SE Academic Review 2023

74 ST EDWARD’S, OXFORD

3. Defeat and transformation: Bosworth, Tudor ascendancy and the legacy of Richard’s foreign policy The Battle of Bosworth Field has long held its pride of place in the standard historiography of England. Not only does it form the dramatic end piece of Shakespeare’s narrative, it fits neatly in as the harbinger of the great Tudor progress to come. In the midst of the battle, a sudden movement by Henry Tudor’s forces reached the valiant figure of Richard III, whose body was brutally beaten, dismembered, and deposited in a ditch. From the incredibly savage treatment of a divinely appointed king, rose the Tudor dynasty and the movement of the English away from the irrational Middle Ages towards a period of Protestant reform, expansion and supremacy. It is too easy to see the action on that field as ‘the struggle in which the Yorkist sun set and the new star of the Tudors took its place in the historical heavens’ without contemplating how immediate the change was for England’s position, at home and abroad (Slavin, 1986, p. 80). Domestically, the Battle fits easily into the historical narrative of the Wars of the Roses, as the final showdown between the two factions; a battle of suitably Shakespearean proportions. Out of the tragedies of St Albans, Barnet, Wakefield and Tewkesbury came the catharsis of Bosworth where the revels of civil war finally ended. In terms of foreign affairs, however, the picture is not so simple. The success of Henry Tudor’s forces could never have happened without Richard’s colossal mismanagement of his foreign relations, as well as the entrenched mixture of suspicion and outright hostility which spurred Anne of Beaujeu to give her blessing to an invasion. What was going on at Bosworth can be seen not only as the final act in a domestic tragedy, but as the real ending of a continental conflict which had defined Western European affairs since the 1340s.

There is no single date nor turning point for the French support of the Tudor claim to the English throne. Once again, the only way in which we can comprehend the reasoning behind the French backing of Tudor’s invasion is by understanding the mindset of political thought at the time. English naval raids remained strong in 1485, and the threat of English action after the destruction of the Buckingham rebellion was high. Incidental reasons only partly explain the readiness of a foreign government to risk the expense and political capital of such a mission; a mission that was decided not out of a thirst for conquest, but in the spirit of a defence against foreign aggression. Not that the situation created for Richard III through 1485 was at all a happy one. The failure to capture Henry Tudor broke down the Anglo-Breton alliance, and the French signed a peace treaty with Brittany only two days after Tudor’s forces landed on English soil. Pierre Landais had been hung from the walls of Nantes in July - Brittany was now essentially compliant with French demands (and would sign the Treaty of Bourges two days after Tudor set sail) (Baldwin, 2015, p. 197). The Marshal of France, Philippe de Crèvecoeur d’Esquerdes, was the strongest backer of an invasion, and he had become commander of a large military base in the Seine valley (Ross, 1988, p. 201). A number of Breton and Scots fighters joined the French soldiers and English dissidents which made up the coalition of forces that put to sea from Normandy in July or August 1485 (Baldwin, 2015, p. 206). The choice of landing place was crucial, and the docking of Tudor’s 4,000-strong forces near Milford Haven allowed him to spend significant time traversing the landscape without encountering serious opposition, and giving the time for any English rebels to join his cause.