Looking for Bosworth

by Michael K. Jones

It sounds so simple, doesn’t it? Bosworth 1485, a turning point in our history. Our modern techniques of newsgathering and reportage give us the expectation that exactly what happened, where it happened and how it happened can be delineated and pass into the body of ‘known facts’. But for medieval warfare, this way of thinking can be very deceptive.

My own starting point for Bosworth is that very little is definitively known. The accepted version is this: the wicked and tyrannical usurper Richard III is found perched defensively on Ambion Hill in Leicestershire, nervously awaiting the advance of the heroic challenger, Henry Tudor. Richard fails to exert any control over his army and battle begins in haphazard fashion. It seems likely that many of the king’s soldiers will refuse to fight for him. Suddenly, either in rage at presumed betrayal or panic that the situation is slipping from his grasp, Richard launches a reckless charge at Tudor, accompanied only by a few die-hard supporters. He pays the inevitable price for such foolhardiness, as he and his men are hacked to pieces by Tudor’s bodyguard.

I question everything about this account. My starting point is to look more closely at the moral authority of the king. I do not believe that Richard had stolen a throne not rightfully his. Rather, a powerful case can be made for him as a dynast, a man with a mission to retrieve his family from dishonour and emphasise the legitimacy of his rule. I believe these themes emerge clearly in the way he plans and shapes the battle.

In my book I explore these themes in depth. I argue that Richard’s brother, King Edward IV, may well have been illegitimate, and believing this, Richard came to see himself as rightful successor to his father and heir to the throne. As bearer of this destiny, he sought to communicate his ideals to his assembled troops before Bosworth. This Richard is so very different from the caricature later portrayed by the triumphant Tudor dynasty.

The key to my re-evaluation of Richard III as man and king is ritual, a powerful ceremony enacted before his army on the morning of 22 August 1485. This seems startling, given the near-universal assumption that Richard’s camp was chaotic, there was no time to do anything properly, and the pace of events was entirely dictated by his opponent. But solid evidence exists that this is far from true, and when we examine it, a very different account emerges.

Richard brought with him to Bosworth the ‘most precious crown’ of England, the coronation crown of Edward the Confessor. There he staged a dramatic ceremony before his men, nothing less that a second coronation and procession in the full regalia of kingship. The unifying power and symbolism of this spectacle created such a lasting effect that even his most hostile opponents were moved to mention it. The force facing Tudor was not shambolic and disloyal, but motivated and unified, believing strongly in its leader and his cause, and committed to fight for both.

Why has no-one noticed this before? Medieval battle ritual is notoriously difficult to re-construct, and references to it are oblique, tantalising and inconclusive. Yet I believe that an effort to re-construct what happened here yields a rich dividend. My investigations of an earlier engagement, that of Verneuil on 17 August 1424, one of the greatest English victories of the Hundred Years War, convinced me that the ritual preparation of men before battle was crucial to understanding the outcome. And there is a fascinating reason to apply such an approach to Bosworth.

Heralds were the choreographers of battle, a role little understood in today’s technological era. The standards, crests, badges and banners for which they were responsible united and inspired a medieval fighting force, who would look to them as markers before battle began, and rallying points in the terrifying chaos which ensued once it got underway. This is the protocol of warfare, a protocol in which Richard himself was passionately interested, for as king he gave the heralds their own charter and a splendid London residence. We would expect this king to plan and orchestrate a battle with enormous care. It is therefore intriguing to note the lasting rancour of the newly victorious Tudor against the heralds – one of his first actions on reaching the capital was to boot them unceremoniously out of the luxury accommodation Richard had supplied.

The dynamic and proactive leader I see is unlikely to be found huddled on top of a hill, a fundamentally defensive position which would leave him little room for manoeuvre and at the mercy of someone else’s strategy. Ambion Hill has always been an improbable place to find King Richard III. In my book, I argue for a radically different location, eight miles west of the traditional site, near the Warwickshire market town of Atherstone. Its lowlying fields are ideal cavalry country, and I believe Richard planned to use cavalry to wipe out Tudor in the most decisive manner possible. One powerful piece of evidence clinches this, now emerging in my book for the first time.

The day after the battle, one of the French mercenaries in Tudor’s army wrote a letter home. In it, he described Richard’s final charge against Tudor, and his stunning account makes clear how different this was in reality from its long-accepted telling. Richard armed and prepared himself carefully, and led forward not a scrappy band of last-ditch loyalists but his entire division, which would have numbered several hundred men. This was a carefully-planned, large-scale and highly impressive attack, which created pandemonium in the party surrounding Tudor, grouped in the rear. It must have seemed to them at this point that annihilation was inevitable. Tudor was only saved by the dramatic deployment of French pikemen, in a devastating manoeuvre Richard had never seen before and thus had no way of anticipating. Tudor’s victory came to him by luck and not by judgement.

It is always challenging to consider a different location for a battlefield site, particularly when the new one raises such exciting possibilities for our understanding and interpretation. Yet the actual ground on which a battle was contested is ultimately only a gateway to the highly-charged experience of those who fought there – the powerful psychic landscape of combat. Here we engage with more primal qualities, the terror of battle and the elements of courage, motivation and leadership which inspired men to fight. In this sense, I have transported Bosworth far more than eight miles, transforming it into one of the most epic battles in British history.

Michael K Jones, December 2002