Stanley

Late in the morning of Monday the twenty-second of August 1485, on the small ploughed-and-marsh field of Bosworth between the villages of Sutton Cheney, Stoke Golding, Shenton and Dadlington in the south-west of Leicestershire, Thomas Stanley, fifty-year-old Lord Stanley and the stepfather of the Lancastrian-Tudor claimant Henry Tudor, sat on the open field with his army of approximately three thousand Cheshire-and-Lancashire Stanley levies arrayed on the rising ground to the north of the engagement-field, and held the position through the opening two hours of the battle between Henry Tudor's outnumbered Lancastrian army of approximately five thousand and the larger Yorkist royal army of approximately ten thousand under the reigning King Richard III of England. Lord Stanley's brother Sir William Stanley sat on the parallel rising ground to the south with the second Stanley levy of about two thousand five hundred men. Both Stanley brothers had refused to commit to either side in the morning's deployment in spite of the King's standing instruction to Lord Stanley (King Richard III was holding Lord Stanley's eldest son George Strange as a hostage at the Yorkist royal camp). At approximately eleven in the morning, with the battle hanging on the small cavalry charge Richard III had launched personally against Henry Tudor's bodyguard at the centre of the field, Sir William Stanley committed his levy in a flank charge against the King's cavalry that broke Richard's small bodyguard formation, brought down Richard in person on the slopes above Redemore Plain, and ended the Plantagenet dynasty in twenty minutes of close-quarters fighting. By tradition, the crown of Richard III was found in the thorn-bush near the King's body by Lord Stanley personally and was placed by him on Henry Tudor's head on the field of victory. Henry Tudor was crowned King Henry VII on the spot. The earldom of Derby, created within the year by Henry VII as the reward for the Stanley intervention, has been held in the senior Stanley line continuously since.

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On the morning of Friday the tenth of November 1871, on the dusty palm-and-mango-shaded waterfront of the small Arab slave-trading town of Ujiji on the east shore of Lake Tanganyika in what is now western Tanzania, the thirty-year-old Welsh-American newspaper reporter Henry Morton Stanley of the New York Herald, at the close of eight months of overland march from Zanzibar through the German-and-Belgian-claimed-but-still-uncolonised East African interior with a small expedition of approximately two hundred porters and twenty-seven askari guards, walked through the small crowd of Ujiji locals that had gathered at the shore on news of the European caravan's arrival, picked out from the crowd the small figure of the fifty-eight-year-old Scottish-born Congregational missionary and explorer Dr David Livingstone (who had been six years missing in the central African interior on his search for the source of the Nile, who was widely believed in Europe and America to be dead, and who was at this moment standing weak and ragged at the edge of the Ujiji crowd in his blue cloth cap and the threadbare oxford-grey jacket that was almost his last remaining piece of European clothing), removed his own pith helmet, walked the last twenty paces, and addressed Livingstone in the form of the famous question that has been universally remembered ever since: Doctor Livingstone, I presume? Livingstone smiled, raised his blue cloth cap in return, and replied Yes. The two men shook hands at the centre of the Ujiji crowd at approximately eleven in the morning of the tenth of November 1871. Stanley delivered the eighteen-month-old letter-of-correspondence from Livingstone's children at Newstead Abbey that he had carried in his pith-helmet hatband across the eight months of the East African march; Livingstone read it, wept openly, and embraced Stanley. The meeting at Ujiji was the central single moment of nineteenth-century European geographical journalism and the foundational event of the modern news-reporter-as-explorer tradition.

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