Battle of Bosworth Field

The Battle of Bosworth, fought in Leicestershire on 22 August 1485, brought down King Richard III and put Henry Tudor on the English throne as Henry VII. Richard, the last Yorkist king, died in the fighting, the last English monarch to be killed in battle. The victory, sealed by Henry's marriage to Elizabeth of York, is usually taken as the effective end of the Wars of the Roses and the start of the Tudor age.

When Edward IV died in April 1483, his elder son, aged twelve, became Edward V. The boy's uncle, Richard, Duke of Gloucester, took him into custody, had leading members of the queen's Woodville family executed, and in June arranged for Edward IV's marriage to be declared invalid, making his children illegitimate. Richard was proclaimed king on 26 June 1483. Edward V and his younger brother soon vanished, and their fate has never been established. The manner in which Richard had taken power cost him support.

Henry Tudor had a thin claim to the throne through his mother, Margaret Beaufort, and had spent years in exile in Brittany. A first invasion attempt in 1483 was wrecked by a storm. In 1485, backed by mercenaries provided by Charles VIII of France, he left Harfleur on 1 August and landed near Dale, on Milford Haven in Wales, on 7 August. As he marched inland, the Welsh leader Rhys ap Thomas brought him more men, and by 15 or 16 August his army had crossed into England, heading for Shrewsbury.

Richard learned of the landing on 11 August and gathered his forces at Leicester. The powerful Stanley brothers, Lord Stanley and Sir William Stanley, raised their own troops but kept them apart from both sides, meeting Henry secretly while still not committing to him.

Estimates put Richard's army at 7,500 to 12,000 men, Henry's at 5,000 to 8,000 and the Stanleys' at 4,000 to 6,000. Henry, an untested soldier, left command to the experienced Earl of Oxford, who kept his men in one tight formation rather than dividing them. Richard's vanguard under the Duke of Norfolk attacked and was pushed back, some of its troops fleeing. The Earl of Northumberland, holding Richard's left flank, did not move when signalled, whether from disloyalty or because the ground made it difficult.

Seeing Henry some way behind his main army, Richard led a mounted charge straight at him, hoping to end the battle at a stroke. He killed Henry's standard-bearer, Sir William Brandon, and came close to Henry himself. At this point Sir William Stanley's men rode in on Henry's side. Richard, surrounded and unhorsed near a marsh, was killed. Analysis of his skeleton in modern times found eleven wounds, nine of them to the head. Norfolk also died, and Richard's army broke up.

Henry was proclaimed king on a hill near Stoke Golding; a later legend claims Richard's crown was found in a hawthorn bush. Richard's naked body was displayed in Leicester and then buried in the Greyfriars church there. Henry dated his reign from the day before the battle, so that those who had fought against him could be treated as traitors, and he married Elizabeth of York, Edward IV's daughter, uniting the rival houses. A Yorkist rising was defeated at Stoke Field on 16 June 1487.

The Tudors presented Bosworth as the dawn of a new era, and William Shakespeare made it the climax of his play Richard III. The exact battlefield has long been disputed; research published in 2009 placed it about two miles south-west of Ambion Hill. In 2012 archaeologists found Richard's remains beneath a car park in Leicester, and he was reburied in Leicester Cathedral on 26 March 2015.

Our 1400 map shows the Kingdom of England in the century of the dynastic wars, and the 1492 map shows it early in the reign of Henry VII.