Bosworth 1485:
The Battle That Transformed Englandby Michael JonesPegasus Books, 2015The Battle of Bosworth Field, the nail-biting, earth-churning, eye-gouging, head-spiking climactic 1485 clash between the Houses of York and Lancaster for the ownership of the crown of England, has been a favorite topic for historians since almost before the ravens started gathering in the aftermath. And it's had two major recent spurs to its perennial popularity: the enormous popularity of the cable TV adaptation of George R. R. Martin's “A Song of Fire and Ice” series of novels, which the author has somewhat unwisely said was partially inspired by the Wars of the Roses that reached their bloody culmination at Bosworth, and the recent discovery of the bones of King Richard III, who lost his crown and his life on that day in August five centuries ago.More so the second than the first, at least for history buffs. The sight of Richard's bones, neatly arranged and on display, was an instantly arresting one, very nearly proof against the Tudor-friendly vilification made famous by Shakespeare. They tended to humanize Richard, as we'd expect the man's own bones to do, and there was no mistaking the pathos of the violent damage to his skull that obviously caused his death. Here had been a man with a badly curved spine (but probably no limp, and probably no hump) who'd died fighting.That process of humanization continues in Bosworth 1485 (as opposed to when, one wonders? Bosworth 1985? Not much happening in Thatcherite Leicestershire) by Michael Jones, a vigorous and thoughtful account in which, as the TLS reviewer succinctly put it, “no longer need Richard play the villain.”It's a rehabilitation that has serious obstacles, of course, the foremost being the fact that Richard was a vile, grasping oath-breaker who no sooner saw his brother the king into his grave than he'd abandoned his responsibilities in the North, marched on London, seized the Treasury, driven his sister-in-law and her children into besieged sanctuary, declared his two nephews (including his rightful king) to be bastards, imprisoned them in the Tower of London, and murdered them to secure his crown. As much as the busking evil of Shakespeare's portrait, the snuffing out of the Princes in the Tower has always been the signature of Richard's perfidy in the popular imagination, so naturally Jones has to deal with it in his book. He chooses to take a practical approach; if the boys really were bastards, Richard was within his rights to remove potential rallying-points for future insurrections, and if they were legitimate, that left Richard with even less choice in 1483:
The disappearance of the princes in the Tower is one of the most enduring murder mysteries. At this stage, it is worth making a crucial observation. If Richard believed in his legitimate right to the throne, he would not be compelled to kill the princes for his own accession to take place, for as bastards, they could be set aside. Whereas if he was an usurper, with no rights to the crown, there would be an awful necessity to do just that.
It's an apt phrase, “awful necessity,” and it very likely defines Richard's kingship regardless of his character. As Jones rightly points out, once Henry Tudor had launched his challenge from the Continent, Richard's choices dwindled to zero:
The country was not big enough for two kings and it is important to remember that Richard was facing an opponent who had directly and unequivocally laid claim to his office. The step Tudor had taken was in late medieval terms unprecedented, but it would be stranger still if Richard failed to react to it at once. Had he hesitated he would have appeared to concede. His purposeful readiness, therefore, was not nervous and precipitate but wise and necessary.
The portrait of Richard in these pages is refreshingly complex. There are very good digressions about both the world of his Court and the nature of his bookishness, which seems to have been a bit more genuine than the norm, no doubt accounting for his brooding appeal even among well-educated young students in our own modern era. And Jones's centerpiece account of the Battle of Bosworth itself is superb and headlong and extremely nuanced, reminding his readers that there were hundreds of variables at play that day, from vagaries of weapons and tactics to the fact that the pivotal Stanley forces had a long-standing and bitter rivalry with another Northern family, the Harringtons. By insisting on providing the always complicated and sometimes messy background to those pivotal battlefield hours, Jones succeeds in making them feel even more dramatic. This is a Bosworth book to keep.
