On This Day In History, August 22nd, 1485: The Battle of Bosworth.

As it had stood for the last two years, King Richard III, the brother of his predecessor King Edward IV, stood to rule until his distant death. Having just lost his heir the year prior, gossip-mongers wondered if his wife, consort, and cousin, Queen Anne, would announce that her ill condition was that of a pending child, or whether the rumors were true and that Richard was seeking out other advantageous matches, either with the Princess Juana of Portugual or his own niece, Elizabeth. Nevertheless, once Anne died from a prolonged, unknown illness (which some historians believe to have been consumption), did the future seem very uncertain. When news reached England that Henry Tudor had set sail from Brittany with twelve ships, did things become precarious. Henry Tudor, at the time of his departure, was twenty six years old; having spent his formative years in exile in Brittany following the Battle of Tewksbury fourteen years prior. Having lived at the Breton court with his uncle, Jasper, he had waited for his return with baited breath. For his mother, the stoic Margaret Beaufort, this must've seemed like a dream come true: her boy was returning home, and the King who had stymied every attempt she had made at court intrigue was becoming politically weaker and weaker by the day. This was her chance to kill two birds with one stone- and maybe become the mother of a king. As for Richard, things were not going well: his health was not good (which we know now was due to a combination of roundworm and mercury poisoning), Juana was refusing to marry him, according to legend because of a prophecy that he was going to die in battle, he was having to bet on his nephew, the Earl of Lincoln, as his heir, and now a Breton youth, the nephew of the Mad King Henry VI, was threatening battle. Rumors were still circulating that Richard had killed his nephews two years prior, which gave pause to nobles as to whether to support a kinslayer, or a traitor and exile. As summer approached, so did plague: a new illness stretched across England, one that would become infamous during the next 50 years: sweating sickness. For a very religious populous, this did not bode well for Richard, either: it was seen as God punishing him. By August 1st, Henry Tudor had landed safely in Mill Bay, and began his march towards England. News reached the king by the 11th, yet he did not gather his armies until the 16th. On the 19th, York sent 80 men to help the Yorkist cause. The next day, Richard rode from Nottingham to Leicester. Although where exactly Richard stayed before the battle is unknown, legend has it he stayed at the now lost Blue Boar Inn. According to the Croyland Chronicle, Richard's last nights were fitful, and in the morning "his face was more livid and ghastly than usual." Historian John Ashdown-Hill believes this was due to illness, possibly sweating sickness, yet it could have been anything from stress to symptoms related to roundworm.

The morning of the battle, Richard's army was stationed on Ambion Hill, numbering about 7,000-12,000. Ambion Hill gave a good view of the opposition: Henry Tudor's own army ranged somewhere between 4,000-6,000, 1,800 being French Mercenaries. However, how much of the army was composed of Scottish Lancastrian supporters is contested: three decades after the battle, historian John Mair reported a large fraction of the army were Scottish reinforcements, however modern historians believe the numbers were exaggerated. To the south, Lord Stanley's men waited for order. Richard had taken Lord Stanley's son, Lord Strange, as prisoner before the battle in order to have leverage over Stanley, as he was Henry Tudor's stepfather. Yet, as to whether Stanley would react at this time in the battle was unknown to both sides. The Earl of Oxford, being the more experienced leader in Tudor's army, decided to keep the army together in order to counteract Richard's manouvres. The order was not to stray more then 10 feet from their banners, in order to avoid splitting into the traditional battle formations of vanguard, centre, and rearguard. The army flanked their wings with horsemen in order to form one large group. Once on firm land after trudging through the swampy terrain, Oxford's men began hand-to-hand combat. Richard, seeing that his men were falling in large numbers, signalled to Northumberland, who did not move, possibly due to his changing allegiance from Richard to Henry. Richard then proceeded to lead a mounted charge at Henry with a group of men. The number of this group is contested by historians, ranging from a handful to 1000. Richard killed Sir William Brandon, the father of the future Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk. After the battle, the surviving mercenaries told of how the charge caught them off guard, and was incredibly sudden- so much so that it caused Henry to dismount in order to blend into the crowd. Seeing that Tudor was on the ground, Oxford sent an array of pikemen to surround Henry as protection. As the pikemen slowed the calvary, Henry's bodyguards took over and made distance between him and Richard. The pikemen ran the calvary into a marsh, which caused Richard's horse to stumble, and for him to gain multiple fractures on his right side. As Richard fell, Stanley made the move to join Henry, thus putting Richard at a massive disadvantage. Per legend, it is said Richard was offered a fresh horse, yet Richard refused, stating "God forbid I retreat one step- I will either win the battle as king, or die one." Polydore Vergil wrote in his chronicles that, as the Yorkists were slain around him, that Richard took up arms and charged Henry Tudor in order to end the battle once and for all. Richard came within a sword's length of Henry Tudor, before being struck down with a halberd by a Welsh soldier. The Welsh poet Guto'r Glyn implied that the man who did the deed was Rhys Ap Thomas, a Welsh defector from the Yorkist regime, by writing "Lladd y baedd, eilliodd ei ben," or,"Killed the boar, shaved his head." Nevertheless, Richard III, the last Plantagenet King, and youngest son of Cecily Neville and the late Duke of York, died valiantly. He was aged just thirty-two, and was a mere two months away from his thirty-third birthday. The Battle of Bosworth marked the end of the Wars of The Roses: a bloody conflict that had spanned multiple generations, as well as decades. The original players of the war were gone, and with Richard's death, only their children lived on. Yet, a new rose grew in the dead garden: The Tudor Rose. Henry Tudor would be crowned King Henry VII on October 30th, 1485, and his reign would be much, much longer than his predecessor. However, the Tudor Dynasty would be a short lived one, and they, too, would be overthrown by the Stuarts on the death of Henry's granddaughter, the virgin queen Elizabeth I.