Battle of Bosworth Field, 1485: the death of a king

Bosworth has long been seen as the battle that closed the Middle Ages in England. On a Leicestershire plain two claimants to the throne staked their lives on a single day, while a third army watched to see which way to jump. Within a few hours the Plantagenet dynasty was finished, and the king who lost was to lie in an unmarked grave for more than five hundred years.³

Background: a crown in dispute

By 1485 England had been torn for some thirty years by the Wars of the Roses, the struggle for the throne between the royal houses of Lancaster and York. In 1483 Richard, Duke of Gloucester, deposed his young nephew Edward V and took the crown as Richard III. Historic England notes that the deposition was widely resented and that Richard was never a popular king, especially in the south.⁴

The fate of Edward V and his younger brother, the Princes in the Tower, has haunted Richard's memory ever since. The historian Michael Hicks, writing for Britannica, judges that although there is no reliable evidence, it seems certain the boys were killed in 1483, and that while some sources implicate the Duke of Buckingham, most blame Richard, who had them in his power and evidently chose to conceal their fate.⁵

The most favored rival claimant was Henry Tudor, Earl of Richmond, who had lived in exile in Brittany since 1471. In August 1485 he crossed the Channel, landed in Wales and marched east into England. Richard marched from Nottingham to Leicester to meet him.⁶

Armies and commanders

Historic England stresses that reports of the numbers vary, but gives Henry about 5,000 men against Richard's 10,000 to 15,000, close to Vergil, who wrote that Henry had scarcely 5,000 and the king twice as many and more; Leicestershire County Council describes Henry's as a small rebel army facing the much larger royal army. Henry left the command of his main force to John de Vere, Earl of Oxford. Richard's vanguard was led by John Howard, Duke of Norfolk, and a large force under Henry Percy, Earl of Northumberland, stood on his other flank.⁷

The third army belonged to Thomas, Lord Stanley, and his brother Sir William Stanley, with about 3,000 men. Both claimants had summoned them; neither could be sure of them. Lord Stanley was married to Henry's mother, and Richard trusted him so little that he kept his son, George, Lord Strange, at court as a pledge. On the day the Stanleys took up a position between the two armies and to one side, in the words of the Tudor historian Polydore Vergil, and waited.⁸

The battle in phases

The approach. On the night of 21 August the armies camped only a few miles apart, Richard on and around Ambion Hill. Next morning Henry's army came on from the west, probably along the old Roman road known as Fenn Lane, while Richard drew up his army in the valley below the hill. Between them lay a marsh.⁹

Guns and the marsh. As Henry's men advanced, the royal artillery opened fire on them. To avoid the guns and use the marsh as a shield, Oxford led Henry's vanguard around it and attacked Richard's right, where Norfolk commanded. The two vanguards fought hard, each gaining the upper hand in turn. Vergil describes Oxford ordering his men to keep within ten feet of their standards, so that they bunched together; the royal troops held back, suspecting a trick, and Oxford then renewed the attack in a wedge. Archaeology has since shown how much the guns mattered: Historic England calls Bosworth one of the earliest battles in England with clear evidence of the significant use of artillery.¹⁰

Norfolk falls. The royal vanguard was driven back, and the Duke of Norfolk was killed; both Historic England and the Bosworth Battlefield Heritage Centre place his death near a windmill, while Britannica has him killed in the opening clash. On Richard's left, Northumberland did not move. Whether he chose to abandon the king or was held back by the marsh and the watching Stanleys is not known.¹¹

Turning point: the king's charge

With the battle going against him, Richard saw that Henry stood back from the fighting with only a small escort. He gathered the mounted knights of his household and charged straight across the field to kill his rival. At that moment the Stanleys made their choice: Sir William Stanley, who had privately pledged himself to Henry, threw his men against Richard's flank.¹²

Richard's horse became stuck in the marsh. Unhorsed, he refused to leave the field. Vergil reports that his men brought him fast horses and urged him to flee, and that he answered he would make an end that day of either war or life; he was surrounded and cut down, fighting manfully in the thickest press of his enemies, as Vergil puts it. With their king dead, his army melted away and Norfolk's men were routed. Vergil gives the dead as about a thousand on the royal side and scarcely a hundred on Henry's, after more than two hours of fighting, the same figures Historic England cites. The National Lottery Heritage Fund announced in 2010 that a small silver-gilt boar, Richard's own badge, had been found right next to the site of a small medieval marsh; the Battlefields Trust archaeologist Glenn Foard thought it was almost certainly worn by a knight who rode with the king to his death.¹³

Aftermath

Many of Richard's men simply laid down their arms. The Earl of Northumberland submitted, and Norfolk's son, the Earl of Surrey, was taken prisoner. The final act of the day was a coronation. Lord Stanley set the crown, recovered from the battlefield, on Henry's head on the hill to the northwest of Stoke Golding that has been called Crown Hill ever since. The new king reigned as Henry VII, and his Tudor dynasty held the throne for more than a century.¹⁴

Richard, the last Plantagenet king, was taken to Leicester and buried with little ceremony in the church of the Franciscan friars, the Grey Friars. The friary was later dissolved and pulled down, and the grave was lost.¹⁵

Legacy and memory

For almost five hundred years after his death, Michael Hicks writes, Richard was generally depicted as one of the worst of kings, above all through Thomas More and William Shakespeare, whose play gave him the cry “A horse! a horse! my kingdom for a horse!” at Bosworth. The University of Leicester describes his death as marking the end of medieval England.¹⁶

In August 2012 the University of Leicester, with the Richard III Society and Leicester City Council, began digging for the lost Grey Friars under a car park in the city. They found the friary and a skeleton, and on 4 February 2013 the university announced that it was Richard III; DNA and other tests confirmed the identification. In March 2015 the king was reburied in Leicester Cathedral.¹⁷

Where was the Battle of Bosworth fought?

Not where the old maps put it. For generations the battle was placed on Ambion Hill, where Leicestershire County Council's battlefield center now stands. A five-year survey funded by the Heritage Lottery Fund and led by Glenn Foard of the Battlefields Trust then found that the core of the fighting lay about two miles, some three kilometers, southwest of the hill, astride Fenn Lane.¹⁸

The proof came out of the ground. Metal detecting recovered what the Heritage Fund called the largest collection of round shot ever found on a medieval battlefield in Europe, some thirty lead and lead-composite projectiles from handgun bullets to heavy cannonballs, silver coins of Charles the Bold of Burgundy and, in 2009, the silver-gilt boar badge. Historic England registered the battlefield accordingly.¹⁹

Visiting today

The Bosworth Battlefield Heritage Centre on Ambion Hill tells the story of the battle and displays a selection of the finds, among them the boar badge. A memorial sundial stands on the top of the hill, looking across the plain where the battle was actually fought, and the memorial stone of 1973, which once marked the supposed place of Richard's death near Shenton, has been moved to the Heritage Centre. Go back fourteen years to the Yorkist triumph at Tewkesbury, or forward to the Tudor victory at Flodden, see every battle fought on 22 August, or test yourself in the British battles quiz.²⁰