Bosworth

Dynasties are seldom founded by the obvious heir. More often they are founded by the long-shot claimant who has spent his youth in a borrowed bedchamber on a foreign coast, learning patience as a trade, and who arrives at the decisive field with nothing behind him but a borrowed army and a piece of cloth bearing the dragon of an older Britain. The throne is not taken by right; it is taken in the quarter of an hour when a third party on a hill decides which way the wind is blowing.

THE EXILE

Henry, called Tudor after his Anglesey grandfather Owain ap Maredudd ap Tudur, was born at Pembroke Castle in January 1457, three months after his father Edmund had died of plague in Yorkist captivity. His mother Margaret Beaufort was thirteen. His claim to England ran through her, through John of Gaunt's third marriage, through a bastard line later legitimated by statute and then, in a careful clause, barred from the crown. It was the thinnest claim a man had ever carried into England. He spent his fourteenth to his twenty-eighth year in Brittany and France, kept on a small pension by Duke Francis II, moved from castle to castle when the English embassies came sniffing. He learned French and a court Latin, he learned to wait, he learned that a man with no country is a man whose only currency is the patience of others. When Edward IV died in April 1483 and the two young princes were placed in the Tower and not seen again, the Yorkist house began to come apart at its own seams. Buckingham rose and was beheaded. The Woodvilles wrote to Brittany. Margaret Beaufort, from a London house she was not supposed to leave, began to write also. By the spring of 1485 the exile in Rouen had two thousand men, eight ships, and a date.

THE LANDING

He came ashore at Mill Bay near Dale in Pembrokeshire on the seventh of August, in the late afternoon, on a beach his uncle Jasper had chosen because it was unwatched. He knelt on the shingle and, by the report of the Spanish envoy Bernáldez, said Judica me Deus et discerne causam meam, the opening of the sixty-fourth psalm: judge me, O God, and plead my cause. Then he stood up and was a Welshman again. The red dragon of Cadwaladr went up on a white and green ground, the colours of his grandfather's house. He marched north through Cardigan and Machynlleth and Shrewsbury, gathering men in tens and fifties: Rhys ap Thomas with the gentry of the south, the Talbots of Shrewsbury, scattered Lancastrians who had been waiting twelve years for a standard to walk under. By the twentieth he was at Atherstone. By the night of the twenty-first he was camped at the foot of Ambion Hill in Leicestershire, with five thousand men, and the king of England was three miles away with eight thousand, and the Stanleys, his stepfather Thomas and his uncle William, were sitting between them with three thousand more, and had not said which side they were on.

THE FIELD AT DAWN

The twenty-second of August came up grey and close, with mist on the marsh below the hill. He heard mass before light, on the ground, with the French chaplain. The French regulars, pike and crossbow under Philibert de Chandée, went on his left. The Welsh pikes under Rhys ap Thomas held the centre under the dragon. The English Lancastrians under the Earl of Oxford, who alone among them had commanded in a battle of this size, took the right and the van. He himself sat his horse at the rear of the centre, in a coat of plates over a mail hauberk, the dragon banner planted by William Brandon at his stirrup. Across the marsh on the high ground he could see Richard's vanguard under Norfolk, and behind it the king's own battle, and the white boar standard moving along the line. To the north, on a low ridge of their own, the Stanley horse sat still. His stepfather had sent word in the night that he could not commit until he saw how the field went; the king had Lord Strange, Thomas Stanley's son, hostage in his tent, and had threatened to take his head if the Stanleys did not move on his side at the first horn. Oxford's vanguard went forward at eight. Norfolk's came down to meet it. The lines closed in the marsh and the noise began.

THE SECOND ON THE FIELD

An hour into the battle, with Norfolk down and his line giving and Oxford pressing the slope, Richard saw, from the top of Ambion Hill, the dragon standard out beyond his own left flank, lightly held, with five hundred horse around it and the rear of the rebel army open behind. He saw what every commander of his generation had been taught to see: the enemy claimant, in person, in armour, on a horse, within reach of a single charge of household cavalry. He called for his own horse, the great white courser, and brought down with him the men of his chamber, three hundred lances, the last cavalry of the house of York. They came across the flat ground at a gallop, the boar above them, the king himself in the second rank. Henry, in the centre of his small guard, watched them come. He had never been in a battle. He had been told, by men who had, what a charge of three hundred lances at four hundred yards looks like when it is coming for you personally, and he found that the description had been accurate and also insufficient. He looked left for Oxford and Oxford was a quarter of a mile away and committed to the slope. He looked north for the Stanleys and the Stanleys were sitting. He turned in the saddle and the horse turned with him and for the length of a breath he understood that if he set his spurs to the beast and rode east he would live, and his mother would die in the Tower before sunset, and Jasper at the bridge would die, and the dragon would come down, and no Welshman would ever again carry a claim into England under the colours of Cadwaladr, because no Welshman would ever again be foolish enough to try. He understood also that if he ran, Thomas Stanley, watching from the ridge, would not move; that the Stanleys did not back a horseman going east; that the only thing on the field that would bring his stepfather down off that hill in his favour was the sight of him standing still with the dragon over his head while the king of England came at him with three hundred lances. He thought of the psalm on the shingle at Mill Bay. He thought that he had asked God already for everything he was about to ask Him for. He thought that he needed thirty seconds. He turned back to William Brandon and said, in the voice his uncle had taught him to use when a thing was to be done and not discussed, plant the standard, hold the line, the Welsh pikes do not break. Brandon planted the standard. The pikes braced. Henry sat his horse and did not move.

THE CHARGE

Richard's first rank took the pikes in the chest at the gallop. Three horses went down in a tangle of legs and ash-shafts and steel; the second rank wedged in behind and the press began. Richard himself, on the white courser, rode into the knot around the standard, swung his pole-axe at William Brandon and cut him down at a single stroke, swung again at Sir John Cheyne, the largest knight in either army, and unhorsed him with the second blow. The dragon banner went down and was picked up and held by a second man. Richard was at thirty yards from Henry. Then, on the northern ridge, Sir William Stanley moved. Three thousand Cheshire and Lancashire horse came down the slope at the gallop into the unguarded flank of the king's charge, and the press, which had been driving forward, collapsed sideways and inwards. Richard's courser went down under him. He fought on foot in the centre of a closing ring of his household, calling, by the Croyland chronicler, treason, treason, treason, and was killed by repeated blows of bill and sword, his helmet beaten in, in the marsh at the foot of the hill. The white boar came down. The battle was over before noon.

CROWN HILL

They brought him the circlet. It was a thin gold band that Richard had worn over his helmet, dented now, and they had taken it from a thorn bush beside the body, or off the body itself, the accounts differ. Sir William Stanley brought it forward. Thomas Stanley, who had come down off the ridge at last, set it on his stepson's head on a low rise above the marsh, in front of the army, and the army, French and Welsh and English together, called him king. The rise was called Crown Hill from that afternoon and is still called Crown Hill. Richard's body was stripped, slung naked across a horse, and carried the fifteen miles back to Leicester, where it was displayed in the church of the Greyfriars for two days so that the city could see that the king was dead, and then buried in the chancel without a stone. Henry rode south slowly. He entered London on the third of September, was crowned at Westminster on the thirtieth of October, and on the eighteenth of January 1486 married Elizabeth of York, the dead king's niece and the eldest daughter of Edward IV, joining the red rose to the white in a single badge that his heralds would draw, two flowers in one, for the next hundred and eighteen years.

THE LONG RETURN

The Wars of the Roses, which had run for thirty years and consumed four kings, ended on the field at Bosworth and did not resume. Henry VII reigned for twenty-four years, paid off Brittany, married his daughter Margaret to the king of Scots and so set in motion the union of the crowns four generations later, and died in his bed at Richmond in 1509. His house, Welsh in the male line through Owen Tudor of Anglesey, ruled England until the death of Elizabeth I in March 1603. Wales was bound to the kingdom by statute under his son Henry VIII, in the Acts of Union of 1536 to 1543; the Welsh language and the old patronymics survived the absorption, because Welshmen had taken the throne and not been taken by it. Richard III was the last king of England to die in battle. His grave under the chancel floor of the Greyfriars was lost when the friary was dissolved by Henry's grandson in 1538, and the ground was paved and built over and forgotten, and in September 2012 a skeleton with a curved spine and a battered skull was lifted out from under a Leicester city-centre car park, identified by DNA against a Canadian descendant of his sister, and reburied in Leicester Cathedral in March 2015. The dragon of Cadwaladr that went up on the shingle at Mill Bay still flies, in red on a field of white and green, over public buildings in Cardiff and Caernarfon and Anglesey. The Tudor rose, two roses in one, is the emblem of the English crown. Underneath it, in gold on red, is the dragon.