The Tudors Read Online Free Page A

would be Richard. For “bought and sold” we would today say “sold out.” We are told that Richard’s army was melting away like snow in springtime, some of the deserters joining the rebels, others running for home.
    These stories have come down to us at second or third hand, selectedby a writer who was a propagandist at least as much as a historian, and any or all of them could be inventions. We can’t even be certain that the Battle of Bosworth Field was fought at the place called Bosworth Field, which is now a popular attraction with walking tours and a visitor center and all the paraphernalia of the tourist trade. Richard is supposed to have positioned his forces there, atop a high point called Ambien Hill, from which he could look out and see his enemies approaching in the distance. Henry Tudor would have been accompanied by his standard-bearer William Brandon, who hoisted a banner on which was displayed the red dragon of Wales. They would have been surrounded by a lifeguard of pike-wielding foot soldiers and mounted knights.
    Supposedly the battle began when the main body of Tudor troops, commanded by the dashing Earl of Oxford, recently escaped after ten years as Richard’s prisoner, started up Ambien Hill. Perhaps it happened that way, but students of the battle now living claim that the two sides collided not at Ambien Hill but on flatter ground some distance away. The evidence they offer is complicated but not easily dismissed. The author of the present work can attest, after visiting Bosworth and walking its length and breadth, that the landscape as it exists today does not make the traditional version of the story particularly convincing.
    This we do know: at some point after the first clash of troops under the command of Oxford on one side and Norfolk on the other, with the situation stalemated and the Stanleys still hovering like vultures on the sidelines, Richard made a decision that would lead to one of the most dramatic climaxes in the history of warfare. He decided to forget about defeating the invader army with his army and instead settle things personally, in something very close to single combat, himself against Henry Tudor. In the absence of sources, it is permissible to imagine him summoning his lifeguard of perhaps a hundred knights to gather round, unsheathing his sword and pointing with it in the direction of the red dragon, and shouting for his men to follow while spurring his charger into a headlong gallop. Something like that has to have happened.
    Why it happened we can never know. Possibly Richard acted out of desperation: apparently Norfolk had been killed by this point (taken by an arrow in the throat by one account, executed on the spot after surrendering to Oxford by another), and if indeed his troops had failed inan initial assault despite their superior numbers, this must have been deeply unsettling. Or perhaps Richard saw a target that was simply too tempting to ignore: the tiny far-off figure of Henry Tudor, as passive as the king in a game of chess, remote from the action and not that strongly protected. If Henry’s guard could be penetrated—and why not, if Richard himself brought a phalanx of heavy cavalry down on it like the blow of a mace—killing him would become a simple matter. It would no longer matter what the Stanleys or anyone else did. The Tudor cause would be decapitated, the whole invasion rendered pointless.
    What ensued was a poetically fitting end to three centuries of rule by Plantagenet warrior-kings. The last link in that long royal chain, sword in hand and blue boar unfurled above his head, thundered across the battlefield with his knights just behind, the hooves of their chargers throwing up fat clods of earth. Richard crashed headlong into the first defenders to come out to meet him, laying about him with his sword, bringing down the banner of the red dragon by instantly killing William Brandon, and sending the biggest of Henry’s knights crashing to