SE Academic Review 2023

76 ST EDWARD’S, OXFORD

Conclusion If medieval kings lived and died by the battles they fought, so did their reputations. Richard III could easily have been victorious at Bosworth on 22 August 1485, had it not been for the daring charge, which nearly brought down Henry Tudor, but ended in the king himself being hacked to the ground - Tudor himself called it ‘the judgement of God’. In a moment, the fate of English rule for the next 120 years was decided, and Henry VII crowned on the next hill (Griffiths, 1986, p. 210). In a broad historical perspective, the Tudor ascendancy began; Richard was confined by history to a different age (Bennett, 1985, p. 120). Yet what happened on the field of Bosworth had ramifications beyond the succession of the English crown. It has been shown that the rhetoric, motives and political strategies of Richard’s foreign policy owed more to the Hundred Years War and its fallout than it did to anything else. It is, in fact, little surprise: the conflict was clearly ‘one of the central events in the history of England and France’ (Sumption, 1990, p. iv). Richard’s policies were remarkable in their emphasis on traditional antagonisms and military hostilities between England and France, and by their willingness to encourage the same spirit of conflict that had been familiar to rulers in the decades and centuries before his reign. His military defeat in such a way did, close a certain chapter of Anglo-French relations, just as Henry Tudor began a new one. By 1485, it was clear that it was the French that had got most of what they wanted: the English threat assuaged and a more friendly king installed with their support. This is the most damning fact about Richard’s foreign policy, and it is only by framing Richard’s rule in this wider context that the implications of his defeat can be fully determined. Paradoxically, this led into a new period of expansion, power and relative peace in a defeated, post-Yorkist England.

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