Henry Tudor: The Training of a King

Abstract

British schoolchildren are taught that Bosworth Field is one of the decisive battles of British history. In the sixteenth century its significance seemed as great as that of the battle of Hastings, and within a generation of 1815 it was being compared with the battle of Waterloo as an epoch-making encounter.1 Although scholars by their nature are skeptical of such claims, it is still popularly believed that the battle of Bosworth on 22 August 1485 rang down the curtain on the tired old Middle Ages and opened a spanking new play that took as its themes the power, the Protestantism, and the overseas expansion of the glorious Tudor dynasty. The contemporary audience in 1485 had no awareness of all this nor, naturally enough, did it see things quite as later generations have done. To most contemporaries the outcome of the battle is likely to have been unexpected, indeed astonishing, and to many the role of Henry Tudor in it doubtless seemed quite incongruous. After all, this was the first battle fought in England since 1066 in which the anointed king-who was widely acknowledged as king and on whom therefore, according to popular conviction and regnal theory, God had smiled-had been defeated and slain, even though he had worn his crown to battle and had stood beneath his unfurled banner.2 Not since Harold Godwinson died at Hastings had the God of battles changed his mind so devastatingly, even though in August 1485 Richard III had been on the throne of England three times as long as had Harold in October 1066. Secondly, the Almighty's new instrument, Henry Tudor, won his battle with an army that was partly French, at a time when France was still England's most hated adversary. Henry's new subjects, for their part, were not so easily persuaded or deceived into changing the attitudes of centuries. When an epidemic of sweating sickness broke out in England some months later, Hen-