I've excused myself of the oath that I made to Richard. And he seems to shadow, he doesn't openly declare for Henry straight away. His army seems to move separate to Henry's, but he's not stopping him, which is his job, which is what he'd sworn to do, and he just doesn't do it.
19:25 Dan Snow? Yeah. And he's saying to King Richard, no, I'm doing my best. I'm just, I'm being all strategic.
19:29 Speaker 05 I'm waiting orders.
19:31 Dan Snow? Yeah, of course. Yeah. Okay. So they get to Shrewsbury and you're now quite close to Nottingham. So are the two sides getting ever more?
19:39 Speaker 05 They are. And I think frustratingly for Richard, the gates of Shrewsbury are opened to Henry's army. They're allowed to enter. And from here, he can pick up the old Roman Road, Watling Street, now the A5, but it goes straight from Shrewsbury into London.
19:54 Dan Snow? Can I just quickly start with that? It seems like Henry is sort of quite popular, always Richard unpopular. I mean, what's going on? If his men in Wales aren't fighting, Shrewsbury opens its gates. Is that because they didn't want to fight?
20:04 Speaker 05 It's really tricky. It's good. We are at the end. I mean, it's quite easy to just think, oh, everyone hated Richard, so they're welcoming any rival to him. But there are also lots of people coalescing around Richard. And as we said, Rhys Appthomas isn't keen to declare openly for Henry straight away. And I think there is a sense that we're at the end of 30 years of sporadic fighting that has seen huge battles that have cost hundreds and thousands of lives. Families have been torn apart. And I think there is a strong sense that nobody wants that again. You know, Shrewsbury might not particularly favour Henry, but do they want to be slaughtered by his army? Or just let them go through and wash your hands of it?
20:40 Dan Snow? Okay. So they're able to replenish and rest in Shrewsbury. What does Richard do?
20:45 Speaker 05 This is where Richard seems to begin to move a bit faster. So he's been gathering in his army. He gets news that Henry has landed in Wales and reports say that he's quite excited. Now, this is the last threat that he could possibly face to his throne. And now he's going to get to fight this guy one on one.
21:01 Dan Snow? He's come, he's presented himself into his kingdom. He's fallen into a trap, I suppose, in Richard's mind.
21:05 Speaker 05 Yeah. And Richard feels prepared. He's been waiting for this. So he begins to raise the levies from all across England. But I think the smart move that Henry makes is when he picks up the A5. That puts him on a straight line to London. Traditionally, throughout the Wars of the Roses, if you get into London, you're in a really, really strong position. Taking the capital has often led to a change of regime. The faster Henry moves down this road on a direct course to London, the faster Richard feels like he needs to intercept him and stop him getting there. So Richard ends up mustering his forces at Leicester, but he's forced to march out from Leicester before everybody has got there. So there are famously the City of York, which adores Richard and remembers him fondly,
21:49 Speaker 05 doesn't send any men to Bosworth because the last thing they've done is sent a message down saying, can you just be clear about how many men you want and when you want them to be there? And they haven't actually managed to get there in time because Richard has obviously had to leave before he's managed to gather in all of his forces. So we normally reckon numbers are really, really hard to get to here. But it seems like Henry has raised about five or 6,000 men from France and from his march across Wales.
22:10 Dan Snow? Not a big army, that.
22:11 Speaker 05 Not a huge army by the standards of the day. Richard is often credited with something like 10 to 12, maybe up to 15. So he's got the numbers and he may well have felt like, you know, that's enough. If I've got two or three times what they've got, I'm going to have to move now. And I should be in a fairly favourable position. So he marches out from Leicester, set on a course to intercept Henry on the Roman Road, Watling Street, heading for London.
22:40 Dan Snow? You're listening to Dan Snow's History. There's more to come.
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25:34 Speaker 06 After civil war, regicide, and Cromwell's Republic, the monarchy returned. But Britain would never be the same. I'm Professor Suzanne Ellipsom and this month on Not Just the Tudors, we're transported back to the age of Restoration royalty, from Charles II to Queen Anne and the birth of the Empire. Join me on Not Just the Tudors from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts.
26:12 Dan Snow? And so Richard's got a lot of troops. Has he got the leading aristocrats of the kingdom, the great warlords?
26:17 Speaker 05 I mean, there's very few of them left at this point.
26:19 Dan Snow? Yeah, well, true.
26:20 Speaker 05 But he does have the Duke of Norfolk, who is an experienced old soldier who had been a key member of Edward the Fourth's government.
26:25 Dan Snow? The Howards.
26:26 Speaker 05 This is the Howards.
26:26 Dan Snow? They love the battlefield, those boys.
26:27 Speaker 05 They do. John Howard, the Duke of Norfolk, his son, the Earl of Surrey, is with him as well. The Earl of Northumberland, Henry Percy, one of the many Henry Persys.
26:35 Dan Snow? Those thugs.
26:36 Speaker 05 The Earl of Northumberland has made his way down and is looking after the rear guard of Richard's army too. So again, he's maybe not packed with aristocracy and nobility, but there's also not that many that don't turn out for him because there just isn't that many left anymore.
26:51 Dan Snow? Now, talk to me about the famous Stanley family.
26:54 Speaker 05 Ugh. One of the interesting things about Bosworth is that we end up with this, I mean, in The Hobbit, you famously get this battle of five armies. This is a fairly rare medieval battle in that you've got three forces on this field.
27:05 Dan Snow? Okay, so let's talk about this Stanley family.
27:07 Speaker 05 So we've got Thomas Stanley. So he is the head of the Stanley family. And we've got another section, Sir William Stanley, which is Thomas's younger brother. Most people think now that Thomas Stanley wasn't there at all.
27:19 Dan Snow? Okay.
27:20 Speaker 05 Thomas Stanley is fantastic at propaganda and he's great at inserting himself into some of these moments that he wasn't actually in. No contemporary source puts him there.
27:27 Dan Snow? Okay.
27:28 Speaker 05 He puts himself there later.
27:29 Dan Snow? Amazing.
27:29 Speaker 05 So William is definitely there. So what we've got is we've kind of got three armies on this field because the Stanleys are sworn to Richard. Lord Stanley is a key member of Richard's government.
27:40 Dan Snow? They're powerful in the North West, aren't they?
27:42 Speaker 05 Yeah, so kind of Lancashire, Cheshire.
27:44 Dan Snow? Yeah.
27:44 Speaker 05 They've been really building the family's fortunes over previous generations and they're doing really, really well for themselves, capable of putting a big army in the field. So everybody wants the Stanleys on their side, but nobody's ever quite sure whose side the Stanleys are on.
27:56 Dan Snow? The Stanleys are on their own side.
27:58 Speaker 05 I think that's the bottom line.
27:59 Dan Snow? Okay.
28:00 Speaker 05 This is one of the very few families who comes out of the Wars of the Roses vastly improved, which maybe says something for the way they do things. But we end up with three armies. So we've got kind of Henry's army, we've got Richard's army, and then we've got this Stanley army off over here. So although the Stanleys are sworn to Richard as king, Thomas Stanley is also Henry Tudor's stepfather.
28:20 Speaker 05 So he is going to be looking at this situation and thinking, what works best for me? This Yorkist king who I'm, you know, I'm quite close to him. But what if your stepson was king? What kind of power does that give you? And he's obviously, his wife is Margaret Beaufort, Henry's mother. She is going to be trying to encourage Thomas Stanley to act decisively for Henry. We know that the Stanleys have a meeting with Henry while he's on his way to Bosworth, and they swear to fight for him. So they've now sworn to fight for both sides in this battle.
28:48 Dan Snow? Hasn't Richard got a member of the family hostage?
28:51 Speaker 05 There is a story, I suspect that this is Thomas Stanley making things up slightly later again. There is a story that Richard has Thomas's son, Lord Strange, as a hostage, and that Richard kind of threatens to execute Lord Strange unless Thomas Stanley decisively enters the battle on his side. And Thomas Stanley supposedly replies, saying, go ahead, I've got other sons.
29:12 Dan Snow? Yeah. So give me the scene set here. Night before the battle, Henry's marched into London. Richard has intercepted him, so that bit's going all right. He's precipitated the battle that he wants. You've got Stanley floating around the edge, Richard a bit worried, sending him messages between me going, oh, come and join, come into the camp. And so how do things go from there?
29:28 Speaker 05 So I think they must all go to bed on the night of the 21st of August, quite uncertain about what's going to happen. We've been told that Richard is excited that his opportunity has come to face his last remaining rival. Henry has been out of England for half of his life. He's never fought in a battle. We don't quite know how much training he's had while he's been in exile. So he must be terrified. This is a frightening prospect for him. He's going to go into battle against the King of England with an army he barely knows and minimal training to do it.
29:59 Dan Snow? But when you put it like that, it is such an extraordinary decision to give battle. It does make you wonder whether he had assurances from the Stanleys that they would get involved. Otherwise, he's horrendously outnumbered. He's in the middle of a country he doesn't know. He's up against a proven warrior leader with a much bigger force. He'd run away, wouldn't he? I mean, this is very unequal.
30:17 Speaker 05 He must have been fairly confident. And you wonder whether Margaret Beaufort had assurances from her husband that the Stanleys would fight for Henry, but they were going to have to be careful about how and when they declared they were going to have to look like they were there for Richard for as long as they possibly could. And that perhaps Thomas Stanley is selling this as a way to trick Richard. You know, we can make him think he's got the numbers in a big way. Because the Stanleys turn up with maybe another five or six thousand men.
30:41 Dan Snow? Oh, wow. Okay, so a decisively large number of men.
30:44 Speaker 05 If you add them to Henry's, then Richard has lost his numerical advantage altogether. If we're at the lower end of Richard's army estimate, that would put them on the same numbers.
30:53 Dan Snow? But if you add them to Richard's army, then Henry hasn't got a chance.
30:56 Speaker 05 No, then he's hugely outnumbered, overpowered.
30:59 Dan Snow? But Lord Stanley's wife is going to be at him for the rest of his life.
31:03 Speaker 05 He's going to get told off when he gets home if he does that.
31:05 Dan Snow? Okay, so tell me about the, we wake up in the morning, the layout, the geography of the battle is quite important, isn't it?
31:10 Speaker 05 It is. So we're traditionally told that Richard camps on a hill called Ambien Hill, which is where the visitor's centre is now, the battlefield centre, if you go there. He may have camped somewhere along that ridge. Again, we're not entirely sure that's precisely where he camps. So he has a nice bit of high ground. He can see all around him to see where Henry is coming from. Probably went to bed seeing the campfires of Henry's burning in the distance. Maybe had one eye on where the Stanleys had lit their campfires that night as well. They get up in the early hours of the morning of the 22nd of August. Lots of sources talk about the fact that Richard rises really early, to the point where breakfast isn't ready for him and there's no priest ready to celebrate mass with him. So this is seen as an ill omen on the morning of the battle. For Richard, it might just be
31:53 Speaker 05 that he's got up so excited and ready to go that he's kind of preempting everybody.
31:57 Dan Snow? It must preempt to sleep when you're about to fight to the death for your crown.
32:00 Speaker 05 I think so. You know that either you or him are not going home tomorrow. We used to think the battle happened on the slopes of Ambien Hill, and it was really small area and contained. It's now been moved kind of two miles to the southwest. And medieval battles moved over distances across fields. It wasn't, everybody stayed still and fought. It would get pushed around and pulled about in the landscape. So the majority of the fighting seems now to have happened to the southwest. There's a ridge of sort of high land.
32:31 Dan Snow? Okay.
32:32 Speaker 05 Richard is sort of mustering his army on the slopes of Ambien Hill along the ridge.
32:37 Dan Snow? So Henry's down the valley.
32:39 Speaker 05 He's down, Henry is probably off over by Shenton and the Stanleys are down by where the Ashby de Lysouche canal is now. So you've got kind of three blocks all facing off against each other. Both of them are probably looking at the Stanleys thinking, you'd better be on my side or I'm in trouble, but not quite sure what to do. And so when they eventually line up, Henry, because he has such a small force, he's put it under the command of the Earl of Oxford, who is the most experienced military commander in his force. You know, Henry absolutely accepts, I think, that he doesn't really know what he's doing. But in Oxford, you've got someone who does. So he delegates all of that to Oxford. I think it's a very smart move. Richard takes control of his own centre. So Henry, because he has this smaller army, Oxford makes the
33:22 Speaker 05 decision to put them all in one block. So traditionally, a medieval army will be in three separate blocks. You either have the left wing, the centre and the right wing, or they line up behind each other. So you have the vanguard at the front, the centre in the middle and the rear guard at the back. And Richard seems to line up like that. So you've got the vanguard under the command of the Duke of Norfolk, that experienced old soldier with his son there as well. Richard takes control of his own centre and you've got the Earl of Northumberland looking after the rear guard. He's essentially there to provide reinforcements as they're needed through the battle. And Oxford puts all of his men in one block because he knows he doesn't have the troop numbers to separate them and effectively take on any of Richard's force.
34:02 Dan Snow? Yeah, he hasn't had the luxury of keeping a reserve in hand. He's just got to throw them all into battle. It's a gamble.
34:07 Speaker 05 It's just, he's got to throw the dice, throw everything all in one go, you know, hope that you can land that killer punch with a big haymaker of a joint force.
34:15 Dan Snow? So is Henry going to attack? Is he going to push up at the Yorkist forces?
34:19 Speaker 05 Again, we're really unclear about exactly what happens in what or what to join the battle. They're not very good at recording these things for us, annoyingly. So traditionally, we have a story that Oxford sends out his men to move around the side of Richard to look like they're going to flank them. And Oxford will later claim that he was doing this because he's a military genius. They sort of move in an arc. And Oxford claims that the reason he does this is to manoeuvre them closer to some marshy land, which will help protect part of their army, but also because he wants to get the sun in the eyes of his enemies. Which is old, it's this classical world military thinking that he should have done this. So.
35:01 Speaker 05 Did Oxford do this, or did Oxford paint himself as a military genius a little bit later? We don't entirely know.
35:07 Dan Snow? The men just stumble around the fields and end up going that direction.
35:09 Speaker 05 Yeah, because the other interpretation of the battle is that, in fact, it's Norfolk with the vanguard who move out in an arc from Richard's army with the intention of flanking Oxford and Tudor's army.
35:21 Dan Snow? So that's very helpful, Matt. So we've got two interpretations which are diametrically opposite to each other.
35:26 Speaker 05 Well, the question is who starts it, but the the end effect is the same, that we end up with Norfolk and Oxford having a clash kind of off to the the side of the battle. Norfolk is quite quickly killed, unfortunately. He falls really early, his banner goes down. So this is bad news for Richard. This is his vanguard beginning to fail. His most senior nobleman on the battlefield has fallen and been killed. And it's at this point that Richard begins to muster. Well, there's a question about whether he tries to send Northumberland in from the rear with some reinforcements. And then Northumberland doesn't move. And there's lots and lots of questions about why Northumberland fails to move.
36:06 Dan Snow? So Northumberland's the rear guard.
36:08 Speaker 05 Yeah.
36:09 Dan Snow? And he is not moving. Okay.
36:10 Speaker 05 So the the theories are that he doesn't move because he's now penned in by some marshy land, and that that was what Oxford had been trying to do. There is a theory that he is conscious of where the Stanleys are, and that they might attack if he abandons the back of Richard's army. Richard may well have told Northumberland to protect their rear. He's the rear guard. And if the Stanley force, they're a fairly mobile cavalry unit, if they're sort of popping up all over the place around the field, and Northumberland can't be quite clear what they're going to do, that he can't afford to abandon the back of Richard's army. The other theory is that Northumberland planned all along to abandon Richard. That seems unlikely. He's killed in a tax riot at Northumberland two years after this. And it's said that the people did it in vengeance for his abandoning of
36:54 Speaker 05 Richard. But we also know that he spends Six months or so in the Tower of London as a prisoner after Bosworth because if he was planning to abandon Richard, clearly Henry didn't know that.
37:03 Dan Snow? So Northumberland's rigger doesn't participate.
37:06 Speaker 05 They effectively don't move.
37:07 Dan Snow? So if his vanguard, under the Duke of Norfolk, is struggling, does he decide to take down the main body under his own command and get involved?
37:14 Speaker 05 This is where Richard does something very left field. He gets all of his household knights together and he initiates a huge cavalry charge.
37:23 Dan Snow? Right.
37:23 Speaker 05 This is something English armies haven't done for more than a century.
37:27 Dan Snow? Really?
37:28 Speaker 05 What he does is he actually spots Henry Tudor with a small bodyguard. And so the question then is, was this Richard's plan all along to use Norfolk to go around the side, drag Oxford out and clear a path to lead this cavalry charge? It's an odd thing to do as a spur of the moment decision. So the more traditional narrative is that Richard spots Henry, looking like he's going to make his way across to the Stanley force, undoubtedly to try and encourage the Stanleys to come and fight for him. And that on the spur of the moment, he decides to charge Henry and try and end this. That's entirely possible, but it's also possible that the cavalry charge was Richard's battle plan all along, because it's something that English armies by this point aren't very good at defending against. English armies for more than a century have fought on foot. They
38:13 Speaker 05 tend to dismount and they fight on foot and they've perfected the art of fighting against French cavalry. And so English soldiers just aren't very good at facing cavalry charges anymore. So has Richard decided to fall back on an old tactic that nobody will be expecting? Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition. Nobody expects a cavalry charge from Richard the third. So maybe he decided to do this all along because he believed it was a really smart way to try and win the battle.
38:39 Dan Snow? You're listening to Dan Snow's History. Don't go anywhere, there's more to come.
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39:40 Speaker 06 After civil war, regicide and Cromwell's Republic, the monarchy returned. But Britain would never be the same. I'm Professor Susanna Lipscomb, and this month on Not Just the Tudors, we're transported back to the age of Restoration royalty. From Charles II to Queen Anne and the Birth of the Empire. Join me on Not Just the Tudors from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts.
40:19 Dan Snow? And this a battle not of one country versus another, one religious identity. This a battle of a man against a man. It's all about who's going to wear that crown when the day comes to a close. So even more than usual, presumably killing the opposition leader is the purpose of the day.
40:33 Speaker 05 It's the only way to end this once and for all. If Henry escapes from this battlefield, the threat remains and he may well come back another day. I think Richard knows he needs Henry dead. One of them is not making it off this battlefield.
40:44 Dan Snow? Right, so this massive cavalry attack goes down. What happens?
40:49 Speaker 05 The problem that Richard immediately faces is that the small bodyguard that's been left around Henry are French. And French soldiers know how to defend against a cavalry charge. It's still within their sphere of experience. And so they form this hedgehog formation where they literally, all the sharp bits pointing outwards towards the horse. And they're able to defend Henry against this cavalry charge. And I think we have to imagine this incredible scene of these dozens of horses thundering across the countryside with lances couched and the rattling of armour and the adrenaline of all the men inside that with that kind of really narrow vision that you've got left in a helmet, charging towards this packed group of men who are sort of braced for impact with their spears pointing outwards.
41:34 Speaker 05 And they smash into each other and there is an almighty struggle. So we're told that Richard unhorses a man named Sir John Chaney, who is a six foot seven knight who is around Henry. So for someone who is five foot seven, five foot eight with his scoliosis and may have been struggling for physical fitness, he's doing incredibly well to have unhorsed a six foot seven knight. And Richard then runs his lance through Henry's standard bearer.
42:03 Dan Snow? Wow. So that's how close they are. It is hand to hand. The two claimants of the throne could be metres away from each other.
42:09 Speaker 05 The standard bearer's job is to stand next to Henry Tudor. So if Richard has run his lance through him, he's got within a hair's breadth of Henry. There's an interesting question about whether Richard was aiming for Henry or aiming for the standard bearer. So he's got the problem that Norfolk standard has gone down and his vanguard is faltering. Does he cure that by causing Henry's banner to go down? So panic amongst Henry's men, persuade the Stanleys not to intervene for Henry because his cause is gone. And then you can try and mop up Henry in the melee that follows. Perhaps that's the decision that Richard made, or perhaps at the very last second, his lance shifted a few inches and he hit William Brandon instead of Henry Tudor.
42:51 Dan Snow? And so William Brandon goes down?
42:53 Speaker 05 William Brandon goes down, the standard goes down. Somebody seems to pick the standard up fairly quickly and get it flying again. And it's at this point that William Stanley decides.
43:02 Dan Snow? Oh my goodness, the Stanleys are over here.
43:04 Speaker 05 So the Stanleys lead a charge and they plow into the side of Richard's small force that's come with him. And all of a sudden he is squashed and crushed between these forces. They're pushed further back across the fields. And this is where the battlefield becomes quite large and they travel quite a distance. And they're perhaps two miles southwest of where the battlefield centre is by now. So just being pushed further across as the melee moves. But essentially, Richard's household knights begin to fall sort of one by one around him. And these are some of his closest friends and his oldest companions. And it seems that we're left with this real Hollywood moment of Richard as the
43:43 Speaker 05 the last man standing, his helm is cut away or removed and he's shouting treason, treason, treason in the midst of all of these men. There is a story from a Spanish squire who says that he offered Richard a horse and encouraged him to flee and Richard refused to take it and said, you know, I either win this battle or I die here today as a king of England. And he fights to the very end. And it's quite striking that all of the the most negative sources about Richard say that he fights heroically to the very end, that there is not a hint of cowardice, that he he fights bravely, but he is overwhelmed by all of the people around him. There is a story that Rhysap Thomas, that Welshman
44:25 Speaker 05 who was meant to have protected South Wales for Richard, he claims at one point to have delivered the killing blow. So with a big sort of probably something like a halberd blade on a poleaxe, a big wide blade sliced some of Richard's skull off at the back, exposing his brains. If he was still alive, that would have been a killing blow. So there's some sense that Rhysap Thomas delivered that blow himself. But either way, Richard is overwhelmed, beaten to the ground. There are numerous wounds on his skeleton from this time when he meets his end. And then it's William Stanley who finds the crown that Richard had had on top of his helmet under a bush and hands it to Henry Tudor in a real symbolic moment of saying, this is yours, you're the king now.
45:09 Dan Snow? And by the way, it's the Stanleys that put you there.
45:11 Speaker 05 Yeah, don't forget who put you there. Thomas Stanley is now stepfather to the King of England and William Stanley is the man who was literally handed in the crown, who has effectively won the Battle of Bosworth for Henry and given him the crown. They're going to be wanting something for this.
45:27 Dan Snow? And surprise, surprise, surprise, they get the Earl of Derby and they're still big, powerful, rich guys to this day.
45:31 Speaker 05 Still the Earl of Derby today.
45:32 Dan Snow? 500 years later. Amazing. So Matt, I mean, that's what you call a decisive battle.
45:36 Speaker 05 It is. It's very clear who is the winner and who is the loser. There are no loose ends after Bosworth. Henry is king. He fairly slowly makes his way, he goes back to Leicester, but makes his way down to London. And has his coronation as King Henry VII, the very first king of the new Tudor dynasty. You might have heard of them.
45:55 Dan Snow? Yeah, I've heard of the Tudors, yeah. And in fact, lots of the people present on this battlefield become the big courtiers of the Tudors as well. The Howards, the Stanleys, the Brandons, you know, these are names that will then go on echoing through the next hundred years and more.
46:09 Speaker 05 They are. For the first portion of Henry's reign, he's really reliant on those people that were in exile with him because he just doesn't know anybody in England. He doesn't have the tools to operate government in England at all. So he relies on these old officers of Edward IV's who do know how to run a government. So Henry's government begins looking very, very Yorkist for the first few years, until he manages to establish a bit of independence and move away from that. But the Howards will be rehabilitated, you know, they fought against him at Bosworth, but they will find a way to rehabilitation and to become Dukes of Norfolk again. William Brandon's son, Charles, will famously become the best buddy of Henry VIII and will become the Duke of Suffolk and a significant figure in the early 16th century. So lots of people make their names here on the field at Bosworth.
46:54 Dan Snow? So Henry VII, he's on the way to London now, he's on the way to get crowned and marry the princess that when he's promised to marry. What about the body of Richard III?
47:02 Speaker 05 So this seems to be a bit of business that Henry deals with, kind of on his way out of Leicester. He's put the body of Richard on display for about three days after the battle. And this is a fairly standard thing to do, to prove that he's dead. So Richard had left Leicester on the morning of the 21st, people had seen him go. Henry wanted to be clear that he's now dead. There can be no rumours that Richard is still alive somewhere. These rumours have a tendency of cropping up that kings who are supposed to be dead are actually still alive. So Henry displays his body, make sure everybody knows. And as he's leaving Leicester, the monks from the Grey Friars in Leicester sort of come to Henry and say, can we bury the body, you know, he deserved a Christian burial? And they're sort of given a bit short shrift by Henry, he's like, go, fine, go ahead, do it then. And they seem to have buried him in a grave that was very shallow in the choir of
47:46 Speaker 05 the Greyfriars Church and not quite tall enough for Richard. So there's a sense this is a real rush job, that they were feeling the pressure from Henry's men to get this done. Strikingly, perhaps 10 years or so later, Henry actually spends an awful lot of money on a monument to be put on top of Richard's tomb. And he has a whole verse put around the outside about Richard being king. He doesn't try to pretend that Richard wasn't king.
48:09 Dan Snow? So once he's feeling more confident of the throne, he starts to think, well, I owe it to my people.
48:13 Speaker 05 I feel like 10 years after Bosworth, Henry would have been through a couple of attempts on his own crown. And probably more than ever, he realises what Richard had been through in his short two years. And he's perhaps beginning to sympathise and empathise a little bit with Richard and think, you know, maybe he wasn't such a bad guy. Fate just threw us against each other. And so this grave is eventually lost at the Reformation. So Henry VIII breaks up all the monasteries. The Greyfriars is torn down, the land is all sold off. It becomes houses, it becomes a garden of a mare of Leicester. There is briefly a small monument there that says, you know, here's where Richard III's grave used to be. That's eventually lost. And over time, it becomes a social services car park
48:56 Speaker 05 in the middle of Leicester, until there is this fabulous project in 2012, led by the Looking for Richard project and the University of Leicester Archaeological Services, to try and find the Greyfriars precinct in the belief that Richard is still there somewhere. And kind of against all of the odds, they find him exactly where he would have been buried in 1485 after Bosworth.
49:15 Dan Snow? Amazing. It wasn't just change dynasties. It sometimes feels in English history like it was just a change of period, at the end of the medieval to the beginning of the early modern. I mean, you don't like to stray too far into the Tudors, do you, Matt? I mean, that makes you feel, you get nosebleeds.
49:26 Speaker 05 I try and avoid them. It makes me nauseous to get too close to the Tudors. But for a long time, people have dated the end of the medieval period and the beginning of the early modern era to the Battle of Bosworth in 1485. Incredibly anglocentric view of the world. But that's just how seismic it is seen. It's one of those big historical pins in the map, like 1066 in Hastings, you've got 1485 in Bosworth.
49:46 Dan Snow? And did people feel that at the time? Did it feel like this was the end of a period? This is the end of the Wars of the Roses? We've now got, there's only one game in town when it comes to kings?
49:53 Speaker 05 I think there were very few options left, depending on what you think happened to the princes in the tower. Oh, there's a little bit of a question around that. But people had had decades by this point of changing regimes, fights and battles. And they must have been, at the very least, hoping this was the end of it, that there was going to be no more of that, no more civil conflict, no more trouble, no more endless deaths just to decide who sits under a golden circle on a posh chair.
50:20 Dan Snow? But you know, the 16th century would be wild too. That's the problem with us humans. We create drama and the Tudors would provide plenty of that. Matt, thanks so much for coming on the podcast.
50:30 Speaker 05 Thanks for having me, Dan. It's been a pleasure.
50:33 Dan Snow? Thank you so much for listening to this episode of Dan Snow's History Hit. You know, you could have watched this episode and others on YouTube. That's right. You can peek behind the curtain of how we record this podcast on our YouTube channel. Very exciting new development here. Just click the link in the show notes and head over to subscribe. New YouTube releases every Friday, friends. Don't miss out.
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