There the decisive battle was fought between the great rival houses of York and Lancaster (S300).  Richard represented the first, and Henry Tudor, Earl of Richmond, the second.  The King went out the evening before to look over the ground.  He found one of his sentinels slumbering at his post.  Drawing his sword, he stabbed him in the heart, saying, “I found him asleep and I leave him asleep.”  Going back to his tent, he passed a restless night.  The ghosts of all his murdered victims seemed to pass in procession before him.  Such a sight may well, as Shakespeare says, have “struck terror to the soul of Richard."[2]

[2] Shakespeare’s “Richard III,” Act V, scene iii.

At sunrise the battle began.  Before the attack, Richard, it is said, confessed to his troops the murder of his two nephews (S310), but pleaded that he had atoned for the crime with “many salt tears and long penance.”  It is probably that had it not been for the treachery of some of his adherents the King would have won the day.

When he saw that he was deserted by those on whose help he had counted, he uttered the cry of “Treason! treason!” and dashed forward into the thick of the fight.  With the fury of despair he hewed his way into the very presence of Henry Tudor, and killing the standard bearer, flung the Lancastrian banner to the ground.  But he could go no further.  Numbers overpowered him, and he fell.

During the battle Richard had worn his crown.  After all was over, it was found hanging on a hawthorn bush[1] and handed to the victor, who placed it on his own head.  The army then gathered round Henry Tudor thus crowned, and moved by one impulse joined in the exultant hymn of the Te Deum.[2] Thus ended the last of the Plantagenet line (S159).  “Whatever their faults or crimes, there was not a coward among them."[3]

[1] An ancient stained-glass window in the east end of Henry VII’s Chapel (Westminster Abbey) commemorates this incident. [2] “Te Deum laudamus” (We praise thee, O God):  a Roman Catholic hymn of thanksgiving, now sung in English in the Episcopal and other churches. [3] W. Stubb’s “Constitutional History of England.”

316.  End of the Wars of the Roses (1485); their Effects.

With Bosworth Field the Wars of the Roses ceased (SS299, 300).  During the thirty years they had continued, fourteen pitched battles had been fought, in a single one of which (Towton) (S303) more Englishmen lost their lives than in the whole course of the wars with France during the preceding forty years.  In all, eighty princes of the blood royal and more than half of the nobility of the realm perished.

Of those who escaped death by the sword, many died on the scaffold.  The remnant who were saved had hardly a better fate.  They left their homes only to suffer in foreign lands.  A writer of the day[4] says, “I, myself, saw the Duke of Exeter, the King of England’s brother-in-law, walking barefoot in the Duke of Burgundy’s train, and begging his bread from door to door.”