and concerned for his own soul, he relied sincerely and devotedly on the Church’s intercession.
Henry was relaxed about the occasional Lollard being executed for heresy. Lollardy was a small but persistent underground religious movement, more extensive in England than in Scotland. The Lollards were followers of John Wycliffe, an Oxford professor who had been the most notable English heretic of the fourteenth century. Wycliffe and his colleagues were eventually removed from the university. They were conscious of, and angered by, the contrast between the obvious wealth and power of the Church and the inner world of grace as revealed in the Bible.
The early Lollards translated key biblical passages into English, and these heretical papers were passed from generation to generation. What had begun among the intellectual classes persisted more among millers, weavers or artisans – not members of the underclass, but not people of influence either. The Lollards continued to stress biblical authority, and they disputed the status of the pope. In his constant but discreet suppression of Lollardy, Henry once again evinced pragmatism as well as loyalty to the Catholic Church – for Lollardy was obviously subversive. To be lenient with Lollards would be to encourage other dissidents.
In political terms, Henry’s seizure of the English throne was the beginning of the end of years of debilitating division between two great dynastic houses, the Lancastrians and the Yorkists. The division manifested itself in constant feuding and fighting, the so-called Wars of the Roses (the phrase was invented many years later by none other than Sir Walter Scott). The Lancastrian rose was red, the Yorkist rose white. The Lancastrians and the Yorkists each had legitimate claims to the monarchy going back over 100 years.
Henry Tudor had spent the first fourteen years of his life in Wales. His father was half-Welsh, half-French. His mother Margaret was wholly English. By a series of accidents, Henry became, when barely a teenager, the only male claimant on the Lancastrian side at a time when the Yorkists were in the ascendancy. In 1471, for his own safety, he was taken to France by his uncle, Jasper, Earl of Pembroke. Here he stayed in reasonably comfortable exile, mainly in Brittany.
Henry’s window of opportunity opened with the patently illegal accession of Richard III in 1482. But it was the murder of the two young princes that changed everything. The Yorkists now had no obvious successor to Richard III. This was the moment for which his Uncle Jasper had patiently prepared Henry. He knew that he was now the leading claimant to the English crown. His claim was endorsed by the king of France. His invasion of England in 1485 was the one really bold act in the life of this cautious man. His small fleet, organised and commanded by Jasper, left Honfleur on 1 August.
Henry landed in Wales, near Milford Haven. The invasion force was not large. There were a few hundred Lancastrian exiles, a significant detachment of French soldiers, and a smaller contingent of Scots, led by Bernard Stewart. The happy band, flying the flag of the Red Dragon and encountering no resistance, but gathering few supporters (though Welsh historians were later to claim that those days in the summer of 1485 were among the most glorious in Welsh history), stuck to the coast at first, moving northwards. Then they struck eastwards through the mountains and crossed the border into England near Shrewsbury. The crucial and inevitable encounter with Richard’s forces came, as we have seen, much further east, at Bosworth Field near Leicester, on 22 August.
As soon as he became king, Henry set about ending the tiresome dynastic feuding which was sapping England, a reasonably prosperous country of just over two million souls. Henry married Elizabeth of York in 1486. The Roses were joined: red and white merged into a kind of pragmatic pink. The couple’s first son was christened Arthur. Henry, despite his lack of showmanship, was an accomplished propagandist, an early master of spin. The idea was to invoke the glorious (and legendary) beginnings of the English royal line.
Henry’s method of ending the years of strife was not so much by the expedient of marriage, useful though that was, or by brutal repression, which was contrary to his nature, but rather by the judicious deployment of that greatest of human qualities, mercy. By the standards of his time, Henry was to prove a clement king, although there were pragmatic exceptions, as with the Lollards. His compassion was frequently evident, and a good example was the way he treated the man who posed the first serious threat to his rule.
After so many years of civil war, Henry’s own royal line was not yet secure. The crisis came as soon as 1487, when an insignificant lad called Lambert Simnel suddenly presented an extreme danger to the new but precarious stability of the kingdom. The chief troublemaker was the Earl of Lincoln, who had, like Henry, a flimsy claim to the throne. Lincoln had been – or pretended to be – one of Henry’s leading aristocratic supporters in the aftermath of Bosworth in 1485; but, at Easter in 1487, when the pious Henry was on a pilgrimage to Walsingham in East Anglia, Lincoln started raising mercenaries in Flanders.
Lincoln moved on to Dublin, where many Yorkists were exiled, and took up Simnel (in reality the son of a cobbler from Oxford), who was now presented as the Earl of Warwick. This was ridiculous; it was well known that the real Earl of Warwick, who was the son of Edward IV’s brother, and had a more valid claim to the throne than either Henry or Lincoln, was imprisoned in the Tower of London. Henry had him taken from the Tower and paraded through London to St Paul’s Cathedral; but this did not deflect the mischief-makers in Ireland. In a brazen and absurd ceremony in Dublin, the impostor Simnel was ‘crowned’ (with a bejewelled wreath appropriated from a statue of the Virgin Mary), and a so-called ‘coronation sermon’ was preached by the Bishop of Meath. Simnel was presented to the people of Dublin as King Edward VI, and a feast was held in his honour at the castle.
Then Lincoln led the dupe Simnel and his army, including a force of hardened mercenaries led by Martin Schwartz, a German soldier of fortune, and many Irishmen, across the Irish Sea. They landed near Barrow in Lancashire – but the men of Lancashire unsurprisingly refused to join the Yorkist army. Nonetheless, after not even two years, Henry’s kingship was in genuine peril. The ‘Tudor dynasty’ could have lasted less than two years.
Henry, always cautious but capable of decisive action when necessary, did not panic. Realising that a major military confrontation was now inevitable, he worked with speed and flair to organise his supporters. He gathered an army of about 15,000 men. Most of these troops were well armed and equipped; and, unlike the rebels – still no more than a conglomeration of brave but ill-disciplined and unarmoured Irishmen, continental mercenaries and relatively few English soldiers – they had the advantage of not being a multinational force. In addition, Henry, himself relatively inexperienced in battle, had a competent commander, the Earl of Oxford. Yet the morale of the royal army seems to have been brittle, and there were desertions as the crucial engagement approached.
In mid-June, Lincoln led his rebel army across the River Trent at Fiskerton Ford, a few miles south-west of Newark. That night, they settled on a broad ridge, high above the Trent to the west. The long straight Roman road known as the Fosse Way was on the other side, down to the east. The little village of East Stoke lay in lower ground a few hundred yards off towards Newark. Henry’s army, meanwhile, was camped on flat land at Syerston (now an airfield) a mile or so to the south.
The battle – involving about 25,000 troops – that ensued the next day is in many ways of greater significance than the Battle of Bosworth. It is generally known as the Battle of Stoke – and that has caused confusion over the years. Even the authoritative Brewer’s Royalty claims that it took place at Stoke on Trent, which is in the Potteries, many miles further west.
How the fighting developed is still a matter of dispute. But it is clear that the Yorkists, though outnumbered, were deployed in a strong position. Lincoln’s early attacks on Henry’s advance troops inflicted heavy casualties, and the royal ranks did not hold. Some of Henry’s men fled, and at this point a rout seemed likely. Henry’s best troops arrived as reinforcements, just in time. On the Yorkist side, the German and Swiss mercenaries maintained their discipline, but the Irish – who were poorly prepared for battle – broke and fled down
