Thomas Penn: Winter King: Henry VII and the Dawn of Tudor England

Travelling to Brittany, Richard’s men struck a deal with leading counsellors around the ageing and infirm Duke Francis, pledging money and arms in the duchy’s fight against an increasingly menacing France, in exchange for Henry. Warned of his imminent betrayal, Henry fled across the border. At the French court, the embattled faction struggling to retain control of the fourteen-year-old king Charles VIII was delighted to welcome this prestigious English pawn. There, bolstered by new arrivals, fugitives from failed uprisings in East Anglia and Lancastrian diehards escaped from the English enclave of Calais, Henry started to create another story for himself, his half-blooded lineage blurring into legend. No longer a fugitive, he was a king-in-waiting, whose line could be traced back into the mist and rime of British prehistory. No less a king than Cadwallader, forebear of the mythical King Arthur, had prophesied his return, in irrefutable proof of which Henry had added to his arms a red dragon. In his letters into England, meanwhile, his signature of ‘Henry de Richemont’ was replaced by the poised regal monogram, ‘H’. 13

In the spring of 1485, with the threat from an English-backed Brittany increasing, France proclaimed lavish financial support for Henry’s invasion of England. But by early July, as the Breton menace evaporated again, so too did France’s enthusiasm, its promises now dismissed with a shrug of indifference. For Henry this was a shattering blow, and more bad news was to come. In an attempt to neutralize the political threat of the Woodvilles, Richard III arranged a marriage between one of his household knights and one of Edward IV’s daughters. Indeed, it was whispered that Richard himself was paying close attention to the oldest of them: his sixteen-year-old niece, Henry’s betrothed, Elizabeth of York. The rumours ‘pinched Henry by the very stomach’. Scrambling to raise loans from financiers, he and his advisers worked to assemble victuals, arms and artillery, horses and transport. He bolstered his sketchy forces with a battalion of French mercenaries who, demobilized from France’s recent wars in Flanders, were idly terrorizing the local populace.

At the French court, Henry had exchanged words with the diplomat and political theorist Philippe de Commynes, a man with a lifetime’s experience in power politics. Commynes, who had first encountered Henry on his arrival at the Breton court fourteen years before, was unsparing in his assessment. Henry, he wrote, was penniless and his claim to the English throne non-existent, ‘whatever one might say about it’. Henry was entirely self-fashioned, his reputation depending not on his lineage, but on his virtues, his ‘own person and honesty’. And, he recollected, Henry’s conversation was tinged with heaviness and resignation as he described how, since the age of five, his life had been an interminable sequence of suffering, evasion and prison. This was not, Commynes seemed to say, the talk of a king confidently expecting to recover his birthright, but of a man resigned to his fate. 14

It was not hard to see why. A lifetime spent depending on the caprices and whims of others, the hopelessness and boredom of exile punctuated by false hopes, had culminated in an invasion whose meticulous planning had been thrown into confusion by the scrambled events of the last weeks. But as his small fleet set sail from the northern French port of Honfleur on 1 August 1485, Henry knew that he was, at last, taking his fate into his own hands. Even defeat and destruction were better than the alternative: the slow death of endless, fugitive begging around the courts of Europe. 15

The battle of Bosworth Field, fought in the English east midlands two weeks after Henry’s inauspicious landing at Milford Haven, was in this context a miraculous, God-given, victory. There could be no other explanation. As Henry’s forces marched through Wales and into northwest England, the heartlands of his stepfather’s powerful Stanley family, the hoped-for support had arrived with reluctance. Lady Margaret Beaufort’s third husband, Lord Stanley, an accomplished political trimmer, gave fair words but little commitment: the vast, well-armed Stanley retinues shadowed Henry’s route southeast to the battlefield and waited, detached, to see how the chips fell.

Early on the morning of 22 August, they watched Henry’s well-drilled vanguard march determinedly towards the massed lines of the king’s forces on the ridge above and, as Richard’s artillery erupted and the armies engaged, saw them refuse to give ground. They saw nobles apparently loyal to Richard fail to advance against Henry – confused, perhaps, or reluctant to commit – and the king’s desperate, impulsive cavalry charge thundering into Henry’s household troops. In the carnage, monarch and pretender fought face to face, the heavy, painted canvas standards of Richard’s sunburst and boar pitching and yawing against Henry’s rougedragon and red rose. Then, as Henry’s standard bearer had his legs hacked from under him, the Stanley forces, led by Lord Stanley’s brother Sir William, piled in to his rescue. ‘This day’, soldiers heard Richard shout, ‘I will die as a king or win.’ He was swept away, battered to death so viciously his helmet was driven into his skull. 16

By mid-morning, it was all over. Moving busily about the battlefield, Henry’s soldiers stripped the dead and dying of their valuables and piled the bodies onto carts for burial. Richard’s nearby camp, loaded with fine hangings and ornaments, was looted. On a nearby hill, Lord Stanley, whose chief military action had consisted, ingloriously, of hacking down Richard’s defenceless and fleeing troops, placed the dead king’s circlet – picked up from where it had fallen, under a thornbush – on his stepson’s head, to the shouts of acclamation from his troops. He was King Henry VII.

On 3 September, Henry’s torn, bloody battle standards were carried through the suburb of Shoreditch towards London, a city still under curfew, armed patrols silhouetted against its battlemented walls. At Bishopsgate, the mayor and officials waited uncertainly in their scarlet finery to welcome with gifts of cash and gold plate the king they had unceremoniously dismissed weeks before as Richard III’s ‘rebel’. 17

Of the details – Henry’s flight to France, his invasion plans – there was no mention. Nor was there any detail of his genealogy, of precisely what his claim consisted in. And so it would remain: his fugitive history was chronicled in the haziest of terms by design as much as by accident. That was how Henry wanted it. He had appeared out of nowhere – an avenging king come to claim his kingdom from Richard III, who had murdered his nephews and wrenched the true line of the Yorkist dynasty off course. After the battle, the dead king’s wrecked body had been slung over a horse, its long hair tied under its chin, then set on display at Leicester’s Franciscan friary, naked except for a piece of cheap black cloth preserving its modesty, before a perfunctory burial – ‘like a dog in a ditch’, some said. 18In the first flush of victory, the myths were already being written. ‘In the year 1485 on the 22nd day of August’, ran one poem, ‘the tusks of the Boar were blunted and the red rose, the avenger of the white, shines on us.’ 19

The latest contender in the cycle of violence to be raised up, Henry was now faced with a profound challenge. He had to stop the wheel while he was at its highest point, to keep himself far above the private quarrels and vendettas of nobles, the world from which he had emerged. He had to create a ‘new foundation of his crown’, one which merged his family’s name indistinguishably with the idea of royal authority. Through its power, its magnificence and its justice, his rule would need to ensure that, of all the proliferation of heraldic devices and badges that indicated which lord you followed and where your affinities lay, the red rose commanded instant loyalty and the ‘dread’ inspired by a sovereign lord who ruled indifferently over all. 20If he looked, behaved and ruled like a king, perhaps the exhausted, traumatized country of England would come to believe he was one.