Dan Snow's History Hit - The Battle of Bosworth

Episode Date: January 22, 2026

In August 1485, the would-be king Henry Tudor went head-to-head with King Richard III - the final, decisive battle of the Wars of the Roses. Only one of these men would leave the battlefield alive, and this bloody clash between Houses York and Tudor would decide the future of Britain.Joining us is Matt Lewis, host of the Gone Medieval podcast, to take us through this climactic moment in British history.Produced by Mariana Des Forges and edited by Dougal Patmore.Dan Snow's History Hit is now available on YouTube! Check it out at: https://www.youtube.com/@DSHHPodcastSign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe.We'd love to hear your feedback - you can take part in our podcast survey here: https://insights.historyhit.com/history-hit-podcast-always-on.You can also email the podcast directly at [e-mail]. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

It's the climax of the Wars of the Roses, the epic, decisive finale. The Battle of Bosworth is about to begin. King Richard III, wearing his crown into battle, faces down a rebel army, led by the pretender, Henry Tudor. Richard's superior army holds the high ground. But his crucial allies, he hopes,

the Stanley's weight. on the flanks. Their loyalty is undecided. As the battle rages, Richard risks everything on a desperate lightning charge across the battlefield to kill Henry and end this generational struggle here and now. This is the story of that day. It's the story of the end of the Plantagenets and the birth of the Tudor Age. The Battle of Bosworth is just one of the key turning points to England's long history. And it's a wild story. So it can only be done justice to by the wild man of history himself, the incredible historian, Matt Lewis. Matt Lewis. Matt, great to everyone on the podcast. It's wonderful to be here. Matt, great to

everyone on the podcast. It's wonderful to be here. Thank you. We're going to talk all about the famous French invasion of England with their puppet. Just one of the many. Oh, my goodness. We mustn't go there straight away. Let's explain to people what we're talking about. Okay, so wild century, 15th century, civil wars, regicide, kings are killed, all sorts going on. Just sum up the wars of the roses.

Henry the 6th is not a great king. He's deposed eventually by Edward VIII. His cousin, Edward the fourth. The first king of the House of York, a different line from Edward III. Edward VIII, kicked off the throne briefly. Henry the 6th comes back. He's still not very good. So Edward VIII's back. He dies unexpectedly in 1483. Some things

happen in that year. There are some young children involved. So when he says, Edward VIII dies unexpectedly. Great warrior, ends the Wars of the Roses, what it looks like, so brings England under his sway. Henry the 6th is killed in the Tower of London. He then dies. Two little boys left in the Tower of London, his two sons.

There's a 12-year-old and a nine-year-old. The 12-year-old should have been king. Never makes it to his coronation. for reasons that are open to debate and discussion. Okay. And instead it is Edward's brother, the prince's uncle, who becomes Richard III in 1480. Now, you are a big Rich the Third fan.

So let me be interested to tell people that. But traditionally it has been said widely that he killed those two princes in the tower. It has been said widely and incorrectly for many, many years. Okay. And folks, if you want more content on this, then Matt has got his own podcast in which he unpackes this on numerous occasions and has done so on my podcast as well.

Go and check that out. So we got Rich the third on the throne now, 1483. Everything looks sorted. The two princes have disappeared in the tower. They've gone. It looks like the House of York. It's secure on the throne. Richel the third, good king.

You've potentially replaced the issues of a minority with an adult king who is experienced. This could have been perceived by many people to be a good thing, but there are lots of people who aren't happy. And I'm not sure that this revolves around the idea that Richard had murdered his nephews quite as much as the fact that people have spent 12 years preparing for Edward V's kingship. They've put people in his household to grow up with him.

They've kind of put all their eggs in an Ed with the Fifth-shaped basket. And they've all been tipped out by Richard the third. So there are people who are deeply unhappy with the way things are gone. And by people, we mean aristocratic, sort of courtiers, stuff like that. So they thought, like, a young Edward V's going to take over or nice, suddenly the uncle's taken over. And I think in particular, Margaret Beaufort, who is the mother of Henry Tudor, spies in all of this an opportunity that the Christ,

of a contested succession provides her with an opportunity to get her son back from exile and back to England. Right. So Margaret Beaufort is a British noblewoman, royal blood in her veins. She has got a son called Henry Chudor. He's been an exile in France for... Well, the time he comes back, 14 years, he's 28 years old. Half of his life is an exile. Hardly remembers what Britain are and... And nobody in England knows who this guy is. But as with ever, with royal history, he's got that all-important thing, he's got that raw blood in his veins. Yeah, so his mother Margaret is descended from Edward III through a line of illegitimate children,

who are later legitimised, of John of Gorn, who is the third son of Edward III. So the same Lancasterian line that gave us Henry IV, Henry V and Henry the 6th. Margaret Beaufort is from that kind of stable, that's a family. So she's from the Fantaginite family? She has royal blood. She's got royal blood.

Her son is this guy, Henry Chudor. He's been sitting out the Wars of the Roses. It's too dangerous from to come back. People have tried to kill him, right? There has been a long effort by both Edward the 4th and afterwards by Richard the 3rd as well, to get custody of him. He's very much seen as the last potential rival to the House of York. Edward, by the end of his life, has sort of come around to the idea of Henry coming home

and becoming Earl of Richmond, his father's old title, and he dangles a marriage to one of Edward's daughters and the potential to return home. And when Edward dies unexpectedly, I think whether you get a minority under Edward the 5th or you get Richard the 3rd, it's not a great time to be bringing exiled rebels home to muddy the water even more. But Margaret Beaufort kind of had got so close

to getting her son home. The paper is drafted waiting for Edward the 4th signature when he dies. And I think having come so close, her patience now just really snaps. And she's like, that's it. Come hell or high water by hooker by crook, I'm getting my son home.

Best they ever happen to that family, arguably, because they would get the big prize. Anyway, we're going to talk about that. So Henry Tudor is sitting there. Richard is on the throne. What's Richard like as a king? He's 30 years old? He's 30 when he comes to the throne in 1483.

He's an experienced governor and experienced nobleman. He's had some military experience a few years earlier in the Wars of the Roses, but maybe not for a little while. He's been constantly battling the Scots on the borders in the north of England and maintaining law and order there. He's seen as quite a fair and just man. He's interested in the lot of the common man. He reforms lots of laws in the north to increase and improve the lot of the ordinary people,

often at the expense of the nobility, which in some way doesn't make him very popular with some of the nobility. and when he comes down to London, this also means that he is slightly viewed as a bit of a northerner, a bit of an unknown quantity, and everyone isn't quite sure what they're going to get with him.

So people should put out of their minds the rich of the third that they get from Shakespeare, which is the sort of physically and emotionally and mentally sort of twisted and angry and vile human being. That's just pure propaganda. Well, we know that he had scoliosis from his skeleton, so he did have a curvature of his spine,

which Usain Bolt's got, you know, this isn't a terrible, terrible thing, which may have made one of his shoulders look slightly higher, than the other, but they would have covered that probably in padding in his clothing. It's significant that nobody during his lifetime talks about him having an uneven shoulders. And quite often those physical symptoms are used in a medieval mind as the outward representation of a corrupted soul. And that's something, you know, we wouldn't recognize today. But Shakespeare kind of builds on all of those

physical elements of Richard, he gives him a limp and a withered arm and things like that as well, to really drive home that this is a bad guy to his core. Right. Okay, so we've got a more rounded picture now, thanks to you. But he's making a few waves in the nobility. Quite quickly, though, his reign is thrown into crisis. He faces invasion. So what's going on? He's crowned in July 1483, and in October there is the first big rebellion against him

that's remembered as Buckingham's rebellion. And this has, as part of it, getting Henry Tudor home. So Margaret Beaufort is backing this. She's actually related to the Duke of Buckingham as well, because everyone's related amongst the aristocracy. And it seems like this autumn 1483 rebellion is centered on the idea of putting Buckingham on the throne instead of Richard, probably so that Buckingham will allow Henry Tudor to come home.

That's why Margaret is funding all of this. It doesn't become an effort to put Henry Tudor on the throne until after Buckingham is dead. The first time that Henry has talked about as a potential rival to the Crown is a few days after Buckingham is executed after this failed rebellion. So Henry does try to invade as part of this rebellion to support it, but his fleet is scattered by a storm in the channel.

There is a report that his ship cites land and lots of Yorkie soldiers realize who it is and they're sort of come ashore it's going really, really well. We're going to overthrow King Richard. And Henry, in a way that seems to have a knack for this for his entire life, looks at it. Imagine him narrowing his eyes and going, nah, that smells funny.

And he turns his ship around and goes back to Brittany. Okay, so he gets quite close to it, and gets extremely close to evading, and then goes back to Brittany, back in France, right. So now Buckingham's dead. So another potential king's been taken off the board. I mean, it is all just, there's only Henry left really now, isn't there? He really is the last man standing.

And at this point, he enters an alliance with Edward the Fourth widow, Elizabeth Woodville, who is in the sanctuary. So anyone that doesn't like Richard III, for whatever reason, Henry is the only man standing. And I think he knows it, and his mom knows it. There's no doubt that Margaret is the brains behind everything that is going on here. And I think she builds this alliance with Edward the Fourth widow, based on a marriage between Henry and a daughter of Edward the Fourth. to try and get all of these disaffected Yorkists who aren't happy at Richard the 3rd coming to the throne to get them into Henry's camp.

And so at Christmas Day, 1483, he swears an oath at Wren Cathedral that he will marry Elizabeth of York, Edward IV's oldest daughter, if he's able to invade England and defeat Richard the 3rd and take the throne. So then all of these disaffected... So he's going for the throne now.

Obviously there's no question now. So now he is clearly and openly saying, I am coming for Richard the 3rd's throne. And he begins this kind of faux court in exile. Initially, he's in Brittany. He flees to France just before the Bosworth campaign. But he builds this kind of faux court with all of these Yorkists who don't want to be in a Richard the third version of England and all of those who've been driven out after the rebellion of October 483, those who took part. And they all begin to coalesce around Henry. And he's building

quite a nice little faction around himself. And we see Richard, for the rest of his reign, preoccupied with what Henry is doing and trying to get his hands on him. He tries to bribe the Duke of Brittany to hand Henry over and the Duke of Brittany wants a load of soldiers and archers and things. And Richard seems to be preparing to do it. And he almost gets his hands on Henry when yet again, Henry seems to have his wits completely about him. He gets a last minute warning that he's about to be handed over. And he feigns illness on the road on his horse, steps off the road, you know, presumably to go and throw up in a bush or something like that, and just runs to the French border. He just legs it. And he manages to get across the border into France, makes it to the French court.

during this period, what would the French like more than a rival to the English throne at their court? It's so useful to have a puppet at your core, isn't it? And he's just fallen in the lap of the French. So Henry's a sort of king in waiting. He's in France. Is he dependent on the French to give him the ships and the men and the money to get him across the channel? He really is slightly at their mercy. He doesn't have any resources of his own. He's got some fairly minor Yorkish gentry around him. The Earl of Oxford, who has been a prisoner at Calais for the last 10 years or so, manages to escape from. prison and make his way to Henry. This is someone else who can't be reconciled to a Yorkist government. Edward VIII had killed Oxford's father and brother, so he's firmly out for revenge to. But apart from Oxford, he's not really got any ranking nobleman around him. His prospects don't look entirely

great. But as soon as he gets to the French court, and there's a little bit of context here in France as well. So when Edward VIII dies, a few months later, Louis the 11th, who is his great rival in France, also dies fairly unexpectedly and leaves behind a 13-year-old boy to rule as Charles the 8th. And Charles VIII has this kind of regency council all around him. There is lots of problems with people looking to take control of that regency council, not necessarily to depose Charles, but there is a lot of infighting around who should have control of the regency. And this will spill into a period of civil war in France known as the Mad War from 1485 to 1487. So they are conscious that they have their own internal problems.

Richard is building a huge aggressive alliance against France. He's had Queen Isabella in Spain, has offered him tens of thousands of men that she'll pay for if he'll take them into France and attack them. He's trying to get the Holy Roman Empire out of their reliance with France, and he's trying to work with Burgundy and Brittany, who were trying to maintain their independence from France. So England now looks like a threat to France at the very time when they're faced with their own minority crisis, and all of a sudden, this guy falls into their lap, who is the last man standing that could possibly lay claim to the English crown, apart from Richard. And there's nothing the French like more than just throwing a claimant to

throne across the channel and seeing if it will just light the fires in well in England and Wales. Yeah, I mean, we saw Louis the 11th did it in 1470 when the Earl of Warwick came over. He mashed him together with Margaret of Anjou, his old rival, and threw them like a hand grenade across the channel to explode into England, drive Edward the fourth out, put Henry VI briefly back on the throne. It all went a little bit wrong, but I imagine Louis the 11th was laughing his head off at all of that. Yeah, and then they do it again in their 1740s of Bonnie Prince Charlie. I mean, it's never ending. So what is the moment at which they decide to launch this invasion? It gets towards the end of campaigning season in 1485.

So the fleet launches from Half-Flur on the 1st of August, which is fairly late in the year to be embarking on a military campaign. You're sort of right at the end of the window of summer weather that you would want to be campaigning during. And it seems like they probably feel like they've kept Richard on his toes for as long as they possibly can. He's been waiting for this invasion for a couple of years now. He knows it's coming. He's just not sure when.

And I think they're conscious of this alliance that he's building against them, and it's kind of a case of if we don't move now, he's going to move against us. So it seems like a really good time. There's talk of them kind of emptying all the French prisons, rounding up a load of French mercenaries, piling them all in ships with these disaffected Yorkists and shoving them out from Half Lurr into the channel. So a few Englishmen who've sort of gone into exile and found that way to Henry's courts. So these are mostly French troops. A large portion of them are French troops and it's French ships and it's French money that is bringing them across.

And unusually, the weather in the English Channel plays ball. everything seems to be working out for Henry. These are all good signs. I mean, it takes them a week to get to where they're going. You know, they leave Hafleur on the 1st of August and they land at Milford Haven in southwest France. They don't just go straight across the narrowies. They don't go straight across the channel. They go all the way round, round by Cornwall, up into the Bristol Channel and land in southwest Wales. And it seems that part of the game that they've been playing is to keep Richard guessing about where they might come. Richard has based himself in Nottingham, which is kind of geographically the middle of his kingdom. because he doesn't know where they're going to come from. There's been lots of invasions. Henry IV and Edward the 4th have both landed in Yorkshire, in the north-east. Traditionally, you'd expect them to maybe land somewhere in Kent or on the South Coast.

But the second's wife landed in East Angley, didn't she? Yeah, so anywhere down there. Richard seems to have had intelligence that they're going to land at Milford. He thinks that could be Milford at Southampton. That's me in my house, yeah. He sends some men to Milford at Southampton to watch there, but it ends up being Milford Haven in the southwest of Wales. And this is really playing into, so one of the key people that is coming back with Henry is his uncle Jasper Tudor.

And they are a strongly Welsh family. The southwest of Wales is Jasper's kind of old heartlands before he'd gone into exile with his nephew. So I think there is a feeling that they can come and land there and maybe try and drum up some more men. They haven't got enough men for an invasion, really. They hope this is going to be fertile ground for them as they move through Wales. And is it? Probably not as fertile as they were hoping. That's the way.

There's a few people who come to them, and there's a couple of armies that seem to sort of gather a march parallel to Henry, shadowing him. They don't ever stop him or attack him. And it seems a lot like people are beginning to hedge their bets now. The Welsh are keen to have a Welshman on the throne. And Henry really leans into that. He comes under the banner of the Red Dragon of Cadwallady. He's really leaning into that old Welsh heritage of those Arthurian prophecies of Merlin that the Red Dragon will return to drive out the white Saxon dragon from the English lands. Henry is really playing up to all of that in the hopes of drumming up some men. And he gathers some, but I suspect he would have wanted more to come as he marches up the west coast of Wales, up through Aberystwyth, gets to kind of McCongliff, where Owen Lindur had held his parliament earlier in that century. And then he cuts east and decides now is the time to head to Lund. Hed to Shrewsbury to pick up the old Roman road. Heading into the heart of England. And you said there were some armies shadowing and what, so Richard's troops in Wales don't get involved. They're sort of hovering around the edges?

There's a guy called Reese App Thomas who becomes significant at the Battle of Bosworth. He's a name that crops up as someone who potentially makes a fairly decisive slice during the Battle of Bosworth. Richard has appointed him as effective ruler of South Wales. And Reese has kind of sworn that anyone who tries to take Richard's land or assault Richard will have to do so over his body. And there's a story that Reese stands underneath a bridge and lets Henry walk over the top of the bridge. It's like, oh, he's done it over my body. I've excused myself of the oath that I made to Richard. And he seems to shadow.

He doesn't openly declare for Henry straight away. His army seems to move separate to Henry's, but he's not stopping him, which is his job, which is what he's sworn to do, and he just doesn't do it. Yeah, and he's saying to King Richard, no, I'm doing my best.

I'm just, I'm being all strategic. I'm waiting orders. Yeah, of course, yeah. Okay, so they get to Shrewsbury, and you're now quite close to Nottingham. So are the two sides getting ever more? They are, and I think frustratingly, for Richard, the gates of Shrewsbury are opened to Henry's army. They're allowed to enter.

And from here, he can pick up the old Roman Road, Watling Street. Now the A5, but it goes straight from Strewsbury into London. Can I just quickly start with it? It seems like Henry is quite popular, always Richard unpopular. I mean, what's going on if his men in Wales aren't fighting, Shrewsbury opens its gates? Is that because they didn't want to fight? It's really tricky. We are at the end. I mean, it's quite easy to just think, oh, everyone hated Richard, so they're welcoming any rival to him. but there are also lots of people coalescing around Richard. As we said, Rysap Thomas isn't keen to declare openly for Henry straight away.

And I think there is a sense that we're at the end of 30 years of sporadic fighting that have seen huge battles that have cost hundreds and thousands of lives. Families have been torn apart. And I think there is a strong sense that nobody wants that again. You know, Shrewsbury might not particularly favour Henry, but do they want to be slaughtered by his army or just let them go through and wash your hands of it? Okay. so they're able to replenish and rest in Shrewsbury. What does Richard do?

This is where Richard seems to begin to move a bit faster. So he's been gathering in his army. He gets news that Henry has landed in Wales and reports say that he's quite excited. This is the last threat that he could possibly face to his throne. And now he's going to get to fight this guy one on one. He's presented himself into his kingdom. He's fallen into a trap, I suppose, in Richard's mind. Yeah. And Richard feels prepared. He's been waiting for this. So he begins to raise the levees from all across England, but I think the smart move that Henry makes is when he picks up the A5, that puts him on a straight line to London. Traditionally throughout the Wars of the Roses, if you get into London, you're in a really, really strong position. Taking the capital has often led to a change of regime.

The faster Henry moves down this road on a direct course to London, the faster Richard feels like he needs to intercept him and stop him getting there. So Richard ends up mustering his forces at Leicester, but he's forced to march out from Leicester before everybody has got there. So there are famously the city of York, which adores Richard and remembers him fondly, doesn't send any men to Bosworth because the last thing they've done is sent a message down

saying, can you just be clear about how many men you want and when you want them to be there? And they haven't actually managed to get there in time because Richard has obviously had to leave before he's managed to gather in all of his forces. So we normally reckon numbers are really, really hard to get to here, but it seems like Henry has raised about five or six thousand men from France and from his march across Wales. Not a big army, not a huge army by the standards of the day.

Richard is often credited with something like 10 to 12, maybe up to 15. So he's got the numbers. And he may well have felt like, you know, that's enough. If I've got two or three times what they've got, I'm going to have to move now. And I should be in a fairly favorable position. So he marches out from Leicester, set on a course to intercept Henry on the, the Roman Road, Wattling Street, heading for London. You're listening to Dan Snow's history yet.

There's more to come. And so Richard's got a lot of troops. Has he got the leading aristocrats of the kingdom, the great warlords? I mean, there's very few of them left at this point. But he does have the Duke of Norfolk, who is an experienced old soldier who had been a key member of the Force government. This is the Howard's. They love the battlefield, those boys.

They do. John Howard, the Duke of Norfolk. His son, the Earl of Surrey, is with him as well. the Earl of Northumberland, Henry Percy, one of the many Henry Burses. The Earl of Northumberland has made his way down and is looking after the rearguard of Richard's Army too. So again, he's maybe not packed with aristocracy and nobility, but there's also not that many that don't turn out for him because there just isn't that many left anymore. Now, talk to me about the famous Stanley family.

One of the interesting things about Bosworth is that we end up with this, I mean, in The Hobbit, you famously get this Battle of Five Armies. This is a fairly rare medieval medieval. battle in that you've got three forces on this field. Okay, so let's talk about this Stanley family. So we've got Thomas Stanley. So he is the head of the Stanley family. And we've got another section, Sir William Stanley, which is Thomas's younger brother. Most people think now that Thomas Stanley wasn't there at all.

Okay. Thomas Stanley is fantastic at propaganda and he's great at inserting himself into some of these moments that he wasn't actually. No contemporary source puts him there. He puts himself there later. So William is definitely there. So what we've got is we've kind of. I've got three armies on this field because the Stanleys are sworn to Richard. Lord Stanley is a

key member of Richard's government. They're powerful in the northwest, aren't they? Yeah, so kind of Lancashire, Cheshire. They've been really building the family's fortunes over previous generations and they're doing really, really well for themselves, capable of putting a big army in the field. So everybody wants the Stanley's on their side. But nobody's ever quite sure who side the Stanleys are on. The Stanley's are on their own side. I think that's the bottom line. Okay. This is one of the very few families who comes out with the Wars of the Roses. vastly improved, which maybe says something for the way they do things. But we end up with three armies. So we've got kind of Henry's army, we've got Richard's army, and then we've got this Stanley

army off over here. So although the Stanley's are sworn to Richard as king, Thomas Stanley is also Henry Tudor's stepfather. So he is going to be looking at this situation and thinking, what works best for me? This Yorkist king who I'm, you know, I'm quite close to him. But what if your stepson was king? What kind of power does that give you? And he's obviously, his His wife is Margaret Beaufort, Henry's mother. She is going to be trying to encourage Thomas Stanley to act decisively for Henry. We know that the Stanley's have a meeting with Henry while he's on his way to Bosworth and they swear to fight for him.

So they've now sworn to fight for both sides in this battle. Hasn't Richard got a member of the family hostage? There is a story, I suspect, that this is Thomas Stanley making things up slightly later again. There is a story that Richard has Thomas's son, Lord Strange, as a hostage. and that Richard kind of threatens to execute Lord Strange unless Thomas Stanley decisively enters the battle on his side. And Thomas Stanley supposedly replies saying, go ahead, I've got other sons. Yeah. So give me the scene to sit here.

Night for the battle. Henry's marching to London. Richard has intercepted him. So that bit's going all right. He's precipitated the battle that he wants. You've got Stanley floating around the edge. Richard a bit worried, sending a messages between me going, oh, come and join, come into the camp. And so how do things go from there?

So I think they must all go to bed on the night of the 21st of August, quite uncertain, about what's going to happen. We've been told that Richard is excited, that his opportunity has come to face his last remaining rival. Henry has been out of England for half of his life. He's never fought in a battle. We don't quite know how much training he's had while he's been in exile. So he must be terrified. This is a frightening prospect for him. He's going to go into battle against the King of England with an army he barely knows and minimal training to do it. But when you put it like that, it is such an extraordinary decision to give battle. It does make you wonder whether he had assurances from the Stanleys that they would get involved. Otherwise, he's horrendously outnumbered.

He's in the middle of a country. He doesn't know. He's up against a proven warrior leader with a much bigger force. He'd run away, wouldn't he? I mean, this is very unequal. He must have been fairly confident, and you wonder whether Margaret Beaufort had assurances from her husband that the Stanleys would fight for Henry, but they were going to have to be careful about how and when they declared they were going to have to look like they were there for Richard for as long as they possibly could. And that perhaps Thomas Stanley is selling this as a way to trick Richard, you know, we can make him think he's got the numbers in a big way. Because the Stanley's turn up with maybe another five or six thousand men. Oh, wow. Okay. So a decisively large number of men.

If you add them to Henry's, then Richard has lost his numerical advantage altogether. If we're at the lower end of Richard's Army estimate, that would put them on the same numbers. But if you add them to Richard's Army, then Henry hasn't got a chance. No. Then he's hugely outnumbered, overpowered. But Lord Stanley's wife is going to be at him for the rest of his life. He's going to get told off when he gets home if he does that. Okay, so tell me about the, we wake up in the morning. The layout, the geography of the battle is quite important, isn't it?

It is. So we're traditionally told that Richard camps on a hill called Ambien Hill, which is where the visitor centre is now, the battlefield centre, if you go there. He may have camped somewhere along that ridge. Again, we're not entirely sure that's precisely where he camp. So he has a nice bit of high ground. He can see all around him to see where Henry. is coming from, probably went to bed seeing the campfires of Henry's burning in the distance,

maybe had one eye on where the Stanleys had lit their campfires that night as well. They get up in the early hours of the morning of the 22nd of August. Lots of sources talk about the fact that Richard rises really early to the point where breakfast isn't ready for him and there's no priest ready to celebrate mass with him. So this is seen as an ill omen on the morning of the battle for Richard. It might just be that he's got up so excited and ready to go that he's kind of It must be able to sleep when you're about to fight to the death for your crown. I think so. You know that either you or him are not going home tomorrow.

We used to think the battle happened on the slopes of Ambien Hill, and it was really small area and contained. It's now been moved kind of two miles to the southwest, and medieval battles moved over distances across fields. It wasn't everybody stayed still and fought. It would get pushed around and pulled about in the landscape. So the majority of the fighting seems now to have happened to the southwest. There's a ridge of sort of high land.

Okay. Richard is sort of mustering his army on the slopes of Ambien Hill along the ridge. So Henry's down the valley. He's down. Henry is probably off over by Shenton, and the Stanleys are down by where the Ashby-Dalusch Canal is now. So you've got kind of three blocks all facing off against each other. Both of them are probably looking at the Stanley's thinking,

you'd better be on my side or I'm in trouble. but not quite sure what to do. And so when they eventually line up, Henry, because he has such a small force, he's put it under the command of the Earl of Oxford, who is the most experienced military commander in his force. Henry absolutely accept, I think, that he doesn't really know what he's doing.

But in Oxford, you've got someone who does. So he delegates all of that to Oxford, which I think is a very smart move. Richard takes control of his own centre. So Henry, because he has this smaller army, Oxford makes the decision to put them all in one block. So traditionally a medieval army will be in three separate blocks. You either have the left wing, the centre and the right wing,

or they line up behind each other. See, the vanguard at the front, the centre in the middle, and the rearguard at the back. And Richard seems to line up like that. So you've got the vanguard under the command of the Duke of Norfolk, that experienced old soldier with his son there as well. Richard takes control of his own centre, and you've got the Earl of Northumberland looking after the rearguard.

He's essentially there to provide reinforcements as they're needed through the battle. and Oxford puts all of his men in one block because he knows he doesn't have the troop numbers to separate them and effectively take on any of Richard's force. Yeah, he hasn't done the luxury of keeping a reserve in hand. He's just got to throw them all into battle. It's a gamble. It's got to throw the dice, throw everything all in one go,

you know, hope that you can land that killer punch with a big haymaker of a joint force. So is Henry going to attack? Is he going to push up at the Yorkist forces? Again, we're really unclear about exactly what happens in what order to join the battle. They're not very good at recording these things for us, annoyingly. So traditionally, we have a story that Oxford sends out his men to move around the side of Richard, to look like they're going to flank them. And Oxford will later claim that

he was doing this because he's a military genius. They sort of move in an arc. Okay. And Oxford claims that the reason he does this is to maneuver them closer to some marshy land, which will help protect part of their army, but also because he wants to get the sun in the eyes of his enemies. Right. Which is old, it's his classical world military thinking that he should have done this. So did Oxford do this or did Oxford paint himself as a military genius a little bit later? We don't entirely know. The manager stumble around the fields and end up going that direction.

Yeah. Because the other interpretation of the battle is that in fact it's Norfolk with the Vanguard, who move out in an arc from Richard's army with the intention of flanking Oxford. and Chulah's Army. So that's very helpful, Matt. So we've got two interpretations, which are diametrically opposite to each other. Well, the question is who starts it,

but the end effect is the same, that we end up with Norfolk and Oxford having a clash kind of off to the side of the battle. Norfolk is quite quickly killed, unfortunately. He falls really early. His banner goes down. So this is bad news for Richards. This is his vanguard beginning to fail.

His most senior nobleman on the battlefield has fallen and been killed. And it's at this point that Richard begins to muster, well, there's a question about whether he tries to send Northumberland in from the rear with some reinforcements. And then Northumberland doesn't move. And there's lots and lots of questions about why Northumberland fails to move. So Northumberland's the rear guard. Yeah. And he is not moving.

Okay. So the theories are that he doesn't move because he's now penned in by some marshy land and that that was what Oxford had been trying to do. there is a theory that he is conscious of where the Stanle's are and that they might attack if he abandons the back of Richard's army. Richard may well have told Northumberland to protect their rear. He's the rearguard. And if the Stanley force, there are a fairly mobile cavalry unit, if they're sort of popping up all over the place around the field,

and Northumberland can't be quite clear what they're going to do, that he can't afford to abandon the back of Richard's army. The other theory is that Northumberland planned all along to abandon Richard. That seems unlikely. He's killed in a tax riot Northumberland two years after this. And it's said that the people did it in vengeance for his abandoning of Richard. But we also know that he spends six months or so in the Tower of London as a prisoner after Bosworth. Because if he was planning to abandon Richard, clearly Henry didn't know that.

So Northumberland's rearguard doesn't participate. They effectively don't move. So if his vanguard, under the Duke of Norfolk, is struggling, does he decide to take down the main body under his own command and get involved? This is where Richard does something very left. field. He gets all of his household knights together and he initiates a huge cavalry charge. Right. This is something English armies haven't done for more than a century. Really? What he does is he actually spots Henry Tudor with a small bodyguard. And so the question then is, was this Richard's plan all along to use Norfolk to go around the side, drag Oxford out and

clear a path to lead this cavalry charge? It's an odd thing to do as a spur of the moment decision. So the more traditional narrative is that Richard spots Henry looking like he's going to make his way across to the Stanley Force, undoubtedly to try and encourage the Stanleys to come and fight for him, and that on the spur of the moment, he decides to charge Henry and try and end this. That's entirely possible, but it's also possible that the cavalry charge was Richard's battle plan all along, because it's something that English armies by this point aren't very good at defending against. English armies for more than a century of fought on foot, they tend to dismount and they fight on foot, and they've perfected the art of fighting against French cavalry.

And so English soldiers aren't very good at facing cavalry charges anymore. So has Richard decided to fall back on an old tactic that nobody will be expecting, nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition, nobody expects a cavalry charge from Richard III. So maybe he decided to do this all along because he believed it was a really smart way to try and win the battle. You listen to Dan Snow's history. Don't go anywhere. There's more to come.

And this is a battle not of one country versus another, one religious identity. This is a battle of a man against a man. It's all about who's going to wear that crown when the day comes to a close. So even more than usual, presumably killing the opposition leader, it's the purpose of the day. It's the only way to end this once and for all. If Henry escapes from this battlefield, the threat remains and he may well come back another day. I think Richard knows he needs Henry dead.

One of them is not making it off this battlefield. Right. So this massive cover attack goes down. What happened? The problem that Richard immediately faces is that the small bodyguard that's been left around Henry are French. And French soldiers know how to defend against a cavalry charge. It's still within their sphere of experience. And so they form this hedgehog formation where they literally all the sharp bits pointing outwards towards the horse.

And they're able to defend Henry against this cavalry charge. And I think we have to imagine this incredible scene of these dozens of horses thundering across the countryside with Lansy's couched and the rattling of armor and the adrenaline of all the men inside that with that kind of really narrow vision that you've got left in a helmet charging towards this packed group of men who are sort of braced for impact with their spears pointing outwards and they smash into each other and there is an almighty struggle so we're told that richard unhorses a man named john cheney who is a six-foot-seven knight who is around henry so for someone who is five foot seven, five foot eight with his scoliosis and may have been struggling for physical fitness.

He's doing incredibly well to have unhorsed a six foot seven night. And Richard then runs his lance through Henry's standard bearer. Wow. So that's how close they are. It is hand to hand. The two claimants of the throne could be meters away from each other. The standard bearer's job is to stand next to Henry Tudor. Right. So if Richard has run his lance through him, he's got within a hair's breadth of Henry. There's an interesting question about whether Richard was aiming for Henry or aiming for the standard bearer. So he's got the problem that Norfolk's standard has gone down and his vanguard is faltering.

Does he cure that by causing Henry's banner to go down? So panic amongst Henry's men persuade the Stanley's not to intervene for Henry because his cause is gone. And then you can try and mop up Henry in the melee that follows. Perhaps that's the decision that Richard made. or perhaps at the very last second his lance shifted a few inches and he hit William Brandon instead of Henry Tudor. And so William Brandon goes down?

William Brandon goes down. The standard goes down. Somebody seems to pick the standard up fairly quickly and get it flying again. And it's at this point that William Stanley decides to actually intervene. So the Stanley's leader charge and they plow into the side of Richard's small force that's come with him. And all of a sudden he is squire. washed and crushed between these forces. They're pushed further back across the fields, and this is where the battlefield becomes quite large, and they travel quite a distance, and they're perhaps two miles

southwest of where the battlefield centre is by now, so just being pushed further across as the melee moves. But essentially, Richard's household nights begin to fall sort of one by one around him, and these are some of his closest friends and his oldest companions. And it seems that we're left with this real Hollywood moments of Richard as the last man standing. His helm is cut away or removed and he's shouting treason, treason, treason in the midst of all of these men. There is a story from a Spanish squire who says that he offered Richard a horse and encouraged him to flee. And Richard refused to take it and said, you know, I either win this battle or I die here today as a king of England. And he fights to the very end. And it's quite striking that all of the most negative sources about

Richard say that he fights heroically to the very end, that there is not a hint of cowardice, that he fights bravely. But he is overwhelmed by all of the people around him. There is a story that Riesap Thomas, that Welshman who was meant to have protected South Wales for Richard, he claims at one point to have delivered the killing blow. So with a big sort of probably something like a halberd blade on a pole axe, a big wide blade, sliced some of Richard's skull off at the back, exposing his brains. If he was still alive, that would have been a killing blow. So there is some sense that Riesat Thomas delivered that blow himself.

But either way, Richard is overwhelmed, beaten to the ground. There are numerous wounds on his skeleton from this time when he meets his end. And then it's William Stanley who finds the crown that Richard had had on top of his helmet under a bush and hands it to Henry Tudor in a real symbolic moment of saying, this is yours. You're the king now. And by the way, it's the Stanley's that put you there. Yeah, don't forget who put you there. Thomas Stanley is now stepfather to the King of England,

and William Stanley is the man who is literally handed in the crown, who has effectively won the Battle of Bosworth for Henry and given him the crown. They're going to be wanting something for this. And surprise, surprise, they get the elder of Derby, and they're still big, powerful, rich guys to this day. Still the Earls of Derby today. Five hundred years later. Amazing.

So, Matt, I mean, that's what you call a decisive battle. It is. It's very clear. who is the winner and who is the loser. There are no loose ends after Bosworth. Henry is king. He fairly slowly makes his way. He goes back to Leicester, but makes his way down to London

and has his coronation as King Henry the 7th, the very first king of the new Tudor dynasty. You might have heard of them. Yeah, I've heard of the Tudors, yeah. And in fact, lots of the people present on this battlefield become the big courtiers under the Tudors as well. The Howard's, the Stanlies, the Brandons. These are names that will then go on echoing

through the next hundred years and more. They are. For the first portion of Henry's reign, he's really reliant on those people that were in exile with him because he just doesn't know anybody in England. He doesn't have the tools to operate government in England at all.

So he relies on these old officers of Edward the 4ths who do know how to run a government. So Henry's government begins looking very, very Yorkist for the first few years until he manages to establish a bit of independence and move away from that. But the Howards will be rehabilitated.

They fought against him at Bosworth, but they will find a way to rehabilitate. and to become Dukes of Norfolk again, William Brandon's son Charles will famously become the best buddy of Henry the 8th and will become the Duke of Suffolk and a significant figure in the early 16th century. So lots of people make their names here

on the field at Bosworth. So Henry the 7th, he's on the way to London now, he's on the way to get crowned and marry the princess when he's promised to marry. What about the body of Richard III? So this seems to be a bit of business that Henry deals with kind of on his way out of Lester.

He's put the body of Richard on display for about three days after the battle. And this is a fairly standard thing to do to prove that he's dead. So Richard had left Leicester on the morning of the 21st. People had seen him go. Henry wants it to be clear that he's now dead. There can be no rumours that Richard is still alive somewhere. These rumors have a tendency of cropping up that kings are supposed to be dead are actually

still alive. So Henry displays his body, make sure everybody knows. And as he's leaving Leicester, the monks from the Greyfriars in Leicester sort of come to Henry and say, can we bury the body? he deserves a Christian burial. And they're sort of given a bit short shrift by Henry. He's like, go fine, go ahead, do it then. And they seem to have buried him in a grave that was very shallow in the choir of the

Grapefriars Church and not quite tall enough for Richard. So there's a sense of this is a real rush job that they were feeling the pressure from Henry's men to get this done. Strikingly, perhaps 10 years or so later, Henry actually spends an awful lot of money on a monument to be put on top of Richard's tomb. And he has a whole verse put around the outside about Richard being king. He doesn't try to pretend that Richard wasn't king.

So once he's feeling more confident at throne, he starts to think, well, I owe it to my peers. I feel like 10 years after Bosworth, Henry would have been through a couple of attempts on his own crown. And probably more than ever, he realizes what Richard had been through in his short two years. And he's perhaps beginning to sympathise and empathise a little bit with Richard

and think, you know, maybe he wasn't such a bad guy. Fate just threw us against each other. And so this grave is eventually lost at the Reformation, so Henry VIII breaks up all the monasteries. The Greyfriars is torn down. The land is all sold off. It becomes houses. It becomes the garden of a mayor of Leicester. There is briefly a small monument there that says, you know, here's where Richard III's grave used to be. That's eventually lost. And over time, it becomes the social services car park in the middle of Leicester until there is this fabulous project in 2012, led by the Looking for Richard Project and the University of Leicester

archaeological services to try and find the Greyfriars precinct in the belief that Richard is still there somewhere and kind of against all of the odds. They find him exactly where he had been buried in 1485 after Bosworth. Amazing. It wasn't just changed dynasties. It sometimes feels in English history like it was just a change of period at the end of the medieval to the beginning of the early modern. I mean, you don't like to stray too far into the Tudors, do you know, Matt? I mean, that makes you feel it. You get nosebleeds. I try and avoid them. It makes me nauseous to get too close to the Tudors. But for a long time, people have dated the end of the medieval period and the beginning of the early modern era to the Battle of Bosworth in 1485.

Incredibly Anglo-centric view of the world. But that's just how seismic it is seen. It's one of those big historical pins in the map like 1066 and Hastings. You got 1485 and Bosworth. And did people feel that at the time? Did it feel like this was the end of a period? This is the end of the Wars of the Roses. We've now got, there's only one game in town when it comes to Kings.

I think there were very few options left, depending on what you think happened to the princes in the tower. Oh, there's a little bit of a question around that. but people had had decades by this point of changing regimes, fights and battles, and they must have been, at the very least, hoping this was the end of it, that there was going to be no more of that, no more civil conflict, no more trouble, no more endless deaths just to decide who sits under a golden circle on a pos chair. But, you know, the 16th century would be wild too.

That's the problem with us, humans. We create drama, and the Tudors would provide plenty of that. Matt, thank you so much coming on the podcast. Thanks for having me, Dan. It's been a pleasure. Thank you so much for listening to this episode of Dan Snow's History Hit. You know, you could have watched this episode and others on YouTube. That's right. You can peek behind the curtain of how we record this podcast on our YouTube channel. Very exciting new development here.

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