that the princes still existed there was room for all manner of
impostures and false rumours.
The usurper’s reign was from the first a troubled one. Less than three months after his coronation the first insurrection broke out; it was headed—strangely enough—by the duke of Buckingham, who seems to have been shocked by the murder of the princes; he must have been Bucking-ham’s rebellion. one of the few who had certain information of the crime. He did not take arms in his own cause, though after the house of York the house of Buckingham had the best claim to the throne, as representing Thomas of Woodstock, the youngest son of Edward III. His plan was to unite the causes of York and Lancaster by wedding the Lady Elizabeth, the eldest sister of the murdered princes, to Henry Tudor, earl of Richmond, a young exile who represented the very doubtful claim of the Beauforts to the Lancastrian heritage. Henry was the son of Margaret Beaufort, the daughter of John, first duke of Somerset, and the niece of Edmund, second duke, who fell at St Albans. All her male kinsmen had been exterminated in the Wars of the Roses.
This promising scheme was to be supported by a rising of those Yorkists who rejected the usurpation of Richard III., and by the landing on the south coast of Henry of Richmond with a body of Lancastrian exiles and foreign mercenaries. But good organization was Execution of Buckingham. wanting, and chance fought for the king. A number of scattered risings in the south were put down by Richard’s troops, while Buckingham, who had raised his banner in Wales, was prevented from bringing aid by a week of extraordinary rains which made the Severn impassable. Finding that the rest of the plan had miscarried, Buckingham’s retainers melted away from him, and he was forced to fly. A few days later he was betrayed, handed over to the king, and beheaded (Nov. 2, 1483). Meanwhile Richmond’s little fleet was dispersed by the same storms that scattered Buckingham’s army, and he was forced to return to Brittany without having landed in England.
Here King Richard’s luck ended. Though he called a parliament early in 1484, and made all manner of gracious promises of good governance, he felt that his position was insecure. The nation was profoundly disgusted with his unscrupulous policy, and the greater part of the leaders of the late insurrection had escaped abroad and were weaving new plots. Early in the spring he lost his only son and heir, Edward, prince of Wales, and the question of the succession to the crown was opened from a new point of view. After some hesitation Richard named his nephew John de la Pole, earl of Lincoln, a son of his sister, as his heir. But he also bethought him of another and a most repulsive plan for strengthening his position. His queen, Anne Neville, the daughter of the kingmaker, was on her death-bed. With indecent haste he began to devise a scheme for marrying his niece Elizabeth, whose brothers he had murdered but a year before. Knowledge of this scheme is said to have shortened the life of the unfortunate Anne, and many did not scruple to say that her husband had made away with her.
When the queen was dead, and some rumours of the king’s
intentions got abroad, the public indignation was so great that
Richard’s councillors had to warn him to disavow the
projected marriage, if he wished to retain a single
adherent. He yielded, and made public complaint
Henry of Richmond lands at Milford.
Battle of Bosworth.
that he had been slandered—which few believed.
Meanwhile the conspirators of 1483 were busy in organizing
another plan of invasion. This time it was successfully carried
out, and the earl of Richmond landed at Milford Haven with
many exiles, both Yorkists and Lancastrians, and 1000 mercenaries
lent him by the princess regent of France. The Welsh
joined him in great numbers, not forgetting that by his Tudor
descent he was their own kinsman, and when he reached Shrewsbury
English adherents also began to flock in to his banner, for
the whole country was seething with discontent, and
Richard III. had but few loyal adherents. When the
rivals met at Bosworth Field (Aug. 22, 1485) the king’s
army was far the larger, but the greater part of it was determined
not to fight. When battle was joined some left the field
and many joined the pretender. Richard, however, refused to
fly, and was slain, fighting to the last, along with the duke of
Norfolk and a few other of his more desperate partisans. The
slaughter was small, for treason, not the sword, had settled the
day. The battered crown which had fallen from Richard’s
helmet was set on the victor’s head by Lord Stanley, the chief
of the Yorkist peers who had joined his standard, and his army
hailed him by the new title of Henry VII.
No monarch of England since William the Conqueror, not excluding Stephen and Henry IV., could show such a poor title to the throne as the first of the Tudor kings. His claim to represent the house of Lancaster was of the weakest—when Henry IV. had assented to the legitimating Henry VII. of his brothers the Beauforts, he had attached a clause to the act, to provide that they were given every right save that of counting in the line of succession to the throne. The true heir to the house of John of Gaunt should have been sought among the descendants of his eldest legitimate daughter, not among those of his base-born sons. The earl of Richmond had been selected by the conspirators as their figure-head mainly because he was known as a young man of ability, and because he was unmarried and could therefore take to wife the princess Elizabeth, and so absorb the Yorkist claim in his own. This had been the essential part of the bargain, and Henry was ready to carry it out, but he insisted that he should first be recognized as king in his own right, lest it might be held that he ruled merely as his destined wife’s consort. He was careful to hold his first parliament and get his title acknowledged before he married the princess. When he had done so, he had the triple claim by conquest, by election and by inheritance, safely united. Yet his position was even then insecure; the vicissitudes of the last thirty years had shaken the old prestige of the name of king, and a weaker and less capable man than Henry Tudor might have failed to retain the crown that he had won. There were plenty of possible pretenders in existence; the earl of Lincoln, whom Richard III. had recognized as his heir, was still alive; the two children of the duke of Clarence might be made the tools of conspirators; and there was a widespread doubt as to whether the sons of Edward IV. had actually died in the Tower. The secrecy with which their uncle had carried out their murder was destined to be a sore hindrance to his successor.
Bosworth Field is often treated as the last act of the Wars
of the Roses. This is an error; they were protracted for twelve
years after the accession of Henry VII., and did not
really end till the time of Blackheath Field and the
siege of Exeter (1497). The position of the first Tudor
Early years of the reign.
Insurrections and plots.
king is misconceived if his early years are regarded
as a time of strong governance and well-established order. On
the contrary he was in continual danger, and was striving
with all the resources of a ready and untiring mind to rebuild
foundations that were absolutely rotten. Phenomena like the
Cornish revolt (which recalls Cade’s insurrection) and
the Yorkshire rising of 1489, which began with the
death of the earl of Northumberland, show that at
any moment whole counties might take arms in sheer
lawlessness, or for some local grievance. Loyalty was such an
uncertain thing that the king might call out great levies yet be
forced to doubt whether they would fight for him—at Stoke
Field it seems that a large part of Henry’s army misbehaved,
much as that of Richard III. had done at Bosworth. The
demoralization brought about by the evil years between 1453
and 1483 could not be lived down in a day—any sort of treason
was possible to the generation that had seen the career of
Warwick and the usurpation of Gloucester. The survivors of that
time were capable of taking arms for any cause that offered a
chance of unreasonable profit, and no one’s loyalty could be
trusted. Did not Sir William Stanley, the best paid of those
who betrayed Richard III., afterwards lose his head for a
deliberate plot to betray Henry VII.? The various attempts
that were made to overturn the new dynasty seem contemptible
to the historian of the 20th century. They were not so contemptible
at the time, because England and Ireland were full
