Henry VII and Stoke Field

Henry, freshly-married in early 1486, had a pregnant wife, and he was praying it was a boy. A boy would mean a natural heir, and the presence of natural heirs always brought a sense of peace to the realm; disputes over the throne tended towards bloodshed, and the masses of English people just wanted to live their lives in peace. A son would not only be a boom to Tudor propaganda, it would also put a dent in Yorkist insurrections and be a step towards legitimacy before the world powers.

Henry VII's archnemesis, Margaret of
Burgundy/York

His reign, however, was just months old, and propaganda would need time to take root. All he could do now was try to pacify the Yorkist sympathizers and crush any uprisings in the name of the king’s peace. The first uprising, led by the late Richard’s chamberlain, Lord Lovell, was weak and impotent. After Bosworth Field, Lord Lovell and Sir Humphrey Stafford locked themselves in Colchester Abbey, seeking sanctuary from Henry’s scourge of Yorkist high-rollers. Confined to the Abbey, they began plotting how to restore a Yorkist monarchy. Though Henry’s spies kept tabs on the Abbey, the Yorkist leaders managed to escape and began raising support. Henry’s spies informed him of what Lovell was doing, and Henry dispatched a force of soldiers to arrest him. Lovell received word that he was being hunted and sought safety in numbers with a ragtag group of rebels at Furness Falls before seeking sanctuary again, this time across the Channel in Flanders with Margaret of York. Margaret was the Duchess of Burgundy, daughter of Richard, 3rd Duke of York (whose aspirations for Henry VI’s throne set off the Wars of the Roses), and sister to two previous Yorkist kings, Edward IV and Richard III. She wasn’t shy about where her loyalties lie.

Sir Humphrey Stafford and his brother Thomas, still in England, stoked a second uprising in Worcester.  Henry was near York during a tour of his kingdom, and when he heard news of the uprising, he immediately turned his forces towards Worcester to stamp it out. The Stafford brothers lacked the resources to oppose the king, so they, like Lovell, sought sanctuary in an abbey. Lovell was safe across the Channel, and if Henry were to go after him, he’d cause a stink with France; but the Stafford brothers were within his realm, and he’d be damned if he let them cower in a church a second time. Under cover of darkness on 14 May, they were forcibly removed from the abbey and dragged before the King’s Bench, where justices determined that sanctuary wasn’t applicable in cases of treason. Henry ordered Sir Humphrey executed but pardoned the younger, more impressionable Thomas; perhaps he hoped that the young Thomas would become an ally among the pro-Yorkist faction. Pope Innocent III wasn’t happy with Henry’s breaking of sanctuary, and the two got into it for a while, but they smoothed things over. A little tension with the papacy was a speed-bump compared to the price he’d pay if he let rebels take advantage of church rules. Henry was playing for keeps.

The Stafford brothers had been dealt with, but Lovell was still at large – and still plotting. Margaret picked up what he was laying down, and it’d be her hand – and finances – behind the next two Yorkist attempts to reclaim the throne. In 1487 an actor-impostor named Lambert Simnel claimed to be Edward, the earl of Warwick, the closest Yorkist to the throne, whom Henry had locked in the Tower. His was a game of a different sort of propaganda; as news of Edward Plantagenet abroad swept through London, Henry had the real Edward escorted from the Tower and paraded through the city—but all to no avail. In a war of propaganda, people tend to believe that which caters to their tastes. John de la Pole, Earl of Lincoln, heard about this impostor and pondered how to use him to his advantage. Lincoln had sworn fealty to Henry and was privileged to be in the king’s court, but his aspirations burned too bright for his loyalty to remain untouched: he, like Henry Tudor, had royal, albeit diluted, blood in his veins, and his childless late uncle Richard III had named him heir to the throne for the House of York. In mid-March he made up his mind, and he fled across the Channel to begin conniving with his aunt Margaret of Burgundy. She provided financial and military support (consisting of two thousand German and Swiss mercenaries), and Lovell, who’d been sheltering in Margaret’s court, threw in with Lincoln’s cause. Lincoln was joined by a number of English lords-in-exile along with a captain of the English garrison at Calais. They turned their backs on the French coast and sailed for Ireland.

Ireland was savagely pro-York, and after landing in early May, Lincoln had no trouble recruiting 4500 Irish mercenaries, mostly light-infantry kerns. In late May he had the pretender Lambert Simnel crowned ‘King Edward VI’ in Dublin. An Irish Parliament was called to legitimize Simnel’s title, but Lincoln wasn’t willing to wait. Henry’s intelligence told him Lincoln was in Ireland, and it wouldn’t be long before news of the faux crown reached him; thus Lincoln and his army crossed the Irish Sea and landed in northern Lancashire in early June, where a number of local gentry led by Sir Thomas Broughton met him. His force now numbered some eight thousand men, and by forced marches they covered two hundred miles in five days. Lord Lovell proved his worth on the night of 10 June when he and two thousand men led a night attack on four hundred Lancastrians; granted the numbers were tipped severely in their favor (just over 4:1), Lovell’s crushing victory sparked a boost in rebel morale.

Henry had dispatched an army under the liberated Earl of Northumberland, and Northumberland was determined to show Henry he could be trusted. He was eager to get into the fray, so it wasn’t difficult for the clever Lincoln to send him astray. Lincoln sent a detachment of rebels against the walled city of York; they banged on the city gates and demanded that the gates be opened ‘in the name of Edward VI.’ The panicked citizens sent urgent messages to Northumberland, begging for his aid. Northumberland turned his army towards York, thinking that was where Lincoln was making his move; when they came into sight of the city, the rebels fled north, and Northumberland gave chase. Lincoln patiently waited until his scouts reported Northumberland had fallen to the trap, and then he continued the march towards his real goal of London.

As they neared the capital, they were harassed by Lancastrian cavalry under the command of Edward Woodville, called ‘the last knight errant’ due to his devotion to chivalrous ideals. Woodville’s cavalry did excellent work, grinding the Yorkists down to a standstill in Sherwood Forest. Yorkist numbers played once again in their favor, and Woodville’s battered and weary force retreated towards Nottingham where they rendezvoused with Henry’s royal army. Northumberland may have been gallivanting to the north, but Henry felt confident that he could crush Lincoln’s rebellion. Woodville’s gallantry in Sherwood Forest had bought the king breathing time to assemble his men, and by 15 June he had gathered close to twelve thousand soldiers, including a number of Welsh fighters under Rhys ap Thomas. Lincoln, who had so far enjoyed numerical superiority, would now have a harder go at it.

Lincoln began crossing the River Trent, and Henry moved to meet him. Around nine in the morning on 16 June, his forward troops – under the command of the Earl of Oxford, who had proved his mettle at Bosworth – encountered the Yorkist army near East Stoke. Lincoln’s forces were assembled in a single formation atop a knoll called Rampire Hill; the hilltop was surrounded on three sides by the River Trent. Lincoln’s right flank was anchored on a high spot known as Burham Furlong; when that height came into Henry’s sight, he determined that he’d have his standard planted on it by the end of the day.

The Battle of Stoke Field is viewed by many historians as the last battle of the Wars of the Roses. Henry had shown he could win a throne – but could he keep it? Winning a battle is one thing; winning two is quite another. So far as the English people were concerned, Henry was just the next player on a wheeling ‘game of thrones.’ He would have to prove his ability to steel that throne against all usurpers. Nearly twenty thousand men – numbers similar to those gathered at Bosworth two years earlier – stood face-to-face, ready to do violence to one another. At Bosworth Henry had been the usurper then; here he was the king defending his crown. For all his machinations toward legitimizing his claim on the throne, from his propaganda to his marriage with Elizabeth of York, nothing would be as valuable as winning a pitched battle against his direct pretenders—and nothing would damage him as much as losing this contest.

Echoing his strategy at Bosworth, he divided his army into three ‘battles’, or groups, and as at Bosworth he entrusted Oxford to lead the vanguard and exercise command over the royal forces. As Henry’s men assembled for battle in the mid-morning glow of the sun, unusual lights were seen in the sky, the identity of which remains unknown. The royal soldiers were unnerved, fearing them to be evil omens, and a number of soldiers deserted. Oxford and the other nobles stoked the waning morale, and soon the soldiers’ heads cleared just in time for battle. Lincoln’s core soldiers were the two thousand mercenaries in the pay of Margaret of Burgundy, and among these mercenaries were Swiss crossbowmen and German gunners. Lincoln, from his perch on the heights, had the upper hand, and he opened the battle by ordering his missile mercenaries forward to harass Henry’s vanguard. The mercenary fire tore through Oxford’s battle, but he remained firm—and then the English longbowmen responded. Crossbows and handguns were slow-loading, and their operators were exposed to a withering fire of volley after volley of arrows. Many of the mercenaries and higher-ranking rebels wore armor that could deflect the arrows, but the rain of steel forced the armored knights to keep their visors down to protect their eyes, reducing their visibility and leaving them half-choking in their helmets. The Irish kerns didn’t wear armor, so they were chewed up by the onslaught.

The English arrows were wreaking havoc on Lincoln’s men, so he urged them forward. They abandoned the high ground and launched into the attack, their whole mass plunging towards Oxford’s vanguard. They hoped their steel-willed resolve, and the sight of them coming like a horde upon the royal forces, would drain enemy morale and send them to flight. Lincoln hoped to break the Lancastrian line and roll up the enemy army, opening his path to London where he could have the pretender enthroned and take the reigns of the government. But Oxford’s men were made of steel, and though they were the only of Henry’s three groups engaged, they fought without breaking. Though the line wavered time and again, Oxford rallied his men over the din of battle. Henry’s uncle, Jasper Tudor, fed reinforcements into the vanguard while the longbowmen loosed relentless volleys into the enemy mass. For three hours a ferocious back-and-forth melee coated the ground with blood and shit; bodies piled up in heaps. The Yorkists, with their backs to the River Trent, didn’t have a route of retreat, and so they fought tooth-and-nail until, one-by-one, their leaders fell by the sword. Lincoln fell fighting, and what remained of the rebel army’s ragged order dissolved. When they finally broke, some of them made for the River Trent, hoping to swim to safety on the far bank; those encased in armor or who were simply exhausted drowned, and those who managed to swim had to do so under a ceaseless rain of arrows. The river, one chronicler tells us, ‘ran red with blood.’ Other refugees were pursued down a ravine (known today as the Bloody Gutter) where they were cornered and butchered.

Casualties between the two force numbered around seven thousand, the lion’s share being suffered by the disintegrated Yorkist army, and Henry planted his standard on Burham Furlong to mark his victory. The pretender Lambert Simnel was captured but pardoned in a gesture of clemency; Henry could clearly see that he had just been a puppet for Lincoln and his coconspirators (Simnel would be given a job in the royal kitchen and would later be promoted to falconer, in charge of the upkeep of the king’s falcons). Henry pardoned the Irish nobles; he needed their goodwill to pacify Ireland, which was hotheaded even in the best of times (he would later convince the papacy to excommunicate the Irish clergy who had supported the rebellion). He had hoped to capture Lincoln alive so as to interrogate him on the true measure of Yorkist support in his kingdom, but with Lincoln dead, all he could do was authorize an inquiry which resulted in ‘relatively few executions and very many fines.’ After the battle he made a ‘triumphant march’ through traditional strongholds of Yorkist supporters to show that he had bested the best of them.

And as for Lord Lovell, who can say what happened to him?

True to his nature, he managed to escape.

Some contemporaries claimed they saw him crossing the River Trent on the back of his horse. He disappeared after Stoke Field and was never seen again. Historians speculate that he may have fled to Scotland, given evidence of a safe pass being granted to him by the Scottish government. In the 18th century, his old house in Oxfordshire was undergoing chimney remodeling when a skeleton was found inside a secret room. Some have conjectured that the skeleton is none other than Lord Lovell, who’d hidden himself in the room and starved to death; however, this isn’t fitting with a character who didn’t seem to give up, and it’s fruitless conjecture that the remains belong to him, anyways. The cause of the entombed skeleton’s death is undetermined.