SE Academic Review 2023

75 ACADEMIC REVIEW 2023

To this immediate and serious threat, Richard replied in the only language an encircled and betrayed 15th century monarch could know. It can be seen as little surprise that Richard employed the rhetoric and sentiments of the Hundred Years War as his last and most eminently persuasive call for support. The French challenge to the throne began in 1485, with calls ‘in the furtherance of [Henry’s] rightful claim’ and denunciation of ‘that homicide and unnatural tyrant which now unjustly bears dominion over you’. Richard’s reply was fully in line with the rhetoric of past conflicts: the ‘ancient enemy Charles calling himself king of France’ had joined with Tudor, who ‘hath covenanted and bargained … to give up and release in perpetuity all the title and claim [of England] … into the possession of the king’s enemies’. Richard linked the domestic traitors directly to the larger eternal enemies of England (Grant, 1993, pp. 125-126). The idea of unchangeable exterior foes, and internal traitors, was fully in line with the mantras of Richard’s battle-hardened predecessors. The fact that such sentiments were the king’s instinctive reaction highlights the permeating influence of the Hundred Years War, and all that it meant, in the minds of Richard and his contemporaries. Richard’s last proclamation continued in the same vein: Tudor was seen as a threat to the very existence of the realm and the Christian status of England, ‘to the

withstanding and resistance thereof every true and natural Englishman must lay to his hands for his own surety and weal’ (Grant, pp. 128-129). In one way, of course, Richard was correct: Tudor was taking the crown by virtue of foreign backing alone, something Tudor sources in the years after Bosworth notoriously overlooked. Throughout his reign, French writers would highlight the debt Henry VII owed to his previous allies; it is a prime example of nationalist historiography that Henry’s reliance on foreign aid was consistently overlooked in English sources, and how Bosworth was regarded as a simple victory of good over evil, hero over villain, straight-backed English peace lover over hunchbacked tyrant. What was not highlighted by Polydore Vergil or Thomas More in their influential accounts was the undeniable truth about the invasion of 1485: that it was a quest backed in military, political and economic terms by Britain’s greatest enemy, and that it represented the final defeat for two centuries of attempts at British expansion in France. By framing the showdown at Bosworth in the terms of the Hundred Years War, Richard III only confirmed this. If the fighting at Bosworth was merely what should have happened at Agincourt in 1415, as Colin Richmond has claimed, then 1485 truly represented the reversal of British fortunes from the time of the real battle there 70 years before (Grant, 1993, p. 113).

“ Tudor was seen as a threat to the very existence of the realm and the Christian status of England... ”