The death of his wife freed him for a further matrimonial alliance, and serious reports emerged at the time that he planned to marry Elizabeth of York, Elizabeth Woodville’s eldest daughter, thus pre-empting her betrothal to Henry Tudor. It was even rumoured that he had poisoned his wife in order to hasten the new marriage. It never seemed likely, however, that he would be able to marry the girl whose brothers he had destroyed. Even by the standards of this harsh and cruel age, it would not be considered to be a blessed union. In any case his disdain for the Woodvilles was well known.
Yet the rumours persisted, to the point where Richard was obliged to summon a council in which he denied ever having wished to marry Elizabeth of York. Even his closest supporters had been horrified at the prospect and, according to one of the chronicles, declared to his face that the people ‘would rise in rebellion against him, and impute to him the death of his queen’. There was widespread mistrust of him, especially of his harsh and unyielding temper. We have the paradox of a man of faith who was also a man of blood. But is it such a paradox, after all? Those of an austere faith may be the most ruthless and relentless, especially if they believe that they are acting in God’s best interests. Richard III has often been accused of hypocrisy, but his real vice might have been that of zealotry burning all the brighter with his belief that he was surrounded by enemies.
Elizabeth of York was of course engaged elsewhere. In the cathedral of Rouen, on Christmas Day 1483, Henry Tudor pledged that he would marry her on being crowned the king of England. His supporters, all the time swelling in numbers, then swore loyalty to him and to his claim. Polydore Vergil states that Richard III was now ‘vexed, wrested and tormented in mind with fear almost perpetually’. He travelled around his kingdom, never staying in one castle or monastery for very long. He arranged for a force of soldiers to seize Henry Tudor from the duchy of Brittany but Henry, warned in advance, fled across the border into France.
It was from this country that he launched his invasion of England in the summer of 1485. An exile of twenty-two years was about to come to an end. Richard could not of course predict the point of invasion, despite the presence of his spies in Henry’s entourage; so he settled on Nottingham as a convenient site for a court that was now essentially a war camp. Nottingham was in the middle of the kingdom and in any case close to his northern territories, from which most of his support would undoubtedly come. In that early summer, the king issued a general proclamation in which he denounced Henry Tudor as a bastard on both sides of the family and as a minion of the king of France; if he seized the throne he would ‘do the most cruel murders, slaughters and robberies and disherisons that ever were seen in any Christian realm’.
On 7 August Henry landed at Milford Haven, in Pembrokeshire, with seven ships and 1,000 men. The French were happy to finance the venture as a way of distracting Richard from his designs to aid the old enemy of Brittany. Henry began moving northwards through Haverfordwest to Cardigan, where his forces were joined by some of his Welsh allies; Henry was the nephew of Jasper Tudor, earl of Pembroke, and was thus considered by Welshmen to be Welsh. A bardic song rang in the valleys:
Jasper will breed for us a dragon –
Of the fortunate blood of Brutus is he
A Bull of Anglesey to achieve;
He is the hope of our race.
Henry needed a myth to bolster his uncertain claim to the throne. In any case the Welsh affinity was of vital importance to him. As he led his troops through Wales he flew the red dragon of Cadwallader, from whom he claimed ancestry, on the white and green colours of the Tudors. He advanced into England through Shrewsbury and at Newport, in Staffordshire, he was greeted by his first English adherents. His was still a vulnerable army, made up of men from France and Brittany as well as Wales and England, and might not have been considered powerful enough to confront the king of England. Even by the time he reached Shrewsbury, however, it was clear to the king that a rebel army had come into England without meeting any serious resistance.
