Battle of Bosworth (1485): Richard III Falls, the Tudors Rise

The Battle of Bosworth was fought on 22 August 1485 in Leicestershire between King Richard III and Henry Tudor, the exiled Lancastrian claimant to the English throne. Richard was killed in the fighting, the last English king to die in battle, and Henry took the crown as Henry VII. The victory founded the Tudor dynasty and is traditionally seen as the decisive end of the Wars of the Roses.

Background: an insecure king

Richard III had taken the throne in June 1483, setting aside his nephew Edward V on the grounds that Edward IV’s children were illegitimate. Edward and his brother then disappeared in the Tower of London, the mystery of the Princes in the Tower. Many people believed they had been murdered, and Richard’s reign was troubled from the start.

In October 1483 a rebellion in southern England, joined by Richard’s former ally the Duke of Buckingham, collapsed and Buckingham was executed. Its survivors fled to Brittany and gathered around Henry Tudor, a young man with a thin but real Lancastrian claim through his mother, Margaret Beaufort, a descendant of Edward III’s son John of Gaunt. At Rennes Cathedral on Christmas Day 1483, Henry swore to marry Edward IV’s daughter Elizabeth of York, uniting the rival houses.

Richard’s position weakened further in 1484 and 1485. His only legitimate son, Edward of Middleham, died in April 1484, and his queen, Anne Neville, died in March 1485. Henry, meanwhile, moved to France, where the regency government of the young Charles VIII gave him money, ships and troops.

Henry Tudor’s landing and the armies

Henry sailed from Harfleur on 1 August 1485 and landed at Mill Bay, near Dale on Milford Haven in Pembrokeshire, on 7 August. He chose Wales because he had been born at Pembroke Castle and his family, through his grandfather Owen Tudor, was Welsh. His force numbered perhaps 2,000 to 4,000 men, a large share of them French and Scottish soldiers alongside English exiles.

He marched north through Wales, gathering support. The most important recruit was Rhys ap Thomas, the most powerful man in south-west Wales, who joined with a substantial force. Henry crossed into England at Shrewsbury and moved east towards the Midlands. Along the way he held secret meetings with the Stanley brothers, whose large retinues in Lancashire, Cheshire and North Wales made them kingmakers.

Richard had expected an invasion and had positioned himself at Nottingham, in the centre of the kingdom. He summoned his lords and marched to Leicester, arriving on 20 August. On 21 August his army moved west towards Henry’s line of advance near Market Bosworth.

Exact numbers are uncertain and historians give a range. Richard’s army is usually estimated at 8,000 to 12,000 men, though not all of it fought; the contingent of Henry Percy, Earl of Northumberland, seems to have stayed out of the action. Henry’s army probably numbered around 5,000. The Stanleys between them may have brought 4,000 to 6,000 men, and their decision would determine the result.

Thomas, Lord Stanley, was Henry’s stepfather, being married to Margaret Beaufort. But Richard held Stanley’s son, Lord Strange, as a hostage for his father’s loyalty, so the Stanleys kept their options open until the last moment.

What happened on 22 August 1485

The battle was fought in the morning of Monday 22 August. Henry’s vanguard was commanded by the experienced John de Vere, Earl of Oxford, a veteran Lancastrian. Richard’s vanguard was led by John Howard, Duke of Norfolk.

Oxford ordered his men to stay close to their standards and advanced in a tight formation, which proved effective in the fighting with Norfolk’s troops. Norfolk was killed in the struggle. Archers and early firearms were used on both sides; archaeologists have found more lead round shot from small cannon on this battlefield than on any other battlefield of fifteenth-century Europe.

Richard then saw Henry Tudor near the rear with a small bodyguard, apart from his main army. He decided to end the battle at a stroke and led a cavalry charge of his household men directly at his rival. The charge reached Henry’s party: Richard killed Henry’s standard-bearer, Sir William Brandon, and unhorsed the powerful knight Sir John Cheyne.

At that moment Sir William Stanley committed his men against the king. Surrounded, Richard was unhorsed, probably in marshy ground, and killed fighting on foot. Several sources, including writers hostile to him, praise his courage at the end. The battle was over in perhaps two hours.

Richard’s naked body was slung over a horse and taken to Leicester, where it was displayed publicly for two days to prove he was dead. It was then buried without ceremony in the church of the Franciscan friars, the Greyfriars. According to tradition, Lord Stanley placed Richard’s fallen crown, or a circlet from his helmet, on Henry’s head on the field; the story of it being found in a hawthorn bush is a later legend.

Casualty figures are uncertain. Estimates commonly cited suggest around 1,000 men died, most on Richard’s side, while Henry’s losses were much smaller. Among the dead were Norfolk, Sir Robert Brackenbury, Constable of the Tower, and Sir Richard Ratcliffe.

Archaeology: the battlefield and the king in the car park

For centuries the battle was placed on Ambion Hill, where a heritage centre was built in the 1970s. A major survey led by archaeologist Glenn Foard for the Battlefields Trust and Leicestershire County Council, carried out between 2005 and 2009, used metal-detecting, soil analysis and documentary research. It located the fighting about 2 to 3 km to the south-west, around Fen Hole near Dadlington and Stoke Golding, a once-marshy area.

The finds included around 30 pieces of lead round shot and a small silver-gilt badge in the shape of a boar, Richard III’s personal emblem, found near the edge of the former marsh. The badge was of a type given to members of Richard’s household and is thought to mark where some of his close followers fell.

The location of Richard’s grave was lost after the Greyfriars was dissolved under Henry VIII in 1538. In August 2012 the University of Leicester, working with the Richard III Society and Leicester City Council, began excavating a council car park on the site of the friary. On the first day the team found human leg bones, and on 5 September a full skeleton was uncovered in the choir of the church.

The skeleton was of an adult man in his late twenties to late thirties with severe scoliosis, a sideways curvature of the spine that would have made one shoulder higher than the other. It bore eleven wounds inflicted around the time of death, including two potentially fatal injuries to the back of the skull, consistent with a halberd and a sword or similar blade. On 4 February 2013 the university announced that radiocarbon dating, the skeleton’s features and a match of mitochondrial DNA with two living descendants of Richard’s sister Anne of York established beyond reasonable doubt that this was Richard III.

After a legal dispute over where he should rest, Richard was reburied in Leicester Cathedral on 26 March 2015, in a ceremony attended by members of the royal family and watched by large crowds.

Consequences

Henry VII dated his reign from 21 August 1485, the day before the battle. This allowed him to treat those who had fought for Richard as traitors and seize their lands. He was crowned on 30 October 1485 and married Elizabeth of York on 18 January 1486, joining the red rose of Lancaster and the white rose of York in the “Tudor rose” emblem.

Yorkist resistance did not end at once. In 1487 supporters of the pretender Lambert Simnel were defeated at the Battle of Stoke Field, the last significant battle of the Wars of the Roses. Henry later faced the long challenge of Perkin Warbeck. But he kept his throne, rebuilt royal finances and passed a secure crown to his son, Henry VIII, in 1509.

By the numbers

Myths and facts

• Myth: Richard cried “My kingdom for a horse!” Fact: The line comes from Shakespeare’s Richard III. Contemporary sources say he refused a horse to flee and chose to fight.
• Myth: Richard was a hunchback with a withered arm. Fact: His skeleton shows scoliosis, which would have affected his posture, but no withered arm or hunched back of the kind Tudor writers described.
• Myth: The battle took place on Ambion Hill. Fact: Archaeological evidence places the fighting a few kilometres to the south-west.

Timeline

• 1483, 26 June: Richard III takes the throne.
• 1483, 25 December: Henry Tudor vows at Rennes to marry Elizabeth of York.
• 1485, 1 August: Henry sails from Harfleur.
• 1485, 7 August: Henry lands at Mill Bay, Pembrokeshire.
• 1485, 20 August: Richard III arrives at Leicester.
• 1485, 22 August: Battle of Bosworth; Richard III is killed.
• 1485, 30 October: Henry VII is crowned at Westminster.
• 1487, 16 June: Battle of Stoke Field defeats the last major Yorkist rising.
• 2012, 5 September: Richard III’s skeleton is found in Leicester.
• 2015, 26 March: Richard III is reburied in Leicester Cathedral.

Why it matters

Bosworth changed England’s ruling dynasty in a single morning. The Tudors who came to power there would go on to oversee the English Reformation and the reign of Elizabeth I. The rediscovery of the battlefield and of Richard’s body has also shown how archaeology and science can test, and sometimes overturn, centuries of tradition.