The Stanley intervention at Bosworth

A dynasty is rarely ended by a brother-and-brother decision to commit at a precise moment in a battle the brothers had deliberately delayed entering. The Stanleys held their two armies on the rising ground above Bosworth for two hours of the battle's opening phase while Richard III watched his own cavalry charge break against Henry Tudor's bodyguard formation and recognised, in the last minute before he was brought down, that the brothers had decided against him. The Plantagenet dynasty ended in those twenty minutes; the Tudor dynasty that opened the modern English state began in them.

LORD STANLEY

Thomas Stanley was born around 1435, eldest son of the Sir Thomas Stanley who held the family estates of Lathom, Knowsley and Hooton in Lancashire and Cheshire and the small feudal Lordship of the Isle of Mann that the Stanleys had held by Crown grant since 1405. He succeeded his father as Lord Stanley and Lord of Mann in 1459 in his twenty-fourth year, married Eleanor Neville (the sister of Richard Neville, Earl of Warwick, the Kingmaker) in 1457 in the political alliance that consolidated the Stanley position in the Yorkist-Lancastrian power-politics of the Wars of the Roses, was widowed in 1471 on Eleanor's death, and in June 1472 made the second marriage that became the central single political fact of his subsequent career: he married Margaret Beaufort, the thirty-one-year-old Lancastrian dowager countess of Richmond, the only surviving senior Beaufort claimant to the Lancastrian crown, and the mother by her first marriage to Edmund Tudor of the eighteen-year-old Henry Tudor, then in exile in Brittany.

He served Edward IV through the 1470s as the senior royal officer of the north-west of England, was Steward of the Royal Household 1471 to 1483, attended Edward IV's funeral in April 1483, and on the accession of Richard III in the constitutional crisis of June-July 1483 (the Richard III assumption of the throne in derogation of the Princes in the Tower) made the careful political accommodation that kept his position as Steward of the Household and Lord Constable of England under the new King. The accommodation was unstable. Margaret Beaufort, Lord Stanley's wife, had become from the autumn of 1483 the central single organiser of the planned Lancastrian invasion under her son Henry Tudor; Lord Stanley was protected by Richard III only through Richard's calculation that the Stanley-Beaufort connection was more useful to the Crown if held at the centre of court than if driven into open opposition.

THE INVASION

Henry Tudor landed at Mill Bay on the south coast of Pembrokeshire on the seventh of August 1485 with a small army of approximately two thousand French-and-Breton mercenaries and Welsh-Lancastrian exiles, marched east across South Wales through Cardigan, the Tywi valley and the Welsh Marches, and entered England at Shrewsbury on the seventeenth of August. He was joined on the march east through the Midlands by approximately three thousand further Welsh-and-Lancashire levies, raising his army to approximately five thousand by the time he reached Tamworth on the twentieth of August.

Lord Stanley had been at the Stanley-family seat at Lathom in Lancashire through the summer on the official Royal Household leave of absence Richard III had granted him in July (the leave was the formal cover for the political-and-military disengagement Lord Stanley had been carrying out across June and July). He had raised the standing Stanley levy of about three thousand Cheshire-and-Lancashire men through July and August on the formal-official basis of the King's commission to defend the north-west against the rumoured Tudor invasion. His brother Sir William Stanley had raised the parallel second Stanley levy of about two thousand five hundred men at Holt in Cheshire on the same formal-official basis.

Richard III, on receipt of news of the Tudor landing, ordered Lord Stanley to bring the Stanley levy to the royal muster at Nottingham. Lord Stanley replied by despatch that he was suffering from a fever (the standing-and-traditional Stanley excuse) and could not move the levy from Lathom for several days. Richard III, recognising the implication, took George Strange (Lord Stanley's eldest son, then aged about twenty-four and serving at the royal court) into close confinement at the Nottingham camp as a hostage on the strength of Lord Stanley's deferred muster. Lord Stanley moved the Stanley levy south from Lathom across the third week of August by a deliberately-circuitous route that brought the army not to Nottingham but to the open ground above Atherstone, ten miles north-east of the eventual Bosworth battlefield, on the twenty-first of August. He held the army there overnight and through the morning of the twenty-second.

THE FIELD AT BOSWORTH

The two armies met on the morning of the twenty-second of August 1485 on the small ploughed-and-marsh ground between Ambion Hill and Redemore Plain, three miles south of the village of Market Bosworth in the south-west of Leicestershire. Richard III had drawn up the royal army of approximately ten thousand men on Ambion Hill at the north of the field; Henry Tudor had drawn up the Lancastrian army of approximately five thousand on the rising ground to the south of the marshy Redemore plain. The two Stanley levies sat on the parallel rising ground to the east and west of the battlefield: Lord Stanley with his three thousand to the north-east, Sir William with his two thousand five hundred to the south-east. Neither Stanley army had committed to either side.

Richard III sent the formal-and-final demand to Lord Stanley at eight in the morning that the Stanley levy commit to the royal cause within the hour or his son George Strange would be executed at the royal camp at noon. Lord Stanley returned the despatch with the famous reply that I have other sons.

The battle opened at nine in the morning with the Yorkist artillery barrage against the Lancastrian centre, the Yorkist heavy-infantry advance under the Duke of Norfolk against Henry's centre under the Earl of Oxford, and the Lancastrian counter-advance through the marshy ground of Redemore. The fighting was approximately even through the opening two hours; the smaller Lancastrian force held the line against the larger Yorkist advance through the careful Oxford ground-management of the Redemore marsh. By eleven in the morning Norfolk was dead on the field and the Yorkist heavy-infantry advance had stalled.

Richard III recognised at approximately eleven-twenty that the battle was going against him on the central front and that the Stanley armies had not committed. He took the personal decision that has been universally remembered ever since: he led his household cavalry of approximately one hundred and fifty knights in a direct charge across the open ground at Henry Tudor's bodyguard formation, with the intention of killing Henry Tudor personally and ending the battle on the strength of the death of the Lancastrian claimant. The charge ran across the open Redemore plain at approximately eleven-thirty in the morning, struck Henry's bodyguard in the centre, killed Henry's standard-bearer William Brandon in the first close-quarters strike, and brought Richard III within sword-reach of Henry Tudor himself.

THE STANLEY COMMITMENT

Sir William Stanley committed his levy at this moment. The Stanley charge from the south rising-ground struck Richard III's small cavalry formation on the unprotected right flank, broke the household cavalry in approximately three minutes of close-quarters fighting, and brought Richard III down from his horse on the slopes above Redemore. He was killed by a Welsh halberdier of the Stanley levy in the close-press of the fighting (the Welsh halberdier has been variously identified in the chronicle accounts as Rhys ap Maredudd of Cardigan or as a junior Stanley knight; the modern Bosworth archaeology of 2009 to 2012 has confirmed the position of Richard's body in the close-press on the slopes above the marsh).

Lord Stanley brought up his own levy at the same moment from the north-east, cleared the remaining Yorkist resistance on the open field, and met Henry Tudor at the centre of the field at approximately twelve-fifteen in the afternoon. The crown of Richard III, by the Bosworth chronicle tradition (the standard account in Hall's Chronicle of 1548 and the Polydore Vergil History of 1534), had fallen from Richard's helmet into a thorn-bush near his body; Lord Stanley picked it up from the thornbush, walked across the open field to Henry Tudor's position, and placed the crown on his stepson's head. Henry Tudor was acclaimed King Henry VII on the spot. The Plantagenet dynasty had ended in twenty minutes of close-quarters fighting; the Tudor dynasty had begun.

THE EARLDOM OF DERBY

Henry VII rewarded Lord Stanley with the earldom of Derby within the year (the patent was issued on the twenty-seventh of October 1485, two months after the battle, in the parliamentary session that opened the new reign). The Stanley family has held the earldom continuously in the senior male line for the next five hundred and forty years to the present day (the current holder is Edward Stanley, 19th Earl of Derby). The Stanley family at Knowsley Hall in Merseyside continues as the senior north-west English peerage and as the founding family of the Derby and the Oaks (the two great Epsom flat-racing classics, founded by the 12th Earl in 1779 and 1780). The Bosworth battlefield site at Sutton Cheney has been preserved as the Bosworth Battlefield Heritage Centre since 1974 and is one of the principal medieval-battlefield heritage sites in England. The Stanley name in modern English political-and-historical memory carries the weight of the twenty minutes on Redemore plain on the morning of the twenty-second of August 1485.