The Tudors Read Online Free Page B

the ground with a clang of armor plate. His horsemen hit like a wave of flesh and iron, driving into the melee with lances lowered, hacking away with clubs and blades. Whether any of them got close enough to engage Henry personally is not known, but the onslaught had to be terrifying. It is to Henry’s credit that, despite never having experienced anything like this, he did not turn and run. Nearby, perhaps steadying him, was his uncle Jasper, as tough and fearless an old campaigner as anyone on the field that day.
    For a long moment things hung in the balance. In one recent treatise on the battle, the writer claims to have found evidence that Richard’s assault was foiled by a tactic he had not encountered before: French pikemen, forming up in a square around Henry and planting the butts of their weapons in the earth to create a wall of iron points that no cavalry could penetrate.
    To return to what we know: suddenly, from the side or rear, scores and then hundreds and finally thousands of men in red tunics came pouring in, swamping Richard and his band. These were William Stanley’s men, wearing the Stanley livery. In the moment of crisis—perhapsas soon as it became clear that Henry was not going to die—Stanley had seen his opportunity and gone in for the kill.
    Richard was swept back and unhorsed. Shakespeare, more than a century later, would have him crying out for a fresh mount: “My kingdom for a horse!” Older accounts say something very different: that one of Richard’s companions urged him to flee, offering him a horse. If that happened, the king refused. Again we can only guess at his thinking. He could have had little hope of assembling another army if he managed to escape, and perhaps he could accept nothing but victory or death. He fought on as, one after another, his men were cut down around him. The faithful Thirlwall held the blue boar aloft until his legs were chopped from under him. Finally it was Richard’s turn: men he could not get at with his sword, Welsh troopers, jabbed at him from all directions with their long-handled points and hooks. He screamed defiance, cursing them as traitors. It must have been even more like butchery than most battlefield deaths in the Middle Ages, the pikemen probing for the seams in the king’s armor. Without question it was a brave death; even those who depict Richard as a monster have always acknowledged that. When it was over his body was stripped naked, thrown over the back of a horse like a sack of grain, and hauled off for public display. Those of his men who were not dead or captured ran for their lives. Lord Stanley’s son was still alive. In the confusion no one had remembered, or bothered, to kill him.
    The whole thing must have seemed a dream or a nightmare, depending on which side one was on. In seconds Richard had been reduced from a king at the head of an army of thousands to a mangled lump of dead flesh. Henry had been vaulted from adventurer to conqueror. Survivors must have stumbled about the field, trying to absorb what had happened.
    It fell to the ever-resourceful Lord Stanley, who had played no part in the battle even after his brother went in, to focus the moment. Someone retrieved the crown that Richard had lost in the moment before his death. The legends say it was found in a hawthorn bush. Sober historians have dismissed this as a romantic fabrication but fail to explain why, not many years after the battle, a crown in a thornbush became a royal emblem. In any case, Stanley arrived on the scene while everything was still in confusion and took possession of the crown. Putting himself atthe center of a great occasion that he had done nothing to bring about, he placed the crown on his stepson’s head and led the assembled company in a hearty round of cheers.
    At which moment, in a turn of fate as improbable as any in history, Henry Tudor became King Henry VII of England.



1
The Luck of Henry Tudor
    N one of the events that have made the