On 22 August 1485 King Richard III met the invader Henry Tudor1 at Bosworth Field in Leicestershire, the last great battle of the Wars of the Roses. When the powerful Stanley brothers held back their men and then turned on the king, Richard gambled everything on a charge straight at Henry and was cut down. He was the last king of England to die in battle.2 Henry took the crown as Henry VII and founded the Tudor dynasty.
It was the battle that ended the Middle Ages in England. On a Leicestershire field two claimants to the throne staked their lives on a single morning, while a third army sat on the ridge and waited to see which way to jump. By noon a dynasty that had ruled for over three hundred years was finished.
A crown in dispute
By 1485 England had been torn for thirty years by the Wars of the Roses, a dynastic struggle between the houses of York and Lancaster. Richard III had taken the throne in 1483 amid the disappearance of his young nephews, the Princes in the Tower, and many of his own nobles distrusted him. Across the Channel, the exiled Lancastrian claimant Henry Tudor gathered support, landed in Wales in August 1485, and marched toward the king.1
The armies gather
The two hosts met near Market Bosworth in Leicestershire3 on 22 August. Richard's royal army was the larger, but its loyalty was uncertain. Nearby stood a third force under Lord Thomas Stanley and his brother Sir William, several thousand strong, who had promised support to both sides and now waited to see which way the day would turn. Richard held Stanley's son hostage to force his hand2, but the brothers still held back.
Betrayal and the last charge
The fighting opened between Richard's vanguard under the Duke of Norfolk1 and Henry's men. When the Stanleys refused his summons, Richard saw Henry's banner lightly guarded and made a bold decision: he led his household knights in a headlong cavalry charge to kill his rival with his own hand. He cut down Henry's standard-bearer2 and came within yards of the man himself. At that moment Sir William Stanley threw his force in on Henry's side4, and Richard was surrounded and hacked down, fighting to the last.
The end of the Plantagenets
Richard III was the last king of England to die in battle, and the last of the Plantagenet line that had ruled since 1154. Henry Tudor was acclaimed king on the field as Henry VII and soon married Elizabeth of York, uniting the two houses and all but ending the Wars of the Roses. His dynasty, the Tudors, would rule England for over a century. Richard's hastily buried body was lost for centuries, until it was found beneath a Leicester car park in 20122 and reburied in the city's cathedral.
